Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Sluuurp...

Steve Pavlina's rockin' the house on his blog this week.  Check out today's post on self-discipline - bring your thirst for learning, and drink up!

My favorite line: 

"But eventually I faced the reality that trying to wait out my life wasn’t working. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to have to do something about it. And initially this meant tackling a lot of difficult challenges, but I overcame them and grew a lot stronger in a short period of time."

That, my friends, is what it's all about.

Read More

Take note (but no Moleskine for me)

Michael Hyatt has some thoughts on taking notes on Working Smart right now and, while I agree with most of his advice, I have my own variations on note taking techniques. Specifically, I disagree with his choice of notebook. Like Michael, I tried (and loved) the Moleskine notebook, but it didn't work for me as a note taking implement (though it is perfect as a journal or diary).

My favored technique was inspired by David Allen's use of legal pads, which allowed him to tear things off and put them in "In." Here is what I do:

I carry around a spiral notebook with micro-perforated pages, and take all my notes in there (here's a grainy Treo 600 snapshot of mine).

I prefer notebooks by a company called "Notebound" because they are cheap and durable, but look professional enough for a high-level business meeting. They also have a plastic pocket inside, which is good for stashing a couple of business cards and to serve as a traveling inbox when I don't have my red folder with me. I can also put temporary things like directions, etc. that I've printed out to help me get where I'm going. I can find these at Walgreen's for around $5 for the 10.5" x 8.5" size (120 or 160 page versions are available).

Here's where these are different from those beautiful Moleskine's: As I process the pages, I can tear them out and a) discard them, b) put the action items into my Outlook task list, c) file them, d) hand them off to someone else.

When I take notes, it's just for taking notes - so this process works for me. It means that I don't carry around a bunch of old notes that I will probably never read, and since I tear out pages as I process them I can see at a glance how much needs to be processed.

When I have notes I *do* want to retain in their original form, I can file them just like I would file any other piece of paper. More often than not, I need to summarize the outcomes of meetings in an email to other people and I use that opportunity to distill the meeting down to its core elements, then file that in my electronic filing system (which I can search easily with Lookout).

How do you deal with notes?

Read More

[Updated] Activewords

As I mentioned the other day, I've been trying out ActiveWords at Bren's suggestion. Well, I've seen enough. I'm now a happily registered owner of ActiveWords PLUS!

In addition to the things I mentioned in my previous post regarding the ease of creating Outlook notes and tasks without having to even run Outlook, one of the things that put me over the top was a suggestion from Buzz Bruggeman, the CEO of ActiveWords.

He noticed I was a MindManager user, so he suggested I set up activation words to start my maps. How cool is that? Now, for example, when I want to go to my top-level Project map in MindManager, I simply hit [Ctrl]+[Space] to get the ActiveWords console to pop up, then I enter "prj" and - shazam - my project map comes up!

This is a great productivity-increasing, time-saving app and it's effectively removing barriers to procrastination for me. As you know, I'm a big fan of that.

Read More

Some of my favorite tools

I've gotten a few questions recently about my "must have" tools for personal productivity, so here are a few (with potentially more to follow, if folks are interested):

Roboform AI - This is an add-in program that securely stores your personal information and fills out web forms, passwords, and other web-centric information for you.

  • It has a toolbar that shows up in IE and Firefox and can track multiple profiles (home, business, etc.) for both address information and payment information. It can even generate random, secure passwords for web sites -- and track them for you. Pretty cool stuff.
  • Note: I resisted using something like this for a really long time, and decided to take the plunge about 6 months ago. Now, I have noticed that it saves me a ton of time.
  • They have a long trial period - worth a try.

Anagram - This one makes it easy to add appointments, contacts, and other stuff into Outlook (it also supports Palm, and Salesforce.com).

  • Pretty simple - highlight the text, hit Ctrl-C twice, and it automagically figures out how to put it into Outlook in the right form. It's pretty smart.
  • A very generous 45-day trial period.
Puretext - This allows you to remove the goofy formatting from stuff that's on your Windows clipboard, and paste it in 'plain old text' into any application.
  • To use: copy just like you always do, but when you paste you hit the <Windows key>+V instead of <Ctrl>+V and it strips out all the special characters. This is a good shortcut to having to go to the edit menu in Windows apps to select "Paste Special..." from the menu.
  • It's free!

Sharpreader - This is an RSS feeed reader / aggregator that I find very easy to use. I have a couple dozen blogs I follow on a regular basis, and use Sharpreader to bring them together. It will grab them automatically and I can then read them off-line (on planes or whatever). It can be scheduled to poll and retrieve my subscribed sittes on a scheduled basis, which I love. I have it running in my Startup group in Windows.

  • It's free!

MindManager - I never used to engage other people to help me solve problems. MindManager helped change that.

  • This is such a great tool for creating mind maps, facilitating brainstorming, and bringing people up to speed very quickly on 'where my head is at' on issues.
  • I've found that using diagrams and maps to discuss issues really makes it easy to keep debates focused on the issue - and it doesn't become personal.
  • Again, a decent trial period. And the sales folks are nice (my sales person was Laryssa, who was great to work with). I ended up buying MindManager X5 Pro.

Just so you know, I have no affiliation with any of these products other than being a happy customer. 

Others might see me write about in the future:

Read More

What's your filter?

Yesterday a couple of cohorts and I were teaching a class on how to do IT audits of change management. This consisted of some lecturing, followed by a few role plays in which auditors interviewed us acting out the parts of a CIO and a Director of IT Operations.

During the exercise, we noticed how large groups of people can hear the same thing and emerge with different pictures of "the truth."

After the class, one of the other instructors said it reminded him of a story he heard once:

A shoe company sent two salesmen to a remote part of Africa to scope out the market.

The first one comes back and says, "It's a terrible market - nobody wears shoes."

The other one comes back and says, "It's a great market - nobody wears shoes!"

A good story, whether it's true or not. Then, on my morning drive today I was listening to "Getting Things Done Fast" and David talks about how you sometimes have to "tune yourself to a different frequency" to change the outcomes your getting.

A good reminder to reflect on what filters might be affecting our results.

Read More