Over the next few weeks, we will be making some changes to the organization and focus of this site. The first major change is that we are doing away with the blog. Consequently, this will be the last post here. Instead, we will be doing posting within the topic areas in the forums.  You should head on over there and take a look!

UPDATE: The blog and forum will be on hiatus for the summer. Please register for the forum and watch for an update in October. We are going to have some really exciting stuff, including coverage of Stephen Smith’s trip to SOBCon Colorado – some real work.life.creativity!

I’m sure some of you have used time-tracking methods to see how you use your time. I’ve never done that, personally. Sure, I’ve tracked time spent on projects at work my entire professional life, since a designer essentially rents out billable time. But I’ve never done it at home or in my personal life.

A few weeks ago, I read in Matthew Cornell’s newsletter about the concept of big chunks and little chunks. The main thing I got from it was that some days you feel like you got nothing done because you never did any of the big tasks you wanted to do. But you got a lot of little things done.

Now that my life has changed and I’ve had the biggest role-change ever: I lost my job 2 months ago, my wife went back to work, and I am now a stay-at-home dad who is hunting for freelance design work to do when the baby is sleeping or when the wife is at home. At the end of the day I feel discouraged because I haven’t tackled any of the big projects I’ve been meaning to tackle.

So what I want to do is start keeping a simple log of what I do every day. Just jot down what time I started doing something, whether it’s big or small. It can be something business-related like making follow-up phone calls, or it could be a household chore like sweeping the kitchen.

Have you ever done anything like this? How did it help? What did you find out? Share in this thread in the WLC forums.

Recently I’ve been inspired by our own Patrick Rhone’s new Minimal Mac project, wherein he (and a host of contributors) post about different ways to simplify your Macintosh experience as well as how easy it is to simplify that experience. I’ve taken steps to simplify things on my own Mac, things like eliminating Widgets, menubar icons, Dock icons, and the like.

One thing that has bugged me over the past year or two is the volume of RSS feeds that keeps piling up. If you’re like me, you add more and more feeds to your feed reader (mine is Google Reader). And eventually the volume of feeds gets to be too much. I know some people get as many in one day as I get in one week and are fine with that, so I can’t say there’s a “magic number” for the maximum or minimum number of posts that can be read without it becoming unwieldy. The bottom line is, you have to be aware of your own limits, and know where stress sets in for you.

I know some people go so far as to divide up their RSS Feeds into different categories based on topic. Personally, I divide mine up into six folders:

• 1st Tier: Things I really want to read
• 2nd Tier: Things I want to read, but not as badly as the top tier. Strangely enough, this is the shortest list.
• 3rd Tier: Things I want to read, but not as badly as the previous two.
• people: Friends and family members’ blogs
• personal: blogs I run or otherwise have a stake in
• read when time permits: Stuff I can live without reading, and usually view in list mode, after which I usually hit “Mark all as read” after skimming the headines. Many of these post way more often than I’d like.

As I typically read my feeds about once a week in one one-or two-hour session, I’m thinking about changing how I go about my RSS feed consumption. So, over the past few weeks, I have begun pruning ruthlessly, eliminating items from Google Reader that I know I don’t have much interest in reading anymore. It’s like when you realize you no longer read a particular magazine you subscribe to: you may feel a little sad that you’re parting with a dear old friend, but relieved that you’re letting go of something you no longer really pay attention to, thus freeing up more attention to devote to what you really care about. You lose that “Ugh, one more thing I have to read” mentality when it crosses your mental threshold one more time.

So, in the forums, I have 3 questions for you:

1. What’s your strategy for dealing with RSS feed overload?
2. How often do you review your RSS feeds (if you do that sort of thing), and how long does it take you?
3. Finally, how do you decide when to let those feeds go?

Fire away.

Greetings to all of our gracious WLC blog and forum readers. We are truly grateful that you are taking the time to make WLC a better place. We envisioned this place being a hub for productive talk and tips and tidbits that can help you out every day.

It has been quite awhile since I last posted a blog post here at WLC. Things happen and this blog kept sliding down my list of priorities. Hopefully that has all changed and I will be here every two weeks with some insight that I hope you find helpful.

One of the things that has led me back into blogging (both here and my regular gigs at Black Belt Productivity and 1-Man IT Department) is that I have taken a long look at my areas of focus (GTD’s 20,000 level),  and gotten them straightened out so that I can be more productive. I have identified a number of areas in my life that I need to pay more regular attention to in the future and ‘Blogger‘ is one of the main areas that was lacking and I would like to remedy.

