By Ben Barone-Nugent Read more » 1. You unironically use buzzwords. You used to laugh at those white-collars who said shit like ‘synergy’ and ‘future-focus’ with a straight face. Now you’ve given up. You play the game. In your performance review, you dwell on how you hit all your KPIs and delivered…

Hello, New Person. It’s great to meet you. We’ve been waiting awhile for you to come here and now that you’re here, we’re pumped. It’s going to be so much better with you here because we’ve built up impossible expectations in our heads regarding what you can do. Don’t worry - we’re not going to tell…

http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

Like it or not, we all display signs of social status when we go out in public. From our clothing to the car we drive, we give others indications of all kinds of things about us. Quite often, people buy into the idea that expensive items display high social status. If they dress well, have a perfect…

"Manage your energy, not your time." This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it's one that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle in the 21st century. Yet, living "manage your energy, not your time" is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around a year…

For a few days last week, I spent a lot of time reading and playing video games. It was kind of out of the blue for me, so it didn’t take long for me to start asking myself why I was doing these things. What was triggering it was an avoidance of thinking about the pain in my lower legs. For several…

Yes, Google Reader is going away, and yes, there are great alternatives. However, if you're tired of web services shutting down on you, why not take matters into your own hands? Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source syncing RSS platform with more features than Google Reader ever had, and it can't get…

Este letrero marca la altura a la que llegó el Pisuerg aquel día La crecida que experimentó el río Pisuerga a su paso por Valladolid el 6 de marzo de 2001 ha sido una de las peores sufridas en los últimos 40 años. Fue la culminación de un proceso de reiteradas subidas de caudal y de inundaciones…

Former Founder of Forrst. Now in SF building new things, like @Thinglist, &c. April 3, 2013 I’m currently working the fewest number of hours per week I ever have in my professional life, and I’ve never been more productive. We’ve all fallen victim to this way of irrational thinking before: The…

Apr. 3, 2013 By Ben Branstetter Ben Branstetter is a 24-year-old writer living in Central Pennsylvania. He attended Milton Hershey School followed by ... Read more » You’re-Tearing-Me-Apart Pork BBQ INGREDIENTS 2 lb pork tenderloin ($8) 1 16 oz bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ ($2.50) Kaiser rolls…

By James Altucher Read more » This was going to end badly. I would play chess all day in my office with the door locked. My boss would knock on the door and I would put my headphones on and ignore him. People would complain that the software I wrote didn’t work. My boss would say, “Where were you…

Co-founder @Copyin.com. Lies, damn lies and startups. The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state…

By Sara Sheridan Read more » TC Flickr I like being sad. I like feeling utterly alone or helpless or dark or all three at once. I like lying in bed and crying or just laying in bed, staring at my ceiling, brooding over the train wreck my life seems to be. I like feeling sorry for myself. I like…

A neolithic grindstone for preparing grain1. For generations their people had collected the seeds of tall grasses, which they cooked and ate to supplement their diet of foraged fruits, vegetables, and leaves, and hunted game, fish, and seafood. Some years, due to drought or animal migration, food…

http://www.psmag.com/environment/oil-production-peak-oil-fracking-kern-river-north-dakota-brazil-energy-53395/

I’ve just finished my first PHP application that had to handle dates and time spans correctly across multiple timezones and I thought I would share a couple of the things that I learned. My first piece of advice is to store EVERYTHING in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The reason for this is that if you…

For years, I kept hearing how awesome Evernote was: how it could store everything you possibly needed, make it available everywhere, and how scores of people couldn't live without it. I tried it multiple times, and never saw the appeal until now. Here's what I was missing. Any time we talk about…

A few days ago I had a moment of sheer panic because I couldn't find a pen. I went through the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of penlessness (Denial: Maybe I don't need a pen? I don't need a pen! Anger: Where is my goddamned pen?! Bargaining: If you give me your pen, O nice, accommodating waiter, I'll…

(I just felt the need to lift a comment I posted on an earlier thread up here where it belongs.) Quoth a commenter, to whom I felt the need to reply: This is a statement of ideology, not of fact. For most of the duration of the human species, change has not been an overriding influence on our lives.…

Egads! I was recently given a 478 page hard-cover textbook by a major educational publisher on Scrum. You gotta be kidding me. There is so much talk and writing about Agile and Scrum and, frankly, in my opinion, 99% of it is confusing and makes things worse for the people who read it. Don’t read…

Happiness—in your business life and your personal life—is often a matter of subtraction, not addition. Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following things. People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time. So you blame them for your…

