It was a great lecture, and I enjoyed it a lot. I have heard about Tony before, and did read quite a few articles and posts on mind mapping. Finally, I really like the approach and use a software version of it for some of the creative processes of mine. But I’ve yet to read a single book by Tony, so it was great to hear all his most known sayings in person with vivid examples and explanations.

On creativity

Studies prove that babies and kids up to 3-5 years are the most creative individuals among most of us, they are 95% creative in solutions and reactions to life. As we grow, our creativity somehow drops. By the time we are students graduating from a college, we’re only 25% creative on average, and most of the adult life we’re only 10% creative.

Now, this is what many people say is normal. But I really liked Tony’s point of view when he said: normal is not natural.

Naturally, human creativity only grows with age. It is true! If we look at our history and culture, there are countless examples of people who created most important and influential works of their lives in their last, not first, years. Da Vinci, Verde, many others- they all spent their lives perfecting their art and their mind, only feeling ready for their masterpieces by the age which most people consider to be a hard rock bottom of their creativity.

On human brain and our activity

A revelation for the audience was that on average we use less than 1% of our brain’s abilities. Tony asked everyone to guess the percentage and we all had a quick discussion about it. I was the most pessimistic of my group with 3-5% activity range. I must say, less than 1% was a shock even to me!

So why not spend a bit more? Why not use this amazing tool available to us - our mind?

We take for granted the common limitations like the degrading memory or inability to constantly come up with creative solutions to our challenges. But once again, this normal situation shouldn’t be considered natural: if we only spend some time developing our mind’s abilities, consciously concentrate on getting better at creative thinking and writing, our mind will flourish and keep amaze ourselves and everyone around us with incredible results.

What it takes to be a genius

Not much, really! We all are quite equal when it comes to out potential for becoming the next world-famous genius.

Here are the two distinctive ways to tell geniuses apart from everyone else:

1. A genius has great and big daydreams.

Think and plan to make it big, don’t limit your future achievements by agreeing with yourself what’s possible and what’s not in your current situation. Your brain follows the images it sees or gets through self-affirmations, so unless you have big daydreams and plan to produce something incredibly powerful and useful for as many people as possible, you won’t achieve much.

Humble thoughts will get you even more humble results, so prepare yourself for achievements of your lifetime by daydreaming something massively good.

Example: Thomas Alva Edison  didn’t just dream of inventing a light bulb, instead he put all his knowledge and persistence together to invent a whole system of electric lighting to be used by all the mankind: light bulbs, electricity generators, electrical wiring and a range of sockets, plus much more. His vision of providing the light to everyone at any given time helped him make it through thousands of failed experiments before he finally made a breakthrough.

2. Genius works to make daydreams come true, to make them real

This is another thing not many of us pay attention to - it’s not enough to just have a vision, an idea which can potentially be useful. You have to be prepared to work on this idea, to make mistakes and face failures, to resist opinions of others and to persistently make progress towards your ultimate goal.

When you think about it, it does take a lot to be curious and unstoppable in a genius-like way - quite possibly, this is what makes some people successful and others unsuccessful - just their being faithful to their own daydreams!

Your brain needs a diet to stay active and healthy

If you want to make sure your brain stays active throughout all the years and increases its activity and potential instead of slowly degrading as you age, here’s some of the things you should include in your daily life:

1. Plenty of oxygen - this essentially means regular exercise

2. Sensory stimulation - be creative and re-discover your own senses - touch, smell, taste and see things as if you suddenly became a different, much more curious person

3. Lifelong learning - never stop discovering new subjects and expanding your knowledge - even if something is not directly related to your career, pick a topic every year to read a book about or watch an educational TV series on

4. Take plenty of rest - enough sleep, regular showers and relaxing physical activity when your mind gets distracted from its everyday worries - running is a great activity for this.

5. Friendship and love - be friendly and kind to people; make new friends regularly and try to stay connected with all the generations and not only your own age group; fall in love and enjoy this wonderful experience

6. Eat healthy food - nutrition is very important for your body and brain in particular

That’s it. Tony spoke of many more things which fascinated me, and I’m sure I’ll learn more as I read his works in the future (I’ve brought a book in mind-mapping which he signed for me during one of the breaks!), but these notes above is what I’ve taken home from that evening. Hope you enjoyed the article and will use some of the advice, I can see how even some of it can really make a long-lasting positive change in our lives.

Read more in: Personal Development.

• DLM: How To Get Better Sleep While Spending Less Time in Bed
• Whakate: What is Wrong with GTD?
• Whakate: The Closed List: Regaining Control Over Your Day
• Zen Habits: Sound of Silence
• Mark and Angel: 22 Tips to Increase Productivity

Hope you like these too, and if there are posts you enjoyed last week and would like to share - just post links in the comments area!

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’ve never seen anything like it before, nothing less than amazing!

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Read more in: Personal Development.

It was bound to happen: I’ve joined Twitter! Some of you probably know that it’s a micro-blogging platform with tiny (up to 140 characters) updates you can leave through your browser or many specialized applications.

It would be great to get connected, so look me up:

http://twitter.com/PerfectBlogger

Please leave your Twitter name in comments below as well!

Read more in: Personal Development.

New Personal Development Blog look

Welcome to the brand new, shiny Personal Development blog!

Starting today, this blog will sport a new design reflecting a chance of my focus.

Things you’ll probably notice right away are less ads and less clutter, fewer main menu options and a second-level menu highlighting the four categories of posts I spend most of my time on:

• Goal setting
• Productivity
• Motivation
• Happiness

There’s more to come in about two months time, but until then - enjoy your stay and let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make this website even more useful.

Read more in: Website news.

I’ve been meaning to write about Evernote Web for quite some time now. Being a fan of the original Evernote application and having used it for managing all sorts of personal notes for the past few years, I’m really excited to see that Evernote Web has finally arrived: it now takes only seconds to get started with using one of the most useful online services on the web.

What is Evernote?