My biggest ‘Blogger‘ goal is to be able to network with others in relevant other areas in my life. I really want to try to better myself in a number of different ways and creating a network of like minded individuals is the best way that I can think of doing that. Sitting down with a piece of paper (or blank text document on your computer) and thinking about all of the areas that you are responsible for is really empowering.  It showed me that I was being pulled in many different directions and not succeeding at any of them. Now, before I make any commitments, I look at where it falls in relation to other areas (father, husband, IT professional, baseball coach to name a few) and make a much more informed decision.

I am hoping that this will allow me to plan better in all facets of my life. To be able to sit down and plan out blog topics for here or at BBP (with Jason) will hopefully result in better content from all of us. I would like to use it to hopefully branch out into a couple of areas that I have never attempted before, but suddenly have the urge to try.

What areas in your life are you struggling with? Have you had a planning session on how you might want to remedy that?  Take it to the blog and see what other WLC members think!

This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama

Hi everyone. This post is not about dictating rules, but about how rules affect the enjoyment of our lives. I love how the posts here at WLC encourage us to examine ourselves. Hopefully this will stimulate some thoughts that you will be excited to share in the forum.

Rules Are Not Bad, They Are Part of Life

We are surrounded by rules, many of which help us. Rules are created to increase order, predictability, and reliability. Driving within the lines on the road helps everyone travel faster and safer. Being aware of the rules of any game enables you to create a strategy to reach your anticipated future.

Without rules, there is no way to tell what you can do or what you can expect. Rules help us concentrate, so we can get somewhere and make progress. Rules become problematic when we become concentrated in an area we do not like.

Sometimes rules hold us back. In order to increase predictability and reliability, rules sometimes make sure that you do not go anywhere. When we are unable to move to where we want to go, we become frustrated and stop enjoying the rules.

The Revolutionary Changes the Game, Not Abolish It

We often do not notice the rules that move us forward because we enjoy the game. However, we do notice the rules that hold us back because they cause friction in our lives. This friction causes us to desire rejecting all rules (especially in the name of freedom).

It is easy to be met with rules we do not like and give up on the game. We become disengaged from our own life and seek an escape. We may imagine being another person or even dream of a better life for ourselves. Dreaming is a wonderful thing, but are we pursuing our dreams or do we keep them off in the distance?

When met with rules we do not like, we look to creativity to turn them into rules we do like. A common rule in Monopoly is collecting a bonus when you land on free parking. It is not an “official” rule, but so many people use it because it makes the game more enjoyable. When we enjoy the game that is our life, we become more engaged and invested in ourselves.

Remember that rules just serve to concentrate you. Changing where you play may lead to increasing your enjoyment. Maybe you do not know what makes your life enjoyable, so you need to define rules. Maybe there are rules holding you back; is there a hidden path around them? Maybe there is no way around and you need to grind; can you create a meta-rule (like “see how many tasks can I finish in an hour”) to make it enjoyable?

Is there a rule that is preventing you from enjoying your life? Maybe some individuals in the forums can offer a creative solution. Or maybe you have already found a creative solution that made your life better and you want to share it with us in the forum.

This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama, owner of WhiteHatBlackBox, which has been featured in Lifehacker.com for its free paper-based productivity tools.

Part of the idea behind this community is to share thoughts and ideas about the things we do. Today I would like to share my own personal thoughts on my Productivity (yes, with a capital P) practice. Not the nuts-and-bolts of how it works, that is what you can find at my own blog, rather I’d like to share and discuss the “why” and the “what’s in it for me”.

My own personal approach to achieving a productive workflow practice is not to find a way to force my nose down to the grindstone and crank, crank, crank my way through a never-ending list of tasks and obligations. Nor is it my desire to create a series of lists and sub-lists that I can scan for something to work on based upon the time of day and where I happen to be sitting, like some sort of choose your own adventure story.

Rather, my goal is to be able to manage and maintain a capture & filter system that allows me to quickly sort & identify the urgent and the important tasks that will require my full attention. “Cranking Widgets” is no longer the source of any personal satisfaction for me. Instead, I have chosen to lovingly hand-craft the widgets that I choose to make.

Is Everything Work?

