52 Productivity Principles For Work & Life

Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life – the second book of David Allen, famous productivity guru.
The universal problem of today’s world of work–too much to do–is the very thing Allen aims to help you handle. His tack is this: you can do more and be more productive if you relax and use his methods. His methods are all about doing the objective things, like making lists and cleaning up the small stuff, that clear your mind to be relaxed, creative, and free of stress.
This is an excellent self-development program, one that is up-to-the-minute in its use of metaphors like “mental RAM” and “open loops” and others drawn from our computer/network age. It speaks to the most contemporary issues in managing tasks, projects and energy. It draws on the best ideas of various traditions but is not merely a rehash of them. It sparkles with solid insights. It’s worth listening to over and over.
Here you’ll find two parts of review. Each of them describes one major area of productivity, according to Ready For Everything.

The First Major Area of Productive Behavior: Completion

1. Clean up your current projects before starting new ones

To create energy and clarity for a new project, go through and mentally clear the decks first by:

• Completing all the projects you’re half-way through.
• Processing everything in your in-basket.
• Answering or purging all your mail and e-mail.
• Clearing your desk and workspace.
• Working through your stack of material you must read.

The more things you can get completed, the clearer you’ll be able to think about your new project. Clearing the decks also energizes you, and creates a feeling of accomplishment. That’s important to have at the start of a new project.
You should also arm yourself with a tool for capturing new ideas. This needs to be something you’ll always have with you to capture new ideas the moment they occur to you. Configure it to suit your needs – a pocket notebook, three-by-five cards, miniature recorder – whatever works in with your preferences.

2. Get into the habit of writing everything down

Too many people have jumbled thinking. To avoid this, do a “mind dump” – that is, write down everything that pops into your head, regardless of how important or how irrelevant that thought is. You can then take the material from your mind dump and evaluate it logically, deciding on some priorities. If you try and do this mentally, all you’ll end up creating is confusion. Instead, capture ideas by writing them down and then work through them, deciding what’s actionable and what’s not.

3. Make better choices by tracking your commitments

Until you know what you’ve already committed to doing, it will be impossible to agree to take on any new projects. By deliberately and consciously tracking your present commitments, you’ll also become more selective about any undertakings you give to other people.
What you want to do is hit the right balance between controls and constraints. That is, you want to be able to concentrate on what’s important without having so many systems in place that your thinking becomes stifled. One way to achieve this is to create some simple daily processes for taking care of the important details of your life and career. With a thorough process in place, you deal with the important elements with a high level of awareness and attention.

4. To achieve your goals, know your current realities

Before you can set meaningful priorities for the future, you have to take inventory of where you are at present. Find the answers to six key questions to do that:

• What are your current daily tasks?
• What are the projects you are now working on?
• What specifically are your current areas of responsibility?
• What changes do you anticipate happening in the next year?
• What’s the big picture of changes over the next few years?
• What do you see as your purpose for living?

Once you make a thorough inventory of all your present commitments, you then have a more accurate perspective on how much time and energy can be committed to new projects that will move you towards your goals.

5. Visualize positive results and act constructively

To achieve more with your life:

• Get things on paper – because if you try and remember everything, you’ll get muddled and confused.
• Make decisions when things show up – not when you’ve delayed deciding so long they become problems.
• Organize reminders – so you follow through and complete the projects you start rather than abandoning them.
• Keep your system current – so you can trust it completely rather than being out of date. That frees your intuition to help prompt you in what you should be doing.

6. Avoid conflicting commitments

Your mind is constantly tracking and reviewing all your commitments – big and small, professional and personal. Having too many open projects at any one time creates frustration and anxiety, impeding constructive actions. Therefore, to avoid this, spend time and energy clearing up all the “loose ends” before embarking on a major project. You’ll be able to focus on what’s needed to succeed far more effectively if you don’t have open loops nagging at the back of your mind.

7. Inventory all your open projects on paper

Never try and track all your open loops mentally. That will only cause confusion and stress. Instead:

• Make a list of all your open projects (probably 30 -100).
• Write down the next step for each project.
• Update your list regularly so it is current and applicable.

Don’t worry if you don’t actually do anything on a project – that’s fine because it’s your conscious choice rather than the result of circumstance. Once you’ve specified what actions are required to move forward with each project, then you can start on the efficiency game of finding ways to get them all done.

8. Generate more energy by closing open loops

The more of your current projects you can complete, the more energized you’ll feel. Therefore, don’t worry about setting priorities. Get some projects finished each and every day. Clear out the mental clutter of unfulfilled commitments and you’ll be amazed at how great you feel.

9. If it’s on your mind, it won’t be getting done

Whenever something “bugs” you, take that as an indicator that you need to:

• Do something that will progress the project; or
• Decide what your next action should be; or
• Put in place a reminder you’ll notice to act in the future.

Don’t even attempt to keep all your self-commitments in your head. All that will produce is jumbled thinking or stress, neither of which are helpful. Instead, get into the habit of writing things down. Save your mental energy for bigger and better things. If you get into the habit of doing all your planning on paper rather than in your mind, you’ll be using your energy where it can produce the greatest benefits. Be smart about what you choose to think about, because that will have a large number of flow-on benefits and advantages.

10. For creative thinking, you have to make space

Instead of saying to other people or yourself: “You know, if I didn’t have so many responsibilities, I could be very creative”, you need to take more control. The key is:
Write everything down.
Think about it all, not just what you get to.
Decide what needs to be done about all your projects.
Manage all your options in a consistent external system.
As you do this, you’ll find the experience highly liberating. The release of the pressure of trying to remember everything will create a surge of self-esteem that will cut through the fog and allow you to achieve much more. Once you get started, it then becomes a matter of being consistent as you work the system.

11. Set up your life for expansion, not contraction

Do whatever it takes to make it worth your while, personally and professionally, to generate new business. That may mean raising your prices so you’re genuinely enthused when a new customer comes along. If you don’t do this, you will subconsciously resent new business, which is not helpful. Simplify your business systems, create the capacity for expansion, clear your mind and then go to work developing new ideas that will allow you to serve more people better than before. That way, you’ll welcome new opportunities, not shun them.

12. Periodically review where you’re heading

To think less about what you should be doing and thereby create more time for actually achieving, run regular reviews of the key elements of your life:

• Every week, review all your open projects and write down a suitable next step for each.
• Every month or two, go over your life and career and check the right projects are getting the right amount of attention.
• Every year, formulate a plan for where you want to be by the end of the next year.
• Every few years, sit down with other key people and think about your life’s direction and your lifestyle needs.
• Every so often, stop and reconnect with what your personal grand purpose of life is.

13. Be the master of your work, not its slave

By accurately categorizing and tracking everything you need to get done, you’ll have the confidence to think more about what really should be done. In other words, writing lists of actions to take is exceptionally useful because it helps you be more efficient, but effectiveness requires that you do the right things. Sometimes the right thing to do will not be something that’s on your lists, but because you’ve taken the time and thought to develop lists, you can feel confident that nothing important is being overlooked.
In essence, the system works but not always in ways that you have planned. When you reach the stage where you process 100-percent of your requirements into a good system, you can then pay attention to what really counts without distraction. The true payoff will be that you’ll get the right things done, not necessarily that you’ll do everything on your lists.

See also Part II

Based on:

Schooley Mitchell’s excerpt
Metapsychology’s review
TheSimpleDollar post

By Katie Barry, Ellen Domb and Michael S. Slocum

TRIZ is a methodology, tool set, knowledge base, and model-based technology for generating innovative ideas and solutions for problem solving. TRIZ provides tools and methods for use in problem formulation, system analysis, failure analysis, and patterns of system evolution (both ‘as-is’ and ‘could be’). TRIZ, in contrast to techniques such as brainstorming (which is based on random idea generation), aims to create an algorithmic approach to the invention of new systems, and the refinement of old systems.

• Projects of all kinds frequently reach a point where all the analysis is done, and the next step is unclear. The project team must be creative, to figure out what to do. Common creativity tools have been limited to brainstorming and related methods, which depend on intuition, fiat and the knowledge of the members of the team. These methods are typically described as psychologically based and having unpredictable and unrepeatable results.
• TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team’s ability to solve these problems creatively. TRIZ also provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure and algorithmic approach. “TRIZ” is the (Russian) acronym for the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” G.S. Altshuller and his colleagues in the former U.S.S.R. developed the method between 1946 and 1985.
• TRIZ is an international science of creativity that relies on the study of the patterns of problems and solutions, not on the spontaneous and intuitive creativity of individuals or groups. More than three million patents have been analyzed to discover the patterns that predict breakthrough solutions to problems.
• TRIZ is spreading into corporate use across several parallel paths – it is increasingly common in Six Sigma processes, in project management and risk management systems, and in organizational innovation initiatives.

  ---

• TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. The short version of this is:
• Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.)
  Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem.
  The research has proceeded in several stages during the last sixty years. The three primary findings of this research are as follows:
  1. Problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences. The classification of the contradictions in each problem predicts the creative solutions to that problem.
  2. Patterns of technical evolution are repeated across industries and sciences.
  3. Creative innovations use scientific effects outside the field where they were developed.
• Much of the practice of TRIZ consists of learning these repeating patterns of problems-solutions, patterns of technical evolution and methods of using scientific effects, and then applying the general TRIZ patterns to the specific situation that confronts the developer. Exhibit 1 describes this process graphically.

  

  In Exhibit 1, the arrows represent transformation from one formulation of the problem or solution to another. The solid arrows represent analysis of the problems and analytic use of the TRIZ databases. The striped arrow represents thinking by analogy to develop the specific solution. This four-step problem solving approach forces the user to overcome inherent psychological bias that is typically the foundation of psychological ideation techniques.

  ---

• The TRIZ general problem at the highest level is to find a way to produce the product with no waste, at 100 percent yield, with no added complexity. A TRIZ general solution formula is “The problem should solve itself.” One of the patterns of evolution of technology is that energy (fields) replaces objects (mechanical devices). For example, consider using a laser instead of a scalpel for eye surgery. In this case, ultrasound can be used to break the cell walls or using an enzyme to “eat” the cell wall (chemical energy) instead of hitting them. This may seem very general, but it led the pharmaceutical researchers to analyze all the resources available in the problem (the cells, the cell walls, the fluid they are in, the motion of the fluid, the processing facility, etc.) and to conclude that three specific solutions had high potential for their problem:
  1. The cell walls should be broken by sound waves (from the pattern of evolution of replacing mechanical means by fields).
  2. The cell walls should be broken by shearing, as they pass through the processing facility (using the resources of the existing system in a different way).
  3. An enzyme in the fluid should “eat” the cell walls and release the contents at the desired time.
     All three methods have been tested successfully. The least expensive, highest yield method was soon put in production.
• The “General TRIZ Solutions” referred to in Exhibit 1 have been developed over the course of the 60 years of TRIZ research, and have been organized in many different ways. Some of these are analytic methods such as:
  • The Ideal Final Result and Ideality,
  • Functional Modeling, Analysis and Trimming and
  • Locating the Zones of Conflict. (This is more familiar to Six Sigma problem solvers as “Root Cause Analysis.”)

Some are more prescriptive such as:

• The 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving,
• The Separation Principles,
• Laws of Technical Evolution and Technology Forecasting and
• 76 Standard Solutions.
• In the course of solving any one technical problem, one tool or many can be used. The 40 Principles of Problem Solving are the most accessible “tool” of TRIZ. These are the principles that were found to repeat across many fields, as solutions to many general contradictions, which are at the heart of many problems.

A fundamental concept of TRIZ is that contradictions should be eliminated. TRIZ recognizes two categories of contradictions:

1. Technical contradictions are the classical engineering “trade-offs.” The desired state can’t be reached because something else in the system prevents it. In other words, when something gets better, something else gets worse. Classical examples include:
   • The product gets stronger (good), but the weight increases (bad).
   • The bandwidth for a communication system increases (good), but requires more power (bad).
   • Service is customized to each customer (good), but the service delivery system gets complicated (bad).
   • Training is comprehensive (good), but keeps employees away from their assignments (bad).
2. Physical contradictions, also called “inherent” contradictions, are situations in which one object or system has contradictory, opposite requirements. Everyday examples abound:
   • Surveillance aircraft should fly fast (to get to the destination), but should fly slowly to collect data directly over the target for long time periods.
   • Software should be complex (to have many features), but should be simple (to be easy to learn).
   • Coffee should be hot for enjoyable drinking, but cold to prevent burning the customer.
   • Training should take a long time (to be thorough), but not take any time.

Two personal examples offered by recent TRIZ classes:

• I want my boss at the meeting, but I don’t want my boss at the meeting.
• I want to know everything my seventeen year-old child is doing, but I don’t want to know everything she is doing.
• TRIZ research has identified 40 principles that solve the Technical/tradeoff contradictions and four principles of separation that solve the Physical/inherent contradictions. Additional examples include:
  • Entertainment: Singapore needs to find a way to manage automobile traffic on the Sentosa, its entertainment island (aquarium, bird sanctuary, dolphin show, restaurants, music, etc.). Applications of TRIZ developed eight families of solutions.
  • IT Product development: A manufacturing company doubled the value to the customer of their patient interview system for opticians offices by applying the feedback and self-service principles of TRIZ to the overall product development, and applying the principles of segmentation, taking out and composite construction to the training and support.
  • School administrators: Creativity has been greatly enhanced in situations ranging from allocation of the budget for special education to building five schools with funding only for four, to improving racial harmony in the schools.
  • Waste processing: Dairy farm operators could no longer dry the cow manure due to increased cost of energy. TRIZ led the operators to a method used for the concentration of fruit juice, which requires no heat.
  • Warranty cost reduction: Ford used TRIZ to solve a persistent problem with squeaky windshields that was costing several million dollars each year. Previously, they had used TRIZ to reduce idle vibration in a small car by 165 percent, from one of the worst in its class to 30 percent better than the best in class.
• A recent case study presented from the Dow Chemical Company showed the combined effect of TRIZ with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) most dramatically.

A Dow Plastics business found itself responding to meet the ever more rigorous needs of a cost-driven marketplace, for a technology tuned over decades.  It convened a group of technical experts to redesign its “most effective” standard process technology for manufacturing facilities for this family of products. To stay competitive in costs, they needed to drastically reduce the capital needed to build future plants. Requirements seemed ever-tightening, calling for lower energy use, better ergonomics for operating personnel, and lower monomer residuals in product. The process, being decades old, had technology and equipment systems considered highly optimized – oh, the psychological inertia!
An overall Ideal Final Result helped outline the zones of conflict / pathways to innovation so that sub-groups could divide and attack each opportunity with the most appropriate tools. Substantial use of technical contradictions and inventive principles helped address trade-offs. The group assembled a dozen alternative systems by using a morphological box at the high, conceptual level.  A Pugh concept selection matrix helped narrow the candidates to four for which the intermediate level of detail enabled cost estimations. Elements of IFR contributed to the evaluation criteria.
Breakthrough was achieved in control of monomer residuals, handling of raw materials, and reactor design. The reduction amazed even the project team, when the capital cost of a plant built to the new standard dropped by more than 25 percent, from nearly $110 million to < $80 million.
The best way to learn and explore TRIZ is to begin a problem that you haven’t solved satisfactorily and try it!

Based on:

What is it – TRIZ?
Wikipedia materials

Many people, myself included, have used PowerPoint to make important presentations. Did you just throw boxes on the screen or did you think about your audience and your message? I know that I am usually too overwhelmed by color and animation choices to put much thought into how each page should be designed. Stephen M. Kosslyn, chair of the Department of Psychology and John Lindsley Professor at Harvard University, has written a book to elucidate the process. In Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Creating Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, Kosslyn presents eight simple principles, based on modern science about perception, memory, and cognition, that will make any presentation work. In the original article below Kosslyn provides some tips to get you started.

Kosslyn says that presentation success can be virtually defined by meeting these three goals:

Goal 1: Connect with your audience. This goal is supported by the principle of Relevance and the principle of Appropriate Knowledge. Do not include too much nor too little information, and select information and use language appropriate for your particular audience.

Goal 2: Direct and hold attention. This goal is supported by the principles of Salience, Discriminability, and Perceptual Organization. Attention is drawn to areas that are perceptibly different, so leverage design principles such as contrast and make differences big and obvious. Or as graphic designer Robin Williams would say, ” Don’t be a wimp!” Also remember that people will naturally tend to group similar elements into a single unit.

Goal 3: Promote understanding and memory. This goal is supported by the principle of Compatibility, the principle of Informative Changes, and the principle of Capacity Limitations. Messages are easier to remember when they are compatible with meaning. For example, the word Red presented in green text violates this principle as would a graph about the homeless cat population in Osaka decorated with a background image of people playing with their healthy dogs. Remember too that people expect any change in your presentations — such as a sudden interjection of a joke or a story, or a visual change in slide color or an animation, etc. — to have meaning, and when they don’t have a meaning this becomes noise and hurts effectiveness. And of course, audiences can only retain a limited amount of information in a presentation (see cognitive load theory), so choose carefully and do not try to stuff people’s brains with more and more information. It won’t work.

Electronic slide shows (PowerPoint, Keynote, and all the rest) can become vastly easier to understand if presenters respect some simple rules, which will allow them to play to the mental strengths of their all-to-human audience members and avoid pushing them to (or beyond) their limits.
Here are a few of these rules:

• Goldilocks Rule. Don’t give people too little or too much – give them just the right amount for the message you want to convey.
  On the one hand, if you don’t include enough, you’ll just be dumping a puzzle on their laps – or, worse yet, make them annoyed at you for not being clear. On the other hand, if you give too much, you’ll make the audience work too hard. It might be tempting to show how smart, knowledgeable, and well-prepared you are by showering the audience with details. But if that information doesn’t really help you tell your story, and doesn’t help the audience understand your main points, then it just gets in the way. You will force the audience members to search for the information-bearing needle in the haystack of your words and graphics – and they will probably just give up. And they probably should, because you’ve put them in a Catch-22: People don’t like expending energy unless they know it’s worthwhile, but you’ve forced them to spend energy in order to find out whether it’s worthwhile to do so!

  

• Rule of Four. Don’t expect the audience to keep in mind more than four groups on a slide. Car license plates and telephone numbers are as long as they are because of how much information we can easily store in our short-term memories: on average about four groups. This means, as a general guideline, that you shouldn’t show more than four bullets, and in each bullet should comprise no more than two lines (assuming that each line has on average two phrases or concepts).
  The Rule of Four provides another reason why you should follow the Goldilocks Rule, and not provide too much. But more than that, if there is too much on a slide, the words are likely to be very small, and difficult to see. Nobody likes to risk eyestrain when viewing a presentation. And yet another reason for keeping it short and sweet is that if there is too much material on the slide, the audience will be reading one thing while you are saying another, and we are not good at such multitasking: You’ll force the audience to read or to listen to you — or to try to do both (which means that they will not do either very well).

  

• Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer Rule: As Rudolph knew all too well, what’s different stands out, be it a red nose, a large graphic, or words in bold.
  Make what’s important stand out by being different from the surrounds. It can be larger, bolder, or a more striking color. Or it can move in from the side. But avoid overdoing this. The human brain is a “difference detector”: we notice the red nose among a group of black noses, or the nail the sticks above the floor boards. But if all noses are red, or all nails protrude, we quickly adapt and don’t pay attention to them. So, don’t use all bold, or have every word or graphic come flying in. If you decide to have the words or graphics come flying in from different angles, you will succeed in making the audience notice them – but you’ll also annoy the audience by continually grabbing their attention as if something new and important were happening when it was really same ole, same ole. Not just boring – irritating!

  

• Backgrounds, salience, and compatibility
  Let’s use two of the principles, salience and compatibility, to examine the single issue of slide backgrounds. The most important element of your design should also be the most salient, says Kosslyn. This could be done in many ways such as with larger or bold type, color choices, positioning, and myriad other ways that help guide the viewer’s eyes. Generally, slide backgrounds should have low salience, says Kosslyn. That is, backgrounds should be simple without lots of perceptible differences among the background image itself since this would interfere with the foreground elements. And if you use a photo for your background image, Kosslyn reminds us to use a background image that underlines our message instead of undermining it. A good background, says, Kosslyn, can “…allow you to underline your message effectively, or it can create confusion, the background image should not conflict with the message of the display.”

Above: These are posters I found in two store fronts at a shopping mall in Guam Sunday. The one on the left uses three colors (white, red, black), the one on the right has over twice as many colors at seven (yellow, green, blue, red, black, violet, and white). In both cases the key element is the number set in large type: 40% and 50% are what attracts the eye of the shoppers looking for a deal (“off” and “%” are made smaller because they are a step down in importance and are assumed or implied given the context). The limitations of the discount (that they are for selected items only and that you have to buy one first at full price to get the discount on the shoes, etc.) are made subordinate and may in fact be missed until the clerk informs the customer who is now all ready in the store. The power of the “40% Off” on the colorful poster for a game software shop is reduced due to weaker overall design priority of the poster, which even includes superfluous clip art, and in the end simply blends into the sea of noise.(The poster reminds me of some PowerPoint slides that have a large title competing with the more important elements in the slide). The poster for the shoe store is a good example of salience (“Attention is drawn to large perceptible difference”) as it is clear which element is the most important.

