Productivity

Yesterday, I presented you with the first five tips for a more effective to-do list.

Always the over-acheiver, I’m offering up five more for your to-do list pleasure today (six, if you count the bonus, which I didn’t because it made for a cuter title).

So without further ado:

The To-Do Tweaks Collection (Part Two)
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Tweak Six:
Your Most Important Thing

Your MIT (Most Important Thing) is the one task that is… well…. the most important. (Bet you didnt see THAT coming! Ha)

An MIT might be a time sensitive, fragile task, something which has serious consequences if it isn’t done, something which will have huge benefits if it IS done, or something that later tasks will be built on.

Some days you may not have an MIT - others, you’ll have several. But try to keep it down to 3 or fewer, so you aren’t tempted to prioritize the full list.

How to mark Most Important Things? Place them in the top few slots on your list, intial them with MIT, or mark them with a star. I’m fond of those little foil stars. Sticking those on a to-do list before I’ve even started makes me feel all accomplished first thing. (Or it would, if I did it.. which I don’t.. so never mind!)

Credit? I’ve no idea where I picked this up.

Tweak Seven:
BrainDump!

The BrainDump is exactly what it sounds like… a big ol’ list with everything in your head dumped onto it. It’s a place for all of the could-ought-might-maybe-someday tasks and loose action items, the things you want to keep in mind, but don’t want or need to do right now. Don’t worry if the task is feasible, expensive, or even nearly impossible, this isn’t the time to judge it. Just get it out of your head and onto paper.

The BrainDump is about decluttering your mind, while preserving the sanctity of your to-do list. Every so often (once a week would be great) it needs to be processed, reviewed, sorted, and purged, with some of the items moved to your todo list, some just *done* right then, some moved onto the next BrainDump list.

Akin to the GTD tickler files and capture steps, it’s just a good idea.

Credit to Productivity501

Tweak Eight:
Use Specific & Active Wording

Start each item with an active verb, so that it serves as a call-to-action, setting you in motion. Then describe your task items in terms of specific action, rather than short hand general notations. For example:

• “Tend To Current Bills” instead of “Bills”
• “Mop Kitchen Floor” instead of “Kitchen Floor”
• “Schedule Appointment with Dr. Smith” instead of “Doctor Appt.”

Making each item specific helps to narrow your focus, and keeps the momentum from being slowed by the instant of confusion as you glance at the list and ask “which bills? which doctor?”.

The few extra keystrokes will save time and confusion ordinarily spent in mental background sorting.

Credit to Lifehacker and me : )

Tweak Nine:
Keep It Organized & Approachable

A napkin or the back of an envelope may be great for spontaneous note taking, they probably aren’t the best choice for your to-do lists. Whether in pixels or on paper, organizational lists should *look* organized. Visual organization reduces mental clutter and encourages organized thinking.

Simultaneously, whatever you use for your list needs to be approachable; it shouldn’t be so structured or fancy that it is intimidating. I have an entire collection of beautifully bound notebooks I never use, because my lists never seem “worthy” of them, and Daytimers never worked for me because the structure was intimidating and inflexible.

Index cards are my personal favorite: inexpensive, easily available, naturally structured, and infinitely flexible. (Behance’s Action Pads would be my top choice, but I can’t afford them for daily stuff.)

Credit: Me! Ok, it’s not original, but
I figured it out all on my own!

Tweak Ten:
Your Progress As Art Work

Speaking of the cool folks at Behance, they came up with the idea of using completed task lists as wall art. Surround yourself with progress, or as core77 put it, “Bask In Your Own Progress” by pinning completed to-do lists on your wall. It provides an excuse to spend time on making a list “Pretty”, and encourages the use colors and scribbles and gold stars and the like. I can imagine it set up something like this photo wall. Cool, No?

Credit: Behance

Bonus Tweakage:
A Clean Slate

Don’t be afraid to take items back off the list. Don’t be afraid to just throw a list away. Every once in a while, your task list needs a fresh start.

I start with a new primary to-do list each day, but I often roll tasks over from the day before. Sometimes I’ll notice some items that have been on each day’s list for a week or more. If it’s not done in the next 2 days, it clearly wasn’t important enough to be on the lists. So off it goes. The next list is started totally from scratch, a clean slate.