In the introduction to his latest book, “Making It All Work“, David Allen writes:

“…any number of techniques and tools are available to help us get organized, manage our time, and be more efficient. What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of, and effective model for, the dynamics of the process as a whole – a way to make it all work.”

The first time that I read this I took it to mean that there is some sort of global system of processes that can me wrapped around every aspect of our lives, not only our work but our home and families as well. The more I thought about this idea, the more it bothered me. This concept, in my own personal opinion, goes against much of what the founders of this very forum wrangled with as we were creating it.

“What is the point?” we asked ourselves and each other, “Why are we doing this?” Part of the answer was “to create a community where people can share ideas”, and another part of the answer had to do with applying creativity to our work and to our lives so that both could be full and rewarding. To be able to avoid having our work encroach on our lives.

It’s About Being Done

As you can see in the tagline at the top of this page, we believe that Life is not about making everything into Work – to be managed and processed, instead we believe that we should be using our powers of creativity and innovation to enhance our life and our work. These two realms may have some overlap but they are distinctly different.

They require different approaches. As anyone who has ever tried to manage a spouse or child as if they were an employee can tell you, using the same approach to both is a difficult proposition.

Getting my Work done, as efficiently and effectively as possible, allows me to close the office door and go into the living room and start on my Life. I practice my productivity principles while I am working so that I can stop working. So that I can live my life without worrying about work.

It’s about being done.

Share your thoughts in the forum [link].

Several of you here at work.life.creativity. know that I lost my job last month. The economy took it’s toll on the company I was working for. Since I got laid off, I’ve been at home most of the time, when I haven’t been working with BarCamp Nashville 2009 to get it ready for October (which has really been great, since I’ve had the time to focus on it and meet some really rockstar people.)

But now that I’m home all the time, it seems like I have even _less_ time on my hands than I did before. Of course, a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that I have a seven-month-old around whose little finger I am wrapped. So I am not able to get much done between her naps, and naptime gets shorter and shorter. In about six months, she’ll be down to one nap a day.

So I am trying to figure out the best way to manage my time so that I can still get a lot of stuff done. I have freelance gigs to hunt down and work on, fine art to do, and then household duties as well as taking care of my family. I’ve thought about coming up with a sort of block schedule much like a school schedule, where for a blocked off segment of time I work on a designated area of my responsibilities. A few years ago, I read about graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s “Year Without Clients,” where he took a year-long sabbatical from client projects. (Of course, he taught class at SVA like one or two nights a week, but other than that he wasn’t doing anything.) He found that his time was being spent doing chores, and not exploring graphic design problems like he had wanted to during his sabbatical. So he went and made a school-like schedule, where he would, for example, experiment with Photoshop from 9 to 11 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or visit galleries on Thursday afternoons, and so forth.

It seems that having some sort of structure to work within helps us be more productive and really do what we want to do. So I wonder if taking that sort of approach would help me accomplish what I want to accomplish.

If you work in an unstructured environment, or if you’re at home all the time, how do you make sure you get done what you want to accomplish? Share over in the forums.

I recently to decided to call it quits on one of my favorite hobbies and activities…blogging regularly about being more productive on the Linux desktop. It was a long, hard decision to make, but I really think that it was the right thing to do. Here are just a few reasons that I decided to hang it up:

It was taking up a lot of mental RAM that I wanted to use elsewhere. When you run a semi-professional blog, there’s always a certain pressure to post at least semi-frequently and to stay on top of the news in your field. As it turned out, keeping tabs on all the great software releases for Linux and the latest developments on the desktop was taking up a lot of my mental cycles…mental cycles I ultimately decided I’d rather be using thinking about some things that just more important to me right now…like my Master’s thesis. I was thinking about my blog way more than I really wanted to.

The amount of time I was spending on the project was time I really needed to be spending doing other things. Don’t get me wrong…I love writing about Linux and connecting with the community through blogging, and I derived an immense sense of satisfaction from it. But RSS feeds, post planning and writing, and site maintenance were taking up time that I ultimately concluded would be better spent on activities more vital to the spiritual, emotional, and physical health of myself and my family. On a good week, my blog took up about four hours of time…that’s now been translated into about 3 hours of exercise per week with my wife, and an extra hour of reading material that pertains to my career field.

