Knuckling Down

I keep it short this week: a quick update and thoughts on my coming, time-poor, week. I then share a very effective tip for avoiding the dreaded P-word: procrastination. As always if you have any feedback or suggestions then please do get in touch, I’m bealers@siftware.com. I’m @bealers on Twitter and there’s also @knucklingdown on Twitter. Links from show: The Brain Audit The OneNote Book coming soon page Have a great week! A full transcript of the show follows below Hi, I’m Darren Beale and you’re watching or listening to Knuckling Down, my weekly show where I use you, the internet, as my accountability partner, where I share my fails and wins as I run my business, as I try and ship my side projects or my discretionary projects and generally also try and share any insights I may have learned over the years running my businesses or trying to keep myself healthy both mentally and physically. I hope you had a good week. I had a good week this week. It was definitely a good week for getting things done. Siftware, my web development company, I’ve been focusing quite heavily on search engine optimization and through competitive analysis and through quite a long time of figuring out what sorts of services we want to provide. Had it figured out that we should be highlighting more the support maintenance side of things as opposed to just we do dev. I realized we weren’t really promoting them very well on the website. I’ve been doing quite a lot of [inaudible 00:01:15] analysis and looking at what sort of offerings there are already out there and they’re not packages, that sort of thing. I spent a good slot this week brainstorming and making sure that our offer, in terms of the features that we would be offering, as more of a product-sized service offering. Brainstorm that out well and got all the features listed out that I think we will be offering. I have my team in the office this week. It’s always nice to have everyone in, so they all came from around the way, all into Shrewsbury, and we had two days where everyone was all together, which is always very nice. A lot of energy in the room and a nice meal in the evening, that sort of thing. Also, ran by them the things that I’m telling them that they’re going to be offering and making sure that and tweaking those things. That now gives me a platform to build on. In terms of discretionaries this week, I’m really stoked to say that I launched what I wrote, recorded, edited, and uploaded three screencasts relating to OneNote quickstart tutorial I’m calling it. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time. The one of particular interest to you, watching or listening, would be the third one I uploaded which is my workflow. My personal workflow on how I use OneNote. That will tie in quite heavily into a couple of my larger blog posts, particularly my morning routine, which does mention OneNote there. That was quite epic and that’s been on my to-do list for over two years. I kid you not. I knew that it would be something that would probably be of interest to some people. If anyone’s anything like me, I suck a lot out of seeing other people’s workflows and it was just something I’ve been meaning to do and do. Recording screencasts is officially ten-times harder than it looks. Maybe in times, and it’s a large number. You can’t help moving your mouse around and then you forget your fluffy lines halfway through. I got a lot of confidence by the end of it and I felt really good doing it. I really enjoyed it. I can see myself doing quite a few more of those as the time goes on. Also, I published my book coming soon page on my blog, which I’m really pleased. I got the artwork nailed after quite a long time of sitting on it, really again. Not procrastinating but it was de-prioritised. I got the artwork done and I just wrote some quick copy, which I’ll probably refine over the coming weeks. Quick mailing list signup form at the end. That was really nice. You know when you set a thing, I want to put a “Coming Soon” page on my blog, but actually it’s about 15 different things I have to get done before I can do that. Finally, I was able to go to press publish. That was a really nice feeling. I had a really major breakthrough with Notepad, the SAS application I’m building at the moment. That was a particular blocker on synchronization. Well, not synchronization so much but getting data out of the API. I was getting data out of the one API no problem, but it felt quite inefficient how I was doing it and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to deal with it once I wanted to check to see what changed, that sort of thing. Well, I nailed that this week. I’ve still got a bunch of code to write, but intellectually I know how I’m going to do it. That was really good to see, and I feel that there’s light at the end of the tunnel now with that. Now it’s just a case of getting a thousand things done, but at least there’s no unknowns anymore. It’s just a case of just working through the list and that feels fantastic. That will be the quite clunky MVP version as well as obviously the actual main list is even longer. As I said, a good week for getting things done. I felt very good at the end of the week. The coming weeks are going to be really busy, but it’s not a lot of margin. I’m off tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday. I’m taking a day off work. I’m helping some friends in their woodland. Do some forestry work. Do some tree felling and clearing. That’s a day out of the office. Two days out of the office because I’m doing some surveying in London. Friday’s mastermind day. Every two weeks, we have that on Friday morning. Then, it’s the end of the week and the end of the month so Friday afternoon is going to be planning for the coming month, which is always, for me, quite an essential part of my calendar to make sure that I’ll get everything done the next month. I really look forward to those sessions now because I also know what I can get done and some months are going to be heavier than others. It’s going to be particularly challenging because September is looming now and I’m pretty much off for most of it. It’s family holiday for a week and then two weeks cycling around Scotland. I’ll need to cram it in in August. I’ve got half a day left for discretionary or nondiscretionary actually. Just anything. To get anything done next week other than being. I’ve got about half a day. The focus, obviously, is going to be my business primarily because that’s what pays the bills. My aim is to finish the packages that I’ll be offering. Support maintenance packages that we’ll be offering, to pad those out and make sure we’ve got the actual nuts and bolts sorted and then start writing the service offering page for support maintenance. To do that, I’ll be following the Brain Audit methodology. The insights I gleaned from reading the Brain Audit book. If you’ve not read that book and you are in any way a sales person, by that I mean you’re self-employed or you sell your services, as a lot of us are, if you’re a freelancer or anything like that, get that book and read it and it will change the way you think about how you offer your services. It’s highly