Welcome back, friend. Per what I wrote in your yearbook back in June, I hope you had a nice summer and stayed sweet and cool. You look great. Did you lose weight or something?

Somewhere along the way over the past few weeks, I seem to have got my game on again here at 43 Folders. I wrote a few items that I’m proud of and that lots of people seemed to enjoy. I’m once again posting about stuff that means a lot to me, and I’m feeling good about the site and where it (and I) will be heading over the next year. (More on that soon)

But, if you were tanning on Ibiza or building houses with Jimmy Carter and missed out on my wordy comeback season, here’s a few articles I hope you will enjoy.

It’s nice to have you back; I found the Vette, and I’m pumped for Fall.

Making Time to Make Series

Link: Making Time to Make

One of the reasons I’ve started really enjoying writing for the site again is best summed up in my favorite thing I’ve written recently — a three-part series on public attention management for creative types that I called, “Making Time to Make.”

It’s been a while since I’ve had such clarity about what I need to do with myself (and, perhaps, more importantly, what I need to be okay with not doing with myself). And these three posts captured what I wanted to say.

If you’re in a big rush and only have time to read one thing out of all these links, jump to the third and final article in this series, Making Time to Make: One Clear Line; that’s got lots of tips and what have you.

Here’s links to all three:

• Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence - Aug 4 2008 - “As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), ‘I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.’”
• Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have - Aug 5 2008 - “Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were.”
• Making Time to Make: One Clear Line - Aug 6 2008 - “For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us…”

Rest of the Best of the Summer

And here’s a few more of the posts that people seemed to like over the past few weeks.

• Free Books for your Amazon Kindle - Jun 6 2008 - My favorite places to find free material for Summer’s favorite new toy
• NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create - Jun 14 2008 - Big Companies are starting to get the email problem. Now they’re just trying to figure out what to do about it.
• Guide to Better Napping - Jun 17 2008 - Link post to a fantastic infographic on ad hoc snooze-taking.
• Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better - Jul 14 2008 - Writing advice that’s as practical and down-to-earth as the guy who offers it - a humble man who obsessed over every page he ever wrote.
• On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving - Jul 24 2008 - A controlling metaphor that helps explain why I advise people not to save their peanut shells.
• Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking - Aug 08 2008 - Simple formula for distilling any mystery meat need into a Project + a Next Action.
• Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur - Aug 11 2008 - More thoughts on why ideas are just a multiplier of execution.
• What Makes for a Good Blog? - Aug 19 2008 - I still owe Six Apart a list of favorite blogs, but, weirdly enough, this list of things I look for in a good blog was the most popular thing I wrote this summer. Go figure.
• Social Networks: The Case for a “Pause” Button - Aug 26 2008 - I love you, but sometimes I need “me time.” And I need you not to know it.
• Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics - Aug 27 2008 - My snarky (but honest) shortcuts on quickly sussing out whether a book is worth your attention. (Hint: most don’t make the cut.)

Like I say, welcome back. In case it fell out of your pocket on the train to Paris, here’s our site’s free RSS feed.

See you in study hall.