I was a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which I discovered about four years ago in high school. There’s more “productivity porn” on the Web these days than anyone knows what to do with, so if you’re looking to jump in to Allen’s system it’s worth having a knowledgeable guide. That link should help you out!

But there are a fair amount of problems with GTD, not the least of which being how narrow its focus is. It requires a LOT of thought and attention every day in order to function the way it’s designed to, and it won’t give you a whole lot of feedback on how much real progress you’re making (everything becomes splintered into bilions and billions of tiny tasks). It’s always much easier (and tempting) to let things slide, and that’s never a good idea.

The best way to combat this is to rethink and re-tweak the system, and Leo Babuata of Zen Habits has done exactly that in his Zen-To-Done” system. I find his ideas extremely complementary to my way of working. The idea of “Big Rocks“, or the concrete work for the week that you absolutely need to pay attention to, gives otherwise freeform and chaotic lists of tasks some necessary context. The same basic process of GTD (where you capture every idea you have whenever you have them, process them when you get home, then select and complete each action individually) remains the same. I highly recommend ZTD; it’s well-thought and incredibly useful.

Enter Software

To handle my lists and quickly enter new tasks, I use Things.app, a fantastic piece of (Mac OS X) software from Cultured Code. I’ve never (well, almost never) been as thrilled with a piece of code in my life. I love Things almost as much as I love actually getting things done. There’s an iPhone version too, which I’m dying to play with when I get one later this year.

For virtually everything else (my life-in-a-database), I use Evernote. Not only can I write notes to myself (including PDFs) and tag and organize them however I like, but those notes are automatically synchronized to a website where I can log in and read them anywhere in the world. I can even take pictures of a sign with a digital camera, upload them to the site, and the text will be recognized so I can search for it in the future. Wow. After trying a ton of related software, including Yojimbo, DevonTHINK and Notational Velocity, I think Evernote strikes the best balance of simplicity and usefulness. And of course, there’s an iPhone app already. Did I mention that it’s free?

A typical day on my Mac involves Things, iCal and NetNewsWire for reading news; Evernote for taking notes, Photoshop and Lightroom for my photography, Scrivener for longer, multi-part documents, Transmit for working with my web server, and MarsEdit for writing Evolation.

So that’s it for software.

A Nifty Trick to Organize a Room

I’ve been stuck on the concept of rational space for a few weeks now. I want my room to be rational, and I spent a few days at the end of last year coming up with ways to do it. One of the most useful habits I’ve started is to label EVERYTHING with the information that’s relevant to it. A stack of CD cases gets a label saying “these are just cases”, so that I don’t need to open them up and look at them when I see them in a drawer. My subwoofer has L and R taped onto the back so that I don’t have to squint at the 6-point-gold-text-on-black wiring diagram. The computer I need to fix has its serial number taped to the top. This all seems obvious, but when you have inattentive ADD it’s hard to remember all the minutae or be able to find what you’re looking for. The fewer chances to make a mistake, the better. What I’ve found is that in keeping things consistently labelled, the amount of decisions I need to make at any given time (where do I put this? what’s in it? why do I have it?) are reduced dramatically. The room practically organizes itself, since everything becomes self-contained. I still need to get better about putting things away, which is part of the 2009 challenge!

Next time, we’ll look at so-called Internet Addiction and the ways in which I’ll be leaving technology behind this year in favor of living real life. Don’t miss anything– subscribe to my RSS feed and make sure you get the biggest kickstart to 2009 you can!

This year seems particularly conducive to optimism: with the election of Obama, the global economic avalanche, and (on a more personal note) my graduation from college, the future is anything but certain. With all that ambiguity comes a special kind of potential: anything can happen now. I’ve also had a special feeling about the year 2009 for as long as I can remember, so I hope that intuition holds true.

I discovered a fantastic annual review exercise on Chris Guillebeau’s site, The Art of Nonconformity and have been hard at work elaborating exactly what I want to get out of 2009. I encourage you to do the same! Here are a few areas where I will be working particularly hard, as well as an area I’ve chosen to take a break on this year.

