I’m so exhausted that I can barely focus.  My hips are killing me.  My hands are hurt from giving high-fives to someone else for 30 minutes straight.  I can’t stop smiling.

These are all symptoms of the fact that Get Down 2010 is currently ongoing in Vancouver, and I’ve just finished the second day of three days that I’ll be attending workshops.  As the preceding paragraph suggests, the workshop is a deeply rewarding experience, and the opportunity to dance with the some of the founders of the funk styles that I dance and teach is a rare treat.

I cannot go into too much depth, because I just don’t have the energy right now.  That’s not a complaint – it feels incredible to leave everything you have on the dance floor at the end of the day.  I do, however, want to capture some of what we’ve learned today.

One of the first things you learn training with the creators is that dancing is a social activity.  Before there was popping, before there was locking, before there was hiphop, there were people getting together and dancing.  Social dances have evolved as time has gone on because they allow people to get together and share in a groove.  It gives you an opportunity to mutually experience the physicality of music with someone, and that is an amazing feeling.

Social dances aren’t a style – they’re just dancing.  While any one particular social dance (eg, the Bart Simpson*) can be attributed to the genre that inspired it, there’s nothing stopping someone from taking that social dance and interpreting it to a different style of music.

*yes, there is a social dance called the Bart Simpson, and yes, it is awesome.

The more I dance with the originators, the more I see how much influence this social aspect of dancing has, and by that virtue, how much influence social dances have had.  You see them everywhere.

My theory is that these dances teach you how to move a certain way with your body.  Think of them as little programs that you can install into Neo’s brain in the Matrix (“I know how to move my hips this way now Morpheus!”).  Once you’ve learned a particular social dance, that movement becomes inherent to you, and it starts to influence and inspire the rest of the way you dance.

Anyhow, enough about this epiphany I’m having, I want to document the social dances that Sugarpop and Lockadelic taught us today, and you want to hear their silly (awesome) names:

• The Stevie Lock

Throw away your ab machines, this dance is the new way to blast your abs.  Sitting up and down has never been such an ordeal.  I imagine that Sugarpop has abs that can stop bullets based on the ease with which he can move his body and perform this dance.

• The Texas Hop

I told you right – dope names!  After breaking down the parts of this dance for us, Sugarpop lined us up and had us do a Soul Train line.  Class cut down the middle, and everyone repeatedly does part of the dance.  The two people at the end then do the full social dance down the line, then join the line at the bottom.  I’m sure that this may sound intimidating to a lot of people (myself included!), but the truth is that after standing in that line, surrounded by people doing the same simple part of the dance as you, enjoying the same groove that you are, it feels completely natural to just let it out and bust your way down.

• Cha-cha-cha

Sugarpop and Lockadelic had awesome synergy together, and I’m really glad that I got the opportunity to take the classes today with both of them teaching.  Sugarpop handed over the reins to Lockadelic this afternoon, who taught us this funky dance.  Once we’d learned it?  Back to the Soul Train line!  This time, instead of going down the line, two at a time, we went back and forth across the line with whoever was in front of us.  Again, it may sound intimidating, but when you’re in that groove with someone, you learn so much faster.  Sharing that moment is what dancing is about!

• The Funky Chicken

One of things that I really appreciated about Lockadelic was that she would teach us a social dance, and then we would just spend time moving around in it.  I never realized what the Funky Chicken actually looks like; it’s not the dance done at weddings, although this is a perfect example of a social dance.  And hey, we all have fun doing that right?

Unfortunately, I can feel my concentration losing, and the desire to play video games and let my mind regenerate is overwhelming.  I will sign-off on that note, but there’s certainly more to come – the challenge during this week is always absorbing and recalling as much knowledge as possible!

Dance, Funk Styles, Get Down 2010, Lockadelic, Locking, Popping, Sugarpop, Summer, Vancouver Hide

Two quick items today, aimed at making you more efficient at using and managing your iTunes library, and maintaining a zero’d out inbox, once you’ve gotten there (check out this post if you want some directions on how to achieve a zero’d out inbox in the first place).

iTunes

A quick little tidbit today, that may make it simpler to manage music collections that span across multiple computers on your network at home.  The setup that Bay and I have is a computer in our living room that operates as our media machine.  All of our TV shows, movies, and music sit on this computer, and it’s connected to our stereo and our TV.  I want this place to hold all of our music, but don’t spend a lot of time sitting in front of this machine because it’s awkward.  Most of the actual acquisition of music occurs when I’m at my laptop.

As you can imagine, this means that I need to go through the tedious process of copying my files across the network to our media machine, logging in to that machine, loading up iTunes, adding the songs into iTunes, and then deleting them from their original location (as I have iTunes setup to manage the files in its own directory structure – once it’s copied them in, it leaves the original files, which then need to be deleted).

However, there is a little-known aspect of iTunes that can greatly simplify this process.  The library of folders that iTunes creates and uses to manage all of your music will contain a folder called “Automatically add to iTunes”.  Any files that you copy into this folder will automatically be added into iTunes (and sorted into their appropriate directory) and then the originals will be cleared out of the folder.

We can leverage this convenient functionality by creating an alias to this folder, then moving that alias on to our local laptop.  Here are the steps, with the caveat that your computers will already need to connected to your home network, and you will need to have file sharing turned on for your media machine:

1. Using your laptop, connect to your media machine over the network.  On a Mac, you will do this through the Finder, in Windows, through the Windows Explorer.
2. Navigate to the iTunes folder, and search it for a folder named “automatically” (this is only part of the string, so it should catch the folder called “Automatically add to iTunes”).
3. Right click on this folder and choose either “Create Alias” (Mac) or “Create Shortcut” (Windows).
4. Drag this alias to a convenient location on your laptop (I keep the alias in the sidebar of my Finder):
   

   I keep a shortcut to this folder in my Sidebar

5. Done!

Now, whenever you’re ready to transfer music from your laptop to your media machine, simply drag and drop the appropriate folders onto this alias.  They’ll be copied across the network into your media machine’s iTunes automatic add folder and loaded into iTunes the next time you open it (or immediately if it’s already opened).

Maintaining inbox zero

The last post I made was related to getting to a state of inbox zero.  Once you’ve gotten to this spot, you still have the challenge of maintaining it.  One of the things that I find frustrating is that I often am not able to be as agile as I would like at all times that I check my e-mail.  Sometimes I’m out and checking e-mails when I’m on my phone, waiting for the bus.  Other times, I’ll get an e-mail at work that I want to input into my system as a task, but can not conveniently do this from my work computer.

This trick will provide you with a little more agility, and enable you to immediately deal with incoming e-mails and clear them back out of the inbox.  (Incidentally, even if you don’t yet have a zero’d out inbox, this tip should still help you stay on top of all of your stuff a little better).

The means by which we make ourselves more agile is to make use of the e-mails that many of the web applications out there provide us when we sign-up.  In this case, I’ll be talking about Evernote and Remember the Milk, but I know that many web applications these days provide e-mail addresses that give you the same functionality.  If you’re like me, you probably saw that the web app mentioned an e-mail address you could use to do something, and then immediately forgot about it and have not touched it since.

What these e-mail addresses provide you is a way to instantly input tasks and items into the appropriate container in situations where you have only e-mail at your disposal.  If I’m waiting for the ferry, checking my e-mail on my phone, and receive an e-mail that I know I need to act on, I can simply do the following:

1. Forward the e-mail to my Remember the Milk e-mail address.
2. Update the subject line to something like “Look into information Graham has provided me RE: dance workshop”
3. If you’re especially adept at RTM, you’d probably add some additional information to the subject line like “^tomorrow” (indicating that the due date is tomorrow) “#@web” (the context you need to complete this task is access to the web), and “=10 mins” (you estimate 10 minutes to complete the task)
4. Send off the e-mail and archive it, removing it from your inbox.

You’ve cleared the item out of your inbox, you’ve input the appropriate action item into your todo list, and the body of the mail is saved for you as a note attached to the todo list item.

Evernote offers very similar functionality, allowing you to archive any piece of e-mail (and attachments that you include) into your digital filing cabinet.

And that’s all there is to it.  I know that WordPress, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook all offer similar e-mail addresses that can provide you with equivalent functionality.  The key to making use of these addresses is setting up your address book appropriately.  Everytime you receive one of these addresses, add it into your address book under your contact.  Make sure that you sync your address book/contacts with whatever mobile device you use to check your e-mail, and then you’re ready to go.

Too easy?

If these tips seem too easy, don’t kid yourself.  Whenever you’re striving for more efficiency, you want tips that are easy and simple.  You don’t want complicated, convoluted processes to add to your daily life that require additional mental overhead and will take up your creative energy.  The simple tasks that integrate cleanly and effortlessly into your daily life are what we’re after here.

That’s all for today.  The upcoming week is the annually recurring week-long dance workshop called Get Down.  I was fortunate enough last year to take the entire week’s worth of classes, and it changed the way I thought about and approached dancing forever.  I’m looking forward to working again with some of the originators of the styles of dance that I love, and bringing that knowledge back to Victoria for this Fall’s classes.

E-mail, GTD, Inbox Zero, iTunes, Management, Music, Productivity Hide

This post follows the previous, and was written as part of an original 2-in-1 post that I had conceived while taking the ferry from Departure Bay on the mainland over to Nanaimo, on the island.

Although the two posts can be read independently, you may want to see part 1.

This post is a little more specific than the previous, and is a bit of an instructional on achieving the coverted inbox-zero.  A clean inbox is a bit like keeping the entry-way of your home tidy: you feel more relaxed every time you move through it.

Getting (and staying) to inbox zero

Our aims here are: 1.  to get down to an empty inbox, and, 2. to stay there.  The first part is to deal with everything that is currently sitting in our inbox.  The second is to set up some daily habits that can make it easier to maintain the pristine state of our inbox.

Getting to a zero’d out inbox is no small task, but the rewards are worth it.  With an empty inbox, you’ll feel more relaxed every time you check your e-mail.  Maybe this isn’t an issue for your personal e-mail, but any e-mail inbox through which you may receive action items (eg, “Call Bruno Mexidando about that party”, “E-mail back Glarkon Slektor about space beer”, etc.) will serve you better when are able to keep it clean and lean.

The task of actually checking your e-mail will become far more efficient, as you’ll be presented with fewer items demanding your attention.  Even if you tell yourself that you only need to review the items that are marked “unread”, you are still burdening your eyes with that much more text to sift through.

Not so fast…

I tricked you though.  There’s actually a step that needs to occur before you being clearing out your inbox, and that is reaching the conclusion that you actually buy into the philosophy and feel that it’s a worthwhile task to take on.  If you don’t really believe that maintaining a clean inbox is a worthwhile pursuit, you’ll encounter your own mental resistance at every turn.  Each e-mail you bring up and need to make a decision on, you’ll feel compelled to just “set it aside” and make an exception for that one.  Before you know it, your inbox will rapidly begin filling back up.

Don’t blindly follow advice like this because I’m telling you that it’s good practice – consider why you might benefit from a cleaner inbox, and see if you there are reasons that you buy into.  When affecting change in an organization, nothing can happen without buy-in from your employees.  In order for them to accept change, they must first buy-in to what you are putting out there and truly believe in it.  You are no different, and must truly buy into what you are trying to take on if you actually want to achieve it.

Clearing out the cobwebs

If you have never gone through the process of clearing out your inbox, this task will take you a while.  Try and approach it with an attitude that you are going to enjoy it, and if that is simply impossible, try and keep in mind the benefits that you have convinced yourself you will gain when you have finished the process.  Establish a reasonable expectation of how long it will take, based on the contents of your inbox.  If there are hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, it may take quite a while.  If you determine an estimate and later on find yourself blowing through that estimate, don’t be discouraged.  Just take note of that fact for next time, and come up with a new estimate for how much longer it will take to finish up.

