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- 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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Featured Blog: Patrick Rhone and His Journal
This is the first post of many over the coming months as part of an ongoing attempt to help shed more light on bloggers who aim to help you get more done and reach your goals. If you’d like to suggest a blog, check out my original post “How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered” and leave a comment.
Patrick Rhone is by no means new to the blogging world. He has been doing it for a few years now and has been mentioned in some pretty big blogs, such as 37Signals’ Signals v Noise as well as Merlin Mann’s 43folders. I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to his work when I started writing for Cranking Widgets a few months ago.
About Patrick Rhone
When I asked Patrick why he started blogging, and why he still does it today, here’s what he had to say:
My first job in the tech industry was writing customer service correspondence, technical documents and copy for a computer company. Even as a kid I wanted to grow up to be a writer. I started out in my career as a writer and, though blogging, I continue to do so now. The main reason I enjoy doing so is to share my ideas, clear my head and, hopefully, pass along a useful lesson or two.
Patrick exemplifies the essence of why blogging originally rose to popularity. Blogging started as a place for real people to express themselves and maybe help others in the process. His writing offers a nice balance of soul and useful information. He doesn’t do it for money, there are no ads to be found anywhere on his blog. It is clear that he’s gone to great lengths to make his blog all about communicating the content and nothing else.
A Few Notable Posts
Below are some of my favorites from Patrick’s archives.
- In Defense of Fiddling: I’ve been known to bash the concept of fiddling. Patrick offers a good argument for why fiddling may not be so bad.
- Getting Real With Your Lists: A great wake up call that deserves a re-read periodically. Sometimes we get caught up in the moment with our ideas. For example, once upon a time I thought I wanted to learn how to kite surf. I live near the beach so I thought it would be a fun thing to do. It was on my someday list for a while, then I realized I never saw others kite surfing at my local beach, which made me realize I probably wouldn’t do it since I’d have to travel. I got real. It got scratched.
- AwayFind: A great review of a new service that deserves mentioning. He goes beyond the product features and talks about the real benefits. Well done.
Conclusion
Patrick is not one to post for the sake of posting – He generally writes when he has something useful to say. A solid focus on value is never a bad thing. This makes Patrick Rhone’s Journal is a perfect candidate for subscribing to his RSS feed, or alternatively you can get notified of new posts by following him on Twitter.
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 
Why Working Long, Hard Hours Gets You Behind (?)
I was at a dinner party the other day and observed the following fascinating exchange (names have been changed to protect the innocent ):
Cheryl is enjoying her wine and poking away at her Blackberry when she notices her acquantance Jude had just arrived. Cheryl gets up and walks over to Jude. They greet eachother with a hug’s and hello’s. Jude asks, “Hey! How have you been?”
Cheryl proudly replies, “I’m stressed out! I’ve been putting in 10 hour days to finish a very important project at work and I can barely sleep at night. Its all I can think about.”
Jude, appearing to feel inferior, retorts, “That sounds great! But, I wish I had your schedule. I’ve been working 10 hour days and most weekends recently!”
Cheryl gets a bit defensive and quickly shoots back with, “Well, I’d trade my weekends to get rid of these headaches. At least you don’t get migranes twice a week! But it’s worth it. I bought a new boat, its a beautiful 40 footer. I’m just not sure when I’ll be able to find the time to use it!”
At that point I had lost interest and stopped listening. I’m pretty sure the pissing match continued for a while longer…
High Stress = Success!
How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered
It is my observation that writers of niche blogs have a fairly predictable shelf life. Most non-news-telling bloggers that see some early successes last a good 2-3 years before they stop posting. Most of the time the value posts are made within the first 12 months and it goes downhill from there. (Side tip: whenever you discover a new blog on a topic of interest that boasts a solid readership today, find the archives and start from the beginning. You’ll rarely be disappointed.)
