RenewBlog

Think faster to be happier?

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:47:00 +0000

This article in Scientific American discusses the work of Princeton researchers that found that going faster makes you happier:

think quickly by having them generate as many problem-solving ideas (even bad ones) as possible in 10 minutes, read a series of ideas on a computer screen at a brisk pace or watch an I Love Lucy video clip on fast-forward

That sounds a lot like using a Tachistoscope. Who knew that speed reading could make you happier?

On tools

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:32:00 +0000

Whenever I explain what I teach, I usually answer "email mastery, speed reading, and productivity." The next question I get is either for help with Outlook or a recommendation for email/task list/calendar software or other tools.

Focusing on the tools we use is a natural, but unhelpful, instinct. When we see someone doing something admirable, we want to know how they accomplished that feat - and that often includes the tools they used. Trek bicycles will sell you the same bike Lance Armstrong won 6 Tours on. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to duplicate the feat. It's not the tool: it's the skills, practice, and experience of the person wielding those tools.

I enjoy riding Motorcycles, and several years ago, I ran across an article by motorcycle enthusiast and columnist Fred Rau (found it copied here) that has stuck with me:

I remember once, back when I was about 11 years old, watching a pitchman
at a carnival as he demonstrated a gyroscopic toy that he balanced on a
string between his hands. He made the toy run back and forth on the
string, turn upside-down, do somersaults and all kinds of other
incredible stunts. I just had to have one, and shelled out my whole
month's hard-earned allowance of $5.00 to get "one of the last ones
left." Naturally, after getting back home with my prize, I found that I
couldn't make it do any of the things the carney had demonstrated. It
ended up in the back of my closet, an embarrassing reminder of how I'd
been taken.

Months later, when confessing to my Grandfather about what had happened,
he pulled out an old pocketknife he always carried with him and held it
up in front of me.

"Remember when I carved you a toy airplane out of a block of wood with
this knife?" he asked.

"Sure, Grandpa."

"Well, if I sold you this knife," he said, "do you think you could carve
your own toy airplane with it?"

"No, Grandpa. I don't know how."

"Exactly; it took me years to learn, and lots of practice. It ain't the
tool, boy. It's the man operating it. Just like with your toy."

...the article eventually applies this lesson to motorbikes, but the lesson applies here too: use the simple tools at hand to do extraordinary things. In many situations, we don't have the luxury of choice. Focus on developing your skill set.

What tools do I carry with me everyday?

A cellphone that came free with the subscription plan (a SonyEricsson whatever-i)
The smallest, lightest, cheapest laptop I could find (a 2.6 lb, $370 MSI Wind running OSX, Ubuntu and Windows)
gmail (and Google Apps for Your Domain) and Lotus Notes
A composition notebook
An excellent blue rollerball pen given to me for free, two employers ago
Business cards
A $20 black canvas satchel

With these simple tools, I'm able to coordinate:

A full time day job
Owner of a productivity training company
Serving on the board of a non-profit
A significant other
Friends
Volunteer work
Exercise

Inspiration: The incredible Shrinking Opera Singer

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:50:00 +0000

Today, New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope (re-)visits Austin opera singer Cindy Sadler, who has lost over 130 pounds. Her mantra: "never more than today," meaning that she will never weigh more than she does today - hence she is the "Incredible Shrinking Opera Singer."

Her "secret" is simple: eat less, exercise more. Do it every day.

Blog post and inspirational video here.

To keep up with her story, Ms. Sadler's blog is here.

Congrats on losing the weight, and hooray for keeping it off!

meetings: a waste of precious time [nyt]

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:36:00 +0000

Found this article about meetings in the NY Times over the weekend.

My favorite part:

Time is the most perishable good in the world, and it is not replenishable. You can’t earn an extra hour to use on a busy day. Nonetheless, we usually have a vague feeling that there is plenty of time — somewhere in the future — so we waste it now and carelessly steal time from our families, friends or ourselves when we come up short at the end of a workday and need to stay an extra hour.