• If you want to be a PowerPoint Jedi, and not a PowerPoint Sith, my advice is to start by thinking about who your audience is, what they are interested in knowing, how you can tell a story that will connect for them, and how you can show-and-tell in ways that they can grasp without straining. May the Force be with you!

There may be nothing necessarily new for the most experienced of you in this book, but because the advice comes to you from a renowned cognitive neuroscientist from Harvard, who aligns his list of presentation and PowerPoint “do’s & don’ts” with sound psychological principles, this book will be of help to you as you try to change your own “PowerPoint culture” around you. It’s one thing when a designer says the current methods are flawed, but it is quite another when a cognitive neuroscientist says so. The book is by no means the final word on presenting with slides, but it does offer plenty of graphic examples of what works and what doesn’t, and it will give you some “hard evidence” to use while you try to persuade your own entrenched curmudgeons trying to defend the status quo.

Based on:

Presentationzen post
PowerPoint for Martians

by Paul Graham

PART I.

The big mystery to me is: why don’t more people start startups? If nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a significant percentage get rich, why doesn’t everyone want to do this?

It seems like people are not acting in their own interest. What’s going on? Well, I can answer that. Because of Y Combinator’s position at the very start of the venture funding process, we’re probably the world’s leading experts on the psychology of people who aren’t sure if they want to start a company.
There’s nothing wrong with being unsure. If you’re a hacker thinking about starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you’re part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filo before they started Yahoo. In fact, I’d guess the most successful startups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather than gung-ho business guys.
The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components. Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eight different reasons mixed together in their heads, and don’t know themselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and some bogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, you don’t know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified or mostly bogus.
So I’m going to list all the components of people’s reluctance to start startups, and explain which are real. Then would-be founders can use this as a checklist to examine their own feelings.
I admit my goal is to increase your self-confidence. But there are two things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise. One is that I’m motivated to be honest. Most people in the confidence-building business have already achieved their goal when you buy the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell you how great you are. Whereas if I encourage people to start startups who shouldn’t, I make my own life worse. If I encourage too many people to apply to Y Combinator, it just means more work for me, because I have to read all the applications.

The other thing that’s going to be different is my approach. Instead of being positive, I’m going to be negative. Instead of telling you “come on, you can do it” I’m going to consider all the reasons you aren’t doing it, and show why most (but not all) should be ignored. We’ll start with the one everyone’s born with.

1. Too young

There’s a reason we have a distinct word “adult” for people over a certain age. There is a threshold you cross. It’s conventionally fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages. You’re old enough to start a startup if you’ve crossed this threshold, whatever your age.
One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. As a kid there’s a magic button you can press by saying “I’m just a kid” that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they’re ruthlessly pruned.
The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who’s not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance.

2. Too inexperienced

The best way to get experience if you’re 21 is to start a startup. So, paradoxically, if you’re too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That’s a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal who thinks he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write.
So now I’d advise people to go ahead and start startups right out of college. There’s no better time to take risks than when you’re young. Sure, you’ll probably fail. But even failure will get you to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.

3. Not determined enough

You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success.
Most hackers probably underestimate their determination. I’ve seen a lot become visibly more determined as they get used to running a startup. I can think of several we’ve funded who would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but are now set on world domination.
I’m guessing here, but I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn’t seem as if Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors’ bidding. They started projects of their own.

4. Not smart enough

You may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder. But if you’re worried about this, you’re probably mistaken. If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are.
And in any case, starting a startup just doesn’t require that much intelligence. Some startups do. You have to be good at math to write Mathematica. But most companies do more mundane stuff where the decisive factor is effort, not brains.

5. Know nothing about business

This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. You don’t need to know anything about business to start a startup. The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you’ll have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly.
Acquirers know the rule holds for them too: if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow, and if they don’t, the cleverest business model in the world won’t save you.
We’ll bet a seed round you can’t make something popular that we can’t figure out how to make money from.

6. No cofounder

Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.
If you don’t have a cofounder, what should you do? Get one. It’s more important than anything else. If there’s no one where you live who wants to start a startup with you, move where there are people who do. If no one wants to work with you on your current idea, switch to an idea people want to work on.
The real lesson to draw from this is not how to find a cofounder, but that you should start startups when you’re young and there are lots of them around.

7. No idea

In a sense, it’s not a problem if you don’t have a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway.
So here’s the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them? A need that’s narrow but genuine is a better starting point than one that’s broad but hypothetical. So even if the problem is simply that you don’t have a date on Saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by writing software, you’re onto something, because a lot of other people have the same problem.

8. No room for more startups

A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think “this can’t continue.” Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there’s any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies.
Nearly everyone who works is satisfying some kind of need. Breaking up companies into smaller units doesn’t make those needs go away. Existing needs would probably get satisfied more efficiently by a network of startups than by a few giant, hierarchical organizations, but I don’t think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying current needs would lead to more.
Usually the limited-room fallacy is not expressed directly. Usually it’s implicit in statements like “there are only so many startups Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo can buy.” Maybe, though the list of acquirers is a lot longer than that. And whatever you think of other acquirers, Google is not stupid. The reason big companies buy startups is that they’ve created something valuable. And why should there be any limit to the number of valuable startups companies can acquire, any more than there is a limit to the amount of wealth individual people want?

9. Family to support

This one is real. I wouldn’t advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that I don’t want to take responsibility for advising it. I’m willing to take responsibility for telling 22 year olds to start startups. So what if they fail? They’ll learn a lot, and that job at Microsoft will still be waiting for them if they need it. But I’m not prepared to cross moms.
As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups when you’re young.

10. Independently wealthy

This is my excuse for not starting a startup. Startups are stressful.
There is a bit of a problem with retirement, though. Like a lot of people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problems you discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interesting people you’d like to work with are not rich. They need to work at something that pays the bills. Which means if you want to have them as colleagues, you have to work at something that pays the bills too, even though you don’t need to. I think this is what drives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.

11. Not ready for commitment

This was my reason for not starting a startup for most of my twenties. Like a lot of people that age, I valued freedom most of all. I was reluctant to do anything that required a commitment of more than a few months. Nor would I have wanted to do anything that completely took over my life the way a startup does. And that’s fine.
If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect. So if you’re ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation session, you may also be ready to start that startup.

12. Need for structure

I’m told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority.
If you’re one of these people, you probably shouldn’t start a startup. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even go to work for one. In a good startup, you don’t get told what to do very much. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That’s too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them.
How do you tell if you’re independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you’d bristle at the suggestion that you aren’t, then you probably are.

13. Fear of uncertainty

Perhaps some people are deterred from starting startups because they don’t like the uncertainty. If you go to work for Microsoft, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anything might happen.
Well, if you’re troubled by uncertainty, I can solve that problem for you: if you start a startup, it will probably fail. Seriously, though, this is not a bad way to think about the whole experience. Hope for the best, but expect the worst. In the worst case, it will at least be interesting. In the best case you might get rich.

14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding

One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
There’s no concept of office hours in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at work. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time. If you’re a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work. But you never have to pretend to.

15. Parents want you to be a doctor

A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t listen to them. Families are entitled to their own traditions, and who am I to argue with them? But I will give you a couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parents really want for you.
The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents’ opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think about why they’re asking for something, and see if there’s a better way to give them what they need.

16. A job is the default

This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It’s a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that’s something that’s changing pretty rapidly.
We may be seeing another such change right now. I’ve read a lot of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well, and it now seems to me fairly likely that we’re seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing. And you know what? If you’d been around when that change began (around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their manors, it can’t have been that hard to run away to a city. There were no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. What prevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky. Leave one’s plot of land? Leave the people you’d spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you didn’t grow it?
Frightening as it seemed to them, it’s now the default with us to live by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very ones trying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry and Sergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn’t get jobs themselves?
Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?
It’s exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing. That’s why I care about startups. Startups aren’t interesting just because they’re a way to make a lot of money. I couldn’t care less about other ways to do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. There’s more going on with startups. They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.

Based on

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

by David Allen

GTD^® is the popular shorthand for “Getting Things Done^®“, the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity.
Sophisticated without being confining, the subtle effectiveness of GTD lies in its radically common sense notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments , organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment.
GTD embodies an easy, step-by-step and highly efficient method for achieving this relaxed , productive state.

The Problem with “stuff”

• Getting Things Done succeeds because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the atomic tasks that we want to accomplish in a given day. That’s “stuff”. Amorphous, unactionable, flop-sweat-inducing stuff. David says:
  «Here’s how I define “stuff:” anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]»
• Stuff is bouncing around in our heads and causing untold stress and anxiety. Evaluation meetings, bar mitzvahs, empty rolls of toilet paper, broken lawn mowers, college applications, your big gut, tooth decay, dirty underwear and imminent jury duty all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains. Stuff has no “home” and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps rattling around.
• Worst off, we’re too neurotic to stop thinking about it, and we certainly don’t have time to actually do everything in one day. Jeez Louise, what the hell am I, Superman?
  So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your “stuff” has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?

You can do anything – but not everything

• According to David Allen, 54, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on personal productivity, there is the “silent trauma” of knowledge workers everywhere.
  We inhabit a world, he says, in which there are “no edges to our jobs” and “no limit to the potential information that can help us do our jobs better.” What’s more, in a competitive environment that’s continually being reshaped by the Web, we’re tempted to rebalance our work on a monthly, weekly, even hourly basis. Unchecked, warns Allen, this frantic approach is a recipe for dissatisfaction and despair — all-too-common emotions these days for far too many of us.
• Allen argues that the real challenge is not managing your time but maintaining your focus: “If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. Remember, you’re the one who creates speed, because you’re the one who allows stuff to enter your life.”
• “There was a lot of flaky stuff on the edges, but at the core of the philosophy were some good ideas about how to live a life that’s more in line with your values,” Allen says. At the time, many HR executives were also broadening their interest in personal growth — in helping people to think and to work together more effectively. Over time, Allen discovered a bridge between his fascination with self-understanding and his desire to interact practically with the world. That bridge was time management.
• Allen has never been a naturally high-productivity person. (“I’m more of a party guy,” he quips.) But he tried hard to change that. As he did so, he became convinced that time management was the key to personal freedom — to greater self-discovery. He then became convinced that there was a pretty robust market for instruction in his newfound art. Finally, he became convinced that “God didn’t really care whether I had money or not.” More or less at that moment, he became a consultant.

In a series of interviews with Fast Company, Allen shared his ideas on increasing personal productivity in a business world that moves at warp speed.

- If there’s one thing that all of our readers probably agree on, it’s that they have too much to do and too little time in which to do it. Why do so many of us feel that way?

