Longtime readers (George, mom) will know that I have a giant internet crush on Merlin Mann, who most people outside of Tallahassee first heard about through his productivity-themed website 43folders, then through his Inbox Zero e-mail talk at Google, and most recently as a podcaster on shows such as Back to Work, Roderick on the Line, and You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene. (How big a crush? I invited him for a 3-talk visit back in the day.) Merlin usually says that he’s interested in time and attention, and in creative work; for me, he’s most helpful in talking through that anxiety endemic to most “knowledge work”: what is my job? what should I be doing next? will my job be disrupted or unbundled?
Mann’s most recent talk, “Advanced Tricycling,” from last month’s E4E Developers Conference takes on several of these issues as it grapples with the elusive problem of what it means to get “better.” (Not unrelated: “Better.”) On the one hand, he organizes his talk around the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which may or may not be especially compelling to you. On the other hand, Mann’s talks are very much about the ways our concerns about knowledge and status both permit and block certain kinds of work, and how to be more mindful of it. Academics might be interested in his journey from a liberal arts background to web developer, or, for that matter, in the offhand Kierkegaard/Foucault joke.
At any rate, it’s worth a watch:
Do you have a recent favorite talk or podcast you’d like to share? Let us know in comments!
Photo “Tricycles” by Flickr user radlxmax / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND-2.0
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