Areas to Focus On

Health

Vision – my computer-induced nearsightedness has bothered me to no end, and since my new puppy chewed up a very expensive pair of glasses, I’m electing to forego buying a new pair and instead use natural vision improvement exercises (which have worked wonders in the past for me, but I have not had the discipline to follow through on). I will practice these techniques every day for a minimum of 45 days to evaluate if they will help my eyesight.

Mind – after spending nearly a year conducting research for my upcoming senior project, The Anatomy of Awareness (more on that later!), I have learned a great deal about neuroscience and brain chemistry. With that knowledge comes the awareness of just how many things in my own brain are not working correctly: my focus, concentration, energy levels and motivation are seriously fucked. This year, I will conduct exhaustive trials of supplements and prescriptions to find what works best for me in these areas. I’m currently waiting on a shipment of piracetam, a “cognitive enhancer” proven beneficial in Alzheimer’s patients and in connecting the left and right brain hemispheres. I’ll post some information on that in the near future.

Diet and Exercise – I have occasionally been in great shape, so I know it’s not only possible, but relatively simple given the right motivation. This year I am going to try eating much fewer carbs. I am interested in learning more about Ayurvedic (Indian) dietary practices, especially since an Ayurvedic herb (Tulsi) just rescued me from a very serious cold.

Work and Finances

Career – I have had a rocky road of internships and part-time work during my college’s Fieldwork Term, but my experiences have been largely positive. I’ll soon begin working at my former high school and hope to turn this into a full-time position or find other work that is similarly rewarding and fulfilling to my purpose as a human being. Since I am leaving college this year as well, I have plenty of ideas of where I want to go and will need some time to whittle my options down!

I’ve also just completed 90% of the paperwork for launching Evolation as a small business (from now on known as Evolation Media, LLC) and I am excited about the prospects. I am still examining ways I can use the medium and content of this site to help others. I will be adding some slight redesigns to the site in order to better prepare it for the direction I have planned for it.

Organization

I am making an intense transition towards being more organized and aware of the myriad details of my life. I have practiced David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method before, and found it fantastic, but have not had the time or incentive to put it into full-time use. 2009 is that time. I will be documenting how I use his and other organizational systems, as well as offering tips on what’s helped me stay on top of all this!

Areas to Leave Alone

Spirituality – I have spent altogether too much time in this realm recently, and though I feel intensely connected, grateful, and conscious in my daily life, I have lost a fair amount of personal power because I have never really worked at being effective in the real world. Since I know I will be a spiritual person regardless of what I do, and that this is an innate and inseperable part of who I am, I will try to leave it on the back burner and focus more on interpersonal, entrepreneurial and physical work in the real world. In Steve Pavlina’s terminology, I am moving away from a fixation on Oneness (the combination of Truth and Love) and towards a focus on Courage (the combination of Love and Power).

I’ll be documenting all these trials over the coming months, so there will be much more info to follow soon. Have a happy 2009!

Not doom in the sense of the world ending (sure, we have those issues with planes blowing up the neighborhood); I mean doom in the context of going somewhere with one’s life. Doom in the very real sense that every second we have is valuable (and, potentially, profitable).

New York breeds some of the most determined and hardest-working people on earth. From the street cleaners to CEOs, everyone is trying to get ahead, and the only way to do that (given that we all live a roughly equal number of days) is to work harder, or faster, or better. Being surrounded by this energy, especially living somewhere like Wall Street, gave me the constant signal that everything should be very very important. Work when you’re on break. Work when you’re on the train. Every second you aren’t working is a second someone else is.

The thing is, far from being neurotic (though my friends might beg to differ), I think this energy helps me prioritize. It’s true, I always claim to be busy. It’s also true that I always claim to be having fun. This is no accident.

In truth, people become more lazy and more unmotivated the more “breaks” they take. Why go back to work at all, after a certain point? If your work requires you to stop so often, it’s probably not something you want to be doing. If it was really tailored to your energy levels and tapped into your real drive, hours would go by before you even considered stopping. The fact is that 99% of what we do is irrelevant to our core motives, detached from our real passions. But this is something you can change. You can choose to move forward towards your goals, or you can choose to have the same day over and over again until you die. Which do you choose?

Next time you’re faced with a decision about what to do next, which “next action” to cover, ask yourself this:

Which choice will put me in a position of greater knowing? Which choice will I look back on and say, ‘that was important’?

You’d be surprised at how much that clears up.

Most of our lives, we’re caught up in an endless loop of consistently choosing the least-useful path, simply because it requires less effort. We’re not just creatures of habit, we’re creatures of laziness. What did you do today that was dramatically different from yesterday? Can you name five things? Three? Even one?

It takes courage to do something unique, something difficult, every single day. But damn, is it worthwhile.

Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself if I’m truly moving forward. If I’m not, I want to know it as soon as my day starts, and address it right then and there–not after 14 hours are wasted on projects I don’t care about, or whose outcomes don’t affect me.

New York may be a hell of a bizarre place to live, but at least it’s been a good teacher.

Are you better prepared today than you were yesterday? Are you closer to the things you want? Are you working, or just surviving?

No matter how overworked you might be, or how tired you feel, or how much you hate the idea of challenging yourself with new directions, there’s still time to learn something new today. This is the internet. Read something worthwhile. Just one new piece of information a day will mean you’ve learned 30 new things in a month. And at least one of those things might completely change your ideas about yourself and your career.

It’s worth the effort.

Image: “Dimensional Shift” by Michael Cook.

Well worth the read.

What am I going to do? I’m going to be alive; to dream and explore and experience as much as possible. Is that not good enough? Is that not a life lived richly?

Richly, yes. But surely without riches–for such things come only from a dedication to the world of Work, a wholehearted acceptance of market culture, a willingness to sell oneself for the promise of eventual (promised) freedom. Those who ascend the corporate ladder are those who have best shaped themselves to the demands and needs of the market, who have positioned themselves as being valuable to others. Above all else, abstraction and specialization are rewarded–the more specific one’s work becomes, and the more abstraction (education, disconnection) required to get to that level, the more these men and women become indispensable– if only for their assumed “expertise”.

If one is unable or unwilling to dedicate oneself so totally, to give up their time and their minds for the benefit of a corporate hierarchy, they’re left with few ways to make ends meet: after all, in the end, sweat is low-class. Being close to the earth, to machinery, to physicality, is the mark of a lesser being no matter the freedoms one enjoys. Despite these labors being the very crux of our civilization, despite them being the most critical aspect of any sort of production (the production itself), they are considered expendable, fit only for dumb machines. Hard labor indicates that one is not “a success”.

For as we all know, the world’s decisions are formed by the sedentary, clustered in dim boardrooms, their glasses masking destroyed vision, wearing identical suits, “power nooses” around their necks. They have the world’s resources at their disposal, but life’s resources, it seems, have evaded them entirely: the sensuous and subtle, the simple joys that are our birthright–these are not quantifiable. They are not marketable.

In the end, our system rewards sacrifice, and one would expect that those whose physical sacrifice is so great would be the first to benefit: as unfair as it is, this is not enough. Perhaps this is why doing what one loves is so important: all we can hope for is to provide true value, giving all we can give in order to serve the greater good (rather than corporate interest), and to be justly rewarded, as the world deems appropriate. That, to me, seems a life lived richly.

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living fully, passion, personal development, purpose, reform, society, work, labor

Notice the reflections in your spoon. Notice the exact sound your feet make on your bedroom floor. Try to hear every nuance of a dripping faucet. Find a color that exactly represents the word “movement”. Unfocus your eyes and feel just how much air there is between you and the objects around you; all moving, pulsating, yet totally invisible to our eyes.

Or think of larger ideas, even if the answers are impossible. How many children are speaking their first word right now? How many paintings were created today? Why are we speaking English? How many electromagnetic signals are crisscrossing your body right now?

Our world has been accelerated to such an incomprehensible blur that these gestures may seem meaningless or even boring. But I’m convinced that attention is everything. By really paying attention to those aspects of your daily life that were once ignored, you’re training your brain to create finer distinctions, sharpening your senses and invigorating what is otherwise a monotonous series of events (otherwise, you would have remembered them vividly… right?).

It is always useful for us to realize the “circle” of our actual perceptions–not that which has been informed or given to us in other ways, but the actual sum of our sensory and mental/spiritual experiences. In other words, it’s important to think in terms of what has occurred within “body space”. Taken in this way, much of our supposed life appears missing. Most of us have not traveled far, and have not done or felt or seen nearly as much as we erroneously believe. The physical actions of our bodies–or the states of consciousness we experience–are often clouded by vast arrays of thought, outside input, and objective “knowledge”, to such an extent that we often have difficulty recalling what it is we’ve done as opposed to what others have written or spoken about. Very rarely do we actually remember the feeling of a warm cup of tea or coffee in cold hands (have you ever felt it?) or the sound of rain when everything else is silent. The spread of mass communication has given virtually everything a sense of familiarity, even the unfamiliar. The result ends up clouding everyone’s experience of the Real, the Here and Now. It is no wonder so many people have become addicted to newness, acquiring and consuming whatever they can in order to feel that rush of unfamiliarity. With most other frontiers removed, our exploratory senses have learned to be satiated by advertising. There’s no world out there to conquer, but there is a sale going on downtown…

Much of what we do in life operates on the basis of assumptions– some, like gravity, are relatively necessary. Others, like the persistent existence of a world “out there”, complete with wars and bicycles and export laws, are less grounded in actual perception. We assume these things exist because we are told they exist, and this reinforcement leads us to stop wondering about it. The problem comes when our brains assume virtually everything about our day-to-day life, saving its exceptional pattern-matching software for more important tasks.

I live across the street from the World Trade Center site in downtown New York. There is currently ongoing construction, day and night, virtually 24/7. There are jackhammers, trucks, and drills pounding away in a continual percussion that echoes across the neighborhood.

When someone came to visit me recently, they could barely hear me speaking. “What’s all that noise?”

I had forgotten the construction was even there.

Far from my brain thinking these jarring sounds meant that now was probably a good time to run (as it should be, if one were to ever encounter this sound in a prehistoric Earth); no, here loud drilling and hammering has become, in essence, a new form of background noise. For some readers, this may be difficult to imagine, but for others the experience is all too familiar. Our brain must continually dump otherwise pertinent data in order to try (as hard as it can) to find what is relevant in a situation. The end result of all this is that we no longer see what is right in front of us. Our thresholds have been raised too high to actually experience our own lives.

So take this last day of 2007 to remember where you are, and what you can know, right now. Notice the small things. Key in to your own experience of the world–not what you’re told to experience, not what you’ve heard experienced–and find something truly your own. Ultimately, learning to see more depth in daily life will allow you more detailed levels of thinking, because the brain learns to not shut out as much input as it has grown accustomed to. Cultivate silence. Appreciate noise. Whatever it is, shut off your analytical mind for a second. Extend your senses as far as they can go. Take it in. And have a wonderful New Year.

It may be simple, but it’s absurdly significant. Once I discovered it, I was forced -- literally forced! -- to re-examine everything I did. More to the point, it’s what distinguishes those who do from those who wish. It’s a momentum-booster and boredom cure all in one. And it’ll take less than ten minutes. You can use it a thousand times a day, if you like-- the more you do, the more effective it (and you) will become.

But first, answer one quick question:

Do you even want to move forward?

Are you sure?

For some, it’s easy to be caught up in the rush of “improving”. It makes sense that we can be kinder, wealthier, more beautiful. It makes sense that we can learn to think faster, sleep less, do more, and have better relationships. To some of us it makes sense that we can, in essence, become modern superheroes. Even if we’re not sure how, we know on some level that it should be possible. And if we find ourselves falling short of this ideal, we feel terrible. No matter how far we’ve come, we aren’t “enough”.

To others, though, this entire concept is absurd. Doubtful voices chime, “sure, try it if you want.” Excuses are made-- ‘that’s not for me, but go ahead…” No matter what happens as a result of one’s achievement, negative people will feel that it was somehow due to an undefinable quality of the person-- that luck, or their good looks, or their better family, or their genetics, or their superior education were the reason that they’ve changed themselves. The same voice that says “that’s not for me” reaffirms it-- “I could never do it“. And the negative tend to become “lazy thinkers”, doing only what is required of them because they are unable to think of what might be wished of them.

Face it. Most likely, you don’t really want to improve. You don’t really want to work at it-- if it came in the form of a magic pill or an “ancient Chinese secret”, you wouldn’t mind being someone new for a while, but the amount of energy required to do it sans snake-oil is more than you’re willing to give. And it’s easier this way -- you already know what is required of you, and can more or less fulfill those duties (obligations/minimums) without having to give in to any kind of existential crisis. (And that’s what inevitably happens, when one realizes they haven’t done enough with their life-- are you honestly prepared for that?) Ask yourself if staying this way satisfies you, or if it leaves you wanting more.

So I ask again, do you really want to move forward? Because I’m going to reveal the secret.

Are you ready?

Here it is.

In every moment, there is a chance-- usually a difficult one, mostly an obvious one and always, always a beautiful one -— to be a better human being.

I say difficult because you almost certainly will not enjoy it. It will call upon resources you aren’t sure you can give, provide you with little feedback as to how far you’ve come, cast into doubt everything you’ve done, and make you wonder-- sometimes frequently-- if you’ll ever get there.

I say obvious because you know exactly what you should be changing, 90% of the time (how often have you approached a situation with an idea of your behavior that didn’t match what you ended up doing?). Obvious because the very motivation behind doing it came from within you.

This isn’t about “lose 30 pounds in 30 days” or “become a millionaire by Saturday night”. These “betterments” aren’t even necessarily measurable (Before you take issue with that, keep reading…). This is about making some headway-- sometimes small, sometimes great. What matters is the momentum. What matters it that, even if you aren’t exactly sure who this “better” self is, you acknowledge that they’re in you. You acknowledge that someone better than who you are right now is trying to come out in every interaction you have with others. Someone better than who you are now is trying to solve your problems (or might not even be worrying about them). Someone better than who you are now is trying to enrich even this moment, right now. And you have a choice to live it from a place of higher development-- if you really want to.

I said earlier that this simple idea is what distinguishes those who do from those who think, and it’s true-- think of all the times when someone you know went almost all the way, but stopped right before they might have otherwise had a real breakthrough. As you’ve probably already seen, laziness often builds up most intensely right before a real transformation happens. But if one is constantly seeking to move forward-- even in the smallest possible way-- they will not and cannot stay satisfied with a lower level of consciousness than they know themselves to be capable of. Temporary laziness is OK-- maybe even incurable-- but if you make the commitment to constant improvement, it will only be temporary.

Your own consciousness should provide the boost, in terms of followthrough. You may need external reinforcement in the beginning, but once you decide once and for all to be your best self, you will know exactly where you are going wrong. It won’t be a question of motivation, because your life is your own motivation. Why not wake up every morning with a sense of awe at the sheer potential of the day ahead? What possible force on earth can drag you away from that feeling?To live a life this fearlessly takes effort-- a ton of effort. That effort might be better spent elsewhere-- it’s all up to you. But when you wake up tomorrow, or whenever you think of it, ask yourself these three simple question:

– “In this moment, am I the best person I can be?”

– “What’s the next level?”

– “How can I get there?”

Don’t hold yourself to an outside standard that is impossible to reach-- even the most enlightened human beings on this planet have flaws. Just ask yourself if you’re the best that you can be right now. Don’t take it too far; don’t scare yourself too badly, because that will only exacerbate the problem. Realize that you are either choosing to try, or choosing not to.

Trust me. You’ll know. You can worry about the level of commitment later.

There are no time-outs. There are no dead ends. There are no excuses.

Act accordingly.

(And by the way… thanks for the Digg!)