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A good post about offices, workspaces and work environments and how they help or hinder getting into the creativity "zone".
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A rather cool use of Yahoo! pipes to filter and publish data from twitter.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Archive for March, 2008
links for 2008-03-31
The Great Liberation Experiment
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X
A key component to The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle is liberation from the office. The main idea is that once you are working remotely, you are not beholden to the clock but rather to your productivity. Once liberated from your cubicle, you can freely outsource and automate as much of your work as possible. Taken to the extreme, you provide all of the deliverables required of your job as you sip margaritas on the beach while some guy in India does all the work.
Up until now, I have been treading very safely on my 4-hour workweek quest. Too safely. On Friday I decided to do a simple, but meaningful experiment in liberation. I had arranged with my employer to work from home on Friday. However, I had a slightly different plan. Instead of working from home, I would work from another country! I wanted to see if my employer would know any better. I figured by limiting the experiment to a single day I could mitigate any real risks, for example, if it all went to hell I could call in and feign sickness or something like that.
Preparations For The Great Escape
Of course, in order to pull this off, I needed a plan!
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
- Napoleon Hill
My preparations:
- A Laptop with all the software I would need to access my email and office files. I have covered these before in my post on Tools For The Mobile Office.
- A cell phone with a decent voice plan to take and make calls from Canada. I set up my home phone to forward all calls to my cell phone.
- A Blackberry so I could respond to email if I was not in the vicinity of a wi-fi network.
- A hotel reservation in Montreal.
- A full tank of gas.
Escape
On Thursday evening after work, unbeknownst to my employer, I left Boston and headed north to Montreal, Canada under the cover of darkness. It's about a 5 hour drive and I got into Montreal just before midnight. It was all very clandestine. I used the hotel's complimentary Internet access to check email. I did a little bit of the work I would have started in the morning had I worked from home. Crucially, I staged all my email in my drafts folder. I waited until after breakfast the next day to send these out, making it look as if I was already knee deep in work from my desk at home. The stealth!
Next, I spent the day exploring the city. It's a nice place, and if you have never been, I highly recommend a visit - it's a like a little bit of Europe in North America. I made sure to stop every hour or so to put in 30 to 60 minutes of work at a coffee shop with wi-fi. If I had to respond to an email outside of these working periods, I had the Blackberry. Of course to make and take any calls I had my cell phone.
At the end of the day, I had a great evening in Montreal and headed back to Boston Saturday afternoon.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
In the end, it was a smashing success. For all my employer knew, I was at home the whole day. In hindsight, there was no real reason why I would not have been able to pull this off, which of course I did. I think the biggest outcome of this little foray was breaking down the psychological barriers that I had. It takes some time to get the idea that a specific location is often inconsequential to one's work. I am already planning my next great experiment in liberation, where I will try to work for a few days at a time away from the office. I'll up the ante by working from a different time zone or something like that.
Thanks
To Oliver Mallich for the photo of Montreal (I know, I should have taken my own while I was there! It's just that Flickr is so convenient...)
Popularity: 10% [?]
6 Tips For Using Your Calendar Effectively
I've been on a calendar,
but never on time.
-Marilyn Monroe
Here are some great tips that I have learned using my calendar for scheduling appointments and events. Since I have only ever used an electronic calendar (first Outlook, then Google Calendar and most recently the Lightning extension for Thunderbird), these tips cater somewhat to these types of applications, although there is no reason why they could not be equally applied to physical day timers and appointment books.
Tip 1: Use Only For Time Or Day Specific Items
Of all you need to do, some things need to be done at a specific time or on a specific date. For example, you may have a department meeting scheduled for Monday from 11 AM to 12 PM, or you may have made a commitment to follow up with a client on Tuesday. David Allen, in his book Getting Things Done, calls these types of things the hard landscape of your schedule. There are, however, a lot of things that might need to be done sometime, or even as soon as possible, but they are not truly time or day specific.
The problem is that there is a temptation to use your calendar as a to-do list and to include items in it that you would like to do on a certain date. In reality these items do not have to be done at a specific time or on a specific date. As Allen says, your calendar should show the hard edges of your day, and the things you would like to do can take place around these edges.
Tip 2: Use The Location Field
Often, we are tempted to only put in the title or name of the appointment or event, for example: "Call Mary at ACME". I have found it very helpful to always make sure I use the location field, which is usually the one just below the title or name in the new appointment/event form. The contents of the location field will differ based on the type of appointment/event:
- Phone Call: I will put in the number of the person I am supposed to call. I can't tell you how many times I have been busy right up to the time of the scheduled call, and I have to quickly fumble to open up my contact manager or email application to find the number.
- Physical Meeting: If the meeting is at a different geographical location, put in the full address. If it is in your own building but not in your office, put in the meeting room or physical place where the meeting is taking place. For offsite appointments, this also helps you cut and paste the location into Google Maps if you need directions.
- Virtual Meeting: If the meeting is a conference call or web meeting, put in the conference call number and participant code and/or the url.
- This practice can be a godsend if you find yourself out of the office and you are accessing the event details from a mobile device or from a reminder received via email or sms.
Tip 3: Use The Notes Field
Use the Notes or description field to put in the main topic to be discussed and an agenda. It is a best practice for pretty much everything to have an agenda. It may also be useful to put in some relevant background material so you have access to the main facts at your fingertips exactly when you need it. Just like the use of the location field, this practice can be crucial if you find yourself out of the office and you are accessing the event details from a mobile device or from a reminder received via email or sms.
Tip 4: Use The Invitation Feature
If you are initiating the meeting, and using an electronic calendar, use the calendar's invitation features if they exist to send out invitations. You probably need to send out a confirmation email anyway, and by doing this, you pretty much have the best chance of the appointment getting on the calendar of those you have invited (lest they don't show up and you are looking for them at the appointed time).
Tip 5: Set A Reminder
It would be great if we all reviewed our calendars at the beginning of each and every day, but the reality is that it is probably best if we are able to set it and forget it, when it comes to adding appointments to our calendars. To make sure we keep our appointment once it is set, make sure you send an automated reminder of the appointment at a set time before the scheduled event. Most calendar applications will interrupt you with a popup dialog, or can email or sms you before the appointment (these later methods being important if you are away from your computer).
Tip 6: Block Your Golden Time
Yes I know I said to only put the hard landscape of your schedule into the calendar. But why not make your most productive, heads down, working period a time specific event? Protecting your golden time like this ensures you will schedule around it and that it will occur everyday without any scheduled interruptions.
I would love to know what tips others have when it comes to using a calendar. If you have any, it would be great if you could share them in the comments!
Thanks
- To Pieter Ouwerkerk: for the great photo of the iPhone.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
I bring you the second instalment of the Life Sutra Motivational Speech Series. Actually it is the first official instalment, however I would like to consider Randy Pausch's Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams speech in my The Other Lecture post to be the unofficial first instalment. Today's motivational speech was given by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Stanford Commencement ceremonies. Truly inspiring:
Popularity: 11% [?]
GTD vs. The 4-Hour Workweek
Clay Collins has a new post titled Productivity Guru SMACKDOWN: Tim Ferriss v. Dave Allen at his excellent blog The Growing Life. It immediately appealed to me having read both Getting Things Done (GTD) and The 4-Hour Workweek. Before I get into this, I have to mention that Clay is a great writer! This is one of the most entertaining posts I have read lately. It is hard to believe that his blog is only a couple of months old given the quality of the writing!
Here is my take: I am biased towards Tim Ferriss myself, but mostly because his material seems a little more fundamental. He questions assumptions about work before he talks about doing work. Dave Allen is mostly about the doing part. Personally, I agree with Ferriss when he says:
[T]he person who…develops an elaborate system of folder rules … is efficient on some perverse level. … Doing something well does not make it important … What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
Source: Timothy Ferriss.
However, surely once you discover what you really want to be doing, what is truly most important, you can still be more effective at that if you are better organized! If you put the thinking of Ferriss ahead of Allen, I think The 4-Hour Workweek and Getting Things Done actually complement each other.
Productivity
Fair enough you might say, but both Ferriss and Allen both speak about how to do work. Perhaps there is some competing, incompatible strategies here that require a SMACKDOWN! Let's review productivity from the vantage point of a really smart guy:
Productivity is driven by two variables: the amount of work performed and the time it takes to perform that work. Productivity can be increased by either increasing the amount of work performed in a set amount of time, or by performing the same amount of work in a shorter period of time.
