Category: general

From 43 Folders:

• Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
  • “Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson’s group on 2008-10-03” is a Project.
• Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
  • “Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation” is the next action for my Project.
• Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
  • “@calls” is the Context for my Next Action
  • in this case, “@calls” serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
  • (See? Different angle.)
• The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
  • The other three are “Time Available,” “Energy Available,” and (you guessed it) “Context.

Link

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the poet Li-Young Lee… born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. His parents were Chinese. His mother was the granddaughter of China’s first president; his father was the son of a gangster. His father worked as the personal physician to Mao Zedong, but the Lees were extremely Christian, and so after the Peoples’ Republic of China was established in 1949, Lee’s parents fled to Jakarta, which is where Li-Young was born. But the authorities were suspicious of his father’s Western interests —he was a professor and he taught Shakespeare, opera, and Kierkegaard—so he was imprisoned. The family fled again, this time to Japan, Macao, and Singapore before ending up in Hong Kong, where Li-Young Lee’s father became a successful evangelical preacher. The family eventually moved to the United States, where Lee’s father was a Presbyterian minister. As a child, Lee learned to recite ancient Chinese poems and the psalms from the Bible. He has published four books of poetry, including The City in Which I Love You (1991) and Behind My Eyes (2008), and a memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995).

Link

From Publishers Weekly:

“[Small Press Distribution]’s structure is very much about selling a lot of books relatively shallowly,” says [Brent] Cunningham, who notes that SPD sells about 100,000 books per year, with annual growth ranging between 5% and 15%.”

Link