Using the Mini Tickler

I have been dabbling with the Mini Tickler for about a week, and now I need to make a conscious effort to incorporate it into my planning and organising system.  This sounds a lot more impressive than it really is because my planning and organising system is not necessarily the well oiled machine that the previous sentence makes it sound like.  But the Mini Tickler well hopefully fill one of the gaps that is letting it down.

Okay this is the plan.  Every day I will review the tasks, ideas and reminders that come up in the Mini Tickler.  I'll discard the ones that I have finished with.  File the ones I want to come back to in the Tickler.  The small number I intend to take action on I'll put together with a bulldog clip to put in my pocket.  I'll have another set of blank ones for taking notes on during the day.

The format is to put the goal or project in the bottom left hand corner and the context in the top right hand corner.  The context will allow me to pick out things I should be working on in a particular place.  Lets see how it goes.

The Mini Tickler

The Mini Tickler - A personal organiser made out of business cards

I use a tickler file at work at keep the number of things I am giving attention to every day down to a manageable level.  Well actually I don't.  I am continually trying to use a tickler file to keep the number of items I am giving attention to down to a manageable level.  What I actually do is give myself daily proof that I don't have the willpower to keep them down to a manageable level.  Nonetheless, although I am not particularly happy about how well I use it, I do a much better job of keeping control of my workload with a tickler than I do without it.

I have a second portable one in the form of an A4 ring bound folder that covers my personal life.  This one doesn't work nearly so well, though it is still better than nothing.  The problem with it is that although it is portable it is nowhere near portable enough.  You also can't use it everywhere.  There are times when getting out an A4 folder simply isn't acceptable.  And it makes too much noise to use in bed when you partner is asleep.

So my solution is the mini tickler.  This is basically a small version of the tickle file made out of business cards. I use the box the business cards came in to house the tickler.  It is a little big to carry everywhere, but you can get it in your pocket if you have to.  I don't, at the moment, plan to carry it everywhere with me.  I currently plan to use it just once a day.  But I'll see how I get on with it.

Some wisdom from Stephen Fry

For the third day running I am blogging about a Steve, though it is very rare to hear the erudite national treasure Stephen Fry referred to as Steve.  But technically he is a Steve in my book.

I am just a couple of years younger than Stephen Fry and have sort of grown up with him.  I can certainly remember when he was one of a new set of entertainers that had just made it onto television. Originally he wasn't really the most prominent of them by quite a long chalk.  In fact I can remember wondering why he was bracketed with a group that seemed a fair bit more talented than him.  And yet he has stuck with it and with the possible exception of his one time partner Hugh Laurie he is the one who has done the most really good work.

Now I remember the precise moment when I picked up on Stephen Fry as someone  to watch out for. He was being interviewed on some programme some time in the eighties.  I don't remember who was interviewing him or why, or what the year was or anything at all actually.  What I do remember is what he said, though I dare say after all this time my memory has heavily paraphrased it.

What he said was imagine you decided to change how you signed your name.  You have signed your name thousands and thousands of times, so it will take quite an effort to change it.  And for the first few times it will be hard and take a long time to do something you used to be able to do without thinking.  And for a long time after you have chosen to change it, you will be acting in an artificial way.  For a long time it won't really be your signature.  So in a sense for a while you are a fake.  It is only when your new signature has really taken over the place the habitual one used to fill that you will become genuine again.

I haven't read all Stephen Fry's books or watched all his output, so my apologies if this is something he has talked about at length somewhere else.  I only remember the one instance and have never heard anyone refer to it since.  But I have noticed that Stephen Fry has gradually turned into the man we know and love today, and I imagine that in the process he as consciously changed a lot more than just his signature.

Steve Jobs - Is his real product excellence?

There is quite a bit of coverage of Steve Jobs in the papers this morning.  His resignation from Apple due to ill health is big news for lots of reasons and I certainly wish him well.  It probably doesn't say much for my humanity that I found myself reading what should have been a human interest story looking for clues to what it is about him that makes him so successful.  In my defence, I am not the only person who finds this interesting and a lot of the coverage has been along the same lines.

I am typing this on one example of his Steve Job's products and nobody in the world can be unaware of Apple's products.  There are three types of people on the planet.  Those who have Apple products, those who want to have Apple products and those who don't want to have Apple products.  You may not have met many of the last category.

For a long time I have thought that the key was simply the quality of the products.  Sweat enough on getting that right and everything else falls into place.  This fits in well enough with my experience working in product development.  I have been well aware over the years that when you present the world with an indifferent product the reaction is generally indifference.  It doesn't matter much if it meets the brief you are given, is on time, on budget and the guys in marketing have a great 'story'.

So when I started my own company - which my wife works on full time and which I plan to give up my full time job to work on as soon as I can - I naturally gave the emphasis to making the products great.

I don't want to undermine myself with negativity, but realistically it isn't doing as well as Apple yet.

