Your Brain At Work Braindump

Pandalyn mentioned reading this at book club and it seemed pretty intriguing, so I perused this over a weekend.  This isn't really a paradigm-shifter, it seems the only concrete shortcuts to blissful productivity the author can endorse are caffeine and extra monitor real estate, but there are some decent hacks.

• Hierarchy of needs might be better framed as SCARF
• Status-- happiness is the corner office or whatever trappings jive with your value system
• Certainty-- we like to have a very clear idea of what will happen next
• Autonomy-- but we also like to have control over our situation
• Relationships-- and we like to connect with other humans and do better when we feel we are surrounded by friends rather than foes
• Fairness-- this seems a bit too narrow a definition for me.  We have some ideals and ethics, about how people should be treated, about how the planet should be treated, about how money should be gained and spent, etc.  We like to function in concord with those ideals.
• Tim Ferriss basics
• Mastery (in the 10K hours of training sense) could be seen as becoming a master at chunking concepts or patterns into the most coherent mapping... so if you were savvy enough to decompose what 20% to focus on and put in blocks to limit the amount of time mastery of these tasks expanded to take up, you would be competent ahead of schedule?
• GTD basics
• Writing things down saves you from having to use CPU to remember them
• Queue only items that are actionable so you're not constantly spending CPU to consider and conclude something isn't actionable.
• Sublimate as many recurring tasks as you can into habits so you don't have to use as many CPUs to do them.
• Pictures can be powerful compact ways to store complex goals.  I started pulling together a secret pinterest board for my 2014 short list.  If I just remember to curate it from time to time, that may be more elegant than a mess of unrealistic gantt charts. 
• Routine thinking that involves larger brain areas (i.e. going for a walk or training for tri) can diffuse meltdowns and blocks in the controller part of your brain
• Some people get their buzz from the stress hormones of an imminent deadline, others need to manage that stress hormone so as not to melt down and decrement performance.  This might be why women seem to front load work and guys procrastinate... or why parties are a great incentive to work on the house.