- There is always more to do than there is time to do it, especially in an environment of so much possibility. We all want to be acknowledged; we all want our work to be meaningful. And in an attempt to achieve that goal, we all keep letting stuff enter our lives.
The problem, of course, is that we also want to finish what we start. Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started. That’s why a lot of my work has to do with how people deal with their input — email, phone messages, reports, conversations. Everything that isn’t where it should be is an open loop, an incomplete, a distraction that slows you down. Your brain says, “Hey, that doesn’t belong there,” and you have to deal with that impulse.

• If you allow too much dross to accumulate in your “10 acres” — in other words, if you allow too many things that represent undecided, untracked, unmanaged agreements with yourself and with others to gather in your personal space — that will start to weigh on you. It will dull your effectiveness. You’ve got to dig into the mess and put those things to rest. Productivity is about completion.
• Isn’t it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They’ve cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year. In fact, I tell people to take inventory weekly — to sort through all of the stuff that they haven’t yet acted on. If you can get a clear picture of everything that you have to do, you’ll be able to say, “Oh, this is what I have to do right now” — and then take the next step in getting it done.

- If people took such an inventory, what would they find?

• I like to talk about the “runway level” of life — all of the current actions, all of the little things that stack up. On their runways, people typically have enough stuff to create 300 or 400 hours of work. What’s driving all of those tasks are between 30 and 100 projects of various shapes and sizes — commitments that people have made that require many steps to fulfill.
• Once you’ve taken inventory,  you can start to make sense of your runway. But then comes a second challenge: finding the time to do what you need to do. What’s really different today is that we live and work in what I call “weird time.” In weird time, no one gets 2 hours to do anything. Instead, we get 15 minutes — and sometimes only 5 minutes — between meetings and phone calls. You actually can get a lot done in weird time, but most people’s thinking just isn’t set up to take advantage of it. There are lots of opportunities during the day that people waste. They feel bad because they’re not as productive as they should be, but they don’t know what to do about it.
• What to do about it is to turn it into a game: How efficient can I be? When something lands on your radar screen that isn’t where it needs to be, you must decide two things. First, what’s a successful outcome? In other words, what will stop the cognitive dissonance? And second, how do I allocate resources to make sure that the outcome materializes? That doesn’t mean that you need to take action right away. But it does mean that, in order to get the task off of your mind, you need to decide on a course of action. The worst thing that you can do is to let things sit.
• That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should always work on “the important stuff” first. You might not have the energy, the tools, or the time. Sometimes, the most appropriate thing to do with five free minutes is to water the plants. Once you know what you’re doing, productivity becomes your one true competitive edge. There’s an elegance to how you work and live; it’s not just about running faster.

- That leads to a simple question that most of us find difficult to answer: How should we go about setting priorities?

• When people ask me how to set priorities, I ask them a question: At what level do you want to have this conversation? Each of us operates on many different levels at all times. We each have a runway that holds all of the little things that consume our time. At 10,000 feet are the projects. At 20,000 feet, people are deciding on their roles and goals. At 30,000 feet, people are thinking ahead, asking themselves where they want to be in their careers 12 to 18 months down the road. At 40,000 feet, they’re thinking 3 to 5 years out and looking at their organizational aspirations. Then, at the top — at 50,000 feet — they’re asking, “What’s my job on this planet?”

- So a big part of setting priorities is being clear about your values?

• Be careful. That’s a very popular notion these days:
  If you focus on your values, then you’ll improve the “balance” between your business and personal lives. Give me a break. Focusing on your values may provide you with meaning, but it won’t simplify things. You’ll just discover even more stuff that’s important to you.
• We suffer the stress of infinite opportunity: There are so many things that we could do, and all we see are people who seem to be performing at star quality. It’s very hard not to try to be like them. The problem is, if you get wrapped up in that game, you’ll get eaten alive. You can do anything — but not everything. The universe is full of creative projects that are waiting to be done. So, if you really care about quality of life, if you want to relax, then don’t focus on values. Just control your aspirations. That will simplify things. Learning to set boundaries is incredibly difficult for most people.

Most people make the opposite choice. They feel such a sense of responsibility to their job and to their colleagues that they become even more harried…

• Which is utterly self-defeating. Your sense of “responsibility” is a function of your response ability. I learned that in karate. Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. The power of a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle. And a tense muscle is a slow muscle.
• In other words, you can’t do things faster until you learn how to slow down. How do you slow down? It’s all about the dynamic of detachment. You have to back off and be quiet. Retreat from the task at hand, so that you can gain a new perspective on what you’re doing. If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. If your inbox and your outbox are completely full, or if people are screaming at you, then it’s difficult to back off and think about things at a different level.
• Have you ever felt as though time disappeared? Say, when you’re really into a good movie? Or when you’re busy doing something that you love, and the morning just flies by? From my spiritual practices, I know that when you get to some levels of existence, space and time seem to vanish. When I’m at those levels, I don’t even think in terms of space and time anymore. When everything really lines up for me, speed is not an issue, because I have found my own rhythm. That rhythm may seem lightning fast or deathly slow, but inside me it’s all the same. It’s outside time.
• Look at the best martial artists. They move very slowly. The faster you type, the slower it will feel to you, because you surf with your thinking. The same thing applies to reading: The faster you read, the more time will disappear, because you’ll be able to feed stuff to your brain as fast as your brain can process it. That’s why speed readers have better comprehension. They’ve trained their eyes to recognize stuff as fast as their brain can handle it.
• But it’s hard to leave space and time behind when you’re distracted. If there’s an open loop, space and time will find it. And anything waiting for a decision is an open loop. If there’s a stack of papers on your desk, you have to decide on a course of action. As long as you’ve let that pile into your world, it’s got a hold on you. What’s the very next thing that you need to do? Until you decide on that, there’s a gap between where you are and where you need to be — a big black hole that will suck you in.

So how does GTD work?

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.
Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff). It’s actually sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

The System

In Ready For Anything, Allen says that when he has to describe his approach in under a minute, he usually says something like this:
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. (p.16)
It’s that simple! And that difficult! Below are the major components to the GTD system

• Collect
  Capture everything that you need to concern yourself with in what Allen calls “buckets”: a physical in-box, an email in-box, a notebook you take with you, a little tape recorder, etc. Don’t try and remember everything!
  When you first start: get a big in-box.
  You can put the thing you need to act on itself in your in-box (a bill, an assignment) or write a note on a single sheet of paper (“change oil in the car”). When you first start, or when you feel like there are lots of things on your mind, sit down and do a “mind sweep” of everything you are concerned about.
• Process
  Now it’s time to empty all those “buckets.” Start at the top of the in-box, pick up each item and ask yourself “is there an action I need to take about this item?”
  If there is no action you need to take, either throw the thing away, file it for reference, or make a note on your “Someday/Maybe” list.
  If there is an action you need to take, can you do it in two minutes or less? If so, do it now! If not, decide what that next action is, and enter it on your “Next Action” list. If one action won’t finish this off, enter the overall goal on your “Project” list.
• Organize
  

  

  Obviously, the cornerstone of this system is lists. Like with your collection buckets, you want to have enough lists to keep everything straight, but not so many that you are never sure what list to use. Here are the basics:

  • Next Action: what is the very next thing you need to do to get your thing done? (E.g., “read chapter 4 and take notes,” or “email a copy of my report to Anne for review”
  • Projects: chances are, many of your things will need more than one action to accomplish. Keep track of those multi-action things here. (E.g., “class presentation on Dante,” or “write year-end report for boss”)
  • Waiting: often we depend on others to help get things done. If you are waiting on something, write it down here, so you don’t forget. (E.g. “get back revised version of report from Anne”)
  • Someday/Maybe: for when you have a great idea or long-term goal that you just can’t make time to work on now. You don’t want to forget about it, but you don’t want it to clutter up your Projects list.
  • Context-sensitive lists: e.g., “Phone calls,” “Errands,” etc.
  • Calendar: try and use your calendar just for appointments and other things that have to happen on a particular day/time.
  • Filing: keep a simple, easy to update filing system. Don’t let files pile up in a slush pile. Get comfortable with putting a single piece of paper in a folder, labeling it, and filing it away.
• Review
  If you don’t look at those lists, they won’t do you much good now, will they? You’ll have to review your Next Action list and your calendar every day (and probably several times a day). Set up an appointment with yourself to do a weekly review, where you process all your in-boxes down to empty, and review all lists to be sure you are on top of things.
• Do!
  GTD tends to leave it up to you as to how to decide what needs to be done right now–Allen seems to believe if you have everything laid out in front of you, it will be obvious what needs to be done at any given moment based on your circumstances (deadlines, how much time you have available, what tools are nearby, how much energy you have, etc.)

Thank God It’s Friday

Get Things Off Your Mind and Get Them Done:

1. horizontal control maintains coherence across all activities in which you are involved
2. vertical manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects

At the heart of David Allen’s productivity coaching is the discipline of a weekly review. “That is critical to making personal organization a vital, dynamic reality,” he says. Here, adapted from Allen’s Web site, is a list of steps that you should work your way through every Friday afternoon.

1. Sort your loose papers. Gather all scraps of paper — business cards, receipts, miscellaneous notes — and put them into your in-basket to process.
2. Process your notes. Review journal entries, meeting notes, and miscellaneous scribblings. Turn them into appropriate action items, projects, and so on.
3. Review previous calendar data. Look through expired daily calendar pages for remaining action items, and move those items forward.
4. Download your data. Write down any new projects, action items, “waiting-for” items, and so on.
5. Review outcome lists. One by one, evaluate the status of each project, goal, and outcome.
6. Review “next action” lists. Check off all completed actions. Look for reminders of further action steps.
7. Review “pending” and “support” files. Browse through work-in-progress materials and update lists of new actions, completions, and “waiting-for” items.
8. Review “reminders” lists. Make sure that there isn’t anything that you haven’t done that you need to do. Also, make sure that there aren’t any checklists that you need to review.
9. Review “someday” and “maybe” lists. Look for any projects that may have become active, and transfer them to your “projects” list. Delete any dead items.
10. Review “waiting-for” lists. Record appropriate follow-up actions. Check them off as you complete them.
11. Be creative and courageous. Add to your system any new, wonderful, harebrained, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas that have occurred to you.

Sidebar: Little Tricks

David Allen’s productivity principles are rooted in big ideas – in a continuous search for personal growth and self-understanding. But they’re also eminently practical. Here are some of his tips for confronting life in the fast lane.

