• WOWOW: Embrace Novelty and Resubscribe

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Please resubscribe; no meat in the 21th century? Maths, again and again, more maths, novelty, creativity, and no reason to hide.

    • What the 21st Century Will Taste Like --

      So it really chilled me when he said, "America better prepare for some uncomfortable changes. Things might get really ugly."

    • 9 Mental Math Tricks --

      Math can be terrifying for many people. This list will hopefully improve your general knowledge of mathematical tricks and your speed when you need to do math in your head.

    • Project 10 to the 100 --

      May Those Who Help The Most Win

    • Novelty Makes Brains Creative --

      Discoveries by neuroscientists studying the brain say that novel experiences are key in increasing brain power and creativity. When the brain experiences, or imagines a familiar situation, it already has a shortcut to understanding -- it's got that categorized in a neat little mental box. Novelty, new experiences and stretches of the imagination keep the mind limber, and more creative.

    • Looking for a reason to hide --

      Inc. magazine reports that a huge percentage of companies in this year's Inc. 500 were founded within months of 9/11. Talk about uncertain times.

      But uncertain times, frozen liquidity, political change and poor astrological forecasts (not to mention chicken entrails) all lead to less competition, more available talent and a do-or-die attitude that causes real change to happen.

      If I wasn't already running my own business, today is the day I'd start one.

    OK. LETS DO THIS, THEN............

    Now, please resubscribe for a continuous stream of links to interesting and diverse material, under the working title --

    Are you a scientist, an artist, an athlete, or a businessman? All of these? Me too.

    Thanks for reading so far.

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  • WOWOW: There!

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Philippe Petit, Lego, Fructose, Third-World-Workouts, Chernobyl, and the 10 Skills you don't want to miss teaching your kids.

    • Inspiration: Philippe Petit, Man on Wire --

      In 1968 I was 18 years old and I saw an article about those towers. There was a photo of a model, and the article said that they would be built one day, and they would be the finest in the world. And here I was, a completely new self-taught wire walker, and I thought, "What a fabulous thing to transform the top of those towers to a theater for one morning." And that's how the idea came.

    • Toys: LEGO Mini Sport City 2008 --

      ... currently one of the most amazing LEGO productions ever in China. The theme of this city is the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Swimming Cube, Nest Sports Ground and Sport Village were built as a landmark of this LEGO city. 300,000 bricks and 4,500 mini-figures are used to construct a 3m x 8m artistic show.

    • HFCS: How High Fructose Corn Syrup Makes you Gain Weight --

      "The message from this study is powerful because body fat synthesis was measured immediately after the sweet drinks were consumed," Dr. Parks said. "The carbohydrates came into the body as sugars, the liver took the molecules apart like tinker toys, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within four hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, the lunch fat was more likely to be stored than burned."

    • Testosterone: The Evils of Fructose --

      Unlike glucose, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, whereas glucose can be passed to other body tissues, like your muscles.

    • By any means necessary: Third World Workouts --

      In my world, the equipment is always there. You just have to teach yourself to recognize it. If you see something you can lift, push, pull, or throw, you can build a workout around it.

    • Foundations: 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything --

      Success, however it's defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.

      Public Speaking, Writing, Self-Management, Networking, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Math, Research, Relaxation, Basic Accounting.

    • Fungi: Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming --

      The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor.

    Let go.

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  • WOWOW: Cognition Nutrition

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Food for thought, very elaborate, circular visualizations, cable ties and ghost towns, Knol and as always, ... things to do before you die.

    • Cognition Nutrition --

      Children have a lot to contend with these days, not least a tendency for their pushy parents to force-feed them omega-3 oils at every opportunity. These are supposed to make children brainier, so they are being added to everything from bread, milk and pasta to baby formula and vitamin tablets. But omega-3 is just the tip of the nutritional iceberg; many nutrients have proven cognitive effects, and do so throughout a person's life, not merely when he is a child.

    • Circos: Visualizing the genome, among other things --

      Circos uses a circular composition of ideograms to mitigate the fact that some data, like combinations of intra- and inter-chromosomal relationships (alignments, duplications, assembly paired-ends, etc) are very difficult to organize when the underlying ideograms (or contigs) are arranged as lines. In many cases, it is impossible to keep the relationship lines from crossing other structures and this deteriorates the effectiveness of the graphic.

    • Art Students Build Massive Environment Using Only Cable Ties --

      Students at the Academy of Arts in Munich spent over 16,000 hours weaving together an impressive environmental installation made entirely out of cable ties. The space was made using 1.3 million ties and has the look of a highly advanced plastic spider web.

    • Knol is open to everyone --

      Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

    • 10 Most Amazing Ghost Towns --

      The Kowloon Walled City was located just outside Hong Kong, China during British rule. A former watchpost to protect the area against pirates, it was occupied by Japan during World War II and subsequently taken over by squatters after Japan's surrender. Neither Britain nor China wanted responsibility for it, so it became its own lawless city.

      Its population flourished for decades, with residents building labyrinthine corridors above the street level, which was clogged with trash. The buildings grew so tall that sunlight couldn't reach the bottom levels and the entire city had to be illuminated with fluorescent lights.

    • Things to Do Before You Die ... Yes, I know, but you too know what and why --

      At least once in his life, a man should...

      There is no checklist. Nothing on this list is that automatic. Every element here is a matter of the choices you make, the chances you take, the courage you are willing to show. You can trick yourself into thinking bungee jumping somehow satisfies those criteria, but willfully falling off a crane in a mall parking lot is more or less a rite of passage by now, isn't it? Maybe you call that a big moment. The trick is choosing to experience them all that way.

    Once you participate in life, it really works. I'll see ya.

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  • WOWOW: Dangerously Cosmopolitan

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Writing better, whining and learning, and reinventing those corporations.

    • Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better --

      1. Find a subject you care about
      2. Do not ramble, though
      3. Keep it simple
      4. Have guts to cut
      5. Sound like yourself
      6. Say what you mean
      7. Pity the readers

    • Should small businesses whine? --

      Thank you for your inquiry. To answer your question we are NOT an big company like Amazon we are actually a small company, That is why it does take us a little longer than others.

    • Anti-Hero of the Day: The Constantly Whining Business Man --

      In the end, the always whining business man is probably ignorant and incompetent. It's a matter of honor to stop complaining, otherwise quitting is an option to consider -- for vendors, employees, and ultimately, for the poor man himself.

    • Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning --

      Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage." We and other forward-looking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for?

      • ... analytical reasoning.
      • ... communication skills.
      • ... a willingness to experiment.
      • ... team players.
      • ... passion and leadership.

    • Learning? Try Polyhedral Maps --

      Intuitively, distortion in polyhedral maps is greater near vertices and edges, where the polyhedron is farther from the inscribed sphere; also, increasing the number of faces is likely to reduce distortion (after all, a sphere is equivalent to a polyhedron with infinitely many faces).

    • Corporate re-invention --

      How do large tech companies like Dell have to re-invent themselves in order to make the grade? To keep their ever-growing army of customers and shareholders relatively content?

    Cosmopolitan cosmopolites. Dangerous freedom. Play it where it lies is just that.

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  • WOWOW: Believing in the Improbable

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Bugs and books, naming names, and the improbable improbable from Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno.

    • Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol --

      Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'.

    • Books that changed my life --

      I don't mean merely great books, or memorable ones, or favorite ones. I mean books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.

