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
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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]
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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.
Read MoreAt 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...
Read MoreThanks 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?
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