Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian:

This realisation is alarming at first, but it's ultimately deeply reassuring. As the UK organisation Action for Happiness likes to point out, one of the biggest causes of misery is the way we chronically "compare our insides with other people's outsides". We're all mini-New York Timeses or White Houses, energetically projecting an image of calm proficiency, while inside we're improvising in a mad panic. Yet we forget (especially in an era of carefully curated Facebook profiles and suchlike) that everyone else is doing the same thing. The only difference is that they think it's you who's truly competent.

The Cult of Busy

Have you ever had someone say that they’re ‘too busy’ to do something? Think we all have. Do you know what they really saying? They’re saying that they don’t have the time, don’t have the desire, don’t have…the list goes on and on. And if you are reading between the lines you will see if someone is claiming to be ‘too busy’ they are really saying something else entirely.

Matt Knisely on the many excuses we make when we allow unimportant things determine how we spend our time. 

Gretchen Rubin: The 4 Ways to Successfully Adopt New Habits

When someone (even yourself) gives you a rule to follow what do you do? Are you a Rebel, refusing to follow all directives? Or are you more of a Obliger who will respond to outer rules, but so much to inner rules? In this 99U talk, bestselling author Gretchen Rubin shares the four personality types when it comes to adopting new habits or “rules.” Knowing your personality type and its pros and cons are instrumental for us to adopt new habits and behavior.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

Elizabeth Gilbert returns to the TED stage. Once she was an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters, and yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes. 

Frank Chimero: No New Tools

Another great essay by Frank Chimero: 

So, now I come to the part where I make my plea: no new tools, please. If you are interested in improving how people work, you should devise methods for work, manners of behavior, and methods of decision making. Document your ideology and apply it with existing tools, so nearly anyone can follow along. Why don’t you use our best tool? Language. Increasingly, I feel documentation beats an app if you’re trying to shepherd an idea along. This approach seems to have worked pretty well for David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Josh Clark’s Couch to 5K. Of course there are innumerable apps supporting each method, but the ideas are bigger than an app, so you don’t need to download anything. Buy a notebook or put on your running shoes. Commit to the plan.

Really enjoyed reading this essay. It is not about to-do lists, or project management methodologies. Being productive is about cultivating the right habits, the right reflexes to circumstances as they occur.