Note: This is a guest post from Steve Scott of Steve Scott Site

You’ve probably noticed that the market is saturated with self-help guides, audio books, and outrageously-priced seminars by motivational speakers. This is simply proof that most people enjoy receiving advice from others.

Here are a few “tips” that I’ve discovered on my own. Some of them are a bit humorous, but most of them are common sense. I think if you do your best to take them to heart, you’ll start to notice a clearer head and a bigger smile on your face.

1. Wake up at a reasonable hour. Everyone’s schedule is different, so if you work the night shift, your “reasonable hour” may be noon, but it’s a good idea to wake up before you have to. When I was in college I had the horrible habit of crawling out of bed ten minutes before I had to be in class. Although nearly everyone I knew at the time did the same exact thing, looking back, I see how stupid it really was. If I have a ten o’clock appointment, I wake up at seven so I can get in some exercise, take a shower, and eat breakfast before I run out the door.

2. Think of something that you have to look forward to. Once the alarm goes off and the initial confusion of “Ugh, it’s already morning!” has ended, think of something cool that you have going on in your life at the moment. Yeah, it sounds hokey, but it’s pretty helpful … and I’m sure you can think of something. Come on, anything! It can be as simple as, “Oh yeah! It’s Thursday, and that means it’s almost Friday! Weekend, here I come!” or something even better, like “The FedEx man is gonna deliver my new flat screen TV today!”

3. Look in the mirror. I’ve seen plenty of people in the movies and on TV shows who look at themselves in the mirror each morning and say things like, “You’re awesome!” or “You can do it!” before they start their day. I know this sounds relatively insane, but it helps—and I speak from experience. If you can’t tell yourself that you’re good at something and actually believe it, why should you believe anyone else who says it?

4. Take a shower and get dressed. This may be a no-brainer, but spending five or ten minutes in the shower will help clear your head and make you feel a whole lot better. Hopefully you can even find clean clothes to wear. (You know, ones that were hanging in the closet as opposed to the ones that are still in the laundry basket on the floor, wrinkled and covered in cat hair since Fluffy decided to take a nap on them.)

5. Scan the news online, read the “real” newspaper for a few minutes, or tune into the news channel on TV for a few minutes. However you get your news is up to you, but it’s a good idea to stay on top of things that are going on in the world, even though lately most of the news makes everyone angry. You shouldn’t be ignorant about issues that may affect you personally, and you’ll want to have firsthand knowledge as to what’s happening in case someone asks you about it later or tries to force their opinions on you as “the truth.”

6. Eat breakfast. Eating breakfast is a biggie that a lot of people skip, so be sure to eat something. A container of yogurt, a banana, maybe a granola bar as you run out the door … just be sure to eat. You’ll need energy to get through the morning. I like Starbucks just as much as the next guy, but a cup of coffee is not breakfast—even if it has chocolate syrup in it and whipped cream on top.

7. Make a to-do-list each day. I run my own internet business and mainly work from home (or a hotel, or wherever “home” may be at the time) so it’s a huge benefit to know what I have going on each day. Even if you spend your days at the office, you’ll still want to have some kind of agenda to follow. Set up a schedule on your Blackberry or write things down on a legal pad, but do it somehow … or you’ll wind up forgetting something important.

8. Get to work safely. Again, I mainly work from home, but if you drive to work – or ride your bike to work, or take the bus or train – do it safely. This is also why it’s a good idea to wake up relatively early. Rushing leads to speeding and speeding leads to tickets or fender benders … which will make you even later than you were going to be in the first place.

9. Take a deep breath and count to 3 when something starts to bug you. Co-workers, clients, things that aren’t going as smoothly as possible … there are dozens of things that can easily start to drive you nuts at the drop of a hat. You don’t want to wind up getting so frustrated with someone or something that you wind up going postal, so close your eyes and take a deep breath as you mentally count to three before you say something you may regret. Most likely, whatever’s bugging you isn’t as bad as you think it is.

10. Periodically take a break … away from your desk! Be sure to walk away from your desk every few hours. You’ll wind up getting frustrated if you sit there staring at your monitor nonstop, and your eyes will start to hurt. Getting up for five or ten minutes every three or four hours will not blow your entire day, believe me. You also need to take a break and eat lunch. Sitting at your desk with a Snickers bar that you got from the vending machine doesn’t count.

11. Tie up as many loose ends as possible before the work day ends. We all know that some days you’ll wind up working later than expected, but don’t make it a habit or your boss (or you) will start to assume that you really do work twelve hours each day even though you get paid for eight. Get as many things done as possible each day, but try to leave on time. There’s always tomorrow.

12. Eat dinner. I had to stress the importance of eating breakfast and lunch, so of course I’m going to remind you to eat dinner! And if today is one of those days you wind up putting in some overtime, get up from your desk to eat dinner. A carton of Chinese take-out every night of the week will begin to affect your waistline and your mood. Try to eat dinner with other people, if possible. Everyone should have friends. (You know, besides Fluffy the cat, even though I’m sure he’s cool.)

13. Enjoy a hobby after work. Whether it’s taking a bike ride or a walk, watching a movie, reading a novel, it’s a good idea to have some sort of hobby besides work! Spend an hour or two doing something that you enjoy to help get your mind off of work.

14. Unwind a bit before bed, and get ready to repeat the cycle tomorrow! Whether “unwinding” involves the above-mentioned hobby or something else, take time to chill out for a bit before hitting the sack. This will give you the ability to get a good night’s sleep, wake up, and do it all over again … and if this happens on Friday night, you probably don’t have to go to work tomorrow! Even better!

Yes, some of these fourteen tips might seem a bit common sense. The funny thing is they really work. I guarantee that implementing them into your daily routine will make you feel happier and more excited about the possibilities that each day brings!

Steve Scott is currently realizing one of his dreams by traveling throughout the world. To read more about his adventures and how he’s able to afford this reality, check out his blog at Steve Scott Site.

Photo by R’eyes

Note: This is a guest post from Noah Arobo of Noprobo.com.

As a child I was both a bookworm and a TV junkie. I remember the last thing my fourth grade teacher said to me, “Try to leave some books in the library for the other kids.” I had earned my reputation by reading more than any other student in class. Oddly, I spent most of that summer watching TV. Six hours per day in some instances.

As an adult I choose to flip pages, not channels. After four years of not watching the tube and two years of not owning one, the empirical evidence is in: My life is better without a TV. Here’s why:

1. TV consumes an enormous amount of time

Let’s do the math. According to a 2009 Nielson study, the average amount of time an American spends watching TV is around five hours per day! Five hours!

Excluding time spent sleeping, this means the average person is spending a third of their day distracted or downright comatose. By extension, this works out to more than 3.5 months (15 weeks) of nonstop TV watching each year.

If that doesn’t strike you as extreme, think of it this way: if your employer offered you 15 weeks of vacation each year in exchange for giving up TV, wouldn’t you jump at the opportunity?

Admittedly, you may be spending less time per day in front of the set. I currently live in Switzerland where the average daily viewing time is closer to three hours. Yet, even at these smaller figures, television still accounts for mammoth amounts of time wasted each year.

2. TV is full of reruns

Syndicated shows are played ad nauseum. At one point I was able to recount my favourite episode of the Simpsons verbatim. By watching these repeats you don’t even get to hear a unique joke or learn something new. TV reruns are quintessential time wasters, not only are you vegging out, you’re also not taking in anything novel.

3. TV news is a poor way to be informed

TV news justly receives much criticism. It has followed the path of professional wrestling: once genuine, yet now mostly for entertainment. Getting news from a rolling ticker or a talking head is like going to a restaurant and waiting patiently to be served whenever the staff gets around to it. News should be ready on demand. With the internet it is. With TV, you wait. If they have a story about a kitten caught in a tree, you endure it, lest you miss a minute of something that is actually relevant to you.

In truth, any news worthy of knowing will find its way to you through others. Let someone else waste their own time filtering out the kitten stories.

4. TV hinders the development of relationships

Time spent watching TV is time you’re not enjoying quality experiences with friends and family. Instead of tube time, try something new and out of the ordinary with the people in your life. Play billiards. Fly a kite. Or just talk to each other.

5. TV is expensive

Basic channels, premium channels, video on demand, DVRs, and TVs themselves are all costs you can live without. Many of these are also the worst kind of expenses; ongoing ones, not to mention the periodic high-priced equipment upgrades. In my homeland of Canada, the typical cost of cable service alone adds up to enough for a week-long, all-inclusive Caribbean vacation every year.

6. TV has too many commercials

The average 30 minute slot of television programming has 8-9 minutes of commercials. Based on our earlier calculations, this can work out to more than a month each year spent watching advertisements. Books have no advertisements. Even ads on the internet can quickly be ignored if they’re of no relevance. TV ads, in contrast, are time wasters that are forced upon you.

7. TV isn’t that hard to get rid of

You might think, “I couldn’t possibly quit watching [insert favourite show]”. Firstly, you don’t need to. There are alternatives, including downloading the show or watching it on DVD, both of which offer stop/play control with no commercial interruptions. Secondly, it’s really not that hard to give up a show. They’re not like nicotine. There’s no chemical dependence. Sure you might get disappointed the first time you’re left out of a watercooler conversation about last night’s episode, but you can offset this disappointment by telling people about how you learnt to hang glide instead. I’ve liked a lot of TV shows but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t completely disposable at any given minute.

