When I look at these pictures, I see disconnected chapters in a poorly written book where the protagonist’s life fails to follow a coherent narrative. The more I struggle to find a thread to follow, the more I feel the seeming randomness and general lack of plot. At the same time, I look at these pictures and am envious of someone who has done so much and who has been to so many places and who seems to be more fearless than random. I’m sure these pictures document someone else’s life, though, because I’m quite the chicken and could never have been so brave to make those choices and strayed from the traditional path or so lucky to have had all of those amazing experiences and to have know all of those incredible people.

I have always measured my life against everyone else’s, and mine has always fallen short. Not always. I couldn’t imagine anyone being luckier than me when it comes to my wife and our amazing son. But the rest of it, no matter how far I’ve traveled, both figuratively and literally, I’ve always felt like everyone else has done more, or has done it better than me. I could compare my life to any random person and find a way to feel inadequate, and so I’ve often wished that I was leading someone else’s life.

The longer I look at these pictures, though, I see a pattern emerge. I found a thread that ties all the stories together. I see the story of a life well-traveled, of someone who has experienced a lot of different things and learned, and grown, and who was as is surrounded by amazing people. The narrative is intriguing and diverse, filled with twists and turns, and heartbreak, and tragedy, and love.

This is the first time that the someone else’s life that I wished I had living is actually my own.

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As I walked up the stairs tonight carrying a pot brimming with boiling water, I remembered those days in my grandparents house when there were too many kids that needed baths and not enough hot water to go around. My grandmother would boil water on the stove and add it to the tepid water that filled the tub of every bath after the first one of the evening.

We never fought to be the first one in the tub because we knew Grandma would make each bath equally warm and inviting. Apparently, that is among the tasks called out in the job description of being a grandmother, and our Grandmother was overqualified for the position. From the warm bath each of us enjoyed, the home cooked meal on the table for every meal, the extra money she snuck us each time we passed “Go”, and the way she said “Oh, my” to every one of our exaggerated tales, there was love in everything she did.

When I was putting my son to bed, I told him the story of my grandmother filling the tub with boiling water from the stove. She was so excited when we told her that my wife was pregnant, but our son was still in my wife’s belly when we sang at my grandmother’s funeral almost four years ago. My sadness at the loss of my grandmother was matched only by the thought of my son never getting to meet her.

Simply telling stories seems so inadequate, so incapable of encompassing the brightness of her star. But there are other ways to honor her memory, and to follow the example that she set forth for me. And so from making sure the bath is warm to watching the same Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for (literally) the hundredth time, I hope to keep a piece of her with me, and to do everything for my family with love.

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For me, the problem is that these systems spend so much time setting up rules and structures, and coming up with names for the different constructs, and it all feels very religious. Having grown up Catholic, that means when I violate one of the edicts of the doctrine, I feel guilty, and I’m tired of walking around feeling guilty.

Much like traditional religions, though, there are a core set of fundamental principles that are common between the productivity systems; the efficiency equivalents of the “golden rule” and the Ten Commandments that I learned in Sunday school that are common in just about every other theology, worded just differently enough so that each system can claim its originality and superiority over the others.

Some people like the rules. They like the structure that these productivity systems give them, and it works for them. And that’s just great. For others, the rules and the structure wind up being a road block from taking advantage of the nuggets hidden within the system. That was me. I wanted to write more, but couldn’t seem to find the time. I wanted to work out. I wanted to work on my iOS applications. I had all these things that I wanted to do, but ten times the number of reasons why I wasn’t doing them. I looked to GTD and other systems to help solve the problem and get me writing more, but all it did was frustrate me.

Instead of focusing on finding a system to commit to, I looked at my situation. What was keeping me from doing those things I wanted to be doing? That’s when I stopped focusing on what these systems were trying to trademark and realized that many of them were talking about the same basic concepts. I looked past the implementation details and nomenclature differences and tried to find those concepts without the noise and apply them to my life.

