A couple months ago, I made the decision on a complete whim to become a runner.  After years of self-identifying as an “athlete”, “martial artist” or a “lifter”, I dove into running with everything I had and studied it like I studied plant biology back in high school.  I’ve learned a ton and feel like I may have found a new escape for myself.

If you’ve never run a mile, or if it’s been years since you laced up running shoes, keep reading.  And if you’re an old pro, you might learn something new here, but I kind of doubt it

The obvious caveat is that all of this advice is coming from someone who’s probably a lot like you and not some ultra-marathoner or Tarahumaran.  I’m not a “real” runner… yet.  I haven’t finished a 5k (my first race is July 31st) or written a book about running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days.  But ultimately that shouldn’t matter much, because unlike learning how to hit a 90mph fastball or drive a car, running is about overcoming the resistance to move more than anything.  And that’s mostly a mental game… it shouldn’t take years of experience practicing impeccable form until you can run well enough to impart wisdom, it requires the will to get yourself up off your ass and onto the street.

That isn’t to dismiss the fact that running, like most physical activities, is something you can dissect down to the most minute detail.  Ankle inversion, foot pronation, stride length, heel vs. toe running, etc.  But I’m not at that level yet – probably never will be – and my guess is that you aren’t either.  We’re just two wanna-be runners right now… so let’s start with the basics together.  I’ll give you some links to follow when we’re done to learn more if you care.

First, a little background: I’ve always hated running.  Loathed it with a real passion reserved only for instant chocolate pudding.  There have been times in my life (college, mostly) where I ran pretty regularly but it’s been something I’ve dreaded the whole way through.

Yet running is the world’s oldest and simplest activity.  Most everyone is born a runner… it doesn’t require a gym membership or any special overpriced equipment (like, say, biking does).  Ear buds, running shoes, headbands, and special socks aren’t required in order to run.  You just need two healthy feet and a bit of willpower and determination.  I mean: you don’t even need to have a destination in mind, you could run in circles around your block and feel better.

And boy will it humble you.  Running will teach you more about yourself than most other sport or activity.  Mostly because it’s you against yourself and you’re in your own head most of the time… but also because it’s just plain hard.  Exercise is meant to give you progressive resistance in order for you to improve, and running does that in spades.  There’s always a new goal to be had no matter how accomplished a runner you are.

That’s why it’s a real focuser (or a refocuser as it were).  Teaching yourself to push through pain and fear is something that transcends sport or activity – it’s something you need in life.  I’ve found that the hardest part about running is “pushing through”.  Knowing that it hurts… but that it won’t hurt forever, and that there’s more to gain through “pushing through” than there could be by quitting.  And the better you get at it, the more fun it becomes (just like most anything!)

As the character of Bob Bowerman said in the great Prefontaine movie, Without Limits:

Running, one might say, is basically an absurd past-time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning, in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd past-time… Life.

Running will make you a better you. There are twenty-six things I’ve identified that you can learn from intense physical activity such as living in the present, performing well under pressure, and fostering healthy competition.  Check out that list because becoming a runner means you’ll benefit from each and every one. 

Will Smith put it best when he talked about running as a key to life (along with reading).  Check it out:

You’ll also see your cognition and concentration improve with running, which is a big unexpected win for most people.  We moved a lot as early humans, chasing down our next meal everyday, and as such the brain has evolved to thrive when fed with aerobic exercise like running.  There have been many studies that have shown the importance of exercise for the brain, demonstrating that with an increase in oxygen flow due to exercise, the brain works better and faster as well.  You can see mental acuity rise in direct correlation with exercise, and fall when it’s taken away.  So if nothing else, running will help how you think better as well.

OK, enough of that, let’s get to it.  Want to be a runner?

Ditch the limiting beliefs

First things first, everyone can be a runner.  For years I believed that I wasn’t a runner because I was told somewhere along the line that my body type is better suited for building muscle mass.  And muscle mass and running don’t mix.  Of course, that’s ridiculous. 

In just 8 runs over two weeks, I was able to go from sucking wind on day one after just two minutes of running, to running for thirty minutes straight.  Naturally your experience won’t match mine exactly.  But if you believe you aren’t a runner, you won’t be.  If you want to be one, just run!  But…

Don’t start running!

The biggest mistake you could make is to think you can run a marathon on day one of training.  No matter what kind of a runner you’ve been in the past, accept that you aren’t one now – and give yourself some time to build up to one.  Over the course of 30 days you could go from primarily walking to primarily running provided you take a slow progression. 

Start with walking… then run for a bit… then walk again.  This way you’ll ease your muscles and your psyche into the process of running regularly.  Go at your own pace and if that means you only run for 30 seconds at a time, that’s fine!  Just make sure that the next time out you run for 35 seconds

Start with measuring time rather than distance

In fact, don’t even think about distance for the first 6 weeks.  Just keep yourself moving for a period of time (say, 20 minutes) regardless of your speed or distance.  Distance is something you can worry about later once you’ve established your running habit.  Getting hung up on distance too early is a sure path to injury or burnout, and we’re in this for the long haul.

For what it’s worth, I made this mistake myself.  After a 4 mile run a few weeks into starting, I had so much pain on the ball of my foot that I couldn’t run at all for a few weeks.  It was fun to explore cycling and rowing during the downtime, but I could have avoided this injury altogether if I just took it slower.

Track and share your progress

One of the best things you can do is to let success breed success.  Running is a fun activity and doesn’t need any sort of hard measurement, but if you’re like me, you might benefit from knowing how well you’re doing.  There’s nothing better than seeing consistent improvement and having friends cheer you on. 

There are a variety of tools available for tracking your runs:

• GPS watches like the Garmin Forerunner 110
• Nike+ (which I use and covered a bit here when talking about self-tracking)
• iPhone apps like RunKeeper and RunMeter.  There are great videos of both of these apps on Scobleizer.
• Dailymile.com which is the best way I’ve found to network with running friends and motivate each other.  This is me on Dailymile.

  

Get past the awkward stage (that first 3 mile run)

For many new runners, it takes a while for your muscles to adapt and the right mindset to take over.  Typically you’ll see a lot of people “get it” after they pass their first three mile run.  Three miles is just long enough to be hard, but not such a long run as to be completely debilitating.  And it just so happens to be almost exactly the length of a 5k, which is probably one reason 5k races are so popular these days.

Take it slow and know that once you pass that first three miler, you’re doing it.  You’re past the “hard part” and can now really focus on the intrinsic joy.

Learn as much as you can

Running as a lifelong pursuit requires a certain level of knowledge about it.  There are a bunch of resources out there for inspiration and straight-up learning.

• Read Runner’s World and other magazines about running.  Just remember that lots of the information presented in these magazines are about equipment you don’t need or goals you may not have.  I’ve found that a lot of them cover ultramarathons (anything longer than a marathon) and I doubt I’ll be running a 50 mile race… ever.  So remember to “just be you” and not get too caught up in being the person the magazine thinks you should be.
• Check out the Couch to 5k plan and the Runner’s World 8-week beginning training program.  Both are great resources for getting started and I recommend starting with one of them.  Couch to 5k also has a great Facebook page where updates will come to your news feed automatically.
• Read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.  Hands down the best book I’ve read on sports in a long time; hugely inspirational and informative.  This ‘creative non-fiction’ piece will have you wishing you were running while flipping the pages   If you like this one, you may also like Ultramarathon Man or Chi Running too.
• Read The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Barefoot Running on Zen Habits.  This is the guide I wish I would have written, but I’m a couple months behind Leo in my barefoot running exploration.  It’s quite detailed and after everything I’ve learned, a great general resource.
• Check out the No Meat Athlete blog for good tips on running and gear.
• And if you’re having trouble keeping up with exercise as a habit, check out 7 Tips to Make Exercise a Habit And Keep It That Way.  4 Steps to Learn Any Physical Activity can also help you “drill” until you find your running zone.

Most importantly, have fun!

By the way, it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that you should talk to your doctor before you start any exercise program.

Related posts:

1. Strength Training 101

‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ – Ben Franklin

Self-tracking – or personal analytics as some call it – is a relatively new phenomenon brought about by the ubiquity of cheap sensor technology and the internet.  It’s a space that’s just now coming into its own thanks to the tech getting cheaper and lots of interested, data-driven geeks finding each other on the net and exchanging ideas.

The potential impact of self-tracking on personal health and overall well being could someday rival the discovery of penicillin – seriously – and we’re just at the beginning of what’s going to be a huge wave of self-improvement and individualized health care based on self-tracking and analysis.

I’ve recently entered the world of self-tracking… and there’s no going back.  My weight, body fat percentage, running speed and distance, calories burned, sleep patterns, investments, genetic predispositions, daily routines, mood, and even commute times are tracked and analyzed.  Sound a little excessive?  Maybe.  But only because it’s still not 100% automatic.  But it’s really, really close to being “set it and forget it”, and for me, the benefits far outweigh the few minutes I spend each day tracking things.

What is Self-Tracking?

The basic concept behind self-tracking is simple: our ability to determine cause and effect through our memory or experience alone is inherently faulty.  It’s tough enough for most of us to remember a birthday or anniversary.  Ask us to calculate how many calories we burned yesterday and how that affected our sleep last night and our blood pressure will rise – and we won’t even be able to detect that in order to prevent it from happening in the future! 

Our minds play games with us… they trick us into seeing and believing things that aren’t there in order to "protect us".  We can rationalize most anything we do or say (science shows this) which means deciding not to exercise because we’re busy or just don’t feel like it is easy to justify.  Of course, machines aren’t as easily tricked.

You can’t trick yourself when you have hard data.  You can’t convince yourself of something that the data doesn’t show.  Data tells you almost everything you need to know, whether you like it or not… and then implicitly asks, "what do we do about this now?" 

Data isn’t affected by human emotion.  It just is.  It’s difficult to look at data and "talk it down" like you can with your ego.  It’s ruthless.

You may have heard of the Hawthorne Effect.  The basic premise behind it is what makes self-tracking worth doing.  Basically your behavior can be improved or modified just in response to being studied, even if no other changes around you occur.  Does it matter if the person studying your behavior isn’t actually a person at all but a $50 sensor strapped to your shoe?  Not if you plan on leveraging the data.

We’ve all had that feeling of wanting to get credit for something.  If you’re tracking your morning run, and you know it’ll be posted online, do you think you’ll walk that last half-mile?  It’s amazingly powerful what a little pressure from data can do.

We also all have consistent patterns and routines each day.  These patterns (or habits) are a big determining factor in whether we’re happy or not, energetic or not, fit or not, or healthy or not.  But it’s hard for us to accurately determine exactly which of those patterns affect us the most in the most important ways.  Do you sleep better when you exercise in the morning or at night?  Does that better sleep affect your mood or your ability to focus on the computer screen at work?  Does that nagging back pain get better or worse when you take a hot bath or is light morning stretching the key? 

You’ll never know unless you pay closer attention.

So people are turning to self-tracking to help.  It’s a way to take all the data we generate everyday and start to draw correlation or causation between the events.  It’s not entirely dissimilar from how Microsoft, Google, or Amazon build software at the scale they do – lots of attention is paid to how people actually use stuff instead of how they say they do.  Data is king.

How to Get Started

Getting started with self-tracking is as easy as grabbing a pen and paper and making a small behavioral change to start tracking something (yes, the number of lattes you drink each week counts…)  The easiest thing to do of course is to get something that does the tracking for you.  If you can afford any of the tools below (like Nike+ or the Fitbit) you might want to consider picking one up and seeing how it helps… because honestly, most people don’t want to spend the time required to track things by hand.

1. Start with one thing you’d like to improve.  The best way to do this is to ask yourself that ultimate question: if I changed one single thing that would have the biggest impact on my quality of life, what would it be?  The things you consider will be entirely personal and unique to you, but there are also probably some commonalities with others.  For instance, when Gretchen Rubin started her Happiness Project last year, she knew that increasing her energy through exercise would pay dividends all year.  So she started there.  Some other ideas: lowering your blood pressure, losing five pounds, getting more sleep, meditating every day, spending less money on impulse buys, etc.

2. Commit to tracking it for thirty days at first.  Thirty days may not be long enough to drop 50 pounds, but it’s probably long enough to see if self-tracking is for you.  Don’t let yourself off the hook until the thirty days are up… by then, you may find it isn’t too hard to keep up after all. 

3. Spend some time each week looking at your data and drawing conclusions. Come up with your own theories about why things are happening.  There’s little point in self-tracking if you aren’t going to learn from the data!  If you’re someone who does a weekly review, that’s probably a good time to also look at the data you’ve collected and figure out what you’re going to tweak.

4. Test your new hypothesis.  Make a discovery about yourself based on the data at hand?  Think you know how to “fix” it?  Try making a small adjustment to your behavior and see what happens.  Do you focus better in meetings when you have green tea, espresso, or a Diet Coke?  You won’t know until you test it out.

5. Rinse and repeat.  Once you’ve maxed out on one area, take a look at tracking and analyzing another.  Could you improve another aspect of your life just by starting to track it?  Who knows?  Give it a shot.

Tools

As it stands, there isn’t a single, central repository out there for data gathering and analysis across all the various tools.  And there isn’t just one thing you can strap to your wrist to track everything from your cycling distance to your checking account. 

But there are a bunch of great tools available for specific things, or provided you’re OK doing a little bit of aggregation on your own.

Here are some of my favorite tools for self-tracking.  You can’t go wrong with any of these.

• Nike+.  If you’re a runner and you aren’t using Nike+ or a GPS unit like a Garmin Forerunner, you’re missing out!  It’s incredibly empowering to track your distance, speed/pace, and frequency over time.  Both tools also work with sites like Dailymile to help you challenge and motivate others as well.  I’ll likely do a follow-up post on both Nike+ and Dailymile at some point.
• Fitbit.  One of the cooler things to come out in a while, the Fitbit is a small sensor you attach to your clothing (or via arm band) to track your fitness and sleep.  Things like sleep patterns, steps taken, and calories burned can be huge motivators and important data points in an overall self-tracking program.  Just knowing how many steps you’ve taken (vs. what your goal is) can motivate you to ditch the elevator and take the stairs instead.  Remember: just knowing you’re tracking it and that you have have a goal actually matters.
• Withings scale.  A scale that sends your weight, body fat %, and body mass index wirelessly to a private web site.  An iPhone app that gives you a simple chart to see how far you’ve come.  All in all, the Withings scale is probably my favorite gadget this year.  It’s like peeking into the future.  Check out this mega review of it by DC Rainmaker.
• Joe’s Goals.  One of my favorite sites to track daily habits and something I use all the time to keep myself moving in the right direction.  We all like to get gold stars for getting stuff done – Joe’s Goals is just another way to do so.  I’ve written about Joe’s Goals before, check it out.
• 12 Goals: Excel Spreadsheet.  A basic spreadsheet containing everything you need to track your vision, goals, and your daily progress throughout the year.  A Refocuser exclusive!
• Track Your Happiness.org.  See “how your happiness varies depending on what you are doing, who you are with, where you are, what time of day it is, and a variety of other factors.”  Very easy to use!
• Mint.  The best way to analyze your finances across all your accounts and investments.  If you have more than $1 sitting in a bank account and you aren’t using Mint, you should give it a shot.
• Foursquare.  More social than analytical, it’s still a great way to track how often you’re visiting the same places and when.  The stats page is a lot of fun; for instance I know that Saturday is my busiest day of the week, that I’ve visited 46 different venues in the past few months, and that I drink a lot of coffee at the local café where I’m the unofficial “mayor”
• 23andMe.  Plan for your own health and wellness with the latest in genetic science.  Find out which diseases you may have increased risk for and what you can do about it.  You can also learn fun stuff like if you’re likely a fast caffeine metabolizer (I probably am, yay!) or have have bitter taste perception.

That’s just a short list to start, but they’re all things either I’ve personally used (in fact, all but Track Your Happiness I use all the time).  For a more complete list of tools, check out:

• Resources @ The Quantified Self

The Hardest Part

Believe it or not, the hardest thing when self-tracking isn’t the change you need to make to your daily routines in order to maintain it.  It’s actually learning something you may not want to know and not taking it too seriously.  You want to use the data to your advantage… not become a slave to it. 

Does knowing that your blood pressure is borderline high make your blood pressure worse?  Well, you’ll only know if you start tracking it, right?  And chances are if you do discover this, you’ll be motivated to fix the root cause.

The key with self-tracking is to work under the assumption that knowing is always better than not knowing.  If you don’t agree with this, you might want to think about why.  Is it out of fear?  Or is it because you know you’ll overly stress over what the data implies? 

Before you get started, make a promise to yourself that you will use the data to improve your well being – and that if you ever find yourself overanalyzing or stressing over the details, that you’ll back off.  Or at a minimum, you’ll work to get to the bottom of what’s driving your fear.

This process should be enlightening, but it should also be fun.  Don’t let it own you.

More Resources

• Wired Magazine: Know Thyself
• Wired Magazine: The Nike Experiment (about running and Nike+)
• New York Times: The Data-Driven Life
• The Happiness Project: Think About Your Routines
• The Quantified Self (blog)
• Total Recall (book)

If you liked this post, please share it with the ShareThis link below… or print it out and post it on the wall at Starbucks.  Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Guarantee Success By Tracking Your Habits with Joe’s Goals
2. 12 Goals: Tools You Can Use
3. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

I work with lots of people who are booked all day long, 8am-6pm, every single day of the week.  Most of these people complain that they have no time to do any “real” work since they’re “sooooooo busy” all the time.  Yet sitting in a meeting with a laptop open only half paying attention isn’t real work, and most people know that

Still, they let their time get abused left and right and don’t realize that they’re ultimately in control of the situation.  Heck, they may not even identify it as a problem to begin with.  They’re busy right?  Who has time to think about producing, creating, or <ugh> leading anyway?!

When you break it down, time is the purest and most ultimate resource we have for action.  We don’t own many things completely and totally, but time is one of the things that we get to choose how to spend.  And as we’ve discussed on this blog in the past, your life is the sum of what you choose to focus on – so spend it wisely, because you aren’t going to get it back.  How you spend your time is going to impact your life in ways greater than your money, relationships, or job alone ever could.

It’s easy to look at a situation like being booked all week and think it’s unavoidable.  If you’re in a role with a decent amount of responsibility, it’s also easy to assume that responsibility has to equate to meeting attendance and being “busy” all the time.  But of course, it doesn’t… and never will.

Having responsibility for something important means that you’re a decision-maker of some sort.  The best decisions are made based on experience, instinct, and data.  And there are ways to gain practical experience, hone your native instinct, and collect and synthesize data outside of meetings.  In fact, you could make an argument that the more time you spend in useless meetings, the less opportunity you have to gain that experience or practice your craft.

Follow me?

Responsibility means, almost by definition, that your skills are best spent on “top of the stack” problems.  Which means that the more responsibility you have, the more time you should be spending on higher-level (aka more important) problems.  And in order to do so, focus is an absolute must-have in every way.  Because you can’t make a significant difference if you can’t focus on something, right?

To deconstruct it further, you may find that you can only make progress on solving those higher-level problems if you have uninterrupted blocks of time.  Studies have shown that it can take as much as 20 or 30 minutes to “recover” from interruptions.  This means that if you have to spin-down for even just a few minutes, you’re going to have an inordinately hard time spinning back up into flow.

And the harder the problem, the more it requires dedicated time to focus on.

You don’t get uninterrupted time if you let yourself get booked all day, every day.  And if you’re like me and have kids and a life outside of the office, you’re going to quickly find yourself sacrificing the things that make your life worth living in order to get back on track at the office.  It doesn’t have to be this way, I promise.

Here are five simple tips that should help you prioritize your time:

1. Block off time every Friday to kill meetings for the next week.

As part of any good weekly review (see The 3S Approach for more on the weekly review process) you look ahead to the upcoming week.  Use this time to start hitting the Cancel or Decline buttons for things you just don’t have time to do if you want to get non-meeting work done.

Always do this with the goal of having large blocks of uninterrupted time – it’s no use if you’re just grabbing a half-hour here and there to catch-up on email.  Remember: you want to get something done, not just mess around with your email.

2. Frontload your commitments.

This is something I’ve begun doing recently and it’s been great.  See, I’d rather have a couple days each week where I don’t have time to think so long as I know I’m going to have huge blocks of uninterrupted time coming up to do nothing but think. 

Lots of people look at a 40-hour work week and see 40 available slots for meetings, but I find this to be counter-productive to real focus.  It means you’re bouncing around all week and never have time to find flow.

So try this: squeeze all the recurring and one-off meetings you have into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (if needed).  Leave Thursday and Friday wide open.  In fact, book a bunch of writing/coding/designing or whatever time on those days just for yourself.  Then protect that time like a mama bear protects an injured cub.

You may find that not only do you get an abundance of time to do “real” work, you also have a buffer for those important meetings that you couldn’t have possibly anticipated at the start of the week.  This way you may have some meetings on Thursday and Friday, but you guarantee they’re the most important ones and that they happen around your commitment to produce.

3. Get outta Dodge.

Plan to be out of the office for at least four continuous hours every couple weeks.  Work from a coffee shop, a satellite office, or your favorite lookout spot.  It doesn’t really matter much, so much as you make a habit out of not being around for others when they are looking for you. 

Of course, if you alert people that you’re planning on doing this, they’ll know to find you before or after your disappearance – and you’ll find that it won’t make one bit of a difference for them.  But it will do wonders for your ability to get stuff done.

4. Start every phone call with “Is this still a good time to talk?”

I picked up this habit from Merlin Mann, web celeb extraordinaire and creator of Inbox Zero.  Starting every call with “Is this still a good time?” does two important things:

1. It gives the person you’re meeting with an opportunity to duck out if they need to.  Important because it also conveys that you feel this is important enough that you expect them to be present and active on the call.  If it’s not a good time to do this, say so now – otherwise we’re diving in.
2. It makes it clear that you’re going to be engaged – that you are going to be an active participant on the call.

Plus, it’s just courteous and respectful of someone else’s time.  Other people face the same overbooked pain as you do, so it’s just the right thing to do.

5. Don’t solve other people’s problems for them.

It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, shut up.  When someone comes to you with a problem they need to solve or a decision they need to make, you need to quickly assess what your role is going to be in their process.  Sometimes it’s easy to see yourself as the “hero” – the person who’ll solve all the world’s problems in one fell swoop.

But that has two unintended consequences.  First, it involves you directly in the lifetime of that thing.  If there are follow-ups, you’re going to be involved.  You may even end up being in the driver’s seat.  So what may have taken 20 minutes of your time can easily turn into 20 unexpected and unplanned-for hours.  And second, it’s setting a bad precedent and taking a learning opportunity away from someone else. 

You want people to be able to solve their own problems, especially if you’re a manager, and doing the work for someone else just makes it easier for them to ask next time.  And of course, the primary role of any good manager (or co-worker for that matter) is to help those around them learn and grow.  How is that person growing by listening to you rattle on?

Hope this helps!  If you haven’t, checked out what is really part one of this post; Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff.  8+5 = 13 tips for making the most out of your most limited and valuable resource.

Related posts:

1. Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff
2. 15 Ways To Get a New Habit To Stick Forever
3. 9 Ways To Stop Overthinking Everything

As a part of an overall approach to personal growth, it’s important to know when your mind – which is far more complex than many of us give it credit – is working on your behalf and when it isn’t.  Or, to put it more specifically, when it thinks it’s working on your behalf… when in reality it’s doing the equivalent of tying your hands behind your back so you can’t hurt yourself… but can’t eat or drink either!

In so many ways, our minds have adapted almost too well over millennia.  In an effort to protect us in the short-term, we can frequently be hurting ourselves over the long haul.

The self-serving bias is like that.  It’s the tendency to see ourselves as responsible for our successes, but to see others – or the circumstances – as responsible for our failures. 

This is so clearly a coping strategy – we do this to protect our self-image, improve our confidence, and keep ourselves from dwelling on the negative.  We also do it to (at least seemingly) protect the image of ourselves in the eyes of others by playing up the good stuff and deferring blame for the bad stuff.

But is it healthy?  Is that really who we strive to be?  Someone who takes the credit and assigns blame?

I doubt it.  Most of us would probably say that this doesn’t describe us at all.  That we’re great about giving credit where it’s due and taking blame when things don’t go well.  And of course, most of us would be kidding ourselves (there’s that damn bias again).  Because who you think you are and who you actually are are rarely the same.  That’s one of the core tenets of psychology.

Not a day goes by that you don’t witness the self-serving bias in action if you’re actively looking for it.  In sports, you typically want to win.  So of course you’re going to believe that the umpires or referees have it out for you if you don’t.  At work, you want to be seen as someone who makes things happen.  So when they don’t, it can’t possibly be your fault, right?  And in politics, you want to be right.  So everything your candidate or party says can be seen through that lens.

Is this inevitable?  Are we doomed to demonstrate the self-serving bias whether we like it or not?  Of course not   Where would the fun in life be if we couldn’t change ourselves and become better people?

Step 1: Learn about the self-serving bias

Naturally, like many things in personal growth, the most important thing you can do is to learn about the self-serving bias.  Watch the video above, read a little bit on the web, and think about how you exhibit this in your own life. Knowing that the self-serving bias exists and that we can all be lured into its trap can help you avoid it in the future.

PsychWiki as usual has a good write-up and a list of references you can refer to.  The relationship to self-handicapping is especially interesting to me.

Step 2: Value failure and take accountability

The best way to succeed is to double your failure rate. - Bill Gates

It sounds cliché but failing is the only way to grow.  If you don’t take pride in your failures and use them as opportunities to learn and adapt, you’re handicapping your progress.  Failing is all part of the process.  Start accepting the fact that failure isn’t always someone else’s fault and start owning up to it.  The people around you will respect you more and you’ll all be able to learn from your mistakes moving forward.  Yes, it’s hard to admit you’re to blame – even partially.  But it’s critical to overcoming the self-serving bias.

Step 3: Find ways to give others credit

Taking credit for everything is something children do when they don’t know any better.  It’s far more fun to help others succeed provided you do it genuinely.  Give others an opportunity to shine even in situations that don’t seem “important”. 

Helping others grow and get recognition can have such a profound effect on you that it can outweigh any perceived benefits of taking all the credit to begin with.

Bottom line: Be aware that you probably have a tendency towards the self-serving bias.  If you find yourself exhibiting it, refer back to this post and straighten yourself out!

Related posts:

1. Going Paperless at Home in 6 Easy Steps
2. 4 Steps to Learn Any Physical Activity

It’s admittedly hypocritical of me to use the word ‘perfect’ in the title of this post when I’ve written in the past about perfection being overrated.  But the word perfect does actually have a place in personal growth so long as you don’t take it too literally.

True perfection isn’t really the point though.  The big idea is that practicing your craft has to be done with a level of respect for how you’ll perform in reality at all times.  No ifs, ands, or buts.

The only way to achieve your maximum performance potential is to train your body and mind to do so over and over… and over.

Let’s assume for a moment that talent is overrated (just like perfection).  Sure, there are people who are naturally better at certain things than others – they have talent, that’s indisputable – but no one can achieve great heights without lots and lots of practice.  As Malcolm Gladwell said in Outliers, you need 10,000 hours of practice to be great.  Or, really, to even have a chance at being great.

Peter Norvig recognized this pattern as well in “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”:

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

What does this mean?  Simple.  It means just because you were born with a golden arm doesn’t make you Roger Clemens.  Bad example, I know… but despite his pretty obvious use of performance enhancing drugs, the guy was also a workhorse on the baseball field.  His workouts would mimic the intensity of the game and when on the mound, his movements were like a machine.  He put in his 10,000 hours and then some.

Kobe Bryant is probably somewhere right now shooting free throws.  Derek Jeter is taking batting practice on his off-day.  Steve Ballmer is rehearsing his next keynote.  Tiger Woods… well let’s not go there.  We’ll assume he’s practicing his golf swing or something.  Chefs are cooking, athletes are training, executives are rehearsing, gymnasts are bouncing, and dancers are dancing the world over. 

That’s what they need to do to be the best.

Chances are, they’re not dragging their feet either – they’re really doing it.  Pretending it’s the real thing all the way.  They’re practicing “perfectly”.  That doesn’t mean without flaw, it just means they’re not letting themselves off the hook mentally “just because it’s practice”.

Which brings me back to the core message. Practice may not actually make perfect, but if you aren’t practicing perfectly, you have no shot.  The more you practice the right way, the more you’re creating routine – or “muscle memory” as the coaches call it.  Your brain understands sequence and your nervous system reacts more quickly as the pathways are grooved.  The more this happens, the better you become at the task at hand and the more natural it all becomes to you.

So what happens if your practice becomes lazy?  If you start training yourself to be sloppy, what do you think is going to happen when the time comes to perform under real pressure?  Sloppiness.  Failure.  Failure you could have prevented just by putting forth more effort during practice.  Your brain and body are just reacting how they’ve been trained to.  They way you’ve trained them.

I learned this stuff firsthand during intense martial arts training with some of the best instructors in the world a few years back. If you drop your hands or turn your back during drills, you’ll drop your hands or turn your back during sparring.  We were very deliberate during all of our training to make sure our practice was as realistic as we could make it.  So now, even if I’m just hitting the heavy bag at the local gym, I never drop my hands anymore.

We also ran all sorts of stress drills (lights off, eyes closed, unpredictable situations) to make our training feel real.  If you didn’t get scared, we weren’t doing it right.  This way the "real thing” was just another practice session.

I’ve since applied this “perfect practice” approach to just about everything in my life that requires rehearsal.  If I’m giving a talk, I rehearse it like it’s the real thing.  Start to finish.  I try and get on the actual stage ahead of time and run through it 10 times, forcing myself to continue if I flub something so I can get used to rebounding from it.  It’s going to happen, I might as well be ready for it.

When rehearsing a presentation you can’t just:

• Start over just because you messed something up
• Skip sections because you think you know them
• Rehearse alone if a partner will actually be speaking with you
• Use acronyms or lingo you wouldn’t use for real
• Rehearse things out of order

Make it real! Imagine if when you learned how to drive you first learned to steer, then a week later you practiced the brake, and the following week you practiced the accelerator.  Ridiculous, right?  That’s how a lot of people practice stuff.  Section by section.

