I’ve had a heck of a time blogging here at LifeClever, but as my own productivity suffers, and now that Chanpory is able to return to the site full time, I’ve decided to step away from the site. Thanks for reading, and thanks to all of you for your insightful comments over the last few months.

If you aren’t quite through with me yet, you’re welcome to check out my podcasts: Moldawer in the Morning (comedy) and the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas (science fiction).

And remember, don’t let your focus on the system take you away from doing what you enjoy and doing it well.

Thank god for my wife. Really. If it weren’t for her patient, gentle fashion influence over the last four years, I would probably be wearing a utility belt today. Or worse, a Utilikilt.

The two of us will go into a store and I’ll see, let’s say, a cool vest with lots of pockets, or perhaps a techno-fanny-pack, and I’ll make a beeline for it like I don’t have to walk in public with normal people. Deftly, my better half will steer me away from such geekbait and toward a handy distraction, like a shiny button, or confetti.

Naturally, I read Cool Tools, and I purchase probably half their recommendations. Often, I’m left with something that works great at doing what it does, but does something I didn’t need to do.

I buy and toss a lot of gadgets, but it hasn’t all been fruitless. A precious few actually save me time and effort and money. Unfortunately, all those savings were lost in the search for more and better gadgets. C’est la vie.

To help you avoid my fate, here are tools that, for me, were actually less trouble than they’re worth:

• Alphasmart Neo A godsend for anyone who works with type. The Neo is a bare-bones text editor designed for educational use. It can go hundreds of hours on AA batteries, and it has a big, chunky keyboard that’s a pleasure to type on. The screen is a teeny black-and-white number out of the late 80s, which is good, because it makes editing yourself basically impossible. Typing hasn’t been this effortless and distraction-free since my Dad’s old GRiD laptop. When you’re done typing, you plug it in via USB and dump the text into the editor of your choice. As Steve Jobs would say, “Boom!”

• Casio Data Bank 300 I bought this to supplement my Polder timer. I wish it vibrated, but the fact is I can quickly plug in my day’s schedule first thing in the morning and rest confident that, no matter how crazed things get, I’ll get a little ping just in time to move on to what’s next. Surprisingly, my wife thinks having a small Atari strapped to my wrist actually looks good! The Data Bank 300 features the very latest in digital technology, circa the Reagan administration, with the capacity to hold 300 events and contacts, as long as they’re a dozen characters long each. But it works great for my purposes.

• Brother P-Touch Home & Hobby Labeler Whether or not you worship at the shrine of GTD, this small, reliable, battery-powered labeler is an incredibly handy thing to have around home and office. It’ll help you organize your filing cabinet, sure, but the uses don’t end there. For instance, my wife was interrupted by a couple of friendly Jehovah’s Witnesses this afternoon, who buzzed our apartment, making the dog bark like crazy. Solution? A label reading “Do Not Buzz!” where our apartment number used to be.

• Levenger International Pocket Briefcase + Pilot G2 minis The International Pocket Briefcase works great for me because it can hold a bunch of index cards on one side, and an array of color-coded shorties on the other. As for the pens, well, that’s an extremely emotional subject for most productivity geeks. I would never presume to tell you that my choice of pocket pen is better than yours, even if it is.

• Tide to Go Stick I spilled wine on my tie shortly before proposing to my wife. A future in-law quickly produced one of these magic wands and saved the day. I still managed to knock over a poker by the fireplace when I went down on one knee, but at least the stain was gone. Got one of these in every bag I own.

• Staples Black Plastic Rotating Desk Organizer Forget that mammoth desk thingy from The Apprentice. This sucker is just big enough to provide easy access to pens, ruler, scissors, paper clips, etc., without sucking up all the desk-estate. Got one on every desk.

• Handmade pocket tissue holder For Larry David, a real man should have mints, tissues, and a pen on him at all times. Problem is, when I carry one of those Kleenex packs in my jacket pocket, it gets all shredded and linty after a while. So I asked my wife to sew a pocket tissue holder for me, and it’s awesome, all the way down to the embroidered initials. Unfortunately, she’s my wife, so you’ll have to troll Etsy for one of your own, but I highly recommend the effort. Nothing like pristine tissues.

Photo by revjim5000.

