There are a few things I’ve done this time I haven’t done in the past to keep me going.

I’ve stopped worrying about what people might think

I used to spend a lot of time carefully crafting comments, tweaking little words, trying not to offend anyone at all, make some point of view not sound too closed minded and working on jokes. The problem with that is, I often would abandon a comment rather then post something I’m not happy with, where as now I’m just hit the post and let fly. That way, I can start getting feedback on things. The same goes for actual blog postings, getting stuff out is the priority, to see what works and what doesn’t first hand. Besides, there are six billion people in the world, if only one in a million likes my posts, that’s six thousand readers!

I’m keeping better track of ideas using a project managment package

It might seem a bit of overkill, but I set up Active Collab to manage all my tasks, I have a lot of websites and a few big projects that make a full management package like this useful, so my blogs now all have projects too, where I can post ideas for a post as a task, and come back to the easily. I had a play with BaseCamp as well, a nice little package and the free version is great for keeping track of a project, particularly if there are a couple of people working on it. Once I’ve played with Active Collab some more, I’ll write up about my experiences in using it in more detail.

More action, less thinking

I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas. So much time I could actually do them. I’m still streamlining a lot of processes, but in general I guess this is where I’m setting my self into full “Getting Things Done” mode, starting projects one action at a time to get moving. It really does work.

Stop being laze

There is a fine line between procrastination, and laziness. In the past, I’ve been guilty of slipping over it, usually when I’m stressed and feeling down anyway. That has stopped, and getting plenty of sleep helps here big time.

In general all this adds up to one key method in the end, just to keep going, keep writing, and keep learning. It’s not going to be perfect right away, but as with any craft, practice make perfect and the experience of actually producing something, rather then idly wishing ideas away is certainly the way forward.

I’m not sure you even need to go that far, this last week rather then poke around waiting for RSS feeds to update or a new email to drop in searching for some inspiration, when I’ve been at home I’ve stopped, and gone to read a book for a bit, and come back later. And while the actual amount of things I’ve managed to contribute to my various projects on-line has remained pretty much the same, I’ve managed to fit in finishing a book along side. Essentially, rather then worry about not doing anything, I’ve embraced the quiet moments and do something fun. In turn when I get back to working on something more “productive” I  generally feel all the better for the break, and am able to think about things more clearly.

Once you have a page bookmarked, right click it and select “Properties” and you will see a “keyword” text box, with this you can simply enter the keyword into the URL field and jump right to the bookmarked page without having to move your hands away from the keyboard, or hunt around in your bookmarks for the link you want.

So for example, I can now quickly jump to my GMail account by tapping Ctrl+t to open a new tab, which automatically puts the url in focus, and then just type “gm” and hit enter. To use the current tab, Ctrl+l will jump you right into the address bar.

For a more complete list of Firefox short cuts, there is a cheat sheet provided by Leslie Franke which has been praised frequently.

Now, it’s a neat little plug in that offers some swift keyboard short cuts (and a menu) for adding actions as a line and some syntax highlighting to make it easy to read when you tag it as a project or add a context. But it just seems a little limiting to me, mostly in the way to review the data once it’s in. My Vim-Fu is a little lacking, so maybe there are some short cuts I’m missing, and the formatting falls back neatly to been filtered though “grep” or other text processing tool, but that means leaving it to another application.

Edit: After a bit of further investigation, I discovered that it automatically reorders lines by project name, and then by context, and keeps finished items at the bottom, so no option, just magic that wasn’t immediately obvious as none of my tests cases overlapped.

Still, if you live your life in Vim clients it might be what you need to give you that little bit of an edge. It did make me take another look at the way Vim can be extend in other areas however, and so a worthwhile effort even if not for me right now.

So these three things put forward by Work Place Life aren’t anything amazing on their own, but they can still have an impact when you add them all together, or perhaps give some inspiration as to how else you might shave off some lost time, even if just by a little.
Here’s three more you might try

1. Stockpile Stationary
   Keeping a collection of various bits of stationary you need in a draw can save you a fair amount of time. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you don’t want to have to get up mid-flow and trek of to find a stapler or something.  For items in limited supply like staplers, keep two - one in common use that you don’t mind lending out. One you keep hold of no matter what, that you only ever use if the common one is AWOL.
2. Send Your Personal Mail Via The Company “Out Box”
   Firstly I’m not saying the company should pay for your personal mail, but my company is fine with accepting people’s personal mail, stamped as normal and dropping it in the Out Box for collection by the Post Office directly. Which saves me 10 or so minutes each time I want to post something because I don’t need to go out of my way to the postbox.
3. Buy Your Lunch
   Sure, it costs more to buy lunch if you look at the just the costs of material. But for me, it’s easier to buy a sandwich from the guy who delivers to the office, then it is to make my own. To make a basic sandwich is fairly quick, but the end result isn’t very interesting, and as soon as you start to make it interesting, the cost raises pretty close to what I’m paying anyway, only I have to spend the time putting it together. In other words, as with any money saving exercise don’t forget how much your time is worth.

1. Pen and Paper
   Don’t leave home without it, in fact, don’t leave the room without it. You want to capture that flash of inspiration you had while waiting for your cup of tea to brew without having to hunt down materials to do so.
2. D*I*Y Planner or Filofax
   In theory, I love the idea of a D*I*Y planner. In practice, I use a Filofax (A5 Logic Zip) with a few sheets from D*I*Y Planner to complement it. I did try to use non-Filofax binders, but there is such a lack of consistency in “contents”. With a Filofax I know I can pick up a new calendar refill each year, without trouble, and I can’t see myself printing, cutting and punching my own diary. The cost of paper, ink and time just makes it ineffective. But for additional sheets, D*I*Y Planner is invaluable.
3. Pocket Diary
   Carrying an A5 binder that contains your whole life is not ideal, so I picked up a Filofax pocket diary, that doubles up as my wallet so I always have a quick reference of my diary, somewhere to collect notes. - I have mixed feelings about it currently, usually depending on my trouser pockets and how tight they are. Keeping it in sync with my main diary is sadly a memory job currently, something I need to address.
4. Post-It Notes
   I collect most of my “Next Actions” on Post-It notes that I then stick to a pair of section dividers in my Filofax, or to my monitor edge for the one’s I’m actively working on so I always have an at a glance view of my work load.
5. An Inbox
   I use an old sweet tin from Christmas as an inbox, it’s an odd shape and so after a while it becomes very difficult to stack extra things in, which prevents over filling and forces me to process it. I’d love to say I use this correctly, but I don’t nearly enough at present.

What I don’t have yet, and what oddly the Lifehacker list also missed, was a Whiteboard - something which is currently top of my to-buy list. (Well, a Nintendo DS lite is top… but the whiteboard is second, and practical to boot) and maybe index Cards might get a look in, but they come more under pen and paper.

I never really though about this before, but I was listening to a Brian Tracy audio book this morning, and it’s mentioned there, and when it was it stuck me as such a simple approach to improvement: If you improve your productivity by just 2% each week, in three months your total productivity will have increased by nearly 27%. And in about eight months, you will have doubled your total productivity. By year end, you’ll be operating at 280% of your current productivity. That’s with just a 2% increase per week.

To put that into a picture, lets say you get 10 “Man Hours” work output done per week, and increase your effectiveness by 2% each week: