I thought it would be fun to write about “how I work” as well, and expand on it a little to include play.  It’s a question I get asked a lot as a manager at Microsoft, and it certainly fits within my goal to make Refocuser more personal this year.  Instead of just writing generic “how to” articles and checklists of stuff, every once in a while I’ll dig into something a little closer to home.  This started in November with My Happiness Interview and continues here with this post.

I aspire to wake up at the same time each day, around 6:30am.  The exact time is dependent on whether or not my daughter has a cold (like she does now) which makes it a little earlier – or later if she had me up during the night.  I recently bought a wake-up lamp for Seattle winters which has made waking up much easier for me.  I’ve always been a night person.  But gradual increases in light coupled with soft chirping bird sounds is a much more pleasant way to rise than jumping out of bed from the sounds of a beeping alarm clock.

After showering, getting dressed, and quickly making the bed, I meditate in a quiet, dark room for 15 minutes.  If I did this as soon as I woke up, I’d probably just fall right back asleep.  This is time I need to start the day; getting myself into the right frame of mind.  Once the 15 minutes are up, I prepare my daughter’s breakfast along with my own, which is usually a bowl of Kashi GOLEAN cereal with fresh blueberries and 32oz of water.  I use breakfast time to quickly catch-up on email, Twitter, and RSS feeds.  I try to power through my work inbox from the night before to bounce at zero before the day officially begins.  Once we’re finished with breakfast, I spend some time playing with my daughter before she leaves for school.  I always let her choose the activity.

My drive to work takes about a half hour, not including a stop at the local coffee shop for a short cappuccino.  I know everyone who works there at this point, and it’s fun to see them everyday.  They know more about me than a lot of the people I work with everyday.  I use my car as a rolling classroom for both ends of my commute.  Depending on my mood, I listen to either audiobooks or podcasts, and on rare occasion, some music if I want to relax my mind.  Spoken word audio has really helped me to enjoy things I used to try to avoid… like shopping.

I usually get to the office between 9 and 9:30 most days, and hit the ground running with meetings and interviews.  I work hard to balance my schedule over the week so that I only have about 4 meetings each day.  This way I have time to focus on things as they come up (which they always do) and I’m able to walk the halls or have impromptu chats with people on the team.  I also like to use non-meeting time to work with my team on feature design or anything else that needs some work that week, and to catch up with our internal partner teams on work we’re doing together.

I try not to take a laptop to meetings, a habit that most people at Microsoft can’t break.  I figure if I’m not going to pay attention, there’s little point in attending.  Of course there are a few meetings each month which are exceptions, and even without a laptop I do still glance at my smartphone once or twice to see where I’m going next and to make sure nothing has blown up.  Given a meeting-happy culture, I try hard to protect my time by scheduling 15 or 30 minute meetings (instead of an hour) and pushing to get the time back if the meeting isn’t productive.  Inefficient meetings can easily fill the day if you’re not careful.

Our job at Microsoft is to help people organize and tell stories through their digital memories (photos and videos).  With over 1 billion people using Windows around the world, it can be a big, scary mission.  But it’s what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember, so even when I have to deal with the not-so-sexy parts of the job, I try and keep it all in perspective.

Two things I do everyday: eat frequently and get outside.  At 10am, 12pm, and 3pm or so, I make sure to eat – usually greek yogurt, almonds, string cheese, or an apple (see focus snacks) along with a clean lunch.  This keeps my brain working when I need it, otherwise I’d be a walking zombie.  I also go on short walks instead of sitting in my office, usually with my direct reports or peers during weekly 1:1s.  If the meeting doesn’t need a screen or a whiteboard, we’re not doing it sitting down.  The campus has some great places to walk to, and a little fresh air can really help in the middle of the day.

On a busy day, I can easily rack up a few hundred emails.  I’m diligent about having dedicated email bursts throughout the day where I go through my inbox deleting, filing, or replying.  I never read an email twice if I can avoid it.  I also try not to send as many emails as I receive, because that’s just asking for trouble in a place where email is as ubiquitous as Diet Coke.  During the day I try and maintain fewer than 10 emails in my inbox most of the time, and I almost always clear those out before walking out the door.  Getting to zero a few times each day is important to me.

Because I’m usually hopping around from meeting to meeting throughout the day, whenever an idea pops into my head (no matter what the context) I capture it in my task list or my note-taking software.  I don’t have the ability to store and manage everything in my head, so I rely on this habit more than any other to keep me from forgetting important things.  I do regular sweeps (usually at the end of each day) where I’ll go through my tasks and notes and make sure things are heading in the right direction.  Collecting my thoughts doesn’t get me very far unless I actually organize and process them.

A couple nights each week I’ll hit the gym in place of sitting in traffic, with an even split between strength training and cardio work.  I spend no more than 50 minutes in the gym; my goal is to get in and get out so I can get home to my family.  On the nights I don’t go to the gym, I use this extra time to get ahead on work for the week, or if the traffic is light, I’ll get an extra hour or so in with the fam that night.  Of course, my car speaks to me on the way home too with tech commentary or Audible books, so no matter how long it takes, it’s productive and fun.

Once home, I spend as much time with my daughter as I can before she goes to sleep.  Playing, reading, eating, “flying” around the house.  Once she’s asleep, some nights my wife and I watch a little TV – no cable or commercials, strictly Netflix or Xbox video on demand.  We almost never watch more than a single episode of whatever we’re currently addicted to.  Some nights I write or work on blog-related things instead like coding or planning new features for the site.  I almost always check-in with work email to get back to zero during the evening as well – just not right before bed – as I’ll then be stuck in “work mode” while trying to fall asleep.

I read for about 30-60 min on my Kindle every night before going to bed.  I really do love consuming information and find it hard to stop reading in order to go to sleep, frequently reading past my self-imposed deadline.  Reading fiction or psychology before bed has been better for keeping my attention lately since I’m thinking about business and technology all day long.  Once ready to sleep, I “switch off”, get comfortable, and start my pre-dream routine.  I’m usually asleep within 15 minutes.

Weekends are dedicated to friends & family with the exception of quick morning workouts, and writing on Sunday during my daughter’s nap.  We spend a lot of the weekend together as a family.  My wife is our social coordinator and makes sure we’re also getting in quality time with people we care about.   We also try and get out, just the two of us, a few times each month to pretend we’re not old homebodies.  But many weekend nights we just relax at home with a movie.  And at some point during the weekend, I usually find myself a cupcake

We also try and travel as much as we can.  While we both love our jobs and our life in Seattle, in order to really appreciate it, we need to maintain perspective.  We’ve found that getting away can really help with that, even if it’s just a long weekend somewhere local.  I’ve discovered that I’m exponentially more creative when I change up my environment, especially when surrounded by the ocean or trees.  So while pure relaxation is fun for a while, I usually find myself using that downtime to explore things I would never think to do otherwise.  I love it.

No related posts.

Forget “Just Do It”… the procrastination-defeating rallying cry of this new decade is “Just Do Something!”

Procrastination is a funny word.  It’s a long, strange sounding expression that strikes fear and a knowing empathy in the hearts of people around the world.  Putting things off until a later date, even important things, is what humans are best at.  You have to assume that even our biggest accomplishments and creations as a species came with equally large bouts of “I’ll just do it later” sentiments.

Could the Egyptian pyramids really have been completed without an architect taking one look at the enormity of his day’s work and saying “tomorrow… I’ll do it tomorrow”?  I doubt it.

Assumptions that we can “just do it”, or that we’re supposed to get things right on the first try don’t help us.  In fact, I’ve found that the reason so many people can’t get past their own thinking relates to a misunderstanding about the people around them.  People frequently overestimate the talent, dedication, and circumstances of others while underestimating their own.  They actually believe that the people who have been able to “do it”, did it without the same level of internal battles of procrastination that they themselves have.  That these people either got lucky or got it right on the first try.  And of course, that they don’t have the same ability to do so as these more capable people – that they’re either too lazy, stupid, or just aren’t in the right place or right time.

That’s ridiculous.  The first step to overcoming procrastination or it’s close cousin, perfectionism, is to believe – to really know – that what you have is good enough, and in many cases better, than what you perceive to be required.  In other words, believe in yourself, wouldja?

What is Procrastination?

First, a definition of procrastination from Niel Fiore’s The Now Habit which I find to be a good one:

Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

You can think of procrastination as being the single biggest roadblock to an individual’s success or achievement in any realm.  It stems from an innate belief or understanding that tomorrow will always be a better day than today for doing what you need to do.  At its very core, that’s all procrastination is: the inability to see today for what it can positively bring, and an equal inability to see tomorrow for what it can negatively bring.

If tomorrow were always better, doesn’t it stand to reason that all tasks would always be delayed just a single day – not months or years?  Of course, that’s not what happens when people procrastinate…. in the real world, things get postponed to tomorrow a dozen times before, begrudgingly, the task (sometimes) gets done.

Timothy A. Pychyl and Bill Knauss, two experts on procrastination, believe that “self-awareness is a crucial first step in learning to change your procrastination habit.”  Timothy contends that this assumption that tomorrow will be better than today for you is actually a testable hypothesis:

The next time you put off a task until tomorrow, telling yourself tomorrow (later) is better, then simply note the next day whether you now believe that tomorrow is better.  Chances are, it’s not. If anything you may feel more guilt and pressure related to the task at hand and yet not have any more motivation to do the task.

I love that.  It speaks to your ability to track and monitor your own progress and to be real with the results.  If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll likely discover that your habit of putting things off until “tomorrow” isn’t actually helping you get to where you want to be.  It isn’t working.  In fact, our tendency to downplay the importance of today – ignoring that “today is as good a day as any” – keeps us from moving forward.

So what can you do?

How to Unblock Yourself

Below are six ways to unblock yourself and get moving in the right direction that I’ve found helpful:

1. Overcome your fear of embarrassment, failure, or success.  This is a critical step in many posts on this site, primarily because fear drives so much of what we do (or don’t do).  If we knew we couldn’t fail, what would we do?  The single biggest take-away from fear management is this: picture the worst thing imaginable, the thing you’re most scared of, if you were to complete your task.  This could be embarrassment, loss of money, or even loss of anonymity if you’re successful.  Then picture it happening, develop your own coping strategies, and accept it.  Once you realize that it won’t actually be as bad as you think it’d be, you’re free to start.
2. Allocate “fun time” in advance of starting.  One of the reasons so many people can’t get moving is because they think they’re doing something “unfun” in place of something fun.  There’s a nagging feeling that instead of studying, writing, or working there’s a dozen things that they’d have more fun doing.  It’s partially a present-hedonistic desire – solving for right now instead of the future.  Here’s one way to help: give yourself as much time as you need to fulfill those desires on a regular basis.  If you’d rather be reading than writing, before you sit to start writing, block off time later in the day when you know you can focus 100% on reading.
3. Reduce all distractions.  All of them.  Distractions of any sort give you excuses to stop, and require you to regain your momentum in order to get going again.  If you really want to get something done, you’re better off setting yourself up with a distraction-free environment (no kids, no dogs, no Internet) for a length of time long enough to get into a flow state.  Two hours of dedicated focus is always better than six twenty-minute blips.
4. Prep your environment.  Get comfortable in your surroundings, creating mini-rituals that put you in the right mindset.  This could mean putting on the right music, lighting candles, cleaning off your desk, putting on comfortable clothing, or even just doing some physical warm-up (stretching, yoga, jumping jacks) before getting into it.  This tip isn’t a common one, but I find it to be pretty important if you’re going to hit that flow state frequently.
5. Set a deadline with someone else.  It isn’t enough for many of you to just make a promise to yourself.  It isn’t real if it’s inside your own mind.  So tell other people when you plan to get something done – use Facebook, Twitter, email, or do it the old fashioned way: tell them in person.  Broadcast your plan to get something done and you might find yourself even more motivated to keep from letting others down.
6. Most importantly, lower your standards!  Too many people get tripped up trying to make things perfect instead of just getting something done.  Think about whatever you’re doing as a “first draft” of whatever it is you want to create, not the final thing.  And think of yourself as a perennial “starter”, as it’s usually easier to start something of low quality than it is to finish something of high quality.  Changing your internal monologue to be more like “I want to start that project” vs. “I have to slog through it” can help reignite the senses.

Seth Godin recently gave a fantastic talk on what he calls the “Lizard Brain” – and really speaks to the heart of #1, overcoming your fear.  Check it out (via Merlin):

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain from 99% on Vimeo.

Procrastination is a tough nut to crack.  But when you find yourself continually putting things off – and not being completely honest with yourself about why you’re doing it – remember, that the single most important thing you can do is just do something.  Get started.  Get moving.  Just do something.

Related posts:

1. 15 Ways To Get a New Habit To Stick Forever
2. 9 Ways To Stop Overthinking Everything

• 8 productivity experts give their productivity messages for 2010

Since I wanted to cross-post the snippet here for my readers, I waited a few weeks before doing so… since technically, I wrote this for Jack’s blog:

If I were to pick my most important message for 2010, it would boil down to one word which can set a tone for the year ahead: CHOICE.  There’s a big difference between people who CHOOSE what they want their life to be about and people who let others – or their circumstances – decide for them.  This “power of choice” is something each of us have – it’s part of our human nature – yet so few people make their own choices about who they want to be, how they want to contribute to the world, or what things matter most to them.

Many times this apathy is related to fear, lack of information, or ingrained limiting beliefs about their potential.  Lack of information leads to fear of the unknown, which in turn leads to a victim mentality and an inability to see yourself for the person you could be… and so the cycle continues.  The end result is someone who never chooses to take ACTION and instead justifies inaction through statements and behaviors motivated by fear (usually fear of humiliation).  The key is to get out of that dangerous spiral by taking control of the fear and gathering as much information on the thing you’re most frightened of.  People who LEARN and have experience with something are rarely afraid of it, and once they realize that the worst possible outcome isn’t that bad at all, light bulbs go off about what’s POSSIBLE for them.

That’s how you start to make choices and change your life one bit at a time.  We all have the ability to influence the world around us and how we perceive our place within it.  It starts with CHOOSING to do so (and a little work!)… so make 2010 the year you start making your own choices.

Check out the rest of the messages on Jack’s blog if you’re curious about what others chose as their 2010 message.  Many of these names were new to me, though I’ve since started following them to see what else they write about!

Related posts:

1. My Happiness Interview: Bookstores, Hugs, and Making Movies

The book in general was a fascinating read – I took lots of notes in my Moleskine (which have since made their way into Evernote along with everything else).  The biggest takeaway I had, and something I’ve referred back to time and time again at work and play, relates to ways to improve short-term memory.  I’ve used some of these “hacks” during games with family where memory is the limiting factor.  I’ve surprised myself more than once with just how easily I’m able to remember things just by converting them to the visual representations described below.

Memory is critically important in everyday life, yet we’re outsourcing our memory to search engines, Wikipedia, and other tools on a daily basis.  For most of human history, people have been exercising brain power out of sheer necessity.  We didn’t have digital to-do lists and access to all the world’s information on our smartphones; if we wanted to speak intelligently about a subject, for the most part, we had to store that information in our brains (the horror!)

We’ve since gotten lazy.  And that’s OK for most things, but it means that when our memory is needed, it’s not always ready.  We haven’t trained ourselves to be able to recall things at-will, and that ultimately has an impact on our lives (where was I going with this again?  I can’t remember).

If you find yourself struggling to remember things – and if you feel this is impacting your life in a negative way – there are some things you can do to work around it.  With just a little bit of practice, you can improve your chances of remembering your landlord’s last name, your girlfriend’s phone number, or your credit card’s 4-digit PIN.

The basic idea is this: for thousands of years, our ancestors spent a lot more time processing spatial data than they did with numbers.  The difference in the size or color of a predator or plant made a big difference in terms of survival, but remembering sets of numbers or a list of Starbucks drinks to buy for friends didn’t.  So most of these hacks rely on your brain’s ability to remember a short static list of things (“pegs”) to start from, and clear images to go along with them that you “burn” into your mind. 

Here are the three most basic tricks I learned from this book that I’ve used in the real world. 

(For a detailed explanation of these tricks from someone who knows a lot more than I do, I’d recommend checking out the Mentat Wiki or getting Mind Performance Hacks.)

1. Make mental journeys (my favorite)

Also referred to as memory palaces, and possibly the origin of the phrase “in the first place”, “in the second place”, this trick is the easiest to learn in my opinion.  It’s super-effective too.  The basic idea is that you use places as your triggers for remembering things.

Here’s how you do it: take a set of physical locations (like the rooms of your home) and create a walking path through them.  Memorize that path (i.e. walking in the door, walking through the kitchen, stopping at the closet, etc.)  Then when you need to remember a sequence of items (of any type) you mentally place them in the rooms as you go, creating a mental image that’s so memorable in that spot with your item there’s no way you could forget it.  You can best do this by exaggerating something about the thing you’re trying to remember. 