There are only so many tips one person can have for how to make widgets, shave your body hair, make money online, collect monkeys, or whatever else may get a bloggers goat for a while. The symptoms are the same: deceleration of posting, the authors posts seem forced and/or repetitive, more guest posters, etc. My gut tells me we’re coming to an end of a cycle of higher-profile bloggers in the productivity world. I think its a shame because many were an invaluable source of inspiration and great ideas.
Here’s to New Blogs With Great Content in Need of Readers
A few weeks ago a fellow named Chuck Westbrook started a movement designed to give up-and-coming bloggers a chance to gain some exposure. Chris Brogan caught wind of the concept and tweeted about it to his ~20k followers on Twitter. Later Darren from Problogger and Guy Kawasaki tossed in some links and really gave the idea some legs.
Chuck is on to something, but my definition of an interesting blogger is slightly different that what has been selected so far. I like reading what helpful and/or inspirational productivity or personal development-oriented bloggers have to say. Since joining The Cranking Widgets Blog I’ve already been introduced to some new authors that I’ve found very valuable and are still loving their blogs. I’m confident there are plenty more out there that I’ve yet to discover.
I want to be introduced to other success-minded bloggers who are still excited about how to help others get more stuff done and reach their goals. I want to share the ones that are particularly valuable with you by giving a more in depth review or interview… Maybe even put something about them in the sidebar for a week or two. (If I get too many submissions, I’ll share my favorites on Twitter — follow me here.)
My Criteria
This one will be a moving target, but generally I’d say:
- I’m not interested in GTD calendars, notebooks or other productivity pr0n. I’ve seen some newer bloggers that appear to be all about trying to make a buck instead of helping others. I can’t blame them, but it adds too much noise.
- Insight and passion are key. That’s the beauty of blogs. “Ordinary” people can write about their passions and it actually shows! I’d like to give exposure to people who are passionate about helping people get more done and reach their goals.
- 5k RSS readers or less. I’m happy to promote the Zen Habits’ and Lifehacker’s of the world since they are definitely high-value, but I’m looking for smaller-scale. I realize 5k RSS readers is pretty significant already. The main objective is finding high-value blogs that aren’t already a “household name.”
How You Can Help
I would be grateful if you could help shine some more light on the quality bloggers that are out there. A couple options:
- Please share your favorite productivity or personal development oriented blog with our fellow readers via comments. Give us a link and tell us why you like it.
- If you have a blog and you feel like it fits the bill, writing up a detailed post that summarizes what you’re all about would be helpful. How do you like to preach productivity/reaching goals? Do you post tips? General concepts? Inspiration? What is your mission (following your passion is a perfectly good mission btw)? Highlighting your favorite articles that you’ve written so far would be value-added (I’m sure your readers wouldn’t mind either.) Include a link to your post as a comment below.
I have already selected the first blogger that I’ll be highlighting. He’s someone that Brett introduced me to a couple months ago and I’m grateful to be able to read what he has to say. I’ll be sharing his blog with you next week.
For now, please submit away! I’m really looking forward to discovering and sharing new blogs!
How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony
I’ve read a lot of posts out there in the blogosphere trying to answer whether Basecamp or Backpack is the best solution for managing projects. The fact is that there is no reason that you should have to, or want to, choose one over the other. I have been using both for about a year now and I’m happy to be able to share what I’ve learned so far. I recognize some of you may not have heard of these tools, so let’s start with what they are.
What is Backpack:
Taken from the Backpack website: “Backpack is a web-based service that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with colleagues, co-workers, friends, or family.” (You can also see how Brett uses Backpack as a general GTD system here)
What is Basecamp:
Taken from the Basecamp website: “Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.”
First, I Had Backpack.
Productivity Tweet of the Week(ish): Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
Not only am I a GTD late bloomer, I’m a Twitter late bloomer too! Before giving the service a fair shake, I kept reading blogger after blogging telling the same story: “I didn’t get it until I tried it for a week, now I love it!” I tried it for a week, I didn’t get it. I asked Brett to help explain it to me. He did… I still didn’t get it. Then all of a sudden it clicked. I’m not sure why it took so long, but all of a sudden I’m sold just the same as the rest (you can follow me here )!
