Monthly Archives: January 2009

Blogging Inspirations

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blogging-heros

(There are a lot of links to great further reading in this post, so please set aside some time to have a look through them.)

A great blog, and therefore one I am likely to subscribe to is one that I can get lost in for a while. It will in someway connect with me and captivate my interest to make me click through the top posts and open up the archives for more nuggets of gold posted over the life of the blog.

In my current area of blogging there are some obvious ‘hero’ bloggers. There is Leo Babauta from Zen Habits who was one of the major inspirations for me starting a blog. There is Tim Ferris, the self styled guru of lifestyle design. These people enjoy the power of exponential growth in their following on an hourly basis. They all work very hard at what they do and collectively inspire millions of people around the world.

Aside from the above ‘A-List’ bloggers, I’d like to share some of my other favourite blogs. As you can see they all operate in different ‘niches’ and are excellent sources of information as they are aligned with my own Lifestyle Project. As with many blogs I can’t remember how I first came across them, and I’m sure if you are reading you might not remember how you go here. That’s how it rolls in the blogosphere.

Almost Fearless (@almostfearless )
I love this blog as Christine is on the journey that I am aiming for. A successful manager in an fortune 500 company, she earned a good living, worked hard and got great results. There came a time and, she just didn’t want to do it anymore. She had the realisation that there is more to life than a career and a few weeks away each year. The world is an amazing place. Don’t you want to do out and see it? Christine now travels funding herself through freelance writing and photography – and tells us all the story along the way.

Read Christine’s Lifestyle Project she shared on this blog here.

Posts to get you started on Almost Fearless:

Caroline Middlebrook (@cmiddlebrook)
Before you jump over to Caroline’s excellent blog which is essentially a blog about making money online, understand that it is not my primary motivation for subscribing to this blog. Caroline’s back-story is inspiring and this is what is important to the Lifestyle Project blog. Caroline also quit her day job to pursue what she wanted to do. She is an absolutely excellent writer and has a particular talent for teaching through writing. She demystifies the world of social media, blogging and making money online and shares here journey with you at a detailed level with monthly earning reports. Caroline is able to communicate simply the concepts in this minefield niche.

Posts to get you started on Caroline-Middlebrook:

MuscleHack (@musclehack)
Mark’s passion for muscle building, diet and communicating his message is outstanding. He has an excellent system for building muscle and loosing fat. His free eBook is exceptional if you want to learn about this. Mark cuts through all the fuzz in this area and gives you the cold hard facts based on his own learning. Currently I am working through Mark’s Total Six Pack Abs programme, the results are already showing! Expect a review of his book here soon. Mark is a great writer of focused informal posts, and has build up quite a following in just over a year of blogging.

Read Mark’s Lifestyle Project he shared on this blog here.

Posts to get you started on MuscleHack:

One of the reasons I believe the above people are successful bloggers is because they have a genuine voice, and really make you feel that you can succeed doing what they do . They are passionate about what they do and are truly inspiring to my Lifestyle Projects and me as a blogger. An interesting thing to note is the above blogs, like mine, are all under 18 months old!

5 Reasons to Say Yes More

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There other night I saw the new film Yes Man, starring Jim Carrey. This is based on a book by the writer Danny Wallace, although the film follows a different story to the book. The basic premise of the plot is that the main character leads a boring life. Since the breakdown of his marriage he has become an introvert and says “No” to going out with his friends and similar opportunities. He attends a cult-style seminar where a man describes to him the power of saying “Yes”. He is told that he needs to say “Yes” to everything, obviously with appropriate entertaining consequences.

Behind the easy watching of the film is a real message that good things happen if you start to say “Yes” to things. How many opportunities have you passed up on because you are stuck in the rut of your current job or group of friends? Remember the last time you did something truly spontaneous? I bet you had a great time that you weren’t expecting.

yes

Before I get in to the reasons why you should say “Yes” more, I feel that I should justify this in the context of some of my previous writing. When talking about maximising your time and making sure that you have control of your time and not letting people steel it from you, I have talked about learning to say “No”. The point of this is that you should say “No” to things that do not get you towards the places where you want to be, or those that add to you already endless to do list and give you no real reward.

Reasons to say “Yes”

1. Learn something new
If you say yes to something that you wouldn’t normally, chances are you will learn something new. Everything we do is a learning experience, but if we repeat the same routines over and over again then you will start living you life on auto-pilot. Saying “Yes” to something new is a great way to open your eyes to a whole new world of experiences and opportunities.

2. Operate outside of your comfort zone
Often we say no to new experiences because we are afraid (either consciously or subconsciously) of what the experience will bring us. Operating outside of your comfort zone teaches you deal with difficult situations. “Do something everyday that scares you” Eleanor Roosevelt.

3. Choose your destiny
You are where you are today as a consequence of the decisions you have made up to this point in time. By saying yes you are making a conscious effort to have a positive influence on the direction your life is taking.

