ToDoOrElse.com

Plans, hard work, and you

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work." -Peter Drucker

The well respected late Peter Drucker was right about plans as he was about so many things. I’m prone to overplanning what I want to do, and not immediately putting those plans into practice.

If you’re too into planning, ask youself if you’re over-planning because there are issues – emotional, financial, practical – that your plans don’t address but need to? It’s not a comfortable question to ask yourself – but it does pay to ask it.

If you have plenty of plans, but not enough hard work, what’s holding you back and how do you start turning some of those plans into action? What are the 3,5 or 8 specific next physical actions you can take to start acting on your plans?

Now that’s a plan I hope Peter would approve of!

Tags: Peter+Drucker, overplanning

Six ways not to go Crazybusy

Most of the time I feel I’m just this side of crashing and burning in this Web 2.0, Future Shocked, too much to do, too many decisions world. If you feel the same, it’s time to confront this and start getting a handle on it.

Crazybusy is a term coined by Dr. Edward Hallowell, a New England psychiatrist, who believes many of us are suffering from environmentally induced attention deficit disorder, brought on by technology and activity overload. His book, Crazybusy, is required reading if you want to avoid being run digitally ragged.

If you don’t have time (yet) to read it, here’s the gist of what he recommends from a very good Businesweek.com story by Anne Tergesen:

• Set aside time to work before you check your e-mail or snail mail or voice mail, before you allow the world to intrude on your fresh and focused state of mind.
  
• Do not allow the world to have access to you 24/7. Turn off your BlackBerry and cell phone. Stretch or have a five-minute conversation. When you sit down again, you'll be focused.
  
• Prioritizing is crucial. If you don't, you'll find yourself spread so thin you'll only be able to see your good friends on the first Tuesday in February.
  
• Give yourself permission to end relationships and projects that drain you.
  
• Do what you're good at and delegate the rest. This is important, because when we do what we're good at, the work can take on the quality of play.
  
• Keep in mind that some of our best thoughts come when we're doing nothing. Downtime is a forgotten art.

Tags: Crazybusy

Flash card productivity for Power Users

For me, the breaking point was how to quickly move from one tab to another in IE7. I learned early on how to do this in FireFox, the first major browser to support tabs: Control-Page Up, Control-Page Down. Easy. My fingers automatically jumped to those keys while in IE7 – no luck.

That was the straw – the dismaying shock, the turning in my stomach, the feeling that bad things had developed while my attention was elsewhere – came later. When I realized my fingers no longer knew the easiest, quickest way to operate all the programs I spend all my days in. Somewhere between this major upgrade and that new feature I'd become, gasp!, a newbie.

In my misguided obsession find ever new ways of being productive, I'd forgotten the cornerstone and wellspring of all computer productivity: the keyboard shortcuts. Knowing dozens and dozens of keystroke shortcuts has always separated the Power User Men from the timid newbie girly boys since the days WordStar was cutting edge office productivity software. Now, I needed to play catch up, bigtime, if I wanted to regain my former computing proficiency. But How?

After pondering this over several portions of adult beverage, my thoughts meandered back to my high school days when I aced four advanced placement classes in two years by using up boxes and boxes of flashcards. You remember flashcards – On one side, Capital of Kansas? On the other, Topeka. Why not apply the same proven technology to all those beckoning keyboard shortcuts? Yes!

So here's what I did:

Step 1: Roundup the usual suspects. A few minutes in Google yield good keyboard shortcut .pdfs for Microsoft's Word, Internet Explorer7, Visual Basic/Visual Studio 2005; Firefox and yes, Google. Why .pdfs? Because I wanted to save and print these collections of shortcuts off so I could cherry pick the commands I use most often, but don't know.

Step 2: Check High School locker for old flashcards. Well, I do remember leaving a box of them there. Finding flashcards today turned out to be surprisingly difficult – I finally found this vendor via Amazon and ordered two boxes. Why paper? Writing facts helps get them into your brain. Also, I wanted a technology delivery system robust enough to use in all the odd free moments of my life and holding a laptop in your lap while in the restroom is too weird even for me.

Step 3: Start Writing and working the Cards. I found a good post on this at this blog; here are the points that applied to my use:

• One simple question, one unambiguous answer. Not "How do I adjust type size up or down in Firefox?" but "Firefox: increase type size?" (Ctrl + <mouse wheel).
• Keep your cards with you. You can't review them if you don't have them.
• Review your cards at least 3 times a day. Repetition pays.
• Don't think you've learned a card until you can get the answer after you've had a night's sleep (You want to make sure that new fact gets from short term memory to long term memory).

So that's it: I now have a starter stack of flash card commands I'm squeezing into my middle age brain. I'll report back here in a few weeks on how this experiment to bootstrap myself back into the ranks of power users is going.

I want I do I get

[I originally wrote this for Lifehack.org, but I think it's one of my best, so here it is.]

