Extend your reach
Energy Ball by Jam343
One of the things that leaves me dumbfounded all the time, is the way I often let myself be slowed down by not knowing the process of the workplace in which I work.
In the beginning of a new job I am really inqusitive, and explore every aspect of the companys way to do stuff. But after a while I refrain from doing this.
This is bad. And I'm trying to fight this tendency.
1. Explore further
You ought to explore even further, because this will increase your leverage in the organization, increase your ability to get stuff done. Once in a while challenge yourself. Find out what ressource in the company you would like to be able to have access to, and then go about finding out how to influence this ressource to do work for you. Often the answer is really simple. It’s right there in front of you, but you just didn’t see it. Perhaps you we’re afraid to ask.
2. Don't get bogged down reorganizing other peoples processes
I, on the other hand, have a tendency to reengineer the way in which people around me work. While in some cases this is a good thing, it also drains a lot of energy, and takes a long time to deliver results.
It is of the outmost essence to know WHEN to reengineer, and it's a lot less often than you might think. Changing the way things work in your workspace is HARD work. Don't reach for this solution just because you don't understand what's happening.
Because... sometimes, this is exactly what's happening. You chose to reengineer a work process, not because it's wrong, but because you feel more in command when you're changing, than when you're admitting ignorance.
3. Nurse a happy, helpful and interested attitude
Most people loves to talk about what they do. If you're genuinely interested, they will be willing to share a cup of coffee and tell you about what they do. This is what we all do, when we start a new job. The key is to do this on a regular basis, even when you're firmly established in your job.
You could say this is a form of personal Kaizen. Continously furthering your ability to coorporate with people around you. Keep exploring your workspace for possibilities and gradually you will be able to perform better and better.
- Jens Poder
A simpler autofocused productivity system
Autofocus gives you a simple list and easy fun rules to guide your proces
I recently read about this system by Mark Forster. Autofocus is a todolist system based on simple rules, and an in-built trust in your own innate ability to sense the right thing to do right now.
The autofocus system will appeal to people with a fondness for paperbased systems, and particularly the Moleskine Crowd.
Here's how Mark Forster describes it himself:
1. Read quickly through all the items on the page without taking action on any of them.
2. Go through the page more slowly looking at the items in order until one stands out for you.
3. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so
4. Cross the item off the list, and re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it
5. Continue going round the same page in the same way. Don’t move onto the next page until you complete a pass of the page without any item standing out
6. Move onto the next page and repeat the process
7. If you go to a page and no item stands out for you on your first pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (N.B. This does not apply to the final page, on which you are still writing items). Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items.
8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active.
I like several things about the autofocus system:
1. it's compact
I love to be able to walk around with my system all the time. Capturing ideas depends on this. I must admit that my Iphone with Omnifocus is used a lot less, than I had imagined. My test-run of autofocus had me capture more stuff, and remembering more as well.
2. it's simple
It's not complicated. I tend to lose my perspective when everything is sorted in projects and contexts. Especially the context part of GTD makes less sense to me than ever. I don't really need anything besides @work and @home. Autofocus urges to have two lists. One for work and one for private stuff.
3. it gets rid of old todo-list garbage
The idea of dismissing old items when you look at a page without anything standing appeals to me a lot. The thing I get rid of this way, is the non-doable things, that seems to creep into every todo-list I make. In autofocus you highlight it, and then someday later you can review these dismissed items and totally forget them, put them on a someday/maybe list og or re-enter them in another form.
4. it's fast!
You can do this really fast. With 22 lines per page, you can quickly skim a page. Adding new items is lightning fast. And since you never grow your list to more than 10-15 pages, findign something is actually quite simple.
5. it's in a moleskine
Well... you gotta love a moleskine. I love touching them. I love carrying them. I love looking at them. Well... maybe it's just me :)
Anyways... that's it. A simple analouge system that you can check out at the blog of Mark Forster. The decribtion of the system is a mere 6 pages in the printer. So go ahead read about it. I have been using it for my home stuff for a week now, and I'm pretty happy. I am considering moving my someday/maybe lists into Taskpaper, but that's another story.
Oh... by the way... drawing on the top was made with wonderful children focused drawing app: Doozla.
