This post will attempt to be short and to the point for reasons that will become obvious in a few sentences. I recently came across a link to a post on Marty Nemko’s Website. It asked a simple question – Do you talk too much?. He provides a few basic questions to see if you fit into that category and tips to, well, learn how to shut up.

The Verdict for me? Guilty!

Everyone who knows me knows I can be, um, shall we say “wordy”. The post certainly made me a bit more mindful of this.

That said, It also got me to thinking a bit further on this idea. One of the things that I think makes Twitter so magical is the restraint of having 140 characters at a time to express oneself. It literally forces you to think about not only what your are going to say but also how to express that idea in as simple and brief a way as possible.

How do we incorporate Twitter style restraints into our daily lives? I know there are many times I could say the same amount of information in 140 characters that I often tend to do in 140 paragraphs. Perhaps one way to conquer the “blah, blah, blah” is to, before speaking, think about how you would tweet the same thing. 

See, there I go again, blathering on like some village idiot. Enough already. Perhaps there are other ways to make Twitter like restraints work for the better in the real world. Have some ideas? Come share them in the forums.

I had a very interesting discussion with a friend of mine on Saturday morning. We haven’t been able to keep in touch as much as we would have liked, especially with the way that 2008 ended for my own family. So we took some time to catch up, talk about how our businesses were going, and how we could work together in the future.

She happens to have a great deal of experience working with people who have ADD and chronic disorganization problems, and our conversation veered off into that territory in short order. It was a very profitable discussion, since I was able to “step back” and look at some of the things that had happened last year and how to avoid them in 2009. I have written about this before, but I believe that this is probably a good time to bring it up again:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective ADD Adults

First, let me start with the qualification that ADD and ADHD and other “Attention Inconsistency” difficulties are real, and that I am not a doctor. I struggle with this situation daily, sometimes I do well, other days are less than excellent.

These practices and this outlook work fairly well for me, your mileage may vary.

In order to get the most from the positive aspects of the ADD mind, such as creativity, originality, it is important to do our best to stay away from those things that make ADD a “negative” aspect of our lives. While many ADD adults resist structure, the truth is that our minds crave it. The secret is to discover a structure that engages our imagination, encourages our creativity, and is flexible enough for our individuality.

From the book Delivered from Distraction by Dr. Edward Hallowell, here is a list of “recurring qualities” of adults that are able to harness the positive power of their Attention Deficit Disorder.

1. Do what you’re good at. Don’t spend too much time to get good at what you’re bad at (You did enough of that in school).
2. Delegate what you’re bad at to others, as often as possible.
3. Connect your energy to a creative outlet.
4. Get well enough organized to achieve your goals. The key here is “well enough”. That doesn’t mean you have to be very well organized at all – just well enough organized to achieve your goals.
5. Ask for and heed advice from people you trust – and ignore, as best you can, the dream-breakers and finger-waggers.
6. Make sure you keep up regular contact with a few close friends.
7. Go with your positive side. Even though you have a negative side, make decisions and run your life with your positive side.

When it comes to getting organized, a terrific weakness of the ADD adult, David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a pretty good solution. Why “pretty good”? Because the GTD program can easily spin out of control, due to a major weakness of the ADD Adult: trying new things. I have spent a lot of time and energy on trying out new applications, new methods, this gadget and that filing system. It took a major change in my life and circumstances for me to pare my workflow practice down to the essentials and accomodate my own particular needs.

For example, I am addicted to (or have a fetish for) blank notebooks. Always have. So I have embraced it. I have given up on using a software-based GTD system and I manage the larger portion of it in my notebooks. What a relief!

This list is not just for work. I have personally found this list to be extremely helpful in utilizing the beneficial aspects of my own ADD.

