I spent some time writing out 100 wishes of mine on post-its inspired by this post: How and Why to do a Life Audit. The idea is to brainstorm your life goals, values, dreams and then categorize them based on themes and timeframes. The process allows for your priorities to come to light and helps you to see the patterns of your life. I could only fill 50 post-its in one sitting and as I discover new dreams of mine I go back to my remaining post-it pack to add more. I found that once I had written down all the desires inside of me and, in a sense, got them out of my system, it freed up space for completely new and weirdly fun wishes to show up. — CD

Four Note Boards is an online app and private text tool where you can paste and drag text around into one of four boxes. It’s perfect for when you need to compare blocks of text. I used it to compare and select poems for the new issue of Phantom Kangaroo. It’s simple and allows you to think multi-dimensionally. — CD

This is a great blog post on “How to Ask Useful Questions,” by Josh Kaufman. Poorly worded questions don’t respect the recipient’s time, energy or attention, and as a result often go unanswered. An inexperienced question might sound like “I’m thinking about [action]. What do you think?” If your intention was to ask for help, a better worded question would be: “I’m trying to A, and I’m having trouble. So far, I’ve tried B with result C, and D with result E. Now I’m stuck. Any guidance?” Josh gives a few more examples based on what your intention is, like asking for agreement, information, clarification, etc. The goal is to be specific, and give as much context as possible in a concise way. And of course, be polite. — CD

I beta-tested one of Clearer Thinking’s mini-programs to help identify my greatest sources of pleasure, which is important to know, because “positive emotions are one of the pillars of well-being. By identifying your Sources of Pleasure, you can pursue them on those times you are feeling a bit low, our use them as a reward for engaging in other activities you do not feel like doing.” My sources of pleasure were mostly sensorial and not surprising to discover: animals, nature, humor. But what was surprising was the genius advice that could apply to everyone: “Coupling” to come up with ways to incorporate pleasure into your daily life. “Couple boring activities, like vacuuming your home, with something you really like to do such as listening to your favorite podcast or singing out loud.” I do love listening to standup comedy while stuck in traffic, I had never thought of listening to it while I cleaned the house. — CD

A recent issue of The Sunday Soother newsletter ran a list of “high-quality questions to determine high-quality answers” to help you get unstuck from a sticky situation. Here’s the first half of the list:

• Am I attempting to mind-read somebody else’s intentions in this situation?

• How could I give myself what I’m hoping this other person will give me?

• Is this thought arising from shame or fear? What is a thought I can have from self-compassion or hope instead?

• Can I name three things I need right now?

• Can I name three things I could let go of right now?

• Can I figure out a way to make this 5% easier on myself?

• What answer feels easiest to me?

• What if what felt right to me, was right?

• Who may be benefiting from how I am thinking or feeling right now?

Read the rest here. — MF

In his newsletter James Altucher reveals how he decides to say yes or no to opportunities. Here’s what he wrote:

Two out of these three have to trigger for me to say YES:

• KNOWLEDGE: Will I learn something?

• FUN: Is it fun?

• MONEY: Is it financially worthwhile?

James says no a lot more than yes. — MF

Most overnight successes take at least 5 years. As Dave Perell notes in his newsletter Monday Musings, “[Marques Brownlee] is one of the most popular technology-focused YouTubers in the world. As I write this, he has 13.6 million subscribers and his videos have been watched 2.4 billion times. But when he recorded his 100th video, he only had 74 subscribers.” In other words he made and posted his first hundred videos with the tiniest possible audience. To make something great, keep showing up! As Perell noted in another of his issues: “If you create something weekly for 2 years, you WILL earn an audience.” That is, make 100 creations BEFORE you have a big audience. Every “overnight” success I’ve ever seen was preceded by years of relentless, and sometimes unappreciated, hard work. — KK

My daughter told me about director Harmony Korine’s brainstorming tool, which he demonstrates in this video. It’s loose, unstructured, and irrational, which may turn some people off, but my daughter gave me examples of how she’s used it with excellent results and I’m impressed. — MF