• If you travel regularly, dedicate a separate drawer in your dresser to the items that you take on most trips. Keep duplicates of things that you always take — toilet kits, power cords for your laptop, chargers for phones.
• Create an “action support” file in your briefcase or on your desk. Use it for one-off paper items — airline tickets, fax confirmations, and so on — that don’t warrant their own file but that you need to have at hand for certain situations.
• Keep your email inbox empty. Discipline yourself to dump as many messages as you can right away, to address immediately any action that will take less than two minutes, and to group actions that will take more than two minutes into an “Action” folder.
• If you travel with extra batteries for your laptop or cell-phone, put a rubber band around all charged batteries. That way, you’ll always know which batteries are live and which are dead.
• Increase your ease at the keyboard. If you don’t type at least 50 words per minute, install a typing program (such as “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing”), and then practice. Also, learn the seven most common speed-key combinations for navigating Windows.

Based on:

Official site
Getting started with “Getting Things Done”
Lunch & Learn by Steve Lawson,
You can do anything, but not everything

Nearly 25 years ago a former Rhodes scholar and doctor, from an Anglo-Maltese family, had a new theory as to how the brain works. Might it be possible, he asked, to generate new ideas on demand, artificially, instead of waiting around for inspiration? His answer was yes.

Serious Creativity will seem a contradiction in terms for many people. Everyone knows that creativity has to be fun, lively, and crazy – so how can we have serious creativity?

• It is precisely this misconception about creativity that has done so much damage and has held back the development of creativity for at least two decades.
• There are far too many
• practitioners out there who believe that creativity is just brainstorming and being free to suggest crazy ideas. I intend to show that this is inadequate.
• Brainstorming was originated by Alex Osborne. It was designed for use in the advertising industry, which is a key point. In the advertising world, novelty, as such, can be a value. Suppose there were a discussion of ways of getting people to by more wool. Someone suggests that sheep ought to be purple because purple is an expensive color and that would give a prestige value to wool. You could indeed run an advertisement showing purple sheep. Such an advertisement would attract attention and might sell more wool. Novelty and gimmicky does attract attention and does have an advertising value. But in almost every other field, novelty by itself is insufficient: the creative idea must make sense and must work.
• In my courses, I find that people who have a brainstorming background tend to perform rather poorly. This is because they are always looking for the way out, exotic idea and often miss the simple, practical idea which is at hand. It is as if during a brainstorming session each participant is trying to make the other participant laugh at the craziness of an idea. I would also like to point out that creativity does not have to be a group activity. Creative techniques can be used in a powerful way by individuals working entirely on their own.

Judgment, Patterns and Creativity

• Everyone knows that instant judgment is the enemy of creativity. That is certainly true because judgment will force us back to our present position. The brain is not designed to think creatively but to set up routine patterns of perception and behavior and to make sure we do not deviate from these.
  Judgment is the powerful tool we have for keeping on these routine tracks. Judgment is like the stern father forbidding the playfulness of a child.
• So if judgment prevents creativity then all we have to do is to suspend judgment, defer judgment or delay judgment in order to be creative. So we believe it is sufficient to be crazy and free and nonjudgmental. Surely we will then be more creative? It is not as simple as that.
• Children are often creative. Innocence can be creative. Ignorance can be creative. If you do not know the usual approach to a problem, you can more easily come up with a fresh approach. There is a story of a group of women being shown around a wartime factory. Someone mentioned that there was a problem in the sharpening of the carbon rods that were used in searchlights. In her innocence, one woman suggested the use of a pencil sharpener-it worked. When the Montgolfer brother flew the first hot air balloon in France, word reached the king in Paris. The king sent for his chief scientific officer (M. Charles, whose name we still use in the law of gaseous expansion with temperature) and demanded a balloon. Ignorant of what the Montgolfer brother had done, M. Charles proceeded to invent the hydrogen balloon using the newly discovered gas.
• So if we think like children, will we not be more creative? If we take off our ties, sit on the floor, and play some fun games, will we not approach that childhood state of innocence in which everything is possible?
  Then there is the matter of the right side of the brain. This is the more innocent side of the brain and has not learned “how things should be.” In using the right side of the brain we tend to draw things as they are rather than as we know them to be. We believe the right side of the brain represents creativity, but it does not. It represents innocence, which may play a role in creativity-particularly in artistic expression.
• So if we suspend judgment, feel innocent and childlike, and try to use the right side of the brain, should we not then be creative? We will certainly be more creative than before, but not very much more. We will be able to use our natural creativity. Unfortunately, natural creativity is not very powerful. As I shall try to demonstrate later, creativity is an unnatural process.

The Logic of Creativity

In 1969 I wrote a book called The Mechanism of Mind. In that book I described how the nerve networks in the brain allow incoming information to organize itself into sequence or patterns.

• What it amounts to is that there are two broad types of information systems: the passive system and the active system. Almost all our usual systems (including computers) are of the passive type. Information is recorded on a surface and lies there passively until it is used by some brain or central processor. The surface and the information or data are entirely passive. In the active system, on the other hand, the information and the surface are both active. All information changes the surface which then receives future information differently. This process eventually gives rise to self-organizing systems. Rain falling onto a landscape is a very simple example of such a system. The rain eventually gets organized into streams and rivers.
• Self-organizing systems set up patterns. Such patterns are usually asymmetric. This means that we normally go along the main track without even noticing the side track. But, if-somehow-we get across to the side track, the route becomes obvious in hindsight. This is the basis of both humor and creativity.
• This asymmetry and hindsight access gives rise to a very serious problem: every valuable, creative idea will always be logical in hindsight. If an idea were not logical in hindsight, then we would never be able to appreciate the value of the idea. The idea would remain valueless. So we are only able to appreciate those creative ideas that are indeed logical in hindsight. Then we go on to say-as we have been doing for 2,400 years-that if an idea is logical in hindsight, then better logic should have found it in the first place. So we try to teach more logic instead of taking creativity seriously.
• It is quite true that in a passive information system, an idea that is logical in hindsight is also accessible to logic in foresight. But this is totally untrue in an active, self-organizing system.
  That is why an understanding of the basic behavior of patterning systems is necessary in order to understand serious creativity. Cutting across patterns is what I have called lateral thinking. This has nothing whatever to do with right-left brain thinking.
• In any patterning system there is an absolute and logical need for something like lateral thinking in order to cut across patterns. But cutting across patterns is not natural behavior for the brain. The purpose of the brain is to establish and use routine patterns. That is why creativity is not a natural process in the brain. In fact, it goes against the natural process of following patterns.
  What I have written here may seem theoretical, but it is a necessary base for the understanding of creativity (changes in perception and concepts). From this base we can derive specific tools which can be used deliberately.

Practical Lateral Thinking Techniques

• The first difficulty is to get time and space for creative thinking. There are those who think that creativity is only for special brainstorming sessions. There are those who believe that creativity is not for them but for artists, designers and inventors. This is a dangerous and limiting attitude. Just as the ability to use the reverse shift is part of every driver’s driving ability, the ability to use creative thinking should be part of every thinker’s thinking skill. Creative thinking is definitely not limited to special people or special occasions. The logic of perception demands the ability to think creatively so anyone who has to do any thinking must develop this ability.

  

• In order to make creative thinking part of ordinary thinking, I developed the Six Thinking Hats system. There are six metaphorical hats. The thinker can put one on or take one off to indicate the type of thinking that is being used. This putting on and taking off is essential. The hats must never be used to categorize individuals, even though their behavior may seem to invite this.
  • White Hat: This covers facts, figures, information, asking questions, and defining information needs and gaps. “I think we need some white hat thinking at this point…” means “Let’s drop the arguments and proposals and look at the data base.”
  • Red Hat: This covers intuition, feelings and emotions. The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition without any need to justify it. “Putting on my red hat, I think this is a terrible proposal.” Usually feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Usually the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious. The red hat gives full permission to a thinker to put forward his or her feelings on the subject at that moment.
  • Black Hat: This is the hat of judgment and caution. It is a most valuable hat and the one we need to use most of the time. The black hat is used to point out why a suggestion does not fit the facts, the available experience, the system in use, or the policy that is being followed. The black hat must always be logical.
  • Yellow Hat: This hat finds reasons why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in looking forward to the results of some proposed action. It can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.
  • Green Hat: This is the hat of creativity, alternatives, proposals, what is interesting, provocations, and changes.
  • Blue Hat: This is the overview or process control hat. It looks not at the subject itself but at the thinking about the subject. “Putting on my blue hat, I feel we should do some more green hat thinking at this point.” In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition.

    

• An individual can ask another individual to put on or take off a particular color of hat. For example, if someone is being very negative about an idea, the other person might say: “That is great black hat thinking, now let’s try some yellow hat thinking.” In this way a switch is made immediately and without offense.
  An individual can express his or her thoughts under the protection of one or the other hats. For example, someone might say: “Wearing my red hat, I think that idea is exciting. I cannot tell you exactly why, but I have that feeling about it.” Someone else might preface a negative input by declaring that some black hat thinking is needed.
  An individual can ask a whole group to adopt a hat for a limited period of time. For example, at a meeting someone might suggest: “What we need here is three minutes of green hat thinking.”
• I am not suggesting that in every moment in thinking there is a need to wear one of the hats. The hats provide an opportunity to switch thinking. In the course of an ordinary discussion someone might say: “Let’s have three minutes of black hat thinking here.” At the end of the three minutes, the discussion would resume as before.
• Sometimes it is possible to put together a formal sequence of hats in order to think productively about some matter. The actual order of the sequence will vary with the situation. For example, with a new matter, the sequence might be: white (to get information); green (for ideas and proposals); yellow followed by black on each alternative (to evaluate the alternatives); red (to assess feelings at this point); followed by blue (to decide what thinking to do next). On the other hand, in discussing a well known proposal, the sequence might run: red, yellow, black, green (to overcome the negative points), white, and then blue.
• The Six Hats System is not directly a creative technique, but it makes time and space for creativity. Many people ask me how they can introduce creativity at a particular level if the whole corporate culture does not encourage creativity. The Six Thinking Hats system is a specific way of doing this. Once creativity is there as an expectation and a demand, people will notice that they are not very good at it-and may try to get better.

The Logic of Provocation

• In humor the storyteller suddenly places us on the side track and immediately we can see our way back to the starting point. In humor the punchline serves as the bridge between the main track and the side track.
• With lateral thinking, however, there is no storyteller to make the jump for us. So we have to devise a practical means for cutting across the tracks. We can do this by using a combination of provocation and movement.
• I invented the word “PO” which stands for a provocation operation. It signals that what follows is to be used directly as a provocation (that is to say, used for its movement value). A PO provides the some sort of value that has been provided historically by accident, mistake, eccentricity, or individual bold- mindedness. The PO (provocation) serves to take us out of the comfort of an existing pattern.