Then, to recall the list in order, just walk the same exact path through your home and recreate the story for each room in your mind.

You can use this approach to remember an almost limitless number of things provided you memorize a consistent “path” that feels natural to you, and you get creative enough with your visuals.

For instance, here’s a journey through an apartment:

1. bedroom

2. master bathroom

3. guest bathroom

4. loft

5. living room

6. deck

7. kitchen

8. downstairs bathroom

9. storage closet

10. entry/car

I’ve personally used this approach to remember 20+ celebrity names in a family game of “Tribes”.  I’m always surprised by how easily I can walk through my childhood house, picturing Michael Jackson moonwalking on the kitchen table and Babe Ruth smashing the TV with a baseball bat.  On the first try, I got as far as remembering 19 things out of 20 in order when previously I capped out at maybe 7.  Trying to remember things without my memory journey seems crazy at this point.

There’s a subsequent hack that has you memorizing things in the “nooks and crannies” of the rooms, enabling you to store even more.  You use a predetermined sequence through each room (near-left corner, left wall, and so on) that can help you remember 10 (or more) items per room which can help your memory journey store 10 times as much data on the whole (10 x 10).  This is a little overwhelming for me at this point, but I can see delving into this someday if needed.

2. Use the number-rhyme system

This approach is great for remembering up to 10 items (in order… or not) and is relatively easy to learn.  The author of the book uses this hack to remember grabbing ten things each time he leaves the house. 

Here’s what you do: first, memorize the ten words below that rhyme with the number it correlates to.  One is gun, two is shoe, three is tree, and so on.  Then for the first item on your list, visualize something containing both a gun and the item itself (for example your keys being blown to pieces by a bullet).  For the second, visualize your item wearing large, obnoxious shoes.  And so on.

Then to recall, just count up from 1, convert the number to the word it rhymes with, and think about the visual.

Here’s one possible rhyme list – there are lots of options:

1. gun

2. shoe

3. tree

4. door

5. hive

6. sticks

7. heaven

8. gate

9. wine

10. hen

3. Use the number-shape system

This is also for remembering up to 10 items; order may or may not matter necessarily… but if it does, this trick still works.

The number-shape system is quite similar to the number-rhyme system in that you pair your items with a visual that represents a number.  This time, the number is converted to a shape that looks like the number (to help you remember it initially) instead of something it rhymes to as in the last hack.  For example, to remember a grocery list (eggs, milk, cereal, apples, peanut butter) you’d take each item in order, and pair it with a visual representing one of the numbers below:

0. black hole, donut

1. pencil, candle

2. swan

3. butterfly, heart

4. sailboat

5. hook, pulley

6. lasso, golf club

7. axe

8. hourglass, snowman

9. tadpole, flag

So for the grocery list above you could imagine: #1 an egg balancing on a pencil, #2 a swan drinking milk out of a cat’s bowl, #3 a butterfly landing on a Cheerio, #4 a sailboat that’s candy apple red circling The Big Apple, #5 a hook pulling a container of peanut butter off of the shelves, etc.

Those are the three basic tricks.  But there are tons more where they come from.  Mind Performance Hacks goes into detail on all three of these plus Nooks & Crannies, the Major System, the Dominic System, Carroll’s Couplets, and more.  Lots of fun.

And for those who read this far just because you’re wondering what our view was from that deck in Positano, here it is

No related posts.

The hardest part about sitting down to read a book these days is that there are so many other things competing for your attention, almost tricking you into believing you’re actually reading.  As an example, on a typical day, I could read 350 Facebook status updates, 75 Twitter updates, 250 emails, and 75 blog posts.  The first two types of “reading” are completely passive – days go by before I learn anything interesting about myself (or others for that matter).  The last one, blogs, are far more useful in that many times full ideas are presented in a clear, coherent manner.  Most of the bloggers I follow have unique and interesting things to say, and I value the time I spend reading their work (and if I don’t, I don’t follow them). 

But blogging is still what I’d consider “short-form” in that most blog entries are fewer than 5,000 words.  While still far more than the 140 characters of Twitter, they aren’t (usually) long enough to form a complete “story” about a topic.  They don’t always go into any reasonable depth on the research they cite, and many times they don’t do their own research like published authors do.  You just can’t always learn as much as you can from a well-written book.  Most importantly, you can’t get lost in a blog entry.  It’s awfully hard to find any sense of flow while reading a 2,600 word blog post.  And I value flow.

So I read books.  I appreciate the depth.

In years past, I read almost exclusively non-fiction (with the exception of DC Comics) – but this year I expanded a bit back into some fiction as well.  My thinking in the past was that movies were my form of escapist entertainment, and when I’m reading I’d prefer to be learning something.  But like many things in life, I realized that it’s not always as black & white as that for me.  There are times (for instance on vacation) when sometimes it’s nice to read a little Sci-Fi or a mindless thriller.

Without further adieu…

Personal Growth Books

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.  A fascinating look into the world of the future – a world where humans live forever through the use of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics.  The purpose of the book, however, is to help people get to what the authors call the “first bridge” of life extension through nine targeted recommendations:  Talk with your doctor Relaxation Assessment Nutrition Supplementation Calorie reduction Exercise New technologies Detoxification.  While some of the advice is obvious, other areas of the book can open your eyes to how important living right today can be for your future.  I drink a lot more green tea since finishing this book.

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life.  David Allen’s follow-up to his classic Getting Things Done covers both a helpful recap of GTD as well as a new approach to gain perspective in your life through Allen’s “horizons of focus”.  These horizons include things like "areas of responsibility", "goals & objectives", "vision" and "principles & purpose".  As you can probably imagine, these kinds of things are interesting to me.  The book stayed relatively high-level (unfortunately) but was still a valuable read.

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential… in Life and Business.  Leo Babauta’s book covers similar ground to his popular Zen Habits blog, recommending an overall simplifying approach to your life.  Limit the number of things you focus on at any given time, reduce time spent on email, create positive habits, and make small steps towards your goals.  Leo’s book is an easy – yet worthwhile – read.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.  A research-backed book on increasing happiness, this book covers creative and insightful approaches to improve your life from the ground up.  I found myself taking reams of notes while reading this one because the recommendations made a lot of sense to me.  Things like learning how to deal with stress, committing to goals, and living in the present are all things I believe in (and write about myself).  Strongly recommended reading.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.  “We cannot always be happy, but we can almost always be focused, which is as close as we can get.” is just one of many bits of wisdom from this book.  Less about strict “how to” and more as a “just so you know, you can actually do this” type of book, I found a lot of the messages throughout to be pretty empowering.  No surprise I wrote about this book a little while ago.

Fiction Books

Daemon.  Probably the best cyber-thriller ever written.  As a techie myself, I really appreciated the attention to detail with respect to the “geekery”.  And of course, the entire time I found myself thinking “wow, this could really happen!” which kept the pages turning.  A sequel is on its way.  If you care at all about technology and how it could go wrong, this book is for you.

The Hunger Games.  A great “beach read” about a post-apocalyptic world where 24 kids, one from each district, are recruited into a sort-of Survivor game with only one emerging as the victor.  It reads like a screenplay (I wonder why?) and keeps you interested from page one with some fun twists and turns throughout.  A fun and very easy read.

Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War.  What comic events should be: a huge universe, crazy evil villains, and an amazing corps of heroes to defend us, drawing from decades of mythology (and beautifully illustrated).  Green Lantern is the DC book that has been setting the tone for the entire DC Comics line since Geoff Johns brought Hal Jordan back.  If you’re interested in a wild space war with some of the best art and writing in Sci-Fi, this is it.  I’d start with Green Lantern: Rebirth first though if you haven’t already read it.

Business Books

iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.  I realized this book is probably worth reading when Apple removed it from the Apple Store (probably based on its title) around the time it was released.  Any book about Steve Jobs is interesting to me, and this one goes into more depth than others with respect to who he really is and how he’s accomplished all he has.  It was published just before the release of the iPhone, so that alone makes it interesting knowing what’s to come.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software.  One of the “realest” books on software development ever written.  I loved the history of programming and the comparisons made to other projects despite reading this during crunch time for one of my own software projects (this combination led to some sleepless nights).  If you’re wondering how the software that makes our world go round is built, there are few books with as close an approximation.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.  Zero to $20B in revenue in 400 weeks.  Curious how they did it?  Hint: it wasn’t all altruistic genius   I’ve read most of the books on Google, and this one felt the deepest.  Exclusive access to the executive team, partners, board members, and friends probably helped, but Ken Auletta’s in-depth analysis and writing style set this one over the top for me.  At times it did focus a little too much on the media companies surrounding Google, but when it was “on”, it was awesome.

One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making.  Based on a series of blog posts written inside Microsoft during the development of Windows 7, Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti describe how to combine strategy and tactics to drive innovation in an organization.  I’ll admit – I haven’t read this entire book – because I read each and every one of the blog entries (sometimes twice) that comprise it when they were first written.  And I actually lived through it as a member of the Windows organization   If you’re interested in the handbook for management, this is it.  Speaking as an “insider”, the approach in this book works better than anything I’ve seen.

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The majority of these books I read on my Kindle so I had the ability to highlight sections and take notes inline.  Now all of my notes and highlights are searchable on the Kindle, they appear on all my devices (phone and PC too), and best of all, they’re available online through Amazon.com.  Just by highlighting a sentence I can see if from any device connected to the Internet.  The other night I took the text file of all my notes on the Kindle and added them to my Evernote notebook so they’re now centralized with everything else and searchable from a single place.  Love it.

Hope this reading list was helpful!  Please do let me know if you’ve read – or plan to read – any of these books.

Related posts:

1. How to Read 3 or More Books a Month
2. Refocuser in 2009: Year in Review

This year, Refocuser’s first in existence, has been a great one.  After an entire decade of thinking about starting a site like this, I up and decided to just do it one day in early 2009.  A few weeks later, the site soft-launched – and thanks to all the great tools out there like Twitter search, people started to find it within a few minutes!

Writing here really has been a lot more rewarding than I thought it would be.  To get emails, comments, and – in the case of family and friends – phone calls to discuss some of the topics on this blog is the primary reason I wanted to start it to begin with, so that’s been a lot of fun.  The site has also given me an outlet to crystallize my thoughts and processes into something (hopefully somewhat) understandable, and to connect with new people who are interested in similar topics.  And then there’s the added benefit of writing practice.  What a blast!

Looking forward to 2010, I have a few goals related to Refocuser.  First, I’ll be exploring new topic areas & relevant research and will continue to grow the content on the site.  Secondly, I’m going to create a small site dedicated to the 12 Goals program now that the skeleton of the program is finished.  This sub-domain on Refocuser will have the entire program, links to research, a PDF eBook, and other online tools.  Once complete, I’d also like to have discussion forums on Refocuser (provided the traffic justifies it) and even clothing, mugs, mouse pads, and other 12 Goals merchandise to remind you of your ongoing progress.  It’ll be a fun project.

We’re also due with a baby boy in April – so the total time I’ll be able to dedicate to Refocuser will likely decrease for a bit in favor of keeping my head above water with the rest of life.  But hey, there’s no better way to test some of these strategies than to use them under tough conditions like sleep deprivation   Having another little person join our family is such a gift; I can’t wait to meet him!

Stats & Stuff

Refocuser had a busy first year.  A quick look at the Archives page shows that March, the blog’s first month, was also its most active with 11 posts.  Throughout the year, I averaged 5 posts/month.  While I’d love to be able to post more often (ideally 2x/week) the time investment and rhythm has felt right this past year, so it’s unlikely to change much.  One thing I’m considering for 2010 is accepting some guest posts.  So if you’re interested in doing a little writing, please let me know.

In terms of content, the most frequent tags on the site have been habits, goals, happiness, self-talk, visualization, and attention.  And of course, the 12 Goals tag thanks to the burst of posts related to the 12 Goals program recently.  When looking at the category counts, there were 19 posts related to Productivity, 11 related to Goal Setting, and 4 each related to Fear Management and Exercise.  If you’d like to see more of the site’s archives to see what else has been covered, head over to the Archives page.

The most popular post (by far, thanks to Leo at Zen Habits) has been 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever.  It has had tens of thousands of page views since it was posted in the Spring, easily eclipsing all other posts on the site.  The second most popular post, found primarily through search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and Twitter is 9 Ways to Stop Overthinking Everything.  People found this post by searching for just about every combination of ‘overthinking’ with another word!  And finally, the third most popular post, also found through search engines, was a post I wrote in a Starbucks while on vacation in Kauai when I probably should have been at the beach.  That post is Neuroplasticity: Your Brain’s Amazing Ability to Form New Habits.

Refocuser has had almost 20,000 non-repeat/unique visitors from all over the world (primarily from the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the U.K.), about 300 RSS and email subscribers, and over 400 Twitter followers without resorting to any tricks to artificially increase subscriber count like so many people do.  Naturally I’d love for these numbers to be higher, but I also know that it’ll come in time provided I put effort into the writing and stay consistent.  I’m not doing this to have a top 100 blog again, but the more people that can benefit from Refocuser, the happier I am about the work!

(One thing you can do to help get the word out: send a link to this post to your friends and family for the new year!  Or hand pick an entry from the list below that you think someone might like and send it out.  This stuff is only useful if people find and read it.)

Posts from 2009

1st Quarter:

• Welcome to Refocuser
• 7 Tips to Make Exercise a Habit (and Keep It That Way)
• How to Read 3 or More Books a Month
• 4 Steps to Learn Any Physical Activity
• Writing in Microsoft Word Without Any Distractions
• How to Read 200+ Blogs And Other Sites Everyday
• Increase Focus With Greek Yogurt, Almonds, and Green Tea
• Introduction to the Flow State (part 1 of 2)
• Introduction to the Flow State (part 2 of 2)
• Project Management: Starting a Blog (part 1 of 2)
• Project Management: Starting a Blog (part 2 of 2)

2nd Quarter:

• 5 Keys to Overcome Your Fear
• Pick Your Top 3 Focus Areas… and Drop Everything Else
• Finding Time to Write (Or to Get Into Creative Mode)
• Increase Focus With Low-fat String Cheese and an Apple
• Strength Training 101
• Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer
• Keep the Plates Spinning
• Bouncing at Zero – “ZBB” in Life
• Trick Yourself Into Saving More Money
• Does Goal Setting Hold Us Back?
• Efficiency is Anything That Scores
• Take Micro-vacations to Boost Focus
• Staying Focused With Microsoft Outlook: Email
• Make Your Training Harder Than The Real Thing
• Neuroplasticity: Your Brain’s Amazing Ability to Form New Habits
• 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever
• Use Controlled Bursts of Focus to Leap Ahead And Find Balance
• 26 Things I’ve Learned Through Intense Exercise
• It’s Hard to Focus If You Can’t Find Anything
• How the Psychology of Time Can Help You Focus

3rd Quarter:

• Precommitment: Commit in Advance to Keep Yourself On Track
• Your Master Habit: Get One Thing Clicking, Watch Others Follow
• Spontaneity: Enabled Through Order and Organization
• 5 Steps to Use Lucid Dreaming To Improve Any Skill
• Guarantee Success By Tracking your Habits with Joe’s Goals
• 11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated!
• 9 Ways to Stop Overthinking Everything
• 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter
• Form Positive New Habits Through Active Association

4th Quarter:

• Focus: How Rapt Attention Changes Who We Are
• 12 Steps to Simplify Your PC (with Windows 7)
• Going Paperless at Home in 6 Easy Steps
• My Happiness Interview: Bookstores, Hugs, and Making Movies
• 12 Goals Program
  • One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)
  • Create Your Vision (Step 1)
  • Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
  • Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
  • Tools You Can Use

Enjoy.  Happy New Year… On to 2010!

Related posts:

1. Great Books I Read In 2009
2. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners.  If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement.  There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all.  In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction.  What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress.  My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you!  If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

Now that you’ve made your way through the details of the Twelve Goals program, it’s time to get serious by employing the use of some tools.  These tools are meant solely to supplement your plan, not to replace or define it.  In order to get the most out of these tools, you have to have your vision, your monthly goals, and your habits & tasks ready to execute throughout the year.  These tools are only as good as your plan is.  Far too many people in situations like this get more carried away with the tools themselves, tweaking every setting imaginable, instead of focusing on the thing that matters: the plan itself.

So before going further, please do spend the time to make sure your plan is as complete as you can make it.

Excel Spreadsheet

The following (very basic) Twelve Goals Excel spreadsheet contains everything you need to track your vision, goals, and your daily progress throughout the year.  It consists of three main worksheets (which you can switch between using the tabs at the bottom).

1. Vision.  On this sheet, type your personal vision in whatever form you have it.  There’s nothing magic about this particular worksheet, it’s just text you can look back on throughout the year.  Refer back to Step 1 for recommendations on creating your vision.
    
