Personal Development

Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.

Productivity

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.

LookOut – Extremely Fast Search for Outlook

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This post marks the beginning of another category on this blog: Useful Software.

Being in IT for the past 10 years, I’ve accumulated many useful tips and tricks – and more importantly, a hunger for new and more optimized ways of doing things. Nowadays, if you want something done in a computerized way, you’re very likely to find a piece of software which does just that. We’re facing challenges daily, and sometimes the solution is just few mouse clicks away, so hopefully you’ll find it easier to decide whether you need something or now and how you can use it, by just reading this category of my blog.

Meet lightning-fast email search: LookOut

LookOut is an amazing add-on to your Microsoft Outlook email client, and it allows you do all kinds of searches in any emails you have ever sent or received.

MS Outlook is mostly a corporate tool these days – you’re most likely to be using it at your workplace. And while some of us are blessed by having only a handful of emails a month, other people like me are facing hundreds of emails on a daily basis. And so as the volume of useful messages grows, so does the time it takes to find something unless you’ve got a perfect email filing workflow in place. Which I don’t. Not yet, anyway :)

So LookOut helps you improve your productivity by minimizing the time and efforts to find a particular email in your inbox or any other folder. It takes 15 minutes or so the first time you start it, because LookOut has to index all your emails before it can speed up your searches. After the index is generated, all new emails are being indexed automatically.

What LookOut can do for you

  • index all your emails AND documents to ensure everything is accounted for when you search
  • make any search return results in just few seconds. What this really means is that you’re going to save lots of precious time simply because you’ll never have to wait on a search again
  • empower your searches with a flexible search query language
  • easily limit periods or places you search in: limit search to last month or last week, or search only emails or contacts. You can also specify a certain folder you’re interested to search in

Search query examples

This is really just to give you the idea of how powerful the search is with LookOut:

from:gleb – this will find all the emails which have “gleb” anywhere in their “from” field
from:alex yesterday – this will find all the emails you received yesterday from all the people with “alex” in their name
from:alex nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and word “nice” anywhere in the email body
from:alex subject:nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and “nice” in the subject

LookOut: why you need it

So, if you:

  • hate waiting longer than 2 seconds to find an email
  • do lots of email searching daily
  • like the idea of having intelligent searches (LookOut has a very simple yet flexible system of queries)

then this is definitely a tool for you. Go on, download it and give it a try: Lookout for Outlook

Asking Questions The Smart Way

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Sometimes we get so busy trying to solve a particular problem, that it’s very hard to maintain the focus. I’ve seen it happening many times – simply because someone fails to solve the problem right away, this person starts jumping from one thing to another, asking random questions and making completely irrational decisions. It’s very easy to get into similar position, but knowing few simple techniques it’s as easy to steer clear of such traps. Today I’d like to mention just a few of such principles.

Make note of every question

It is vital that every question of yours is noted. Put them in a simple list, or make a complex tree-like structure – it’s up to you, but always document everything. Only when every single question is put down on a paper or entered into one of your electronic documents, you can be sure that you’re starting off properly.

The most important reasons for making notes are:

  • it’s easier to think when you take notes. It had been proven numerous times that even simple problems make seem uncomfortably complex just because you have no paper or pencil to work on them. Working on technical problems and doing some calculations, it’s much easier to see what I mean – sometimes just writing down a short list of numbers is all it takes to help you solve a problem.
  • it’s easier to maintain your focus. When you have all the questions (and answers) outlined in an easy to follow form, you can always see where you are and stick to the subject.
  • it’s easier to maintain a methodical problem solving. What I mean by this is that you have a much smaller chance of repeating your own questions or following the same direction more than once in your thinking process. Having your notes in front of you, it’s easier to see what you’ve already tried.

Never Leave A Question Unanswered

I have written a fairly long blog entry on this subject, so if you haven’t read it yet – please do so: Never Leave A Question Unanswered. Today I’m mentioning this to show one more thing why it is really important.

Asking questions is not very useful on its own. Answering them is what really matters. And since questions usually take form of a logical chain with a sole purpose of filling in the gaps of your knowledge about the problem, it’s important to realise that the more questions you answer before moving forward, the more complete picture you’re going to see and therefore there more easier it is going to be for you to stay focused.

If you don’t take some time to stop and answer some of the earlier questions of yours, you may easily get lost on your way towards the solution. So when asking questions, always maintain the number of unanswered questions as small as possible.

