Moleskine Desk Calendar

via moleskinerie

Planning Your Day…

18 minutes from now you could be having a perfect day…

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful. What can you realistically accomplish that will further your goals and allow you to leave at the end of the day feeling like you’ve been productive and successful? Write those things down. Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

link: An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day – Peter Bregman – HarvardBusiness.org

Again With The Seinfeldian Chain

The infamous Seinfeldian Chain is back with a new printable implementation. Don’t know if it’ll actually produce any positive results but it sure looks good, which of course is half the battle…

Refocus is a simple printable template that allows you to lay out a handful of goals and track your adherence to those goals over the next 30 days.
Tracking goals in a concrete and visual way is an excellent motivational tool. The Seinfeldian Chain, previously covered here, is certainly a strong example of the effectiveness and popularity of the technique when used as motivation for a single goal. The ReFocus worksheet allows you to track up to five goals over a month. From the author’s web site:

via lifehacker

Almost Perfect…

My wife’s Dad was an architect and while helping him move a few years ago I ran across a couple of his old notebooks, his handwriting was spectacular…clean, precise, almost perfect.

(via moleskinerie)

A Brilliant Ideal Or To Much Free Time?

You judge…its called “the circle“

Let’s get started. Write down the projects name, like: Product Brochure for My Brand Inc. Put a circle in front of the name. Then, indenting lines a bit, draw a circle. After the circle, you write down the actions you need to do before the project is finished. One line at least for each action. You might want or need to add a few actions or a phone number later on, so leave a little space between projects.

Ok, this was about the bones and now it’s the meat. The Circle.

We now have projects with its actions, all with circles in front. And we surely have individual actions that are not part of any project, like Pay this bill and so on. Put everything in, every action you need to execute at home or work. Don’t try to remember everything — except one thing: The notebook remembers.

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Daily Review

photo by paul worthington

Recently I’ve developed the habit of doing a brief daily review just before I go to bed. When I say brief I mean brief, taking only five or ten minutes max to write in my Moleskine Daily Planner a overview of my day…what worked and didn’t work…what I should focus on tomorrow.

This simple daily act is really helping me to stay focused (on my alleged goals) and it also makes my weekly review a lot easier.

Your thoughts…

Technorati Tags: gtd, weekly review, moleskine

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Productivity Power Links 01-05-08

The creative process?

My sense, though, is that for most people who repeatedly do (and sell) creative work, this all seems a bit like wanting to feel like a world-class athlete. Because “feeling creative” produces great work in approximately the same way that “feeling like a doctor” makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.

Uuuuummm paper!

New Year, new templates. The D*I*Y Planner Dynamic Template application has now hit version 2.0, ready to produce any size and shape of yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily calendars for your printing pleasure. All designs are based upon the Classic versions of the D*I*Y Planner, along with input from Doug, and so will integrate completely into your DiyP setup. (The daily design was created by Doug, but was never implemented as a static template owing to the insane amount of repetitive work required.)

Free your eyes and productivity will follow…

Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate: “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.”

Let me see you explain this bad boy to your boss

Taking a nap at one’s desk isn’t the easiest thing to do, but taking a quick desk nap just got easier with the iSleep USB pillow. To use, just plug this inflatable pillow into an available USB port on your computer. (That is if you have a USB port to spare.)

SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry…anybody care?

Their initial SlingPlayer only worked on Windows-based PC’s. With today’s public beta launch of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry, I can now access my cable TV subscription on a BlackBerry from any location worldwide where it has high speed Internet access.

Problems with your short term memory? Well here comes cramberry…

A web app that helps people (students, actors, or anyone else) memorize things (schoolwork, lines in a play, etc.) using flashcards. Users create a blank "set" of flashcards, then name the set, and start adding cards to the set. Once you’re ready, the app presents these cards to you in a random order so you can answer the cards.

Manage thangs with Things…

The latest application from Cultured Code is Things, a task organizer and to-do list manager for Mac and iPhone. It centers around the ideas encompassed in Getting Things Done (GTD) and makes it easy to break down and organize tasks.

Singing the praises of pen and paper…

Lamy Safari – Why? Because they are inexpensive, great writers, are built like a tank, and are available in really cool colors. My first fountain pen was a Safari, and I still love them (I now have four of them) as much as when I started out.

Productivity junk for your Crackberry…

Did you get a new BlackBerry this holiday? Are you looking to trick it out with some sweet applications? Mashable has come to the rescue, posting their top 20 productivity and organization applications for BlackBerry.