Well, I guess some people are perfectionists, because the team at Diigo has just a launched new and improved version 3 in beta. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and, for my purposes, it offers a few nifty improvements. Tags are listed alphabetically by default, and the Diigo plugin for Firefox offers a “Twitter This” option which sends your link to Twitter as a tinyurl link.

The new Diigo also offers spiffy social networking/recommendation functionality, but that’s not my bag, although it may be yours. Either way, there’s really no reason anyone should use the Yahoo’s stagnant Del.icio.us service anymore. Diigo’s much prettier and it runs faster too! Go import your Del.icio.us bookmarks today.

Diigo

GTD’s Weekly Review is all well and good in theory, but in practice I run out of steam doing high-order planning and brainstorming after 30 15 minutes. I mean it; I need to take a nap.

And I’ve got tasks for 19! projects in my handy Toodledo account right now. (And I’m not even that orthodox about creating projects every time I’m supposed to.) Giving each of them their mental due in one lazy Saturday afternoon is simply out of the question. So I decided to break it up.

I’ve been relying on Memo to Me for easy to set, reliable email and SMS reminders for tasks that aren’t events: brush the dog’s teeth, etc. So I added a new daily task: Project Check-in.

Most of my projects are individual books to be published within the next year or two. In the notes field for Project Check-in, I’m reminding myself to:

• Check the schedule and confirm that all upcoming due dates are “in the system”
• Check on publicity status
• Check on marketing status
• Print out latest numbers (print runs, sales, etc.) for the to-go folder (what I grab for any impromptu meetings related to the book)

For different kinds of projects, different checks are called for, but you’re basically trying to sew up all the open loops and think ahead, as well as create a folder with up-to-date refresher info for when you get called into a meeting on Project X.

With almost 20, I can check 3 a day and cover each one at least weekly. I keep a note in my Netvibes dashboard indicating which projects I most recently checked, and I proceed in alphabetical order.

Have your own method for staying on top of an array of projects? Share it in the comments.

Photo by sakura.

For most of the people who read this blog, saying yes is easy. The bright, driven folk who read Lifeclever do so in part because they feel overwhelmed by their workload. No slackers in this bunch”at least, few normal people would call one of us a slacker, although I’m sure we sometimes think of ourselves as lazy, unmotivated, and so on.

What if I told you I was trying to lose weight by exercise alone? What if I told you I got up at dawn every morning to run eight miles before my morning coffee? And what if I told you this while tearing into my second hamburger, complaining about how hard it is for my body to lose weight.

“It’s my metabolism!”

But it’s not my metabolism, you’d say. It’s the fact that I eat too much. Right?

Same thing applies to productivity.

Productivity As Dynamic Equilibrium

Remember those diagrams from Earth Science that demonstrated “dynamic equilibrium”? Here’s one. If you feel overwhelmed by your workload, your personal dynamic equilibrium—your work “thermostat”—is set too high.

That’s why you can work twice as hard Monday, and before you can take a breath you’re saying yes to another project and digging yourself back into your hole.

Once you get accustomed to feeling overwhelmed all the time, you will unconsciously seek that sinking sensation when it goes away. If your task list gets a little smaller, you’ll think of new tasks. Complete a project, and you’ll add two.

Even though you come home every night bemoaning your workload, promising yourself that you’ll commit to fewer things in the future, when someone sends you an email asking if you could design their site, or write them some copy, or just help them setup a WordPress install, you fire off an affirmative without a second thought.

Build a Dam

I carry around my shorties in one of these gorgeous Levenger items. One side has a small plastic window for ID. Recently, I put a card in there that reads:

SAY NO TO NEW PROJECTS

There are only so many mantras you can stick in your own face at a time, and I figured this was the highest priority.

The next day, I was on the phone with someone at the office while idly toying with the card. That person offered me the opportunity to participate in an exciting project. Something with lots of potential for learning and growth. I found myself saying yes even as my eyes were directly resting on a card that read

SAY NO TO NEW PROJECTS

Luckily, I snapped out of my trance and took it back before things went any further. And in retrospect I’m incredibly glad. What was I thinking?

