Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

Merlin Mann gets right to the heart of my own current plans:

kung fu grippe - Better

And, to be honest, I don’t have a specific agenda for what I want to do all that differently, apart from what I’m already trying to do every day:

* identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
* shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
* make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
* avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
* demand personal focus on making good things;
* put a handful of real people near the center of everything.

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better.

Better, better.

I have “fallen off the wagon” over the past two months, as I have been working like a crazy man to manage the catering operations at the resort where my lovely bride works. It was a consulting gig that turned into a full-time day job.

I have written before about not wanting to work to make someone else’s fortune but this was something I had to do for her. The first sentence of The Purpose Driven Life is “It’s not about you,” and that is a truth that I definitely believe in. Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good. In this case, the greater good was served by putting a bunch of projects on hold until the end of the summer.

Thank you to all of those readers who have patiently waited for new content here, and thank you to Mike St. Pierre for keeping up with the GTD Cafe on Wednesdays. This week is about catching up and cleaning things up here in the hidden base, so watch for some pretty cool new ideas and more in the next couple of weeks.

Have a great day!

Today’s post comes from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint

Everyone’s talking about the economy.  And the presidential election.  And the Church.  Even GTD is being discussed as “old school”.

Seth Godin’s talking about fixing problems rather than just talking about them.  If you could change just one thing about your own job, what would it be?  Here are some suggestions:

• Your time of arrival.
• Your morning routine.
• Your preparation for the week.
• Your choice of planner, PDA, software, you get the point.
• The times of the day when you check email.
• The times when you close your office door and actually get stuff done.
• The layout of your workspace.
• The way in which you talk to your boss.
• The number of times that you say “thank you” to someone else.
• The speed with which you work.
• The little prayers before the difficult moments of the day.
• The final hour when you wrap things up.

Today’s post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

This week I interviewed author Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking.  Here is my fourth question to Dave which I thought PinContext readers would enjoy.

Q#4. Who would win in an arm wrestling match and why: David Allen or Stephen Covey?
No offense to David Allen, I have to go with Covey. Since I grew up pretty much in his neighborhood, I’ve met him a couple of times. Covey looks like he’s pretty tough, and he’s fathered a quarterback.

Michael Miles has a great post at Pick the Brain about Marcus Aurelius and 6 timeless observations:

#1: We Are Responsible for Our Own Experience of Life

“Such as are your habitual thoughts; such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the color of your thoughts.”

Much has been made recently of the (so called) ‘law of attraction.’ Before ‘The Secret,’ a wealth of writers had tapped into the idea that what happens in our mind is the most important thing in shaping our experience of life. From Norman Vincent Peal’s ‘Amazing Power of Positive Thinking,’ and Joseph Murphy’s ‘Power of the Subconscious Mind’ to Wallace Wattles ‘Science of Getting Rich,’ all were taking about a truth which Marcus understood so may centuries ago.

Go read the whole thing.