WOW: Multiply Excellence and Chutzpah

Develop in Public, Refine Later

Do something, do anything. Everything you ever do is always under construction. Everything is work in progress.

Why not publish your new website under its working title on a makeshift domain? Not having decided about the final name and title is not an excuse.

Develop in public, redirect and refine later. It works not only with domain names, website content, or actual product prototypes. To get started, nothing works better than output. Publish, release, deliver, make something real and let the customer, recipient, beneficiary, have at it.

In fact, that's what the scientific method is all about --

The scientific method relies on the hypothesis. What's more intuitive than an initial hypothesis? Everything follows the scientific method, after all.

Determine a goal, make a plan, follow the plan, evaluate, improve the plan, follow, evaluate, ... is there anything which or anyone who doesn't work this way?

Scientific researchers propose specific hypotheses as explanations of natural phenomena, and design experimental studies that test these predictions for accuracy. These steps are repeated in order to make increasingly dependable predictions of future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry serve to bind more specific hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn aids in the formation of new hypotheses, as well as in placing groups of specific hypotheses into a broader context of understanding.

Setting up a hypothesis, testing it and replacing it with a better one. If real progress is involved, is there any one thing which works differently in the first place?

What about starting from scratch? Without a hypothesis?

Sometimes -- and only sometimes -- you have to start all new, start all over from scratch and tear everything which already is, down.

Where exactly does the act of creation take place... Is it the letting go? Is it the pristine ground?

It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

Let's pretend to lose everything and examine the difference it makes -- compared to adhering to structures, conventions, and rules of existing systems.

That, in part, is the beauty of remixing: You start from scratch without holding on to any weights from previous structures yet you make use of the best parts of what's already manifested.

Thus, the act of remixing in public, recombining elements which are already tested and trusted, is a virtually guaranteed way to successfully create something more than the sum of its parts. Every subsequent remix will be better and better than its ancestors, hypothesis is being built on top of hypothesis.

The key is initial output.

Labels: analysis+paralysis, business, decisions, goals, gtd, lifehacks, personal+branding, productivity, remix, scientific+method, wow, wow-bits

Linking Park: 2007-W07, The More Suggestions Edition

by Alexander Becker

More networking, productivity, health and exercise suggestions, the whole enchilada.

We've had this before, but here is a great follow up on LinkedIn in particular and on making your business network pay dividends --

LinkedIn is just a tool, albeit a powerful one if you have a use for it and know how to make it work. If you are good at what you do, it amplifies it. If you suck, it amplifies that too. We'll assume the former and give some pointers on how you can make it work more effectively for you. If you find yourself wondering how to better use, derive benefit or get value from this tool, the following suggestions might prove useful. Don't forget the basic rule of being of service to others.

Basic rules? Priorities? See the pattern here? What we talk about when we talk about "priority" --

Since the Bronze Age of personal productivity, conventional wisdom has taught us the importance of priority in deciding how to plan and use our time. And, in the abstract, anyhow, that notion of putting your time and attention into those things that are the most valuable to you seems so "obvious" as to be a tautology, where "productivity = acting on priorities." (Of course, whether people's execution of the things they claim are important always maps to their stated intentions is another matter for another post a really big book.)

[...]

But, in practice, what the hell does "priority" really mean?

Almost everybody wants effortless success, the question remains whether it is possible to emulate effortlessness in the first place --

I believe our lives, world, and reality is actually created by the desires, thoughts, intentions, and images we give our attention to. Action is simply a way for us to enjoy what we've created.

... except for the fact that the effortless stuff is the stuff you really really want, everything else is not effortlessly achievable because you can trick yourself into true desire only so far.

Let's keep this issue open for later discussion and in the meantime, admire your results since you've decided to get in shape..... again, suggesting to --

Get in shape for life, not an event.