Shut the Door in Opportunity’s Stupid Ugly Face

Sure, there will be some projects you can’t refuse, either because your job depends on them or because they truly represent once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. But in both cases, if the new project is really that extraordinary, ask yourself which of your current projects you’d be willing to postpone or cancel to make room.

Also, this is not to say you should say no forever. You just need to find a new equilibrium.

After a few months of religiously saying no whenever possible, you will find yourself with more and more breathing room. Eventually, you’ll realize you’ve gone too far, that you actually have an hour of free time each night to spend as you please. Congratulations! From that point forward, maintain dynamic equilibrium by adding projects and tasks only as you complete others.

Be vigilant and you may find yourself feeling rested, alert, and simply whelmed. You might even spend less time reading LifeClever. Don’t worry about Chanpory and me, though. There will always be masochists out there willing to overcommit themselves.

Photo by midnightcomm

In academia, professors have the option of taking a year away from their home institution for the purpose of expanding their intellectual horizons. They might spend this time doing research in the field, teaching at another university, or writing a book.

For those of us working in a world without tenure and tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, taking a step back from our professional lives and finding a little perspective isn’t as easy. But it’s still necessary.

Luckily, I’ve found that the quality of a sabbatical leave can compensate for a lack of quantity.

Introducing the Amazing 24-Hour Sabbatical.

Why take a sabbatical?

At points in our professional and personal lives, we feel swept up in the flow of events. As milestones and markers fly past us, we promise ourselves that we’ll take a good, deep breath and look around as soon as things slow down. But they don’t. When one project is finally wrapping up, three more kick into gear. Forget smelling the roses, we forget to taste our morning coffee.

I’m in the middle of this myself: from my wedding through a promotion through the honeymoon through a move, I haven’t so much as looked up from my feet in 9 months.

To be clear, a one day sabbatical is NOT a Weekly Review. It is NOT an opportunity to catch up on less urgent tasks, re-prioritize our to-do lists, or brainstorm on projects. It’s an opportunity you grant yourself to get a little perspective.

Immediate benefits

A one day sabbatical will:

• Recharge your emotional and intellectual batteries
• Stimulate your creativity
• Suggest new directions for your efforts
• Highlight areas in your life that aren’t worth the effort
• Stimulate long-buried emotions and memories

What do you do when you hang a picture frame on the wall? If you’re like me, you walk a few feet away, then turn quickly and look to see if it’s really crooked or not. That’s what a sabbatical is all about: getting far enough away to see the big picture.

How to Take Your Sabbatical

Your first question might be, why 24 hours? In reality, you’ll only be gone for 8 or 10 hours. But the most important first step in taking a one day sabbatical is to get terrific sleep beforehand.

Get up bright and early the day before your sabbatical, which unless you’re a freelancer who can make your own schedule will probably be a Saturday or a Sunday. Then get to bed as early as you can manage. Set your alarm to wake up before dawn, before your spouse and kids, if any, and get on the road.

Pack Your Sabbatical Kit

Prepare a small, light bag. You’ll be on your feet a lot so you want to travel light. Bring:

• A paperback book
• A journal and/or voice recorder
• Pens
• Bottled water
• Snack bars, fruit
• iPod (no podcasts)

Do not bring work. Do not bring a laptop. No iPhone, no Blackberry, no cellphone whatsoever.

Wear comfortable clothes and your best walking shoes or sneakers.

Choose Your Path

If you live in a walkable area like New York City, embarking on your sabbatical may be as simple as picking a direction and walking. The main thing is to walk someplace off your own beaten path. If you’re in a suburban area, drive somewhere long unvisited. Useful sabbatical activities include:

• Perusing a major library
• Visiting your local art or natural history museum
• Strolling along your nearest lake or, if available, seaside
• Eating unfamiliar foods

The point is to allow yourself to spend one full day separated from the tasks and obligations of your life. Which is not to say, don’t think about your job or your family. First of all, that’s a hopeless endeavor. Don’t think of an elephant while you’re at it.

But once you step back from the immediate, practical concerns, you may start thinking about your job or life as a whole. Maybe it’s time to accept that your career doesn’t make you happy and never will. Or, it may occur to you how lucky you are to be in your position.

In the first case, you might start brainstorming ideas for a career transition. In the latter, you might decide to come back on Monday morning with renewed vigor and dedication.

