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.

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

I’ve been away for a while, re-organizing my professional life after the death of a colleague.  My new responsibilities dramatically reduced my free time, and had a less-than-perfect effect on my personal life as well.  But, in the midst of the chaos, I have (again) started thinking about how to keep my work out of my business (forgive the pun).

I have a saying I use a lot – ‘I refuse to get stressed over leisure activities.’  What it means is that, in general, work is stressful enough.  Life, kids, the house – those are stressful enough.  When we do finally manage to squeeze in a little leisure, it’s a minor miracle.  So, in those moments, I try hard to ensure that whatever I have planned isn’t planned too tightly.  I don’t worry about being late.  I don’t worry about my appearance (too much).  I definitely don’t worry about the cost.  I want to enjoy the whole activity – “The journey is half the experience”, or whatever trite saying you want to use.

When work gets crazy, as it has for me, it often spills out of the office.  The text messages, phone calls, email via iPhone/blackberry…  heck, even what is in your head.  It is all distracting.  It all can detract from your rare leisure time.  Worse yet, for me anyway, it can bring stress into my leisure activities.  And that’s one thing I won’t tolerate.

So, what do to about it?  My current strategy is to try to take myself off the grid a little, but to abort the leisure activity if it seems stressful.  It isn’t doing anyone any good, so I just pack it in and try again another time.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t worked out very well.  I need a new approach.  I need a way to periodically and briefly divorce my professional life from my leisure time.  And that way needs to not involve drinking until I can’t remember I have a job.

Suggestions?  Let’s discuss it in the forums!

Lately there seems to be a shift taking place in the blogosphere.

The more you read some of the mainstream blogs, the more you see the word “simplicity”.

I like the word “simplicity”.  Just typing it makes me fell less stressed.  Simple is of course the opposite of complicated.  Complication, naturally, increases stress.

The mantra we have started to march to of late is to simplify our lives.

I like the whole simplification push.  It is necessary. However, I do see some on the bandwagon to stop productivity in its tracks in the process.  I, for one, think that is not such a good idea.

Those that know me closely know that my thinking tends to gravitate toward the hybrid.  I am always piecing things together with ideas from several different places to make something work for me. Some of you will shreak when I say this, but my organizational philosophy is pieced together from several different schools of thought.  I personally believe that Stephen Covey speaks well to areas that David Allen does not spend a lot of focus time on, and vica versa.

For me, it is the same with simplicity and productivity.

There are some of us that no matter how well we organize and make our processes better, we still have way too much on our plate.  Then it becomes necessary to simplify our lives…eliminate some things…cut out unnecessary noise.

Simple processes are also desirable. Especially since simple processes breed effectiveness and efficiency.

But should we throw out the baby with the bath water on productivity?

Let’s look at these two terms and think on that.

In your dictionary, you will find this definition of the word simple…

1. easy to understand, deal with, use, etc.
2. not elaborate or artificial; plain
3. not complicated

On the other hand, the definition of produce is…

1. to bring into existence; give rise to; cause
2. to bring into existence by intellectual or creative ability

So, simple, an adjective is descriptive of a process or a task. Produce, however, is a verb. It requires action.

What does this mean for the people who are looking to not only get things done, but get the right things done when they matter?

It means that we should focus on simplifying the things we do as much as possible.  Why? Because we want to spend our time doing the right things with as little drag on the process as possible. Thus we focus on simple processes.  We also want to simplify in terms of our lifestyle. What do we need in life? What makes us happy? If something we do is not helping us achieve happiness and peace…should we be doing it?

The point is this…

Simplifying a process speaks to disciplining a process or procedure by which we do things.  Productivity is about disciplining ourselves to not just simplify that process or task, but to take action and be a doer.

Productivity and simplicity go hand in hand. Simplifying things makes us more productive.

Just remember, it is all about being done.

What are your thoughts?

I’m not a workaholic (that’s for sure) but lately I’ve found that it’s easy to for me use my entire day for work, work related tasks, or chores. Just a few weeks ago I realized I’d gone for well over a month without reading anything for fun! Worse, sometimes I’ll go an entire day and realize I haven’t had one real conversation with my wife.

To combat this problem (and it is a problem…what’s life without the people you love and stuff you love to do?) I’ve started instating some self-imposed boundaries  on my work habits, and I’ve actually begun scheduling out some time just for relaxing and hanging out (no computers allowed, unless video games are involved!!). I’ve had a lot of success in some areas…my weekly “date night” with my wife is a great example. We’ve both freed our schedules completely for Saturday evenings, and–barring some emergency or urgent engagement–the only thing we’re allowed to do during that time is hang out…watch movies, go out to eat, whatever. It’s a great way to catch up on the past week and relax in preparation for my busiest workday (Sunday).

I’ve also thought about scheduling in smaller blocks of time throughout each day as well, but this is a bit more difficult for me. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence on the web regarding increased productivity when people take regular breaks, etc. I think it will take substantial discipline to develop this habit for me; when I’m deep in “work-mode” I can easily go 4+ hours without a break. When I do take a short respite, it’s hard for me to tear myself away from something fun after only 15 minutes or so.  So, it’s a struggle to find the best “rhythm” for me. Should I take a fifteen minute break every two hours, thirty minutes every four? I don’t know…maybe trial-and-error is the best way to go here.