That kind of actvity just didn’t fit in with my life plan or lifestyle anymore. At one point, I was looking at working in technology/web business as part of my career plan. That has since changed. My life circumstances are different now…when I started blogging, I was working part-time at a pizza place and finishing up my under-graduate courses. Now, I’m entrenched in very time-consuming graduate work, working in my chosen career field, and planning for a baby. As much as I enjoyed what I was doing while it lasted, I’m now just as happy to being using that time to better prepare myself for my job, or work on the nursery with my wife.

All this isn’t to say I’ve given up my hobby completely…I’ve just removed all pressure from myself for it to be anything but a hobby. It’s now something I do as I have time, when I feel like, no pressure at all. To that end I placed my branded Linux blog on indefinite hiatus (who knows, maybe I’ll be able and willing to take it back up in a year or two) and moved all of my blogging activities (Linux and otherwise) to my personal blog.

Have you ever had to cut something substantial and important to you from your regular activities? How did you decided to call it quits? Share in the forums.

Photo Credit: cosmonautirussi

For the past 24 years, I have been volunteering with groups that produce computing standards.  We did good things, albeit slowly.  But that’s the nature of these groups – it’s hard to get good help; it’s even harder to get good free help!  Being a fan of productivity, I usually tried to impose some structure and process on the group in the hopes that it would get things done more predictably.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.   There’s a saying in the computer industry – “Managing programmers is like herding cats”.  It’s more or less accurate.

My epiphany about this sort of work came in 1990, when I was charged with “project managing” a collection of these volunteer groups in a formal way.  Now, in retrospect, that was just insane.  These are creative, passionate people who were trying to do their best to develop “standards” for the computer industry.  Most of them are doing it in their free time. Many with no support from their employers at all!  How can you “manage” a group of people that not only doesn’t report to you, they don’t even get compensated or reviewed based upon their performance?

My answer?  You cannot.  The creative process isn’t one that can be managed. It doesn’t work on a schedule.  You can’t say “today you three people will write a symphony” and expect a result that is anything other than noise.  I expect this is true across the board when working with creative people.  It takes as long as it takes.  We will sell no wine before its time.  Just because a saying is trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true!

So, getting back to my epiphany, I realized that my job as a manager wasn’t to try to ‘herd the cats’ so much as to manage the expectations of the people who were waiting for the output (I will spare you extending the metaphor to what cats might output).  Sure, we had schedules; but those schedules were guidelines, not deadlines.  It is important that in work, and in life, we make room for the creative process.  So I would continually update MY managers with progress reports, and in each report change the targets.  Sometimes they got earlier, usually they got later.  I stopped pressuring the creative people to create on a schedule.  As a result, we delivered better, more mature, well thought out products.

So that’s my message for today.  Whether we are talking about your real job, or your real life, or something you do in your free time that is neither work nor life, don’t forget that if a task requires creativity, it almost never gets done “on time”.  The creative process is one that is impossible to predict.  If your boss tells you to write a paper and have it done in an hour, push back a little.  If you are the boss, don’t set unreasonable constraints on creative tasks.  Even if you are doing something as simple as making a bird house with your child, don’t just set aside an hour.  Do it until you are both happy you created something!  And along the way, revel in the knowledge that you are doing it until you get it right, not just until time ran out.

How do you make time for the creative process?  Let’s talk about it in the forums?

Lately being productive has been a struggle. Maybe it’s because my schedule is much more relaxed than usual during the the summer months, or perhaps it’s because of some added stress coming from various sources…or maybe I’m just being lazy . Whatever the cause, I’ve found that how productive I am over the course of the day really depends on how I start things out.

I’ve noticed that if I shrug off the first few items on my plan for the day, I’m much less like to do any of it. If I just discipline myself enough to do the first few items though, I usually come pretty close to getting everything done. After that initial moment of decision to be productive, motivation just doesn’t seem that hard to come by.

So right now, starting my day out right is the biggest challenge for me. It’s not that I don’t want to get things done…in fact, most of the “tasks” on my list are things I truly enjoy (working on my master’s thesis, for example). It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to actually sit down and get started.

A few things I’ve implemented to help myself get off the ground in the mornings:

• I’ve been trying to establish a very regular routine: Get up, eat breakfast, morning meditation, start my tasks.

• I try to make my first task small and easy to complete.

• I’ve been making my second task my biggest one for the day, usually working on my thesis. Once I’ve completed my goal for the day there, everything else seems a bit more manageable.

How do you make sure you get off to a productive start each day? Share your thoughts and experiences in the forums.

Photo Credit: FreeWine