Many people try to be efficient. There are various methods for achieving high efficiency in life and work. Many sites exist that describe how to become more efficient and how good it is. Interestingly none of them describes drawbacks. Sites and books and seminars all provide tools but none warns human being about potential dangers of high efficiency.

Nothing in the life is absolutely black and white. There are always mid–tones and shadows. Efficiency also has its light and dark sides.

Personally I am a big fan of efficiency. I tried being...

I like RSS feeds because they help me to read articles when articles appear on a publisher's web site. I do not have to visit each site to check for new articles. They all are under by hand in the RSS reader.

Currently I have 19 feeds. Some of them are listed on my 'Recommended reading' page. Half of these feeds are updated frequently and sometimes I do not have time to read them. This causes a lot of unread messages in by feeds folder.

Today I decided to clean up all unread feeds. I quickly scanned all subjects in every feed and deleted...

Camino is a Gecko–based browser for Mac. It is a little brother (sister?) of FireFox. But unlike FireFox 3 it is works at least two times faster. Why is that? No idea. In addition it takes less memory and does not seem to leak it. Fonts look better in Camino.

I decided to use Camino after FireFox hanged up once again and destroyed all my tabs (despite of session saver extension).

I found only two problems with Camino.

Firsts, it does not import FireFox bookmarks correct. It looks only in the "default" profile...

There is one rule I started to follow recently. I found it to be universally usable and useful. It applies to any area of the life: programming, shopping, reading, repairing your house.

The rule is simple: never rush.

Rushing means you miss possibly more optimal alternatives. These could be alternative ways of doing the current task or alternatives to the task itself. In 100% of cases I find that waiting for a couple of hours either presents a much better solution or eleminates the problem completely. So even if something needs urgent...

In July I had a session about personal productivity at TYPO3 user group in Holland. I planned to make video from these slides but I instead I decided another way to share slides. I put them to SlideShare. You can also vote for these slides to participate in the "World Best Presentation Contest' 08".

Enjoy!

Some people asked for files from productivity session. Here it is as image. Feel free to use for non-commercial purposes.

One way that I found very useful to increase my productivity is background thinking.  It is not usually what people can do just when they read it. Some self-training is required, though some people learned it instinctively.

The principle is: when you have something to think about, imagine that you put it like a mid-size closed box somewhere in your mind. May be on a shelf, or in the dark corner - depends on how you can imagine your mind. To me it usually a long room with lots of corners but never ending, completely dark. I can see a...