2. Monthly Goals.  Here’s where you’ll put your goals & primary habits for the year (of course feel free to rearrange if you’re not starting in January).  There’s space to paste an image that represents your goal, and there’s a “progress indicator” arrow to help you see how you’re doing.  Refer back to Step 2 for recommendations on setting monthly goals.
    
   • To use the progress indicator, you just have to enter a number from 0 to 4 in the cell.  0 is “not on track”, 1 is “trending poorly”, 2 is “going OK”, 3 is “trending well”, and 4 is “complete!”  Update how your goals are going from time to time!
3. Tracking.  This tab is a daily tracker.  The idea is simple: it’s a calendar which helps you mark the number of days you’re on-track and the number of days you’re off-track.  It gives you basic counts and a percentage (think of this as your batting average for the year – except you want to be closer to 80% than 30%). 

   All you have to do is enter a “Y” on days that you’re feeling good about your progress (they light up GREEN) or an “N” on days that you didn’t make progress (they light up RED).  The 10 seconds you spend each day doing this could make the biggest difference in your year.  Refer back to Step 3 for more on daily tracking. 
   

The spreadsheet doesn’t attempt to replace a real task manager however – Excel isn’t really the best way to track daily tasks without a lot of custom work.  There are better task management tools listed below like Microsoft Outlook, Things, ToodleDo, or Remember the Milk.  If you use the 12 Goals spreadsheet in conjunction with a task manager, you’ll have a good progression from vision->goals->tasks & habits->daily tracking.

Note: this spreadsheet has been tested for compatibility with Excel 2007 and 2010.  If you have an earlier version of Excel, some features may not work as they should.

Click the icon to download (XLS)

PocketMod Printout

The PocketMod printout is a unique way to track your progress.  For a single year, you’ll need to print 2 PocketMods, one for Months 1-6 and another for Months 7-12. 

Click the image to download (PDF)

Here’s how to get the most out of this PocketMod:

• First, you may need to install Adobe Reader to view the file.
• Next, print the PocketMod on any printer.
• Then fold the PocketMod (written instructions or watch a video)
• Finally, you’ll need to fill it out – it’s simple!
  • Your twelve goals and primary habits (+ two bonus goals) go on the front
  • Your vision goes on the back. 
  • The other 6 pages are for keeping track of progress month-by-month.  Similar to the spreadsheet, check off the days that you feel you’re on-track to meet your goals.  You’ll be able to, at a glance, see how your month is shaping up.

Note: The PocketMod is too small and, in my opinion, too inflexible to adequately track a fluid task list all year.  So similar to the spreadsheet, you’ll need to use another tool like Microsoft Outlook, Things, ToodleDo, or Remember the Milk for tracking your individual tasks.

Other Tools

Here’s a list of tools I’ve used or am currently using – something here may come in handy for you:

• Joe’s Goals (Online goal tracker, read my write-up)
• Traineo (Online fitness tracker)
• Pen & paper (Moleskine is my favorite)
• ToodleDo (One of the best online task managers)
• Remember the Milk (Also a top online task manager)
• Things (Best Mac OS X task manager)
• Microsoft Outlook 2007/2010 (Windows information manager; track goals as Notes, and tasks as Tasks)
• OneNote 2007/2010 (Best Windows note-taking application)
• Evernote (Great online notepad; what I use for everything)
• Mint (Fantastic financial tracking and planning site)

You can find more self-tracking tools on The Quantified Self resource list.  Here are some other sites you’ll find there potentially relevant to Twelve Goals:

• Bedpost (Track how often you get busy – seriously)
• Lifetick (Online goal tracking – a little complex but powerful)
• Track Your Happiness (How do you really feel right now?)
• LiveStrong (Dare to change your life)
• Daytum (Collect and categorize personal data)
• And more…

Finding the right tools may take a little trial and error.  If you don’t find yourself adjusting well to a site or process in about 7-10 days, it might be worth trying something else.  Like with most things, it’ll likely come down to a combination of a few different tools and not a single one that does it all for you – at least for now. 

Ready for the Execution Phase

Planning is now officially finished!  You have your vision, monthly goals, tasks and habits, and you have tools to use throughout the year to keep you focused.  Now it’s time to execute.

Good luck on your journey and may you achieve all twelve of your goals this year!

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
2. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)
3. Guarantee Success By Tracking Your Habits with Joe’s Goals

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners.  If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement.  There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all.  In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction.  What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress.  My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you!  If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

Breaking Down Each Goal

I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change. – Jim Rohn

Twelve Goals is an annual plan you create for yourself.  A plan of inspiration, a plan of action, and a plan you can be accountable to.

By this point, you should have all twelve of your goals locked and loaded for the year.  It’ll probably be frustrating then to hear that even though they’re 99.9% committed, they can still change throughout the year.  How so?  By identifying what it will take to actually achieve them given your circumstances. 

In Step 2 you probably did a “squint test” or “t-shirt sized cost (i.e. Small, Medium, Large, X-Large) ” of feasibility.  Meaning: if you squinted hard enough you could probably see how a particular goal could be achieved in the month you assigned it to.  But guessing really isn’t good enough.  Sometimes you don’t know just how much work needs to happen in order to get something accomplished, and it’s easy to get sidetracked or delayed by unforeseen events.

This step is all about figuring out what it’s going to take.  It’s about getting real.  But it’s also about being agile and adapting your plan throughout the year as conditions change.

In project management, the approach of breaking down a project into smaller work items is called a work breakdown structure (or a work backlog).  As defined by Wikipedia, a work breakdown structure consists of "the end objective, successively subdividing it into manageable components in terms of size, duration, and responsibility which include all steps necessary to achieve the objective.”

In Twelve Goals parlance, this is identifying every task that needs to be checked off in order to accomplish your goal.

Sounds like a lot of work… and it can be.  But spending the time now to squabble with yourself about what it takes to make something happen is better than fighting yourself when you’ve hit a wall halfway through your second month.  There’s nothing more frustrating than assuming you know how to do something, just to find out you weren’t ready to begin with.  In other words, this step above everything else is about being honest with yourself about where you are, what you need to do, and what needs to happen around your goal to make it achievable.

Preparation is key.

Defining a work breakdown structure for a complex project can be harder than coming up with a task list for a single goal, but the intent is the same.  Your primary objective throughout this process is to learn.  Learn everything you can about the thing you’re going to accomplish so you have all the ammunition you’ll need when you need it.

Remember: your future self is lazier than you are right now.  Right now you have energy, you have positive intent, and you have that elusive feeling that you can conquer anything.  Use this vigor for the next few hours to lay out your plan for the year.  Because if you do it now, you’ll have something to refer to for the next twelve months.  No excuses.

Ultimately, each goal should have a series of tasks associated with it up-front.  Here are some recommendations for creating your task list for each goal:

• Identify 100% of the work required for each goal as you see it today.  Go goal-by-goal and break it down into a series of tasks.  You need to identify 100% of the work as you see it right now.  Don’t assume someone else will do it for you (including your future self – remember: that person is lazy!)  Figure out exactly what needs to happen, in the right order, to accomplish what you’d like to accomplish.
• Give each task a “day-I-will-complete-this” deadline within the month.  I hate to call this a “due date” because that implies you should wait until that day to do anything with it.  In reality, there are two dates for each task that are interesting: the day you think you’ll start, and the day you’ll think you’ll finish.  Managing that can get tedious however, so for now, identify your completion date and balance it against all your other tasks such that the date is actually achievable.
• Make your task outcome focused and action oriented.  A task with a subject of “Chapter 1” isn’t outcome focused, and it’s not a task you can look to at a future date without prejudice.  “Write 2000 words in 3 hours towards Chapter 1 of my novel” is something you can work towards.  Assume that your future self is going to second guess your work, and is going to look for loopholes to get out of doing the work to begin with.  Don’t give him or her any outs.
• Estimate how long each task will take and scope each task appropriately.  Think about this like planning any project – each task should be four hours or less – or even fewer if you don’t have four hour blocks to spend.  Generally speaking, if something takes more than 4 hours, you need to find a way to make it smaller or it’ll be vague to know where to start, or too overwhelming to get started at all.
• Make sure the total time doesn’t exceed the time you have to spend.  If your monthly goal is to learn to play piano at an advanced level, you might find that the total time you have to spend towards your goal in a single month isn’t enough.  This is where the idea of compounding goals is useful.  Instead of trying to squeeze everything into a thirty day window, break up your goals across multiple months and each month, build on the month before.  You’ll find that being realistic during the planning phase will keep you from setting yourself up to fail throughout the year.
• Call out any dependent tasks.  Some tasks will have dependencies on others being complete – or on something you’re expecting from someone else.  It’s important that you track this just as you would any other "waiting for" item so you are actively managing the things you need to get started prior to the start of the month.

And finally, the most important thing to keep in mind throughout the year:

• Revisit your tasks for the next month prior to the 1st of that month.  This is where that agility comes into play.  If you were identifying everything you needed to do all year in December of the previous year and you didn’t have any flexibility in the process, you’d probably find that you aren’t as omniscient as you had hoped.  By using the planning phase to get everything out of your brain for each monthly goal, you’re doing yourself a service that will help you when that month comes around.  But the task list you’ll have at the start of that month will likely vary depending on prior successes and/or failures, by your current life circumstances, or by something as trivial as the weather or the amount of time you can spend on it.  This is why allowing yourself some flexibility to adjust your tasks throughout the year is key.

For example, in order to lose 5 pounds in February, you might have a task list that looks something like this:

1. Sign-up for online fitness tracking at www.traineo.com (by 2/1)
2. Download grocery list from Men’s Health (by 2/1)
3. Enroll in 24 Hour Fitness – setup automated billing (by 2/2)
4. Add morning workouts to my calendar (by 2/3)
5. Buy a digital scale that can track bodyfat (by 2/7)

And a few days before the end of January, you’d take a look at the task list again and determine if anything about it needs to change before you start.

Identifying One Habit to Change Each Month

As I wrote in 15 Ways To Get a Habit To Stick Forever,”habits are the single most important ingredient to achieving real focus and real growth.”  This is proven in day-to-day life constantly, and habits have been shown in recent research to be vital to personal development.  Habits simply aren’t something you can ignore or put off if you want to make lasting change and significant progress toward your goals.

Here’s how we’ll approach identifying habits.  The first thing to do is to identify your “master habit” – the one thing you do that helps get you back on track with everything else (for me it’s daily exercise).  In Your Master Habit: Get One Thing Clicking, Watch Others Follow I’ve outlined four recommendations for finding and then implementing your master habit.  Remember that self-regulation builds on itself, and if you’re able to make progress with just one thing, you’ll find that you’ll end up making progress across the board.

Once you have your master habit identified, for each goal, you’ll need to identify the habits you’ll need to change or adopt in order to make achieving your goal possible.  As with anything else, it’s important not to go overboard with this and try to change too many things at once.  So for now just make a list of habits for each goal. 

For example, for our goal of losing 5 pounds in February, here are some habits you may write-down:

• Wake-up daily at 6am
• Get to the gym or run outside 4x weekly
• Sleep at least seven hours each night
• Always pack my gym bag the night before
• Go grocery shopping every Saturday
• Plan and cook my weekly meals on Sunday

And so on…

Each habit in the list may be important, but because of the propensity to try and do too much (we are human, after all) I’d recommend having no more than twelve total habit changes for the year, or one for each month.  If each of your goals requires habit changes that exceed your capacity for change then it’s likely that your goals are a little too ambitious and may need some tweaking.

This means boiling down your list of habits for each goal to a single “primary” habit, that when combined with your master habit makes the biggest positive difference to your month.  Remember: throughout the year, take it one step at a time and make sure you’re cementing the change, not just going through the motions.

So for our goal of losing 5 pounds in February, you might identify the following habit as the single most important one for you.

Primary Habit: Wake-up daily at 6am after at least seven hours of sleep each night

This doesn’t mean the other habits you’ve identified aren’t important, but this primary habit you’ve identified should have the highest chance of helping you achieve your goal.

Tip: Leo of Zen Habits has a great new site focused on picking six habits to change which complements Twelve Goals pretty well, check it out: www.6changes.com. 

Monthly Planning Rhythm

At the start of the year, you’ll have your vision, your twelve monthly goals, your per-goal task list, your master habit, and your twelve monthly primary habits identified and written down.  This is your plan.

Before the start of each month, you’ll do a check-in to validate your goal for that month and the corresponding task list and primary habit you identified at the start of the year.  If the plan needs tweaking, you’ll adjust your monthly plan.

Here’s what this rhythm looks like (below).  Again, remember, this is supposed to be fun!  You’re making choices that will define yourself for decades to come.  Just as compounding monthly goals helps you make more progress in a year, compounding your goals year over year means you’ll be an unstoppable machine.

Checking It Off

The final step is simple.  It involves keeping yourself honest throughout the year

I’ve found that the best plans fall apart pretty quickly without accountability.  Accountability to yourself can be a tricky thing to simulate in order to benefit from this process, but there are trivial ways to keep yourself moving forward.

First off, I’ve found that daily progress tracking is more effective than weekly or monthly.  This is because tracking, in itself, is a habit that benefits from consistency.  The more you read and affirm your goals and habits, the more likely you are to be elated with progress, and disappointed with failure.

Instead of tracking everything every single day, I’ve also found that a single yes/no indicator each day is powerful yet easy enough to be effective.  This means that each day, probably at the end of the day, you’ll read your monthly goal, primary habit, and tasks for that month and check off that day if you feel you’ve been true to the spirit of the goal and made ~1/30th progress towards achieving it.

The key is to have as many checkboxes each month as you can – though striving for perfection (going 30 for 30) isn’t something you should worry about.  Read 11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated! if you struggle with this.  If you miss a day, or a few days in a row, just look at each new day as a chance to start fresh.

Tracking is easy and there are a number of ways to do this that we’ll cover in the next post on Tools.  For now, here’s what your month could look like (courtesy of Don’t Break the Chain – red equates to a “check” – a day that you’ve identified as positive progress):

Almost Finished!

You’ve come a long way if you’ve gotten this far.  In fact, you’ve already come further than 99.999% of the people in the world in terms of actively choosing who you want to be and how you’re going to contribute.  If you’ve been following step-by-step, you now have everything you need for the next year.  The final post in the series will be about software, websites, and/or things you can use in the real world to help out along the way.

Good luck!  And please do let me know if this series has been helpful in any way.

Continue to: Tools You Can Use ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
2. 12 Goals: Tools You Can Use
3. 12 Goals: Create Your Vision (Step 1)

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners.  If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement.  There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all.  In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction.  What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress.  My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you!  If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

Getting Ready

You have your vision.  Now it’s time to formulate (and document) your monthly goals for the coming year. While this may sound easy or even uninspiring, it’s actually quite the opposite.  It’s hard and it will take more time than you think.  But that time is well spent, both in terms of the outcome (a set of clear goals to work against) as well as the inspiration it can immediately provide.

Remember, goals help form the building blocks for positive emotions and subjective happiness with life.  So while there’s obvious benefit in having goals soley as virtual signposts for achievement, there’s also a residual sort of “under the covers” benefit of enhanced well-being – a deep well-being that can be long-lasting.  If you’re setting, working towards, and achieving goals you’re more likely to find flow regularly.

Now, it can be pretty difficult to sit and write up your twelve goals in twelve minutes and be finished.  You should be prepared to take your time, ensuring that the goals you’re creating are the “right” goals for this time in your life given all your circumstances.  I generally take a phased approach and assume my goals are going to be in flux for a couple months before I lock on my annual plan. 

Here’s one way you can do this:

• A few months in advance of your new year, start keeping a running list of potential goals in a notebook.  Have some targeted brainstorm sessions where you generate your “300% list” – or all the things you could accomplish in the next year if you have to the time.  If you haven’t been doing this already for the next year, you can certainly catch-up with a little extra legwork provided you’re focused on it.
• A few weeks in advance of your new year (for 2010, this is now), you’re going to want to “get real” with this list, validating your current goal list with your vision and their feasibility.  This means getting your total goal count down to twelve, one for each month of the year.
• If there’s a particular goal or two that you’re anxious about, it can be useful to “try before you buy” for a few weeks.  In other words, give the goal a shot prior to committing to it for next year.  This is particularly useful for goals that involve a fundamental change in your schedule (i.e. a 5pm biking class a few miles from your office) since they can be the first ones to go.

Assuming you currently have a blank slate, let’s get going.

Starting with Virtues, Categories, and Attributes

Before getting started on documenting your exact goals for the year, one thing you should do is revisit your vision.  Your goals should flow from the ultimate vision you have for yourself, so if you need to modify your vision before you start, you should.  Your vision should be accurate and speak to who you are right now, not who you were a month or a year ago.

