Category Archives: productivity

habits

A woman walked up to a little old man rocking in a chair on his porch.
“I couldn’t help noticing how happy you look,” she said. “What’s your secret for a long happy life?”
“I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day,” he said. “I also drink a case of whiskey a week, eat fatty foods, and never exercise.”
“That’s amazing,” the woman said. “How old are you?’
“Twenty-six,” he said. (from unwind.com)

For the sake of argument, let’s say that habits fall into two general categories: good habits and bad habits. A good habit is flossing every day. A bad habit is smoking. Some habits might fall somewhere in between, or depend on frequency. Flossing every day is a good habit. Flossing once per month isn’t a bad habit, exactly, but it’s not strictly speaking a good habit either. Eating a huge overcooked steak once a year is not a terribly bad habit. Eating one for breakfast every day is.

But let’s stick with good habits and bad habits, because most people can tell the difference and don’t need more distinction than that. Most of them can then be thrown into another 3 categories:

  1. habits you should break - debt, looking down on things, negativism
  2. habits you should take - wake up early, play outside, etc from when you were a kid
  3. habits you should make - positivity, frugality, love

We’ll call that break, take and make.

Break
In a sense, it is often a lot easier to identify a negative habit than a positive one. Overeating or smoking or playing too much Halo is usually a fairly easy pattern to spot. However, the habits that you need to break are often either very pleasurable (overeating for example), or arise from addiction (smoking), or are based on deeply ingrained behavors (negative thinking). So how do you go about modifying bad habits? What are the methods for eliminating them from your life?

  • Stop. Sometimes a bad habit just needs to cease. If you smoke, stop - get some nicotine gum instead. If you watch 6 hours of TV per day, disconnect your cable. If you gossip, turn the subject to sports or politics or movies. This method is hard, and frankly almost never works - but sometimes it’s worth a shot.
  • Modify. If you drink Coke, try switching to diet Coke, or diet Sprite, or ginger ale, or seltzericon - or cycle through them in that order. You do not have to immediately stop a habit. Take baby steps. If you don’t exercise, don’t imagine that you will run a marathon the week after you start taking a 20-minute walk; but DO imagine that you’ll take a 25 minute walk the next week, then a 45 minute walk, then a 20 minute jog and then - who knows? That marathon might not be so far away after all!
  • Inhibit. In another post I wrote about using a rubber band to help stop negative thoughts. You can use this extremely simple tool very effectively. The purpose is not to injure you or create a fear of an action, but merely to jolt your awareness. I think this is probably the easiest yet almost the most effective way to halt any bad habit. It is one of those exceptionally simple methods that most people scoff at until they try it. Give it a shot.
  • Journal. I have plenty of bad habits, but I have seldom seen one that can withstand a brutally honest journal. If your habit to break is sweets, keep an extremely detailed sweets journal. When, where, what, how many calories, why you ate it (sad? bored?) and almost inevitably you’ll notice a decrease. Writing things down will help solidify the habit in your mind, and make you think twice before engaging in it, knowing you’ll have to record that incident in your journal.

Take
When you were a child, you woke up full of energy and excitement on Saturdays. The cartoons were on, it was the day you were allowed to eat Lucky Charms instead of something good for you, and you didn’t have to go to school. You didn’t know it at the time, but waking up early was a good habit. It kept you from wasting half the day sleeping, making it harder to fall asleep Saturday night. It meant that on your weekends you accomplished “maximum fun” and really squeezed as much into the day as you could. Where did that habit go? Some of it left because you got older… because work beat you down … because you just NEED that sleep. You don’t have to leave this good habit behind you in childhood, though. Reach back into your past and take back these good habits. Take back the habits of playtime, of reading, of avoiding things that didn’t directly contribute to your health and happiness. These are habits which are just day-to-day simple tasks that improve the quality of your life. Examples could include:

  • Making time for play
  • Learning about things because you’re curious
  • Questioning “the way it’s always been done”
  • Never learning to sit still

Here are the first steps to doing this:

  • Identify those habits:
  • Remember how they felt
  • Ask yourself if there’s any reason you couldn’t still do that
  • With a nod to Prince: act your shoe size, not your age

Make
If you have seen the Secret, or read any one of a number of self-help books, you’ll realize that the power of positive thinking is a hot topic right now. It has been a hot topic for hundreds of years, in fact, and there’s a reason for it. It works. Having a mental habit like positive thinking is a snowball habit. The more you do it, the more powerful it becomes and makes it easier and easier to maintain as a habit. There are other key “make” habits like this:

  • Eating a healthy, natural diet
  • Spending time with family and friends by actually being there; no Blackberries, no agendas, and no pressure
  • Making time for meditation
  • Daydreaming
  • Being kind

So how do you make these habits? I’ll refer back again to the Secret, but it could just as easily come from the works of Benjamin Franklin or any self-help individual in-between. You can control your thoughts. There is very little else in this world that you can control the way you can control your thoughts. Use that power to your advantage. Tell your mind “this is a habit, this will be a ritual and we will keep it.” Imagine you have already been doing this habit for years. Imagine that it has made you happier, more fit, richer, calmer - whatever it is that you want. You really have to visualize it, write it down, draw it or otherwise make it a real image in your mind. You will be amazed at how quickly your mind adapts to a “new reality” once you order it to. A habit is not a set of chains or a gun pointed at your head. It is 100% the result of your mind, so only you - as the person in control - can change your mind and therefore the habit.