Evernote is an information organizer. Coming from the world of standalone applications, it started as a Windows app, but is now available on a number of platforms. The most useful thing about the current Evernote service is that it’s an online repository - so all your information is available instantly on any of the devices - including Apple iPhone.

I’ve waited for a service like this for quite some time. Surely, there’s been quite a few around which allowed you to grab text and images from websites and store it online (I’ve used Google Notebook for a while, for instance), but Evernote brings a very powerful search. One of the most unique features is the image recognition, which means you can scan your to-do notes, business cards or any printed material and Evernote will recognize all the text and help you later find it using the keywords. It all happens automatically, and the quality of image recognition is really impressive.

What I use Evernote for

I like the web clipping functionality - it’s a button on the bookmarks toolbar of my Firefox browser which helps me instantly grab information from whatever page I’m currently on. You select the text (can be images or tables, anything really), then click the Clip to Evernote button and voila - the information piece is in your online Evernote repository.

I really like the way it saves me time with my scribbled notes - previously I had to allocate time to re-type them. It’s much quicker now - I simply make photos of whatever I need to capture and store it online. I haven’t even started using the image recognition feature properly yet - even having my scanned/photographed notes centrally available online is already a productivity boost.

Are you using it yet? Let me know how you find it. This isn’t a paid review (isn’t even a review, really), but a sincere recommendation - check Evernote out if you haven’t done so. There’s only a few apps I truly like, and this one does seem to be one of them.

Let me know, and good luck with staying productive and organized!

See also:

• Evernote Downloads
• Evernote on iPhone
• 7 Ways to Use Evernote - Lifehack.org

Read more in: Productivity.

Sharing your knowledge, especially if it’s useful and unique, isn’t always easy. There are plenty of reasons why you should do this, but somehow it’s very easy to get stopped by negative assumptions. In today’s post, I’d like to share my opinion on sharing knowledge, and ask for yours in return.

Naturally, most of us feel competition. Even in your own team, you’re bound to think now and then of how good or bad your performance is compared to that of other team members. While this is absolutely natural, you shouldn’t let such a competition spirit get in the way of you sharing the knowledge with others.

The Truth About Sharing Knowledge

One of the worst things you can do is to refuse sharing the knowledge with your team. When you do this, you may have your own reasons, but even if you tell them, your peers would get their own, very different ideas.

One of the most common reasons for not sharing is the fear of losing your unique advantage. I used to think that it’s always best to have a unique skillset within a team, and never share any of the knowledge with others. The more you know of things nobody else knows, the better. Boy, was I wrong in such thinking!

The truth is, all the knowledge must be shared. If you think a bit longer, you will understand that no matter how good you are, if you work for a company and act on behalf of a certain team of people - this implies that everything you know or learn must be shared. You are paid for achieving collective results, and if this means teaching others how to do everything you’re capable of, then do your best and show them. You are not paid for making life harder for other team members just because you’re not feeling like sharing something.

Being open with your team and freely sharing anything you know is one of the major signs of you being comfortable where you are. Being a great team player depends on your comfortable participation in every process of such a team, including knowledge exchange. In addition to this, shared knowledge ensures your team stays safe should anything unexpected happen to you - even if you’re temporarily unavailable, your team members will be quite comfortable covering for you with the information you had previously shared with them.

There is a certain point in your professional life, when you suddenly see how most of your fears were really amateur. In fact, I’m sure that every fear you have about your job becomes silly at some stage of your career. Every single one of your fears can and will be smiled upon one day - you’ll look back and laugh how you were afraid of doing something so simple or easy. It’s just a matter of time and a subject to your ever-expanding experience.

Common Fears and How to Overcome Them

With this in mind, I’m going to save you the trouble of figuring out most of the competition fears which stop so many people from sharing their knowledge. I’m giving you the false statements similar to the ones I myself had once believed to be true.

Before we start: Using this opportunity, I’d like to apologize for my behavior to some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career so far. I also thank you, for if it wasn’t for the support and guidance from some of you, I would have never changed for the better.

Here they are, the statements which you should never accept, long with my advice on how to act in every situation:

Fear of Not Having Unique Skills

False statement: If you don’t have a unique skill, you will no longer be needed in your team and will probably be fired.

Yep, that’s exactly how I looked at sharing knowledge at some stage in my life (the first years of my career, to be precise). Now, I admit that some companies support and promote such a behavior among their employees, but without cooperation and shared knowledge it’s impossible to have people function as a team.

My advice: Skills, not matter unique or not, can’t really be shared. They are your own ways of doing things, of applying the knowledge the most effective way. Your knowledge can and should be shared, but skills are always going to be yours - there will never be two people on a team with exactly the same skills, so you shouldn’t worry about it. If you explain everything you know to others, you will only gain wider acceptance as an authority.

Losing Your Roles and Positions Within a Team

False statement: If I give away everything I know, my services will no longer be needed as other team members will be doing everything themselves

My advice: if you have so much knowledge you worry about sharing it, you’re probably an avid learner. This means it will never become possible for you to give everything away, because you’ll be learning something new almost every day. If others start doing more based on the knowledge they get from you, this will give you a chance to work on new and perhaps more exciting projects.

You know what? Eventually there comes a time when you want to move on. When you’re no longer feeling like you’re giving most value by staying in your position and doing what you currently do. And guess what - until you have your knowledge properly shared, you won’t be able to leave your functions behind!

Another common way this happens is that you become so unique and so good ad your particular functions, that everyone else in your team wants you and only you to keep doing it! Sometimes your colleagues won’t let you work on other things just because this will mean you’ll have to abandon some of the common functions you’ve been doing so far. For them, it can be an unnecessary risk - nobody knows how good you’ll be at new things, but everyone knows you’re really good with your current functions. So, before you decide that you want to move on to something new, be sure to get into the habit of sharing.

Shared Knowledge Reducing Your Chances to be Promoted

False statement: If I share everything, I will never stand out enough to be promoted

My advice: you never get promoted based on the knowledge you possess, it’s always to do with your experience and results - both measuring your ability to apply the knowledge.

