So Evernote is a web based app that has changed the way that I work / exist online during the last few months. Simply sign up for free, download the app to your computer and every time you’re on a page that you want to remember, just click the Evernote button and the page will get imported into the Evernote application. If you don’t want the entire page, just select the area you want then right click –> “Add To Evernote” and your selection will then get added to Evernote. It will also record the time added and website that it came from. You can also add .pdf files and image files in a similar way.

Text in image recognition

I don’t want to go into too many details about what it does, as you’re better off just watching this 2 minute video by clicking this link here. But I will mention one of the coolest things it does is recogise text in images that you upload, wether it be typed text that you photographed, or a snapshot of some handwriting. This has to be seen to be believed.

What is a scanner?

Scanners are basically people that flit from one topic to another and will easily get distracted and head off on a tangent. They are lovers of knowledge and learning about many different things. They are rarely specialists on a particular topic as they get distracted and move onto a new topic. You can either look at this as a bad thing or embrace it and use tools to help you control it and use it positively – like Evernote. If this sounds like you, I recommend you check out a book called Refuse To Choose by Barbara Sher. It’s all about scanners….like me!

How I use Evernote

I do a lot of web research on various topics. Things for work, or just things that interest me and I don’t always want to be digging through the history for things that interest me. So whenever I come across anything that interests me I just add it to Evernote. I usually then file it within a general topic (e.g. Business), but don’t worry, you can always do this later. You can also add tags if it helps you find things easier, but I’ve never seen the need.

Just add away, you’ll never know when you’ll need the information. After all, its not like you’re collecting leaflets or printing out physical copies of the data. Its all easily text searchable at a later date, even the pictures.

A big digital scrapbook in the cloud

I find that I use Evernote like a giant digital scrapbook, which is much better than an offline scrap book as it takes no time at all to put together, its text searchable and doesn’t take up any physical space. To add the sheer volume of information that I add to Evernote into a physical scrap book would take me ages, and I’d quickly get bored of it. Everything syncs up to the Evernote servers and you can access the data in three ways – through the desktop based application, from the web, or from their iPhone app. You can also add stuff to your account via all of these. I find using the iPhone app out and about very useful for photographing menus and bottles of wine for checking up on later.

I love having all my random findings with me wherever I go via my phone. I recently used Evernote to record websites as I found wholesalers / suppliers for a new website. I then took it out with me when I went to visit these suppliers, photographing photos, brochures and business cards for later use on the computer. Last week I also used Evernote when researching how to build boats.

The possibilities for using Evernote’s functionality are endless. It should definitely be on everyone’s desktop and iPhone. Try it…you’ll probably love it.

I’m naturally a bit of a night owl, and when I spend a year working as a DJ I didn’t have any problems with my sleeping routine. I’d get to bed at 3/4am and get up around midday, wander to the university (i had just graduated) to have coffee with friends and just generally spend the day relaxing before heading off to the club later that evening if I was working!

But times have changed, and I find that my normal sleeping routine is pretty ineffective for my current needs (though I do love it and intend to return to it as soon as possible – now that’s lifestyle design at its most very basic). I am also aware that its not necessarily possible to change your sleeping pattern effectively in the long term i.e. you can’t become a morning person if you are a night owl. But hey, I’m going to test this out for myself. I figure if I can get enough sleep then I should be ok.

I have three main problems at the moment.

1. Getting to bed early
2. Getting to sleep when I do get to bed
3. Getting up when my alarm goes off in the morning

Getting Up

The last is the greatest of all these problems. I find myself to be very devious and dishonest with myself when woken up by my alarm. I’ll happily tell myself that I can hit the snooze button a few times, but that just doesn’t work. I end up just turning it off again and again. I also find myself willing to make up the most elaborate excuses about why I shouldn’t get up, and what I’ll tell people about why I wasn’t where I should be that morning. Disastrous. Is anyone else like this?

Motivation

So, what is my motivation for doing this. I’ve already mentioned the exams coming up, so I can’t be lying in bed all day thinking about doing work when I should be doing work. I also need to get into the hospital early in the mornings as its the best time to see patients and I have a clear head to get work done.

Some of the most effective people I know are early birds. One particular person springs to mind, a doctor that I once worked with. He would get up at 5am and go running every day,  he would then manage to get loads of work done even before he started at work at 8.30 am. He was in ridiculously good shape for a 40 year old guy and had recently managed to write a book whilst working full time, and he had a hefty teaching schedule also. An amazingly effective guy.

