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.

(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.

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.

Many of us have read The Four Hour Workweek, the much talked about guide to being part of the “new rich.” I’ve heard several people put it right up there with David Allen’s Getting Things Done in terms of how it’s helped change the way they manage their lives, and I have to admit that I did take away several great concepts and ideas that have really helped me keep on my path to “being done.” That being said, I still struggle with some of the specific strategies that Ferris suggests for developing a freer lifestyle…especially the idea of a “muse.”

A muse, according to The Four Hour Workweek, is basically a self-sustaining, easily automated business that one sets up to supplement one’s regular income (or replace it altogether) for the purpose of funding a dream life. Ferris suggests creating an original, niche-market product that can easily be sold in a mid-price range of about $50 to $200. Tim’s book contains several compelling case studies for muses, as well as what seem like some pretty simple ideas to get the reader started. After my first reading of The Four Hour Workweek about 6 months a go, I was psyched and ready to get my muse off the ground!

Then reality started to set in, and I realized that I had to learn a lot of stuff! Like how to test markets, how to advertise via the Internet, and how to find/create a niche product in the first place! I started researching ideas in earnest, and I realized I was nowhere near ready to get a Ferris-style muse up and running…and to this day, after hours (probably days) of research into marketing, product creation, and automation via the Internet, I’m still not sure I really know where to start. In fact, I’m starting to doubt the whole concept.

The idea is that a muse saves me time so that I can pursue my passions, but I feel like I’ve wasted months attempting to self-educate about something that may or may not work. It’s a struggle just to find time to research how to start an effective business…how can I find the space in my schedule to really nurture my effort? In addition to the time required just to figure out how to create a viable product, many businesses (even Internet ones) require at least a minimal amount of startup capital. This is hard to come by when young, married, and in graduate school.

I’ve found precious few examples apart from the case studies in The Four Hour Workweek of real, working muses. Plenty of people are out on the Internet saying stuff like, “I’ve got a few niche products that are really working for me right now, but I’m not quite ready to disclose them yet.” I understand people want to protect their markets, but for the rest of us, it sometimes seems fishy. And then there are disturbing reports like this one from The Lazy Business Owner:

So what did I discover?  I think it’s very unlikely that most people can go in and create a muse that would provide a full-time income
to support them.  The problem people face is the one that most entrepreneurs face when starting a business.  If there is money to be made in the market that you’re moving in to, there probably is a competitor there who has taken the easy profit. 

This is from an experienced web entrepreneur. I am beginning to feel that the entire concept of muses is either fatally flawed from a practical standpoint, or simply just isn’t viable for me at this point in time (since I have little to no ability to make a monetary investment).

What do you think? Is a muse a really practical idea to solidify your financial dreams? Are the efforts required to self-educate worth it or even possible for you? Have you successfully created a Tim Ferris style muse to fund your ideal lifestyle? Let’s hear it in the forums.