Once your vision is up-to-date, grab a pen & paper (or a keyboard & mouse) and start with the “ultimate brainstorm”, taking as long as you need to exhaust your mind of all possibilities for the year.  This is how you’ll generate your 300% list.  Again, it may be best to do this in several sessions a few months in advance, but you should be confident that you can start this at any time. Realize that this isn’t your list of goals, this is your list of possible goals to choose from.  Because it’s not yet “real”, don’t constrain yourself at all – the sky’s the limit!

If you’re having trouble getting started, I’ve found that starting with virtues, categories, and finally attributes can be helpful. 

A virtue is an “admirable quality” you aspire to have – so if you look at virtues and consider what it’ll take to improve upon them, you may be able to generate a set of meaningful goals. 

Here are ten virtues I’ve found helpful over the years (not coincidentally they roughly map to categories on Refocuser):

1. Courageous.  Overcoming fear and “false expectations appearing real”.
2. Present.  The right time-perspective; focusing on the present over past/future most of the time.
3. Active.  Strength training, cardio, yoga, or any other thing to get your heart beating regularly.
4. Efficient.  Making the most of your time each and every day; focusing on important things.
5. Nourished.  Keeping your body and mind fueled with the best food, vitamins, and supplements.
6. Alert.  Prioritizing sleep, meditation, active rest, and downtime.
7. Determined.  Being goal-oriented and focused on constant improvement.
8. Connected.  Spending time with the people that matter most to you.
9. Purposeful.  Living a meaningful life; working towards something bigger than yourself
10. Positive.  Banishing negative thought; finding the light in every thing and every one.

Once you’ve exhausted all virtues, it’s time to level-up and look at broad categories of goals.  Each person will have a different approach to each category, and people may interpret what they mean in vastly different ways.  But they’re all important – it should be difficult to look at the following categories without coming up with a bunch of potential goals!

Here are seven categories to explore:

1. Mind.  Learning, teaching, and challenging yourself intellectually.
2. Body.  Exercise, nutrition, supplementation, and generally being active.
3. Family and Friends. Fostering and growing your most important relationships.
4. Spiritual.  Religious and/or spiritual needs; how you connect to the source.
5. Professional.  Making a living; progressing or advancing at your pace.
6. Financial.  Savings, earnings, investments (tip: what you have, not what you make).
7. Hobbies and Passions.  Making time for personal things that help you feel alive.

Once you’ve worked through virtues and categories, it’s time to move on to attributes.  These are traits that each of your goals should have in order to be effective.  This list of twelve attributes has been cross-posted from 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter, one of the first posts related to the Twelve Goals concept on Refocuser.

Here are twelve attributes you can use to refine the effectiveness of your goals:

1. Holistic.  Each goal must fit like a puzzle piece with all other goals.  If your goals aren’t holistically aligned, you’ll quickly find that you’re working in conflict with yourself.  As an example, if one of your goals is to spend more time with your family, and another is to start a business in another state, you’ll find yourself at odds.  Your goals need to work together or the whole thing could go up in smoke.
2. Value driven.  Your goals need to speak to who you are at the core.  This means you need to know yourself and understand what drives you.  For example, if you’re someone who lives to spend time with your grandchildren, it’s important that your goals reflect that joy.  If your goals reflected someone else’s values or society’s at large (material wealth based on social comparison) and not your own, you may find yourself chasing down the wrong thing at the expense of what really makes you tick.
3. Personal.  Are you someone who likes to spend the majority of time with lots of other people, or do you like to spend your time alone or with a small close-knit group?  Are you someone who likes things to be predictable or someone who thrives on chaos?  These aren’t small considerations when it comes to setting goals.  You want to make sure you know under which circumstances you’ll thrive best, otherwise you’ll end up with a goal you don’t even want to look at.  One fun evaluation of this is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – derive goals from your personality type and have a better shot at success.
4. Fresh.  Setting goals is not something rigid and unbending, it’s actually a very fluid process.  If you’re only setting goals every few years, and only looking at them annually, there’s a pretty good chance your goals don’t align with your current reality.  That’s a sure way to ignore them.  Instead, your goals need to be fresh and adjusted on a semi-regular basis.  My own timeframe is annually – with monthly check-ins and readjustments.  What’s yours?
5. Scoped.  Only you know how many goals you should have in order to feel balanced.  Too many goals and you can become crushed by the weight of them.  Too few and you’re failing to realize your full potential.  This may take some adjustment, and it may take years to find the right rhythm, but sooner or later you’ll find the scope of goals most appropriate for you.  I’ve had as few as five and as many as twenty for the year – each year is also somewhat different depending on the variables at play.  [Note: In the context of the Twelve Goals program, your goals should be big enough and small enough.  An individual goal shouldn't be something you can do in an hour - that's a task - but if it takes you 2 years, it's too big for this program.  We're scoping goals to months, not hours or years.]
6. Habit forming.  Goals that are habit forming are far more powerful than goals that are solely about the outcome.  For instance, if you’d like to get a 5% pay increase, the best way to make that happen is to break down your behavior and get the right habits in place to enact positive change.  Don’t focus on the increase in pay, that’s just a byproduct of the success you’ve created.  The increase in pay may (or may not be) an indirect result, but the more lasting and important change is in your day-to-day approach.  Habits are the building blocks of goals.
7. Present tense. “By February, I’d like to buy my first home” isn’t a present tense goal.  “I’m a homeowner and have found and purchased my first home” is.  Trick yourself into believing you’ve already accomplished your goal.  By reaffirming this with yourself with each review, you’ll find that your goals come more easily.  I’m not talking about some mystical “Law of Attraction” – I’m talking about proactive reinforcement and implicit influence of your self.
8. Positive.  Studies have shown that people are more apt to achieve “approach” goals vs. “avoidance” goals, so your goals should be positive in nature.  In other words, make your goals about enablement and the things you’re going to do, not the things you don’t want to do.  If you want to quit smoking, you want your goal to be about improving your health or setting the right example for your children – not constantly calling attention to the thing you’re depriving yourself of.  “Stop taking daily cigarette breaks” is tough to rally behind, but “Improve my health and overall well-being and show my kids how to live a healthy life” is motivating.
9. Challenge/skill balanced.  Sound familiar?  That’s right – this is a core component of Flow.  You want to have a goal that take you closer to the Flow state and not goals that make you bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise apathetic.  The key is to find the right balance between the challenge involved, and the skill you’re developing to address that challenge.  From Csikszentmihalyi’s Wikipedia entry: “If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.”
10. Want-to.  A goal can quickly degrade to perceived work if it feels like an imperative.  Yes, there are things you have to do in life, but your goals – in order to really work – have to be things you actually want to do.  The process of setting your goals alone can open your eyes to how many things you do on a regular basis that aren’t things you actually want to do.  And even if some of your goals are have-to goals, you should figure out how best to phrase them as want-to goals.  For example, you have to go to work in order to get paid.  But you want to close 10 sales/week in order to be at the top of the sales force for the year.  And if you don’t want it at all, maybe it’s time to pull out your copy of What Color is Your Parachute and change something bigger.
11. Lasting.  Goals that are subject to hedonic adaptation aren’t lasting enough to focus on, while goals that have long-term value can make a serious positive difference in your life.  For example, buying a brand new $50,000 car may be a great goal – but research has shown that after some time (shorter than most of us think) we adapt to changes in our circumstances, returning our level of happiness back to where it started.  The best goals are the ones that compound on themselves – similar to compound interest in your retirement account – and “keep on giving” long after they’ve been accomplished.  For instance, learning a new language or skill, spending time with friends and family, or organizing your life are all more impactful long-term than buying a new gadget (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with buying gadgets!).
12. Shared.  Most of us aren’t an island – we have life partners, spouses, kids, close friends, pets, and imaginary friends.  While it may seem that goal-setting is an isolated experience, it shouldn’t be.  The things you decide to commit yourself to are, in some cases, just as important to the people around you as they are to you.  And (to speak in project management terms): you need to get buy-in from the stakeholders before making any commitment.

Picking Twelve!

Now it’s time to “narrow the funnel”, taking your 300% list and whittling it down to just twelve, one for each month of the year.  This is going to be challenging, primarily because you’ll feel like you should keep them all on the list even though you know it’s not possible to actually achieve them all.

But without focus, this whole process falls apart!

Cutting goals can be the hardest part of this entire program.  This is partially due to the fact that since you’ve already written the goal down, some part of your consciousness has already pre-committed to it.  Breaking up with your most cherished goals can be hard to do, but in order to make progress against the most important goals, you need to focus on twelve goals and twelve only.

In order to go from 300% (everything you could possibly do) to twelve (the things you will do), try asking yourself these questions:

• On a scale of 1-10, how badly do I want to achieve this goal?
• On a scale of 1-10, how achievable is this goal this year?
• In order to achieve this goal, do I need to achieve other goals first?
• How much will my life change if I achieve this goal?
• How much will my life change if I don’t achieve this goal?
• Can these goals be compounded on top of each other to lead to something bigger?
• Which categories and virtues are most important this year?
• Does this goal meet all twelve attributes?

The answers to each question should be able to narrow the funnel further in your quest to get to the “final twelve”.  Keep iterating through the questions until you’re able to make the hard trade-offs; choosing specific goals to keep and jettisoning the rest to oblivion.  Or, maybe just to next year

Tip: For the goals you postpone to future years, it’s still helpful to keep them in a list that you can refer to, and even add to over time.  This approach is similar to the Someday/Maybe list in Getting Things Done.  It can be curative just to know that you’re not “losing” all of your aspirations, you’re just purposely ignoring them for the time being.  The idea that they could come back in future years can relax your mind for now and help you focus on the ones you’ve decided to commit to.

Making Goals Visual

Once you have your twelve goals, we’re going to put the icing on the cake with imagery for each goal.  Imagery has been shown to be more effective than words alone in terms of getting something to “stick” in your mind, so it goes without saying then that using it for your goals is critical.

Imagery can help awake hidden emotions and unlock feelings about your goals – and more practically, it makes it easier to quickly review and affirm your goals throughout the year.

What does this mean?  This means you need to pick imagery that reminds you of the goal at a glance.  Find imagery that’s both inspiring and meaningful.  And similar to the goals themselves, make sure the imagery isn’t reinforcing a negative (i.e. a picture of a homeless shelter as an indicator of what could happen!) but instead is reinforcing a positive.

Here are some places to look for good goal images:

• Bing Images
• Google Images
• Flickr
• Getty Images

Putting it Together

Now that you have your twelve goals and your imagery, you can place them in a basic table, imagery and all.  This table may be in a notebook or in an Excel document; it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you have it and that’s it available when you need it.

January	I’ve lost 5 pounds on the scale
February	I’ve learned how to use my new camera + took 1000 test pictures
March	I have $2,000 in my Savings account

…

Always have your goals readily available.  You could paste them to your bathroom mirror, keep them on your bedside table, or make them your computer’s wallpaper.  I keep mine in an Evernote notebook that’s available on all of my computers and from my mobile phone.

Congratulations for getting this far!  Creating your monthly goals is step 2.  Continue to: Define and Track your Habits & Tasks (Step 3) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
2. 12 Goals: Create Your Vision (Step 1)
3. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners.  If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement.  There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all.  In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction.  What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress.  My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you!  If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

Beginning at the End

“Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs” – Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

One of the underlying principles of 12 Goals is to “begin with the end in mind”, similar to what Stephen Covey proposes in his books.  This is a key tenet of any planning process, and is absolutely essential to do as a first step on the path to achieving your goals.  When you think about anything you’ve ever accomplished in your life – from remodeling your kitchen to getting a new job – you probably had some level of vision about what you wanted the outcome of your process to be.  It may have taken a little while to get a handle on what that vision really was, but somewhere deep down you knew it was there.  You probably didn’t just wake up one day, make a phone call, and land a job that afternoon.  You likely spent time and energy defining your end result.  Beginning at the end is about figuring out what the ideal end result is, writing it down, and then working backwards from there.

Think about creating your vision (or personal mission statement as some call it) as being explicit about what you want your life to be about, and through the process, learning more about what you want your year to be about. Your next year should be a very deliberate step in the right direction – and it’s awfully hard to do that unless you know where you’re going.

An example of vision creation “beginning at the end” that I like to give relates to software development at a large company.  In certain divisions of Microsoft, a thoughtful planning process takes place prior to the start of any major release.  It’s during this time that the team works to formulate the game plan by looking at market research, doing deep competitive analyses, brainstorming about potential breakthrough ideas, and so on. 

One of the outputs of this process is a mock press release or blog entry, post-dated around the time the team expects the software to be released to the world, describing in detail (in present tense, of course) what the “story” for the release is going to be.  Frequently the team will also go into depth about what they expect the press, bloggers, and enthusiastic users to say about the release as well as a means to better describe the vision.

Imagine that: describing in advance what you’re working towards – months, and in many cases, years before you’re ready to announce it to the world.  And before you’ve even started any of the “real” work on the project (in this case, writing code).  This particular document has a few immediate effects on the team.  First, it clarifies for them and their management what they’re committing to (and by extension, what they aren’t) so they can focus on the things that matter the most.  Secondly, it always, without a doubt, excites the people on the team to see the potential impact of the thing they’re working on!

There’s no better way to ensure the members of an organization have similar goals than to write down the vision first; goals should always flow from vision.  While this process isn’t the same as creating a personal vision, it’s remarkably similar in terms of its intent.  Our main objective with our envisioning process is to make sure our monthly goals flow from the ultimate vision we have for ourselves.

Creating Your Vision

Now onto the fun part: creating your own personal vision.  Your vision might be a single sentence, a few pages of written prose, or a bulleted list.  Ultimately the format isn’t important – it should be in a format that resonates the most with you.  It may even change from time to time as you get more comfortable with it.  You might start with a paragraph, migrate to a bulleted list, and end up with a combination of both.  So long as it’s serving its purpose – which is to inspire and focus you – it’s probably fine.

Important note: Even though 12 Goals is a year-long process, your vision isn’t.   How you view yourself and how you’d like to grow over time shouldn’t have a time limit or a deadline.  Think about your vision as “above” your goals.

Setting out to create your vision can be intimidating.  Heck, writing is intimidating no matter what it is you’re writing.  Just keep in mind that you are the only consumer of this document (for now) and perfection isn’t required.  What’s most important is that you start with something.  As any writer will tell you, it’s a lot harder to edit a blank page than a poorly written draft.  Ultimately this process should be fun.  I get a real kick out of thinking about, and putting to paper, how I view myself in relation to the universe now and in the future.  It’s nothing if not clarifying.

So let’s get started.  I’d recommend freeform writing at first, which means just let your pencil or keyboard work for as long as you can.  Spend at least 15 or 20 minutes jotting down whatever comes to mind as you think of it.  Don’t spend any time correcting your writing or going back and adding punctuation – there will be time for that.  Just write.  If you feel like it helps, start putting things into the format that helps you best describe your vision – for me it’s a set of bullets or an outline, but for others it may be keywords, phrases, or memorable quotes.

Realize that whatever you write can always be changed later.  It’s not permanent, nor is there a time limit on the process.  Clarifying your vision may take multiple sessions over a couple months, or you could be satisfied after just a few minutes.  The most important thing is to start with something.

Here are some things you can do to get started creating your own vision:

1. Define your top three focus areas.  Your vision should be a result of the most important things to you (for me it’s family, career, and personal development).  Think about the various things you want to be known for and make sure those things are represented in your vision.
2. Identify your core values and incorporate the five most important into your vision.  Examples might include integrity, dedication, enjoyment, efficiency, empathy, courage, wisdom, friendliness, flexibility, strength, focus, improvement, balance, or honesty.  A quick Internet search yields many more for you to consider.
3. Consider the roles you play.  Each of us serves various roles everyday: parent, teacher, businessperson, babysitter, manager, employee, and so on.  Make sure your vision addresses each role that’s important to you.
4. Think about your personal heroes.  What characteristics or values do they have that you admire?  What are they best known for and how does that relate to what you’d like to be known for?
5. Answer these four questions in order to learn more about yourself and who you want to be.
   1. What am I here for (Purpose)?
   2. Who am I really (Values)?
   3. How do I live that Purpose and those Values every day?
   4. How do I translate that Purpose and those Values into a successful year?

Over the years, I’ve found that the best personal vision documents have had the following attributes in common.  While you don’t need to address each and every one, look at your vision and see how these seven attributes describe it.