- Jens Poder
Taking a break from Lifehacking
I have been trying to shift my focus away from lifehacking and productivity in the last couple of months. The reason for this was the obvious lifehacker trap: I simply wasn't relaxing enough. After a prolonged period of GTD'ing I found myself thinking about everything in a "get more done mode"
This, in my opinion, is a bad mode to be in. Because when everything serves the goal of efficiency a couple of other important parts of life is at risk. I often found myself anxious about thing I should be leisurely enjoying.
So, since new years eve I have been on a kind of productivity diet. No more fiddling with OmniFocus, at least for a while. Instead I have been trying to introduce a couple of new focal points in my life. These aren't projects that I am trying to achieve. There's no deadline to them. It's three ways of being that instills relaxation and enjoyment.
1. Thinking deeply
I love staring through the window. In my home in Copenhagen, I have an absolutely amazing view over the entire city. While looking at horizon I often float into a state af calm, pondering. It's one of the things in life I really treasure, being alone in deep thought. When doing this I often find that amazing things happen. Good ideas seems to hit in the back of my head out of nowhere.
I also find myself in this state when I'm writing in my journal, but ideas tend to be more related to the subjects I'm writing about.
BTW: I love this talk on deep thinking from google sessions on youtube.
2. Being Happy
This one became a goal of own after reading Tal Ben-Shahars book Happier. I hadn't been very good at just doing stuff that made happy. Benjamin inpsired me to mindmap all the things in life I knew would make happy doing more of.
I now carry this mindmap around with me in my notebook. And from time i'll look at it and get ideas for something that'll make me happy.
Reading novels instead of productivity literature or blogs has been one of the things I have introduced. I used to read several novels a month, but came out of the habit, reading business related stuff instead. Now I'm frequently relaxing with a novel and great coffee instead, enjoying the sound of a turned of telly.
3. Being Healthy
This one has been a troublemaker in my life since childhood. I don't like sports. Or... let me rephrase that... I like the idea, but I can't seem to get my butt from the couch after a long day at work. I just think sports are so amzingly time-consuming.
So I'm trying to do slowly take very very small measures towards a healthier way of living, and I'm doing it in a rather different mode than I used. No more putting ambitous goals into the calendar.
For me, it's all about removing hurdles and adding little incremental habit-changes, to become healthier. I have been bicycling to work for a month now, and I have been eating a lot healthier. I have found all kinds of gymnastics I can do without leaving the house.
Instead of focusing on my disability to turn myself into a marathon man, I focus on the small things I can do instantly, now and here.
So there you have it... This is the reason why I haven't been posting as frequently. All this computer time simply feels to much like work. Now I'm going to get myself a cuppa and a good long stare at the horizon before my loved ones return from work.
Please share you experiences below, if you have any, regarding lifehacking and relaxation.
- Jens Poder
Use Prism to Focus your use of Online Apps
Are you having trouble with online productivity? I have...
It happens every time I open a browser to add a calendar event to my online company calendar. I open the browser, ZAP!!!, my mind turns blank, and twenty minutes later I find myself on StumbleUpon thinking "what was I doing?"
My attention got hijacked. My normal browser is so full of possible distractions. It's just to tempting to check one of the Facebook updates on your startpage on Netvibes or Igoogle or whatever.
Well I think I have found a solution. It's called Mozilla Prism.
The idea is to make a number specific small chopped down browsers. Each of these browsers gets a specific starting URL. For instance, you could have one for your Gmail, one for your Online Calendar, and so on.
I installed Prism today, and it works wonderful. When you run Prism, it will ask you for a URL and where to put the little app. You can put it on the desktop or in the applications folder. You can even give each of these minibrowsers their own unique Icons.
So now I can enjoy the benifits of having focused apps that runs online software. I can launch them from spotlight or have them in my dock. And there's way to enter another URL. When I open my online mail to do work, I stay in my online mail.
- Jens Poder
Top Performers have strange and unique routines
This is a must-read article! It's from LifeDev.net. It shows the very unique working routines of powerful thoughleaders and creatives. Here's a clue. They don't sit all day staring a the computer, waiting for the next mail, to tell them what to do.
The lives of great people give us interesting clues about how to organise our days.
All of them attached great value to their daily routines. This is because they saw it as being part of ‘becoming who they are’, as Nietzsche puts it.