recommended. That’s my update. In terms of things to share with you this week, last week was quite epic in terms of what I did. I went through my tried and tested method for dealing with overwhelm. Now, I’m happy to say that I’ve not been in that mode for quite awhile now because I think I’m a little more in tune to me. I know what I’m like in terms of self-inflicted overload. Now, because I can control that a bit more, I don’t get into that mode. But I’ve been there and that is a definite. The overload method, or the crisis mode proclivity, whatever you want to call it, it works very well for me and my brain. I shared that. It went a lot longer than I expected, but hopefully there was some value there for you. This week, I’m going to be a lot briefer. I just got a tip for helping you do. It’s all well and good brainstorming. It’s all well and good listening at all the things you need to get done. It’s all well and good feeling like, okay, I know exactly what I need to get done now. No, what you need to do is, you need to do it. You need to get down, you need to start doing it. Hopefully, you’re not too scared of doing that. There is always one enemy, and that’s procrastination. There’s going to be things you don’t want to be doing. There’s going to be things you’re avoiding. You’re putting off. You don’t want to look in the eye. My tip this week is how to avoid procrastination and it’s so basic, so simple, that I hope it will help you. It’s certainly not unique and it’s just my take on a simple visual aid to avoid procrastination, to avoid Facebook, to avoid Twitter. It’s the countdown timer. You may have heard of the Pomodoro technique. I don’t get on with that at all. It’s quite regimented in terms of the 25-minute slot for doing and then you have a break, and then you do again. If someone interrupts you, you reset it. I’m probably not marketing it very well. I’m not dissing anybody who uses it to great effect. For me, it does not work. The time slots are too small and it’s a bit regimented. I just need to know that my calendar says today I’ve got to get these five things done. My calendar says that right now I should be doing this thing. What I like to do is I like to set a timer for a set period of time, whether that’s an hour, a half an hour, whatever the time slot says, and I keep doing the thing until the timer is finished. Each time I’m tempted to go on Facebook, to check Twitter, to check my phone or open my email, which is also the worst thing to do, you bring your focus back to the thing that you’re doing for the next period of time, until the time is finished. It’s like meditation. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried meditation. You’re there and you’ve got your eyes closed and you’re trying to have your mind empty and then what you’re going to have for tea tonight pops up into your head and the idea is that you’re meant to recognize that you’ve just thought about what you might be having for tea tonight and you have to gently bring your focus back to your breath or whatever else. It’s a bit like that, but more like, oh, I just thought I was going to go on Facebook and you tell yourself you’re not going to do that because you want to get some stuff done, right? You’ve got a timer running and you said you would work on this thing. You’ve already figured out that you want to get this thing done because you’ve looked at your goals and all of those sort of things, internal struggles going on within your head, but ultimately the timer says no, so you don’t do it. It works. It really does. It’s very simple but I think very effective. I’m on Windows. I don’t use a physical timer. I’ve tried my phone in the past. I’ve started using a timer, actually, within my operating system. What we’ve got here is the default one built into Windows and I’ve just selected the timer and I’ve created two countdown timers. One for an hour, one for half an hour. Then, you can full-screen it if you want, and you can flip between the two if you want, and just press play when you are ready to start. That’s about it. After using this for awhile, I thought that I had some shortcomings. You can imagine if you’ve got something else over the top of this, because you’ve got Windows open, almost a visual aid. I asked around on the slack group that I’m involved with. I Googled the best one I could come up with for Windows was called Tomighty It’s a pomodoro timer for Windows. I think it might work on OSX as well. I’m not sure. You’ll have to look into that. Ultimately, you’ve got the ability to set a time. It’s very limited this thing. This only goes up to 99. It doesn’t let you. It’s basically two digits you’re allowed to type in. The best bit is that you set your time slot and then you can just start. Now, what I needed, what I wanted was this. I wanted a visual aid to see how long I had left in my taskbar so I could just keep looking down and see how long I’ve got, obviously. The idea being, you’re thinking there’s that itch. Not so much that you’re obsessing about checking these things, which you may or may not be. I know I have been in the past. Ultimately sometimes you just forget. It’s an ingrained habit. It’s like that’s the thing you do every now and again. Well, I can look at my taskbar and go, oh no, it’s five minutes time. Why don’t I quickly do that, or go and stretch my legs, or go an get an apple out of the fruit bowl, or whatever it is to break the day up. I can do something frankly time wasteful at the moment. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter but ultimately you’re putting off the thing that you want to do. Set the timer, but you’ve got a visual aid to tell you that you’re not in that mode right now. I say that’s extremely effective. I’d strongly recommend you to give it a go. If there’s anything else you find in terms of, if you know a better timer, let me know. Pop it in the comments or let me know via Twitter or something. That would be really useful. This is the best one I’ve found for Windows. That’s it. As I said, last week was quite a big one. I’ll just leave you a quick tip today. I hope you have a great week. I will speak to you next week. If in the meantime you have any feedback for me, I know for instance that when I did the screencast, I know the sound wasn’t as loud as I would like. I think I’m going to try a different microphone. I’ve got a shotgun mic and maybe that will help so I don’t have to have the microphone too close to me. That’s my phone ringing. Excellent. If there’s anything that you think that you’d like me to cover in terms of things that maybe you’re struggling with or things that you’d just like to hear my take on. I’ve already shared my workflows, but any other things that you would like to know, just as a matter of interest, how I handle what situations, how I would handle the situations, whether that’s professionally or personally. We’ll leave it at that. Have a great week. If you do want to get in touch, I’m bealers@siftware.com. I’m @bealers on Twitter and there’s also @knucklingdown on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening or watching, and I’ll speak to you next week. The post Tip To Avoid Procrastination appeared first on Darren Beale.