You can get hired partially because of your vast knowledge, yes. But promotions usually happen because you grow out of your position by accepting more responsibilities and doing more. This happens not because your professional knowledge grows, but because your become more aware of processes in your organization and recognize the potential for improvements. The higher you are in your career, the more personality-based your success is, and the less it is dependent on your professional skills. The value you bring to the team or organization is rarely based only on your knowledge of the processes, it’s increasingly more to do with how comfortable you are doing what you do and taking on new projects and challenges.

Sharing Knowledge To Be Successful

Sharing knowledge is one of the best things you can do to become a great team player and ultimately a leader. It is essential not only for the success of people around you, but for your own success in the first place. The more you share, the more people respect you. The more respected you feel, the more you’re willing to share. The more you give away, the more new opportunities come your way.

Perhaps my advices won’t cover every possible situation you can find yourself in, but they’re drawn from my own experience. I know how hard it is to learn from somebody else’s mistakes and not your own ones, but my advice stays the same - learn to share the knowledge, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Finally, if you recognize the common fears of sharing knowledge or have some of your own - leave them in a comment, I’m sure it will help someone.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Personal Development.

The first edition of a podcast is now up, and it’s based on the 3 Rules To Help You Fight Procrastination article.

What is a podcast?

Podcasts are usually quite short (5-15min) audio recordings accessible from your website or through one of the many podcast catalogues. Podcasts are very similar to blogs in a way that they’re like an information channel which you can subscribe to, thus constantly getting the latest editions for you to listen to. Many blogs have grown their popularity due to podcast service; at the same time, many podcasts became even more successful than the original idea or a website which started them off.

How do your listen to a podcast?

Websites usually have some kind of a widget - an on-page audio player with basic controls (play/pause, seek and volume) which allows you to start listening to a podcast. For my blog, you will find a widget like this in the sidebar:

To get started, simply click the play button!

What can you expect from Personal Development blog podcasts?

There will be 2 monthly podcasts, initially going back and voicing some of my previous posts, but with a plan to start covering new articles.

Right now, it is planned to cover the posts from the website, which means podcasts will be yet another way for you to get the best of the information I have to offer. I think, however, that there’s nothing wrong with posting unique podcasts in the future - something which has never been posted on my pages before.

Tune in to the first edition, and let me know what you think!

Read more in: Personal Development.

This is a guest post by Mark McManus from MuscleHack.com. Mark is a muscle and nutrition enthusiast who has spent years in independent research finding the most effective strategies for building the body of your dreams. Mark will help you build muscle & lose fat. He is the author of the book ‘Total Six Pack Abs‘, the guaranteed system for burning fat & sculpting chiseled abs.

There is something you can do which can improve virtually every area of your life.

Weight-training

You say, “Weight training can enhance my quality of life?” Yes it can.

Any fitness program can, but here’s a few brief reasons why weight-training beats them all…

1. Less fat, more muscle. Weight training burns calories all day long. You’ll lose fat and build muscle. Ladies, you’ll get that toned look. Fellas, you’ll be brawnier and more defined. With resistance training, it’s not just about weight-loss but about body recomposition, losing body-fat and gaining lean muscle tissue.
2. It’s not exhausting. Long-distance running, for example, is fatiguing to say the least. If you workout correctly, you can be in and out of the gym in 30-45 mins max, taking 2 minute breaks between sets.
3. Increased Strength. Weight-training obviously beats them all for strength gains, this can come in handy in your every day life.

Ok, with that said, how can training like a bodybuilder improve your life in general? Glad you asked.

Here’s 5 ways weight training can enhance your quality of life:

1. More energy - Energy begets energy. People tend to see the amount of energy they feel as only a result of calorie intake. However, you know as well as I do, that movement and activity make you feel energetic. Lack of movement makes you lethargic, regardless of how much you eat - it’s simply a fact of physiology. Movement in the form of exercise, causes the desire to move more, creating a positive feedback cycle of energy and enthisiasm. With weight training, you’ll perform brief workouts almost every day which ensures that you’ll feel vibrant and passionate in all other areas of your life!
2. Excitement – As readers of this blog, you know all about goal-setting. However, how many of your goals produce quick, tangeable results? Using an effective workout plan can produce remarkable results. In a few short weeks you can see your body change before your eyes! I don’t know of many things more exciting than that.
3. Confidence – Looking good makes you feel confident. It’s not vanity, it’s empowerment. Apart from the fact that your physical body will make you feel confident, you’ll begin to ask yourself, “If I can control my body with the conscious use of my will, what else can I control?” This is the beginning of unbounded confidence and a mental attitude that will propel you to success.
4. Sexual attractiveness - No point in dodging this one. Your physical appeal and magnetism will increase. That’s great news for single people and also great news for the spouses of those of you in relationships ;)
5. Better Health. Here’s some health benefits of weight-training:
   • Increased muscular strength
   • Reduced body fat mass and increased lean body mass
   • Strengthened tendons and ligaments
   • Positive changes in lipid profile (cholesterol & triglycerides)
   • Improved bone strength and density
   • Improved glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity (warding off diabetes)
   • Increased metabolic rate - You’ll burn more calories even when resting
   • Decreased blood pressure

So what are you waiting for? You can get your free workout plan here, get started with a bodybuilding diet, and head over to the bodybuilding forum anytime where you’ll meet people who’ll be glad to offer help and support.

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’d like to share my findings with you in case you’re looking for the next online tasks and projects management tool which follows some of the best ideas of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach.

What is GTDagenda?

GTDagenda is a new online tool for managing your tasks. It can be used as a simple to-do list tool, or can easily be incorporated into projects-based workflow. To help you stay on track, it supports setting goals and helps you manage your calendar.

Naturally, there are some great features inherited from the world of GTD: contexts, projects and next actions are all here for your convenience.