Setting public goals is an important part of maintaining your habits, and tomorrow I will be launching a meme or a viral concept or whatever you want to call it, with a twist, to help you set and keep your habits and goals. So stay tuned!

stopping other negative habits

Yesterday I talked about stopping negative thoughts by wearing a rubber band around your wrist and popping yourself with it when bad thoughts start to surface. I realize that there are a number of other behaviors you could modify the same way. Maybe it’s too much to do with a single little rubber band, but I might start trying to use it for a lot more than just negative thinking cessation:

  • Overeating. Before getting up for seconds, or eating that donut, just pull back and SNAP! Make sure that you only use this when you’re already full, because otherwise you’ll just be creating some ugly associations with food in general. But every time you look at a candy bar or potato chips, POP! You’ll learn to avoid them.
  • Not exercising. Taking the elevator? POP! Get on the stairs instead.
  • Smoking. Every time you reach for a cigarette, pop yourself hard with the rubber band instead. If you have to have a smoke, just keep popping yourself the whole time you smoke with your free hand. Eventually the welts will make it painful to even pick up a cigarette. Or may be you can just start on the path of quitting smoking by using vaporizers (Go to www.davinicvaporizer.com to learn more about portable vaping). Many can agree that it is a very good way to kick out the habit.
  • Drinking soda. I didn’t need the rubber band to quit diet sodas, but if you were tempted I think this would cure you of a desire for Nutrasweet-laden diet Pepsi caramel watermelon or whatever horrible flavors they have now.
  • Speeding. Got a lead foot? POW! Slow down and reward yourself by stopping popping yourself.
  • Buying stuff. If you really feel you need that iPhone or purse or new screwdriver, stare intently at it while hammering away at your rubber band. As soon as you turn away, stop. Before long you’ll associate consumerism with pain instead of pleasure and ‘stuff’ will become your kryptonite.
  • Watching TV. Everybody Loves Raymond reruns on again? If you sit there idly popping your rubber band against your wrist while you watch TV, eventually you’ll want to turn it off.
  • Waking up late. Pop yourself once for every hour of the day. Wake up at 10? 10 pops. Wake up at 6? 6 pops. It’s better to wake up at 6, isn’t it?
  • Gossiping. This one should more or less be required. I’m even guilty of this, recently. If you utter the name “Britney Spears” pop yourself until you fall on the floor crying. You have to do this for the sake of our country.
  • Reading the news. If you are watching anything about politics, pop. If you are watching a report about a murder in Portland, and you live in St. Louis - pop yourself, you don’t need to know.

And finally, you can use it to cure yourself of annoying sports affiliations. Every time the Red Sox get a base hit, POP! Before long you’ll be wearing pinstripes. And that will really make the world a better place.

stopping negative thoughts

Type “stopping negative thoughts” into Google and you’ll get almost 2.5 million results. People recognize that although they have negative thoughts there is nothing that requires negative thoughts for health or mental stability. I believe you can live easily without them. Stopping them is a whole different problem.

A million different self-help gurus can give you seminars and motivational tools designed to help you wean yourself off the negative thought habit. The best tip I ever picked up, though, is a simple one. I can’t tell you where I heard it first, although I think Tony Robbins made a passing anecdote about trying it in his early days of self-improvement. I’m sure it’s not original to me, but then again “spend less than you earn” is offered up as advice by everyone on the planet and that’s pretty old advice, too.

I made a comment once that I am very fond of complicating things. What do I mean by that? If I need to poach eggs, I will buy an egg poacher instead of using a pan. If I need to crush spices, I will buy a mortar and pestle instead of using a big spoon. Write a blog? Download LiveWriter. Paint a room? Buy 15 different types of brushes: one for corners, one for edges, one for broad strokes, etc. I have never seen a problem that I can’t complicate by attacking it with overwhelming force and a multitude of tools.

This trick, however, works so well for me that I always wonder why I don’t do it more often, or even 100% of the time. It probably comes from my desire to buy a book to conquer negative thoughts, or watch a DVD. None of that is necessary (although it probably doesn’t hurt).

The simple solution? Put a rubberband on your wrist. Every time you have a negative thought stretch it out and let it snap. Pow. That hurts. It may even leave a welt if your rubber band is too thick. Take it easy, you aren’t trying to maim yourself, but you are trying to create a little bit of a pain avoidance reflex with the negative thoughts.

I have done this exercise for days at a time, then stopped or forgotten about it for weeks or months, then done it again. Currently I’ve been doing it for about a week. My post yesterday, which was at best gloomy and at worst outright negative, was actually written about a week ago - right before I donned the rubber band.

Generally the rubber band is pretty effective. The biggest problem is that it looks a little odd, but I imagine if you’re a woman with long hair you can tell people it’s for your hair in case it gets unruly. If you’re a man you can tell people it’s to remind you not to forget something. Or you can tell people it’s a hot new accessory, the Vulcanized Rubber Happy Thought Maker, and sell them one for $3.99 on eBay. Lance Armstrong did it, after all.

