Clinton Skakun

1. Build a completely reliable system of trust and clarity that promotes your ability to relax. Create an empty mind to the whirlwind and a open mind to creative and higher thinking.

A large distractor and productivity killer is having open loops in your short term memory(think of it as your RAM). Another thing that will happen is, when ideas come to you you’ll have a potentially large chance of forgetting them, if you just rely on memory. Ever get that where you had one good idea after another, assumed that you’d remember it, and when the time came to use that idea you couldn’t remember it? We can assume everyone has at one time or another. When you constantly try to store your task list in your RAM(short term memory), it drains the resources you need in order to focus on hard tasks and to stay focused for a long period of time. It also depresses your ability to think on your feet, think creatively and feel relaxed while you work. The ultimate goal for your system should be to store everything in an external storage(note pad, PDA, your computer), one that you can trust will alert you and keep you updated on what you need to be doing, thus freeing your mind of the massive task of trying to remember a simple list and allowing you to focus entirely on the task at hand AND giving you room to clear your mind and relax(with out the “gotta remember this, gotta remember that, but what was it again?”).

The word “system” doesn’t refer to any particular technology. It basically has to be a convenient, easily assessable(and even enjoyable) system that you can update and review on a day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis(or however often you need). This can be on your computer, hand held device or just on plain old pen and paper. If you don’t have 24/7 access to your system use something simpler. I use a pen and paper, basically because I can use it anywhere and any time of the day. Use all the resources you need: Filers, calenders, simple sticky notes, what ever works best for YOU.

Now here’s the important part! As said above, the system must be completely reliable and your conscious and subconscious mind must trust it, or else it wont work. YOU CAN’T TRICK YOUR OWN BRAIN. If you end up thinking, “oopps, forgot to add next weeks’ supper with the family, ohh well I’ll remember.” Suddenly you’ll mistrust your system, your brain will be working constantly to remind yourself that you have a supper to attend on this certain date. And since this part of your brain often doesn’t have a concept of time I’ll will constantly remind you. (ironically you might end up forgetting when that reminder is needed.) So what’s wrong with this? It ruins your ability to handle large amounts of tasks and, at the same time, complete those tasks. In short, it screws your ability to get things done. This is a must. It doesn’t matter what your system really is, as long as it works very well for you. Make sure you write down everything you want to get done, projects, next actions, someday/maybe lists, urgent little things, priorities.

How will you know when your system is reliable? When you don’t feel you need to think about anything other than what you’re currently doing. If you’re still rolling something over in your head, put it in your system(unless it should be done right a way) and trust your system to remind you of it later. You will continue this until you’ve achieved clarity. You won’t believe how much of a difference it will make. Ever feel you need to be right-here-right-now but cant stop thinking about everything going on in your day/week/month? That’s because you feel you will lose it OR you aren’t clear on IF what you’re thinking about is even important.

If you need to think something through, write down in your system: “think Calgary Tower re-design through, solve [this] problem and decide next action.” (WARNING: you can confuse the crap out of you with vague, ambiguous phrases. Do yourself a major favor, ALWAYS be concise and clear, specify an “action” you must take and “why” and for “who” and “what” and “where” and “when” it needs to be done.)

There are a few key points to your system:

• It NEEDS to allow you to relax, it needs to put your mind at ease. (“How much you can relax is dereclty related to how much you get done.” – Unknowen)
• It NEEDS to be updated whenever needed to continue to be reliable and trustworthy.
• It must alert YOU.(the word “alert” means your review as well, not just a buzzer that goes off.)
• It should be simple, fun, and it should be 24/7 accessible(i.e. you jump up in the middle of the night remembering something you need to do Wednesday, DON’T “remember” it tomorrow, you might not)