    • Unthinkable futures --

      Improbability is still a strong bias to overcome. Much that is happening today would have been dismissed as unbelievably bad science fiction only 15 years ago. The US with secret prisons torturing Muslims? Street sweepers in India with their own cell phones? Obesity a contagious disease? A trusted encyclopedia written by anyone? Yeah, right, give me a break.

      [...]

      This list of unthinkable futures -- probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking -- was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.

      Believing in the improbable is quickly becoming a survival skill.

      • A new profession -- cosmetic psychiatry -- is born. People visit "plastic psychiatrists" to get interesting neuroses and obsessions added into their makeup.
      • A new kind of holiday becomes popular: you are dropped by helicopter in an unknown place, with two weeks' supply of food and water. You are assured that you will not see anyone else in this time. There is a panic button just in case.
      • Seed companies start selling packets of unpredictable mutants produced by random genetic engineering programmes: "JUST PLANT 'EM AND SEE WHAT COMES UP!" Suburbia is covered with exotic new blooms and giant cucumbers.
      • The first Bio-Olympics, where athletes can have anything added to or subtracted from their bodies, take place in 2004.
      • A microbe engineered to eat oil slicks evolves a taste for rubber. [Ed.--See above.]
      • Traveling as a process enjoys a revival. People abandon the idea of "getting from A to B" and begin to develop (or re-discover) a culture of traveling: semi-nomadism. Lots of people acquire super new faxed-and-modemed versions of the mobile home. It becomes distinctly "lower-class" to live in a fixed location.

    • A two-part rule for naming your Startup --

      Our minds are built to make connections, mostly at a subconscious level. When a metaphor is detected, it triggers a process in our brains that associates the metaphor with the next object or reference. This naming system forces the mind to take the cognitive step of associating the metaphor to the product it represents, thus forming a positive association to the brand. And once your brain has woven the connection, it sticks, so there’s a great chance your company name won’t be forgotten.

    Where nothing is improbable, nothing is impossible either.

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  • WOWOW: Education × Curiosity

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Education × curiosity. Continuous education × insatiable curiosity. Learning is important, it is hard and you need it to maintain excellence. In this spirit, travel, language, and quantum physics, again.

    • 7 Websites You MUST Check Before You Go On A Vacation --

      Since there are different needs for everyone planning to go on a vacation, there are huge number of websites on the internet offering different solutions to those needs.

    • I wanna go there --

      ... where independent travellers can share up-to-date information and recommendations with other independent travellers – organised in a practical way to help us planning our trips and discovering new destinations.

    • 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner --

      Many people understand material much better when it is presented in one format, for example a lab experiment, than when it is presented in another, like an audio presentation. Determining how you best learn and using materials that cater to this style can be a great way to make school and the entire process of acquiring new information easier and much more intuitive.

    • Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds --

      Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need.

    • Visuwords --

      Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

    • Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious --

      Quantum physics shows that reality doesn't exist apart from our observation of it, or Science has disproved the idea of an objective reality, or even just Quantum physics is one of the great mysteries of modern science; no one understands how it works.

      There was a time, roughly the first half-century after quantum physics was invented, when this was more or less true. Certainly, when quantum physics was just being discovered, scientists were very confused indeed! But time passed, and science moved on. If you're confused about a phenomenon, that's a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself -- there are mysterious questions, but not mysterious answers. Science eventually figured out what was going on, and why things looked so strange at first.

    There. More education to come. Much more. Be well, know where you are, know where you want to go, and enjoy everything in between. Everything.

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  • Get Uncomfortable, Finally

    edited by Alexander Becker

    The situation: Complacency. Complacency on even the lowest level: A feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.

    Homeostasis. The human body and the human mind resist change as hard as they can.

    Unhappy Enough

    You may be unhappy. You might be miserable. But are you unhappy enough, miserable enough to get you moving, finally?

    As long as it isn't that bad, there is no real reason for a change. After all, the change is endangering the status quo.

    The resolution: Get uncomfortable with the status quo. Escalate the status quo to the point where it gets really uncomfortable and you are ultimately required to get up and finally move.

    Your Mind is Playing Tricks on You

    Please note that you are already unhappy with your situation. Do you really think that an eventual change will make things worse? Could it be remotely possible that your mind is playing tricks on you, tricks to prevent change? Any change? Even the change to something better?

    Something better. That's what is almost guaranteed. What do you think is going to happen after a long stretch of discomfort? The mere change, change itself, will make you feel better, once you overcome the inertia that your mind builds up to save itself.

    Make it Worse

    How? Do something stupid. Something stupid that will turn out to be ultimately intelligent. Break that situation by doing something against your values that will literally make you want to run away. Of course, stay somewhat sensible but -- you have to break that situation by going just far enough for yourself. You don't want to destruct other people's life and lives when all you need to do is to break your own mindset. The usual disclaimer applies here.

    Drive that car into the ground, quit that job, and leave that relationship. Do you really think that anything will be worse that it is now? Make it worse now and expect nothing but the best in return.

    Again, the plan is not to blow up the situation in a negative way. I do not suggest to provoke getting fired for bad performance; instead, get fired for excellent work; get too big for your current situation.

    The decision is made. Right? That's the part where thinking can pause and step back for doing. Think up the plan to quit, to change the situation and then do without further thinking. Let go. Avoid rationalizations like the plague.

    Avoid Rationalizations

    I can't stress this enough: Fight rationalizations. Dismiss them once the decision is made. The beauty is that you don't know yet what is to come. The trick is to move on anyway. How? It doesn't matter. One thing is for sure, though: It will be better, especially since you don't know what it is. Don't you love surprises? I know that you don't, by the way, but you will love this one.

    Enjoy and embrace your discomfort and move now, finally.

    Set a Deadline

    Set up a deadline, a really outrageously tight, deadline. One that is so tight, it isn't possible to linearly achieve. Set a goal of quitting in 4 weeks, whatever it is. That said, what about tomorrow? Today?

    The Process

    To sum it up, the steps are roughly as follows --

    1. You are comfortable and complacent.
    2. You set a ridicoulously tight deadline to end complacency.
    3. You get really uncomfortable with the little you have.
    4. You realize that it will be better.
    5. You fight rationalizations.
    6. Your mind is playing dirty tricks on you.
    7. You have your mind in check and your actions are pursuing the deadline.
    8. Quantum leaps happen.

    Are you uncomfortable enough?

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  • WOWOW: Jazz and Entrepreneurship

    edited by Alexander Becker

    The right mix between laid-back and fighter-pilot focused; Jazz and the art of continually starting up.

    • 100 essential Jazz albums --

      These hundred titles are meant to provide a broad sampling of jazz classics and wonders across the music's century-long history. Early New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, third stream, and fusion are all represented, though not equally.

    • 100 ways to be a better entrepreneur --

      Need help reenergizing your business? Out of creative ideas for reaching your business goals? We've compiled a list of the top 100 tips to improve your business. Consider it your checklist for maintaining a successful business.

    • How to start a startup --

      You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

    • Brand Tags --

      The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.

    • Are You in Personal Branding Prison? --

      Too much personal branding can be damaging to a professional. If you brand yourself too strongly, you can’t take a break, because there’s no one else to fill your shoes. Without you, your business has no value.

    That said, mix right and mix wise, and have a successful week.