Here are some specific tactics as they apply to ‘perfect’ practice, whether it’s for athletics, public speaking, or basket weaving:

• Simulate real events.  Get the environment as close to the real thing as possible, down to the smallest detail if you need to.  Even if you’re just doing a dry run of a talk while driving your car, try and simulate your cadence and rhythm.
• Make your training harder than the real thing.  Know deep down inside that you’re ready with all the confidence in the world.  You’ve been there already.
• Never practice tired.  One of the worst habits people have: practicing tired because they think it’s helping.  It’s not.  When you’re tired, you’re training your brain and body to be sloppy.  Just stop.  Always practice fresh and form good habits.
• Get over your fear.  Stop projecting the worst that could happen all the time.  Prepare for the worst and you’ll know you’re ready. 
• Always think “what would I do if…?”  Back when I played baseball, I used to have a word written on the outside of my glove in black marker: THINK.  When I’d be standing around in the outfield between pitches, I’d find myself looking down at the glove, remembering to think, and then constructing the next play in my head.  When the ball was hit my way, I was ready.

Off to practice sleeping now (it’s late as I’m writing this – and we have a 2-week old baby boy!)  Enjoy your practice and keep the realism coming!

Related posts:

1. Make Your Training Harder Than The Real Thing
2. 11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated!

If you work in the tech industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “Real artists ship”.  It’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs, the founder and current CEO of Apple, as a motivator for the development team of the original Macintosh computer.

In this context, shipping means getting your product out the door and into the hands of the world.  But it could mean submitting your term paper, completing a big sale, or finishing a year-long boat renovation.  Life is full of projects like these that could go on indefinitely, but ultimately have to ship in order to make a difference. 

If these projects don’t ship, they’re just hobbies.  If they don’t ship, they were just fun ideas – and ideas are a dime a dozen… everyone has good ideas.  But shipping… that’s hard.  And the rewards of shipping are reserved for the few that are able to do it, not the people who first thought of the idea.

The “problem” with starting a project with the expectation that it’ll ship is that it imposes all sorts of constraints.  The technology isn’t where you need it to be, you don’t have the time you need to do everything you want to do, or you don’t have the people or money.  In order to truly think “outside the box” you need a team that’s twice as big with twice as much money and faster computers!  Of course that’s all bogus.

Constraints are why things ship.

If you didn’t have a deadline to submit your term paper, you could tweak it forever.  If you didn’t have customers waiting for the next version of your software or competitors breathing down your neck, you could add every feature you’ve ever thought of.  You need constraints to really think about how to best solve a problem.  Constraints are good.

The most important creations in the world are the ones that have shipped.  Creating without constraint isn’t creating… it’s just messing around.  Michelangelo didn’t mope around in Italian coffee shops instead of painting the Sistine Chapel because the ceiling was too big or he didn’t have enough time.  He shipped it.

Seth Godin has a great quote in his (highly recommended book) Linchpin where he discusses shipping:

Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacuum. Outside of the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box… Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done.

I love that.

I’ve shipped a lot of things in my life, as I’m sure you have too.  And not a single one went out the door, including every post on this site, without me thinking, “Is it really ready?  Did I do everything I could have done?  Yikes, it’s not ready.  I need more time to get it right!”  The times when I pushed through the fear were because I had a plan.  When I had to come up with a plan ahead of starting, I’d already felt this fear once before, so I knew how to deal with it.

This is why it’s important to plan from the start to ship.  To be clear that come hell or high water, shipping something is non-negotiable.  Planning to ship is the difference between you and 99.9% of the world that never ships anything.

It’s critical that your plan to ship is comprehensive.  If your plan isn’t trusted, what’s the point?  You need a plan that you believe in through and through.  Even if the world changes around you, you’ll at least have a framework to deal with it.

A plan proves to your scared self that you’ve already done the research and you’re ready to go. This way, you feel that the path to shipping has been predetermined.  It’s much harder to second-guess yourself or your team when your plan is written down and sitting right in front of you.  The person (or group of people) who wrote that plan were confident – they were sure – that the plan would succeed.  Trust those instincts even if you don’t feel them right now.  Because shipping matters.

Most importantly, planning gets all the arguments (or “thrashing” as it’s often called) out of the way before they matter.  You debate (and ultimately decide) during planning, either with yourself or with others, so you’re not debating in the end game when it’s too expensive to discuss.  With any project, changes are always 10x costlier at the end than the beginning. 

You can always spot a well-run project by how little thrashing there is at the end.  The disaster projects are the ones that look great / on-track until the last 10%, and then they become thrash-fests.

That’s not to say the end is ever easy.  It isn’t.  It’s always hard.  But at the end of the project, you need to be focusing on the little things because the big things were already discussed, debated, and decided long ago.  If you’re still debating the big things near the end of the project, you’re done for.

The two biggest reasons for failed projects: 1) Complete lack of planning, and 2) Poor planning.  Projects with good planning become well executed projects that ship.  Projects that aren’t planned, or are planned poorly, become poorly executed projects that don’t ship – or ship late.

No one will remember the projects that didn’t ship 100 years from now.  You only have a shot at getting them to remember those that did.

We have a phrase we use at Microsoft all the time when a decision is made.  Ship it!  It’s the geek equivalent of saying, “We’ve reached consensus, we don’t need to discuss again, now the most important thing to do is to get it out there.”  It’s also more fun than saying “Yup, I agree”

Ultimately, shipping is what matters!

Related posts:

1. Project Management: Starting a Blog (Part 1 of 2)
2. Make Your Training Harder Than The Real Thing
3. Project Management: Starting a Blog (Part 2 of 2)

My job is to make you worry.  So please stop all your focusing, getting things done, sleeping, and goal setting to read this, and then backup your computer right now.

Let’s start with the basics of your situation:

• Your memories (baby photos, loan documents, and old music from college) are stored on a hard drive.
• Hard drives fail every second of every day.  There’s nothing “safe” about a hard drive.
• When your hard drive fails, chances are solid you’ll lose everything with no way to recover it.
• It happens to everybody at some point.

Having a hard drive fail must be every bit as bad as having your house burn down was fifty years ago.  Every photo and song you own, every scan you’ve made, all of your personal documents and emails… this stuff is no longer stored in cardboard boxes in a dark attic… it’s all stored on a super-complex piece of mechanical equipment with a seriously bad failure rate that is by no means inversely correlated with its importance.  For many people reading this, your entire livelihood is being held together by little screws.  Crazy.

To be clear about why backup is important: it’s not a matter of IF your hard drive someday dies, it’s a matter of WHEN.  And it’ll probably happen without warning, like an earthquake or major power outage.  Eventually they all fail, and chances are it will be the day before you decide to backup.  50% of people have lost data from their computer at one time, and many, many people have experienced the nuclear meltdown of full data loss… that moment when the guy behind the counter tells you there’s nothing he can do: IT’S ALL GONE.

Your data is as good as gone if you’re not paying attention to it.

My Horror Story

Like a trip to the emergency room, everyone has a story.  If you’re sitting there saying, “well, I’ve never had to to go to the emergency room” – to that, I say “just wait”… exactly what I say to those who think their hard drive will never fail.

In July 2001, some weird things were happening with my computer.  Files were throwing errors when trying to copy, and things were running at a glacial pace.  I realized that I hadn’t done a backup in a few months, so I started getting ready to backup all the data on my hard drive to an external drive by formatting the external drive (mistake #1) to prepare it.

Just after the long, full format process, my computer started making funny noises from inside the case.  <click> <click> <click>.  I freaked out and turned the machine off, waited a few seconds, and then turned it back on.  It said just one thing:

- Error: Hard drive failure -

My heart started racing, realizing that my backup drive was completely empty.  I turned off the computer again and started over.  Same thing.  I did this about 15 times (mistake #2 since that can make things worse) to no avail.  What I had were warning signs (slow performance, strange errors, clicking noises) but right here, right now: I’d reached the point of total failure.

After hours of research, I came to the conclusion that I only had one option: calling a data recovery service. 

In theory, the data was safe on the hard drive platters but the drive itself would need a new read/write head in order to retrieve the files.  In other words, software couldn’t solve the problem; I needed someone with specialized equipment. 

It would cost a small fortune, take at least a week, and there was still no guarantee that anything could be saved.

Long story short: some teenage kid showed up at my house in a beaten up old car, charged me $800 on the spot, and took my computer away with him.  I didn’t even catch his name (mistake #3 – luckily it turned out OK).  After the longest week of my life to that point, my data was mostly recovered (all but 16 random files) and my computer was returned to me with a new hard drive.

I realized then and there that I needed to be maniacal about “data insurance”.  I needed my files to be safe no matter what.  Since then I’ve had no fewer than FIVE hard drive failures, and the stakes have gone way up for me – I have a family now and tens of thousands of family photos.  I’ve scanned and shredded all of my important documents.  And I work in high-tech, so everything I do all day is stored digitally. 

I now sleep soundly every night knowing that it would take an all-out global disaster for me to lose my stuff at this point.  And if that actually happens, I have bigger things to worry about.

Getting Started Right Now

Here’s how you need to think about this starting today:

• Nothing is safe until it’s on at least three different drives, in at least two different physical locations – and it’s updated all the time.

Sounds like it could be a lot of work, but it’s not at all.  There’s a little bit of money and effort upfront, but the cost of ongoing maintenance is so minimal as to not even be noticeable.  Trust me, if I can do it, you can do it.