Habits lists, Braindump lists, all of them need to be “rebooted” every so often. Glance over them briefly to see if you’ve missed anything *really* important, transfer any items you think are worth saving, then burn, shred or flush it the whole thing. Make it a scheduled ritual, or a spontaneous action saved for when you’re just fed up. Torch it! Down with The Tyranny of ToDos!

If you’re opposed to violence (sometimes I am) just think of it as setting the tasks free, giving them room to run and grow, to develop into the free-range todos that God meant them to be…

Ok, I’ve just gone silly now.

If you want to go back and read the first five, be my guest. Otherwise, start listing!

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MindTweak: The To-do list is a tool of the devil, but I have faith I can master it, and lift it to the heavens with a… oh the hell with it. Give me the torch….
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In my quest for the perfect productivity system, I’ve run across a number of interesting to-do list ideas. They deserve a better fate than their current role as cyber dust-catchers on my own todo list… So now, for your tweaking pleasure, I present:

The To-Do Tweaks Collection
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Tweak One:
The Sacred To-Do List

Your primary to-do list should be held sacred; include only the most worthy of tasks.

Don’t add tasks just to fill in all the blanks on your list. Each item should specifically advance your goals, meet a need, or give you pleasure. Leave off all of those “ought to do” items that you really couldn’t care less about, and don’t impact your life significantly. You probably wont do them anyway, so why give yourself the guilt over it? And if you do tackle them simply because they are on your list, they’re taking your time and attention away from what really matters.

So hold your task list sacred; resist the urge sully it with filler and fluff.

A Hat Tip to Productivity501

Tweak Two:
The Done-Did List

Left to their own devices, to-do lists quickly become daunting never-ending demands of more-more-more. It’s enough to squash any budding sense of accomplishment you may be developing.

So take the time to note your daily successes. Before starting a new to-do list, make a list of what you’ve already accomplished. Include completed items from your previous list, any items you worked on, and anything you did that *wasn’t* on the original list. (It may not be necessary to do this on a whole separate list.. I just make marks on the previous todo list, and add anything else I took care of, and make a few notes about partial accomplishments)

Credit: My own productivity gurus.
They so rock.

Tweak Three:
Prioritize Pleasure

Each day, list a luxury task that is just for fun, things like:

• Spend an hour playing with the dog.
• Take a long bath with luxury bath salts.
• Lay in the sun
• Listen to music with full attention.
• Write a love poem to the dustbunnies under the bed
• Practice hoops in the nearby park
• Stare at the stars and look for UFOs

Make it an item you wouldn’t necessarily make time for otherwise, something that increases your pleasure, advances your goals of well being, something that makes you smile. You’ll be surprised what a difference this makes in your attitude towards your to-do list, and your life.

Credit: My own productivity gurus
I told you they rock!

Tweak Four:
The Habits List

Workouts, vitamins, cleaning off the desk, meditation — They’re definitely tasks, we definitely need reminders, but they really don’t belong on the regular to-do list.

I’ve always instinctively separated them, and Mark Shead of Productivity501 explains why my instinct was a good idea. Listing habits on the primary to-do list clutters it up, de-emphasizes the most important tasks, puts a focus on daily results rather than lifestyle results (which is what habits are about) and can cause discouragement if a day is especially productive work wise, but there wasn’t time to work out.

He suggests a completely separate list, and makes a really pretty form available to his RSS subscribers. You’ll also find a wealth of habit-list tips from him here and here.

Credit goes to both my own gurus and Productivity501

Tweak Five:
The Could-Do List

Sometimes the simplest tweaks are the best. Ready for this one? It’s a simple word change in your list title:

Cross out “To-Do” and pencil in “Could-Do”. The shift in attitude from that single word opens the horizons of your day, releases the sense of pressure and obligation, and gives a feeling of freedom of choice that both relaxes and energizes. For more thoughts on this, see the article on Positive Sharing at the link below. Seriously cool stuff.

Credit to Hilda Carroll via
Alexander Kjerulf at Positive Sharing

And yes, I’ve got more tips waiting in the wings ( I’m serious about my productivity collection! ) but I didn’t want to overwhelm you ( or me) with too many at once.

So stay tuned for the rest tomorrow, plus a peek at my own new task list experiments.

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MindTweak: “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” -Paul J. Meyer

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Yesterday I stopped procrastinating, set up my writing system, and jotted out a rough outline for Plate Spinning, The Book. How cool is that?

Long term, I hope to develop some specifically plate oriented tracking tools. In my own life, I’ve used spreadsheet for this from time to time, but that’s remarkably boring and not a lot of fun to share with you - so I went on a tool-hunt, and wound up with Joe’s Goals.

