Jim’s Junk Drawer

This essay captures something I struggle with all the time: how to get momentum on a project when your day is dominated by calls & meetings. Short answer, you can’t. You need to do project work in relatively long uninterrupted chunks of time.

“For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, and also by the same guy (Paul Graham), Good and Bad Procrastination.

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

Good article in the NYT on the importance of dissonance in priming the brain for learning.