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Don’t Be Afraid series

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I think I’m ready to start yet another category of my blog – the Don’t Be Afraid series of posts.

 

Fear is one of the most natural feelings we can experience. It’s a self-preservation mechanism which takes a form of a strong unpleasant emotional state when we sense some kind of danger. It is quite common to feel the danger unconsciously, and the more unclear the possible threat is, the stronger your fear becomes.

What I’d like to cover in my series is just a basic list of our everyday fears practically everyone has. Some fears are simple and even childish, others are serious and very hard to overcome, so hopefully my notes will help you understand just a little bit more.

 

The purpose of this series is to:

  • show you that the fears you have are common, well-known and can be dealt with
  • provide an explanation how you can overcome your fears
  • help you become a stronger person
  • help you look at your fears from a different point of view

 

Don’t Be Afraid series has the following posts so far:

16/05/2006: Don’t Be Afraid To Show Your True Self

05/07/2006: Don’t Be Afraid To Speak Up At Meetings

Having To-Do Lists Is Just Not Enough

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I’m not a to-do lists person. Not anymore, anyway. You’ll see what I mean if you read about my recent To-Do Lists Revolution. Still, I have deliberately left quite a room for developing the topic, so there it is – yet another blog entry on to-do lists.

Thoughts described below are just an opinion of mine, and the aim of this entry is to help you make up your own view of to-do lists and decide whether they really are the best tool available for managing your daily tasks.

To-do lists are supposed to be a fairly simple and self-explanatory concept. You make and follow these lists to do stuff. Usually we refer to our daily to-do lists, but it’s not uncommon to have weekly or even monthly to-do lists as well.

To-Do lists are great for getting more things done that you’d normally do without such lists, but at the same time they’re not so great for lots of other aspects of your activities. In other words, simply having to-do lists is just not enough to stay on top of things. And in this entry, I’m going you show you why, and I will give you examples of how to-do lists don’t encourage and sometimes even slow down your progress.

Reaching your goals

If there’s one thing completely left out in traditional to-do lists, that’s the goals we’re trying to achieve. To-do lists are simply not about goals. You’re supposed to have your goals defined somewhere else, and keep them outside of the to-do lists routine.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get buried in your to-do lists. Quite often we get so thrilled with the idea of getting all the planned actions into our to-do list, that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, why exactly we’re going to do this thing or that one. This means that we’re still going to have many things done according to our list, but we’re not necessarily going to achieve the original goals which have triggered us working and creating to-do lists in first place.

So it’s important to stay conscious and be focused on the goals, not the tasks in your to-do list. If all you’ve got is your daily to-do list – you’re playing a dangerous game. You really need to take some time and analyze the current state of things in order to come up with your new goals or maybe simply correct the existing ones.

The good thing though is that you can always have a “Review goals” item on your to-do list for the day, and this will attract your attention and make you work more on your goals at the end of the day. And naturally, once you have worked out the habit of reviewing your goals daily or weekly, you can get this item off your lists.

Tracking progress

Again, because to-do lists are not meant to be a sophisticated progress tracking tool, you need something else to help you do this.

Daily to-do lists could be giving you a false impression of having everything completed each day, while in reality you may be nowhere near the completion of a bigger task or a project. You have to track your projects and goals with a separate process. Daily to-do lists are just too small a scale to reflect the overall state of your projects.

Staying motivated

For many people, to-do lists are a constant source of frustration. Whenever they start their day by looking at the list, they find the list to be too long. There are so many tasks and so little time to make them all happen, that it can easily depress people even before they get started. On odd days, it requires some real courage to dive into your to-do list and find a way to get most of the things done in a matter of just few hours. Some people always find this courage, but then some of us never do, so it could be a real problem even though making to-do lists and following them is somewhat the right way to go.

Routine may be another reason for your lack of motivation. When every workday starts with a long list of things to do, and you know that no matter how hard you work, you’re going to get a similarly long list for the following morning, at some stage you lose your interest. You don’t see any challenge in doing better that you already are, because each brand new day will invariably bring a brand new list full of not so exciting things you’re going to just have to work through.

So again, you need something else to keep you motivated. Reviewing your goals daily is a good start because it will help you realise how far you’ve progressed with each of your goals, and see the difference a paricular day has made.

That’s it for now, I don’t want to make this entry too long, so I guess I’ll write more on this topic later. I hope you found this useful, so please let me know if you did.

Why I Always Have Time To Do Things

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Many people talking to me or reading this blog are impressed with the number of things I do on a daily basis. While some of us find it impossible to do anything at all outside of working hours, I have found the hours of my commute or my time at home to be the almost as productive parts of my day as the time I spend working.

