links for 2008-05-01

By brick | May 1, 2008

First time here? If you would like to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Topics: Links | No Comments »

The Top 5 Posts That Subtly Mock This Blog And A Zen System For The Artful Ridicule Of The Life Sutra

By Brick | May 1, 2008

jumpingThe honest and sincere ones invite ridicule,
While the false and scheming ones enjoy praise.

- Venerable Master Hsuan Hua

 

Instead of writing something original, I thought I would simply rehash some existing content on the Internet. I just read a hilarious post over at one of my all time favourite blogs The Growing Life and it occurred to me that I could use one of my beloved, top secret techniques (mysteriously named “Ctrl+C”) to quickly add content to my own blog!

So without further ado, the top posts containing hacks for writing  productivity articles that in reality subtly deride the Life Sutra (and really any “productivity” blog):

  1. 70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It
  2. Go to The Growing Life home page and scroll down until you see the post “70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It”
  3. Google “70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It”
  4. Try this article on Digg.
  5. If it’s worth saying once, it is worth saying again: 70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It

Another List

Why create my own list, when I can use someone else’s? Let’s see how the Life Sutra measures up against these Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks (Hint: for what follows, you really have to read Clay’s article first if you have not already done so - I know, I probably have not provided enough links):

1. Call Your Article a Guide or System: I am not sure I have actually called my articles “guides” or “systems”. I am such a novice! However, something like GMail From The Desktop could easily have been titled “The Simple Zen Hack Guide For Accessing Gmail From The Desktop”. I just wasn’t thinking.

2. Make a Numbered List: I love numbered lists! For examples, you can click on almost any of my posts. I sensed early on that the “list of tips” format was a winner.

3. Include a Number in the Title: Yes, I also figured that one out on my own. Maybe I’m not such a newbie to the productivity blog genre after all!

4. Make the List Long: No, I have not done this (because I am lazy) which means that my blog was not the sole inspiration for 70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It.

5. Write a Really Good Productivity Article: Of course, this is exactly what I am always doing.

6. Make Sure you “Hack-ify” Your Tips: Yeah, I throw the “hack” word around a lot, but not nearly enough. After I hack some coffee and hack a daily creative period, I might be better able to hack a list of article ideas that can be hackified. Hack, hack, hack, hack, hack…Hold on! I’m too sexy for hacks.

7. Don’t Use Transitions: I don’t even know what they are, so I definitely don’t use them.

8. Use as Many Buzzwords as Possible in the Title: Lesson learned - see number (1).

9. Write About a Buzz Topic like how to wake up early, and how you’ve implemented GTD: I’ve done both. 

10. Ignore the Principals of Psychology: Out of sheer laziness, my lists are rather short (see 4).

11. Don’t Cite Any Research: I never do.

12. It’s OK to Write about the Same Topic Over and Over Again: Like waking up early and GTD?

13-25. Its OK To Add Fluff To Your List Just To Take Up Space: I don’t do enough of this, but point taken.

26. Tell People to Write Down Their Goals: That’s a great idea for a post! thanks!!!

27. State the obvious: Fish are not people.

28. Write More Things on Your list: Yes I get it, you really have a thing for long lists.

“While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.”

- Lewis Carroll

Credits

Thanks Cat Louise for the jumping photo!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Topics: blogging | 2 Comments »

Spoon Bending

By Brick | April 30, 2008

I was reading the Attraction Mind Map blog today, mostly because of a link to there from another blog I read regularly. I really liked what the author had to say about abundance:

I realise now that the key attributes of what “being rich” really means include financial freedom, love, happiness, better relationships, improved health, etc. Money is not just an end, but a means to an end. It is only when I began to comprehend the meaning of abundance, and what I needed to do to clear my negative blocks, did I experience immense peace, happiness, joy and started to attract wonderful opportunities and outcomes.

Source: Attraction Mind Map.

