Cool Tool: It's All Too Much

As my battle with clutter continues, one of my favorite people (and one of the smartest guys writing for the web, period), Kevin Kelly, noticed my efforts and took note of my affection for Peter Walsh's wonderful book, It's All Too Much.

My review for Cool Tools is indeed adapted from a few posts that originated here, but I think it's worth pointing to because, a) that book has had a huge influence on how I think about my relationship to "stuff," b) I'm honored that KK liked what I'd had to say about it, and c) if you aren't already reading Kevin's sites -- particularly his consistently insightful The Technium column -- you'd do yourself a favor to get acquainted fast. Kevin's the real deal.

YouTube - Ira Glass on Storytelling #3

Video featuring terrific advice from This American Life’s Ira Glass on having the tenacity to get better at the creative work you’re passionate about — even through the times when you know what you’re making isn't as good as you'd like.

Beeswax - Mind Your Own Beeswax

Wow, this looks like a really interesting project to watch — a GNU-licensed, command line productivity app that finds inspiration in a bona fide classic:

Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda’s flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views & reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting…

The relationships between items of information are highly flexible. An item can be easily assigned to several different categories and the view immediately displays the new relationships. An item can just as easily be detached from categories. As you move items through Beeswax, their relationship to each other remains highly flexible.

You still hear a lot of people saying Agenda is the closest they ever got to their dream productivity app. And, depending on who you ask, Agenda's endless flexibility was either incredibly powerful or infinitely fiddly.

Beeswax is a very young application, but I’ll definitely be giving it a spin. There's certainly a long-standing itch for Agenda that lot of folks would love to have scratched.

[via Anarchaia]

I'm not sure how anyone feels about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the idea that the words we use shape the way we think or exist - but I'm much happier knowing that the word "lagom" is out there.

I am entering it into my person lexicon forthwith.

How to nap - Boston.com

I'm a big fan of napping and often evangelize the transformative power of a quick Pzizz. If you're new to the nap habit -- or if you buy the propaganda that naps are only for infants and layabouts -- treat yourself to this cool infographic from The Boston Globe (shown in part above).

[via Arts & Letters Daily]