Month: March 2015

How to Get it All Done

On my weekly newsletter, I often hear from people about what their biggest challenge is related to focus and doing their best creative work.

One very common issue is the issue of having more ideas (and more tasks) than time.

People have so many interesting, exciting, or important projects they are working on that they don’t know where to start. They feel overwhelmed by options. They have too much to do.

And so one very common question is “How do I get it all done?”…

Last summer, I was in San Francisco talking about this issue with a friend. He’s an iPhone app developer with dozens of apps out there that he has made. I ask him how he juggles his focus and priorities.

For me, at times I feel stretched thin with “just” my 3 websites and podcast. I know that I do my best work when I am head down and focused on just one project and it’s all I think about until I’m done.

But sometimes that’s not an option (or is it?).

My friend said that to have multiple projects you have to be okay with letting one or more of them be neglected for a time while you work on the others. And, in his experience, coming back to an app and working hard to ship a big update, he often wouldn’t even see a big spike in new sales. So the update wasn’t even worth it all that much in terms of the short term, only.

* * *

Let me start by saying that I don’t know the answer, here. There isn’t one universal rule here. You have to trust your gut and know your situation to make the call if you’re going to keep juggling many projects or if you’re going to let some go to focus on one.

That said, for those of us who have several projects and ideas all going at the same time, how do we juggle them?

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Identify your roles and goals: you need balance in your life, so step back and identify your roles (parent, boss, employee, self-improver, etc.) And make sure that you’re not spending the vast majority of your time in just one of those roles.

  2. Reduce the scope: consider scaling back what “1.0” looks like, so it’s something that is attainable. And consider lowering your bar of perfectionism — my friend Sean McCabe says we ought to aim for 90% complete (instead of 99%).

  3. Reduce your project load: do you have to be doing all the projects right now? Can one or more of them be put on pause? Instead of doing three projects all simultaneously, can you do one at a time? Even on a week-to-week basis?

  4. Get help: consider delegating and/or hiring others to help you.

  5. Learn to say no to your own ideas: In The Focus Course, there is a day dedicated to ideation and strengthening our creative imagination. One of the benefits to this exercise is that you learn you have more ideas than time, and you don’t have to be a slave to your good ideas. We all will have ideas that we want to do, but the existence of them doesn’t mean we are now obligated to flesh them out.

  6. Spend less time on counterfeit rest: things like television, video games, social media, mindless internet surfing — these things can be time sinks. Moreover, they don’t leave us feeling refreshed, motivated, or recharged. You most definitely need breaks and time to rest, but there are some great ways to do it other than zoning out.

  7. Plan ahead: your productive tomorrow starts today. What is one thing you can do now that will improve life for your future self? Go to bed on time, set out your clothes for tomorrow, write down the first thing you’re going to do when you sit down to work in the morning, etc. This will give you a head start on your projects.

How to Get it All Done

Fantastical 2 for Mac  →

Speaking of time management, there’s a new Fantastical app out and, well, it’s fantastic.

I’ve been using Fantastical for Mac since before it shipped, and it is hands down one of my most-used and favorite apps. It’s such an awesome blend of helpful and delightful.

The new version is a serious upgrade. It rocks a very handsome, Yosemity-ified look, a full-on (non-Menu Bar) Calendar app, Calendar sets, and a slew of new features.

Fantastical 2 for Mac is on sale for 20% off right now. If you’re a Fantastical user, it’s a worthwhile upgrade. If you’re new to Fantastical, you’re in for a treat.

Fantastical 2 for Mac

Rescue Time Review

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life’s made of.”

— Benjamin Franklin

* * *

Protip: There are four ways to help yourself avoid squandering time:

  1. Plan ahead (make a schedule)
  2. Awareness of how you tend to spend your time
  3. Accountability
  4. Don’t be dumb

Regarding (1): There are a lot of resources available to help you improve how you spend your time. Heck, I’m building an entire course to help you be more focused and do more meaningful work (and then some).

Regarding (4): well, that’s up to you.

Regarding (2) and (3): There’s an online service called Rescue Time that I think is pretty awesome.

* * *

In the past 8 weeks, I’ve logged more than 400 hours of my time using Rescue Time. They say hindsight is 20/20, and the Rescue Time service is a way to see how you’re actually spending your time. Its insight and data can help you make better decisions about what you do with your day.

In a nut, Rescue Time is an online service that tracks and categorizes how you spend your time. It’s ideal for folks who spend most of their time working from a computer.

You start by signing up on their website. Then you download and install the app to your Mac (they’ve a PC version as well), and then you register the app with your online account.

Once your computer is connected, you create your profile. Rescue Time asks you what your top three most distracting activities are and what your top three most productive activities are.

I put (a) Social Networking, (b) News & Opinion, and (c) Shopping as my top three most distracting activities.

Then I put (a) Reference & Learning, (b) Design & Composition, and (c) Business as my top three most productive activities.

I also asked Rescue Time to prompt me for time spent away from my computer. This way, when I return to my Mac after taking a lunch break, reading break, or going for a run, the Rescue Time app will prompt me to ask what I was doing while I was away.

Rescue Time Prompt

Once your Rescue Time profile is created, you’ll have some default preferences set up for you. The two goals Rescue time starts you with are:

  • More than 2 hours spent daily on your first-listed, most productive activity.
  • Less than 2 hours spent on all of your most-distracting activities combined.

I changed my first goal to be 2 hours spent on writing each day. I feel like all the things which fall into my top 3 categories would easily be accomplished in 2 hours and then some. I wanted to try and have 2 hours focused just on writing itself. This is, for me, my most important thing every day.

Unfortunately, after my first week, I didn’t hit my goal. [Shakes fist in the air.] But it turns out Rescue Time was set to average my goal of 2 hours of writing across a 24/7 schedule. Since I take Saturday and Sunday off, that was messing with my average. So I adjusted the goal to be 2 hours/day between Monday-Friday 6am-8pm. And boom.

Rescue Time Goals

For the first week I tried to log all of my offline time including sleep and personal time in the mornings before sitting down at my desk. That proved to be tedious. So I just stopped logging sleeping hours. I’m not going to try and let Rescue Time keep tabs on all 168 hours of my week, just the ones when I’m at the computer.

It’s been 8 weeks now, and twice I’ve gone in to my Rescue Time dashboard to fine tune the categories and productivity score (between 1-5) of my activities. For example, I do a lot of basic note taking and writing in Simplenote (I’m doing my initial notes for this Rescue Time review right now, in Simplenote). But Rescue Time defaulted to seeing Simplenote as being a Business-related activity, not a writing-related one. Well, I want Simplenote to count toward my 2 hour goal of writing.

This is easily changed when viewing the activity page for Simplenote: I just Edited it and changed what activity category it should fall under. I also changed its level of productivity (on a scale of 1-5 from very distracting to very productive).

The productivity level of each activity contributes to the overall “productivity score” that you receive at the end of the week. Right now for the 8 weeks I’ve been using Rescue Time, my overall productivity score is 79. Which I think is pretty good.

Rescue Time Dashboard

I know there is some margin of error in there. For example, not all the time I spend on Twitter is distracting. But sometimes it is. I suppose that to keep a clear distinction between “productive Twitter” and “distracting Twitter” I could set the twitter.com website as distracting and Tweetbot as productive. But that’s easier said than done when it comes to keeping yourself on track. So I just let Twitter be distracting and try not to be too productive on there lest I feel cheated.

Focus Time

For the paid, Pro level of Rescue Time you can choose to have certain websites blocked. This is called “Get Focused”.

So far as I can tell, when you “Get Focused” it only blocks websites. Which means you can still launch certain apps. So, for instance, twitter.com would be blocked but Tweetbot still works.

(Matt Gemmell has an article about this, and shares about some certain apps that run on your computer and full-on block websites and APIs and apps and more.)

