Genuine Curiosity

Awesome “give & get” opportunity

In my last post, I reviewed Rajesh Setty’s book, Upbeat.  Well, I finally got around to subscribing to his new newsletter and was pleasantly surprised that this entitled me to download a PDF copy of his book, “Beyond Code” (which I’ve also reviewed).

This is a phenomenal example of “give & get” – you give Rajesh permission to keep in touch with you in his newsletters, and you get a free copy of a very powerful book.

By the way – I just realized it’s been over 3½ years since I first read Beyond Code, and I still feel its impact.  I have re-read it a couple of times, and have recommended it to others countless times.

If you want to sign up for Rajesh Setty’s newsletter, you can do so by clicking this link.

[Updated] Quick clicks for Monday

Last night I was getting caught up on my online reading and finally got a chance to spend time on some of the sites on my “to read” list.  Here are a couple you should click on:

• My friend Derek Newman’s new blog, “Just Thirty Minutes A Day” [updated with new link to Derek’s newly redesigned site]. He just jumped back into the blogging fray on a new topic and is focused on personal productivity tips.
• A good article on “12 Essentials for the Digital Nomad,” which came to me via Phil Gerbyshak.
• Good resources at John Richardson’s “Success Begins Today” 5 Minute Resources page.  I am trying out the 5 minute outliner.
• On the lighter side (via YouTube), there is a funny new episode of “Ask A Ninja” available, as well as a new installment from season 2 of Chad Vader (this episode: The Basement Strikes Back).

Have a great and productive week!

Loves me some books

The annual "A Love Affair With Books" (ALAWB) is going on this month at Joyful Jubilant Learning. If you're a reader and haven't visited ALAWB yet: what are you waiting for?

Each book is discussed by a different blogger, so you get a ton of different perspectives. Mine went live this week - check out my discussion of "The Red Rubber Ball at Work."

By the way - this year is different than last year. In the past, the books have been mostly business / nonfiction books but a few fictional works have found their way into the mix this year.

Pause and Resume

You may have noticed that I’ve been a bit quieter than usual here of late.  You see, I’ve been dealing with the illness and death of my father-in-law, and I pressed the “Pause” button while traveling this past week for his funeral.  He was a wonderful man - we will miss him, and I will be forever shaped by the beautiful example of his life.

While I have your attention, I might as well give you an idea of what you can expect in the near future as I press Play again:

• I’ll share my early experience with Amazon’s Kindle 2;
• I’ll (of course) review a number of books, including one that provides a very intriguing alternative to GTD;
• I’ll review a backup service that provides an interesting alternative to Mozy;
• I’ll be sharing more about some interesting gadgets and travel tips;
• And more.

Also, if you have feedback on what you like or don’t like here (more of x; less of y; etc.) drop me a line (Email Me).

Twitter: What’s the deal?

Over the past month or so, I’ve found my sea legs on Twitter.  I went from thinking it was a goofy fountain of randomness to something that is actually helping me increase my “reach” in interacting with the world (both sharing what I’ve found and learning from more people).

Want to know more about Twitter?  Here is a great video that describes how it works (this is from an awesome series of videos from commoncraft – check it out).  If you don’t see the embedded video, you can go there with this link.

If you want to ‘follow’ me on Twitter, you can do so by going to my Twitter page and clicking the “Follow” button.  You’ll need to sign up if you don’t already belong to this crazy thing.

You can also just lurk (i.e. watch without participating), both on my Twitter page or by watching the Twitter widget in the right-hand navigation bar on my blog.

Link sharing (December 22, 2008)

Here are some links of interest I’ve gathered in the past 24 hours, as shared on Twitter (you can follow me, if you like).

• Mahalo Follow: A fantastic way to share links (like this one) on Twitter.: http://tinyurl.com/2by5mt
• iPhone Applications for Increased Productivity: http://tinyurl.com/455lp3
• Excellent tips for Navigating Through Volatile Times from Andrew Sherman on Phil Gerbyshak’s blog: http://tinyurl.com/8zg8fv
• Horrible layoff "code words" - an analysis by David Zinger: http://tinyurl.com/7gh42z
• Liz Strauss has an awesome list of "Twitter best practices" and people that use them.: http://tinyurl.com/9f85ut
• Nice analysis of Intranet tools that are like Twitter.: http://tinyurl.com/66tewa
• John Richardson gives away free Word templates to drive your success.  Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/8swrgh

I’m just getting more active in sharing links via Twitter – what do you think?  Leave a comment with your feedback.

Hey- look over there!

Yesterday, I posted an article on the JJL site called “Where’s the fire?” and it is starting to gather some excellent advice in the form of comments.  Go check it out – and stay tuned for a review later this week of an awesome book I’m finishing up – I’ll be posting it here on this blog.

Give to live

I know I've been a bit quieter than usual here lately, but I'm resurfacing and I've got some "in progress" posts that you'll start seeing over the next week.  In the mean time, I've just posted an article on Joyful Jubilant Learning for this month's "Giving" theme.

Check it out - and click around to see what some of the other awesome folks in the JJL community are saying about Giving, as well.

Productivity, like crime, requires motive and opportunity

Lately, I've had a non-standard routine going - more time in meetings than I'm used to, more attention-demanding things at both work and home, etc. The interesting side effect is that my days have been much more focused on "must do" than "wanna do" items and tasks. As a result, I'm not doing as many of the fun things as I'd like to - like reading and blogging.

Right now, I'm on a long layover en route to Spain and decided to carve out some time to actually write something. Whew - what a relief it is to be sitting at the keyboard blogging instead of doing emails and working on urgent items.

