Entries from March 2008 ↓

I’ll give you fair warning on this post: if you don’t like “the making of” pieces or introspection, you likely won’t get much out of this post.  I’m not sure how it’s all going to fit together or whether I’m going to be providing anything useful.

I’ll also admit that part of this post is to relay a more personal aspect to what’s going on with me.  The posts I enjoy most from other people are those in which they actually talk about what’s been going on with them, yet I don’t do it very much. It’s not as though I’m really scared of revealing what’s going on, but there’s always that lingering question for me: have I said or done anything that’s actually helped my readers?  I’ve already warned you that that answer is likely going to be negative for this.

I’ve been in a bit of an existential funk the last few days.  It hit me really hard Friday night and Saturday morning, but I’m doing better now.  I think the major issues are those of authenticity, sustainability, and friendship.  Not sleeping well last week probably weighs in on it, as well.
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credit: )3runo

This post is a continuation of the Practicing the Virtues Series. This week, we’ll talk about practicing friendliness.

I’ll give a brief recap of where we’re at.

• We become more virtuous through practice. For more information, see this post.
• The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. Improving one virtue tends to improve others, and you’ll see those others listed.

I’ll spend a little bit of time on the Doctrine of the Mean, as it applies to friendliness, since many people think you could never be too friendly. First, by friendliness, I do not mean being nice to people, although being nice to people is often times a good way to practice friendliness. What I mean by friendliness is the virtue of being able to connect with people in a mutually beneficial way. To be deficient in this virtue is to be quarrelsome, i.e. constantly picking fights with people or going out of your way not to connect with them, and to have the excess of this virtue is to be a flatterer, i.e. going out of your way to connect with people.

Why we shouldn’t be quarrelsome is fairly evident. This is not so with why we shouldn’t go to the other end. Simply put, if you have to many “friends,” you’re not able to connect with them in a mutually beneficial way while maintaining proper balance with the other aspects of your nature. The amount of time and energy that it takes to develop and maintain true friendships is far too great to have 452 friends. Your mileage may vary, but the main point is that trying to have too many friends is self-defeating.

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Hot off the press!: the Daily Productivity Planner. This aid is a companion to the Productivity Heatmap and allows you to plan in detail how you’re going to execute the tasks for the day.

I’m taking my own advice here and releasing this before it’s perfectly spaced and arranged. Before I describe the Daily Productivity Planner in detail, I must give credit where credit is due.

The giant whose back I’m standing on: David Seah

I must credit Dave Seah for inspiring me to create this aid and giving me awesome templates to start from. Dave’s forms have been great for helping me to work, and I still make use of the Emergent Task Timer on those days that I wake up with no clue what to do. But I had a hard time using the Emergent Task Planner because I did too much fiddling and scratching and confusing myself. Note that this is probably operator error, but nonetheless, it wasn’t working very well for me.

Those familiar with his forms will note a lot of similarities. I pretty much scalped his Notes Block, since that worked well for me. I also picked up his Emergent Task terminology, since unexpected tasks emerge every day and require attention. Lastly, I’ve always liked the way he uses text to describe the boxes, and I’ve emulated that in this design.

(Dave, you’re a great teacher and thanks for indirectly mentoring me for the last few years. Let me know if this is too close to some of your stuff and we’ll work something out.)

What’s the basic concept of the Daily Productivity Planner?

The main thing I’ve been trying to do is to focus my day first by major projects, then by tasks, and then figure out when I should do what. The DPP has all of these elements covered.

There are five work areas to the DPP:

1. The Projects in Focus area
2. The Supporting Tasks area
3. The Productivity Sorter area
4. The Emergent Tasks area
5. The Notes Area

The Notes area is self-explanatory. The rest could probably bear some description.

The Projects in Focus area

This block is intentionally small. Trying to plug too many major projects in one day tends to leave us overwhelmed with how much we have to do. I give enough space for three (3!) projects. If you can get three major projects done in a day, then you’re doing better than a lot of people are.

(Sidebar: I’m using “project” in the broad sense, meaning some key product or service that needs completion. Whether something is a project or a task is a post for another day.)