Try it for a few days. Every time you feel a negative thought creeping in, pop! If you complain to yourself or someone else - pop! If you feel sorry for yourself - pop! If you feel tired, or irritated at work, or even let down about a sports team - POP! It’s strange but you’ll find if you do this simple exercise the negative thoughts start dying down pretty quickly, and you’ll feel a lot happier.

photo by Cristiane Sousa

how to write a halfway-decent email

Did you know that more than 62 billion emails are sent daily, on the Internet and elsewhere. Approximately 15 of the emails were not selling prescription drugs or offering genital enhancements. So if 62 billion (or more) email message are being sent every day, you have to ask yourself whether your email is effective or not. Here are 7 tips to write an effective email.

1. Write a clear, concise subject without re’s and fw’s. Which one of these is more effective?

a. Thu, Apr 15 update on TPS report
b. Re: re: re: fw: re: re: where are we with the TPS report?

Many times people write emails without giving much thought to the subject. If you are keeping up an email chain with a friend, the subject “re: re: re: re: re: hey” may be fine, but if you are trying to differentiate your email from the hundreds that show up in most people’s mailboxes you should make sure that the subject covers the topic to be discussed, as well as any identifying information. A subject matter of “Important - read” is far less likely to be read quickly than “You forgot to pay the cable bill.”

2. Keep it short, stupid. Unfortunately that has to be the easiest tip to an effective email to give, and the hardest to follow. Most people offer unnecessary information in their emails. I am just as guilty as anyone. This fact may sound terrible, but many people will get bored with your email if it requires scrolling down even a little bit. Keep your emails short. Remember that it’s not a phone call, it’s a message. J. K. Rowling can write thousands of pages that people are dying to read. You probably can’t.

3. No ‘thanks in advance.’ Many people are unnecessarily grateful in emails. If you ever saw Office Space (and if you didn’t, do), you’ll recall the slimy boss Lumbergh’s way of intoning “greaaaaat. thaaaaaaaanks.” It was grating. Asking someone if they will get to work right away on something, thanks, is just annoying. Everyone understands that you are appreciate of their work, but there’s no need to tell them before they do it. That seems like a nag. If you ask someone to pass the salt, would you say “pass the salt, I appreciate it” or “could you give me a hand here, thanks and regards?” No. After the task is finished - you have the salt - then you can say thanks.

4. Learn what “reply all” does. We all make this mistake sometimes, but the pain and humiliation you feel the first time you do it should cure you in the future. I don’t think a week goes by when some client HR group sends out a “reply to Mary if you are coming to the XYZ event” and some poor schlub replies all to MASSIVE_CORP_EMPLOYEES_ALL.

5. Avoid return receipts. If the person you’re sending to is a friend, this is just sneaky. If it’s work-related, don’t do a return receipt - just keep following up with 1-line emails every day until they answer (these tips are effective, not nice)!

6. No cc’ing or bcc’ing unnecessarily. Let’s face it - if you have to bcc you’re either sending out an inappropriate joke or trying to stab someone in the back. As for cc’s, I remember one boss who told his assistant to delete every single email where he was cc’d - without even looking at it. He just didn’t have the time. I have a forwarding service set up with my work email to only forward messages to my personal email if my name is in there. If it’s a group distribution, I’ll get to it once a week when I bother to open up my work email.

7. Use IM. If you want to send a one-line response, send an IM. Sending an email is pointless if your message is “thanks” (see above). Don’t send emails to friends that are one line long if you all have access to IM. Use Meebo - it’s a great IM consolidator site that lets you use one web interface to access ALL of your IM accounts.

I’m sure there are many other tips on how to write an effective email, but if you stick to these you’ll be off to a good start.

Also from the Brip Blap archives, check out 10 suggestions for better writing for some writing tips and you are reading the work of the greatest writer in the world for writing productivity tips.

7 ways to stifle your creativity

After writing for this blog for a few months, I’ve noticed that occasionally I’m really stumped for topics. I don’t really get writer’s block, since once I have a topic I can usually fly away with it, but I do get stifled on overall themes and ideas. I was trying to come up with a list of ways that my creativity gets stifled in order to fight that tendency. Here they are:

I write for a living…technically. The kind of writing you do in a corporate environment does not encourage any creativity whatsoever. Here is a lovely gem I put in an email: “John Doe - Based on your note, I think the 5/31 date needs to be revised for the 2nd and 3rd issues, and the first issue (negative admin credits) still appears to be ready to be closed pending whatever verification is necessary. These will need corrected close dates, revised action plans if necessary and an updated open/closed status by 6/15 at the latest.”

That is not exactly the kind of writing that would draw visitors back to this blog, I think.

I watch TV. I have given up watching regular TV and only watch Netflix, but every now and then I will be distracted by something someone else is watching at our house or someone else’s house. I try not to be tempted, but something about flashing lights and loud noises draws me in. I find these shows fill up the empty, creative and quiet places in my head and replace them with light and fluffy cotton candy-like filling. The advertising pounds away at your senses and fills your head with jingles and multiple jarring images. I have a different experience watching a good movie on DVD, since it can inspire me to think about deeper issues and is not broken up every 10 minutes by commercials asking if I have heartburn or want to buy a new car.

