Tynan :: Twice, Then Stop :: This is one of those concepts I thought I would have tried already. It’s a very simple idea: Whenever you’re hard at work, meditating, writing, whatever it is that you do for an extended period of time, it’s likely you’re going to want to stop at some point. No matter how much I love blog posting, writing a news piece, and reading, it can be difficult to sit still sometimes and pump out those final few paragraphs. This rule of thumb is very simple: When you want to stop, don’t. When the urge arises again, don’t. When it surfaces again, stop. Tynan argues that this ultimately squeezes more and more productivity out of your daily routine at times when you might otherwise quit and call it a day. The more you do this, the better you get at it, and the more you’ll be able to accomplish. You’ll also enjoy it more.
Marginal Revolution :: Liberalization Increases Growth :: It took me a couple of reads and a Wikipedia search to grasp what was being said in this short article. It’s been several months since my Economics course, so the abundance of terminology was far from fresh in my mind. Once I understood it, I was very interested with what I found. According to their study (very well-supported with another paper and several figures), an air of liberalization that occurred in the decades prior to the turn of the millennia drastically increased the growth of those countries. Had liberalization, which is the relaxation of government control of a market, been traded for continued synthetic control of the economy, it seems that countries like South Korea and Mexico would be considerably worse off than they are at present. Perhaps us Americans can learn something from this data.
WW2 Today :: US Destroyers Ambush Japanese at Vella Gulf :: I found this to be very fascinating. Telling the tale of Japanese destroyer Shigure, you get a glimpse into the moment and the types of thought processes you enter when faced with imminent death. The Shigure, the only of four ships to survive the surprise attack by US destroyers, barely escaped the scene and were the one thing between the US and a full victory in battle. The accounts WW2 Today has to offer are extraordinary. Give it a read.
Aside from this, I’ve spent the majority of my day considering how I’m going to fit everything in once I got to college. I’ve found that the only way for me to enjoy my free time, and to be at my most productive, is through following a good routine that takes into account the occasional distraction and enables me to get things done anyway. College is going to flip all of that upside down. With classes at different times on different days, with the new pressures of meeting new people and interacting with them, and weighing my ever-growing list of writing obligations, it’s going to be difficult for the first week or so to really determine what is going to work over the course of the next semester.
Instead of letting this ramp up my anxiety, however, I’m going to accept that all of this is new to me, and that there’s no way I can confidently set up a new routine until I’ve actually experienced a taste of college. Until then I can continue making educated guesses, but I must bear in mind that they may change drastically when move out a week from tomorrow.
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The only issue I'm finding with writing about everything I read is that it can be a major time-killer. I still believe in writing about the things you read, but I may (as I have today) restrict what I write about to a few key or notable articles, or simply narrow down the amount I write about each. I suppose it comes down to whether or not I'm able to find a good, quick, easy way to document everything I write. I currently use OmmWriter and Pages, and both work fairly quickly, but I don't have the level of mastery of organization at present (I'm working on it) to make it a less time-consuming process.