• Written down.  There’s little use in coming up with a vision if you can’t remember it or pull it up when you need it.  Writing it down (or typing it up as I do) is more important than any other attribute.  Research has shown that writing things down helps us remember them.
• Uniquely you.  When your read your vision, you should deeply identify with it.  Your vision shouldn’t reflect anyone else’s vision for your life but your own.  Your values, your ambitions, and your dreams should be encapsulated by your vision.
• Holistic.  Your vision needs to incorporate all aspects of your life that are important to you.  If it’s only about your business, it’s not going to be personal enough.  Make sure to call out everything that’s important to you.
• Uplifting.  Keep your vision positive and you’ll be more inclined to refer back to it.  The more you refer back to it, the more you reinforce it.  Reading your vision should be inspiring, not something you avoid.
• Birds-eye view.  Your vision shouldn’t be too specific.  It needs to be something that’s above the fray, taking a top-down look at your life.  Your vision isn’t your goals, and neither of them are your to-do list.  Your vision is high-level.
• Simple.  Or at least as simple and short as you need it to be.  If it takes you thirty minutes to read your own vision document, it’s not something you’ll do very often.  Keep it short and sweet to be most effective.
• Available.  Your vision doesn’t do much good if you don’t read it!  One thing you could do is carry a printed version of your personal vision around in your wallet or purse.  I have a digital version stored on my phone so I can refer to it regularly.

Remember: format and length don’t matter at all so long as it’s your vision,  it’s simple and uplifting, and you have it with you when you want to read it.

Sample Vision Statements

Here are some sample personal mission/vision statements from around the web.  Note how they’re all different formats and structure, yet all are unique to that individual. 

Gandhi: “Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day: I shall not fear anyone on Earth.  I shall fear only God.  I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.  I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.  I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.”

Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues:

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children… to leave the world a better place… to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Walt Disney: “Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.”

Mike Torres (mine ):  I suppose now’s a good time to laugh about “which of these doesn’t belong” since putting my name next to Ben Franklin and Gandhi is pretty ridiculous.  But I figured why not show you what I wrote down for myself.  My own vision document started in 1999 as a paragraph or so and has evolved since.  I recently added happiness commandments to it so I make sure to read them.  Here is my vision.

What’s Next?

By now you should be ready to start documenting your own personal vision.  Using some of the recommendations in this post, you can set out to really craft a vision for yourself, which will make the next step in 12 Goals easier – and set you up for greater success.  Remember: if you don’t have a vision for yourself, you’re like a boat without a rudder.  You’ll end up going wherever the wind takes you.  It’s a lot more fun to be in control of your destiny than it is to be an actor in someone else’s play.

Creating your vision is step 1.  Continue to Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
2. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
3. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners.  If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement.  There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all.  In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction.  What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress.  My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you!  If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

The Idea

“What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve” – Malcolm Gladwell

Setting goals is hard.  Achieving them is even harder.  Over the last decade, I’ve come to realize just how few people have any idea about what they want their life to be.  The majority of people take things day-by-day without a clear roadmap or direction.  Unfortunately this type of approach only works when you have an extreme amount of luck or an otherworldly amount of talent on your side.  Most people need a little more structure to their approach.

The big question: where do you start?  Some people jump right in after reading a personal development book and start thinking about their goals.  They work on this list for a few days, but without a blueprint for success, they eventually give up and fall back into their previous habits.  Habits that haven’t been able to generate the level of success they’re looking for.  The "ah-ha" moment for me came when thinking about what it is about the goals people set that has them giving up so quickly?

This led me to a simple conclusion.  Goals that are too big, too grand, simply don’t work.  Yet in order to qualify as a life goal, the goal by its very nature has to be big – otherwise it’s just a to-do item on a sticky note. So where does that leave us?  Well, right in the middle!  Goals that are scoped to approximately 30 days have an innate sense of urgency, yet there’s enough “runway” to achieve something pretty big.  When you break things down into 30 day milestones, you also have the benefit of being able to build on successes from month to month – you know that by April you will have achieved your January, February, and March goals, so you can make your April goal something that moves you that much further in the same direction.  Compounding success like this is quite powerful.

With this 30-day goal idea, I started searching through my research to see how I could group various concepts together to make Twelve Goals a more structured program.  The notion of 30-day goals is a start, but it certainly in and of itself isn’t enough to get people up off the couch.  That requires a little more.  After a few weeks of dissecting the data I’ve been collecting, I settled on a high-level structure that can serve as a basic template for people.  But more on that in a minute…

Why Set Goals At All?

Because they work.

Setting and working towards goals has many benefits.  In recent years, there have been studies linking goal-setting with an enhanced state of well-being; a feeling of purpose and happiness that’s unique to people who set and strive for something meaningful and important to them.  Goals that align with our needs, values, and identities are the types of goals that work best as they’re able to speak to who we really are.  People with this type of forward momentum exude positive energy and are able to better adjust to life’s ups and downs than those who are mindlessly wandering through their days.

It’s no secret that people who set goals are also more likely to achieve them.  Yet while people are diligent about setting goals at the workplace as part of standard practice, few take the time to focus on their lives outside of the office.  Naturally people who achieve their goals are more likely to be able to repeat the process with less mental overhead, reinforcing that positive state of well-being.  Researchers have referred to this as a happiness spiral.  Not a bad spiral to be stuck in, huh?

Goals are also refocusers.  Sure, it’s not a word that any dictionary recognizes, but it’s a very real concept as anyone who has ever been “off track” knows.  Goals have a very real ability to straighten us out during times of confusion or unhappiness by reminding us about who we are and what we need to do.  If you’re able to refer back to something tangible that describes to you what’s really important, chances are greater that you’ll saddle up, refocus, and make it so.

If you’re down on goal setting, you might want to stop here and check out Does Goal Setting Hold Us Back? before continuing.  If you’re back and you’re still down on goal setting, you still might want to read on and see if anything in the program resonates with you.

The Template

Twelve Goals is based on the following basic equation:

Achievement = Vision * (Monthly Goals * (Positive Habits + Specific Tasks + Daily Monitoring))

This formula is as simple as I could make it.  Any simpler and it would lose its punch.  What this says is that the combination of positive habits, specific tasks, and daily progress monitoring will really magnify your goals.  When combined with the right, appropriate vision for yourself, achievement is… well, achievable!  Here’s the primer (we’ll get deeper into each element over the next 60 days and I’ll come back and hyperlink each section).

Vision is what you use for inspiration and aspiration.  It’s the equivalent of the corporate mission statement.  The idea with a vision is to "begin with the end in mind".  For example, a trick we use at Microsoft is to write a press release before we begin developing the software so that when the time comes to make trade-offs, we know what our ultimate goal is.  Not much can be achieved without a vision, so it all starts here.  And of course, it’s not just thought about, it’s written down.

Monthly goals are your commitments for the year.  These monthly goals serve as the backbone for the entire Twelve Goals program.  Naturally it’s important that when deciding what your monthly goals should be, you look further than the traditional SMART model.  My recommendation is to use the list from 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter when formulating your goals (holistic, value driven, personal, fresh, scoped, habit forming, present tense, positive, challenge/skill balanced, want-to, lasting, and shared).  Another aspect of goal setting that we’ll go into is the use of imagery, which when combined with words can help reinforce your goals.

Positive habits could be the most overlooked aspect of any goal-setting program, but it’s front and center in Twelve Goals.  For good reason too: without forming the appropriate habits, there’s no way to really achieve any level of sustained success.  Naturally the word sustained is the key word here.  There’s a big difference between the “one trick pony” kind of achievement that anyone could reach with a sprint of short-term activity, but what we’re looking to form is the basis for the achievement marathon.  Because similar to compounded interest in an investment account, the real fun comes from compounded success over time.  We’ll be using the 15-point list from 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever (by far the most popular post on Refocuser with thousands of views, dozens of tweets, and lots of discussion!)

Specific tasks are the constructs by which you break your goals into manageable, actionable, and concrete pieces.  With the 30-day window for each goal, we’ll be looking at each month as a milestone within the greater 12-month cycle, and before each month begins we’ll take some time to break that month’s goals into tasks.  If you’re aware of systems like Getting Things Done, this part of the program will likely be pretty familiar to you.  These are the micro-goals you’ll need in order to move forward, step-by-step.

Daily monitoring, the last piece of the puzzle, relates to the way we monitor progress and make ongoing adjustments as needed.  This is another oft-overlooked but important component, particularly when things haven’t become habitual yet.  There’s no quicker way than to tell when you’re off-track than to examine your progress on a day-to-day basis.  Of course, in order for this to work, monitoring has to be a habit in and of itself – and it can’t be something that you dread doing.  And of course, it can’t take more than 30 seconds to do it.  When we cover daily monitoring, a spreadsheet and PDF download will be made available for you to use.

What’s Next?

Continue to Create Your Vision (Step 1) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
2. 12 Goals: Create Your Vision (Step 1)
3. 12 Goals: Tools You Can Use

What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?

Capturing photos and videos and reliving those memories with family.  I love to catch my 2-year old daughter doing something fun and unique; something only she does. It gives me this overwhelming feeling that I’m witnessing one of the most special things in the universe – something that’s never happened before – and I can’t help but feel like I’m helping create the narrative of her life.  Almost like I’m building memories with her that will someday encompass her early life experience.  We’re helping build her past.

Last summer I made a short movie with photos from my daughter’s first two years as we were getting ready to release Movie Maker (what I work on all day).  It was one of the best things I’ve done for myself.  I was able to express my feelings more completely and creatively through pictures and short sentences, and it’s a gift I’ll give her someday when she’d old enough to understand it.  Every so often I go back and watch it, and I find myself filled with pride (and nostalgia) as soon as I hear the first bar of the song start to play. <By the way, I actually got the inspiration for my movie from Gretchen’s The Years Are Short>

I feel like this is one way I tap into that “past positive” aspect of time perspective, which is so critical to overall happiness.

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?

When I was 18, I thought happiness was something I would have “someday” when things settle down.  Until then, I’m go-go-go because I felt I had so much to do before I could really consider myself happy.  But one day fairly recently (during the last couple years) I realized that “happily ever after” doesn’t exist at all.  There isn’t a time in the future when all will be right with the world, when everything will be exactly how I had imagined it being.  And if there is, that feeling won’t last forever… it may not even last a week.  The present moment, the here & now, is the only thing that actually is.  I realized I couldn’t wait until everything is perfect to be content with life.  My perspective shifted for the better once I internalized this.

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?

All the time.  The first thing that jumps to mind is spending too much time in front of a screen of some sort instead of disconnecting.  I’m a total information junkie and bad habits stem from that.  I frequently find myself late at night clicking refresh on my email, my RSS feeds, and random websites over and over like a crazed junkie looking for a hit.  The payoff is never worth it, so I now forcefully shut the laptop lid and pry myself away (though it’s even harder with the buzzing phone in my pocket to fully disconnect… I’m working on it).

I also find myself questioning decisions I’ve made in the past, even when I know they turned out just fine.  Whether they’re career choices, financial decisions, or beating myself up for not making it to the gym during the week, I’ve since learned that I always need to move forward.  And maybe not take things quite as seriously as I had been.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?

I first saw this William James quote in The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

A few weeks later, I came across this quote in Rapt that I wrote about a few weeks ago: “Your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Both sum up happiness for me.  You get to choose what you pay attention to every day, and those choices define your life more than anything else.  Focus!

If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a “comfort food,” do you have a comfort activity?

I have three:

Hugging my wife and daughter takes me into another place and reminds me instantly of what really matters.

Grabbing a short cappuccino and disappearing into a bookstore for a couple hours with a stack of books is something I love to do.  I’ve done this weekly for about nine years, and I always walk out refreshed and feeling more positive than when I walked in.  I also feel more creative as inevitably I learned something new and interesting that I can put to use.

And when all else fails, I go to the gym with my Zune HD and listen to sappy music while I lift weights.  It can be a struggle to get there when I’m not feeling up to it, but I always feel so much better afterwards.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?

The people I know who seem the happiest are those who are grateful for everything and find the positives in the things around them.  A good friend of mine, a working mother, when asked if she is disappointed by how much time she gets to spend with her boys responds, “No because I’m just so grateful for all the time we do get to spend together”.  That’s happiness.

Living in Seattle, where it’s beautiful most of the year with very mild weather, I constantly find people letting the weather affect their mood.  It could be a case of “misery loves company” – complaining about the weather is a great way to relate to others, I guess.  But so many people I know will complain endlessly (on Facebook!) about a rainy day, even after 20 straight days of seventy degree sunshine.  Not only is this detracting from their own happiness, but it’s bringing the people around them down too.  I don’t have much patience for people who complain all the time anyway.  To go back to the happiness mantra above – if you don’t like something, choose to change it!

Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?

Years ago I spent time self-employed because I thought I would be happier defining my own schedule, working from home on my own projects, and hanging out in coffee shops writing code.  But I quickly found that it was a pretty miserable experience (for me).  Happiness with my work involves working with a great team of people and feeding off other people’s energy.  I totally lacked this.  It also means big, scary, hard problems to solve, and I couldn’t always generate those on my own.  I found that I needed a mission shared with others to get the most out of my efforts, and the second I found that again, the emptiness went away.  (I also found that having steady income you can count on alleviates all sorts of stress!)

Do you work on being happier? If so, how?

I do, though I don’t know if I’d consider it work in the traditional sense.  I’ve always enjoyed learning about myself and get a lot of pleasure in trying new things.  It’s like a big experiment to see just how much I can improve my own life through various means.

I find reading to be a great way to learn.  Audiobooks too.  But as great as reading is, I find writing to be better.  You don’t really know how you feel about something until you’re forced to express it in words.  You don’t know how much you really know about something until you have to teach it.  I realized pretty early on that just having this blog available to me makes me happier, because I’m growing through my writing in ways that I couldn’t otherwise.

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa?

I’m a borderline introvert.  I’m constantly scheming to get out of social events, professional and personal, so I can spend more time alone, with my family, or with close friends.  But I frequently lose that battle (being married has a lot to do with that).  Yet I’m almost always pleasantly surprised to find that I can have fun, sometimes lots of fun, with larger groups of people.  Even strangers.  Typing this right now I’m thinking “Ugh, I hope I don’t have to go through that again” – even when I know it’s been a blast before.  So this is something that I expect to find miserable, but instead find quite enjoyable most of the time.

Thanks for humoring me with my mock interview!

Related posts:

1. Making Your Choices in 2010

My family went completely paperless last Fall.  The only paper we have in our house right now: books, my daughter’s artwork, and a few important documents locked up in a safe (birth and stock certificates, wills, and so on).  The thought of going paperless can be a little overwhelming – especially if you’re a trained packrat – but after a little work, it’s totally freeing.  Not having paper waiting for you on every surface in your home means you can focus on the things that matter, instead of shuffling paper from place A to B.

Like most things, the first thing you need to do is mentally and emotionally prepare for the shift.  This shouldn’t be difficult, but it’s a necessary first step.  Otherwise you’re going to find yourself fighting the process each step of the way.  This means you have to detach from the concept of “it isn’t real unless I can touch it".  It’s a process similar to the one you may have gone through with the switch from CDs to MP3.  After a while, you come to realize that not holding something doesn’t mean you don’t have it.

There are many benefits to foregoing paper and making the shift to digital.  Here are a few:

1. It makes everything searchable.  If you need to find proof of a charitable donation, you just need to search your hard drive for the name of the organization (using Windows or Mac OS X).  If you want to get fancy and find all references to your mortgage loan number, it’s a split second away. 
2. It means you’ll never lose it.  Now that you have everything you need in digital form, you can make sure you always have it handy.  It will forever be safe from fire, burglary, or misplacement.  Backing up your data is in (serious) need of a longer post, but for now check out the recommendation to backup to an external hard drive, a Windows Home Server, and an online service like CrashPlan from 12 Steps to Simplify Your PC (with Windows 7).
3. It keeps your documents secure.  You can’t encrypt paper, and locks can be broken, but with the right digital encryption, you can keep your files safe from prying eyes.  The easiest way to do this is to use the built-in security features of Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Mac OS X.  On Windows PCs, the feature to look for is Bitlocker which will automatically encrypt hard drives for you (including external drives with Windows 7).  On the Mac there’s a similar feature called FileVault.  Part of going paperless is minimizing the amount of mail you receive as well, which drastically reduces the probability of identity theft.
4. It frees up physical storage space.  Do you currently have a massive file cabinet full of paper?  Does just looking at it make you cringe because you know opening it would lead to paper strewn all over the floor?  Going paperless means you can get rid of that old filing cabinet for good – you’ll never need it again.  Replace it with a Zen garden or a piece of artwork!
5. It unclutters all of your surface tops.  There’s no need to have designated areas for paper accumulation in your home when you could replace those areas with flowers.  Break out of the pile habit and start to free yourself.
6. It unclutters your mind too!  Especially if you’re like me and stacks of paper calling out to you keep you from getting into flow.  Having an organized living space (and workspace) is a central component to focus.

The process itself is actually a pretty simple one, it just takes a little time and a lot of recycling bags.  You could end up spending anywhere from a few hours to a few days in total to make this work, but the payoff is worth it.  One thing you have to be aware of before you start is that this will likely be a broken-up process – it’s not something you can do in a single sitting.  You’re going to have to spread it out over multiple days if you have a few years of paper built up.

