I still believe that the most productive people are the ones who only do a few things, but do those things very, very well. However, that isn't a luxury most of us have--especially early on in our careers. In this series of posts, we are going to look at ways to better manage our time and get the best return on investment. Time is an Investment Speaking of your return on investment--just thinking of time as an investment can help you become more productive. Changing your mindset about time and seeing it as a currency that you can spend as you choose helps put you in a frame of reference to value time appropriately. When you spend your time, you can spend it in areas where there is a … [Read more...] about The Most for Your Minute
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Concentrating with Ambient Sounds
Do you ever have a hard time concentrating because of noisy distractions? Wouldn't it be ideal if you could break out the walls in your office and place your desk 25 or 30 feet away from that noisy employee, grinding printer, or chirping phone? Most of the time, you can't do anything about your physical space and your proximity to noisy distractions. But you can give yourself some sonic space. Just think, if you could take the sound of your co-workers' chitchatting 5 feet away and make it sound like they are 30 feet away. Wouldn't that accomplish pretty much the same thing as physically moving your desk away from them? Do you wish your co-workers had volume controls? You can't turn … [Read more...] about Concentrating with Ambient Sounds
Odds of Success
It has been years since I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, but one of the things I remember the most was the way Robert Kiyosaki said he approached starting his business. He knew that four out of five businesses fail, so he figured he should plan on starting 5 businesses in order to get one that succeeded. This is valuable thinking. When you approach your success goals with the idea that you will need to learn from some failures along the way, you can be much more realistic about what you are trying to achieve. It is also much easier to handle failure when you see it as part of your path to success. Failure should be a springboard to help you do better on the next try. But if you start out … [Read more...] about Odds of Success
Tips for Exercise
The trick to exercising is to make it a part of your lifestyle instead of just something you attempt to do a few times each week. This post is going to look at several things you can do to integrate exercise into your life. Do you have anything you do to help keep yourself active? Please share in the comments. Put your exercise equipment in front of the TV. Move out the sofa and chair and move in the exercise bike. Your goal is to make it as easy as possible to exercise. This works particularly well if you are working your way through a set of cliffhanger-type TV shows on DVD. You still have to put effort into exercising. Just sitting on a piece of exercise equipment won't help … [Read more...] about Tips for Exercise
25 Hour Day
Brett Kelly has a post on four ways to create a 25 hour day. And they don't involve doing any weird things with lights or living in a cave. … [Read more...] about 25 Hour Day
Offline Reading
As more and more content becomes available on the internet it is easy to shift our reading online. There are some benefits to this. It is easy to get timely information on breaking events quickly. The downside is that you can spend a good deal of time reading things with little value or worse. Your educational reading can degrade into a few hours of mindless surfing the web. Sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Reddit supply a constant stream of interesting content that often is little more than a waste of time. I'm not saying that you can't get anything valuable off of the web. However, if most of your reading is done online the chances of it turning into a waste of time are high … [Read more...] about Offline Reading
Borders
My wife and I moved to Mexico for a few months in 2006. I've been struck by how different people perceive the US Southern border. To some it is a definite line, something you don't cross without much fear and trembling. Other people see the border as a soft separation. It is the crossing point to another culture, but something that you can easily cross and return. Generally, the people who see the border as a barrier are the ones who don't really understand much about Mexico and haven't made many trips out of the United States. People with more knowledge and experience in international travel don't see the border as a barrier. As I noticed this great divide in how people perceive … [Read more...] about Borders
Digital Signatures
Over the past few days, the most popular post on this site has been our explanation of how Digital Signatures & Encryption works. Understanding this is key for our society to get past the point of using dead dinosaurs (gasoline) to ship around dead trees (paper). Please take a few minutes to read it and pass it on. The more people that understand it, the easier it will be to move to more paperless and more efficient work processes. … [Read more...] about Digital Signatures
Workstations
If a bus station is where a bus stops and a train station is where a train stops, what happens at a workstation? … [Read more...] about Workstations
Chandler Review
Throughout the past few years, open source applications have been rapidly increasing in popularity. Venerable products such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Linux are widely used by the public, and Firefox, especially, has become a success. A group of developers called OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation) has created a personal information management product called Chandler. Chandler is based on some of the principles of GTD, much like OmniFocus. However, Chandler also shares some characteristics with Evernote, such as the fact that both products have a web version and desktop version that sync with each other, providing automatic back-up. Chandler is free, runs on Mac, Windows and … [Read more...] about Chandler Review