I’ll break it down step-by-step so there are no excuses

1. Buy one, two, or three external hard drives depending on how serious you want to be about this.  Go to Amazon.com and get the biggest drives you can afford.  Western Digital 1TB drives are less than $100 these days, and for most people, that’s more than enough space.  Alternatively you can determine how much space your stuff takes up on your current hard drive and add 25-50% for future growth.
2. Do a complete backup of your system using Windows Backup or CrashPlan on all of the drives.  To setup Windows Backup, just type “Backup” in the Start menu and open “Backup and Restore”.  CrashPlan is a free backup program that’s also really easy to use.
3. Enable Bitlocker on all drives if you have Windows 7 Ultimate (optional).  To enable Bitlocker, just type “Bitlocker” in the Start Menu and go to “BitLocker Drive Encryption –> Bitlocker To Go”.  This will make sure that no one can see your files if they happen to get a hold of the drive.  Note: Make sure to keep your recovery keys for Bitlocker in a safe place too.
4. Place the first drive in a fireproof, locked media safe somewhere in your home.
5. Place the second drive someplace other than your home (optional if you have a second drive… but recommended).  You could put it in your office, at your sister’s house, or in a safety deposit box at the bank.  Whatever you do, you want to make sure it’s not in the same place as the first drive just in case of burglary, earthquake, Terminator attacks, etc.
6. Leave the third drive connected to your computer for continuous, onsite backup (optional if you have a third drive… but recommended).
7. Rotate backups for the first two drives not connected to your PC.  Using whatever reminder system you have, make sure you have a reminder set to backup each drive every 30-60-90 days.  Alternate which drive you backup so you aren’t doing them both in the same month.  Note: incremental backups take just a few minutes so there’s really no excuse!
8. Sign-up for CrashPlan Central.  For $50/year you get unlimited, offsite, encrypted, continuous backup.  If you have no idea what I just said, don’t worry: your stuff will be stored in a place that only you can access and will be backed up all the time.  This will take a long time to finish depending on your Internet connection, but it’s worth it.  Trust me.  This is the most important step in the plan.  No, CrashPlan doesn’t pay me a dime, I just love it.  Learn about it here.

The process may take some time, but there’s less than 60 minutes of your time required to get the entire backup system in place.

Once you’re finished, you’ll have an immediate backup onsite, an immediate backup offsite, and ways to get back to files you may have deleted months ago.  This strategy has saved my hide more times than I’d like to count.

And yes, if your files aren’t that important to you, then even this level of investment may not be worth it.  But at least do steps #1, #2, and #8 with a single external drive if you’d be at all upset to one day wake up and have to buy a new hard drive and start from scratch.

Good luck next time you have a total hard drive failure.  I’m sorry to say, it will happen.  When it does, you can check out the 5 stages of data loss grief on Gizmodo to see what’s in store!

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Simplify Your PC (with Windows 7)
2. Going Paperless at Home in 6 Easy Steps
3. Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff

Similar to how some people can’t navigate their way out of their own driveway (myself included), some of us just weren’t born with an ability to gauge elapsed or remaining time.  We consistently think we have more time than we actually do, downplaying the reality of the situation: that whatever time we have remaining, even though we think it’s enough, isn’t even close.

We forget about the little things, we assume the best of every situation, and we get caught up in a "right here, right now" mentality instead of making a clean break from the present and moving onto what’s next.  

It’s called time denial.  And you’re living in it.

Time denial isn’t just specific to chronic latecomers, most everyone falls prey to this mentality at one point or another.  Yup, even you my friend.  So stop judging the dude in the next cubicle.

You know the drill… You’re right in the middle of something that has your complete attention, all the while your next commitment is creeping up on you.  You glance at the clock, trying to squeeze in another few minutes to finish that email – or frag that alien with your rocket launcher – thinking that no matter what, you have time because it "only takes" 15 minutes to get to the office. 

By the time you pull away from your current activity, grab your coat, and run to your car, you’re already down to 14 minutes… and you need to get gas.  And of course, traffic has started building up.  Before you know it, you’re not 5 minutes late, you’re 25 minutes late!

Avoidable?  Certainly.  Acceptable?  Most certainly not.  Maybe you can get away with it the first time… if you’re a nice person.  But great things weren’t achieved showing up 25 minutes late.  Trust isn’t built by letting people down, making them wait for you and your bad habits.  Real artists of life don’t show up late all the time.

Real artists of life have integrity.

Look, time management is only as good as your relationships.  If you’re a master at managing your task list but people don’t want to work with you, or don’t trust you to show up when they expect you to, it doesn’t matter how many to-dos you’re checking off each day.  Commitments are the most important thing in business, and are pretty high on the list of "personal life" as well. 

If you find yourself showing up late all the time, you simply need to get a fix on it.

Here are some things you can start to do immediately to keep yourself from ever being late again.

Analyze your behavior

Next time you’re late, figure out exactly why before it leaves your short-term memory.  For me, it’s almost always the time it takes to park in a parking garage and take the elevator.  For whatever reason, each time I’m 5-10 minutes late I can always work backwards from the start time to see that I didn’t budget that last 5% of the travel time.  For you, it could be the time it takes to do your hair or drop your kid off at school.  Whatever it is, you’re better off knowing than guessing.  Learn from your mistakes!

Work backward from the commitment

If you need to get to work by 9am but have dry-cleaning to pick-up and a donut to grab on the way in, start with the end in mind and work backward.  In order to get to work by 9am, you’ll need to be on the road by 8:40.  In order to be on the freeway by 8:40, you need to leave the donut shop by 8:35.  And in order to do that, you’ll have to get there by 8:30… which means leaving your house at 8:20.  All of a sudden, getting to work on time isn’t so difficult.  My wife is a master at this when we have a flight to catch!

Assume the worst

In order to get somewhere on time, you can’t assume that the roads are just going to clear for you.  Similarly, if you need to get a report finished, build in the time it takes to get your errands finished – don’t underestimate the time because you’re assuming rosy circumstances.  Of course, nothing is ever perfect – there’s always going to be an accident on the bridge, or a longer than expected line at the coffee shop.  If you assume the worst and build that into your plan, you won’t have to worry about it becoming reality.  If and when it does, you can just shrug it off.  And if things are perfect, you may even be early!

Prep things in advance

One trick I use all the time is to assume my future self is lazy.  Because based on past experience, I know he is.  Once you’ve accepted the fact that the "you" right now is 10x more motivated to make your life easier than the "you" tomorrow, you start to trick that bum into doing things your way.  You do things like put toothpaste on your toothbrush two hours before you brush your teeth so you have no excuses, you pick out your clothes for the next day and even iron them, you pull the trash out of the can and stick it by the door ready to go.  This of course applies to being late in a fundamental way: if you can anticipate the thing(s) that have the highest chance of making you late tomorrow and can shave minutes off of your routine, you can make things easier for the future you.

Putting it into practice

Tomorrow is the first day I’m dropping my daughter off at school.  We have a baby on the way in a couple weeks and the responsibility of drop-off is shifting to me for a while.  With my 35+ minute commute in the morning, I’m going to have to get serious about getting out of the house on time.  There are simply more things that can make me late now.

Here’s how I’m implementing these ideas right now for tomorrow morning:

• When I’ve been late in the past, I’ve underestimated traffic and how long it takes me to get my morning espresso.  Now I’m going to assume the worst.
• I have a dentist appointment in the morning, and I know that getting there involves local street traffic that’s worse than my normal commute to work.  So I worked backwards from the start time to give myself enough time to get there on time.  
• I know I want to publish this in the morning, so I’m going to get it ready for a single "Publish" click so I don’t waste time word-smithing it more in the morning.
• I need to get gas!  So I actually did it tonight instead of watching TV since there’s no way I’d make it on time if I had to make another stop on the way.
• I know I’ll need my laptop for my first meeting, so I’ll charge it right now.
• I’ll pack my gym and laptop bag tonight before I go to bed and leave them by the door with my coat & keys.

Like so many "secrets" in life, none of this should be a surprise to anyone.  The ideas aren’t what’s important here though, it’s the execution of those ideas – the formation of positive habits that improve your life step-by-step, little by little.  You aren’t going to get a wish granted by a genie anytime soon (and if you were, "never being late" shouldn’t be what you pick) so the next best thing is to be the change you want to see in yourself.

Related posts:

1. 9 Ways To Stop Overthinking Everything

We’ve all heard this quote, most likely from an interview in a business magazine with some mega-billionaire CEO.  Of course this person is either a walking collection of crazy or some genetically gifted mutant.  I’m actually not kidding about that mutant option, as those who thrive on little sleep may have a rare genetic mutation according to a recent sleep study at the University of San Francisco.  Of course, that mutation was found in just 2 out of 1000 study participants – so rare is right.

The rest of us need sleep and need it badly.  And we probably need more of it than we think, or at least more than we’re inclined to let ourselves get by on.

In a 2002 study conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (PDF), it was found that the majority of American adults (68%) don’t get the recommended 8 hours of sleep needed for good health and optimum performance, and more than one-third (39%) sleep less than 7 hours nightly.  Strangely (yet ironically) enough, a staggering 85% of those surveyed said they would sleep more if they knew it would improve their health.

Guess what?  It does improve your health.  And your sex life, body shape, and ability to stay awake during Avatar in IMAX 3D.  It’s also the best way to improve your mood and the way you respond when you’re frustrated or stressed out.  In other words, good sleep can keep you from being a jerk AND help you look and feel better.

Lack of sleep can also have a profound effect on memory and other cognitive skills.  In an interesting study, researchers measured cognitive function in sleep-deprived, right-handed men and found that sleep deprivation has a negative effect on cognitive functions associated with "right-brained" functions such as "motor, rhythm, receptive & expressive speech, memory and complex verbal arithmetic function." (PDF link)

There are a number of ways to improve your sleep habits – this post is just going to scratch the surface with six basic habits you should start incorporating into your life if you don’t already.  Over the next few months, I’m sure there will be six more… and then six more and so on.  But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere! 

1. Know how much sleep you need, and make it a priority

This one may take some trial and error, but its impact on your lifestyle will be immeasurable.  Draw a correlation between the number of hours you sleep on a given night and your energy levels the following day. (Make sure to maintain a constant diet as changes in your diet could cause your energy levels to vary considerably.)  Before going to sleep, start a stopwatch or a timer.  (If you fall asleep as your head hits the pillow, it is a sure sign of sleep deprivation!).  As soon as you wake up, stop the timer and record the total time you were asleep in a sleep journal.

Do this for about two weeks, making sure to record your energy level using a 1-10 scale in your journal each day.  When you felt "awake" and full of vigor throughout the day, score it a 10.  If you’re nodding off at your desk and have little or no real energy, give that day a 1. (While the scoring will be subjective, since you are the only one performing the evaluations, it should be relatively reliable.)

