Personal Development

Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.

Gleb Reys

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.

MyLife Organized: Progress Review

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Today I’d like to tell you how some minor tweaks helped me greatly improve my experience with the MyLife Organized software and enjoy managing my daily tasks even more.

This week has been quite controversial for me. I’m enjoying the week because I’ve managed to do so many things already, and it’s not even Friday evening yet. But I also felt somewhat frustrated about the things I had plans to do but never found time to make them happen. It wasn’t a major frustration now, but more like a disappointment of some opportunities you missed without any reason for doing so. Having seen the negative impact on my daily performance imposed by this frustration, I’ve decided to stop and analyze the situation.

You see, what happens quite often is that we get so caught up in doing things, that we neglect the processes of thinking about our tasks or reviewing the results accomplished. We’re so busy that we aim for the immediate result, and because somewhere deep inside we have a rough idea of how effective we really are, we trust this feeling and we skip the review process. We postpone such reviews till “it’s appropriate to have a break” or when we “don’t have so many things to do”. And while we’re conscious enough that such good times may not come in the nearest future, we usually find it an acceptable sacrifice to be made. After all, the things are still being done on time, and that’s what really matters! That is not entirely true. And I’d like to explain briefly why I believe reviewing your progress is a vital part of your personal development, and any area where you’re aiming for major improvement, for that matter.

So, looking back a few days, here is the single thought that I found the most frustrating when reviewing my tasks for each day: I’ve been working really hard, yet there are many things from today left to be done tomorrow.

As you remember, I’m trying to organize my plans and tasks in a form that I have an easy overview of things to be done today, this week, this month, and in some distant future. At the end of each time period, I take few minutes to review it. Usually, I do this review at the end of my day, right after I get back home – this is done so that I finish off the open loops for the working day, and review the plans for the rest of the evening.

The frustration I had was seeing a long list of things which were meant to happen today, but never had the time allocated to them. So these tasks effectively become plans for the following day. Having started day with a certain number of tasks to do, it is very frustrating to finish the day with the same or even bigger number of similar tasks.

But in reality, the only reason for the frustration there was the lack of my focus. When reviewing your day, it is absolutely vital to keep track of not only the things you have left to be done, but also the once you’ve completed. When I stopped for a moment to analyze the frustration of mine, I was surprised to notice that all the frustration was caused by my recent switch to the MyLife Organized software for managing my tasks, and the particular way this software presents the lists of tasks and plans.

What happened is that the default behaviour of MyLife Organized didn’t have few important things:

  • completed tasks are not hidden
    By default, all the completed tasks are still visible there in the Outline view of the software. This means that your to-do lists only grow in size and therefore increasingly irritate (and quite often, even intimidate) you. Luckily, there is a checkbox right there to hide the completed tasks and this makes the Outline view look a whole lot better :)
  • there is no separate tab for the completed tasks
    I was getting frustrated cause I didn’t really have an easy way to see how much I’ve done during the day. Because of this, I was automatically maintaining my focus on only the things not finished, which isn’t such a bad idea, but is definitely not enough to see where you really are. Again, I’ve found out that Outline tab has a number of different views, and one of them is the list of completed tasks sorted by either the day or the project they belong to.

I must say I’m impressed with the software. I definitely appreciate the flexibility it has. While not all the features are obvious and intuitive, it’s still a great joy to finally discover them and realise that they do exactly what you want.

I guess the most important lesson I’ve learned from this week about personal development, is that it’s always important to maintain your focus on things that matter to you most. Given a particular situation or environment, you may want to pay more attention to the list of current things, but generally it’s always a good idea to review what you’ve done to really appreciate the amount of things you ticked off your list.