Step 1: Collect all your snippets

Collecting all your documents to go digital is either a two minute task or a two day task depending on how organized you are.  First cull through your filing cabinets and existing piles, pulling everything out onto a large open floor.  Do a pass through the pile for “to scan”, “to shred”, “to recycle”.  The difference between “to shred” and “to recycle” should be based on whether or not you care who sees these documents.  If your social security number or other personal information is included on the document, it’s certainly worth shredding over recycling.  But if it’s just a brochure for a spa, shredding isn’t worth the hassle.

During the sorting process, also keep a running list of the “types” of documents you’re coming across to make Step 2 a little easier.

Before you get started, I’d recommend pulling aside any original documents and putting them in a separate pile (“to keep”).  This includes birth and death certificates, stock certificates, original versions of your estate paperwork, and other unique original documents.  For most legal documents, a scan is just as valid as the paper itself, but if you’re worried about shredding something, it’s worth researching online first.   (Don’t just assume you can’t do it – you’ll be surprised how many things you don’t need to keep!)

Put your entire “to keep” pile into a fireproof safe in a secure location and then stop thinking about it until you need to.  Put your entire “to recycle” pile into garbage bags and… recycle them.

Once you have your 2 remaining piles (“to scan” and “to shred”), you can get going on the next steps.

Step 2: Setup your digital filing system

As your documents are scanned and enter the digital realm, you’re going to want to have a way to file them.  It’s best to set this up upfront so you aren’t left reorganizing everything halfway through – that’ll take at least twice as long as it needs to.  Only you know what kind of documents you’re going to want to keep and how you’re going to want to organize them.

Storing these documents in your Users folder (in Windows) or your Home folder (on the Mac) is the safest bet, as these folders are associated with your user account and are the most important folders to backup.  It’s a matter of preference whether or not you store all documents in the Documents folder here, but it’s a pretty obvious choice.  Underneath your Documents folder, you’ll likely want to have separate folders for the types of documents you’re going to have (Auto, Home, Marriage, Kids, etc.)  Even though search makes filing a little less important, it’s still nice to know exactly where certain files are going to be if you need them.

Step 3: Scan/shred and print to PDF

Prerequisites: a good paper scanner and a decent shredder.  I strongly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap 300 and the Fellowes Powershred shredder (although there are less expensive shredder options out there).  Without the ScanSnap, this entire process may be too onerous if you’re using an old-fashioned scanner – but this little gem makes it fun.  The key is to make sure you check the box for “Make searchable PDF (OCR)” so that each document you scan is made automatically searchable by your operating system.

Take your “to scan” pile and get started!  While you’re scanning from one pile, you can start shredding from the other.  I found that the shredding can easily take as much time as the scanning, so instead of doing everything sequentially, you should look to do it in parallel.

Once you have your scanned, searchable PDF, you should immediately drag and drop it into the right specific folder from Step 2.  Don’t leave anything in the “My ScanSnap” folder (in fact, I set the ScanSnap to save files on my Desktop so I always have a visual reminder to file it, and could just easily move them from there)

Also, from now on, instead of printing to paper when you come across something, you should just print to PDF and save yourself the scan/shred step!  You can do this using Adobe Acrobat or a free product called CutePDF for Windows (Mac OS X has it built-in) which makes a virtual PDF “printer” show up as a printer in the Print dialog.

Lifehacker has more about the life-saver that is the ScanSnap.

Step 4: Automate your money

Automating your money is a big step in going paperless.  If you were to analyze all the paper in your life, you’d probably find that the number one source relates to finance.  I’d say that a full 80% of the documents I scanned and shredded last year had to do with money – and while the majority of our finances were already digital, I realized we could do even more.

First things first: setup direct deposit.  if you don’t have direct deposit setup, it’s a huge time saver.  Not having to go to the bank every other week saves a fair amount of time and, of course, saves paper.

Next up: minimize the number of accounts you have to optimize your financial flow.  If you have multiple credit cards, a few brokerage accounts at different banks, and bank accounts out the wazoo, you’ll likely have a tough time staying on top of everything.  Getting this down to the basics (1 checking account, 1 service for investment accounts, and 1 credit card) can help minimize statements and simplify your finances.

For each account you have, turn off paper statements and enable email notifications.  If you’d prefer not to receive statements at all (like me) then you can automatically filter those statements to a specific folder or label.

Next: Centralize your tracking.  My favorite service for this by far is Mint.com, though I also use Microsoft Money for reconciling transactions.  Mint is a service (now owned by Intuit, the folks behind Quicken) that aggregates and analyzes all of your accounts in a single place.  Yes, you have to give them your usernames and passwords, but the tradeoff is a good one.  As Gina Trapani said in Why I Stopped Being Paranoid and Started Using Mint , “Mint actually keeps me safer from identity theft or break-ins because it can alert me the moment a big withdrawal, purchase, or deposit happens on any one of my accounts”.

Finally: take advantage of online bill pay through your bank.  I’ve written a total of (maybe) two dozen checks over the last decade since I started using online bill pay, and there’s no way I could ever go back to it.  I distinctly remember my parents spreading the monthly bills out on the kitchen table and painstakingly handwriting checks, finding stamps, licking envelopes, and driving by a mailbox.  Ugh!  When you receive a bill or anything else requiring payment, do it the next time you’re sitting at your computer.  It’s that easy.

Step 5: Reduce your paper mail

For $20/year, you can have a cleaner mailbox in 90 days through MailStopper.  I used MailStopper a few years ago (when it was called GreenDimes) and found my mailbox a little emptier each day compared to what it was like prior to MailStopper.  It’s an important step in going paperless as a huge amount of paper, at least in my home, comes in through the good ol’ mail service.

You can also use OptOutPrescreen to opt-out of credit or insurance offers via mail.  But ironically you have to print out and mail a form in order to do it.

Step 6: Keep it up!

Now that you’ve made the switch from paper to paperless, the key is to keep at it. 

Keep a physical inbox right next to your scanner, and throughout the week, add documents to the inbox that you’d like to scan at the end of the week.  Give yourself a weekly task or appointment to scan/shred any important documents in your inbox – it should take more more than 5 minutes tops (unless you just bought a house! )  Always ask yourself “do I really need this paper hanging around?”  99 times out of 100, the answer is no.

If you receive a bill, utilize the 2-minute rule and pay it immediately, then shred it.  I do this for scanning/shredding as well, since I only need to do it a few times each month.

Gong paperless takes a little elbow grease and a little know-how (like most good things) but it’s achievable.  And once you’ve done the hard part, sticking with it is simple.  Then it becomes harder to ever look back once you have an uncluttered home, a simple process in place, and everything you need safe, secure, and at your fingertips.  Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Simplify Your PC (with Windows 7)
2. It’s Hard To Focus If You Can’t Find Anything
3. Bouncing at Zero – “ZBB” in Life

Apologies in advance!  This is the kind of piece I used to post to my old blog – a geeky article about how to squeeze the most out of some aspect of technology.  That blog is no longer active now that this blog has taken its place, and given that my interest in technology relates to its ability to improve people’s lives in a general sense, I figured some thoughts on simple computing would fit in nicely on Refocuser.  It’s hard to contain my excitement these days for my day job in high-tech (what a luxury!) so there are worse things than having it bleed into my other passion.  This post, however, will be a little more “basic” than some of the stuff I used to post about – there won’t be any hard drive partitioning here!

As many of you may have heard, Microsoft released the latest version of Windows – Windows 7 – on October 22, 2009.  Disclaimer: I do work on the Windows team at Microsoft – but I’m a fan of good technology first and foremost, so this isn’t some sort of advertisement – nor does it represent anyone or anything at Microsoft.  This new version of Windows is known for being faster, more reliable, more secure, and just plain better than any version of Windows to-date.  I’ve been beta testing it for well over a year, and I can definitely say that it’s changed the way I feel about my PC.  My PC is fun again with Windows 7 and works exactly how I want it to.

Getting a PC into the most optimal state isn’t something that just happens though.  We aren’t (yet) at a place where computers are perfect all the time (despite what Apple apologists will tell you) – and they certainly can’t read our minds yet – it still requires a little bit of know-how and some work to get your PC into tip-top shape.  And once you set it up how you want it, it requires some level of discipline to leave it that way…. to not ruin it with loads of junky software, and to avoid cluttering your desktop or personal files with things you don’t need.  It’s important that if you’re going to spend the time to simplify your PC that you keep it that way for as long as you can (at least until Windows 8 comes out!)  You’ll find yourself operating at a much higher level, focused on the task at hand instead of struggling to find files, or simply fighting with your computer every step of the way.

After all, that’s what this is all about. Focus. Very few of us actually enjoy configuring software or moving data from one computer to the next. But with a little groundwork, you can increase your ability to focus tenfold.

Now before you do anything, I’d recommend installing Windows 7 on a new computer, or at least a blank hard drive.  I wouldn’t do a straight upgrade from Windows Vista (or Windows XP, which is a little trickier) – I would start on an empty hard drive and do what’s called a “clean install” so that you only have the operating system, and not the loads of old software and settings you’ve been carrying around.  If you’re wondering which version of Windows 7 to buy for a new or existing PC, I would look at this chart and check out the Microsoft Store.  If you’re still confused, or if you don’t know what you’re reading at all, I would just opt for Windows 7 Home Premium.

Once you have Windows 7 installation under way, here are the 12 steps I recommend taking:

1. Enable Automatic Updates during Setup. Windows 7 is a living operating system, constantly updated to keep your PC secure and running smoothly.  In order to keep this up, the best thing to do is to enable automatic updates – that way you don’t have to worry about manually checking for new updates from Microsoft.  Whether it’s an updated driver for a new piece of hardware or a security patch, you’re going to want these things automatically installed for you while you’re sleeping – so you can focus on things other than being an IT manager for your home!

2. Install Microsoft Security Essentials. While Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 are more secure than any other operating system and browser combination out there, hackers and virus hounds still like to pound on Windows since it has 1 billion+ users.  This means you’d be silly not to have some additional protection to make sure you don’t inadvertently get any spyware or Trojans on your PC.  Microsoft Security Essentials is free and it’s the quietest security software out there, only bugging you when something is wrong.  Highly recommended over naggy, heavyweight, and expensive security packages like McAfee or Norton.  You can get Microsoft Security Essentials from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

3. Install Windows Live Essentials. Microsoft removed many of the in-box applications from Windows XP/Vista in order to release them more frequently.  These applications include Movie Maker (what I work on), Photo Gallery, Writer, Mail, Messenger, Silverlight, and others. These programs really do complete the Windows experience (without them, you only have very basic ways to manage your photo collection for instance) and they’re lightweight, fast, and full of great features for Windows 7.  Also highly recommended. You can get Windows Live Essentials from http://download.live.com.

4. Install Office 2007 (if you need it).  If you need Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and/or Outlook, Microsoft Office 2007 is the best way to go (note: Office 2010 is currently in beta testing).  If your needs are minimal, you can get by with a web alternative – but given that Office 2007 runs like a charm on Windows 7 and gives you the “real deal”, enabling just about anything anyone would need from a productivity suite, it’s worth a strong consideration.  The first thing I do when I install it is change the Theme to Black or Silver – the Blue theme is so 2001. You can do this by opening Word and going to Options.  You can buy Office 2007 from www.microsoftstore.com.

5. Install Adobe Reader and Flash. These two programs are necessary evils – you can’t do much on the web without Flash, and with so many documents in PDF format, you’d be hard pressed to get by without Reader.  There are alternatives (like Foxit Reader) but Adobe has been much less aggressive in the way it takes over your computer lately, so there’s not much harm in installing the real deal.  When I install Reader, I turn off automatic updates when it prompts me because I just don’t want another program “phoning home” when I’m trying to use it.  That’s a personal preference though.  You can get Reader and Flash from www.adobe.com.

6. Install Windows Live Sync (if you need it). Keeping files “in sync” across multiple computers isn’t an easy concept for people to understand, but once you do, it’s really powerful. Windows Live Sync helps you roam specific folders (like your Documents or Pictures) across the Internet to other PCs.  It’s also great to keep your Internet Explorer Favorites the same everywhere.  I use Sync to keep a set of roaming documents synchronized between 4 different PCs (and a Mac) so that wherever and whenever I happen to be, I can get to my most important up-to-date files.  If you don’t need this capability, I would just skip this step entirely.  But if you do, this can change the way you work.  You can get Windows Live Sync from http://sync.live.com.

7. Choose a Theme. Once you have the basics running on Windows 7, you can have a little fun with it.  Open the Control Panel from the Start menu and go to “Change the theme”.  From this screen you’ll be able to choose from one of seven great themes, which come with their own window color, desktop backgrounds, and sounds.  You can also click “Get more themes online” to browse popular themes for your PC like Infiniti, Coke, Zune, and my favorite, Bing pictures.  And if you want to get creative, you can even create your own – just choose a theme you like and then change some aspects of it (like adding your own background images to cycle through) and save it.  I personally like great photography, so I usually stick with the simple but highly inspiring photographs.

8. Setup HomeGroup (if you need it). HomeGroup is a new feature in Windows 7 which connects all PCs on a home network to documents, music, video, pictures, and even printers.  If you have a laptop and a desktop, or just multiple PCs at home, HomeGroup is a lifesaver.  You can print easily to any printer in the HomeGroup, and access all of the files you need once connected to the network (yes, it works wirelessly too).  It’s so much easier than standard file or printer sharing, and even works with laptops that are a part of a corporate domain – so your work laptop can connect seamlessly to your home network at home with HomeGroup.  To setup HomeGroup, just click Start and type “HomeGroup” and enter.

9. Pin Your Favorite Programs to the Taskbar. Forget digging through the Start Menu when you want to find your favorite program, just add it to the new taskbar. You can do this a few different ways – the two easiest are to just drag and drop the shortcut from the Start Menu onto the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, or to right-click on the program you’d like to pin and click “Pin to Taskbar”.  You can then rearrange your taskbar however you’d like by dragging and dropping.  One fun trick: when you right-click on icons on the taskbar, if they’re designed for Windows 7, you get what’s called a Jump list – a list of actions you can start right from the taskbar.  Another fun one: you can pin the Control Panel down there by opening up the Control Panel from the Start menu, and then right-clicking on it in the Taskbar and selecting “Pin to Taskbar”.

10. Put Everything in Your Users Folder. From now on, everything you save should go into your Users folder.  You can access this by going to Start and then clicking on your name.  If you keep all your documents, downloads, music, videos, and pictures in one place (C:\Users\Your Name) you can more easily move this stuff to a new computer in the future.  You can also backup your system without fear that you’re forgetting something important somewhere.  This is something I’ve been doing for over 20 years (long before Windows started supporting it) and feel very strongly that it’s a requirement for peace of mind. You want your backups to be actual backups of your stuff!

11. Clean Up Your Messy Desktop. If your desktop is littered with files, folders, and other shortcuts, I’d recommend booking an hour and going through every single thing on your desktop and finding a place for it in your Users folder (just not the Desktop folder).  If you can’t do that, create a folder called “Old Desktop MM/DD/YYYY” (with the actual date) in your Documents folder and put everything into that.  When cleaning up, don’t worry too much about deleting shortcuts to programs that litter themselves on your desktop – you aren’t deleting the program itself, just the pointer to it (which is also in your Start menu).  One trick I also like to use is to turn off my desktop icons entirely since everything I need is either in the Start Menu or the Taskbar.  You can do this from the Control Panel by searching for “Turn off desktop icons” and selecting the “Show or hide common icons” option.  This keeps me from emptying my recycle bin all the time – instead, it actually serves the purpose it was meant to solve (namely keeping things “almost” deleted until I need them again!)

12. Setup Regular Backup. 1 in 3 people don’t view backup as a necessity, yet 50% of people have lost data at some point.  Laptops are stolen all the time (over 2,000 each day) and hard drives crash every minute – and with over 500 billion digital files in existence, that’s a lot of potential data to lose.  The average U.S. adult has well over 2,000 digital files – photos, documents, music, and other types.  Having lost data in the past, I take my backup system very, very seriously (at any given time I have 5 different copies of my data in 3 different physical locations).  It’s not something I have to think about anymore.  While there are a number of great backup solutions out there, I’m going to recommend you do at least two of these three things:

1. Backup to an external hard drive (preferably stored in a fireproof, locked media-ready safe) using Windows Backup.  To setup Windows Backup, just type “Backup” in the Start menu and open “Backup and Restore”.  Windows Backup will automatically backup the important folders (see #10 above).
2. Backup to an online service.  I use CrashPlan these days because I think the desktop software is a little better than the others, but Mozy and Carbonite are also good options.  Backing up to an online service will take days (or weeks – or even months) but there’s no better peace of mind that your data is safe somewhere other than your home.  Even though your hard drive is most likely to fail, fire, earthquakes, and burglary are real threats too.
3. Backup to a Windows Home Server.  Don’t let the name fool you – even though it’s called a server, it’s surprisingly easy to use.  Windows Home Server backs up all the computers on your local network automatically every day, and lets you restore individual files or the entire computer.  You can even go back to any date (depending on how many backups you choose to store) and restore your PC to an exact date and time from weeks ago.  HP, Acer, and Lenovo make great Home Servers – check them out.