Notice the colored boxes? Those correspond to the level of productivity this project needs to be slotted for. Projects that require the most productive horsepower get an “X” or “check” in the red box, whereas tasks that need to be done but require less juice get a yellow tick. It’s hopefully self-explanatory why there are no green or grey boxes.

The Supporting Tasks Area

These are the tasks that directly support the projects you’re working on. The boxes mean the same thing, as some tasks require more productive capacity than others. I’m using tasks a bit broader here, too, so the task “Respond to Email” may include the sub-task “Check Email”, “Sort Email,” and “Respond to Email.” I’ve intentionally left it broad so that you can manage the tasks at whatever level you need to, e.g. sometimes you really need to list every step in the process and sometimes you don’t.

The Productivity Sorter Area

This area is where the rubber hits the road. You’ll notice that the colored blocks are there but that I’ve also added a green block. Since the default use of this area assumes that one block is an hour, there’s twelve hours represented. During that period, you may go green on productive capacity, and that’s good to know so you don’t plan to work during that time. Take a powernap, stretch, meditate, exercise, or do something besides work unless you absolutely have to, i.e. the Boss is standing over you watching and clocking your work.

The colored blocks label that block of time based off your results from the Productivity Heatmap. Of course, you may not have liked the whole heatmap concept, in which case you can use the blocks to indicate something else. Just define what the colors mean and drive on!

You’ll also notice four gray lines in each block. The default context for those blocks is that they’re fifteen minute increments. Using them this way, you can just quickly write the task down on the third line and understand that you plan to do the task at thirty minutes on the hour. Alternatively, you could see the lines as listing all the tasks you want to get done sometime in that hour. Either way works, as long as you’re consistent with the usage.

Lastly, the boxes can be linked by arrows, brackets, circles, or whatever way makes sense to you as you plan. I tend to group several of the boxes because I like to schedule large blocks of time to work on projects, but that’s just me.

I’ve intentionally designed this area to have some flexibility so that as much usable information can come from one sheet as possible. You may not need twelve hours in focus, in which case you can just cross through the boxes you don’t plan on using. Hopefully the versatility here is an advantage and doesn’t lead to indecision and confusion because indecision and confusion are counterproductive.

The Emergent Task area

It’s relatively common for tasks that need to be completed to pop up in the middle of the day. This block is the place to dump those tasks. If it’s one of those that requires more capacity to complete than some of your other tasks, it may bump them. Otherwise, it can sit there until you have time to deal with it. This area is helpful because it gets the task off your mind while you work or it makes you re-prioritize your work to complete it if it has to be done. It remains empty during your planning process so that you can review it later on to see what tasks you planned to do and what tasks you didn’t plan on doing–it’s helpful for future planning.

Closing the Time Management Loop

The major weakness of the Productivity Heatmap is that it’s just a recording and evaluation aid. The information pulled from it is only partly actionable because it’s too general. The Daily Productivity Planner takes that information and fits it into the other major components of time management: planning and execution.

And, as I type this, I just figured out how to present the Special Theory of Productivity that I’ve been stewing over. Look for that one to come out in the next few days!

Give this planner a try and let me know how it works for you. Feedback (good, bad, or otherwise) is greatly appreciated.

Grab it here if you didn’t already: Daily Productivity Planner

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or submitting it to one of the social media sites below. If you find the Daily Productivity Planner helpful or have any suggestions for how to make it more useful, please let me know. (If you think it’s really good and worth a tip, please consider donating and supporting research and development of these types of aids by clicking here.) Thanks for sharing your time with me, and I appreciate your support!

The Global Elders, from left: Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus, Mary Robinson, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson. Taken from the Global Elders website.

Some people seem to be able to script themselves to change habits almost at whim. Where most of us falter and fight, these people make a quick decision either to radically change their lives or look at their current good habits and tweak them to make those habits even better. These people have what Clay at The Growing Life called the the habit of changing habits.

The self-improvement meta-habit is incredibly useful to have, but like any other virtue, it’s best taken in moderation. Those who go overboard in the productivity cult which many of us are in are far too familiar. These are the type of people who try to think about the most effective way to put out their burning house while standing next to the fire hose. Pick it up, spray, and adjust fire!