I read too much. I have just finished speed-reading through the seven books of the Thomas Covenant series (which are wonderful books). I read about 70 blogs per day, dozens of emails and reports and memos and even the occasional children’s book aloud. Trying to pull in and process all of that information can crowd out creativity. I did quit reading any news that was not business or sports-related a few months ago, so at least my attention is not distracted by the latest developments with Paris Hilton. All of this is on top of my work-related reading, which is full of gems like this one I got in a memo today: “If applicable, does the appendix include a listing of all applications processes included in the assessment process and the process conclusion for said processes?” Read that again. Yes, I have to read this kind of writing and reply to it all day long.

During my commute, I read instead of brainstorming. I have a huge advantage over many people in that most of my commute is on public transportation. The trains on the particular route I’m taking to my current client are seldom very crowded, so I have a seat. I like to spend that time reading, since it makes the commute pass much more quickly, but I really should use it to let my mind wander and make notes of that wandering. I find that once I’m home there are too many other distractions – at least until everyone else goes to sleep – to properly brainstorm.

I do not write ideas down as soon as they occur. Too often, I have a great idea and tell myself “excellent post idea! Write an article about it this evening!” only to forget it by the time I get home. I make an effort to carry around a small notebook all day and write ideas in it as they occur, but I still sabotage myself constantly by thinking “remember to write that down when you get back to your desk.”

I am still learning to be creative. When I first started blogging about four years ago, I wrote a virulent political blog that was a huge series of links and videos and random comments and thoughts on almost a stream-of-consciousness basis. If I read an article, I would throw out a link and two lines of commentary, and then move on. Being creative means taking all of the influences you receive during the course of the day and processing them and creating something new, not just consolidating information. Many blogs just turn into link fests, but my favorite ones are usually written by people unafraid to present their own ideas rather than linking to others’.

Football. I used to be a sports fanatic, following the NFL, NBA, MLB and college football and basketball. I even watched the Tour de France and most tennis Grand Slams and golf majors. Other than hockey, I seldom missed a game of any sort on TV. SportsCenter was the wake up call and the goodnight lullaby. Those days are gone – the demands of marriage and fatherhood have crowded them out. However, I still love the NFL so much that I make time for it. I do realize, though, that spending time reading about NFL roster news, watching the games and buying Jets merchandise are bad, bad habits. Nothing about football will help me write this blog, be a better person or be more frugal. Still, I have loved the NFL since becoming a fan of the almost-great Browns teams of the 80s (Brian Sipe and Bernie Kosar, anyone?). I have to admit I am a footbaliholic. That barrier to creativity will probably remain.

Learning to overcome these barriers to creativity is part of what I am enjoying about the blogging process; having a small idea and then seeing the words spill out on the page once I get underway writing is a tremendous feeling.

ten tips for new bloggers

As a grizzly old veteran of the blogging business (3 months on this blog but 3+ years on a previous one) I have a few ideas about what makes a blog successful or not, at least in the early stages. Part of this knowledge comes from running a blog for years and years and years… with no readers. I then blew up the site, refocused on different topics, changed the way I approached building a blog, and voila! Readers. My site is certainly no Zen Habits, but the traffic levels are continuing to trend upwards. Here are ten tips on how I did it:

Get a domain name. I know that not everyone think a domain name is a reasonable expense, but your site will be taken far more seriously if you register a domain name. I kept a blogger account for years, but once I switched over to using bripblap.com I think people took it more seriously. I’m not saying you have to host your site and start using WordPress if you aren’t ready to, but at least get a domain name and have it redirect to your blogspot.com or wordpress.com (or LiveJournal, etc.) blog.

Leave comments. I like getting comments. The old advice “give and ye shall receive” is completely true in this case. If you leave meaningful, insightful comments on other blogs, those bloggers and their readers are more likely to come visit your blog and leave comments. Maybe not at first, but keep plugging away. I know that there are a few sites in the blogosphere that have very active readers who love following comments - The Simple Dollar always has dozens of comments for even the briefest posts.

Find out what other bloggers in your field are reading. One of the first exercises I did when I decided to leap back into blogging was to go to a few of the “big names” in the fields I’m interested in (personal finance, parenting, health, environment, career, and blogging) and go through their blogrolls. Those blogrolls are there for a reason. I identified the blogs from the “big guys” blogrolls and kept working my way down. I found a few gems here and there, many dead blogs and a few that simply didn’t appeal to me. That exercise gave me an idea of what people find appealing in those areas and helped spur me on some topics.