At the end of the two-week period, you should be able to determine your "ideal" nightly sleep target, which should fall somewhere between 7 and 10 hours depending on genetics (few can get by with only 6 hours and VERY few can get by with less than 6).  Now, make it a priority to reach your quota by doing whatever you can to put sleep first!

If you’re too lazy to do this (no judgment here! I am too) then start with somewhere between 7 and 8 hours of sleep each night as this is the most common requirement.

2. Limit your naps, if you need them, to 15-30 minutes

It’s natural to feel sluggish or tired every once in a while.  If you feel the urge to nap, do it!  There are a couple of caveats though, and they’re important to remember.  Try not to nap in the late afternoon, as it could delay the time you fall asleep at night and cause your internal sleep clock to go haywire for a few days.

Napping in the late morning or early afternoon, on the other hand, can help you feel more alert throughout the day and give your system a needed "boost" as well as promote faster recuperation from intense exercise.  Keep the amount of time you spend napping to a minimum, usually no more than 30 minutes.  A short nap is all the body needs to revitalize the nervous system and restore alertness.  Any longer, and your body falls into delta (deep) sleep and you may have trouble waking up.  And when you do, you may be irritable or slightly dazed.

See How to Power Nap on WikiHow for more on this.

3. Maintain a consistent sleep schedule

It’s very important to go to bed and wake up (unassisted!) at the same time every day, even on weekends.  This will help regulate your internal sleep clock, making sure you are at your most awake during the day when you need it most.  Interestingly, if you maintain a constant sleep schedule for a few weeks, you may find that your nightly quota will decrease slightly, and you will be more alert on less sleep each night!

4. Pay back your "sleep debt" as soon as possible

Think of your body like a bank.  Every time you fail to meet your sleep quota, your body registers it as debt and expects to be "paid back”.  Your sleep debt will continue to accumulate until you make up for it!  Have you ever noticed that you naturally sleep more the night after a late-night?  That’s your body attempting to make up for lost sleep.

Unfortunately, however, your body can’t store sleep just like it can’t store exercise results.  You can’t sleep 12 hours one night and expect to get by on 4 the next if your quota is 8 hours nightly.  With that said, it becomes even more important to maintain a regular sleep schedule.

5. Avoid alcohol before bed

Many people believe that a glass of wine right before bed will help them sleep better.  The opposite is true. While the alcohol may "knock you out" and make you feel very relaxed initially, it disrupts sleep later on throughout the night.

Alcohol, taken less than 4 hours before bedtime, will severely limit REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is essential for daytime alertness.  While you may not even realize it, alcohol could in fact be the indirect cause of lethargy throughout the day.  You may also find yourself waking up more often throughout the night, and that’s an indicator that a deep sleep state isn’t being reached.

6. Practice good sleep hygiene

Maintaining a regular “wind down” routine can help improve your sleep.  Some general tips in this arena include:

• Read some fiction – or something that helps get your mind off of other things.  Non-fiction can get your mind working too hard, which is not conducive to good sleep.  Read something fun.
• Shut down computer screens at least 30-60 minutes prior to retiring.  The light emitted from screens can disrupt circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep.  (Snarky note: this is the reason I won’t be buying an iPad for nighttime reading anytime soon)
• Remove your TV from the bedroom.  Certainly don’t watch prior to falling asleep if you’re having trouble.
• Kick dogs, cats, and chimps out of your bed.  They’ve been known to disrupt sleep, even if you aren’t aware of it.
• Break up your nightly routine into multiple parts to make it easier to go to bed.  For example, I take out my contact lenses a few hours before going to bed because I know that when the time comes to get ready, that annoying act of taking out my contacts will give me an excuse not to start the process.  And I’ll stay up later.
• Keep your bedroom cool – but not cold.  Cooler temperatures are best for sleep.
• Use a white noise generator (fan, noise machine, etc.) to drown out the sounds of pets, cars, or other hindrances to a good night’s sleep.
• Straighten up your bedroom each night.  This can help you get out of bed in the morning.

Stop reading this now… and go get some sleep if you need it.  It’s important if you expect to be able to focus at the level you obviously want to (otherwise, what are you doing reading this?)

Thanks to Dr. James Maas of Cornell University for first opening my eyes to the importance of sleep fifteen years ago.

Related posts:

1. Increase Focus With Greek Yogurt, Almonds, and Green Tea
2. Take Micro-vacations to Boost Focus
3. Form Positive New Habits Through Active Association

So much has been written about the Weekly Review as a part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system that it feels sort of ridiculous to even entertain writing about it.  I pride myself in making this blog different – not just another GTD/life hacks wannabe poser blog thing – but at the same time, a lot of the best practices in productivity fit under the GTD umbrella.  So there will be times I feel compelled to write about GTD in all its glory.  This is one of those times.

If you’re new to GTD, this post really isn’t the best place to start as it’s only covering a small piece of what GTD is all about.  You should dive in and read the official book.  If you’re the type of person who can’t stay on top of the most important things in your life, you won’t be sorry.

First a few words about GTD.  GTD isn’t a panacea by any means.  It’s just a framework for “thinking about thinking”.  It’s updated software for your brain that will help you make sense of all the inputs and outputs in your life.  It’s also a set of habits that for some people can be hard to get into, because they require a change in behavior.  But hey, it’s ultimately just “advanced common sense” as David Allen puts it, so there’s really no excuse for not giving it a shot if you feel you need it.

The funny thing about GTD is that people tend to get so fixated on the “how” and not on the “why” of the system.  Whether you use post-it notes, Microsoft Outlook, a Moleskine notebook, or your pet hamster to track your work isn’t the important thing – the system is adaptable and should be used in the way that works best for you.  In other words, the implementation details aren’t what matter, but the way the system is used at the macro level does.

In a lot of ways this reminds me of Bruce Lee’s unique approach to fighting, Jeet Kune Do.  Stay with me for a second; other than just being three-letter acronyms, JKD is actually quite similar to GTD.  One of Lee’s most famous quotes about JKD is:

I don’t believe in different ways of fighting now, I mean, unless human beings have 3 arms and 3 legs – then we will have a different way of fighting. But basically we all have two arms and two legs so that is why I believe there should be only one way of fighting and that is no way.

In other words, there’s a reason why the best fighters in the world learn to throw a jab and execute a choke the same way.  While there are subtle differences in their own personal styles, and certain techniques that work best for some people, they’re still fighting using the same basic systems.  Chokes may be executed a little differently from person to person, but there’s a “right” way to choke that everyone starts with. 

GTD is the same way.  There are differences in people’s approach to GTD, but the foundational physics of the system are the same.  Show me a super-productive person and I can point out how that person is implementing GTD – even if they don’t know it.  It may not look exactly like the next person’s GTD (just like fighting) but the core pieces are almost always there.  And if they aren’t, well, there are likely improvements to be made!

One of the most important pieces of GTD is the weekly review.  The weekly review is the “backbone” of the system and is an absolute requirement for doing GTD.  If you aren’t doing something that resembles the weekly review, you aren’t really doing GTD!

What is the Weekly Review

Once a week, for as long as it takes, you need to take a step back and get the bird’s eye view of your tasks, projects, goals, and vision.  This simple step – which can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours or more – helps you achieve (or maintain) that Zen-like state that comes from being in control of your world.  You’re further reducing friction in your life by clearing your inboxes, making sure your projects all have next actions identified, and clearing all mental and physical clutter out of your life.

Here are some ways to think about the weekly review:

• It should take as long as it takes
• …But to make sure you do it, you need to make time for it.
• The best time is “when you’re most likely to do it”
• …But Friday afternoon, Sunday, or Monday morning can work well for Mon-Fri workers.
• Do everything you need to do to feel like you have a grip on your life
• …But sometimes leaning on a little bit of structure can help.
• It doesn’t have to be weekly
• …But let’s start there since it works well enough.

In general, the weekly review is something you won’t be immediately penalized for skipping.  You could go weeks on-end without really “laddering up” and looking at your life.  But just like any other maintenance task (flossing, exercising, showering, oil changing) you’ll pay the price in the long run for your avoidance.  Things will start to slowly unravel at the seams and you’ll find that you’re not able to keep all your plates spinning all the time.  Your system will simply atrophy, and it won’t be obvious that it’s not working until you start recognizing those nagging feelings inside you screaming, “something’s being missed!”

Waking up in a cold sweat is also a clear sign that you need a weekly review.

The good news is that there’s usually a simple fix to this problem: just do the equivalent of the weekly review immediately to get yourself back on track.

What Do I Do?  (The “3S” Approach)

The weekly review is easy to avoid if it’s amorphous.  I’ve spent the better part of my work life not doing the weekly review and still thinking I had everything under control.  As soon as I discovered what I was missing however, I reached a pretty fantastic state of bliss when it comes to my workflow.  The weekly review can really bring confidence and clarity to a chaotic world.

Until I settled on the “3S” approach for myself however, I still couldn’t always get into the rhythm of the weekly review.  I didn’t know what it was I was supposed to do during the time I set aside – and I wasn’t good about keeping that commitment with myself.  So without further adieu, here are the 3 S’s.

1. Schedule it.  If you live by your calendar during the week like I do, you do things if you both a) have the time to do it and b) you’re reminded to do it.  Adding it to your calendar and protecting that time addresses both.  I do my weekly review every Friday afternoon but if I have something else going on during that time, I’ll catch up over the weekend.  Friday works well for me because I enter the weekend with a totally clear head, and that’s an invaluable thing.

   The important thing is that it gets done.  Which means you need to treat this appointment just like you would any immovable appointment on your calendar.  It’s not something you can sacrifice indefinitely.

    

2. Structure it.  If you don’t know what to do, what happens when that reminder bell goes off to do your weekly review?  The weekly review needs some structure to make sure you’re not flailing or running in place.  Once you get into the habit, you may be able to back off on the structure, but that’s a slippery slope.  After years of doing this, I still find myself referring back to this list of “make sure I do this”. 

