Genuine Curiosity

Thinking of hanging up my jeans...

I work at a software company, and our dress code around the office is fairly relaxed most of the time. Therefore, when I'll be in the office all day and not seeing any customers in person, I usually wear blue jeans.

The other day, I didn't have any clean jeans so I threw on a pair of khaki trousers from The Gap and went to work. I got quite a few comments like, "Why are you so dressed up - is a customer visiting today?"

Why was I surprised by this reaction? I was (literally) wearing all the same clothes --right down to the shoes-- that I usually wear to work except the blue jeans. Changing my trousers noticeably changed others perception of my professionalism.

This small effect reminded me that it doesn't take much to positively influence how others perceive us. I'm not just talking about clothing - I think the "little bit extra" factor can make a difference in a lot of things we do.

Becoming purposeful

Now, I'm trying to be more conscious of when I could add a "little bit extra" to key activities and deliverables in my job to positively impact others' perception of my work. For example, some examples of areas I can improve are:

• Planning more for meetings I chair and sending out agendas, expectations, and pre-reading ahead of time.
• Being more conscientious about follow-up after meetings and calls, including sending out meeting recaps and action items.
• Being more proactive in informing others in my team about things that I'm working on which may affect them.

This is not an overnight change, as it takes time to develop new habits in this area, but I think it will be worth it. Just added a Next Action to my "@computer - web" list to order more khakis...

What about you - have you discovered any small changes that make a big positive difference?

Favorite line from a family reunion

OK, so this happened a while back, but I just remembered it during a conversation with my mother who's visiting us this week.

At one of our family reunions, I saw an uncle I hadn't seen in about 10 years. He'd gone completely bald since the last time I saw him.

Me: "Hey - what happened to your hair?

Uncle John: "It's the strangest thing - one day I woke up and my forehead went all the way to my ass."

I'll keep that line --I just might need it one day.

Marking up the internet

A while back, I wrote about a tool called "ClipMarks" that I was using to share snippets of web pages with other people. I really like it.

However, I have now found a tool I like better for this, and I have converted to i-Lighter. I'd looked at it before and didn't like it, but they've made significant improvements since then and now I think it is awesome. What's so cool about i-Lighter? Read on...

Easy as a yellow pen (but much better)

i-Lighter is a free browser add-in (Firefox and IE) that gives you the virtual equivalent of a yellow pen that you can use to highlight all or part of a web page. You see the highlights right there on the page.

First, you download the browser add-in and create an account at the i-Lighter site (this stores your highlights centrally in a sort of catalog). Then you click the i-Lighter toolbar button to turn on your yellow pen, and start highlighting.

Share the love

Once you've marked the best parts of the page, then the fun really starts. i-Lighter has a bunch of options for what you can do with your highlights:

• Add a note to the highlights to blend in your own commentary
• Email the page (with highlighting) or just the highlights to someone else (you can create an i-Lighter address book to streamline the process)
• Send the link to Twitter - this automatically creates a tinyurl for you!
• Blog it (Wordpress or Blogger only)
• Tag it on del.ici.ous

I use this quite a bit these days to share news article on interesting topics with my coworkers, and find that i-Lighter makes it very easy. If you want to see i-Lighter in action, check out the online tour.

By the way - this is Windows only for now, but the i-Lighter CEO's blog says a Mac version is likely in the future.

A less geeky walk with thee

After reading an article from the Nov. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, I wanted to get a pedometer that I could use every day. You see, the study says that people who use a pedometer to track their daily steps tend to increase their step count by about 2400 steps per day. I guess it's one of those "That which gets measured gets improved" situations.

Trouble is, I didn't want to hang some funky pedometer on my belt (most pedometers I've seen are either too bulky or gaudy for me to want to wear them every day). I still haven't found a "businesslike" pedometer, but I've found the next best thing: the ThinQ Pocket Pedometer from Sportline. This is designed to fit in your pocket (I find it works great in either your pants pocket or shirt pocket).