So I started to read a bit further. The first post on the home page was titled Be One With The Spoon - And The Universe. The post was about attending a workshop and learning to bend spoons, “not by brute force but by the mental focus of thought.” Excellent - the sceptic in me awakens! As I was reading, I was thinking there was no way I could buy into this unless there was at least some video proof. As luck would have it (or was it me willing it to be?), there was indeed a video demonstrating the ability to bend spoons by sheer mental will:

 

Well, it only took me about 3 seconds to debunk this video by clicking on one of the “Related Videos”, conveniently located beside the video on  YouTube:

 

Does anyone really believe you can use your mind to bend spoons? I am open enough to admit that perhaps anything is possible, but I just replicated the initial spoon bending video myself and I wasn’t even meditating!

Popularity: 33% [?]

Topics: Telekinesis | No Comments »

How Fine Grained Should Your To-Do List Be?

By Brick | April 30, 2008

In Getting Things Done, Dave Allen suggests that we must always be working from lists of actionable tasks. The “actionable” part is a powerful distinction. As Allen points out, we often end up with big chunky activities like “Marketing Campaign” on our to-do lists. The problem is that this is not actionable as you cannot really do a marketing campaign. What you can actually do is perform all the fine grained tasks that go into a marketing campaign, for example, one can research advertising channels, write copy, hire a graphic designer, create an advertising budget, etc. Without a list of actionable tasks, we run the risk of becoming paralysed when we reach something as chunky and undefined as “Marketing Campaign” on our list of things to do.

So far so good: we understand the need to break down the big things into a set of smaller, actionable tasks. However, how small do we go? How granular should we break down a task for our to-do lists? My opinion is that we should split big activities into a subset of actionable tasks based on how long these actionable tasks will take to complete. Specifically, for the sake of a to-do list, an actionable task should be something that can be completed in a single session.

A session corresponds to the typical length of an uninterrupted period in a given context.  In the office, you might be able to count on one hour of time before you could be interrupted by meetings, phones, or colleagues.  It might be as long as the entire workday if you don’t usually get a lot of phone calls or interruptions. However, in the office a session could never be longer than one work day! For tasks in your house, a session might be more like 30 minutes. A session is the amount of uninterrupted time you can usually count on in a given context.

Why should we engineer it so that our actionable tasks can be completed in a single session in a given context?

  1. Because once you start it, you can finish it and therefore partially completed tasks do not litter your to-do list.
  2. Because you will always complete something you always have a sense of progress and accomplishment.
  3. If it will take longer than a single session, you probably have not thought through the activity in enough detail, and what is involved in completing the overall task. So it is a good check.
  4. It eliminates a desire to put off or procrastinate on the “big things” because, well everything and anything on your to-do list fits into your working time.

Joel Spolsky provides excellent advice on creating task lists for software development projects that is equally applicable to just about any to-do list:

Pick very fine grained tasks. This is the most important part to making your schedule work. Your tasks should be measured in hours, not days. (When I see a schedule measured in days, or even weeks, I know it’s not real). You might think that a schedule with fine grained tasks is merely more precise. Wrong! Very wrong! When you start with a schedule with rough tasks and then break it down into smaller tasks, you will find that you get a different result, not just a more precise one. It is a completely different number. Why does this happen?

When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take…These steps are easy to estimate…because you’ve [done them] before.

If you are sloppy, and pick big “chunky” tasks… then you haven’t really thought about what you are going to do. And when you haven’t thought about what you’re going to do, you just can’t know how long it will take…

Here’s another reason to pick fine grained tasks: …By being forced to plan ahead at this level, you eliminate a lot of the instability in a … project.

Source: Joel On Software. 

Here’s something actionable for your to-do list: subscribe to Life Sutra.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Topics: To-Do Lists | No Comments »

links for 2008-04-28

By brick | April 28, 2008

Popularity: 29% [?]

