A slight different version of the marshmallow test suggests kids will wait longer—on average twice as long—for that second marshmallow if they have good reason to believe that it will actually come.
Interesting outcome.
Another good point to create safe environments where kids/people are free and safe to play/experiment. Like tests in your code!!

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/10/the-marshmallow-study-revisited.html

Make sure to watch the original video on TED that introduces the Marshmallow experiment.
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

Just looking at the table of contents, I can say I like this book.

Split up in 3 parts: Importance, Focus, Value
Covers the Pomodoro Technique, Time to think, Write things down, Prioritize, Plan your day (GettingResults), and more…

My 2c
Think about what you are doing

• What could you improve?
• What could you get rid of?
• Are you enjoying it?

MiniBook - The 3 Pillars of Personal Effectiveness
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/three-pillars

How did you delight your customers today?

The Simple Truth of Service
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_6y1CieJHo

via Scrum Breakfast Zürich

The main problem is not the task switching by itself.
The main problem is the loss of responsibility for every project.

Jeff Atwood great post about Multi Tasking
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/the-multi-tasking-myth.html

As per my other tumble: Great leaders tell great stories Book Review
and Steve Denning’s tips about StoryTelling
here are 6 great tips for a story

1. Try to pick the most intriguing place in your piece to begin
2. Try to create attention-grabbing images of a setting if that’s where you want to begin
3. Raise the reader’s curiosity about what is happening or is going to happen in an action scene
4. Describe a character so compellingly that we want to learn more about what happens to him or her
5. Present a situation so vital to our protagonist that we must read on
6. And most important, no matter what method you choose, start with something happening! (And not with ruminations. A character sitting in a cave or in jail or in a kitchen or in a car ruminating about the meaning of life and how he got to this point does not constitute something happening.)

6 Rules for a Great Story from Barnaby Conrad and Snoopy
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/12/snoopy-barnaby-conrad-rules-for-stories/

Great post about paying attention to the details to delight your customers.

Best bits

Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html

Great to read: “Deliver Early and Often” in there…

DoD Goes Agile
http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/04/dod-goes-agile.html

Great list with reasons for writing things down:

Great TED video on how to live longer.
Who doesn’t want to?

I am not sure about all the statistics that Dan mentions…
but the 9 points he makes are great:

1. Move Naturally
2. Know Your Purpose
3. Down Shift
4. 80% Rule
5. Plant Slant
6. Wine at 5
7. Family First
8. Belong
9. Right Tribe

The video on TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html

This reminded me of some TDD sessions I did, where I tried to scramble around code until I made the test green. My thoughts about here
A better approach would have been to think about the problem more in advance and then start coding. TDD works but you still need to think!! 

How do you solve problems?
Do you use a synthetic approach?

4 key features that characterise “flow”:

1. intense and focused absorption that makes you lose all sense of time
2. autotelicity (“having a purpose in and not apart from itself”)
3. finding the “sweet spot”, a feeling that your skills are perfectly matched to the task at hand, leaving you neither frustrated nor bored
4. flow is characterised by automaticity, the sense that “the piano is playing itself”, for example.

Don’t try this at home: hook brain up to a 9-volt battery and use that to train and exercise. Faster to get in the “flow” 

The mild electrical shock is meant to depolarise the neuronal membranes in the region, making the cells more excitable and responsive to inputs.

transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)  —> #brainFry ??? 

People trying this at home…
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=7943

There are great techniques and exercises to improve your reading speed. Google “Speed reading”.
But for proof reading a text you really need to slow down…

From the article:

Most errors in written work are made unconsciously

1. Faulty information from the kinesthetic memory. If you have always misspelled a word like “accommodate”, you will unthinkingly misspell it again.
2. A split second of inattention. The mind works far faster than the pen or typewriter.

It is twice as hard to detect mistakes in your own work as in someone else’s!

Full ack!

Great article about “failure” and “mistakes”.

What we really need is “fail fast”. 

Similar quote ( I think facebook uses this as a motto as well)

“If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not taking risks, and that means you’re not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more changes to learn and win.”

Great way to see a challenge/problem from different angles!

How to remember the colors and what they mean?

• White = Data
  Imagine a white box, where you see through and look at just data
• Red = Emotions, gut feeling
  Imagine fire that is red and in motion
• Yellow = Positive
• Black = Negative
• Blue = Thinking
  Imagine deep blue, the chess computer that thinks about thinking
• Green = Creativity, provocation
  Imagine Peter Pan, that provokes, invents and is creative

Try to order these statements to their corresponding color

• What do we know?
• What is the subject?
• We could double X by doing Y.
• What information do we have?
• We found a lot of benefits to this idea.
• Could we implements this like X?
• Doing X would be great!
• This idea is not very attractive.
• What do we need or miss?
• Does this feel alright?
• I can see a big problem X with this.
• What is the focus of this meeting?
• Here is an interesting alternative.
• What are we thinking about?
• What is our goal?
• This costs too much.

As always more good stuff on the C2 wiki

Nice post (as most posts on Trizle are) that brings it to the point.
This is basically the start of Getting Things Done (GTD)