I fell off the path and am getting back on...

I recently wrote about Beeminder here, and talked about how much I liked it to help keep me on track.  That is all still true. 

Unfortunately, technology can't always overcome human flaws.  You see, in spite of Beeminder, I missed my commitment to post here at least 4 times per month and wandered off my yellow brick road.

What happened?  

I could make any number of excuses - I got busy, I didn't have a good idea for a post, I was tired, I was on vacation, etc. (all of which are true, but irrelevant).

Basically, I decided to procrastinate when I could've taken a few minutes do write something, or I couldn't planned ahead and written posts early & scheduled them, etc.  In other words, I didn't take proper responsibility for my commitment and didn't hold myself accountable.  It happens.

What am I going to do about it?  

I have paid my pledge of $5 to Beeminder, reset my graph, and am back on the horse trying to meet my commitment of at least 4 posts per month through the end of the year.  And this time, it will cost me $10 if I miss my commitment again.

You know, this made me realize another benefit of Beeminder:  consequences are making me get back to my commitment sooner.  Prior to Beeminder, I could've been a slacker for any length of time and nobody would have known - there is some benefit in a public scoreboard.  If you want to watch my progress, check out my current graph to see how I'm doing.

Begin with the end in mind

I have been traveling a lot the past couple of weeks and was catching up on my reading today, when I learned that Stephen R. Covey died on July 17, 2012.  Apparently, he had a bicycle accident back in April and died of complications from the accident.  I am sad to see him go.

Back in the late 80's, I started to get into time management in an effort to be more productive.  Like many people at the time, I began with a Franklin Planner and even took a course on how to use it.  The Franklin method made a big impact on me and helped me begin my decades-long relationship with productivity methods.  In the 90's, I discovered Covey's book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which helped me re-frame why I did things and helped me more consciously work on more impactful activities.  This matrix is one I still think about as I plan what I want to work on:

From this book, I began to embrace the "Sharpen the Saw" concept and tried to spend more time in Quadrant 2, Important but Not Urgent.  I also learned the value of outcome-oriented thinking with his principle to "Begin With the End In Mind," and tried to create mutually beneficial results with his admonition to "Seek First To Understand."  Very powerful and motivating stuff.

Dr. Covey's work has influenced me quite a bit - in fact, my first post on this blog was a review of his book, "The 8th Habit."

I have since turned to other methods for the "how" part of productivity (such as David Allen's Getting Things Done, and my current favorite system, Michael Linenberger's Master Your Workday Now), but Stephen Covey's work is still my anchor for the "why" part of productivity.

Rest in peace, Dr. Covey - and congratulations on a fine legacy.

5 Ways Taking Classes Helps Improve My Skills

This week I was reminded of a great way to improve your skills:  hands on practice in a well-organized workshop or training program.  In my case, I took some "boot camp" courses in computer hacking at a security conference to brush up on my skills and learn about new tools.  I felt like I was getting rusty and wanted a refresher.  Boy, was it fun!  [Note: I don't hack things for malicious reasons - I help people secure things for a living, and a strong defense requires a deep knowledge of how the attackers will come at you.]

I try to keep up with things from online sources (blogs, discussion boards, etc.) but it is difficult to internalize some of this without sitting at the keyboard and trying some things.  In this regard, the workshops I was in had a few key advantages:

Access to experts who can help you learn

I am generally good at solving problems because I have a good mental process for figuring things out.  However, sometimes I know what questions to ask but not how to get the answers.  This happened a lot in my class.  

One of the instructors set the stage nicely for this by saying, "I won't tell you the answer, but if you ask me the right question I will tell you how to get the answer."  Essentially, he was testing for whether or not we grasped the concepts behind the problems we were trying to solve; if we understood well enough to formulate the right question, he would point us to the right tools, resources, or processes for us to research how to get the answer we were looking for.

Access to others with different approaches

Another aspect of the classes that I liked was how we compared solutions and approaches after each challenge.  Each student would independently solve the problems, then we'd talk through how we got to the solution at the end.  I learned a bunch of techniques from other people that helped me improve my own skills - in other words, when I saw a method that worked better than my approach I added it to my arsenal.

We also learned about tools and tricks to make things easier - typically leveraging a proven process, or automation, or resources we didn't know about before the classes.