Post daily. This one may irritate people, but don’t go more than 24 hours without a post. If you use a free blogging service, this may be difficult, but WordPress lets you load up posts for future publishing. Even if you are going to Antarctica for two weeks your blog can look like you never left. This is important. Many fine writers’ blogs I’ve come across start off strong then trail off over time to four posts a week…three…one every two weeks…dead. However, avoid the temptation to leave “oops, sorry, busy, no time to blog!” posts to fill space. I did that once myself and saw half of my RSS subscribers unsubscribe, and it took me a week to build readership back up to where it was before I did that. Even if you write a three-line post (“here’s a great tip on how to clean countertops: use white vinegar and water mixed 1:3 in a spray bottle! non-toxic, too!”) people will keep coming back.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Most browser users are simple folk. When they come in from a hard day’s working the soil - figuratively speaking - they don’t want to figure out that your site uses bold lettering to indicate hyperlinks, a big book icon to subscribe to RSS or cursors that turn into butterflies when you click something. They want blue underlined hyperlinks, the big orange icon and no further monkeying with their browser setup. Just don’t do it.

Keep the site clean. I think most people understand that pop-up ads, 5000 adsense links, endless widgets and noisy graphics distract from a site. The most popular sites can get away with being visually busy not because they arranged it just a little better, but because they have great content! A new blog doesn’t have that luxury - a sloppy design or aesthetically unpleasing design will scare people right away before they get a chance to become readers. At first, keep the ads and widgets and fancy text to a minimum.

Don’t use partial feeds. I understand that most bloggers don’t get any ad revenue if you don’t visit their site. I don’t. However, I am happy if someone signs up for my feed, and it’s up to them to come to the site on their own time. I try to offer other resources at the site to lure people in, but if not, fine. I think a partial feed in your RSS feed is a none-too-subtle bash at your readers. I don’t subscribe to any partial feeds, personally. Too often I want to skim through my Google Reader rather than flipping from site to site. If I find something good, I’ll flip over to the site and leave a comment, but I want that to be by choice, not because I’m forced to go.

Make yourself accessible. If you want to be the mysterious X-Blogger and be anonymous, that’s fine. If you do decide to do that, though, set up an email account at Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo like “mysterious-x-blogger@gmail.com.” Don’t keep people from emailing you just to remain anonymous. Even if you aren’t anonymous, make sure that you allow people to contact you very easily. Keep a contact page or put your email on your site (here’s a handy site to generate email logos to help dodge spammers). Make sure you reply to every email, even if you don’t have much to say other than “thank you for reading!” People want that feedback, and if they get it they’ll be more excited to keep coming back.

Don’t do link posts. If you want to write a paragraph mentioning a URL somewhere else, fine. Make sure you explain where the reader will go (e.g., “warning! PDF link!” or “read my article about quasars here”). Most people don’t like being told to read here and here and here for more information. A blog that’s filled with one-line posts (“hey, check this out! <EOM>”) should be moved to Twitter or Tumblr.

Spellcheck, grammar proof! I know people hate being told they need to spell correctly. An occasional typo is fine. I recently visited a blog that prominently displayed “Please visit our sponsers!” towards the top; a big banner that you couldn’t miss. There is really no excuse in this day and age for misspelling words. If you have trouble with “there” versus “their” or “it’s” versus “its”, spend a little time with Strunk and White. Not everyone cares as much about spelling as I do, true - but do you want to lose readers because they came to you’re sight and wrote someting tuff to follow their? It’s annoying enough to me that I’ll move right on.

As a final bonus tip (#11) I will tell you the most important tip on starting a blog: love the subject. I liked (not loved) politics, so I started out strong on a political blog, but I found it really just made me angry and frustrated after a few years. I love writing about all of the topics I cover now. I would do it for no readers, honestly. But I love the feedback and it does exactly what it says - it feeds readers’ interest and enthusiasm straight back to me and helps me develop even more passion for what I write about. If you don’t like personal finance, don’t blog about it. If you get bored by productivity writing, don’t do it! If you love astronomy, don’t try to blog about the market just because you think that’s the way to make money. I realized that I’m passionate about learning about and teaching certain subjects and there was no reason not to blog on them. I took some unrelated topics and started other blogs (on movies and books) and eventually as I get into more and more of a groove I’ll start others (maybe on other topics that wouldn’t quite fit Brip Blap like food and travel). But I have decided never to worry about starting a blog on auditing (my profession) since I realized I have very little enthusiasm for it as a writing subject. I’ll stick to the fun stuff!

Now go out there, start a blog (or update your existing one) and let me know if any of these tips helped you out, I’d love to hear about it.

brilliant to-do hacks

I use a Moleskine notebook to capture my to-dos. If I think of something I need to do, in accordance with Getting Things Done I capture it immediately in my notebook. This is fine if your task is “sign up for CPR class to get recertified” (an actual to-do of mine). Sometimes a task recurs, though. One of mine, for example, is “water plants.” Since they are just decorative climbing vine type things, I need to remember to water them every two weeks. More than that seems to do more harm than good. Less than that will kill them.

So my terribly simple hack to merge my recurring to-dos with my notebook is that I put all of my regular recurring to-dos in my Google Calendar. I have Google send me an email the day a recurring task is due, and I write it in my Moleskine. This may seem like a rather minor problem and solution to some, but it was the final step in letting me eliminate any worries about getting things done.

One other quick hack is needed when I don’t have my Moleskine on me. In that case, I do one of the following three things.