For the same reason they were also highly individual in their routines. They had the courage to go against popular opinion and work out often strange daily plans that suited them.
link: 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work | LifeDev
Key Findings:
- Get a lot of real mental rest
- Work less
- Do a variety of things
I love the way talking long walks figures extensively in this list. Recently I find that going out for a no-purpose walk is my best way to regain focus.
Link spotted on Zenhabits.
- Jens Poder
Stop doing half-actions
One of the main productivity tips I have been given is this: eliminate half-actions in your daily habits. Focus on getting the job done to a level, where the value of the job is achieved.
“It’s only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement.” - Shigeo Shingo
What is a half action? Well... you see them all the time. It's everytime someone has started on something and then haven't brougt it to the level where something was actually accomplished. Here is some examples:
- Garbage taken halfway out. Now it sits in front of the door in smelly pile of bags. Moving the bags the final 4 meters would haven taken just a little more. Now the task remains. Nothing has been accomplished.
- Starting on a job you haven't got the time to finish. If you start on a knowledge task, and only gets half-way through. Instead break knowledge work into manageable chunks. Do the brainstorm/outline whatever. Don't write half a paragraph, then leave it, and ditch it and start all over in the morning.
When you start to consider these half-actions, you'll be surprised how many of them you do out of sheer habit.
I tend to empty the dinnertable, and then put all the dinnerware and the plates in a big pile on the kitchen-table. Why didn't I put them straight into the dishwasher?
I also have a bad habit of leaving my newly washed clothes in a pile on a small chair next to my wardrope, and THEN, some time later, put it into the wardrobe. How weird is that?
In your daily life such half-action habits are just annoying, perhaps especially for the people living with you. But in the workplace they're a real hazard for completing anything. It's where I have gained the most value from this shift of habits.
You need to cut through the tendency in busy organizations to get a lot of projects moved very little, instead of focusing. This is mainly done out of a misplaced will to show stakeholders that you put in some effort. Don't put in the effort. Deliver the goods instead.
Sometimes you will feel the urge to "get started" on something, where you haven't actually got the time or ressources to finish the task. I say take a break instead, or find something you can actually complete.
When I succeed with this kind of willful focus on finishing tasks and reaching goals, instead of just satisficing and shuffling papers around, I accomplish much more
Half-completed knowledgework doesn't mature with age, like fine wine. It gets stale and crumbles like bread. Stop a couple of times every day, and ask yourself: "Am I about to complete this?"
- Jens Poder
A week without television completed – almost
Having returned from two weeks on Omø, a small island, I decided to do a little experiment. Living in a little house on a remote island with no media or internet, and nothing to do but to stare at the sea, it makes you all Thoreau'ish.
"I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Wonderful quote! The idea of a life lived deliberately is a strong and beautiful one. Countless are the hours, I have wasted in front of my television, or surfing idly on the web. And how futile such evenings have been. Mostly... reaching for the remote have become a habit for my tired mind. After a long day, I simply haven't got any mental energy left to get started on something.
But after Omø I decided to give myself a weeklong challenge:
- No television - Unless it's recorded to skip commercials and positively interesting.
- No pointless surfing or RSS reading.
- Time spent on computer is only to be creative. Not on taking in inputs, only on generating outputs.
I have now completed this challenge, an it has worked really well. I can highly
recommend it!
A lot of hours got released! Every night at eight o'clock, when the kid was fast asleep, there was a whole evening to get something interesting done. I have been Running. Discoursing. Writing. Sorting. Uncluttering. Every single evening I got something done, that made me feel content with myself.
Lesson Learned: Prepare to relax! When your fingers are itching for the remote, you have to have something else to do. This have made me add an extra context to my GTD system "Home - Play". On this list I put things that I find thoroughly enjoyable, that I can do in the evening. Get something prepared.
Enjoy the sound of silence: It is easier to relax, when the television isn't churning in your ears all night. Your mind will enjoy this breathing space after a day of working and parenting. You'll perhaps even daydream and stare out the window!
Go to bed earlier: This is my final benefit from the week. I got to bed earlier. There was no latenight comedy to keep me up past midnight. No feeling of unfullfillment to keep me haunting around the internet for something new and interesting.
So I'll keep up my life without television next week as well. Have any of you ever tried such an information diet? How did it work out for you?
