Maintaining Motivation
Jason Santa Maria realized some new challenges when he started working from home. The solutions that he found for these problems are good for all of us, however—even those who aren’t self-employed and/or working from home.

What Was That Keyboard Shortcut?
Michael Hyatt was one of my inspirations for making my decision to buy an iBook. Since I am still a relatively new Mac OS X user, I’m still looking for ways to be more productive. As with any notebook computer keyboard shurtcuts are much faster than the trackpad. KeyCue is a great tool to help one learn those Mac Keyboard shortcuts. If they can develop a Windows version it may become one of the greatest productivity apps ever.

Be A More Productive Blogger
Keith Robinson says that the biggest reason for his blog success is that he “writes fast”. I remember Isaac Asimov saying that he wrote fast too. Although I type at a decent speed, I don’t write very fast. I may never be able todo anything about that, but at least the other thirteen suggestions that he presents may prove to be useful. I’ve printed this out and put it in my tickler file so I will see it periodically.

How to avoid crying when chopping onions
Ok, I’ve seen this article referenced in so many places this week. This actually seems like a lot of unnecessary work. My mom taught me an easier way back when I was probably in about 5th grade or so. Just don’t talk while cutting the onion! This has worked great for me for years. It seems that as long as our mouth is closed during the cutting process that there are no tears. Let me know if this works for you.

Effective Online Forum Usage
Steve Pavlina talked about his previous discussion board addiction this week and referenced an article he had written some time back called, “Effective Online Forum Usage.” Hey, I’ve been there and done that myself. I probably need to apply some of this to my blog reading now. Don’t think you have an Internet addiction? Denial may be a sign of addiction.

Got a minute? Get Something Done!
Bert Webb over at Open Loops talked this week about being prepared to make use of those very small windows of time. Available time is one of David Allen’s criteria for choosing actions in the moment (context, time available, energy available, and priority). I will frequently look over the list for my current context and ask myself, “Which of these can I knock out between now and the x number of minutes I have before such and such meeting?” In addition to the items that Bert mentions, I would also add that those of us who carry PDAs need to always keep some reading material on there so that we can take advantage of the opportunity of a small amount of time when it arises. I will frequently sync eZines and email newsletters to my Palm—I find these better for small amounts of time than a full book. The short articles in most of these are perfect for enlightening myself while, for example, I’m waiting for my wife to try on something in a clothing store dressing room. Right now, I’m reading previous 48Days.com newsletters.

Personal Quotas

A lot of the things that make us productive are just little tricks. Back on April 14th Steve Pavlina challenged us all with his 30 Days to Success post. In this post he suggested that we implement new habits by seeing them as trial software installations. We try them for 30 days and if they don’t work out we can “uninstall” them. This is a great concept. I’ve used this technique before myself, but never put in the trialware framework. Great blending, Steve!

All too often, on the computer, I will install the trial version of some new software, spend a few minutes playing with it and then not get back to it until the trial period has expired. I think that to get the maximum benefit from a 30 day trial of “life software”, or trying new habits in your life, you need to also do a “personal quota” like he mentions in this post from May 19th. This provides the framework to insure that we actually make every effort possible to make our new habit trial a success.

Why do they call them radio buttons, dad?

I’ve been developing web sites for about 7 years now. I’ve always used radio buttons and never given much thought to why they are called radio buttons. I guess I always assumed that it was because they were round in shape. In fact, I found it a little confusing when I first started Palm development and my radio buttons were rectangular. In this post Eric Mack makes things so much clearer, and takes me back to my childhood years as well.

Getting Things Done With “Delete”

Keith Robinson just started his blog called “To-Done—Working to Live” this month. I think we’ll see some real good stuff there. This article already caught my attention.

When I check my email inbox, the first thing I do is delete a bunch of stuff. If I processed straight from the top down, and actually opened everything, I wouldn’t have time to do it all. Spam and viruses are a real problem. A good portion of the mail I do open is deleted as well. He talks about carrying this over to other areas of our life and getting rid of thing we don’t need. I’m pretty good with this as well. For example, with so many good Bible study tools now online, I’ve donated my Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and a ton of other Bible reference books to our church library. I try to keep a good check on my closet and donate any clothes that I no longer wear for whatever reason. This minimalist appreach certainly helps me to keep the main thing the main thing.

I would like to take his thought a step further, however. In the Getting Things Done methodology David Allen presents a “Four Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment” to determine what we should be doing at any particular time. I use a “deletion principle” similar to what Keith mentions here to apply David’s model.

