Time management

You could say that my time management is crap. Maybe I have too much on my plate also, but I’ve never been convinced that is a good excuse. In fact, the only person I’m making an excuse to is myself. No one else really cares if I finish these things on my own deadlines. So basically, I’ve been letting myself down a ton.

The first step to getting things done is to realize what really needs to be done and by when. The best way I’ve found to plan things out is to visualize them. This is probably one of the main reasons I use Google Calendars. This service that Google offers lets you easily keep track things you have going on in your life. If you don’t have an account, go there today and start playing around with it.

I would recommend putting in all the things that you know have deadlines. I mean definite deadlines. Then start putting in things you need to have done, but the deadlines are kinda fuzzy. I wouldn’t suggest going overboard like I did in the beginning. At one point I started listing my lunches.

Make a better to-do-list

If you’re not making a to-do-list, then you could probably benefit from one. It’s like making a skeleton before you write a long paper. My normal to-do-list is full of everything I’ve been meaning to do. I start it out writing what I have to do that day, but it quickly develops into things that need to be done that week. After I finish it, I “try” to cross things off the list by completing them. Usually by the end of the week though, I’ve only crossed off a couple things.

It took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t finishing my to-do-lists. I decided to sit down and read the tasks that weren’t getting completed. After getting through several of them, I started to notice something. The tasks that kept getting pushed back were vague. They didn’t specify exactly what I wanted accomplished, and they didn’t give me a time frame for getting things done.

The second step to getting things done is to make a to-do-list. You’re not just making any to-do-list; you’re filling it with specific tasks you want to complete within a time frame that you can manage. An example of a bad task on your to do list is “Work on Group presentation.” That task sucks. I rewrote it and now I’m waiting for the group to get back to me, not vice-versa. What I wrote was “Review group project tonight and email back your thoughts.” It’s clear whether I completed it or not, and I knew when I had to do it by.

Eliminate distractions

Distractions are another cause for me not getting things done. I imagine they are a cause of long to-do-lists many other people too. If I were to just limit it to the internet, the things I typically pull up everyday on my computer are: Stumbleupon, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Calendars, Google News, Dumb Medicine, Clicky, Mint.com, Facebook, Wikipedia, and various instant messengers. You could see how these would be a barrier if say, I were trying to write this article. In fact, at this moment I’ve got Gmail and Google Reader up.

Now that you know when you need to have things done by and you have your to-do-list in front of you, pick the most important thing on your list. Our goal is to eliminate distractions, so you can’t have anything else pulled up and you have to isolate yourself. Continue working on your to-do-list, and do it until you’re finished (but finish this article first). Hopefully you haven’t written “Paint the entire house.” Remember, we want something you can achieve in a relatively short block of time.

The third step to getting things done is to eliminate distractions. If you’re painting some room in your house, then don’t turn on the TV and text your friends. Both can wait, and your TV isn’t showing anything anyway. If you think your TV is more important, then stop painting. Our goal here is to get quality work out of the time you spend instead of half-assed attempts which you have to go back and fix. This gives you time for quality play.

Consistency

Consistency will keep you from reverting back to crappy time management and ineffective to-do-lists. Keeping yourself on track will make you a work powerhouse, and once you finish being your work you’ll be a playtime powerhouse.

After starting the first 3 steps, you’re going to have to keep with it for a little while. Once you start knocking things off your list, other things will start dropping in that you’ve been avoiding and you gotta do those too. You should find with consistency in getting things done, you’ll finish things on time and become even more efficient at doing tasks.

Consistency has been my failure. I had discovered these steps several years ago, but I slacked off with my lists. After re-initiating my work regimen, I’m starting to come up with some free time. Guess who’s going wine tasting this weekend?

-DM

Ken Robinson believes that creativity should be valued just as much as reading is. I must say that I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Let’s define creativity

First, we need to be on the same page. To me, creativity is the ability to come up with an original idea that adds value to some aspect of life. It usually presents itself as a combination of two previously separate ideas into a new useful form. An example of this would be bringing together my understanding of websites, and my wish to develop both myself and others. What I’ve created is something new that is useful.