8. TVs are the last non-portable relic

For the most part we’ve managed to make our technology mobile. Internet and phone services are available almost everywhere. TVs, in contrast, are like the coil-corded phones of yesteryear, keeping people cooped up indoors, glued to the couch. A stationary TV sets encourages a sedentary lifestyle that seldom serves us well.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I value entertainment and relaxation as much as the next person. There are shows I download and watch regularly, summing up to perhaps four hours per week. The truth is once you target a few specific shows and cut out commercials, there’s really not that much to watch.

So save time, learn something new, try something different, build your relationships, and for your own sake, turn off the TV.

Noah Arobo explores how to be fit, happy and successful at Noprobo.com. Recently he challenged himself to break a longtime habit whilst packing on the sexy.

Photo by Joe Edwards

Do you want to be effective? Then you need to focus only on a few important things. This is the essence of the 80/20 rule. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. You might try to simplify your life only to find that you are still doing too many things at once. You might try to simplify your life and still be overwhelmed by your responsibilities.

But why does it happen? Why is it often difficult to apply the 80/20 rule? I think one important reason is that we lack the willingness to let go.

Just think about it. If you focus only on the top 20% then you need to let go the rest 80%. Imagine doing ten things and then letting go eight of them. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound easy to me.

But focus is essential so it’s important to build the willingness to let go. The better you are at it, the more you can focus without being distracted along the way.

Here are four lessons I learn that help build the willingness to let go:

1. You can’t do everything you want. No matter how hard you try, you can’t do everything you want. You simply don’t have enough time and willpower to do them. You will always have to choose and you will always miss something. Some people don’t like to miss something but that’s how life works. Be aware that you can’t do everything you want and it will be easier for you to let go.

2. Focus is necessary to go through failure period. To be successful at something, there’s a period of failure you must go through. You can only go through it if you focus your effort. Being all over the place means that you will never do that and you will end up in failure. Only by letting go can you have the focus necessary to achieve something valuable.

3. You will get more than what you miss. By letting go you will miss something. But you will eventually get more than what you miss. The higher level of focus allows you to achieve a level of success that would be impossible otherwise. Just you need to remember that you won’t be successful overnight so you need to have the faith that you’ll make it.

4. If something is really important, it will get back to you.You might worry that you will miss something important. But remind yourself that if something is truly important, it will somehow get back to you. It could be through the people around you or through other channels. If it doesn’t, then it’s not that important.

Photo by Fr Antunes

Do you want to be productive? Then you need to get organized. Getting organized helps you do your work efficiently. You won’t waste time and energy trying to get the resources you need when you need them. You won’t miss opportunities just because you forget something.

I recently read a good book on this topic titled Getting Organized in the Google Era by Douglass C. Merrill (former CIO of Google) and James A. Martin. The book aims to help you get organized by taking full advantage of the tools the Internet era provides.

Let’s dig deeper into the book.

Inside Getting Organized in the Google Era

The book has three parts with a total of fifteen chapters.

Part One. A Panoramic View of You

1. Cocktail Parties & Cap’n Crunch -  A Journey Inside Your Brain

Many people try to organize their lives in a way that doesn’t match the way their brains work. Doing that will only lead to failure. There are many limitations of your brain that you need to be aware of. For instance, the brain isn’t good at remembering. So you need to get stuff out of your head as quickly as possible.

2. Summer Vacations, Suburbia, & Factory Shifts -  Overcoming Organizational Challenges in a Disorganized World

Many things that have become conventional wisdom are actually based on outdated principles. A clear example is the nine-to-five work style. It’s no longer the best way to work in the world we live in now, yet most people still do it.

3. Racecars, Basketball Shorts, & Opera – Owning up to Our Personal Constraints

You need to consider your personal constraints. Be careful though: there are assumed constraints and real constraints. You should distinguish between them so that you don’t waste time on the wrong things.

4. Climb That Mountain or Chill in the Barcalounger? – The Importance of Having Clear Goals

Having clear goals is important to organize your life. It helps you know what information to keep and what to ignore. It helps you make the right decisions. But, though you need to have clear goals, you should be flexible in your way to reach them.

Part Two. The New Organization – and How to Achieve It

5. Beyond Taylorism & Trapper Keepers – Why Search Matters

What makes the Google era different is the power of search. In the past, you needed to carefully file each piece of information in order to retrieve it. Today that’s no longer necessary. You can instead use search tools to find exactly what you want.