It’s not got all of the features I want, but it’s intuitive, which counts for a lot in plate-spinning. And.. tada.. it’s free!

To use Joe’s Goals, just set up each “Plate” as either a goal or a log. Then as you move through the week, either add a checkmark for each related task (if it’s set up as a goal) or a note about what you did (if its a task).

Either method should show you at a glance which areas need attention, and which ones have momentum going, and which areas need attention.

So go check it out. Joe’s Goals. Tell them I sent you. They have no idea who I am, of course, but I think they should, don’t you?

To find out what plate spinning productivity is all about, check out the posts in the Plate Spinning Category.

So, who needs Plate Spinning Productivity?

Well, I do.

But in case you aren’t me… (and you probably aren’t) I came up with gratuitous bullet-points, to help you decide.

• Are you a creative type, involved with the arts, product development, copywriting, design, etc?
• Are you primarily in charge of your own scheduling?
• Do you struggle with dividing your attention between multiple, diverse projects and areas of interest?
• Do you work best entirely immersed in a single project?
• Does the idea of prioritizing tasks according to importance confound you?
• Do you require a lot of ruminating time on projects?
• Are you overwhelmed with the idea of balancing acts of actual creation (writing, painting, code development) with the business end of marketing, promotion and book keeping?
• Do you long for your own personal project manager?
• When focused on a project, have you got the nagging sense that you should be working on something “else”?
• Are you regularly behind schedule, overwhelmed, and missing deadlines?
• Is there a collection of shattered, splattered china tucked away in your closet, the remnants of abandoned projects that lost momentum?

Now, I don’t have a nifty little scoring formula from this quiz to tell you if you need to learn Plate Spinning, but somehow, I suspect you can figure it out

I would really appreciate comments, though… Please let me know how many of these points describe you!

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MindTWEAK: Bullet points. How… organized of me. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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(I got a bit carried away with this post, so if you’re in hurry, go on and jump ahead to the gratuitous bullet points. Otherwise, carry on!)

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Patsi Krackoff (of The Blog Squad and Writing Great Ezines & Blogs) recently posted something remarkably familiar:

“I have a problem managing my work load: I can’t multi-task like most successful people seem to do. I am a one-track minded gal. Like for most entrepreneurs and small biz owners, I have plates spinning in the air all the time, and juggling is required.

If it were up to me, the plates would have splattered already… ” (from One-Track Mind: I Have a Problem )

In my world, the juggling *is* left up to me - and I have an astounding collection of splattered and shattered china to prove it. I’ve also got an impressive set of productivity plans, kits and books, none of which quit did the trick, because again, like Patsi:

“…. I need ruminating time. I need to think about each project with plenty of “mind time” in between. That’s how my best ideas come to me - in the empty spaces in between projects.”

None of the systems I’ve tried allowed for that, or my other quirks. In addition to “mind time,” I need plenty of space to sink myself into my work.

With numerous, diverse projects, finding that space to focus, as well as that necessary mental space between tasks is very difficult — especially while also making sure that nothing essential (like, say, paying the utility bill) slips through the cracks.

So I’ve started experimenting with my own productivity system.

Enter Plate-Spinning Productivity.

Plate-spinning is all about keeping multiple, diverse projects active and rolling, with as little effort and maintenance as possible.

Currently in Beta .1 (or is it Alpha .04? maybe its… oh, bother. I’ve lost track. It’s in development, anyway), it’s tailored to over-focused creative types: people like me, like me, like Patsi, and very likely you, too (If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably creative. Only creative people seem to relate to my peculiar brand of insanity)

People like us often have trouble shifting gears and balancing priorities. We tend to work best according to the driving inspiration of the moment, rather than a pre-defined schedule. Our best work often comes when immersed in the process of creation, sometimes to the point of obsession, and we usually need plenty of unstructured free space to ruminate, think, experience, and shake off our obsessions.

Normal, disciplined productivity methods tend to get in our way.

We’ve tried most popular methods. They look great, they sound great, and we love the bells and whistles. Sometimes we get enthused for a while, inevitably become focused on the organizational method itself, and wind up forgetting the actual projects it was supposed to organize. If we avoid that trap, eventually we wind up immersed in another single obsessive project, and forget all about the method we’re supposed to be using.

