Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

1. Rework your to-do list. Choose one to three most important tasks 2. Measure your results, not your time. Try breaking your project down into "completable" sections. Keep a list of everything you get done in a day. 4. Track where you waste time. Track how you spend your time during the day and look for patterns. 5. Build habits to help you stop working. Quit while you're ahead. Hemingway: "The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next." Set a firm cut-off time for your day. 6. Take more breaks. On average, your brain is able to remain focused for only 90 minutes, and then you need at least 15 minutes of rest. 7. Take more naps. Research shows naps lead to improvement in cognitive function, creative thinking, and memory performance. 8. Spend more time in nature. spending time in nature to help you reset your attention span and relax your mind. 9. Move and work in blocks. Use this time to practice your...

I've got a storied career. I went from being a draft resister hippie type near the end of the Vietnam War to being an expediter at a nuclear power plant construction company near Wall Street, then finally left New York for warmer weather in Florida where I spent a couple of years as a real estate broker and eventually landed at Merrill Lynch as a financial consultant. I stayed at Merrill for about 8 years. It was at Merrill that I first became interested in programming. I had been graphing the technical indicators from Bob Farrell's group in New York with colored pencils and there was an older guy at the Orlando office who had a TRS-80 and printer. So I learned to program the indicator data in BASIC and print out graphs. Before long I had saved up $3500 to buy an Apple IIe and began seriously studying BASIC. Later I enrolled in an external doctoral program to get my PhD in economics, and a good part of my dissertation was spent coding FFT algorithms in Turbo Basic. Later on...

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.   --Marshall McLuhan Now here's the thing: I'm on Twitter; I like it because I can follow anybody I want, and although there is an awful lot of moronic "noise" (e.g., "I have a hangover and my cat just threw up"), there is also some interesting stuff that lets you find out where others in your particular "groove" are going, what they are working on, what they're thinking about. You can even post a request for help and occasionally somebody that's following you will give you a helpful idea. The problem is, this is just a "teaser" of what it really could be , and it's totally disconnected from all the other "social" apps. It doesn't connect you to ...

"As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that." -- Joel Spolsky on IE 8.0 and standards   Well, I just sat through a two plus hour meeting that went right through the normal lunch hour. You know what happens to your productivity when you've been sitting in the same chair for over two hours and you are hungry and the hell with lunch and other perfectly civil human needs, we're gonna finish this meeting if it takes until 10PM tonight, right? Time for a refresher on something I wrote about back in 2001: How to hold a successful development meeting.  The first and best way is NOT to have a physical meeting at all. In this day of intranet discussion groups, Instant Messaging, Remote Desktopping, email distribution lists and other excel...