2. Work on your own tenancies to be anti-productive.

“90% of everything you do is mental and 10% technical/physical, to have true control over the 90%, your mind, is to have control over destiny”
The best of us procrastinate and put off until the last minute, eventually causing the minor insignificant issue to escalate into an enormous, sometimes dangerous and costly problem that we are “forced” to deal with or else, our heads! Yeah, urgency has its own emergency system of telling us when we’ve put off for too long. Why do we put off when we know how it could kill us tomorrow? Because it wont kill us today. And because today we have our own pile of emergencies to handle and fires to put out. Fires will start and emergencies will happen, although most of the emergencies could be prevented with a bit of smart planning, some thought and some quick small action before hand. We really don’t have time for this crap. When there’s only time to put out fires and no time to run the store, we loose money. And if we don’t put out the fire, we loose money. The best question would be: how do we run the store, make money, and put out fires when they happen without diverting from priorities? The answer is quite obvious, practice prevention! Do the thing today while it’s easy, do it this week instead of next week. You’ll find that when you do today, what you putting off is now history and it feels like it was done and gone last month instead of a few hours or days ago. It’s almost effortless. This one simple practice can make you rich and free up lots of time.

The funny thing is, people who spend ALL their time on short term pleasure also spend lots of time getting rid of following, succeeded short term pain. The future comes faster than you think, thinking one week into the future is like preparing for tomorrow … or the next minute.

A few keys for killing procrastination and making your mind work for you:

• Do harder things impulsively, over calculating often brings hesitation and uses more energy.
• Ask yourself in the morning, what are the hardest 3 things I could do this morning? As the day goes on, you’ll thank yourself.
• Create a 1 day rule, do urgent things within the day they occur(or 1 week rule for harder or more time consuming tasks)
• Improve communication with your self, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your communication, with yourself and others” – Tony Robbins

“If you believe you can or can’t, you’re right on both accounts.” – Henry Ford

3. Separate the truly important from the *sarcasm* merely urgent

Ever wonder why people say, “I don’t have any time”? Any time for what? What’s your purpose for your time and how do you find value from time? We can talk about time management, actions, tasks etc etc but unless we truly know why we’re taking that action, the action lacks purpose. We might as well sit on the couch and watch TV. It’s stupid to put so much effort into DOing without knowing what it’s leading up to or what caused the decision to take the action.

Motivation basically comes from emotion. If you have the right emotion you will take action to either avoid pain or gain pleasure. It only makes sense, right? Have you ever done something for no good reason that didn’t cause you pain or pleasure? Probably not. Link anything in human motives to an emotion. Whether it’s fighting in a war, driving to work, having sex, or running a mile a day. There’s either a long term, short term gain or both involved.

Why do you need more time? Maybe, to spend more time doing things that feel meaningful to you. And you’re emotional about what you want to accomplish either short term or long term. (e.g. you go to ‘John’s Booze Mart’ to buy a 26 or Bacardi, drinking may mean pleasure to you or else you wouldn’t bother going there in the first place.)

Basically the meaning we put on actions, and how we determine how much time they’re work, the priority level, stems from this:

Your mission in life … then
Your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
Your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
What you do right NOW, determined by your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then

The value of what you put on NOW is decided by what is deeper down. It’s hard to know what an action is worth unless you know how it relates to the truly important.

This is the truly important. Don’t confuse the important with the urgent, things like paying bills, washing the floors or updating your facebook status(unless, of course, these things lead up to your actual goals). When you learn how to measure actions between importance and urgency you will understand what deserves more attention.

4. Rest your mind, Review your lead and lag measures, sharpen the saw and see the big picture.

There are those who like to spend every waking moment on doing something and getting a little more work done. It’s great to push the limits and to strive to a little harder. It’s also harder to stop once you get into the addicting groove of work. People who tend to overwork tend to burn out every so often. Try not to do this to yourself, there’s more to life than work. If you neglect the big picture, how will you know when you get there? Will you just continue to fill your void of boredom with more work?

“If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.” – Unknown

“Work for the sake of work is a form of laziness, how many lazy people try to become more productive?”

“Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise” – Tim Ferris, Author of 4-Hour Workweek

Some things that are completely crucial to your focus and mental health:

• Review the big picture Friday or Saturday morning, plan the next week, organize, get everything off your chest. The only thing you should think about is how awesome the coming week’s going to be. Don’t stress about things you have to do and make sure they’re in your system.
• Enjoy the entire weekend, or one day if you have demanding work. Don’t think about anything business unless you absolutely need to.
• Talk to people you haven’t talked to in a long time, hang out, splurge a little at the mall, do something different.
• Since you have nothing on your mind, a flood of creative ideas will probably hit you. Make sure they are kept down on paper, otherwise just forget about them all together.

