Two Minute Offense

How to Become an Early Riser - Part II » Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog

I recommend getting up at the same time for 30 days straight to lock in the habit, but after that you’ll be so conditioned to waking up at the same time that it will be hard to sleep in. I decided to sleep in late one Saturday morning and didn’t set my alarm, but I woke up automatically at 4:58 am. Then I tried to sleep in, but I was wide awake and couldn’t fall back asleep again. Oh well. Once the habit is established, it isn’t hard at all to get up, assuming you’re going to bed at the onset of sleepiness.

Just a little something to add… If you’re having trouble waking up a lot earlier, try doing it in increments. This is the approach I took and I’ve gone from 6:45am to 6:00am in 15 minute increments over the past few months. It’s much easier to wake up 15 minutes earlier (and you won’t feel as tired later on) than it is to wake up 45 minutes earlier. It like a patch vs. cold turkey. If 15 minutes is still too much, try 10 or even 5 minutes… Then you can tell yourself, “It’s only 5 minutes earlier, that’s nothing.”

If you have trouble waking up in the morning even before you start trying to wake up earlier, you will need to look at some other blog posts on Motivation (there aren’t any here just yet, but there should be eventually… a good reason to subscribe to the RSS feed)

I don’t know if thise was intended as a meme, but I’m turning it into one! Here’s the original:
Open Loops: Got a minute? Get Something Done!

What I can do in thirty minutes
* Do a filing session and empty my “To File” folder
* Mind map an upcoming project
* Complete my @Calls list
* Read a professional journal, marking articles for deeper review
* Clean the inside of my car

What I can do in 15 minutes

* Return voicemails
* Chunk my inbox
* Prepare a meeting agenda
* Review notes from a meeting and process Next Actions into my system
* Write some thank you notes
* Process my email inbox

What I can do in five minutes

* Prepare materials to work on a project
* Review my @Context lists to choose a Next Action
* Schedule an appointment
* Transfer some Next Actions from my digital recorder to my system
* Review my email inbox or blackberry for emergencies to handle
* Answer an email on my blackberry

What can you do in five, fifteen, and thirty minutes?

30 minutes:

• Most work tasks that don’t require a longer, concentrated effort
• Clean out my work email Inbox (I’m still working getting everything from my inbox to a list; sometimes I add a Next Action to my list, but leave the email in my inbox since filing it away would make it take that much longer to find. And as I write this I’m realizing that maybe I could use some more folders … Hmmm… That seems like a whole different discussion)
• Read most of my blog subscriptions in BlogLines (cause BlogLines makes it easy, I’m telling you)
• Read half a magazine (I find that things like ESPN the Magazine, InfoWorld, and Chicago magazine take me about 60 minutes when I read the articles that interest me)

15 minutes:

• Pick a topic that I’ve saved as a draft and make it into a post (this applies to this blog and GiveMeTheRock, although sometimes this gets into the 30 minute area)
• Write an email to my friends or family
• Get through email newsletters, Google Groups, and forum alerts (it’s a stretch to do all of these in 15 minutes, but I’m working on my efficiency)
• Enter blog stats into spreadsheet (it takes 15 minutes since I’ve got 3 blogs for which I track stats)

5 minutes:

• Do half the dishes (assuming we haven’t let them pile up for too long)
• Clean out/chunk my personal email Inbox

and … since this IS the 2 Minute Offense… things I can get done in 2 minutes:

• Follow-up on an email
• Pick off the low-hanging fruit in my BlogLines account (I do this more often than I need to)
• Make the bed
• Put away some clothes
• Review and update a to-do list

Save yourself a trip. Call before you go and see if they have it ready for you.

This is one of those things that “everyone already knows.” But when you drop a dress off to be altered and they say it will be ready on the 19th… don’t you expect it to be ready on the 19th? Especially if the 19th is 2 weeks away?