Perfectionism is very closely related to an excess of this meta-habit. Perfectionist, at their most crippled, fail to be able to create anything because they’re too focused on producing the perfect product from the get-go. The advice is much the same to the perfectionist as to the self-improvement fanatic: get something produced, review it, and edit!

We’re also far too familiar with those who are deficit in the meta-habit. Stuck in their ways, they will do the same ineffective behaviors or processes day in and day out just because it’s already a habit. Or, even worse, they have no inclination to change themselves for they see no need to change.

Between these two extremes is the sweet spot. Find small, tangible ways to improve yourself everyday, but understand that it’s a constant work in progress. Focus on becoming excellent, not perfect, and practice this virtue everyday.We become excellent through habit, and having the habit of changing habits make excellence far easier to attain.

But wait, there’s more!

What we often forget is that self-improvement is partly a social endeavor since we are essentially social creatures. You can’t improve being a friend in a vacuum–you have to practice it with people. It’s interesting, however, that we are really quick to look at the social environment we’re in and blame our lack of flourishing on it. That which has the power to negatively affect us also has the power to positively affect us, and we often forget that we make up a component of the social environment we’re in and have as much influence to affect others positively as they affect us negatively.

Sure, many of you are thinking, that’s easy for me to say, as I have the luxury of not working in the corporate structure with its incessant, emergency demands on attention. Merlin said it far better than I can, but positive productivity and self-improvement changes can start and are most effective at the team level.

(Warning: The video is something like 90 minutes long, but it’s good. Watch it with the notepad at the ready.)

Why is this? Because a team of 5-6 people can be accountable to each other for their personal behavior far easier than a corporate managerial team can be responsible for 500-600. If a team becomes more cohesive, productive, and begins flourishing, do you think it won’t be noticed? If that team becomes the superstar team, they have incredible leverage on other teams to get them to change.

My point? The meta-change habit applies to groups of people as well as it applies to individual persons. Look at successful families and peer groups and you’ll see this in action. The ideal situation is when the group is making the individual better at the same time that the individual is making the group better. We, as groups, become better through habit, but we, as groups, also become worse through habits.

I’ll be explaining this social aspect of self-improvement in the upcoming posts. These posts will likely be staggered through some of the other themes running through this blog, but they are in the works. We’ll start with some Aristotelian goodness and go from there!

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I mentioned in How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive that I thought most personal planners got time wrong and presented all blocks of times as being equal. Later that day, I was thinking about how to capture the rather inchoate ideas in A Special Theory of Relativity (it really is coming, but I’m having trouble making it coherent and short) and it dawned on me: we learned how to manage our time in preschool.

We learned time management by playing with shape sorters and learning to put the right shape in the right hole. If you all were anything like me, you tried to figure out how to put the square through the circle hole, even though you knew that wasn’t where it belonged. It belonged in the square hole. I’m sure you also figured out, like I did, that you could get the wrong shape through the wrong hole, but it took a lot more work.

The practical application of the Productivity Heatmap is much the same. It’s about using your own rhythms (the sorter) to determine which is the best time to do certain tasks (the blocks). Sure, you can do the wrong tasks at the wrong time, but it’s a lot harder.

(Sidebar: If you didn’t make it through the article about heatmapping or didn’t see the link, you can get your own blank one here: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (4290)

I’ve now been toying with whether getting a shape sorter, limiting the number of blocks I get, and labeling the blocks with tasks (writing, networking, etc.) would be a useful metaphor and tool for my work planning. If nothing else, they foster creativity.

It’s strange how many lessons we learn as children, forget as adolescents, and then have to learn again as adults.

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I’m trying to save all of my metablogging posts ’til Friday, since if I wrote about all the stuff related to blogging that I’m thinking about, I’d probably write as much about blogging as I do anything else. That said, we’re off!

Michelle at Bloggrrl wrote today about something that has been on my mind more and more recently. Basically, it’s about the use of our blogs and who should be the primary focus.
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Update: I decided to place the form at the top of the post to make it easier to download. Grab it here: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (4290)

I’ve been a bit bottlenecked recently with some of my posts. I’ve been stewing over A Special Theory of Productivity and trying to figure out the best way to present it. Meanwhile, another post that I’m working on also needs some preluding explanation. This post is related to both of those.

I’m a huge fan of heat maps, and here recently I’ve started to think about productivity in terms of heat maps, as well. The above picture is a heat map of my daily productive capacity.

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In my overview of Aristotelian ethics, I noted that we become more virtuous through practice. This post gives activities and suggestions that help you practice courage.

The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. It turns out that working on one virtue has reciprocal effects on other virtues. You’ll see the reciprocal virtues listed in each bullet, as some of the different activities that make us more courageous tend to make us more virtuous in some areas than others.

It’s key to remember the Doctrine of the Mean when reviewing this list. For every activity mentioned, there’s a way to overdo it, leading to rashness, and there’s a way to underdo it, leading to cowardice. Find that middle ground between the two and begin flourishing.

Name Your Phobias and Conquer Them.

There’s a difference between being uncomfortable in situations and having a spine-tingling phobia of something. The thing is, some phobias are such that they keep us from flourishing. Agoraphobia (fear of large crowds of people), for instance, keeps us from interacting with other people in ways that they’re comfortable and limits the way we can find joy outside of home.

Muster up the courage to name your phobias and work through the fear they generate. The reality is that you may just move to being uncomfortable with whatever you’re currently scared of, but you can function as a rational person through discomfort. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Friendliness, Indignancy)

Get in a Romantic Relationship if You’re Not in One Due to Insecurities

Perhaps an odd tip for becoming more courageous, but many people never find their true happiness for fear of being rejected, accepted, stifled, or whatever other fear of intimate relationships they conjure up. The root of their relationship avoidance is fear, and this fear leads to sub-optimal flourishing.

Fight the fear and open up…what’s the worst that can happen? You could end up lonely? That’s the route you’re currently on, anyways. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Friendliness, Truthfulness, Benevolence, Conscientiousness, Generosity)

Handle Tough Emotions when They Come up.

A lot of people shove tough emotions down when they come up and they never deal with the source of the emotion. Some are afraid to know what lurks in their core and, as a result, they never know how to process their emotions and figure out who they are.

But you can’t make meaningful decisions about your life if you don’t know who you are. You’ll waffle from year to year, make commitments you can’t keep, be insecure with jobs you take, and be in awkward relationships with others. It’s possible that you could stumble into flourishing, but it can sometimes be really easy to confuse temporary, security blanket positions for lifelong flourishing. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Temperance, Spiritedness)

Talk to Someone Who Is Not like You.

We naturally tend to congregate with people who are very much like us. They have similar skin colors, financial statuses, and political and religious ideologies. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it has a tendency to make us very narrow-minded when it comes to different perspectives on the human condition.

Find someone who has a different perspective on the human condition and talk to them. Try to understand their position, but most of all, get slightly outside your personal comfort zone. Break down the unconscious social barrier that you have set up for yourself. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Friendliness, Generosity, Benevolence)

Tell Your Boss “No.”

Many people are scared to tell the Boss “no” because they’re afraid of long-term repercussions like being fired, so they constantly take more work than they can possibly do, which impacts other areas of their lives. They become stressed about work, disgruntled, and frustrated at themselves for not standing up for themselves.

Find a good reason to say “no” before the Boss asks. Usually, all it takes is looking at what all you currently have to do and being prepared to use that as the justification for you not taking anymore work. Saying “no” is much easier when you can say “I’m sorry, but if I attempt to do that Project X may fall further behind” or “I had this great idea about Project X that’s taking a little bit longer to complete than I thought…would you rather me drop that, or work on what you’re proposing?” Be able to talk about the status of the project, and then over-deliver on the product.

Lastly, remember the difference between being the “go-to person” and the “default person.” The go-to people get the hard jobs, but their Bosses use them differently than they use the default person. The default person just gets all the jobs because the Boss knows she’ll do them. You want to be the go-to person, not the default person. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Industriousness)

Stand up for What’s Right when It’s Hard to Do.

It’s really easy to stand up for what’s right when everyone else is already doing it. It’s much more frightening to the be the first person to stand up for something or to be part of a small group who are going against the tide of injustice or social slights.

Dr. King observed that it wasn’t the small minority of evil people that made the world so bad, but rather it was the silence of the majority that went along with what was going on. Don’t be a part of that silent majority. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Generosity, Truthfulness, Friendliness, Indignancy, Spiritedness, Benevolence, Conscientiousness)

Become Slightly Rebellious About Something

We are all unique people, with unique tastes and slightly different perspectives. Many people are afraid to be their true selves, though, for fear of rejection or because they don’t want be singled out as being different.

If you figure out who you are and what you like, manifest yourself and pursue those things you find valuable. If someone asks you why you’re doing what you’re doing, stick up for yourself and defend your choices. Ask them why their position should be the default one. You’d be surprised how many people don’t have an answer for that question.

The key here is not to through your life choices and beliefs at other people. No one likes a zealot. But don’t let either people’s ways dictate your just because they’re in the majority. If they press you, press them back. Check out Amy’s rebellion for a good example of how to pull this off. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Temperance, Conscientiousness, Generosity, Truthfulness, Friendliness, Indignancy, Spiritedness, Benevolence)

Become a Guardian

I’m not talking about a parental guardian. This is a reference to Plato’s Republic, which listed types of people out by what function they performed for society. Guardians are those who protect the fabric of society. In today’s context, they are the policemen, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, military servicemembers, and emergency response personnel (think FEMA).

All of these civil service organizations have volunteer or part-time positions available, so you don’t have to have a major career change to become part of them. Many, like the National Guard or Reserves, give financial benefits for being a part of them, so you get a side-benefit, as well.

Few things test and temper your courage like being in emergency situations and having to respond. And there are few things more rewarding at the end of the day, or one’s life, as knowing that when the time came, you were able to face your fear and help others. If you join one of these organizations, you will have at least one situation where your courage will be tested. But the organizations will also train you how to become more courageous, and those lessons apply outside of emergency situations. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Temperance, Conscientiousness, Benevolence, Spiritedness, Industriousness)

Run for a Political Office.

Few things are as frightening as living your life with others watching. What’s even more frightening is doing that while you have to make important decisions that affect the lives of others. This fear keeps many from considering running for office, with the result that a lot of otherwise qualified, good people sit at home on the couch and we get the…er…other type.

I’m not saying you have to run for President, but run for something important that you believe in. Don’t like the way the PTA is operating? Rather than complain, run for PTA president. Overcome the fear and make positive changes for those around you. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Temperance, Conscientiousness, Generosity, Truthfulness, Friendliness, Indignancy, Spiritedness, Benevolence)

Start a Blog

Expressing yourself to people you know is a bit scary. Expressing yourself to people you don’t know, and (potentially) a lot more of them, is even more scary. Observe that most blogs don’t take off when their authors are hiding behind the text; it’s only when those authors expose themselves as true people that others become interested.

Deliver the content, but deliver it through your person, not your computer. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Conscientiousness, Friendliness, Industriousness, Wittiness)

Start a Business

Fear of failure and uncertainty keeps most people from considering starting their own business. Some people find meaningful employment working for someone else, but many, many others don’t, and rather than flourishing while doing something they love, they wither most of their adult lives while they look forward to retirement.

Even if you like doing what you do, starting your own business will make you a better person and will allow you many different options should your desires or conditions change in the future. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Industriousness, Temperance, Spiritedness)

Read Philosophy

No, this is not about job security for me. This is about the fact that most of us live comfortably with unexamined lives because we’re afraid to subject our beliefs and choices to the scrutiny of the wisdom of the ages. What’s so scary about philosophy is that it has a tendency to get us to move from comfortable certainty to uncomfortable uncertainty.

Overcome this fear and learn to live the Good life. Or at least learn that though the Good life is simple, it’s not easy and it’s not really certain. (Reciprocal Virtue(s): Temperance, Indignancy, Conscientiousness, Spiritedness, Truthfulness, Benevolence; Practice Wisdom, in general)

This post is Part One of an 11 Part Megaseries that lists every virtue displayed here. My goal is to do one virtue a week until completed.

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The question “Why Am I Productive?” very rarely comes up when we’re productive. Usually, it’s when we’re not productive that we ask why we’re not being productive. Asking the question in the negative like that often gets us to quick fixes, but very often does not answer it in a way that’s helpful.

Here recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes people productive in general. What follows is a general theory that captures what I think is going on:

Productivity= (Creative Energy + Focus + Motivation + Aptitude + Ideal Time)/(Difficulty + Distractions)

A discussion of the individual components is in order:

Productivity: Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

There’s a difference between being effective and being efficient, as highlighted by most productivity systems. Basically, here’s the difference:
Effectiveness: completing tasks related to meaningful goals.
Efficiency: Completing tasks in a specified amount of time.


The model of Productivity that I’m working with is based off effectiveness, not efficiency. We can complete any number of tasks in a given amount of time, pat ourselves on the back, and not have advanced a single, meaningful goal. While it may seem that we should be proud of the feat we’ve just accomplished, the reality is that we have moved backward rather than forward. Time is finite, and every minute spent on tasks that are not related to meaningful goals puts us further behind.

“Meaningful goals” is intentionally vague at this point, and though it is a critical part of the theory, we’re going to leave that aside for another day. I’ve started making stabs at it with this proposed model and I’m thinking it’ll be something like “goals that promote flourishing.”

Productivity Enhancers

The following components positively affect our productivity, meaning that more of any one of those components have a tendency to make us more productive.

Creative Energy

This one is fairly straightforward. Though we can influence ourselves by setting up the right conditions, the brute fact is that there are times when we are insanely, innately creative.

Focus

Another straightforward one. There are times when our attention is laser focused on one task, project, or idea and time, reality, and physical necessities melt away while we chase the muse.

Motivation

Motivation comes in two distinct breeds: general motivation to get something–anything–done and specific motivation to get specific tasks completed. The higher the motivation, the more likely we are to stay on task and complete the project.

Aptitude

Our proficiency at a given task has a major impact on our ability to complete that task in a given amount of time. For example, people who have difficulty writing have to work so much harder to complete the same given article, essay, or post than someone who is either innately better or better through practice. Experts at a task are quantum leaps ahead of novices in terms of productivity.

Ideal Time

Different tasks require different amounts of time to complete them. Figuring out your own ideal time is a matter of practice, but it’s critical for planning and execution. The importance of being able to plan work is obvious on the planning end, but many people forget that going past the ideal time in execution also hampers productivity.




Two Observations:

• All of the productivity enablers are internal


By internal, I mean that they have to do with our own natures, we can individually identify what’s missing, and we can influence the components. The “hack” literature on the blogosphere is mostly about giving you ways to influence these components. While this is not a hacky post, I’ll give some starting reads that works on each of these dimensions.

• Creativity
• Do You Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking?
• Are You As Creative As You Want To Be?
• Focus
• 20 Ways to Eliminate Stress From Your Life
• The Power of Clarity
• Motivation
• Top 20 Motivation Hacks
• Motivational Tips to Hack Your Day
• Aptitude
• Zen and the Art of Remarkable Blogging
• How To Get From a 7 to a 10
• Ideal Time
• The Key to Productivity: Schedule Calibration
• Big Rocks First: Double Your Productivity This Week




• The Enablers are Interconnected


Each of the dimensions have a tendency to increase the others. Being in an incredibly creative mood tends to motivate us to work the ideas through. Working within an ideal time tends to make us focus on the given task at hand. Being apt at the task tends to open up creative avenues to approach and complete our work.

This interconnected feature of the enablers also can work to our disadvantage, too. Low motivation, for example, tends to make us lose focus, creative energy, and squander our ideal time.

So, there are two tricks here. The first is figure out how to increase each of these dimensions and incorporate these into productive habits. The second is to identify the weakest dimension and work on increasing that one so that it doesn’t drag down the other enablers.

Productivity Detractors

The following components negatively affect our productivity, meaning that more of any of these components have a tendency to make us less productive.

Difficulty (of Task)

This is different than our aptitude at a task. Some tasks are inherently more difficult than others and require more of the enablers to complete. Compare the difference in difficulty between, say, writing a catch-up email to a friend and writing a pillar post for a blog. Though the word counts might be the same, the difficulty of writing a good pillar post is simply far greater than writing the catch-up email.

Distractions

Distractions are different than focus because focus has to do with what’s going on inside our heads, whereas distractions have to do with what’s going on outside our heads. Of course, what’s going on outside our heads has a tendency to creep inside our heads, but usually removing distractions require you to cut yourself off from something else. Increasing our focus requires us to quiet the noise inside of our heads. Understanding the difference between the two is critical, for decreasing distractions requires different methods than increasing focus, although the two dimensions are heavily inter-related.



Observations:

• The productivity detractors are external


We can’t control when our children need attention or when our loved ones are having bad days. We also can’t really control the fact that some tasks are more difficult than others. Our ability to influence these dimensions require us to handle things outside of ourselves. Minimizing the detractors consists of (a) minimizing distractions, and (b) simplifying difficult tasks. Some resources for each component:

• Simplifying Difficult Tasks
• How to Actually Execute Your To-Do List: or, Why Writing it Doen Doesn’t Actually Get it Done
• Granularity for Students
• Minimizing Distractions
• Best 8 Ways to Deal With Detractors
• Top 20 Parent Hacks: Tips for Organization, Kid Optimization, and Happiness




• The productivity detractors are interconnected


I’ve covered this above, but observe that the detractors have the same feature. Given that difficult tasks require more productivity enablers, we’re all too prone to look to outside sources to make them easier and wind up distracted. And being distracted makes difficult tasks that much harder.

The Take-Away Value of The Theory:

We can create habits that increase the enablers.

Every one of the enablers are within our control to foster, despite the common myth that we’re born creative, focused, and motivated. That myth is rubbish and doesn’t address the reality that creative people are creative through habit, focused people are focused through habit, motivated people choose to do things that motivate them, and experts train and hone their skills routinely.

We can examine the tasks that we do and plan ideal times to work.

We can plan around or minimize distractions.

We can’t help the fact that kids returning from school require attention. But we can plan our tasks around them (and we can also recognize that time spent with them is itself a valuable goal). We also can’t help that someone has to make food and we have to eat. Yes, we can turn email, IM, IRC, Twitter, Growl, and the myriad other technological time wasters off and do our work.

We can simplify complex tasks.

Some tasks are just hard. But even hard tasks can be simplified by breaking them down into more manageable pieces.

It helps us figure out why we’re productive at “weird” times.

I’ve been trying to figure out why most of my ideas come up in the shower and on Sunday afternoon. Answer: few distractions (in shower and off work) and high creative energy (batteries recharged since I’m not at work and I’ve had time to play). Apparently, Dave Seah has the shower problem, too.

Of course, not a single bit of this is new information, as the links attest. But there comes a point where we need step outside of hacks and look at general trends. In the next few days, I’ll be covering a Special Theory of Productivity that focuses more on time management.

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A while back I started a series on “Learning to Play a Song.” Those who were following that may have noticed that I haven’t done anything with it for a long, long time. What happened?

After doing some brainstorming about what to write about, it quickly became apparent that I had way more content than I had time to write about for this blog while keeping other content flowing. In one of my more wise fits of judgment, I decided that the content stretched this blog too thin.

I really enjoyed thinking and writing about it, though, and right about that time Steve Pavlina did an excellent review of Site Build It! that touted the service as the way he’d create a webpage if he had to do it again. I checked the service out, did a little thinking, and decided it was the format for all of the content that I was yearning to get out.

Sidebar: I’ll not spend too much time talking about Site Build It! (SBI!) in this post, but I do want to plug that I really think it’s the best way to start a website that you intend to make money off of. The tutorial they provide, the tools, and the lively, helpful forum have increased my knowledge and page creation ability tenfold, and I credit the service with the improvements that I’ve made on this blog. If you’re at all interested in creating a successful, highly profitable webpage, I encourage you to check out SBI!’s Sitesell Homepage.

That series has been transferred to Become-a-Musician.com. If you visit, you’ll notice that a lot of it is still under construction, but I add a few pages a week. Please stop by that site if you’re interested in that series.

I’ll be writing more about SBI, as the process has inspired a lot of different ideas that I’d like to share. Hands-down, I think it’s the service and process that has the best Return on Investment of time and money if you want to create a webpage. I know I said that above, but it’s such a great opportunity that I think people should know about. Again, you can check it out here.

If you liked this post or are interested in following my discussion of SiteBuild It!, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. SBI! is simply too good of an opportunity for you not to hear more about it. Thanks for sharing your time with me.