Short Bursts

Business Insider: Why Successful People Leave Work Early

Try this for a day: don’t answer every phone call. Stop checking your email every two minutes. And leave work early. You’ll be astounded at how much more you’ll get done.

According to a study published in the Psychological Review conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericcson, the key to great success is working harder in short bursts of time. Then give yourself a break before getting back to work.

The trick is staying focused. Ericsson and his team evaluated a group of musicians to find out what the “excellent” players were doing differently. They found that violinists who practiced more deliberately, say for 4 hours, accomplished more than others who slaved away for 7 hours. The best performers set goals for their practice sessions and required themselves to take breaks.

via @Richard_Florida

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Career

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Drudge

Forbes magazine on Pew Research Center’s new study on where big news sites get their traffic from.
Turns out The Drudge Report kicks some ass:

Facebook figures larger in the mix, driving anywhere from 1 percent (AOL News, MSNBC.com) to 7 or 8 percent (CNN, ABC News and, leading the pack, the Huffington Post). But if what you want is a real firehose of visitors, no newfangled social network can compete with the Drudge Report. The 15-year-old aggregator of links was responsible for between 5 and 10 percent of the traffic to the New York Times and USA Today during the period studied. It accounted for 15 percent of the traffic to the Washington Post, 20 percent to the New York Post and an astonishing 30 percent to the Daily Mail.

Remember too, the site is only one page.
Maybe Jason Fried over at 37Signals was right when he declared in 2008 that The Drudge Report was one of the best designed sites on the web.
via FishbowlNY

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Human Experience

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Second to Dylan

From Rolling Stone magazine, Paul Simon doesn’t like being Second to Dylan:

Simon, who has just released his new album So Beautiful Or So What, says that in his head at least, there has been something of a folk stand-off going on.

He told Rolling Stone: “I usually come in second to (to Dylan), and I don’t like coming in second. In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan’s work. The Sound of Silence wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and Mrs Robinson. They weren’t folky any more.”

via The Guardian

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Music

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Annoying Alerts

Nick Fletcher on the flaw in iOS’ Notification System:

Quite simply, the modal alerts that iOS currently uses are broken not because tech bloggers everywhere are struggling with notifications all the time, but because the iOS system fails to account for the contextual areas in which showing a notification is actually impeding your use of the device. For example: when you’re on the phone and an SMS comes in. I’ve never once been on a phonecall where, after concluding the call, knowing I got an SMS from my fiancĂ©e was more important than hanging up the call.

I’m looking forward to the next version of iOS where this is fixed. I know it’s something Apple is aware of and has every intention of fixing, but make no mistake, it’s a BIG fix. I would say it’s on par with copy-and-paste because it’s a core feature effecting every part of the operating system.
And like copy-and-paste, Apple is going to take it’s time to make sure the solution release is thought out, elegant and easy to use.

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Human Experience

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Options

The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out of prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear.

—Paul Rand
via @mullerbrockmann (via Analogue)

Categories:

Philosophy

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Organized Cords

I came across a product called Applecore over at Minimal Mac. It’s a little piece of plastic you wrap your extra long electronics cables around so they’re not a gangly mess:
Applecore_cable_tamer.jpg
It’s a great idea, but I came up with my own, home-grown, hand-rolled (if you will) solution to the cord problem years ago.
As my friends and anyone who’s worked with our near me knows, I’m a bit OCD about my cables, but you don’t need an Applecore to fix it, you just need to do this:
bundled_electronics_cords.jpg
If you don’t have the patience or dexterity to do what I did, I still think Applecore is a great product.

Categories:

Materials

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It Irks Me Too

Frank Chimero on Reading Readiness:

It irks me when people say that blog posts are too long. Sometimes, I catch myself saying the same. Who ever decided the proper length of a blog post? Not me. Not you. Not anyone. An individual only decides the length of their attention. Text takes time–to make, to design, to read. For things to work, effort must be matched. To return to our kung-fu movie: effort and attention from the student is matched with the attention of the master. Similarly so with the writer and the reader. To be willing to match attention is to be kind and ready.

Categories:

Words

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Pornotechnics

The Guardian: Rihanna and the rise of raunch pop:
S&M marked a pivotal moment for pop. In 2007, Rihanna told Paper magazine she aspired to be “the black Madonna”, and it’s possible S&M was her calculated attempt to top the level of infamy her heroine once attained, but she could just as well have taken her cues from the generation of phenomenally successful good-girls-gone-bad that preceded her: Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Their own transmogrifications from wholesome teen stars to FHM poster girls upped the stakes for future pop princesses, who must wear less and promise more to make the same impact on an over-stimulated audience. Pop music has reached a point where it’s most successful young women are shooting whipped cream (Katy Perry) and fireworks (Lady Gaga) out of their bras.

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Music

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