Hey there,
This week, while watching National Geographic's Ultimate Supercar, I got reminded of the
concept of artificial deadlines.
The head designer at Aston Martin talked about how setting close to impossible deadlines, earlier than actual deadlines, can help fuel productivity.
Keeping Parkinson's Law in mind, I would agree. Work expands to fill the
time allocated to it.
And setting early deadlines can help achieve the task within the actual deadline.
But:
I'm curious to understand if this works in the long term.
If you continue tricking your brain into a false deadline, then soon enough, your brain will learn to ignore that deadline.
And you end up back in square one.
What do you think? Have you found setting artificial deadlines useful?
Now, grab a coffee, sit tight, and enjoy this week's issue:
Book to Read
Deep Work
Focus is a rare element in our hyper-busy world. Learn how to carve out focus time and get your best work done with the tips from this classic book. More deep work equals more progress in life.
View it on Goodreads
•••
Apps & Services
TABLERONE is the best session manager I've used in a browser. With this extension, you can quickly select multiple tabs in your Chrome window and save the session for later. This is extremely helpful for creating a list of pages you need to visit later
or share with someone else. Talk about sharing; you can share your saved tab list with anyone using a public link or formatted table that you can paste into Google Sheets. TABLERONE is free to use.
Onboarding pages for new team members are usually a boring dump of company information and resource links. Frond Hello looks to make onboarding experiences exciting by letting you create an interactive welcome page for your new team members. You can record
and add videos, helpful links, and more to the page and personalise it for the joiner. Frond Hello is free to use.
Acreom is a new productivity app that marries a calendar with notes. You can jot down your meeting notes or plan for the day and have corresponding events show up in a calendar on the side. How? Add tasks to your notes with a time, and it'll show up on
the acreom calendar as well as your Google Calendar. Like an
IDE,
acreom provides a delightful typing experience and shortcuts.
This is a web app, currently free to use.
Modern for Wikipedia is a browser extension that gives Wikipedia pages a complete UI overhaul. For the better. With this extension installed, Wikipedia pages automatically get changed into a modern look. And with a modern UI comes modern features like
a sidebar with clickable page sections. Also, you can tweak the font, page colour and content width in a few clicks. This extension is free to use and available on Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Taking the Shortcut
Add a CC recipient while composing an email in Gmail.
•••
Interesting Reads
Overworking and burning out is common trait amongst the workforce these days. I've faced it too. But, with the Macro-Meso-Micro method of relaxation, I've learnt to take varied and meaningful pauses in my work and keep myself going without crashing into
burnout. Read this post to learn how to use the same technique in your routine.
How we perceive ourselves and the world around us goes a long way in determining the kind of life we end up living. The better your attitude towards life, the more content you can be. This post highlights 11 faulty beliefs that make our life a living
hell. Make sure you're steering clear of them.
The digital nomad lifestyle has been in craze for the past few years. Selling all of your belongings and leaving your community to travel the world and work remotely seems like fun. But, it's not always a rose-covered path. In this retrospective blog
post, Nat highlights his year as a digital nomad talking about the ups and downs of this way of living.
There's a fine line between being challenged at a task and being overwhelmed. Challenging tasks keep you engaged and fuels you further to solve a problem. Whereas overwhelming tasks suck the life out of you and makes you feel miserable. Read this post
to learn about this distinction in detail.
It's the holiday season. And that means consumerism is at its peak. It gets tempting to stock up on everything and even buy things that you don't need with deals everywhere. This article gives us a good reminder that our money works better if we invest
it in the right place rather than mindlessly following a consumption train.
Thread
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