Well, I learned the hard way to not count on it. It’s a shame that I can’t trust the tailor to do what they say they’re going to do, because now I won’t be able to trust anyway to do something they say they’re going to do… at least until I forget about the 70 extra minutes I spent in traffic. At least Val had her cell phone so she was able to make calls, catch up, and make plans with people while we slowly drifted along the expressway river.

Do yourself a favor, and remember to call before you come. Don’t just pop it over, out the blue-oo-oo-oo.

Jason Womack - Stay Motivated

So, here’s an example of the process under the “Category” Product Management:
Goal: Enhance awareness and customer base of a new product.
Milestone: Roll out the new advertisement campaign.
Target: Contact 100,000 people by 3rd quarter.
Task: Draft e-mail to set up a meeting with marketing team.

I’m working on doing this kind of thing with my goals. I’ve only recently (as in, last week) started writing down my goals (in the past/present/already-happened tense, no less) and found that it really does help to motivate. Knowing that certain things have to be accomplished in order to make those goals a reality is a good way to kick yourself in the ass (since I’m not actually that flexible).

To add to the above example, here’s one of mine:

Category: Continuos Learning
Goal: I can hold first-year level conversations in French with Val.

I haven’t broken it down into Milestones with Targets and Tasks yet, but as soon as AirSet supports hierarchical lists, I’m all over it (they’ve promised that it’s coming soon… hopefully in enough time to help me achieve my goals). That particular goal is a good nominee for the breakdown, because it is very abstract when you’re looking at where to start. My girlfriend (Val) is a French teacher, and I figure I can learn in a year what her students do (especially since I’m more motivated than a lot of them). I’ll probably need her help to create Milestones like “Finished Chapter 1″ or something.

Another, perhaps superior, example is:

Category: Fanatical Pupil
Goal: I have self-published Between Blue Lines and one other new book of poetry

The beginnings of Between Blue Lines can be found over at Fanatical Pupil… it’s a good example of the needed kick in the proverbial ass. You can see (at least at the time of this post) that my last posted poem was on April 25th. That’s over a month ago… So, in order to get that book and another completed by next year, I’m going to have to start writing some damn poetry. (Don’t worry, I have goals for this blog and my other one, so writing here is not wasting time that could be spent achieving my goals… or rather, the time spent here is, in fact, time spent achieving my goals)

Anyway, to break that down into Milestones, Targets and Tasks, it would look something like this (probably):

• Milestone: Writing (first drafts) are finished
• Target: I have 100 poems ready to go
• Task: Write a poem (until I’ve got 100)

That seems like how it would work for me. Comments and suggestions are welcome, of course. And any other goal-setting advice…

Write down your passwords : Lifehacker

A Microsoft security expert said banning users from writing down passwords compromises security because it results in rarely-changed weak passwords used across multiple systems:

“Since not all systems allow good passwords, I am going to pick a really crappy one, use it everywhere and never change it,” Johansson said. “If I write them down and then protect the piece of paper—or whatever it is I wrote them down on—there is nothing wrong with that. That allows us to remember more passwords and better passwords.” Johansson said the security industry had been giving out the wrong advice about passwords for 20 years.

I have a file on a thumb (and/or jump) drive that I use to store my passwords on. It’s a spreadsheet (I won’t say what company makes the software), and it’s password protected. I used a hint at the password as part of the name of the file, since I’ve password protected stuff before and then not been able to open it again (luckily it was for stuff that I didn’t really need anyway). Any time I register for a website (at least one that I know I’ll be coming back to), I put in the jumpdrive and enter the username and password into the spreadsheet. It’s certainly easier than trying to remember then, and allows me to use several different passwords without necessarily having to remember them. Although, I do use a select few in rotation formation… as kind of a prefetch; I can guess at the password a couple times and usually get it right, but if I don’t then I have to go to RAM (the thumbdrive) to get the password from my “memory.”