ChicagoSpeedreading.com site refresh

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:48:00 +0000

We've succumbed to the fashionable sensibilities of our (admittedly wise) friends and released a beautiful new website in place of the (ahem) utilitarian site that served as the ChicagoSpeedReading home. Highlights include graphics and fonts! Go take a look, your eyes will thank you.

New Chicago Speed Reading Classes! Finally!

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:12:00 +0000

Over at ChicagoSpeedReading.com, we've (finally) landed some amazing space to hold our classes.

We will begin holding classes at 200 S. Michigan Ave, Suite 400 in Chicago, IL, beginning on March 9 at 6:00pm.

Here is the full class schedule, with paypal links to reserve your seat:

Monday, March 9, 6-8pm (2nd session on Monday, April 6, 8-9pm):

Monday, April 6, 6-8pm (2nd session on Monday, May 4, 8-9pm):

Monday, May 4, 6-8pm (2nd session on Monday, June 1, 8-9pm):

Tahcistoscope + RSS feed reader = Spreed News

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:06:00 +0000

From Lifehacker comes the news of this nifty mashup: Spreed News.

It's a tachistoscope that receives feeds from news sites and spits the articles at your eyeballs a few words at a time at a speed you choose.

I played around a bit and read a Newscrunch article at about 750 words per minute.

My thoughts: I like this as a training tool, but I won't be using it to replace Google Reader as my RSS feed reader - you can't skim, look at pictures, or quickly skip to the next article after the first few sentences.

Email Addiction: PC World

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

PC World's JR Raphael has 5 quick signs that you might be addicted and 5 things you can do to prevent email addiction:

1. You check your e-mail more than once an hour, even when you aren't on the clock.
2. You look at every message that comes in, as it comes in, either at or away from the office.
3. You feel the need to respond to messages instantly or within minutes of when they arrive.
4. You interrupt real, in-person activities on a regular basis to deal with e-mail.
5. E-mail has, in some way, interfered with your regular life -- be it in the form of sleep loss, relationship troubles, stress, or any other noticeable effect.

...

1. Remember, there's no such thing as an e-mail emergency.

...

3. Schedule e-mail times.

Link

Website Update (Finally!)

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:43:00 +0000

The new site look is finally up.

Please take a look around and leave a comment about the new design...

link

Email Becomes a Dangerous Distraction: SMH

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:51:00 +0000

The Sydney Morning Herald talks about email research produced by Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, ClearContext, an email management tools vendor, Karen Renaud, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and her colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland, Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks.

There's loads of good stuff in this article, and I'm trying to not reprint the whole thing, so here are my favorite quotes:

Back in the early 1990s, email was a privilege granted only to those who could prove they needed it. Now it has turned into a nuisance that's costing companies millions.

...

For some people, checking email is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of.

...

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Link

3 steps to mastering the art of the Follow Up email

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:20:00 +0000

When you pass an issue to someone, or are awaiting a response, or just need something from someone by a deadline, knowing how to ask for results without looking like a jerk is extremely important. Not only will you get the results you want, but you'll help your entire team from fumbling an important task.

When sending a follow up or reminder email, there are three things to keep in mind:

Don't accuse, nag, or make the recipient feel guilty.
Keep your tone helpful.
Less is more. A brief note, with message history attached (for memory stimulus) is best.

This morning, I received this excellent email from a woman to whom I promised broadcast-quality versions of these videos by this afternoon (I'll be delivering the disk on my way home from work):

Sacha,
Looking forward to this afternoon and if you have any questions give me a call.

It's short, sweet, and manages to deliver a reminder without implying that I may have forgotten anything.

Here's one I sent not too long ago. It was slightly more direct, but still light and friendly:

Hi XXXX,

I'm just emailing to see how the list is going. Is there anything I can do to help?

Big changes = short term neglect

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:33:00 +0000

I realize that it's been since July 30th since the last posting around here. The reason for the neglect is that our time is a finite resource, and we have big, exciting things brewing here in Chicago. I can't wait to share it with you all, and I'm sure you'll be as excited about it as I am.

In the meantime...

