Hasta La Ideas

The following is an excerpt from my book Unclutter Your Life in One Week, which comes out next week on November 3. If you have pre-ordered the book, THANK YOU! and also don’t forget to sign up to receive the special PDF bonus worksheets. And, to let you know, the electronic Kindle version is now available for pre-order (still no word on the other e-book formats).

Now, on with the excerpt from the Thursday chapter, “Working While at Work” section of the book:

“… try these strategies for improving your productivity when you don’t really want to work:

• Similar to what you might do when exercising, play music with a fast rhythm.
• If you drink caffeine, consume it in small, frequent amounts instead of just one large cup at the beginning of the day.
• Set time-specific goals in two-, five-, or ten-minute increments. Identify what you want to accomplish in a very short amount of time, and then set a timer and go for it.
• Isolate yourself. Remove the desire to procrastinate by not having any other options but to work.
• Acknowledge that you’re procrastinating. Often, just realizing that you’re putting something off is enough to get you working.
• Challenge a colleague to see who can get the most work done in a set time period.
• Ask someone to help you stay accountable. There are professional motivators who will call you once a day to see how you’re doing, but a trusted and willing friend or coworker can do the same thing for free.
• If the task doesn’t require much though, listen to an audiobook while you work. Agree to only listen to the book when you’re working on the project you don’t want to do. This way, you’ll be interested in hearing more of the story each time you take on the undesirable task.”

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of using 3×5 cards to capture and organize tasks and ideas, but they can be somewhat inconvenient to use. Various cases and Hipster PDAs attempt to make note cards easily accessible, but they rely on carrying around yet another item in your pocket.

Last year, I picked up a Pocket Briefcase, which has now become one of my favorite organizational tools. Instead of carrying around a wallet and a stack of note cards, I’m able to carry just a wallet, because the cards fit inside. This particular briefcase has a pocket for cash, slots for a few debit and ID cards, and two pockets to organize used cards. I recently went on a trip out of the US and discovered that my Pocket Briefcase will even fit my passport.

This works for me because even when I don’t want to carry a notebook, I’m always carrying my wallet, so I’m never without a pen and paper. If you use note cards with your personal information on them, then you’re carrying business cards too!

Levenger’s pocket briefcase isn’t cheap, so if you want to see if this kind of tool will work for you without spending a lot of money, you can find similar items in many stores that carry office supplies.

Collaborating on files with a group presents a unique set of challenges. Where do you store the files? Who has the latest version? What changed?

Let’s say you’re composing a song about Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote. You get your band together, you lay down the tracks, and there they are on one computer. You can go back and punch in a solo, cut vocals, or whatever else you need to do. No sweat. But what if one of your bandmates lives 800 miles away?

One option would be to keep sending a file back and forth for each change. The problem is that it’s difficult to keep track of changes, and eventually you each end up with a folder full of files and no way to tell who has the latest version.

A better solution is Subversion, a version control system designed to be a single repository for current and previous versions of files.

In my example, the file happens to be a GarageBand file, but Subversion can just as easily handle any other type of file. Developers have been using it for years to keep track of source code and documentation.

Here’s how it works:

• Create a Subversion repository. You can create a free repository at Beanstalk
• Get a Subversion client like Versions. There’s a 21 day free trial period.
• Create a bookmark to your repository in your client. You can find Versions-specific instructions here
• Check out a “working copy”
• Add folders and files to your “working copy,” or make changes to existing ones
• Commit

When you commit a change, Subversion updates the current version of the file with the changes that you made, but also saves the previous version so that you can revert back to it if you need to. If you try to commit a change to a file that someone else has recently changed, Subversion will let you know. If it’s a text file, you can see what the differences are, and choose to merge the changes together.

By keeping all your files updated and in one place, Subversion is a great tool for eliminating collaboration clutter.

These are the basics, but If you want to indulge your inner egghead and understand more about how Subversion works, I recommend O’Reilly’s book.