On a related now (sort of), writing things down is good. And here I mean, by hand. I’m convinced (and I’m sure there’s a study out there somewhere) that writing things down by hand helps you remember them. More on this in a later post…

Only 6? + GTDTagglyWiki + FIFO or LIFO?

How to Become an Early Riser » Steve Pavlina’s Personal Growth Blog

If you sleep based on what your body tells you, you’ll probably be sleeping more than you need — in many cases a lot more, like 10-15 hours more per week (the equivalent of a full waking day). A lot of people who sleep this way get 8 hours of sleep per night, which is usually too much. Also, your mornings may be less predictable if you’re getting up at different times. And because our natural rhythms are sometimes out of tune with the 24-hour clock, you may find that your sleep times begin to drift.

…It’s very simple, and many early risers do this without even thinking about it, but it was a mental breakthrough for me nonetheless. The solution was to go to bed when I’m sleepy (and only when I’m sleepy) and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times every night.

I go to bed when I’m too sleepy to stay up. My sleepiness test is that if I couldn’t read a book for more than a page or two without drifting off, I’m ready for bed. Most of the time when I go to bed, I’m asleep within three minutes. I lie down, get comfortable, and immediately I’m drifting off. Sometimes I go to bed at 9:30pm; other times I stay up until midnight. Most of the time I go to bed between 10-11pm. If I’m not sleepy, I stay up until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer…

When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple seconds, and sit up. I don’t think about it. I’ve learned that the longer it takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep in. So I don’t allow myself to have conversations in my head about the benefits of sleeping in once the alarm goes off. Even if I want to sleep in, I always get up right away.

After a few days of using using this approach, I found that my sleep patterns settled into a natural rhythm. If I got too little sleep one night, I’d automatically be sleepier earlier and get more sleep the next night. And if I had lots of energy and wasn’t tired, I’d sleep less. My body learned when to knock me out because it knew I would always get up at the same time and that my wake-up time wasn’t negotiable.

I also discovered this pattern myself by setting my alarm clock and waking up at the same time every morning. It just seemed like a good thing to do to get into a habit. Once you get used to it (and often during the Spring and Summer when it’s lighter in the mornings) your body (well, mine at least) will wake up automatically at the time it’s used to getting up. I usually have a lot of stuff I like to/need to get done in the morning, so staying in bed is not an option. It’s been longer than I can remember since I hit the snooze button.

A slight variation on this system is that I will often sleep in until 8 or 9 on the weekends (during the week, I get up at 6). I usually sleep in a little later on Saturday and/or Sunday if I’ve stayed up late for a few days during the week. I kind of just let my body wake me up on those days. However, I don’t stay in bed for an artificially long time; after I wake up the first time, I get up. Yes, this is true even after I’ve been out drinking. I’ve got my alcohol tolerance pretty well figured out, so I know how much I can handle without getting a hangover. In addition, I make sure to have water ready in the fridge to drink when I come in from a night out. I try to drink at least 16 ounces of water, and find that it’s enough to help my body flush the alcohol. But I guess that’s getting a little off topic…

So, yeah, wake up at the same time every day. Go to bed when you get sleepy. If you need to stay up later, you’ll probably get tired sooner the next day, so you should still wake up at your usual time.

Bad Music + Future Tickle + Praise for TaskToy

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to increase my efficiency and double my productivity is to Ignore Updated Posts. If you have an RSS reader, and you read as many (okay, maybe not that many) blogs as I do, you probably already understand what I mean. If you don’t, let me expandiate a bit…

First off, for this to be of any use, you’ll need an RSS reader. I recommend BlogLines, and I have no affiliation with the company beyond using their product.