The slight conundrum about Rescue Time’s Get Focused tab is that things like checking Twitter and email are a mixed bag. I often use Twitter for productive work, but also it can be a time sink. So it’s not this one-to-one direct ratio where Twitter equals unproductive every time. But it can be unproductive. And I think having at least a little bit of understanding about how much time I tend to spend on Twitter can be helpful to keep myself on track.

Alerts

When you’ve met a goal you can get an alert, or when you’ve spent too much time on “distracting” activities, you can get an alert. I’ve gotten pretty good at hitting my daily goal of writing for 2 hours, so I don’t get an alert for that. But I get an alert if I spend more than one hour on distracting activities.

Also, Rescue time works with Zapier. I haven’t figured out just how I’m going to exploit this, but it’s awesome nonetheless. You could use it to log your WordPress blog posts, MailChimp email campaigns sent, and who knows what else.

Time Away

As I mentioned earlier, Rescue Time knows when I’m away from my computer via inactivity. Which is awesome and kind-of annoying. When I come back to my Mac, Rescue Time prompts me to categorize the activity I was doing while away.

I can define and set these categories so that my time away options suit my most common time away activities. And I can give a description detail about the time away if I want.

Some other apps I’ve used for time tracking like this don’t do a great job at watching when I’m away. And so they’ll say that I spent 5 hours one day in OmniFocus b/c I left that as the frontmost app when walking away from my computer or something like that.

Since I try to spend a good amount of my time reading and working away from my Mac, I like that I can still log that time and have it count.

Defining “productive”

One thing I don’t like about Rescue Time is how bent it is on office work as the center of everything. I had to go to the Miscellaneous category and create two new sub-categories: one for “Family” and another for “Personal”. And then I had to set those as “Productive” times. Oy.

I’m not sure if Rescue Time assumes I treat family time as non-productive (as if time with my family means time when I’m not doing anything of value) or if they just assume that I don’t take breaks in my day to be with my family.

But for me, I often take breaks in the afternoon and into the evening to be with my kids. (It’s a huge reason why I quit my job 4 years ago to work from home.) But then I may come back to my computer in the evening to wrap up some tasks or work on photos or something. Rescue Time’s default was to log that Family time as uncategorized and neutral. But no way — it’s just as much a valid use of my time as writing is.

So, that said, my biggest gripe against Rescue Time is its bias toward defining productive as “working”. But with a little bit of customizing my reports and categories, I’ve been able to change the definition of Productivity to something more along the lines of “doing what’s important”. (Now that’s what I call meaningful productivity.)

Rescue Time and the Small Wins

And this ties in with something I wrote about a while ago regarding celebrating progress.

Acknowledging our daily progress is a way to strengthen our inner work life. In our efforts to create meaningful work, it can be easy to get lost in the mundaneness of our day-to-day.

And so, one way we can thrive in the midst of the daily chaos is to recognize the few things we did today that made progress on meaningful work or that strengthened an important area of our lives.

When we take the time to celebrate our small victories — to celebrate progress — then we are re-wiring our brain (our thought process) to seek out the reward found in doing meaningful work instead of the quick-fix high we get from putting out meaningless fires and filling our time with busywork.

I’m an advocate of journaling my daily progress as a way to give myself a daily boost of confidence and motivation. Which then impacts my behavior to keep on doing the important work, which leads to better and better results and increased performance.

Rescue Time plays a role here as well. It’s a 3rd-party telling me that I met my daily goals and had a productive day / week. Rescue Time’s report is mostly just the amalgamation of time spent in productive and very productive categories. But since I’ve defined those categories and their level of “productivity” for me, I trust the reports and use them to boost my own motivation.

Having a 3rd-party service track your time may sound crazy to you. But I think it’s worth it, if even for a short season. It’s not always easy to view our habits, workflows, and calendars objectively. But if we can learn about how we spend our time and use that knowledge to rescue even just 15 or 30 minutes a day, wow! That time adds up fast.

