The Podcast

Annual Review series, part 2.

Last week we discussed how to structure goals. Today, we discuss how to select your goals in the first place.

It starts with deep self-knowledge. Truly understanding the things about you, what motivates you, what excites you, what makes you tick, and also what you dislike and despise. Not the things that everyone will nod their head at, but the things particular to you.

When you write down what you really are like, it suddenly becomes clear which things are important, and which ones merely seemed like a good idea.

Annual Review series, part 1.

Sometimes you stumble upon a project that excites and engages you so much, it gives you what feels like superhuman power. We discuss how to foster the right environment for such projects to appear in your life.

We also explore the subject of focus. We're much better at doing hard things sequentially than all at once. Well… most things. Some — keystone habits — only work if you do them with high consistency.

And so we present a new template for planning goals for the year. Either as burst projects (high intensity, short duration), or keystone habits (low intensity, high consistency). But not long, stretched out projects layered on top of each other.

How to become less addicted to notifications and badges.

The thing is: they're designed to make us react. Every time we see there's a new message, we check it out. And thus it becomes a compulsive behavior we cannot stop (we're just humans after all). We can reduce our exposure to the trigger (have less notifications), but how do we fix the root cause?

Learn a new language in the New Year!

Following up on the previous two episodes on learning languages, we share more tips on how to learn efficiently, as well as our own progress (Radek learning Spanish, and Michael learning French)

Cool gadgets you can get for Christmas.

Also: Review of 2017 in hardware, and why Radek doesn't wear an Apple Watch anymore.

Just follow your passion, right? … No.

Unless you’re already highly skilled at something you’re passionate about, following your passion will only drive you to be miserable. To get a great job you can feel passionate about, you must first have something rare and valuable to give. You must be so good they can’t ignore you.

A much better idea: Follow your curiosity.

Optimizing your day for Deep Work.

Or, what to do to make highly productive, deeply focused work possible (and likely).

More mobile life & iOS automation talk:

1. Using Scanbot (and not Evernote) for document safekeeping

2. Optimizing Magic Spreadsheet for iPhone, tracking time spent, micro-journaling

Part 2 of our discussion on:

- How to develop a better accent in a foreign language

- Michael’s story of learning Spanish

- Duolingo and computer-aided language learning

The story of how Michael and Radek learned English, German, and other languages. Michael's way was to watch lots of movies and sing lots of songs. Meanwhile, Radek plugs in historical spaced repetition learning data from his very first magic spreadsheet (again!).