My constraints: hot tea in the morning, with milk, and I don’t have to get out of bed in the morning to make it.

The first constraint was the easiest. I have a thermos, and at night after steeping the tea for 5 minutes in the thermos, I put the lid on, and it went next to my bed. It was still piping hot after 8-9 hours when I woke up.

The second was a little more tricky. I don’t know if I can leave milk out all night without it going bad. (My guess is: it would be fine in tea.) Instead, I took a second thermos (not nearly as good as the first one) and filled it partially with milk. I then put the milk in the freezer for several hours, and took it out just before going to bed. It also went next to my bed. I put a cloth under the thermos to capture moisture in case. The next morning, it was still cool (but completely melted).

There was one more trick. The tea was too hot to drink in the morning, so I had to pour some out in order to pour some milk in. I happened to have a glass with water, and so drank some water and then poured some tea into there. (I could have poured it into the milk thermos, but then all the milk would have had some tea in it. This way left over milk was kept to be used as milk later on.)

Ta-da! Hot tea in bed in the morning.

Next, I think I’ll have an empty cup and pour the tea from the thermos into there, and then the milk from the other thermos also into there for a cup of tea. This produces more smell than drinking from a thermos where the top’s on.

King’s Cross - London

I stumbled into the deli across the cobblestone street and ordered a prosciutto sandwich. It was 10:33am now, the fifth time I’d checked the time, and the twentieth time I’d asked myself, “What the &%$# am I going to do today?”

The best answer I had come up with so far was: get a sandwich.

Thirty minutes earlier, I had woken up without an alarm clock for the first time in four years, fresh off arriving from JFK the night before. I had soooo been looking forward to it: awakening to musical birdsong outside, sitting up in bed with a smile, smelling the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, and stretching out overhead like a cat in the shade of a Spanish villa. Magnificent. It turned out more like this: bolt upright as if blasted with a foghorn, grab clock, curse, jump out of bed in underwear to check e-mail, remember that I was forbidden to do so, curse again, look for my host and former classmate, realize that he was off to work like the rest of the world, and proceed to have a panic attack.

I spent the rest of the day in a haze, wandering from museum to botanical garden to museum as if on rinse and repeat, avoiding Internet cafes with some vague sense of guilt. I needed a to-do list to feel productive and so put down things like “eat dinner.”

This was going to be a lot harder than I had thought.

I enjoyed reading this, because I’ve experienced most of these things - even putting “eat dinner” on a to-do list.

Also see here.

He gives 8 points, and I agree with all of them. A few in particular:

“1. Limit your friends. Not real-life friends, but social network and blogging and forum friends.”

“2. Limit your feeds. Blog subscriptions, newsletters, other updates and news subscriptions and so on. Limit them to a handful of essentials, and let the rest go.”

“3. Limit your communication time. Going into your email inbox? Just give yourself 10 minutes to read, reply, delete, and get out. Going to do Twitter? Give yourself 5 minutes. Seriously, set up a timer. Don’t let these things take up all your attention.”

“4. Give up on news. It’s a never-ending cycle. And if you’ve paid attention to the news as long as I have (I’m a former journalist), you know it’s all the same, year after year. Unless your job depends on it, the news is usually a waste of your attention. Let go of the need to stay updated. Even if your job does depend on it, keep it limited.”

These all tie into the habit I’ve recently started, limiting all on-line stuff to 30 min. a day.

“7. Become conscious of your distractions. Once you’ve decided to focus your attention on the important, become more aware of distractions as they come up. Make note of them, and as you get the urge to be distracted, learn to pause, breathe, and return to the important.”

The following 3 steps led to my starting my most recent habit:

i) Spend 10 min. brainstorming productivity distractions.

Then, pick the #1 productivity distraction.

ii) Spend 15 min. brainstorming ways to get rid of the distraction.

Then, pick the most promising solution you’ve brainstormed.

iii) Spend 5 min. immediately to take the first step to implement it.

Why would you go to university in order to learn how to teach elementary students?

I am guessing that teaching is about 1% theory and 99% know-how (beyond the body of knowledge being taught). A much better way to create teachers would be with apprenticeships, where the teacher-to-be goes and learns by actually sitting in with exemplar teachers, taking on more and more duties as they get better, and mixing this with workshops or master classes where they can take the ideas presented and see if they work.

Having a university education has very little to do with being a good teacher, except that people who are able to get a university degree tend to be smart, having a relatively good work ethic, and so on.

When will people notice that the university Emperor has no clothes?

“Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” It’s not enough to use information for “something” - it needs to be immediate and important. If “no” on either count, don’t consume it. Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.”

What percentage of information learnt in university fits this criterion (in something other than a circular way - using it for a test, for example)?

The whole university, high-school, and so on model of learning is upside down and backwards - you learn naturally in a context where you can use something relatively immediately in a useful way. This makes sense on all sorts of levels.

By separating the two, university creates a) useless top-heavy intellectuals with more opinions than know-how (actually, worse than useless, but that’s another discussion), and b) a sense of nihilism or purposelessness among students.