Whenever his clients had trouble understanding the meaning of their dreams, Sigmund Freud would ask them, “What does this dream definitely not mean?” Once they started discussing invalid interpretations of their dreams, the inertia was broken, and they would transition without effort into examining the actual meaning of those dreams. Keep Reading…

Two minutes might not seem like much, but appearances can be deceiving. There’s actually quite a lot you can accomplish in a two-minute window if you develop the habit if asking yourself if something takes two minutes or less. This habit was codified by consultant Dean Acheson (not the deceased U.S. senator), and later David Allen, as the Two Minute Rule. Keep Reading…

You’ve read the usual advice on career, productivity and self-development  blogs when it comes to handling interruptions at work. Firewall your attention. Don’t check email. Stay off of Facebook and Twitter. All good suggestions, but they’re tautologies equivalent to saying that the best way to avoid distractions is to be undistractable. We’ve read that the typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes, that it takes 15 minutes to recover from each interruption, that interruptions cost the country $12 trillion in lost productivity (the number fluctuates radically). We get it: interruptions are not welcome. Keep Reading…

First, a word of warning. This isn’t a keyword research primer for hardcore internet marketers. This is for the rest of us. Most of this will be familiar to anyone seriously involved in internet marketing, but even the most basic keyword research concepts are unfamiliar to 95% of the population.

There are two main ways of making offers for your company’s products or services. You can use your experience to intuit what your customers want, or you can do actual market research. The usual tools for conducting market research are polls and focus groups. Unfortunately, these can be loaded methodologies, since polling makes it hard to avoid positing leading questions and answers, and focus groups tend to generate self-conscious feedback that’s not representative to real-world customers. Both approaches elicit reactive information.

So how can we find out what’s on customers’ minds without asking them? Welcome to the wonderful world of keyword research.

Keep Reading…

A little over a year ago, I started going on a low information diet. Rather than just reduce the number of feeds in my RSS reader, I dumped them all in one shot. I knew myself well enough to realize that I would open up the reader the moment I felt the need to postpone taking action on something important. So I still found myself opening the reader, but there was nothing in it that would serve as a tool for procrastination. Rather than just limiting my email consumption to one or two scheduled sessions per day, I added Gmail.com to Leechblock, a Firefox extension that blocks your access to designated sites for designated time periods.

The principle is simple: it’s easier to increase our concentration by controlling our environment than controlling our attention. By setting the conditions in which we operate on the front end, we spare ourselves the order of having to make moment-to-moment decisions for staying on task. I kept trying to open GReader and Gmail, despite my conscious commitment to the low information diet. The problem isn’t changing a behavior, it’s changing a habit, and a habit is much more deep-seated and has more momentum than a single action.

Keep Reading…

In my last post, I talked about how I gave up reading blogs for a while by dumping all of my feeds from Google Reader. Initially I still found myself opening GReader, but since it was devoid of content, the habit died much more quickly than if I would have just tried to restrain myself from opening GReader.

A couple of months later, when I felt that I had the habit under control, I started adding a feed or two — or six or eight — to the reader, until I realized that I was back where I started. Whenever I was bored or anxious, feed reading was my crutch activity. So I dumped the feeds again and recovered.

Keep Reading…

Do you have a bunch of similarly formatted Excel spreadsheets piling up in your Documents folder? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see one large worksheet than see the same collection of data spread out over dozens of worksheets. Let’s roll them all up into one. Keep Reading…

Most people understand the need to set goals and higher standards, but how does that translate into practice? What does it mean to have a goal to “Lose 10 pounds,” or “Get promoted”? Drilling down to an actionable level of detail makes the difference between aspiration and achievement. One of the keys to actualizing goals is understanding the difference between goals and projects.

Keep Reading…

Ah, the evergreen question of all self-proclaimed productivity geeks. Should you keep your appointments and action lists on paper or in an electronic organizer? The answer: pick one.  Making a decision work is more important than making the right decision.

It really doesn’t matter. No, really, it doesn’t. I’ve spent most of my organized years using an electronic setup with a smartphone synced with a desktop PIM — initially the Palm Desktop. Then I briefly defected to a paper organizer, which I swore by for a few weeks until the novelty and its placebo effect wore off, then I returned to an electronic system. Due to the reduced administrative overhead of my current work situation (less email, less customer interaction), I’ve recent been flirting with the idea of just dumping everything on a legal pad, keeping all of my lists on a single sheet.

Keep Reading…