Frankly, contexts and projects aren’t anything special these days - pretty much every second online tasks management tool has them, but Next Actions, surprisingly, is still very hard to come by. In GTDagenda, Next Actions are put right in the main menu of the website, allowing for instant access to all the next actions in your projects. I believe Next Actions is the default view of GTDagenda once you log in:

At the moment, you can have as many Next Actions for the same project as you like, but I’ve found that you can nicely prioritize them if you use the priority field (can be seen in the screenshot - priorities are the numbers in black-coloured bubbles).

Adding tasks is done in a very standard way, but all the basic are covered: parent project, due date, priority and even a text note for each task, as well as a Next Action flag:

I expect that the bulk tasks creation feature will be implemented very soon, cause adding a few tasks in a go for a particular project would be really great.

Unique features of GTDagenda

Checklists

I really liked this feature, it’s not another representation of your daily tasks, but rather a different way to look at your regular activies. For example, I found it very convenient for tracking my weekly gym attendance or for making sure I work regularly on my future posts for my blogs.

It’s a very simple interface which allows you to create and update as many checklists as you like:

Schedules

Schedules allow you to plan your days better. You can create as many daily or weekly schedules as you like, and they should help you manage your time through the day better:

For example, you can schedule your writing time, your lunch break or your gym session, just to get an idea of how your day will look. You can similarly block time for any other activities without going into too much detail. But, based on your schedule, you can then expect to spend appropriate amount of time working on specific tasks.

I may want to concentrate on a specific topic for my writing today, and will have a task called “Write more on GTD workflow” in my tasks list, however in my daily schedule I’ll simply know that it’s time to get busy writing based on my “Writing time” slot.

Neither Checklists not Schedules are mapped into projects or tasks, however you can specify which project a particular schedule should be attributed to. Like I said, these features simply allow you to experiment and optimize your time - based on your expectations and not on the actual tasks lists.

User friendly features of GTDagenda

The service itself is very young and is still very much in development - new features are added weekly, and you can keep track of them using this page: GTDagenda - What’s New.

There are some really nice features which make this service universally pleasant - print and email options, for example. Printing allows you to print your projects, tasks or next action lists as a nice-looking list. I thing Next Actions are a great list to print - will help you stay on track even if you’re away from your browser, for example.

Conclusion

GTDagenda is a promising project. It is being actively developed and has good chances of becoming a really useful tool for your daily use. There are different plans - one free and two paid ones, so all options are covered. If the pace of development stays the same for the next few months, I see a really bright future for GTDagenda.

I don’t think it’s good enough for me to jump off my Vitalist account, but it’s going to be good enough for many who are just looking around. I’ll definitely revisit the tool once it gets HTTPS access for access security and AJAX for better interface experience, but the set of core features is a great mix and so it has a lot of potential.

Read more in: Reviews.

Here’s a link: Exam Success: Top Tips from Brilliant Blogs (I’m really honored to be among the brilliant company there, thanks for including my tip!)

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’ve been using the Evernote organizer for quite some time, it’s the best offline organizer I’ve seen - even the free edition. You can create, organize and easily search notes with text, web clips, images, handwriting and even digital ink!

Evernote guys have been working on online version of their organizer for the past few months, and have released the Evernote service as a private (invitation-only) beta. There’s a browser version of the service with web-clipping add-ons for typical browsers, and there are clients to access the Evernote Beta from Windows and Mas OS X.

For today only, the Giveaway of the Day site is doing a promotion of the Evernote products: you can download the latest full version of their Evernote 2.2 organizer (full version means you have a functionality which automatically recognizes and indexes text in all the images of your notes in Evernote, among many other improvements), and - the best news - you can get an invitation to the Evernote Beta service!

I’ve already activated my account, and you have 15 hours left to do the same if you’re interested. If you’re after the traditional Evernote software (regular price is $49.99, by the way!), be sure to download it right away as it has an activation which will only work for another 15 hours.

If you want to avail of these amazing offers, please go to the Giveaway of the Day: Evernote beta page.

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’m honoured to be a part of this list, and think that it’s yet another great compilation of the best resources available - go have a look as you never know what gems are waiting for you just a few clicks away.

Thanks, Amy, for letting me know!

Read more in: Productivity.

“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.”
- Confucius

We all have a voice inside our head that chatters to us constantly about the day-to-day situations we find ourselves in. It’s one of the main ways that we interpret external data by constructing conversations internally with ourselves. Although we all have this voice (or more often than not, several different ones) we have our own particular versions, some of which can be more helpful than others.

Does your voice support and encourage you when things aren’t going quite as planned or does it become aggressive, whiny, rude, pessimistic and thinks nothing of tearing a strip off you? Is it often far more hostile and abusive to you than you ever would be to other people?

I once heard this voice likened to that of a bad tempered, miserable, old duck! Yes that’s what I said, a duck. Close your eyes and you can hear the voice in your head now quacking away at you. You may not have noticed it’s duck-like aquatic qualities before, but now you can. Do you know why you can? It’s because inside your own head you can hear whatever you want to hear. You can of course hear your own voice in whatever tonality that you care for, or if you’d prefer you could be listening to yourself in the dulcet tones of Jimmy Stewart or James Earl Jones or even Oprah Winfrey. The options are as limitless as your own imagination.

So with all the people to go at, why on earth would anybody ever pick the desperate duck? That’s a real tough question to answer. I regularly have people tell me that there isn’t any voice inside their head in the first place and I usually respond with “So you’re dead then?”

The fact is we have had years to perfect our quacking and it happens so quickly and so unconsciously that many people have stopped noticing it. We mess up at something and the voice is sitting there in the background ready to chime in “Quack, you’re a failure, you never do anything right, you’re an embarrassment.” Even when something goes well it can still undermine with “Quack, you just got lucky, wait until they find you out.” It’s so insidious and so good at its job that it’s barely noticeable, but the overall negative effect on you can be enormous. It has a drip-drip effect that serves over the course of time to make you believe that what it’s saying is true. Which in turn makes it so. It sets your own reality for you. That’s what I said; a duck sets your reality for you.