So I wanna be like those kind of people, up-and-at-it early in in the morning, every morning, and not being tired by 9am because it was my routine. I only need to do it for the next 10 weeks or so, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Methods / Tools

Alarm Clock x 2

I have set my alarm on my phone for 9pm with the aim of getting to sleep by 1o pm initially.

I will be setting two alarms for the morning the first on my phone, and the second is on my Lumie Bodyclock Advanced 200.  The latter is a dawn simulator which lights up over a set period of time to simulate dawn – its great.

I’ll be setting my alarms for 6am tomorrow morning and will hope to be reducing it to 5 am over the coming days.

I’ve also downloaded the iPhone White Noise App, which I’ll be using to help me get to sleep, its got all sorts of calming ambient noises on it like running water and cats purring. Personally I like the tinkling chimes, they remind me of Bali.

Once I’m Up

I’ll be getting on with my fitness regime. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are running days. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are weight training days. Sunday is a Cycling day. Then breakfast, then work.

That’s about if for now. I’m going to update every Sunday on how I’m getting on.

I’m a big fan of web apps that can track really useful metrics in life. I’ve also been tracking my web productivity using RescueTime for a while now and am finding it really useful to see where I’m loosing my time.

In a nutshell Daily Burn is an app is totally free (unless you want to upgrade to pro). It allows you to monitor  the three important factors in your health – Body, Nutrition and Exercise. What more could you want.

Track Body

This area of the site allows you to track your important body metrics such as weight, waist size and resting heart rate. It also allows you to set yourself goals based on these metrics. For example you can set your target weight and see a nice graph of your progress towards your target weight.

Track Nutrition

Now this is really nifty. Based on your goals and the basic body information you provide on signup it will calculate your target daily Calories, Protein, Fat and Carb intake. You then input (via a very simple interface) what you have eaten. If the product that you’ve eaten isn’t listed, as long as you’ve got the nutrition data, you can enter a custom item, but I’ve only ever needed to do that once. The database is pretty damn impressive, even for UK based users there is a pretty comprehensive database of products.

Tracking my nutrition has been a really important step for me, as as we all know, you can’t out train a bad diet. One amazing revelation for me was that 1 teaspoon of olive oil contains 4.5 grams of fat. Yeah I should probably have realized this, but I used to cook with plenty of olive oil thinking that it was a healthy alternative to other oils. Everything in moderation I guess. I expect that this discovery alone will be a significant step in reducing my weight to my target goal.

Track exercise

The final area of tracking is your exercise. There is a huge range of exercises to choose from, both cardio and strength training exercises and you can always add your own exercises if you can’t find the particular exercise you want. There are also videos to demonstrate most of the exercises in the database.  The application will calculate your calorie burn per exercise if you don’t already know them.

Its really easy to organise your workouts, pick one of their pre-made training regimes or make your own. I’m currently working on the ‘Couch to 5k Running Plan’ which has been really great so far.

Challenges

There are loads of challenges for you to complete, such as ‘Bike 100 Miles’, ‘Burn 5000 Calories’ or ‘Lose 20lbs’ etc. These are really good, and you get a little medal / trophy icon attached to your account when you complete one.

Motivation

One of the coolest features about Daily Burn is that it has embraced social media in a big way. You can find people to motivate you on the web by inviting your friends, or requesting another user to become your motivator. It will also enable to you find people in your area who are trying to achieve the same goals, I imagine that this is awesome if you live in a city.

iPhone App

The latest development in Daily Burn land is that they’ve brought out a new free iPhone app, which enables you to do pretty much all of the metric tracking on the go, which is great if you’re out at lunch and away from your computer. It also allows you to take the app to the gym to check and log your workouts. Brilliant!

Do it…

So yeah, that’s it really, why don’t you try it. The website is DailyBurn.com. My user name is: dan_maggs if you wanna check my progress or add me as a motivator.

Thing is…there is very little that consistently inspires me, and for me to write a blog on one subject just wouldn’t work. I need to write about the things that inspire me on a day to day basis, and this is difficult when your mind works the way that mine does.

So I’ve decided to keep this blog free and easy at the moment. Its not like I’m actively pursuing high readership, after all, the aim of this blog isn’t about money. I’ve always got thoughts about what I might like to write about on here, but they never really happen because I feel they don’t conform to a theme. So I’m going to forget the theme for the moment and just write.

For each REALLY important task I add to my to-do list I seem to add at least another two less important tasks to distract me.

Yesterday, I spent the day getting stuff done, so that today I could spend completely focused on a ‘mission critical task’. Ok, I didn’t completely get things finished, but I definitely got things to a point where I’m happy with the state of the house (job done, pat myself on the back). This morning,I sat down to write my to-do list as I do each morning and I find that I have no less than 8 important task to complete, and one REALLY important task.