1. If you are not good at something, give it two chances. The possibility that you just got distracted the first time is strong. After that, keep trying new things. You will be pleasantly surprised at how many things you can be good at, you just didn’t know it. The key is to keep at it, for the downside of ADD is that you may get distracted before you are able to get enough practice in. This is one of the instances where setting up a routine can be helpful.
2. Delegating can be hard, but it is very important. The good news is that GTD provides you with a system for keeping track of what you are Waiting For. Slogging away at tasks that you hate to do, or are not very competent at, can be a huge source of frustration. People with ADD have a very low tolerance for frustration, and these activities are to be avoided.
3. Being creative is one of my greatest joys. I love hacking notebooks, building models, and keeping my journal/”morning pages”. Find The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, it is packed with tips and strategies to increase your creativity and boost your productivity. Keep your journal and a capture notebook handy. Looking back through these notes and journal entries is a good way of spotting trends in your behavior, saving good ideas from being lost, and tracking your progress to success during your Weekly Review.
4. Your GTD practice can be as detailed or as unstructured as you need. My own system continues to evolve as I discover areas that need more attention, and those that need less. My Tickler File is one of the most important tools for assisting my fleeting memory. And I am not alone: so many others are new to the GTD Community, and they are posting away on what works for them and what does not.
5. Join the work.life.creativity Community for advice from people that you can trust. There are quite a few very powerful resources for getting personal assistance from others who practice GTD or other organizational systems who will help you because they enjoy helping others.
6. Keeping in contact with close friends is one of the hardest for me personally. I tend to blow through my days without stopping to check in with any of my friends. Until they call or email me. My wife has been a big help in reminding me to call people, and I use my Tickler File for sending myself a note to catch up with people too. In spite of not being “close” with my friends I am able to pick up right where we left off.
7. I have always been a very positive person, confident that everything will be just fine. It has helped me get through some very tough times when I could have listed the negatives and become depressed. “Always look on the bright side” may sound like the corniest of cliches, but it is an impressive tool that you can use to control your ADD over the long-term.

I have saved the most important tip for last, an Eighth Habit if you will: Don’t get discouraged. You can harness the power of your ADD mind in special ways, ways that you may not yet have discovered. Keep working at it and never tell yourself “I can’t“. If you do find something that is nearly impossible for you to do, do not be afraid to ask for help. You will never regret it.

Recently I was browsing through reference materials I have for blogging for Mysterious Flame (Yeah, I know, I need to write more stuff there and on my personal blog) and found a piece I had printed out way back in 2006 — the publish date is 9/22/05 – entitled “Notes On Making Art.” (You may have seen it before, since Merlin over at 43Folders evidently linked to it.) The author, Sven, mentioned he had been reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a book I can easily recommend to many people. Sven blows through ten things that stick out for him in the book, and there are two main themes that emerge in his notes:

1. Jump in and don’t edit yourself or your work
2. Keep moving; work quickly

The note that really stands out for me is point number 8:

Work fast. Creativity is exciting. If you’re not judging while you’re making, then you can just throw things together as fast as your mind can move. You’re smart; if you don’t like what you’ve made, you’ll know immediately. You might not know what to do about the problem you perceive… Don’t “think”, standing there cogitating — try things. If your hands are in motion, you can be generating new permutations. The one that you want to pick will come out on its own time.

I think this resonates with me since I have a tendency to dawdle. I over-think stuff. I have a bad habit of thinking about everything that could happen and end up getting stuck. However, a great way to get un-stuck is to just keep moving — without editing yourself.

It’s hard for me to do that — to allow myself to just dostuff and not get caught up in editing myself or get so obsessed with some little detail. (Sure, details are important, but not when they keep you from getting anything accomplished.) See, I think a lot of us are afraid of messing up,of making a foolout of ourselves, doing bad work. But I think the habit of plowing on through will yield some great results. That’s how Thomas Edison invented so many useful things andPablo Picasso created so many outstanding paintings: they stuck with it and plowed on through, even if something wasn’t the best. They did it and moved on.

How about you? How have you dealt with this same sort of thing, making yourself work quickly so that you don’t get bogged down? Feel free to share your comments in the forums.

(This is a little bit of a departure for me.  Be kind

Some days, maybe even most days, I am really productive.  I wake up, work out (or not), formulate a plan while showering, and execute it.  Those are good days.  I get to the end and I can say “yes – I did what I set out to do today!“.  Or maybe “I had a plan, I made a list, and I got some of the way through it – tomorrow I will finish it!“  I am sure you know what I mean.  I hope that everyone has days like those.  If for no other reason than this: days like those serve as incentive to get through a “revving” day.

What’s a “revving” day?  Revving is my term – I have never heard anyone else use it.  It’s how I describe the situation when my brain starts looping.  I have so many things on my plate, all going on at the same time, that I fail to execute on any of them.  I am in effect paralyzed into inaction. I am stuck in neutral – my engine is just “revving”.  I might look like I am making progress to people around me, but in reality I am just shifting things from one side of the room to the other (mentally, not physically). On a revving day, I never formulate a plan.  I never get to the point where I can begin to accomplish anything.

Obviously, a revving day is really really bad for productivity.  Its doesn’t even have the beneficial side effects of a “mental health day”, where you just check out and focus on yourself for a day so that the next day you return refreshed.  On the contrary, subsequent days (for me) tend to have lower productivity than before I fell into the mental morass.

This happens to me from time to time (last fall it prompted me to write a forum post). Recently I have had some things go on in my life that are making me “rev” more than usual.  While this is pretty bad for me personally, it has forced me to examine the “rev” cycle to try to break it – because if I don’t things are going to get really bad professionally and personally.  Here’s what I have learned:

• Concentrating on the problem REALLY doesn’t help.  Since I am already “revving”, I can’t focus on anything this big long enough to solve it.
• Drinking, while an classic tactic for me, doesn’t help.  It is distracting, and it sometimes slows down my mind, but in the end alcohol is a depressant and that’s just not a solution. Mostly it makes me sad that I am not getting anything done!
• Sleeping sometimes helps in that when I wake up I am no longer paralyzed.  However, most of the time I can’t sleep because I am too wound up – a vicious cycle.
• Working on really, really mindless, tedious tasks that require almost no concentration can get completed.  As a side effect, those tasks can also break me out of my “rev” cycle.

This came as a surprise to me.  Apparently the monotony of something like mopping the floors or vacuuming the house helps my head reset!  Not every time, but enough of the time that I feel it is worth a shot when I start feeling like I am “revving”.  And when I feel myself slowing I start doing things that are a little more worthwhile, clawing my way back to productivity one task at a time.

I am guessing that some of you know what I mean by all of this.  If you do, how do you break your “revving” cycle so you can get back to your usual, productive self?  Let’s discuss it in the forums.

One of the things I am constantly impressed by when browsing the forums is the vast number of little nuggets of wisdom that pop up. Many of these are little ways to approach our tasks that we may not otherwise consider. Sometimes, these are so interesting to me that they merit their own thread.

For instance, recently a call for help went out to our forum members regarding advice for staying on top of things when you are a manager in a retail environment. The trouble, it seems, is that with so many demands on attention by customers, employees, and the hectic pace, even ubiquitous capture seemed futile. 

One of the best pieces of advice, in my opinion, came from forum member JRT, who also works in a retail environment and had to make some similar adjustments.  While everything he had to say was great, it was this piece the really resonated with me:

“I keep a litle pad in my pocket, noting everything as I go along and am constantly amazed by what I thought was important at the time, doesn’t need to be done by me afterall.”

I am not quite sure why this really jumped out at me. Perhaps it is the idea that so many items in our life, if they are at the forefront of our attention, seem like the most important thing mainly while they occupy that space. One of the benefits of any productivity system that is driven by capture and review is that it allows for a certain buffer of time between those two steps. This time often puts things into their proper perspective. A perspective that can not be gained by constantly chasing after every demand placed before us.

Also, I think this can be applied to so many other inputs in our lives. Email is a good example. One of the many benefits to checking email far less often (I check mine twice a day) is that, sometimes, the “urgent” message someone just had to make sure you see right this very moment is much less urgent when you decide not to participate in the urgency. Heck, wait a little bit longer and you may find that the person, motivated by their haste, solved the issue themselves or found the answer elsewhere. This may not always win you brownie points with those giving out the merit badges but I would argue that your sanity is far more valuable than the patch they want to sew on your sleeve.

All I am trying to say is that sometimes things have an interesting way of fixing themselves when left alone for a while. Next time you smell some hot items cooking down the line, let them simmer for a bit. It just may be someone else’s job to fan the flames. If the dish is not meant for you it will still be there once it cools down a bit and will probably be far easier to digest.

As always, if you wish to discuss further on this topic, you can do so in the forums.

Lately I’ve been working my way though The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. The basic premise of the book (as set forth on the back cover) is that dedicated artists (or scientists or whatever) make a habit of going into the studio, the lab, the office regularly to do their work. It’s really a philosophy of focusing on quantity and letting the quality come up on its own.

Here’s the thing, though, and I talked to my Dad about this a little when we met for lunch last week: it seems to me that a lot of things in life can be solved by putting good habits into effect, and getting rid of the bad habits. Our conversation was about Christian purity, but I think that can apply to a lot of other areas as well.

My Dad put it this way: he asked me what the best way was to prevent weeds in a field or a garden. I knew there was some elegant, clever answer to this other than “plucking them out.” He said, “You fill it with good vegetables.”

So it seems the trick is to replace the bad habits and negative influences with good ones. I know it sounds a little simplistic, but it makes sense. If you’re a recovering alcoholic, you’ve got to ditch the old drinking buddies who want you to hit the bars with them, and replace them with people who won’t let you near the stuff. A guy I used to work for didn’t lose weight until he quit keeping beer and potato chips around the house. He beat his snacking habit by refusing to keep junk food at home. He’s now a dedicated cyclist.

Once you get the good habits in place, it’s not so much a challenge to start doing the things you really want to do.

And for me, personally? I’ve found my habits of procrastination and sitting around wasting time are what get me in trouble. Fill up my time with constructive tasks and I’ll be a happy and productive boy.

What kind of habits do you need to toss? What kind of habits do you need to acquire? Feel free to share this over in the forums.