Yesterday I got a good question from a reader. His email was too long to paste in full, but the gist of the question was that he was trying to do a lot of self improvement stuff at once, and his attention seemed to be too spread to really made a big impact in any…

The one thing I consistently fail to account for when planning trips, especially shorter ones, is the disruption it will cause to my routine. For over a hundred days in a row, I wrote a blog post every day, did a Chinese lesson, worked on SETT, and a few other things for which I hold…

Right now I’m waiting to start a video interview. I called in early, but my friend who is doing the interview wasn’t ready, so I’ve got five or ten minutes to kill before we get started. My first inclination was to catch up on email. I only had a couple to write, so I finished…

Okay, okay, okay… I’ll write the gear post before the year’s over! One of the things that keeps me from writing all year is that it never really feels like the stuff in my pack has changed all that much. I switch one item at a time, never thinking I have much to write about.…

When I talk about working like a maniac for 10-14 hours a day, I sometimes get criticized for working too hard. I need to relax or enjoy life more, people say. When I read this, I assume that I’ve done a poor job explaining how I feel about work or how I actually construct my…

The benefit of having your subconscious make decisions isn’t so much that it’s a better decision maker than your conscious mind (it’s probably not), but that it can make decisions much much faster than your conscious mind. You don’t have to spend your focus and energy making decisions that you already have heuristics for. For…

When I first released SETT, a common bit of feedback I’d get was, “It’s nice, but it’s really slow”. This shouldn’t have been too surprising to me, given that I hadn’t spent any time optimizing it, and didn’t know how to, anyway. So I sat down and decided to fix the problem. Now SETT is…

I had only the roughest of plans coming to China– hang out in Shanghai, make it to Hua Shan, and drink some good tea. With a couple weeks of Shanghai loafing and a trip to Hua Shan under my belt, only tea was left on my checklist. China has very high quality famous teas in…

We’re getting pretty close to being ready to launch SETT to the (unsuspecting) public. Shooting for mid December, but no later than January no matter what. If you’re a blogger, you can do us a HUGE favor by answering this quick one-page survey about blogging. *** If you’re not a blogger, sorry about the clutter…