…or 49 pages.

Came across this excellent guide written by Trent Hamm at his website simpledollar.com.  If you like what you see in this guide, it represents just a small portion of this great stuff he has on there.

What it all comes down to is:

1) Spend less than you earn

2) Live Frugal

3) Earn More

4) Manage Your Money

5) Control Your Own Destiny

Whether you are a blogger or someone who forwards YouTube videos to all your friends on your distribution list the following website gives some great tips on how to make YouTube more useful for you.

By adding the following extentions listed in the link to YouTube URL’s you can do such things as have a video start at a specific spot in a video, disable the related video feature, autoloop or autoplay an embedded video.  Great hacks to know

LINK: 10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About

In todays online edition of Business Week David Allen writes a guest column entitled: “Time Management in the Age of Social Media.”  As a person who frequents both twitter and facebook I ask myself if these social networking sites are productive or black holes of time.  David Allen writes:

“The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.”

Read the full article at businessweek.com here

FYI for the increasingly larger portion of the population that is looking for work.  Tomorrow (March 10, 2009) the FedEx Office / Kinkos stores are going to be offering up to 25 free copies of your resume when you bring in a paper or CD copy of it. See the full story at lifehacker.com.

Always love to hear and watch when two people I am fans of get together to chat and exchange ideas.  If you have read this blog you know about my man-crush on David Allen but I also very much enjoy the work Leo Laporte does on the TWIT network.  In February ‘09 David and Leo connected on TWIT Live and exchanged some great ideas about how the mind works, why it is a horrible master and how to squeeze the most out of it.  Watch the video and read some of the main ideas below presented below:

• When you hold something in your mind it has no sense of past or future - it thinks you should be doing it all the time psychologically which is why it will wake you up at 3 in the morning and beat you bloody about something you cant do anything about while you are lying in bed.

• Its telling you that you need to go buy batteries when in fact you cant buy batteries from bed at 3 in the morning.

• Once you get it out the brain calms down and lets go.  The brain realizes it no longer needs to hang on to that and will allow you to renegotiate that agreement with yourself.

• You cant renegotiate agreements you cant remember you made so you have to get them out of your head and look at them and say, ‘no, not right now!’ (thus the importance of having a ubiquitous capture tool at hand at all times)

• You mind is for having ideas but not hanging on to them.

• Your mind needs to be free to express and expand… so the more you can trust that on the back end that you have an executive process that can handle things the more freedom it will have on the front end

Lifehack.org describes it as “any hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.”

Lifehacker.com explains that its website, which is dedicated to publishing life hacks, as “tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently.”

The term originated from a man by the name of Danny O’Brien who studied and polled a group of highly productive computer programmers versus their less fruitful piers.  O’Brien summarized his research in a 2004 presentation called Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks. Sounds like a fun read!  From this point websites and blogs such as the two listed above as well as 43Folders.com and ZenHabits.net emerged - among others - as places to go to learn about such tricks and hacks.

In future posts I am going to focus more on some of these simple ideas I have picked up on.  In the meantime I thought I would provide some links to some of the better posts I have found online.

Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks lifehacker.com

Top 42 Exercise Hacks zenhabits.net

Peter Walsh’s Clever Hanger Trick 43folders.com

50 Ways to Make Your Home more Organized, More Attractive, and More Efficient lifehack.org

So much to do, so little time! Time management and productivity guru, David Allen takes his bestselling book, Getting Things Done, to new heights with Making It All Work. In this video, he illustrates how to gain control of your to-do list and offers tips for finding focus and perspective.

My first stab at a video blog.

If you want to see more about the Flip Note check out www.flipnotefan.com

In two previous entries I have written about the first 2 stages of mastering the flow of work.  I thought it would be interesting to post a recent video that showed David Allen the author of the book Getting Things Done going through what some of his own personal system looks like.

As noted before I think it is interesting to see how everything goes into the in-box from a piece of note paper to his audio recorder.  The setup as you can see is not that elaborate and does not require big bucks to start.  GTD at its most advanced level is all about simplicity.

GTD five stages of mastering workflow: collect, PROCESS, organize, review and do.

Process

I think this is the phase that really sold me on GTD.  There is obviously more to it, but this is the beginning of really getting clarity and de-cluttering your life.  In the Process stage, the bucket or in-box is emptied.  It is important in this phase that you start at the top of your in-box and work your way down.  For the magic to work it has to be arbitrary - you cant go digging down into your in-box to find what you think is most important to start with first.  You have to win the battle to trust the system over the worries in your head.  Simply start at the top and follow the flow chart.

This flowchart can also be downloaded for free at the official David Allen GTD website at this link: http://www.davidco.com/pdfs/tt_workflow_chart.pdf

As discussed in the previous post the first time you do this I can take hours and hours.  If I am being really good I empty my in-box daily and if not at a bear minimum once per week.  This phase also introduces the need for some additional tools.  Just as the in-box is critical in the collection phase a fresh stack of plain paper sized folders is critical in the processing stage.  Of course folders can take on the electronic form as well but since we are not yet a completely paperless society the suggestion is to always have and start with the “low-tech” folder and file system.  Below I have attached a video from a guy by the name of James Marwood who walks you through his office as well both paper and electronic forms of his GTD system.  It is a great example of what the finished product looks like.  The great thing about GTD is that everyone’s system looks a little different.

James’ GTD Description from James Marwood on Vimeo.

other resources:

gtd cheatsheet: processing your stuff (lifedev.com)

gtd desktop wallpaper

how to make a GTD system for about $20 (crankingwidgets blog)