Words from Web Worker

It becomes tempting to reserve the best of ourselves for the short-term gains of work and “automate” the long game of life. Would you pay someone in the Philippines to answer your email for you — even your personal messages? Or hire strangers on the internet to plan your spouse’s big birthday party? Or throw meat, vegetables, and butter into a blender and call it dinner? These are just some of the actual “life-automating” techniques of busy entrepreneurs today. Maneesh Sethi, best known as the easily-distracted man who paid a woman to slap him in the face every time he checked Facebook. He spoke at South by Southwest in Texas about how he’s now hired a man in Manila (Caleb) to check his email for him. Caleb, who Sethi found through Staff.com, goes through Sethi’s email — both work and personal — every morning and flags important messages for follow-up, as well as categorizing and drafting responses for the rest. By the time Sethi wakes up, his email has already been sorted; and by the...

When we struggle to express ourselves, we use lists. Lists help us to make sense of the world around us. We create lists of the sights we see on vacation, the places we want to visit, the food we need to buy at the grocery store, and the tasks we need to get done. It's a simple habit of increasing our day to day productivity. We pack all the madness and ambiguity of life into a structured form of writing. In short making lists is a great way to increase our overall happiness and feel less overwhelmed. These days, we use lists for productivity as much as anything else: shopping lists, reminders, planning for events, and the to-do list are all variations on a productivity-based list that we use to help us get past procrastinating. The to-do list in particular is one that we spend a lot of time and energy on perfecting. But getting the tasks on our to-do list done is a whole other ball game. 4 Tips for a To-Do List That Will Actually Help You Get Things Done Here are some insig...

In Michael Dearing's The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done presentation , the five distortions are: Personal exceptionalism Dichotomous thinking Correct overgeneralization Blank canvas thinking Schumpeterianism last one sounds difficult to understand, so he outlines Schumpeterianism like this: Definition: sees creative destruction as natural, necessary, and as their vocation Benefits: fearlessness, tolerance for destruction and pain Schumpeterianism means the ability to let go of old ways and embrace teardowns and criticism as a way to improve the way you do things. The processes that lead to change and innovation can never happen without at times criticizing and tearing down the old standard ways of work. On a personal level, this means that learning to embrace criticism well, even if it means an utter teardown of your work and a new approach. Ideally, that new approach will inevitably lead you to better things. If you can embrace that ki...

Like so many heroes of the startup world, I started early after college. Now, with years of experience in Technology behind me, it has become a lot easier to polish my workflow and get lots of stuff done. Let's talk about my workspace setup, go-to apps, best life hacks, favorite gadgets and tunes. In my free time, I work on a few side projects, including Blogging and managing several  communities  over Google+ . Since launching in Dec 2012, +Project Glass  community has become one of the fastest growing community. With  more than 2500(and counting) users and a thriving community of Glass fans, needless to say, the past few months have been crazy for me.  Last time I went through this , it was 2008. I was using different apps, but did have sort of productivity system that  really  helped me get things done. In last few years, I've picked up a few tips and tricks along the way and I've been making som...

Not many of us would admit that we're poor listeners, but the proof may surround us in our daily life. If you find your friends/coworkers asking you the same questions repeatedly, or you respond to email without reading it, you're probably missing something. Fortunately, being a better communicator isn't that difficult. Web Worker Daily argues that a great deal of productivity is lost to resolving miscommunications, that could have been avoided if each party had simply paid more attention to what was said & when. They point out that ineffective communicators are usually the ones who skip meetings, figuring someone will fill them in later, ones who are asked same questions repeatedly by friends/colleagues and the ones who reply to a message with multiple questions in it but only answer one of them. Few tactics for being a better communicator: Slow down a little & make sure you completely understand what you're being told. It helps to make sure you're c...

We’ve shifted from a society of artists and specialists to one that stares at digital pixels all day. In April 2008, the New York Times published an article which uncovered that nearly a third of one’s work day is spent on irrelevant items and distractions such as email. What’s more, the Radicati Group found that the average person is on track to spend nearly half of their day staring at email. Our innovation and information has quadrupled over the past century. But why hasn’t our value grown proportionally? If our innovation has sky-rocketed, why hasn’t our effectiveness sky-rocketed? Looking at the late nineties and early twenty-first century, our innovation within the information realm outshines the industrial age. It’s absolutely staggering. The wealth of available information on demand, as well as our ability to communicate anytime, anywhere, is absolutely insane. Yet, amidst this firestorm of information innovation, we’ve lost touch with what truly adds value to the world, ...

I’m a pretty productive guy(at least I believe so) and I’m often asked from my friends what do I do to get things done. Keeping it simple is kind of key to my whole philosophy. To be productive, you must be able to focus all of your energies on the tasks you have. In my opinion, one of the biggest deterrents to getting things done is having a system that has to be managed. If you’re spending more time looking for new ways to help you get things done you’re missing the point. Remember KISS(Keep it simple stupid) I’ve got a few “rules” and methods that I stick to pretty religiously that make up about 90% of what keeps me productive and here they are: Capture everything important. The first rule: capture everything important. I hardly ever “try” to remember anything. I simply record anything I need or want to remember or I know is important for me to recall or refer. I do this in several ways. I’ve habit of taking notes on my Cell phone, when I am away from my computer for brainstorming...