Below are the five biggest changes that I made in my life that resulted in the most dramatic changes to my productivity level. They have also had a huge impact on my stress level since I wasn’t walking around feeling like I was failing at any particular system and I was actually seeing positive changes in my daily output. There is nothing new or innovative about these ideas, and many of them are buried beneath the lingo and rigid rules of the productivity systems. They focus on setting yourself up for success by addressing some of the common barriers to production. Here they are, in plain English, without buzzwords.

1. Get Organized

No, I don’t mean 47 folders to file things in to, or carrying around a series of notebooks, although if that is what it takes for you to get organized, then do it. But find something you can use to introduce some order in to the chaos. Knowing where something is can be the key to using it. If you’re inspired to write but spend 45 minutes looking through a stack of random paper for a note you wrote an idea on, by the time you find the paper your inspiration might be gone. If you are trying to get handle on your budget but can’t seem to find all of your receipts to make sense out of where your money is going, you’re probably never going to stick to your budget. Whatever your goal is, figuring out a system to organize your life is a fundamental building block for everything else.

For me, that turned out to be going digital with everything, and then using tools like Evernote and DropBox to manage those files. I track to-do lists for projects in Evernote, as well. I also use tools like Mint to track my finances. With these systems in place, I can easily access all of my notes, I know where my money is going, and when tax season comes around, I have all my receipts ready to go.

Like most things, the more you put in to it, the more you get out of it, but even a little effort can produce benefits.

2. Automate Everything

Technology is a wonderful thing. It allows us to put so many things on autopilot. Ten years ago, I was writing at least 10 checks every month for my mortgage, utilities, magazine subscriptions, and whatever else I needed to pay for. Now, I rarely write a check. Instead, the gas company e-mails me a bill that automatically gets forwarded to a folder in Evernote. I review the bill electronically and tell my Mint when the due date is and how much it is for. When the bill is due, the gas company automatically deducts the amount I owe from an account, and Mint reconciles the two transactions. It takes 2 minutes. The same goes for using automatic payments with your bank. If you have something that is due the same time every month, why waste brain cells thinking about it? Automate it. If you are afraid of giving out your bank account information, choose a bank that offers bill pay and take advantage of it.

3. Schedule Everything

My wife and I use Google Calendar extensively. She has her personal calendar and her work calendar. I have my personal calendar and my meal planning calendar. They’re all visible every time we pull up the calendar on the computer or on our phones, and she knows what I’ve got planned and I know what she has planned so that when we’re trying to make plans together, we save a lot of time and hassle e-mailing, texting, or talking back and forth. Having things in the calendar also means you get reminders as often as you need them and in any format you want them in. If I need to go to the grocery store after work, it goes in the calendar. If I need to remember to bring something to work the next day, it goes in the calendar. I’ll have the reminder pop up the night before and the next morning. Put it in the calendar and forget about it until it’s relevant.

4. Get Ready The Night Before

Even though I am a morning person, those early hours my brain is still not at 100%. If I wake up late and rush around, my focus and recall is even worse, and I either forget something I was supposed to do or bring with me that day, or I run out of time to do whatever it is I needed to do and it doesn’t get done.

One of the biggest boosts to the likelihood that something I wanted to do the next day would be to get it ready the night before. Want to stop going out for lunch but always forget to pack a lunch? Do it the night before. Want to work out but always forget your gym clothes? Pack them the night before.

5. Watch Less Television

My nighttime routine used to be get home from work, make dinner, eat dinner, play with my son, put him to bed, then watch television until we went to bed, which was usually one to three hours worth. Now, we might watch one show and then I’ll head to the office to do some work or write before I head to bed.

Note that I didn’t say “don’t watch any television”. I still like my television, but I limit my dosage and venue where I can watch it. There is no television in our office or our bedroom. The office is for working and the bedroom is for sleeping and, well…not watching television.