What I am able to say about the changes you'll see around here in the next month or so:
RenewLab homepage refresh.
The homepage is looking a little stodgy, and doesn't render properly in Internet Explorer version 6.

New site launch.
We will be gaining a sister site, to launch at the same time as the homepage refresh, along with marketing hoopla.

New product launch.
Obviously, if there's a new site, there must be a product to go along with it... TBA

More stuff.
To be announced when ready.

Thanks for your patience, keep watching this spot!

Average time spent emailing

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:17:00 +0000

Jorge Cham (quite possibly the only reason I got through graduate school) just published this extremely funny comic:

Average time professors spend per email versus grad students:
link

10 Productivity Myths that Hold You Back

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:04:00 +0000

Dustin Wax over at the excellent Stepcase Lifehack.org details the 10 most common productivity myths:

Organized equals clean
I don't have time for a system
Systems are rigid and unflexible
Productivity means more work
Creativity can't be fit into a system
I work best under pressure
My lack of a system IS my system
I need inspiration to work
Being organized is boring
There's something wrong with me no system can fix

Click the link for the reality behind these myths.

Mann on Email Archiving

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:17:00 +0000

I recently had an acquaintance ask me for help straightening out his byzantine Outlook rules that control how emails get filed and filtered. Specifically how he filters and organizes his outgoing email stream (no joke). I struggled to explain that he probably doesn't want a byzantine way of organizing his outgoing mail, and was unable to explain at the time why precisely organizing and categorizing your email (including your sent messages).

As always, Merlin Mann manages to come up with an excellent metaphor that gets to the heart of the matter. Like a loser getting sand kicked in his face at the beach, two weeks later I finally have the right comeback. This what I wish I had said:

...you probably don’t have a place in your home or office where you store the shells from every peanut you ever ate. If you did, you’d definitely want to organize them by the year in which you ate them, perhaps keeping separate jars per-month or per-location where you ate the nut. You know. For posterity.

But you don’t do that. It would be insane. Once you eat the peanut, the job of the shell is done. So lose it. Ditto dead email. Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can’t discard it, throw it onto one big pile.

link [43 Folders]

Blog for Research

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:04:00 +0000

One of the largest parts of talking about productivity and work practices is gathering material and keeping up-to-date on new ideas, reports, and trends.

Finding and looking at the the information is pretty easy to do - Google search and reader help me with the vast majority of the heavy lifting here. The real difficult part is in storing, sorting, and organizing both these finds and my thoughts on them.

For me, an ideal storage method would be easily accessible, searchable, tagable, and cross-referenced. Like a blog. In fact, like this blog.

The blog you're reading is my research file. In case you haven't noticed, this blog has comparatively few articles that contain original content. This is by design.

I'm gathering what I feel is the best content that fits my work philosophy (simplified GTD), and indexing it for my use as research fodder. Likewise, when I have some ideas that I want to capture, I'll add them to the blog. Everything is tagged and searchable through the search box in the upper left corner of this page, and I can access all my research from nearly anywhere on the planet. For me, this is the ideal data repository.

If you have a large, ongoing research project, I recommend a personal blog (you don't have to make it public like this one) or if you don't need universal accessibility, a personal wiki like tiddlywiki is an excellent choice.

blogger.com - free blogging service and hosting
wordpress.com - free blogging service and hosting
tiddlywiki - free personal wiki (wikipedia article)
tiddlyspot - free online personal wiki hosting

image: wikimedia commons

One List to Rule them All

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:48:00 +0000

A bit of meta for your Monday morning:

Zen Habits has a list of the 20 best productivity lists.

Don’t read these all at once. It would ruin your productivity. But I’m hoping this will be a resource you come back to every now and then when you feel you need it. Bookmark it for later!

Zen Habits' The List to Beat All Lists: Top 20 Productivity Lists to Rock Your Tasks

Email bots to the rescue?

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:45:00 +0000

In this month's Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson discusses email overload and a new class of software to help deal with it: bots like Xobni.

It's a fairly breathless piece and most of the features seem like minor improvements over what Outlook can do out of the box, with the possible exception of this:

It also endows you with superpowered sorting. If a work-related thread goes off the rails — like when colleagues hijack a project discussion to argue about Lost — you can zap it. From that point on, new messages in the thread are filtered out and deleted automatically.

This sounds neat, but I can't think of a discussion I've been a part of that has gone this far off the original intent.

For me, the most interesting part of the story is Thompson's explanation of the slavering beast that email has become in modern times:

Why has email spun so badly out of control? Because it's asymmetric — incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.

For example, in one minute I can send an email to a thousand coworkers asking them to review a document. Let's say each recipient spends five seconds disgustedly discarding it. Boom: In just one minute, I've wasted 5,000 seconds — 1 hour, 23 minutes — of my organization's time.

Link

Noise Generators

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:40:00 +0000

Work in a cube or shared space? Too much noise? Need to actually concentrate?

Lifehacker discusses several white noise and binaural beat generators:
In-Browser:
i-Dose streaming and downloadable binaural beats
Simply Noise in-browser white noise generator

Downloads:
Noise (mac) - waterfall pink noise
ChatterBlocker (windows) - configurable: pink, white, chatter

via lifehacker

Seth Godin: Three laws of great graphs

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:08:00 +0000

I've been posting a lot of Seth Godin's ideas lately, but here's another: the Three Laws of great graphs.

1. One Story
2. No Bar Charts
3. Motion

Link

Dumb Little Man: 8 ways to avoid unproductive meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Dumb Little Man provides this excellent discussion of how to avoid pointless meetings:

Have you watched CareerBuilder.com’s hilarious "Donut Jungle" commercial? The one where naïve employees are lured with delicious deserts into attending pointless meetings? The commercial is hilarious because it contains a hint of truth: many meetings, especially in larger organizations, are utterly pointless and devoid of usefulness.

The phenomenon of chronic, pointless meetings is also known as the Dilbert Meeting in some circles. Dilbert Meetings happen every day, wasting people's time and patience.

Meetings can be quite productive, but most organizers simply don’t take the steps to guarantee that a meeting will be useful. Here are 8 things you can try to help make your meetings more productive.

Link

Seth Godin: speedy shouldn't equal impolite

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:17:00 +0000

Seth Godin makes the following observation:

At a restaurant yesterday, the maitre'd, who is paid to be busy, looked up our name in the reservations book and then said, "over there against the wall," while he pointed. He repeated this approach with at least three other parties.
How much longer to say, "Welcome, we'll be ready for you in just a second. Would you mind waiting over there please?" Amazingly, saying that while smiling takes precisely the same amount of time.

In the rush to be busy, what simple pleasantries and social lubricants fall by the wayside? If you ignore them too long, you'll be even less productive.

An example: while we suggest everyone should try keeping their emails to less than about 5 sentences, sentence #1 should always be a personalized pleasantry.

link

Five things Yahoo! search can do, but Google can't

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:29:00 +0000

Here's an older post via Lifehacker: Amit Argowol over at Digital Inspiration clues us into 5 surprising features that Yahoo! search can do, but Google can't.

Number 3 is an impressively advanced search technique:

Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries
Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:

[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

It's been a while since I stopped using Yahoo! for my day-to-day work, but it's good to see that innovation is not dead over at the big Y.

link [via]

Gmail: make it your main inbox

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:41:00 +0000

Joel over at Stepcase lifehack.org has a great post on how to make gmail your productivity hub. He also introduces some of the more obscure gmail settings:

Make it Your Central Email Inbox
1. Set up the Send mail as feature.
2. Get your email out of your other inboxes and into Gmail.
3. Ensure your accounts are all heading into the right labels.
Use the All Mail Feature

Link

Video: Fox 59 Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Sacha) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:48:00 +0000

Way back in March, I appeared on the local Indianapolis Fox affiliate to give email productivity tips. I have (finally) uploaded the video, and it shortly be up on the RenewLab homepage.

Here are a few fast email tips:

Email productivity tips and tricks from RenewLab on Vimeo