By the way, if you’re still using Windows XP and need access to something that’s only available in Windows XP for some reason, you can also use Windows XP Mode with Windows 7 provided your hardware supports it.

Naturally there are many, many other things you could do with Windows 7 if you want to.  You have access to millions of programs, utilities, gadgets, peripherals, and so on.  If you have an iPod or a Zune, you’re also going to want to install software (like iTunes or the Zune player) to go along with it.  But for the most part, you should avoid installing too much stuff like the software that comes with your camera, webcam, or removable hard drive.  Most of what you need comes with Windows or Windows Live, and cluttering up your PC with a bunch of half-baked software is never a good thing. 

If you start with the list above, you’ll have a system that should hum along for years.  It’ll be fast, full of great software for fun tasks like video and photo editing, but most importantly, it will get out of your way and let you do your thing.  Exactly what a minimalist PC should be.

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. It’s Hard To Focus If You Can’t Find Anything
2. Going Paperless at Home in 6 Easy Steps
3. Writing in Microsoft Word Without Any Distractions

I’ve recently started reading Rapt by Winifred Gallagher (book number fifteen on my annual goal list of eighteen relevant books).  While the book has a set of good and bad reviews on Amazon, I found the description and the Kindle Sample interesting enough to buy and read it.  It’s no secret I’m interested in learning as much as I can about attention and focus, so anything that could help improve my understanding of the area even a little bit is worth the $10 investment.

So far, I’ve been quite pleased.  The introduction section of this book has one of the most accurate descriptions of focus and attention I’ve read to-date – and given Refocuser’s subject matter, I thought it would be fun to relay what I found to be the key takeaway from Rapt’s introduction: the grand unified theory of positive psychology.

In physics, the notion of a “grand unification theory” or “grand unified theory” is the holy grail of research, and has been for many years.  The idea is to merge all disparate theories into a single theory that describes everything in the universe – gravity, quantum mechanics, relativity, and so on.  It’s clean and simple, and scientists like structure and order.  When it comes to positive psychology, you could say that a similar unifying theory would help crystallize things into something more approachable for everyday people.  There are thousands of interesting studies to draw upon, and thousands more sources to pull from, but because of this explosion of information, it’s hard to grasp onto it.  People speak often of the many of things you can do to increase the quality of your life, but maybe there is actually a single statement or line of thinking that wraps everything up with a bow; something that everything else hangs off of.  This proposal from Rapt is as close as I’ve found:

Your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

It is pretty simple, isn’t it?  But it has broad implications.  It suggests that your internal experience is entirely forged by your external experience, specifically the things which you choose to apply your attention to.  And that you have control over it.  You can create your experience by learning how to focus your attention on the things that matter the most to you.  Maybe it’s not easy or natural right away, but it’s possible.  I love that thought.

Attention has gotten you this far.  It’s created the self you know yourself to be.  The time you’ve spent directing your attention throughout your life – from the first moment you were aware of your actions to this very moment spent reading this post – has created a very unique filter for your experiences.  You see things a certain way, based on what you’ve focused on in the past, and that will help determine what you do and who you are in the future.  Everyone internalizes experiences differently based on their own specific filter.

It’s a physiological fact that the things you decide to focus on – whether it’s another person in conversation or building an IKEA desk – are registered by your brain as unique “targets”.  It isn’t pseudo-science.  Subsequently, the things you implicitly choose to ignore (like the cat sleeping behind the desk) by applying your focus elsewhere literally don’t exist to you.  Your brain doesn’t know the difference between non-existence and just-not-focused-on.  This implies that simply by choosing to direct your focus on the right things, and choosing to ignore the wrong things, you’re able to change your perspective to positive effect.

In short: your life is the sum of what you focus on and you can self-direct your focus.  If you’re able to apply your focus like a laser beam, your life would “stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents but a work of art.”

The key to this is learning and then practicing how to do this.  The introduction to Rapt is chock full of down-to-earth explanation for how focus changes who we are, along with some great quotes.  The rest of the book, presumably, will give more specific guidance on what we can do.  Things I’ve talked about here like learning to avoid perfectionism, minimizing overthinking, finding the flow state regularly, and picking your top areas to focus on ahead of time will help significantly. 

But is there more?  Stay tuned…

Related posts:

1. Pick Your Top 3 Focus Areas… and Drop Everything Else
2. Take Micro-vacations to Boost Focus
3. How the Psychology of Time Can Help Channel Focus

Do something enough times and it becomes a part of you – perhaps to a fault – and from that point on, it can be harder not to do something at all than to do it.  In truth, most of our lives consist of habitual action each day.  Have you ever been driving along and realized (too late) that you’ve gone in the completely wrong direction, because you habitually started driving to work even though you were originally planning to go to a friend’s house?  Your conscious mind shut-off the second you got into that car and was on auto-pilot until you realized you were heading in the wrong direction.  I don’t know anyone that hasn’t happened to.

Forming positive new habits (and replacing negative old ones) is the only foolproof path to achievement there is.  Your habits “accumulate up” to your goals – there can’t be real triumph without small wins along the way.  You don’t just wake up one day as the president of your company, or as someone who exudes positive energy and contentment, without taking individual small steps to get there.  This is the subtlety that’s lost on those people we all know who insist that good things don’t happen to them; not everyone realizes that it’s not just handed to you

One interesting thing about habit forming is that recent research has shown that each time you repeat a behavior, the context in which it occurs is linked in your mind to the activity itself.  Context in this example refers to the things happening around the activity – the time of day, the music that’s playing, whether you’re in your car or sitting in your favorite chair, and so on.  As explained by psychologist Wendy Wood and her team in Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits, an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “habit associations are represented in learning and memory systems separately from intentions, or decisions to achieve particular outcomes. Thus, walking into a dark room can trigger reaching for the light switch without any decision to do so.”

In other words, habits benefit from having similar context in order to be successfully maintained.  At first, people start with an explicit intent to change some aspect of their life.  As an obvious example, someone might have a goal to lose 15 pounds prior to their wedding day.  This eventually translates into action (if this person is serious about the goal), and most times this action is ongoing (daily or close to it).  With this repetition, associations are formed between the context of the action and the action itself.  Eventually, these cues can help trigger automatic repetition of the activity and the original goal itself is used less in terms of personal motivation.

It becomes more about just being “what you do when you do it” than about doing something solely based on reason.  You become like a computer executing a program step-by-step without much in the way of decision-making.

There are ways to form this active association between context and habits as a shortcut to form positive habits.  Here’s the idea: surround the habit you’d like to form with corresponding positive context, forever linking your new habit with an environment or situation you enjoy. You may need to experiment a bit with this a bit to determine which things help the most (for me it’s music and scents).  Here are some examples from my life:

• In order to get into the habit of writing, I combine classical music and the smell of (good) espresso – now whenever I hear the music no matter where I am, I’m immediately ready to pour my heart out with a keyboard. 
• Getting into the habit of going to the gym early in the morning years ago required a daily ritual of Rocky music as soon as I got out of bed.  To this day every time I hear Burning Heart from Rocky IV I’m ready to exercise. 
• And as odd as this is, in order to get into the habit of flossing every night, I first had to reorganize my bathroom.  Seeing that the bathroom is organized how I like it as soon as I walk in reminds me that I need to floss!

The key to doing this is to combine something you already enjoy with a developing habit that isn’t yet second-nature.  The association between the two can be enough to ingrain that habit a little more quickly.

Give it a try!  The importance of the things happening around your behavior, positive or negative, is something that isn’t always recognized by people – but it’s important.  In order to switch your behavior from manual to auto-pilot more quickly, associate happiness-inducing experiences with your new habit until it becomes something you do instinctively.

Related posts:

1. Neuroplasticity: Your Brain’s Amazing Ability to Form New Habits
2. Guarantee Success By Tracking Your Habits with Joe’s Goals
3. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

This acronym is one of the most overused in all of personal development, and doesn’t capture the essence of goal-setting.  Not because it’s necessarily bad advice, but rather because it isn’t personal and authentic advice.  It’s cookie cutter… and is more about task management than achievement.

To recap the SMART designation, the general thinking is that any goal that doesn’t meet the following attributes is a goal not worth having.

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic (or Relevant)
T = Time-bound (or Timely)

Specific is about making sure your goal isn’t too vague, but instead represents exactly what you plan to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, and how you’re going to do it.  Measurable makes sure you can actually see and celebrate progress against the goal in order to move in the right direction through quantitative means.  Attainable goals are goals you can actually achieve in the timeframe allotted – i.e. having a goal to make $10 million dollars in 1 week would be an unattainable goal for most people.  Realistic refers to having a goal that you’re both willing and able to achieve.  Time-bound (or Timely) is all about making sure you have an end-date in mind to hold yourself accountable to; a goal to become President of your company isn’t really a goal unless you set a date by which you’d like to accomplish it.

Sounds great, right?  Sure, maybe if you’re a Cylon.  For the rest of us, SMART doesn’t give us a solid enough framework to set personal goals.  The SMART methodology is believed to have started in corporate America, and was originally used for commitment setting in the new practice of management in the 1950s.  It’s intended mostly, to this day, for project management and not for real-world use.  Perhaps this is why it seems so “big company” and not very relevant to the uniqueness and quirkiness that is human nature.  Sure, you want your goals to be SMART, but don’t you need them to be more than that?

We need a new way to think about goals.  A new framework for forming them, and a different way to think about evaluating them once they’re set.

I first starting formal goal setting in 2000, although I do recall setting informal goals throughout my college years in the mid-90s.  My first set of goals were more like a test for me: how exactly do these things work?  How should I write them so that they matter?  How should I track my progress against them?  I didn’t know any of those answers at the time, and looking back at my 2000 goals, they were a combination of core values, a personal mission statement, things I wanted to achieve “someday”, and very specific things I wanted to achieve that year.  A total hodgepodge.

Over the past 10 years, my goals have become a lot more refined.  I now have a very clear and specific set of goals for each year, as well as a 5-year plan – and I reserve time each year to reflect, celebrate, and refresh my goals.  My personal goals have become far more focused on my family and on intrinsic personal growth, and less about specific circumstances or desired outcomes when compared to my goals from 10 years ago.  I’ve spent the better part of the past decade perfecting what goal-setting means for me, and in the process feel like I’ve reached a point of real Zen about the process.

These 12 traits are the most important attributes of goals I’ve found, and many of them have been validated in University studies.  While there are others that didn’t make the list, these are the qualities I most look for in my goals each year.

Goals should be:

1. Holistic.  Each goal must fit like a puzzle piece with all other goals.  If your goals aren’t holistically aligned, you’ll quickly find that you’re working in conflict with yourself.  As an example, if one of your goals is to spend more time with your family, and another is to start a business in another state, you’ll find yourself at odds.  Your goals need to work together or the whole thing could go up in smoke.
2. Value driven.  Your goals need to speak to who you are at the core.  This means you need to know yourself and understand what drives you.  For example, if you’re someone who lives to spend time with your grandchildren, it’s important that your goals reflect that joy.  If your goals reflected someone else’s values or society’s at large (material wealth based on social comparison) and not your own, you may find yourself chasing down the wrong thing at the expense of what really makes you tick.
3. Personal.  Are you someone who likes to spend the majority of time with lots of other people, or do you like to spend your time alone or with a small close-knit group?  Are you someone who likes things to be predictable or someone who thrives on chaos?  These aren’t small considerations when it comes to setting goals.  You want to make sure you know under which circumstances you’ll thrive best, otherwise you’ll end up with a goal you don’t even want to look at.  One fun evaluation of this is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – derive goals from your personality type and have a better shot at success.
4. Fresh.  Setting goals is not something rigid and unbending, it’s actually a very fluid process.  If you’re only setting goals every few years, and only looking at them annually, there’s a pretty good chance your goals don’t align with your current reality.  That’s a sure way to ignore them.  Instead, your goals need to be fresh and adjusted on a semi-regular basis.  My own timeframe is annually – with monthly check-ins and readjustments.  What’s yours?
5. Scoped.  Only you know how many goals you should have in order to feel balanced.  Too many goals and you can become crushed by the weight of them.  Too few and you’re failing to realize your full potential.  This may take some adjustment, and it may take years to find the right rhythm, but sooner or later you’ll find the scope of goals most appropriate for you.  I’ve had as few as five and as many as twenty for the year – each year is also somewhat different depending on the variables at play.
6. Habit forming.  Goals that are habit forming are far more powerful than goals that are solely about the outcome.  For instance, if you’d like to get a 5% pay increase, the best way to make that happen is to break down your behavior and get the right habits in place to enact positive change.  Don’t focus on the increase in pay, that’s just a byproduct of the success you’ve created.  The increase in pay may (or may not be) an indirect result, but the more lasting and important change is in your day-to-day approach.  Habits are the building blocks of goals.
7. Present tense. “By February, I’d like to buy my first home” isn’t a present tense goal.  “I’m a homeowner and have found and purchased my first home” is.  Trick yourself into believing you’ve already accomplished your goal.  By reaffirming this with yourself with each review, you’ll find that your goals come more easily.  I’m not talking about some mystical “Law of Attraction” – I’m talking about proactive reinforcement and implicit influence of your self.
8. Positive.  Studies have shown that people are more apt to achieve “approach” goals vs. “avoidance” goals, so your goals should be positive in nature.  In other words, make your goals about enablement and the things you’re going to do, not the things you don’t want to do.  If you want to quit smoking, you want your goal to be about improving your health or setting the right example for your children – not constantly calling attention to the thing you’re depriving yourself of.  “Stop taking daily cigarette breaks” is tough to rally behind, but “Improve my health and overall well-being and show my kids how to live a healthy life” is motivating.
9. Challenge/skill balanced.  Sound familiar?  That’s right – this is a core component of Flow.  You want to have a goal that take you closer to the Flow state and not goals that make you bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise apathetic.  The key is to find the right balance between the challenge involved, and the skill you’re developing to address that challenge.  From Csikszentmihalyi’s Wikipedia entry: “If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.”
10. Want-to.  A goal can quickly degrade to perceived work if it feels like an imperative.  Yes, there are things you have to do in life, but your goals – in order to really work – have to be things you actually want to do.  The process of setting your goals alone can open your eyes to how many things you do on a regular basis that aren’t things you actually want to do.  And even if some of your goals are have-to goals, you should figure out how best to phrase them as want-to goals.  For example, you have to go to work in order to get paid.  But you want to close 10 sales/week in order to be at the top of the sales force for the year.  And if you don’t want it at all, maybe it’s time to pull out your copy of What Color is Your Parachute and change something bigger.
11. Lasting.  Goals that are subject to hedonic adaptation aren’t lasting enough to focus on, while goals that have long-term value can make a serious positive difference in your life.  For example, buying a brand new $50,000 car may be a great goal – but research has shown that after some time (shorter than most of us think) we adapt to changes in our circumstances, returning our level of happiness back to where it started.  The best goals are the ones that compound on themselves – similar to compound interest in your retirement account – and “keep on giving” long after they’ve been accomplished.  For instance, learning a new language or skill, spending time with friends and family, or organizing your life are all more impactful long-term than buying a new gadget (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with buying gadgets!).
12. Shared.  Most of us aren’t an island – we have life partners, spouses, kids, close friends, pets, and imaginary friends.  While it may seem that goal-setting is an isolated experience, it shouldn’t be.  The things you decide to commit yourself to are, in some cases, just as important to the people around you as they are to you.  And (to speak in project management terms): you need to get buy-in from the stakeholders before making any commitment.

These 12 attributes have helped me take a process that was pretty vague at first, and turn that ambiguity into smarter goals over time.  It isn’t that having SMART goals isn’t important – it’s just that it isn’t nearly enough if you want to both succeed and improve your happiness level during the process.

My recommendation is to start simple: pick a single goal you’d like to target, tweak it until it meets this criteria, set a date on the calendar, and go for it.  Start with something that can be scoped to 30 days at first; if your first goal is something you won’t be able to see success with for years, it’s not a good first step.  Once you’ve been able to succeed with one goal, you’ll be able to repeat the process as many times as is feasible for you (see #5 above).  Eventually, you’ll get it down to a science!

Have fun

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)
2. 12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
3. 15 Ways To Get a New Habit To Stick Forever

Overthinking is a natural part of life for many of us, even when we’re not aware we’re doing it.  Research has shown that overthinking is prevalent in young and middle aged adults, with 73% of 25-35 year-olds identified as overthinkers.  More women (57%) find themselves overthinking than men (43%), which is a significant difference.  This means the majority of women are overthinkers, and the majority of overthinkers are women. 

