Personal Development

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Archives for June 2006

Reclaim Your Time!

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A natural step in my personal development and self-improvement is concentrating on the things that really matter to me, and reclaiming the time I currently spend on things which are not important at all. I mean, wouldn’t it be so much better to spend your time on things you like, enjoy a company of your family, or simply bring more value to others, instead of wasting precious time doing things which are much less important to you? This article will show you my approach to increasing my productivity and reclaiming my spare time.

Find out what activities require a regular commitment

This is the first step towards reclaiming your time. You’ve got to find out what is it that you’re required to do on a regular basis. Some things, you will be surprised enough to find out, are not required to be done at all, yet you’re following a habitual pattern and do them anyway.

Like with so many things, the Pareto Principle can be applied to finding the time parasites as I call them. In context of the search for things which regularly take up your time, you will most likely realise that 20% of your tasks would be consuming (wasting, if you take a closer look at some of them) 80% of your time. This means that if you find only a few of the major offenders, you’ll be able to reclaim a substantial amount of your time by changing very little – like consciously fighting one of your bad habits, etc.

For example, I haven’t been entirely happy about my e-mail processing habits. Not only have I got a habit of replying to almost every e-mail very quickly, but I’ve also gotten into the terrible pattern of checking my e-mail almost every 10 minutes. A quick research has shown that I’m by no means alone with such e-mail problems – Dave Lorenzo has recently been reporting his progress in fighting e-mail patterns in his Making The Most Out of E-mail article.

Now, it doesn’t really take you this long to check your e-mail, it could be done in just a few seconds. But the real damage is done not through wasting my time, but through distraction from other activities. If I’m working on some task, like writing a document or  reading through some technical manual, or simply working on some problem, it is best solved with my full attention.

And every now and then there are these moments when it’s slightly harder to maintain your focus – I could be stuck with a problem not seeing what to do next, or I could be taking some time to analyze the command output I’m seeing on the screen – it could be anything, really. But during these moments it’s very easy to get distracted, cause you’re in some kind of suspended mode – not very focused at all. It is during these moment that you can be tempted to switch the task and do something else “for a change”. Now, please don’t mix these moments of weakness with powerful and conscious multitasking – it’s very different.

Now, what happens is that I start checking my e-mail, and even if there’s nothing new there, I’m still going to be distracted enough that it’s going to take me some time to fully focus on the original task again. And that’s the real damage I’m talking about.

Make a decision to reclaim your time

Once you’ve come up with the list of things you think are taking too much of your time, it’s time to build a strategy. You need to make a decision to stop spending more than a certain amount of your time for a certain activity. If you want to make it easier, write your decision down somewhere – when written, it automatically becomes a very powerful commitment, and it will help you stay conscious and focused when fighting your habits or behavioural patterns.

In my case, I’ve decided to change my e-mail patterns completely. Instead of constantly checking my various e-mail boxes, I’m now checking my e-mail only few times during a day, and plan e-mail-related activities to happen during the designated periods of time only. I’ve made a decision to do so, and I’m documenting all my attempts to break the old pattern and adopt a new.

Generally, you want to find as many ways to optimize your time, as possible. One great idea I’ve got from Peter Kua in his Triple Your Free Time article, for instance, is that you have to make free time a goal, and plan for it!

Sometimes this will involve giving bad habits up, in other cases this will be a radical change in your approach to a certain task, and obviously this will require more  discipline from you. Steve Pavlina did a great job sharing his thoughts on this in his Do It Now article, which I consider to be one of his most influential posts.

Stick to the plan. Enjoy your results!

It’s been a couple days for me fighting my e-mail patterns, and I must say I’m thrilled with both the general feelings and the results I have. It wasn’t hard at all to wait for the agreed times of the day to read and write e-mails. Once you have a plan, it’s easier to see that it’s not really so hard to follow through.

Secondly, it was great to see that nothing critical went wrong because I’ve changed the pattern. This confirmed that my plan was reasonable, and reassured me of the positive change I’m fighting for.

What’s left now is to make sure I stick to the plan and confirm the new pattern to be the only way of processing e-mails. Once I’ve done this, in just few weeks times, I’ll be able to move onto a next time consuming task to optimize or even get rid of.

I encourage you try the same: reclaim your time now, and you’ll be amazed how easy it is!

Use Google As Your Writing Assistant

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Today I'd like to share with you three very simple yet amazingly useful ways of using Google search engine as your writing assistant. I use at least one of these techniques practically every day, and I believe learning these simply tricks is definitely worth your time.

 

Spell-check words using Google search: suggestions

This is probably the easiest and most obvious way to use Google search. Just go to Google, type any word in the search box, and if there are no spelling errors, you'll see just the results you were probably looking for.