I think that Allen is really addressing the work variable in the productivity equation. Allen is starting from a tacit assumption that work has to be done or managed by you and so he provides a system for performing more work in a set amount of time. Ferriss is really working on the time variable (the title of his book is a dead give away). By automating and outsourcing massive amounts of work, you can get the same amount of work done in a fraction of the time.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Why can't we employ both strategies? Why are the methods and philosophies of Ferriss and Allen exclusive of one another? Why not attack the productivity equation on both sides of the division sign? Yes, we need to ensure that we don't use our productivity gains to do work for work's sake, but I don't think Allen is advocating this at all. Besides, I find it hard to believe that massive amounts of automation and outsourcing do not require a decent amount of organization. What would Stephen Covey say? What do you say?
Popularity: 12% [?]
Printable High Intensity Training Log
A few days ago, I described a high intensity workout that forms part of my own Geek to Freak program. This program is based loosely on Timothy Ferriss' famous blog post From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks. Part of this program involves recording every workout in detail, including the date, the time of day, your weight, your mood, the order of exercises, reps, and weight/resistance.
As I mentioned earlier, a high intensity workout is characterized by a one-set-to-failure method. What this means is you only do a single set of each exercise and you keep doing reps until you cannot lift/move the weights any longer. In my case, each workout session consists of eleven different exercises covering the whole body. I perform a single set of each exercise using a 5/5 cadence (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down) which eliminates momentum and ensures a constant load. I choose the weight so that I reach exhaustion somewhere between 8 to 12 reps. If I can do 12 reps it is an indication to raise the weight next time. If I cannot do 8 reps it is an indication that the resistance is set too high. I prefer machines over free weights for this program because I feel machines have a better chance of ensuring both a full range of motion and discipline in each movement. I space my workouts by at least 48 hours.
I created this workout log to track of my progress. Here is how it works:
First, you enter the date and start time of the workout. I track my weight, but you may also like to track other vitals such as waist size, arm diameter, chest size, etc. I also track my mood. I know this is subjective, but I feel it is a major factor in the performance of exercise.
Next, you perform a single set of each exercise in sequence (so as to not alter the order of the exercises). For each exercise you fill in the weight or resistance used and the number of reps you performed. For example, if you lifted 100 lbs. for 10 reps, you would write in "100 X 10" in the spaces provided.
At the end of the workout, you capture the finish time, at which point you can calculate the duration of the workout. You can take this log home and enter the results into a spreadsheet, database or simply place it in a simple file folder. This can be used for tracking your progress over time.
In the hope of conserving a little paper, I formatted things in such a way as to allow two log forms to be printed on one sheet of 8 1/2 X 11 paper. You can simply cut the page down the middle and you have a log form for two workouts! Hopefully it helps you keep track of your own high intensity training which hopefully pays off in four weeks. So far, I have found this very useful.
Give it a try and let me know what happens!
Popularity: 31% [?]
links for 2008-03-18
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A good article on the difference in calories and carbohydate content between regular and light beer. The authors suggest that the loss of taste and body is not worth the minimal "gain" achieved when switching to light beer in terms of calorie and carbohyd
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I admit I am a documentary junkie. This points to a pretty good set of online sources for documentaries. So much for an information diet!
Popularity: 10% [?]
High Intensity Workout
One claim made by Timothy Ferriss in his blog post From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks seems rather incredible. Given my new daily schedule, I decided a week ago that I would devote my scheduled workout time to testing the ideas in Tim's post. After all, who does not want to become an intimidating hulk while only spending 4 hours a month in the gym (fortunately I am already intoxicatingly attractive!)? In Tim's own words:
The end result? I gained 34 lbs. of muscle, while losing 3 lbs. of fat, in 28 days...all of this was done with two 30-minute workouts per week, for a total of 4 HOURS of gym time.
Source: Timothy Ferriss' Blog.
Is this another case of questioning assumptions leading to revolutionary results, or a case of unsubstantiated infomercial-esque claims?
The Theory
As far as I can tell, the program Ferriss describes in his post is a cross between high intensity training and the Aitken's diet. The ideas are not really new at all, but both are somewhat controversial in their respective domains.
The idea behind high intensity workouts is that exercises should be, well, intense! - meaning that one uses heavier weights, for a limited number of repetitions until exhaustion. The corollary being that workouts are brief and infrequent (the typical regimen is to do one set of each exercise three days a week). Supposedly this kind of exercise will cause large increases in muscle size. The controversy surrounds the fact that this type of workout is facilitated by Nautilus style equipment, equipment which came to market at the same time as this style of training was first advocated. One could wonder whether these claims were made for the express purposes of selling such equipment.