6. Paris, France, or Paris, Vegas? – How to Master the Art of Search

To fully utilize the power of search, you should master the art of search. Learn the tricks of your search tools to get the most out of them. On Google, for instance, there are many search operators that you can use to refine your searches.

7. Colored Markers & Filters – Making Information Stick

Remember only what you need to remember. As such, the first thing you should do is filtering. Having clear goals helps you decide what to do with a piece of information.

8. Day-Timer or Digital? – When, and When Not, to Go Paperless

There is no such thing as a perfect organization system; you should find the system that works best for you. This also applies to the choice between paper and digital tools. There are areas where paper is better (such as for taking quick notes) and there are areas where digital tools are better (such as for manipulating data).

9. Beyond Send & Receive – Turning Your E-mails into a Searchable History That’s All About You

Your e-mail account is a key part of your organization system. Gmail is especially good for this because it has features like label, conversation, and advanced search that make it easy to organize your data.

10. Thanks for Sharing – Why You Should Keep Your Calendar in the Cloud

Google Calendar is a good tool to manage your calendar because you can create multiple calendars in it and share each of them with different people. This way you share only the part of your schedule that’s relevant to someone.

11. A Browser, an Operating System, & Some Cool Stickers – Organizing Your Documents and Web Content

Do you want to create a document collaboratively with other people? Google Docs is what you need. You can use it, for instance, to create meeting notes that every participant may edit. You can also use it to create personal documents.

Part Three. Overcoming Challenges, Big and Small

12. Avoiding Brain Strain – Strategies for Minimizing Distractions and Staying Focused Throughout the Workday

Shifting contexts – especially if it happens frequently – is harmful to your productivity. You need focus to get things done so minimize distractions whenever possible. If distractions do happen, minimize the effect by making the transitions easier for you (for example, by making notes of where you are before moving to something else).

13. Checking E-mail from the Beach – How to Integrate Work and Life

Don’t put your work and life in separate compartments. Instead, integrate them. This is a better approach for “work-life balance” in the world we live in now. Take time for yourself during workday. On the other hand, you could handle some small tasks during the weekend.

14. Dealing with the Unexpected

Unexpected things happen, so you need to prepare for them. And have some friends to help you because in hard times it might be difficult for you to think clearly.

15. Putting It All Together

Apply the organization principles to the challenges you face. For example, if you are looking for a job then you can use the principles to organize information that’s relevant for your job search.

Conclusion

Getting Organized in the Google Era guides you to the organization principles that are relevant to today’s opportunities and challenges. One of the author (Douglas C. Merrill) has a PhD in cognitive science, so this book has a strong emphasis on organizing yourself in a way that matches the way your brain works. The book itself is organized in a brain-friendly way: it has an Encoding section at the end of each chapter that summarizes the key points of the chapter.

In addition to the tools covered in the three parts of the book, it has an Appendix that introduces you to a lot of online tools for different purposes. I found some tools I’d never heard of here.

There are some parts of the book that I don’t fully agree with though. For instance, I think the advice on creating strong passwords (by combining some clues in your life) is inefficient and difficult to apply, especially if you need a lot of different passwords. It takes too much work both to create and retrieve them. In my opinion, using a password manager application is a much better approach.

A few months ago I wrote a post on personal analytics. There I discussed how more and more people make their life decisions based on numbers. They don’t make their decisions based on what they feel but based on facts. This way their decisions are well-informed and based on strong foundations.

How can we apply personal analytics to our lives? The key is to track your life metrics. Only by tracking them can you get the numbers upon which to make informed decisions.

Unfortunately, the tracking process is still mostly manual these days (with a few exceptions like Nike+ that can automatically track your running speed and distance). Because of that, if you track too many metrics you risk spending too much time on the tracking process at the expense of doing real work.

So the best thing to do is to track just a few important metrics. This way you can get the benefits without spending too much time on the tracking process. Here are three essential things you should track:

1. Income and expenses

You should know how much money you make and how much money you spend on different things. Many people aren’t aware that they have financial problems until everything is too late. Or perhaps they’re aware, but they don’t know how it happened. Consequently, they have no idea how to solve it.

That’s why it’s important that you take note of your income and expenses. Doing that helps you spot the weak areas in your personal finance so that you can take the necessary actions.

To track your income and expenses, you can use a spreadsheet or a personal finance application. Here are a few personal finance applications you can use:

• Quicken
• Mint
• Wesabe
• GnuCash

One simple rule on money management that I find useful is to spend your money to buy assets whenever possible.