One thing is for sure though…as much as I love my job, my studies, and getting things done around the house, I get miserable real fast if those are the only things I’m doing. I think that although I may not get as much done in the beginning, making a conscious effort to put leisure activities at a higher priority on my lists will help bring a bit more balance to my life.

Do you schedule your leisure time? How do you find the right balance between work and break periods during the day? Do you find that regular “fun time” gives you a creative/productive boost? Let’s take it to the forums.

As we all know, life is about being our best in every role of our lives. So performing on the job is not the only important endeavor we should be concerned about.

Some of you young people out there are probably not as concerned about this as I am, but I am reaching the age where I need to focus a little less on living it up…and more on taking care of myself.

Health is an important part of our quality of life.

For many, it is enough to just get a 30 minute jog in and be happy with it. But if you are like me, you want to track progress. These days, the choices in terms of tools are vast. Again, your choice probably comes down to your preference of paper or something electronic.

There are forms that you can add to your paper planner that help you track everything from your nutrition to your jogging stats. You can even keep up with your resistance training by tracking your lifting.

There are also web based apps that will help you manage your health. My big cardio activity is cycling. We Endure is my tool of choice at this time.  It allows me to keep up with distance, total time, and calculates my average speed and time per minute.  We Endure helps me as I work toward my goal of averaging 100 miles in the saddle per week.

Mobile applications are available also for BlackBerry and the iPhone.  Most of these apps are used to track diet and nutrition.

The whole idea is this. We feel it is good to be able to track how we are performing on the job by keeping solid metrics. It only makes sense to track our performance as we manage our health with similar metrics.

What tools do you use as you work toward a healthier you?

Let’s discuss.

Despite the fact that I have a well-thought out, time-tested system for productivity, and a wealth of productivity related software and resources at my fingertips all the time, I really fell off the bandwagon this past week. While the main reason can truly be summed in one word (lazyness) there were several distinct areas where I failed to stay disciplined, and boy did my productivity (and thus my stress level) suffer.

• I left tried and true tools. I recently decided to try out some Moleskine Volant Extra Smalls as my capture notebook, and the fact is they’re just too small for me. I can’t really plan anything, take any kind of good notes, or make use of a full two-page spread. Cahiers and the larger Volant notebooks are much better for how I use them. Here’s the real problem, though: Even though I was aware that the Volants weren’t working for me, I kept using them! I hate to waste paper, but this was a mistake. I should have accepted the loss, given the unused Volants to my wife or a friend, and gone back to a tool that I know works for me.

• I fragmented my information repositories. Somewhere along the line I thought it would be cool to have a separate capture notebook for tasks only, and other notebooks for journaling and random ideas. The only one I’ve been carrying around is the task notebook (I leave the others in my man-bag). The result is that I’m jotting down less ideas and I have less access to information I want to have on hand. I gained some portability in the exchange (I use a thinner notebook for tasks only) but I’m really not conviced the trade-off was worth it.

• I stopped reviewing/planning. This is where I got really lazy. I had been taking a specific time at the end of each of days (at 10pm for half an hour) to process tasks from my capture notebook and plan the next day. This really helped to me to hit the ground running in morning and feel less stressed in general. Well, somehow I got out of that habit (it’s really been almost month since I’ve been consistent) and man, did I pay for it…pages of unprocessed capture lists, an overflowing inbox, and stressful planning in the mornings have wreaked havoc on my soul. Okay, that may have been a bit melodramatic, but seriously, I’ve been way more stressed than I need to be, simply because I’ve not been discplined to have a brief process/plan/review time each day!

The recovery plan is simple, thank goodness….I’m just going to do the opposite of all my mistakes . I’ve learned my lesson over the past few weeks, and this last week especially. I’m sticking to tools I know work for me…serious experimentation can wait ’till summer or vacation. I’m going to go buy a decent full sized Moleskine and consolidate my lists and journals, and I have to get back in the habit of regularly processing tasks and planning my day. A key strategy for getting back the swing of things on that front will be scheduling (duh!) my process/review/plan time.

If you feel like you haven’t been disciplined lately either, here are my sugestions:

• Write out the specific areas that you’ve been lacking in. Sounds like it should be obvious, but taking a just minute to put it down on paper will help you to solidfy where you want to improve in your mind and help you focus on the next step.

• Create an action list. For me, it was “buy new notebook” and “schedule planning period.” That’s it. You might be surprised at how small this particular todo list will be.

• Just Do It. This is really hard part. At some point, you have to move beyond simply planning, and into actually being disciplined in order to stick to your system. To help me stay motivated, I plan on setting some goals I know I will only achieve if I stick to my system, like creating an hour or two of extra time this week for leisure reading. I also plan to create reminders in the form of notes or something on my desktop that will help remember that in the end, I will be less stressed if I just take a little time each day to stay on the ball.

Maybe you’ve made some of the same mistakes I have…how did you get back on track? Let us know in the forums.

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.