Have you ever spent the entire weekend catching up on work, just to find yourself on Monday morning wishing you could just take a day off and have some free time already? There’s an old saying, “Too much work and not enough play, makes Jack a …” yeah you know… life’s too short to not have fun. Your brain needs to understand that there’s a bigger world out there than that little problem you’ve been bashing your head out over for the past month.

“Life could be more enjoyable if we stopped taking so many un-serious aspects of life too seriously too often and just sat back … and to live and let live now and then! The variety offered to us in this short time on earth gives us opportunity to explore and to grasp a deeper sense of what life is, to explore, experience and continually be inspired and to eventually act in abundance and give back” – Westly Hartell

5. The Art of Elimination!

Some of the best thins in life, leave. Use the art of elimination to create a more productive life:

• The enemy of the GREAT is the GOOD! Get rid of the GOOD, make room for the GREAT!
• Use Pareto’s 80/20 principle to eliminate the 80% that only yield only 20% results and focus on the 20% that yield 80% results.
• Use the Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the alloted time. Give work less time to fill: “The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.” – cited from Wikipedia 3 hours can be more than 12 hours.

“One does not accumulate, but eliminate. It is not the increase but the daily decrease. The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.” – Bruce Lee

I have to admit when I first picked this book up, I didn’t know what to expect from it. There are all kinds of tid-bits about productivity on the Internet, and thought I knew a thing or two about time management already. Liking the idea of learning “the art of stress free productivity” I dove into it.
Photo Credit: mslindz

What caught me in the beginning was the methodology Allen uses that focuses on clarity, keeping organized, and creating a system that puts your mind at rest and allows you to relax while working. What makes this book PRICELESS is the one concept I learned at the very beginning: the more you tasks you think about the more open-loops you have tugging at your brain, the more more open loops you have the less productive you are. The only way to get rid of open-loops are to be able to forget about them, by inserting them into a system(like on paper, a computer, physical space, what-not)

There are five core principles that Allen discusses in his book:

1. Collect – Get a load off your chest by capturing the instructions you need to remember, that you can return to, into what Allen calls “baskets”. A basket can be any number of ways to store and track your tasks. Paper, PDA, a physical space, e-mail, journals, or whatnot. What ever works best for you. Allen explains that in order to stay organized and updated your baskets need to keep reviewed once a week. This gives you a chance to update and empty your baskets.

2. Process – Do it(if it takes under two minutes–two minute rule). Delegate it(someone else can do it better if you can’t). Defer it(maybe it’s not something that needs to be worked on now). If an item does not require action NOW, file it, throw it away or give it a “maybe” for later.

3. Organize – There are different types of tasks: Next actions, projects, waiting for(stuff you’ve delegated), someday/maybe(e.g. “eat snails in Fiji” or “Add on to the house”).

4. Review – Do a weekly review on everything in your system. If you let things slip, you’re system gets out of date really fast, and that won’t maintain the quality of stess-free productivity you’re striving for.

5. Do – Probably the simplest part, now that you know exactly what you should be currently doing, DO IT.

These are the basic principles that the book covers, however, the book goes way deeper and gives more concise information on how to use the principles and apply it to your personal and business.

“Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up – not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.” – Allen

If you haven’t read this book, READ IT!

Here’s a good exercise to clear your thinking:

What’s your dream for 2010?

You should be able to sum this up in one sentience or two. This is not a list of your goals but rather an abstracted vision of where you want to be at one year from now. What are three goals, that if accomplished this year, would make all the difference? Using this idea, write down a sentience or two describing what your life will be like one year from now(the changes in the next few months will be very exciting).

For an example here is mine: To build (exact amount is private until accomplished) passive income, retire from web development, contribute to open source GNU Linux coding projects(my passion for coding poured into my passion for open source), to move out on my own, to meet a lot of new people and to become highly proficient in people skills and personal development technologies/techniques. To lead a team of people. To kick back and enjoy myself more often(because all work and no play makes jack an egotistical, over serious ass hole).

Not too large and not too small!

One way to disappoint yourself is to expect too much too fast. “There are no impossible goals. Only impossible time frames.” If you’re starting from nothing try to avoid things like, “Make 10 Million Dollars”(one of my goals many years down the road), focus on the $100k first, or the $50k. You can’t always stop progress, but don’t try too hard to rush it either.

“How do you cut through a rock? You either use time or a water-jet-cutter. The problem? For most, the proverbial water jet cutter hasn’t yet been invented.”

As a nation where the word “instant” is commonplace and where we can get results within seconds, we’ve undervalued this thing called consistency. We’re always looking for instant cash, instant breakthroughs and instant improvement. The problem with breakthroughs is that their extremely rare and most people cant live on lucky breaks. Instantaneous change also brings low value. Usually, the faster something is made, the lower its quality. It creates unpredictable and artificial results. It ignores the laws of momentum and the worst part is, it only works once in while.

“Trying to make a single momentous change is often not only successful, but often does not result in the desired effect. In fact, it is far better to make small habitual positive life changes that will catapult you to success. “ – Lighthouse Marketing Blog

Success could be much easier and would come much sooner if we could control our urges to rush things beyond their capacity. A lot of problems can be solved if we’d quit working so hard on having it all now and just learned how to pace ourselves. There are countless day to day routine actions you could take to improve your future. Maybe like working-out daily or finishing one small task on an unfinished project every day.

How many times have you spent entire weeks on a project to the point of complete burn out? It distracts your attention from other projects and other things that need to get done. It ends up feeling like you’re moving backward instead of forward. The climax of this overkill is a day of the week where you’re warding off a million urgent little things, fighting burn out and on top of that there’s regular work to do.

There’s nothing wrong with hard work, and sometimes/often you’ll feel the need to pull an all nighter to meet a deadline or get back up to speed. The point is, an effective work philosophy takes all the important areas of life and moves them ahead on a consistent basis, thus creating momentum. Much of this progress is so small that we tend to underestimate its significance. A lot of people throw in the towel before results have a chance to reveal themselves. However once the snowball grows larger it starts moving faster and starts cutting down and crushing whatever stands in its way. Only once it has come to a complete stop is when it’s hardest to get going again.

The momentum factor is what we miss when we overload ourselves with too much work, or try too hard to move things too fast. We’d all love to get a massive load of work done in a short period of time. Although the reality of it is, it somewhat goes against a few laws of nature. What happens when things grow too fast? Growing pains, other parts have to catch up and it can turn into a mess. After the fact, we expect to eat an entire elephant in one bite.

Jeff Olson explains the Sligh-Edge formula: the philosophy of “constant and never-ending improvement” similar to Dr. Deming’s philosophy. Dr. W. Edwards Deming partly responsible for his influence in reviving the Japanese economy after the second world war:

“Dr. Deming is credited as one of the leaders who brought one of the first quality movements to the Japanese. His basic premise was that the secret to help the Japanese achieve world power and economic success was if every single person and organization commit to constant improvement.” – Tony Robbins CANI System Explained.

It has been said, “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.”

“Jeff Olson talks about the Slight-Edge Formula for success. Imagine an incremental system where you consciously plan to improve just ¼% each day, or even each week. Can you do that? Sure you can. Everybody can. It has been said that “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.” The same idea holds true with this concept. The premise is to experience minute improvements on a consistent basis that tend to compound over time like interest. A ¼% improvement in any skill each day is a 1-¾% improvement each week! A 7% improvement each month! An 84% improvement in just 1 year! It’s actually higher than that because all of your advances are compounding at an exponential rate! Are you beginning to see the potential of this compounding power at work within you?” – The Slight-Edge Formula

The Slight-Edge formula is easy, but it’s hard if you lack patience. The Slight-Edge formula will work faster than the overload, 20-hour-day-burnout formula. Even a baby can use this simple but dangerously powerful model.