As I sit here on the road, I’m pushing the Pre to it’s limits.  In addition, I’m pondering a piece of blog feedback I received about talking more about the Pre “extending the brain,” and the best answer I’ve come up with is, well, two possibilities: Life Comes Fast, Don’t Miss a Thing – thanks Palm – or, a better fit that just struck me – Relaxed Productivity!

The Pre truly lets me do what I want to do, most of the time, when I want – short of “Sorry – Too Many Cards!” or, holy cow, I just had a call come in, (a good thing), I answered it and all I could hear was myself in my ear buds (a bad thing!)  So, here is some random thoughts via a post that started as a rant, shows some love, and ends up with a final thought (Plea?) for Palm.

* Video
I love the quality of the video, as well as the share options (Facebook, You Tube, etc.). Sometimes, completing an upload seems for not, resulting in errors until I reboot.
(Well, side note, I thought the Facebook upload was going to fail, but it pulled through. So I’m batting .500)

Many times, the audio gets out of sync from the video.

* Life Moves Fast
I love notifications. (Love, love, love!) They let me keep on top of everything (alarms, texts, Facebook and Twitter if I want to) and truly makes sure I don’t miss a thing.

* Moving Backwards
Why did the calendar loose features moving from PalmOS to WebOS?

- The monthly calendar is useless on WebOS. On PalmOS, I could look at it and quickly identify through colors, categories and symbols what was happening through the month. You can’t do such on the Pre.

- Reminder options are limited.

- Seeing meeting attendees is neat. (I can’t remember if you could see those on PalmOS.) However, you can’t use the feature to invite someone to a meeting via the Pre.

- I LOVE the calender collapsing the freetime space – that is a great, great feature.

* Moving
I love being able to listen to Pandora, write this post, surf face book, review and post videos (when they upload) and im / text all real time. I can move from app to app seamlesly.  NORMALLY, I can answer calls! (Fail! – as my teenagers say.)

* Innovation
(Not sure if that is the right section title.) So, I ran across a client today with a Pre. I got about the same reaction out of him as I do most. Mixed to negative. The Pre doesn’t seem to “wow” him as much as it does me (for some of the reasons I chat about above). I get a much different reaction from iPhone users. This coupled with the fact that Palm has only brought out the Pre with really one or two minor OS updates in the same time Apple brought out the 3G, Multi-Tasking OS (though not as slick as WebOS), 4G and the iPad, makes me say that Palm had better get it in gear. Life IS moving fast, and I hate to see them miss the thing – a thing called survival.

(Side Note: Pasting from Notes to Poster lost my extra CR LF that I use for breaks between paragraphs. I think I got them all put back in here.)

What a great way to end the week! So looking forward to some down time!

Mychael Hyatt - Courtesy of www.MichaelHyatt.com

Michael Hyatt, who – to me – is an amazing guy on several levels, wrote two blog entries recently on delegation.  Though I am a very spiritual person, I know some are not, and the title and content of the first blog entry may turn you off.  However, I encourage you to stick with it anyway as they are great tips for personal productivity.

What The Bible Says About Leadership And Delegation

How Do You Delegate If You Don’T Have A Staff?

Photo by 'laffy4k' as posted on www.Flickr.com

Buzzzzzzz, buzz-buzz buzzzz!

5:45am and my Palm Treo is buzzing to wake me up for another work day.

I am not a “morning wake up” person.  When my Palm goes off, I am not an “Oh, boy!  I’m ready to go!” person. I generally say “Oy!  I have to get up,” and, very slowly (if I’m lucky) I get out of bed.  Though, I am not a “morning wake up” person, I enjoy being a morning person once I am up as I get much more done and believe it is important for success.  The other morning, I stumbled across something that changed my whole attitude and helped me succeed at getting up.

Instead of saying I have to get up, stated in the future tense, I said to myself, “I am getting up,” as in the present tense.  This one little change sent such a good feeling of energy through me that it made it a TON easier to get up and do what I wanted to do; be that morning person.  I am now working more on applying this to other areas.  For example, instead of saying, “I have to work on that goal,” I will say, “I am working on the goal.”  It just changes the whole ball game.

Question: What can you change to the present tense to help you succeed?

“Being comfortable” is the best theme for the lesson.  As I have written about at least once here, David Allen himself once told me, and I firmly believe that you have to be “comfortable” with your To Do list.  You have to be comfortable with what is on it, the size of it, the importance of things on it and the “do-ability” of things on it (all my words).  When it came to Foresight, I was getting uncomfortable with it as the do-ability was gnawing at me.  I knew with a full time job, with my children and my Fiancé that I did not have the time and resources to devote to Foresight.  One might think the decision seemed easy.  However, there was one item that kept holding me back.

Challenges

You would think with all the above reasons that I would just pull the plug.  However, there were a couple of things holding me back.  The first one was money & debt.  I have a relatively significant amount of debt built up from developing and deploying Foresight.  That debt stares at me every day.  When I started thinking about shutting down Foresight, a little nay-saying voice would say to me, “But you have to keep it going; you have to pay back the debt.”  And, it is that little voice that would keep me basically frozen, which is not a good state.

Action

Lately, my Pastor has talked a lot about a two themes:

• Things must remain in motion, otherwise they stagnate and die.  (For example, think about a stream of water in nature – if it flows, it stays fresh.  If it does not, it stagnates and grows crud.)
• Action is required to make progress in all facets of life.

In thinking about this, I identified that I was not taking action and thus things were stagnating and slowly dying.  I figured action – any action – was better than none.  Does shutting down Foresight help with my debt?  Well, not on the surface; the debt is still there.  But, taking action might help in the long run.