The Return

Spend the day out of the house, away from work, and without your gadgets, and I can guarantee that you’ll return home at the end of the day feeling, on some level, transformed. Your journal will be full of new ideas. You’ll be physically tired but mentally recharged.

Don’t worry about processing all those notes right now. A few will be gems; most will seem like they were written by a drunk person in the light of day. Get another good night’s sleep, which is an essential step in absorbing any new experience, and take a look in the morning.

There, you’ve taken a sabbatical, just like an academic. Now, to find a tweed jacket with patches.

Photo by dopesmuglar.

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If you’ve ever taken a look at my photo, you might be surprised to discover that I’m a killing machine.

That’s right. Green belt black tip in the deadly art of karate, courtesy of three years of classes at my local YWCA.

This is a few years back.

I’d like to pretend that my martial arts training took place in a remote, forbidding mountain palace, or at the very least at a YMCA. But appearances can be deceiving. My sensei was one tough cookie, and I learned some valuable lessons from her, although I can’t say the karate part really stuck with me.

What Sensei really taught me was how to set a goal and achieve it. Luckily, doing a jump kick through a wooden board has never been one of my goals.

Finding Yourself in a Tight Spot

Sensei was a determined, powerful woman with close-cropped hair, glasses, and a big, hairy mole. She was utterly no-nonsense, and when she dipped into judo she’d have us jump in there and start throwing each around regardless of size or age. (I still remember being absolutely unable to pin a girl about half my size, and half my age. That would have made her about seven.) Sensei would often share stories of self-defense and survival, and one in particular still stands out in my memory.

Sensei was in the subway. This was back in the late eighties, when the New York City subway system was even less user-friendly than it is today. No air-conditioning, graffiti everywhere, no good signage, and dead ends waiting to trap the unwary.

In a NYC commuter’s worst nightmare, Sensei went through a turnstile only to discover that the station entrance was closed. This was before 24-hour turnstiles, too. It was a one-way street. Sensei was trapped.

Listening to the story, it was hard to imagine Sensei helpless. But even she couldn’t bend steel bars.

To Shatter a Great Obstacle, Think Small

Naturally, she called for help from the commuters rushing by on their way to work. One after the other, they ignored her.

That’s when her karate training kicked in. She picked a single person out of the crowd.

“You,” she said. “Yes, you in the brown coat. Stop. I need your help.” Singled out, the guy came over and agreed to find the station manager.

By directing her energy at a focal point instead of scattering it, she got herself out of a tight jam, fast. Same principle she applied to wooden boards, made suddenly practical.

Are there any obstaces in your life that seem immovable? Focus your energy on the tiniest part you can pinpoint. Even slight movement of a seemingly intractable problem can set off a chain of events leading to a resolution.

As Archimedes said of the lever, “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.”

(All this is not to imply that I gave up on the martial arts. I went on to study the streetfighting art of zujitsu, where one of the mottos is “whatever works!” That’s another post all by itself.)

Photo by totoro!

This is a nifty one, simple to implement and, in my experience, surprisingly effective.

Set your watch to beep every night at 10 o’clock.

When your watch goes off, get up that instant and prepare for morning. Whether you’re in the middle of watching a DVD, rushing to meet a work deadline, reading that one last blog entry, etc., get up and get rolling.

Your Morning Prep Checklist

In addition to brushing up, walking the dog, and otherwise getting ready for bed as usual, do as many morning tasks as you can ahead of time:

• Plan breakfast and make sure the fridge is stocked (if necessary, run out to the grocery store to stock up on milk, eggs, etc.)
• Grind your beans and set your coffeemaker to go off
• Lay out your outfit and the contents of your pockets (make sure you have cash and change in your wallet)
• Pack your bag for work with any necessary files, gadgets, etc.
• Charge your cellphone and laptop
• Set your alarm
• Set out your workout clothes and sneakers if you’re going to the gym
• Check your calendar for any key events early in the day you should be expecting

Once you’ve figured out which tasks can be done, write them down on an index card and keep it handy. Leave only those tasks that can’t be done the night before, like getting dressed”although I guess some hardcore productivity folks might sleep in their clothes to get a faster start to their day…

Organize Your Space

I inherited a lovely little stand for hanging out your outfit, wallet, and keys for the next day from my grandfather. It’s old, but they have new ones at places like the Container Store. Whatever furniture or other tools you use to lay things out, everything you need in the morning should be within arm’s reach, prepped and ready to go.