But one article mentioned something about Apple that is rarely talked about.  It doesn't just produce good products.  It is also a spectacularly well run company.  It has grown without acquiring debt for example.  In fact it has done the opposite, it has built up piles of cash.  I have never studied business, but I don't think this is the way you are supposed to do it according to the text books.  Its R&D activities deliver on time.  Not many companies succeed in that.  And it runs a profitable retail operation almost as a sideline.

I really don't think any of this is down to luck.  And it flies in the face of a lot of what is both conventional wisdom and apparently common sense.   After all if Apple really has got a unique talent base in say product design, shouldn't they be concentrating on that key skill?  By contracting out all the other less valuable activities wouldn't they be more profitable?  It certainly makes logical sense.  And yet somehow Apple are the ones with all the money in the bank.

Maybe the answer is that it makes more sense to simply be excellent at whatever it is you happen to be doing, whether it is the glamorous end of things like presenting to trade shows or mundane activities like stock control and sourcing raw materials.

Steve Loves the Bombs

My reaction to http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/08/love-the-bombs/

I have been reading Steve's blog for over six years now and I've been interested in watching it develop.  Although high production values have never been Steve's thing, even from the start you could sort of see what he was trying to do from the way it was set up.  The original blog was very austere but it took you to the meat very quickly.  You had no trouble finding the content.  In fact there wasn't much more than content and context sensitive adverts.

It worked pretty well for what Steve was obviously trying to do at the time, i.e., catch your attention with something valuable and give you the chance to generate him a bit of income.  The content was distinctive and interesting, but most of it was along the very popular 'tips and tricks' format.  Later he set out to build a community and we got a forum integrated into the blog with lots of cross links.  This was quite fun and the community he built was, and is, an interesting one.  I am sure none of the contributors would object to being described as non-mainstream.

But having created this community I think Steve is now stepping back from it.  There is still a link to the forum on his blog, but the individual blog posts don't link to the discussion on the forum any more.  The contact form has gone.  Steve contributes very sparingly in his own forum nowadays.

I think he is off in a new direction.  I guess we'll all find out soon enough and speculation isn't particularly productive.  But it is fun, so here I go.  The latest blog post is eccentric even by Steve's highly individual standards.  We should accept inequality and conflict because of the growth opportunities they represent?  Okay Steve gets real time gambling tips from dead people and proposes that the whole universe is a figment of his imagination, so it isn't necessarily the most crazy thing he has written.  But it does seem to be crazy in slightly different direction.  For a start it shows a bit of awareness of the world outside.  This is quite unusual in his writing.  He is normally very, how can I put it, Pavlinacentric in his world view.  Whatever else he has talked about, which includes his diet, his sex life and the nature of reality one thing that has never come up is his politics.

Until reading Love the Bombs I had never really thought about Steve's politics.  It didn't really come up as an issue.  But if I had I would probably have assumed that a West Coast vegan working in IT with a bias towards New Agery and animal rights would probably be a liberal of some kind or other.  But then he comes out with a straight out justification for income inequality and an aggressive foreign policy.  A totally off the wall justification for sure.  But nonetheless, if you quickly translate what this kind of thinking into an actual programme that a government might draw up it does put you in a surprising place on the political spectrum.  It implies very much the kind of libertarian approach that you might associate with say the Cato Institute.  Not mainstream Republican maybe, but definitely on their side of the fence.  It would definitely not find favour with anyone who identifies with the left in any shape or form.

So is Steve going into politics?  On the face of it, it is just about the most unlikely thing for him to do. But he does continually surprise us.  If he was running for office I have a feeling that the last people he would want behind him would be the free thinking types who contribute to his forum.   Is this why he is distancing himself from them?

Time Power - Build Your Self Esteem

One of the surprising things brought up early in Time Power is the importance of building self esteem.  Self esteem is a key component of performance.   The route to building self esteem is to determine your values, strive for mastery and to know what you want.  This enables you to like and respect yourself which in turn builds your confidence, which builds your performance.  You can then get into a virtuous circle.

Okay so how am I going to translate that idea into action?

First off lets look at my values.

I believe in honesty, community, respect for others and for the planet.  My problems with that are issues where there is a conflict between honesty and upsetting others.  But I have a particular problem with my job.  My actual role is one that has integrity, but it supports activities by others that supports some very dubious marketing claims.  This is going to continually undermine my motivation at work and will continue to do so until I can give it up and work on my own business full time.  There isn't a solution so I'll just have to be aware of it.  If I describe it to myself as a known bug in the system it will help me work around it and not let it derail me.

The next aspect is striving for mastery.  I need to master time management above all else so how am I going to go about that?  The book claims it takes 21 days to bed in a new habit - that sounds reasonable enough though I have no idea where the figure comes from.  But lets work with it.  I have a whole series of bad time keeping habits.  I think it will be a long time before I run out of new habits that I would like to build or old ones I want to modify.  But the advice is also to not try and do too much at one time.  So here is my plan.  First off I'll list the first ten desirable habits that come into my head.