The October issue of Real Simple magazine quotes a Microsoft and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study that claims it takes 17 minutes “for a worker interrupted by e-mail to get back to what she was doing.”

If this statistic is true, and I know from experience that there is a refractory time after any distraction, it is strong evidence against leaving the notification alert active on your e-mail program. Instead, you should schedule time in your day to check your e-mail. Based on the type of office environment you work in, you might need to check your e-mail at the top of every hour. However, most people can get by only checking their e-mail two to four times during the work day.

I also recommend checking e-mail during the times when you are usually distracted during the day. Whether this is when others tend to interrupt you or when your mind typically wanders on its own, it’s best not to try to do high-functioning activities when you plan to work through your e-mail inbox. For me, this is right after lunch when I find it difficult to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. I check e-mail, return phone calls, and do a little bit of filing.

Try turning off the notification alert on your e-mail system and only checking e-mail on a schedule and see if it improves your productivity. If the interruption refractory period really is 17 minutes, you should immediately notice significant gains in your focus.

We want to again welcome guest author Alex Fayle, the writer and professional organizer behind the helpful anti-procrastination website Someday Syndrome. This is his second post of three in a series on fighting procrastination.

In my first post in this series on Unclutterer, I talked about vanquishing the Getting Started Monster and hopefully you were able to defeat your own personal Getting Started Monster.

Great! If it’s an organizing project you’ve started, you’ve probably cleared a surface and streamlined your stuff. Maybe you’ve even managed to clear off the dining room table for the first time in years. Momentum has supposedly kicked in and you’re ready to keep going.

But you don’t.

The rest of the space stays disorganized and the papers start piling up again on the dining room table and you feel totally discouraged. Why bother when it’s just going to get cluttered again?

I’m the same way with my writing. Unless I’m vigilant about my writing, I can let it slide by the wayside and without really noticing I’ve come up with enough excuses not to write for over two weeks.

Not good.

You think I’d want to write every day. After all, it’s my passion and writing every day brings me closer to my goal of being a published author?

Yes, but it’s also work. Hard work. And there’s no immediate pay off. Yes, I have the reward of 200 or 2000 words written, but I get nothing, no gold star, for doing so and my long term goal is still a long way off.

Unfortunately, just like with getting started there’s no trick to continuing. You can use positive enforcement of mini rewards, or picturing how happy you’ll be after you achieve your goal. You could also use negative motivation by imagining how much regret you’ll feel for not doing the thing that you’re procrastinating about.

In the end, however, there’s only the choice to continue.

The Power of Choice

There’s a saying about courage: A brave person feels fear and continues anyway. For getting around to it, a productive person feels like quitting but continues anyway.

Looking at it another way — every single day is a new start so getting back to a task you did the day before is exactly like starting it all over again facing the same Getting Started monster.

Almost every single goal I can think of requires a series of smaller steps to complete. Many times those small steps are repetitive and require a long-term commitment. The longer the commitment the easier it is to lose energy and enthusiasm until you’re moving less than a run-down grandfather clock.

If you’re the sort of person this happens to (I certainly am) all you need to do is make a choice to keep going. When I don’t feel like working, I remind myself that I’ve chosen my goals and if I don’t want to achieve them I don’t have to. Of course I wouldn’t be happy letting most goals fall by the wayside so I say “okay, fine” and get back to work.

With some goals, however, I truly do lose interest and I realize that the goal isn’t for me. By offering myself a choice to continue or not, I sometimes do choose to stop, often with a huge sense of relief.

So, how do you make sure you remember this choice? By repeating it to yourself every day.

I’m not big on affirmations where you stare in the mirror and tell yourself good things that you’re supposed to believe about yourself. The phrase in this exercise is meant as a daily wake up call, reminding you to keep the autopilot turned off and to stay engaged in everything you do.

And just what’s the super fantastic phrase that’s going to keep you motivated and moving forward?

I choose all my actions including what I’m not going to do.

That’s it. By taking responsibility for your actions, every day you’ll make a choice to continue or not, but remember – it’s your choice, no one is making you do or not do anything.