If I have my cellphone, I call Jott. Jott is a nifty service and if you don’t have an account yet, you probably should (it’s free). It is a voice-to-email application that takes any voice message (“buy eggs”) and emails you a text version of that message. I have found it’s about 90% effective. Some words get garbled, but I usually blame that more on AT&T or ambient noise than I do on Jott’s software. Once I am back at a computer, I transcribe my to-do from my email to my Moleskine.

I write it down on another piece of paper. This is an obvious step that sometimes people aren’t very good at. I find that if I’m in a meeting and someone says, “Brip, remember to put the correct cover sheet on that TPS report” I’ll remember to write it down if I’m walking out the door and back to my desk. If someone says that to me and then the meeting continues for another two hours, I will forget. Writing it down and then IMMEDIATELY moving it over to my Moleskine the first chance I get is critical. A simple hack, but terribly effective.

I remember it. I have a mind like a sieve except for a very disturbing ability to recall minor details about every movie I’ve ever seen. Remembering Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pronouncement in Conan about the three best things in life (see the end of this post for the answer)? Easy. Remembering to buy orange juice? Need to write it down. Yet sometimes I do manage to remember things. Not too far out, and I prefer to write them down once I have the chance, but I will remember to take the trash out, or to turn off the stove. At least so far. I have used this book to improve my memory - it works.

These hacks may seem trivial, but in a sense I think any truly organized person goes through a few trivial phases before getting organized. First, they decide to get organized; second, they arrive at a system that works for them to get organized (where I’m at) and third, they actually implement the system and stay organized. If you aren’t comfortable with your system, no matter how fancy it is, you will never get organized. That’s where I was with my Treo. I just never managed to fully utilize it to manage my life. I think now I’m finally comfortable with my solution.

Oh, and Conan‘s list of the best things in life? To vanquish your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Hmm, now does that go in my @vanquishing or @conquering category?

another drone in the Moleskine army

If you spend much time reading personal productivity blogs or personal finance blogs, you’ve probably heard people fussing constantly about their precious Moleskine notebooks. I always thought it was ridiculous that people went on and on about them like they weren’t just notebooks. I was using the little spiral-metal reporter notebooks and that was working just fine.

Then it happened. I violated half of the things I preach in this blog. I was on vacation and window-shopping at a bookstore with Bubelah. There, in a little display, was the infamous Moleskine notebook. I made a fatal mistake and thought “well, I could just pick one up and look at it and see what all of the fuss is about.”

It was light and sturdy. The pages were nothing like regular paper, rough and bleached white. They were smooth and cream-colored and looked elegant. The ad proclaimed it the notebook of Hemingway and Matisse and Van Gogh. I knew that if I had one, I would “join the club.” I was on vacation and wanted a souvenir. I felt the Amex struggling in my wallet (an uncomfortable sensation) and I was lost.

A little bit of background is in order here about my personal productivity habits. For years I used a Treo 90 (no wireless capability) as my organizer. Dates, contacts, memos, everything went in my Treo. I really liked my Treo, and it served me well on many a boring business trip. I never had any trouble syncing it up with my desktop and generally there was nothing it couldn’t do.

However, after four years of heavy use my Treo started to fade a bit. The battery needed recharging constantly. Most importantly, I found myself needing it less and less. I left my heavy-traveling job and started consulting, a job where I am seldom more than an hour away from a computer. Google introduced a huge mix of free applications that were wonderfully searchable and easily accessible - Gmail in particular, but also Gcal and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I found that since I was sitting at a computer at work and I had a laptop sitting on the kitchen counter at home, it was far easier to access all of that information on line. Plus, the integration of all of these applications made re-entering info in the Treo painful. When someone emailed me their address, I didn’t really want to reenter it in my Treo when I could click one link and put it in my Contacts list.

So I found myself gradually drifting away from my Treo, and finally put it away a few months ago. One process didn’t lend itself well to online work, though - my to-do list. I tried a few applications, and several were very good. Remember the Milk is excellent. But I wanted to have access to my to-do list all the time. I thought of carrying my Treo around just for that, but that seemed excessive.

The past few months I tried carrying around a little wire-spiral notebook but it just didn’t appeal to me. My dad has done this for years, with great success, but I kept forgetting to write in it or check it. Eventually I was going to have to find something to manage my to-do list, because I can’t rely on my brain to track even 2-3 to-do items at a time, much less my usual 40 or so. I like to write down

Enter the Moleskine. It may just be temporary infatuation, but I love writing in it. I love checking my notes. I love crossing things off my to-do list in there. To this point, it has made my to-do list a breeze. I can’t imagine switching back to a regular notebook. The negatives are that they are of course expensive, they are habit-forming and maybe a little pretentious. The negative for you, the reader, is that now I’m one of those people who will pepper you with anecdotes about my Moleskines like I’m crazy woman with 16 cats talking about Mr. Whiskers, the feisty one. I irritate myself, in advance. But it’s true - they are great.

