Sept. 27, 2019 | The New York Times | By Jane Rosenzweig. Ms. Rosenzweig is the director of the Writing Center at Harvard.

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019 | Financial Times | by Elizabeth Uviebinene.

Mobile apps: Wunderlist and Trello.
Podcasts on the “back to life” mindset: How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, Better Life Lab and Without Fail
Newsletters: The Roundup by Otegha Uwagba

Autumn now brings a sense of trepidation — it can be an unsettling time for those who are starting new opportunities and a source of anxiety for those who feel stuck in a rut while others move on......I look at autumn a little differently, seeing it as a time to reset and an opportunity to make small changes to my routine without the cynicism that is attached to new year’s resolutions...... a little refresh now can go a long way...... it’s more about making time to check in with them, to realign and reprioritize.......The first step is to check in on your long-term goals, the ones you want to achieve in a few years. Is your current trajectory aligning with those goals? If not, why not? What can you implement today to get you back on track?....write down what you’ve achieved this year and positioning it within the overall business objectives that show your individual impact......journal when it comes to both long-term and weekly career planning. Spending time writing down objectives and reflecting on how best to get there in the coming weeks and months can provide a sense of control......prioritizing is essential to maintaining a healthy work and life balance. Journal five goals for the next four months and then place them in priority order, cross off the bottom three, to leave the two most important ones. That's where to focus one's time and energy......."Find your tribe”. A sense of community is key to battling the loneliness that this time of year can bring. This could be done online by signing up to a newsletter, or via community groups and live events....Attend conferences.....use this time of year to consider making a career change, aiming for the next promotion or starting a side project, ....reflect, plot and plan on how best to get there. Sneaking small changes into our working life can make all the difference.

Aug. 27, 2019
Updated Sept. 2, 2019

By J. D. Biersdorfer
July 10, 2019

June 12, 2019 | The New York Times | By Lindsey Rogers Cook.
[Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.]
Reporters from across the newsroom describe the many ways in which they increasingly rely on datasets and spreadsheets to create groundbreaking work.

Data journalism is not new. It predates our biggest investigations of the last few decades. It predates computers. Indeed, reporters have used data to hold power to account for centuries, as a data-driven investigation that uncovered overspending by politicians, including then-congressman Abraham Lincoln, attests.

But the vast amount of data available now is new. The federal government’s data repository contains nearly 250,000 public datasets. New York City’s data portal contains more than 2,500. Millions more are collected by companies, tracked by think tanks and academics, and obtained by reporters through Freedom of Information Act requests (though not always without a battle). No matter where they come from, these datasets are largely more organized than ever before and more easily analyzed by our reporters.

(1) Karen Zraick, Express reporter.
NYC's Buildings Department said it was merely responding to a sudden spike in 311 complaints about store signs. But who complains about store signs?....it was hard to get a sense of the scale of the problem just by collecting anecdotes. So I turned to NYC Open Data, a vast trove of information that includes records about 311 complaints. By sorting and calculating the data, we learned that many of the calls were targeting stores in just a few Brooklyn neighborhoods.
(2) John Ismay, At War reporter
He has multiple spreadsheets for almost every article he works on......Spreadsheets helped him organize all the characters involved and the timeline of what happened as the situation went out of control 50 years ago......saves all the relevant location data he later used in Google Earth to analyze the terrain, which allowed him to ask more informed questions.
(3) Eliza Shapiro, education reporter for Metro
After she found out in March that only seven black students won seats at Stuyvesant, New York City’s most elite public high school, she kept coming back to one big question: How did this happen? I had a vague sense that the city’s so-called specialized schools once looked more like the rest of the city school system, which is mostly black and Hispanic.

With my colleague K.K. Rebecca Lai from The Times’s graphics department, I started to dig into a huge spreadsheet that listed the racial breakdown of each of the specialized schools dating to the mid-1970s.
analyzed changes in the city’s immigration patterns to better understand why some immigrant groups were overrepresented at the schools and others were underrepresented. We mapped out where the city’s accelerated academic programs are, and found that mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods have lost them. And we tracked the rise of the local test preparation industry, which has exploded in part to meet the demand of parents eager to prepare their children for the specialized schools’ entrance exam.

To put a human face to the data points we gathered, I collected yearbooks from black and Hispanic alumni and spent hours on the phone with them, listening to their recollections of the schools in the 1970s through the 1990s. The final result was a data-driven article that combined Rebecca’s remarkable graphics, yearbook photos, and alumni reflections.