   Here’s a basic 5-step plan you can use:

1. Collect all loose papers and notes from the week.  Process them for next actions or file.
2. Get all inboxes to zero.
3. Review all previous and upcoming calendar appointments.  Process them for next actions.
4. Review & update all project lists, goals, vision, and personal habits/task lists.  Make sure everything is where it needs to be.
5. Empty your head completely by walking through the incompletion triggers list (external link – great resource!)
3. Stop it.  Sometimes the hardest part about the weekly review is finishing.  There are always things you identify for follow-up that you feel you should be doing ASAP.  It’s quite easy to let your mind wander down various paths (“maybe I’ll just get this report done now” ) instead of staying focused on the weekly review for the time you’ve allotted. 

   And then of course letting it all go the second you’re finished in order to focus on what’s important: living, being, and doing, not planning to live, be, and do.  That’s why I do it on Friday – I could keep my laptop closed for the weekend and not feel the teeniest bit of guilt for doing so (though I usually don’t – because I love my job!)  But make sure your weekly review doesn’t degrade into an hourly hell of overthinking all week long.

The weekly review is a lot like exercise: you don’t always immediately miss it or recognize the value it adds to your life when you slack a bit.  But as soon as you get back on the wagon, you find yourself wondering how you ever got by without it.  It’s a critical piece of GTD and highly recommended for folks wanting to get a stronger grip on their life.  Even if you’re already a black belt in this stuff, a good weekly review can still help take you to that next level.

Let me know how it goes!

Related posts:

1. 5 More Ways to Protect That Time!
2. How to Beat Procrastination One Step at a Time!
3. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

“Every year, hundreds of New Yorkers congregate on Tax Day at the 24-hour post office at 34th and 8th Avenue, polishing off their 1040s, filling out their registered mail slips, and sealing their envelopes. The lines snake up and down the cavernous interior of the building and most of the people are more tired than anxious. (With the exception of the few still filling out their forms.)”

Photo and description by Amit Gupta.

Last weekend I had the unenviable (yet unfortunately inevitable) task of getting our 2009 taxes prepared.  I stopped actually doing our taxes about 10 years ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely off the hook here.  There’s still just as much preparation involved to make sure everything is tracked and reported, and that my accountant has all the information he needs in order to file.

There are far worse things in the world, I know.  But I definitely don’t look forward to this time of year.  In fact, it’s probably the most postponed thing on my to-do list.

Let’s see… I could play with my daughter or sit in my home office surrounded by arcane forms.  We could go for a walk down by the waterfront as a family or I could scan and shred documents instead.  My wife and I could watch an episode of Friday Night Lights or read in bed… or I could sit at a computer adding up real estate taxes and 1099/W-2 forms.  You get the picture.

I decided to take a different approach this year.  Instead of dreading and postponing the project from week to week, I’d learn from it.  I knew I didn’t want to do this, but I knew I had to.  So I decided to use it as a sort of test for overcoming procrastination – how would I get myself to move forward despite knowing it wouldn’t be any fun?  At the very least, I could write up my experience on Refocuser and see if the process helps others.

So I documented my thoughts throughout the week in my online notebook – and simplified it down to a pretty straightforward process for powering through unpleasant things.  Just like everything else, this may not work for everyone, but now that I can articulate the steps I followed, I recognize it as a pattern that’s worked for me for a long time.

But before going further, it may help to figure out what kind of procrastinator you are.  The type that puts things off and never does them – or does them super poorly – or the type that does eventually get things done, albeit with a bunch of unnecessary anxiety.

This article (thanks Steve!) does a great job of describing the difference between a “procrastinator” (the first type) and an “incubator” (the second):

Incubators were the only students who had superior-quality work but who also worked at the last moment, under pressure, motivated by a looming deadline.

This set them apart from the classic "good students," the planners who strategically start working long before assignments are due, and from the procrastinators, who wait until the last minute but then hand in shoddy work or hand it in late.

For most incubators, having a label that is less pejorative than "procrastinator" can be a breath of fresh air.

Everyone has the list of boring things they dread need to do.  Clean the gutters, do your homework, write your dissertation.  If you’re a true procrastinator, you may never get these things done – so this process may help you quite a bit (although you should also consider some more radical change). 

If you’re an “incubator” then you know you’ll eventually get them done, though you’ll beat yourself up every step of the way.  This process may help you structure the way you respond to a looming deadline.  Regardless of which type you are, there’s an easier way.

Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to overcome procrastination, step-by-step:

1. Get into the right mindset

If you think you’re doing something forced upon you, you’re not going to want to do it.  But if you feel like it’s something you’ve chosen – or something you can benefit from – you may find yourself a little more motivated to get through it.

For me, it was helpful to reframe the task in my mind from something I had to do (mundane busy work) to something I wanted to do.  I reminded myself throughout the week that the sooner I get it done, the sooner we’ll have a tax refund deposited.  In other words, I was training myself to think about the outcome first and the process second.  It helped motivate me… ever so slightly. 

So try thinking about things a little differently – no more “have to”, more “want to”.

2. Give yourself enough time to get it done easily

This of course is important – this practice won’t work if you have a deadline tomorrow.

I knew I had some time to get it done because I started thinking about this project well in advance of the deadline.  It was only the first week of February and I had until April 1st (or so) to get this project finished.  In other words, I had enough time to break up the project into tasks I could actually imagine myself doing easily. 

If you aren’t the type of person to plan ahead, you’re going to need to try and become one.  At least to the point that you aren’t putting planning off until you no longer feel comfortable with the time you have left.  Just a little bit of upfront planning makes the entire project a ton easier.

Anxiety may help motivate you, but there’s still a better way.  Zero anxiety beats even the smallest bit of anxiety any day.

3. Break out everything you have to do into a bulleted list

A common theme in a lot of the things I write about (see 12 Goals) is to get specific.  If you don’t know exactly what you need to do to finish the project, you’re going to look at it as an amorphous blob of face-eating hell.

“Finish my taxes” is a lot scarier to your psyche than “Collect all the forms from the filing cabinet and kitchen counter”.  So break the project into logical chunks: collect all the forms, sort them, scan them, figure out which to keep and shred the others, and so on.  All the way down to “Put it into an envelope and walk to the post office”. 

Keep the tasks relatively small (30-60 minutes of actual focused work) and put the list somewhere you can reference it easily.

4. Commit to a single task for the first day, not to exceed 60 minutes

Commit to just one task for the first day.  Something small and easy, realizing that most of your project is probably small and easy when looked at in 30-60 minute chunks.  As David Allen describes, you want to reduce everything to a “crank the widget” sized thing so you don’t even have to think about it when the time comes to do it.

So just do the single task… start to finish.  If you don’t want to continue once that task is finished, you don’t have to… because you have time for the rest.  But no matter what, you’re going to get this one, simple, easy, widget-cranking task finished.  And when you do, you’re going to check it off the list and give yourself a nice little “task completion high”.

If you still find yourself trying to talk yourself out of it, try combining the task with something you actually enjoy doing.  For me it’s listening to music or watching a movie.  Since I don’t usually sit around listening to music by myself very often, it’s something I can look forward to – even if I’m sorting documents or doing research at the same time.

5. Allow yourself to continue.  Or just do the next thing tomorrow!

This is where things usually get interesting, thanks in part to that Flow state.  You’ve gotten yourself to start, but you aren’t forcing yourself to finish it all right now.  You’re setting yourself up pretty nicely to get into a zone where you lose track of time and just move easily from step to step.  Now that you’ve gotten yourself going, give yourself time to continue on.  Allow yourself to get the next task done if you’re motivated at that point to do so.

Success breeds success.  If you finish step 1, you’re more likely to do step 2.  Especially since it’s been broken down into its smallest possible form, and is presumably something that builds on the first step.  In  my case, if the tasks are small enough, I can usually get myself to move onto the next thing right away because I’m happy to be making progress, and feel good about what I’d just accomplished.

The more you do, the easier it is to picture yourself finishing the project.  The finish line isn’t off in the distance anymore.  It’s amazing how motivating checking things off can be – you can make a lot of progress just by starting!

If you find yourself anxious about continuing onto the next step right away, don’t!  You always have tomorrow.  Put it off – you can afford to since you just got a critical piece done.  There’s something freeing in knowing that you don’t have to do anything at this point – you may choose to, but that’s entirely up to you.  This alone can help beat that feeling of dread away.

In short: start early, break things down, commit to a small single thing, continue if you find yourself in the zone to continue, or move onto something else and continue tomorrow.

Have fun!  Even though I know this post is really about doing things that aren’t necessarily fun   If you’re still having trouble getting started, you may want to read Just Do Something: 6 Ways to Unblock Yourself & Get Moving.

Something to keep in mind: February is a short month.  It’s over next week.  Which means you have just over a month to get those taxes done!  53 days from today to be exact.  Now’s the perfect time to attack that specific project if you haven’t already.  And if you have, what are you doing still reading this anyway?

Related posts:

1. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
2. The “3S” Approach: The Lost Art of the GTD Weekly Review
3. Project Management: Starting a Blog (Part 1 of 2)

Happy Monday!

This happens to everyone… at least once!

The key to good time management is to protect your time from the unimportant in order to focus on the important.  It’s really that simple.  But in practice, it can be difficult.  Because it sometimes means being a jerk.  Or at least coming across like one to people who enjoy time-wasting activities because it’s the only way they know how to work.

We have a word at Microsoft we use when our time is wasted: randomize.  I was randomized by him.  Please don’t randomize me.  This meeting is going to be randomizing, we can do this over email.  What a randomization! I’m not exactly sure where it came from – likely from the comparison of wasting time to a random number generator – but the basic idea is that if something is randomizing, it’s to be avoided at all costs.  I suppose it’s nicer than saying “you’re wasting my precious time”, especially for people who don’t know what the word means in context.

Don’t be randomized!

The single biggest time-waster in the corporate world is the all-too-prevalent meeting.  Most meetings are 50 minutes of people hearing themselves speak and 10 minutes of useful dialog or conversation.  You may not be able to avoid them completely, but you can sure as hell try.  More important stuff happens outside of meetings than in them.