The moral of the story - stay off the crack, kids. Once you try it, you’ll be hooked for life.

you are reading the work of the greatest writer in the world

OK, that may be jumping the gun but humor me and read on. Writing is something almost everyone does, but seldom have I taken a step back and considered how it is best done. Almost everyone writes an occasional letter or email or report at work. I started to note how many times in a day I write something and it is far more often than I might have thought. Can you really learn about your own abilities by stepping back and analyzing your likes and dislikes towards certain activities? I think you can. I know that my own personal prejudices about writing are fairly easy to define. Here are a list of my writing observations from blogging.

I hate writing stuff out longhand. I am part of the last American generation to have grown up writing longhand at school and in day-to-day life. I remember working through legal pads in high school, trying to write a report on the causes of the Civil War or a biography of George Washington. I would use index cards to write paragraph lead sentences, then move them around until I felt an outline emerge. I hated every minute of it. I took typing in high school, and I realized that writing didn’t have to be a cramped, dull scribbling exercise. For me, manual typewriters were a discovery, electric typewriters were a pleasure and computer keyboards were a revelation. My personal handwriting has deteroriated to an eleven year-old’s block printing because I so seldom write by hand. At work, my notes from meetings are painful to look at, and I usually transcribe them instantly into a word processing program so I can actually read them.

I have never written well on schedule. I am prone to floods of ideas. Once I get an idea to write about, it just keeps tumbling out until I am finished with it. If I sit down at 9 am and tell myself “start writing,” I usually struggle to start and allow myself to be distracted easily. But if I start writing on what I call a “burst,” the biggest challenge I have is to get it out of my head, through my fingers and onto the screen fast enough. My bursts aren’t even necessarily related to what I’m writing about in most cases. The way my thought process works is similar to the index card method I mentioned above. I have lots of little ideas that float and wander about – little square ideas, little triangle ideas, and so on. At some point, they find their little triangle place and so on, and the overall picture of the writing coalesces. That’s the beginning of the burst. It doesn’t guarantee quality writing, but it does mean a lot spills out. However…

I started this blog partially as a tool to try to force myself into writing on a schedule. Unless you’re already a highly-sought-after writer you can’t really get away with posting once or twice a week if you want to have any sort of readership on your blog. And for every post you see here on my blog, there are probably 10 or more lengthy comments I’ve written on other people’s blogs. I’m trying, sporadically, to work on another blog. I’m even considering launching a blog related to my professional life (audit and Sarbanes-Oxley Act consulting). And before this blog existed, I kept up a furious and detailed political blog for almost four years, which suffered from my ‘burst’ style. There would be twelve posts in a day and then nothing for two weeks. All of this is because I realized that I have the time to write, but often don’t for lack of a purpose. Writing in a blog gives you a great outlet for your ideas, but it also forces you to open your eyes and mind to receiving those ideas and turning them into writing on a daily basis.

After thirty plus years of reading, I still discover new ‘art in words.’ I love to read and the subject matter is sometimes secondary to the style. A tremendous example of this is William Faulkner. I have never cared for his stories, to be honest. Most are too gothic and some (Sanctuary, for example) are horror stories to match Stephen King’s work. But if you ever want to see words flow off the page like liquid gold, pick up a Faulkner book. His writing makes the English language sing. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech is a great short example of his writing. Even the blogosphere has some compelling writers. Blogs like The Simple Dollar, for example, are not building huge readerships by simply throwing out random ideas, but taking some original ideas, mixing in some assimilated/compiled knowledge and writing it into a compelling narrative that makes you want to read more.

Don’t read the news. I have found that since I quit paying attention to the news my reading has picked up. I don’t think your average person – myself included – has the ability to read nonstop 24 hours a day. Eyes get tired, for example. So I was expending a significant amount of my limited ‘reading attention’ on articles about Iraq or Paris Hilton or the stock market. None of that writing really helps me improve my own, because it is often formulaic and static. There are a few ways news writing is helpful: brevity, catchy headlines and descriptiveness. But in general putting down the paper, for me, has meant picking up a book.

I don’t like to revise. Maybe it’s because of my typing skills, combined with the magic of spellcheckers to catch typos, but I hate to revise. Once the words spill out, I don’t like to go back and re-read and edit. I do… but not because that’s my normal style. I recognize that what may sound good in my head may not sound natural if read out loud, or read after a good night’s sleep, or read without hearing the background narrative that’s rolling around in my head (yes, I just said I hear voices in my head, but they are friendly voices, people). So I usually write something, then set it aside and re-read it a day later to see if it still looks good after the ink dries, so to speak.

I am the greatest writer in the world. That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? I thought for a long time no-one would ever be interested in my writing, or that I had much interesting to say. I think now that almost everyone has something interesting to say, but not everyone takes the effort to put it in writing. I decided that there was no reason I couldn’t be a great writer. I may not ever achieve that goal, but I see little harm in imagining that I will. I think of it as a win-win: there may not be a single greatest writer in the world. Maybe there are many, and maybe if the motivation is right anyone can be the greatest in their world.

If you are a writer (blogger, IM’er, or even a traditional pen-and-paper scribbler) what can you say about your own writing?

10 suggestions for better writing

I may or may not have any particular professional skills, but one I have is writing. The audit/consulting profession that I’m in requires a lot of very dry technical writing that has almost evolved into its own little niche language. Sentences like “ensure that the failed control has been tested and proven to be operationally effective (e.g. substantive control tests passed) for at least the consecutive number of required time periods” are quite common. The writing is often tortured and the underlying material is dry and brittle.