Stop Trying To Find A System And Start Making Changes

If you want to write more, what is stopping you? Is it because you aren’t using GTD? Probably not. Is it because you watch too much television, spend too much time on Facebook or reading about productivity systems? Maybe. So change that. If you can’t get a handle on your office paperwork because everything is in a pile, focus on organizing. If you aren’t working out because you constantly rush out the door in the morning and forget your workout clothes, pack the night before.  

You don’t need to subscribe to a system to make a change, just like you don’t need to subscribe to a particular religion to know that you should treat other people the way you would want to be treated. You just need to look at your own life, see what is preventing you from doing whatever it is you want to be doing, and focus on changing that.

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With the new house came a new office with a new desk and a blank canvas for a new computer workstation. In putting together my requirements for the new system, I had a few hard requirements. First, I knew I wanted a Mac. I use both at work, and find that the Mac lends itself better for my creative workflow. I also knew that I wanted a desktop. I have an older MacBook plus my iPad for portability, and I wanted the feel of a real desktop and a place I had to go to work.

Most of the work I do on the computer involves a few different categories: general home-office activities (e-mail, document management), photo and light video editing, and some software development. The biggest use of the system resources would likely be required by the photo and video editing, and I wanted to make sure that whichever system I went with would not be an immediate bottleneck to my workflow.

I gave up building computers from scratch 10 years ago, so I was not interested in a Hackintosh or any other form of assembling a computer from components; I was looking for an off the shelf-solution. That meant the iMac, a Mac Pro, or a Mac Mini.

I ruled out the Mac Pro both because of price and because it’s too much computer for what I do. That left the iMac and the Mac Mini, an option I actually didn’t consider until a coworker brought it up.  As I researched that option more, it became the preferred option. You can get practically the same machine in a Mini that you could as an iMac for much less. The configuration I looked at had an iMac priced more than $600 more than the configuration I chose, simply for the “cool” factor.

In the end, I’m a week in but very happy with my system choice. Here are the details [affiliate links]:

Mac Mini (2.6 i7, 4 GB RAM, 1TB HDD) – The fastest i7 processor available in the Mini today with a respectable 1TB of disk space. With the iMac, there isn’t a clean way to upgrade the memory. With the Mini, however, upgrading the memory couldn’t be simpler, so I ordered the bare minimum RAM and saved $200 by doing the upgrade myself.

Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) RAM – This RAM was $99 compared to the $300 price tag of upgrading to 16GB via Apple, and it took 3 minutes to swap out.

2 x Dell S2340M LED-Lit Monitor – I was looking at both the 21″ and 27″ iMac. The 27″ was too big, but I like the real estate that 2 monitors offers. These Dell monitors were well rated and reasonably priced.

Logitech HD Webcam C310 – Relatively inexpensive, but very high quality webcam for FaceTime and some recording.

Logitech K810 Keyboard -  The beauty of this keyboard is that it allows me to sync with up to 3 devices, so I can pair with my computer, iPad, or iPhone, all from one keyboard. The layout is more Windows-centric, but it is fully functional in the Mac world.

Super Drive – This would have been necessary even with the iMac. Apparently, no one uses DVD drives anymore.

Magic Mouse – A mouse! And it’s magic!

Wacom tablet – This is an old, old Wacom tablet, but I still use it occasionally for precise touch-ups.

iPad 3 – I still plan on using my iPad as a portable extension of my desktop, and I’m continuing to explore new ways to do so.

Note: Amazon affiliate links used above.

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The two tools I settled on that helped me do that were Evernote and DropBox [affiliate link]. Evernote is a tool that allows you to capture, access, and find information and DropBox lets you store and access files.

Evernote and DropBox do a lot of the same things. For me, the big deal was being able to organize and access information wherever I was: on my computer, on my iPhone, on my iPad, on another computer over the web, and both tools allowed me to do that. But until recently, I was using Evernote just for my notes, and DropBox for everything else, including documents.