The rainbow gang

There are many different mail servers out there, ranging from the more popular ones like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail (ugh), to company and private e-mail servers.  You may also log in to your mail provider’s webmail in order to get your e-mail, or connect directly to the server using a desktop application, such as Mail.app (on OS X), Thunderbird, or Outlook.  Although the nuances will be different across each of these varieties of e-mail, the broad overview will remain the same.  Almost all mail servers these days will allow you to archive your read e-mail on the server, and will allow you some means to set up folders within which you can file mail.

Make some folders

When first sorting through your mail, you are likely going to find that most of your mail falls into a few main categories.  Using whatever means your mail program allows you, create the folders mentioned below into which you will be able to sort your e-mail.  I will elaborate on when you use each of these folders later, but for now, here are the brief descriptions:

• TODO

This folder is a temporary folder that will cease to exist after you have zero’d out your inbox.  The aim, in this initial pass, is simply to go through and process everything sitting in your inbox.  You don’t want to actually do anything, you just want to clear out your inbox.  That is the task that you are currently focusing on, and you need a way to allow yourself to keep focus on that goal.  This folder holds any e-mail that requires an action on your behalf.

• Archive Folders

These folders represent the location that you can store any e-mail that you do not want to delete, and that don’t require any action.  You may have only one archive folder, or you may have a ton of these folders.  If the e-mail account that you are working on is a work e-mail, you will likely want to create folders that relate to each project or client you are managing.  If you only ever work on one thing in particular, then you may only need one folder titled “archive”.  Whatever approach you take, make sure you have at least one folder into which you can file e-mails that do not require any action on your part, and that you simply want to store for future reference.

If you are using an e-mail account like GMail, you may not actually need to create an archive folder.  GMail allows you to archive all of your e-mails, and provides an interface to search them all directly.  With this convenience you may not feel like you need to create a separate folder to archive old e-mails for reference.  Having said that, it can be handy to look through all e-mails the relate to a specific project, without having to search out individual e-mails or subject lines.  If you anticipate being able to do this, you’ll best be served by creating the appropriate folders now and archiving appropriately.

When creating folders, make sure that you are able to think of a use case for which that folder would be of use.  Ideally, you want to create a minimum set of folders that will be of use to you.  The more places you have that an e-mail can be in, the more places you will find you have to search when you need to it.  Usually archiving e-mails between projects and clients is sufficient.  Whatever you choose, make sure that you can think of a situation in which you will want to search that particular folder.

One at a time, without cheating

Now that you’ve created buckets within which you can place your e-mails, it’s time to go through your inbox.  The rules to follow are simple:

• One at a time

No peeking forward.  Go through each e-mail and deal with it quickly and efficiently.  If it requires some kind of action on your part, move the folder into the TODO folder.  Don’t get bogged down thinking about what you actually need to do to deal with this e-mail – determine whether or not you actually need to do something, and only that.  If the answer is yes, file into the TODO folder.  If the answer is no, file it in the appropriate archive folder.

If you notice that you don’t have an appropriate folder to put this e-mail into, create one.  The best organization can happen on the fly.  Don’t fight it – just create the folder and pop the e-mail into it.  (and don’t forget the rule above that the more folders you have, the more places there are that you need to look when you’re trying to find something).

• Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out

When in doubt, throw it out.  Don’t hesitate, just get rid of it; the things that you need to keep track of for reference will be obvious to you.  If you can’t let go and find this too difficult to do, create a folder called THROW OUT, and store the e-mail in there for now.

• No more than two minutes per e-mail

You’re not allowed to spend longer than two minutes deliberating on an e-mail.  If you have been looking at an e-mail for longer than two minutes, make a decision and act on it.  None of what we are trying to determine at this point should require more than two minutes of thought.  If you’re trying to figure out which folder to archive an e-mail in, just put it in the first of the two (three/four/five/etc.).  If you’re trying to figure out whether or not to throw an e-mail out, throw it out.  If you’re unsure of what the next step is for the e-mail, but know that there’s something required of you, put it into the TODO folder for now.

Take this step, and move on.

• Seriously, one at a time

Don’t cheat this step.  Doing so will lead to procrastination, and you’ll be back where you started – numb to particular tasks in your e-mail and resistant to emptying out your inbox.  Again, it should not be taking you longer than two minutes to deal with the current e-mail, and there’s no such thing as an e-mail that requires attention so immediate that it cannot wait another two/four/six/eight/ten minutes.  Deal with the current e-mail, and move on.

What todo, what todo

If you’ve completed the above steps, you now have an empty inbox.  Look how clean and pristine it is!  It’s beautiful and polished!  Take a minute to appreciate how it feels.  Log out and log back in if you like.  Take a moment to celebrate the small victory.

You’ve now completed the first part and pared away a significant portion of your e-mails to deal with.  The next step will actually require some doing, rather than simply sorting, but that’s okay, you’re moving forward.

Decide upon a place to keep track of todo items.  This can be a text file on your desktop, or a notepad beside your computer.  If you already have a todo list that you manage, then use that, adding items to it as you go.  It can be tempting to use the TODO folder we have created as your todo list, but this is a bad move.  It will get confusing when you want to delete e-mails but they’ll need to stay in this folder to be on your todo list, and it will become difficult to tell at a glance what you have left to process.

Now, applying the same rules as before, go through each e-mail in your TODO list one by one.    No cheating and jumping forward!  For each e-mail decide if:

1. The action required can be completed in two minutes or less.  If so, complete that action and then either delete the e-mail or archive it if needed.
2. If the action will take longer than two minutes, put the task on your TODO list.  If you need the e-mail in order to provide you with context for the TODO item, print it out.  If you need to keep the e-mail for future reference, put it in the appropriate folder (and again, create a new folder if you need a new one); if not, delete it.

You may find out as you go through your TODO folder that some of the e-mails you’ve moved here don’t actually have an action associated with them.  If so, no problem – either archive or delete it and move on.  Put your head down and stay vigilant, and again, remember, no more than two minutes.  If a task takes longer to complete than two minutes, you shouldn’t be doing it, you should be putting it on your TODO list.

And..  Dismount!

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve now completed the following:

1. Emptied out your inbox
2. Archived a bunch of e-mails for future reference
3. Completed a bunch of tasks that you needed to get done
4. Created a list of items you need to accomplish over the course of the next few days/weeks/etc.

Well done!  This is no small accomplishment, and worthy of some celebration.  You can repeat this process whenever you like, but the ideal state is to do this same thing every time a new e-mail comes into your mailbox.  Look at it, and determine if you need to act on it.  If it requires less than two minutes, complete it, and otherwise move it to your todo list.  Then (or if it did not require any action), either archive or delete it.

Once you’ve got an empty inbox, you’ll find this process far easier to accomplish, and your mind will be much freer when you check your mailbox.  If you can achieve this task, you may be interested in checking out some of my other posts on GTD and productivity.  Anyone that can accomplish zero’ing their inbox can practice GTD principles and methodology.  If you’re happy with this step for now, enjoy your nice clean inbox and check back later.

E-mail, GTD, Inbox Zero, Management, Productivity Hide

I originally wrote this and the following post while taking the Departure Bay ferry from West Vancouver to Nanaimo with Bay.  We both had a week off, and spent a couple of days in Vancouver and one in Whistler.  We had a great time and continue to grow together in every way possible.  I don’t often boast about my relationship, because I find that gets obnoxious far too quickly; however, I will permit myself to say this time that there is not a single aspect of my life that is not made better by my wife, Bay.

Back on topic – I originally planned this as one post tackling two subjects.  However, they both expanded, and I edited them and felt like I would just release them both individually, and preserve what I’ve written.  The first post s a little more philosophical: Motivation, and how we can manage our daily lives and feelings to maintain a strong and positive mental momentum.

Soon to follow, a little more pragmatic: getting yourself to a zero’d-out inbox, and some tips and tricks that you can use to remain in this state a little more effectively.

Staying motivated

My friend asked me the other day how it is that I manage to stay motivated in all of my pursuits.  The reality is that I face the same difficulties, the same ups and downs, and the same rise and falls that all of us do.  There may be some people out there that are immune to the highs and lows that our body chemistry and daily lives subject us too, but I have yet to meet them.

Having said that, the way that we deal with these daily, weekly, monthly and annually occurrences differs greatly from individual to individual and will make a huge difference in our ability to navigate the highs and lows that make life what it is.  Most of these suggestions are simply things that work for me, and I make no guarantees that what works for me will work for you – as always, your own mileage may vary.

Practice a GTD-style approach

Given how often I wrote about the pros of a GTD, it should be no surprise that I credit this philosophy with some of my ability to remain motivated in my pursuits.  One of the great challenges I have always faced when tackling larger projects is the inertia of getting started.  This was not limited to my job (“one hour left in the day… am I really going to start on a new project?  Maybe I’ll just check out Google News for a while”), but also to projects around home (“This weekend feels like the first chance I’ve had to sit down and relax all week – do I really want to start on that gardening station now?”).

Both of these mental dialogues typically lead directly to our procrastination, and putting the project off until another day.  If you drill into these conversations, you can see something happening.  Rather than addressing the next step, we’re mentally considering whether or not we really want to start on the entire project at that moment.

Mentally staging our approaches to projects like this is self-defeating.  The monolithic project occupies a huge amount of our mental space, and carries an equivalent amount of inertia that needs to be overcome in order to start in on it.

GTD approaches to accomplishing things espouse breaking up your projects into the smallest next steps that you can.  This way, when you’re thinking about what it is you could do in your last hour of work, you are no longer thinking “Do I really want to start in on that big project?” – your conversation hopefully looks something more like this: “One hour left – that’s not a lot of time, but I could probably review the project plan and background documentation for it easily within that”.

If you’re really on top of things, you won’t even need to have this dialog – you can simply load up your list of tasks that can be accomplished in under 20 minutes and grab the first one off the list.

Just a head’s up – I don’t expect myself to be 100% efficient, and neither should you.  Applying GTD techniques to my task list makes it easier for me to pick tasks up and dive right into them, but it doesn’t mean that I will always spend that last hour of the workday productively (anyone telling you that you should be 100% efficient, 100% of the time, is either unreasonable, or holds unrealistic expectations of the way humans work).  However, even if you are only able to squeeze out thirty minutes of productivity in that last hour (with thirty minutes spent daydreaming about the weekend ahead of you), isn’t that better than wasting  the entire hour?  I’d say so.

Be reasonable in what you ask of yourself

This advice sounds pretty trite, but I mention it here because it’s rare that I see people genuinely following it.

Holding yourself to reasonable expectations doesn’t mean lowering the bar for yourself. Lowering the bar is the situation where you set a lower initial goal for yourself, and achieve it.  Once you’ve done that, you become complacent.  That lower bar becomes the metric that you are satisfied with, and you cease to push yourself to achieve above and beyond that.

Holding yourself to reasonable expectations means setting a lower initial goal for yourself, achieving it, and then setting a new goal that you aim for.  Iteratively set your goals, work towards them, achieve or reevaluate them, and continue to progress.  Most importantly, be willing to fail.

If you continue to fail a goal that you have set, be gentle, honest, understanding, and reasonable with yourself.  Why did you fail?  Is there something else that got in the way?  Is there a pattern forming here?  Are you asking too much of yourself at this point in time?

Being reasonable with yourself doesn’t mean that you are setting limits on what you can achieve – it simply means setting limits on what you can achieve in one sitting.  Be willing to accept that change and accomplishment take time.  If you lose sight of this fact, you will lose sight of everything.  Be absolutely clear: it’s the struggle that makes it worthwhile.

Celebrate the small victories

A lot of what I’m writing about here mirrors the statements that I’ve made about setting and achieving goals.  When you break your projects, your goals, and your workload, up into smaller sub-tasks, you will find yourself accomplishing many small things as time goes on.  You will achieve greater victories as well, but these may seem subjectively smaller because you will be accomplishing many small things leading up to them.

