Travis Eneix

Okay, this is not actually by a kid, but it so could be!  This is a great twist on time management systems over at Better Software Development, On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column.  I don’t know if I will implement this system personally, but the excuse to play with LEGOs again may just be too much of a temptation for me!

I came across an excellent article by Rosa Say this morning, and thought readers here would find it interesting. I know I did! The article is Break the Mold and Create Your Own Work. It asks some very important, and basic questions regarding what the Buddhists call ‘Right Livelihood.’ In this day and age of amazing proliferation of career opportunities and artistic pursuits, it is a sad thing when a person does not consider what would server their soul best before taking on a job (either for others or for themselves.) Also, the concept of a job being only for the purposes of making income should be examined. Pursuing your hobbies is a job too, with yourself as the employer and employee, and the paychecks consisting of contentment.

As you have probably seen in my earlier posts, I am on a persistent quest to find ways to tweak my personal organization system to enhance my productivity levels.  I have done a fair amount of digging, and come up with a solid basic system.  Along the way have developed a very powerful personal productivity “hack” and thought I would share it.

You ready?

Okay.  Presenting Travis’s A-Number-1 Personal Productivity Tip -

• Stop researching productivity methods and be productive.

Heh.  Did I wow you?  Okay, tongue now out of cheek.  Obviously this is a confession that I came to the point (quite rapidly) where I was doing more to work on my productivity than on doing actual work.  I became a productivity addict.  That’s no surprise really since I have pronounced addictive behavior issues, and it’s an easy trap for me to fall into.  But, I have roused out of the research numbness a bit, and am actually applying what I have learned.  Its going quite well.  On a more serious note I have basically put research about productivity back into my own task management system and will continue to make tweaks, when prompted to by my Next Action list.

Hope you enjoyed the tip.  Get back to work.

Leo, of ZenHabits, knocks one out of the park again with his latest contribution at LifeHack.org. Minimize Work: Cut Your Work Week in Half in 6 Steps. Thanks Leo! His six step process is well thought out, complete, difficult, and I believe well worth an attempt (to one degree or another.) In a nut shell -

1. Become super valuable. If you’re not already one of the top performers in your company, or an expert or extremely knowledgeable in a valuable area, this will be your first priority. You must become extremely valuable.

• My first thought is that this is easier in highly technical fields, Database Administration, Network Infrastructure Management, Website Maintenance. But, really, all this means is that you have developed a skill that others value, to a high level.

2. Work for yourself. Once you’re super valuable, you’ve got what it takes to quit your job. Why give all this value to a company when you could be giving it to yourself? Cut out the middleman and hire out your services directly.

• Leo, also gives an interim step, which is to build a side business. That’s my particular take, having made myself more valuable at work lately, I have less worry time after work and can devote more time to the things that matter to me; writing (with a subset of blogging), Aikido and spiritual study. The first two lead to income, the third is just a good idea.

3. Raise your rates. In order to support your lifestyle on half your work week, you’ll need to make the same (or more) money while working fewer hours.

• Your increased rates should map to the increased value of step 1.

4. Know your biggest ROI tasks. Which are the tasks that will really make you money, that will make a name for you, that will give you the most bang for your buck?

• This is part of the 80/20 rule now popular in self-organization.  In this particular usage - 80% of your profits come from 20% of your tasks.

5. Set your hours. OK, you’ve done a lot of work to get to this step, but you’re now at that beautiful stage where you can control your work week.

• Whee! This is part of the true failing of the modern work paradigm.  It is simply a fact that different people have different bio-rhythms and are more productive at different times.

6. Focus. OK, you’ve set your dream work week, and you know what tasks you should be doing during those hours (your MITs), and you’ve set a pay rate that’s high enough to support you financially. Now you just need to do the MITs within the hours you set.

• If you want to get all your money making done in half the time there is no way around this step.

One thing to keep in mind about the above plan is this - Do you really want the type of work life it entails.  You may not.  I, myself, would love this kind of life.  But, whether such a plan is for you or not, Leo has done a grand job of laying out a very clear way to get there.

Perfectionism is a path fraught with peril and frustration.  Examining the concept of perfection it is immediately apparent how impossible it is to achieve.  For something, anything, to be truly perfect it would have to be perfect for all time and in all states of observation.  Putting aside the universal law of entropy for a moment achieving a perfect thing that would be perfect to all observers would mandate that their mental make up (desires, predilections) would never change, and that each observer have the same set of criteria for believing a given phenomenon is perfect.  That simply is not going to happen.  Life is fluid and changing, and purposefully so.  People are individual and no two subjectively receive the same phenomenon the same way.  Going back to the law of entropy - anything made perfect will need to be maintained over time and the repairs would have to be perfect as well.

Striving for perfectionism flies in the face of universal law, and individuality.  To struggle for it is to perpetually fail and find nothing but frustration.  The end result of a perfection is a static state in which no growth can take place.

I have intimate familiarity with two types of perfectionism.  Mine, and my Wife’s.  My wife is the type of perfectionist who stays up long hours (sometimes all night) and fiddles with minute details of a project with no end in site.  She often suffers the health consequences of such an activity, and occasionally fiddles a couple of steps too far and damages the project at hand.  On the other hand, when she has made a few too many adjustments to an art piece and gives up in frustration she often goes back to the piece after some temporal separation and realizes that without active eyes of perfection the last changes she made were not ruinous.  This lends strength to the concept that as people’s mental states change their perception of a perfection change making it, in fact, not a perfection in the first place.

My style of perfectionism is on the opposite end of the spectrum.  I am often caught at the very inception of a project by wanting to get everything perfectly right for its start.  I swing back and forth between what time of day is best, what tools are most appropriate, what skills need developing, how to acquire those skills, etc.  I also long for some sort of guarantee that the outcome will be perfect even before I begin.  Life is not like that.  You never know what’s going to happen until you take the first step, and often not until you have taken the last.

Neither of these types of perfectionism is a good thing, but at least my wife gets things done.

The alternative to perfectionism is greatnessism (yes I just made that word up).  Doing something great is absolutely achievable.  Something that is great is alive and changeable, adaptable to the uniqueness of individuals.  Even though there will be shades in the perception of something great it will at least be really good across a broad spectrum of observers.  Doing a great job requires an active stance, a liveliness.  And, maintaining a status of great at an ongoing task requires continuous development and refinement.  That means continuing growth which is the essence of life.

I commit to abandoning perfectionism and plot instead to be great.  It is enough.