Steve Pavlina wrote a terrific post for someone like me, working at home and wasting far too much time reading email and surfing the web. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/07/how-to-create-a-personal-productivity-scaffold/
The whole day can go by with little accomplished when I end up reading favorite blogs all day, in between hits of "catching up" with my email. Sure I've kept my inbox to 0 but that can't be the whole of my day. I want to get over this bad habit, replace it with better habits. Steven is the big "30 days to form a habit" man (I don't know where he really got that data, that 30 days in a row is what it takes to form a habit). But he maintains that in order to form a new habit, first it is wise to have what he calls a day's "scaffold" in place. This, he says, will help me stop the nonproductive use of my time. Steve reports that the way he has managed the email-surfing-email problem was to create a scaffold, a structure or edifice to hold the beginning and the end of his work day. With a highly structured beginning, he is able to the proceed to be productive in the ways he wants all through the day. His beginning includes a simple review of the day, a short period of journaling, meditating and a few other activities that he does somewhat by a checklist. His whole "morning scaffold" takes an hour, from 8 to 9. Now I know from other Pavlini posts that he has already gone out and run or lifted weights or whatever else his current exercise programs consists of, and that he does this every day. He failed to include that in his description of his "scaffold" or morning routine, and this is an important emission. If I were getting up at 5 everyday, running for 45 minutes, eating breakfast, I would be ready for a sold scaffold by 8, and it would be a whole new me. I tried getting up early for a few weeks, and it fell apart, I couldn't keep it up, I simply got too tired. Right now I am trying to establish a daily Kundalini yoga habit.
I like the idea of establishing a "scaffold" for my day in my at home office. I'll let you know how I progress; I'll work on it over the weekend when things are varied (family demands) from my usual patterns.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Saturday, July 14, 2007
"15 Ways to Use a Wiki:" And --How I use my own Wiki..
A great post on Web Worker Daily: (http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/13/15-productive-uses-for-a-wiki/ ) by Leo Babauta, provides a detailed list of ideas for how to use a personal wiki.
"A few of the things that are emerging about web workers is that 1) we do just about everything online; 2) we want to be able to access it from any computer, anywhere; and 3) it’s hard to organize all the stuff we use and do, in our work and personal lives.
I still can't say what exactly a "wiki" is except it is a place where I do some heavy personal planning, complaining, whining, and writing up my goal statements and I do it fast. So a wiki is fast. I have mine on the zoho site http://wiki.zoho.com/HomePage.html/ meaning I didn't have to know anything to get it going, and I still don't know anything to keep it there, always available when I log in to my Zoho Wiki . Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) is a very cool service offering online documents that take and provide ms compatible files, a project planning program, a personal wiki service, and many other options. I like it. I've been using my wiki there for a few months. I also use BackPack (www.Backpackit.com) for some of my listmaking which I could do entirely on my zoho wiki, but I love the aesthetics of Backpack, its ajaxy feel. I like the big fonts, the way the lists look. So I use that for lists that I return to, but I use my wiki for sudden jerky planning that I'm not likely to use again. I date the entries, so lets say its a planning diary that maybe I won't ever look at again. I write down a sudden commitment to FOCUS because I've been unfocused for hours at a time, or I write down an evening's plan, that doesn't belong on my Vitalist "to do list" because its too spur of the moment, its intended to get me up off my ass, to begin a day or evening of ten minute dashes. My wiki is a tool, part of the process that I sometimes need in my working, its only for process for that matter. I don't use it for storing for the future but for motivating me, organizing my spinning around mind, to get going right now.
I love my wiki
I recommend a wiki for everyone. It can be shared, or very private. If you want to get started, go to http://www.zoho.com/ and start your own wiki, free, fast and effective. There are many other sites providing free wiki service, this happens to be the only one I've tried, so I don't know about recommending anything else. I love my wiki, its the way I get inspired when my enthusiasm and spirit is drifting downward. And I have a record of my process, not that I look at it again. This one is for me, not history.
"A few of the things that are emerging about web workers is that 1) we do just about everything online; 2) we want to be able to access it from any computer, anywhere; and 3) it’s hard to organize all the stuff we use and do, in our work and personal lives.
But online organization dozen’t have to be complicated. There are many tools for organizing all our stuff, of course, but one of the simplest is the wiki.
We’re all familiar with wikis, of course — Wikipedia being the most famous example, but many other useful wikis abound on the Internet. But one of the most productive forms of wikis is the personal wiki, which you can create at any number of sites."
"Once you’ve got your personal wiki set up.. this post lists "15 ways to use a wiki productively, web worker style, beginning with a to-do list."I still can't say what exactly a "wiki" is except it is a place where I do some heavy personal planning, complaining, whining, and writing up my goal statements and I do it fast. So a wiki is fast. I have mine on the zoho site http://wiki.zoho.com/HomePage.html/ meaning I didn't have to know anything to get it going, and I still don't know anything to keep it there, always available when I log in to my Zoho Wiki . Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) is a very cool service offering online documents that take and provide ms compatible files, a project planning program, a personal wiki service, and many other options. I like it. I've been using my wiki there for a few months. I also use BackPack (www.Backpackit.com) for some of my listmaking which I could do entirely on my zoho wiki, but I love the aesthetics of Backpack, its ajaxy feel. I like the big fonts, the way the lists look. So I use that for lists that I return to, but I use my wiki for sudden jerky planning that I'm not likely to use again. I date the entries, so lets say its a planning diary that maybe I won't ever look at again. I write down a sudden commitment to FOCUS because I've been unfocused for hours at a time, or I write down an evening's plan, that doesn't belong on my Vitalist "to do list" because its too spur of the moment, its intended to get me up off my ass, to begin a day or evening of ten minute dashes. My wiki is a tool, part of the process that I sometimes need in my working, its only for process for that matter. I don't use it for storing for the future but for motivating me, organizing my spinning around mind, to get going right now.
I love my wiki
I recommend a wiki for everyone. It can be shared, or very private. If you want to get started, go to http://www.zoho.com/ and start your own wiki, free, fast and effective. There are many other sites providing free wiki service, this happens to be the only one I've tried, so I don't know about recommending anything else. I love my wiki, its the way I get inspired when my enthusiasm and spirit is drifting downward. And I have a record of my process, not that I look at it again. This one is for me, not history.
Friday, July 13, 2007
7/13/07: Movie Review: Politics, Suburbia, and Sicko
I've been doing something lately highly out of character. I've been watching movies and documentaries almost nightly, some on the TV screen and some projected onto a wall in our living room, where I feel like I'm in a theater with all the comforts of home. I fell into Michael Moore's new masterpiece (and I mean that by way of the Internet. I don't know if its illegal, but someone sent it to me, and voila, I had it. I heard that he heard it has been released over the Internet and he said that was fine by him. I figure the artist has to be the real owner. But if I'm going to get into legal trouble for this confession, I hope someone will warn me.
A disturbing moment that went on all evening
Watching Sicko turns out to be one of those riveting but deeply disturbing moments in modern life. I know we're bombing countries where we shouldn't even be, I know we're engaged in torture tactics which apparently (according to a group of psychologists who have studied the matter) were developed by psychologists working with the military. I our poor are getting poorer and our rich richer, I know highly educated people are out of work and facing destitution. I know people are wanting to believe the message of the movie and book "The Secret" --that what you think determines what happens to you, and if you can start thinking about good things, you will to attract good things, coming from the universe to you. What I didn't know was the main message of Sicko, namely that having health insurance is no protection from poor medical care when disaster strikes. You may carry fine insurance and then get cancer, to discover that your carrier considers the treatment being recommended is still in "research phase" and therefore you are ineligible to receive, unless you want to pay out of pocket. Moore brings it home, in enough cases and enough ways to make me very nervous. But that wasn't the only point of the movie. He went on to show health care in other countries and the comparison was almost more compelling than the rather gruesome case stories. He then points out that this is part of an overall situation of fear induction. If we are afraid of losing our health insurance (which may or may not protect us from disaster in a health crisis), that makes us more afraid of losing our jobs, which in turns makes us more afraid of being decisive and strong on our jobs as is. Ripped of our potential for a happy state of confidence, fear takes over and permeates everything. Moore really does it, he takes us on a path that describes the state of fear that perhaps most of us are living in.
The comparisons left us looking selfish and cruel: Is this how we are as a nation?
His comparisons bring home clearly how our system has become selfish and cruel, and a fear-ridden population is far too weakened to change things. In other countries he describes --Canada, England, France and Cuba-- the citizens expect to pay for nationalized health through their taxes. Now why don't we, that's obvious. We're spending all our collected taxes on something most of us don't approve of, a widespread military offensive in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't exactly spend what we spend on warfare (in the name of democracy and national defence) and have anything left over for health care for everyone. Moore doesn't make this specific connection, but we all know he knows better than anyone where our money is going. Its going to the oil empire living in Texas either in direct dollars or in insuring that the oil or what's left of it, is well protected and in the hands of the same ..umm. families.
That brings me to "The End of Suburbia"
I'm writing this before I've seen the whole documentary because my husband and son got so anxious watching this spectacle that they wouldn't let me finish it. These are two men who can spend endless hours watching men chasing men with every kind of horrific weapon, and blood, guts, and gore exuding from the screen for hours. But they could not handle Suburbia. They said it was monotonous and boring, which I interpret to mean anxious. In Suburbia finally someone is saying what has been clear and obvious for years, but is never or rarely spoken. We live an entirely unsupportable life, dependent on taking and more taking from the environment, without giving anything back. The suburban life style is dependent on the oil economy and oil production is peaking (or has peaked) and will now be dwindling from now to forever. We have had it with oil. We can't expand and we can't even expect to continue as is, at our current standard of living. There is not enough energy to be had to keep us going, even as is, let alone while expanding. The way we developed suburbs for living and then suburbs for working was only possible because of the excess of cheap oil. We could drive long distances to work and home again every evening, because of cheap oil, meaning cheap and available gas for our cars. This is about to come to a stark and frightening halt as availability of oil rapidly diminishes. The message of Suburbia is clear, we have to change our whole lifestyle and economic set up by necessity not by choice.
The two documenatries belong together
The Moore movie ends up depicting us as a very selfish and cruel nation, jibing well with the message of Suburbia where people have been thriving by ripping off the planet of all of its natural energy resources. We are going to be punished, or if we can get the hit of Sicko, we are being punished right now as our requests for medical care are "denied" and denied and denied. Our way of life in untenable. We need a self-sustaining lifestyle where we plant our food in our backyards and in our community gardens, we work and live in the same location, we make our own clothes locally, no longer depending on the delivery of goods to Walmart from China. Same goes for our dishes, and everything else that becomes junk (or to use the GTD slogan/word, our stuff) in our houses. We cut back and change absolutely everything about how we live and how we function on a day to day basis, simply because we have to. With the end of oil, we have to stop our military offenses because they are so dependent on the oil economy. We can't fly planes without oil. So maybe the change in our life style will free up some taxes to go to free national health care.
No wonder the guys got so anxious. Meanwhile I'd like to see the end of the documentary I guess I have to do it the guys aren't with me.
A disturbing moment that went on all evening
Watching Sicko turns out to be one of those riveting but deeply disturbing moments in modern life. I know we're bombing countries where we shouldn't even be, I know we're engaged in torture tactics which apparently (according to a group of psychologists who have studied the matter) were developed by psychologists working with the military. I our poor are getting poorer and our rich richer, I know highly educated people are out of work and facing destitution. I know people are wanting to believe the message of the movie and book "The Secret" --that what you think determines what happens to you, and if you can start thinking about good things, you will to attract good things, coming from the universe to you. What I didn't know was the main message of Sicko, namely that having health insurance is no protection from poor medical care when disaster strikes. You may carry fine insurance and then get cancer, to discover that your carrier considers the treatment being recommended is still in "research phase" and therefore you are ineligible to receive, unless you want to pay out of pocket. Moore brings it home, in enough cases and enough ways to make me very nervous. But that wasn't the only point of the movie. He went on to show health care in other countries and the comparison was almost more compelling than the rather gruesome case stories. He then points out that this is part of an overall situation of fear induction. If we are afraid of losing our health insurance (which may or may not protect us from disaster in a health crisis), that makes us more afraid of losing our jobs, which in turns makes us more afraid of being decisive and strong on our jobs as is. Ripped of our potential for a happy state of confidence, fear takes over and permeates everything. Moore really does it, he takes us on a path that describes the state of fear that perhaps most of us are living in.
The comparisons left us looking selfish and cruel: Is this how we are as a nation?
His comparisons bring home clearly how our system has become selfish and cruel, and a fear-ridden population is far too weakened to change things. In other countries he describes --Canada, England, France and Cuba-- the citizens expect to pay for nationalized health through their taxes. Now why don't we, that's obvious. We're spending all our collected taxes on something most of us don't approve of, a widespread military offensive in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't exactly spend what we spend on warfare (in the name of democracy and national defence) and have anything left over for health care for everyone. Moore doesn't make this specific connection, but we all know he knows better than anyone where our money is going. Its going to the oil empire living in Texas either in direct dollars or in insuring that the oil or what's left of it, is well protected and in the hands of the same ..umm. families.
That brings me to "The End of Suburbia"
I'm writing this before I've seen the whole documentary because my husband and son got so anxious watching this spectacle that they wouldn't let me finish it. These are two men who can spend endless hours watching men chasing men with every kind of horrific weapon, and blood, guts, and gore exuding from the screen for hours. But they could not handle Suburbia. They said it was monotonous and boring, which I interpret to mean anxious. In Suburbia finally someone is saying what has been clear and obvious for years, but is never or rarely spoken. We live an entirely unsupportable life, dependent on taking and more taking from the environment, without giving anything back. The suburban life style is dependent on the oil economy and oil production is peaking (or has peaked) and will now be dwindling from now to forever. We have had it with oil. We can't expand and we can't even expect to continue as is, at our current standard of living. There is not enough energy to be had to keep us going, even as is, let alone while expanding. The way we developed suburbs for living and then suburbs for working was only possible because of the excess of cheap oil. We could drive long distances to work and home again every evening, because of cheap oil, meaning cheap and available gas for our cars. This is about to come to a stark and frightening halt as availability of oil rapidly diminishes. The message of Suburbia is clear, we have to change our whole lifestyle and economic set up by necessity not by choice.
The two documenatries belong together
The Moore movie ends up depicting us as a very selfish and cruel nation, jibing well with the message of Suburbia where people have been thriving by ripping off the planet of all of its natural energy resources. We are going to be punished, or if we can get the hit of Sicko, we are being punished right now as our requests for medical care are "denied" and denied and denied. Our way of life in untenable. We need a self-sustaining lifestyle where we plant our food in our backyards and in our community gardens, we work and live in the same location, we make our own clothes locally, no longer depending on the delivery of goods to Walmart from China. Same goes for our dishes, and everything else that becomes junk (or to use the GTD slogan/word, our stuff) in our houses. We cut back and change absolutely everything about how we live and how we function on a day to day basis, simply because we have to. With the end of oil, we have to stop our military offenses because they are so dependent on the oil economy. We can't fly planes without oil. So maybe the change in our life style will free up some taxes to go to free national health care.
No wonder the guys got so anxious. Meanwhile I'd like to see the end of the documentary I guess I have to do it the guys aren't with me.