You must take the time-out to celebrate, in whatever marginal manner is appropriate, these small victories.  Every accomplishment is something to be proud of, and should be treated that way.  There are two attitudes that you can adopt each time you finish up a task: “Sweet, I’m 10% closer to being done”, or “Argh, I still have 90% of the project left to finish”.  Which one of these two attitudes is correct?  Prepare yourself for the mindblow!  They both are.

You are indeed 10% closer to being finished, and likewise, there remains 90% of your project to be competed before you’ll be done.  The only difference is the perspective that you adopt.  And that leads to the last and most important consideration…

Maintain a positive attitude

Perhaps the most metaphysical piece of advice I’m offering, and the most difficult piece to simply take on.  However, if it’s any compensation, this is also the most valuable piece of advice that I can offer.  As mentioned above, there are always two basic approaches that you can take for any situation that you’re presented with – a pessimistic one, and an optimistic one.

I’m not suggesting that you cease thinking critically and skeptically, or that you walk around with a smile plastered on your face.  It’s okay to think that a movie that you saw recently sucked, or that the service you just received at a restaurant was bad, and to report on that.

What I’m suggesting is that when something happens in your life, and you have no option but to accept it, the only difference that your perspective makes will be what you can take away from that event.  If you’ve just been given job feedback that was high on constructive criticism, there’s nothing you can do to change that performance review.  But you can change the perspective that you adopt – are you going to wallow in misery about that job review, or sit resentfully at work, feeling negative about the people that gave the review?  Or are you instead going to adopt a positive outlook, changing your work habits to perform better and see the review as an opportunity to reevaluate your own progress and continue growing?

The more frequently that you can turn a negative outlook into a positive outlook, the more energy you’ll  you have and the easier it will be to maintain your motivation.

Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of saying “It doesn’t matter what I think, event X happened”.  It does matter, at least in as much as how it will allow you to grow and progress forward from that event.  If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely because you care about these things, and believe in the power of individuals to change themselves positively.  Recognize the power of positive thinking.  It won’t grant you the ability to fly, or magically make people behave more positively toward you; but it will give you the ability to mentally take things in stride and stay youthful in thought.

Conclusion

(Meta: I need to come up with more copacetic ways of concluding my posts)

That concludes the first portion of this double whammy of blog posts.  The next will follow shortly!

Goals, GTD, Motivation, Productivity, Self-improvement Hide

For a long time, I’ve been frustrated with the process of screening new music.  We’d get new albums, I’d put them on my iPhone, I’d screen them there, then hear the same songs I had deleted from my iPhone the next time I put my collection on shuffle on my media computer.

Well, I’ve got a quick solution that will effectively allow you to screen your entire music collection while you’re on the go.  To do this, you need an iPod device and iTunes on the computer you sync with.

Use autofill to fill your iPod with songs from your machine – I have stand-up comedy sets, audiobooks, podcasts, and voicememos that I don’t want to have filled on to my iPhone, so I created a playlist that does not contain any of these, and have iTunes fill my device from this playlist.  You can do something similar, or simply use your entire music collection.  The most important part here is that you don’t create a narrow or specific playlist – the goal is to screen through your entire collection, so you want to try and keep the playlist as big as possible.

Now, when you’re out listening to your device, make a point of rating your songs.  I find this easiest to do when I’m working, as I can plug my device into the USB port of my computer, and have the songs show up as they’re playing.  This makes it very easy to rate as each new song comes up.

If you find rating tedious, then you can skip most of them, except for the songs you want to delete.  Whenever a song comes on that you really don’t care for (we’ve all got them in our collection), assign it a rating of 1.  Any other song, rate between 2-5.  I keep songs that I’ve rated as a 2 usually because sometimes I will want to listen to them within the context of the full album, even if I’m not particularly keen on them (some songs sound better when they are included in the overall progression of the album).

When you get home, sync your device with your computer.  All of your ratings will be transferred back on to your main computer and synced.  Now, sort your Music collection by rating, and delete all songs rated 1.  Then, autofill your iPod again, and you’re ready for the next day.

Using this technique, you will gradually screen through your entire collection.  I like to have a random sampling, which includes some of my favourite songs, so I use a fairly broad playlist.  If your goal is to screen through your collection as quickly as possible, you can create a smart playlist of all unrated songs and autofill your device from that.  This will ensure that you’re always listening to songs you have not yet screened.

I’ve been using this little technique, and it definitely allows me to squeeze a tedious task into the little nooks and crannies of time that exist throughout your day.

Happy screening!

Efficiency, iPhone, Productivity, Uncategorized Hide

A friend recently asked me about the process of setting goals.  It got me thinking that while most of us understand on an intuitive level what the word means, we generally lack a good grasp of the process that exists behind this intuition and how it can be leveraged to enable our own growth.

To me, the act of setting and attaining goals is a sublime source of inspiration, growth, and self-satisfaction.  From attaining loftier goals like getting into Law school (and amassing a mountain of debt) to the smaller ones, like checking off the check box next to a task I have in my TODO list, achieving a goal makes me feel better about myself.  When I end a weekend, being able to look back at the weekend and see what I accomplished (including hanging out with friends and having a good time) helps energize me for coming week, and achieve closure on the two days I’ve just had off.  I’ve started to notice that the weekends where Sunday evening comes around and I feel sad that the next week is starting are usually the ones where I haven’t accomplished as much.

Setting goals for yourself is an intrinsic part of any system oriented toward productivity, but there’s no reason that it should be limited to people that practice methodologies like GTD.  Taking a goal-oriented approach can be beneficial to almost anyone, granting them a sense of accomplishment, and a way of keeping track of their progress.  Setting goals can help ground you when you get so deep pursuing a task that it becomes difficult to come up for air and note your own progress.  Goals provide you with an objective metric with which to see how you’ve progressed.

So, having said that, let’s dive in.

What’s the point?

Hopefully I have already made part of the case for setting goals.  In life, we often place demands upon ourselves without realizing it.  I can pick up a new sport and come to the conclusion that I enjoy it, and want to progress further.  Or maybe you, like me, have returned to school and want to achieve a certain grade point average.

Goals give you a milestone with which to check your progress.  When you’ve got your head down and you’re focused on the task at hand, it can be easy to forget why you’re doing something and lose sight of your original pursuit.  This is a common problem in Law school, and if Bay’s experience was representative, MBA programs as well.  Students get so focused on the assignment sitting in front of them that they forget why they’re doing it all in the first place.  Once you reach this point, burnout or disengagement can quickly follow.

Goals give you something to look to when you’re feeling unmotivated, or burnt out.  They provide you a reminder of why you’re doing what you’re doing, and they give you an opportunity to pull yourself up out of the mire and remember where you’re going.

This is a common problem many project managers suffer from.  When meeting with teams of developers to do project planning, the discussion will start to spiral out of control as we get caught up in discussions about how to implement a relatively minor detail.  Our actual goal for that piece of functionality (in the context of project management and software development, we referred to these as our “user stories”) gave us a peg to quickly come back to and ask ourselves “Okay, hold on.  Does this really matter for the purpose of achieving our goal?”  Half the time we would realize that it wasn’t relevant, or at least that it was probably something that could be worked out later.

Lastly, it just feels good to achieve a goal that you’ve set out for yourself.  Seriously, try it out.  We’ve all felt great when we’ve achieved some progress toward the New Year’s resolution that we made after waking up the next morning with what feels like half our head missing.  Of course, these kind of goals usually fall by the wayside within a few weeks (more on that later), but the initial feeling we get achieving some progress toward our desired end is exhilarating and energizing.

Before we go further, it’s worth noting that a goal doesn’t have to be something that takes you years to complete.  It can be as simple as a single task (“Clean out fridge”), or something longer term, like (“Be running my own business by 2015″).  Although these aren’t the same kind of goals, they are both goals.

What do they look like?

Ideally, your goals should share a certain set of qualities.  Good goals should:

• Be measurable

Meaning that you can actually determine whether or not you’re moving toward or away from that goal.  Bay and I often discuss this topic in the marriage preparation class that we facilitate when discussing the process of resolving conflict in a relationship – this is ultimately about setting a goal and achieving it together with your partner.

A goal that is not measurable is something like: “Drink less” (Okay, theoretically it may be possible to determine if you’re drinking less by calculating your drinks when you made this goal, and then the number you’re consuming now, but forget about that and trust me).  A measurable goal would be something like: “Drink no more than 10 drinks a week”.  That’s measurable.  You can tell pretty quickly if you’re on the right track, what you need to do to continue towards achievement, or whether or not you need to adapt that goal.

• Be reasonable

Quite often, people think that imposing limits on your goals means that you are restricting your potential.  I can appreciate the logic that gets you to this point, but it’s the wrong way to look at your goals.  Remember, the goal in setting your goals (yah, I know, sorry), is to actually achieve them.  That’s the whole point here.  If you achieve your initial goal and you feel you’re ready to take another step, there’s nothing stopping you.  What we’re aiming for in all of this is to maximize our success achieving goals.  Each time you get to check something off your  list of goals, you will feel energized and rejuvenated in your ultimate pursuit.

An example: let’s say decide that you’re not happy with the amount that you’re drinking (and I’m not sure why that’s the theme I’ve decided upon, but nevertheless, there it is).  A good starting goal would be to figure out how much you’re drinking, and then make your goal to consume four less drinks each week.  Upon achieving and sustaining this goal, you can then make the decision as to whether or not you’re ready for the next step and to make a new goal to cut back further.

A bad starting goal would be to jump straight in with “Stop drinking altogether”.  Is this really a reasonable expectation to place on yourself?  While there are some that believe in abstinence, my own years of success have taught me that iteration and small steps are what best enable me to achieve the things I strive for.  Which leads us to the next point…

• Be representative of a milestone

It’s good to have a set of “ultimate” goals.  These are goals like “retire wealthy”, “raise a loving family”, and “own a yacht from which to throw flotsam at seagulls”.  These goals will help guide the smaller goals that you set for yourself.  However, if these are the only goals that you make, you will be minimizing the successes that you can celebrate for yourself.  Looking at each of the above-mentioned goals; at what point are you going to be able to raise your arms above your head and say “Yes, I get to check something off my list!”  Three times right?  No small victories along the way, just three giant victories.

A good approach is to identify the small steps along the way that will help you achieve these ultimate goals (and here is where the ultimate goals will help guide you in the smaller accomplishments you aim for).  Give yourself lots of opportunity to celebrate your small successes.  As mentioned above – these will energize and motivate you further in your pursuit of the ultimate goals.

Choose goals that indicate stopping points along your desired path, and this will grant you plenty of opportunity to ask yourself questions like:

“Okay, I’ve cut back on the number of drinks I’m having to no more than ten a week.  Now that I’ve accomplished that, do I want to aim for complete abstinence, or should I modify my ultimate goal?  If I modify my ultimate goal, what will my next milestone be?”

Another benefit of setting goals in this manner is that you will allow yourself plenty of opportunity to fail.  And believe me, you will, at times, fail.  I know this with certainty because you are a human, and all of us fail at times (to my knowledge I do not yet have any dolphin readers).

By setting smaller, milestone-type goals, your failures will be much less catastrophic, and will provide you with opportunities to evaluate your progress and your ultimate goal (“Okay, I failed at cutting back to ten drinks a week.  Why did I fail?  Was it because that goal isn’t sustainable given my lifestyle?  Was it because I still want to drink more than that?  Or did I just not commit enough to my goal?”)

• Be sustainable

Goals should be sustainable, as should the means by which you achieve them.  This and the above point are the two biggest reasons that New Year’s resolutions often fail.  People set ridiculous goals for themselves at the start of a new year, without actually considering what steps they will need to take to achieve them, nor whether or not the means by which they will need to achieve them are something that they can keep up for the longterm.

