Organize IT

Some months back I asked my readers whether they thought personal development could and should be taught at schools. The response was largely positive, with most of you agreeing that even though children at a school age wouldn’t necessarily get it, it would still introduce some valuable topics and ideas for them to think about. As Mike King commented, school generally only provides basic knowledge and understanding (to function in a work environment), it doesn’t necessarily help with preparing them for life and its other challenges.

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After years of blissfully eating Big Macs, cooking cheap, greasy foods and drinking fizzy drinks there is now an ever increasing focus on living an healthier lifestyle. However, that’s easier said than done. The whole project of getting healthy covers a lot of areas, ranging from having the right foods in your fridge, getting into the routine of exercise and just ultimately finding the motivation to stick with it all. But, where do you even start? Well firstly, you shouldn’t jump in at the deep end as you will end up drowning. I really believe that small steps done regularly and consistently is much more effective than the rush of enthusiasm followed by the comedown that usually results from trying to make big changes immediately. With that in mind, I present five of the simplest things you can do which will have you taking those first small steps to an healthier lifestyle.

Organize IT recap for 12th September 2008.

• This week I expended my series of productivity tips, discussing the importance of streamlining your system and the hard landscape. I hope you are enjoying this series because in the near future I hope to expand the series and turn it into my next ebook. Keep an eye out for updates.
• The ten worst job tips ever is incredibly insightful. There are all sorts of tips out there involving trying to stand out from the crowd and make an impression of perspective employees. However, as this article proves, most of it is very nieve.
• Tim Ferriss encourages people to basically go on an information diet. While this is great for not filling your head with useless junk (and there is really no denying that the bulk or what we watch and read is junk). However, Nick Cernis makes a very interesting counter-arguament – it leads to you not giving a sh*t about anything. Well worth a read.
• I’ve dismissed several times the belief that rising early will boost your productivity. In fact I believe it’s one of those common self-help myths. Life Evolver makes a very good point about how society wrongly views sleeping in as being lazy, and provides five reasons why sleeping in will actually boost your productivity.

The hard landscape is something I discovered from GTD. It is often used to describe calendars and other time planning tools. The tasks you put them must be unchangeable, or at the very least not susceptible to your whims and moods. If you put down that you need to finish a report on Monday, you better mean it. If it comes to Monday and you decide to push it back a few days, then your calendar becomes unreliable. Your hard landscape starts to turn into a soggy, marshy one.

Your productivity system is an integral part of your workflow. Gone are the days of having a handful of simple tasks that you could keep in your head. Nowadays, work is multifaceted, complicated and even overwhelming. That’s why you need a reliable system to get it all out of your head and get it organized. It can be as simple as scribbling down a to-do list for those with a small workload, to having a complex computer-based system encompassing several tools. Contrary to the general consensus, when it really matters there are only two rules you need to follow for getting a system that won’t let you down.