The fundamentals of how we make a living have evolved over the past few centuries. The changes were brought about by the Industrial Revolution and have accelerated alongside technological advances. Allow me to show you a gross oversimplification to illustrate my point: The distant past-1840: Doing things we hate for ourselves. We worked our parents’ trade […]
Best Podcasts for Authors
I don’t like to waste time. Some things like sweeping the kitchen floor, mowing the lawn, and walking the dog aren’t wasting time, but are time-consuming activities that we must do. These activities don’t take much brain processing power. One way to make your time more productive is to listen to podcasts while doing […]
The Best Book on Amazon, Ever.
Amazon.com has a page showing some all-time bests. I went in and looked at the data in an attempt to find the best book on Amazon, ever. Top 3 best-selling books of all-time Top 3 customer-reviewed books of all time Top 3 best books of all time Now to the fun part. Which from the top […]
Apple Music Took Away the Stars. Now What?
A couple years ago, Apple iTunes let you give each song a star rating of 1-5 stars. It was great and powerful, and it let me use “smart playlists” to create a tiered system for my music. Then iOS 10 came along and took away the star ratings. They might have also taken away […]
Top 10 Most Essential Windows Apps for an Author
After my computer’s motherboard fried in 2016, I bought a new computer. I had been working on the cloud as much as possible, so I didn’t have to install much software on my new computer. To the uninitiated, “the cloud” is a fancy way of talking about data stored on the Internet. But there was […]
Meditation Techniques
Many of the world’s top performers practice meditation. I view it as a way to get your mind in the right place before you start work. There are many different types of meditation. It is worth exploring which kind of meditation works best for you. Here are some of the more popular forms of meditation: […]
Work Ethic
Money is what you get in exchange for helping someone else. It is an “I owe you” note. You help somebody, whether it’s your neighbor, a customer, or your boss, and they give you money in exchange for your time and effort. The time and effort you spend to help somebody else is called […]
Mentor Focus: Steve Scott
With the Internet and social media, almost anyone can be your mentor. They don’t even need to know you exist. Just pick a person whose work you admire and follow them on the Internet. In the Mentor Focus series, I profile the people I follow online. Before he began his Kindle book empire, Steve Scott […]
The One Habit to Avoid All Scams
I once got an amusing phishing scam email informing me that someone has been trying to access my account from a foreign IP address and that I need to verify my information with them. Here’s an excerpt: “If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but to temporaly suspend your account.” […]
Time Auditing
The first step in taking control of your productivity is to know how you spend your time. Sometimes time just seems to “fly.” Time just slips away, and you can no longer account for all of it. It is where time auditing comes in. If you pay close attention to your time and track it, […]