An excellent example are diets.  We all have friends or have worked with people that announce that they are going on a diet and plan to lose 30 lbs.  Then proceed to go on an extremely reduced intake of calories, and if they are successful, they typically gain that weight back in short order (along with, as statistics show,  an additional 5 lbs or so).

What is this person’s ultimate aim?  Is it to lose 30 lbs, or to lose 30 lbs and keep it off?  They will tell you that it is the latter, but the means by which they are attempting to achieve that goal are not sustainable.  People on restrictive diets with the intent of losing weight rarely plan to stick with them after they’ve accomplished that goal.

The truth is that losing 30 lbs is a difficult task, and to do so in a sustainable manner takes time, practice, patience, and yes, sometimes, failure.

Their mental energy would be better spent achieving smaller milestones.  ”I would like to adjust my diet and exercise and lose 5 lbs”.  Upon achieving that goal, they can then set a new goal “adjust my diet and exercise to lose another 5 lbs”.  Hmm, they failed at that goal.  Okay, well, at least it was just a failure of losing 5 lbs.  That failure is much less likely to shatter their confidence and have them discard the entire pursuit now – after all, they’ve already achieved one of the milestones along the way to their ultimate goal.  It’s simply an opportunity to evaluate where they went wrong, and determine if they need to set a different goal, or simply recommit themselves to this one.

• Have a deadline

Just like good goals should be measurable, they should also have a deadline at which point you check in with yourself.  At what point do you know if you’ve succeeded in cutting down to ten drinks a week if your goal is ongoing with no deadline.  You can always just tell yourself “well, I’m on the path to attaining that, I’m sure in two weeks or so I’ll be there”.  A firm deadline will prevent you from slipping into complacency and forgetting about the goals you’ve set for yourself.  It’s much easier to commit to something when you’re aware of a point at which you will be held accountable for your progress.

Deadlines like this also give you an opportunity to review your progress, and determine whether or not the goal you’ve set is still reasonable, or even one that you still want to pursue.  There is no shame in aiming toward a goal, and then realizing that the circumstances that made that goal appealing no longer apply – in fact it’s much better to reach this conclusion sooner rather than later, as it will free up your willpower and creative energy to focus on new, more pressing or desirable goals.

In project management, we also referred to these lines in the sand as deadlines.  In marriage prep, we refer to it as “contracting a solution”.  Upon agreeing to a solution to try out to resolve the issue causing conflict, the couple identifies a later date at which point they will evaluate how well the solution is working out for both partners.  If it’s not working out, then no harm, it’s just time to return to the drawing board and figure out a new solution.

What about when you fail?

Failing is an integral part of setting goals.  We are not robots; finely tuned machines carrying out well-defined tasks.  We are humans, trying to accomplish new challenges and overcome existing habits.  This is difficult work and if it was an exact process without the risk of failing, it would lose a significant portion of the reward that comes from achieving your goals

So, rather than adamantly refuse to plan or consider what it means to fail, or worse yet, close your eyes shut and refuse to accept that it’s even a possibility (known as the “George Dubya Bush approach to failure”), our goals are much better served if we spend some time thinking up front about what it means to fail.

Failing is integral to progress.  As I mentioned above, you will not always set reasonable goals for yourself.  Your goals will not always be measurable.  Sometimes you may think that you’ve set a goal you’re interested in achieving, only later to discover that you actually no longer care about it.  If you hold the right perspective, you can use failure as an opportunity to further your own growth and learning.

So the real question to ask is not “how can I avoid failure?”, but rather, “how can I minimize the damage from failing, and maximize the learning from it?”.

The way that you minimize the damage from failing is by minimizing what you have at risk.  We do this through iteration – when we iterate with a smaller goal, we have less at stake when we fail.  Note that it’s important to take on some small amount of risk for failure.  If you aren’t taking on any risk, there cannot be any growth – they are inexorably entwined.

Let’s take crash dieting as an example.  When people go from eating poorly, without much exercise in their life, to a bootcamp fitness regime and cutting out everything fun, they are putting everything on the line with that one change.  If they fail in achieving their goal of making those habits stick, where do they end up?  Right back where they started.

Let’s take the counter-example now of someone setting goals that act as milestones.  They first start by setting (and achieving) the goal of consistently jogging twice a week.  Next, they set and achieve the goal of drinking only 10, instead of 12 drinks, each week.  So far, so good.  Now let’s say they set the goal of no longer eating red meat, but fail.  What are the consequences of failure for this person?  They’ve failed in achieving the goal of cutting out red meat, but they have still achieved two smaller goals, and can continue practicing those good habits.  Their failure is minimized, because the goal that they set out to achieve was a smaller milestone.

So, we can see that we minimize the impact of failure by following the already established advice of setting goals that act as small, iterative milestones.  What about getting more benefit from our failures?

The first thing to do when you fail is to recognize that you’ve failed.  Make a point of checking in with yourself and being honest about your failure.  ”Hmm, I ate red meat last night, even though I had set a goal for myself to cut it out of my diet”.  If you can’t come to terms with this fact, how are you going to be able to accomplish the goals you set out for yourself?

When you recognize that you have failed in achieving your goal, it is important to understand and accept that that is all you have failed.  You have not failed at losing weight, or at being a better person, or at life, or anything else.  This is a common problem for people setting monumental “all or nothing” type goals.  Upon failing, they feel so dejected that they abandon their desire to change altogether and return to their previous routine.

Analyze your failure. Why did you fail?  Was it because you really really wanted to eat red meat?  Were you craving it?  Did you just have a momentary lapse?  Did you decide that you actually didn’t want to give up red meat?  These are all good questions to ask yourself.  The thrust of each of these questions is to try and get at the heart of why you failed.  It may be that your goal was simply not reasonable.  If you’re generally fairly iron deficient, maybe giving up red meat is simply not feasible, in which case, perhaps your goal should be something a little more moderate.

Maybe your goal was simply not realistic.  If you and your friends go out for a steak dinner once a month, and you really enjoy that, it’s probably unlikely that you’re going to be as happy eating a salad while your friends are tearing into a succulent steak.

Once you’ve accepted the failure and thought about why it may have occurred, it’s time to reevaluate your goal.  Was it unrealistic?  Maybe your goal was simply too great a milestone to accomplish at first.  If so, try to come up with a more moderate version of that goal.  Remember, you can always accomplish something smaller, and then adjust your goal to go another step further.

Maybe you hadn’t really committed yourself to the goal.  Sometimes our goals look like “I’m going to give up drinking for my long term health”, but when it comes time to be the sober guy at the party, we just can’t turn down that ice cold beer.  Ask yourself – is the problem that you’re setting too large an initial milestone, or that you’re simply not committing yourself to achieving the goal?

Lastly, it’s possible that the goal is simply no longer relevant to your ultimate goals.  Perhaps you had initially planned on moving to Mexico for a while after graduating, and in planning for that, had set the goal for yourself to learn Spanish.  It’s possible that after life changed and moving to Mexico was no longer a possibility, the associated goal of learning to speak spanish had just stuck around (orphaned from its original motivating purpose).  While this example is pretty clear cut and easy to identify, it won’t always be the case, and it’s worth asking yourself if the goal is still one you want to pursue.

In closing

Goals can assist and improve your ability for growth.  Setting and achieving goals with increase your self-esteem, and once you get into the habit, it can be a really fun way to measure your progress.  The more I have identified and achieved goals for myself, the more I have learned about who I am, what makes me tick, and how best to leverage those two things in order to get what I want out of life.

Just remember: Keep your goals measurable, simple, small, and be willing to fail.  Above all, never forget that it’s the struggle that makes something worthwhile.  If you are wrestling with an especially challenging habit to overcome, it will be that much more rewarding when you successfully achieve the goal you have set out for yourself.  Learn to see that difficulty and the accompanying failures are challenges to be overcome, and you will be that much closer to achieving your goals.

Incidental

Some incidental items to close on.  As of late, I’ve been tinkering with the blog layout to turn it into the nerve centre of everything that I publish.  WordPress comes with an excellent library of plugins, and using those plugins, the sidebar now displays my most recent tweet, the last three items I’ve shared on Google Reader, and has a prettier and more dynamic (though perhaps less functional?) tag cloud.

Many of my readers subscribe exclusively through RSS readers (as would I), so swing by the actual site to see the changes.

Goals, Growth, GTD, Habits, Lifehacking, Productivity Hide

Okay, first, the background.

I love GTD.  It stands for “Getting Things Done”, and is a methodology for accomplishing more.  Accomplishing more at work, accomplishing more in your spare time, accomplishing more in your creative pursuits, just plain accomplishing… more.  One of the core principles of GTD is to get tasks, ideas, and “things” out of your head and into a trusted system, allowing you the creative and psychic energy to come up with new ideas and focus on the existing things that you want to do.

I learned GTD at work, from the project manager that mentored me.  This was a great head-start.  I was given the perfect opportunity, time, and place to get started and practice the methodology.  I had someone to discuss issues and problems that I encountered when trying to create my own approach to the system; I had a constant influx and outflow of daily tasks that needed my attention and were well-suited to using an approach like GTD; and it was acceptable for me to spend some time focusing on applying this new methodology, since it made me more efficient at my job.

But not everyone has this same benefit.  In fact, changing your existing habits and making the move toward a system that is more efficient can be both challenging and daunting.  Taking a step forward usually looks (and feels) like taking one step back and then two steps forward.  So, today, I’m talking about simple steps that you can take to prime and move yourself to a better system for managing your daily tasks, chores, and projects.

We would all like to maximize how we use our time.  Even those of us prone to procrastinating wish that we weren’t.  It’s not that most of us aren’t interested in getting more things done, simply that we don’t know how to make that happen, or that the processes that are available out there require so much mental investment that they are too intimidating to even find a place to start.

These tips aren’t groundbreaking.  You may already do these, in which case you may be ready to graduate to something more full-fledged.  But, if you feel like there’s some room for improvement in the way you organize your daily life, these suggestions may give you some ideas for how to accomplish that.

Let’s do this.

Record stuff (start writing things down)

I told you – nothing groundbreaking here.  But this suggestion actually is pretty groundbreaking for most people.  So often, I’m out with friends, we have a discussion, and then they exclaim “Oh, that reminds me, I need to do X when I get home”.  That’s all that happens though.  They don’t do anything with that thought after having it pop in their head, other than comment on it.

They may try to hold it in short-term memory, or even simply hope that having it pop in head in the first place will make them more likely that  it’ll come to them when they’re back at home.  It’s possible, but why clog up your psychic energy with this thing nagging at you from the back of your head?

Getting into the habit of recording things is the best, and probably the easiest, thing that you can do to improve your ability to get things done.  Recording can take many forms.  You can carry a notepad and pen in your bag or purse.  Or, you can simply carry a pen and write on yourself (a lot less classy, but you’re much more likely to remember to do something with that information when you get home).  If your cellphone has a notepad application, you can write yourself notes.

When I first decided that I was tired of having good ideas disappear from my limited short-term memory, I went out and bought some moleskine notebooks, grabbed a few pens, and put a set of each in my bike paniers, my backpack, and my laptop bag.  Now, whenever I was out, I was sure to have a notepad and pen with which to capture my ideas.  This system wasn’t bad, but it was annoying having to fish them out when I had an idea.  While hanging out with my friend Jay, he suggested trying a voice memo recorder, and that idea has since become my go-to method for capturing my thoughts.

Voice Memos are the best for me because I can record the thought that I’ve had with a minimal amount of time.  It looks a little nerdy holding your phone up to your mouth and speaking into it like a doctor transcribing, but you can circumvent that by holding it up to your head like you’re taking a call and speaking that way.

