Productivity hack: How to copy blocks of text from Kindle using Scanbot

Ebooks. Look but don’t touch! Ebooks are great. The convenience of having searchable text with me at all times has even been enough to make me grudgingly buy kindle versions of books that I’d already bought in paper form. However ebooks are not without their frustrations. Despite having all that text on your screen you’re […]
One sleep or two: is an unbroken 8 hours an unnatural aspiration?

The received wisdom nowadays is that getting 7 or 8 hours of quality sleep per night is vital if your want to maintain good health, but I don’t know many people that actually achieve this ideal. Personally I manage to spend around 7 hours in bed each night but this is only rarely a continuous, […]
A modern creative workflow

Jack Kerouac typed furiously on a continuous scroll in a benzedrine fuelled frenzy. Roald Dahl retreated to his shed, placed a board over his blanketed knees and started writing longhand. Paul Theroux’s product was finished after he’d produced two handwritten drafts from his notebooks. My own creative workflow comes across as rather convoluted and tech reliant when compared to […]
Countdown to midlife crisis Part 1: developing a time management obsession

With a significant birthday under 6 months away I have started making preparations for my mid-life crisis, or to use less alarmist language, my mid-life transformation. I can trace the roots of this transformation to about a year ago when on holiday in Turkey. I got back into doing tai chi on a daily basis and on […]
Why open plan offices amplify existential angst
Ever get the uneasy feeling that your life might be sliding past in an undifferentiated grey mass? It probably is: the machinery of the brain conspires with the open plan office to make modern work an unsettling, unmemorable experience. The brain’s internal GPS and the grey fog of similarity I recently listened to Grandmaster of […]
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