[Link] THE LIES BEHIND PRODUCTIVITY

by Andrea Judy

Sharing time! I'm obsessed with productivity tips and blogs. Articles like '7 Habits Only Happy People Have' and '12 Ways You Waste Time Every Day' devour my morning and leave me feeling productive even when I have literally just spent 3 hours on LifeHacker and have nothing to show for it but chapped lips, dry eyes and a lingering sense of guilt. 

While I love reading about these tips, it's just because it feels productive without me having to actually do anything hard. Reading an article? Psssha, that's easy work and a total time waster, but this article will teach me how to optimize my morning so I get everything done and become a productivity ninja! 

That's not to say that these articles don't share good advice or fun tidbits of information that make you feel great about yourself. (I mean, did you know that millionaires tend to smile a lot. I smile a lot, I'm totally on the way to being a millionaire since we have so much in common.) However, at some point it's time to stop with the fun articles and buckle up for a ride. 

Read the full article: http://www.judyblackcloud.com/blog/2017/3/13/the-lies-behind-productivity

[Link] Famous Writers From John Steinbeck to Maya Angelou All Swore By This Weird Productivity Trick. You Should Steal It

These literary greats solved the riddle of work-from-home productivity decades before the rest of us.

by Jessica Stillman

John Steinbeck may have won a Nobel Prize but he still preferred to write at an unstable little desk on his fishing boat. Another giant of American letters, Maya Angelou, liked to rent out hotel rooms and write perched on the bed. Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, outdid both of them -- he penned the thriller from the clanging back room of a furnace factory. 

All of which might make you conclude that writers are a bunch of odd ducks. That might be true, but according to a thoughtful recent New Yorker piece from best-selling author and Georgetown professor Cal Newport, that's the wrong lesson for less literary types to take from these writers' unusual approach to productivity. 

Newport insists that decades before our recent switch to remote work these authors discovered something many of us are going to learn in the coming months and years: Working close to home beats actually working at home. 

Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/productivity-remote-work-john-steinbeck-maya-angelou.html