In the book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, Stephen Covey suggest catagorising tasks into one of four categories.

• Urgent
• Important
• Unimportant
• Irrelevant

It’s all about prioritisation really. So what do these categories mean to me?

Urgent Tasks / Really Important Tasks

I think I’d like to call this section ‘Really Important Tasks’ because I don’t think that a task has to be time urgent for it to be more important than the ‘Important’ category.

For me this category can either include urgent tasks that have to be done (such as shipping off an order so that it makes its postal deadline), or includes mission critical tasks that are not necessarily urgent, but if they don’t get done they will disrupt the whole bigger picture.

Today’s mission critical task me is a Market Analysis for my new business plan. This is a crucial step in the business plan and is really important for me to get it done without delay.

Important Tasks

These are things that I need to get done. They’re not hugely time sensitive, but they still need doing just the same.  They are time consuming and distract from really important tasks. Some examples from today’s list include:-

• Sort out council tax – They have two accounts with my name on, and keep trying to charge me extra, so I have to make yet ANOTHER call to them to try and sort it out.
• eBay – Following my recent declutter, I have a large box of things to list on eBay.
• Credit Card – Call and request a new card

Unimportant / Irrelevant

If you can’t categorise a particular task into any of the above categories, should you be doing it at all? Unimportant task will just distract your attention from the job at hand. This is not to say that things in the unimportant category can’t become important, or even urgent over time. I have some washing that needs to be done, but today it is unimportant to me as I have no need for any of that washing any time soon. Doing the washing would be important if I was starting to run out of clothes to wear, it may even become urgent if I have to have a smart shirt the following day and I don’t have one clean.

So for me to-do lists need to be organised to include just the first two categories – Urgent and Important. Urgent things get done first, followed by important things. I just completely ignore the other categories and they are as their titles suggest – Unimportant and Irrelevant. It’s a really simple way of organising your prioritisation and I recommend you try it!

Now, I’m not trying to be all high and mighty here, I’m certainly not a perfectionist, far from it. But I do like to think that things should be done right, and I like to think that I strive for the ideal of perfection. But I’ve heard variations on the title of this post crop up a lot lately in the books and blogs that I have read and its become clear to me that there is a lot of truth in those words.

Over the couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the business that I’m about to start which will involve a lot of time and effort over the coming weeks. Due to other constraints in my life I’d have about 4 weeks to get the business planned, markets and products identified, tested and begin trading. I want to have as few distractions as possible from the goal at hand, so I figured a major clean up and declutter of the house would be a good thing to do. The intended side effect of this is that I would find out loads off things that I could put on eBay and Amazon Marketplace in order to raise some cash to help with the business.

So one week has passed, and yes, I’ve done plenty of work on the house, I’ve managed to sell quite a bit of stuff on eBay and Amazon, I’ve taken three car loads of junk to recycling, charity shops and the tip. I’ve managed to completely empty my filing cabinet from nearly 15 years of paperwork, recycling most of it, and scanning documents I need to keep, and filing in a small box the stuff I can’t scan (birth certificate, passport etc).

Yet, I look around the house today, but its far from perfect.

• My desk is covered in things that don’t really have a home yet.
• There is a big pile of stuff right behind me that needs photographing and listing on eBay.
• There is yet more junk in my car that needs to go to the recycling place.
• I’ve done all the washing and hung it out to dry (and it has just started raining). The side effect of washing is of course – ironing!

Aside from all that, the house needs a damn good clean, and I also need to go shopping for food!

So, what went wrong in my plan? I had aimed to get this all done in two days. Things went well for two days, but I realised about half way through the second day that my goal of having the perfectly decluttered, clean and tidy house within two days was unrealistic.  Disheartened, and overheated by the heatwave last week, I plodded on doing this and that for the next week, and now I find myself one week later writing this post.

• Did I set myself an unreasonable time frame to do the task?
• Did I set myself an unreasonable goal in trying to achieve the perfectly decluttered, clean and tidy house?
• Am I just procrastinating because I’m afraid of failure in the task that lies beyond the current job?

I think it is important to try and get the job done, I’m not far off completing the task now, but I need to stop this task from extending any longer into the four weeks. I MUST start this business!

So here we go, a new compromise. I need to get everything done TODAY, that stops me from doing the really important stuff that I need to do tomorrow. Ideally this should mean that I get this place spotless by midnight tonight, but if it isn’t, I need to forget it and get on with important stuff tomorrow.

So perfection really IS the enemy of productivity, it is also a great excuse to stop yourself from achieving your goals through fear. But in order to face your fears, you must decide on how much time perfection is worth, and stick to it!