As you may have read in My Day: The Way I Work, Rest, and Play, my workday can easily be filled from 9-6 if I’m not careful.  This certainly isn’t unique to my situation; it applies to lots of people.  Many people end up using evenings and weekends to “catch up” instead of for much-needed downtime.  Not fun.

Worse, they’ve convinced themselves that their job is to go to meetings.  I don’t know anyone whose job is just to attend meetings – or just read email for that matter – no matter what role they’re in… and for those who think it’s their job, my guess is that they’re filled with guilt because their contributions are severely limited.  They’re not actually doing anything.  Also not fun.

No matter what you do, you want to maximize your contribution.  You want to spend more time creating and producing than consuming.  You want great output.  You want to be someone who pushes the boulder another foot up the hill each and every day.  You don’t want to run in-place like the people around you!  Unless you’re a full-time hole puncher with 30 years of experience, you have something unique and significant to contribute.  Useless meetings take away from that.  If they’re not wasting your time directly, they’re still breaking up valuable opportunities to find flow in your work.  Meetings aren’t where you’ll make your mark.

It’s important to look at meetings – including phone calls – in terms of their opportunity cost.  An example of opportunity cost from Wikipedia: A person who has $15 can either buy a CD or a shirt. If he buys the shirt the opportunity cost is the CD and if he buys the CD the opportunity cost is the shirt.  The same logic applies to meetings.  If you attend that 60 minute meeting, what else could you have accomplished in that 60 minute, uninterrupted period of time?  That output is the opportunity cost of attending the meeting.  You need to determine if it’s worth it.  Sometimes it is.  Many times it’s not.

What I’ve found is that most 30 minute meetings can be handled over email if you can anticipate the outcome of the meeting ahead of time.  Most 60 minute meetings can be done in 20 minutes or less.  Just like work, meetings will fill the time allotted.  If a conference room is booked for 60 minutes, most people don’t start standing up until their 60 minutes have been used up.  It’s a strange territorial thing, like a pack of lions protecting their turf.  “I’m not going to get up, it’s still my time!”

Of course, the same can be said of the inverse – sometimes a 15 minute conversation can save 60 minutes of back-and-forth via email.  It takes practice to figure out the right balance.

Before getting into the tips, let’s start with a basic “what if” exercise.  When you look at a meeting on your calendar, ask yourself, “What if I didn’t attend this?  What’s the worst that could happen if I delegated, cancelled, or declined the meeting?” Are you OK with the expected outcome?  If so, don’t go – ask for the notes or a quick verbal summary once the meeting is over.  If you still feel you need to be there, ask yourself, “what could I do to minimize the impact of not attending?”  Sometimes this involves writing a quick paragraph to outline your perspective and what you hope to get out of the time.  Give people time to respond over email first and you may not need to meet at all.  If you still need to meet, you may at least be able to shorten the time you need to spend.

Here are some proven ways to protect your time:

1. Ask for an agenda before agreeing to meet with anyone

Getting into a room to define an agenda is a waste of time.

Meetings should be about bounded problem-solving, not about determining what’s wrong – that should happen ahead of the meeting.  Lots of times you can take a look at the agenda and produce the same outcome without the meeting.  I’ve started to use a standard template for most meetings (apologies in advance if you’ve been one of the recipients):

”Could you send over an agenda for the meeting so we can make the most of the time?  I want to make sure I’m prepared, so please let me know want you’d like to cover and how I can help.”

Word of caution: sometimes people take offense to this.  But it’s perfectly appropriate to ask people to think about how they’re going to use their time before they actually do.  You have other things you could be doing, as I’m sure they do too.  When they send the agenda over, you can determine if the time is actually required.

2. Propose a new time for all meetings that are set for an hour

An hour is a long time.  Break down your workday, subtracting lunch, other meetings, and commute time, and you probably only get 2, maybe 3, hours each day to do stuff.

If you accept too many hour-long meetings, you’re going to be one of those people complaining that they don’t have time to do their job.  As mentioned earlier, lots of people will fill the scheduled hour because they think they have to – after all, it’s on the calendar.  Use time as a forcing function – schedule it for less time than you think it should take and see if you can do it.  Here’s how I usually do this:

“My day is slammed with meetings and other commitments.  Let’s see if we can do this in 20 minutes – I promise to be on-time – and if we can’t get it done, we can always follow-up over email or schedule another quick sync.  Would 10 to 10:20am work for you?  If not, I’m also free from 3 to 3:20 or 4:40 to 5.  Thanks!”

The word of caution from above applies here too.  I remember the first time someone did this to me years ago, I felt dejected.  I got over it the minute I realized I needed to do it too.  Expect others to as well.  Your entire company can learn to work smarter.

3. Batch meetings together so you have time to complete real work

To do anything of value, you need dedicated, continuous time.  Time to get ramped up, into a zone, and time to finish.  Creative work is hard and isn’t usually done in 10 minute intervals.  It can take 30 minutes just to figure out what you’re going to do sometimes.

The solution to this: leave continuous blocks of time unscheduled each day.  This means proposing new times for meetings others have setup and taking a close look at your calendar before setting up a meeting to begin with.  Which day do you think would be more productive?

or…    

Imagine how much you could get done just by being proactive about this?

4. Setup quick standing meetings instead of seated meetings

It’s amazing how quickly meetings can go when you can’t get comfortable in a seat.  Whenever I can avoid it, I don’t schedule seated meetings.  When you’re standing, you’re constantly asking yourself “why am I standing?” and the motivation to sit can help push the meeting along.  It’s funny watching people go through this thought process in a meeting.

Along the same lines, you can schedule your standing meetings in a small, cramped space instead of a spacious conference room filled with snacks and projectors.  Use someone’s office or a shared open space instead of a place where people just “settle in and get comfortable”.  Most people will understand the motivation if you explain it.

I’ll take a 15 minute standing meeting in a small office over a 60 minute seated meeting in a conference room any day.

5. Avoid recurring meetings (without a clear agenda each time)

Recurring meetings have three possible states in my experience:

1. They recur too soon (~50% of them)
2. They recur too late (~40% of them)
3. They recur just at the right time (~10% of them)

The majority of recurring meetings are just ways to book time on people’s calendars so you can get them together.  Lots of time, at least at Microsoft, if you try and only book a meeting as-needed, no one can attend because they have other meetings already scheduled.  Recurring meetings keep that time on their calendars booked just for you.

This means that recurring meetings either recur too soon (nothing to discuss) or too late (you should have already met – and sometimes have).  In rare occasions, the timing is just right.  Depending on where you work, you may not be able to get out of all recurring meetings – but you can try and make sure there’s an agenda sent ahead of time, or that they’re done standing in a small space   At the very least, you can quietly excuse yourself if you don’t find the meeting useful.

6. Kill two birds with one stone

I’ve scheduled meetings during time I had scheduled to pack up my office or walk to the post office.  I’ve scheduled meetings over lunch and commute times, even picking people up at their home to have a meeting while driving to work.  I’ve scheduled meetings in a racquetball court or during planned social events.  People usually understand – everyone’s busy.  What’s the difference where the meeting takes place so long as we’re both committed to the outcome?

As mentioned in my previous post, I like to combine at least one meeting each day with a quick walk outside.  Not only are we exercising our bodies at the same time as our brains, but it usually results in more engaged, creative conversation.

Meetings that serve a dual-purpose can really make a difference to your schedule.  Another way this comes in handy: instead of having single 1:1 meetings with folks, get a few of you together to save the trouble of passing the results on amongst the group.

7. Minimize back and forth responses in email.

Sometimes 2-word responses to emails can just invite a back-and-forth exchange.  “No” is almost never as good as “No” and here’s 2 sentences why not.

Email isn’t instant messaging.  It’s meant to be “asynchronous”, not real-time.  Frequently someone will ask me a yes/no question via email that I could easily just respond with a single word.  Of course, if I’m able to anticipate their reaction, or if I know their motivation to begin with, a little extra information in a single email can save us the back-and-forth.  For example:

”Yes, that’s the way the product is designed.  We decided to do it this way because the data we’ve collected shows that people only use this feature in 0.05% of user sessions.  For more information on the exact implementation details and detailed justification, you should check out the specification (here’s the link).  After reading through, if you still have questions, please feel free to email.  Thanks!”

This applies to setting up time to get together as well.  Saying “I’m free at 4” is never as effective as “I’m free at 4.  If you’re not free at 4, could you give me a few options so I can choose the best time for both of us?”  You can save at least three emails that way.

8. Get out of the habit of answering your phone when it rings

Respond to all phone calls with an email or text so you can work when you want.  A great response to a missed call or a voicemail could be something like the following – concise with no wiggle room for follow-up:

“Hi Bob, I saw that you called.  Sorry I wasn’t available.  If this is about the trip on Friday, I’m currently booked on Alaska flight 416 and plan to get to the airport at 3:30.  I’ll wait for you by the gate and I’ll have the documents we discussed.  See you then – pls. email me if you have any questions.  Thanks!”

Unless it’s a member of my family or a close friend, I don’t answer my phone if I’m in the middle of something.  My voicemail asks people to send me a text or an email instead of leaving a voicemail (which takes time to listen to).  But if they do leave a voicemail, I almost always follow-up with email or text.  It forces people (including me) to be concise and keeps us from having to be available at the same time.

…ultimately, try shifting your mindset

Lots of people work this way: “I automatically accept meeting requests sent my way.”

It’s just a bad way to be productive.  Try this instead:

“If a meeting is the most efficient way to get this done, I’ll accept the request… once I’ve confirmed that for myself… and then tried to shorten the length.”

Some of this stuff may sound crazy.  Or it may be common sense to you by now.  The bottom line is that your time is the single most important resource you have in order to contribute to the world.  Don’t let time vampires or their meetings suck your blood dry!

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. 5 More Ways to Protect That Time!
2. Staying Focused With Microsoft Outlook: Email
3. Backup: The Most Important Thing Your Computer Can Do

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.

Related posts:

1. 5 More Ways to Protect That Time!
2. Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff

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. How to Beat Procrastination One Step at a Time!
3. 5 More Ways to Protect That Time!

• 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.

—

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. The “3S” Approach: The Lost Art of the GTD Weekly Review
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).

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. 12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)

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 ->

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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)