Saying “no” is one of the biggest timesavers in existence. It could spare you from unproductive commitments which may cost you hours, days, or even months of your time. Unfortunately, it may not be easy to say “no” when someone…
The single most important ingredient of effectiveness is clarity, and the only way to increase clarity is by minimizing noise. That actually is the reason why you should read history more than news: history has much less noise than news.…
What does it mean to live smart? In my opinion, living smart means knowing how to leverage your situations in the best possible way to your maximum advantage. Regarding this, there is one word I often hear recently: arbitrage. I…
Being well liked is what most people want in relationships. The benefits are obvious. You will get the help you need at the time you need it. People will give you information about new opportunities you didn’t know before. Above…
I will go out of town until Sunday with no Internet access, so I may not be able to reply to your comments nor emails during that period. I have prepared a post to go live on Friday though (in…
There are so many interesting links I found since the last link post that my initial list for this post had no less than 24 links! But 24 articles is a bit too many for effective reading, so I trimmed…
Bill Gates described himself as an avid reader. And as you who follow this blog might know, I am also an avid reader. I refer to a lot of books in this blog. I’ve had the habit of reading since my childhood…
We can improve our personal productivity by applying the the Pareto principle or Parkinson’s law. But why not going further by applying the Long Tail concept? The Long Tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson to describe how entities…
Effectiveness is more important than efficiency. In Tim Ferriss’ words, “What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.” Last week I wrote about what I believe is the single most important ingredient of effectiveness (which is…
There is an article entitled Food Boom in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American which I found interesting. It talks about the tremendous increase in U.S. agricultural productivity in recent decades. “Over the period 1948 to 2004, total farm…