DropBox was nice because I could structure my information any way I wanted in folders, where I felt Evernote had more limited hierarchy potential. But by storing all my documents in DropBox, I had to rely on naming my files in a way that would allow me to search for them, such as taxes_2010_dave_receipts.pdf, if I wanted to be able to search by “taxes” and “2010″. My recipes would be stored in a “recipes” folder, in a category, such as “vegetarian”, and the recipe itself would be stored with the name and some of the ingredients, like “indian_dahl_lentils” so I could do a search for a recipe with lentils and find it.

It works, technically, but a better way is to let Evernote do its thing and make my PDF and recipes searchable. Here is the same search for “lentil” in Evernote:

The search found the word lentil in the recipe itself. Neat! I could also tag the recipes with the ingredients if I scanned in a hand-written recipe. I can also just copy and paste a recipe in to a Note and not have to scan it in at all. Either way, Evernote can look at what is inside the note, too, and make it searchable.

As I started to go deeper with Evernote, I discovered another nice feature in local notebooks. There are some pieces of information, such as my Taxes, that I would like to be able to catalog and find at home that I don’t need or want exposed on the Internet or on my phone. With Evernote, I can have a combination of synchronized notebooks that are available on all my devices and local notebooks that are only available on the computer in front of me. So on my home computer, that might include my taxes, medical claims, scanned documents such as marriage licenses and birth certificates. At work, that might be some confidential information that has to stay at work. But I can also have synchronized folders, too, that would be available in both locations. And by storing them in Evernote, I can tag the documents and, with a little magic, take advantage of the PDF searching, as well.

The final selling point for moving my information in to Evernote was how easy it is to get the information in. I can drag-and-drop files, just like DropBox. I can also clip notes right from web sites. But I can also forward things in via e-mail and have them directed to the right notebook. That opens up opportunities for automating my filing system for things like receipts, utility bills, and more.

The more I read in to Evernote, the more I realized that I was not taking advantage of all that it had to offer. While some of the features that make the good stuff possible, like PDF search, are for premium accounts only, at $5 a month or $45 a year, I have a feeling it will be worth it.

If you want to get started using Evernote the right way, Brett Kelly wrote a great guide that explains the terminology and storage concepts surrounding Evernote, and provide some use cases for how to fit Evernote in to your workflow. You can purchase his guide here [affiliate link]. At $29, it’s only a small investment but will take a lot of the guessing out of using Evernote and will allow you to hit the ground running.

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I tried working out in the morning, but it was hard to get motivated. I tried exercising after work, but by then I was exhausted and I would get home too late and miss an opportunity to spend time with my family. Eventually, I wasn’t working out at all. I simply couldn’t find the time in my day to dedicate to exercise. It wasn’t until I talked to a friend about his routine that I even considered using my lunch break to work out, but even after a few weeks, I know it was the right move.

Here are 5 reasons that exercising during your lunch break might be right for you, too.

1. Because you aren’t working out at any other time.

If you are not exercising at all, it’s important to find time in the day, even a few days a week, to be active. Using a few of your lunch breaks during the week is a great option. Even if you only get a half an hour, that’s enough time to take a brisk walk and get your heart rate up.

2. You want to spend more time with your family.

When I was single, I used to exercise after work. It didn’t matter if I didn’t get home until after 7 because there was no one to go home to. Now, I have my wife and our son, and spending time with them after work is the most important part of my routine.

I didn’t want to have to choose between exercise and spending time with my family, but by working out during my lunch break, I can do both. By the time I get home, I’m done with work, have already exercised, and can cook a a healthy dinner for my family and give them my undivided attention.

3. To be more productive and creative.

My old routine was to work from the time I got to the office to the time I left, eating lunch at my desk most days. I thought I was being more productive that way, but “taking regular breaks from mental tasks improves productivity and creativity — and that skipping breaks can lead to stress and exhaustion.” [1] Even after the first day, I felt my concentration level was higher later in the afternoon, and I accomplished every bit as much work as I would have if I hadn’t taken the break.

