How being disorganized can suck up your IQ

I’m not sure if it happens to me because I’m a creative worker. Well, actually I’m what one calls “knowledge worker”, but whenever I feel I have lost control of my perspective and tasks. Boom. Suddenly energy is sucked up from as if I was about to enter a black hole.

The consequences? Well, I just can’t do anything well until I feel I everything is in its place. A weekly review is often what I need in these cases. The issue is that weekly reviews are not yet a habit for me and I end um procrastinating and not doing it

Anyway, living and learning.

Timebox it and don’t forget your habits!

From my experience, it has been damn hard to create habits and to actually reach high-performance when executing.

GTD deals with the Collect, Process, Organize and Review slices of personal organization very well. The DO is where it fails to give useful insights.

Executing is another world in itself, and requires a new set of foundational rules and strategies if you want to do that well.

For example: I can have my whole inventory up to date, my inbox clear, reminders for projects and next-actions set up, but still don’t go anywhere far that where I was. In fact, if you delay too much to execute, the data in your GTD system will get out of date (at least until the next review) and will loose value.

I’ve been failing on execution, either by loosing too much time or by not doing actions I promised myself I would do. Regarding the firt problem, that is a problem of focus — I loose focus too easily and too often, and, even though I know what I should be doing, I end up spending way more time that it would be needed. The second one, is worst: There are regular actions that I want to make into habits (I do (try) to track habits) and that I end up not doing.

What is the solution for both problems?

Well. Firstly, take a deep breath and relax. You don’t need also to run against the clock. Stop trying to manage time. Don’t try to save time to the seconds, this is not healthy. However, do manage your perception of time. And something that has helped a lot was the Pomodoro Technque.

The Pomodoro Technique is as simple as setting up a 25 minutes timer to timebox an activity, the 25 min. timebox is called a pomodori (you don’t need to finish everything in one pomodori — a task might need multiple pomodoris, and that’s ok.). Once the countdown alarm reaches zero, you rest for 5 minutes (go for a walk, prepare the coffee, take a shower, call your girlfriend, check emails, whatever) and after that, setup another pomodori.

It might sound stupid, but it is amazing how timeboxing a task is so powerful. Your mind’s perception about the time gets more clear and you will focus, trust me. The problem with not setting timeboxes, or, in other words, the problem with having long deadlines, is that you will end up procrastinating. Short iterations are the way to go.

Now, for the habit thing, I’m trying to keep a daily/weekly and monthly checklist. These are simple lists on my GTD file (which is a simple text-file, managed by orgmode) like this:

* Daily Checklist - except saturday and sundays
** Books to read
*** Making it All Work [2 pomodoris] :beforeclosingtheday:
*** 7 Habits [1 pomodori] :beforeclosingtheday:
** Food Journal - track my food :beforeclosingtheday:
file:wiki/FoodJournal.org
** Gym
*** 1hr in the morning -- cardio :beforestartingtowork:
*** 1hr in the afteroon :beforeclosingtheday:

I could have used orgmode’s calendering feature to make them appear in the org-agenda view, but that’s overkill for habit-like activities (They are not sacred to appear in the calender, you can eventually fail on them). There’s also a habit-tracking feature in org, but for now, I’m keeping things simpler. These are reminders, after all — they could have been written in a post it and sticked to my bedroom’s wall.

Note the tag. I don’t use this tag only on these items, but on any item (one time next-actions) that I feel need to be done on these times (I use tags to attach cirscunstancial meaning to actions. This can mean a place (context) (like @gym) or temporalish meta-data such as beforeclosingtheday).

The point is that, to focus, do what you have to do and keep with your (preferrably healthy) routine. You can list whatever you want in the Daily checklist, even your meals or reading a RSS feed before going to bed (closing the day).

GTD and software engineering (through FullOfCaffeine.com)

I wrote a very “to the point” post on how I apply GTD with my programming duties. I didn’t think it was a good fit for LivingTheNewEra, but it is interesting enough to worth linking it here:

GTD and Software Engineering, a Pragmatic Approach, by me

Nice week for you all!

Clarify your life – keeping the balance

There’s a symbol I really like. The ying-yang.

The ying-yang is one of the most beautiful symbols that humanity has come up with, in my opinion. It just communicates the true essence of “equilibrium”.

Well, that’s the mini-intro for a post that I aim on keeping short and deep.

Pay attention to every aspect of your life. Don’t deny anything because of lazyness. Be aware of it, define the meaning of it, if anything doesn’t sound clear, don’t deny it — even if you have to ask someone a paper and a pen to write it and keep it for later on.

Why ? Because if you do, it will keep you on a limited operation mode. Sometimes it will make you so dumb that you will ask yourself how could you be typing in a computer.

Remember when someone wise told you focus is everything. Well, you should have paid attention.

If you have any unresolved issues (the bigger, the worst and the more cycles it will take out of your mind, making your IQ look like cat poop), deal with it, make meaning out of it, but don’t leave it walking around your mind. It can come up in when you least expect and take out critical focus power out of you.

Keep things balanced, deal with your stuff!

Don’t rush, but do experiment – the circle of influence

It’s easy to fall in a never-ending vicious cycle and never really accomplish anything you wanted in life.

Why?

From my experience, it has to do with complexity and paradigms.

Why paradigms, you might ask. Well, I could also say lack of experience. When you gain experience, you change your “inner-glasses” and you start seeing things in a different way. That’s exactly what paradigms do, they are filters, the lens from with you see the world.

So, what prevents you from reaching your goals? Generally, two things:

1) Too much crap. Or at least, unmanaged stuff that ends up turning into crap
2) Inability to see things. Lack of experience.

So, while you can’t stand still, you also can’t rush. The path to your happiness might need yourself to just calm down and act from within your influence circle (ref: 7 habits!). The influece circle is directly related to your experience. As you gain experience in anything — as you live your life pro-actively and try to always be on your track — you will get more contacts, change your paradigms, and you will have more influency, you will feel you can do more. So don’t rush, just always try to be crystal clear about everything in your life, and try to cut the crap.

How to cut the crap? Well, if you feel it is making you feel bad, if you feel it doesn’t align with you, just cut it out from your life, ignore it, get it out of your world.

What if it’s something that is making you anxious because you are not sure about it? Well, take a note and then brainstorm about it later. I suggest implementing any of the 9999 variations of GTD, one of they might work for you (after all GTD follows simple rules).

Then, calmly go towards what you want. You will see that with time your perceptions will change and you will see things clearer and will feel more powerful. This means your circle of influence has grown. Don’t stop, go and make experiments while you walk, try, study, and EXECUTE. At the same time, you have to keep the perspective to what you want, so, that’s why you will want to keep notes of goals in various levels and perhpas brainstorm about things from time to time. Clarity is king.

Do you need a degree?

That’s a tough question, but I’d say it depends.

Firstly, a little bit about myself. I’m a 24 years old male, living in Colima, México. I wouldn’t call my life a perfect example of success — as of now — becasue I didn’t reach a level where I could call myself a fullfilled person. However, I did a lot, and with a few. Right now, I work remotely as a Software Engineer, and go on with my side-projects whenever I have some time.

My life is good. I have achieved a lot, and I still have a lot to achieve.

Some principles I follow:
* Self-knowledge: If you don’t know yourself, you are bound to fail, sooner or later.
* Execute: If you don’t do, not even Harvard will save your ass. I’m sorry but you are not Paris Hilton (or are you?).
* Knowledge: Always go after what interests you, and learn.

That’s it. These are pretty much the principles I follow when it comes to my professional life. So far, I have managed to travel to México (without knowing any Spanish at all), work in there, for a US web-dev company, earning in dollars, travel back to Brazil, spend vacation in my hometown (Rio), getting the Mexican FM3 visa and having lots of friends, in two countries.

That might now sound like a lot, but I do have a very good perspective ahead of me. Why? Well, because I’m the only one responsible for that.

The degree-oriented society is very akin to the passive mindset of “fitting yourself to the system”. Well, it used to be like that, and, hell, it still works like that in many spheres. However, things are changing. If you feel you need a degree, go ahead, but don’t do it to get your spot on the society. You can do that yourself. Think, use your mind, brainstorm, find what you like.

I do plan on getting a degree on graphics design, because that’s the most convenient and effortless way to get myself on track for learning something that has turned out to be another passion of mine. But I’ll do that for the knowedge and perhaps the networking, but the true outcome depends only on myself.

By the way, I don’t have a degree. I gave up on Computer Science on the 4th semester and never looked back. I’m a pretty good software engineer and web developer, but everything I know, I learned on my own, with passion moving me.

Welcome to the New Era!

The new era of mobile-lifestyle, of life/style-design, of stress-free productivity, of crispy-clear clairity and goals, of breaking and defying paradigms and stereotypes, of high performance. The new era of freedom.

This is a personal experiment, a blog about my attempt into evolving my life into what I dream it should be. You are welcome to join this venture.

Getting control of your life, is, IMO, keeping the balance and discipline, while being pragmatic, flexible and of course, defining outcomes, while you develop skills to accomplish what you want. I don’t think it could be summarized, as life design is as complex as life itself, because it is life the way it is meant to be, for us humans.

I’m a fan of GTD and have been applying and enhance my workflow for 2 years already. It really helped me to push things forward and grow my expectations, while allowing me to handle more input and produce more quality output, on time. I still consider myself an intermediate GTD practitioner, but I like the model and was very excited when “Making it all work” was released.

And here’s where “Life Design” enters, which I think is a higher sphere, that wraps the GTD bandwagon as well as time management, self-knowledge/awareness / spirituality and anything else that makes sense and could studied and improved. The Making it All work book is also in this level when talking about control & perspective.

This place is just in its conception, and is meant to be a diary of my new experiments regarding life/lifestyle-design and also a place where like-minded people can discuss and brainstorm about these topics, which go through many layers and can be very general and abstract, and hard to grasp and absorb, but definitely worth it when internalized and applied across all the spectrum of life.

I’m a geek, but a geek that defy the stereotypes, as I also am I gym-freak, body-builder, math student and graphic designer. This is one aspect that attracts me and something that has a lot to do with life design IMHO — defying the current models and paradigms, and just live the life you want: If you like graphics design and if you already are a software engineer, nothing prevents you from being an awesome graphic designer and mix the skills and produce something beautiful and new from it. Also, being a geek doesn’t mean you can’t have a beautiful and well-shaped body and be a body builder. The challenge is, to do all this, you need to be efficient and know how to

That’s why I believe in automation, too. The 4-hour workweek and the unlimited freelancer books are examples of what I believe you can do to have more quality time and quality of life, and automate the mundane stuff so you can be more efficient and focus on new/more interesting things (may be focusing on how to automate things better? The point is, having time to and not feel under stress/pressured/overwhelmed).

However, the most important asset of all this is time. Eventually, one has to cut the crap. Life has infinite possibilities, but we have finite time.

This blog will eventually evolve into a resourceful website with resources about everything that relates to living the life you want.

Welcome to this New Era!