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  • WOWOW: Survive a Plane Crash while Refining Your Learning Skills

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Now that pseudo-productivity is declared dead, let's go back to the drawing board. Start with art, disaster prevention and recoevery, some interesting research projects, and the latest news on how your memory works.

    • The impossible art of Li Wei --

      Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.

    • How to survive an airplane crash --

      According to the statistics, two-thirds of the people involved in air crashes survive. Approximately one-third of the third who do die could have survived if they had known what to do and almost all of these died from smoke or fire. If it seems certain the plane is going to crash, here's what to do while the plane is going down.

    • 25 leading-edge IT research projects --

      While universities don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networking. Here's a roundup, in no particular order, of some of the most amazing and colorful projects in the works.

    • The world in 2058 --

      The consensus view is that we'll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today -- including climate change and terror threats. And we'll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today's 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058.

    • Want to remember everything you'll ever learn? Surrender to this algorithm --

      ... there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

    Make this week yours. Even art is not impossible.

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  • WOWOW: Information Superpower Vampires

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Information-deficits, energy vampires and the one true mental superpower.

    Swimming Against the Stream

    Go on a high-information diet --

    Everyone seems to think that if they could just reduce the flow of information into their lives, everything would be all better. They could finally relax and take a minute to catch up.

    My advice is the opposite: you don’t need less information, you need more information. What you need less of is input — all the crap that flows at you masquerading as information.

    Listen: in order to be information, an input must make you better informed.

    By definition, you can’t have too much information; when an input, no matter how good, ceases to inform you, it is no longer information.

    Use news-fasting as an only temporary solution to increase productivity, for example --

    If you want results and you want them fast enough, you have to go extreme ways. Don't expect a balanced approach, we're going all out here. This is no moderate diet, no zone, this is the no-carb, guaranteed fat-loss, whatever-it-takes solution.

    It comes down to collecting news vs. gathering useful intelligence. You do not want to deprive youself of real information; see above.

    Even more important is the approach of doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing. Especially when it comes to "hacking life": Mass-hacking life anyone?

    Maintaining Precious Energy

    Protect yourself against energy vampires --

    • They are often bitter, angry and resentful... and they want you to share their pain.
    • They don't want solutions, they want pity.
    • They don't want constructive feedback, they want attention.
    • They don't want to take responsibility, they want to blame and vent.
    • They seem to revel in their own misery.

    [...]

    This sounds harsh, but some Vampires need to be avoided.

    Choose your friends and acquaintances wisely. Make sure you spend (lots of) time with people who will drag you up, not down. You need to keep your tank full.

    One Mental Superpower: Belief

    Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing esoteric.

    Mental superpowers: How to unleash the full potential of your mind --

    So, what is it that will unleash the superpowers of your mind? It is belief. You have to believe without doubt in the deepest recesses of your heart and mind that you can and will fulfill your desires. You have to believe so deeply that it creates a level of intensity in your thinking so that your desire becomes a burning obsession. You have to be able to visualize it and emotionalize it vividly. It has to consume you. You have to believe at the level where you know that you can overcome any obstacles that may arise. That you will pay any price. You will give and do whatever it takes to achieve your goal. When you believe like this, you invoke the superpowers of your mind and you will alter reality.

    That's it. Keep and defend your energy as good as you can, make use of the one true superpower, finally, avoid collecting news or raw information but instead actually employ real intelligence. And have a nice weekend.

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  • Intensity and Excess, Forever?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Intensity vs. forever, that is.

    I don't want to be with you forever -- do you know why? Well, first, forever is quite a long time, where some of us, at least temporarily, might get bored or boring, second, almost nothing is forever; and this comes from the guy who once invented forever...

    What I do want is being with you right now, in person, in practice, as intense as it gets, forever is just theory and you nor I can't hold that kind of intensity for this long.

    That is quality over quantity. Let's try to take quality over quantity as often as possible. The result is even more quality.

    You can't endure and enjoy excess forever either.

    Right now

    The rest of time -- beyond now -- isn't supposed to be out of the mind at all. We are still responsible for our future and since we strive to have many more moments of intensity and excess to come, we'd do best to behave as sustaining and responsible as we possibly can.

    Self-destruction is not the most elegant way to appreciate excess, intensity, and that moment.

    Sure, it is not going to be the last moment but if it was, it would be great nonetheless. And since it is not the last moment, you just have to repeat it. Again.

    And again.

    What about that kind of forever?

    A series of nows instead of a extended then.

    A repetition of quality moments, as long as it lasts.

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  • WOWOW: The Artists Edition [Links of the Week]

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Something for my beloved artists -- papercuts, teaching effectively, and procrastinating successfully. Also for the attention-span impaired; then again, we're not after sheer count of items.

    Insanity

    Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are, accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves. --Henry David Thoreau

    Art

    The papercuts of Peter Callesen -- Strange and beautiful.

    Education

    The movie director’s guide to effective teaching --

    Research has shown that learning most frequently happens at the start and at the end of a message. Your message could be a presentation, advertisement or a lecture, it doesn't matter -- people remember the beginning and ending more than the middle. It's called the primacy-recency principle and was first studied in the 1920's. Movie directors understand this to well -- that's why in most movies something big usually happens within the first couple minutes and the best song is left until the end. They want you to remember the start of the movie and feel good at the end. We can apply this concept and provide a better learning experience for your audience.

    Procrastination

    Seven ways to procrastinate for better results --

    1. Where problems go away with time.
    2. Where problems are best ignored.
    3. Where you have good back-up and support systems in place.
    4. Where something more important comes up.
    5. Where you are getting into a deal.
    6. Where you are tired, hungry or angry.
    7. Where people are on your back because you are known to be a doer.

    As always, creating a significant difference between work and play heightens the sensations of both. Feel, appreciate, and enjoy your weekend and your week.

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  • What is your Default Mode?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    What is your default mode, how do you act when it's over, when you're done? Finally idle again? How does it feel?

    You're idle, in between projects or right after a show. You've just completed the big project. That is exactly where the potential to do something really stupid is the greatest.

    The best way to prevent a potentially negative aftermath to any accomplishment is to set up some idle-time protocol.

    Raw idleness tends to be -- especially between bouts of higher achievement -- relatively negative. You can't be high all the time. Also, to really feel the high, you need, by definition and for comparison, the corresponding low. What follows is, that the higher the high, the lower the low.

    Try to establish a baseline or maintenance program that will prepare you for the next project, restore your physical and mental energy and backup your intellectual resources. Start immediately upon exhaustion to appreciate and use the void, as long as it lasts.

    This void, this emptiness does indeed exist and it infects potentially anyone. Creating some routines prevents the "hole" that opens up after finishing any kind of creative work from becoming all too deep.

    My protocol, for example, consists of a strict diet, exercises and -- to contain and to enforce -- discipline. Whenever I become idle, which isn't all too often but especially at the crossroads between projects, before and after, I quite literally fall back into a set of default habits of eating cleanly, exercising hard and absolutely regular, and so on...

    Debriefing; analyzing the finished project is often hard since it's all over and done and you can't change the outcome anyway, but it is an important conclusion of anything you worked so hard for. Just recount what you will be proud of and note what and how to improve when trying next time.

    Research, study, and refining skills are part of my strategy. The more unrelated the better, seemingly unrelated that is, inspiration comes best when the field of research seems way too remote.