As I was getting the links for this article put together, I discovered Rescue Plan has an affiliate program. If you want to sign up for the Pro account, use this link and I get a small kickback. Their free plan is great, too. And a good way to test the waters. Thanks!

Rescue Time Review

NeuBible [iTunes Link]  →

NeuBible has got to be the most well-designed, gorgeous Bible app for the iPhone. It came out just a few days ago and I love it. For years, my go-to iOS Bible app has been ESV Study Bible + which is certainly feature rich, but it’s not delightful and beautiful app.

NeuBible takes a different approach in that the entire experience centers around reading (what a novel idea!). The typography, fluidity, gestures, design elements — everything is simple and considered.

If you’re looking for a power-packed Bible app that has reading plans, commentaries, notes, social sharing, syncing, etc. Then this is not for you.

If, however, you’re looking for a simple, beautiful Bible app that’s built with reading in mind, then this is it. Just $2 on the App Store.

NeuBible [iTunes Link]

Step Out of the Echo Chamber

On a recent edition of The Fight Spot, I wrote about one of the aspects of doing our best creative work: stepping out of the echo chamber.

The dictionary definition of echo chamber is “an enclosed space for producing reverberation of sound.”

An enclosed place where the majority of what you hear is unoriginal (a multi-dimensional repeating of what was once said) and whatever you say is echoed back to you.

Echo Chamber is also a metaphor. Here’s the Wikipedia definition: In media, an echo chamber is a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an “enclosed” system, where different or competing views are censored or disallowed.

By nature, each of us tend to sit in the center of our own echo chamber.

When we get too absorbed in the platform, the new, and the feedback, then the echo chamber becomes the place where we compare ourselves by ourselves. It becomes noisy. Inspiration runs dry. Our creativity gets stifled. We grow cynical and sarcastic. And it serves as an ever-present distraction and pacifier from doing work that matters.

When we look to the echo chamber as our sole source of inspiration, it’s like looking to a bag of chips for our sole source of nourishment. The constant barrage of our timelines and inboxes — those “little updates” — are like snacks and junk food. They will fill you up but they are not a significant form of nourishment.

How can you become a voice — how can you provide something original, unique, and valuable — when all your inputs are unoriginal echoes?

The inspiration and motivation needed for your best creative work will not come from the echo chamber.

  • Limit your feeds and inboxes. Subscribe only to the people and sources of input that enrich your life and give you the motivation and tools to do your best creative work.

  • Seek out inspiration from offline sources. Such as books, nature, conferences, silence, prayer and meditation, relationships, journaling, building your own projects, etc.

  • Create something every day. Write in your journal, come up with 10 ideas, take a photograph, draw a sketch, etc.

  • Curate what you share. Be a source of motivation, encouragement, and equipping to those who follow you. Put thought into the work you publish. Even your tweets and Facebook updates can be nuggets that motivate, equip, and encourage.

A Challenge to You

At some point this week, do one of these things:

  1. Unsubscribe from one RSS feed or email newsletter, or unfollow one person on Twitter or Facebook.

(You should feel free to unsubscribe from my site / newsletter / unfollow me on Twitter — if what I am writing isn’t helpful to you at this time, or isn’t providing you with the motivation and tools to do your best creative work, then cut it out. You only have so much time, and the last thing I want is to be a non-helpful source of input in your day.)

  1. Take 15 minutes to find inspiration from an offline source. Read a chapter from a favorite book, put your phone in another room and just sit in silence, take a walk outside, etc.

  2. Create something. Write a journal entry, take a photograph, draw something, come up with 10 ideas for little ways you can show your friends and family how much you love them (you don’t even have to act on the 10 ideas you come up with).

  3. Do something to encourage or equip someone else.

Before you move on from this article, decide which one of the above challenges you’re going to do and make a time in your week for when you’re going to do it.

