Being More Productive vs. Reducing Expenses

We usually think of being more productive as a way to make more money or at least make the same amount of money with less effort.  This is a short sighted approach.  Being more productive really means doing things that will give you more time to pursue the things that are really important to you.

If I am able to maintain my same level of pay and cut my work time in half, I’ve made some pretty significant improvements in my productivity.  But what if instead of maintaining the same level of pay we just try to maintain the same standard of living.   Or better yet, just maintain the same standard of living on things that are important to us.

This type of thinking suddenly opens up many new ways of looking at how we spend our time.  If I can cancel cable, reduce the number of times I eat out each month, and move to a smaller house, what will that buy me in terms of time? Could I spend another 20 hours a week with my daughter if I was willing to give up some things that will lower my cost of living?

I see a lot of people that become so obsessed with “doing more” that they never stop to ask themselves “why?”

Consider this:  Do you have more or less time to spend on things you enjoy and that are really important to you than you did 5 years ago?  If not, when do you expect the trend to reverse?

Habit List

Note: The PDF mentioned in this post is now available as part of the Habit List Course.

Earlier I talked about the “Habit List” I’ve been using. I wanted to walk people through the tool and show you how it works in this post. First lets revisit the theory behind it.

This tool was created with the premise that “habit” type tasks should not be on our regular todo list. There are several reasons that keeping these types of items on your regular todo list is a bad idea.

1. “Habit” tasks tend to obscure the most important tasks that have to be done.
2. The value of a habit, is measured over time–not just a particular day. Regular todo lists don’t allow for this.
3. When your todo list is full of “habits” it is easy to get discouraged when you have a particularly busy day because the focus is on that day instead of your overall lifestyle.

The Habit List is designed to show you how you are doing an entire month at a time. The idea was to create a light weight tool that makes it easy to focus on whether or not you are regularly practicing your list of habits and minimizes the focus on a particular day. In other words, if I don’t exercise on a particular day, it really isn’t a big deal. What I want to watch for are times where I don’t exercise for an entire week.

Here is a shot of the entire Habit List:

In the upper left hand corner is a place to put your name, the date, and the context. The context is in case you want to have multiple lists for different areas. For example, you might use one list just for exercise and another for your reading plan. most people are probably going to be fine with just a single list.

Each task is listed on a row with a square for each day in the month.

Each day, you check off habits as you practice/complete them. There is nothing wrong with skipping over an item if you can’t fit it in on a particular day. However, the Habit List lets you see at a glance if there are any areas where you may be slacking off.

At the bottom of each day, there is a place to total how many habits you were able to practice. There is also a place to note your daily target if it helps encourage you.

At the end of each month, each task has a place to total the number of times you were able to practice it. This is just to give you a quick checkup to make sure you are practicing the things that are important to you. It lets you see if your time is being spent in a way that aligns with your priorities.

Here is a thumbnail that will take you to a larger screen shot of the entire example Habit List.

The idea is that the tool should be extremely light weight and flexible. It took me a little longer to make it available because I had added a bunch of features to it. When I stopped and looked at what I had done I thought, “Wait a minute, I would personally never use all this extra stuff.” So I simplified it back to the system that I’m actually using.

I’m making the PDF available for download, but there is a catch. I’m going to add it to the bottom of the RSS feed to help encourage people to subscribe. It will also show up as a link in the bottom of the daily emails from Productivity501. If you want the PDF, but just can’t bring yourself to subscribe to the RSS feed or email, don’t worry. I’ll probably put it up on the site in a week or so, but for now I want to make it available exclusively to current and new RSS/email subscribers.

Setting Up Gmail

Last week I talked about how I use IMAP for my main accounts. I do have some Gmail addresses as well, and I think I’ve come up with an optimal setup for keeping things synced with my main laptop computer. Basically I only download emails to my main laptop. If I need to read something from somewhere else, I’ll use the web version and look under the archives if I need to lookup older emails.

Under Settings > Forwarding and POP you’ll want to Enable POP so you can download it with your email client. Then you have to decide what to do with messages once you’ve downloaded them. You can keep them in your inbox, delete them or archive them. I prefer to archive them. That keeps them around in case I need them, but it makes it easy for me to see what is new if I have to use the web version when my laptop is off and isn’t downloading emails.

This has been the best settings I’ve been able to come up with. Has anyone else found any better ways to handle Gmail when you want to download to an email client on your local computer but still get access from the web?

Tuesday’s Tip: Movie List

Video rental stores are one of the most frustrating places for me. It always takes so long to find a movie and once I get to the store my mind goes blank of all the movies I want to see. On the other hand I really like services like NetFlix because they let you make a list of all the movies you want to see and then send them to you one at a time.