Organizing Things Online

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Although I’m pretty happy with the success of using first 5-section A4 organizer and then the MyLifeOrganized software for keeping track of my daily tasks and plans, I’m still looking for an even better way to manage tasks. So I thought I’d post a list of things I’d like to concentrate on, and I will either update this entry later or keep coming back to it, or perhaps (even better!) I’ll get some feedback and pointers to things which do just what I need. Here it is, the list of things I need to find a better way of managing:

  1. Accessibility of my notes, tasks, plans and other information I need to find a way of having the information accessible most of the time. One of the nice solutions is the organizer I’ve mentioned already. I can always take it with me, but unfortunately it’s impossible to keep track of everything in an A4 sized 5-section organizer – it has physical limitations, and there is only so much I can always carry with myself. This suggests that I probably need to use computer for organizing and managing my life. And since it has to be portable, it should probably be something online. So please keep this in mind as you read on, I’m looking for an online service (preferred) or a software which could be easily synchronized with an online service. I don’t want to make the task even more technical, but I don’t exclude the possibility of eventually having to write the software myself. Luckily I’m quite capable, so if I don’t find anything really good – I’ll just concentrate on coding. Another thing about accessibility is that I would like to be able to search through my tasks and notes. Search using keywords or filters, like being able to see the list of tasks for today, for the current week, etc. Another vital part of accessibility for me is having a history of all the tasks completed.
  2. Ideas. I get at least 5 or 6 really interesting ideas a day. And while some of them could be immediately converted into some actions waiting to happen, others are just that – they’re still ideas. So I don’t need to act on them in the foreseeable future, but I would really like to store them somewhere. As of right now, I find Google’s Notebook to be one of the best services. It fits perfectly into my lifestyle, and all the notes are finally in one place and searchable. Too bad there is no way to have a tree-like structure, although it’s possible to have multiple notebooks within a single Google account. It’s so easy to use this notebook with my Firefox browser, that I think I can live with some things which are still far from being ideal in this notebook.
  3. Contacts It’s a rather big category. I’m looking for a way of not only keeping all the contacts info organized, but also being able to track my communication in a more effective way. For instance, here should go reminders about phone calls to be made, be it a business or a personal matter. I’m not looking for a daily planner here. I need something more intelligent than that. I would like to have a tool which would remind me to call these friends of mine I haven’t spoken to in a while, and to be able to set some reasonable time limits for such reminders. So that I would be reminded to give a call once, and if I didn’t make it, I’d like to get another reminder a bit later. Do such things exist?
  4. Complex projects I think that all I really need is a flexible way of managing multiple projects and tracking few goals simultaneously. There are tons of project management tools, so I guess the only challenge here is to find one integrated tightly enough with the rest of my wishes outlined above. I’m planning to go and give a try to most of the Web 2.0 to-do lists and project management services, just to get a better idea of the current state of things in this field.
  5. Balancing activities It is very important to maintain a healthy balance of all the activities you’re involved with. The bigger look at balancing means finding the right proportion between your personal life and work, and a more thorough approach requires ensuring that within these big categories of your activities you give equal (or at least, predefined) amounts of time and attention to every aspect of your activities. This is something I’m only beginning to apply in my everyday life, and that is one of the reasons why I feel like concentrating on this. I strongly believe that wrongly chosen balancing in itself is capable of ruining the positive effects of almost all the rest efforts of yours in staying organized and progressing with your self-growth.

I think it’s enough for the first post on this subject. I didn’t want to put any more URLs to external resources, simply because I’m not prepared to do so yet. I’d like to go and explore all the available services myself, and so it may be some time before I get back to this to post some updates. Still, the reason I’m posting it is that I hope some of you could give me valuable pointers to things you like using on a daily basis, so I’m asking for your help here. If you found some online service particularly useful, please let me know. If you want, then give me some explanations, and if you don’t, just post a URL and a single-line description of what the service does. Thanks in advance!

MyLife Organized review

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Just like I promised earlier, this entry is going to give you a brief explanation of what MyLife Organized is and how I'm using it in my daily organizing. Hopefully, this will help you make you own opinion of this software, and easily see some of the benefits it might have for you.

 

I've been using the evaluation version 1.5.06 of MyLife Organized to replace the organizing process I had been using after my recent to-do lists revolution. So far it's proved to be reasonably easy to manage tasks using this software, but I'm still not sure if it's the ideal solution for me, and I'll explain why.

 

First impressions

MyLife Organized is a really nice software for your time, tasks and projects management. It supports most of the concepts you're ever likely to need organizing your time, and attempts to present information in an easy-to-read form.

