Our Greatest Fear

By Brick | May 1, 2009

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"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

- Marianne Williamson

Popularity: 26% [?]

Topics: Inspiration | No Comments »

High Intensity Training Update

By Brick | May 1, 2009

It’s been a while since I updated everyone on my High Intensity Training (HIT) program. Well, I fell off the program for some time over the winter. I was playing a lot of hockey. I might even be able to come up with more excuses given more time to think. When I did go to the gym, I fell back into the old habit of split training. To all the HIT advocates out there, I am ashamed. I guess I just did not become the hulk I assumed would be the natural outcome of the program and became a little unmotivated.

However, that leads to one very important finding from my experiment with HIT: while I did not become Arnold, I certainly did not lose any size or muscle. What this means to me is that it is probably not necessary to spend a lot of time in the gym to have an effective weight training program. In fact, I would take this one step further: most people doing weight training probably over train, and get little benefit from so much time spent lifting. I look back at the hours I used to spend at the gym and I think it probably just helped me get injured (torn rotator and hamstring to name just a couple injuries I’ve sustained at the gym).

Back For The Attack

Dr. Mike provided a nice comment here a week ago, recommending The New High Intensity Training: The Best Muscle-Building System You’ve Never Tried by Ell Darden. I went out and bought it, and if you are at all interested in HIT, you might do the same. I’ve read a few chapters and it is really good. One part of the book that struck me was a description of Arthur Jones supervising a set of arm curls. It was an epiphany. One aspect of a set in HIT is that you choose a resistance level such that you lift to failure within a limited number of repetitions. I realized that when I was doing the HIT program I developed, I was not really lifting to failure, at least not the way it was dramatically described in Ell’s book!

So back to the gym this week to try again in earnest. Here’s what I did: lifted to where I would stop before and then squeezed out a couple more reps, sacrificing a little form if necessary. I then quickly dropped the resistance by 25% or so and squeezed out two or three more reps. Let me tell you, I was be in agony after each set! I also understood for the first time why the HIT people suggest only two or three training sessions per week. I could still feel the effects of my Wednesday workout in my legs and biceps as I started my Friday workout!

So I’m back!

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What Are You Reading?

By Brick | February 27, 2009

I have no central theme or message here besides me being a big fan of reading. One of my favorite types of posts by others is when they share a book review, or what they are currently reading. Paul Kedrosky does this almost daily. At one point I virtually outsourced my book purchasing decisions to Garr Reynolds who shares some really great reading ideas at Presentation Zen and his personal blog (you will see one of his recommendations below). Here is my current list:

Story by Robert McKee: Storytelling is perhaps the premier instructional technique. In this book, McKee discusses the "substance, structure, style, and principles of screenwriting". Imagine the Gettysburg Address as a powerpoint instead of the story delivered by Lincoln and you start to understand the importance of being able to tell a good story.

Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell et al.: The subtitle says it all - "100 ways to enhance usability, influence perception, increase appeal, make better design decisions and teach through design". Packed full of tips, each presented in a about two pages!

Toothpicks & Logos by John Heskett: "Design in everyday life". Toothpicks as developed and used by Europeans and the Japanese are different. Read this book and you’ll know why.

Buddhism by Smith and Novak: A fantastic introduction.

CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt: For the techno in me. Cascading style sheets are perhaps the most blatant place where the technology of the web and design meet. Anyone creating web sites and applications should learn CSS.

As Will Smith says, whatever problem you may have, whatever you need to know, someone has written about it (he also advocates running!):

So what are you reading these days?

Here’s a reading tip: put the Life Sutra on your reading list. Subscribe today!

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Topics: Reading | No Comments »

Remembering The Milk

By Brick | February 6, 2009

All productivity geeks, including the Getting Things Done ("GTD") priestly class, seem to have a "system". A system is a set of tools and procedures for collecting, processing and dealing with all the tasks and other material that crosses one’s (perhaps metaphorical) desk.  My "system" had relied on Sandy. As fans of that application are painfully aware, Sandy died a horrible death sometime in December. While dealing with grief issues, the logical part of my brain needed to focus on finding a tool to deal with this gap in my beloved "system". I had considered using Remember The Milk ("RTM"). Well, here is my update.

The basis of RTM is the concept of tasks. Like Sandy, tasks can be tagged, have a due date, include a url and a location. While Sandy used special tags like "@todo", RTM allows you to organize tasks into lists. So being the Getting Things Done wannabe I am, I created the following lists:

These are fairly self explanatory. Since RTM integrates with Google Calendars, I also have the following list where I add tasks with due dates that are part of the hard landscape of my schedule:

Lastly, I created lists for all my major projects. The one area where RTM really shines is their Smart Lists. Basically, any search you perform on all of your items can be saved as a smart list. It is like the concept of a "view" in a database - as tasks are added, modified and deleted, the smart lists are automatically updated to include the latest list of tasks that meet the criteria defined for them. This is great for readily identifying tasks in a given context. For example, I may have any number of items tagged as "errand". These items may exist in my Action Item, Someday, Calendar, or one of my project lists. A smart list based on all items tagged "errand" immediately provides me with a list of items relevant to that specific context! If I am about to get in the car to do some shopping, I can click on my "errand" smart list and see if I can knock off any tasks while I am in that context (you can also access RTM from your Blackberry and iPhone). So for me, context, which might include things like:

are all handled via tagging and smart lists.