The fundamental effect that something like this can have on your mindset is quite astonishing.  Taking that idea out of your head and putting it into a reliable means of short-term storage means that it no longer nags at you from the back of your head, or occupies your precious short-term memory.  Less things like this in your head frees your mind up to have new ideas, and to operate creatively.  Keeping these ideas occupying your limited cognitive abilities limits the amount of creative thought that you have available.  With a mind free to wander, without fear of losing track of something you’re trying to remember, you may be surprised at how much more relaxed you feel.

Zero your inbox

This one is daunting to most and achieved by few.  To get this task complete, I suggest scheduling a reasonable amount of time to get through it.  If you have 600 e-mails in your inbox, you’re probably going to need at least a couple of hours to get through all of them.

The reasoning behind zeroing your inbox is that it clears out your inbox and allows you to use it as it should be used – a landing pad for incoming items.  When I worked as a project manager, and gave a talk about GTD, some of my colleagues later came up to me and said that they used their inbox as an archiving tool, and they could tell which items needed to be dealt with because they left them unread.  This is cheating, and should be avoided.  These colleagues didn’t realize that in doing so, they were numbing themselves to the important items in their inbox, and generating inertia that would prevent them from regularly reviewing and dealing with the items in there.

If you really do have a good archiving system that is in place using your inbox, there’s no reason that you can’t take that one step further and duplicate the folders outside of your inbox.  You’ll be left with an intact and functional archive, and a new, clean inbox that adequately represents the new items that you need to deal with.  This change is usually resisted because they know in the back of their head that their approach is far from a functioning system with clean edges.

By emptying out your inbox and keeping it clean, you help ensure that your system has what David Allen (creator of GTD) calls “clean edges”.  This makes it immediately obvious to you what you need to process, and what you actually need to do.  Keeping these two things separate helps prevent your mind from becoming numb to what you need to accomplish, and let you focus on what is important at the appropriate times (end of the week?  Time to process everything new.  Got a block of spare time?  Skip processing and spend that time to get some things done).

Get into the habit of acting on quick items

Most of the time, our inbox is filled with items that are quick to deal with.  Someone writes us and asks for our opinion on something, we need to bookmark a page that we just got sent, or we need to listen to a song that our friend suggested we use in our next project.

These tasks typically take less than two minutes to accomplish, but we often see the item land in one of our inboxes and think to ourselves “I’ll deal with that later”.  But why later?  If you can deal with an item in two minutes, you might as well take the short amount of time to get it done now.  It’s already eaten up some of your concentration to switch your thoughts to the item and figure out what it is in the first place – why go through that mental overhead a second time?

By making a point of dealing with a quick item when it first comes in front of you, you’ll drastically cut down on the amount of “rust” that builds up around your edges and starts to bleed into your mental energy.  Incidentally, this is an excellent way to start taking on procrastination.  Whenever you feel yourself picking up a task and putting it off until later, ask yourself if you can deal with it in two minutes.  If so, clear it out.  You’ll be surprised at what a difference this can make.

If you want to take this to the next step, an item that lands in your e-mail inbox that requires more than two minutes to deal with can be put into your central task manager and deleted from your e-mails inbox, allowing you to keep your e-mail zero’d out, and dealing with the task of actually processing the e-mail immediately.  This is the start of a more GTD-specific approach.

Perform a weekly review

The weekly review is the most important thing you can do to ensure that you stay on top of things and manage your commitments.  The entire success of someone’s GTD system hinges upon them holding the discipline to perform weekly reviews regularly (… weekly, ideally).

The weekly review is simply an opportunity to go through all of your inboxes and open items, and process them.  Review your e-mail inboxes, and process everything there (move the items that need to be stored or archived into the appropriate places); review your facebook inbox and deal with any items that are there (mark old messages as read, or better yet delete them, respond to any events that are awaiting an RSVP, and block everyone that has invited you to play Farmville or Mafia Wars).

Review any places that you store items that you intend to review later, and review any lists of goals that you’re keeping.  If it’s an appropriate time to review those stored items, do so.  If they’re no longer relevant, delete them, and if they are still something you want to review, but don’t have time to do so, leave them on the list to archive – just make sure that you delete or prune where possible.

More important than anything else, go and gather every single piece of loose paper that you have around your house (sticky notes, receipts, bills, etc.) and process them: create a task to deal with the item, or read it and throw it out, or file/shred that receipt you saved (depending on which is appropriate).

It usually takes me between two and three hours to do a weekly review, but that’s because I’m a multi-tasker by nature, and work more efficiently when I’m doing more than one thing at once.  If you are able to devote yourself to the task at hand, you should be able to get through a weekly review in about one to two hours.  Take note, the first weekly review may take, as you’ll need to figure out exactly what it is that you go through.  A weekly review after you have missed a couple will also take longer, for obvious reasons.

When I first describe the weekly review, and the length of time it is likely to take, they typically express disbelief and astonishment at the notion of setting aside that much time each week.  But, this review process isn’t net new work.  It’s work that you would need to do anyhow.  If you don’t perform the review on a weekly basis in this manner, your going to need to do it piecemeal throughout the week, or worse yet, at a longer, or more sporadic interval.  By designating a weekly time to perform a review, you’re not creating new work for yourself, you’re just committing yourself to performing the work that you already need to do.

By reviewing all of your tasks, inboxes, goals and loose paper on a weekly basis, you’ll be able to spend the rest of your week confident that nothing has slipped through the cracks, and that you’re on top of everything.  Isn’t that a pretty worthwhile trade-off?  Would you be willing to spend an hour each week if it meant that you had no nagging feelings during the rest of your spare time?  I am!

In Closing

These are some of the the ways in which you can begin to introduce more order into your system.  I know some people that think “you shouldn’t attempt to impose order into your life, you should just live in the moment”.  This is great if you can manage all of your commitments and daily routine without requiring any additional coping measures beyond your mind, and continue to live in the moment and enjoy yourself.  However, most of us are adults with a large body of commitments, goals, desires, and pursuits.  Order can help you ensure that things don’t slip through the cracks, and that you can maintain your focus on what’s important, rather than what’s immediate.  Most importantly, order can help you feel comfortable that you’ve got a handle on everything that is important so that you can stay present in the moment and enjoy life as you live through its myriad of wonderful quirks and opportunities.

One final note regarding a weekly review – I would recommend starting out very small and keeping the list of things that you do fairly minimal.  For a long time, I struggled with a weekly review, finding it difficult to appreciate why I needed to do so.  The irony of the review is that it is the bedrock of the GTD methodology, and also the aspect of GTD that most people neglect.  If this is the change you choose to make, begin the process by committing to review one or two things on a regular consistent basis.  Once you’re doing that regularly, you can begin to broaden and add more items to your review.  The key for now should be on building a habit of reviewing your tasks consistently.

Because it may be helpful, I’ve included below the list of inboxes that I review, as well as my entire weekly review process.  I’ve saved the review process as a text file that I open up each Saturday morning when I sit down to begin reviewing.  Having everything written out helps me focus on actually doing the review, rather than on the process of reviewing itself.

Both of these lists (inboxes and the review process itself) are released under a creative commons license.

List of inboxes

Below are the list of inboxes that I review on a weekly basis:

• All three of my e-mail inboxes
  • two GMail accounts and my UVic account
• My Facebook inbox
  • I log on to Facebook as rarely as possible as it is a huge time-waster for me.  However, for many people, this is their preferred means of communication.  That’s not an issue for me, I just make sure that I review it weekly to ensure that nothing has slipped through the cracks.
• The saved voice memos on my iPhone
  • As mentioned earlier, I find the Voice Memos app on the iPhone the best way to collect ideas when I’m on the go.
• My starred items in Google Reader
  • I often read through RSS feeds I have subscribed to on my iPhone while taking the SkyTrain to and from work.  Whenever I encounter an item that I want to review or deal with later, I simply star it in Google Reader and come back to it during my weekly review.
• Bookmarks in SoundHound
  • SoundHound is an application for iPhone that will identify any song that it can hear playing through your iPhone microphone.  If I’m out and hear a song that I want to pick up, I identify it in SoundHound and then bookmark it.  I then review and process all of these bookmarks during my weekly review.
• New Music folder
  • This is the folder where I store any music that has been recommended to me by friends, or that is part of a compilation I’ve recently gotten.  I don’t like keeping entire CDs of music, I prefer to screen them and clear out any of the chaff.  Everything in this folder is dealt with during the weekly review and either brought into iTunes or deleted.
• Download folders
  • This includes my Safari download folder, BitTorrent download folder, and any other subfolders that you may have where downloads can end up (eg, MSN contacts, or anything like that).  The Safari sub-folder can get quite clogged up with install files for programs I’ve recently put on my computer and the like, and clearing those out is a good habit to get into.
• ToRead list
  • This list contains all items that I’ve archived with the intent to read later.  This list is less of a typical inbox, as all of the items that end up here are items that I’ve specifically placed myself.  Nevertheless, items here need to be dealt with, either read now, deleted because they are no longer relevant, or left again until I have more time to read them.

Weekly Review

And here is my entire weekly review list:

Loose Paper

Inboxes

Calendar

TODOs/Lists/Projects

Goals

Clean up

That’s all I’ve got for today – any questions, please ask!

GTD, Habits, Productivity, Unclutter Hide

I’ve been out of class (having finished first year) for about two months now.  With a little bit of distance, I can turn my sight back to the last year and reflect on what helped make things easier (or harder).  Some of these suggestions may prove helpful to those of you that are starting out on a new challenge, some may be a bit specific for your tastes.  Let’s do this.

Take time to prepare for the change

After talking with Bay and making sure we could work it out, I arranged my departure from work so that I had three weeks off between my last day and the start of school.  Three weeks may seem like a lot of time, but it only feels that way if you don’t fill it.  I had a number of small projects that I wanted to complete, and I knew that if I was capturing ideas and staying on top of things, that time would fill up.

When you consider the fact that I was undergoing a radical change to the daily routine that I had been building on for the past five years, three weeks really isn’t that long.  Taking this time off may sound obvious or easy to many of you reading this, but these types represent only a portion of the population.  There are as many people that find it almost impossible to let go and accept that even if it means less money, you have to put your mental health before anything else.

Even if it costs more money (as not working is necessarily more expensive than working), it gives you the time to set up the foundation and groundwork for the next year.  Some people prefer to dive headfirst into a new adventure.  I’m all for being adventurous, but I want to reap the maximum benefit from those adventures, and that means setting up at least some kind of framework before diving in.

Some of the things that I accomplished in these three weeks were: performing an experiment with biphasic sleep, spend some quality time hanging out and catching up with some friends, spending some quality time with my wife, hanging shelves and doing some handiwork around the house that has been bothering us for months, and yes, even spending some days doing nothing but playing video games and staying up far too late.

This last one is every bit as important as the others.  Let’s be honest with ourselves – we like to do some things that generally aren’t always for our best interest.  Staying up late and playing video games is hardly a productive activity, but I enjoy it, and it’s a nostalgic thing to do.  Just as much as I know that, these days, I can’t do this very often, I also know that I’m going to want to do that at some points throughout the coming year.  If I’m going to need to exercise willpower to stop doing that in the coming year, isn’t it better to give myself a bit of a mental break and get some of it out of my system now?  I think so.  Again, we’re building a framework here – setting ourselves up so that we’re really able to accomplish our goals in the coming year.

Not only set goals, but be willing and able to adapt them

As of late I’ve heard a bit from studies suggesting that goal-oriented behaviour may not be the best approach for everyone.  This isn’t necessarily that astonishing, because there’s no such thing as “a best approach” to anything that fits for everyone.  We’re all different, and require different approaches to accomplish what we want out of life.  However, setting goals is an important part of how I accomplish and achieve in my life.  It gives me a metric to look back and see how I’ve grown, and it gives me something to drive toward and keep me on course.