Provocations in Action

• I once asked a group of youngsters how they might estimate the height of a tall building that stood near some open ground. They offered several sensible alternatives: ask the caretaker, who might know the height; lower a weighted string and then measure the string; measure the height of one floor and multiply the number of floors in the building; time the drop of a stone and estimate the height by formula; pace out fifty yards, measure the angle to sight the top of the building, and use trigonometry. One youngster wanted to be facetious and suggested that the simplest way was to put the building on its side and then to pace out the length. The idea of placing the building on its side was intended as a silly idea. But if we choose to treat it as a provocation (PO), we can get some practical ideas from it.
  We can physically try to place the building on its side. We can do this in a photograph by cutting the building out of a photograph and placing it on its side. But before taking the photograph, we place a large cardboard box twenty yards from the base of the building. In the photograph the distance of the box from the base of the building will represent twenty yards, so by proportionality, we can easily work out the length (height) of the building. Another way is to put a model of the building on its side. This can be done by holding up a stick so that the top end of the stick is aligned with the top of the building and the bottom end with the base of the building. The bottom end of the stick is kept on the base of the building and the top of the stick is now turned ninety degrees so it is horizontal. A note is made of where the top of the stick hits the ground. The distance between this point and the actual base of the building can be paced out to give the height of the building. Yet another approach is to say that perhaps the building is already on the ground-if there happens to be a shadow, you measure the length of your own shadow and compare this to your known height. Then you take this ratio and use it to multiply the length of the shadow of the building.
• With this example the thinker chose to treat a silly idea as a PO. When lateral thinking is used as a deliberate tool, the thinker must be able to set up deliberate provocations (PO) and not just wait for them to appear. There are indeed formal ways to set up provocations. These include escape, reversal, exaggeration, distortion, and wishful thinking. Using such step-by-step methods, the lateral thinker can set up a provocation to provoke his or her own thinking. There is no need to wait for someone else to set up a provocation.
  The PO that, “the factory should be downstream of itself,” led to the idea of making the input downstream of the output in order to increase consciousness of pollution.
• Movement is a crucial part of lateral thinking. Provocation without movement is useless. The apparently crazy idea is not an end point, but only the first stage. It is what happens next that really makes all the difference.
  Movement is not just a suspension of judgment. Movement is an active mental process. There are steps that can be learned, practiced, and used. With judgment, we look at an idea and compare it to our experience. If the idea does not fit our experience, we reject it. With movement, we use the idea for its movement value to go forward to a new idea.
• Movement is not just an intention or a positive attitude of the mind. There are five formal ways of getting movement:
  1. Extract a principle or feature and work forward from that.
  2. Focus on the difference.
  3. Look at the moment-to-moment effect of putting the idea into practice.
  4. Focus on the positive aspects.
  5. Figure under what circumstances there would be direct value.
• It is an emphasis on the formal steps of movement and also the formal steps of setting up a provocation which are so different from traditional brainstorming.
• Movement is not a technique but an operation. It is a mental operation that requires confidences and practice. The trick is to think slowly. What movement might we get from PO: ‘cars should have square wheels’? Taking the large surface in contact with the ground, we move forward to develop a concept of an inner tire and high pressure surrounded by an outer tire and at low pressure-to increase grip on the ground. With square wheels you would not need a hand broke when parking. This leads to a special set of wheels for braking on heavy goods vehicles. These wheels would not normally touch the ground, but would touch down when strong braking was required.
  I am not suggesting that movement is easy. It requires a lot of careful practice and coaching. But deliberate steps can be used.
• The random word is the simplest of all creative techniques. It is so very simple that it is hard to believe that it works. I first suggested it many years ago and various people have borrowed the process since then.
  You have a need for a new idea relating to some situation. You simply introduce a random word. How? Pick a slip of paper out of a pile of slips on each of which there is a word. Or, think of a page number in a dictionary and then think of a position of the word on that page (say, page 1 27, tenth word down); continue to the first noun which will then be your random word.
  Let’s look at a sample. The subject was cigarette. The random word was traffic light. From that quickly came the suggestion of putting a red band around cigarettes so that the smoker had a decision zone. If he or she stopped at the red band, then the smoker was gaining control over his or her smoking habit.
  How can such a simple technique work? At first it seems absurd. By definition, a random word is unconnected to any subject and so any word would work for any subject. In a passive information system, this would be total nonsense. But in an active (patterning) system, the random word provides a new entry point. As we work back from the new entry point, we increase the chances of using patterns we would never have used if we had worked outward from the subject area. This is why we need to understand something about the information handling system of the brain before trying to devise better thinking techniques.

Beneficial Effects

In general I have found three levels of effect:

1. A change in attitude toward creativity. A willingness to look for further alternatives, the acceptance of provocation, willingness to try and listen to green hot thinking, and willingness to re-examine things that have always been done one way.
2. Use of the label of lateral thinking. Willingness to point a finger at a specific focus and to ask for lateral thinking. Willingness to pause and see if there might not be a totally different approach. Tentative use of techniques-in particular the random word technique.
3. Fluent and deliberate use of lateral thinking techniques. Skill in setting up provocations using movement and organizing concepts with the concept fan.
   At first, the specific techniques and even the six hats system seem strange and artificial-that is an important part of their value. Creative thinking is different from normal thinking. It is not just normal thinking that is more free. Once the methods are used, then the switch to the different mode of thinking takes place. Attitude then follows from the use of the methods.
   It is not enough to be innocent and uninhibited and to have a creative attitude. The normal behavior of the brain in perception is to set up routine patterns and to follow these. In order to cut across patterns we can use deliberate techniques (provocation, movement, random entry). These techniques can be learned, practiced, and used deliberately. The Six Thinking Hats system is a convenient way of switching thinking, and particularly for making time and space for creative effort.

This article was reprinted with the permission from The Journal for Quality and Participation, Vol. 11-3. ©The Association for Quality and Participation

Based on:

Serious curiosity
Official site materials
Wikipedia materials

“…a rare combination of rational scientist and enlightened healer”

Step up to the gateway to your body’s cells. Learn to powerfully support vibrant health as you experience how biology and spirit can come together for healing. Joyce Hawkes, PhD, an internationally respected scientist and healer, will help you begin your own journey to profoundly deep levels of cellular healing.

• Ten thousand could dance on the head of a pin – if they could dance. Invisible to the human naked eye, they are with us from conception, doing their best to protect us from harm and keep us healthy as we focus on the business of our daily lives, largely unconscious of their presence.
• No, they’re not angels – at least not in the literal sense. They are our cells, and just like those legendary guardians, they work night and day without rest on our behalf, doing the countless tasks needed for bodily maintenance, including supply, communication, renewal, repair and defense.
• Recently, while researching human cells myself, I realized that the description of life at the cellular level read more like science fiction than science. The world of cells is so fantastic and mysterious that a hair-tingling epiphany swept over me – I had tens of trillions of these tiny beings working all at once to support me. They kept me going no matter what my endeavor. Suddenly, no matter how much I felt myself as an ego with a body, I had to acknowledge and appreciate their ceaseless labors. Realizing these tiny, selfless creatures worked within me each day, immediately I felt revitalized at a deep level.
• Three days later, on a road trip from California to Oregon, a woman’s voice on my car radio introduced one Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, Ph.D. She was, it seemed, founder of Seattle’s Healing Arts Associates clinic and the author of a new book called Cell Level Healing. For the next hour, Dr. Hawkes discussed her book on the amazing world of cells.

• It was a fascinating story. Before a life-changing accident re-directed her career path, Dr. Hawkes had spent almost fifteen years as a prominent scientist; researching, publishing and lecturing on how cells were polluted by environmental toxins. She had been honored with a U.S. Department of Commerce National Achievement Award, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a position she still holds today.
• She confessed that neither metaphysics, religion, nor heaven were in her belief system until the day a heavy leaded-glass window fell on her head, causing a near-death experience. It would both alter her view of life and dispel her fear of death. In addition, this experience also awakened in her astounding psychic and healing abilities, and, to quote her book, “My view of myself as a levelheaded, rational scientist became unhinged.”
• She began to explore phenomena that defied scientific explanation, and what she found inspired Dr. Hawkes to become a healer: she then went to live and study with shamans and priests in Bali, in the Philippines and in South India. In Bali, a female mentor sat her at the entrance of a fire ant hill to meditate; incredibly, she came away unbitten by the fierce insects, by focusing on her teacher’s chanting.

• When I later interviewed Dr. Hawkes, she rattled off facts about cells that still leave her awestruck:
  “The sheer number of cells within our bodies is astounding – estimated at between 50 and 100 trillion cells, or roughly 1,500 times the population of the earth. Their ability to stay in balance and harmony in our bodies is amazing. By the time we have an adult body, with all the cells we’re going to have, those cells are slowly replaced, at different rates. For instance, skin cells live about a month; red blood cells about four months – about three million red-blood cells are replaced in our bodies each second! Inside almost every cell, are all of the components needed for life: information (in the nucleus, where our DNA lives); communication among cells and to cells in the whole body (chemical information [is] released via [the] cell membrane and its nanotubes). There’s a power pack in each cell (the mitochondria) and there’s an action part of each cell (the endoplasmic reticulum), that’s able to synthesize all the enzymes and proteins are needed for life. And all of this churns along, in every single cell!”
• In fact, this factory-like makeup of cells, and the sheer complexity packed within something so small that it takes an enormous electron microscope the size of a VW bug to see within, is what I found so incredible. The original nanobots, cells are complex machines that do a vast array of specific tasks we’ve probably never even thought about.
• A glance at a Wikipedia page shows over two-hundred cell types, each with specialized jobs. We have cells that produce mucous, saliva and hair; cells that make up muscle, bone and store fat; cells that sense touch, taste, smell, sound and are the photo receptors for our eyes.
• One family of cells, called phagocytes, (which translates as “eating cells”) gobbles up dead cells which are then digested and recycled into material to be reused by healthy cells. These cells know how to make tooth enamel, for instance, because of their ability to read and follow instructions from our 3 billion bit-long strands of DNA, those double-helix strings of unique information that are at their core. Cells do their best to take care of us, but what happens if we don’t take care of them?
• “For their life, cells require nutrients,” say Hawkes, “and if we’re limiting the nutrients we get because we’re eating nothing but sugar, then they can’t work. And if we’re putting lots of toxins into the body; the cells are work to survive all this toxicity. So we’re killing them off, then asking them to [still] work for us and keep our body going. The body, with a 100 trillion cells, is very resilient. It’s got a lot of extra cells and resources, but they’re not unlimited. So if we’re poisoning them, or we’re not giving them the basic nutrients, then they can’t repair when they need to, nor continue their life.”

