John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged productivity · everything

Dan Rodney's List of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts & Keystrokes

This is a comprehensive reference guide to keyboard shortcuts for macOS, organized by function (Finder actions, window management, text editing, screenshots, Spotlight, Safari, Mail, and more) and covering versions from Big Sur through Sequoia. It includes both common shortcuts and lesser-known power-user tricks, such as using Command-drag to customize toolbars, Option-click to access hidden Dock menus, and Emacs key bindings that work in certain applications. The guide is designed as a living document that the author continues to update for the latest macOS versions.

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Bring back the 40-hour work week - AlterNet - Salon.com

Drawing on 150 years of historical research and business data, this article argues that the modern expectation of 50-60+ hour workweeks is economically counterproductive and based on false assumptions about productivity. Knowledge workers have only about six productive hours per day, and working beyond 40 hours per week consistently produces fatigue-related errors, safety hazards, and reduced output that negates any gains from extra time in the office. The article traces how this consensus—accepted from the 1930s through 1960s by major corporations including Henry Ford—was abandoned in the 1980s when Silicon Valley's startup culture romanticized "passion" and extreme hours, a mentality that spread across industries despite research showing that brief overtime sprints lose their productivity advantage after eight weeks and create lasting burnout that takes weeks to recover from.

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Favs App

I can't provide a useful summary of this content. The text appears to be a promotional description for a Mac application called "Favs" mixed with unrelated material (Birkenstock sandals, casino advertising), making it unclear what the actual article being saved was about or what argument it makes. If you have a coherent article or piece you'd like summarized, I'd be happy to help with that instead.

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Pressly - Tablet web publishing

This is a marketing page for Alida, a customer research platform that uses community panels to gather consumer feedback at scale. The platform emphasizes speed and quality of insights by maintaining opted-in audiences with high response rates, and integrates AI tools to help teams analyze and share findings across their organization. It positions itself as solving the full research lifecycle from audience recruitment through data analysis and stakeholder communication.

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9 Advanced Twitter Tips | Mobile and Social Media

This post offers nine practical tips for experienced Twitter users seeking to optimize their engagement and information management on the platform. The advice covers technical issues (avoiding ampersands in profiles, leaving character room for retweets), discovery strategies (searching for yourself instead of using reply columns, using Friendfeed to find old tweets), and social practices (starting replies with periods to broadcast conversations, using groups to organize large follow lists). The underlying philosophy emphasizes that Twitter's value lies in dialogue and interaction rather than status updates, and that thoughtful sharing and reciprocity—through retweets and direct mentions—strengthen the network for all users.

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Longform iPad app brings the web's best reads into one place (hands-on) | The Verge

Longform is launching a $4.99 iPad app that curates long-form articles from major publications and smaller outlets, automatically filtering out shorter content and slideshows to deliver a streamlined reading experience. The app prioritizes simplicity and discoverability over the overwhelming unread counts of services like Instapaper, aiming to help casual readers find quality content without effort while also surfacing excellent work from lesser-known publications. Future versions will expand the source pool to include international publications and integrate better discovery features, though the current launch feels somewhat minimal for the price.

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How to Know When to Quit

Seth Godin's concept of "the dip" versus "the cul-de-sac" distinguishes between temporary struggle worth pushing through and genuine dead ends worth abandoning. A cul-de-sac is a true dead end where you've tried solutions and hit immovable obstacles (like a micro-managing boss who won't allow remote work), while a dip is the difficult middle stretch of any worthwhile endeavor that successful people overcome by "leaning in" harder and changing their approach. The piece argues that strategic quitting—based on calm assessment of whether you're making measurable progress and whether your goal is realistically attainable—is smarter than either never quitting or reflexively quitting whenever things get hard.

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NPR launched "Serendipity Day," a structured three-day event where technology staff abandon regular work to pursue self-directed projects, inspired by Google's 20 percent time and Atlassian's FedEx Days. The experiment generated 25 usable ideas from 30 employees in its first iteration, proving that a compressed timeframe with minimal constraints and strong emphasis on teamwork can unlock innovation and creativity while boosting morale. Unlike Google's ongoing individual-focused approach, NPR designed the event around cross-disciplinary collaboration, reasoning that their public media culture thrives when different disciplines work together simultaneously.

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My Total Money Makeover Community Forums - My degree isn't worth the debt!

This is a marketing website for EveryDollar, a zero-based budgeting app that helps users allocate every dollar of income to specific spending categories before the month begins. The platform offers a free version with manual transaction tracking and a premium version ($6.67–$17.99/month) that adds automatic bank connections, debt payoff tools, and coaching. Users report significant benefits including discovering hundreds in extra monthly savings, paying off debt faster, and achieving the psychological win of ending months with money left over.

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Freakonomics » Ten More Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job Right Now!

Altucher argues that most people should quit their jobs because traditional job security no longer exists (the 2008 crisis shattered the myth of climbing a corporate ladder to retirement), and the supposed reasons to stay—saving for a home, college funds, or tolerating a bad boss—are either unnecessary or destructive to wellbeing. Rather than advocating reckless resignation, he emphasizes that departing requires deliberate preparation across physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions, and recommends a series of posts on building luck, resilience, and entrepreneurial thinking as guides for the transition.

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Freakonomics » Ten Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today

Altucher draws lessons from his early career at HBO to offer ten rules for succeeding at a new job: love your company's product and watch/study it obsessively, learn the company's history and executive origins, arrive early to support your boss and give them full credit for your work, cultivate relationships with secretaries and HR staff who control information flow, regularly test your market value by interviewing elsewhere, study marketing campaigns and industry dynamics, adopt an ownership mentality by saying "we" instead of "I," and plan your exit from day one by identifying gaps you can fill as an entrepreneur. Woven through personal anecdotes about witnessing a fatal accident on his first day and struggling with imposter syndrome, he argues that mastery of corporate culture combined with entrepreneurial thinking transforms a junior employee into someone who can eventually leave to start their own competing or complementary business.

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ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki rebranded both its product and company: the platform became QuickCode, a Python and R environment for data analysis aimed at economists and statisticians without coding experience, while the parent company became The Sensible Code Company. The rebrand reflects the platform's evolution beyond its original scraping focus toward general data analysis and processing.

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