ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all your worldly possessions in one day? I have. It’s a life-changing event, even for someone not too attached to material things, to find out it’s all been burned away, water-damaged or otherwise destroyed in a catastrophic event. Other than the insurance covering my personal property providing little emotional relief for lost baby pictures and irreplaceable artwork, I had one piece of solace--my home inventory. Before or if calamity strikes, you too should have a home inventory. Read full post and listen.

Humans have five common senses. (We actually have several more senses not commonly discussed.) Your sense of touch is mostly dedicated to your largest organ, your skin, comprising 22 square feet (or, 2 square meters), which holds millions of touch receptors of various sensitivity to map your physical surroundings. Your five fingers on each hand alone contain 3,000 touch receptors of the highest sensitivity on each finger tip. Then, there’s your sense of sight, which is the reigning champion of information collection for the brain, provided for by your eyes’s millions of light-sensitive cells. Next up, we have our hearing from our ears and second-most valuable information-gatherer. Finally we have smell and sound caught by our noses’ six million receptors and our tongues’ 10,000 taste buds. Altogether we have a sensory experience unrivaled by any other animal on the planet because of our remarkably curious neurocognitive abilities. Thanks to this, I think we should pay more attention to how we can be more productive in multisensory ways. I’d like to provide the benefits and some examples in this episode. Read more.

As I’ve written about before, “happiness” is a terrible word to me. It’s my version of a four-letter word in regard to positive psychology and personal productivity. And yet, we continue to keep using it; I’m guilty of it as well from time to time. While it seems like a universal term, it’s actually a rather confusing word. If the purpose of communication is to convey information clearly to another, why circumvent the process with vagaries? Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who I’ve written about before, agrees with me in his famous TED talk, “Riddle of Remembering and Experiencing Self.” What does it mean when you say you’re happy? And, to what degree? Difficult to interpret, right?

Learning, in the way that humans can, is one of the fundamental ways that set us apart from all other species on Earth. Skills acquisition is one of those kinds of learning that we do really well, and many of us want to do more of, better and faster. I’m one of those people, and when I picked up The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast by Josh Kaufman, I was skeptical. However, he outlines successfully a 10-step process for rapid skill acquisition and I think he’s onto something potent. Here are the principles of the book.