“We’ll get back to it,” we think, “just as soon as we finish this project…” But we don’t get back to it. Most productivity methods aren’t designed to be put on hold while we work — the whole point is to channel and direct our workflow. No system, no matter how promising it is, can direct the flow when it’s not part of the flow.

Plate-Spinning is designed to stay in the flow, guiding without interfering.

In a lot of ways, it’s less of a system than an attitude, a way of thinking about multiple projects. With plate-spinning, the goal isn’t to get things “done”, organize, or schedule. The goal for us is simpler… keep a small amount of momentum behind each of our projects — just enough to keep them all spinning.

The idea is to keep the maintenance of our projects low maintenance and natural, opening up the time, energy and focus to immerse ourselves in the obsession of the moment, spend time on loved ones, or just staring blankly at the ceiling (ruminating is work, too!)

Plate-Spinning doesn’t replace your to-do list. It doesn’t require you to rework your entire productivity system, replace all of your file-folders, invest in new software, Moleskines or a lifetime supply of index cards.

Think of it as a plug-in or widget for whatever other system you may find successful.

So who needs it?

I do.

But since you’re probably not me, and you’ve bothered to read this far — you should go find out more, via the gratuitous bullet points check-list.

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MindTWEAK: Sometimes, it takes me thousands of words (this post) to come up with the few hundred words (the bullet points) that really matter. The great thing about blogging? I can post both!

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The idea behind plate-spinning productivity is to keep multiple andAS diverse projects active and “spinning”, with as little effort as possible. Before you start, check out this video: Eric Bren, Plate Spinning Wizard, to see the basis of the metaphor. You can read more about it in the series that starts here, or just dive in headfirst with this Quick Start and wait for me to explain more later.

Setting The Stage:

—Step 1: List Your Projects/Tasks

Jot down about seven of your projects or task categories: These are the “plates” you’ll be spinning.

Don’t make the list too detailed, and don’t try and prioritize it - just a simple list is all we’re after. If you find you have many more than seven, lump some of them together into categories.

—Step 2: Mark any plates that seem *Fragile*

*Fragile* plates are those that will break if they stop spinning and fall out of your attention. Anything that requires constant attention (like feeding the baby) is “fragile” - likewise, anything with a looming deadline, or anything that has a high financial or emotional cost if ignored. [click to continue...]

A few days ago, I listed the four of the lessons I learned from a recent small freelance project that took over my life. Today, you get the rest of the info — and hopefully a laugh or two at my expense, as well.

So without further ado? Here are the basics that I so happily ignored, and paid the price for.

Gather Your Tools: All of them.

It’s one of the basics of work flow advice, and one I consistently fail to implement (unless, of course, it means shopping for said tools). I’d rather jump right into the creative stuff, than waste time gathering tools that I might not need. When you’re as disorganized as I am, that gathering tools stuff can take a lot of time! (and it takes a lot more time when you have to stop working to find them)

Since this particular project was so simple, I didn’t need to find my copy of DreamWeaver. I didn’t need to track down a CSS editor. It was a small simple job, and I could just jump right in, start with a free template, and code it all by hand. Um. Erm. Alrighty then!

As the project grew, I realized I would have saved a lot of trouble by using the right editing software, but by then, I would have had to start from scratch to effectively use them. Oops.

Nail Down The Details: Get all the needed info FIRST.

I’ve run into this problem on nearly every design job I’ve done: clients almost never know exactly what they want or need, but they like my style. A typical conversation on logo design, for instance, goes like this.

“Hey, can you do me a graphic for the front of my petstore webpage? Something with fish in it.”
“Sure. What size do you need? What kind of fish? Any particular colors?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you think is best.”

So I design six variations, with a photos of goldfish as the base. They love it, except they’d like to make a few small changes.

1. They were hoping for purple
2. Can I change the size so they can put it on a business card and a billboard.
3. They don’t sell goldfish.

I wind up putting significant time in on something that serves only to help them figure out what they *don’t* want, and now I’m stuck with the basic design which they like, but which was based around the photos of the goldfish. I’m unlikely to find substitute photos of whatever kind of fish they do sell, and the design is not at all resize-able, and.. purple? The purple I can do.

The solution? Put more time in on finding out what they want. Trick them into it if I have to. They may insist that anything I pick is ok, but in the end, it won’t be — and my sloppy eagerness to just dive in will wind up wasting a lot of my time.