Whenever the topic of working from home comes up, I always find myself defending my productivity. A colleague will say, “Well, it’s nice, but you’re just not as productive as if you were in the office.” Something about the argument never sat well with me, and I’ve finally nailed down what it is: it…

¿Existe alguna comida más reconfortante cuando hace frío que un buen caldo casero? Seguramente no. Por alimentarnos en formato líquido a la vez que nos calientan, no existe un preparado más efectivo para acabar con el destemple. Ahora bien, antes de que exijáis que me den 40 latigazos por publicar…

If you have the opportunity to telecommute regularly, or even work from home every now and again, the temptation can be strong to just put your feet up and forget about work unless you have to check in occasionally and clear out your inbox or dial in to a meeting. Occasional slacking is fine, but…

Dear Lifehacker, I know that the trend lately at Yahoo and now at Best Buy is that workers should stop working from home and come into the office, but I still think I can be productive at home. My coworkers agree with me, and we'd like to convince our boss to let us try it one day a week. How can we…

By Karen Noble Read more » 1. Make a playlist of all your favorite songs, old ones you may have totally forgotten about from middle school or ones that bring back good memories. 2. Take a walk outside. I find I only start to feel worse and wallow if I let myself melt into my bed and engage in the…

La sana obsesión de los amigos de Politikón es conseguir un debate político basado en la evidencia. Teniendo en cuenta el grado de crispación y de dogmatismo con el que se nos bombardea cada vez que se confrontan diferentes opciones políticas, un intercambio de ideas basado en hechos mensurables,…

Cuando Hugo Chávez llegó al poder en 1999 trajo consigo el fin de todo un sistema político en Venezuela, un país con una larga tradición democrática. Para los que estudian la institucionalización de los sistemas de partidos este caso es relevante. Si no tenemos unos partidos institucionalizados (es…

By Chelsea Fagan Read more » Aih 1. Draw a long, hot bath (even if this means waiting until you go back to your parents’ house for a visit where there is an actual bathtub), light a bunch of candles, get a glass of chilled white wine and a book. Enjoy that for as long as it continues to feel…

By Monica Heisey You know what's an irreversible waste of time, money and effort? Eating food you take pleasure in eating. I mean, wouldn't you rather just ingest a tasteless form of sustenance for the rest of your life and never have to go through that tedious rigmarole of opening and eating a…

By Ryan O'Connell Read more » Thought Catalog Flickr This past weekend, New York did that cruel thing it likes to do in March where it gives us two days of spring and then decides to take it away from us for another two months. It’s a cruel, cruel tease of what awaits us after months of enduring…

By Kovie Biakolo Read more » TC Flickr There are many different kinds of online or digital writers. From social media content creators to bloggers to news and magazine columnists; the list goes on. Within these categories, writers may also discuss popular culture and human interest pieces in the…

Imagine, if you will, a snow globe. Wait, the snow globe is in California — Long Beach to be exact. It’s really sunny in this particular snow globe. There’s a beach. Okay, thinking of a west coast snow globe? Good. What’s inside the snow globe? Buildings — say, the sprawling, mid-century Long Beach…

Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house. As I went to speak with the driver, he threw the car into reverse and sped off, striking me and running over my right foot as I fell to the ground.…

By Brian Merchant Obviously every single one of Google's "oh man, look at the crazy thing Google's doing now" projects is expressly designed to enable we awed proclaimers to use more Google. Which is cool; Google's a business, and of course it's on a perpetual quest to get us to buy/use more of its…

Hard work may pay off, but there's a big difference between tackling a difficult task and putting in a lot of hours. Cal Newport, assistant professor at Georgetown University, decided to look at the work habits of talented people and found that busier wasn't better. In fact, it was much worse than…

I just watched former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s TED Talk. She provides some nice insight as to what it is really like as a politician trying to grapple with the new realities of the modern world; trying to save jobs in America that just don’t make sense economically any more. Granholm…

By David Cain Read more » Shutterstock I was going to tackle my procrastination problem last weekend but I never got around to it. By Sunday at 5:48 p.m. I realized I had blown it again. Throughout the week I feel like I barely have enough time to cook, eat, tidy up, write an article and do the odd…

http://t.co/PQK3bqyq4l

Starting a new exercise routine is tough, and when your body is in pain from getting into shape it's hard to really enjoy yourself. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at what it is that makes us hate exercise, and what we can do about it. Like many things, exercise is all about perspective. If…