Improvements

The most glaring weakness with RTM, and this as a consequence of my having been using Sandy, is the ability to send RTM a list of tasks in a single email. When I am working through my email inbox (already well integrated), I like to fire off tasks to RTM. RTM allows you to add one task per email if you update RTM that way. That’s a severe limitation I would like addressed. I suppose I should spring for the pro account and submit this request. Money talks!

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Topics: remember the milk | 3 Comments »

The Critical Ingredient For Success: Failure

By Brick | January 26, 2009

I think this would qualify as the fourth installment in my Life Sutra Motivational video series (technically, the preceding installments were all speeches, however this one is not). Just a reminder that there is no success without failure, that failure is simply the discovery of one method that didn’t work, and therefore another step towards success, something to learn from, but hardly something to dwell upon:

 

Story Behind the Video

I should say my story behind the video: I follow Guy Kawasaki on twitter (feel free to follow me). He posts (or should I say "tweets" - I can’t stand the term) every 3 minutes as far as I can tell. I am quite sure he’s outsourced his twitter to virtual assistants. Last night he sent out a link to the above video. I thought it was cool, but I was too tired to write about it. This morning, I couldn’t find his "tweet", but I recalled him labeling the video "F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C", so I searched twitter for "F-A-N". And now we can see how these things go viral.

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Topics: Motivational Speeches | No Comments »

links for 2008-12-29

By brick | December 29, 2008

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Topics: Links | No Comments »

Never Check Email

By Brick | December 29, 2008

I know, that’s just silly. How about this instead: don’t check email in the morning? I watched a great video featuring Julie Morgenstern, the author of, coincidentally enough, Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work:

 

This idea of not checking email in the morning plays off of the idea of working on one’s Most Important Task before all else, and/or doing the most difficult challenging thing first (as in to Eat That Frog). One thing I liked in the interview was Julie discussing the traits of poor workers:

I have not read Julie’s book yet, but it is definitely on my list of books to check out.

Popularity: 71% [?]

Topics: Email | 1 Comment »

Email Disclaimers

By Brick | December 8, 2008

What I would like to see is a standard set for appending legal disclaimers to emails. In this way email client software could hide all this silly text. The email software could, for example, add a link with something like "This email contains disclaimers. Click here to read". Or even simpler, could we just not put a simple link to the disclaimer instead of adding it to each and every email? I heard that the ability to "hyperlink" has become available on the web.

I just read a thread of email where the content was over 80% of the form:

This e-mail (and attachment(s)) is confidential, proprietary, may be  subject to copyright and legal privilege and no related rights are waived. If you are not the intended recipient or its agent, any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail or any of its content is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. All messages may be monitored as permitted by applicable law and regulations and our policies to protect our business. E-mails are not secure and you are deemed to have accepted any risk if you communicate with us by e-mail. If received in error, please notify us immediately and delete the e-mail (and any attachments) from any computer or any storage medium without printing a copy.

This is not efficient. When a lot of people are replying to these messages, it becomes too easy to miss the actual content when navigating around this "fine print". And that’s the problem, in plain text email, there is no real substitute for actual fine print. By the way, while we are at it we could do the same for the email "signatures". 

Popularity: 62% [?]

Topics: Email | 1 Comment »

So Long Sandy, Thanks For The Memories

By Brick | November 25, 2008

I just got the news yesterday that Rael Dornfest is closing down iwantsandy. I have written glowingly about Sandy in the past. It seems that Rael has accepted a position with Twitter, and that’s truly great. I am happy for him. The problem for me (because hey, why shouldn’t this be about me) is that I have come to rely on Sandy! I was setting up reminders into 2010 using that system and now it appears I will lose all that. I wonder why Twitter, which apparently bought the intellectual property for iwantsandy, would not just keep the current system running while they figure out what they want to do with this technology?

Plan B

I have opened an account up over at Remember The Milk (RTM). My plan is for this service to replace my beloved Sandy. I had tailored Sandy around the system described in Getting Things Done (GTD), so I have had to figure out how to do the same in RTM. Here are a few links that describe using RTM for GTD and have helped to get me started:

Life goes on…

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Topics: GTD | 1 Comment »

AwayFind

By Brick | November 20, 2008

As some of you may know by now, Jared over at Technotheory has released his AwayFind service. Inspired by Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek, this service allows urgent messages to get through to you without you having to constantly monitor your email. I can see this as a must-have service for sales professionals.

There is a free plan, and if you sign up before tomorrow you also get a free ebook "Guide to NOT Checking Email" as an added bonus! There also appears to be big savings on the paid plans if you sign up for those by tomorrow.

This is a great service: wonderfully simple in concept, immensely useful in practice. Be sure to check it out.

Popularity: 65% [?]

Topics: AwayFind | No Comments »

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