The “Urgent-Important” decision making matrix seems to be trending real hard (according to all the productivity posts I come across 🤓), and it’s exactly that which inspired this task-mapping tool called Baller ToDo. It will help you visualize and figure out the stuff that really matters and most importantly, what you can put off. — CD

Unexpectedly, you can decrease the fatigue of zooming all day if you don’t see your own image on the screen all day. The easiest way to hide your self picture in Zoom is to hover over or right-click your image until a blue square appears in the upper right corner. Click on the 3 white dots, and in the dropdown menu, click on “Hide Self View”. Once it was gone I noticed the absence of an irritant I had not been aware of before. Zooming is calmer. — KK

“Most of us don’t plan ahead for losing a job, for dealing with a week-long water outage, or for surviving the night if our home goes up in smoke,” writes the author of this 30,000 word guide for surviving life-altering events. Unlike doomsday prepper manuals, this one offers common sense advice for dealing with uncommon circumstances. — MF

In the US, 41 states enable early voting. Early Voting is the national clearing house linking the procedures for early voting for each state. Vote early to be sure. — KK

The Loclock webpage offers a dead-simple way to see what time it is anywhere in the world. Click the little menu icon in the upper left corner to choose which cities to include on a 24-hour circle. — MF

Claudia recommended Readwise a while back, but since then this powerful ebook and article highlighting app has added a lot of new useful features. You can highlight excerpts from Pocket and Instapaper, and even grab clips of podcasts, which are automatically transcribed into text (using the new airr podcast player). Best of all, I can browse and search all my ebook, article, and podcast highlights on the Readwise website or Evernote. It’s an indispensable tool. — MF

I publish the same material on different social media platforms from my computer using a web-based app called Hootsuite.  With Hootsuite I can pre-schedule material ahead of time. I can post images from my camera on Instagram, which otherwise is hard to do. I get analytics, respond, and manage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc, all from one dashboard. There is a limited free version but I pay for the basic $30/month small business version. — KK

This may be a new thing for you. Working from Home Temporarily is a free 72-page ebook that offers extremely practical advice on how to set up this new lifestyle. Some of the stuff is obvious, but there’s a lot of great tips such as how to upgrade to good connectivity, how set office hours, how to share your home with others who are also working, etc. Available in 3 ebook formats, all free. — KK

I started using Burner Mail a couple of months ago and bought a premium subscription because I find it so useful. The basic concept is simple: it’s a service that generates unique email addresses that get forwarded to your regular email inbox. You can use a burner email address to sign up for newsletters or register a new online account. If you decide you don’t want email from a burner address (or if you start getting spam), it’s a simple matter of flipping a switch and you will never get email from that address again. Best of all, it has a browser extension so you can generate a new burner from the dashboard with one click and it will appear in the email field of any web site form. You can also use Burner Mail to send email anonymously.  — MF

I’ve been trying out Miro, a shared white board for video calls. This is a free web-based tool that allows all participants to draw, or post notes, on the same white page in real time. You open Miro in another browser tab while you zoom, so you and your collaborators can sketch, diagram, write down formulas together. Like standing around a white board. You’ll need a drawing tablet such as an iPad, Surface, or Wacom tablet on your end. — KK

This infographic has 9 suggestions for focusing your wandering mind. A couple of them I’ve never heard before, like taking 1 minute to doodle to help cognitive performance, and a yoga hand trick to reduce stress. — CD

Like almost everyone else, I now need to interact with others working in different time zones. Determining their current time is the chore of this neat menu applet for the Mac called There. Unlike a world clock, the There applet tracks the time per person. I can instantly look up a friend/colleague and it gives me their current time; if they do travel and are a There user as well, I see their time at their new location. Ditto if I travel. You can import a whole Slack team and get their local times. It is currently free and will soon be available on Windows and phones. — KK