2. Time

Have you ever had days where you wondered why you’ve accomplished so little? That’s one reason why you need to track your time. You need to know where your time went.

There are many ways to do this. You can create a time log where you record all your activities during the day along with the time and duration. This could be burdensome though. A simpler way is to just track how many productive sessions you have in a day. The Now Habit (here is my review) suggests a session to be thirty minutes long but it’s up to you. The important thing is to make sure that the productive session is indeed productive. Reading e-mails and random browsing don’t count. Alternatively, you can track your time indirectly by tracking your goals for the day or week. If you achieve your desired goals then you know that you’ve used your time productively.

To track your time, you can use a timer and spreadsheet or use a dedicated time tracking application like Klok and RescueTime. If you choose to track your goals, you can use a to-do list application like Remember the Milk or even just a text file.

3. Habits

Do you have a good habit that you want to build or a bad habit that you want to break? As Peter Drucker said, what get measured get managed. So tracking it is a good way to reach your goal.

You can do it simply by taking notes of how many times you do the habit in a certain period of time. You can then see how your score is for that period of time. With good habit, the goal is to maximize the score while with bad habit the goal is to minimize it. If you want to, you can reward yourself whenever you make an improvement. A spreadsheet or a text file is enough for tracking your habits.

***

The first and second metrics deal with your personal resources: money and time. They are limited so you must make sure that you use them wisely. There’s still one more important resource actually, which is your energy, but I don’t know how to track it (any idea?). The third metric deals with your habits which, of course, are essential for an effective life.

By tracking your personal finance, time, and habits, you increase your awareness of your life. This helps you not only to figure out what problems you might have but also to take the necessary actions to solve them.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by a task or project? Perhaps you need to write a report that requires a lot of effort to prepare. Or you need to do something you don’t like that seems big and difficult.

In such situations, there are two responses you might take. The first one is procrastinating. Procrastinating is a way to temporarily relieve the pain associated with being overwhelmed. When you procrastinate, you choose to delay doing the task so that you don’t have to deal with it. The second response is doing the task despite being stressed. You still do what you need to do, but you have many things in your mind that drain your mental energy.

To deal with the situation, there is a good tip in The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz:

I had the good fortune of being trained at Skip Barber’s racing school… What they taught me at Skip Barber was all about focus. In order to navigate the course at top speeds, I was trained to focus exclusively on the next turn while the car was still piloting the current one… Not the current one, nothing beyond the next one, just the next turn.

The paragraph is written in the context of running a company but I believe it’s also applicable to individuals. If you want to be more productive, you should focus exclusively on the next thing to do. Don’t think about what you did or what to do later. Just focus on the one thing that you need to do next. Doing this simplify the situation since you don’t have many things in your mind. Instead of having your energy distracted by the past and the future, you focus your energy on the task that you need to do now.

What if you still feel overwhelmed? Then make it simpler. Break the task to even simpler tasks.

Focus only on the next turn and you will navigate your tasks and projects at top speeds.

Photo by iwona_kellie

Note: This is a guest post by Glen Allsopp of PluginID

With the current economic situation, we are all looking to get more done in less time. Bosses are working out which staff to keep and which to let go, ex-students are looking to shine for future prospective employers and people who work from home realise they need to get more done on a daily basis.

With that in mind, I thought sharing some of my productivity tips would be of use to many of the Life Optimizer readers. These tips have helped put me in a position of being able to work from home in my own time, on projects that I enjoy.

Twice the Work in Half the Time

Plan Before You Execute – Unless you are one very efficient and productive individual, you’ll find that there are times where we sit down to do a project and then we just wander off into doing something completely different. For me this is common when I have to research something (online) and I end up getting distracted by all the intriguing sites the web has to offer; before I know it I’ve completely stopped focusing on my original task.

To give a personal example of planning before I execute, you could look at my blogging strategy. I always come up with a post title first, but after that I would sit down, open up my blog editor and hope ideas would come to me while typing. This works sometimes, but it’s certainly not very productive, and a blog post can end up taking 3 hours instead of 30 minutes.

Instead, I brainstorm on a piece of paper the main points that I want to cover in the article and then I actually go to my blog editor and start fleshing them out. This might add 10 minutes to my working time initially, but once I sit down it’s a total breeze. Whatever you are going to work on, have a quick plan of what you need to do instead of hoping the ideas will come or dealing with the ‘problem’ when the situation arises.

Work in the Quietest Time Possible – I worked at home for 6 months before moving across the world to South Africa, getting an office job in an industry I love. It was the first time I’ve worked in an office, so it took a while to get used to the activity of my surroundings. I’ve found that, without a doubt, my most productive time is when there is less going on around me.