- Jens Poder
Omnifocus for Iphone preview at 43folders
Oh boy... I'm looking forward to this. OmniFocus for the Iphone. Merlin Mann has the details
- Jens Poder
Moving to MAC: Blogging Tools
One of the main problems when moving to MAC is to find a good blog editor. A blog editor is a writing and managing tool, that will let you write in an application while offline, and then upload it to your blog.
Windows user will be using (or should be using) the Windows Live Writer, a really advanced blog editor. When moving to MAC you wont find anything as advanced as this. Instead there is a handful of less complex but quite useful apps. After some basic research I am now using the following freeware tools.
Blog Editor: Qumana
After some time I have ended up choosing the blog editor and manager Qumana. It handles all the top hosting solutions like typepad, wordpress, blogger etc. It offers a very simple and effective user interface to writing your blog post and handling tags and categories from your blog.
Inserting and uploading images is really easy. You can drag and drop and image from the desktop into your blog post, and Qumana will upload it to your blog and insert it in your post. Really easy!
It lets you insert video as snippets of code. But it can't display these embedded objects, like windows live writer does.
A nice touch is when you want to link to something, and have copied the URL to the clipboard. When you mark some text an hit SHIT-APPLE-L to insert a link, it'll automatically take the URL from the clipboard and suggest it. This really streamlines the task of inserting links.
It has a really well-designed and easy to use set of keyboard shortcuts, but support for standard text navigation like APPLE-ARROWS and ALT-ARROWS doesn't work, which is kind of annoying.
It also lacks tools for handling Header-styles (H3, H2 and such). This is a missing feature in many blog editors, and it's really annoying, if you like me use Headings a lot to subdivide blogposts.
Alternatives to using Qumana, that I chose not to use:
- ScribeFire plugin for Firefox: Simple and well integrated with Firefox. But no keyboard shortcuts. So if you want to make a lot of text bold in your text, then you'll soon be tired of reaching for the mouse.
- Marsedit2: Costs money, and is surprisingly lacking in features. It hasn't got a WYSIWYG editor but a HTML editor instead!
- Bleezer: To complicated to setup for my taste. But a nice WYSIWYG editor. Very early in development.
- Ecto: Originally developed for Linux. Resembles Qumana a lot, but... it's a little ugly and cluttered
Image Editor: Imagewell
This little baby is a lifesaver for the busy blogger. Imagewell is the tool everybody should download. Instead of firing up Photoshop to resize and crop a picture, you can drag and drop the image into Imagewell and set the size of the picture in no time at all. It even let's you FTP the picture to your server. I just save it to the desktop, and then drag and drop it into Qumana.
FTP program: Cyberduck
Here's the free FTP-program you'll love. Cyberduck is much easier to use than the old school WS-FTP i used for Windows. It let's you define bookmarks so you'll quickly be able to get to the folders you like.
Screen Dumps
And then of course there screen dumps. I didn't know how to do this in the start, but here's how to.
To enter screendump mode press SHIFT-APPLE-4. This'll get you into screen dump mode. Now you drag and drop a region, and screen capture will dump a file on the desktop (so you can drag it into Imagewell)
But if you want to take a screen dump of an entire window you can do it by hitting SHIFT-APPLE-4, and the when the screen dump cursor appears you hit SPACE. The cursor changes to a camera, and you can "snapshot" a whole window from your screen.
You could also install Jing, that'll let you snap videos of your screen to post talk-throughs of applications. I'm considering doing this in the future.
That's it! I'm am now up an running with an effective set of blogging tools. Tomorrow we'll look at video on MAC. How do you get all your AVI, DIVX and MPEGs to behave on your new MAC. Well with a few tools you'll never need to worry again.
See you tomorrow!
- Jens Poder
Moving To MAC articles:
A great notebook for the Road
For capturing thoughts on the run, I use a Moleskine pocketsize and a pocket lead pencil graciously sponsored by IKEA :) This is quite practical, as it lets my collect all my thoughts on the run. I used to use my cellphone as a dictaphone. This was really mobile, but I had a tendency to forget them, because processing these voice messages were rather slow.
Andrew Mason from the Did I get thing done blog, have refined this Moleskine setup using the ultraportable Moleskine Cahier and a Golf Pencil!
Check out his article right here.
- Jens Poder