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Focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction by Leo Babauta.

It’s about how to find focus in this age of distraction — focus for getting amazing things done, for reflection and contemplation, for what you’re passionate about. It’s about how to do that and still live in this digital world.

Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic:

A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” When you examine your visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs’ slides and Gates’ slides, how do they compare for kanso?

The Rise of Worse is Better | Richard Gabriel

How To: Add Tasks To OmniFocus or Things Using Dropbox and PlainText:

Kind of some ninja-level bootstrapping going on here. Thought it might be handy for some. Especially in consideration of this week’s RSS Sponsor.

“We are in the people business. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the banking business, your customers, you’re in the people business, and it’s how you treat people. I grew up with the thought that I wanted to treat people the way I’d like to be treated, and I think if you do that, it’s pretty hard to go wrong.”

- Nolan Ryan on comparing his cattle ranch business with working with ballplayers.

Full-screen apps. A better way to enjoy the apps you love.

On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can bring an app to full screen with one click, switch to another full-screen app with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your multi-window apps. And systemwide support for full-screen apps makes them bigger and more immersive. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.

Very interesting how things like lack of distraction and focus are now being promoted as a major feature. Don’t get me wrong, I love this. I’m a fan of single-app mode and full screen. That said, I think this speaks to a deeper issue. It’s one I’m working on with or without this “feature”.

I had tea recently with a Zen priest, Susan O’Connell, who is Vice President of the San Francisco Zen Center. She’s a lovely person.

One thing she talked about was the “forms” that are a big part of Zen meditation — forms are the strict rules of posture, hand poses, sitting, and other parts of the meditation that are prescribed by tradition. Some people come to the zazen meditation sessions because they like the forms, and others come in spite of the forms.

Either way, people must figure out their relation to those forms. And they must deal with that in some way.

I told her that the limits I set for myself have the same function: limiting myself to 50 personal things, or 5 sentence emails, or 3 Most Important Tasks each day, for example.

Some people embrace these limits. Other minimalists reject them because they’re too arbitrarily restricting, or they’re not the point of minimalism.

Either way, you must figure out your relation to the limits.

Limits are not the point of minimalism, but they accomplish something important: they force us to figure out what’s important. And if we don’t want to figure out what’s important, they force us to figure out why.

There’s a Zen story (I’m paraphrasing here) about a student who asked a teacher, “What’s the most important thing?” And the teacher replied, “The most important thing is asking what’s the most important thing.”