Nothing special about my approach

I have no amazing sources of spare time or incredible ways to boost my energy levels. I’m as human as everyone else, and trust me, I’m very conscious about me being just at the very beginning of becoming a productive person. There are thousands of people I admire for being much more productive in their lives. So I think it’s not that I’m special or my standards are high. It’s just that the average expectations and standards of all of us are too low.

Because most of us rarely find and take time to organize the way of doing things in our everyday life, we’re constantly overwhelmed with tasks and things to keep track of. This gives us the impression of being so impossibly busy all the time, that we can’t imagine doing something else on top of our daily routine. We feel lucky if we get to enjoy a weekend with our family, yet we never stop worrying about all these things waiting for us back at work.

My basic time management principle

Every time when I tell my friends about a new project of mine, I always see how surprised they are to see me not only doing what I already have on my plate, but taking on something extra. And the immediate question I always hear is this: Where do you get all the spare time to do this?

Well, the short answer is that I don’t. I really don’t have spare time. I don’t have these 3 hours at home which I always know I’ll be doing nothing – so they’re always ready for some of my new projects… No! It doesn’t work like this. As you, as your friends, and just as anyone else – I don’t feel like I have enough time. But the difference between us is that I don’t stop here. If I don’t have spare time, it doesn’t mean I have no time at all. It simply means I have to prioritize things. I have time, I have plenty of it. It’s just I’m already doing or thinking of doing something during all the time I have.

Review and prioritize things

When you review your plans for the week or month to come, you should always see when there’s a good opportunity to try some of your new ideas. And if prioritizing doesn’t solve all the time questions, it’s time for optimizing, because there is always something to improve in just about anything you do. For instance, you can group things together or change the order of doing them, and a tweak as small as this may have a surprisingly strong positive effect on your productivity.

Having time to do things DOES NOT mean having spare time. It simply means having the clear purpose of why you need to find more time to do something, and having the courage to make it happen.

5 Steps of My To-Do Lists Revolution

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I've been using to-do lists both at work and at home for the past few years now. And while I couldn't complain about my overall performance, there was always something not right about the way I'd used them, yet I couldn't tell what exactly it was.

Just a few weeks ago I've finally realised what had been troubling me for so long: my to-do lists! What you're about to read may seem obvious and simple enough, but trust me: I really wish someone had explained to me this reason of my daily frustration a long time ago! So here it is: my own to-do lists revolution!

 

My original to-do lists setup

I had hand-written lists for each day in my A4 year planner, I would usually prepare such lists at the end of a previous day. Having finished all the work, I would take 5 minutes of my time before leaving my workplace to summarize the day's achievements and overview the stuff I never got a chance to work on to the following day's to-do list. I would also cross off all the completed tasks to make sure I can see my progress.

I had originally used the page-a-day approach. So no matter how few or many tasks I'd have for the day, they all would be on only 1 page for this day. But I quickly learned that such an approach is one of the worst possible. Simply because it doesn't work unless you manage to finish every single task you had planned for your day.

It all became obvious after I failed to complete the whole list of planned things for a day, and had to somehow keep track of the things so that they get my attention paid to them at some later stage. And this is where I saw just how ineffective it was to try and support this approach in any way possible. No matter what you do, you're going to lose time. I couldn't let this happen for any longer, and so that's how my to-do lists revolution began.

Below are the 5 steps I've gone through to come up with the most effective way of dealing with my daily tasks so far. Having improved my process so much, I'm absolutely certain there is room for even more improvement, so I'll be sure to describe it on my pages later.

 

Reviewing the past few day's to-do lists

The first thing I tried was to make the review of the past few days' lists my daily routine. This worked reasonably well while I had a backlog of few days, but it became a nightmare as soon as the backlog grew to more than two weeks. Having more and more tasks on my new to-do lists and trying to do follow up with the really important tasks, I could spend less and less time looking back and review some old stuff. Yet, now and then I'd realised something which was left out and didn't seem to be important when it was a week old, is quite urgent now that it's been few weeks since I never got a chance to deal with this task. So after struggling for a while, I gave this method up.

 

Keeping track of all the incomplete tasks

Secondly, I've decided to start moving all the incomplete tasks to the following day's plan. I made it a rule – never start adding items to the current day's to-do list unless I'm positive all the previously forgotten or never deal with tasks are at the top of this list. Again, it worked for a while, but as the list of tasks grew, I'd realised my daily to-do list routine is slowly turning into nothing but stupid rewriting of my previous days' to-do lists. I would actually waste my precious time by making yet another list of something I couldn't find time to do.