So maybe it’s about time to shut the duck up or at least make him or her a little bit more friendly and supportive. We do need a voice inside our head, so let’s pick one that we like. You can drop the duck or whatever you have now and chose a voice that makes you feel good. We still want to be able to get the message across, so don’t make it so chilled and laid back that you never take any notice of it. You can even choose two, three or as many voices as you want for different occasions. The only criteria being that the voice should always support you, always be helpful, never aggressive and it never puts you down.

Wouldn’t that be great, a voice that treats you with the respect that you deserve, the kind of respect that you like to offer to other people? If you perfect this, and it does need practice to break some embedded habits, then I guarantee you will feel a great deal better about yourself.
Question: What does your duck say to you?

If you have enjoyed this article you can buy Tims book in either Hardback or eBook format at www.adaringadventure.com or read his blog at http://www.adaringadventure.com/blog/wordpress

Read more in: Personal Development.

Did you know that 2 out of 3 people have no idea what their personal strengths are? Top achievers, in contrast, fully recognise their talents and develop them into strengths on a regular basis.

If you were looking for a chance to make a giant leap in self-improvement, then I’ve got great news for you!

It just so happens that Warren Davies from Strengths Research is investigating the effect of personal strengths development on happiness, and is offering everyone a chance to participate in his research.

I think a chance to recognize my personal strengths and be able to benefit from them the most for the rest of my life is definitely worth an hour and a half of my time, so I’ll probably participate.

What is Strengths Research about?

The experiment involves identifying your personal strengths using an online questionnaire, and then using some of these strengths in new and different ways for one week, to see if this has any effect on how you feel. In previous studies, people became happier and less depressed when doing this, and I expect the same to happen here. You will be sent all the instructions and all the questionnaires you need by email, which you will complete and email back to me. Upon completion of the experiment, you will be entered into a prize draw to win £30.

What you are required to commit to?

1. Complete some questionnaires taking around 1 hour
2. Use your personal strengths in different ways over a period of 1 week (full instructions will be given for this)
3. Complete some questionnaires at the end of the 1 week period, taking around 20 minutes
4. Complete some follow up questionnaires in 1 month, taking 10-15 minutes

What you will gain from Strengths Research

1. You will be entered into a prize draw to win £30
2. Knowledge of your personal strengths
3. In previous experiments in this area, people were found to be happier, less depressed, and experience more positive emotions

If you are interested in taking part, contact Warren at strengthsresearch@yahoo.com and he will send you the questionnaires and all the information you need to get started. For more information, check the strengthsresearch.co.uk website.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Framing questions in a positive way is a must-have skill for anyone who plans to be successful. Asking positive questions requires some discipline before you feel how they help you be more effective, and it takes time to learn to see the good side in everything, but I’m going to make it all a bit easier for you.

Today I’d like to share with you some principles which are key to positive questions. If you believe you don’t know how to ask anything in a positive way, let’s see how I can help you. If you can relate to anything written below, please leave a comment - I’d love to discuss positive questions in more detail and your opinion will definitely help me identify future topics.

Learn to see the good side of things

One of the most basic things, seeing the good side in everything, may be tricky if you never tried this concept before.

How about this: every problem is a challenge, and every challenge has a good reason behind it. We just have to look really hard to see it, and one of the ways to do it is to simply start with - you guessed right - simple but positive questions:

• What is good about this?
• What is the positive way to describe it?
• What is the best thing I can do right now?
• What benefits does it give me?
• What can I learn from it?

These questions can and should be asked about any challenge you find yourself facing. The most important rule for them is this: by definition, positive questions get only positive answers. If some negative thought tries to get into one of your answers - throw it away. Positive question accepts only positive answer! No exceptions.

Example of Positive Questioning

At work, you are given a task which you don’t understand. The result isn’t clear, but the stakes are high and the deadline is very real. There’s the typical pressure, and this naturally makes you nervous.

Positive questions may help you turn this whole situation around, and here’s how:

What is good about this situation? It’s a challenge. The stakes are high - which means you will get rewarded when you get it done.

What is the positive way to describe it? It’s an opportunity for you to learn something new, get a very important task done and recommend yourself as someone people can count on.

What is the best thing you can do right now? You should talk to your boss or your colleagues to confirm what exactly the task is. Just full understanding of the task alone will make the task much easier to accomplish.

What benefits does this assignment give me? Plenty: you will acquire some new relevant knowledge. You will boost your confidence level when you accomplish such a tricky task. You will earn the trust of your colleagues. You can even get promoted for doing something like this!

What can I learn from it? Once the task definition and a list of objectives are confirmed, you should be able to list a few new things you will learn from working on it. Sometimes it will be knowledge specific to your field, in others you will only acquire or improve general skills like problem solving, project management basics, communication skills, improve your brainstorming or presentation skills. When you put this into perspective - that any challenge, no matter how negative it seems, teaches you something new and useful - it starts meaning a lot.

Learn to see the good side of things! If you’re given a challenge, look for ways to get maximum benefit from it, not how to get rid of it with minimal embarrasment.

Ban all the negativity

That’s right! Agree with yourself to not tolerate the negativity anymore!

First of all, you should stop yourself from being negative. This includes, but is sadly not limited to, the following things you have to stop:

• calling yourself stupid, slow, fat, ugly, or anything else
  Simply stop doing this, once and for all. Remember: every time you say something like this to yourself, you’re reassuring your mind of the partial truth in what you’re saying. And since we ALWAYS exaggerate the negativity in such exclamations, you’re slowly but surely making things only worse. Stop!

• using negative affirmations
  This is simple. Every time you need to give an answer to any question, give it whichever way you want, but don’t use the negative affirmations.If you’re asked for a name of a friend which you can’t remember, instead of saying “I can’t remember”, say “Let me think, I should definitely remember”.If some question seems to hard to answer, instead of getting back to the “I can’t” right away, use every way possible to reassure yourself you can answer it. The reality of most challenges is that they’re only challenging because of some situtional constraints. You may not be able to give a definite answer only because you’ve forgotten an important name, however you may now the rest 90% of the story. Still, instead of explaining it, you would rather say “I don’t know”.

