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What Andy's Doing
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Recently Written
- Passionate People: Get What You Deserve, Become a Career Renegade!
- Featured Blog: Patrick Rhone and His Journal
- Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?
- Why Working Long, Hard Hours Gets You Behind (?)
- How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered
- My Scandelous Confession and A Royal Rant About GTD
- On New Beginnings (And More About Your Host)
- Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
- How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony
- How to Chill Out
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Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?
I hope everyone out there in the US enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday! Many of us enjoyed a 4 day weekend away from work or our normal responsibilities. As for me, I spent all but about an hour completely disconnected from the Internet world. The greatest part was that there weren’t any of those nervous ticks that I might have expected. There wasn’t even a worry about missing anything. I came back online late Sunday night feeling pretty energized overall and got caught up on my non-email online activities within a 20 minutes or so (checking my Twitter stream, RSS reader, etc.)
Coming back from a (mostly) online-free 4 days made me realize how much time is wasted every day checking and rechecking stuff for no good reason. It made me wonder if it was possible, or productive, to have more days where I greatly reduce my usage of the Internet… Or maybe even cut it out entirely!
What do you think? Is there any additional productivity to be gained from unplugging the modem for a day or two a week and forcing yourself to focus on only the important stuff in your life? Has anyone tried it? If so, what are the results? If not, would you? Please discuss 
Eliminating Distractions is Easy.
OK, maybe it’s not “easy”, but there’s certainly no magic to it. Books upon volumes have been penned about this fairly straightforward topic; books full of hacks, wisdom and tricks that will help you maintain your focus and not get sidetracked. But I’ve got some news for you, Jack…
It’s entirely up to you. Anything that you allow into your peripheral vision while you’re hammering away on that big proposal is, yep, your fault. That said, it’s time for a little thing the Russians call “tough love”.
When people in this day and age refer to distractions, most of the time they’re talking about computer-related things. Mind-yankers like instant messaging applications, Facebook, your fantasy underwater basketweaving team, etc. You need to relegate things like this to your discretionary time (obviously). And if you want to remove them as distractions, you have to get freaking guerrilla about it. Removing them from your bookmark toolbar in Firefox isn’t going to cut it (as you probably already know), because the temptation is too great and the satisfaction is too immediately had.
Switchtasking
This post was written by business coach Dave Crenshaw, author of the great new book The Myth of Multitasking
I’d like to share a valuable principle with you. It’s something I’ve taught to many business owners and executives I’ve worked with. This principle may go against the grain of some of your beliefs about time and the best way to get things done. Because of that, I ask you to keep an open mind.
Multitasking is a myth. It just plain doesn’t exist.
Productivity vs. Social Media
As many of you know, I’ve been immersing myself in some of these social media services lately (Twitter, FriendFeed, and most recently Seesmic and Vimeo). It’s been a lot of fun and I’m really happy to have started doing it, but something has been vexing me.
How does a personal productivity nut reconcile the (arguably fruitless) time spent interacting with people online?
I posted a video over at Seesmic of myself rambling on about it. Would love to hear your feedback, here’s the video:
Friday Fun: Flip Video
My wife bought me a Flip Video Ultra for Father’s Day. If you’re unfamiliar, you can find more info here - but it’s essentially a really tiny digital video camera. It’s too cool for words, I kid you not. Here’s a video of my son and I playing with it:
Are You the Hoonan? from Brett Kelly on Vimeo.
Fun, fun stuff.
Be sure to subscribe to my Vimeo feed to see all of the little oddball video clips I put up there. I’m going to have a good time with this thing
Have a great weekend, everybody!
Technorati Tags: vimeo, flip video, friday fun
Describing Twitter in Plain English
I’m a big fan of Twitter (even though we’ve had our differences in the past - mostly due to my not “getting it”). While my updates may not be as fast, furious or incessant as some of the people whom I follow, I do try to pop on there as often as is feasible without completely kneecapping my productivity at work and home.
Whenever I mention Twitter to my non-techie friends and family, I’m often asked what it is and I can never quite articulate it without making it sound like some über-nerd service that only computer people use. It’s frustrating, because it’s such a fun service (and potential time sink - you’ve been warned, uninitiated readers) and I really wish more people used it.
Fortunately, I found this great video (via Twitter, oddly enough) that does a fantastic job of explaining just what Twitter actually is and why it’s so freakin’ cool.
Why I Never Turn Off My Cell Phone
One of the major tenets of this whole personal productivity dance is the elimination of distraction. Many productivity-related sites and blogs (including this one) espouse everything from the closing of email clients and instant messenger applications to the wearing of headphones as possible ways to reduce “background noise” while working. Another one that I hear tossed around is the turning off of the cell phone. Personally, I don’t partake in this particular piece of the pie.
Not long ago, my wife was pregnant with our first child. As the due date drew closer, there was the looming possibility of her going into labor at any moment, including the moments when I was at work. At the time, my job (and the culture of the company) dictated that I would have random, lengthy, ad hoc meetings in the halls of the office. Whenever these normally took place and I received a call from her, I’d hit the little “ignore” key and send her to voice mail. She understood that this meant that I was either talking to somebody or otherwise occupied. But, due to the imminent arrival of our son, we had to develop a system so I would know that the call she was making was “the call”. If I got a call, sent it to voice mail and immediately got another call, that meant that something important was happening and I needed to speak to her.
You Know, I’m a Terribly Interesting Guy…
And for that reason, I know all of you are just itching to chew the fat with yours truly.
So, being the benevolent, emotionally available blogger that I am, I’ve added a couple Meebo widgets to this here blog that give you, my dear reader, immediate access to me. Check the left hand side of all the pages on this site, or you can use the big boy on the contact page.
Please feel free to say “hi”, “you suck” or whatever you’d like. I’m typically on during business hours (Pacific Time), but you can leave me a message even if I’m not on.
Cheers!
The Single Biggest Enemy of Workplace Productivity
If you asked 100 people what keeps them from accomplishing their goals, completing tasks at the office, etc., I imagine you’d hear answers like “procrastination”, “interruptions” and the like. And while those things are definitely formidable foes in their own right, I believe there’s a single object that, for all the benefits it brings, hampers our overall effectiveness more than any of the aforementioned, abstract notions.
This object is one that veils itself in a shroud of almost magical power. It can take you around the world, show you things you’ve never dreamed of seeing, teach you just about anything you could possibly want to know - and even tell you when your prescriptions are ready to be picked up…
6 Ways to Limit Interruptions at Work (That You Can Use Right Now)
Given the type of work that I do, I spend a great deal of time not talking to anybody and just thinking and typing. I do my best work when I can guarantee (which I usually can’t) several solid hours of total solitude. Nobody walking up to my desk asking me questions, no pop-ups telling me I have new email, no ringing phone. Just me and my computer working in blissful harmony.
Unfortunately, this is rarely possible. Tech support has questions, my boss needs status on a project and Jeff wants to know where we’re going for lunch. It’s less than idea, but it’s reality. The good news is, you can easily cut down on the number of times Bob from Accounting taps you on the shoulder about something or other. Here’s the list of time-tested strategies I’ve come up with to get people who walk up to your desk to take one look at you, then turn around and leave:
