Reposting: New Seminar Dates

STILL PLACES AVAILABLE!!

I will be running two one-day seminars in March this year. These are designed for people who have read Do It Tomorrow and want to explore more deeply how to use the principles in their own individual circumstances. They are also suitable for people who have been on the 3-hour introductory course.

The dates are:

Friday, March 14th

Thursday, March 27th

For full details and booking form, click here

Feedback from last year’s seminars

“Amongst the most worthwhile uses you can make of a day that you’re not able to spend outdoors. Mark Forster has genuine insight and wisdom, in contrast to the many impractical and complex ‘systems’ on offer. Superb.”
Perry Duke, Head of Finance Control Division, DEFRA, www.perryduke.org

“A good way to crystalise the book. Now I have consolidated Do It Tomorrow I am looking forward to applying it.”
Aaron Pascoe

“Great value, really good to be able to bring the fantastic ideas in the book to life”.
Iain Gray, Win More Clients www.winmoreclients.co.uk

“I am optimistic that I will implement the DIT structure. Many useful ideas”.
Pauline Hay

“Very useful in terms of learning about practically applying the DIT system”.
Frank Wessely

“It was very good to meet you and pick at my own personal issues with keeping going on the DIT system.”
Mark Jameson

“Thank you for the Seminar on Friday which I thoroughly enjoyed, and more importantly found very useful. I am very determined to work on and install the principles.

“I already have a tidy desk and am working on one thing at a time and have minimized my interruptions using some of the techniques we learned on Friday.

“I found the depth that we explored time management very refreshing and quite different to many of the courses that I have been on, this has enabled me to see where I can more effective and also more productive. I thought the number of people attending the course was a great balance and that their input and sharing of ideas was interesting and helpful.

“I look forward to implementing more of the processes in the next few weeks and reaping the rewards by retaining my sanity.”
Alister Mc Kinnon Clark

“Practical, step-by-step solutions to get back on track and keep all my business and personal commitments.”
Scott Allison, Access Business Communications, www.callabc.co.uk

“Excellent exploration of the principles and how to make them work effectively in one’s own context/role/environment.”
Nick Garring

“Very helpful to recap on the book and to share ideas and difficulties with other people who have read/written the book. It’s now down to me to implement and I am pleased that the day has given me fresh motivation to continue.”
Jackie Brazier

Getting Going Again

As I’ve blogged before in the recent past, I have been working on a new method of time management. Unfortunately in spite of all my efforts - which have been considerable - it simply hasn’t worked. So I think now is the time to call a halt and go back to what I know does work.

Every cloud has a silver lining and this is no exception. It gives me a good opportunity to show how effectively Do It Tomorrow works. After more than a year of not using the Do It Tomorrow techniques, I have badly neglected my business and my work has descended into chaos. So now I have an excellent subject for blogging:- How quickly and effectively can I move forward using DIT?

One of the great advantages of DIT is that it puts you instantly back on top of your work. This is done by “declaring a backlog”. Instead of struggling to get up-to-date with piles of email, paper and tasks, you simply sweep them all into folders and get on with the new stuff. You can then deal with the backlogs at your leisure in the knowledge that they can only get smaller.

The next thing I need to do is draw up a Will Do list. I did that last night and kept it as short as I possibly could. In fact all it consists of is this:

Current Initiative
Email
Voicemail
Paper
Task Diary
Tidy Desk
Draw Up Tomorrow’s List

As I’ve not yet spent any time thinking about projects for the future, the Task Diary list is only four items:

Buy page-a-day diary to use as Task Diary
Follow up lunch with J
Blog: Seminars
Newsletter

And finally, my Current Initiative is to clear the backlogs - the main one is paper.

Remember with DIT the aim is to do everything on the list without exception - that’s why it’s called a Will Do list.  I’ve deliberately kept the list as short as possible today to get myself off to a good start. I shouldn’t have any problem getting through it with ease.

So let’s get going: my first action is to start clearing the backlogs. I’ll start with email. Let’s see, the only email I haven’t dealt with came in yesterday - so that’s not a backlog. Paper? Yes, I’ve got several items including some bank statements to be reconciled. With a Current Initiative, I don’t have to finish everything - I just have to do some work on it.

Time now: 8.40 a.m. How long will it take me to get through everything?

Subsequent Updates

Buy Do It Tomorrow

"Do It Tomorrow" Reviews

Do It Tomorrow now has no less than twenty reviews on Amazon.co.uk - all 5 star. I’ve no idea whether this is a record, but it seems pretty darned good to me. If I came across a book on Amazon with that proportion of positive reviews, I think I’d buy it whatever the subject was!

Latest reviews:

Consistently useful by Helen

Zen and the Art of a Clear Inbox by Daniel Otterburn

The last time management book you will need to buy by Umdolofia

Mark Forster’s book can change your life by Nicholas Bell

Buy Do It Tomorrow

Tiinker: Tailormade News Stories

Today I’ve been playing with a website Tiinker which has been in Beta by invitation for some time but has just been released to the public. It aims to provide you with news articles which are tailored to your tastes. It doesn’t do this by asking you for the type of story you want, but by getting you to give its stories a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This way it learns what you like and what you don’t.