This is the list:

1. Don't switch on the lap top until 9.00pm on workdays.
2. Work through afternoon tea breaks.
3. Review my task cards every morning.
4. Tidy up the house when I get home before dinner.
5. Never go to bed without a clear idea of what I am going to do immediately I wake up every week day morning.
6. Keep journal and do a plan every day.
7. Regularly review goals.
8. Write 2000 words a day on average, to make up to a weekly total of 14,000.
9. Check bank balance daily.
10. Throw away stuff I'll never need again.  (Or sell it if it is worth over £20)

I will pick one of those habits and do a task card for it.  I can mark it every day I stick to it until I reach 21.  With non-daily habits I guess I'll have to cut down the target number of marks.   So the first one I'll pick is working through lunchtimes.  But I'll also put the list on a card to review the other habits as well, even though I am not actually focusing on them.  When I've got to 21 days on one habit I'll delete it from the list and add another.  Lets see how that works.

The third item is knowing what you want.  I need to look at my goals a bit more closely and keep them under review, but I think that will have to be another post.


This post is a follow up to my review of Time Power and my experience in implementing it.
http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-power-dick-tracy.html

Time Power - Dick Tracy. Why manage your time?

What is the motivation for wanting to manage your time better?  It probably seems obvious enough, but is it really that clear in your mind?  The book opens by bringing some much needed clarity to the subject.  Our fundamental objective in life is to be happy.  Managing your time can make a huge contribution to achieving that.  In fact time management is really life management.  Time is the stuff of life so the more we can get out of it the more we get out of life itself.

This ought to be motivation enough, but getting clear what time management can do for me was a huge reinforcement of my desire to be well organised about using my time.  The book claims you can achieve an extra 2 hours of productive time a day.  This is a big claim - and one that invites skepticism.  But while I am a great skeptic and think skepticism is generally a good thing, for this I am prepared to abandon my normally rational approach.

I would love an extra two hours of achievement every day.  I could get so much more done on my business and still have time to write.  That equates to an extra 500 hours a year.  If I devoted just half of that to writing that would be a hefty 250 hours.  At my personal writing rate of 2000 words an hour that equates to a very substantial 500,000 words in a year.  That would be enough for a book.  If believing this is possible makes it more likely that it is possible, then I am prepared to believe it.  After all, if I am wrong I haven't lost anything.  If I am right I have a substantial amount of writing to show for it. 

But I haven't abandoned my reason altogether.  I also have a handy way of monitoring my performance.  If my word count per week gets up to the 14,000 a week that the Time Power approach promises I will know that I am on the right track.  

But the extra time is only one of the benefits and not the one that most appeals to me.  I also want to achieve a feeling of control over my life.  This includes being less stressed and more financially independent.  If I can achieve more towards either of those my life would improve considerably.

So with 400 of this week's 14,000 words spent on this article I will move on to actually doing stuff.  Wish me luck and I will be back soon with more reports on my progress.



This post is a follow up to my review of Time Power and my experience in implementing it.
http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-power-dick-tracy.html

Book Review: Time Power - Brian Tracy

I listened to Brian Tracy's Time Power on the audio book edition a couple of months ago, and I was impressed.  A few of the ideas he proposed sank in and I implemented, but most of it morphed into a warm fuzzy glow in my memory without actually leaving much impact other than a good feeling.  But what I did take from it and start using has proved to be pretty useful so I have started listening to it again.  And this time I will take it more to heart and use it to improve my  time management.  The promise of the book is a very clear one.  You will gain an extra two hours a day of productive time.  Think what you could do with that!

Before I start on describing the details of what I am doing a quick review of the book and Dick Tracy himself.  The book is structured a bit like an onion in that each chapter peels away a bit more.  But it is pretty much onion throughout.  The style is to describe an idea about how you can get more out of your time. This is usually to do with a way of organising yourself or of motivating yourself.  Most of them are reasonably familiar ideas, but they are all presented with a really refreshing level of clarity.

Like Steve Pavlina,  Brian Tracy has a strong dollop of woo at the centre of his offering.  He doesn't emphasise it, but it is clearly there to see.  There are many oblique references to spirituality, life purpose and general mumbo jumbo like the law of attraction.  But like with Steve's stuff, there is enough sound advice and thought provoking ideas to make this a minor issue.  In fact, it helps you keep a critical mind alert for nonsense and so engage with the information.

In outline, the approach is to set your goals, internalise these goals by frequent repetition and then draw up plans and take actions to turn these goals into reality.  The emphasis is on actually doing this, and getting things down on paper.  One of the suggestions - actually more than a suggestion really, rather a cornerstone - is to write out your goals every day.   I did this for a while and found it really helped.  Then I stopped doing it.  The beneficial effect continued for a few weeks then began to fade.  So I have started again this week, and within days I am feeling the benefits again.

You might have assumed that it was lack of persistence that led me to drop the habit.  But in fact it was a practical issue.  I had been using a sheet of file paper and a ring binder and had been rewriting my goals every morning then doing a plan for the day before I actually got out of bed.  Unfortunately the snapping of the ring binder disturbed my wife.  So I had to stop and it took me four weeks to work out that all I needed to do was to get a hard back notebook instead.  On such minor details empires can be won and lost.