Our work schedules were fairly flexible, so if I came into the office an hour earlier I would leave an hour earlier, or if I came in an hour later, I then left an hour later (I tended to go for the later option). I noticed that my last hour at work, when most people were at home, was far more productive, even in the same amount of time.

Three key areas I noticed that were the quietest included:

• In the mornings before most people arrived
• In the afternoon when most people had left
• During lunch, therefore I would change my own lunch schedule at times

Even if you don’t work in an office, you can use this to be free from distractions such as your kids, your partner or even just your friends. For example, if you work from home you could wake up early before everyone has gotten out of bed and get cracking on your projects for the day.

Eliminate All Distractions – Work distractions come in many forms. For me, I was often distracted by other websites (my job is online), Email, Instant Messaging clients and phone calls. You need to be aware of what distractions may be affecting you so that you can eliminate them from your environment / schedule.

Other possible distractions include:

• Colleagues
• TV
• Music
• Construction Work

Try to find a quiet place where you can work and eliminate as many distractions as possible. Limit your email checking to only one or twice per day, if you must use Instant Messaging clients then set your status to busy and if you must make phone calls, make them on a lunch hour. It’s likely the receiver will be in a rush to put down the phone, just as much as you.

Outsource What You Can – Before you think you can’t afford outsourcing, think again. You can hire virtual assistants for as little as $3 per hour who are very capable of:

• Sending emails
• Making phone calls
• Conducting research
• Completing documents (providing they have enough information)
• …and much more

If you are dealing with sensitive information, it’s probably best to have your virtual assistant or freelancer sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) so that your confidential information actually stays confidential. I tend to outsource manual work that can be done fairly easy by anybody but takes up a lot of my time. That way, I can focus on my areas of expertise and make more money back which covers my outsourcing fees and works best for me.

Write Down Your Most Important Tasks – Often, it’s not even our own lack of effort that causes some projects to take a long time; it’s simply that we focus on the wrong area to work. Each day before you start to do anything, write down the MIT’s that you would like to complete. MIT’s (Most Important Tasks) are the things which you need to get done which take priority.

Even if you spend all of your working day on the first of those MIT’s, there is no way your day could have been more productive. Think about that one.

What tips do you have for being more productive?

Glen Allsopp writes for PluginID on the subject of Personal Development. His goal is to help people see they can be who they want to be and live the life they want to live.

Photo by Bug-a-Lug

Have you ever feel overwhelmed in your life or career? Do you want to have more free time for your loved ones and still be productive? The Power of Less by Leo Babauta aims to help you do that. The goal of the book is to help you do less but achieve more. In the author’s words:

Picture a life in which you have a fairly peaceful workday, where stress levels are minimal, where you’re able to focus on your work. Imagine that you only do a few tasks, but they’re chosen so that they have the most impact. You accomplish major goals without the stress of doing everything at once.

Sounds like a great life, doesn’t it? I definitely want to do less but achieve more.

Let’s look inside the book.

Inside The Power of Less

The book has two parts with a total of eighteen chapters. Part one deals with the guiding principles and part two deals with how to implement those principles in key areas of your life.

Part I: The Principles

1. Why Less Is Powerful

If you are trying to do too much, you will feel stressed and overwhelmed. Even worse, you can be busy without accomplishing anything important. By choosing the essential, you will do less but get the most impact.

2.  The Art of Setting Limits

To help you choose the essential, you should set limits in everything you do. The limits force you to choose which are essential and which are not.

3. Choosing the Essential, and Simplifying

With the limits in place, how do you know which things are essential? This chapter has a series of questions to help you decide whether or not something is essential.

4. Simple Focus

To be effective, focus is your most important tool. Don’t spread yourself too thin. At any time, focus on just one task and focus on the present.

5. Create New Habits, and the Power of Less Challenge

You need to create new habits to make lasting improvements in your life. To successfully create new habits, focus on forming just one habit a month.

6. Start Small

One more tip for creating new habits: start small and make small increments over time. Don’t make drastic changes.

Part II: In Practice

7. Simple Goals and Projects

You should focus on just one goal at a time to increase your effectiveness. And don’t work on too many projects to achieve that goal. Choose only a few and focus on finishing them.

8. Simple Tasks

Each day, choose the three most important tasks (MITs) and work on them first before doing anything else. This way you can be sure that you will get the important tasks done.

9. Simple Time Management

Keep your time management simple by reducing your tasks and appointments. And do similar tasks at once to save time.

10. Simple E-mail

Minimize your time on e-mail so that you can spend more time on important things. To do that, you should reduce the number of e-mails that come into your inbox and have clear rules to deal with them.