But if your word is spelled incorrectly, Google will suggest you a correct way of spelling (and the suggestion is a clickable word, so by clicking it you will get the results you had in mind when starting your search):

 

This works best with single words, and Google is mostly right about its suggestions. Still, because this suggestion is based on the number of search results found in Google's database, on rare occasions you could see Google suggest a wrong spelling for complex words, or simply not noticing a wrong spelling in your word and there not suggesting anything better. 

 

Spell-check words using Google search: number of results

If previous tip didn't help you, then this one is definitely for you: pay attention to  the number of search results returned with your query. This is another very useful way to check if you have typed your query correctly. 

For instance, if you do search for the "prescious", you will see that Google finds only 145,000 results for it. While for "precious" it will return you 142,000,000 results. Another quite common error is to use "unfortunatelly" (456,000 results) instead of "unfortunately" (327,000,000), so you probably get the idea.

Simply comparing the number of results will make the proper spelling obvious almost every time.

Be warned though, that this way of spell-checking relies purely on the number of spellings of a certain word found on the web. So, if millions of people have written some word incorrectly, these search results numbers could be misleading.

 

Find word definitions with Google

Another very useful feature of Google search is that it's very easy to find word definitions. Simply prefix your search query by the "define: " keyword, and you'll get something like this:

Know Your Goals

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Ever been disappointed by your results?

Have you ever found yourself being totally depressed by some results you got doing something?

While most often the frustration comes from the lack of results, it’s not uncommon at all to be frustrated simply because the results you’ve got aren’t exactly what you hoped for. So this is the situation when you actually are getting some good results, only for some reason you still feel frustrated about them. This is when you should know: it’s probably a good time to review your goals and expectations.

Goals and expectations must be set, reviewed and adjusted regularly

I’d like to give you just an example of what I mean. Since I’ve adopted personal development as a lifestyle, I’ve seen such a tremendous boost in my self-growth and general life enjoyment (and I was growing and enjoying my life to start with, trust me on this one!), that I definitely am happy I took this path. Still, there are moments now and then, when I feel frustrated about the lack of progress I make in some aspect of my personal development, and the more I analyze reasons for such frustrations, the more obvious it becomes: most of our frustrations are because of the wrongly chosen goals and incorrectly set expectations!

Another major reason for frustrations is simply not having enough attention paid to align with your goals. Whenever you have set your goals, make sure you get back to them now and then to realise if your actions are all aimed at reaching your goals. You don’t want to spend few hours, days or even months spent working only to realise that half of your efforts (and that’s a very optimistic  estimate) have gone the wrong direction and didn’t bring your goal any closer.

The third really big reason for being frustrated with your results is because of the lack (or total absence) of the time you take to review your goals and appreciate the accomplishments. In other words, not only should you regularly review your goals and make sure you’re working towards and not away from them, but you also need time to appreciate the achievements. Quite often you are in a position when something takes longer than you expected. But that’s a planning issue, not a goal setting one. So it is important to review your achievements to make yourself feel better – if you know you’re moving in a right direction, and if you have a list of accomplishments, and if you see that there are few more things to be done before you can finally reach the goal – that should be motivating, not discouraging.

For instance, back when I was only starting my personal development experiments, I had set a number of immediate goals which were directly based on the most obvious sources of my frustrations back at the time:

  • I didn’t like the constant lack of time – and so it was a reason good enough to read more on time management.
  • Some of my daily plans were not realised in time – and so I had to make proper planning arrangements and come up with a task-tracking system.
  • I wasn’t learning enough in some areas of my interest – and so I had decided to discover new ways to find the time and motivation to learning even more.

All these major and minor frustration sources made my first goal setting an easy task. But what happens now is that, having reached these immediate goals, I have to set and aim the new ones. And it’s very important to always maintain the focus and appreciate the work you’ve already done.

I have many days when there is quite a number of things left unfinished or not even started by the end of a working day. Having just a couple of unfinished things is already enough to be a minor frustration. And that’s the last thing you want to happen at the end of an otherwise successful day, isn’t it?

It took me a bit of a discipline to learn the habit of doing a full-day overview, involving both finished and unfinished tasks, before I could learn to stop my frustrations completely. It’s really this simple: don’t ever let an unfinished task shadow the joy of having all the rest things done on time. Focus on the results you’ve got and appreciate how they bring you closer to your goals!

Knowing your goals is really important

If you’re a beginner, just make sure you have some goals set initially and that you’ve given each goal a thought. As you progress and become more and more comfortable with your self-growth, start keeping track of your goals and appreciating the progress you’re making towards them. And once you feel absolutely comfortable doing this, start reviewing your goals, adjusting them accordingly and even set brand new ones!