Once you’ve got your Bloglines account, you can subscribe to RSS feeds. The most common places that offer RSS feeds are weblogs (like this one!). When you go to subscribe to a weblog (or any other RSS) source, do yourself a favor and change the box in BlogLines that says “Updated Items: Display as New” to “Updated Items: Ignore.” (Your results may vary depending on the RSS reader you’ve chose)

But! - you say - you’ll miss all the updates that people are putting up related to their latest and greatest posts! Calm down - I say - if the information is really that important that they needed to provide an update, then either you’ll find it from another source, or it’s not that important. If it really was that important, they’d have created a new post to inform you of the update.

But - you repeat - what about bloggers who actually do update their posts? Well, hopefully we can teach them a lesson. I don’t like having to look through a post to find what’s been updated after I’ve already read the post once. Even if it’s an update clearly labelled as such at the bottom of the post, it’s usually not important enough to justify being shown again in my RSS reader.

On a related note… I have found (after trying quite a few others) BlogLines to be the fastest way to read weblogs. Desktop newsreads are often competitively fast, but they usually still require you to click on each item in order to mark it as read and/or delete it. BlogLines can automatically mark every blog you “expand” as read, which is a killer time saver in enabling you to quickly scan and move on.

Tips for Gamers + TiddlyWiki Tutorial + GTDTiddlyWiki w/ Calendar +

but she’s a girl… » Backpack:

So far, it probably sounds like a nicely implemented wiki, but there are a few other nice features that make it much more useful than that. First, you can send items to a particular page via email. Each page has it’s own unique and randomly-chosen email address, and sending an email to that address with ‘todo: Buy flowers’ puts a check list item ‘Buy flowers’ on that page. Using a similar notation, you can add images, notes and files to the page. This is pretty brilliant, and I’ve used it several times already from my mobile phone when out and about. I used to use Ta-da Lists to house my wishlists of books, CDs and DVDs that I would like to get for myself or as gifts for others, but Backpack provides everything Ta-da did and more so I’ve switched. The emailable items become very useful when you’re in a shop and spot something you’d like to get at some point. You can make a quick entry there and then, and then relax knowing that it’s safely on your list.

I have a Backpack account. I haven’t actually used it. You don’t have to either…

I have an HPDA for things that I see when I’m shopping… and everything else I think of when I’m not in front of a computer. In addition, (I believe this will probably shock some people to the point where I’ll lose all credibility as any sort of productivity contributor) I don’t have a cell phone. So emailing things to myself only happens when I’m actually at a computer. My GTDMail implementation is working fairly well, and getting better the more I use it (and come to trust it). Just because everyone else says how great Backpack is, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Of course, just because I say you don’t have to use it, doesn’t mean you necessarily shouldn’t use it.

My actual PIM of choice, the combo of Gmail and AirSet, provides a List(s) feature, and I can share that with people in my “groups” there… I don’t really have the need to share that kind of information with people I don’t know. I already share information through this blog, my other blog, my del.icio.us account, and my BlogLines account. I’m sure you’re more interested in what blogs I’m reading than what I’m going to buy at Jewel this week.

One other thing - I’m not a freelancer or anything like that (again, it feels like productivity heresy). The company I work for provides me with all the software I need to manage projects at work. It may not be the greatest software, but everyone at my job basically uses these same tools to share project information. So, Backpack doesn’t provide any utility to me in that sense.

I know this post seems like I’m totally downing Backpack, but I don’t mean it that way. I know it is very easy to use and many people find it very useful as well. I just want people to know that you don’t need to change your system to fit with whatever may be the Blogosphere Productivity Darling of the Month. I’d like to try out Backpack and GTDTiddlyWiki more in depth, but I already have a system in place that works. I’m busy enough that I don’t have time to port all my information over to a new system every time something new and shiny comes along. I’m only saying this because I’ve already spent too much time trying to find a new system when I already had one that worked. Go ahead and put that new system on your “Someday/Maybe” list and look at it again when you’ve Got Things Done.