I’m not a woman, but I am an overthinker.  So I guess I’m in the minority… a vocal minority   If you find yourself spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking through something, twisting it around in your head until you’ve seen it from every angle and possibility, chances are you too are an overthinker.

There are very few benefits to being an overthinker.  Being logical (and therefore unemotional) about taking action has a lot of merit and can have positive results, but there’s a difference between thinking about something just enough – and thinking about something to the point of analysis paralysis.  The short of it is, you don’t want to be an overthinker!

Overthinking can occur as a consequence of a decision that needs to be made, big or small, and is typically exacerbated in stressful situations.  It’s not limited to decision making however, as it can also rear it’s ugly head whenever something has the ability to cause any level of anxiety or worry.  It’s the proverbial thing that “keeps you up at night” and stems from an actual or perceived lack of control over some aspect of life.  With a lack of control comes a feeling of helplessness. Overthinking is frequently the direct result.  The worst overthinkers actually spend time overthinking seemingly meaningless things to the point that they’ve spent more time thinking about the thing than the time it would have taken to address it completely.  What a waste of time and energy!

There have been a number of studies over the past 20 years that challenge the view that overthinking equates to better decisions and therefore improved happiness and success.  Specifically these studies have found that overthinkers are more prone to sustained sadness and negative thinking.  And though it may seem that thinking through problems to the extreme would result in better decisions, overthinking has actually been shown to impair problem solving and rational thought, and interfere with initiative and motivation.

What’s worse is that people aren’t clued in to the dangers of overthinking.  Most people feel they’re making progress while cogitating endlessly, but in fact they’re permeating negative thoughts and fostering a pessimistic view of the situation.  As we know, “we are what we think”, and for those stuck in the cycle of overthinking, they’re reinforcing this adverse thought process and letting it trickle into other areas of thought.

If you got this far, chances are you’ve identified yourself as an overthinker. Which means right now you’re probably wondering what the heck you can do about it?  If you were to stop reading right now, you’d probably go off thinking that you have a problem – and then spend the rest of the week wondering how this affects your thinking, what you could do to “fix it”.  And again, you’d be overthinking it! 

Overthinking isn’t something you’re born doing, it’s a learned habit you form over time, probably as a defense mechanism to the possibility of failure.  So before going any further, let’s see what we can do about it.

If you find yourself overthinking, you need to change the channel in your mind immediately.  Simple, right?  It mostly is.  The caveat here is that while the solution is simple, putting it into action takes ongoing practice.  But just like most things, the more you do this, the better you’ll get at it next time and the time after that.  Here are some ways you can change your current thought process:

1. Avoid situations and people that can lead to overthinking.  You can do this based on history – you can probably determine which situations are going to keep you up at night unnecessarily.  Or do this based on how something makes you feel prior to participating.  This takes some self-awareness, but it isn’t unlike what an alcoholic has to do in order to stay sober.  They avoid the people, places, and things that put them into that mental state.
2. Talk to yourself.  Rather, don’t talk to yourself in the way you’ve been talking to yourself; “level up” your self-talk.  When you have something on your mind and you can’t shake it, stay aware of your thought process… You may find it surprising how often the topic pops up.  You may also be surprised to find that overthinking is more likely to occur with negative thoughts, which means you’re fixating on the wrong things to help you overcome the situation.  Every time you find yourself overthinking something, especially when it’s negative, think instead, “This isn’t helping.  What would help is…” and replace it with a positive affirmation.  Do this each and every time.
3. Commit to a project that maps to your goals.  Find a happy person and chances are you’ll find at least one active project that aligns with their core values.  If you’re able to focus your energy on something that matters to you instead of on the repetitive monotony of unhelpfulness, you may find yourself thinking less and less about the thing you want to avoid.
4. Distract yourself.  Get out, do something, and get your mind off of the thing you can’t stop thinking about.  It’s possible to do this… you just have to be willing to give it a shot, which is probably the trickiest part (convincing yourself to do it).  The best way I’ve found to distract myself is to exercise – for whatever reason it’s hard for me to overthink when I’m sweating – but spending time with your family, going on a drive, or just sitting still and breathing work as well.  The best distractions are ones in which you can find the flow state.  Find your favorite distraction and do it!
5. Enforce a time limit to your thinking and document your thoughts.  If you’re going to overthink, just commit to it for a short amount of time.  Give yourself permission to overthink, but only for 15 minutes.  Set a timer, grab a pen and paper, and for the entire 15 minutes, write down everything that comes to your mind.  Don’t stop to correct yourself (pretend there’s no eraser or backspace key), it doesn’t matter what you’re writing.  You’re just letting yourself get it all out.  When the 15 minutes are up, crumple up the paper and throw it out (or safely burn it) and move onto something else.  Something fun.
6. Turn overthinking into a next action in a project plan.  One big reason for overthinking is not knowing what comes next in order to make forward progress.  When you consider that overthinking is usually endless unstructured thinking on something, the key is to turn that energy into structured thinking.  Determining what the next possible action is you could take in order to push the boulder another inch up the mountain could free you from thinking about everything else at once.  Crystallize your thoughts into a list of next actions and take the first step.  Add the next to your calendar or to-do list, and know that you’re making progress.
7. Realize that being perfect isn’t possible.  Striving for perfection is a recipe for disaster, and the sooner you give up those perfectionist tendencies, the sooner you’ll move past the thing that’s occupying all your thoughts.  Perfectionism is highly overrated, and this post lists the 11 reasons why!
8. Work through the 5 keys to overcome fear.  The most important one for overthinkers is to stop projecting the worst of what could happen.  Ask yourself what’s the absolute worst that could possibly happen – and then be OK with that outcome, coming up with appropriate responses if necessary.  This is an amazingly freeing step as almost immediately, a light bulb in your head goes off.  If the worst case scenario isn’t actually that bad, and if you know how you’d deal with it if it came to that, anxiety about that thing may disappear completely.
9. Think about the big picture.  This is the one that has worked the best for me over the past few years.  It takes a little experience (i.e. the know-how to realize that it will indeed pass) but if you ask yourself, “Will this matter in a month/6 months/1 year?” and the answer is “No” or “Not really”, then what’s the point in thinking it to death?  If you do, in fact, determine that it will matter in a year, you can use this opportunity to leverage post-traumatic growth.  How has this experience changed you?  What have you learned from it, or how will you approach it differently next time?

Overthinking is a real detriment to focus and must be stamped out.  Forming positive habits and reinforcing them over time will make a big difference in your propensity to overthink, and these steps are some ways in which you can start to do that.  Let me know how it works!

(One way I’ve stopped overthinking and trying to perfect this post is to close my laptop without rereading it and get outside – it’s Sunday afternoon.  I’ll read it once more in the morning and then post it.)

Related posts:

1. 15 Ways To Get a New Habit To Stick Forever
2. 5 Keys to Overcome Your Fear
3. Just Do Something! 6 Ways to Unblock Yourself & Get Moving

The reason I started this project (Refocuser) in 2009 instead of 1999 when I first had the idea is because I spent 10 years fighting with myself about how to make it perfect, all the way down to how I’d organize the site’s content on my hard drive.  Ugh!

Naturally, striving for your best work isn’t a bad thing… most people would never want to swing to the other extreme where quality and pride in the work are void, because that’s a real slippery slope to mediocrity.  But I’ve found that for me, that’s pretty much a non-option given my personality.  Keeping my perfectionist tendencies in check doesn’t have to mean that the quality of my output is going to suffer.

What I focus on instead of perfection is doing enough to get the most out of my efforts.  The second I start trending towards the familiar “over-focusing”, I force myself to stop in my tracks and self-evaluate.  More time spent on an activity very rarely equals higher quality in the kinds of projects I do – in fact, many times, it ends up being counter-productive – so not being a perfectionist can actually improve my work.

More is lost through indecision than wrong decision – Carmela Soprano

In his great book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz describes research as it relates to consumerism – and the findings indicate that people with perfectionist tendencies often have higher stress levels and are at greater risk for depression.  Schwartz describes two types of people with respect to buying behavior: Maximizers and Satisficers and how their approaches differ.

Maximizers go to extreme lengths to make a purchase decision – they research for days, they compare all the models, and then get second and third opinions from friends before making what they believe to be the perfect decision.  They’re caught up with unrealistically high expectations resulting from their output.  Satisficers know what they need in order to be content, and once they feel those needs can be met, they take action.  This can sometimes be the very first option that meets their criteria.  But the key is that they make a decision and they don’t second guess it.

What’s interesting is that Satisficers rate their overall happiness with life significantly higher than Maximizers.

Schwartz makes it clear that a Maximizer isn’t a true perfectionist.  In his view, a true perfectionist is always looking to get better but realizes that perfection is unattainable.  The example he gives is Tiger Woods.  Tiger is continually striving to up his game, but doesn’t put off playing in a big tournament because he isn’t getting holes in one consistently.  These “perfectionists” strive for good enough.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the same definition everyone else has of a perfectionist, which is generally looked at as a bad thing to be.  To me, a Maximizer as it’s described is the same as a perfectionist as we all understand it to be.

Dr. Paul Hewitt, a researcher who has spent 20+ years researching perfectionism at York University, agrees that there’s a difference between “the desire to excel and the desire to be perfect.”  The former can be healthy so long as it’s mapped to life goals (the Tiger Woods example) while the latter is a “vulnerability factor for unipolar depression, anorexia and suicide”.  The research backs this overwhelmingly.

Now, tips for perfectionism is a broad topic, but here are 11 things I’ve learned about it recently:

1. Perfectionism doesn’t have to conflict with “sweating the details”.  It’s natural to assume that just giving up on perfectionism means you’ll no longer have any attention to detail.  But that’s absurd.  There’s a difference between awareness of detail and expecting perfection in order to finish something.  It’s still possible – in fact desirable – to stay on top of things to the level in which you need to in order to ensure a high-quality output, but this doesn’t mean you get to be unreasonable with respect to the overall outcome.
2. Striving for perfection means you’ll only do 10% of the things you want to do.  When you focus on finishing one thing before you can start another, you’re bounding your creativity and productivity.  If you spend too much time “perfecting” something, you’re likely doing it at the expense of moving on to the next thing.
3. Perfectionists have higher blood pressure, anxiety, and mental health problems.  This almost goes without saying and has been backed up in numerous studies, but if you expect perfection, you’re going to have higher stress levels which will affect your overall mental and physical health.  Relaxation, meditation, and “slow days” are hard to come by for people who are always pushing to make everything perfect.
4. Just doing something over nothing puts you in an elite group of people.  In so many cases, just doing something is enough.  Signing up for a class even if it’s not the perfect time, turning in an assignment even though you know you could have done more, etc.  There are hundreds of examples where the majority of people will agonize until things are perfect and never do anything at all, while you can get something “good enough” out for the world to see.
5. Perfect is the enemy of good.  I love this Voltaire quote and use it in software development all the time.  It’s too easy to strive for perfection and lose sight of the fact that you’re, in many cases, doing this at a huge overall cost.
6. Failing fast can shorten your learning cycle.  Sometimes it’s best to take an iterative approach and ignore perfection as a means to learn.  “Fail fast” is a famous Silicon Valley maxim when it comes to new businesses, because if you’re going to fail, it’s best to do it early at a time when you have the resources to turn it around.  If you’re striving to be perfect, you could fail when it’s too late to anything.
7. Focusing on perfectionism takes your focus away from the things that really matter. If you’re doing anything you can to perfection, you could be missing out on your top three focus areas completely.  Balance is a good thing.
8. Just doing something will start to expose shallow fears.  Similar to failing fast, you may not know what you fear until you give something a shot.  You thought you were afraid to fail, but maybe you’re really afraid to succeed.  The sooner you can identify your fears you can put measures in place to work through them.
9. Collaboration and perfection don’t mix.  Have you ever tried to work with other people on something but first demanded your contribution to be “perfect”?  That’s a sure-fire way to a failed partnership.  Collaboration requires iteration and being open to feedback in both directions – if you’re shooting to be perfect, or if you believe you are, you’re not going to play well with others.
10. It isn’t what you do all or some of the time, it’s what you do most of the time. Something I live by which I first read in Body for Life by Bill Phillips.  There’s never a “perfect time”, and you can never execute something “perfectly”.  But if you’re able to perform well most of the time, it can make up for the times when you’re not “perfect”.  Perfection isn’t possible, but spending more of your time doing something well is.
11. Perfection is impossible.  Every physical thing is in a constant state of change, so even if you think something’s perfect, it won’t be perfect for long.  Give it up.

Are you a perfectionist?  Do you have any other tips or tricks on perfectionism?

Related posts:

1. 9 Ways To Stop Overthinking Everything
2. Just Do Something! 6 Ways to Unblock Yourself & Get Moving

The simplest way to think about this: your personal vision is your “ultimate goal”.  It’s an inspirational but achievable future state of mind and being that indirectly influences your decisions and guides you down your best path.  Your goals are interim milestones that contribute to fulfilling that vision – these are measurable and realistic targets that you use to base many of your actions.  And your habits are the small steps you take every single day that bring you ever closer to your goals.  This means they are the foundational element that everything builds on – your goals and your vision aren’t possible until you form the right habits.

Since many of us are visual, here’s a basic diagram showing how habits form the “bottom of the pyramid”. 

Unfortunately, It’s not abnormal to get into a funk when it comes to your daily habits.  One day “off” can easily snowball into 5 days or 5 weeks.  It’s always easier to convince yourself that slacking off with a specific daily habit isn’t going to make a difference than it is to just do it.  It’s amazing how powerful our internal motivation for slacking can actually be!

I’ve found for myself and for many others that the best way to return from a funk is to put the following two things into place:

1. Track your habits daily (not weekly or monthly)
2. Let other people see your progress

For the past few years, I’ve been using a (free) site called Joe’s Goals to track daily habits that’s helped accomplish both #1 and #2.  It’s based on a strategy used by Benjamin Franklin who developed a list of his Thirteen Virtues at age 20, and used pen & paper to track his “progress” against these virtues every day.  According to the Art of Manliness:

Franklin carried around a small book of 13 charts. The charts consisted of a column for each day of the week and 13 rows marked with the first letter of his 13 virtues. Franklin evaluated himself at the end of each day. He placed a dot next to each virtue each had violated. The goal was to minimize the number of marks, thus indicating a “clean” life free of vice.

Franklin would especially focus on one virtue each week by placing that virtue at the top that week’s chart and including a “short precept” to explain its meaning. Thus, after 13 weeks he had moved through all 13 virtues and would then start the process over again.

This is how I use Joe’s Goals to track my daily habits:

First, I look at my annual goals and determine which behaviors need to change or which specific daily activities I need to perform in order to achieve them.  While this does vary a bit year-to-year, most of the things on my daily list are things I have had on the list for years, and expect to have there for years to come. 

Once I have the list of trackable habits, I enter them into the site as “goals” (even though they’re actually habits).  While most are daily, some of them occur less frequently (such as posting to this blog) and for those, I just identify the days those occur.  From this point on, all that’s left is to actually start checking off the habits on a daily basis!

In order to remember to do this, I’ve done two pretty basic things to remind me to track these habits every day.  In my web browser I’ve added a link to Joe’s Goals to my Favorites Bar so that it’s front and center as soon as I open the browser (along with other sites I visit frequently).  To do this in Internet Explorer 8, you just need to make sure your Favorites Bar is shown by going to Tools –> Toolbars –> Favorites Bar (it’s shown by default).  Once it’s shown, you can add any site to it just by clicking the “Add to Favorites Bar” button:

(In Firefox 3, when you add a bookmark using the Bookmarks menu, just place the site in the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder.)

The second thing I’ve done is to add a link to Joe’s Goals to my home screen on my iPhone.  This is straightforward as well – just navigate to www.joesgoals.com in Safari and then click the “+” icon to add the page to your home screen.  Unfortunately there isn’t a better mobile experience, but given that the site is so basic, using the browser should work pretty well on most smartphones.

Then it’s just a matter of checking off the habits daily as I perform them, and making sure to hold myself accountable.  I use the “Current Chain” indicator as a motivator.  This number shows you how many days in a row you’ve checked off that habit (the chain).  I’m always surprised at how well this strategy works to keep me honest; I hate breaking the chain.

One other great feature of Joe’s Goals is the ability to share your badge with other people through your blog or website – this can help push you just a little harder, knowing that other people have access to your progress chart.  For years I had this chart on my personal blog.  There’s no better motivator than questions or encouragement from friends about how well you’re doing!

Check out Joe’s Goals (and no, I don’t know Joe or own the company!)  It’s a fun site full of potential – and it’s simple to use.  You can get up and running in less than a few minutes.  Tracking your habits every day can make a material difference in your ability to stick to them, and Joe’s Goals is one of the easiest ways to do it!

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
2. 12 Goals: Tools You Can Use
3. Form Positive New Habits Through Active Association