It seems about as accurate as my older, geekier pedometer and it is very unobtrusive. The ThinQ also has a clock, a stopwatch, and calculates the distance (be sure and set your stride length for more accuracy) and estimated calories burned through walking.

The ThinQ comes in blue, orange, and green and you can get it on Amazon, and it is on sale at the time of this posting through REI.

By the way - the AMA article also suggests 10,000 steps as a good goal for most people. Walk on, everyone.

Getting Things Blogged

Thanks to my dear friend Rosa, I have been reading a great post from Web Worker Daily on "Getting Things Done (GTD) for Bloggers."

As the name implies, this article is an adaptation of David Allen's Getting Things Done, geared toward bloggers. I think it does a fantastic job of mapping GTD activities to the tasks of blogging. I'm tempted (but maybe not that tempted...) to produce such a mapping for my "day job," too.

Innate or acquired productivity?

As I reflected on this, I was wondering: how much of productivity is learned, and how much is wiring? I have three children, and they each approach organization and planning in very different ways. My youngest is a natural listmaker and planner. For example, this past weekend, she had a sleepover at a friend's house. The Sunday before, she had her bag packed and had created a little sign that she put on top of her bag, reminding her to put her toothbrush, toothpaste, and her favorite stuffed animal in the bag before going to her friend's house.

She's only 7 but she is by far the most "together" member of the house - and this is all stuff she picked up on her own.

So, what do you think? I consider myself to be productive, but not naturally so. I've learned some tricks and techniques to help with organization, but I must work at it to stay with the program - what have you observed in your own life?

An excellent book

A couple of days ago, I posted a review of one of the most re-read books on my shelf: Thick Face, Black Heart by Chin-Ning Chu.

Click on the banner above and check it out. You'll also find a fantastic book-a-day review cycle going on, all part of Joyful Jubilant Learnings annual "Love Affair With Books" - enjoy!

Old school awesome

Ok, so my birthday is coming up in a few weeks and I know what I'm going to start hinting at - this awesome Bluetooth accessory for my mobile phone!

Yep - that's a Bluetooth handset for use with a mobile phone, courtesy of Thinkgeek. I would love to walk around talking on that thing!

What? You say your phone doesn't have Bluetooth? No problem - Thinkgeek has you covered there, too:

.(And no -- this is not an April Fool's joke!)

Rich Idiots

I flew back from European business trip the other day and, as usual, did a bit of reading on the plane. One of the books I read was Robert Shemin's "How Come That Idiot's Rich And I'm Not?" This was a different sort of business book than I expected, from a few of perspectives.

First, the author introduces a lot of contrarian thinking about how to get rich - he firmly believes that conventional thinking about wealth and opportunity prevent most people from becoming wealthy. Second, he provides a lot of very specific steps to become financially successful. Third, he spends a lot of time on philosophy and your outlook on life, in an effort to help you get past preconceived notions about how to make money.

Here's the pitch...

Initially I was a bit turned off by this book, because a lot of the book leads toward a methodology that Shemin offers on his web site and it felt a bit like a late night infomercial (Shemin's program centers around real estate investment schemes). As I read through it, I found myself taking a lot of ideas away that apply whether you use his system or not, and applicable even if you never get into real estate.

For example, there is a section I really liked about "Forgiving and Committing," which I think applies to many situations in life. Shemin even includes "Forgiveness Scripts" to help you learn to ask for forgiveness from friends, family members, and yourself. And don't think asking for forgiveness gets you off the hook - he is very clear that you're still accountable for your actions even if people forgive you for them.

The part about committing provides a clear and concise process to clarify goals and commit to them in an action-centric way. The concepts will be nothing new here, but Shemin's explanation is very easy to follow and will help you get through the fuzzy front end of deciding what you're committing to.

Relax - good things will happen

Another theme in the book relates to the power of positive thinking. Yes, the concept has been around pretty much forever, and has been reinvented in "The Secret", "The Power of Intention," and other books in recent years. In spite of this being an old concept, I find myself learning or identifying with the concept a bit better through each author's adaptation of this model -- and Shemin's take on it in this book is no exception. He has some great stories (some which sound to good to be true, and he acknowledges that in the text but insists they are absolutely true), detailing how various people's lives improved through positive imagery, keeping an open mind, and going out into the world to embrace success. I have seen enough examples of this in my own life to know there is something to it, and found this book's treatment of this concept to be very energizing.

On to the "doing"

The first half of the book is focused mostly on getting your head in a good place and getting to a point where you are able to look beyond some of your preconceived notions about success. In the second half, the author begins to take you into the details of how he has become independently wealthy (in spite of having a severe learning disability and being labeled as an "idiot" by at least one of his teachers, by the way).

The "doing" part of the book deals with how to save, how to invest, how to use credit responsibly, how to create meaningful objectives and action plans, and -- of course -- how to get into the real estate investment business. It's very well written, and quite intriguing.

Summary

As I mentioned early in this review, I enjoyed this book much more than I expected to. According to Shemin's thinking, the very reason I was inclined to write it off as an informercial is the very reason I'm not yet a Rich Idiot: I'm stuck in my "right side up" thinking and I need to turn my thinking upside down. We'll see how I do with that...

Daily Watch Lists

For those of us immersed or enmeshed in the David Allen "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology, lists take on a big part of our daily lives. In a sane day, I go to my lists, consider my options, and pick the "next action" I want to work on based on available time, energy level, and my context. This method can alleviate lots of stress because it makes it easy to live a dynamic life while capturing everything you'd like to do (just add it to the list if you don't want to do it now).

However, many days (and lately, most days), life comes at me pretty fast. On these days, my lists actually increase my stress because there are too many things to choose from. About a year ago, I had to modify my approach to GTD to help me cope with this phenomenon.

My coping mechanism

I have adopted an approach that I call my "Daily Watch List," and I create a list of the things I really must get done today -- no matter what. At the beginning of the day (when things are quieter), I scan my various GTD context lists and identify the top few items (sometimes only 2 or 3, sometimes as many as 6 or 7) that will cause me pain if they don't get done today. I then write them on an index card that I put in my shirt pocket.

I find this approach very focusing because it gives me a shorter list of tasks to focus on within a given day. It's sort of like ordering in a restaurant - I find it easier to decide what I want to eat if the menu is shorter.

Benefits

This approach has several benefits:

• Portability. My lists all "live" in Outlook so when I'm away from my computer I can still keep my "must do" items in front of me at all times. Sure, my tasks synch to my Blackberry but I don't find its interface easy enough to use when things are moving quickly.
• Simplicity. What could be easier than an index card as a low-tech method for tracking your hot items?
• Focus. I've long believed that sometimes you must limit your options to increase your opportunities. I find that this method filters out lots of merely "fun and interesting" tasks and decreases the likelihood that I will go down a rat-hole working on something that doesn't directly contribute to my highest objectives of the day.
• Flexibility. This method blends perfectly with the GTD method. If you find yourself in a context where you aren't able to do any of the things on your Daily Watch List, simply go back to your "big lists" and find the most valuable next action from the most appropriate context list.

Proven effectiveness

As I said, I've been doing this for about a year and am sticking with it. I was commenting to my office-mate the other day that I felt validated because I'd heard about someone else using a similar approach, discussed on a recent interview I received through David Allen's "Connect" subscription. The person on the Connect interview called his approach the "Daily Radar" but the implementation sounded very similar.

As I described it, it turns out that my office mate hadn't noticed I was using this approach (I guess I'm a poor evangelist), but he liked it the minute he heard it and has since adopted it as part of his toolkit. He now says he 'doesn't know how he ever got along without it.'

Give it a try - and let me know how it works for you.