So here’s a very simplistic view on my approach to goal setting:

  • set and know your goals
  • keep track of your goals
  • review, adjust and set new goals accordingly

There is no winning formula for timing these three stages. Their importance will grow as you grow personally. But it is always a good idea to know and review your goals, cause doing helps you discover just how much you’re really doing, and how quick you’re growing and where.

Get Your Free Copy of “Notes From A Friend” book by Tony Robbins

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I was recently searching the web for a biography of Tony Robbins, and somehow found the Anthony Robbins – Europe website, which apparently offers to send you an absolutely free copy of the Notes From A Friend book by Tony.I already own one of his books called Awaken The Giant Within, and I must say I enjoy reading it a lot. So, naturally, I accepted the offer on the website, and filled in the form, and got an email confirmation. I even got a phone call from one of the representatives of the Tony Robbins European headquarters, and the guy was really enthusiastic about offering me the unique opportunity to attend one of the seminars Tony will have in London this August.

I don’t think I’ll go this time around. If it was a free event, I would definitely go without doubt, but since it costs a substantial sum, I think I’ll take my time reading all the books and audio-courses of his I can find first, and then consider attending the seminar.

Notes From A Friend is a pocket book which summarizes the ideas and practices Tony talks about in his two books – Awaken The Giant Within and Unlimited Power. If you haven’t read either of these books, then Notes From A Friend is a win-win situation for you – order one now, and it will take you only few hours to understand whether approaches used by Tony appeal to you.

Quick And Effective Reading – Part 2 of 5

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This post is the second part of the Quick And Effective Reading series which I started two weeks ago with the Quick And Effective Reading – Part 1 of 5 post.

Today I’m going to share with you some of the techniques aimed at overall optimization of your reading process. Next week, I’m going to concentrate more on improving your ability to concentrate on your reading and make the most out of reading a book or an article.

Reading Speed: That Which Is Measured, Improves

First things first: before you try anything, please take your time and find out your current speed of reading. It is important to do this because otherwise you will not see just how much you’ve really improved in a few weeks time. So either test your speed yourself, by using a stopwatch (found even in your mobile phone these days) and reading an ordinary book, or use one of the many online tests available. For some basic speed reading tests, check these out:

If you also want to verify how well you recall the material you’ve just read, please use these tests:

Reading technique improvements

There is a number of things you can improve to achieve the best reading speed possible. The ones I list here are the factors I’ve found to be most important for myself, so they should help you too, but there is no way of telling whether they are the best ways for your improvement. If you find anything else, please let me know!

Improving your eye span: start reading in blocks

If you don’t read in blocks yet, this is definitely one of the most effective ways to dramatically improve your speed of reading. Instead of reading words one by one, try and read few words at a time. By this I mean that your eyes should stop only few times (ideally – once!) at any given line of text, instead of jumping from one word to the next one. The reason you jump from one word to another is because we move eyes with fixations.

When you’re looking around or reading some text, your eyes need to fix on something after the movement is completed, before you can actually process the visual information. For instance, you go through a series of fixations on different objects when you look around your working place and you go through a number of fixations in a single line of text. Without conscious training in block reading, you’re probably going to do a fixation for each word you read.

Talking about books and online texts, you would see 15-30 words in every line of a text. And this means to you, that unless you master reading texts in blocks, you will be wasting precious time by making 15-30 fixations with your eyes as you move from one word to another. The time it takes to move your eyes from one place in a line to another is roughly the same, so this means that even if you simply learn to read just two words in stead of one without moving your eyes, you will already be reading the whole line twice faster because you will effectively cut the number of fixations in half.

Block reading is a technique for developing your eye span. Simply put, your eye span is how many words you can read at once when reading a line. The bigger your eye span, the more words you will read at once, and the less number of times you will have to move your eyes to the next chunk of text. By having regular exercises, it’s quite possible to improve your eye span so much that you’ll be able to read the whole line of a standard book with only one or two fixations.

Most of speed reading software products would have some kind of block reading routine built-in. What they do is hide the whole line and then reveal blocks of words for you to read. You should be able to set the speed at which new blocks reveal their words and the number of words in each block, so that reading is comfortable. Don’t rush things in, because it’s very easy to get carried away and start reading blocks very quickly ignoring the contents of the text, and this is the last thing you want to do. After all, you’re trying to improve the speed of reading AND understanding texts.

Increasing your reading speed: stop reading to yourself

If you’re an average reader just like me, you’re likely to have this habit too: you pronounce the words to yourself as you read stuff. Some people even move their lips as they do this, but even if you don’t, it still slows your reading speed down quite a bit simply because you pronounce every word. Now, it’s not easy to get rid of this habit, but trust me – it’s definitely one of the most beneficial and rewarding things you can learn about the speed reading.

