Six Lazy Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Being Productive dmiessler.com | blog 5 Unusual Tricks For Actually Reaching Your New Year's Goals With the new year rolling around, most of us are planning ways to improve our health, set some big goals, and finally achieve things we have been putting off for a while. But when you look at the statistics, almost 80% of people will fail by the springtime, and after a year, only a smaller percentage of people are still involved with their goals at all. So here’s how to be that tiny percentage of people that are still going strong a year later. #1 Follow intrinsic motivation… rather than forcing yourself. Let me ask you this: do you think the typical person who just begins working out during the new year will still be exercising if: They’re intrinsically motivated (they like it)They’re forcing themselves to do it by using rewards (money/food), punishments, etc. Can you guess which one? The first! Although your friend may be slimming down quicker than you after spending 5 hours a week pounding it out in the gym, see if they’re still exercising in 1-2 years when it really matters.
30-Second Productivity Strategies Half a minute is all it takes to make each day more productive. 1. Take 30 seconds to set the stage for awesome success. Here's how: Before you start doing something, answer the question, "What can I do to make this awesome?" That's basically what Mike Williams of the David Allen Company (the Getting Things Done folks) asked me. At first, it sounded cheesy. Keep in mind this applies just as much to your personal life, too. Don't just move blindly on to the next task. Answer that question, and whatever you do, you will do a lot better. 2. Unfortunately, all too often you forget what happened. Don't. Then you will remember what's important--and be able to act on what's important. 3. That's a shame, because meetings involve people--and that means there's a lot to think about ahead of time. Terrible meetings are all talk and no action. 4. Feeling stressed? Need to switch from quiet mode to outgoing and engaging? Find little rituals that help prepare you for stressful or unusual situations. 5.
Marshall Kirkpatrick » Getting RSS Organized D.C. non-profit technologist and awesome blogger Michael Stein wrote a very good post this week titled Bread and Butter 2.0. In it he said that most non-profit groups need more access to money and straightforward uses of their computers, not a bunch of “technology for it’s own sake.” Stein said he could see the use of AJAX right away, to increase the usability of web services non-profits are using, but asks what other Web2.0 tools really hit the bread and butter issues. I would contend that RSS does that. If you don’t have an RSS reader yourself, you can see a demonstration account filled with feeds by going to Newsgator and logging in as user: marshalldemo password: welcome. Here’s how I’m organizing my feed reader at Newsgator right now. My feeds go into folders titled: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Anything brand new I will plop into my reader outside all those folders, so I can watch it very closely for awhile and decide where I want to put it.
The Complete Flake’s Guide to Getting Things Done Are you smart and motivated and passionate, and have lots of cool things you’d like to get done, but somehow when it comes to doing them, you just . . . don’t? Are you great at ideas but lousy at execution? Talk a good game but don’t get any results? Spend a lot of time thinking about where you want to go, but not much time actually moving your ass down the road that would take you there? You, my friend, are a flake. Most of us are creative and smart. What we lack is focus. That, and we lack this “drive” thing. If you are a flake, you need to learn how to get things done. We live in a world made of stuff, so it gets pretty painful when we blow stuff off. What Do You Want Out of It? You’re not going to get a damned thing done until you actually know what you want to get out of it. I know this is making your eyes roll into the back of your head. That’s a good thing to do, but I’m not talking about that. Just know what you want to get out of the thing you’re thinking about doing. Getting Real
5 Ways to Make Your To-Do Lists More Effective To-do lists seem pretty straightforward: A list of all of the tasks you plan to accomplish during any given day or week. And, really, there are few things more satisfying than drawing lines through each entry. Progress! But, many times, they balloon to unrealistic levels, and we end up feeling overwhelmed and ineffective. 1. When you take a few minutes to write your to-do list the night before, you can hit the ground running the next morning, Pozen advises. 2. Everything that goes on your daily to-do list should fit two criteria: It should be something important that you need to do--versus that which doesn’t really need to be done or which can be delegated to someone else--and something that needs to be done on that day. “When people don’t take control, they go through their days passively. 3. Whether it’s five minutes or two hours, include an estimate of how long it will take to complete, recommends Omar Kilani, cofounder of popular to-do list app Remember The Milk. 4. 5.
Nerd Alert: Turn Your Browser Into A Notepad Okay, forgive me, but I have to nerd out on you for a second. I have just learned that you can turn any modern browser window into a text notepad, and you can save the contents. It even works on mobile browsers. Type this into your browser's location bar: data:text/html, <html contenteditable> Hit enter, then click on the blank page below. How Does It Work? The reason this works is laid out in a post by Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga on Coderwall. Aguinaga explains that he uses it as a scratch pad since he lives in the browser, and he doesn't want text editor windows cluttering up his workspace. I can relate to that. I've entered the magic words as a snippet in TextExpander by Smile. That's pretty neat, but the wizards in the comments section below Aguinaga's post have figured out even more powerful tweaks, including making it into a bookmark. I learned this via Glenn Fleishman, who learned about it via Tom Standage. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
10 Laws of Productivity You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5, and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would have little in common. In fact, the tenets that guide how they – and exceptionally productive creatives across the board – make ideas happen are incredibly similar. Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors: 1. A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. 2. When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. 3. Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life. To avoid ‘blue sky paralysis,’ pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. 4. When working on in-depth projects, we generate lots of new ideas along the way. 5. 6. Part of being able to work on your project a little bit each day is carving out the time to do so. 7.