On a different level but nevertheless related, check out Yoga and rock climbing and the art of falling down --

I've been telling my students lately that when you fall out of a pose in yoga, that's a sign that you're getting stronger and that you're testing -- and pushing -- your edge. Conversely, if you find that you're never falling down in yoga class, or that you're never falling out of any poses, chances are that you're probably staying in your comfort zone a little too much. A similar set of principles can be applied to rock climbing, providing yet another example of how yoga and climbing fit together so nicely.

Body tightness is the secret of many amazing gymnastic feats. Study these gymnastics tension exercises --

One of the most important elements in gymnastics conditioning is body tension or "body tightness". Gymnasts can control the action of their body more easily (in static strength positions as well as in movement) when their body is held tight than when it is a loose collection of individual parts. A person's weight is much more difficult to handle when their body is relaxed than it is if it were held tight.

Here is another suggestion, namely to eat fewer calories and live longer --

Eating more calories than the body needs to maintain a thin, muscular weight ages us.

Sounds sensible, on the other hand, what about some food for thought -- Want to lose fat? Eat more and get lean --

Taking in too few of the required nutrients is equal to constant starvation. Consequently, your body expects nothing less than famine and starts to store the fat. Yes, every bit of anything you eat is treated as a scarce resource and is therefore stored away for times even worse.

Since we already talk about clogging, ... Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. When I stopped by first, I got this though --

Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!

Nevermind.

One of the worst productivity killers is the bad habit of going back and forth between one and the same task, hence the suggestion to get things done on the spot in order to minimize missed opportunities --

Single-handling is the high-speed, high-performance productivity concept of dealing with tasks, material or immaterial, on first sight, encounter, or touch.

Therefore, ... the book of the week is -- once again -- David Allen's Getting Things Done.

To your excellent life.

Labels: gtd, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, linking+park, networking, productivity, reference, review, wow

Single-Handling vs. Missed Opportunities

by Alexander Becker

Single-handling is the high-speed, high-performance productivity concept of dealing with tasks, material or immaterial, on first sight, encounter, or touch. Get it out of the way as soon as it comes up, without ever looking back again.

Here is a short exercise: Analyze your missed opportunities for a given timeframe, say last year, and determine how much stuff you wanted to get back to. How many interesting things, creative hooks, and potential successes piled up in order to be forgotten and later purged, ironically handled for a second time only to be discarded since their best before dates had long expired.

The intention of building an archive containing reference material, material dedicated for later, unspecified, potential use, will leave you with constructive insights -- you will find things you long thought lost, only to notice that you manage to live without them, leading to the eventual, logical consequence to finally throw them away.

Deal with everything immediately, as soon as possible and do not attempt to preserve anything for later. It will be too late. Everything which you do not act upon immediately gets never acted upon at all. Yes, there are exceptions but considering the results of the exercise above -- the list of missed opportunities is long and the ratio of exceptions to misses indicates a negligible count of exceptions -- you have to triage for ultimate productivity.

If you can decide to deal with it later, whatever it is, you can as well take an additional moment and get it done on the spot. Yes, that's similar to the 2-minute rule from David Allen's Getting Things Done. In fact, it's even easier because it focuses on the yes-or-no decision of acting upon or discarding really fast.

If you have to read it anyway, read it now.
If you need to make the decision, why not make it now?
You first want to prepare ... in order to ... Do it now!

The advantage of trashing over burying is that, when the time comes to go through the archives, you are not confronted with missed opportunities anymore. Instead, your missed opportunities are, from now on, conscious decisions to not participate.

Labels: excellence, gtd, lifehacks, lifestyle, motivation, opportunities, personal+branding, personal+development, productivity, triage, wow

Follow Your Excellence

by Alexander Becker

Do only what you are good at. Even more, of the things you are good at, select those which you are best at. Spend as much time as possible working and applying your set of core skills.