You can use this same idea to help you in the video store. I started keeping a file with a list of movies I want to see on it. When someone says that a movie is good, I just add it to my list. When we want to find something to watch, we use the list to find an appropriate movie for the evening. This has turned what use to be a 45 minute hunt through the video store into a 5 or 10 minute process.

The idea can be applied to other areas as well. When you find yourself struggling to make a decision, ask yourself if in the last 3 months you have had any conversations that would have helped you make your decision if you just remembered. Good restaurants to try, books to read, blogs to read, etc. are all great candidates for their own list.

Productive Blogger: The Distribution of Inspiration

Most successful blogs, post new content every weekday.  People looking to start successful blogs, look at this and think “I guess I need to write something every day.”  The problem is that inspiration isn’t evenly distributed.  One day you may have ideas for 10 posts and the next two weeks–nothing.

To be a productive blogger, you need to learn to use the mountain tops of inspiration to help fill in the valleys where you can’t think of anything to write about.  This can be as simple as keeping a wordprocessor document of future posts.  If your blogging platform supports it, I suggest using the scheduled post feature.  Write your post when inspiration strikes but set it to go live when you know you will need a post.  You can sit down and write posts for the rest of the week or the rest of the year.

For example.  If you take one Saturday each month and write one short post per week for the next month, you’ll have a huge head start.  Even if you get busy with other things or can’t think of anything to write about, your blog will remain active.

It is takes discipline to schedule a post for later.  Once you finish a great post, your first instinct is to put it up so the whole world can see it. This tendency causes many blogs to be sporadic.  They will be silent for two weeks and suddenly have a dozen posts go live a 2am Saturday morning. If all your readers are using RSS, this might not be that big of problem, but running a successful blogs means getting people to integrate it into part of their daily pattern.  Your blog needs to become a habit.  Your reader is more likely to return if they know you will have new content every week or every day than if they think it is just random.

Also keep in mind that one of the things people like about blogs is the “bite size” content.  Publishing the equivalent of 50 pages spread out over a bunch of posts all at once, is probably going to get less brain share than a single post each week or each day just because people can’t take all the information in at once.

So to summarize:  Write your posts when you have the time and inspiration.  Post them when it is most convenient to your reader.

Productive Blogger

For the next several Monday’s we are going to be doing a series of posts on Productive Blogging.  I’ve kind of avoided meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) in the past, but I think enough of the readers here are running some type of blog, that it will make for some useful content once a week for a while.

If this is or isn’t useful, please let me know.

Two Task Lists

Franklin Covey (formerly Franklin Quest) training teaches you to keep all of your todo items in one place.  I don’t think this is the best approach.  I think it is important to separate your important todo items from your list of “habit” type tasks.  For example, if I have a todo item of paying my taxes, it doesn’t seem that this should be on the same list as exercise.  If I miss a day of exercise, it isn’t a big deal.  In fact I expect to miss a few days of exercise here and there.  However, paying my taxes isn’t one of those things I can miss.  It should be on my list of things that absolutely have to get done.

Exercise and things like that are more of habits that I want to practice on a regular basis, but I can skip if I need to.  Most peopel try to deal with this by prioritizing their tasks.  The problem is that you still end up with everything on the same list even though there is something fundamentally different about “habit” type tasks.  For these type of regularly recurring items, you need to see how you are doing over time more than you need to see a particular day.  That is why I like keeping these type of items in a grid that lets me see at a glance how I’m doing for the month. The priorities on each item can change depending on how I’m doing.  So if I haven’t exercised for a week, it becomes more important.

I have a paper based tool I use for this “habit list” that I’ll be making available later next week, so watch for it if this sounds like something you’d be interested in.

Why I Use IMAP for Email

I have been very impressed with GMail. Especially now that they will let you host your own domain. However, IMAP is still too important for me to give up for my main business account. Let me explain why.

There are three main ways to read your email. Webmail is one. The other two are called POP3 and IMAP. POP3 is what Google uses. It allows you to download your emails to your local computer. The problem is that it doesn’t keep things synchronized or allow folders. So if I move an email to a “to-do” folder on my client, the server doesn’t know anything about it.

If I just used one computer that wouldn’t be a problem. However, I have three computers that I use on a fairly regular basis and I need to be able to get to email on all of them. IMAP allows me to do this. If I make a change on one computer it automatically updates it on the other computers. If I create a new folder, it automatically creates it on the server which is automatically synced with my other computers and it shows up in web mail as well.

By using the IMAP protocol I’m able to have the same view of my inbox regardless of what computer I’m using. Of course if you use Gmail over the web, it gives you this capability as well. Internet coverage isn’t ubiquitous enough for me to take this route yet. However, it might be some day. Until then I’ll stick with mailboxes that allow me to use IMAP for my main business accounts.

The other day I was trying to help a fellow blogger get his email set back up after his computer had crashed. Since he used POP3, he had lost all of the emails he had previously downloaded and he had to send out messages asking people to resend anything they might have sent to him.