So you see, anyone can be creative. Just write down a list of things you like to do and you’re good at. Then start combining them. I once saw a movie where the actress hosted a jogging/photography class. Hell, I wanna go try that right now.

The problem with schools

I believe schools disvalue creativity in children. Instructors take this authoritative approach to teaching. They have the answers, they provide the questions, the students should just learn what is taught.

Children become afraid to be wrong, and this in turn creates adults who are afraid to be wrong. The problem is this line of reasoning is completely ass backwards. Take it from your own experiences. Haven’t the lessons that have stuck with you the most clearly been from mistakes you made rather than answers you got right?

Failure is not creativity

Now I’m not saying failure is creativity. However, Ken Robinson pointed out that you can’t be creative if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And the truth is you can’t.

People aren’t born with innate knowledge in whatever field they’re in. They learn it, and a lot of times it’s by trial and error. Those people who are truly creative fail. They fail a bunch. What separates them from the pack is their mindset.

The creative mindset

The creative mindset does not take a single failure as an ultimate failure. The creative mindset learns from the failure and adjusts appropriately. After you adjust, you may still fail. Just keep pushing hard and eventually you’ll come up with a creative solution.

Hope this was helpful. If not, please comment and tell me so.

-DM

What is sleep for

The fact of the matter is we don’t really know why we sleep. We recognize it’s an important part of daily life and that most mammals do it, but we have no exact idea how it works. The most common belief is that sleep gives the brain a chance to reorganize the previous day’s events. It is also thought that sleep helps repair damage done to the body and reset emotional stress experienced during the day.

I find when I wake up from a restful night’s sleep I focus better on my day-to-day tasks, and my body is certainly more refreshed. I basically have a new starting point for my emotions which allows me to be more effective in whatever challenges arise. We don’t know exactly how these processes work, but we know sleep is necessary.

How to think about sleep

The first step to getting a restful night’s sleep is to realize what sleep is. Natural sleep is a response to the physical, mental, and emotional stress of the day. I actually have a friend to thank for this revelation.  I was in my first year of university and had an 8 am class the next morning. It was around 1 am, but I wasn’t quite tired yet. I told my friend I had to go to sleep because I had class in the morning. He pointed out that you shouldn’t sleep unless you’re tired. Since then, I’ve avoided going to bed unless I was tired and I’ve slept much better.

It is my contention that if you plan on continuously having a good night’s sleep, you should not try to get extra sleep before you need it. I believe you end up sleeping lighter, taking longer to get to sleep, and decreasing the quality of your sleep. Instead, catch up on your sleep when you’re tired, and you will slowly start to sleep better.

Our goal is not to have a good night’s sleep one night, and a crappy one the next. Our goal is to provide good sleeping patterns consistently.

Stop keeping yourself up

What I’ve been talking about so far has been how to naturally get yourself to sleep. The problem is most people do things that keep themselves up.  An example of this would be having a cup of coffee 10 minutes before you go to bed. Some people can do this, especially if they’ve been drinking coffee for years, but this is not the case for most people. If you’re having trouble sleeping though, you may want to take an audit of things you do right before bed. As a disclaimer, these activities don’t cause sleep deprivation in all people, but they have the propensity to do so:

• Drinking caffeine before bed
• Having a shower right before bed
• Exercising late at night
• Eating food high in sugar before bed
• Stimulating your mind (e.g. doing work)
• Using a computer right before bed
• Drinking alcohol
• Taking stimulating medications
• Napping during the day
• Using your bed for activities other than sleep (e.g. writing this article)
• Having an inconsistent schedule

So if you do any of these things just before bed, then STOP, at least temporarily. They may be causing you to have sleep difficulties. Unfortunately this is going to be trial and error until we can find out what works for you. After you’ve tried eliminating activities that may prevent you from sleeping, it’s time to looking into ways to help you sleep.

Put yourself to sleep

Now that we’ve talked about things that may be preventing you from sleeping, we now need to discuss methods to make it easier to sleep. You’re probably familiar with most of these so I’ll try to shed some light on how they work and their place in your life.