    Enjoy the low and appreciate it, for the greater the difference, the more pronounced the reward will be. Live both the low and the high as deeply as you can. Just make sure and try to establish a default mode somewhere in the middle between high and low, defaulting to either high or low makes the respective opposite state unbearable.

    See also: Getting Past Done: What to Do After You’ve Finished a Big Project --

    Revise your resume or CV. How does your new perspective affect the way you describe what was important about your previous experiences?

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  • The Best In The World: What's the Point?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Once in a while the question comes up: Why?

    We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. --Chuck Palahniuk

    I hope this helps.

    Even more interesting is the point itself: Everybody is best-in-the-world at something. The trick is to find out what it is and to find it out in time. This brings up the next question: Why does it take so long for most people to find out what they are here for?

    Excellence × Chutzpah = Irresistible + Invincible

    Multiply excellence and chutzpah to achieve peak performance, become irresistible and invincible and look even better in business, fitness, on stage, and beyond.

    That's what it says, at least.

    • Why does anyone would not want to look better, in any sense of the word?
    • If it is possible to improve, would you? Would you want to?
    • The best in the world? Do you want to be the best at anything?

    It is not merely about "accomplishing something", not about "getting things done" and out of the way. The best way to get things out of the way is by getting them out of the way. What it is about is getting things done the best way possible, the most elegant, beautiful, effective, whatever, way there is...

    Accomplishing nothing but the best, whatever it takes. Yes, that's elite. That's real performance. Why not? Courage. Advocating insanity? Probably. Endurance? Doing things anyway. More and more. Faster.

    Maybe you need hardcore, dirty, hacks to get the best out of what you have.

    Attack common sense, because, by definition, common sense is average. Make decisions as fast as possible.

    Do everything as good as you can, if you know someone to do it better, get him to do it. Doing everything the best you can is not the same as doing everything the best way possible. That is what it is about. Exceed expectations.

    Doing the best you can might imply finding someone else to do and complete the job.

    Doing the best you can is always doing more than you are expected to do. It's a little more than you planned to do.

    Immortality is a collateral of best-in-the-world. You are not going to care, though.

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  • WOWOW: The Observer Edition [Links of the Week]

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Food or fuel? The universe and your own university, more resolutions and the observer question.

    • Pick up these 20 foods to snack on for enhanced productivity --

      Most people eat to lose weight, get healthy and build muscle. There are some people, however, who snack correctly in order to enhance their productivity.

      ... to the tune of the previous "food is fuel" recommendation --

    • Accurately monitoring the progress of your resolutions helps to keep them and you on track: 5% down, 95% to go --

      Today is January 22nd. That means 21 days (3 weeks) have already passed in 2008. That's a little over 5% of the year gone already. So let's do a quick "goal review" or a resolution recall. Are you 5% towards your goals?

      The point is - you need to constantly assess where you are in relation to your desired outcomes.

      • Are you on track?
      • Are you headed in the right direction?
      • Have you even moved off the starting line?

      There is still time to reload your resolutions and start all over.

    • Knowledge is still king: How to set up your personal university --

      No, you don't need to rent a campus, hire professors and start charging tuition. Setting up a personal university means taking your self-education as seriously as any schooling you manage pay for. While regular university is expensive and stops when you get a degree, your personal university continues indefinitely and can be run for free.

      Please consider the necessity to authenticate the authority of any expert, yourself included.

    • A great way to put things in perspective, especially You, is a look at the universe within 1 billion light years and the neighbouring superclusters --

      Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are not uniformly distributed in the Universe, instead they collect into vast clusters and sheets and walls of galaxies interspersed with large voids in which very few galaxies seem to exist. The map above shows many of these superclusters including the Virgo supercluster -- the fairly minor supercluster of which our galaxy is just a minor member. The entire map is approximately 7 percent of the diameter of the entire visible Universe. Individual galaxies are far too small to appear on this map, each point represents a group of galaxies.

      Make sure to zoom in...

    • Finally, the question of the week: The key to innovation: Becoming an observer --

      We all need to innovate to stand out from the crowd. But what is the key to innovation? The answer, or at least an important answer, is becoming an observer. By observing how we and other people do things, we will spot opportunities for improvements. The more we observe, the more opportunities we will find. We can then work to provide solutions for some of the problems. By becoming a good observer, we will recognize the problems before many people do and have first-mover advantage.

      ... this is, obviously, correct. It is valuable information for anybody at least remotely concerned with observing.

      What people are yet to realize is that most things you cannot learn, either you are an observer or you are not. Yes, you can learn anything and everything, I know, but when it comes to competition day, the born observer, the naturally talented observer will have the divine advantage.

      Build your skills and to get started, study as broad as possible but make sure to not neglect finding out what you are best at.

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  • Opportunities in Strict vs. Loose Scheduling

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Laying out daily schedules in 15-minute increments enables you to run on autopilot; even so much that taking advantage of anything unscheduled is all but impossible.

    For those who are overwhelmed by a schedule, and would like to take a more open approach, I suggest minimalist time management.

    Me too.

    Whether you schedule strict times and tight frames determines your ability to encounter and embrace opportunities emerging along the way.

    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.

    [...]

    Instead, your missed opportunities are, from now on, conscious decisions to not participate.

    Obviously, an understanding of what's exactly important to you is somewhat of a requirement in either strict or loose scheduling of your time.

    Sometimes, more often than not, momentum builds up over short periods of time, momentum that, when directed properly, would lead to huge changes, dreams fulfilled, and goals met rather unexpectedly.

    Ignoring momentum, any momentum, makes you stumble and trip since the impact is there, whether you intend to make use of it or not.

    What do you do with unplanned input, circumstances, surprises, developments? You have to stay on track, right?

    The trick is -- of course -- to not only dealing with urgent matter but, spontaneous, ad-hoc, taking care of important ideas which show up now and then, according to your excellence and more or less disguised.

    Schedule the big and the really important stuff but make sure to leave room to juggle whatever comes to your mind in between the fixed appointments. Don't even make explicit appointments with yourself, just make enough loose time to enjoy yourself, cherishing the moments as they come.

    For example, do not schedule off-days but instead schedule the on-days and take, maybe, one day off for every three days on. It doesn't have to be 3-1 though, you can just as well decide to go 6-2, or 3-2-3, that's loose scheduling, getting your important stuff done plus having a great time.

    Think dynamic weekends. You cannot efficiently schedule the exact dates for when you need rest, be it from business or from training. You can however, determine the ratio of work to rest and decide to rest spontaneously, upon exhaustion, ideally, shortly before.

    Embrace your opportunities instead of your schedule. Avoid using your schedule as an excuse to yourself. Do not set fixed times and try to fill in the spots with actions. Determine what you want to do, then sort through it and find out when to do it. Keep your day open.

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  • Be Productive or The Law of Specificity

    edited by Alexander Becker

    In chemistry, specificity is --

    The selective reactivity that occurs between substances, such as between an antigen and its corresponding antibody.

    Processes and methods that are more specific have more impact than general tools and strategies. What works in business is not supposed to be applicable in leisure or education, even more specific, what works in my business like a charm isn't necessarily guaranteed to work in your business at all.

    An antigen and its corresponding antibody, that's the key here. Some concepts just don't match while others -- sometimes and with some people -- match squarely. You are only as productive as you are and you most likely improve within your own realm. That said, most tips will -- if anything -- only initiate an improvement that you are responsible for yourself.