• Dr. Joyce Whiteley Hawkes is that rare combination of rational scientist and enlightened healer that makes for an interesting if unlikely mix – a position she nonetheless balances quite effectively. For instance, asked if she would describe cells as having an intelligence of their own, she replies,
• “As a scientist, the scientist part says no, they don’t have an intelligence of their own as we experience intelligence. [However] as a healer, I experience at times something that feels like the life force consciousness [is] in everything, including the cells in my body. But to go to the point of saying that each cell has its own intelligence stretches farther than I can go as a scientist.”
• But Dr. Hawkes, the healer, has a deeper concern about thinking of our cells as conscious beings:
  “If the cell becomes ill, we [can] begin to look at it as a conscious act of that cell, and that limits the ability to heal. I always assume each of my cells is doing the very best it can with the environment, the attitudes, the food, everything I’m giving it, and that if it’s sick, well maybe its genetic code couldn’t handle that particular part of life that got dealt to it. Maybe the environmental toxin it took in just overloaded it – just pulled it right off the edge of what it could handle.”
• Whether one is in a healing crisis, or would just like to learn how healing thought can assist cell health, Dr. Hawkes’ book, Cell Level Healing (Atria Books, 2006) is written as an easy guide to understanding the nature of our bodies and our cells. With simple guided visualization and meditation exercises, Dr. Hawkes leads her readers to appreciate their bodies and those busy cells. She suggests how to clear energy blockages, and teaches how to connect with and strengthen the cells’ own healing ability. Breathing in balance and breathing out harmony is one such exercise.
• Those who believe that thought has no impact on the physical part of our bodies should know that recent scientific experiments have shown otherwise. “Current information coming out of Richard Davidson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin, in his research on brain waves of advanced meditators (Tibetan monks), shows that when compassion meditation is involved, there’s an increase of neurons in the brain…it generates the division of cells with the brain,” says Hawkes. This may prove to be good news in the fight against brain dysfunction.
• Dr. Hawkes leaves one final tip for health from her work as a healer, which might go a long way to healing many of the world’s ills.
  “[From] my experience, working with people for 22 years in healing modalities, I know that we all heal better the more kindness and compassion that we live in our lives, and we [must] give [that] to ourselves as well as to others.”

Questions and Answers

Q:
How is cell-level healing different from Reiki and other “energy work” we hear about?
A:
All these forms of healing have been developed by people for the purpose of becoming practitioners who assist others. The particular beliefs, style, and manner of doing the work and of teaching practitioners varies greatly. Some require years of training, some require initiations, some require significant financial investment. My intention with the book, Cell-Level Healing. The Bridge from Soul to Cell is to provide tools for anyone to begin the process of integrating an energy approach to whatever therapy or treatments they are already doing.
Many of my students, over the years, had been initiated or certified by other schools of energy healing modalities before they found me. They discovered that this work enriched their understanding and deepened their practices.
The work described in Cell-Level Healing is not based in dogma. In fact, is experiential and exploratory in nature. It is dynamic, adapted to each individual and not encumbered by ritual or dogma. This work does not presuppose that a particular ailment or condition means something specific about one’s life, thoughts or actions. The discovery of positive ways to assist you in living fully enables movement  forward, free from limiting practices.

Q:
How has the medical and scientific community responded to the idea of cell-level healing?
A:
Physicians and scientists have come to me as clients, and students, and they refer others to me. Although a small sample, relatively speaking, it is encouraging that professional communities are open to integrating this work with western clinical and scientific practices. There are now 17 medical schools in the US with programs to teach medical students meditation, self care, and complementary medicine. Those schools include Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Georgetown University Medical Center. I have been invited to present to medical and scientific conferences and will continue to do so.
The medical community has become even more interested as recent mainstream research with brain-wave testing on Tibetan meditators has shown clear supportive evidence that this meditation affects brain function in a positive way.
I recently was the subject of similar brain-wave studies, and in both cases—with the Tibetan monks and me—the work shows that our brain function differs significantly from non-meditators and non-healers. An attitude of compassion actually initiates neurogenesis in the brain. That means that brain cells divide under those conditions and therefore keep the brain working well. If brain neurons can do this, the question remains for science to explore how other cells in the body may respond to healing meditations.
Q:
What do you hope to accomplish with the book and your current work in cell-level healing?
A:
My intent is to do everything I can to assist people to find their fullest and most meaningful life, free of as much pain as possible. I trust that ultimately, everyone can find hope and experience transformation from suffering.

Based on:

Interview with Hayward Hawks Marcus
CellLevelHealing.com

By Neil Fiore

The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore is basically a collection of simple strategies to eliminate procrastination in your life, which is a definite stress reducer and also eliminates the guilt that I remember feeling when I would be playing frisbee on the college green instead of working on a project. Almost all of it works hand in hand with whatever you’re doing now – it’s not really so much a time and task management program (a la Getting Things Done) as it is a philosophy about choosing priorities. Let’s dig in and see what’s inside that we can directly apply to our lives.

Digging Into The Now Habit

• Right off the bat, Fiore dissolves the entire premise of the book down into one paragraph:
  Procrastination is a habit you develop to cope with anxiety about starting or completing a task. It is your attempted solution to cope with tasks that are boring or overwhelming. When you use the Now Habit strategies to lower your anxiety, fears, and self-doubts, you can stop using procrastination as an escape and can double your productivity and, often, double your income. When you learn to work efficiently – in the Flow State or Zone, using more of your brain-cell power – you have less reason to avoid important, top-priority tasks.
• In other words, this book is full of tricks to break the procrastination habit, which is mostly a psychological roadblock. But how do we do that?

Chapter 1: Why We Procrastinate

• The book starts off by going through the litany of reasons why people procrastinate – in a nutshell, they all boil down to negativity. For me, if I procrastinate on anything today, it’s primarily because I buy into the idea that my “only reward will be continually higher and more difficult goals to achieve, with no rest and no time to savor your achievements.” What do I procrastinate on? Housework. I often feel as though there’s a theoretical 50/50 split in housework, but there’s little evidence of that, and I begin to think that if I do more housework, even though it’s bothering me, the split will become 60/40 or 70/30 or worse on a permanent basis. So I procrastinate on it because (a) I let myself think this and (b) I don’t really face the root of the problem, which is communication.
• One aspect of this chapter that particularly resonated with me is the idea that procrastination can sometimes be rewarding. Sometimes the problem will go away, or sometimes someone else will solve the problem for you. In either case, though, the “reward” isn’t really a reward at all: it’s someone stepping up to cover for your lack of effort or it’s a missed opportunity that you could have capitalized on.

Chapter 2: How We Procrastinate

• So what mechanisms do we actually use to procrastinate? Fiore suggests first doing this by keeping a truly honest time diary about how you spend your day. He gives an example of such a diary in the chapter. In the not-too-distant past, I actually tried this for a week and what I really learned from it is that I would often turn to mindless activities such as watching television in order to put off doing the things I should be doing, like housework. The example from the book indicated that many people often take an hour or so to “settle in” at work before getting started, so his recommendation is to immediately start on a high priority task as soon as you get there and see where the day leads you from there. I can basically use that same philosophy by taking on the most pressing household tasks for a period of time as soon as I get home. Why do this? It creates an immediate sense of good accomplishment within you, a positive feeling to combat the negative feelings that swirl around procrastination.
• After this, Fiore discusses a procrastination log, where you write down what you procrastinated on and when, how you felt about the task, why you justified procrastinating on it, your attempted solution (i.e., what you did instead), and how that solution made you feel. Most of the time, that solution, in hindsight, doesn’t really lead to you feeling better at all, even if it was something you might enjoy. The log lets you see patterns in your procrastination: which kinds of tasks most often trigger your procrastination spells and the common feelings that they inspire. Then, as you begin trying different approaches, you can see which ones work for you.

Chapter 3: How To Talk To Yourself

• Most of the language of procrastination is inherently negative: “I have to” do this, “I must finish” this, “This project is too big,” and so on. Thinking of tasks from that perspective makes them seem more difficult and insurmountable than they really are. The idea here is that when you are facing a task you don’t want to do, break it down into small chunks that you can get started on immediately so that you can quickly feel some sort of forward progress on the task.
• Another major roadblock towards eliminating procrastination from your life is eliminating the idea that it has to be absolutely perfect – and using that as an excuse not to start yet. By breaking these tasks down into smaller pieces, you can find pieces that you feel much better about in terms of success, and thus you can do those first, much like putting the border pieces together first when doing a jigsaw puzzle. Then, when you’ve started putting the pieces together, you’ll either find the smaller elements you find hard (which you can ask for help on) or they might just end up being easier than you expect.

Chapter 4: Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work

• Here, the focus is on the need for play, particularly guilt-free play. When you procrastinate, you’re trading true free time (that which doesn’t have an uncompleted task hanging over it) for false, guilty “free time” (procrastination). One major way to open yourself up to true guilt-free fun is by simply getting started on that task that hangs over you by breaking it down into littler pieces.
• I know this from experience. If there’s a household task to do and I sit down and read instead, I usually feel worse about it than if I had just done the household task and then read. This phenomenon is true in pretty much any avenue of life, from the workplace to personal life.

Chapter 5: Overcoming Blocks To Action

• The three major fears that procrastination is based on are the fear of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure and imperfection, and the fear of not finishing. Each one of these fears has a particular trick that can dislodge the fear.
• The fear of being overwhelmed can be defeated by three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar. If you have a monstrous goal and a deadline, you can whittle it down by making up a timeline for it. Start by going in reverse and defining the smaller and smaller sections of it that need to be complete by a certain date. So, if you need a report by June 30, have a near-final draft done by June 25, a rough draft done by June 20, a structured outline by June 18, primary research done by June 13, and so on until you’ve got a short-term task that you can wrap your arms around.
• The fear of failure and imperfection can be defeated by the work of worrying. Define what exactly is the worst case scenario if you take a good stab at the problem. Do you turn in a poor report? Well, couldn’t you just have peers review it with you before you turn it in? So then what’s the worst scenario excluding that one? If you really look at the nightmares you have and look at what you can do to stop them, you can often eliminate all or most of the bad outcomes, leaving you with nothing but success if you take an earnest stab at the problem and follow your contingencies that you just defined.
• The fear of not finishing can be defeated by persistent starting. Whenever you come up with an excuse not to get started on a task, close your eyes and just dive in. This section is pretty useful because it deals with excuses that people use not to get started and completely dissects them.

Chapter 6: The Unschedule

• An “unschedule” is basically a schedule that encourages you to get started on tasks by defining small, focused, and clearly defined periods to get stuff done. As a reward for these periods of work focus, you also schedule in defined periods of uninterrupted leisure that are yours as a reward for being on task for those focused periods.
• Much of this chapter really borrows from basic time management. I generally feel that this chapter is a somewhat awkward compresson of Getting Things Done with a scheduled structure formed around it. In general, once you’re able to get past the concept of procrastination and learn how to really break tasks down into graspable pieces, Getting Things Done can really take over in terms of time management. I heavily agree with the idea of planning for leisure, however, as a reward for your focus.

