Survival Tip

Outside Magazine

my new favorite program

Strict Pomodoro Extension for Chrome

"The Pomodoro Technique for time management is simple: work hard for 25 minutes without distractions, knowing that a 5 minute break is soon on its way. This extension helps you stay focused while you work by blocking the sites that can so easily distract us.

We pre-loaded the extension with a handful of popular distracting websites, but you can easily add new sites to the list, or, if you're daring, you can even create a whitelist of the *only* websites allowed during a work session. You can also change the lengths of the work and break timers - though I'd recommend against it: these times are default for a reason, so only change them if you're certain that they will make you more productive.

When we say "strict", we mean it. Once a work timer starts, there's no stopping it without straight-up disabling the extension or restarting the browser. This is for your benefit: I wrote this extension with myself in mind, and I know how tempting it can be to just give up when work gets too frustrating. Therefore, Strict Pomodoro actively discourages this behavior, though you can always disable the extension in case of emergency.

Stay focused, and have fun!"

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/strict-pomodoro/cgmnfnmlficgeijcalkgnnkigkefkbhd/details

Imagination: Unleashed by Constraints

"The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process. In fact, these radical breakthroughs are so valuable that we’ve invented traditions and rituals that increase the probability of an epiphany, making us more likely to hear those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Just look at poets, who often rely on literary forms with strict requirements, such as haikus and sonnets. At first glance, this writing method makes little sense, since the creative act then becomes much more difficult. Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints.

But that’s precisely the point. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and conventions, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process. Just look at Dylan’s verb choice in the second stanza of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which contains one of the most memorable lines in the song:

                You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
                But you know you only used to get juiced in it.

Juiced in it? It’s an incredibly effective phrase, even though the listener has no idea what it means. It’s not until the next couplet that the need for juiced becomes clear:

                And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
                And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it

Dylan uses the surprising word juiced because it rhymes with used, which is part of the snarling line that gives the stanza its literal meaning. Nevertheless, the innovative use of juice as a verb is one of those poetic flourishes that makes “Like a Rolling Stone” so transcendent. It’s a textbook example of how the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”

-Jonah Lehrer
Imagine

Regret 'No Regrets'

"If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. 

The point isn’t to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate ourselves for having them… 

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. 

Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly — it reminds us that we know we can do better."

-Kathryn Schulz

Psychology of Regret TED Talk

Creativity in a Building

"Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing. You say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, the café and the mailboxes were there, the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it, and the six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”"


-Walter Isaacson
 Steve Jobs

The Bigger Picture

"One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. 'If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?' he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. 'Larry was suitably impressed and a few weeks later came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,' Atkinson recalled. 'Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.'"

-Walter Isaacson
  Steve Jobs