Non-RSS visitors may notice a few little changes to 43F's appearance and functionality this morning, including a slight change to the page layout, the addition of a print-friendly style sheet, plus a number of little widgets and finials sprinkled here and there.

Some of the changes are experimental and others are incompletely implemented, so if you are experiencing any visual blips or functional farts, please email “bugs” at this domain. Thanks in advance for your help and forbearance.

Why bother?

In my own experience wrangling life's entropic challenges, some of my best gains have come from maintaining a smart, actionable, and updated accounting of all the things I've committed myself to doing. While the quality of that list may vary from day to day, it's the best place to train my focus whenever things are starting to feel out of control. In fact, the health of my to-do list usually mirrors the health of my productivity (as well as the barometric pressure of my stress). On the good days, my to-do list has a living quality that helps guide my decisions and steers me through unexpected changes in priority or velocity. And on the crummy days, it becomes the likely suspect when I need to quickly reassess the state of the union and make changes.

While you can argue for the flavor and approach to task management that best suits your style (and your personal suck), it's hard to disparage the benefits that come from getting task commitments out of your brain and into a consistent location. One list scribbled on one busy day is not necessarily the answer (although it can be a lifesaver). Try thinking of your to-do list as an evolving plan for responsibly focusing your effort and attention in the near future.

It's been a while, so how about some Friday remainders?

Procrastination can drive most of us into a spiral of shame that’s as mundane as it is painfully personal. We know what we should be doing, but some invisible hang-up keeps us on the line. Unfortunately, the guaranteed consequence of procrastination is growth in the scale of the task you’ve been putting off—as well as the anxiety that it creates. All the time you’re putting something off, your problem’s getting bigger—both in reality and in your head, where your colorful imagination is liable to turn even the most trivial item into an unsolvable juggernaut that threatens to overwhelm you. And that means extra stress, more procrastination, and the music goes round.

My favorite tonic for procrastination—which I have mentioned in passing previously—is what I call a dash, which is simply a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time—perhaps as little as just one minute. By breaking a few tiny pebbles off of your perceived monolith, you end up psyching yourself out of your stupor, as well as making much-needed progress on your overdue project. Neat, huh?

Good, short article on increasing your confidence at work

Just a quickie to let the Moleskine fans know that the 2006 diaries and planners are now available from MoleskineUS. (more inside)

Roy Peter Clark has distilled the concept of “writing as carpentry” down to twenty simple techniques for tightening up your work.

Ideas for keeping your creative life alive while you pay the bills.

Labor Day’s over, campers. Time to put away your espadrilles and start trying to look busy. With Summer symbolically behind us, here’s a fast overview of some favorite 43F posts from the past 3 months.

Sometimes, it's easy to feel like your work has degraded into a series of interruptions--that any block of time you've set aside to focus on a project is in constant danger of being minced to bits by phone calls, emails, and the weekend anecdotes of your co-workers. Worse still, we all suffer daily from innumerable waits, delays, and last-minute reschedulings, all of which can upend our plans and lead to a constant shifting of available time.

Rather than always seeing these changes as an intractable liability, try to look at them as opportunities to liberate unexpected pockets of time and focus. While literally non-stop interruptions are likely to make any of us nutty, a slight adjustment to your planning and outlook can lead to fast gains in productivity and a much-improved attitude about your working environment.

“The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.”

PigPogPDA - PigPog Creativity Wiki [Introduction]

Michael Randall lays out a paper GTD-based system that should appeal to a lot of folks here.

What Is It?

• A Moleskine hack.
• An extreme Moleskine hack.
• A simplified GTD system (What system? See our GTD Introduction), with relatively little actual organising. May be useful if you fancy Doing GTD Without Doing GTD.
• A complete personal management system for those who’s needs aren’t too complicated.
• A rather over-the-top system for dealing with just the capturing and processing end of GTD.

Why?

I was finding GTD a bit much for various reasons, but didn’t want to stop entirely - I needed to be Doing GTD Without Doing GTD. This is the system I came up with in the end. It’s simpler than GTD, and wouldn’t scale to the sort of level that GTD will, but it works pretty well for me, so it seems reasonable to think it might work well for other people too.

Read on for details of a clever system for turning a Moleskine Reporter into a kind of über-notebook, in which capture, processing, and related work are handled using sticky-note flags and some light templating.

Excellent thread over on the Google Group about using a bike to commute to work.

Modest Needs has an initiative to help those folks who are helping others—even as their own finances may feel the strain.

Really good post on a satisfying hybrid of paper and digital. Full of good insight and “what I've learned” observations. Best of many good lines: “The power of Greyskull is the power of the next action.” Word.

The always-enjoyable Mind Tools shares eight of the most popular and reliable tools for decision making.

Clever way to use Thunderbird’s excellent (semantic) flags to implement at GTD-inspired email triage system

Ben Franklin nerded out in so many ways. Check out his cool little book for tracking his adherence to “13 virtues.”