• reporting positive progress in negative terms
  That’s a very common issue for everyone. We tend to use negative words in reporting any kind of progress, thus diminishing the little positive steps in the right direction.If your goal is to lose 5kg, and you’ve lost 2kg so far, you’ll more likely to say “I’m still too fat” than “I’m in great shape and almost hit my target”.It’s unbelievable how much insecurity we plant in our minds by simply not recognizing the success we’ve already seen.If you haven’t finished 2 tasks out of 5 on your list, instead of saying “I haven’t completed 2 tasks of 5″, say “I’ve got 3 major tasks out of the way! 2 more to go”.Wording is everything. Don’t let the negative terms make your accomplishments smaller than they really are!A well-known example: a visit to a physician. Given the same situation, one of the doctors might say “75% of people in your situation recover without any problem”. The other one could give the same piece of information by saying “25% of patients in your situation never make a recovery”. Can you guess which diagnosis most people would like to hear, and which of the two physicians they like prefer talking to?Yo see, the same information sounds and makes people feel very differently depending on the words used to deliver the message.Stop using negative affirmations! There are no things you can’t do and no things you don’t know. There’s only a bit more time you may need to concentrate on improving yourself or thinking how to best present the solution.

Look for new angles in each challenge

Next time you find yourself in a dreadful situation, take the time to recognize all the possible ways to look at it and extract something useful out of the experience.

The most important thing about recognizing the good about seemingly bad is to expect the positive outcome, to look for this with a certainty. Something positive has to be in any situation, and that’s what you need to do - find it.

Now, I’m not suggesting you try to fool yourself. When the situation looks awful, don’t pretend everything’s great if you don’t believe it. But find just one good reason to go on, and settle on it. Don’t expect this reason to outweight all the negativity of the challenge. In many cases, it won’t be possible.

But working out the habit to see good in everything you do, recognizing the positive possibilities no matter how small they are compared to the rest negativity is exactly how you eventually learn to look at each and every challenge from the positive side.

Eventually, you will learn to see the good instantly, and feel like you really have to try hard to understand what can be so bad about each situation - you will turn things around in your mind.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Today I’d like to review a new player on the task management software market - the FruitfulTime Task Manager.

What is FruitfulTime Task Manager

As you can guess from the name, this is a task management software. Upcoming versions may expand the functionality of this tool, but for the moment FruitfulTime Task Manager does just what it promises: simple task management for stress-free productivity.

There are a few things I’ve liked about this task manager, and a few which still have room for improvement. Here they are:

Security

This is a welcome feature to any software these days - if you’re going to trust any program with your personal data, you want to be sure it’s protected from others accessing your files.

FruitfulTime Task Manager comes with a built-in password protection, and immediately takes intiative by making you pick a password before you can do anything else.

You data file is protected with the Advanced Encryption Algorithm (AES) 256-bit encryption, but the password to your data is stored in a separate, also encrypted, file. The reason it’s done this way is that FruitfulTime Task Manager offers a unique combination of security and safety - your data is secure, but if you forget your password, sending your password file back to the company will allow them to decrypt it and send it back to you. That’s a very clever approach, as usually most encryption solutions highlight that if you forget the password, there won’t be any way to restore or decrypt it.

How to stay organized with FruitfulTime Task Manager

When you start using FruitfulTime Task Manager, a number of features is going to help you stay most effective:

Tasks/Subtasks. This is how you store all the to-do lists of yours - any actions which you would like to keep track of. You can look at tasks as small projects or goals, with subtasks representing the actual steps you need to take for successful achievement of the desired results.

Tasks and subtasks lists are always shown in your FruitfulTime Task Manager window, so it’s rather easy to navigate.

Each task and subtask can have its own priority, status, start and due dates and a progress:

The choice is standard, you have everything you need for effectively managing your projects:

• Priority can be High, Normal or Low
• Status can be Pending, In Progress, Waiting and Completed
• Start and Due dates have a drop-down calendar for easier use
• Progress is set in 0, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% for both tasks and subtasks

Notes (for a task, not for a subtask) allow you to add any text information to your tasks. You should use this feature for storing task-related notes and small pieces of information.

There’s a RichText editor built-in, which means you can format text to your liking, change the fonts and colors, play with styles and even insert images:

Once you are done with editing, you can print the notes section out.

It’s also possible to export your notes by saving them in RTF (Rich Text Format) document.

References (URLs and files) - this is where you put links to other documents related to a particular task. You can refer to any local files on your disks, or provide URLs for external resources. It’s a simple table with links - you click the object and it gets open:

Contacts is a section where you keep all the contacts for a particular project - again, a very simple but effective way of storing names, emails and phone numbers for all the people involved.

Reminders allow you to make sure you never lose your focus for a particular task - you can set reminders to flag the task according to its start or due date, and you pick whether such a notification should happen a few days or weeks before one of the two dates.

Using tags for better organization

Quite popular way of organizing your data - tagging every task - is naturally present in FruitfulTime Task Manager. Tags are found in the special Tagging tab which is always shown in your FruitfulTime Task Manager window:

Not only tags are shown in your Tasks list, but you can also use them for searching through your tasks list.

It’s possible to edit the names of all the default tags, and you can add or remove as many of them as you like.

Filtering for ease of use

Sooner or later, your tasks list will grow to a few hundred lines, and you’ll definitely want to use the filtering functionality of FruitfulTime Task Manager.

Filters allow you to only show the tasks which have specific tags attached to them, or highlight the tasks which are due soon:

You have quite a choice of the date filtering options, so searching should be easy. Looking at the views like “This Week”, “Next Week” and “This Month” allow for regular overviews of all your activies on different levels.