With IMAP this is not a problem because the server keeps a synchronized copy of everything that is on your desktop computer. This is a very valuable feature–especially if losing an email could be costly.

Google Reader

Reading RSS feeds is the ideal filler for small periods of downtime. Most articles are short so I can make use of even 45 seconds at a time. This means given the right technology, I can work my way through news feeds while waiting in line at the bank, stuck in traffic, waiting for an appointment, etc.

Up until recently, I used NewsFire because I wanted to have a offline copy for times when I didn’t have an internet connection. However, with the addition of Google Gears, I decided to give Google Reader a try again. While I miss some of the advanced features of NewsFire, the ability to keep my feeds synced regardless of whether I’m reading them on my Blackberry, laptop, or desktop computer has proven to be very useful.

I got a chance to really try out the system this week on a 14 hour car drive. When we had to stop for my wife to feed or change our 2 month old, I picked up my Blackberry and worked my way through my news feeds. Things that were of interest I starred for a closer look later. When I later got back online with my laptop, I was expecting a huge deluge of unread items. Instead I discovered that the time I had spent a few minutes here and a few minutes there while waiting at gas stations or road side parts had gotten me through several hundred items and I had half a dozen starred items of things I wanted to check out more closely.

Here are some of the downsides I’ve found so far:

• Can’t Share from Mobile Version — On the full version of Google Reader, you can share any item. If you look on the right hand side of Productivity501, you’ll see some links that come from items I’ve shared from Google reader. This isn’t available from the mobile version, which is dissapointing. If I want to share something, I have to star it and then share it when I’m at my laptop.
• No Smart Groups — NewsFire lets you have smart groups. So you can put a feed in your “productivity” folder, but then have a smart group that lets you browse all of your feeds based on other criteria, so I could create a smart group with my top rated feeds and another with all of the rest. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do this in Google Reader
• No Search – NewsFire lets you search through all of your feeds. I didn’t use this feature very often, but I’ve found I miss it when I’m looking for something I read, but I can’t seem to locate again. And given that Google is a search company…

All in all, I’ve been pretty pleased–especially with the ability to read feeds from any device and have it centrally keep track of what has been read and what is new. If you have downtime in small blocks and a web enabled cellphone, I’d encourage you to try using Google Reader on your cell phone and main computer. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

• The URL for Google Reader is: http://www.google.com/reader
• The URL for Google Reader Mobile is: http://www.google.com/reader/m
• The URL to add Productivity501 to your Google Reader: Subscribe with Google

Tuesday’s Tip: Dressed for Productivity

You’ve heard of “Dressed for Success” well what about “Dressed for Productivity”. I think that the way we dress can have a big impact on our performance. Where I went to college required that all the guys wear ties and all the gals wear dresses to class. There was quite a bit of debate among the students about whether this was really beneficial or not.

Many students met the dress code to the letter, but were extremely sloppy in the way that the were dressed. Overall it would probably be impossible to tell if having a dress code helped make anyone a better student (although it helped guarantee that all the guys knew how to tie a tie by the time they graduated.)

Personally though, I know that my performance is sometimes influenced by how I’m dressed. If I get dressed for business and feel business-like, I function better than if it is 1pm and I’m still working in my pajamas.

Even more important than how I feel is the way others respond to me based on the way I’m dressed. When you meet someone for the first time they make a whole slew of assumptions about you based on the available data. One of the easiest pieces of data to latch on to is how you are dressed. If you are dressed professionally, this influences their opinion about whether or not you are likely to behave professionally.

In fact, there was a study that showed students who were allowed to rate a college professor after only having watched a 30 second silent video of him teaching, gave the same rankings as students who sat in his class for an entire semester.

The point is that they were able to pickup enough information in just a few moments visually to form the same opinion as students who spent the entire semester in class–or perhaps their first opinions were so strong that an entire semester of teaching couldn’t shake what they initially had decided.

When someone sees you for the first time, they are going to make assumptions (right or wrong) about how you are dressed. These assumptions have a direct influence on how the person interacts with you. So if you dress like someone they would want to work with, you’ll find it much easier to get things done than if you don’t. Your productivity in the interaction is determined in a large way by how you dress.

This is easy to take advantage of. If you are going to a meeting, spend a few moments in the morning thinking about what others are likely to be wearing and how you can dress in a way that will make you as productive as possible. If it is something really important, you might even want to do some research to find out what is acceptable dress for particular situations. For example, if you are going for a job interview, it might not be a bad idea to find out how others dress that work in the position you are applying for. Better yet, if you can find out what the person interviewing you is likely to be wearing, you can adjust your wardrobe that day accordingly.

This method isn’t going to suddenly make you an extremely productive person, but if it helps you retain even 5% of opportunities you might have otherwise missed, it can make a big difference.

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