 

Basic scheduling – marking the stand and end dates for tasks

So the next thing I figured I needed to incorporate into my routine was scheduling. It makes perfect sense – to mark the date when adding something to your to-do list. You need it for historical purposes. Trying to improve the previous paragraph's idea, I started not only rewriting all the incomplete tasks of mine, but also putting the date of each tasks' origination alongside. This helped a lot. This made it obvious that some tasks have been left unattended for way too long. This improved the decision-making because it was clearly seen again how bad a backlog of things I had. It saves my time of thinking back and trying to remember when I was actually going to do a given task, and the date of its supposed start provided the urgency reminder I really found useful. Still, it was not enough, so I've tried to see what else would really help me optimize my process.

 

Throw away your to-do lists

This was the stage where I was much more efficient compared to where I started. So not only I was motivated to continue improving my process, but I also started thinking of changing the most basic parts of it. I've realised that one of the things which was noticeably slowing me down was the fact that I used to-do lists and no other way of keeping track of my tasks.

Even as simple thing as a review of my to-do list for the day would take much longer due to a simple fact that no matter what I did, all the tasks were still left on the same page. So when I would have a task or two completed, I'd tick them off or even color-mark them as being really completed, but this would still leave these tasks on my page. And no matter how hard you try to skip these tasks knowing that they're completed, you still lose some time quickly glancing through them. Time lost on glancing once a day is not so harmful when you think about it. But if you have to get back to your list more than a few times during your day, you'll start noticing how this very glancing through to-do list slows you down.

And that's how I decided to get rid of to-do lists completely. Instead, I've got myself a 5-section A4 organizer, and started using the smallest post-it notes I could find to manage my tasks for the day. So one section of this organizer would be used for all the tasks for the current day. Another section would be the one for the tasks for the whole current week. There's also one for the month (where I temporarily put EVERYTHING that doesn't belong to this week's plan), and there's the completed tasks section.

The main reason for switching to post-its is that I can accomplish all the things I did with to-do lists (like tracking tasks, marking the start dates and marking tasks as deferred or completed ones), PLUS I can MOMENTARILY get completed tasks out of the plan for today. If it sounds too simple for the best to-do list optimization trick, TRY IT yourself!

I can't emphasize enough the sheer pleasure and feeling of satisfaction you have when you mark a tasks completed, and then immediately detach it from current day's list and physically move it into the completed section. As you progress through your day, or get to visibly notice the amount of things left to be done. As soon as something's done, you get rid of it – and therefore you can simply see the current state of things by glancing at a page quickly. Many post-its – many tasks, few post-its – few tasks. It's that simple!

 

Completion dates for all the tasks

Now that I've made a major progress in my daily planning, I only felt like tweaking the process a bit to make it even better. So one of the things I've finally decided to start doing is putting completion dates for all the tasks. Combined with the start dates I've been adding to my tasks for some time by now, completion dates gave me the last bit of comfort I needed to make sure I'm doing the best I can. If start dates were there to ensure I know exactly when I'd put the task on my list and to help me realise the urgency and growing importance of some tasks, the completion dates helped me analyze whether I was coping with the load okay, or whether some particular kinds of tasks were constantly forgotten about, or whether some task took much longer that I originally expected. All I need now is to have a half-an-hour a week spent solely on such analysis – as any tweaks I made to my planning based based on such analysis results have the potential to bring my performance to an even higher level.

 

What happens now?

That's all I've done so far. My To-Do Lists Revolution isn't fully over, but it starts to look and – more importantly – feel like an evolution to me now. There's no major part to change in the process as I'm very happy with the results. I'm spending less time planning and managing my daily tasks, and with the revolution I've gone through I'm not afraid of any tasks – no matter how big or complex. I'm still working on other possible ways to improve my daily planning approach, so who knows – maybe once day I'll have another revolution to blog about! ;) Till then – good luck!

Knowing Where You Want To Be

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I’m so used to most of my friends and colleagues wondering where in the world I always find time and energy to do the things I do, that I’ve finally decided to spend few minutes and give full answers to these questions.

The ultimate answer

First and foremost, the ultimate answer to all such questions: it’s all about having a clear vision in your mind. It’s about knowing where you want to be in not so distant future. It’s about being absolutely conscious that no matter how good or bad the current situation looks, it’s probably not the end of your journey.

I won’t claim knowing a special secret about setting your goals or anything like this – after all, I’m only learning to master the art of goal-setting myself. But I’m willing to share the few things I’ve learned so far, and I sincerely hope these pearls of wisdom would help you make the progress in your personal development you’re so hoping for.

Outcome vs Goal

One very simple thing I’ve learned is to treat my goals as outcomes.

Since all our achievements are nothing but the result of our self-confidence and determination, you really have be sure about what you should be doing to achieve the result you want. And what quite often happens is that we’re thinking goals, as in goals which sometimes seem too good to be true, or too far away to be easily reached, or simply too complex to be fully achieved. In other words, we set ourselves such goals that they’re always a possibility, but not a certainty.

You think: “Yeah, wouldn’t it be great to have more time freed up for my family?!… I should probably try and do something to make sure I don’t work late hours and don’t take up more projects than I physically can…” So the goal of having more time sounds like a good idea.

But because we’re not sure how much more time we’d like to free up, and how it’s going to look and feel, and when it’s going to happen, it’s REALLY hard to achieve such a goal. Quite simply, you’re not giving yourself a chance to know when you’re approaching your goal and when you’ve really achieved it. But what if we consider this goal to become an outcome?

Outcomes are always certain. There is no probability here at all, not a shadow of doubt about getting an outcome – whether we like it or not, we’re going to get some outcome following our actions. It may not be quite the outcome you were aiming for, but it will be an outcome. We have to look at this goal and see what the outcome is going to be for us.

What will really improve when you get more time freed up? How will it improve in your opinion? How much time do you really need to see such an improvement? Would 1 extra hour a day be good enough, or do you want two hours?

So just knowing that there’s something you’re going to get helps you look at the whole plan of yours from a completely different perspective. It’s no longer a question of whether something happens or not. It an outcome now, it’s a thing certain to happen. And just like that, in an instant, you see a magical transformation for a vague goal into a sharp certainty quite possible to be achieved.

Ultimate goals

Every one of us should have ultimate goals. There shouldn’t be too many of them, but you absolutely need at least a few. They would be your guiding lines – something you always keep in mind in every effort you’re making. For instance, my ultimate goals are the driving force behind most of my actions.

There’s an odd action now and then which doesn’t fall into any of my ultimate goals but that’s the truth of life – you can’t turn every action required and expected from you to be beneficial.

Sometimes (as it probably happens with your job, for instance), you have to do things which are part of someone else’s ultimate goal or vision, but that’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?

I don’t want to give you a list of my ultimate goals – partially because I’m changing them all the time, make some of them more accurate and therefore easy to follow, or just reordering them to ensure the most important goals are the first ones I work on. Also it is because no ultimate goal of mine is final – once I reach the goal, I simply make the milestone and develop the goal into a bigger one, so that it’s a constant pursuit of something bigger and better. For me such a state of things is nothing but a pure and constant motivation.

When I have a clear vision of my future, I have a list of my goals – and I know I’m always doing my best to get closer to them. But if my goals were finite, I would simply be disappointed once I’d reached them. So I always push my goals higher and further apart. This way I have the motivation to grow and continue to do what I’ve been doing.

Knowing where you want to be

Many of you will find that it’s much easier to know where you don’t want to be! That’s good enough, work from there! Don’t be so hard on yourself, but simply try being conscious about your current position. For me, I always know there’s something else waiting for me ahead in the future. And this motivates, not disappoints me.

Every time I go to gym I KNOW it’s not the last time I’m going to do it. Right now my goals could be about losing some weight or growing some muscles, but even when I do reach these goals, I’m sure I’ll transform them into some other goal like making sure I stay healthy and physically active for as long as possible.

Every time I’m learning something new in my profession, I KNOW it’s just another piece of useful information. I’m sure that if there’s a chance to learn something else, and provided that I have enough time for it, I’ll go for it. I’ll never stop learning. Every time I write an entry in this blog, I’m ABSOLUTELY SURE it’s not the last one. Because there’s always going to be something else I can learn to help myself grow, to try it out and to share it so that others could enjoy the results too.

Knowing where you want to be is very important. It’s not a set of goals, but more like a vision. It’s a number of your wildest dreams you want to come true once day. It’s all these things which you’re finally going to achieve. And that’s the energy and motivation to keep you going even when no one else believes in you. It doesn’t matter. Y

YOU know better what’s good for you and for your goals.

What about YOU?

Do you know where you want to be? You may not have a clear vision of your future, but let me assure you – even feeling that you’re not quite there is a good start! Don’t stop there! Try and make the next step. Find some time and analyze your goals – both everyday and ultimate ones. See what’s really important for you and start paying them more attention. This is the effort you have to make as it will eventually make all the difference for you.

Don’t worry about so much work to be done. Don’t be afraid to dream of a better future. Don’t be discouraged if something doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to. It doesn’t mean anything! You can do much more than you think you can, and as long as you know where you want to be and you keep working on getting there, you’re going to be just fine!

Why Being Impatient Is Good For Your Success

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Why am I so impatient all the time?It’s just incredible how quickly I expect a result after I start working on something. It doesn’t matter what I’m dealing with – a 5 minute job or a 6-month project. I always want something to happen as quickly as possible, and even when it does in fact happen much sooner than it should have, I would still feel that I really wanted it to happen even sooner ;) It may sound to you like a perfect way to be constantly irritated or disappointed, but trust me I’m very far away from anything like this. In fact, being so impatient makes me happier and more productive!

The most important thing about anything that happens to you is to know as much as possible about the reasons behind it. If I’m impatient, I want to know why. Mostly it’s explained by my character – I’m just an impatient type of a person. I hate waiting for something to happen, especially if it’s anything to do with my personal performance. In other words, if there’s even a remote chance of something happening sooner just by having me put more effort into it, I’ll definitely try my best to finish it off as quickly as I can.

But simply settling for something being the nature of myself isn’t in my nature :) So I’ll always question myself even further into really deep understanding of my being impatient in every particular case. And below I’d like to give you a few examples of how I do this and how this helps me feel much better about the situation, keeps me motivated and even boosts my confidence.

So it’s just a little secret I’d like to share. Trust your senses! Just because I know myself fairly well, I always try listening to my senses. So if I’m impatient, I know that this is a sign. And in my case, it’s probably a positive one. The first I do when I grow impatient is I try to interpret the sense depending on the given situation. It’s really cool actually, just relying on this sense. It’s like one of them sure indicators which are always telling you the truth – so if you learn to feel comfortable with such an indicator, you’ll be glad when you seen one – you’ll just know you’re about to learn a valuable piece of information with little or no effort.
So what does being impatient suggest to me?

– a progress. When I’ve been doing something for a considerable amount of time, and I feel my impatience grow, this usually means I’m making some progress and somewhere deep inside I already feel the final goal is rather close. I’m growing impatient because my mind knows how much I’ve spent working on the subject and suggests it’s about time we finish it off. This progress type of impatience is a very positive sign for me.
– a sense of right direction. I usually grow impatient when I’m fairly confident about the step I’ve just taken, but it takes some time for the result of this step to follow. So when I’ve done something and I feel impatient, I know this is because I’m on the right track. Or at least I think I’m on the right track. This is a very positive sign as well, because it reinforces my confidence. It confirms that what we’ve done so far is a correct thing to do and invites me to continue in a similar way till the goal is successfully achieved.

– a sense of a completed stage of the process. When I’m impatient about something, this suggests that I’ve done what I could for the moment, and I’ve just completed a certain stage in the process I’m working on. The actual reason I’m growing impatient is because I’ve done all the work, and it’s now time to wait for the results. So again it’s a good sign.

– a perfect moment for planning of the process.This is where, having realised and considered all the good signs above, you look one step further to evaluate the rest of the plan of actions. Do you really have to wait for the result right now? Is there anything in your plan that you can do right now? Is there anything that can be changed in your plan so that you don’t have to wait for the result right now, but instead you’ll have the option of coming back to these results later? Basically, this would be a good moment for some prioritizing done to the rest of your plan. Maybe you haven’t realised how far in your plan you actually are, and that you’re only few steps away from a major turning point. Then it might be more beneficial for you to stop being impatient and dive into one of the future steps of the project and later come back for your results.

Improve!

People being unique creatures and all, there’s a pretty good chance your signs of being impatient will be different from mine. That’s why it’s important to analyze a number of situations when you’ve felt impatient and try to remember the actual meanings of this sense.

Remember, you’ll perform much better when you’re prepared for the result. So when you feel impatient next time, just take 2 minutes to think about your reasons for the impatience. Try and use the positive approach, but don’t be surprised if your impatience has some negative signs for you – it’s an equally possible opportunity.

But the bottom line is that no matter what kind of sign it is – a positive or a negative one, it’s still going to help you because it will be a valuable piece of information. Take your time to do the basic analysis at first, and soon enough you’ll learn to quickly recognize the patters and signs of your impatience, and all what’s left for you then is to follow the indications.

What would be really interesting is to know if your signs are very different from the ones I have. So if you do decide to master the goodness of being impatient, please take extra few minutes to come back and leave a comment here. After all, if you have learned something useful from this article, then I’m sure there is something I can learn from your impatience too!