There’s a great song out there by Jimmy Cliff, one of reggae’s top artists, that in six words summarizes just how you succeed in life: I want I do I get. These six words are a very powerful way of connecting what you want with what you will achieve.

First comes wanting something – a better life for yourself, your family, more money, a better job, whatever it is you dream about and long for. You desire it, you dream about it, you daydream about it, you yearn for it. But that’s not enough.
Next – and this the part too many people forget about – comes the doing. All of the wanting in the world is not going to move you one inch closer to what you want: you have to do. You have to find a better job, change jobs, take risks, write software, try new things, stop doing old things, go to college, work, act, do. The doing is the absolutely indispensable connection between what you want and what you get.

Finally, if you keep doing what needs to be done, if you keep adjusting what you do to move you closer to what you want, you get. Maybe not easily, maybe not as quickly as movies and television portray, but it will come.

If these six words connect with you, maybe it’s time to do your “I want I do I get” audit:

• I want. Find a quiet place you can be alone and ask and answer this deceptively simple question: What do you want? Not what your boss, parents, relatives, friends or significant other want. What do you want? What matters to you that you’re prepared to spend your days, weeks maybe years getting? Be honest with yourself – the stakes are high. More than a few people have wasted their lives because they never really asked themselves what they really wanted.
• I do. After you’ve gotten clear on what you want, what are you prepared to do about it? And you thought the step above was hard! When you start looking at what it’s going to cost to get what you want, you may decide that cost is too high. That’s fine. The more you understand the cost, the better you will appreciate the value. Don’t be surprised if you go back and forth between clarifying your wants and calculating the costs of what you want – and that’s a good thing.
• I get. This is where you get your just desserts, right? Maybe. Way too many people find they get what they worked long and hard for only to find there’s a rather nasty catch. The man who climbs the corporate ladder, only to become estranged from his family. The women who forsakes a career to be a mother, but never gets over knowing what she could have achieved in the business world. It’s up to you to define what you want to get, so take the time to think through what you want to get really looks like.

One final philosophical note about these six words: notice that “I” is three of them? Not what others want, not what others say you are “supposed” or “should” do. What’s more, no one is going to do it for you. You are the key to making these six words work.

Give some thought to your morning routine

When 17 out of 20 CEOs take time out of their lives to respond to a survey about morning routines, that’s worth reading. Jim Citrin over at Yahoo! Finance did just that, and the similarities of the responses he got should give you after you read it a pause for thought. Definitely visit Jim’s article for the juicy and important details.

Here’s the main points of CEO agreement when it comes to morning routines; How do you score?

1. Start early. (I get up between 3–5 am, so +1)
2. Get a jump on email. (I completely disagree, but then I live online instead of being a CEO managing thousands of people, so -1)
3. Exercise every morning. (I look at this as a vote for just how critically important daily exercise is, so +1)
4. Be thoughtful about the source, form, and timing of your news. (A good one! As ossified as the Mainstream Media is, reporters worldwide are out there digging up news you need to know. The trick is not drowning in it. For me, I recently canned the daily newspaper and now get my news via weekday BBC podcasts, tevo-ed CNN Situation Room and Lou Dobbs shows, RSS feeds from 5 media orgs into Tab 2 of my Google Homepage, the Sunday local paper (gotta have my comics) and the Sunday New York Times. So +1. By the way, have you audited your news feeds lately?)
5. Problem-Solve. (In other words, use morning time to tackle and think through the things that matter. I use the rule that my time before 10am is three times more valuable than my time after 3pm. so +1)
6. Make Family Time. (Use that morning time to connect with your family before everyone runs off to do their thing. I do, so +1)
7. Be creative with your morning routine. (Another good insight – those first few hours when you return from the land of slumber are just too valuable to waste! so +6, and a score of 6 out of 7. Not bad!)

What's your Value Per Hour?

I'd like to propose a new metric for you to gauge how you are doing: Value Per Hour (VPH). VPH isn't some lame corporate economist term for how much value your employer can squeeze out of you; it's how much value are you getting from each hour of living.

Simply put, you are going to live some X number of hours; how much value you derive from those hours is in very large part going to determine how happy, successful and prosperous you'll be. Being aware of your VPH is a good first step to renegotiating the deal between you and the world.

What is "Value"? It's the sum of everything that you believe, desire, aspire to and want and is uniquely individual. It's how you see what you are doing and it's purpose - regardless of what other people think.

Here's how it works: as you're planning various projects, sub-projects and tasks, add in your gut VPH estimate. Forget about traditional time management categories like A's, B's, C's and 1's, 2's and 3's: traditional time management is about as useful today as proper telegraph etiquette.

Instead, you want to hone your ability to recognize what matters, in the fewest possible seconds, into a reliable, trusted instrument to tell you when you're wasting the lifeblood of your life - your time.

So what are your highest VPH activities? are you getting to them in the course of your day, week or month or do they recede like a mirage, with lower VPH things always getting in the way? Are you getting the VPH from your life you should, or are you running on empty?