Friday Feature: Just Ten Minutes

Anyone who knows me knows I'm in the midst of a love affair with positive psychology. I'm an optimist by nature, at least most of the time, so discovering that things like optimism and gratitude can actually be good for us was just icing on the cake.

One of the down sides to optimism, however, is the tendency to take on more than I actually have time for. I just can't help myself; I possess a sort of magical thinking that leads me to believe that if I want to do something, I will somehow carve out time to make it happen. This makes me the perfect candidate for articles that promise that just a few minutes a day will get me where I'm going.

So, you can imagine how taken I was by this article from Live Happy called -- you guessed it -- "Just Ten Minutes a Day." It helps that the author's list of desirable activities looks a lot like my list of things I wish I had more time for but, who knows? Maybe ten minutes a day is as good a start as any for whatever it is we want to do.

How about you? What new (or old) road could "just ten minutes" lead you down?

Friday Feature: Successful Starts

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I always enjoy reading about the habits of successful people. Sometimes, I even find that I'm already following a few of the suggestions in the articles.

What's fun about this piece in Entrepreneur -- besides its slide show format -- is that it includes links to the businesses of and apps recommended by the leaders it features. Even better, the diversity of the ways in which each entrepreneur begins his or her day makes it clear there's no one pathway to a successful day.

Now if only there was more than one woman represented.

Baby steps.

Sometimes, Drastic Measures are Called For

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Last spring, my e-mail decided to cooperate only sporadically. Its timing was, of course, marvelous. E-mails began disappearing into cyberspace and failing to arrive in my inbox right around the end of the semester, when I had the least amount of time available to remedy the situation. For a few weeks, I worried that friends thought I was ignoring and that business associates really hadn't gotten the things I'd sent to them.

Fortunately, the Apple Store was able to come to my rescue. Unfortunately, this came at a price, and that price was my e-mail stash. It was, shall we say, substantial.

The Apple technician was very kind and understanding -- although he was taken aback by my less-than-organized desktop and amused when I told him I write about organization. He allowed me a few minutes to process my impending loss (mostly because he didn't want to be blamed if I lost anything important, I suspect) and and then we hit the appropriate keys and sent several years' worth of back e-mails hurtling into oblivion.

It was a necessary step -- one that was unavoidable in order to achieve the larger (and more important) goal of a functioning e-mail account.

Three months later, I miss very few of those thousands of emails and am, in fact, relieved to be free of the dead weight of a backlog I could never seem to manage. I still have more e-mails in my inbox than I should, but I've also become more ruthless about what stays and what goes. More important, I've recognized that the time it takes to keep things under control is time well-spent. My goal, after all, is a functioning e-mail account.

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As I prepare to begin a new semester -- one which will include teaching freshmen about setting goals and developing good habits -- it occurs to me that my little lesson in technology applies to much more than e-mail accounts. It is, in fact, an illustration of Covey's second habit of highly effective people: begin with the end in mind.

If we don't know what we want, we can't begin to know how to get there. If we do know what we want, we can often cope with drastic measures, and we might even choose to take them.

What constitutes drastic measures will, of course, vary from person to person. In my case, it was letting go of correspondence, much of which was trash, but some of which might have been buried treasure. For a college freshman, drastic measures might mean staying home on a Friday night to study. To those outside of these situations, neither of these measures sounds particularly drastic, but drastic is in the eye of the beholder.

We all want things that are too expensive, whether that expense comes in the currency of cash, time, e-mail or something else entirely. Sometimes we're willing to pay the price, and sometimes we're not. It depends on how important the goal is.

What ends do you have in mind? What's keeping you from them?

Friday Freebie: What I'm Reading in Ten Minutes or Less: Getting Stuff Done

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I always love reading helpful hints about how to be more productive and efficient, especially when they aren't one-size-fits-all, "this is how you do it" pieces. So, when I found Peter Economy's article, 9 Powerful Habits for Getting Important Things Done, I decided it was worth a look. And when his first two tips were "Do the hard stuff now" and "…do the easy stuff now," I knew it was my kind of piece.

Wishing you a productive weekend where you get the important stuff done, and make time for some  R & R as well. I'm off to do the easy stuff :-)

Link of the Week: A Shopping Triumph

I love it when a plan comes together, especially when the plan involves some of my favorite things. Just as I'm working on trying to keep my to-do lists all in one place, I stumble across the perfect tool.

I was browsing at my local Borders, checking out the 50% off calendars, trying to keep my promise to myself not to buy any more books until I finish reading some of the ones that are stacked up at home, waiting to be read. While enjoying two of my favorite things (books/paper products and a good sale), I found the most marvelous page-a-day calendar. It was labeled the Busy Dad's Page-A-Day Notepad calendar, but that didn't deter me. I'm busy, so I met 50% of the requirement, which seemed sufficient for a 50% off clearance sale.

Each page has a column of little tidbits: a word of the day (what writer wouldn't love that?), a quote of the day (I'm liking this even more), some fun facts of the day, including famous people born on that day, and something at the bottom just for fun. Best of all, most of the space on each page on this oversized calendar consists of a to-do list, with little red squares beside each item, ripe for checkmarks once the task is completed.

I bought the calendar, still lacking faith in my ability to commit to using it, but hoping that plunking down some cold, hard cash for a cool, new place for my to do list would serve as a sort of inspiration. I brought it to school, gave it a place of honor beside my computer, and voila!
A miracle happened. I started to use it. Every day.

My to-do list is all in one place, on my new calendar. I check it every morning. Sometimes, I transfer the undone items to the new day. Other days, I simply cut and paste, quite literally. On the days that I get sick of seeing the same things repeated over and over, I know just what I have to do. I tackle them, if for no other reason than to get them off the list.

I have tried other plans. Many other plans. Post it notes have littered my desk. Notebooks were neater, but when I filled the page and turned it, undone items were left behind on the previous pages, silently haunting me, pleading with me to transfer them to the new page so they wouldn't be forgotten. Single sheets of paper, oversized calendars and loose-leaf sheets have gone by teh wayside. There's something about a fresh sheet of paper each day on a notepad that has its own home that just invites me to use it.

I'm making progress, and I have tangible proof! I don't know what I'm going to do when I have a to-do list that's longer than the page in front of me. I guess I'll just have to break out the Post-It notes and stick them to the top of the page so it's still all on one page, but to this point, that hasn't been an issue. To this point, this plan is working rather well,even if I'm not a Busy Dad.

I remember reading that it takes a minimum of 21 days to develop a new habit. I've had my calendar at school for nine days. Almost to the halfway point of a new habit, I'm already making plans to reserve my 2011 calendar.