July 13 2007: GTD and the Weekly Review
Having finally settled into a rhythm and pattern of organized productivity, I am finally ready to include the famous GTD "weekly review" on today's "to-do" list. By good luck Gina Trapani at Life Hacker has just written a piece about the weekly review http://lifehacker.com/software/getting-things-done/getting-into-the-weekly-review-habit-278118.php
"One of the most important aspects of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system is the Weekly Review - a regular ritual of checking in and updating your task and project lists. When people discuss GTD, they usually focus on the "capture" part of the system, which is the first step: getting everything out of your head and into some holding pen that you trust (whether that's Microsoft Outlook, a paper notebook or a text file.) But having all your stuff out of your head isn't enough: you've got to review it regularly to make sure you're focusing on the right things in your work."
I confess I was relieved to read that Gina only recently implemented this piece of the GTD method, as I just began my own scheduling of the weekly review. The first scheduled review happens today, and I began a half hour ago, by going through my email and dealing with any that have gathered for a while, finally getting my inbox to. I have been hovering at 1 or 15 daily, and that's out of the 150 or so I receive daily. Of course it helped that I moved many of my listservs over to Gmail, where there are something like over 5500 unattended emails sitting there, waiting should I have any interest it attending to them. One Friday perhaps I'll over over and archive all of them, beginning again. Or perhaps they'll all be deleted. Meanwhile, before I return to my focus on the weekly review (and I will certainly report on this) I want to report that I am now into preparing the third research report for publication. Please understand that these are papers that have been waiting to happen for four years now, my productivity had gone so underground and come to a halt as I was weighed down by the mountain of "stuff" that had accumulated in my office/home. Freed of the burden of stuff, having thrown out what seemed like half of my house, I really was liberated to return to work. My grades for the trimester were all turned in early, other academic tasks were completed, and I am now onto a summer of research/writing/consultation/teaching --with the teaching being relatively light, as I work with a few dissertation students. My teaching load for the next year is also light, giving me plenty of time to write everything I've been saying I was going to write, for years to be honest.
On to the weekly review. It includes emptying my inbox, emptying a back up inbox that contains things that were put aside to file or toss, going through my notes from the past week, kept in a circa junior notebook and a moleskin carried with me, processing what ever I find, and finally, reviewing everything on my Vitalist "Next Actions" list including the "Someday/Maybe" list, and the list of projects (www.vitalist.com) I'm most afraid of what I'll find on the Someday/Maybe and Project lists. Maybe it won't be as overwhelming as I'm fearing. So far GTD method, since I made it through the collection phase which anyone following this knows took two whole months, has been a breeze and has made my life much much easier.
"One of the most important aspects of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system is the Weekly Review - a regular ritual of checking in and updating your task and project lists. When people discuss GTD, they usually focus on the "capture" part of the system, which is the first step: getting everything out of your head and into some holding pen that you trust (whether that's Microsoft Outlook, a paper notebook or a text file.) But having all your stuff out of your head isn't enough: you've got to review it regularly to make sure you're focusing on the right things in your work."
I confess I was relieved to read that Gina only recently implemented this piece of the GTD method, as I just began my own scheduling of the weekly review. The first scheduled review happens today, and I began a half hour ago, by going through my email and dealing with any that have gathered for a while, finally getting my inbox to. I have been hovering at 1 or 15 daily, and that's out of the 150 or so I receive daily. Of course it helped that I moved many of my listservs over to Gmail, where there are something like over 5500 unattended emails sitting there, waiting should I have any interest it attending to them. One Friday perhaps I'll over over and archive all of them, beginning again. Or perhaps they'll all be deleted. Meanwhile, before I return to my focus on the weekly review (and I will certainly report on this) I want to report that I am now into preparing the third research report for publication. Please understand that these are papers that have been waiting to happen for four years now, my productivity had gone so underground and come to a halt as I was weighed down by the mountain of "stuff" that had accumulated in my office/home. Freed of the burden of stuff, having thrown out what seemed like half of my house, I really was liberated to return to work. My grades for the trimester were all turned in early, other academic tasks were completed, and I am now onto a summer of research/writing/consultation/teaching --with the teaching being relatively light, as I work with a few dissertation students. My teaching load for the next year is also light, giving me plenty of time to write everything I've been saying I was going to write, for years to be honest.