Another part of the solution is to make an advance agreement about basic charges, allowed changes, and additional fees for producing a whole new set of design roughs.

Finish Up Neatly: Put things away.

I’m generally pretty good about the final presentation of the project to the client, handing it over in a neat package, with notes on anything they need to keep in mind about it.

I’m not so good with putting my own stuff away. Right now, for instance, I have 8 folders, 12 images and 3 zip files scattered across my desktop from this last project. I also have desktop folders from the last 4 projects cluttering up my desktop. Deleting them is usually a bad idea, but there’s no reason they cant be off in a subfolder somewhere.

So I’ll go do that now…. right after I finish this post up neatly.

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MindTWEAK: Uber-creativity doesn’t compensate for the work habits of a finger-painting kindergartner. Slow down, make a plan, and you’ll be able to handle more projects with less stress.

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This week, I took on a freelance PROJECT. Please note the use of uppercase bold, to denote that the imposing, dominating, swallowing-up the space around it nature of the beast.

Curiously, this was supposed to have been a project; small, quick, subtle, undemanding, not taking much attention.

Supposed to be, could have been, should have been, but *wasn’t*… and it *wasn’t* largely because of my own sloppy work habits.

As a result, it ate an entire week of my life.

Straight up, without any salt, pepper, or garnish.

Here’s what happened:

A friend thoughtfully offered me a sweet simple little freelance web design job that he was too busy to work on just now.

“It’s trivial,” he says. “It should take you an afternoon, tops.” Since I’m not as familiar with code as he is, I knew it would take me a bit more than an afternoon — but it seemed simple and straight forward and within my skill set. So I said yes, and dove in head first, as is my habit - no prep work, no plan, no organizing, no flow chart, no task list.

I just started work, and it took over my life.

The thing turned out to be a bit more complex and specific than I’d originally anticipated. The images I needed to find were far more specific than I’d originally understood. There was specific copy I needed to find space for. There were logos to be considered. The colors needed to be more neutral than I’d anticipated, and there needed to be far more variation between the styles than expected.

Still, none of this should have been a problem — except that my sloppy approach to it complicated matters immensely.

Since readers seem to like reading about how I screw up, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned by taking note of said sloppy habits, and how they affected my week.

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1. Assess the job. Is it a big or small job? Is it a task,or a project? Once the question is answered, treat thejob accordingly.

This is one of the main points in Getting Things Done. With GTD, if an actionable task takes less than 2 minutes, you do it RIGHT THEN, when it comes to your attention. If it takes more than 2 minutes, it becomes a project, with it’s own planning, time management, and so on.

At *best*, without any issues or corrections done to it… this project would have taken me a day and a half. That’s just a WEE bit over 2 minutes. Further — not a single actionable step could have been done in under 2 minutes. And yet… I approached it as if it were one of those “do it now” 2 minute tasks.

Since this was rightfully a decent sized project, I should have treated it as a plate-to-spin, rather than focusing all of my attention on it, while other projects wobbled and crashed. So… next time? Assess the job before starting it.

2. Double the time/effort estimate. That number is the minimum of time and effort the project requires. Double it again, for what the time it will LIKELY wind up taking.

I admit it… My time estimates are lousy. At my most accurate, my estimates are best-case-scenario, where I hit no unexpected problems, have no corrections, no interruptions, and my perfectionism is on vacation. I estimate time as if I had nothing else going on in my life, and can stay entirely focused on the task at hand.

That works for really small short jobs, but the longer a task runs, the more problems crop up, and the more outside interruptions demand my attention, and the more likely my brain is to short out.

In the case of this particular project, it’s taking about 3 times my original estimate.

3. Projects should fit *into* my schedule, not determine my schedule.

When you work a “real job”, your employers generally determine your hours, and you fit the rest of your life around it. The job itself provides structure. But as you move up the management ladder, or when you work for yourself, you determine the schedule you work.

Since most of my projects are of my own making.. I tend to treat any outside projects as if they were a “real job” — they take priority, and I let the rest of my life fall into place around them. The trouble is that this leads to skewed priorities. And since there is no real “away” from work time, it allows the outside projects to eat my life.

This week? I let the outside work determine my schedule. Interestingly, if I’d applied #1, #2, this wouldn’t have happened. By treating a large project as a small, immediate task, and underestimating the time it would take, there was no way to schedule appropriately, even if I had tried.