In this episode I run through my Crisis Mode Productivity system that I’ve used successfully in the past when I’ve been feeling completely overwhelmed (usually self-inflected because I’d taken on too much!) It’s a bit longer than I had planned, but I do go through things in detail. I also mention a blog post by Marc Jenkins: Must avoid at all costs and recommend that you use Sanebox, because it’s awesome. DOWNLOAD You can get the Crisis Mode Productivity worksheet that I talk about in the show here. As always, feedback welcomed: email bealers@siftware.com or you can get in touch via @bealers or @knucklingdown. There is also a full transcript of the episode available. Show Transcript Hi, I’m Bealers, and this is Knuckling Down, my weekly show where I use you, the internet, as my accountability partner. I also share my own thoughts and tips, and things like that, from stuff I’ve learnt over the last, well, 10 years of running my business, and the last few years of turning my life around from being miserable and unhealthy to being happier and a lot more healthy, and importantly, much more productive. This week’s been pretty good, I have to say. I’ve got most of my things done. Few things out of my control didn’t get done, but generally the tick list looks pretty good. Artwork for my book cover, that’s finished, so I’m ready to put a coming soon page up on my blog. Had a really good mastermind session with the rest of the guys. It’s starting to feel like we’re gelling quite well now. We know each other’s businesses, and so we know we can ask pertinent questions and we’ve got the history there. It’s taken a while, I think, to get into the groove, but it’s feeling really good, and a lot of value for each of us now in each session. I got my previous podcast uploaded onto my blog and generally had my blog tidied up a bit. As I said in previous episodes, it was a bit messy and full of a lot of rubbish, but now I’ve been able to organise it a bit. Most importantly, I should be able to record this and get it up over the weekend, which was always my aim anyway. Really, other than that, I’m looking forward to a pretty lazy weekend. Don’t have a lot planned on purpose. Just kind of want to chill a bit, so we’ll see how that goes. Last week, I talked with you about overwhelm and how to reduce it. I talked about doing a mind mapping session. Looking at what you’re doing, what you’re being, as in what’s taxing you out. Certainly the things that are causing you the most pains in your being. Also then looking at a very, very high level at your goals. Things you want to get done. Now, that’s all and good, you’ve got a list of … The idea there was that you were going to prune a lot of the things that you were doing, so that you had a chance of actually achieving all of the things that you want to achieve within, say, the next six months. Now, I think from that, when you do that exercise, it can feel quite overwhelming, particularly if you’re feeling overwhelmed anyway. Whether we say it’s arbitrarily, it’s six months to the end of the year, but it doesn’t matter really. If you’re at a state of overwhelm, there’s just too much to do and you’re anxious that you’re not going to get it all done. What I’d like to share today is maybe a method for going from doing that mind map, of at least doing a first past pruning session of, “Well, I can forget this project. I can forget that project. It’s fine, but I’ve still got this list of things to do that I have to get done. Forget goals. I need to do these things.” You’re kind of in a state of crisis. I’ve certainly been in that position myself two, three, four times in the last two, three years, where it’s been overwhelming. There’s been so much to get done and I have to get it done, and I just didn’t know what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I’m going to share with you today my method for getting through that, and I’ve called it in the past, “SOS Productivity”. I’m just codifying it a bit and sharing it with you today. The first thing is you’ve done that mind map. You’ve already pruned some of the doing, all your discretionary projects, and you feel that you’ve got a list of things that you have to get done. You need to give yourself, I would say, preferably on a weekend, give yourself half a day. Three, four hours. Preferably on your own, in a quiet room, and then follow this process. DOWNLOAD You can get the Crisis Mode Productivity worksheet that I talk about in the show here. Stage one About an hour this will take you. What you need is a blank notebook. That could be a physical, get yourself a nice new moleskin or something, or I would literally open a new OneNote notebook, and I would close the other ones so there’s no distractions. Then, on the first page of that notebook, whether that’s physical or virtual, list out all of these projects. Already pruned projects that is, remember. Just list them out. For each one of the projects or the tasks, ask yourself, do you really have to do this in the next month? That’s all we care about right now, is the next month. Do you have to do it in the next month? Is the answer, yes? Why is that? Is somebody shouting at you? Screaming at you to get it done. Is it client work? You’ve got to get it done so you can get paid? Is it something you’ve promised to somebody? Well, can you have a word with them? Could you say, “Actually, look I’m under the cosh at the moment. Is there anyway maybe we can push that back for a bit?” Communicating with people, certainly … At the moment it’s about you. You need to be reducing pressure on yourself, so if there’s anything you can push back, try a bit harder than, “Oh, I’ve just got to get that done.” As I say, talk to other people. If there’s other people that are relying on you for things, ask them, “Does this really matter right now? I really could do with the extra time.” People respect that, and especially if they’re thinking, “Well, I’d rather somebody who was less stressed out doing it.” Obviously, you don’t have to tell them you’re stressed out, but you can certainly just say, “Look, I’ve got a lot on at the moment. Next month, look, it’s looking a lot lighter. I’ll be able to do …” The implication will be that you can do a much better job when you’ve got less on your plate. I think a lot of people would probably recognize and respect that. So, for each of these tasks, do you really, really need to do it? Now, another thing to really watch out for here is the narratives in your head. “Oh, I’ve got to do that thing because I’ve promised somebody, and I’m a loser if I don’t do that.” Well, that inner chimp is a nasty piece of work and you really want to be ignoring that. You’re not a loser if you can’t get everything done. You’re probably the sort of person who’s trying to overachieve, and that’s probably what’s put you into this position right now. You’ve got too much to do, because you’re pushing a lot of this pressure on to yourself. Just be kind to yourself. If you don’t have to do it in the next four weeks, cross it through. It doesn’t make it onto your project list. For each one of the projects that you are listing down, the one’s that don’t make it onto your project list, write on a post-it note. That post-it note’s going to get stuck to the side of your monitor, and that’s going to become your must avoid list. That’s the things that you’re not going to work on in the next