Maybe you subscribe to some del.icio.us feeds in your RSS reader. Probably means you have a del.icio.us account… Is it a one sided fence? Certainly not. Would there be the RSS feeds if other people didn’t have an account? No… because you’d be the only one tagging anything. So, there are people who have an account, and there are people who subscribe to the RSS feeds. Now, since a lot of the people reading the RSS feeds also have an account, let me help you help those people - the ones on the other side of the fence. Your del.icio.us neighbors, if you will.

Tag Appropriately

I’m not sure where ohskylab comes from thinking that How to avoid crying when chopping onions goes under the gtd tag. I’m perfectly fine with that going under cooking, food, lifehacks (since it was posted on lifehacker), and onions. The tag gtd for most “sane” people means Getting Things Done. Now, no offense to my friend ohskylab, but how does knowing how to not cry when cutting an onion help me Get Things Done? Do I get to move on to the Next Action faster because I don’t have to wipe me eyes after cutting up the onion? I guess so… And I guess I also increase my Mind Like Water state since all that saline stays in my head instead of coming out through my tear ducts. If you think the gtd is okay, then let’s move on. If you agree with me that it’s a bit overkill, you can skip down to the next headline.

Still there? Good, then you’re ready to look at food. Now, an onion is definitely food. On the surface, we’re Good2Go. But does knowing how to cut an onion belong in food when it’s also under cooking? If so, then nearly every cooking post could would also be tagged as food, and that makes the food tag kind of redundant, no? Speaking of redundant… if an onion is food, does it really need to be tagged as onions? Is there every going to be a time when you tag something as onions, but not food? There is The Onion… but I don’t think that would get tagged as the plural “onions” but rather the singular “onion” or perhaps even “theOnion.”

Which leads unceremoniously to my next point…

Reduce Overtagging

How Many Tags Do You People Have?? ONIONS? You have a tag for ONYUNS?? For Cry Pete! I’m not sure who ohskylab is, but he/she’s got 16.5 pages (on 1400x1050 resolution) of tags! That’s a {expletive} ton of tags. I like to use my del.icio.us account as a time-saving device, as opposed to a time-wasting device. I still do a horrendous job of saving things (I save way too much stuff that I will most likely never look at again), but I consciously try to keep the number of tags I have low to reduce the amount of time I have to spend looking through tags to remember what I tagged something as. (On a related note, you can search your del.icio.us bookmarks. Related like brother and sister, it is.)

Tag What You Need

Once again lacking all ceremony: My Next Point… Once you read how to cut out the bottom of an onion before cutting apart the rest of it, do you really need to save the page? Chances are, if someone is subscribed to the lifehacks tag at del.icio.us, they’re also subscribed to lifehacker.com and lifehacks.org and lifehackmetopieces.co.uk as well. They’re going to find the same information you are, and they’re never going to really need to look at it again either. Until they go senile. Which will probably be when computers (or else onions) have been advanced to the point where they’re nothing like anything we currently have anyway.

Summary

1. Tag Appropriately - don’t stick square pegs in round holes just because the holes are bigger than the squares
2. Reduce Overtagging - if you have more than about 2 screens of tags, that’s probably more than you really need. “Your focus determines your reality.”
3. Tag What You Need - are you really going to look at it again?

I am certainly going to examine the tagging process again… just you wait. Until then, Look Now Look Again.

Fred On Something…

The problem is that to use the Gmail Atom service in Bloglines, you need to build your feed’s URL like this: https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom, to provide the user and password to the feed’s server.

All the problem is there: you have the username and the password in plaintext directly in the URL.

This is something I thought I should carry as it is important information. I tried to use the Atom feed for my Gmail account once, but didn’t have it right, so it never worked. Good thing, I guess. Of course, I realized that reading my Gmail via an RSS feed is not really that helpful anyway. I use the GTDMail method with my account, so it’s nice to be able to see more than just the new messages when I go there. It also means I use my inbox as a to-do list, but I’m working on ways around that (using the Stars is a good example).

Time to work on some categories for the blog now, I think…