(4) Reed Abelson, Health and Science reporter
the most compelling stories take powerful anecdotes about patients and pair them with eye-opening data.....Being comfortable with data and spreadsheets allows me to ask better questions about researchers’ studies. Spreadsheets also provide a way of organizing sources, articles and research, as well as creating a timeline of events. By putting information in a spreadsheet, you can quickly access it, and share it with other reporters.

(5) Maggie Astor, Politics reporter
a political reporter dealing with more than 20 presidential candidates, she uses spreadsheets to track polling, fund-raising, policy positions and so much more. Without them, there’s just no way she could stay on top of such a huge field......The climate reporter Lisa Friedman and she used another spreadsheet to track the candidates’ positions on several climate policies.

April 3, 2019 | The New York Times | By Janelle Zara.

“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” by chef Samin Nosrat focuses on those four elements as the pillars of flavor.

An exacting standard of organization......is what keeps fast-paced kitchens running smoothly. “When you have a place for everything, you don’t have to think twice,” she says, because there’s no searching for what you need. “It’s about not having to do the extra work.”....... organize your the cabinets, pantry and drawers in the kitchen — because, “just throwing things in a drawer is selling yourself short.”

All cookware should fall under the four pillars of “prep, cook, serve, store,” and should be divided accordingly. Drawers marked “PREP” includes tools like mixing bowls, mortar and pestle, a scale and a measuring glass, while the “COOK” drawer is full of pots and pans. Items for serving — plates, bowls and glasses — are in the cupboard, her resealable containers are all stacked in a drawer of their own, and never shall the four ever meet.

Sort by flavor and function

“Knowing there’s a zone for everything makes it easier to just go and find,” says Bennett, whose refrigerator contents have been grouped based on flavor profile and function: Asian sauces, American sauces, fruits, vegetables and pickled things each have a designated section. On the countertop, she keeps what she calls her “flavor station,” a reliable wooden bowl stocked with shallots, garlic and red onions. “They’re the raw materials,” she says, “the all-around the basics of good flavor.

Date and label

With all these identical containers, knowing what’s inside and when you bought it is essential. There are, however, no label makers here. “In a professional kitchen, everything is labeled with painters tape,” Bennett says, “but chalkboard paint with a chalkboard pen looks nice, and it’s also easier to read.”

Keep everything in plain sight

Bennett hates the guessing game of pulling knives out of a butcher block to see which is which. She prefers to keep them in a drawer or on a magnetic strip mounted to the wall. “It’s all about visibility and making it easily accessible,” she says. On the same note, she transfers her dry goods to labeled, transparent plastic or glass containers from Restaurant Depot or the Container Store so that she can always see what’s inside, a trick she learned from doing restaurant inventory.

Keep your gadgets to a minimum

The tools in your kitchen don’t need to spark joy, but you should toss the things you never use, no single-utility items.

Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket

Separating like items into different trays and baskets makes them easier to grab on the go: All of Bennett’s vitamins and medicine bottles are in one tray in the fridge; her utensils are divided up by open rectangular boxes in drawers;

Keep shopping bags in the car
That way you’ll never forget to bring them to the market.

Store essentials close at hand
“Counter space is precious real estate,” (jk: finite_resources ) says Bennett, so only the truly necessary basics get to stay there.

1. I am organized in all areas of my life.
2. I am organized and productive.
3. I enjoy getting my life in order.
4. I am working on getting my life organized every day.
5. I love finding new way...

By Edward Kosner
May 17, 2017

DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?

By Harold Evans
Little, Brown, 408 pages, $27

Mr. Evans introduces a crisp curriculum of do’s and don’ts for the aspiring clear writer. He counsels the active voice over the passive, the parsimonious use of adjectives and the near banishment of adverbs. (Not as easily practiced as preached.) He also urges writers to cut fat, check their math, be specific, organize their material for clarity, accentuate the positive and never be boring.

October 01, 2013 by Ben Balter, GitHub.

Traditionally, consuming open government data required building and curating many custom tools and wrappers to convert the data from the form it’s exposed in to something more immediately consumable by civic hackers, watchdog groups, and the general public. Developers haphazardly wrote small scripts as one-off efforts and threw them away, or left their solutions buried inside larger infrastructure, reinventing the wheel with each new transparency initiative.

Developers from the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and the New York Times, however, decided to join forces and break from tradition when they reached out to other civic-minded developers and “decided to stop each building the same basic tools over and over, and start building a foundation [they] could share.”