Persuade the people you work with of the enormous increase in efficiency if everyone was doing what they excel at. We are talking orders of magnitude here, even without exaggeration. The advantages almost present themselves: Incidentally, you work fast and most accurate when challenged at your level of expertise. In fact, the work you dismiss as too easy or as not challenging enough is not lesser work -- for you it is even harder than the most difficult jobs within your area of comfort.

Delegate as much as possible of everything which does not fall into your core competency. It is not that you are too beautiful for any job, instead you are too busy accomplishing what only you can do, and what only you can do best.

Install and ruthlessly defend flexible hierarchies of competence, wherever you are, for he who knows best or most is the boss -- this particular time, in his particular field. The result is dynamic leadership with true, original leaders, the capacities of their respective fields.

Do what you are really good at. Delegate everything else. Outsource even the most basic tasks, actions, and processes as long as it helps you and frees time and resources to explore your excellence.

Identify and analyze your stumbling blocks, the tasks where you always tend to procrastinate. This is not about overcoming procrastination, it is about eliminating the cause of procrastination once and for all. Tasks that make you procrastinate are the primary candidates for delegation and outsourcing. Tasks that feel even remotely annoying are likely to be delegated. Focus on your core skills and automatically get rid of procrastination.

How many hours do you spend each day applying your most valuable talent? Two hours? Three? One? You work in the business of your choice, you create a dream job for yourself. Increase the number of excellence hours only slightly and compare your results after a while.

When you feel like you don't even need sleep anymore, you are following your talent most appropriately.

Labels: business, competency, delegation, excellence, gtd, leadership, lifestyle, marketing, motivation, outsourcing, personal+branding, procrastination, productivity, sleep, talent

How Your Mind Benefits from Cleaning Up Your Physical Workspace

by Alexander Becker

After you resolve to clean up that mess, you are forced to make yes-or-no decisions and, as a result, you will enjoy an unexpected, long forgotten peace of mind, in return for your physical efforts.

Get rid of the clutter, take a look at your files in the drawers, at your clothes in their closets, at the too many items on your homepages, ... finally look at the stuff that piles up in your brains, occupying valuable working memory.

No, you won't use any of it at some later time. You will, and neither will no other human being, never ever look again at the so called reference material, the results of your organization efforts to get things done.

Organizing your physical world is an important step on the path leading to clarity, purpose, and success. The sorting through files and paperwork will reload the essence of all these things into your mind. Use this special occasion to handle everything only one single time and immediately make your decisions to either keep or drop. When in doubt, choose the latter.

The intention of building an archive containing reference material, material dedicated for later, unspecified, potential use, will leave you with constructive insights -- you will find things you long thought lost, only to notice that you manage to live without them, leading to the eventual, logical consequence to finally throw them away.

A positive side-effect is, that once you free your physical space from the clutter, you also free your mind. You do not even have to touch your cluttered thoughts to benefit from the cleaning, the newly won space in the physical world will simultaneously widen and expand your mental world. You will even notice the relief from stress, unrecognized stress resulting from long built-up heaps of stuff that is increasingly clogging up your productive system.

Resolve today to get rid of something, everyday.

An extension of this method is to continually and consciously make room for something new. In the same manner you stop old habits or activities in order to find time to start new habits and activities, make physical space for things you wish to acquire. Think of every acquisition as a replacement of something old with something new. Everything you buy, every item or abstract concept or idea you adopt, is in fact a renovation of all that you have -- once you stick to the giving away of something in exchange for anything which you receive. Live life, light.

Peter Drucker would say: Before acquiring something new, give away something old.

Labels: archiving, cleaning, clutter, discipline, gtd, inspiration, lifehacks, mind+sweep, motivation, passion, personal+development, potential, productivity, responsibility, workspace, wow

A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

by Alexander Becker

You plan your objectives in written form. You live Getting Things Done and the accompanying struggles.

That is the easy stuff; mindsweeps, making lists of things, organizing and structuring the always up-to-date lists into contexts and working according to the circumstances, the environment, and the available energy. You will most likely end up with lists that grow longer and longer without even the slightest chance to ever satisfactorily complete any one sub-list.

Enter the advanced stuff.

Since you're working with and alongside intentions anyway, let's try to build a somewhat idealistic, but nevertheless fully functioning, productivity model based on only the best intentions.

Start with the ubiquitous mindsweep.
Recognize and accept the Must Do tasks.
Collect your intentions for the desired outcomes of the Must Do and the Want-To-Do Really Badly stuff.
Inject as much positive thinking as possible into your mental process. Sanitize every thought of potential auto-sabotage.
Feel the synchronicities and the manifestations show up in waves depending on your faith in the actual reception of the intended goal or subject of desire.

It is as simple as reaping what you sow, only more elegant.

You act in accordance with your intentions, you set out your intentions and everything flows naturally, almost effortlessly, you take occasional glances at your plans and lists and you select instinctively, without much conscious thinking, the most appropriate and highest value-yielding task to subsequently accomplish in your sequence of events.

Now that is productivity, where the world seems to run in slow-motion while you are, in high-speed mode and fully alert, observing the fulfillment of your laid out plans and the arrival of your results.

The next -- and the last -- project you are going to tackle the old-school way will be the raising of your consciousness to the level where the magic becomes possible in the first place.

Labels: discipline, goals, gtd, how+to, humor, intention+manifestation, law+of+attraction, lifehacks, mind, motivation, personal+development, practice, productivity, subjective+reality, tips, willpower, wow

11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

by Alexander Becker

Once you have found your purpose in life, you will have more than enough to do in never enough time. Here are some ways to make your experience even more joyous:

List the top three objectives of your current endeavour. To do this, weigh the most important goals and assign them relative importances. You obviously have to decide which ones are not in the top three. Can you see where this is going? No two things are equally important.
Be sure and confident about what you are doing and why and pursue exactly one project, single-mindedly to the end, until completion. This means you have to make decisions. Do not stand in your own way. Concentrate all your efforts and energy on one target at a time.
Be able to present a written list, at any time, with your top priorities. Practice and pretend to be pitching your services and your goals every day.
Define your #1 goal, its #1 project and its respective #1 task and start working on it, once you understand that this is the only thing there is, right now.
Do not worry about the future. Stop worrying altogether. Apply your rage to the present moment. Transform rage into vigor. Do not fight the future and do not fight in the future. Be clear about the present, about this very moment.
Your rewards are nothing to worry about either, they will come to you when their time has arrived -- worrying will only delay them and prevent you from receiving what you deserve.
Realize that you do not have to suffer to achieve what you want. You decide whether suffering is part of your experience or not.
Drop any goal that isn't worth pursuing anymore; do not let your countless started, semi-finished, and never followed-up upon projects divert your focus. They are worth nothing and only add to your sense of failure. Get rid of the clutter.
Set up a hierachy of time and desire. You cannot have everything you dream of immediately. Even if you skip sleep and eating, you are not going to accelerate the pace with which your dreams are made real.
Set yourself up for success by accepting what you have, as the ground in which to plant the seeds. Do not resist the situation you're in for you set up your future failure as long as you fail to accept the present.
Do not break down and destroy your previous achievements in order to follow a new idea. Recognize the foundations that are laid out for you and your creation. Build on top of what you have -- whatever that may be.

There is another way that runs parallel: see and set your goals as plans to improve your current experience of the present, whatever their outcome may be, regardless of the time it takes to successfully complete them, if they are ever going to be completed, that is.

Labels: clarity, discipline, education, goals, gtd, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, lists, mind, motivation, personal+development, practice, productivity, tips, willpower, wow

WOW: Multiply Excellence and Chutzpah

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Develop in Public, Refine Later

Linking Park: 2007-W07, The More Suggestions Edition

Single-Handling vs. Missed Opportunities

Follow Your Excellence

How Your Mind Benefits from Cleaning Up Your Physical Workspace

A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

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