4. Help others
Do you really spend enough time helping others? When was the last time you said “No” to a friend and missed out on something great. Say “Yes”, help and spend time with others. This is something that you will only regret if you don’t do it. Life is too short to say “No” to everything. When was the last time you had the opportunity to help someone else but refused? Say “Yes” and make someones day, as well as your own.

5. Help yourself
It’s not just opportunities and other people you may want to think about saying “Yes” to more, but also yourself. How many things do you censor yourself from doing? Think back to something you said “No” to in the past and now regret. Don’t live in regret, allow yourself to say “Yes”.

Obviously this is the “Yes” side of the argument, but I think you should give it a try. Start saying “Yes” to more opportunities (not pointless tasks) and see where it takes you.

What do you think? Will you give it a try?

Image by davespilbrow on Flickr via Creative Commons

(My First) Video Update

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I’ve decided to give doing a video post a whirl as i’ve never used iMovie on my Mac before (it is very easy to use it turns out), and I thought it would be fun to inject some other forms of media in to my blog. Also I am going to apply for this job so the experience is useful!

Before you watch the video I feel I should justify a few things:

  1. This is the first ever video post I have done.
  2. I am really more enthusiastic than I come across in the video! Like writing, video posting is obviously something that evolves over time.
  3. My hair isn’t always that messy.
  4. Video editing and understanding that kind of technology is my main motivation for doing the video. Like most people I don’t like seeing my own picture, let alone video so this is not a narcissistic activity.
  5. I deliberately didn’t retake or over edit as I want to see how it comes across in the blog etc.

Enjoy the video and I look forward to your feedback!

Note to subscribers: You may need to visit the site to see the video.

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  • As I mention in the video I am currently contemplating a slight change in direction for the blog. Stay tuned – there is going to be a lot more on this…
  • I’m an inspirational blogger! Thanks Jay
  • Yes I’ve had a mess around with my blog design. I’m a lot happier with it now.
Image by Goodimages on Flickr via Creative Commons

And the winner is…

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celebration

Thanks to all those who entered my competition to win the Muji-Chrononotebook.

The entry closing date was Saturday 10th January 2009 at 12pm GMT.

Here’s how the winner was selected.

1. I had 11 entries in the end (which was strange because when I announced the competition a lot more people were interested)

I entered the numbers 1 to 11 in to the Random.org website. When put in random order whichever number appeared first would be the winning comment:

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2. Hit Randomize!

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3. So No. 7 came out first. Over to the entries to see which comment is No. 7.

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4. And the winner is…..MIKE, from Providence, RI – well done Mike, check your inbox!

Thanks for all of the entries and kind comments guys. Look out for more competitions in the future!

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A few notes on running competitions on your blog (if you have one)

  • I decided to run a ‘Subscriber only’ competition for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the chance to give a little back to my subscribers as a thanks (to add extra value to being a subscriber of my blog) and secondly to see if running a subscriber competition would increase numbers. It did increase numbers so I am pleased. I am also aware that people may have only subscribed to enter the competition but I am OK with this as it is inevitable, and it still gets me on their radar.
  • I thought it would be really easy to add a password to the end of a blog post that could only be visible by RSS or Email subscribers. How wrong I was! Unless I completely missed something in my googling, there is no easy way. I tried a footer plugin that didn’t work (hence two posts to annouce the competition, sorry about that). In the end I had to get something up there quickly. I used feedburners ‘feed flares’ feature, which is where you can add links to the end of your feed such as “add to delicious” or “digg this”. I tried to make a custom one but I’ve not messed around with XML before so it didn’t work. I had to therefore opt for an already available text only feed flare hence the rather odd password “Hello, World”.
  • What have I learned about running a competition on my blog? 1. Test your entry mechanism first! (I should have done this anyway and not procrastinated – not taking my own advice on that one!) 2. It is a great way to increase subscribers, I got a jump of probably over 30 subscribers. I also got a link off Zen Habits at that time though…

LOOK OUT FOR ANOTHER COMPETITION HERE SOON!

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In other news: Ross over at the excellent Will it Change You? blog has just released his eBook “Jump-Start Change”. Do head over an check it out.

Image by Kazeeee on Flickr via Creative Commons

Diminishing Returns in Productivity

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toomuchinfo

I work in IT and spend a lot of my time on the Internet. I love gadgets. I love new technology. The question is, does all this technology help us or is it really holding us back? Spending a lot of time messing about with technology and not really achieving anything – sound familiar? I do often have to take a step back and wonder if what I am doing is a productive use of my time. By productive use of my time I mean that I am questioning whether I am using my precious time in the best way to reach my ultimate goals (the end game)?

Whilst obviously it is essential to spend time on your interests (what’s the point of living if you aren’t doing what you want to do), it is important to review and make sure that we aren’t doing things just for the sake of doing them, and more to the point not kidding ourselves that messing around with our ‘systems’ ‘workflows’ and ‘lists’ is actually productive use of time. I have found that the more technology and systems available to me, the more information overload I have. I can’t get enough information sometimes and I often find that I don’t want to discard a piece of information until I have got the most out of it. This could be reading it, committing it to memory, filing it for possible later use or sharing it with other people who might find the information useful.