Chapter 7: Working In The Flow State

• The “flow state,” as defined by this book, is when you are completely focused on tasks without interruptions and distractions from the outside world. Turn off your email and your phone, close your office door, and get down to business.
• The book does realize that it isn’t easy to get into this state, so it offers some interesting basic meditation techniques to get yourself into an appropriate psyche. It’s straightforward stuff: close your eyes, imagine every muscle relaxing one by one, think positive thoughts and block out all else, and repeat those key thoughts for a period of time. But it works – I often meditate myself when I need to be firing on all cylinders to get a task done.

Chapter 8: Fine-Tuning Your Progress

• This chapter largely just cleans up odds and ends that can crop up from using the techniques in earlier chapters. For example, if you’re concerned about being distracted while in the middle of work in the flow state, just keep a blank pad and pen nearby to toss down any thought you might have, knowing that you’ll look at them later. Also, if you have a hard time figuring out if you’ve actually achieved something of note, try to find tangible and clear milestones so that it is clear. Instead of saying “I’ll carry out the findings of this report,” set a goal of “I’ll identify every goal in the entire report and make a list of them,” then turn each of those into a goal with a clear deliverable at the end.

Chapter 9: The Procrastinator In Your Life

• Now that you’ve got your own procrastination licked, how can you deal with other procrastinators in your life? The central key here is to try to see things from their perspective and request things from them that have that in mind. For example, instead of saying, “You’d better have this to me by Friday,” say something like “This report needs to be done by Friday. Could you get a really rough draft of this together by Tuesday morning? We can meet and look at it together then and decide where it needs to go to get it finished by Friday.” In other words, voice the request while using some of the techniques in the book within the request itself to make it palatable. This example sets up a much simpler goal with a shorter timeframe, plus frames it as something that’s a cooperative venture, meaning the worker doesn’t feel alone. In short, this chapter is about how to manage people who procrastinate without consistently butting heads with them.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

• If procrastination is a major problem in your life – or even a minor problem – this book is well worth a reading. The techniques in this book are mostly psychological, but that does not mean they’re not incredibly powerful if used appropriately. Plus, the techniques here dovetail well with many other personal development philosophies, so you don’t have to toss out what you already know and what already works for you in order to adopt The Now Habit.

Based on:

Review by TheSimpleDollar.com

The INTENTION EXPERIMENT is a series of web-based experiments with Lynne McTaggart and leading scientists around the world to test the power of our thoughts to change the physical world.

THE LARGEST MIND OVER MATTER EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY

• The Intention Experiment is a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world. Thousands of volunteers from 30 countries around the world have participated in Intention Experiments thus far.
• Lynne McTaggart, architect of the experiments, is working with leading physicists and psychologists from the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the International Institute of Biophysics, Cambridge University and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. These experiments are being run at McTaggart’s seminars and conferences and on the web, and have produced extraordinary results.
• This is not about sending intentions to make a million dollars. The targets are only philanthropic: healing wounds, helping children with attention deficit or patients with Alzheimer’s, counteracting pollution and global warming.
• Besides the big Intention Experiments, this website runs informal Intention of the Week for people or situations with illnesses or problems.
• In the pilot experiment, McTaggart asked a group of 16 meditators based in London to direct their thoughts to four remote targets in Dr. Popp’s laboratory in Germany: two types of algae, a plant and a human volunteer. The meditators were asked to attempt to lower certain measurable biodynamic processes. Popp and his team discovered significant changes in all four targets while the intentions were being sent, compared to times the meditators were ‘resting’.

Future Intention Experiments

1. The mini-Gaia project.
 An ecosphere with an artificially raised temperature – a little like global warming. Can we lower the temperature with our thoughts?
2. The Germination Intention Experiment.
Can our group intention help barley seeds to germinate early and grow more healthily?
3. The Water Experiment.
Can we change the pH of polluted water?
4. How humans ‘feel’ intention.
Does a person sent intention by thousands around the world ‘feel’ it in different parts of the body?
5. The Crime Rate Experiment.
Can intention lower the crime rate of a major city?
6. The Hospital Study.
Can we lower mortality at a hospital?
7. The Attention Deficit Study.
Can we help children to concentrate more?

HOW TO PARTICIPATE IN THE EXPERIMENTS

1. Note the date of the next big Intention Experiment now on the website.
Scientific experiments are expensive to carry out and require lengthy analysis, so there will be sizable intervals between experiments. If you miss an Intention Experiment, you will have to wait a few months for another one.
2. Read the book The Intention Experiment.
As we are attempting a true experiment, we need to have all our knowledgeable participants who carry out the same type of intention. The best way of assuring that is to have participants read the book and practice the program in the book that helps to maximize intention. Only those who have read the book will be allowed to participate.
3. Log on to the website with the correct password.
You will be asked to supply a password from the book – for example, the fourth word of the third paragraph on page 57 of the US hardback edition.
( We will specify passwords for every edition published in every country.)
4. Locate the time of the experiment in your own time zone on the section of our website marked ‘time zones’.
The website has a countdown to each new experiment. It also specifies the equivalent times in different time zones. It’s vital that you send intentions at the right time.
5. Answer the questionnaires.
On some of our scientific experiments, we may need to know some details about our participants – for instance, their degree of psychic ability.

WHAT TO DO ON THE DAY OF THE EXPERIMENTS

Before or on the day of the experiment, you may be asked to supply some information about yourself. Individual information will be kept confidential, under international and national laws of data protection.

1. Come onto the website 15 minutes before the experiment starts.
2. Follow the links, which will take you to the experiment portal
3. Insert the password from the book
4. Answer the questionnaire
5. Power Up

Follow the program as detailed in chapter 13 of The Intention Experiment about how to get in the right state of mind, the right time and place, and the right conditions to send your intentions.

1. Direct your thoughts to send our carefully worded, detailed intention.
2. Join our forum afterward to discuss how you felt during the experiment.

Remember: we cannot guarantee that the experiments will work – at first or ever.
If the first or second or fifth experiment doesn’t work, we will keep trying and keep learning more with every result.

Results of the first three experiments

The Intention Experiment has run six intention experiments so far – with extraordinary results about the power of intention. We’ve demonstrated that intention from a group scattered around the globe can affect living light — in everything from algae and leaves to human beings.
We’ve also shown that intention can help plants to grow faster. In our latest experiment, we sent intention to barley seeds and showed that our intention caused them to germinate faster and grow taller than three sets of controls.

• Living light

All our early experiments have designed by and carried out at the laboratories of Dr. Fritz Albert Popp at the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany and Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health.
Our first experiments examined the alteration in the tiny light — called biophoton emissions — being emitted from living things.
We chose to look at this tiny current of light, because it is infinitely more subtle than, say, cellular growth rate. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, and Dr. Schwartz uses highly sensitive CCD cameras, which record and photograph the faint light of outer space.
This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.

• Jade plants, algae and human beings

For our pilot intention experiment, we asked 15 experienced meditators in London to send positive intention to four targets at Popp’s IIB laboratory in Germany: two types of algae, a Jade plant and a human volunteer.
In our experimental design, we aimed for an ‘on off, on off’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Our group sent intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off over several hours. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.
After analyzing the data, Popp’s team found that in the light was profoundly altered.
These results exactly match those Popp’s team had observed during a study of healers, when they’d tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place.

•  The little leaf that glowed

In March and April of this year, we began our large-scale computer experiments, with Dr. Schwartz’s University of Arizona team. Unlike our experiment with Dr. Popp, we decided to have a target plus an identical control. The scientists would not be told which target we’d sent intention to until after they’d analyzed the results.
Our first experiment was carried out at a London Conference on March 11, where 400 of our attendees sent intention to increase the light emissions of a geranium leaf at the University of Arizona. Our intention was to make the leaf ‘glow and glow’.
The results were highly significant, compared to the control — so much so that the difference can be seen on photographs taken by the lab’s special CCD imaging systems.

• Technical glitches

Our biggest challenge so far has been technological. Our intention experiments require that thousands of people stare at the same image of the target on our website at the same time. Ordinarily, this is extremely expensive, requiring many servers linked together to cope with the web traffic.
In our early experiments, we also use a ‘live’ webcam or continually refreshed image of the target. This also requires extra server capacity to enable thousands to see the same image at once.
Our challenge has been to find an affordable computer system sophisticated enough to cope with thousands of people around the world staring at the target image on the same computer page all at the same time.

• Technical glitches

On March 24 we attempted to replicate our first experiment, asking people around the world to send intention via our internet site. Some 10,000 people attempted to participate in the experiment. Our system could not cope with that many participants all trying to access the system at the same moment, and the website crashed. It became clear to us that we needed web experts to cope with this challenge and extra server capacity.

• Team of web experts

We hired a team of web engineers, who carefully designed the experiment to enable the pages to show continually refreshed photographs of the target on the website.
We also rented server space from a company that supplies the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol. For the next experiments, we had nine linked servers, which could have coped with traffic of one million visitors.

• Glowing seeds, too

On April 14, we ran our next web-based experiment. The target this time was stringbean seeds, and again the intention was to make them glow. Nearly 7000 participants from 30 countries around the world participated and the technology worked perfectly,
The bean experiment was showed a strong ‘glow effect’, but not in terms of statistical significance — largely because of the limitations of our imaging equipment.
According to Dr. Schwartz: “The beans were in the predicted direction, but the results did not reach statistical significance. However, there were only 12 beans per condition (glow versus control). If it was possible to image twice as many beans, the results would have reached statistical significance (this is called power analysis in statistics).”
In other words, we showed a large effect, but we needed more seeds to satisfy the scientific definition of ‘significant’.

• More technical hitches

A repeat of our leaf experiment a week later also experienced technical problems so that only 500 people managed to log on.
According to Dr. Schwartz, ‘The final leaf experiment showed little effect. Less than 1/6th the number of people who participated in the bean experiment participated in the leaf experiment, so the results are inconclusive.’
We began working with Nick Haenen, a web developer in the Netherlands, who is working in technology that gives us access to 500 linked servers— and now at low cost. In addition, a team of computer experts from a variety of Dutch computer companies have offered to donate their time to our project to assist in any other technological issues.
Our technical problems appear to be solved.

So, what have we learned so far?

1. Intention sent non-locally by a group of at least 400 appears to have a significant effect on distant targets
2. A group of more than 6000 people sending intention from remote sites creates a significant effect, and is as large as 400 people in the same room.
3. For intention to work in a scattered group, we may need to have a critical mass of more than 1000 people.
4. Computer distractions or problems interfere with intention.

Based on:

TheIntentionExperiment.com