Getting away from your desk and taking your mind off work will help improve your focus and concentration. Combining the mental break with physical activity doubles the rewards.

4. Because sitting all day is bad for you.

We’ve known for a while that sitting all day is bad for you. “Sitting for long periods of time contributes to risk of metabolic syndrome, heart attack and stroke risk and overall death risk, among others. Those who sit a great deal also have lower life expectancies, larger bottoms and slower metabolisms.” [2] Yet, in this age of technology, many of our jobs are in front of a computer, in a chair, all day long.

Exercising during your lunch break is an excellent way to get out of that chair, to get mobile, and to lower your risk of all of those horrible things that are associated with sitting down all day.

5. To network.

I work in a building with a few hundred people. While I don’t go to socialize, it’s guaranteed that everyone in our gym works for my company, so it’s a good opportunity to meet other people who I might not otherwise have contact with. Because you’re all there to exercise, it’s a great jumping off point for a conversation, and a great way to make new connections. Who knows, you might get a new workout partner out of the deal, too!

Notes

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/jobs/take-breaks-regularly-to-stay-on-schedule-workstation.html
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/sitting-at-work-why-its-dangerous-alternatives_n_1695618.html

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Nothing is permanent but change. ~Heraclitus

I’m sitting on a new chair in our new office, in our new house, trying to write at our new desk but distracted by the new view out our new window. My thoughts wander from the change of where I live to the changes happening in my relationships to the changes happening at work. I write a sentence or two as my attention comes back to the present; a few clicks of the keyboard before the thoughts of some other change in my life grabs my attention.

Change is inevitable, and change is constant, like the rushing water of a mighty river. I used to look at that river with fear and dread, often panicking and trying to swim upstream to get back to where I was, but that is the easiest way to get overwhelmed, tired, and to drown.

Change brings opportunity, whether it is an opportunity to start from scratch, to change course, or to simply reevaluate. Instead of reacting (often irrationally) to change and fighting it, I’m trying to look ahead to where the current is taking me and hopefully guide this part of my journey safely to shore.

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Google any of those phases, as I have, and you’ll get millions of results. There is no shortage of experts offering solutions. I’ve often thought that if only I could find the one solution that matches my situation exactly, that would be what I would need to get started.  Instead, I fall in to the trap of trying to find the perfect solution, and the result is that I do nothing at all. It’s safer to spend my time pursuing the impossibility of finding someone exactly like me than it is to take action.

In his post today, Seth Godin states:

If you wait for the perfect map before departing on your journey, you’ll never have to leave.

The flip side of the uniqueness argument is also true. If no one is exactly like me and no one has taken my exact journey, the implications are daunting. I am all alone. There is no path. My first step could be in to oblivion. That fear is just as paralyzing as its counterpart. So we tell ourselves that we’re still researching, or we tell ourselves that what we want is impossible to achieve. Either way, our natural tendency is to be safe and to stay put.

Reality lies somewhere in between. We are unique, so finding an exact path to take should not be the criteria for getting started. But there are many people that have gone before us and, while their journeys were unique, there is enough similarity to draw inspiration and courage from the steps they took . If not an exact path, those pioneers have given us a general direction to head, which is enough to take those first steps.

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I would easily dismiss any good thing that happened to me. Got recognition at work? Lot’s of people got the recognition, so it’s not that big of a deal. Finally paid off that credit card? Yeah, but I have a long way to go. You’ve worked out for 3 months straight! Sure, but I didn’t today.

Everything that should have been a positive experience and a cause for me to feel a sense of accomplishment was brushed aside because there was always something else, always something more; it just wasn’t enough to trigger happiness. Kristen Wong called it “the bar for happiness“, and that is the perfect way to describe it.

My happiness bar was too high.

