Category — Productivity

This post is part of the New Year’s Resolutions series running through January.

If we’re going to make 2009 the best year ever, we need to make sure that everything gets done that needs to get done. That may include any of your other goals, whether it’s losing weight, saving money, paying down debt, making time for family, or any of the other numerous things that are important to you.

Organizing your time to emphasize the important is the foundation of achieving your goals, and this series of productivity posts is aimed at giving you some ideas for getting things in order.

Put First Things First

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey argues that there are four quadrants in our lives. Activities can be broken down into urgent and non-urgent, as well as important and unimportant. For us to create a fulfilling life for the long term, we need to put an emphasis on the non-urgent, but important activities.

The breakdown of the four quadrants are below:

Quadrant I emphasizes the urgent deadline orientated activities that are both important and urgent. Quadrant II are the prevention and relationship building activities that are important, but usually not urgent. Quadrant III is where to group the annoying office tasks like going to routine meetings or answering general phone calls. And last is the Quadrant IV activities that include the busy work, television watching, or other time wasting activities.

Quadrant II

It’s important to ask yourself what activities, if done on a regular basis, would bring a positive change in your life? Exercising more can make you feel better about yourself as well as improving your appearance and physical well being.   Saving and investing your money provides you with a peace of mind, and can take you from someone who works for money to someone who has their money work for them. Spending time with family and friends creates an intangible feeling that only interpersonal connections can provide.

These are the quadrant II activities, and quadrant II is where success in life comes from.

The funny thing about quadrant II activities is that they are the easiest to neglect. These are activities like exercising, spending time with family, cooking at home and eating well, keeping your home clean and organized, or saving money and investing. Doing any of these once is usually not enough for you to see a positive difference, and in some cases, like exercising, the first time you do it is painful.

But doing any (or all) of these over time can transform our lives for the positive. I doubt many people reach the end of their lives wishing they had exercised less, saved less, or spent less time with their families. I also doubt many of them wish they had watched more television or spent more time in the office.

Thinking 80/20

The Pareto principle, covered in depth in the book The 80/20 Principle, tells us that a minimum amount of effort is needed to achieve a majority of the results. After accounting for sleep and work, that only leaves about 8 hours a day for personal time, and even more of this time is taken up for eating, commuting, and hygiene. So it’s important to use that time the best way that you can. 20% of 8 hours is about 1.6 hours a day, or about 96 minutes of solid time needed to make positive changes in your life.

The best thing about many of the changes you can make this year like saving money, is that it can be automated. Spending a few minutes to set up automatic deductions and bill pay can save you an enormous amount of time later on. That time can then be used for exercising, reading, or any other activities you think could be valuable.

Thinking 80/20 means digging into your quadrant IV time and spending it on quadrant II activities. The best part is that is the small amount of time you spend a day in quadrant II can have an enormous impact on your life if you stick with it. 20% of your time spent on those life building activities will affect 80% of your life. Not a bad trade off, right?

For more ideas on how you can use that time, check out my previous post on 120 Minutes to Success.

Get Started

So for this first week of January, start thinking about not only what you would like to work on in 2009, but also why. It’s not enough to tell yourself that you are going to make time to workout or make time with your family. You need to realize why it needs to be a priority in your life if you’re going to take the time out of your day to do it.

Also think about where you can find 1-2 hours a day to exercise, read, and spend time with loved ones. This will be the foundation for the rest of the year, and if you do it right, the rest of your life.

Book author and speaker Seth Godin has a great article up on his blog asking if Effort is a myth. So many of us look at people who are successful and think they got there through luck or by having special talent. It is rare that we think about the effort that many people put in to get to the top. We are a society of the quick fix. We would rather believe that we can throw money at a problem to fix it instead of putting in the time and effort that is needed to solve the problem.

Think about it. Instead of taking time every day to get out an exercise we spend money on weight loss gimmicks and diets that don’t work. Instead of spending less than we earn and saving money for the future we hope that someone will come along and help us like the lottery or the government. And on a grand scale many believe that the solution for energy independence is spending money to drill in Alaska, rather than taking a few minutes a month to stop by a gas station to put air in our tires.

Seth Godin sums it up in a simple statement:

While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

To help make your own success he recommends the following:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:
-Exercise for thirty minutes.
-Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
-Send three thank you notes.
-Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
-Volunteer.
-Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
-Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

Imagine if you started following these steps regularly.

First, where could you get 120 minutes from? For most folks giving up television is the obvious choice, and an easy way to get some time back in your day. Some people take public transportation and either sleep on the train or space out and do nothing. Why not bring a work related book or paper along and do some reading on the way? I plan on doing this when I start riding BART, which should get me 30-40 minutes of reading time.

Now what could you do with that extra time each day?

First, taking some time to exercise is a great idea. Studies have shown that regular exercise improves brain functioning as well as improving health and appearance. So get out there!

I also like the idea of reading books, magazines, and blogs that are relevant to what you do, or are relevant to what you would like to do. At my last performance review my boss praised me for having strong industry knowledge versus my peers, as well as being an outside of the box thinker. I think my knowledge comes from the time I take to read and learn new things on a regular basis.

I really do think this comes down to how much you enjoy your job and your industry. If you enjoy computers and work in IT, keeping up with the latest technology will be fun to you and is something that will just happen. If you can’t stand your job it’s likely you won’t want to think about it after you leave. If this is the case I highly recommend you reconsider your career, and spend your time preparing for a new career.

Speaking of preparing for a new career, learning techniques such as MS Excel macros (or advanced Excel in general), keyboard shortcuts, or any other productivity shortcuts can benefit you no matter what job you take (assuming you’re on office worker I guess). And if you hate your career why not start reading up on something that does interest you, and figure out how you can transition into another career?