month, because you’ve already worked through that you don’t need to do it. There’s a blog post that Marc Jenkins wrote. It’s really good. He refers to that, I think it was off the back of an article he’d read. Warren Buffet uses this. Lists out projects and basically only choose five, and the five things that you wanted to get done are your important, and everything else on the list that’s below the fold, you must avoid doing. So, you’re going through. You’re listing out all your projects that you need to get done in the next month. From that, you want to create a new page per project. You’re going to now, per each project, you’re now going to list out the next five tasks that you need to get done in the next month. For each one of those tasks give it a time number. As in, how long is it going to take you to do that thing? If each one of those things is more than an hour and a half, break it out further. You’re looking for about five things that are about an hour and a half each. You don’t need to estimate the task for all of them right now, because otherwise it would take too long, but the top couple, because you’re not going to get them all done, frankly. You’ll see this is the theme. The whole idea is that you’re going to get some of it done, and it’s better than getting none of it done, and it’s better than you feeling like crap. For each task within the project you should have five or six things. Two or three of them you’ve now estimated a time against, but they should all be about an hour and a half each, maximum. Obviously, if they’re smaller, brilliant. So, this is the end of stage one. You’re now going to close all of your to do list apps and all of your other notebooks, and all your thoughts, and other things that are vying for your attention. Things that you need to get done. Go and put them in a drawer. Close them. You don’t want to be referring to them for at least the next week or so, because we just want to be pure on just trying to get some of this backlog out the way. Stage two You’re going to need an hour or two for this, and you’re going to need to be quite brave. First thing you’re going to do is you’re going to go to your email inbox. You’re going to select all. Sorry, you’re going to create a new folder. Call it “Processed”. That’s what I call it anyway. Select all. Drag everything into Processed. It might take a while. I get that. You might want to do that online if you’re using Gmail. Apply the label if it’s Gmail. Processed. What we’re looking for is an empty inbox. Now, go through the Processed folder and just look at the last five days’ worth of email, if you’ve still got that much email unprocessed, or things that’s been nagging away at you. Anything further than five days, I would argue, can wait, or they’ll be getting in touch soon saying, “How did you get on with that thing?” Anything more than five days, ignore it effectively. Through those five days, process. You’ve probably read GTD. If you haven’t, you’re going to delegate things you can, so forward on to colleagues, if you can, “Can you get this done for me?” If it’s a quick thing, like five minutes or so, nail it, respond, move on. Anything longer that’s basically a task, just for now, two things. Either flag it, or drag it back into your inbox. Just for now. Install SaneBox. It’s a SaaS application. It’s really, relatively affordable. It’s cheap. It’s fantastic. You will thank me. Just do it. Go back to your inbox, or look at your flagged emails, and now look through each one and add them to your project list. If they’re part of one of the projects that you’ve already got in your must get done in the next month projects, fine, or add them to a new project, or what you can do is … Certainly what I do, I have a small tasks section within my system for smaller things that I need to do that don’t require a project, and just pop them in there. The idea is at the end of this stage two, after a couple of hours of going through your email, you’ve got an empty inbox. Close your inbox. Stage three This is the last main stage. You’re now going to print off your calendar for the next month. Now, we’re going to focus in on the next two weeks. If you’ve got a calendar like I do, with maybe five or six calendars that are overlaid, try not to have all of them. If you’ve got things like somebody else’s calendar, because you don’t want to see they’re on holiday, close those down. Just stuff that’s relevant to you. Reminders out. Just things that … Should have it so, things you’re going to go running or something, doesn’t need to be in there. It’s things during your working day, so you can see what slots you’ve got. It maybe it’s blank because you don’t use your calendar much, or it may just say you’ve got a meeting on Tuesday, whatever. Print that off and get yourself a sharpie or a pencil, and then block out two or three sessions per day for email. I would say no more than 20 minutes each. I don’t know how much email you get. Maybe that’s unrealistic. If you’re a project manager or something and you get a gazillion emails a day, you might need longer. Just be honest with yourself. How much time do you need, do you think, actually, during the day to quickly look at your email and process? After that, and after all the other things you know you’ve got to get done, like taking your daughter to piano, within your calendar go through each of your projects and take the top thing on the list and slot it in somewhere. The things that you think are going to need your brain power the most go in the mornings, and things that maybe you could do slightly more brain dead in the afternoons. Also, block out a slot for what time do you leave work? If you leave at six, block out a slot for 5:30, and that’s your processing slot to review your day. That’s pretty much it for that stage. Ultimately what you should have then at the end, for a couple of weeks you should have, hopefully, at least one task for each of your projects in your calendar per week. Don’t worry too much about it right now. Oh, and the other thing is try and make these a bright colour, so they’re obvious from the other things that might already be in your calendar. These are your doing things. Now, what you’re going to do is you’re going to turn off all notifications on your computer, so no email pop-ups, and you’re going to turn off all notifications on your phone. Definitely email and social I would argue, on both devices. Assume this is a Saturday or a Sunday, switch off your computer, do something relaxing, try and get an early night tonight. When you do go to bed set your alarm for 30 minutes earlier than usual, so, if you get up at 7, 6:30. Day one of your new trying to be less overwhelmed regime. It’s half an hour earlier than usual out of bed. You’ve got a cup of tea. Open your laptop or your machine. Don’t open up your email. Just open up your calendar and your notebook, whether that’s physical or on your machine, and select a new page for that day. Write out what you’re going to get done, with most important tasks at the top. That’s it. Get on with your normal morning. Have you breakfast. Get the kids to school. Whatever you’re doing. Now, during the day, what you’re going to do is you’re going to try and follow the plan as hard as possible. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re going to get interrupted, but get back to the plan. Note down any interruptions you get or things that come in. Note them down on that day page per day, but then carry on with the task that you’ve got that you’re on at the moment. Try and be using a timer, with an alarm ideally. Let’s say you’ve got an hour and a half task to get that proposal done for client B. Set the timer for an hour and a half. You might get it done in an hour, because you’ve got no notifications coming in, email’s closed. Focus on it. Don’t open up Facebook. Just nail it. If you do find yourself thinking, “I don’t want to be doing this. I’m going to open Facebook,” try very hard not to. What you can do at the end of a session, have a cheeky five minutes as a reward. Try and keep your email closed. That’s really important, because it’s the interruptions that screw you. Just focus on getting the job done for that hour and a half, or that hour. When you do open your email, you’ve got a slot in the morning, slot in lunchtime, slot in the afternoon, I would suggest, train SaneBox, so drag things into the ignore folder. Stuff that you can nail into five minutes, as we talked about earlier, drag into processed. Anything that can’t, write it down on your day page as tasks that need to get done at some point, and then drag it into processed. At the end of the day you’ve got a 30 minute slot. How did you do? Be nice to yourself. Did you do well? 75% of getting a bunch of stuff done is absolutely fantastic. You should be feeling really good that you’ve done some stuff and you’ve done that all on your own. Write how you feel. You don’t have to do that, but I think that’s a good habit to get into, and it’s something maybe I’ll go through in following weeks. Whatever you do, go through your thoughts for the day, your tasks during the day from your page, and fold those into your project list that you’ve already got. You may need to re-jig your calendar if need be. Try not to take any of your more important projects out. You might have to drop a few of the least important ones down. Don’t get too funny about this. We don’t want to spend three hours with our system. It needs to be lightweight enough, but you’ll know that there will be some things maybe you can drop or shift back out of our current two week window. Try to get back to bed early again tonight. Try this regime for a fortnight and see how you get on. I’m pretty sure, if you’re anything like me, by the end of just two weeks, you’ll probably be feeling pretty good again. You’ll be feeling like you’re on top of things again. You can start allowing all of those other projects to come back in and start vying for attention, but that’s where being strict about saying no comes in. Maybe that’s for another time. Let me know how you do get on, and you can email me bealers@siftware.com and I’m at Twitter on @Bealers. Thanks for listening and I hope you have a great week. DOWNLOAD You can get the Crisis Mode Productivity worksheet that I talk about in the show here. The post How To Deal With Overwhelm appeared first on Darren Beale.

Doing, Aiming & Being example mindmap This week there’s a quick update from me and then an expansion on my Doing, Aiming & Being challenge for you. There’s 6 months of the year left, do you have an idea of what you want to achieve? If not why not give this short exercise a try and see what comes of it? If you do give it a go then why not share it with me, I’d love to see it. You can email me, bealers@siftware.com, and I’m at @bealers on Twitter. I also contradict last week I’ve made my mind up and have decided that I’ll keep the show as Knuckling Down, but simply with shortened episodes. This gives me the option to do the odd long-format episode when I’ve got some more experience (and the time!) Things are still rough around the edges, but I feel like I’m gaining some momentum and have a long list of things to talk about so I’m feeling confident that things will improve. A full transcript of the show is available below. Hello campers, I’m Bealers, and welcome to this rainy 9th of July in 2016. This is Knuckling Down, my short weekly podcast, where I use you, the internet, as my accountability partner. I share the things I’m working on, and as I run my business and as I work on my discretionary projects, and I also dig a bit deeper into other things that I’ve learned during my journey, whether that be professionally or on a personal level. As I got better from being miserable and very unwell, through to being relatively happy and certainly a lot fitter and healthier, and feeling very positive and productive. The aim is this is going to be short show, no more than 10 minutes, and that I do it from home, and before if you watched the original pilot of Knuckling Down, I was at my office, I was talking about doing a podcast that would be very much interviewing people and getting experts in on this or that. I don’t have the time to be doing that right now, I need to knuckle down myself. I’m at home, I’m doing this in my own time, and it’s going to be very quick. It should hopefully give you some value, but at the same time, I’m using you as an accountability partner, as I said, to make sure that I carry on  and I do the things that I say I want to get done. Last week I did do the first one of these more shorter-form shows. I called it my diary, and I hadn’t called … I’d said Knuckling Down was dead, and then I realised that actually … that’s crazy, fool, I’ve already got an iTunes feed. I’d already set it all up, so I should be moving that all over onto my blog over the next week or so. That would be the one iTunes feed, and that does also then give me the option to occasionally do a longer show, certainly as I find my feet and I feel more confident doing these random talking into the camera on your own. I won’t go for the long update that I did last week, but I’ll just give you a reminder of the things that I’m working on at the moment. I’ve got 2 core projects as I see them. One is my business, Siftware, where we as a team help the owners of websites keep, maintain and secure, and updated, and basically provide support and maintenance. I also am focused very much at the core on staying healthy both mentally and physically, though I see it both to be the same thing. On the discretionary side, there is me writing a book called the One Notebook. I am building a SaaS product. I personally am building that and my team aren’t, because they’re busy on doing actual work. I’m trying to find a day a week to work, to keep my code skills certainly not completely rusty, and that’s called Notebud. It’s going pretty well, and hopefully get that done by September. This month in July, the other discretionary project is me sorting my blog out, so this has been going about 18 years; certainly as a blog, well over 10. It’s full of rubbish, so I’m going through, pruning a lot, cleaning it up, making it be more sensible, how it’s laid out, and generally just updating it so it better reflects the Darren Beale of 2016 rather than me 12, 13 years ago. My update for this week It’s been a pretty good week, I have to say, pretty positive. Most of my most important tasks that I define at the beginning of the week and add each day, depending on what’s changed day in and day out, I got all of those done, which I’m really pleased about. I’m working quite well towards my fortnightly goals, which tie into goals that we set with our Mastermind group. I had a good sales meeting in London this week, which was quite positive. It’s been a while since I’ve had to go and actually physically see a client. Normally everything’s done over the phone or a video. It was quite good, it felt a bit like a job interview, it was quite odd. I felt comfortable and confident, that’s good to see. On my new thing, I’m trying tracking my discretionary project and progress on an index card. I’m colouring in little blocks for progress, and this week at least one project was worked on each day, so that was good to see. From a professional perspective, I did lots of really good work on Siftware’s SEO. My aim was to have 3 keyword categories completely fleshed out. I’m getting ideas for different words, looking at search volumes, and just building that out, fleshing that out. I’ve done that now, I’ve got 3 categories, and I started mapping that to existing content, and also coming up with ideas for new content. I’ve got a pretty busy week next week ,but certainly by the middle of the month I should be ready to start actually shipping new content that should help my target audience for Siftware, which is people who need their website maintaining or supporting. Give them some value, and hopefully that should give us some better Google juice over the very long term. Also running, my shins are holding out, which is brilliant. I had a bit of a scare a few weeks ago where they started hurting again, but I’ve kept on running through that with physio’s advice. Up to my goal now, 20 miles a week without any pain. I’m not going to try any kind of pushing the miles or the speed or anything over the next month. Just going to keep it at that volume, and then I can think about building on that base. I’m really delighted by that, because … this is a great t-shirt, “I run to keep away the crazy.” That’s very very true. That’s all. I’m feeling like we’re back on track, and finally I’m now waking up again naturally early, which is brilliant, because I was having to set my alarm to get up, and that is a slippery slope to not being [arsed 00:07:14] and getting up a bit late, but now back on that as well. That’s my update done. Last week at the end of the episode, I poorly set you a challenge. I didn’t explain it very well, and I figured I should probably do that in a bit more detail. My challenge was based on thinking that this is July, there’s 6 months of the year left. I’d recently done my 6-month review, where I looked at the goals I has set in January, and I looked to see what’s changed. As expected, at least 50% had changed. I had achieved quite a bit of what I wanted to get done throughout the year, but parts had changed. I started knuckling down, I cut out a lot of things that I hadn’t got time to be getting on with. I reviewed all my goals, and during that process, I tried a different tack and my challenge to you was to try the same thing. I’ll explain it to you now. There will with a copy of this feed to be able to download, or a hypothetical example to give you some ideas of how to lay this out. Ultimately, there are 3 areas. There’s the doing area, what you’re working on right now. Just put it all down on a page. This can be everything from major projects like building a house or whatever it is you’re doing, or writing a book. Pretty major things, right down to very small micro-level things like fix a contact form on my website or unblock the drain. Whatever it is, from the very prosaic all the way through to the great big chunky stuff, just write down everything that you’re doing. At the bottom of the page, list out all the things that you want to achieve. You will, if you read up about setting goals, very quickly you’ll be told by everyone to only focus on things that are measurable and achievable and timely, and all the other SMART things. I would actually disagree with that at this level. This is a high-level kind of brainstorming exercise. Just put whatever you want. If you just want to say, “I want to be fitter,” write that down. You don’t have to, say, give it a time limit or anything. Obviously, remember that goal was just dreams or deadlines, but at this stage, dreams are fine, so mark all those on the page. On the right hand side or left hand side, whichever way is your preference, write down things that are causing you problems at the month, so it’s like an 80/20 analysis. The 20% of things that are causing you 80% of the pain. This could be you’re stressed out, you’re tired all the time. It’s all of those sort of things. Put that down on that side of the page. Then just draw some lines between them and try and see where there’s a congregation of lines, really. For example, in the hypothetical example I’ve provided for you, you might be feeling quite overwhelmed, you’ve got loads to do. That’s going to be a line to pretty much all the things that you’re doing … section. One way to work towards being less overwhelmed would be to see maybe where some of the doing things aren’t really joining up with your goals at the moment. There’s no set way of doing this, in a right or wrong way. Your brain is wired differently to the way my brain is wired. Thankfully, for you. Just see what you come up with, and then from that you should be able to figure out what you want to prune out. That’s the aim of the exercise here, is to prune a lot of your doing. As I say, it should come quite natural to you. It’s a bit like the thing where you flick a coin and the right choice … they’ve got 2 things, should I go left or should I go right? You flip the coin and it says right, you go, “Damn, I want to go left.” Go left then. It’s the same with these. Look at where all the lines come, look at particularly in terms of the ones that are working towards your goals, or the ones that aren’t working towards your goals. Basically cross a load of them out, and say, “Well, I’m not working on this stuff right now, because I can’t get that done in the next 6 months. I can’t get all this done, I’m going to still feel overwhelmed, I’m going to still be stressed out,” or whatever it is that you’ve got. You’re also looking to … in terms of the goals … you’re also thinking, “I’m trying to work towards removing some of these pains.” That’s the idea, so you’ve got a goal but also, not only are you going to be getting stuff done, but you also want to be removing friction, anxieties, whatever it is. I hope that makes a bit more sense, try it out. As I say, there’s an example for you to have a look at. The idea here is that you give it a go. You’ve got 6 months of this year left. It’s not too late to start. Figure out some things that you want to get done in the next 6 months, and then you’re going to prune a lot of that out, because you ain’t going to get it all done. Then don’t get too stressed out about how you’re going to get it all done, because you don’t have to do it all in July, or August or September. The idea is that you’ve just got an idea, a vague idea of the things that you will be doing over the next 6 months. Then maybe you can prioritise that over the coming months. Write down your doing things on a Post-it, pop it on the side of your monitor. If you want to share it with me, I’d love to see it. You can email me, bealers@siftware.com, and I’m at @bealers on Twitter. I hope you have a great week, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. The post Doing, Aiming & Being Challenge appeared first on Darren Beale.

