Episode description

TOPIC: Talk Shows, Baseball, and Inboxes.

This week, Dan and Merlin cover a range of topics related to expertise, experience, professional repetition, and management, culminating in a tour of Merlin's current email filtering strategy.

Links for this episode:

• [SPONSOR] Stock Photos, Royalty-Free Images and Vectors - Shutterstock
  
• [SPONSOR] Build a Website — Squarespace
  
• Ungainly X-Mann Meetup! — Merlin Mann
  A Nerdy SF Comics Event with Merlin Mann, hosted by Two Cats Comics in West Portal.
• Schumpeter: In praise of laziness | The Economist
  Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.
• Ep 7: Humour, comedy and benign violation - The Nudge
  How does the world of humour effect what we do in our jobs? We speak to an expert about the science of humour and comedy, the right time to use humour in design and how to judge it better. We also try to find out if analysing a thing too much can kill it.
• Letterman And 'Tonight' Vet Go Behind The Scenes Of Late Night : NPR
  Fred de Cordova: "If you do one show a year or one show every three months or one show every four months, you have an awful lot of time to realize what a failure you've been," he said. "But we do kind of a baseball season: We do a show one night and we hope it's wonderful, and if not that, we hope it's good and we hope it isn't bad. But even if it's a great show or even if it's not such a good show, we do another show the next night and we have no time, except in self analysis, to decide why it wasn't good or even why it was very good."
• Rim Fire At 234 Square Miles And Counting; SF Power And Water Supplies Threatened: SFist
  It is only 15 percent contained, and pushing quickly toward the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and O'Shaughnessy Dam, San Francisco's primary sources of water and power. Two of three hydroelectric power stations have been forced to shut down, and SF's public utility commission has begun buying power on the open market.
• Amazon.com: Ledwholesalers 400 Nm Uv Ultra Violet Blacklight Flashlight 3 Aaa, 7301uv400: Home Improvement
  
• Amazon.com: Sharpie Type Invisible Ink UV Marking Pen Marker: Everything Else
  
• Twitter / Search - @danbenjamin #squarespace
  
• Frederick de Cordova - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Frederick "Fred" Timmins de Cordova (October 27, 1910 - September 15, 2001) was an American stage, motion picture and television director and producer. He is best known for his work on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
• Moneyball - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. Its focus is the team's analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland's disadvantaged revenue situation. A film based on the book starring Brad Pitt was released in 2011.
• Moneyball (2011) - IMDb
  Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.
• Eight Men Out - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Eight Men Out is a 1988 American dramatic sports film, and based on Eliot Asinof's 1963 book 8 Men Out. It was written and directed by John Sayles. The film is a dramatization of Major League Baseball's Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
• Eight Men Out (1988) - IMDb
  A dramatization of the Black Sox scandal when the underpaid Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series.
• AwayFind - Mobile notifications for priority messages. The email management solution for Gmail and Exchange.
  It gives me confidence todo what I need withouthovering over my inbox 24/7— I highly recommend.
• Marvel Age #16 in merlinmann's Comic Collector Connect collection
  

This week’s episode of Back to Work is kindly sponsored by:

• Shutterstock (use discount code “BACKTOWORK8” for 25% off any package)
• Squarespace (use offer code “HOWARDCHICKEN” for 10% off)