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A Freelancer’s Schedule  →

Dave Caolo, while writing about his daily schedule as a freelance writer, hits on time management:

I’m not afraid of hard work, but I am afraid of regret.

That statement right there? Those are words to live by. It does not get any clearer than that when it comes to the purpose and incredible worth of time management.

Perhaps my two, all-time favorite quotes about time management are these:

Benjamin Franklin:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.

And Robert Louis Stevenson (who is one of my favorite authors):

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Stevenson’s quote above is from the third chapter in his writing, Virginibus Puerisque, titled: “An Apology for Idlers“. Highly recommended. In the article Stevenson talks about the often looked-down upon value of breathing deeply of life instead of always consuming our focus with work and busyness. Sound familiar?

And though this quote from Stevenson sounds like an inspirational one — i.e. devotion to something great can only be sustained by the neglect of worthless things (which is very true) — Stevenson’s point in this context is that perpetual devotion to our work (and I’ll add: entertainment) results in the neglect of our family, our friends, and life in general.

A Freelancer’s Schedule

Kenny Barela Wins HOW’s Best of Show for Promotion Design  →

At the International House of Prayer we’ve been privileged to work with Kenny on some freelance jobs for us in the past — he is a stand-up guy. His personal résumé packaging not only won Best of Show for the HOW Promotion Design Awards, it also helped land him a job in Denver, Colorado. Once you’ve read the writeup you can see some close-ups of the packaging here. Congratulations Kenny!

Kenny Barela Wins HOW’s Best of Show for Promotion Design

‘Worry Isn’t Work’  →

Convicting piece by Dan Pallotta:

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

A lot of this has to do with the (sometimes false and sometimes real) expectations that if we do not look and act incredibly frazzled our peers and supervisors will assume we are not working hard. So we are rigid on ourselves, we live with the fear of man, and we tell ourselves to stay there. Because if not, we’re clearly wasting precious time.

No doubt this hits home for many of us; it certainly does for me. The only solution is to find our value, self-worth, and identity in something other than our job. If what we do defines our value then we’ll never be good enough: every uncompleted task becomes a judgment against our character.

‘Worry Isn’t Work’

Khoi Vinh’s Thoughts on the New Apple TV  →

Man, I Love this line:

As a consumer experience, the living room is something of a disaster: a sprawling, schizophrenic mess of rat king wires hanging off the back of inscrutable devices sending cryptic signals to one another under the auspices of an alphabet-soup of initialisms and branded nomenclature — HDMI, DVI, component video, Blu-Ray, progressive and interlaced resolutions, Dolby, DTS, etc. — and that’s not even mentioning the terminology that intersects with personal computing.

In short, Khoi’s point is that the new Apple TV hasn’t solved the real issue with personal, home media centers in that they’re awkward to operate. Meaning: good luck watching a widescreen, HD movie in surround sound if you’re not intimately acquainted with all the different remotes and components.

Khoi Vinh’s Thoughts on the New Apple TV

“Byproducts”  →

A great article by Jason Fried on Inc.com about making use of, and profiting from, the natural byproducts of your core business:

Just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a byproduct of milling trees), we discovered that we could sell our knowledge (a byproduct of running a business). […]

Whenever you make something, you make something else. Your byproducts may not be as obvious as sawdust, but they’re there.

“Byproducts”

‘One Bucket to Rule Them All’  →

Chris Bowler’s strong and compelling reply to my ttttask piece, stating that OmniFocus is the solution.

I have been getting a lot of recommendations to use OmniFocus lately, but I’m just not ready to switch yet. Is the OmniFocus iPad app getting nothing but rave reviews? Yes. Does their cloud sync look like a dream come true? Yes.

But I am in deep with Things. I adore the app, have a lot tricks established for how I use it on my Mac, and the app itself is built in a way that makes sense to me.

Moving to OmniFocus would be expensive, time consuming, and risky. Risky because we all know cloud sync for Things is en route at full speed, and who knows just how amazing it will be? Even if Cultured Code’s syncing solution did but one thing — let me keep all my devices in sync over the air — I would be ecstatic. But if it does even more than that it almost certainly means another time-consuming switch back to Things for me.

‘One Bucket to Rule Them All’