There are three editions of this software application, the simplest one provided to you absolutely free. The basic differences are that in the free edition you're pretty much limited to managing your time with simple tasks lists, while standard edition ($45.95) adds the idea of places (locations in GTD) and adds flexibility for time management. The professional edition (59.95) supports basic project management and allows you synchronize your lists with Outlook or PocketPC edition of MyLife Organized.

For more details, please consult the MLO features comparison page.

You can get a professional edition 45-day trial, and it takes only seconds to download it. Once you start the application, you have a demo database to work and play with. The main window allows you switching between few tabs, and I'll cover them later on.

 

Outline tab

This is where you'll be spending most of your time working with this program, as it allows you to manage all your tasks and projects. Everything is represented by a tree-like structure, and using the right-click of your mouse you can access all the functionality available to you at any moment and within the current scope. For each task, apart from lots of properties, you can also have a notes section where you put text information. These notes can be printed out along the task when you're printing reports or to-do lists.

MLO-Outline

 

To-Do tab

This is where you'll be looking from time to time just to make sure you're right on schedule. All the tasks are shown as a list, and you can see the dates and times when they have been allocated to a task. You can limit a to-do list to a particular context (place) or a date.

MLO-To-Do

 

Places tab

This is the MyLife Organized way of placing tasks into certain contexts. You create various locations here, and then assign tasks to these locations as you create them (or at a later stage, if you wish). The idea is that places will help you narrow your to-do lists down to something very specific when you need it.

MLO-Places

 

Pros and cons

There are some things I've found very useful, and some others which I don't like at all. And there's probably many more features I simply don't know about this software, so just be warned. As for me, I'll certainly do my best to update this entry later when I discover more about this application.

 

So here are the things I like about this software:

  • very compact piece of software. I've copied its folder to my iPod, and this solved the problem of accessing the same tasks list at work or at home.
  • adjustable appearance. You can change the way application looks to make it present your tasks either as a dead-simple to-do list or as a very useful tree-like structure
  • extensive set of features for time management
  • excellent handling of recurring tasks
  • places support is great for managing place-specific tasks

 

And here are few things I don't like:

  • it's not free. It would be much better if the standard edition was free, and the professional one would cost something like 30$.
  • not all features are obvious – it takes time, some trial-and-error experiments, and, finally, reading the thankfully informational help file before getting some things done the way you want it
  • templates for printing are still very basic. If you're familiar with the freely available DIY planner pack of PDF forms, you'll know exactly what I mean
  • working with groups of tasks (like changing the location or time for all the subtasks) could be improved and simplified

 

Why I don't think it suits me in its current form

While MyLife Organized certainly allows me keep track of all the tasks and projects I have, I really miss some of the features specific to my previous way of organizing things. Here are just a few:

  • To-do lists are cluttered – by default, any tasks which don't have their start date set are going to show up in your to-do list. Unfortunately, I have cluttered to-do lists – that was one of the reasons I tried moving away from them. In my organizing, there are plenty of things I know I'll be doing this month or this year, but I dont' even want to spend time thinking now of a possible date for them. I haven't found the way to make such tasks disappear from the to-do list, cause these tasks would appear on the list even if I try and filter it by the date.
  • Outline is only 1 tab and it's not flexible enough. If you remember, I like having few outlines – one for today, one for the week, another one for the month, and yet another one for all the rest tasks and plans I'll be doing someday. Outline tab gives you only 1 structured list of tasks and projects. The same goes for the To-Do tab, as I would really like to have my to-do list show only the things and plans I have for today.
    UPDATE: Turns out, the tab is actually too flexible ;) If you employ the View feature, this would allow you sort filter and sort your tasks by date or completion (for both tasks and projects). 
  • Lack of history tracking
    Because I'm only developing my own approach to daily organizing, it's vital to me that I keep track of my progress and have the ability to go back and review what I've done or haven't done today or yesterday. This is the part which wasn't excelled in my previous organizing approach, and it's not found in the form I would like in MyLife Organized neither.
    UPDATE: That being said, the View feature allows you to view completed tasks sorted by date.

 

That's it, I think I've said enough to raise your interest and explain how and where this software could be improved even further. Seeing how active its development is, I'm looking forward to reviewing future versions of MyLife Organized. It's definitely one of the best organizers around.