The last two steps seem like they are a little different in direction at first glance, but they are absolutely essential for success.

If you’re in debt it’s tough to concentrate on work and being productive if you’re worried about how you’re going to pay your bills. Second, if you’re saving everything for a year, you will have a great base to start compounding on for the rest of your life.

Last, it’s always important to spend time with your friends and family. Think of all the movies you’ve seen that had an overworked executive who didn’t spend enough time with his or her kids. You don’t want to be that person do you?

For everyone reading this, I challenge you to look at your time and take advantage of it. For most people, myself included, our careers are our number one asset. It makes sense to work towards a higher salary. Follow these for a year, and see if you don’t end up somewhere better.

Like I said, I think this is a great article, and well worth the read. A big thank you to The Simple Dollar for pointing me to this great article.

Has anyone else upgraded to iTunes 8 and tried out the new Genius feature? At first I thought it was a little gimmicky, but I have been loving it the past few days for creating on-the-fly playlists, both for general listening and for workout playlists, which are usually a huge pain to create.

What is it? After selecting a song to play, you simply click the genius button and iTunes will create a new playlist with the chosen song and more songs from your library that iTunes believes will complement the current song. After creating the playlist you can select the number of songs in the playlist, refresh the selections, and even store the playlist for listening later. The last feature is awesome for creating workout playlists from one uptempo song.

If you use iTunes and have a even a moderate size library I highly recommend trying out genius. It’s a huge time saver for creating new playlists, and a great way to rediscover songs in your library.

Something that has intrigued me for a long time has been the idea of speed reading. It is alluring to think I could knock out a 300 page book in a few hours or be able to quickly cover massive amounts of news every day. I have read a few articles on the subject here and there, but have never really felt like speed reading was meant for comprehension. But working on this blog has made me realize that being able to process more information quicker would be advantageous, so I am looking for solutions to learn, and to see if speed reading really works.

I found a link to a free online pdf file written by Paul Edwards on non-fiction reading strategies on the Personal MBA website. The article suggests that reading a 300 page book in six to eight hours is doable by following the techniques outlined. I am going to attempt to use these techniques and see how they work. I’ll follow up in a few weeks and let everyone know how it goes.

There has been a post in my head for a while about working for something better, whether it’s a better paying career or a more relaxed lifestyle. That post is still coming, and I was reminded of it by Merlin Mann’s post today on 43 folders. I am a pro web surfer (not really, pro would imply I get paid to waste hours on the internet). So I like the idea of setting my homepage to a reminder that there’s probably something better I could be doing with my time. Maybe now I will finally work on that idea.

This week I had a project due for my class that I am taking, and as always I ended up doing most of the work last minute. This put a serious damper on the quality of work, so now I’m hoping for leniency versus being confident in a high grade.

While driving to class I started to think about the consequences of procrastinating on bigger things. First up is the biggie - retirement. Are you doing everything you can to ensure you can retire when you want and with enough income to support yourself? What happens if you don’t save enough? Will you just throw up your hands and hope for leniency? Do you really want to be dependent on someone else to take care of you in the future? I know I don’t.

Of course there’s always things that stand in the way of saving. Maybe you have too much debt to pay. Or you have kids or car problems or whatever. There will always be problems. The question is are you taking care of them today or putting them off for later?

What about your health? Do you get annual physicals and dental exams to make sure there’s nothing going on that could be a big problem later? I know I am guilty of not getting my checkups done as often as I need to.

How about your cars? Do you take them in to get serviced at the manufacture’s recommended milage? Do you even know how often you should be going in and what services to get done? Taking your car in every 5000 miles to get the oil changed is a lot cheaper than buying a new engine because you were too cheap to get the oil changed and the engine froze up.

I am not trying to harp, these were really questions I asked myself. I encourage you to do the same. What are you putting off for tomorrow that you should be doing today? Every project begins with a first step. I encourage you to think of the next action that needs to be done and do it as soon as possible. You will feel better you did.

Have you seen this icon and wondered what it was about?

This is the icon representing Really Simple Syndication (an RSS feed), which is basically an easy way to subscribe to to a website’s content. Most blogs, and many professional news sites such as the New York Times, provide this as a means to easily keep track of any news that has recently been posted. Using a feed reader, such as Google Reader, will allow you to keep track of multiple feeds at a time. So instead of visiting multiple websites a day to see if any new content has been created, you can simply open your feed reader which will fetch new articles for you, drastically reducing the amount of time required to find new useful information, and increasing the amount of time for you to actually read that content. And best of all it’s free!

To get started with RSS you will need a feed reader. My current favorite is Google Reader, which I have been using for about a month. The most convenient feature for me is the ability to log in to my Google account and see what is new. Before that I used Firefox’s live bookmark feature, which creates a bookmark of the feed. The biggest drawback to this system is the difficulty in tracking a large number of feeds.

Another option for subscribing to RSS feeds is to use a desktop-based feed reader. Mac users can check out Vienna or NetNewsWire. Windows users can look into FeedDemon or RSS Owl. The biggest drawback to a desktop based system is the inability to view your feeds when you are away from your home computer.

If you would like to try it out (and support my site by subscribing), go to the top right corner of this website and click on the RSS icon where is says “subscribe in reader.” The feed burner page should open up, asking you what program you would like to use to subscribe. You will see Google as an option, as well as a few other options. If you are using a desktop based solution you should be able to select it in the scroll down window.

A few more links for reading:

If you’re trying to weigh the pros and cons of a desktop vs web-based reader, Lifehacker has a great write-up comparing the two.

If you decide to go with Google Reader, Lifehacker also has a few tips to help you become more efficient. And if that’s not enough, there is a whole slew of posts with the Google Reader tag. And in case you didn’t notice, I like reading Lifehacker’s articles quite a bit.