Relax your mind by trying these two relaxation techniques:

• Progressive muscle relaxation: Lightly tense each muscle or muscle group for 2 seconds at a time starting with your face. Move down your body and if you’re still awake by the time you get to your little toe, start over.
• Relaxation by quieting the mind: Picture a calm flow of relaxation from your mind outwards to the rest of your body. Take it slowly, relax your abdominal breathing, and redirect any thoughts towards neutral thoughts.

Increasing physical tiredness:

Most people do not get enough exercise to leave them physically tired at the end of the day. Supplementing this to your daily routine may have a drastic effect on your sleep patterns. Consider one of the following:

• Add 30 minutes of walking, jogging, or biking a day to increase your heart rate.
• Lifting weights without significant breaks between sets can have the same cardiovascular effect.

Sleep restriction:

• Staying in bed longer to make up for lost sleep shifts your circadian rhythm later into the night.
• This causes you to have more difficulty sleeping the next night.
• By limiting the amount of sleep that you receive, you counteract the tendency to stay in bed longer and force the body to be more efficient with its sleep.
• After several days of this, your body adjusts to shorter sleep times and gets more out each sleep period.

Medicines your doctor may recommend for insomnia:

It’s important to note that medications should be your last resort for getting a restful night’s sleep. Use of sleep medications can cause a physical dependence, and even worsen insomnia when you stop taking them. The following are examples of medicines your doctor may recommend:

• Benadryl (diphenhydramine) taken just before bed.
• Melatonin taken as a supplement.
• Prescription drugs which you should talk to your doctor about.

Methods you should not try:

These methods have shown little effect in helping people get to sleep, and stay asleep. Moreover, they have shown the potential to cause damage or actually decrease the amount of sleep you get. It’s best to avoid them.

• Alcohol should never be used to get to sleep.
  • It helps you get to sleep initially, but your body works to counteract the alcohol while you’re sleeping.
  • When the drowsiness effect of the alcohol is gone, you’re left with your body’s counteraction effect which can wake you up.
• Valerian root is a common herbal supplement recommended for sleep.
  • Little benefit has been shown in studies.
  • Can cause damage to you liver.

In summary

If you’re having trouble sleeping, you should  follow each of the  recommendations below in order:

• Establish your own thoughts about how you sleep.
• Eliminate activities that keep you from sleeping.
• Practice activities that help you get to sleep.
• Quiet your mind before you go to sleep.
• Turn to your doctor and medicines as a last resort.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful.

-DM

If you haven’t heard of mint.com, it’s a website that logs into each of your bank accounts, retirement accounts, loans, and many more accounts and keeps track of them all in one place. I know people are hesitant about allowing access to a third party for their financial information, but hear me out.

I used to have 3 bank accounts, 2 credit cards, and 6 separate student loans. I also had 7 or 8 passwords that I had to use to check each one of the accounts. It was a bit redundant. Especially if I just wanted to check the balance for my accounts.

So a friend suggested for me to try mint.com, and I’ve never looked back.

Features

So my favorite thing about mint.com is the features. Because it downloads each transaction from each of your accounts, mint.com can show you the grand scheme of what’s going on in your financial world. It offers Trending which allows you to classify your expenses. An example would be if I went to Home Depot and spent a buttload on rakes, then I could classify that as Lawn & Garden. Then when you look at the Trending for the month, you’ll notice you spent a buttload on Lawn & Garden for that month.

Since Lawn & Garden is not a regular spending category for most people (except farmers), it doesn’t represent a category you should budget for. However, if you did want to budget for rakes, mint.com can help you do that. Their Planning tab gives you the option to create a monthly budget. This was helpful for me because my wife and I have separate credit cards, and we were having trouble keep up with how much we’d spent on each. What we did was set mint.com up to email me when we had exceeded the budget for a certain category for the month. Freaking awesome.

Another tab available on mint.com is the Ways to Save. This one is a bit self explanatory. If you enter your most recent credit score, the website will look for credit cards, bank accounts, and investing you can do to help you save money. It convinced me to get a Discover Card, and will probably show you some way you could be saving.

Mint.com is fully customisable, so your experience with it may be completely different than mine. I personally love this service, and will continue to use it.