George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, had some very useful and succinct writing tips in his essay “On Politics and the English Language.” A few of them are:

  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.

  • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

  • Never use the passive where you can use the active.

  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

 
These rules are not often applied to technical writing. Perhaps they shouldn’t be applied, since part of the audience, at least, is technical and doesn’t want simplified language. However, the horrible level of writing I see in my daily work has led me to come up with 10 suggestions for solid professional writing. None of these are terribly difficult to implement, and if most people would take them to heart the quality of their work would certainly improve. I am not perfect in my writing style – I tend to the verbose – but I think these tips could work for anyone.

  1.  It’s the spellcheck, stupid. When did Microsoft Word start performing spellcheck? 1992? Word 2.0? I cringe to this day to get a document containing mistakes that could have been easily detected with spellcheck. I mistype the word “material” almost every time I type it; my fingers get crossed every time. But spellcheck catches my mistake and fixes it automatically. My favorite word processor, OpenOffice Writer, has a spellcheck function, and it’s completely free, so even if you can’t afford Word there’s no excuse.
  2. It should be noted that extraneous phrases like “it should be noted” or “it was noted” absolutely destroy a sentence. Don’t use them – ever. We note it, already.
  3. After about 2 or 3 lines stick a period in your sentence. Very few professional documents suffer from a lack of wording. Any time I see more than two or three lines in a sentence, or more than 4 or 5 commas, I go back and try to cut it into multiple smaller sentences. It makes it easier to read and to comprehend.
  4. Don’t use passive voice. You hear this advice often, but it’s trickier than it sounds. Usually in professional writing you are attempting to dodge assigning blame or responsibility. For example, you might say “The documents in question are prepared on a weekly basis for review by management” rather than “John Smith, accounting clerk, prepares the documents in question on a weekly basis for review by management.” However, writing that continually pounds away in passive voice is boring because it’s not the way we naturally speak: “This Guidance is intended to establish the minimum requirements” is not nearly as strong as “This guidance establishes the minimum requirements.”
  5. Don’t use slang language, or “slanguage”. You have to assume that your average professional reader knows many common terms and abbreviations. I assume in my audit world that everyone is familiar with COSO and the SEC and the AICPA and the meaning of the words materiality, attestationremediation. However, if the document is intended for anyone who might not know the technical usage of those words, I should take care to explain them. Nothing will cause someone to put down a document more quickly than failing to comprehend two or three sentences in a row because they didn’t understand a term. If I told you to remediate the LOB PP in accordance w/ the PY w/p’s, you won’t read much further if you don’t know what that means. and
  6. Read it out loud. I think a lot of people, myself included, never read their own writing out loud (or possibly at all). When you read some sentences out loud, they sound wrong. There is nothing grammatically or stylistically wrong with them, but they don’t sound ‘healthy’. Try reading a line or two out loud and see if it sounds natural. If not, tweak it until it does.
  7. Cut out the fat. I read a lot of technical writing with phrases such as “Thoroughly document the underlying controls explicitly.” While the writer may be making a good faith attempt to hammer home the need to be thorough, this sentence says the same thing: “Document the underlying controls.” Adverbs are unnecessary 99% of the time in professional settings (as are most adjectives).
  8. Don’t be afraid to talk like a human. Unless you work with near-sentient apes or dolphins or computers, I imagine all of your target audience will be human. Humans tend to talk in a fairly direct way: “I want you to finish that project,” not “Management should be made aware when the project has been finalized.” A lot of this style choice depends on the target audience, but whenever I’m writing I try to write like a human first – then if my client wants something tech’d and geek’d up I’ll give them the robot wording.
  9. Read. Try reading a lot. There are a number of good writers out there, both prose and technical. Read a few newspaper articles or blogs and figure out which ones work for you. I imagine if you examine them you’ll realize that often what you prefer to read is categorized by the writing style, not by the content. There are a number of writers I like more for their style than for their content – particularly in finance writing, where the subject matter is often horrendously boring but is made readable and even enjoyable by a light-hearted approach to the writing (Ben Stein and Penelope Trunk, for example).
  10. Learn to type. Another weird suggestion, since it’s a mechanical one, but trust me – if you can type at a high rate of speed your writing will improve. I guess there are great pen-and-paper writers still out there. But for technical writing, it’s almost impossible to write things out by hand. My ability to slam out a few sentences, look at them in Word or Writer and see if they look and sound right, then zip back and retype is critical for my writing.

As a final note, one of the interesting things you get out of blogging is a release from dry technical writing. In any given day I may crank out 20 pages of audit babble at work – emails, memos, longer position papers, reports or project plans. All of them filter through multiple layers of review and revision, so the work is seldom mine and mine alone. My writing style is buried in avalanche of personal preferences and flat-out bad writing by my superiors. This blog, however, is straight out of my head, and I hope that it will slowly allow me to find a personal writing style separate from my work writing style. Now go home and write a two page essay on a topic of your choice and then read it back to yourself in two weeks.

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