It has been a few months! In this episode I provide a personal update as well as review two books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, both Cal Newport, Also, with us being half-way through the year I also leave you with a challenge to consider your goals for the next 6 months. It’s quite rough around the edges so please bear with me, these will get better! A full transcript of the show follows below. Bealers: Hello, campers. I’m Bealers and you’re watching the first of my weekly video diary entries where I’m going to use the Internet as an accountability partner and to also share my wins and fails in amongst a narrative of starting small, making slow but steady improvements, positive thinking and generally managing the inputs. That’s both to our bodies and to our lives. The idea is that each episode is going to be no more than about 10 minutes and that rather than it being a holy self-indulgent exercise on my part, there will also be something of value for you guys to watch and listen. Before I continue, there’s something that I do want to address from my perspective. There’s a rather large elephant in the room. That’s the fact that a few months ago, I announced that I’d be doing a podcast called Knuckling Down. In that podcast episode, the pilot episode of that, I set out my stall. I then bared my soul to the world, detailing the pretty crappy time I’d been having over the past couple of years, how unwell I was, how in pain I was, how deeply unhappy I was, but then how I turned things round, how I got myself fit and healthy again. Pretty obviously in hindsight by a regime of good sleep, good food, good exercise, I turned things around. It turned out that I had been super-stressed and my body had just given up on me. Anyway, Knuckling Down was and probably still is going to be an interview show where I discuss health, business and productivity with experts or other people within our industry. After that pilot episode, loads of you lovely people on Twitter, email, even face-to-face gave me great feedback, told me your own stories and urged me to continue talking about those things, particularly around stress but also just getting stuff done and health. 3 months on, the irony is, is that I started knuckling down on my own stuff. I had to do that thing that one does when prioritising. I had to say no. I realised that there’s just not enough space in my schedule for a long-form podcast at the moment. The learning curve is quite steep. I have to research guests and practice, get good at interviewing, and most importantly, there’s not [a lot of 00:02:29] space in my work day for it because during the day, I need to be focusing on my business. The idea is that this is going to be a mini version of Knuckling Down or certainly it’s not going to be called that, but it’s just going to be quick video diary entries that I’m doing from home and that I’m going to do them in my own time. They’re only going to take me 1 hour per week from start to finish. My aim is to practice the nuts and bolts of recording and publishing whilst I’m also sharing the ups and downs of my journey, and at the same time, I’ll try to ensure that I share something of value with you each time. By that, I mean there should be at least 1 takeaway for you each week. Format’s going to be fluid and may change, but each week to start things off, I’ll spend a few minutes providing an update on my key projects and sharing anything that I’ve learned during the week. As this is the first time I’ve done this, I’ll detail out what my projects are at the moment. It’s not a long list, don’t worry. First and foremost, it’s scaling and improving Siftware, my software development company. It specialises in website support and maintenance. 2 years ago, Siftware was just myself and Ian. Over the last 2 years, the head count got up to 8 at one point and things are currently are settled at 6. My current focus is on keeping my team happy, keeping my clients happy, making sure we’re efficient and that we’re systematising our process as we go and of course, we always want new work. In that vein, over the past month or so, I’ve been doubling down on tactics to improve our organic search engine ranking, so I have tie that into non-spammy content marketing strategies. I’m sure I’m going to have a lot more to say about that over the coming weeks. Next, there’s a SaaS that I’m building personally to keep my development skills fresh because I hadn’t developed for a couple of years. It’s called Notebud and it’s going to help the users of OneNote keep track of their tasks and also optionally provide a bridge to their third party to-do list manager, so things like Wunderlist or Todoist. Development’s gone really well and I’m super-pleased with that. I’m confident that I can achieve my self-inflicted deadline of September for a Beta MVP. My third major project is a book that I’ve started writing called The One Notebook. It will be, as I’m sure you’ve probably already guessed, a book on OneNote which is Microsoft’s competitor to Evernote, and a far superior competitor it is in my humblest of opinions. I’ve been using OneNote for donkey’s years, 10 years plus, and I’ve banged on about it to all who would listen during that time. The problem has always has been for me is that most of my peers aren’t on Windows, and Evernote, well, was far superior on the Mac, well, it was far superior because OneNote didn’t exist. What’s changed is over the last couple of years, Microsoft have upped their game. They’ve released 4 free versions for Windows, Mac OS 10, Android and iOS. On iOS, there are 2 versions. There’s an iPad version and there’s an iPhone version. That coupled with Evernote changing their pricing structure recently has meant that a lot of people are moving over to OneNote and I want to help those people get the most out of this amazing tool that I run my life on. Of course, having a book on the subject won’t hurt while I look to promote a SaaS product that also provides those value-added services to those users. Did you see what I did there? I have a sample chapter drafted, half-drafted. I need to finish that off. I aim to get that down within the next month. I’ll then start promoting the book, and as I finish things off, I’ll also be recording screencasts, which is another reason for me to have the stuff here at home because I won’t have time to be doing that again during the day when I’m working on my business. Finally, underlining all of these other major projects that I’ve prioritised after getting rid of a lot of other projects that I was also working on, I’m still focusing on my health and general productivity, 2 subjects very, very close to my own heart, an area where I formed a lot of opinions and frankly experience on my journey over the last couple of years from being overweight, stressed and unhappy to leaner, definitely, fit and positive me. I’m probably going to mention running from time to time, but don’t worry. I know that running’s really boring for people unless you actually are also a runner, so I won’t bang on about it too much. I’m also going to touch on my new productivity, things, or any new discoveries that I’ve consumed during the week as I’ve been researching. I’m going to also mention how I’m getting on with my own habits, again, accountability, new ideas that I’ve had, how my morning routine’s working out, what new hacks I found, that sort of stuff. Basically, I’m going to be sharing what’s working for me as I’m going on my own path to personal improvement. Since I’ve recorded the Knuckling Down pilot 3 months ago, I’ve had 1 wobble, health wobble. There was a couple of weeks where I felt pretty rubbish. I was suffering badly from stress again. However, it was much more reduced. The impact was much more reduced compared to the previous, how it used to be a few years back. I was able to … My routines, my exercise, my good diet, and generally my positive attitude and applying mindfulness techniques to what I do meant that the impact was much, much reduced and I was able to keep functioning and I didn’t lose my momentum. Also in April, almost 10 months to the day that as a complete non-runner who would have a minor, mild heart attack running for the bus, I ran 26 miles around London. I’m not going to lie. It was really bloody hard and I did train hard but my performance could have been better. I’ve definitely got some unfinished business there. That said, I’m absolutely delighted and really proud of myself that I achieved it and I’m super-thankful to everybody who sponsored me. We raised £1,000 for the Outward Bound Trust, so thank you so much. Also during April, I was a part of Mark Jenkins’s 30-day writing challenge. Mark’s in my mastermind group along with Andrew and Alex. He mentioned he was doing this challenge as we discussed each of our businesses and our projects, and it seemed really rude not to get involved because I want to get better at writing myself. The premise is that writing is like a muscle. You need to exercise it to get better at it, and the more you do, the better you get. I ended up writing a blog post every day in April, and it was really grueling but it was true. The premise was true. It got easier, and I feel sure that I got better as a writer as we went along. The irony is that it was so grueling. I don’t think any of us have written anything since in the little community that sprang up around the exercise, although I know that speaking to Mark and Andrew yesterday, I think we’re all trying to get back on track recently. That’s the brief update. Normally it’d be shorter than that, but obviously I’ve had a bit of a back story to fill in. Time’s ticking on, but before I go, I want to leave you with a couple of things for you to chew on. Firstly, a few books. So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, It’s absolutely superb. I found out about it on Derek Sivers’s website. I’m assuming you’ve heard of Derek Sivers. If you’ve not, he’s a legend, and you should totally look him up and read some of his work. A pretty good place to start probably would be Tim Ferris’s podcast, and he interviewed him recently. Anyway, the So Good They Can’t Ignore You premise is that pursuing your passion to become a llama farmer or a yak shaver or whatever is probably not that good an idea. You’re probably burning bridges and you’ll be throwing a lot of your hard-earned career capital as Cal called it in the process. Instead, you want to get really, really good at what you do right now, get so competent that you can start to introduce a modicum of control into your life. At that point, that’s when you can start to consider what your life mission might be, and slowly ease yourself into it. Definitely read it. It contradicts the general narrative of Follow Your Passion, but I promise you, it will give you a life-changing perspective. Here we go. Deep Work, again by Cal. This is something that Marc Jenkins recommended, I hadn’t heard of it. The basic premise is that we’ve all become so used to constant interruptions from email, on social media, from all of our notifications on our phones and that the received wisdom these days is that that’s okay, that it’s normal, interruptions are normal, you should always be responding to your staff, you should always be available. Cal argues that if you master the ability to become good at blocking out distractions and diving deep into your tasks one at a time, not load balancing between lots of them, that you will gain an unfair advantage to the rest of society, that you will produce more and that you will attain your goals. The techniques in the books themselves are not that revolutionary. They’re interesting and they’re great, and if you’re anything like me who consumes or are quite interested in what the best practices are of getting shit done, then you probably will have tried a lot of them in some way over the years. What’s important is the general mindset that distractions are bad, and that by being good at focusing in deeply on a task one at a time is that you’re going to get much more productive. It’s so, so good. Just go out and buy it and you will thank me. Just before I go, I want to leave a little challenge for you. Grab yourself some mind map software and at the top of the page, think about … It’s July. It’s early July and you’ve got 6 months of this year left. What are you going to want, what do you want to achieve? Across the top of the page, map out all the things you want to achieve. At the bottom of the page, map out any goals or aspirations or dreams, remembering that goals are just dreams with deadlines. Over to the side, also brainstorm the 20% of things that cause you 80% of pains, stresses, unhappiness. Start drawing lines between these 3 kind of areas. Where are the intersections? I would suggest you pick 4 or 5 things from this list of goals, pains, projects. I’m not going to leave you a set way of trying to prioritise, but just use your own … You can have 20 things you’re currently working on. You can have 5 things that are really stuck at the moment. Out of those things, choose 5 and write them down on a Post-It note and stick them to the side of your monitor and work towards either removing them or getting better or working towards. Whatever you come up with, why don’t you take a photo and send it to me, by Twitter or share it privately by email, or if you feel brave enough, highlight it in the comments of the thread on the blog post that contains this movie? Either way, I’d love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with any feedback or just share what you’re working on. I’m at Bealers on Twitter and you can email me, bealers@siftware.com. Thanks so much. Have a great week. The post Accountability Diary or Personal Development Podcast? appeared first on Darren Beale.

So here we are, the pilot of Knuckling Down, I am excited and terrified in equal measure. In this episode I set my stall out, going through the subjects I intend to cover over the coming months as well as giving my reasons and motivations for launching this show. There’s a rather toe curling – well, for me at least – 10 minute segment in the middle where I also provide some personal context and describe my recent past, describing how I’ve managed to get over recent health and motivation problems. It’s all a bit vanilla at the moment with a basic website and (very)  basic editing, as I figure out how to glue all of this together; this is my MVP to see if something like this is of interest to others. Towards the end of the episode I mention an article by Jessica Able which introduces the concept of Idea Debt. This give me the final nudge to actually ship this before I felt ready. It’s entitled Imagining your future projects is holding you back and is well worth a read. There are players for both the MP3 or you can also watch a very nervous me talk to myself on Youtube. The show was submitted to itunes a few minutes ago, once that’s live the subscribe links *should* then work. I hope this is of interest and I actively encourage your feedback, particularly if you have ideas for subject matter to cover or people to approach for interviews. You can get me on twitter (@bealers) or email bealers@siftware.com.   The post Knuckling Down Pilot appeared first on Darren Beale.