This 10 o’clock routine might take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Once you’re done, go back to finishing your movie, working on your project, etc., secure in the knowledge that you can roll into bed when you’re ready without a moment’s thought.

Reap the Benefits

There are two main benefits to the 10 O’Clock rule. First, you’re much more likely to take care of those end-of-night chores that sometimes get skipped, from washing the dishes to flossing, because you’re tackling them before you’ve completely run out of steam.

Second, you’ll be much more likely to wake up on time, and have a pleasant morning, if you know that all the nasty morning chores are taken care of and everything’s in order: your slippers are by the bed, the place is tidy, coffee’s brewing, breakfast is a few steps from ready, and so on.

I’ve found the little 10 o’clock beep to be all it takes to get me out of my chair. By 10 pm, my evening activities and socializing are almost always over, but I have yet to begin nodding off. Your optimal time might be a little different, but try to set your watch for a consistent time that falls after your main evening activity but before drowsiness sets in.

Photo by jmv.

You’ve got at least one Big Project on your someday list, or at least in the back of your mind: that novel/painting/web start-up/symphony you’ve always wanted to tackle “when the time is right.” One day, you tell yourself, when there’s a nice long lull, you’ll get to it, but until then it’s nose-to-the-grindstone on more immediate concerns…

Face it: the only nice long lull most of us will ever see is dea…retirement.

To be clear, this is a project you would really like to do (or have done) but because it doesn’t directly affect your paycheck and it doesn’t have a real deadline, it keeps getting postponed.

Here’s a simple way to start making real daily progress on a daunting creative project no matter how busy you are.

The Art of Creative Triangulation

Stephen King once wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, that creative ideas are there in your mind but buried, and it’s your job to dig them out of the sand. Think of Michelangelo chipping David out of the marble. He didn’t sculpt an arm, then another arm, then a torso, and so on, finally cobbling it all together. Instead, he chipped away at a complete shape, gradually honing in on it from different angles.

So, first of all, think of your idea as complete and whole, ready to be unearthed. Now, you just need to find it. Just as triangulation can determine the source of a signal, creative triangulation can find your idea by zeroing in on it from different angles.

1. Shut out all external distractions: quit Outlook, close the door, shut off your cellphone, etc.
2. Set out 3 index cards (or shorties).
3. Set your trusty timer for 5 minutes.
4. Make 3 choices about your project.

It’ll take a lot less than 5 minutes, but the timer’s to keep you from dithering around and staring into space.

The Only Enemy is Uncertainty

What kinds of choices? Any kind. From the color of a character’s hair to the key of your musical composition to the kind of paper you’ll be printing your illustrations on.

That’s all there is to it. For instance, if you’ve always wanted to do a large-scale mural, you might write:

• canvas: 3’ tall by 7’ wide
• 10 athletes engaging in different sports
• sense of movement from left to right

That’s it. You’ve given yourself some good triangulation data and you’re that much closer to “finding” your creative goal.

The next day, you can triangulate from scratch, or expand an existing card with three more ideas in that same direction. If you’re writing a novel, one of your cards might reveal that your main character’s best friend is a plumber. The next day, you might name that character Bill, make him short and skinny, and add in that he’s delinquent on his taxes.

You’re Your Own Coach

Yes, this may seem like a slow way to make progress on a big project, but you’ll be surprised at how many important decisions get made in a short time.

Often, what keeps us procrastinating on creative projects are the unknowns. Once you have a thick stack of decisions, you’ll feel a lot more comfortable about laying them out, forming an outline, and getting to work for an hour.

Remember how much fun it was in art or English class when the teacher gave you a clear creative assignment? “Write a 3-page story set in a fishing village with three female characters,” or “Make an alien out of clay that could survive on a planet with no water.” You’d set right down and get to work filling in the blanks.

Creative triangulation is all about separating your creative selves, making the high-level decisions at once without getting bogged down, and then connecting the creative dots separately. It makes the going a whole lot easier.

photo by tom jervis.