Heading into law school, I had set the following goals for myself:  Maintain an A  average in my classes (I achieved this in my undergrad, so it seemed reasonable), continue playing squash three times a week, continue teaching dance, practice dance once a week, and, most important of all, continue to spend time with my wife (yup, you better believe she’s on my list of goals – something would be wrong if she wasn’t).

Throughout the year, life happened, my growth continued, and I gathered more data.  Some of that data was in the form of what realistic expectations were for a law student, vis-a-vis their GPA.  Some of that data was more introspective, such as better understanding how much I can divide my time between various activities.

Some people get overwhelmed when life is changing around them, or they are undergoing their own growth.  The new data creates cognitive dissonance, as it contradicts the goals that they set for themselves, and, if they’re unwilling to adapt, they are forced to either mentally ignore the new data (an awful habit to get into, but a common one), or they discard their goals and forget about it.  The correct approach is neither of these; the correct approach is to accept the new data, appreciate it, and adapt based on what it tells you.

After our first midterm was over, and having our professors impress upon us the fact that the grades we had received in our undergrad were not representative of what we would be getting (I heard the phrase “A B is a good grade!” repeated many times throughout the year, usually more often closer to finals), it became obvious that my goal to maintain an A average may have been unrealistic.

A lot of people believe that adapting your goals means that you have failed.  Many project managers struggle greatly to simply come out and explain to the client that the original goal of meeting a certain deadline is no longer possible, and that they will need to adapt their timeline in order to accomplish what they had originally set out.  This is not a failure on anyone’s part, but our society generally has trouble accepting this fact.  It is simply adapting to new data.  It is the intelligent, and sustainable, way to handle new information.

Changing my goal from an A average to a B average may have seemed to some people like they were giving up on themselves, or lowering their expectations.  In Law, there are many many type A personalities.  These people typically struggle with adaption; they have a strong drive, and they are used to setting their sights on a goal and not relenting until they achieve it.  This generates a considerable amount of stress.  By contrast, when I adjusted my goal, I was not giving up on myself, nor was I lowering the expectations that I held myself to.  This is simply by virtue of the fact that the GPA I wanted to maintain in school was representative of many things.

The GPA I would end with did not simply represent how smart I was, or how much time I had, how much I cared about  my career, and especially not about how objectively good I was at the study of our legal system.  It represented these things in part, sure, but it also represented how much of my life, and my time, I was willing to sacrifice to this pursuit.  Was I willing to sacrifice my other goals, in order to accomplish this one goal?  The new data I received was telling me that if I wanted to continue with my goal of maintaining an A average, I would likely not be able to achieve my other goals, such as regular squash, dancing, and spending time with the most important person in my life.

Here to is a stumbling block for many people.  When setting our goals, we initially start with X amount of data, and then lay out a set of goals that we believe we can achieve (well, that’s what we should be doing.  Many of us shoot far too high in our initial goal-setting process).  Upon receiving new data that tells us one of our goals will require more time/effort/whatever, it necessarily means that out other goals will have to change in order to meet this one.  Just a simple example below (skip if you already get my point):

Let’s say that you figure you have five hours a week to devote to your pursuits.  You set out goal A and goal B, figuring that A will probably require two hours of your time every week, and goal B, three hours.  (Of course, you probably won’t be explicitly thinking this, but when coming up with goals for ourselves, we’re generally considering this in some capacity or another).  Now you receive some new data.  You’ve found out that achieving goal A will now require three hours, instead of two (in my own case, this is basically what I found out about my goal to keep an A average).

You will no longer be able to accomplish both goal A and B with the spare time you have available.  You have a these options:

• Fool yourself and keep the goals, pretending that you will be able to do six hours worth of goals in five hours of time.  (Note: This is the same situation as simply ignoring the new data)
• Get frustrated and discard one of your goals
• Adapt to the new data, and perhaps adjust goal A to something more reasonable.  Or, give up on goal A, and decide to pursue goal C

The hardest part about all of this is recognizing when you are a presented with a moment that a decision is required.  Many of us have these moments pass us by, and only realize when it’s too late that there was a actually a decision to be made.  For Law, it was fairly easy to see – we were told regularly what a reasonable expectation was.

If you’ve been reading this blog, or are a friend of mine, you’ll know that I came up against one of these moments with respect to dancing and squash, both during the school year, and again at the start of this co-op term.  If you read back through the blog entries I wrote in the past year, you can actually see me trying battling through the process of needing to adapt my goals.  Over time, I came to realize that I would either need to adapt my goals and choose one pursuit to prioritize, or, have that decision made for me (or, even worse, have both of my pursuits be given an inadequate amount of time and get dropped as a result).

Making the decision to change and adapt your goals can be a difficult one.  Sometimes you really want something, and we often have a difficult time accepting that achievements require sacrifice.  However, coming to terms with the nature of sacrifice is necessary, and no rewards will come without having to make some kind of sacrifice.  Learn to recognize these moments in your life, and embrace the change and adapation that is necessary – it helped me get through my first year.

Do something outside of school

I was lucky; I was accepted to UVic, the university right here where I live (and also a highly acclaimed law program).  As a result, I already had a social network, and many ongoing interests that kept me from existing solely at school.

Many students enter law school by way of moving to a new city and setting up shop there.  For these people it can be difficult to develop interests that don’t revolve around school in some way or another.  All of their friends are people they’ve met at school, they spend a ton of time on campus, they end up talking about school all of the time, etc. etc.

I continued teaching dance while going through first year, even though this added to my stress at times (it can be difficult to choreograph a class when you’ve got a memo looming shortly ahead).  However, it also maintained a continuous presence in my life that pulled me out of school.  It was impossible for me to allow my life to completely exist within the sphere of school,because there was something that recurred every week and demanded that I pay attention to it.

Maintaining a sense of identity that exists outside of school is essential to staying sane as you go through the process.  If you allow your identity to be defined solely by your experience at school, you’ll start to put too much emphasis on grades and exams; and buy too much into the pressure and stress that accompanies these things.

Worse than that, you can lose sight of the fact that life carries on while you are in school.  If you enclose your existence within the confines of school, life can pass you by, and you may find yourself graduating or coming up for air at the end of each year, only to realize that everything has changed.  By maintaining interests, friends, and activities that exist outside of school, you’ll help ensure that life doesn’t pass you by – it will continue to grow, progress, and move along, and you’ll continue to be a part of that movement.

Collaborate generously*

*where appropriate to do so

Not everyone will agree with this point, but I stand by my opinion, more so than ever before after completing first year.  In first year, there will be plenty of opportunities to collaborate.  Although collaborating on writing an exam or the written portion of an assignment may be considered cheating, most of our professors encouraged collaboration when studying, doing research, preparing outlines, and so on.  Outside of the situations where it would be considered cheating, I think that collaboration is a sure fire way to enhance your success.

The stress would get to some of our cohort, and more than once I would hear students declare that they didn’t want to assist someone any more because they felt like they were being used.  I understand this sentiment – when things are tough and stressful, it’s very difficult to keep our hearts and outlooks soft.  I framed my approach a little differently.  Being a project manager at heart, I already had a good understanding of the value that collaboration and synergy can bring about, and knew that any form of collaboration at all is generally a positive thing for me.  Here’s the real secret though – it’s almost impossible to collaborate with someone and not derive some kind of benefit.  Sure, my fellow students would benefit from anything that I provided or put out there (hopefully), but even if someone took my outline and provided me nothing in return, there’s always the possibility that they would come back to me and ask “Hey, Adam, I noticed you put this case in there – is that actually relevant?”.

Maybe someone would ask me why I had structured things a certain way, or note that I had incorrectly cited a specific case.  Sometimes I would exchange outlines with study partners, and then we’d both gain the benefit of third-party review.  Sometimes, helping out a friend that was having trouble just plain felt good.  Knowing that I was able to make the journey a little easier for some of my colleagues contributed greatly to my own sense of self-worth and self-esteem.  There’s no substitute for the positive feelings that being generous with your work and time can provide.

Being open and collaborative in this manner may really be counter-intuitive to some people.  I’m told that in some law schools, the competitiveness is so strong that people really don’t want to share anything with another student, for fear of it meaning that student will do better, affect the grading curve and result in the initial student’s grade being lower.  I think this is pretty short term thinking, and that if we are able to raise our grading curve collectively by improving each other, we all win in the long run.  Maybe my grade is relatively lowered because I helped another student get a higher grade, but I’m sure that in doing so, my knowledge of the actual material is deeper that it would have been had I not helped that person out.  And that’s what this is really all about – not getting the highest grade on some arbitrary metric, but actually deeply learning the material we are studying.

Sharing in this manner is a lot like the open source approach to developing and licensing software.  A lot of software companies have scoffed at the open source concept, where developers collaborate and work on projects for which there isn’t an obvious economic benefit or reward.  These companies are locked into the unfortunate perspective that the only thing that should really motivate your actions is the bottom line (financial).  This is akin to the law student that figures the only thing that should motivate their actions are their own grades (again, the bottom line, though in the academic context).

Both of these perspectives are short-sighted, and will ultimately cheapen your experience.  Collaborate with your peers, and embrace the opportunity to help educate them if you can.  The more times you explain a concept, the better you will be able to do exactly that when it’s time to write an exam.  If you find yourself explaining something to a colleague more than once, look at it simply as practice.  I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Be a project manager

Okay, this last tip may not be that helpful to those of you that don’t have five spare years of your life kicking around, or aren’t interested in management.  But, you can still take some of the tips that I write about in this blog, and learn to apply them in order to make yourself more efficient and more organized.  That’s what I’m talking about here.  An effective project manager needs to be able to multi-task, remain efficient, and handle many different threads at once.  These are all skills that are greatly benefitted by taking some time to increase your productivity.

My previous career working as a PM in software gave me ample opportunity to hone skills such as applying GTD methodology, effectively capturing ideas, avoiding procrastination, and appreciating the power of collaboration.  Before returning to school, make an attempt to develop some organizational skills, or to build upon those you already have.  Any time that you can put in now toward improving your habits will pay off exponentially as you apply it over the next three years.

Try to view the time you spend adapting these new habits before returning to school as another form of investment.  You’re investing time now into developing new, positive habits, so that later on you will be more efficient and better able to manage the demands that will be on your time once school starts.

Keep sight of the bigger picture

No matter how stressful it gets, always try to keep sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing.  You’re not writing an open memo assignment because you don’t want to fail, you’re writing it because you want to understand how to properly apply legal research and writing skills.  And why are you doing that?  Probably because you want to be able to seek out justice for those in our society that have been wronged.  Or maybe because you want to make a ton of money working a swanky job (a pretty poor reason to go to school for law, in my opinion, but to each their own).  Whatever it is that has motivated you to take on the next big step in your life, take time throughout the course of that journey to recognize that it truly is a journey.  If you cheat yourself out of the ability to recognize that, you really cheat yourself out of part of the experience, learning and benefits.  If things weren’t stressful, and didn’t require you to adapt or change, they wouldn’t be worth pursuing.

And, scene…

These tips are pretty general, and will hopefully serve you you well in whatever new portion of your life you are embarking on.  Change is generally going to be stressful, as we humans are creatures of habit, and changing our environment imposes new requirements and approaches to the habits we’ve developed leading up to this point.  However, if you take proactive steps and maintain a positive outlook, you can help ensure that the journey is rewarding, and that you maximize the benefit that you reap from it.  I always try to tell myself that when I’m feeling stressed out, it’s often because I’m learning something new, or in a situation that I’m not comfortable with.  Aim for this kind of distance and introspection, so that you can identify the situations where you may be able to learn something new.  The more often in life you are able to recognize an opportunity to learn, the greater heights you will be able to achieve.

Okay – I promised podcasts and audiobooks, and that will hopefully come up next time.  The ferry ride to and from the island is an awesome opportunity to write a post, and I really missed putting ideas on to paper (… screen, I guess).  I’m always looking for new ideas to write about, so please post a comment if there’s something that you would like to hear my thoughts on, or particular questions you may have.

Efficiency, GTD, Habits, Law, Managing Change, Productivity, Updates on me Hide

The title is a bit of a paradox.  Creative processes are typically those that fare and progress best when left to their own devices and are free of the encumbrances that attempting to manage them can impose.  However, as with everything in life, I believe that certain guidelines help, rather than hinder these types of processes.  A significant portion of my spare time living in Vancouver so far has been dedicated to improving my own abilities in the styles of dance that interest me most.  I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on this process, and have received some excellent advice from some newly made friends about this ongoing process of improvement.  This post represents the culmination of these thoughts and tidbits of advice after the first month of the Summer.

Let’s get it out of the way, because if I don’t, someone will mention it.  ”You shouldn’t spend time thinking about dancing, you should just do it”.  This is a blanket statement that I have heard more times that I care to think about.  There’s certainly some truth in it, because at the end of the day, the most fundamental thing you need to do when you’re dancing is listen to the music, shut off your brain, and do what your body tells you to do.  If you aren’t doing this, and your goal is to dance, you have failed at your goal.  Beyond that though, this super-general statement will lead you astray.

You do need to put some time and thought into your creative processes if you want to progress in them.  Simply doing whatever you feel like doing, without ever providing yourself with guidelines, goals, and benchmarks, will hinder, rather than aid, your own progress.  It’s important to pursue a direction.  If you want to be a great photographer (as some of my friends are), you take classes to learn how to do that.  If you want to be a great painter, you take classes to learn how to properly paint.  Dancing is no different, nor are other creative processes.  If nothing else, education and thought devoted to your pursuit will vest you with new ideas, inspirations, and an understanding of what has been done, and how you can either build on that, or avoid making the same mistakes.

Okay, it’s out of the way.  I feel like I should just create a boilerplate disclaimer that states that so that I can dump it at the bottom of every post tagged “dance” and save us all a bunch of time.  I’m not going to though because I’m waiting for the ferry and typing that out helps make the time go by a little faster.  Let’s get to the meat of this post.

The Theory

At the core of almost any creative process are two facets: theory and application.  These are just abstract terms that I’m using, and may not bear any actual relevance to the way they’re described in any particular pursuit.  Further, these concepts exist outside of merely creative processes, and apply in a lot of other settings.  In Math, you begin by learning the theory of numbers.  How operations work on constants and variables, how a derivative is performed (ugh), etc.  Once you know that, you need to actually apply these concepts to proper problems.  You can’t apply anything if you haven’t learned the theory beforehand, but if all you’ve done is learn the theory, you’ll be unable to apply it to anything other than the most contrived circumstances that generally exist in laboratory or classroom settings.

This is a common critique that is levelled from both sides of the fence in the ivory tower/real-world debate.  People working in the industry, in various professions, lob criticism at pure academics, claiming that they exist only in the world of theory, and never have their theories and ideas tempered with the versatility and complications of application to real-world problems.  The academics riposte that industry professionals are hopelessly mired in the here-and-now and the application of existing principles to the problems in the real world, and are never able to advance their ideas at any significant rate (thinking outside of the box, so to speak).

They’re actually both right.  It’s important to take time to step back from the real world and analyze and assess our knowledge as it currently stands, and reflect on how we are currently achieving our aims (and whether or not those aims are even still reasonable).  This can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve if you are constantly confronted with the next emergency.  Equally important, if all you ever do is consider theory and never apply it, you’ll never really ground yourself in reality, nor learn the ability to apply your theory with the fluidity and flexibility that is important to any successful endeavour.

The application

The point of this long-winded metaphor is to state the realization that I’ve reached regarding myself and dance: I’ve been sitting in the ivory tower.

This realization has dawned slowly on me over the last couple of weeks.  Every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, many of the street dancers (so that includes poppers, lockers, house dancers, whackers, and b-boys) head out to Robson Square and get down.  On each of these nights, you can usually find at least 10-20 dancers practicing and getting down (which is super awesome).  This was a pretty intimidating scene for me to plug in to.  A week ago this past Wednesday was the first time I’d gone out purely to practice.  Before that, I had been to the square to take some classes that were being taught there (also awesome), but nothing else.  I arrived early and practiced technique for about an hour before someone I’d met recently, named Boris, showed up, and then we started practicing in front of the many windows that surround the now ice-free skating rink that is downstairs.

I asked Boris for some advice, mentioning the frustration I feel every time I try to dance outside of purely doing drills.  Boris’s advice was simple, but profound:

“I’ve been there.  You need to practice freestyling and cyphering* more.  Freestyling is a skill, just like any particular technique is.  If you don’t practice that skill, you won’t be able to improve in it”.

We spent the next thirty minutes taking turns locking in front of each other.  It felt supremely awkward.  The truth is that I’ve never really danced in front of someone else, while they stood their watching.  Sure, I’ve danced at the bar plenty of times, but that’s a different thing altogether.  People at the bar blend into an anonymous crowd.  There’s individual faces, but it’s easy to ignore them.  Plus, at the bar, there’s other people on the dance floor.  I’m sure that being a person that has devoted time to the pursuit of dancing, people notice me when I’m dancing next to people that have not, but it’s easy enough to ignore.

When you’re in a situation like this, you start to fall back on the same things pretty quickly.  I’d come out with a sequence that I had thought up, and then fall right back to the fundamentals and have trouble moving beyond them.  But that’s okay, because this was the first time I’d ever actually tried to move beyond the realm of pure theory into the realm of application.  David and Michael, two twins that I’ve seen dancing at Get Down last year, and at some of the classes I’ve been taking this Summer, showed up later, but I needed some time to reflect, eat dinner, and stretch.  The next night, I repeated this process for popping, forcing myself to get into the cypher and do something – anything.  Dancing first – once that was happening, the technique could flow from it.

The result

I’ve often drawn parallels between squash and dancing.  If you look hard enough, you can find meaningful parallels between almost any two pursuits.  After the second cypher I danced in, I wondered to myself why I hadn’t felt like this was as big of an issue with squash as it was with dancing.  I believe that this is because squash is already set up to impose these two types of learning on your process.  You don’t have to pursue both the laboratory work (drills and working on movement) and the application in the real world (games and tournaments), and many people are content to simply play games.  In fact, squash is probably more likely to lead to people that have the opposite kind of problem to that which I’ve experienced with dancing.  Rather than spending all of their time in the lab working on theory, they spend all of their time playing games, applying what they know (again, this isn’t a criticism – if you’re content doing that, then by all means, continue to do so).

As a late dancer, pursuing a style of dance that requires a good deal of technique, it’s been easy to neglect the importance of real world application, and to simply work on theory, theory, theory.  The more I thought about these changes to my own pursuit, the more I realized that I may very well be passing along the same habits to my students.  Not once have we cyphered in one of my classes.  Why not?  Probably because I’d never done it myself.  Maybe because I was a little bit afraid to dance in front of people when the focus was exclusively on me.

But if I really care about dancing, how is this a sustainable approach?  It isn’t, unless I’m willing to forever remain a laboratory dancer (I’m not).  This point was actually driven home during the first class I took in Vancouver – a locking class with an incredible dancer named Kim Sato.  At the start and end of the class, everyone got together in a circle, and rather than facing the front and the mirrors, where we could focus exclusively on ourselves, we faced in towards each other and danced that way.  At the end of the class, Kim announced that we would be following the leader, and each took turns doing something that everyone else had to repeat for a number of beats before moving on to the next person.  It was intimidating, and I loved it.

Truthfully, the hardest cypher you ever enter will be your first one, and, parallel to that, the hardest time to get into any particular cypher will be the first time.  Each time after that, it gets easier and easier.  I found myself walking to Robson square this past Thursday excited about the opportunity to get down with other dancers, and to work on my freestyle skills.  I knew that I would be intimidated all over again, and that I would find it hard to keep coming up with new things, but I didn’t let that bother me.  I just wanted to get better at the application of my technique.

You…

So what does this mean to you, the non-dancer that has stumbled across my blog because I keep publishing my notes to Facebook, or because you’re bored at work and I was the first thing that popped up on your RSS-reader?

It means that if your aim is continual, optimized improvement in a given pursuit, you too must be spend time reflecting on whether or not you’re spending enough time in the lab, and enough time in the real-world.  If you find yourself plateau’d and unable to break out and experience a new bout of improvement, assess whether or not you’ve been spending too much time, or too little time, working in the lab, honing your skills.

Bonus

Okay.  The theory for today is out of the way.  The other thing that I promised last time I posted was an update on what I’ve been learning.  That list is perpetually growing, and never-ending, and I feel like everytime I spend an hour in a class, it dovetails into me learning about seven other new things related (and sometimes unrelated) to what we were working on.  Maybe I learned a single boogaloo technique, but also picked up new ways to approach teaching, learned about a weakness that I need to work on, and learned that I don’t like dancing on a certain side.  Notwithstanding that, I will try to summarize some of the more salient points, because otherwise this blog amounts to nothing more than verbal masturbation, and that’s not really my steeze.

Up to this point, I’ve been taking three classes each week: One hiphop class, one locking class, and one popping class.  I started taking a hiphop class because it’s taught by someone that I have a great deal of respect for: Liz Vaesen (Please someone correct me if I spelled her name wrong).  Brooke and I first heard of Liz when we took a popping workshop that she was bringing over to Victoria (she brings about four classes over each year), and were both immediately inspired and identified with her approach and view on hiphop, and dancing in general.  An excellent teacher is a better predictor of my growth than anything else about a given class (which may sound trite, but that includes subject matter and many other factors;  I feel like I would learn taking a ballet class with a great teacher than I would a popping class with a bad teacher, all other things being considered equal).

Liz’s class is everything I love about hiphop.  It focuses purely on social grooves, is done in Robson Square (urban!), and it’s not about flashy moves or fancy choreography.  I never really grew up “plugged in” to hiphop.  I knew that I wanted to dance from a fairly young age (though was never able to find teachers for it when I was a kid, and was probably also too intimidated), but never really identified with rap music when I heard it on Much (it turns out I’m just a snob and, like all forms of music that is broadcast, like only a few of the songs that are put out at any given time).  It wasn’t until I met Brooke and started to talk with her about dancing and hiphop that I realized that many of the elements and feelings that exist in HipHop are elements that I identify strongly with.  Individualism, creativity, honest self-expression, and self-awareness (both individual and cultural) are all key aspects of my identity.

Although I struggle to reflect these virtues at times (as do we all), they are all aims that I pursue throughout my day.

Bay’s cousin, Michael (who I like and enjoy chatting with), said something to me the last time that I saw him that really put me off.  He was playing me some music from a group called Bass Nectar (who are pretty good, though not really my top choice), and as we were listening, he commented that “If not for these guys and this kind of music, rap would be dead”.  I smiled and let him know that I couldn’t disagree with him more.  To the outsider, rap, and by association, hiphop, is nothing more than the superficial parts of it that we see co-opted and projected to us through a TV screen, endorsement deals, and product placement.  To most of the public, hiphop is artists like Puff Daddy wearing flashy suits, or Soulja Boy making a catchy hook and posting videos of himself displaying his vast ignorance and the unfortunate arrogance that comes with youth (nothing wrong with that arrogance, as we all have to move through it – it’s just too bad that he’s chosen to have a camera focused on him as he completes that journey).

But hiphop is so much more than these superficial elements.  In truth, these elements are probably so distorted as to have become the antithesis of hiphop.  Michael’s statement that rap would be dead if not for artists like Bass Nectar displays the ignorance that most people have of what hiphop is.  Hiphop is a cultural movement.  A way of feeling, thinking, obeserving, reflecting, and creating.  Hiphop wouldn’t die simply because the mainstream lost interest in the superficial and  overly-refined products that the music and fashion industry have distilled from the movement.  By the same token, a movement that is about culture wouldn’t simply be rejuvenated because a new set of artists have adopted a new interpretation of that culture.  Cultural movements don’t die, or get reborn.  Cultural movements like hiphop are reflections of our society, and they morph and evolve, just like our societies do.

Sorry about that, I didn’t even notice that soapbox I was standing on.  Anyhow, let’s get back on track.  The things we learn in Liz’s class are social dances.  Grooves and dances that have evolved as new music has come out and people have interpreted that into simple movements.  The Humpty dance, the Roger Rabbit, the Bart Simpson, the Steve Martin, the Cabbage Patch, and yes, even the Running Man, are all social dances that have evolved and become a part of hiphop.  These grooves and the music provide a simple pallette for the dancer to paint with.  Their interpretation and creativity in how they use those grooves, and add their own flare, are what leads to a creative process.

I’ve already mentioned the locking class that I take with Kim, and that’s also an excellent class.  Kim’s one of those ridiculously talented dancers, accomplished in ballet, tap, hiphop, locking, and several billion other styles (from what I’ve been told).  I always finish her class exhausted, drenched in sweat, humbled, and with a greater awareness of what it means to dance, rather than simply to lock.

Lastly, I take a popping class with Jamieson, one of the member’s of the Groovy G’s – a very talented popping crew in Vancouver.  Jamieson, like the other two teachers I’ve mentioned, does an excellent job of focusing on the dancing aspect of popping, and is excellent at teaching you without you realizing that you’re being taught.  We usually start out with very basic dance movements, and by the end of the class that has evolved into several popping techniques.  The only thing that I find frustrating about the class is that I am having trouble figuring out how to take his manner of teaching and adapt it into something that I could share with my own students.

Before I left, Brooke and I had discussed teaching two popping classes – one beginner, and one advanced. However, in Vancouver, there’s only one open class for popping, and one for locking.  Furthermore, Jamieson isn’t teaching “advanced” techniques.  He’s just teaching movement, and layering that with technique.  Likewise, Kim isn’t teaching complicated choreography – she’s teaching dancing, and layering that with locking techniques.  I’ve had students come up to me and ask if I was going to teach a more advanced popping class, but I was never able to really understand what that class would look like, nor what I would be teaching them.  I’m more convinced than ever that this isn’t the right approach – I think that what would be better is to have a class once a week, and a cypher once a week.  If the advanced dancers aren’t happy reviewing fundamentals, focusing on dancing, and spending some of that time learning new techniques, they can come to the cyphers and practice applying the techniques they’ve learned.

I’m happy with the length of this post, so I’ll cut it off here.  I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to audiobooks and podcasts on my commute to work, so I’ll aim to focus on reviewing some of the ones that I think are most worthwhile next blog post.  Until then…

* Cyphers are a little bit like a battle.  You have a bunch of dancers in a circle, and take turns going into the centre of the circle and getting down, one after another.  The aim isn’t to out-do one another (though playful one-ups-manship is fun), but simply to come together and create something, with the music, as a group.  The feeling is one of encouragement and creativity, rather than aggression and competition.

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I’ve lived in Vancouver for about a month now.  I’m working here for the Summer on a co-op placement with WorkSafeBC, and living with my brother and his girlfriend Willough.

My brother and his girlfriend are being amazing hosts, and it’s making everything a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.  I haven’t had to worry about finding a place to rent during the Summer and I’ve been living ridiculously close to downtown for rent that is affordable.  Me paying rent helps out Brendan and Willough, so all in all, I think things are working out pretty good.

This is the first weekend that I haven’t travelled back home to Victoria (to spend time with Bay, friends, and family), or had someone coming here, so it’s really the first decent duration of time that I’ve had to sit down and reflect.  The first couple of weeks have been a process of acclimatizing for me.  Learning the ropes at a new job, figuring out where things are in the city, getting over the initial inertia that I experience when I want to start something new (in this case, taking dance classes).  Today I’m planning solely to reflect on that experience, and what it’s telling me about myself.

Dancing

The dance culture in Vancouver is incredible.  There isn’t a single night that goes by where I don’t find myself wishing that we had anything comparable to what I see here.  Every single night I can walk down to Robson square and find someone to practice with.  All of the dancer’s I’ve met have been really friendly, and the quantity of talent is leaps and bounds ahead of what we have in Victoria.  Note that the quality is about the same – in Victoria we have some excellent dancers (I don’t include myself in that category), it’s just that Vancouver has more excellent dancers.

As far as classes are concerned, the options that are available are almost overwhelming.  I’m taking three classes a week, and if I had more time, there are certainly more classes available that I could be taking.  More popping classes, more locking classes, more hiphop classes, and more house classes.

I’ve had to make some adjustments.  One of those adjustments has just been pushing myself out of my bubble.  I generally avoid social situations until I’m tight with people.  Even though I can do it pretty well, I hate small talk.  I spend too much time in my head, thinking about how awkward it will be going up to some random people dancing and saying “Hey, I’m new in town, what’s up?”.  Getting over that hasn’t been super difficult, but it has been something I’ve had to push myself to overcome.

As with many anxieties, once I just made the decision to do it, it was easy.  Things have been helped by the fact that I’ve met a few of the dancers here before, either from classes, or from mutual friends, or workshops that I’ve taken.  I recognize a lot of them from Get Down, which I came over to Vancouver for last Summer.  Even better, doing exactly what I stated above turned out to not be awkward at all.  Everyone has been super friendly, and the culture here is really welcoming and inviting.  Big kudos to the street dancers in Vancouver.  If I can help bring back even 10% of that with me to Victoria, I’ll consider it a success.

The other big adjustment has been accepting that I really do have a long way to go.  I’ve always known that I’m not a phenomenal dancer – just someone that loves doing it.  When I’m in Victoria, it’s easy to forget this sometimes.  Since there are very few people that pop or lock in Victoria, the opportunities to see direct evidence of that reality are rare.  I’m a big fish in a small pond, but do everything I can to stay humble and continue driving myself to improve.

However, in Vancouver, every single day I see someone that is able to prove that point, quite effectively.  Because of the effort I make to remain humble, I can accept how great these dancers are without it affecting my own identity to too great an extent.  However, I do face an ongoing challenge to avoid falling into the “pit of despair”, or even to just become overly intimidated by the calibre of talent that surrounds me.  It’s easy to see someone wrecking shop and think to yourself “Man, these people are so good… what’s the point of even trying?”.

One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed in my popping classes is that I just am not feeling funky.  I feel like I’ve got good technique, because that’s what I’ve been able to watch on TV and replicate.  But as soon as the music starts and it’s time to cypher, I feel like I’ve got about seven techniques I can rely on and nothing else.  I feel dead on the dance floor, or like I’m hiding behind the technique.  This is one of my biggest goals this Summer: to understand how I can get funkier, and try and become more creative.  That might be an impossible goal to accomplish – how do you become more creative?  I don’t know if it’s something that can actually be done, but nevertheless, every time I step on the dance floor, I will be doing it with that thought in the back of my head.

Squash

When in school this past year, I had to come to a difficult conclusion.  That conclusion was that I wouldn’t have time for both dancing and squash.  I needed to make a decision between the two.  I love squash; but I double-plus-love dancing.  The decision between the two wasn’t difficult, but letting go of something that I loved was.  However, I knew that if I didn’t make the decision myself, it would end up happening anyhow, and I would simply become more and more frustrated as I felt the skill I had built slipping away.  Sometimes in life, it is better to accept that we need to change in order to grow, than to try to divide ourselves between too many things to the detriment of all of them.

Throughout the year, I knew in the back of my head that I would return to squash again once the year was finished.  What I didn’t realize was that that wasn’t true.  I hadn’t really sat down and planned out my weeknights, and I hadn’t thought about what it would mean to pursue dancing to the extent that I wanted to.  Without sitting down and thinking about the amount of time that would need to be devoted, it was easy to believe that I would be able to fit both squash and dancing in, and devote myself fully to both pursuits.  After my first dance class in Vancouver, I overheard Boris and Ed (two obnoxiously good lockers) talking to each other, and Boris stating that he had been at Robson square practicing every night that week.  It wasn’t until I was back in Victoria that weekend that it dawned on me that if I really wanted to make the most of the Summer, I too needed to be putting an equivalent amount of time in.  The sacrifice that I would need to make didn’t fully dawn on me until I found myself talking about it with Bay and my friends, but it makes sense.  When I first started playing squash, I was at the courts about four to five times a week.  Improvement doesn’t come without dedication.

And so it is – I have a regular drill session and match with my buddy Bevan, who I first started training with, but aside from that, my time is devoted to dancing.  It’s a decision that was hard to confront, but ultimately for the best.  I’d feel worse if I didn’t feel like I was trading something I like a lot for something that I love.  If I were to take a fatalistic approach, I would still be able to look back proudly on the time that I spent honing a skill and achieving the level that I did.  If I take a more positive approach, I know that squash will never truly leave me, and will always be there in some capacity or another.

Zooming out

This whole process has really gotten me thinking about growth.  In the last year, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth in all aspects of my life.  Not just in myself, but in my wife, my friends, and my family.  Growth can sometimes be hard.  It’s not always easy to let things go that we care about, but sometimes you have to be willing to do that if you want to progress as a person.  Some people never fully embrace change in this manner, and forever restrict their own progression.  If that is the decision that they choose to make, then I salute that decision and hope for them the best.  If it’s something that they are unaware of, I hope that they’re happy.  For myself, I know that this will never be acceptable.

As an agnostic, I don’t generally believe in a god.  This doesn’t mean that I believe that there is not a god, nor that I believe there is not a higher power, intelligence, or order in our universe.  It simply means that I have not yet been given convincing evidence to support me changing my view in this manner.  I try to approach life with as open a mind as possible, while maintaining a critical outlook in order to protect myself from being taken advantage of.  As a Bertrand Russell once said, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”.

Why am I telling you this?  Well, one of the things that I often hear many religious scholars stating is that without a belief in god and an afterlife, our lives are meaningless (just because I’m not religious doesn’t mean that I don’t find Theology fascinating).  Perhaps to some people they are, but to me, it grants me the freedom to dictate my own terms with which I ascribe value to my life.  My own personal growth and progression, and contributing to the same in other people’s lives, are two things which create incredible meaning and purpose in my life.

How high can I reach?  If perfection, as an ultimate ideal, is theoretically impossible, how close to perfection (again, on my own terms), can I come?  The only way I will ever find out the answer to this is to push myself to achieve as much as I can.  To some, the fact that this motivation is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic (comes from within, rather than from something outside of me) makes it less meaningful.  To me, it makes it more meaningful.  If uncovering the deep inner workings of sociology and psychology, through my study of our legal system, is fulfilling and meaningful to me, then that is a victory in terms of my life.  Now, that goal, or end result, may very well be meaningless to someone else; but that’s okay – they need to set their own goals and pursuits that are specific to themselves.  These are part of what make life meaningful to me.  They’re part of the core of what makes me who I am.

Part of pushing forward for that growth means that life is always going to be about embracing change.  Sometimes that change will lead to short-term loss in order to make long-term gains.  Actually, it’s most likely that most of that change will lead to short-term loss.  Any change in your life is generally going to cause you some stress (most change is stressful, be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual stress), and require that you adjust in order to accommodate and figure it out.  Not only that, but not every change will necessarily be for the best.  Sometimes I make changes, only to realize that it’s not the change that I wanted.  These changes aren’t a failure – they’re simply more data points from which to evaluate where I am.

Learn to embrace change in your life, and to recognize that change in and of itself is a rewarding and positive part of life.

I think that’s it for now – the next post will be about some of the techniques and choreography that I’ve been learning in the classes I’m taking, so fairly dance heavy.  As always, I’ll attempt to analogize those things to the more abstract challenges and things happening in my life.  Until then.

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