Topics: Links | No Comments »

Productivity Nightmares

By Brick | April 28, 2008

Anyone who has followed this blog from the beginning will know that my wife and I are big fans of cooking, and the Food Network on television. One show that I particularly enjoy is Kitchen Nightmares. The show features acclaimed chef Gordon Ramsay:

In each episode, Ramsay visits a failing restaurant and acts as a troubleshooter to help improve the establishment in just one week. Ramsay revisits the restaurant a few months later to see how business has fared in his absence.

Source: Wikipedia.

I would like to see someone produce a show called Productivity Nightmares. The synopsis for the show would be as follows: In each episode, productivity guru <insert famous guru’s name here> visits a failing business to make a dramatic impact in productivity and effectiveness in just one week. <insert famous guru’s name here> revisits the business a few months later to see how it has faired in his/her absence.

You could do shows about disorganized and non-productive homes as well as businesses. I think a guru that is brutally frank and not afraid of a little confrontation (like Gordon Ramsay) would work really well. Unlike the restaurant business, we would probably all be able to relate to the various shows in some way.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Topics: Personal Productivity | 2 Comments »

Number 1 Productivity Practice

By Brick | April 28, 2008

You may have noticed that I have been missing in action for a couple weeks. The culprit behind this absence? Multiple projects and an ongoing problem with perfectionism. With respect to the projects, I am working on two major activities at work, one of which is completely new, uncharted territory with the requisite, and inefficient, trial and error attributes. On top of that, I am in the middle of a significant home renovation. My wife was also on the road, leaving me to care for the kids! Busy, busy, busy! Of course, the curse of perfectionism has kept me from being out there (this post, being somewhat off the cuff, is my attempt to start addressing this issue).

In the past, this amount of stuff occurring concurrently at work and at home, coupled with a lack of family support would have drowned me in stress and anxiety. While I wasn’t organized enough to post, and fell behind on other tasks on a few occasions, I was pleased by the general lack of stress over the last couple of weeks. I attribute it to all the work I have done on personal productivity and lifestyle, including the great many blogs out there sharing lessons, tips and mentorship on productivity, simplification and life hacking.

It all got me to thinking, what is your number one productivity, or life hacking practice? After the challenges of the last couple weeks, I know what mine is: capture. The concept of capture is very well articulated in Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done. Basically it amounts to capturing everything, whether mail, to-do’s, ideas and even random thoughts into a real and tangible “inbox”. In this way, we can clear our heads, knowing that we won’t loose track of potentially important items that require our attention. In the midst of so much work, I was able to to stay sane knowing that everything and anything was captured in my system, and even though I had yet to process most of it, everything was there in my inbox - I didn’t have to mentally keep track of anything. While it is just the starting point for Getting Things Done (GTD), in my opinion, capture alone provides 80% of the benefits of the GTD methodology.

What is your number one productivity practice?

Popularity: 28% [?]

Topics: Personal Productivity | 1 Comment »

links for 2008-04-22

By brick | April 22, 2008

Popularity: 39% [?]

Topics: Links | No Comments »

Top 5 Life Sutra Posts

By Brick | April 22, 2008

I feel like a band releasing a greatest hits CD! I don’t know if I like the idea of “recycling” old material, but with analytics it is so easy to track one’s greatest posts on a blog so I thought I would share what has been the most popular material on the Life Sutra up until now:

  1. High Intensity Training Update
  2. 6 Tips For Using Your Calendar Effectively
  3. The Great Liberation Experiment
  4. GTD vs. The 4-Hour Workweek
  5. Printable High Intensity Training Log

It is interesting that two of the top five are workout related. While completely related to lifestyle design, in the back of my mind I guess I felt that my workout material was not really my pillar content. A great example of the numbers speaking for themselves. 6 Tips For Using Your Calendar Effectively making the top five was not as surprising because as a blog reader, especially of the life hacking genre, I gravitate towards the list of tips style posts. I’m always looking for the executive summary!

Popularity: 38% [?]

Topics: Blog Statistics | No Comments »

links for 2008-04-10

By brick | April 10, 2008

Popularity: 52% [?]

Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »

« Older Entries