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Learning to fly a plane is all in your head. Okay, there's a little more to it than that—but a large part of the training given to new pilots isn't about the physical skills required to fly a plane. Instead, it's about the psychological aspects of operating within a dynamic, complex system where mistakes can mean death. Flying a plane is hard , mostly because it requires multitasking : You have to fly the plane (or manage the autopilot), communicate on the radio, work with air traffic control, manage passengers, read and interpret the weather, navigate to a waypoint, and do a dozen other things, all at the same time. So one of the main skills a pilot has to build is the ability to pay attention to many different systems all at once—and more importantly, manage that attention. When I first started flying with an instructor, I'd find that I didn't have any trouble flying straight and level until I had to make a radio call, at which point I'd unintentionally des...

If you're shopping for a new vacuum, it's easy to compare features to find one that meets your dust-busting needs. But what if you want a cleaning service to come to your house and do the job for you? You reach out to six providers, and they all tell you they can do it—and how. How do you know which one will provide the best service? This question gets to the heart of how anyone selling services has to compete to win business. Whether you sell to other companies or to consumers, selling services means selling yourself, your team's expertise, and the value your company brings to the client or customer. It's a tricky prospect, but there are ways to make it work. Differentiating Your Business According to the US Small Business Administration , only about 50% of businesses survive five years or longer. One of the primary reasons: they get outcompeted. To make it past that five-year mark, you need to know your competition and differentiate your business from them—especia...

Modern journalism is digging through piles of information and finding the one or two interesting tidbits you can turn into a story. Good ideas live in all sorts of different places: some you find using Twitter, Google News Alerts, or your RSS reader. Some you find out about from your co-workers, possibly on Slack. And occasionally one of the (approximately) ten million press releases and pitches emailed to you daily by soulless marketers are (somewhat) interesting. Ideally all of the actually useful bits of information would live in one place, so you could reference them all easily. Think of it as an idea bucket . Where your bucket lives doesn't matter: note taking applications like Evernote and OneNote work quite well, but so does a spreadsheet, a Trello board, a to do list app. The point is to collect article prompts all in one place, so you can find them when it's time to write. You could do this by manually copying and pasting information, and in my experience most journa...

When's the last time you "surfed the web" or "went online"? I haven't really heard those phrases used unironically since the early 2000s, which makes sense. The internet isn't a place we visit anymore—it's where we all live. I couldn't help but think about this when I read a beautiful Atlantic article by Ian Bogost , which he wrote using a 30-year-old Macintosh SE. That computer sold for $3,900 in 1990, which is about $8,400 in today's dollars, but people used it a lot less than we use computers today. From the article: Nobody used [their computer] every hour—many people wouldn’t boot them up for days at a time if the need didn't arise. They were modest in power and application, clunking and grinding their way through family-budget spreadsheets, school papers, and games. A computer was a tool for work, and diversion too, but it was not the best or only way to write a letter or to fritter away an hour. Computing was an accompaniment ...

We're all drowning in email. And if you're spending 15 minutes on every reply, no productivity system is ever going to save you. Not inbox zero, not batching, not turning off notifications—nothing. Your only hope is retirement. My rule: I never spend more than five minutes writing a work email. And when I manage other people, it's a rule I ask them to follow too. Ideally, each email will take 30 seconds to write—then, even if you write 100 emails a day, it's still only an hour of your day—but five minutes is the max. I call this rule the five-minute rule, and it's how I do work email. I also think it's how you should do work email, so here I'll give you some suggestions for how to make it happen. Don't Be a Jerk (in Your Emails) You might think I sound like a jerk here, and I am one. But I don't come across as a jerk in my emails, despite how little time I spend on them. This is in marked contrast to what Katie Notopoulos from BuzzFeed calls the...

Everyone dreams of a paperless office. To be fully digital, however, you need the right tools to electronically send, sign, and store important documents like contracts. That's where eSign apps come in. An electronic signature app is an app that allows you to sign paperwork digitally. But how do you know which one is right for your unique business needs? We've done the legwork for you, testing dozens of apps to find the ones that will best help you cross all the T's and dot all the I's—in your signature, that is. Here are the seven best apps you can use to sign documents. Click on any app to learn more about why we chose it, or keep reading for more context on electronic signature apps. The 7 Best eSignature Apps DocuSign for tracking the entire document lifecycle HelloSign for users on a budget Adobe Sign for Adobe integration Preview for occasionally signing documents RightSignature for added security Yousign for sending lots of documents Contractbook...