As I read Kristen’s post about her resolution to lower her bar for happiness this year, I realized that, in many ways, I had already lowered my bar. Paying off our line of credit and my wife’s car, accomplishments that I would have dismissed in the past, were cause for joy and celebration. Sure, we had more to do, but what great achievements after years of hard work! Instead of feeling like the clutter will never go way, I was happy when we cleared out even a handful of boxes, and even happier when we could give them to charity.

When our happiness comes from buying something, it’s fleeting. It’s the sugar spike after having a candy bar. Once the sugar high wears off, the only thing to get that feeling back is to eat another candy bar. So we buy more stuff. When we fill our lives with television, we give up our own experiences for those we can have from the couch.

Eventually, we get to the point where our sense of what happiness is gets distorted. That’s where I was. Those things that should have triggered my happiness reaction didn’t.

Minimalism and simplicity bring with them the idea that happiness doesn’t come from objects. Happiness comes from experiences, from being present, and from filling our lives with those things that we value most.

As I started to clear the clutter from my life, to curb my purchases, and to watch less television, I naturally filled those spaces with things that truly made me happy. Instead of sitting on the couch watching another mindless show, we head to the basement to play hockey. Instead of clicking through social media for an hour, I write. Instead of picking up my phone every time it buzzed, I stayed more attentive to what I was doing and who I was with. I not only feel happy when I have done something, I feel happy while I am doing it, as well, by being present.

Don’t get me wrong. I still own stuff. I still watch television. And I haven’t given up my Twitter or Facebook accounts (yet). You don’t need to cut out everything to start lowering your own bar. You just have to decide you want to live differently, and start doing it your way, and at your pace. You need to start letting those experiences in, as best you can, and then you need to look at yourself in the mirror and say:

“The bar has officially been lowered.”

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So after you’ve decluttered and simplified your life, what’s left? What’s next?

The CliffsNotes road to simplicity breaks down like this: remove things that take away from what is most important to you, and fill those spaces with what is most important. A simple concept, but many of us get stuck on (or addicted to) the first step: the purge. But then what? What is left when there is nothing left to get rid of?

It’s exciting to start a new lifestyle, and I suspect it’s pretty common that many of us start the journey over-enthusiastically with “the purge”. Why? Because it’s easy. It’s easy to look around and find the things in our lives that take away from what we would rather be doing. It’s easy to conclude that we all have way too much stuff. It’s easy to conclude that our houses are full of clutter, and that we spend too much money on stuff that isn’t important to us in the long-term, and that we fill our lives with distractions and noise like television instead of quieting the world and focusing on what we will miss when we are gone from this world or how we can help others. We get so obsessed with purging and purifying as a sense of therapy or punishment that sometimes that is all we see.

I did that. I had fallen in to the trap. The siren song of the purge had lured my ship dangerously close to the rocky shores.  I was embarrassed having all the stuff that I did that I never used, wore, or even knew I had. I was ashamed of how much money I spent on stuff, and watching television, and playing on my phone instead of what I really wanted to do. Getting rid of things was my way of redeeming myself, the Catholic boy succumbing to Catholic guilt and atoning for his sins. I was so focused on getting rid of as much stuff from my life as I could that I never looked up to see what the other half of the equation.

When I found myself asking ”What else can I get rid of? What do I do next?”, I paused. I looked around. And I found that, as if by accident, I was already filling my life with new experiences. Only, it wasn’t an accident. Our hearts and our minds have been waiting around for enough quiet to guide our actions towards that which is more important, and mine brought me to my family, and my writing, and my place for growth in many things.

At some point, maybe earlier than you think, there will be time for you to spend doing something other than purging and simplifying. It’s also possible that you don’t need to get rid of everything and then figure out what your next step is. In fact, you can take that next step today, without getting rid of anything. Go sit with your wife. Go play a game with your children. Read a book. Sometimes it is less about removing something first and then replacing it with something else; sometimes it is more about filling your life with more of what is important to you, and the things that aren’t will remove themselves.

What’s next? Live your life, and surround yourself with the people and experiences that you value most.

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