I am a person who lives and dies by her to-do list. And right now, I’m dying.
I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.
Here are things I’m doing well:
1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do [...]

I’m in the midst of dumping my happiness obsession for something else, but I wonder what is the key to a good life if I’m giving up on happiness? I thought maybe it was interestingness, but I am a little worried because I confess that I’d rather fall asleep in the farmer’s arms than solve [...]

I collect data points constantly, and I index them by topic, and I always hope that they will come together in an interesting, useful way. Lots of times, that doesn’t happen, and I  just have to throw ideas away, because I have a rule for myself that I have to be useful in every post.
But today [...]

Last year I traveled almost every week. Some weeks I traveled to three different cities.
If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from [...]

Most of us have a terrible time focusing on our work.
Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone’s interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This [...]

The cocktail party conversations I have about what I do for a living reveal so much about the world. For example, if I say I have an Internet startup, people generally think: She’s unemployed. If I say I write a syndicated newspaper column that runs in 200 papers, people are impressed. If I tell people [...]

Consistency is an important part of any career. It’s not just doing good work all the time. It goes beyond what quality your work is to what quality of person you are. Being consistent is letting people know they can rely on you, and it’s following through on what you say you’ll do because that’s [...]

Most of us set goals for ourselves to do things that are difficult for us to do. Instead, how about setting goals to work hard at something that is actually a pleasure?
It's clear that the deep, fulfilling experiences in life are when we are very focused at what we really enjoy doing. So goals should [...]

I have hated Tim Ferriss for a long time. I have hated him since we both had editors at Crown Publishing who sat next to each other and I heard how difficult he is.
I didn't blog about it because first of all, I'm sure the buzz about me is that I'm difficult, too. And also, [...]

Almost 95% of Jews do something to observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I want my kids to be part of this when they grow up, so the only way to do that is to model it for them now. Because it's completely clear to me that people who believe in God are fundamentally more [...]

This post is from Clay Collins, author of the blog The Growing Life.
Generation Y is known for rolling into work late while wearing headphones, and dressing as if every day were casual Friday. We're often seen TXTing in our cubicles, taking breaks, and instant messaging. While these images don't exactly encourage others to view us [...]

Are you thinking your Blackberry use is out of control and you need to turn it off? Forget it. The problem is not the Blackberry, it's you.
The Blackberry actually gives you the freedom to effectively mix your personal life and work life so that they don't have to compete with each other.
Don’t talk to me [...]

Recently I have fallen back into my evil habit of writing a to do list and then ignoring it because I don’t think I can get it done. I know from past experience that the best way out of this rut is to read research about productivity. Even if I don’t act on the research, [...]

So, I guess I took a week off from my blog in order to launch my company. It wasn't planned that way, believe me. Every day I told myself that I'd blog the next day. Surely many of you know this feeling. The feeling of having been lied to. By yourself.
When I am sucking [...]

I recently mentioned a new book about happiness: The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky. The premise of the book is that we each have a setpoint for happiness—we are born with a proclivity toward being happy or not. But we can affect that proclivity to become happier. And Lyubomirsky tells us how.
There are snooty [...]

This week is the one-year anniversary of the week that I became so overwhelmed with my workload that I started to act like a crazy person.
It happened slowly at first. I was taking care of my kids half-time and writing my syndicated column half-time.
Then I added my Boston Globe column, which required reporting. I had [...]

We all know that we need to be good at delegating in order to have any traction in our careers. We need to be able to learn how to do something and then teach someone else how to do it, so that we can move on and learn how to do something new. This is [...]

I used to write a lot about productivity, until I started reading blogs and discovered David Allen's world of Getting Things Done. I discovered that some of the most popular blogs are about productivity, and my blog audience is full of productivity gurus. They gave me a lot of recommendations to improve my productivity ignorance, [...]

In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, we're paid to process information. And since there's an infinite amount of information, there's an infinite amount of work. For everyone.
So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three weeks — if you let it. If [...]

It's telling that some of the most popular blogs focus on productivity. I learned this when I interviewed productivity gurus about their best time-management tips last year and it became the post that bloggers link to most often on Brazen Careerist.
How to get more things done is a hot topic for younger workers especially, and one [...]