For example, at the moment I am spending quite a lot of time redeveloping my system for holding, organising, using and storing the mountain of information I come across on any given day. I’d say that over 90% of this information comes from being connected. It could be a new blog, a search that I have done on a particular topic and found 10 links I want to follow up on or something that a fellow twitterer has suggested. Whilst systems (such as GTD) are great for organising and storing information, without a execution plan (the actual doing rather than just collecting) your pile (albeit digital) of information to digest just continues to grow. 18 months ago I don’t think that I had this mountain of information to deal with. I wasn’t aware of as much about social media, blogs and productivity. I probably did have a similar amount of information to deal with but just didn’t realise that I did or wasn’t so worried about it as I wasn’t clued up on ‘being productive’.

Tim Ferriss suggests going on a low information diet. This is a brilliant Idea and I have applied that principle (at least in part) by cutting down my RSS feeds, and only going on the internet to look for information when I need it. The problem I have is that I am interested in a lot of things, as always Google and the answer to my endless questions is only a click away.

I do enjoy learning something new every day and being knowledgeable on a given topic, but sometimes I need to take a step back, not gather any new information and process the information I have.

At the moment I am trying to simplify my system to serve two main purposes therefore:

  1. Efficient capture, storage and relevance of information.
  2. Efficient execution of action with the information relevant to my goals and progression.

So my system is a work in progress. I don’t think I’ll ever stop tweaking it, but for now it’s back to organising the wealth of information I have whilst being ruthless with the deletes and taking action against those things that are going to make a difference.

Is productivity making you unproductive? Have you any tips to share? Let me know in the comments below!

Image by Will Lion on Flickr via Creative Commons

COMPETITION ENTRY

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Sorry for doing a separate post about this but the plugin didn’t work on my previous post.

If you are a subscriber via RSS or Email you will see a password at the bottom of this post (I hope!).

For a chance to win the Muji Chrononotebook all you need to do is leave a comment on the competition page (not this post) – that’s it. Say anything you want (preferably nice). On the 10th January I will assign each comment a number and used an internet based randomiser to pick a winning comment number. Simple.

Please make sure that you submit a valid email address with your comment so I can contact you should you win!

CLICK HERE FOR COMPETITION PAGE

PASSWORD APPEARS BELOW FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY (enter exactly as seen with punctation and space):

Letting Things Go

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lettinggo

“Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you’re liberated in a way that few people ever know.” Timothy Ferriss

I was spending some time the other night catching up on some internet reading using the excellent Instapaper iPhone Application (you don’t need an iPhone to use Instapaper, I started using it in it’s web-based form well before I got my iPhone). I found one article I had saved which was an interview with an author of an upcoming book. I did not recognise either the name of the book or the author and after a quick skim over the contents of the article and I could see no reason why I had saved the article. I do save a lot of information to process later and extract anything that I think is relevant.

I tell this brief story as I am trying to overcome a personal habit of consuming too much information. I have hundreds of blog posts to read, stacks of books and magazines and a fast internet connection at both home and work which means I am only seconds away from finding the answers to any question that may pop in to my head. What the above example showed me it is OK not to consume all of the information, and if something is interesting and relevant it is very likely that it will present itself to you again in the future.

I am making a real effort to cut down on my information consumption and this will certainly help. Why am I cutting down you may ask? Well, I feel that I have reached saturation point on a lot of the topics I usually read about, so I want to focus my time more effectively on my Lifestyle Project (namely the quitting the 9-5 bit), and I think that a better use of my time at the moment is to do more writing than reading. Reading is important to inspire your writing but I think that I have gotten a little out of balance, spending most of my time consuming information and not much time producing content, which is a pretty important part of being a blogger. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just my balance is so out of whack it is not the most effective for improving my writing and my longer term goals as a blogger.

So I am training myself (slowly) to only consume the information needed to do the task at hand, and make taking action for my own projects the real priority. Therefore  please forgive me if I miss the odd post or commenting on your blog, I am keeping an eye on things and increasingly it seems I garner a lot of information from twitter. Twitter is like a river that you dip in to from time to time but can’t catch everything that flows through it – I like this approach and it seems to be working well! I am a big fan of simplicity so am on a real simplicity binge at the moment trying to simplify a lot of the elements that take up my time and attention.

It’s about selective ignorance and the art letting bad things happen. What’s really the worst that could happen anyway?

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  • Hope you are enjoyed the festive period and are well on the way with your Lifestyle Projects in the New Year!
  • This post should (for RSS and EMail subscribers only) contain secret password to the Muji Choronotebook competition – so I hope it works! [NB: The plugin did not work! I’ll have to post a subscriber only link again somehow – sorry!)
  • If you have any requests for topics you would like me to cover on my blog please do let me know.
Image by PentaxFanatiK on Flickr via Creative Commons