A safe environment to try new things

We were all in the classes to learn new things, so there was no stigma attached to making mistakes, and no shame in asking for help.  

Also, the people who conducted the classes provided us with a fantastic assortment of systems to hack, each with different operating systems, different vulnerabilities, different kinds of target "prizes," etc.  This is very difficult to come by in the real world unless you have a pretty sophisticated lab setup. It felt kind of like a playground.

Competition fuels the fire

In a lot of classes, there are competitive exercises intermingled with the learning exercises.  My classes were no exception - we had several "capture the flag" scenarios that allowed us to compete with each other to see who could achieve the goal first.  This was a lot of fun, as it forced us to apply the things we'd been learning but put some time constraints on us.  That made it feel much more real, and not so academic.

Feed the thirst for knowledge

The other side effect?  I now want to learn even more about the topics I worked on in class.  I have a long list of things that I touched on in class, but want to research more deeply.  And I want to check out a few training classes that can help me get there faster.

There you have it - 5 ways classes helped me improve my skills.  There are other benefits (met some great people, got CPE credits, etc.) but these are the ones that will keep me coming back.  What about you?  Have you taken a course lately?  It might be a good way to get you into a new mode of learning and improve your skills.

Beeminder is keeping me on task

I'm roughly 100 days into my use of "Beeminder" and wanted to provide an update.  If you recall from my earlier post on Beeminder, it is a "put your money where your mouth is" kind of commitment tool.  I committed to blogging at least 4 times per month and, if I don't, I owe money.  Yep, cash money.

I got into this base purely on curiosity, but I am now a huge fan.  There is nothing like a commitment to someone else to keep you honest, and nothing like a commitment of money to get you to take things seriously. When I first found out about Beeminder, it was relatively unknown.  Last month, the Beeminder team (now located in lovely Portland, Oregon along with me) received some well-deserved publicity from LifeHacker.

Here is how my progress is going so far:

Basically, the yellow line is my "yellow brick road" and my goal is to stay above it - below it, I owe money.  This is a great system and I am growing addicted to it.

They do a great job of providing you with updates via an email from the Beeminder Bot.  You can provide updates via email or on the Beeminder site, and provide data to make your graph go, as mine has. Rumor has it they are working on even more mobile-friendly ways of updating your status.

Got a goal that could use some pressure / encouragement?  Head on over to Beeminder and give it a try.  You'll love it.

Sharpen your saw with THINKBook

A while back, I bought a THINKBook, which was developed by my old friend Rajesh Setty.  The problem?  I got busy and forgot I had it, so I just got around to using it a few weeks ago.  I am very impressed with this unassuming little notebook.

What the heck is a THINKBook?

In simple terms, a THINKBook is a hard-bound red notebook, about the size of a Moleskine notebook.  But it's way more than that; sure, it has ruled paged you can use for writing, but it is more than just a general purpose notebook.. This is a thinking person's journal, for challenging your thinking.  

The thinking challenges are framed by "prompters" on various topics interspersed throughout the THINKBook (see the example on the right).  There are a bunch of topics relevant to both business and personal introspection, and I like them very much.  Full disclosure, I didn't think I'd like them at first, but I surrendered to the process, tried a couple and found that they were very useful.

The structure of the prompter exercises in the book really pushes you to think at a fairly deep level, and definitely promotes "out of the box thinking."  It feels very soothing to follow this process and begin writing journal entries in the THINKBook - this is all about crystallizing your thoughts and devoting some time for your own improvement.  That's something a lot us us don't take time out to do, and I think we'd all be better off with some periodic deep thinking.

Spread the Thinking

I really like one of the suggestions from the THINKBook web site, which is to use the THINKBook as a personal and professional gift.  I particularly like the thought of giving it as a business gift, and I just may try that to see how people react.

I like the framing of the "why" behind the THINKBook, according to Rajesh:

THINKBook makes it easy to pull your people’s own best advice out of them. It can be used to super-charge group brainstorming sessions or as a trusted advisor to help you improve the brilliant idea keeping you awake at 3am.

Pretty cool, don't you think?

If you could use some time working on your own creativity and mental health, I encourage you to  grab a THINKBook and give the process a chance.  And, if you like it why not give one as a gift to someone you like (a new one, not your old used one)?

Get things done on the Mac and/or without Outlook

The dark side of the Mac:  personal productivity systems

As some of you may know from following my escapades on this blog, I have been a big proponent of the Getting Things Done (GTD) and Mastering Your Now (MYN) as personal productivity systems. At one point, I was pretty good - and very productive - using these systems.  A couple of years ago, however, I switched to the Mac and I lost a lot of momentum.

You see, I used to use Outlook as my "home base" for processing my inbox and managing tasks, and I relied heavily on ClearContext for managing my mail volume.  On the Mac, Entourage, OS X Mail, and Outlook don't even come close to the power of Outlook on Windows.  To make matters worse, Outlook on the Mac is not extensible so there is no way to do anything like ClearContext on the Mac.

I tried OmniFocus and a number of other tools, but never could find one that became a habit, so they all fell by the wayside (usually after a couple of days).

I found a personal productivity system I like on the Mac!

I have good news - I've found a personal productivity approach that is a) familiar, b) works well on the Mac, c) has a mobile approach that works.  This one comes from my old friend Michael Linenberger (creator of the Mastering Your Now (MYN) system - that's him in the video freeze frame).  A few weeks ago, I found out Michael had created an online offering for Master Your Now ToodleDo Video Training.  He has done a lot of work to apply his MYN system to a pretty powerful cloud-based task management service called "ToodleDo."

I bought Michael's video course (as I write this, the price is discounted - not sure how long that will last), and I have been using ToodleDo and MYN as my new home base for tasks.  I really like the system.  Not only does it work extremely well on the Mac and my iPhone, I find that I actually check in on my tasks regularly

It fits well with inbox processing, as I can send emails to ToodleDo to automatically add them as tasks on my list.  There are also some intuitive "commands" you can add to your subject line to adjust the priority, start date, and more on the task right from your email (I'm using OS X Mail).

This MYN/ToodleDo system will work with pretty much any mail system on pretty much any OS - a big plus in my book

ToodleDo customized for MYN

I'd used ToodleDo in the past, but it didn't flow well for me. Now, Michael Linenberger has collaborated with ToodleDo and has implemented a quick setup method that optimized the settings to support MYN.  That made a huge difference by reducing clutter in the UI and making it simple for me to understand and use.  There are also instructions in the course on how to configure your mobile client to work in this new way with ToodleDo (the mobile instructions are manual, but short and easy to follow).

With this setup in place, all your sorting, columns, default values, and so forth are set up as they need to be to make MYN easy with ToodleDo.

Why do I like MYN?

MYN is very similar to GTD, but I find it to be a bit more prescriptive - just enough to make it work better for me.  The philosophy with GTD is "Do what you need to do for the system to work for you" which doesn't alway work as well for a distraction-prone guy like me.  GTD also relies heavily on "Contexts" to drive what you do - do the thing that matches the place you are.  I had a tough time with contexts, and never felt effective in that aspect of GTD.

In contrast, MYN is more of a "Do it this way" kind of system, which is what I need when it comes to time management.

For example, MYN cares a lot about when you want to do things, and less about where you want to do them.  The diagram on the right illustrates what I think of as the "MYN Zones" for when you want to get things done.  The Critical Now tasks are ones that must be done today (they are the "If I don't' get these done I've gotta stay late" tasks).  The Opportunity Now tasks are ones you'd like to get done within the next 10 days.  The Over the Horizon tasks are analogous to the "Someday Maybe" list in GTD - you want to get them done someday, but if they don't get done it's not the end of the world.

Limits are good

Within these "MYN Zones" it gets even more structured - you should have no more than 5 Critical Now tasks on any given day, and no more than 20 Opportunity Now tasks.  Everything else should be in the Over the Horizon bucket, which can be as big as you want it to be.

I find this budgeting method to be a great forcing function as a safety valve against over-committing (that's a big problem I tend to have).

Summary

I'm just scratching the surface here, but my summary is this:

• After years of frustration I've found a personal productivity scheme on the Mac that I can actually use and stick with.
• I am a big fan of Michael Linenberger's Master Your Now ToodleDo Video Training.
• Using ToodleDo with the Master Your Now ToodleDo Video Training is really powerful.
• This method will work very well for those of us not using Outlook, and/or not using Windows.
• The ability to use this consistently on my desktop, from a web browser, and on my iPhone is very powerful.

Would love your feedback and war stories regarding productivity on the Mac - particularly if you're a distractible type like I am.