Design

I would be doing you a disfavor if I didn’t talk about the design of mint.com. It’s got a very clean design. They have a soft green background with a white gradient which makes it look slick. I’m not sure, but I believe there is a ton of AJAX on the pages, so you don’t always click the submit button. If you’re unfamiliar with AJAX, it’s a way of building websites so you don’t have to click submit buttons all the time.

I remember when I first started using it, it didn’t take me very long to figure out where everything is. The organization of the website is intuitive, and the layout is easy to read. You’ll find your way around quickly, and if you don’t, send me a comment and I’ll try to write a tutorial.

Wish List

The only thing mint.com doesn’t do that I wish it would do is allow me to pay off credit card bills and transfer money between accounts. You can think of the website as a view into your financials, but nothing more. You can not move money around, pay off bills, or otherwise alter your online bank accounts. I understand how that can protect customers, but it would still be great to be able to do everything on one site.

Well, I hope you found this article helpful. It’s the first review I’ve ever written so there are bound to be some gigantic holes. Let me know what you think and please comment if you’ve found this helpful or if this has been a waste of your time.

-DM

So goals are pretty important aren’t they? I tend to think so at least. They help us make sense of what we’re trying to do with this life. I unfortunately have not been very good at keeping with my goals lately. I consider it a personal failure.

The most recent example is actually this website. It has been a medicine blog for about 2 years now, and before personal development, my plan was to write a fictional story about a pharmacist who is having a normal day, then is thrown into the worlds of spies and action. My plan was to produce an article every 3 days.

I had already written 7 or so articles when I started and had set them up to automatically come up. The problem is I never kept with it after I set up the articles. I left the story on autopilot, and eventually became disinterested in the story all together.

My challenge to you

You’ve come to a personal development website to develop yourself. I’m here to provide you with the information you’re seeking to develop yourself. Therefore, I feel a bit accountable for your successes or failures, so I’m going to assume the role of a coach.

My challenge to you is to set one goal. It can be almost anything, but I want you to set a goal. If I were you, I’d set some goal that you consider a self improvement. I’m not even going to try to tell you what your goal should be, that’s personal. For some, growing a mustache could be their goal. If they consider it a self improvement that is. For others, the challenge could be to shave their mustache away everyday. This should be entirely personalized to you, and should be a self improvement.

What kind of goals are you talking about?

I could say that one goal I have is to get out of bed everyday, but it’s a crappy idea. For me it has never been an issue. I believe I’ve never spent an entire day in bed. My point with this is I would never consider getting out of bed a goal. Getting out of bed is a habit of mine and is also a habit most other people. Now, I recognize there are people who have struggled with getting out of bed every day of their life. If you’re one of those people, then getting out of bed could be a goal for you.

I know that was an exhaustive metaphor, but my point is your goal should be something that is not a habit of yours. It should be something that improves some aspect of your life that you are not already doing. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but general themes for self improvement are as follows:

• Improves your health
• Improves your mind
• Improves your spirit
• Improves your relationships

Why set goals?

Like I said, I think goals are generally a good thing. Goals give us direction for our actions, and allow us to achieve things we would otherwise not do. I’ve found from my own experience that if I don’t develop some plan for my day, I will actually do nothing. I might read random articles or look at work without actually doing it, but at the end of the day I couldn’t tell you what I did.

Goals however make you accountable to yourself. They give you a skeleton for your day, and generally help you remember you have things to do.

Enforcing your goal

I find that if I don’t write down what I’m meant to do I forget. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a poor short-term memory, or a by product of being a guy. It’s probably a mixture, but that’s still no excuse for the number of things I forget. So lately, I’ve been writing down a list of what I’ve meant for myself to do. This may be a strategy that helps you. Please let me know if it does.

Write down your goal, and put it somewhere that you will see several times throughout the day. You shouldn’t hide it, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed by it. If you are, then use code words!

My challenge

I wouldn’t be a very good personal developer if I didn’t hold myself accountable to a goal either. So even if no one else reads this blog but my wife, my goal is to write at least 1 article every 2 days. This one has taken me about 30 minutes of dedicated time, and I think it is a pretty decent start. Let me know what you think.

If you end up following my blog, please keep me on track. I’ll get emails if you guys comment, and I think social reinforcement would be helpful. Oh yeah, thanks for reading my first post!

DM