Desired features for FruitfulTime Task Manager

1) Progress bars functionality. When updating the status of task or subtask using a drop-down menu, the Progress bar only gets updated when you click away (somewhere else on the tasks/subtasks list) - I would expect this to update the progress on the fly

2) Context menus are not available - I would expect to right-click on a task or subtask to remote it or mark it completed - this would really improve the productivity. For the time being, I have to click a certain field of the tasks list to update it, or use the selection column (to the left of each table) to mark the tasks and then click the action button (mark completed or delete, for example) from the toolbar to apply

3) Marking tasks and subtasks as completed should be made easier - it needs to be a single-click operation

4) Updating progress of the subtasks must automatically update the parent task completion progress

Summary

I think FruitfulTime Task Manager is worth a try. I personally like online solutions these days and prefer a bit more control over my planned activities, but If you’re looking for a simple and specialized piece of software to manage your tasks, perhaps this is the solution for you.

Free 10-day trial version will give you the taste of main features, and a full version will set you back by $39.95.

Currently, FruitfulTime Task Manager is available for Windows only, but if they ever decide to start a Mac version, I’ll be sure to update this post with relevant information.

Read more in: Reviews.

I’ve bought and read Zen To Done book just a few days after it was announced. It met all the expectations of mine and served its purpose perfectly, providing a great introduction into a simple way of organizing your life and staying most productive with the least amount of stress. If you were looking for news ways to get your self-organization and productivity levels up, this book is a winner - it truly is the ultimate simple productivity system.

What is Zen To Done?

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits have used his personal findings and experience to come up with ZTD - Zen To Done system, and here is how he describes it:

Simply put, Zen To Done is a simple system to get you more organized and productive, and keep your life saner and less stressed, with a set of habits. ZTD teaches you:

1. The key habits needed to be productive, organized, and simplified … and no more than that.
2. How to implement these key habits … tips on forming a habit.
3. How to organize these habits into a simple system that will keep everything in your life in its place.
4. How to simplify what you need to do.
5. Minimal ZTD. Also includes an even simpler version called Minimal ZTD.

I really like the way Leo makes most things appear as simple as they really should be. It’s not a secret at all that many people fail to become organized simply because they associate too much effort with such a goal. But the truth of being organized is that the better you get at it, the easier it is for you to get things done.

For those of you who have read and tried following the Getting Things Done book by David Allen, there’s a comparison of how and why ZTD could get even better results for you. I loved the GTD book, and have incorporated parts of the GTD system into my daily routine, but somehow the feeling of not being a true GTD follower stayed on. Zen To Done offers a simplified approach which many will find much easier to follow.

Why read Zen To Done?

Essentially, Zen To Done tells you about 10 habits for being productive and organized, and every habit is given thorough explanation and a few practical examples.

The most useful feature of Zen To Done book is that Leo gives practical advice on forming and maintaining the habits. It’s rather easy to understand the principles, but unless you know exactly how to stick to them on a daily basis, they’re not going to help you much.

Apart from a generic introduction to mastering your habits, you will also find reasons why certain habits are so hard to establish and what are the best ways to make your new habits permanent. There’s quite a lot of explanation given for every habit so that you understand exactly why you would like to work on such a habit, and so by the time you get to the practical application of a new principle it’s much easier.

Zen To Done: Is It Worth Reading?

Absolutely, yes!

I highly recommend you to buy and read Zen To Done, it’s a pearl of simplified productivity wisdom which effortlessly summarizes all the principles you will ever need to stay productive and organized.

See also:

• Zen To Done introduction by Leo Babauta

Read more in: Book Reviews.

Just a week after posting my 3 Rules to Fight Procrastination, I have something else for all of you who want to reduce your procrastination to a bare minimum!

My contact from FruitfulTime has just let me know about the launch of their free ebook on procrastination: Stop Procrastion Now.

FruifulTime is a new player on the task management software field, and I’ll be posting my review of their task manager soon enough.

For the time being though, I suggest you head over and download the procrastination book - it explains quite a lot:

• what is procrastination
• common reasons most people procrastinate
• tips to confirm whether you are a procrastinator
• suggestions regarding the kind of a procrastinator you may be
• list of procrastination killers - effective ways to fight procrastination

As a bonus, the book comes with a free 10-day trial version of the FruitfulTime task manager, so you’ll have a chance to give it a try as well.

Read more in: Productivity.

I’ve recently read a wonderful book about money. Rich Ezzo has managed to surprise me in many ways, starting with the fact that the book isn’t about affiliate marketing or get-rick-quick schemes.

In our world of instant information delivery and hundreds of self-proclaimed monetization geniuses, this book was the least expected kind of a guide: a wonderful tale explaining what basic habits you should develop to ensure not only that you attract money into your life, but also truly appreciate every moment of your financial freedom.

I absolutely loved the five lessons given by the very easy-flowing story of this book, and I can relate to every one of them.

To give you the idea, here is just one of the lessons:

Earnings come from whatever the world decides a skill is worth. However, there is no one more deserving than another.

I’ve seen this happen so many times already: you see how successful a certain business idea is and you’re just amazed and how you never came up with the same thing. You look at the proud business owner and think: How in the world did this person ever come up with an idea to charge for this service? Who could have thought there are so many people willing to pay for it? How is it that nobody made this discovery before? After all, everything was waiting for us right there on the surface - just come and grab the idea, make millions and move onto the next brilliant project.

At the same time, there are so many hard workers who work late hours and deprive themselves of sleep just to make an extra few dollars. They do their jobs perfectly, and their products and services are worth dozen times more than what they charge. Yet when you ask them why their price is so low, you realize that these people do not think so highly of themselves. They do not find their ideas and services special, and therefore do not believe it would be possible to ask for more.

Well, that’s where one of the best lessons lies: do your best to produce a result, but let others decide how much it’s worth. If you’re passionate about your work and you genuinely try to produce the best service possible, you will be surprised how many people will want to pay for your services, and even more surprised at how much higher their price will be.

One unique feature of the When Money Talks, Listen! book is that it comes with plenty of examples to demonstrate the point of each lesson. To make the impact of the book last even longer, you’re also offered a list of all the five lessons at the end of the book, plus a workbook - a set of printable templates you can use to track the progress on your quest to better understanding money and attracting abundance into your life.