Aitken's diet is a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. A quick and dirty version of this diet might be described as simply eating what you eat today, but cut out the bread, potatoes, rice, fruit, desserts and sugar. If you are hungry, eat whatever you want as long as it is not part of the aforementioned list. This diet is controversial because it is more or less mute on the topic of eating fat - the reduction of which is usually the pillar of standard diets and nutritional programs. Having tried a low carbohydrate diet in the past, I believe it can be effective. One would think it is easy to do as there does not have to necessarily be a reduction in food quantity - as long as the carbs are cut out. However, after a month of low carb'ing it, you would be surprised how enticing a simple bowl of steamed rice or a bun appears.
I want to state emphatically that I am not an expert on high intensity training, or the Aitken's diet. Furthermore, I am not an athlete, personal trainer or a doctor (unless I am trying to meet women in a bar). The above is just my simple understanding, I encourage you to investigate everything further, and I am hardly advocating that either works or is even healthy (I don't know!).
My Geek to Freak Program
Here is how I have decided to implement my own kinder, gentler "Geek to Freak" program:
- I am following the high intensity training one-set-to-failure method (see the Colorado Experiment). Unlike Ferriss, I am going with the more regular frequency of three workouts per week with 48 hours rest between sessions, which amounts to me doing the training on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The 4 hour per month claim simply sounds too incredulous.
- I am performing every repetition with a 5/5 cadence (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down). As Ferriss points out, this eliminates momentum and ensures a constant load.
- I am doing 11 exercises per training session, working the entire body each workout. I am favouring machines over free weights to ensure discipline and full extension in each movement. My exercises include: Leg presses, extensions and curls, shoulder press, seated rows, chest press, biceps curl, triceps extension, chin-ups, cable cross-overs and calf raises.
- On the diet side, I am avoiding bread, potatoes, rice, fruit, desserts and sugar. I am not going out of my way to eat enormous quantities of protein however by cutting out carbohydrates I am no doubt eating more protein. One thing I need is sugar in my coffee. I am only putting in half a teaspoon per cup (I would put in a teaspoon per cup before).
- I think I will keep the number of exercise sessions per week static even if I increase in strength, size and good looks, as it just works well with my daily schedule. I will do cardio or play hockey or another sport on Tuesday and Thursdays.
- I am recording every workout in detail, including the date, the time of day, my weight, my mood, the order of exercises, reps, and weight.
I'll keep you posted and get some stats up regarding this experiment as soon as possible!
Popularity: 37% [?]
links for 2008-03-13
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Free excerpt from the new, updated Lifehacker book: Chapter 1, Control Your Email.
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Interesting post on how the web is migrating towards services over sites. We are seeing this play out today as more and more web brands offer API's.
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This is the table of contents for the second edition of the Lifehacker book. What's nice is that they provide links to related posts on their website. A nice organized list of email, organization, getting things done and computer tips all in one place.
Popularity: 9% [?]
The 4-Hour Workweek Hype Cycle
Gartner uses the Hype Cycle to describe how the hype regarding a new technology is often followed by a period of disappointment and subsequently by a period of more modest practical benefits:
Source: Jeremy Kemp / Wikipedia.
If we also consider management fads and personal productivity movements as technologies, I think one would find that the hype cycle equally applies to these as well. For example, there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about GTD entering the "trough of disillusionment". Where in the hype cycle is The 4-Hour Workweek?
Personally, I think it is still in the "peak of inflated expectations" phase. The book remains wildly popular. My prediction is that people, specifically salaried employees, are going to have problems liberating themselves from the office environment. If they can even achieve mobility in the first place, the next challenge will be automating sizeable amounts of work via personal outsourcing (the single biggest issue I hear from 4-hour workweek readers is "what can I outsource?" often accompanied by explanations built around client confidentiality, etc.). I have already commented in my post The 4-Hour Workweek: Easier Said Than Done on some of the reasons to be skeptical. So, like almost all personal effectiveness movements, I am certain The 4-Hour Workweek will go through the inevitable trough of disillusionment. I am also equally sure it will rebound, especially since some have already been successful in applying the principles - so there is something real here.
Where do you think The 4-Hour Workweek is in its hype cycle? Do you even think the hype cycle applies?
Popularity: 18% [?]
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