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To Do lists are helpful in identifying what should be done. Assigning those To Do items a date and time on the calendar declares when they should be done.

But then – reality interferes.

My friend Garrick, perhaps one of the smartest people I know, shares his new daily planner with the world. I have been using it a bit this week and, while it does not exactly fit my normal working style, the concept is interesting. Give it a whirl and share your feedback with him as I know he is open to it.

THAT’S RIGHT. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.

Stephen is at his best when he is writing Stephen.

(via Lone Gunman)

Courtesy of Oxford University, the complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays from the First Folio of 1623.  You can download all of these texts in the open ePub format. And if you have an iPad (or an iPhone with a copy of iBooks), they easily sync to the device, and make for a great reading experience.

This is very cool.

Some guys, they do it for the money. Other guys do it ‘cause they don’t know what else they can do.

That pretty much describes why I write.

(Thanks, Jane, for sharing this.)

The title has a double meaning, referring to both the band’s ability to play as fast as they could (there are 17 songs crammed into 26½ minutes) and their penchant for amphetamine pills, which they took mostly as appetite suppressants due to lack of money to buy food.[citation needed]

I say, listening to this album on repeat is the only citation you will ever need… For anything, really.

Conceive of this tumble-bug interesting himself in my punctuation — which is none of business & with which he has nothing to do — & then instead of correcting mis-spelling, which is in his degraded line, striking a mark under the word & silently confessing that he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it! The damned half-developed foetus!

Writers have always been at war with Editorial.

I’m not moving my periods and commas for America; I’m leaving them where they are for America.

Writers have always been at war with Editorial.

The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a calendar. A calendar isn’t a person. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an abstraction. But subtracting an hour from the life of another human being isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s almost violent. It’s certainly invasive. Shared calendars are vessels you fill by taking things away from other people.

So. Very. True. This is a great examination of why traditional calendars don’t work and what can be done to fix them. 

You and me, partner, are pretty much screwed when any rich and powerful interests dominates what should be a simple conversation about how we want to live together.

Preach it, Brother Randy! 

For Greenberg, it’s all about feeling the granularity of prioritization. By manually bumping a certain task every day, he feels that it is incomplete. He is faced with the reality and forced to either complete the task, delegate it, or bump it again. 

That’s the same thing for me. It’s why, no matter what task system I’m using at the moment, my Today Card is what gets me through life.