Rich has written a lovely book which you will probably finish in a couple of hours. It has no revolutionary discoveries to offer, it suggests no shortcuts to getting rich overnight, but instead it gives you much more: a timeless wisdom of not making money matters bigger than they are, of cherishing every moment of joy you but with your money, of sharing your riches with people around you to make your own life and this whole world a much better place.

Go get the book and read it, you won’t regret: it’s been a while since I read something so simply beautiful and so immediately useful.

pS: if $9.95 stretches your budget, please consider contacting Rich directly, as he’s willing to give his book as a gift to those in need.

See also:

• Do You Listen When Money Talks? You Soon Will
• The 7 Laws of Money and Wealth by Ryan Whiteside
• 5 Tips for Acquiring a Money Magnet mind

Read more in: Book Reviews.

Procrastination is one of the processes in our lives which you can safely call natural: long before you learn this word in English (or your native language), you’re already procrastinating on a regular basis. You don’t have to learn anything to become a true master of procrastination, but once you acknowledge it as an unwanted gift, it takes great discipline and advanced tactics to successfully fight it.

Today I would like to share with you 3 simple rules. Like many other things, their real power is in their simplicity. It’s very easy to remember these rules, and just as easy to follow. Try them for a few days when approaching any task or project of yours, play by these rules as if they were some kind of a game, and see for yourself how your productivity will improve.

The Clarity Rule

This rule is useful in many contexts. The more you know about something, the more comfortable you are working on it or talking about it.

When you look at procrastination, one of the reasons for it to take (or should I say make?) such a part of your life is your own lack of clarity regarding what things need to be done, how exactly and when.

Most things sound much worse than they really are, but if you just take a few minutes to take a closer look, quite likey you will discover that your next assignment is nothing more than a 5 minute job.

The Clarity Rule states that you should never add a task you don’t fully understand to your list. It is perfectly allright to take notes during meetings and phone calls, but until you confirm what’s expected from you, how much time and other resources of yours will be needed, and when the result has to be produced - don’t add it to your list. Also, refuse to take such pseudo actions from anybody else: unless it’s clear what needs to be done, there is no point adding it to your list - you wont’ be able to act on it anyway.

Those who know and follow The Clarity Rule are not only more productive in their activities, but they are also much better communicators: they set clear goals, give clearly defined tasks, and always ask for relevant information during the conversation, making it clear that unless all required information is present, they would not be able to start working on a task. Everyone who deals with such people quickly learns to appreciate such a clarity of communication, because it saves everyone’s time and helps achieve results quicker and easier.

The 15 Minutes Rule

I told you, these rules are really simple. But trust me and give them a try to see the magic they do.

The 15 Minutes Rule states that every task you’re working on needs to get at least 15 minutes of your full attention. If you’re not sure how long it will take in addition to these 15 minutes - that’s fine. But first, spend 15 minutes honestly trying your best working on the task.

This rule is most useful for tasks you’re not interested in. They’re usually the ones which you know you HAVE to do, but you don’t really WANT to. Give yourself a promise to spend 15 minutes working on such a task, and get rid of all the interruptions and distractions under your control.

For example, you need to prepare a report by next Friday. It may be a week and a half before your deadline, but you need to get started now so that you don’t have to rush things and do everything at the very last minute. You know it’s going to take you hours to do the report, but you don’t really know why - you need some time to look at all the data at your hands, perhaps identify if you can get more data off your colleagues, or even find someone to delegate part of your report. Use 15 minutes for this. Sit down, and get started with your report. If after 15 minutes you’re still not interested, drop the task until the next chance to work on it for 15 minutes. But most likely, in 15 minutes of really focused effort you will have made such a progress that you’ll get motivated enough to continue for another half-an-hour or so.

The logic behind my 15 minute rule is this: when it works, it will get you into the mindset of getting a certain task done. When this rule doesn’t work, it will at least allow you to make progress with tiny 15-minute steps. One way or another, you’re getting closer to your task’s successful completion - and you’re therefore not procrastinating by definition.

The One More Thing Rule

One more thing is the one I like most. This is your chance to be creative when tackling your task, because everytime you’re thinking to yourself that you’ve had enough with your problem and it’s time to drop it and give up, this rule tells you: do one more thing towards completion of your task, and then move on.

This rule does wonders for me: it makes use of the very nature of how things happen in this life, and serves quite often as the last push I need to finally complete the task.

Quite often we feel like we’re exhausted or bored with the task so much that there’s no point even trying to do anything else to get it done. We just want to leave it there and never see it again. Deep down in our thoughts we know, of course, that someday really soon we’ll have to get back to this task and we’ll have to get it done, but we prefer not to allow this kind of thinking to stop us from dropping the task.

The reality though is that if you leave something unfinished it becomes an open loop - something your mind keeps consciously and unconsciously getting back to, something which needs action and thinking time before you can mark it off as completed. Even if you try really hard not to think of such open loop, your mind will respond to your other activities and tasks slower, because some of your thinking power will be wasted on pointless re-runs of the unfinished task you left behind.

The more tasks you leave unfinished, the slower you’ll be able to get ones done. That’s why you should do whatever you can to close each issue and complete each task - thus freeing up your thinking power and memory for working on your new tasks and projects.

What also happens a lot is that we give up just one step away from the success. We may have tried different approaches a thousand times and think it’s enough, but if we force ourselves to try just onces, this may be that one time when things work out. There are numerous success stories of this kind: you’ve got to keep trying, failing, and trying again before you succeed.

The one More Thing rule helps you do just that - give a task the last chance to be completed before you move on and revisit this task once again some other time.

These are my 3 rules to combat procrastination. I obviously have many more tactics and I experiment a lot to achieve best results, but if you’re really stuck and want a easy option to work your way out of procrastination - these are your rules to try. Let me know how it works, and best of luck!

See also:

• 33 Time Management Strategies
• Ryan Whiteside has a great article: 10 Tips for Learning Self Discipline
• Free ebook: Stop Procrastination Now

Read more in: Productivity.