On to the weekly review. It includes emptying my inbox, emptying a back up inbox that contains things that were put aside to file or toss, going through my notes from the past week, kept in a circa junior notebook and a moleskin carried with me, processing what ever I find, and finally, reviewing everything on my Vitalist "Next Actions" list including the "Someday/Maybe" list, and the list of projects (www.vitalist.com) I'm most afraid of what I'll find on the Someday/Maybe and Project lists. Maybe it won't be as overwhelming as I'm fearing. So far GTD method, since I made it through the collection phase which anyone following this knows took two whole months, has been a breeze and has made my life much much easier.
Monday, July 2, 2007
GTD made simple
Minimalist GTD
I'm just finishing up the grading periods, meaning I have finished the trimester of teaching and am wrapping up the administration of a course. I had put put blogging on the back seat, while my job took precedent. I've also been busy finishing up 2 articles for publication --one about antecedents to psychopathology in chimpanzees. (Don't ask how I got quite so far ranging, suffice it to say I examined data from a personality study of 145 chimpanzees living in well-run zoos). The second is about a measure I've developed with colleagues, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)." If anyone wants to check out this measure they can go to my lab at www.eparg.org and find the study under current studies, the one called "emotion and personality." If you want to participate you can, its completely anonymous.
My GTD efforts have continued, and I attribute this recent productivity to my GTD lifestyle. I'm working on a blog on my "killer GTD set up" responding to a blog calling on all of us out here, to add our piece. I'm going to publish it here as soon as its finished. Meanwhile I just ran into a great blog about a minimalist approach to GTD, it's worth reading. It's a guest appearance by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, http://zenhabits.net/, and a great summary of what you really need to know to get going on GTD.
http://lifedev.net/2007/07/time-management-simplified-how-to-be-productive-with-no-worries/
If you want to know something, teach it
I find in my teacher/psychotherapist role, people are asking how I got so organized, they want some of that too, so despite my still being in an implementation phase (that might go on for years I suspect), I am now forced to pass it on. Just as well, the only way to really know something is to teach it.
Remember that, its a hard and fast rule. If you want to know an area, any area, find a way to teach it. Before you turn around you'll have mastered the basics. If you want to get organized, start teaching people how to get organized.
I'm just finishing up the grading periods, meaning I have finished the trimester of teaching and am wrapping up the administration of a course. I had put put blogging on the back seat, while my job took precedent. I've also been busy finishing up 2 articles for publication --one about antecedents to psychopathology in chimpanzees. (Don't ask how I got quite so far ranging, suffice it to say I examined data from a personality study of 145 chimpanzees living in well-run zoos). The second is about a measure I've developed with colleagues, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)." If anyone wants to check out this measure they can go to my lab at www.eparg.org and find the study under current studies, the one called "emotion and personality." If you want to participate you can, its completely anonymous.
My GTD efforts have continued, and I attribute this recent productivity to my GTD lifestyle. I'm working on a blog on my "killer GTD set up" responding to a blog calling on all of us out here, to add our piece. I'm going to publish it here as soon as its finished. Meanwhile I just ran into a great blog about a minimalist approach to GTD, it's worth reading. It's a guest appearance by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, http://zenhabits.net/, and a great summary of what you really need to know to get going on GTD.
http://lifedev.net/2007/07/time-management-simplified-how-to-be-productive-with-no-worries/
If you want to know something, teach it
I find in my teacher/psychotherapist role, people are asking how I got so organized, they want some of that too, so despite my still being in an implementation phase (that might go on for years I suspect), I am now forced to pass it on. Just as well, the only way to really know something is to teach it.
Remember that, its a hard and fast rule. If you want to know an area, any area, find a way to teach it. Before you turn around you'll have mastered the basics. If you want to get organized, start teaching people how to get organized.
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