To become an Eagle Scout, a Boy Scout had to earn 21 merit badges, 13 of them in required areas, and complete a community service project. In 2016 a resolution in the Nebraska Legislature congratulated four Eagle Scouts from Troop 17 in Gering. It noted that “only a small percentage of the boys who join the Boy Scouts of America achieve the rank of Eagle Scout.”
Close Your Rings
The Apple Watch shows a day’s activity as three rings: Move, Exercise and Stand. Users try to close all three. Apple gives awards for closing them, including a limited-edition award on Global Close Your Rings Day, April 24, 2025.
Real Artists Ship
At a retreat of the Macintosh team in Carmel, California, in January 1983, Steve Jobs told the team: “Real artists ship.” To ship is to deliver a finished product to customers. The account comes from team member Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote about it later. Quote Investigator concludes that Jobs popularized the expression.
The Progress Principle
Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and the psychologist Steven Kramer studied some 12,000 daily diaries kept by 238 white-collar employees at seven companies. They found that, of everything that drives people at work, “the single most important factor is simply a sense of making progress on meaningful work.” Small wins were “nearly as effective as major breakthroughs.”
When 669 managers ranked five motivators, support for making progress came “dead last.”
The Save
In baseball, a save is credited to the pitcher who finishes a game for the winning team under certain conditions, for example with a lead of three runs or fewer. The sportswriter Jerome Holtzman lobbied for the statistic in 1959. It became official in 1969, the first new official statistic since 1920.
The save created a role, the closer, a pitcher who comes in to finish games. The writer Bradford Doolittle called it “the only example in sports of a statistic creating a job.”
The Punch List
Near the end of an American construction project, the contractor prepares a punch list of the items still to be finished or corrected. Contracts usually allow the owner to hold back the final payment until the list is done. One explanation of the name is that a hole was punched next to each item when it was completed.
In everyday speech, a punch list is any list of the last small tasks before a job is finished.
Deep Work
In 2016 Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, published Deep Work. He defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration” that “push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.” Its opposite is shallow work, the tasks that divert us easily and demand little thought.
Suckers for Irrelevancy
In 2009 researchers at Stanford University tested about 100 students. Those who often used many media at once were constantly distracted by irrelevant information in the tests. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said Clifford Nass, one of the researchers.
Forty-Seven Seconds
Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, began studying attention at work in 2004. Then, people spent about two and a half minutes on one screen before switching. In her 2023 book Attention Span, she reports an average of 47 seconds. After an interruption, it can take up to 25 minutes to return to a project. People check email on average 77 times a day.
Inbox Zero
In 2006 Merlin Mann coined the term Inbox Zero in a series of articles on his website 43 Folders. Each message is handled with one of five actions: delete, delegate, respond, defer or do. The goal is to bring the inbox down to zero.
In 2020 Mann said that the term had been misunderstood, and that he does not keep his own inbox empty.