11. Simple Internet

Apply limitations to your Internet usage so that you use it productively. Don’t let it become a productivity black hole. Also learn to work while disconnected to minimize distractions.

12. Simple Filing

Don’t waste your time going through stacks to find the documents you need. A simple filing system will help you find what you need quickly.

13. Simple Commitments

One thing you should do to free up time for the important is cutting back your commitments. Choose only a few essential commitments and eliminate the rest. Learn to say “no” to new requests.

14. Simple Daily Routine

Having simple daily routines can help you boost your day. A morning routine can help you prepare for the day ahead and an evening routine can help you prepare for tomorrow.

15. Declutter Your Work Space

Having a decluttered desk will help you focus on the task at hand. So get your desk down to the essentials and eliminate the rest. Have a simple system to process incoming papers and store items.

16. Slow Down

Slowing down your pace will make you not only happier, but also more effective. There are several ways to apply it: move your attention slowly, work slowly, eat slowly, and drive slowly.

17. Simple Health and Fitness

By eating healthily and exercise regularly, you will have greater energy and productivity. So form the habit of exercise and healthy eating. Start small and increase it gradually.

18. On Motivation

Making the all the changes suggested in this book requires motivation. This chapter gives you a lot of tips on how to find and sustain the motivation you need to make lasting changes in your life.

Conclusion

The Power of Less is a useful book that helps you do less but achieve more. Trying to do a lot could make you feel stressed and unhappy. This book advocates doing less but doing the right things and doing them well. The Power of Less is the right book for those who feel overwhelmed in any area of their life or feel like they can’t achieve anything important although they are busy. This book can also help you maintain your life balance.

What I like about the book is instead of just talking about the theory, it is full of practical tips in each chapter. You can apply them right away and start feeling the difference in your life.

When talking about productivity, we often talk about how to do things efficiently to save time. While doing things efficiently could save you time in the short term, you may still lose time in the long term. The reason is that you lose more time not by how you do things but by what you don’t do. Not doing things efficiently could cost you hours or days, but not doing things at all could cost you months or years.

Why does it happen? Why don’t people do what is right to do? There are three reasons for that:

1. They don’t know what is right to do.
2. They know what is right to do  but underestimate its importance.
3. They know it’s important but procrastinate doing it.

In this post I will focus on the first and second reasons. For the third reason you can read defeating procrastination habit or my review of The Now Habit.

The first and second reasons have cost me time again and again. One example in blogging is regarding Amazon Associates program. Since the early days of my blogging I often write about the books I read. Some of the posts (like 37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters and 106 Tips to Become a Master Connector) became popular and attracted a lot of visitors. But I didn’t know that I could earn commissions by referring people to Amazon through those post. Only after blogging for almost one year did I realize that and join Amazon Associates.

Experiences like this teach me that to save time I need to prevent such things from happening again in the future. I must find the right things to do and do them.

Here are some tips to save time by finding the right things to do:

1. Expand your knowledge

The first thing you should do is expanding your knowledge. If you don’t even know that something exists then there is nothing you can do about it. That’s why it’s important that you get as many options as possible on your radar. You can do this by regularly reading books, magazines, and blogs in your field. You can also read materials from other fields – whether they are related or not – so that you can cross-pollinate ideas. Of course, reading is just one way to expand knowledge. There are other ways like watching videos, attending seminars, and joining professional organizations.

2. Write down all potential ideas

While expanding your knowledge, you will find potential ideas along the way. Write down all of them in your idea journal. The act of writing makes the ideas sink deeper into your mind. You should write not only the ideas that incrementally improve your way of doing things but also the ideas that could radically change the way you do things. I often get such ideas from unrelated fields and experiences.

3. Take the ideas seriously

This is where I often make mistakes. It deals with the second reason above: knowing what is right to do but underestimating its importance. To overcome it, whenever you encounter an idea ask yourself: what if the idea is right? What consequences will it have on my way of doing things? Perhaps there is no consequences right now, but what are the potential consequences five or ten years from now?

4. Find the ideas that have the biggest potential regret for you

Since you have only limited resources (whether they are time, money, or energy) and most likely many potential ideas, you should choose only a few of them that are most promising to implement. My favorite way of doing this is by assessing the potential regret I would have if I didn’t implement an idea.

Imagine yourself years from now looking back. What can you potentially regret if you don’t implement the idea? Questioning potential consequences as you do in #3 should help you find the regret level you could have if you don’t implement it.

So here is a key question to choose the few ideas to look deeper into:

Which ideas – assuming the ideas are right – could make you regret the most if you don’t implement them?