I start out by printing out my task list. Because of my deletion process I find it easier to work my next action list when it is on paper and I can see everything. I have 3 contexts that I primarily use: @home, @work, and @errands. Most of my @work stuff can be done at any time while at work, but some of the stuff requires special circumstances (context). For example, I might have an item for today to talk to my boss about something. I want to keep it visible, but I know that he isn’t anywhere around, so I remove it from the possibilities of stuff that I can do right now.

Once I’ve removed stuff that I can’t do right now I look at the amount of time that I have. I may have several things that will require 2 to 4 hours to accomplish. If I only have 45 minutes before a meeting, I can’t do any of those, so I will scratch them off as possibilities. With the items that are left, I scratch off a few more just because I don’t have the energy for them. This hopefully brings me down to just a few things. From there I can remove a few more because they just aren’t a very high priority. This systematic “deletion” process allows me to work on items for which I have the right context, time, energy, and priority. Those few items must therefore be the best thing for me to work on at that particular time.

Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki

This LifeHacker post brought me back to a cool little program that I first discovered a few months ago, but didn’t give it much thought at the time. I love client-side JavaScript and I’m amazed at the stuff that other developers are doing with it now. The original TiddlyWiki by Jeremy Ruston is a great example. It runs entirely in a browser, offers a lot of potential and power—you can make changes from the web interface and then save it to any file system of your choosing. The latest TiddlyWiki offshoot, GTD TiddlyWiki by Nathan Bowers has captured the interest of a lot of people in the GTD community. I must admit that I spent far too much time playing with this last night. (In my defense, I had a headache so I probably wouldn’t have gotten much else productive done either so this wasn’t a complete waste of time.)

If there was some way that I could synchronize this to a Palm application, I think it would be perfect for me. I would want to be able to make changes to it on my Palm as well however. At this point, it’s output isn’t even usable as a read-only option. (I tried saving it to my card and opening it with WebPro.) I could probably write some kind of “Export to HTML Flat File” feature for it which I could read via iSilo on the Palm, but even that only gets me half way. I mentioned on the GTD_Palm Yahoo Group a couple weeks ago that I could really use something that I could store on a remote web server and synchronize with my Palm. I can see how this tool could be that if someone created some synchronization routines that would work with it. This application is definitely something to keep your eyes on.

Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday)

I previously blogged about How I Use Opera’s Built-in RSS Aggregator. After getting my iBook I decided to install Thunderbird and try it as an email client instead of Outlook. I realized that Thunderbird also had a built in RSS-Aggregator. I set up some feeds and quickly realized that I actually liked it about as good as the one in Opera—that was until I read this post on the Linkhacker site.

The article provided such a detailed description of the Bloglines service that I decided to try it out. That was Wednesday night. It has everything that I had been wanting in an RSS aggregtor: full text from the RSS feed; inclusion of all posts since I subscribed (not just what is currently in the feed); capability to save particular posts; ability to see how many unread posts I have for each site; easy feed subscribing; web based so I don’t have to always use one particular machine to know what I have and haven’t read. I may disocover other needs later, but for now this fits my needs perfectly. I would love to see more detailed articles like this for other online services.

Revolving workflow strategies

Chris Murtland presents some strategies for attacking your next actions list(s): alternate projects, big chunks of time on certain projects, complete as many small items as possible, oldest first, newest first, squeaky wheel, and goal driven. I actually use these myself, I had just never really thought about it as organized as this. Usually I will take the first hour or two each morning and try to complete as many items as possible. This gets a lot of small things off my list and gets me going for the bigger things. Then for the rest of the day I try to focus big chunks of time on certain projects. If I have time during processing I will sometimes try the newest first approach. A couple times a month I try to hit the oldest first. If I have a really long stretch of time to use I will use the alternate projects approach to make at least a little progress on everything on my current projects list. I try not to use the squeaky wheel strategy too often, but sometimes you just have to drop everything and deal with the complainers.

I would add at least a couple more to this list: what am I most resisting? I got this one from Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play by Mark Forster; and the converse of that what do I most want to do.

Park on a downhill slope

Merlin Mann’s post goes quite well with the post above by Chris. We often use the phrase “when I get to a stopping point.” It can be quite useful to stop before we get to a stoppping point—right in the middle of the road! This way when we come back to what we were working on we don’t have to establish new momentum.

Have a great weekend everyone!