I use a very simple decision-making while asking questions: if I pose a question and it seems to be a fairly easy one to answer, like one of them I think is going to take only a couple of minutes to answer, I stop right there and start formulating the answer. Simply because 2 minutes is mostly an acceptable sacrifice to make in order to get one more answer answered right away. If it feels like it’s going to take longer, I move on.

After some time spent on a problem asking questions this way, always do a quick review. Many quickly answered questions from different thinking directions will be somehow related to other questions and may render some of more complex questions to be easier than you originally thought. So by reviewing all the questions all over again, even by simply glancing through the list of posed questions, you’re effectively making sure you re-assess every question with absolutely all the information you have at hand.

Know why you want a particular question answered

Again, it sounds so simple – but I just had to put it in here. So many people never do this. They pose one question after another, and they never stop to think whether a particular question is even relevant to their original problem at all. Asking yourself why you need a particular answer is always a good way to make sure you’re moving in the right direction. And as with many other routines, there is a number of simple principles:

  1. If you don’t know why you need an answer to some question, drop this question. Mark it off your list so that it doesn’t distract you anymore. If you don’t know why you would need an answer, this means that you don’t have a place for neither this question nor this answer in your logical chain of thinking. And it also confirms that answering this question is not going to help you progress simply because you wouldn’t know how and where to use this answer.
  2. Maintain your focus and respect priorities. By knowing exactly why you’re posing a particular question and trying to find an answer for it, you stay focused and aware of what impact a particular question might have. Sometimes a simple follow-up on a seemingly simple question triggers a whole chain of then-obvious steps to resolve the problem or reveals an area of your problem where you should concentrate on.

Taking just a few seconds to realize the purpose of answering each of the questions you pose is definitely worth the comfort and confidence it gives you in your problem solving.

I hope this short article will help you in your problem solving, and I’ll definitely write more on the subject in the future.

Let me know what you think – is there is anything you agree or disagree with? Are there some other approaches in asking questions you find particularly useful? What works for you and what doesn’t? Please let me know – I’m very keen to learn from you!

Performance or Balance: What’s More Important?

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The last few days of mine were spent browsing the web in search of a perfect organizing tool. I don’t care at this stage whether it’s online or offline, I just feel the need for a computerized way to improve my daily organizing routine.

 

As you have probably read in My To-Do Lists Revolution article before, I’ve gone through few stages of various optimizations in search of the most efficient way of organizing all the things I have to do.

 

These are the things I’d like to keep track of:

  • what needs to be done and when
  • what had already been finished, and when
  • what is tomorrow (today) going to be like

 

This isn’t the full list, of course, but it gives you the idea. All I’m trying to do is to get through the day in the most efficient way – meet my own expectations, make sure I fulfill requests of my peers, don’t forget to enjoy my lifestyle, and – most importantly – enjoy the comfort of knowing exactly what is getting done and why, trying my best not to forget anything. And while I’m growing better and better at this, I realise that it’s also important not only to keep track of things, but to keep them in some order and maintain a healthy balance.

I think in everyone’s personal development there are quite a few pivotal moments, when your approach to dealing with everyday tasks changes dramatically in such a way that it would feel unnatural, if possible at all, to come back to the old way of things. So here are just a few of such moments I can think of right now.

 

The pivotal points in personal growth:

  1. You accept that your way of doing things is not perfect. In fact, it’s far from being perfect. And not only you feel it’s time to change, but you also decide to change things. You agree with yourself to make commitments.
  2. You find out that there are better ways of organizing your life. You’re excited and you’re full of energy, and everything seems to be so easier to manage even if you don’t really change anything in your approach. You enjoy the first results of your personal growth.
  3. You pick a set of rules to follow, and you do your best in making the whole new approach work. And it does! You soon enough realise that dealing with daily routine isn’t hard at all. Things at work get done easier, things at home bring joy in a natural way, and you finally accept that your development does pay off.
  4. You realise that your life isn’t only about getting things done, and there has to be more to it. This is when you agree that everything has to be balanced. You have to work, but you also have to enjoy other aspects of life. You have to advance with your career, but you should also never forget about your precious half making some professional progress too. And there are all sorts of things which don’t quite fall into one of the bigger categories of your daily routine, but your life will become dull and grey and sometimes even empty without them. You suddenly realise that you can’t go on without balancing things.
  5. You find the perfect balance, and yet again you realise how much you’ve grown – things are done with ease, and you enjoy every day of your life more that ever.

 

This list is probably much longer, but I think I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 on this scale, and because of this I can’t see much further than 5. I’m sure though that many things will become obvious and apparent once I make some progress.

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.