My goal is to help you focus on your passions by reducing or eliminating the time needed to maintain the mundane tasks in your life.
If you are a developer or involved in creative work, I urge you to check out the blog post I wrote for SendGrid titled: Personal Development for Developers.
The goal of the post is to provide you with a system that will allow you to find more “Zone” time. All feedback is welcome. Enjoy!
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:
It took me a long time to get Evernote. I felt like with Simplenote and Notational Velocity, why would I need to complicate my note taking with yet another app. Two things made me revisit Evernote, Tim Falls uses it religiously and he is one of the most productive people I know and SimpleNote sync had started to become slow and unreliable for me. In this post I’ll share three key use cases that have made Evernote a welcome part of my workflow.
In particular, the offline notebook feature (this requires a premium subscription) is what makes using Evernote valuable for managing events. As a Developer Evangelist with SendGrid, I attend a ton of events and managing them all is non-trivial; especially, while at the event. It’s a given that for portions of any event, Internet access will be flaky at best.
Prior to each event I store all the key details about the event into an offline notebook, such as:
I dislike carrying around any type of paper, even business cards. Yet, I don’t always have time to input all the business cards into digital format, especially while attending the event. As a compromise, I used take pictures of the business cards with the iPhone camera, but the problem is that then I have a bunch of business cards mixed in with my other pictures and it becomes easy to lose any sense of organization. So instead, I’ll create a note in Evernote for that event and take the photo from within the app, adding any relevant notes.
In the same way I manage the business cards, I do the same with receipts.
I also found the Mac Power Users Podcast episode dedicated to Evernote to be valuable in discovering the virtues of Evernote.
Just option-click the notifications icon in the upper right corner. The icon will dim, signifying that it’s off. Option-click once more to turn it back on.
I also use Vitamin-R for focus when working on my Mac. The app allows me to follow the Pomodoro Technique, but with time increments I define, as well as shut down unnecessary distractions. I also like how it allows you to define the focus of the moment for easy reference in case you get distracted.
In addition, consider creating a new account on your Mac called Focus, where you customize that profile to contain no distractions (e.g. don’t connect your email or social media accounts in that profile). This concept is also useful if you give presentations or demonstrations in public. You can create a streamlined Demo account to ensure your presentation is not disrupted by random interruptions from your Calendar, Email, Task management app, etc.
In an attempt to motivate myself to complete all my weekend chores, I turn to Benjamin Franklin:
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Of course, keeping everything clean appears to be a never ending task that can consume your whole life if you let it. Where is the limit? I’m not sure, but I do find that the time spent (at least once a week) creating order in your life, through ordinary household chores and GTD weekly reviews, definitely helps keep my world flowing smoother.
If you need some motivation to get you going, check out “Everything in its Place, Finally and Forever” and “I Don’t Want Stuff Any More, Only Things” from one of my favorite blogs, Raptitude.com.
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.
I’ve been putting off blogging for quite a while now, with a growing list of reasons to procrastinate. Along with some other commitments, which I’ll share later in this post, I’ve decided to once again attempt to achieve my greater goal of spreading the most positive energy to the greatest number of people possible. Writing is a scalable way to achieve that goal.
Because of a bout of food poisening ( there is an opportunity in every set back 🙂 ) I’ve had some time to spend thinking and reading. After reading some technical books like RESTful Web Services and Javascript: From Novice to Ninja, I turned to a oldie but goodie that has been neglected on my virtual bookshelf, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
So you’ve already made checklists for all of your routines and acquired the habit of using them consistently. What’s the next step?
Go through each item on your checklist and ask these questions:
Take a step back and look at the entire checklist and ask: Can I create a system or process to simplify (including outsourcing the entire checklist)?
Recommended reading for anyone interested in learning to program or enhancing their programming skills.
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.