Step Out of the Echo Chamber

Meaningful Productivity

Is the stay-at-home dad who spends most of his day changing diapers and cleaning up messes any less productive than his wife who is the CEO of a charity organization?

Productivity tends to be defined by how well we use our task management systems, how organized our calendar app is, how fast we can blaze through a pile of emails, and how fluidly we flow from one meeting to the next. But those metrics can skew toward rewarding effective busywork while giving little dignity to meaningful work.

What if we started defining productivity differently?

Less focus on our party trick of balancing many plates at once.

More focus on consistently giving our time and attention to the things which are most important.

Meaningful Productivity

“The Watch is Coming”  →

Apple’s updated website for the Watch has all the details we’ve been speculating about for the past several months. Like shipping date (pre-orders begin April 10, ships on April 24th), battery life (18 hours), the price of the Edition (starts at $10,000 and goes up to $17,000 depending on the bands), that yes, you can buy individual bands, and more.

Also, on the Apple Watch website, there’s a weekly blog by Christy Turlington Burns tracking where she’ll be writing about how she’s using her Apple Watch to train and prepare for the London marathon.

“The Watch is Coming”

How to Recharge  →

Just in time for the weekend, here is this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly. And today’s topic? Rest. Defined as time taken to relax, refresh, and/or recover strength.

I believe the reason people dislike Mondays is because they wasted the 48 hours in their weekend — they didn’t get any true rest, and thus never recharged. They are more worn out on Monday morning than they were on Friday evening. On this week’s episode, I talk about a thing I call “counterfeit rest”. What are tiny little things we could do to break our habits of resting poorly, and thus give ourselves more energy (mentally, physically, and emotionally)?

How to Recharge

The Foolish Crowd

When Ray Bradbury was first staring out as a writer, he thought the path to success was to do what everyone else was doing. He found inspiration in other people’s work, but he lacked originality. It wasn’t until later in his career that he began to discover what he called the truths beneath his skin and behind his eyes.

Last Wednesday on The Fight Spot, I wrote about removing ourselves from the Echo Chamber. An echo chamber is “an enclosed space for producing reverberation of sound.”

Have you ever felt that you’re spending too much time in an enclosed place where the majority of what you hear is unoriginal and whatever you say is echoed back to you?

When we get too absorbed in things like the platform, the analytics, the new, and the feedback, then the echo chamber becomes the place where we compare ourselves by ourselves. It’s noisy. Inspiration runs dry. Our creativity gets stifled. We grow cynical and sarcastic. We lose motivation for doing meaningful work; it serves as an ever-present distraction and pacifier from doing work that matters.

* * *

I’m going to ask you a question. And I want you to answer honestly.

Don’t answer to me or to your peers. Don’t answer with what you think you should say. Take a breath and answer honestly to yourself.

Okay, here’s the question:

Do you want to do work that matters?

Pause for a moment.

Think about it.

Okay. One more question:

Are you willing to be foolish?

Pause for a moment.

Think about it.

Are you willing to be foolish in order to do work that matters? Are you willing to fail? To be honest with others? Are you willing to create something even when life is still messy? Are you willing to take risks? Are you willing to put your work out there even when you’re afraid it might not work? Are you willing to try something different than what everyone else is doing because your gut says “why not”? Are you willing to make space in your schedule so you can show up and create something every day?

In our heart, we say, “Yes!” Then we tell ourselves we’ll start tomorrow.

Most of us want to do work that matters. But most of us don’t want to be foolish. At least, not right now. Or, we’re okay with being foolish so long as it’s calculated, planned out, polished, and then distilled down to the lowest common denominator until it’s so insipid it couldn’t possibly be confused as foolishly original.

Here’s a tip: it’s easier to be foolish and to take risks when you are surrounded by people who are also being foolish and taking risks.

If you want to do work that matters, then run from the risk averse and put yourself right in the middle of the foolish crowd.

How can you become a voice — how can you provide something original, unique, and valuable — when all your inputs are unoriginal echoes?

The Foolish Crowd