For those who haven’t joined up yet, the coolness factor is probably the hardest thing in the Internet world to explain. I know people I follow are broadcasting their 140 characters to hundreds or thousands of people, but somehow reading about whats going on in their lives makes it seem more intimate than it really is. I can turn a tweet from someone else into a conversation at any point, as long as I have something valuable to give back to the conversation starter. We exchange a couple replies and we both go on our merry way. Quick, easy, interesting and non-committal.
I’m going to start a regular(ish) post highlighting my favorite productivity tweet of the week(ish) — I add the “ish” because I’m not sure I’ll be able to find one worth mentioning, but I’ll do my best. Luckily this week we have a great one to kick things off. It comes from James of Organize IT and here’s what he had to say:
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.
Productivity Systems Don’t Suck, But Sometimes I Do
Few would argue that Merlin Mann is the Godfather of GTD/productivity blogging. About a month ago he posted Four Years and followed it up with Time, Attention, and Creative Work. If you haven’t read these, please do so now… It’s good stuff.
What do you think?
I look at both of these posts in a positive light. They are sobering reminders of how our personal productivity systems are nothing more than a means to an end. Why we produce boils down to reasons that live deep inside of us. I focus on being productive because my personal goals and commitments require me to get a lot of things done in a short period of time. I am passionate about productivity systems because they allow my over-achieving, over-estimating self to get closer to achieving my goals faster and with minimal affects on my health and overall well-being.
Are you Ready?
If you were to ask me for the true marks of a really productive person (which I’m not, incidentally, so take this with a grain of salt), I wouldn’t say anything about their work area, notebook collection, or pocket contents. I wouldn’t even necessarily cite their ability to consistently meet deadlines (because that just means they may not have very many commitments). You know what I’d say?
They’re ready. Like, for just about anything.
No, I’m not referring to the type of superhero cool that some are able to maintain during times of extreme stress or duress (think Jack Bauer). I’m talking about the guy who, when you walk up to his desk unannounced, turns away from his computer, busts out a clean sheet of paper and a pen and gives you his full attention. Immediately.
This is one of those skills that takes a hell of a long time to cultivate, and can really only be mastered by those who have two things:
- A hell of a lot of responsibility
- A hell of a lot of time to practice changing their immediate focus
For the guy whose job it is to make sure that the equipment at the oil refinery doesn’t explode, this may not be something he gets to spend any time working on (or maybe it is, hell if I know). When your job requires you to be ready to switch to firefighter mode at a moments notice, you’ll be faced with a “sink or swim” type of situation. After an innumerable amount of “sinks”, one day you’ll finally start to clumsily swim. After a whole mess of that, then (I imagine) you’ll be “there”.
Just to reiterate, I don’t see myself as possessing this trait. I can change focus easily enough, but the cost of doing so is incredibly apparent when I try to return to the original, pre-interruption task. So I’m giving advice on a topic that I, frankly, have no business giving advice on. But that’s how I imagine this type of skill being manifest.
So, are you ready?
How to Reclaim 15 Hours of Your Life Back - Every Week!
A guest poster over at Get Rich Slowly recently shared an incredible tip for how to use a recording device to get control of your TV watching habits so you can redirect your attention to far more productive endeavors.
Erica Douglass writes:
750 hours a year is 14.42 hours a week, or just over two hours a day. Besides housework, “market work” (the term the book uses to denote paid-for jobs), and sleeping, what activity consumes the most time?
The answer shocked me: It’s watching television.
She goes on to suggest using a DVR to strategically record shows you are interested in and only actually watch what is necessary. I actually have been using this technique for about a year now. It’s been very good to me. Here are a couple thoughts / suggestions not discussed in Erica’s post:
