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Professionalism isn’t just a set of appearances — neatness, good grooming, “shop talk” and the like. Nor is it just technical skill; many technically skilled people are not really professional….

The Straight-A Method is supported by four pillars: capture, control, plan, and evolve. Each pillar is associated with a high-level goal you should strive to achieve as a student. Here’s the promise: If you can satisfy these four goals — regardless of what specific strategies or systems you use — you will ace your courses…

I take time blocking seriously, dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building my schedule for the next day. During this planning process I consult my task lists and calendars, as well as my weekly and quarterly planning notes…

On Monday mornings I plan the upcoming work week. I capture this plan in an e-mail and send it to myself so that I will be sure to see it and have access to it daily…

Not long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue…

I recently began reading Haruki Murakami’s excellent mini-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If your life requires a non-trivial amount of creative work, I highly recommend this quick read…

Ever since I first read these words, they stuck with me as useful for understanding the working world in particular. The whole edifice that we now call “productivity advice” distills, I realized, to instructions for cajoling the elephant. If you’re not firm, it’ll do what it wants to do…

How do I balance an ambitious work load with an ambitiously sparse schedule? It’s a simple idea I call fixed-schedule productivity…