Personal Development

The Miracle Morning

January 14, 2015 by Elmer Thomas Leave a Comment

Here is a summary of the Life S.A.V.E.R.S technique, to be done immediately after awakening and 30 minutes before your normal waking time:

Silence – prayer/meditation
Affirmations – describe the highest vision for yourself
Visualization – visualize what success looks like and the actions to get there
Exercise – 10 minutes to get the blood flowing. Try a push-up/sit-up/air-squat/pull-up circuit
Reading – self-help/motivational books
Scribing – check out the 5 minute journal

From the “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod

Listen to Hal’s explanation on the Smart Passive Income podcast.

Filed Under: GTD, Life 3.0, Life Hacks, Personal Development, Productivity

Import an OmniFocus Completed Task Report into Evernote via AppleScript

October 12, 2014 by Elmer Thomas 1 Comment

This OmniFocus AppleScript (based on this code) allows you to specify a time frame (e.g. Today, Yesterday, Last Week, etc.) of completed OmniFocus tasks to export into Evernote.

This is what the report looks like:

Here are some ideas to expand this script:

* organize the results by Folder
* make the note title start with YYYY-MM-DD
* send this report via email

Filed Under: GTD, OmniFocus, Personal Development, Productivity

Talk: A Personal Life API

September 17, 2014 by Elmer Thomas Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting a 40 minute tutorial on how to create your own Personal Life API at API World in San Francisco.

The talk consists of the slides, documentation (on APIary) and code (on GitHub, written in Python/Flask).

Big thanks to API World for offering a platform to express these ideas and SendGrid for sponsoring my attendance.

Personal Life API from Elmer Thomas

Filed Under: APIs, GTD, Life Hacks, Personal Development

Chaos Proof Your Habits and Routines

August 9, 2014 by Elmer Thomas 2 Comments

When I became a Developer Evangelist at SendGrid (one of the best jobs on the planet), I learned just how difficult keeping habits and routines while traveling really is. While I still struggle with this challenge, there are a few tips I’d like to pass on to help you keep moving towards your goals, posthaste.

Enjoy and pass along to your chaotic good friends.

Have you created your own Personal API?

June 10, 2014 by Elmer Thomas Leave a Comment

If so, tell me about it 🙂

If not, head on over and read my latest blog post, Quantify Thyself: Creating a Personal Life API, that describes how to create one.

Filed Under: APIs, GTD, Life 3.0, Personal Development, Productivity, SendGrid

Automate Thyself, Then Go Forth and Multiply Your Robots

April 24, 2014 by Elmer Thomas Leave a Comment

I’ve written a two part series about creating bots to automate various aspects of your life. The first part, Automate Your Life With a Bot Army, was published today and the second post is coming soon.

If you have automated something in your life that has been a game changer, let me know and I’ll add it to the second post.

ACTION: Commit to automating at least one system/process per week. Imagine the outcome after 1 year!

Filed Under: GTD, Life 3.0, Life Hacks, Personal Development, Productivity

Keep Fighting

October 2, 2012 by Elmer Thomas 1 Comment

I just found out that one of my dear mentors had cancer twice last year and was given 30 days to live in the second case. He survived and is now thriving. Towards the end of our conversation, I remarked at how well he sounded and asked how he survived those challenging times. He told me he simply kept fighting.

And what to fight for? In his case, the goal was to help as many people as he can, including me.

Here are some action items for you:

Don’t quit.
Keep fighting. Simply not quitting is not good enough.
Figure out how to help out as many people as you can.
Reach out to the people who you care about more often.

Filed Under: Life Hacks, Personal Development

Humble

August 24, 2012 by Elmer Thomas Leave a Comment

If you want to gain some perspective on your life, I recommend the following two things:

1. Approach a homeless person and ask them to share their story with you or alternatively do the same at a senior citizens home.

2. Visit a developing country and spend more than a week living there.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Life Hacks, Personal Development

Personal Productivity: GTD + Agile and Priorities

July 16, 2011 by Elmer Thomas 4 Comments

Currently, I practice GTD using Omnifocus [pdf link] as the execution tool. I believe this system to be the best out of all the systems I’ve tried thus far, yet I still struggle with prioritization. After completing a few weeks of agile training with our awesome Rally coach Ann, I began to think of how I can apply agile principles, particularly the prioritization methods, to help solve the priority issue.

The first major difference that struck me is the prioritized backlog that is central to agile vs. the list of next actions split by context that is key to GTD. In trying to follow the non-prioritization ethos of GTD, I always have this feeling in the back of my mind that perhaps I’m working on the wrong thing at a given time. My work around has been using due dates and flags within Omnifocus. Specifically, due dates are for items that have some consequence if I fail to deliver on that date and flags are action items I’d like to complete that day.

Here are some initial thoughts of how to apply concepts from both GTD and Agile within the framework of the GTD weekly review in order to achieve some level of prioritization.

What is in your GTD Weekly Review Checklist?

April 6, 2010 by Elmer Thomas 10 Comments

I’m in the process of evaluating my GTD weekly review process, as I feel like I’ve entered into the trap of executing the checklist without concern whether I am doing so productively. Following is the current checklist I am using: