Goal of the month: NetWorker

At work, I use the Internet. All the time. Above the local network stuff (HR, internal memos, and the like), I am constantly doing research about various items in my work life.

However, the Internet is also quite the distraction. Yes, I can get sucked into Slashdot and lose an hour. But also in more insidious ways. For example, checking my e-mail. It's great to stay on top of things, but nervously checking it every five minutes is not helpful to my work flow. (Yes, I have been known to do this, mostly when expecting confirmation or a reply.)

Anyway, this month my goal is to get more productivity out of my Internet time (or around my Internet time). Specifically, my resolutions come in two forms: a prohibition and several limits.

Prohibition: No idle browsing

That means no clicking onto Slashdot because I'm bored. If I'm bored, there's probably a reason, and the reason is probably that I am avoiding doing something.

This also includes Slickdeals and other deal sites, which can be real time-sinks for me as I peruse the deals and think about them. To help with this tendency, I've created a custom RSS feed (using Yahoo's Pipes) to go through all the deal sites I could find and filter out the mess, to return just the things I'm looking for. It's worked well so far (I've found one or two pertinent things and ignored countless "deals" that wouldn't be deals to me.)

Daily limits

My feed reader: 1x. I use RSS to catch up with my favorite websites, and to put reading material on my Palm for later perusal. However, checking my feed reader more than once a day is wasteful. Indeed, an RSS reader functions as an aggregator, so I don't have to check multiple places for information. What I'm planning now is a similar aggregation, only across time: checking just once a day will still get me all the information.

E-mail: 5x. I will check both my personal and business mail only five times daily, maximum. Tentatively, these five times will be allotted as follows:
* once in the morning, after I arrive to my office
* once just after lunch
* once before leaving work
* two discretionary times
This should free me up to do more work with fewer interruptions.

What to do instead

With all the time freed up by not browsing idly and aggregating tasks across time, what should I do? My focus is going to be on my to-do list. That is, not things that pop into my head on their own, but things that have "made the cut" and are already on my list. This should help me filter out spurious "urgencies" and make room for important things that I might otherwise neglect.

That should leave me room to get my workday (and life) in better shape.

Catching Up after Falling Behind

With the beginning of "the lusty month of May", my new habit is to stick to a daily exercise routine. This is not a new goal—I had the exact same goal last year, when I was initially trying to get into doing some regular exercise. Why the repeat?

In March, some personal health issues prevented me from sticking with my routine, and I didn't recover at all during the month of April. May is here, and it is time to get on board again, but my habit is broken. (I tried getting started yesterday to verify this—it was tough!)

So with May starting up, I have a decision to make on which monthly goal I would like to pursue. While I would love to tackle something bigger and better this month, I realize that I have taken a few steps back, and I should work back up to where I left off.

When you get out of a habit, don't be afraid to take some time to get back into it—it sets a foundation for further progress..

Tracking, Franklin-style (as in Ben, not Covey)

In recent reading, I ran across an interesting tidbit about Ben Franklin. As a young man, he drew up a plan for being better (or even perfect) in thirteen areas. To take himself to task on it, he made a big grid, with a row for each attribute (temperance, kindness, etc.), and a column for each day. At the end of each day, he checked off the attributes he had exemplified that day. From his autobiography:

I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul'd each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross'd these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.

(I track this sort of information using Reinhard Engel's excellent online tracking tool, HabitCal.)

Tracking, however you do it, serves two purposes:

First, recording successes and failures raises the stakes of the whole endeavor. If records are going to be kept, then your actions matter more, whether you followed through or not. This matters in the moment—feeling accountable makes you more likely to do what it takes to succeed at your endeavor.

Second, the record allows for later analysis. I keep tabs on how I'm doing with respect to past resolutions, as well, and it's interesting to note that when I fail in one tends to coincide with failure in the others. They are connected somehow, and the patterns formed by them are informative. (For example, when I don't exercise in the morning, I am more likely to also fail at staying on task at work.)

Keeping a record of your successes and failures is an integral part of effecting real change.

Starter Motor

When I woke up this morning, my eyes seemed glued shut. The thing I wanted least in the world was to hop out of bed and get going. But it happened anyway.

In a way, starting off a new day is like starting a car. There's work to be done, and you start with very little power. (Note: I'm not terribly familiar with these systems, but I do have a passing acquaintance with them.) As I understand it, in a car, there is a battery that powers the starter motor, which cranks the engine manually until it starts firing.

When I am starting up my day, I use my habits as the battery.

My daily routine is the starter motor. Really, this is because my early-morning willpower isn't yet strong enough to always wake me up with energy and pizazz. It is, however, sufficient to get me outside my bedroom and doing some early-morning exercises.

My morning routine serves as a lifeline, getting me out of bed promptly each morning. Without it, I would be... asleep still, probably.

As soon as you wake up and turn off your alarm clock, where does your mind go? If it goes towards the routine you do every morning, congratulations—you are harnessing the power of habit for your own ends. If your morning includes a daily discussion of whether getting up is worth it today, try setting a routine.

My personal secret weapon is exercise. Even if I feel sluggish and sleepy when I rise, if I can start my exercise routine, I am up for good—once my body starts pumping blood to my working muscles, my body really wakes up, including my eyes (always the stickiest part of me).

Long ago, I read one particularly provocative idea related to setting morning habits—rehearsals. First, set the stage—turn off all the lights, close the curtains, and hop into bed. (In your pajamas, preferably.) Then, set your alarm to go off in a minute or two. Lie awake, and as soon as the alarm sounds, hop right out of bed and turn it off. (Presumably, one can append any additional morning routine here.) Go through a few "rehearsals" during the day to get the idea ingrained.

I haven't tried this, and I admit I would feel a bit silly practicing getting up, but it might be a useful tool if you're looking for a way to get things started.

Maybe you can find a different source of power to start the day right. You might try self-advertising, or telling your spouse about your plan, or just plain willpower. After a few weeks of a supporting method, you should be able to use habit as the sole source of kick to get your day started.

And that makes mornings a lot more fun.

Bucking tradition for efficiency's sake

As a freshman in college, I was introduced through friends to a new keyboard layout, named Dvorak. Its layout resembles the traditional "Qwerty" keyboard, but the positions of the letters are modified to optimize for how people type. (Legend has it that the Qwerty layout was designed to make sure that people typed slowly, so as not to beat up the typewriters' innards with extreme speed.)

I was intrigued, and the idea absorbed me for weeks. The elegance of optimizing the keyboard's layout to suit me seemed genius. And I wondered: should I do it?

This was essentially a tradeoff of time. As for the long term, I knew that I would spend a good portion of the next forty years at a computer. At the same time, I was at college, so I had papers to write and programs to code, both requiring a lot of keyboarding. Learning a new keyboard layout could slow me down a lot in the short term, making it more difficult and time-consuming to finish my coursework.

Life is full of these kinds of compromises. Should you work on the proposal due tomorrow, or spend some strategic time planning a more streamlined business process? Plan a lesson for teaching a course, or devise a better process for planning lessons?

In the end, I decided to stick with my trusty Qwerty skills for a while, though later, when I was keyboarding a lot less (only writing letters home once a week, as a missionary), I made the switch—the short-term cost had gone down enough to make the long-term benefit more appealing. And to this day, I still do most all my typing in the Dvorak layout.

The guiding question should be: is it worth more to you to have your current performance in the short term, or increased performance in the long term?

Preparing for Monthly Resolutions

If you're looking to improve yourself, and if you think (as I do) that setting monthly resolutions will provide a framework to help you in that effort, here are a few tips that might make things a little easier in starting up the habit.

Spend some time thinking about how exactly you want to improve. Where do you want to be in a year? Five years? What are your ultimate goals? These big-picture ideas should point you in a certain direction.

Using your goals, find a manageable issue to start with. While your goals could (and should) be hugely different from your life right now, find something that you can do now to change in that direction. A jumping-off point is just the thing for a monthly resolution, especially your first resolution in an area.

Keep a list of other ideas. As you ponder your life and how you would like it to improve, ready yourself for epiphanies by having a list handy. I find that I get ideas about ways to improve all the time, from church services to riding the bus. And the time invested in making and keeping a list of ideas is easily recouped through less headache in the next step.

Every month, pick a new resolution. I usually give myself a reminder a week in advance of the new month. This gives me a chance to isolate the most important resolution for the month. Here, a list of ideas proves invaluable—I feel much more comfortable picking one resolution when I can see at a glance all the alternatives that I'm not choosing.

In the week before a new month, write up a plan document. This can range from a bullet list of accountabilities to detailed prose on the methods you will use. I include a paragraph explaining why I think it's an important resolution—this is useful in keeping my mind focused on the goal, and also can provide inspiration if the going gets tough later on.

With your plan document in hand, you are ready for a new month!

Resolutions for a New Age

Resolutions are funny things. For most people, resolutions are made in December, broken in January, forgotten in February.

The prospect of changing a habit for an entire year is not one that I find encouraging. That's a long time. And what if you fail at your resolution? Will you have to wait until next year to set another?

That's the way lots of folks do it. But that's not how it has to be. I have had great success in my own life with setting resolutions at a more manageable level. Specifically, I set one resolution (at least) each month. Here's why.

A monthly resolution seems easier to keep. Its short time frame tricks the brain into underrating the difficulty of the resolution, raising confidence. This may sound like a cheap trick to play on your own brain, but it works for me.

A month comes along a lot more often than a year. At a rate of one per month, you can fully accomplish twelve resolutions in one year. On the other hand, doing twelve annual resolutions starting in January is probably biting off a bit more than you can chew.

A new month is never more than five weeks away. By this I mean that if you utterly fail in your lofty goal, that's okay---at least you don't have to wait until next year to start again. Also, if the going gets tough around day fifteen, you can often convince yourself to keep going because you're already halfway done.

A month is long enough to develop a lasting habit. A large number of my own monthly resolutions have stuck around for good. According to some people, twenty-one days are required to formulate a habit, and you're giving yourself around thirty. In my experience, that's enough time for habit setting, even giving you a few days' padding at the beginning to get things rolling. (I often find that my resolutions are hardest at the beginning of the month.)

Some projects may be too long for a month. But instead of setting up another New Year's Eve goal, try breaking it up into month-long components. If you're trying to lose weight this year, set individual monthly resolutions for things like exercising, mindful eating, and drinking water.

Setting monthly resolutions will get you all the benefits of yearly resolutions without the headache.