4. Productivity methods apply to outside projects, too. They’re just another Plate to Spin, another “Thing to Get Done”.

Just like outside projects should fit into my schedule, they should fit into my productivity methods, too. That’s why the structure is there …. to .. well.. structure things. Systems like GTD or 20in/80out or my own productivity plate-spinning don’t just apply to my own work. In fact, they don’t just apply to work, at all… they are methods for structuring * life.*

There’s not much point in having a productivity structure in place if I’m going to ignore it every time an outside project comes up. Projects may be “outside” in that they work doesn’t originate with me, but they should not be outside my structure.

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These aren’t the only lessons I learned, but they’re probably the most foundational. Since I promised to write shorter posts, and this is already long, I’ll stop here, and save the others for tomorrow. And for the record? The-Project-That-Ate-My-Life is NOT on tomorrow’s schedule!

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MindTWEAK: “Every problem has a gift for you in its hands” Richard Bach.
“Does it come with a gift receipt?” Me.

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The idea behind plate-spinning is to keep as many of my projects up in the air and spinning as possible, with as little effort as possible. Read about it here, here and here too.

With my recent lapses in brain-care, you’d think my productivity would have gotten off track, and my projects would have all fallen by the wayside.

My focus was poor, my energy tanked, and I generally felt like I didn’t get a thing done. Funny thing, though… when I sat down to look at where I am from a plate-spinning perspective, it ain’t at all bad. What I think I’ve gotten done and what I’ve actually gotten done are two different things.

Here are my current plates/projects, all of which are in beta-test mode right now.

• This Blog: Spinning I’ve manged to post decent content regularly. I’ve kept up with comments, commented on other blogs, and done some fine-tuning to the design and code.
• Personal Finances: Spinning Everything is up to date, and paid on time. Those taxes still need doing.
• Housework: Spinning This one is a shocker. But I’m actually getting somewhere, starting to keep up, and even <gasp> get ahead. Granted, my inbasket is overflowing, but that’s just an hours work or so.
• Fine & Graphic Art: Spinning I ordered supplies, and the projects I’ll be working on next are pretty well defined in my head.
• Health: Spinning Though this wobbled badly while I had the poison ivy, by noting the problems here, I put them back into my head, and they’re sort of auto-correcting.

So While I lost focus for 2-3 weeks, my projects had enough momentum that they took very little effort to keep moving along. I didn’t put any new projects in the air, but nothing is wobbling. I apparently caught all of the problems before the projects could crash.

How cool is that?

Plate Spinning actually works as a productivity method. Without conscious effort, I’m balancing my projects, maintaining momentum, and as an added benefit? even better is he shift in my attitude after completing this review.

When I started this review post, I was overwhelmed. I felt behind on everything, anxious, and upset that I had slacked off while feeling sickly.

Now that I’ve looked at the situation, I realize that instead of being “behind” and in danger of a crash, I have some room to breathe. None of my plates are in danger of falling, so I can put my energy wherever I like, whether it’s with one of these projects, something new, personal, or just goofing off

I’d really like to make a chart of some sort to give the review process a more visual aspect, so I’ll add that to my Next Projects List:

• Used Book Sales (pre-alpha)
• Book Writing (alpha — the software is ready to go)
• Plate Tracking Chart (pre-alpha)

So there you have it. An MT original method, that is actually, actively working.

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MindTWEAK: Isn’t it great when things just work?

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My friend Ken over at GhostDogAlpha has a new podcasting productivity project : EightyOut.com

It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it can leap tall buildings in a single bound, it’s.. well, ok, I might be overselling it a bit.

Still, it promises to develop into something pretty cool. EightyOut will chronicle my very own webguru’s “lifestyle redesign” based on the current blogosphere-buzz-book, The 4-Hour Workweek

The idea is to get more benefit out of your effort, while putting less actual effort in (a variation on the 80/20 rule-of-the-universe). The attitude changes suggested by author Tim Ferriss amount to a set of pretty effective mind tweaks. I haven’t read the book yet, but some of the keys seem to be learning to outsource the stuff you aren’t good at (and never wanted to do anyway) as well as how to enjoy yourself *now* rather than postponing the good parts of life ’til some vague and mythical “retirement” date.

I’m especially interested in the EightyOut take on the subject; Ken’s brain works very differently than mine in some ways, but we both get stuck in similar inner-conflict loops when making choices about where/when to invest our energy.

So check it out!

Eighty Out: Episode one

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MindTweak: Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing…
-Timothy Ferriss

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