Diamonds form under pressure

In the past, I've commented quite a few times that one part of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system I don't use is "Contexts." The idea behind GTD's Contexts is to group next actions according to the context in which they can be performed. I found that so much of my tasks could be performed in so many contexts that this wasn't working very well for me so I quit using Contexts.

Well, the "pressure" of these past few weeks has caused me to re-think Contexts. Now, I really do have a lot of tasks that have clear contextual boundaries and I find I need to really maximize the time I spend in each context - much more deliberately than in the past.

Need begets function

As I started to try to use Contexts again, I quickly remembered one of the other reasons I was so anxious to get away from Contexts: the Blackberry does a lousy job with categories, making it hard for me to look at a context-based list.

Therefore, I've come up with a hybrid (read "bastardized") approach to help me get the right things done.

1. I still maintain my lists using Outlook (using ClearContext, of course).
2. Every morning, I do a daily review of my possible tasks, and look at the contexts I expect to be in that day. If there is a "must do" that doesn't have an appropriate context coming up that day, it's time to juggle what's on my calendar to create the opportunity to get the "must do" done.
3. I use one index card (note card) for each of my major contexts, and add the items I must get done that day to the appropriate card.
4. I carry those cards in my shirt pocket and refer to them regularly as I decide what to do next. I also carry around a blank note card that I use to capture new commitments I make during the day and to jot down ideas for other things I want to do later.
5. At the end of the day, I check off (on the card and on Outlook) the things I've gotten done, and add any new items to Outlook.
6. The process repeats the next day.

This takes little pieces of lots of systems - GTD, Managing Your Now, Hipster PDA, etc. but it is working for me right now. I'll probably change it up again when things calm down, but for now, this is my system.

What's my point?

I realized I had lots of motive in my life, but was lacking in the right opportunity (context) to act on my motive. By changing how I assert control over my day, things are getting better. Yes, I'm still crazy busy, but I don't feel quite as reactive.

What about you - any of this resonate? How do you deal with life when you are in these situations?

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Related items:

• Productivity and Efficiency Mojo (10/18/2007)
• My GTD Odyssey - Part 1 (10/10/2006)
• Total Workday Control (6/2/2008)

Learning from mistakes

I had the honor of kicking of the new month at Joyful Jubilant Learning. This month's theme is "BLUNDERIFFIX!" which focuses on the good things you can learn when bad things happen to you (or because of you).

When you're in the heat of the moment, it can be tough to see your way out of a difficult situation, but I find that I get a lot of value out of reflecting on what went wrong to extract the learning. I encourage you to write - not just think - about a situation in your life that was a failure, near-failure, debacle, etc. and try to find a positive thing you learned from it. There is something focusing and cathartic about writing these kinds of things down. If you blog, please share you learnings with the world. If not, at least consider keeping a journal so you can codify some of your learning.

Coincidentally, I saw a fitting quote from @HowardBienstock on Twitter yesterday:

"When you're going through Hell, don't stop."

It promises to be a good month of sharing - and my story is about what I learned about relying on others when I realized I couldn't be a "savior" of a tough situation. Click on over today to hear my story, and keep clicking in all month long at JJL.

Del.icio.us tags: learning, Howard Bienstock, Dwayne Melancon, JJL, Joyful Jubilant Learning, mistakes

“50+ Productivity Blogs...” list

Thanks to Dustin Wax for an excellent resource list on Lifehack.org, called "50+ Productivity Blogs You've Never Heard of Before (and about a dozen you probably have)". And double thanks for including me on the list (#18).

Though I was familiar with quite a few on the list, at least half of them are new to me - and after sampling about a dozen of them in the last 30 minutes, I like what I'm finding on his list.

Check it out and go exploring. You can also see Dustin's personal blog at dwax.org.

[Update: Dustin has just added an OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader that will automatically add 62 of the 65 named sites - talk about easy! Just scroll to the bottom of the list and look for the link to the OPML file]

On the trail to learning

You may not have noticed it since I 'pre-wrote' some posts here that went live automatically, but last week I was on a 200-mile horse trek with my son and a bunch of other folks. It was an awesome learning experience, with no phone, no email, no electricity, etc.

There was pletny of time to work hard, reflect, enjoy the scenery, and recharge on that trip. There was also a ton of new things to learn.

I had the chance to share a few insights from that trip in this month's "Rapid Fire Learning" roundup at Joyful Jubilant Learning (JJL). Click through to JJL find out what I learned, and please share your top 5 learnings for June in the comments of that post.

Learning from movies

At Joyful Jubilant Learning, this month's theme is Learning from the Movies. I just posted my thoughts on this topic over there.

In actuality, I didn't write about what I learned from a specific movie. It's more about some of the collective learnings I've gathered from movies, actors, and abominable 3rd movies in multi-movie sagas...

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?

Here’s to you, Marc - wherever you are

I just read the sad news about the passing of one of my favorite friends and personalities in tech, GTD, and just being an all around neat guy - Marc Orchant. I never met Marc in the flesh, but he touched my life in a lot of ways. He was funny, smart, kind, and supportive.

We talked a lot on email, and followed each others blogs regularly. He helped me get mirrored on OfficeZealot a long time ago. I took Marc's Microsoft Outlook online course. But most of all, I just liked Marc and loved his energy and perspective.

I miss you, Marc. My thoughts and prayers to Marc's family.

You can read a wonderful tribute to Marc on bub.blicio.us, which is where this picture came from (photographer: Brian Solis).