What I found to be most useful is to detach from the text you’re reading. As you read the words, instead of pronouncing them to yourself, start pronouncing something else, and do it out loud. The two easiest things to do here are to either sing a song or to count numbers. You’re pronouncing words to yourself because of a pattern you’ve worked out for your reading over the past years. And in order to break this pattern, you should do something totally different.

So by singing a song or counting numbers out loud you’re going to be silencing this inner voice of yours which tries to pronounce the words you’re reading. Now, it will feel really weird and even funny at start, because you will still hear the attempts of the inner voice to follow the text you’re reading, but as you practice more and more, this voice will start to fade and eventually you’ll hear no voice and have no attempts to pronounce the text you’re reading.

Paying attention: stop re-reading words and lines

This is yet another quite common weakness some of us have. Having just read a line or a whole paragraph, we quite often come back to re-read a word, a line, or a whole sentence or paragraph simply to “better understand the text”. The reality is that while this could help you understand more from the text, it would definitely slow you down by so much that the advantage of better understanding will lose most of its attractiveness.

What you should do is try and train yourself to stop re-reading from happening at all, and you usually do this by using a sheet of paper or a postcard which will help you cover all the text you’ve read through up to the line you’re currently reading. So you have to move this piece of paper down every time you progress to the next line. As you master the skill, you will notice that your moves will become smooth and even, without any jerkiness, and after a while you will learn to pay enough attention to every line without having to read it again.

Another useful habit this exercise will give you is to focus better on the line you’re reading, without even looking anywhere above this line. This is only for the better, as some people find it very distracting and irritating when they unwillingly pick words up from the line just above the one they’re reading. Words automatically pop up in their thoughts and sometimes break the whole pattern of understanding the current line’s contents.

Staying focused: read with the help of your hand

When reading text, you will find it easier to move through the line of words if you follow your hand. Simply move one of your fingers across the line, following it from left to right in a slow and evenly paced motion. As you improve, you will quicken your movements. What you will be trying to do is to follow the general location of your finger, and not track its exact position. Place you finger just under the line you’re reading, and don’t worry about not being able to follow the even movement of your hand at first – this skill will come with practice.

Well, that’s it for this week. I hope you found this entry useful, and in case you want to read more on the subject, here is a couple of webpages I think might help you:

  1. Learn-Speed-Reading at WikiHow
  2. Reading Efficiently

Stop Worrying About Time When Taking Shower

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Today I’d like to share a lifehack with all of you. It’s very simple, but made such an amazing difference in my life that I just have to share it :)

As you probably know, any standard mirror will not only get foggy just a few minutes after you turn the hot water on, but will also gradually degrade to a state of constantly being foggy even when the air is dry and cold. These features of regular mirrors (or lack of features, I should probably say) had finally turned my morning shaves into such an annoying experience that I lost all the usual joy I’d get from shaving.

So, a few weeks ago I’ve finally decided to do some research and buy one of them fogless shaving mirrors. I’ve gone through quite a number of them, to find out that basically they all are split into two groups: mirrors with fog resistant transparent film covering the surface, and mirrors with some kind of built-in surface heating. All fogless mirrors are expensive enough, and so every company tries to add some unique feature to mirrors they produce. All sorts of things are being added, and it proved to be impossible to find a plain simple mirror with some film on it in any of our local stores. So I had finally to go for a mirror with some additional gadgetry. The model I’ve got has a built-in LCD clock and a battery-powered LED light, in addition to a simple mirror with fog registant film. I really would’ve gone for a simpler mirror if I could find one, but I was shocked to realise how useful the built-in clock was after just a few days of using the mirror.

Do you know the days when you woke up too late, and you rush into your shower and nervously take it almost seeing the impression on your manager’s face as you arrive to work half an hour later than usual? Simply because there is a bit of a time pressure, all the joy from your morning shower goes away. You nervously finish the shower and what’s the first thing you realise as soon as you return to your bedroom? You’ve got plenty of time left!

There’s another kind of days. When there is no hurry at all, but you enjoy the shower so much that you finally get this suspicion that you’ve been standing there under the warm pleasant streams of water for way too long? Again, you start rushing yourself and end up jumping out of your shower to only find out again… Yes, you’ve still got time and you could’ve enjoyed a good few more minutes of a wonderful showering.

Do you remember these days? Do you recognize yourself being in a similar position now and then? Well, I don’t anymore! These days I’m really enjoying my shower, every single day! Simply because I can always glance at the clock and see exactly how much I time I have left, I can easily make sure I’m not spending more time showering and shaving that I should be.

You see what I meant by saying it was an easy lifehack? Go get yourself a shaving mirror with a built-in clock and you’ll be absolutely blown away by how it will bring the long-forgotten positiveness in your morning showering routine! And the beauty of it is that it will also make yourself a better organized person, in a way that day-by-day, as you keep taking showers and checking with your clock, you’ll be enjoying the fact of another really good habit you’re working out almost automatically.