Giving

I’ve always been a generous person.  And, over the past couple of years, I have purposely tried to increase my generosity; to give more and to be a blessing to people.  Being that I use Foresight everyday to keep many projects (27 is today’s count) successfully moving forward, I decided that my success should be one major factor in taking action.  I said, “Foresight is still a great tool as it is.   Let’s let others gain what I gain out of it every day.”  It is my hope that with giving it away, my generosity will be returned by people who find it adds the same value to their lives and choose to make a contribution.  And, in continuing with the giving desire, it is my plan to give away a portion of those proceeds to charity, hopefully keeping motion, in motion, for some time to come.

Closure

So, even though my “action” on the surface may seem like it will not address my severest needs, I have high beliefs that it will.  On top of that, it brings closure to a chapter in my life, makes my To Do list comfortable again and allows me to move forward.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/chai-wallah.html

Make it a great weekend!

Just like most weeks, this week was another intense one keeping everything moving forward.  Let’s wrap up the week, and series, and talk about Friday:

• Had conference call right out of the shoot.  While waiting for it to start, banged through the DCL.  Being that I keep my inbox (well, inboxes, see my other post), at zero everyday, this was a breeze.
• Transitioned to my Next Action list (Projects Widget), and managed to hit about five different projects.  Again, I date things for follow-up, so three different projects popped up for follow-up, and I got them all done.
• The rest of the day consisted of work on one project.  I was able to get that one wrapped up; a nice way to end the week.

So, all in all, I think this was a relatively good week.  I helped a lot of people move forward on their projects.  Also, I moved forward on * all * of my projects (even if it was a quick glance during the Weekly Review to assure they have follow-up dates on them so they will pop up in the Projects Widget) even with all the interruptions.

What were the lessons learned from this week?

• Quick Capture Interruptions.
  • As I think I commented about this week, interruptions are the real killer.  You have to capture them and keep your focus.  I didn’t do as well in this area as I like and will need to focus on that more next week.
• Break the addiction to email, IM and Twitter.
  • These are all major sources of interruptions.
• Block out more time, especially when you have projects that require big chunks of un-interrupted time.
  • This, along with corralling interruptions, will be my goals for next week.

That wraps up this series for this week.  On the onset of this series, I had said that I had two goals for it:

1) To give you some ideas / tips / tricks on managing multiple projects.

2) For me to track what I’m up to – helping me see progress as well as possibly see where I can improve.

I hope this series helped you out; it did me and I have some great goals for next week to help boost productivity even further.  Make it a great, relaxing weekend!

Small problem kept me up till midnight (hence what I think is a really hilarious graphic above – the corporate icon symbol, the warning – that is actually on GE’s support page!).  That, plus an overcast day today made it a rough day. 

Here’s what I did to get through it and make progress:

• Americano!
• DCL - I kind of just blew through this.  Email traffic heavy, but I pressed through to get them out of the was because I really wanted to make progress on my large “report” project.
  • Because I glanced at my calendar (as apart of my DCL), I saw that commitments on two projects were coming up – so I made sure I was ready for those.
• Successfully focused my my report; good progress made.

Signing off for the day.  Stick a fork in me; I’m done!

As I’ve written about in the past, flexibility is a must to effective and relaxed productivity.  And, as I reflected on at the end of the day today, capturing and containing stuff is a must!  Here’s Wednesday:

Americano (this one is a deal breaker; I lived above – no flexibility for me on this one first thing in the AM!  Well, I lied again, I don’t go to Starbucks very often; instead, I bought one of their home espresso machines and keep plenty of beans in stock.  My Fiancé is an incredible Barista!

On to the Daily Check List….

• Voice Mail (had call from internal client and returned it immediately as I feel that if they left a voice mail, as opposed to email, they are desiring a call back sooner than later.  Glad to be of service to Mr. WW!)
• Check e-Mail (Though I still believe that this being my primary form of communication and job for my employer, I’m starting to feel I’ve become way to addicted again – it comes and goes – to checking email.  I feel like I’m in the movie “You’ve Got Mail!”)

Side Note: Wow; crazy day already (though, this is not unusual – hence why I want to write more about relaxed productivity).  Several things, a couple via IM, popped up and put me off down some different paths.  Fortunately, and as usual, they are related to current projects, so, progress has been made.  If they were not related to current projects, I would have Quick Captured them and got back on track.

Wrapped up DCL.  Wrapping up the “different paths” from above.  Then, I’ll stop, take a couple of deep breaths, and regroup to make sure I get my focus back.  Decided to drop the blogs today; especially with how busy it is today.

(Later that day…) Well, “wrapping up” really never happened.  Today ended up being a “chase several fronts” day and I now am noting that I didn’t make much progress on “Big Rock” projects.  Some, progress mind you – I have one thing checked off.  And, I’m going to SHUT OFF email, IM and focus on getting one more “notch in my belt.” for the day.

Lesson of the day, or at least something to ponder – how to stay pertinent and relevant in today’s connected society, without letting it eat you (and the important stuff you need to be working on) alive.  One things I didn’t do as well today as I usually do — and it’s pretty much in line with David Allen’s advice, capture everything that hits your plate, get it contained, get it off you mind and get back to -a- mind like water and -b- the important task at hand.  That ultimately needs to be my goal for tomorrow, use Quick Capture much more.

(To put picures in the blog, or not?  That is the question)

The secret to my success – follow-up’s; after I touch base with someone, or delegate something, I put a follow-up task on the project, dated, so it will pop up in the Projects Widget, reminding me, and basically forcing my attention back to that project.

This is something I’ve always done, but then had it really solidified for me when Jack Welch said in his book that * you have * to follow-up with people.  It’s the only way to make sure things keep moving forward – and that’s so true!