Letters Remain

Tag: tips

  • Assorted Health and Fitness Tips from a Veteran Trainer

    After years as a trainer, Mike O’Donnell compiles and shares an extensive list of health and fitness tips. As Jason said, there’s “a lot of good (and questionable) stuff in this list”. Here are my favourites: Diet is 85% of where results come fromā€¦ for muscle and fat loss. Many donā€™t focus here enough. If…

  • Summarising Joel on Software

    Now that Joel Spolsky has ‘retired’ from blogging at Joel on Software (in the format the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is reading the entire back-catalogue of entries and condensing the knowledge within each essay into a single sentence (or two). The result is a stunning list of tips on…

  • Writing Tips for Non-Writers

    MultipleĀ Hugo Award-winner andĀ Stargate Universe creative consultantĀ John Scalzi offersĀ ten writing tips for non-professional writers: Speak what you write. Punctuate, damn you. With sentences, shorter is better than longer. Learn to friggin’ spell. Don’t use words you don’t really know. Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does. Front-load your point. Try…

  • Eliciting Quality Feedback

    Feedback is important, there’s no doubt, but obtaining quality feedback that is honest and of use can be difficult. After spending an evening with a person “oblivious to the social dynamics” of a situation, Ben Casnocha providesĀ tips on obtaining honest feedback: For feedback on specifics — such as your participation at a dinner or a…

  • 100 Tips for Providing Perfect Restaurant Service

    Bruce Buschel–author, co-creator of a musical, director and producer–isĀ opening a seafood restaurant in New York. In his Small Business column forĀ The New York Times he offers 100 tips to ‘restaurant staffers’ (waiting staff) on how to behave front of house (that’s the first 50 tips;Ā here are the second 50). I (unexpectedly) found myself agreeing with…

  • On Meetings

    Contemplating how to lead without meetings , The Washington Post asks three equally qualified people for their views on them. Daisy Wademan Dowling, executive director of leadership development at an unnamed Fortune 500 company, responded with the following: The real reason leaders end up in too many meetings? Because it’s flattering: having your presence “required”…

  • Scheduling and Non-Hierarchical Management

    These two essays have been doing the rounds of late, and for good reason: Paul Graham’s comparison between the schedules of Managers and the schedules of Makers (creatives). The gist? A manager’s day is divided into hour-long blocks of time, makers work in much longer, relatively unconstrained and non-discrete units of time. The problem is…

  • Twleve Tips for Staying Alive

    Dr. Doug McGuff is an emergency physician in South Carolina. From this perspective, he has compiled a list of twelve tips on avoiding what he calls ‘negative Black Swan events’ā€”an early death from things we consider unlikely (but are all-too-common to emergency physicians). Drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive. Never get on…

  • The Science of Persuasion

    Persuasion is not an art; it’s a science. That’s according to Yes!ā€”the book by social psychologists Robert Cialdini,Ā Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin that proposes to offer 50 ‘scientifically proven ways to be persuasive’.Ā  For his review of the book, Alex Moskalyuk lists these 50 ways to be persuasive, as gleamed from dozens of psychology studies.…

  • The Introverted Traveller

    Starting with the declaration that “We introverts have a different style of travel, and I’m tired of hiding it”, Sophia Dembling looks at the differences in how introverts and extroverts travel, and what this means. I’m always happy enough when interesting people stumble into my path. It’s a lagniappe, and I’m capable of connecting with…