• Although Kathryn Minshew’s post at HBR on how to respond to the question “how are things going” is aimed at entrepreneurs, the problem she describes will be familiar to many people working on a large-scale research project or writing a book:

  [Y]ou’re asked that simple question that often feels like the hardest one:

  “How are things going?”

  “Great!” you respond

  Cue, awkward pause. Where do you…

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Plan Your Time: Anastasia points out that we often fall prey to an illusion of an “Endless” Summer and suggests that “more unscheduled time or perceived freedom can be dangerous, with the temptation of grandiose planning and over-commitment.” Last summer she experimented with an alternative calendar app to help plan her summer.

In Summerproofing Your to-Do List, Jason usefully warns that

It can be very easy to reach August with May’s goals largely untouched. This is perhaps especially true when you’re not teaching

Jason lists several task manager tools and approaches in his post, pointing out that it’s worth spending time now to set up whatever system you’ll use to track your summer goals and actions. In Get the Most From Summer With Well-Made Deadlines,…

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Many of us have good intentions that we don’t act upon.

One way to clarify your commitments and to take action towards your important goals is to involve other people.

Find an Accountability Partner or Community

A good accountability partner should be able to ask you clarifying questions, offer you encouragement and support, and hold you to your commitments. Depending on your personality type and the kinds of goals you want to work towards, you may want a partner who is primarily supportive or one who will be more firm with you if you start to back away from your commitments.

Several online communities exist to help motivate and track personal goals. 43 Things has been active for several years and allows you to see the goals that others have set and comment on them to provide support and advice….

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When Brian wrote about the new Gmail Compose back in November, it was an optional interface. At the end of March, it became the new default compose behavior for Gmail users.

The new interface is deliberately minimal, according to Jason Cornwell, a lead designer at Google. By making the window smaller and hiding the text formatting options that used to make your email compose screen resemble word processing software, Cornwell suggests that the new interface will “give you permission to write shorter messages.” (To access the text formatting options in the new interface, click on the underlined capital A next to the Send button.)

Many productivity experts like Leo Baubauta of Zen Habits and the crew at five.sentenc.es have been arguing that overly long emails larded with quoted replies deter good communication and often languish unread.

But even for writers of pithy emails,…

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In that spirit, here are a few questions that can increase your awareness about how you’re spending your time and energy.

What are you doing right now? The first step in cultivating mindful awareness is just to pause and notice something. If you want to begin doing something differently, you have to first understand what it is you are currently doing. Simply pausing a few times a day to take an inventory of how you’re spending your time can teach you about your own habits, energy levels, and current priorities. (To help with this, you can set a recurring alarm on…

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Suddenly, your email inbox is filling up: the count of unread messages (or, perhaps even worse, messages that have been read but not actually dealt with) has crept into the triple digits. (Maybe even the quadruple digits.)

You vow to sit down and clean it out. But you only get through a screenful or two at a time and you can’t imagine how you will ever handle this backlog.

Here’s a simple tip that really helps. Sort your inbox by the name of the sender. This will allow you to quickly see groups of messages that you can delete without reading. Some of these include:

• outdated announcements of events
• old newsletters or bulletins
• notifications from online services

…

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Tracking your behavior helps in two key ways: by creating awareness of your actions, which can help you further adjust them, and by giving you concrete evidence of the success or failure of your choices. Without some form of tracking, most people find it difficult to remember day to day actions with any clarity or specificity.

For example, if my goal were to eat more vegetables, tracking what I eat over a span of a few days or weeks would help me discover how many different vegetables I’m actually eating, and where I might easily make some changes.  Keeping a food log has been shown to …

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Given how fast technology changes, and how nearly ubiquitous smartphones are today, that post has already acquired a kind of antique charm.

Over the subsequent years we’ve written quite a bit about using your phone productively, as you’ll see in this Archive collection.

Our Favorite Apps for your Phone

• I reviewed CamScanner in Turn Your Phone Into a Scanner. Lincoln likes the scanning app DocScanner.
• Mark explains Editing Google Docs on the Go
• Billie explains how to Catalogue Your Books with Book Catalogue
• I described the recently added Dropbox Camera Upload feature, which automatically uploads pictures you take on your phone to your Dropbox account.
• Brian recently reviewed Launch Center Pro for iOS devices
• Mark has reviewed a number …

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Maybe you know you need to go to the gym, but you never seem to make the time for it. Or you tell yourself that you will start writing that article when you have three hours free, or when your desk is organized, or after you’ve read just one more source. You fully intend to make a big effort, but then you don’t follow through.

Behavioral psychologist Robert Maurer suggests that when we find ourselves stuck, sometimes taking a teeny, tiny step is the best strategy. In One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, he applies the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement initially developed in the …

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If you have difficulty focusing on your priority projects because you spend much of your day responding to email, one of the best strategies to improve your processing of email and your focus on other things is to limit your handling of email to set times during the day. Batching your email processing allows you to better assess what is truly urgent, what is truly important, and what can be quickly deleted or archived.

Several years ago, I read Tim Ferriss’s post How to Check E-mail Twice a Day, in which he suggested that in addition to retraining your own work habits, you should add an autoresponder to your email that lets people know…

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