    Over on lifehack.org, Dustin Wax dicusses the five productivity ideas he's not buying (yet?)

    The body of work on productivity, life-work balance, and personal achievement sits uncomfortably -- perhaps perilously -- close to the genre of “self-help”.

    I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. Here are the five examined points --

    1. Mind mapping.
    2. The 80/20 Rule.
    3. The power of Brand You.
    4. Making productivity a habit.
    5. Visualizing success.

    Mind mapping? It works for people who would work this way anyway. If you never draw ideas then there's a good chance that mind mapping isn't for you. It certainly isn't for me either.

    The power of Brand You. It works if you're so inclined -- it won't work for everybody but for those in need and with a corresponding personality, it works wonders.

    The 80/20 rule. Obviously it's ridiculous to examine projects and calculate percentages -- but the concept is certainly valuable and at least inspires people to think.

    A question is whether --

    ... it [is] possible to increase this small number of high-performing causes while at the same time decreasing the relatively high number of underperformers?

    Now, take a look at the opposite --

    In order to increase the quality of your work, you have to increase your output in quantity.

    It's a matter of reflection and analysis, ever so short of the proverbial paralysis. I don't think that any recipe or laid out how-to hack whatever part of your mind does indeed work as advertised or prescribed. Instead, it's the one spark contained in one article out of hundreds, the one way out of the dozens of X ways to do Y written in almost robot-like staccato all over the place with hardly enough resources to finish yesterday's 25 ways with today's 50 ways already waiting to get socially bookmarked and overwritten by tomorrow's -- hey it's sunday, let's present the 100 ways of non-productivity and hope that nobody notices that ... don't worry, nobody does ever notice the dupes, because of severe how-to overload.

    By the way, making productivity a habit is a great example of a concept devoid of any meaning at all. Isn't productivity being productive in the first place? The short form of this truly revolutionary concept is to be productive -- wow. I mean WOW.

    This is Zen. I love Zen.

    Who's the intended audience of the content-avalanche, anyway? (I use the term content in its most generic form and not for the lack of a better word here.)

    The desperate need for serious help is directly anti-proportional to the willingness to accept it and follow even basic recommendations. People become help- and advice resistant when they need it the most.

    The rant is over now. Thank you for your patience. Have a great weekend and when it's over, make sure to be productive again.

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  • Develop in Public, Refine Later

    edited by Alexander Becker

    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.

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  • Constrain Yourself, Your Time, and Your Tools

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Some concepts keep recurring, again and again, less is more, for example.

    Of Ririan Project's 33 New Ways To Overclock Your Brain, one is particularly powerful --

    Constrain yourself.

    You need structure in your life. And by constraining yourself -- say giving yourself deadlines, limiting your time on an idea in some manner, or limiting the tools you are working with -- you can often accomplish more in less time.

    Use deadlines and short time frames. What do you do with your time and sharply defined increments?

    Let's take a look at relativity -- what do you accomplish within an hour?

    Exercises, for example
    100 bodyweight squats: 3 minutes.
    10 intervals of 15 seconds all out sprinting and 45 seconds recovery jogging: 10 minutes.
    Four ridiculous minutes of dumbbell thrusting.
    Full body workout using free weights: 30 minutes.
    Writing
    One such article: 20 minutes.
    Food preparation
    A big omelette with vegetables and some chicken, all freshly chopped: 15 minutes.

    Now, what is it, what single activity takes a full hour? Is there anything taking one full hour? Sure, but cramming those activities within the available 30 minutes makes them even more intense, more dense, and more fun to begin with.

    On the other hand, try to limit tools and get your ideas out, with whatever's at hand.

    Pencil and a notebook instead of the computer anyone? The medium makes the message. Leave the notebook at home and write your million-dollar-idea down, on the next best surface. Do not let the medium or the brand of your beautiful sketchbook dictate your message.

    In other words, do you need a certain, specific, tool to get the job done, a piano made out of glass, for example? One of my favorite quotes from Hugh MacLeod's How to be Creative, is about pillar management, and the props used to hide behind --

    There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

    There you have it, etc.

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  • The Top 5 Reasons to Get Even Leaner

    edited by Alexander Becker

    The following article is an entry in the group writing project "Top 5" by Darren Rowse at problogger. The whole known web is currently getting streamlined, partitioned, sliced and diced, by Top-5s only to eventually be reunified in that one, giant, list of all of them. Enjoy.

    Let's take a look at why it is beneficial to get even leaner. Not lean instead of fat. Leaner instead of lean. Leaner than lean. This is about and for the already lean. Get more perfect. Here is why --

    5. Excellence. The #5 reason to get even leaner is the act of pushing through and going all the way, expecting more than others think is possible.

    You leaned your system down until now. Up to this point, you recognize that the leaner you get, the better it gets overall. Why would you settle for mediocrity. You're well on your way to excellence. Why settle for less? It's the goal and the relativity in leaner that propels you forward and makes you accomplish more and more in order to get there. You may not reach perfection but no one ever died from wanting too much either.

    4. Efficiency. The #4 reason to get even leaner is to get ever more revenue for the same or even less input.

    A leaner organism is a more effective organism. Come with minimal luggage. Don't bring more than you really need. Lean determines the ratio between work and rest, between production and administration, between muscle and fat. The more muscle that is at work against less and less superfluous weight -- as opposed to specific workload -- the more effective is the whole system. Think bureaucracy. Think governments.

    3. Hunger. The #3 reason to get even leaner is the hunt, its prerequisites and its conditions. There is no place for complacency on the hunt.

    The leaner you get, the more hunger you experience. Hunger keeps you awake and makes you alert. You need all your senses to even mildly satisfy that hunger. It's the hunger for more that guides you on the path to getting leaner in the first place.

    2. Discipline. The #2 reason to get even leaner is the reward -- in this particular case, the reward is the reward.

    The process of getting leaner is the opposite of instant gratification. It's the noble art of enduring the delay to eventually get it all. As long as the journey appears to be the reward, you're not there yet.

    1. Competition. The #1 reason to strive for maximum leanness is doing it because it's possible.

    Something that gets infinitely harder, the closer you come to reaching the absolute goal, is the ideal feat to fight for. If it was easy, anybody would do it and succeed. To succeed in getting even more lean -- leaner than any one of your competitors -- is the chance for you to set your name in stone. Competition is the ultimate comparison. There is only one first place.

    Please note that while thinspiration employs and works with human role-models, you may also consider lean management, or think lean business administration, for example, if this makes you feel more comfortable.

    Getting leaner is ultimately getting rid of more stuff. The ideal of getting leaner is about releasing the unnecessary. Less is more.

    Good riddance.

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  • The News Diet: Less News = More Productivity

    edited by Alexander Becker

    News Fasting. The deliberate avoidance of all forms of news media, particularly to relieve stress and relax the mind. Also: newsfasting.

    The concept is tried and trusted. Achieve moderation through deprivation. Go on a controlled fast and recognize the difference it makes.

    If you want results and you want them fast enough, you have to go extreme ways. Don't expect a balanced approach, we're going all out here. This is no moderate diet, no zone, this is the no-carb, guaranteed fat-loss, whatever-it-takes solution.

    Try and temporarily avoid the news and see the difference it makes. Do not ignore but screen out the news altogether -- without even attempting to keep track of what's going on through blogs -- for a specific time.

    Think fasting, in the dietary sense. Go on a controlled news fast for four weeks, no local news, no global issues, no foreign politics allowed. Schedule one cheat day each week and indulge in the weather channel. Make sure to stay with your local weather and avoid the world weather binge fest.

    Potential benefits include less TV time, less newspaper expenses and therefore less waste, a better mood and a greater sense of control since you cut out the things you can't influence anyway. The double effect on productivity is a relative increase in actionable information and an absolute increase in time to take action.

    Focus exclusively on your business (supposed you're not in the news business, in which case this diet isn't for you) and monitor the time you save and the decisions you make -- unbiased from and not influenced by daily news events.

    After completing this special diet, start to participate in news-inspired discussions -- freshly resetted and devoid of all too current facts, you'll find yourself perceiving -- ideally without judging -- the assumptions and influences of world news on your peers.

    No, there is nothing wrong with it, news are no evil, nor are they bad per se, just as carbohydrates aren't bad as part of your diet. The reason for going on a total fast is the occurring break and the experience of the difference. Just as with carbs, we slowly and moderately and consciously reintroduce news into our information diet. Start by gradually adding section by section of your newspaper or news aggregator of choice to your reading schedule. Deliberately include them in your diet, choose one, two, or three sections, and deliberately exclude the rest. What can you do without?

    Please note that the four-week duration is capable of breaking the habitual news consumption once and for all. Appreciate and enjoy your extra time.

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  • Defining Unknown Variables

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Let's take a look at the unknown and find a way to not only make it known, but even more, make it our very own.

    As long as you don't know the content of a variable, you can safely assume the most favorable one to match your expectations. Sure, you can always assume the worst in order to have the eventual outcome exceed you expectations but what for?

    What's the point in calculating with minimum positives and maximum negatives other than smaller rewards? Of course, you also minimize frustration, but at the same time, you keep the potential gains in check as well. You can easily maximize your results by fixing the unknowns on the positive side.

    Think communication. As long as you cannot be sure about an answer, you can as well assert that it is positive. Pretend the outcome to be good and it will be at least -- better.

    You don't know the answer? Even less, the answer is likely to be negative but isn't yet expressed? It is your chutzpah to assume and define the most positive reply possible. Thank your correspondent for their understanding and their help and move on. Build on top of that extorted outcome and everything down the road will be tangible and legitimate in its consequences.

    In short, once you inquire, do not waste time waiting for a reply, instead, act as if the answer was already received -- positively.

    ... expecting more than others think is possible...

    Expecting more, ultimately leads to more. This is one of the attributes of excellence. The self-fulfilling prophesy is about stating outcomes and determining variables, thus paving the paths for least resistance. A preconceived outcome is easier to realize than any alternative simply because the alternatives aren't made up yet. The more detailed your assumed variable, the closer to manifestation it is; it's just the easiest way possible, laid out, predigested, and formulated.

    When comparing the definite with the indefinite, the definite prevails because it just is. It is closer to being. Shape your dream and make it as definite as you can, for realization is just that.

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  • The State of Flow and Becoming Addicted to Action

    edited by Alexander Becker

    There is much said about the state of flow. If you want to achieve genuine and non-esoteric flow, try action. Cascading action. Action which builds on top of preceding -- action. Action as in progress. Action as in creation as well as in evolution.

    Become addicted if you aren't already. More and more. Create. Evolve. Whatever it is but let it move and it keep it ever new. Progress. All the time. There shall be no single day without any -- even the smallest -- step towards the current and the next goal. Action.

    What did you do today to achieve immortality?

    As with publicity, almost any action, good or bad, is preferable to inaction and static being. Positive progress is obviously favorable -- though when in doubt, have it move in either direction, as long as it moves to begin with. If and since you work -- you do, don't you -- under the premise that each and every time you perform at the very best of your ability, that at that particular time, you can only excel and ask for more and more tasks to crunch.

    By following and cultivating this attitude it will be easier to do only one thing, that nobody will ever forget -- every day. Which, by the way, is just the minimal answer to the immortality question. What if you accomplish that one thing early in the morning, even before breakfast? Would you try and get done one more thing towards immortality? What about an entire series of things?

    Once you start a series of cascading actions, the addiction part is taking care of itself. This is flow. This is the point where it is commonly said that success is inevitable. It just doesn't work any other way because each event triggers -- almost domino-like -- the next and the following ones with the result becoming inevitable because of cause and effect.

    Please note that while some effects certainly do not require specific causes, and some causes produce no effects at all, it is equally certain that inaction -- unless no action is the desired cause -- is not going to cause any significant effect. In other words: No cause doesn't cause anything.

    One last thing: The use of the term addiction hints at some negative implications. While the focused, conscious obsession definitely helps with achieving your goal, the addiction has its downsides: Laser-like concentration tends to utilize other system's vital energy and you may destroy on one side as much as you are trying to build on the other side. Get rid of your addiction as soon as the negative issues outweigh the positive ones -- and yes, there are positive aspects with any addiction. Otherwise it wouldn't be such a problem in the first place. Remember that you're after the rewards.

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  • Linking Park: 2007-W07, The More Suggestions Edition

    edited 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.

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  • Single-Handling vs. Missed Opportunities

    edited 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.

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  • Assess and Improve Your Trends

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Now that you measure your data regularly, it's time to analyze and see if we can derive some meaningful information from the amassed figures...

    Measure and compare your key data over time. Compare your financial data, weight, health, ... recognize and determine the trends and make sure that each trend goes in a -- meaningfully -- positive direction.

    Everything you do or are responsible for is measurable and comparable. To keep things going or to bring things back on the right track, make sure to monitor and -- if desirable -- change trends that are possible to monitor and observe with little effort. You need at least five measurements over time and, sometimes after eliminating the extremes, you can read a general direction of progress. Do not go crazy about spikes and weird, single instances, it is the general trend that we're after.

    Getting better, staying the same, and getting worse. There are only three general, observable directions for any given, measurable, progression. By the way, in order to avoid the trap of interpreting stagnating figures as positive inactivity, try to always get on a track of -- ever so slightly -- increasing quality.

    Look at your weight, three years ago, last year, six months ago, today: Is it staying the same? Congratulations. Your net worth. This should go up. Is it increasing over the course of the key dates measured? What about inflation? Do not forget to normalize your results.

    Determine a number of key indicators and monitor them religiously, set goals to improve each one of them, ad infinitum. There is no need to stop making progress once a certain amount of growth is achieved. Do not settle for a perfect figure. The only perfect figure is the next, better one. Continue and go on and on.

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  • Follow Your Excellence

    edited 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.

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  • The Secret of Building a Strong Reputation

    edited by Alexander Becker

    This post is part of The Foundations of Your Personal Brand Series.

    Your business depends on your integrity while your integrity depends on delivering what you promise.

    Consider two scenarios. You sense that the new client brings some great business. The first job needs to be completed as soon as possible and you want it to get the follow-up business.

    1. You estimate how long the job takes, you project a completion time that sounds good and acceptable to the client but you know is probably impossible to achieve.
    2. You do not estimate but instead you convince the client that his job will be treated as a priority and will be taken care of with all the resources you have. You immediately start working on the job and you get back to the client as soon as you know the time frame for definitive completion.

    Scenario #1 is based on your belief that the client is off to the competition if the production time seems to conflict with his own projection or deadline. This is fear-based thinking and you end up apologizing (see below).

    Scenario #2 is the way to go. It is your job to communicate that you are the best to get the task done without getting into specifics that will eventually turn out suicidal for your business -- having to deliver on your word despite the fact that everything has changed but the client's mind and expectations. Avoid the trap of running after your own word.

    Your clients and customers take your vague estimates and treat them as promises. It's the only thing they have, after all. Whatever you state, you give your word. Whatever you say, guess, or estimate, make it as accurate as possible or avoid saying anything at all. Do not give any numbers or time frames before getting acquainted with all the required information.

    When stating production or delivery times, it is almost always preferable to generously pad the time needed. Do not over-promise only to prevent the customer from asking the competition for a quote. You will have to apologize to a client you only gained with promising too much only to have him later, unable to leave, wait for your services to complete. You will apologize to a client who won't bring you any more business.

    State accurate times and amounts, to the best of your knowledge, not according to your hopes or fears, even when the services rendered are taking longer than the client expected. Educate your customers about production times and requirements and have them base their estimates and expectations on the newly gained knowledge.

    Your client's deadline is your client's deadline. If you know you won't be on time, immediately communicate this. Make a plan to get as much done as possible, try to help your client with his deadline but never promise the impossible. A client who knows that you do everything to meet his deadline will be your grateful client.

    Compete with vigor, compete fairly, honestly, and trustworthy. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

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  • How Your Mind Benefits from Cleaning Up Your Physical Workspace

    edited 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.

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  • Learn to Trust Your Inner Voice

    edited by Alexander Becker

    How old are you? Aren't you old enough to finally trust yourself?

    You feel like not exercising today? You feel like really overeating? Maybe there is a big project that is labeled important and thus would have to be treated first, with top priorities... but you feel like not touching it today?

    You are old enough. Listen to your instincts and do not always assume that your inner voice is a lazy one. Your inner voice, your instincts are guiding you. Why would you accuse yourself of attempting to cheat? Do you really think you are that bad?

    On the other hand, you may fear your inner voice could tell you to double your efforts -- how would you react to that?

    How many times did you give in to your feelings of not doing something at that particular time and on how many of these occasions did you beat yourself up, drowning in guilt, only to later realize that it was just right to not pursue that project on that day. Funny how the day after came along the last bit of input that I would have ignored if it hadn't been for my day off... and I thought I was lazy...

    The amazing thing about instincts is their effectiveness, they work... instinctively. It's like an additional sense -- but only when carefully observed and trusted.

    Take advantage of your inner voice and test it with minor issues at first. Act according to your instincts, preferably on difficult decisions where your conscious mind would suggest doing the exact opposite. Go with your instincts and evaluate what turned out to be different compared to the conscious-mind-only method. You will notice how your instincts contribute to your sensory input and -- once trusted -- are an important way to achieve clarity and stable decisions where the mind-only way would be still guessing.

    Respect your instincts and learn to trust your inner voice. Why would you assume that your inner voice is wrong? Why assume that your inner voice is bad in the first place?

    It is easy to ignore the inner voice, sometimes it is even easier to keep up the discipline than to break it. You have to constantly evaluate your actions. Do not let your habits run you and prevent you from optimizing your environment and your decisions. Do not stick to a habit because of the guilt that is associated with taking a day off. Stick to your habits because your mind and your instincts tell you to do so.

    Listen to your inner voice. Trust your inner voice. Rely on your inner voice.

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  • Autopilot and the Advantages of Flying by Yourself

    edited by Alexander Becker

    You can work either creatively or you can work reactively, closely following a fixed plan that doesn't allow too many deviations in order to get fulfilled.

    Once a basic system is up and running, working on autopilot, pursuing one laid out path according to preset instructions and requirements, seems to be the way to go. Grinding away at the work that shows up is the perfect application for the autopilot, you could substitute a robot for your labor, and that's exactly the problem.

    The required and expended mind power depends on the phase of the project you're in. In the planning and developing stages of any project, you obviously don't want to give up control or flow nor would you want to bypass your own brain.

    Pragmatical exceptions are of course settings which are worth the effort in terms of fast results, for example. Mindless, robot-like work is the way to go to get things done effectively, for short, discrete periods of time that is. Don't ever feel -- nor dare to express -- that you are too good for any kind of work.

    Working on autopilot robs you of any emerging, synchronous incubation tracks which would offer themselves spontaneously if you were consciously present and fully alert, working as if you'd still be enthusiastically conceiving.

    You can use the fact that you feel yourself like working on autopilot as an indicator that you have to change something about your system. You work on quantity instead of quality, on stuff instead of making any real progress. It's like moving laterally on a ladder. You are exploring the width of the field while it would be so much more rewarding to move up, step by step, and leave the lateral field-scanning to the robots.

    Your autopilot is not a creator. You are. Using the human mind and its power to run like a, however complex, machine is a tremendous waste of resources, it's overkill.

    Setting up, programming, and training the autopilot is an exciting task only to have it up and running on its own without your continual input needed. Just make sure to not program yourself to become the autopilot.

    Fly by yourself. You are no robot.

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  • Moderation in All Things?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    One of Benjamin Franklin's virtues was to: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

    I am always a proponent of pursuing extremes, if not for the outcome then at least for the value of the experience. Yet recently, I discover moderation as a concept. There are many events in life that benefit greatly from a moderate approach. Selective moderation leaves time and energy for the really important, for the high-priority issues to be tackled in extreme ways, excessive in single-mindedness and with overwhelming determination.

    With the overall concept and pace being moderate, as moderate as possible, resources are shifted towards the high-leverage objectives that are treated with all the power available, with utmost persistance and through exaggeration and escalation of circumstances whenever possible, even beyond the likelyhood of success.

    Moderation adds variety and promotes diversity since active moderation is capable of breaking repetitive habits -- the prevention of having too much of the same too often, for example -- allowing fresh input into your life.

    It may seem to conflict with the issue of discipline and exceptions, but you can benefit from moderating discipline itself for too much restriction -- and that's what a good part of discipine is about -- is detrimental to your success and your well-being.

    Moderation is important to break up black-and-white thinking since nothing is perfectly black nor white. Moderation is the complete scale from black to white and so is life which is -- to stay with colors -- taking continuously and simultaneously from the whole spectrum, including the extremes, incorporating every color that is imaginable, all side by side.

    Moderation precludes -- by definition -- the effects of excess.

    For good measure, take a look at extreme moderation which seems to be a contradiction in terms. You can exaggerate everything, just apply the concept of excess to the idea of moderation.

    Contemplating the reasoning behind moderation does in fact temper the extremes by itself through showing the nature and the evident advantages of moderation vs. excess; variety vs. uniformity; diversity vs. similarity; &c.

    I still feel the urge to take moderation to the extreme...

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  • Why You Should Seek Inspiration Instead of Motivation

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Motivation makes you want to do while inspiration tells you what to do.

    Motivation is unspecific. You are motivated or you become motivated through external stimuli and you get ready to do something. Once you are motivated, i.e. stimulated to a sufficient extent, you can and do start whatever task is offered or would offer itself to you.

    To sustain motivation, it has to be kindled and rekindled and carefully guarded while, on the other end of the scale, the overwhelming force which inspiration creates, is hard to disturb and even harder to resist.

    Inspiration starts with an idea or the seed of an idea, call it a hunch or an intuition, with only the slightest hint of motivation. Once picked up, the idea will immediately start to unfold and pull motivation towards itself until completion, until its full manifestation.

    Inspiration-invoked motivation is invincible and divine, it is not comparable to the externally aroused, raw, almost crude, give-me-something-to-do kind of motivation.

    The trick is thus, in order to achieve maximum and real motivation, to work on and take care of inspiration. Inspiration is the shortcut to motivation and it is much harder to induce since the reception seems to be a very delicate and subjective process without the physical means that trigger motivation.

    Inspiration takes place in the mind, via emotions and evaluation of the effects of sensory input. Motivation, on the other hand, is a matter of tangible cause-and-effect events that function via direct sensory input. You can become motivated through physical activity -- inspired you won't become, not necessarily though.

    I may motivate you with passion and with the influence of physical power but without actual inspiration and you will ask me for a task to complete... any task, you will be eager to use your instilled energy no matter how. I may do the opposite and give you inspiration; you will instantly and effortlessly motivate yourself and find and complete, all by yourself, the exact task for that very moment.

    Always look for inspiration and motivation will take care of itself.

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  • Willpower: Let Go of Everything

    edited by Alexander Becker

    You have a strong will. People fear your willpower, you even celebrate it. Yet, against popular belief, you cannot change other people's will with your own will, no matter how strong or terrible it is.

    You may use seduction or force to get what you want, but you cannot put up willpower against willpower. Try to recall such a situation -- did it work? What were the consequences?

    Get rid of the belief that you can control everything, because you can't. In fact, you are not even able to control anything, what you can and do control is your perception of things and events. You control and set up your expectations and your evaluations of events and their particular circumstances -- this is the mechanism to influence reality itself. Your subjective perceptions do objectively change your realities. You change your point of view, you walk around the object of contempt or desire and start to see it from different perspectives.

    Putting up your will against an undesirable situation causes frustration and resent, your own frustration and the situations' resent. You may use or leverage some hierarchical power to change the situation but this is not your will. The moment you're trying to control your environment through your will, you do in fact force that very will upon your own mind. Your ability to create suffers as a consequence.

    Change the situation using your will for good, not going against any other person's will and you are going to employ willpower for the first time in an economical and successful manner. Use that powerful will of yours to enhance and enforce your discipline, for example.

    Let go. As an exercise, let go of everything. How does that feel? Let go of everything and consciously select the few things that you actually desire to productively take care of. Let go of everything else.

    Now you are free. Free to create and free to succeed.

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  • A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

    edited 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.

    1. Start with the ubiquitous mindsweep.
    2. Recognize and accept the Must Do tasks.
    3. Collect your intentions for the desired outcomes of the Must Do and the Want-To-Do Really Badly stuff.
    4. Inject as much positive thinking as possible into your mental process. Sanitize every thought of potential auto-sabotage.
    5. 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.

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  • 11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

    edited 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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.
    7. Realize that you do not have to suffer to achieve what you want. You decide whether suffering is part of your experience or not.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. 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.
    11. 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.

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  • Reality Check: The Implications of Elite Training

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Is it possible to be in top physical and mental condition while at the same time participating in life with all its seductions, influences, and an environment that is, if not negative by definition, at least neutral, neutral as opposed to the maximum goals and achievements that are so not-average and pursued while training for life?

    Coming out of a controlled environment, mind and body, discipline and willpower are finally allowed to show what they are really able to achieve.

    Yet it seems that only in a controlled environment, it is possible to train and prepare yourself for heights formerly unknown. This creates a dual environment problem, where you train for the outside world but not within that world. I'd love to promote training for the real world in the real world but it doesn't work this way.

    You train with amazing results, you eat perfectly healthy, your thinking is positive and untainted, only to emerge from your laboratory immediately starting to effectively de-train your mind and your body. Life is cyclic.

    I'm still striving to attain the heights of the monk, always, and continuously, although I do not recommend living completely ascetic. Life has to be instinctual -- to a certain degree at least -- it encompasses ups and downs, exceptions, successes and failures.

    After a certain point, after accomplishing your goals for yourself, to go even further, to reach for the next impossible, the unreasonable, you have to decide whether to drop everything incompatible or accept satisfaction with what you have within easy reach.

    This is what is meant when the best is being defined as the enemy of mere good.

    WOW! You look like you're not from this world is not an exaggeration but a perfect truth.

    We're talking about the training of elite athletes here, with goals hard to attain, training levels hard to maintain, and rewards hard to believe but why not adopt some of the methods and include them in your everyday mindset.

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  • How to Motivate Yourself with One Word

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Your own word: give your word. If you are a person of honor and integrity, you know what it means to give your word.

    One method is emotional motivation, pumped up at seminars or at group meetings where the participants leave with that smile on their face, only to have their motivation literally fade away over time, another method is Steve Pavlina's "sans chest-pounding motivation for smart people," intellectual motivation with the main idea to always set unreasonably big and thus intellectually challenging goals.

    There are ends to achieve that are important and may be emotionally lit brightly and furthermore intellectually founded and held up by logical reasons and even some scientific evidence... Some goals, the really big ones, can't get enough motivational support to be pursued and focused on, no matter what.

    Alcatraz Revisited

    Give your word to someone in order to complete and deliver on the promise whatever it takes. There are not many events that would make an acceptable excuse for yourself showing up with empty hands.

    This goes beyond intellectual or emotional motivation. If it is promised, it has to be done. Motivation through honor.

    Now, if you develop a similar sense of integrity in dealing with yourself, you may give your word to yourself in order to accomplish any given task even after emotional or logical motivational means are not available for some reason. The emotional momentum may be long gone and logic is hard to employ under certain circumstances.

    It doesn't matter why exactly you have to do it, you gave your word and that is more than sufficient to change the world around the issue at hand.

    Develop that sense of integrity and give your word to guarantee that things get done. Just make sure to be absolutely convinced that you are not going to give up before the defined and promised goal is achieved. Do not give your word if you are not willing or able to invest whatever you have in order to succeed.

    The beauty of this approach is that you do not have to continuously invoke the whole array of "whys" and "what ifs" and "what if nots" in order to stay focused. Your word is a shortcut that let's you switch to autopilot and enables you to work without any doubts or any further questions on the current obsession.

    The phrase because I said so now takes on a completely new meaning.

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  • Matching Levels of Energy to the Tasks at Hand

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Time management is no rocket science. Do you work in accordance with your energy level at each moment? Anybody does this without even thinking about it but you can do it consciously and thus more effectively when deciding beforehand how energy-intensive the tasks are going to be and then mapping them across the day.

    In the morning, you may be calm and able to concentrate deeply, so why not shift your high-concentration tasks to the morning hours and do the easy, not peak-performance requiring jobs to the end of the workday where you can afford to work on autopilot?

    High-level planning for example, is often done best early in the morning, within a quiet hour or two.

    Levels of alertness are naturally depending on when and what you eat. Mind-taxing tasks that are due before lunch get automatically more high-quality attention than the after-lunch, digestion-influenced and impaired, heavily diverted focus, is able to provide.

    Another excellent time to function with maximum abilities is during the late evening, depending on when you go to sleep, the hours before crashing can be very productive when sensibly filled with the proper tasks.

    Monitor and lay out your personal energy map over the course of a typical workday and try to exchange the to dos according to your available mental and physical energy schedule.

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