business

productivity tip: display completed to-do’s

Like many people, we’re always trying to find ways to increase productivity without stressing ourselves out. We’ve discovered that along with the idea of being more productive and in control comes the pressure to accomplish things. I can have the effect of making us “look over the fence at other people’s greener grass” and be too hard on ourselves.

Recently, we’ve taken to periodically take stock of the big things we’ve accomplished over the year, or several years, i.e. the broad picture as an antidote to thinking we’re getting nothing done. Then the other day on Lifehacker we came across the idea of making a DONE wall, where you post all the tiny steps accomplished. read more…

renovation lesson: going cheap can cost time + money

Once we had a rough plan and sketches for the Laboratory renovation, we needed to take them to the next level: real, accurately measured, to-scale architect’s plans. How do you afford an architect on a very tight budget, we wondered.

This is where we made the first of MANY mistakes during the renovation. We hired someone from Craigslist who advertised himself as a graduate of a pre-architecture graduate program; he made  his living by drawing plans and his references checked out well, so we hired him. He arrived at the space with a laser measuring device, and completed measuring a 1000 sq feet in 30 minutes or so.

He emailed the plans a few days later. They looked strangely “off” so we ran up to the space with our trusty measuring tape. At least 10 key measurments were wrong.

The lesson (learned the hard way): read more…

a crash course in finance via 11 TED talks

(Video link here.) Vicki Celestines, one of our readers, sent us this great compilation of “compelling TED Talks on Money.”  Together, the eleven videos make up a unique “crash course in economics and personal finance” which we can certainly use. They cover topics such as putting a value on nature; raising kids to be entrepreneurs; poverty, money, and love; and investing in a post-crash world.

Our hands-down favorite though is Matt Weinstein’s talk about “What Bernie Madoff Couldn’t Steal from Me.”

It puts the fear of loss in another light.

Related posts: an astonishing video (made from Tedtalks)
11 questions to ask before buying something
louis c.k on being broke (with su tung-p’o)
recession jokes

how to sell your books online

photo: sally schneider

Like everyone we know, we have a growing pile of books that we’ve been wanting to sell, to cut down on clutter and make a few bucks in the process. We recently discovered BookScouter, a website that tells you how much your used books are worth to a variety of online retailers.

The best part is that they pay for shipping (book rate) and provide labels, making selling books fairly simple—you just have to pack them up and drop them off when you are making a trip to the post office. We decided to test the process out to see if it’s really that easy. If you’re looking to sell, here’s the deal, start to finish: read more…

report from tangier: 3d business cards

tangier men drinking coffee waiting for work

photo: peggy markel

The streets of Tangier in North Africa are a mix of the ancient and the contemporary but some traditions still hold fast. Outdoor cafes are populated with men who seem to sit for hours on end, drinking strong coffee or Moroccan ‘whiskey’ – gunpowder green tea with loads of fresh mint and sugar. Passing the day in conversation or sitting quietly is normal. But every day? Don’t they work? I wondered.

“They are working”, said our friend Said. “Did you see the paint bucket sitting on the side of the street? read more…

kickstarter project: a magazine about ‘makeshift’


(Video link here.) Here’s a magazine idea we find compelling: called Makeshift, it’s about the ingenious solutions and inventions people all over the world are making with what they’ve got on hand. Right now it exists as a Kickstarter project. We see it as a quarterly reminder of possibilities in magazine form, an antidote to Martha Stewart Living, Wallpaper, Elle Decor…

What do you think? (Is this something you’d buy?…Are you buying any magazines these days?)

via Core 77

Related posts: magazine pages as envelopes
annals of bad design: the digital ‘new yorker’
remodelista’s newsstand (we’re in it)
self-publishing your own… point of view

minimalist business cards (why not blank ones?)

minimalist business card by Boris

Business cards can be so unimaginatively designed, that we are happy to post about innovative ones when we find them, as a reminder of the possibilities. We love this utterly succinct business card by Boris, although he got a good amount of flack about it on his site: some commenters complained that it doesn’t let people know what he does. It says enough for us; we get the gist (he is a”creative technologist” and general smarty pants).

It segues with an idea we’ve been meaning to write about: of buying blank business cards and then writing what you want on them ‘in the moment’, tailoring the info to the person you’re giving it to.. These days, many of us have multiple business and personal identities anyway—why not personalize a business card depending on the opportunity at hand? read more…