5. Investigate the ideas

Now that you have a few promising ideas, you should look deeper into them. Get as much information as possible about them. Ask or learn from people who already apply them. Use the questions what, why, when, where, who, and how to guide your investigation:

• What is the idea?
• Why should I apply the idea? Why is it good?
• When should I apply the idea?
• Where can I apply the idea?
• Who should apply the idea? To whom should the idea be applied?
• How should I apply the idea?

If possible, find multiple viewpoints for the questions so that you get complete view of the idea.

6. Test the most promising ideas

From your investigation you will get one or two most promising ideas. Now what you need to do is testing them in the real world. Apply the ideas. Incorporate them into what you do. Find out by yourself whether or not the ideas work. Some of them will fail but that’s how you improve yourself to save time in the future.

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These tips will help you save time in the long term. As you’ve seen, the idea is to minimize your potential regret. Minimizing your potential regret has nothing to do with playing safe. Instead, it requires you to take risks here and there.

Photo by Michel Filion

Can you imagine being productive without setting priorities for your tasks? It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s a characteristic of Getting Things Done (GTD). The lack of priority in GTD makes it different from many time management practices that use things like ABC method to set priorities for tasks.

As I wrote in my review of Ready for Anything, David Allen handles this problem by introducing a simple distinction: projects and someday/maybe. Either something needs to be done as soon as possible (which makes it a project) or not (which makes it a someday/maybe).

After knowing this, I then asked myself: Don’t we need to distinguish different projects to know which ones are more important? Don’t we still need to set priority?

Around the time when I was thinking about it, I watched Randy Pausch’s lecture on Time Management. There he featured Covey’s quadrant that classifies tasks into four quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent
  For example, finishing a report that due tomorrow.
• Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent
  For example, building relationships.
• Quadrant 3: Not Important but Urgent
  For example, unimportant phone calls.
• Quadrant 4: Not Important and Not Urgent
  For example, playing games excessively.

Then, connecting this quadrant concept to GTD’s lack of priority, I saw a place where we don’t need to set priority:

We don’t need to set priority when we are in quadrant 2

The reason is simple:

For tasks that are considered important, priority setting are only necessary when some tasks are urgent.

When you need to finish something tomorrow, you have no choice but to work on it first. You must give it high priority. The situation is different when you have plenty of time to do your tasks. You have the freedom to choose what you want to do at any moment. You don’t need priority setting because – though the tasks are important – none of them is urgent.

So I would say that:

GTD’s natural place is quadrant 2

Of course, GTD can help you manage crisis (quadrant 1), but quadrant 2 is its natural place. Quadrant 2 is where you can have “mind like water”.

If you want to reach this position where you no longer need to set priority, here are some things you should do:

1. Eliminate unimportant tasks

This should be the first thing you do. You can’t afford to have your time spent on unimportant tasks in quadrant 3 and 4. So look at each item in your next action or project list, and ask yourself: Do I need to do this as soon as possible? Think before you answer. Be selective. Being selective is essential because you may leave some unimportant tasks otherwise.

If the answer is yes then you can leave the task in your project or next action list.

If the answer is no, then the next question is: Can I eliminate this? If you say yes then just eliminate it. Otherwise, put the task in your someday/maybe list.

Though it would be difficult to eliminate all tasks in quadrant 3 (sometimes you just can’t prevent unimportant phone calls), do your best to eliminate as many of them as possible.

2. Get the urgent things done

The time you save in step 1 can then be used to get tasks in quadrant 1 done. The key here is not to procrastinate (see Review: The Now Habit and 7 Can’t-Miss Ways to Defeat the Procrastination Habit for tips). The sooner you work on quadrant 1 tasks, the sooner you will finish them. Your goal is to clear quadrant 1 as soon as possible.

3. Finish tasks before they become urgent

Now that you have cleared quadrant 1, you can focus your effort on quadrant 2. Look at tasks that can potentially be urgent in the future and work on them. Try to finish them before they become urgent. This way you can keep your quadrant 1 clear.

4. Keep pushing back

You can take the previous point further by keep pushing back. Start with the tasks that will due first and get them done. Then push back and work on the task that will due next. This way you clear your tasks further to the future and you will have enough “cushion” for unexpected things. When unexpected things come, you can handle them without compromising your performance. It will also give you the freedom and flexibility to quickly seize on unexpected opportunities as they arise.

5. Allocate time for tasks that never become urgent

There are some tasks that will never become urgent though they are important. As I wrote above, building relationships is an example. For this kind of tasks, you should allocate time to do them. Make a commitment to do it as soon as possible and put it in your project or next action list.

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When you do all these, you no longer need to set priority. You have the freedom to do what you want. You do something not because you have to but because you choose to.