The interface is simple and easy and I found after very little use that it was already getting to know me quite well. The quality of the stories seems quite high too. So I recommend it for anyone who wants to keep up with the world in general or any subjects in particular.

A word of warning: set yourself a time limit for using this site - it can be quite addictive. (Just as well I didn’t have anything very important to do today!)

"How to Make Your Dreams Come True" Review

There’s a complimentary review of How to Make Your Dreams Come True on Jennifer George’s Lifemuncher blog.

Forster combines a comforting, down to earth, practical Englishness with a very American understanding of the value of self-interest and creativity

I’d not seen this blog before, but it’s full of useful tips and tricks for everyday productivity, written with some humour and a great deal of zest for living. Thank you, Jennifer!

To read the whole review, click here.

How to have a great 2008!

John McConnel, a stress management trainer and coach, has sent me a useful checklist for having a great 2008. You can read it and/or download it by clicking here.

He is happy for you to make what use you like of it as long as you attribute it to him.

Attention

When you give something your attention, just how much attention do you give it?

I said in my first book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play that the key to dealing with any task, problem, challenge or project is to give it the amount of focused attention that it needs. You can’t succeed if you don’t give it your attention. Or if that attention is not focussed, or if you don’t give it sufficient attention.

That is one of the reasons why it is so important to make sure that you don’t take on more things than you are able to give that sort of attention to.

When you do give something your attention, it starts to move. But it doesn’t always move in the way you expect it to. For instance a couple of years ago, I decided to make this website produce a lot of income. I expected the income to come from advertisements. But in fact what I found was that advertisements were hard work. What instead I found was that the website was an excellent way of attracting firms and organisations which wanted in-house time management training, and also for selling my own seminars.

So giving my attention to the website did indeed produce excellent results, but they weren’t quite the ones I was looking for. This is quite normal: when things begin to move new opportunities start opening up all the time. That’s a good reason why plans should never be so rigid that you can’t adapt to the new opportunities.

One note of caution though: don’t think that just because something is a good opportunity that you therefore have to take it. Taking on opportunities indiscriminately is a fine way to dilute your attention, not focus it.

Distraction or pure action

When you do an action how pure is that action? Do you just get on with it or are there all sorts of additional intentions which make the action more complicated than it needs to be?

Some examples of these additional intentions would be: wanting to show off how well you do it, wanting to do a perfect job, wanting to impress the boss, wanting to avoid an argument, wanting to get the job out of the way, wanting to make a point and so on.

If we have these sort of intentions the action becomes much less easy to do and it also becomes much more liable to distraction or emotional upset.

To give an example which may resonate particularly for men, there is a lot of difference between:

A. Driving from A to B

B. Driving from A to B showing off what a great car you have, proving you can drive faster than other people, trying to impress your passenger, trying to beat the SatNav, getting annoyed with the car in front because it’s driving too slowly, and trying to avoid the police mobile cameras.

With a set of agendas like B, it’s no wonder that your driving might be aggressive and dangerous. If you simply have A as your agenda your driving is much more likely to be courteous, efficient and safe.

To those of you who don’t relate to the car example, have a look at the agendas you have on occasions like the following:

a. you are dressing for a party.

b. you are doing the housework before a visit from your mother-in-law.

c. you are complaining about poor service from your bank

Or instead, try examining the very next action you take after reading this. See if you can identify how many intentions you have attached to that action. It’s quite a good idea to write them down.

Then decide what you are going to do next, consciously drop all intentions about it and say to yourself “I’m just going to do it”.

Goalless living?

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is “What happens if we deliberately live without any goals?”

All the books I’ve written in the past and just about every other self-help book assumes that goals are essential to success. But is this true?

We tend to think that living without goals would result in lying on a couch in front of the tv all day with a six-pack of beer (or whatever your own particular form of goofing off is!) But I suspect that this is actually the result of negative goals, rather than no goals at all. A negative goal would be something like “I don’t want to do the housework”, “I don’t want write that report”, or “I don’t want to do any work”.

The reason I have been asking that question is that I am conscious that many major positive changes in my life have come about without my having formed any definite goals about the changes. It’s been far more a case of acting on opportunity out of a deeper feeling that I am taking the right action for me. I’ve written before about how it’s sometimes only possible to see what is important to you by looking back to see where your past actions have been leading you.

So if you genuinely live without goals, positive or negative, what are you going to be doing? I think a fair amount of the time you would be doing the things which you enjoy doing, simply because you enjoy doing them.

If you enjoy doing something, you are far more likely to do it well in my experience.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading me, but I am sure it will be interesting to find out!

Google Notebook v. Diigo Update

Well, it didn’t take long to decide whether I preferred Google Notebook or Diigo. As I said when I started the comparison, the real test was which of the programs I would end up using.

There’s no doubt which program has won. I’m still using Diigo and not using Google Notes at all. In fact I’ve transferred all the bookmarks I made with Google Notes into Diigo.

What were the factors that led to this?

I found Google Notes a bit slower to use, especially when entering tags (called labels in Google Notebook). Tags are the key to both programs, so the ease by which they can be used is crucial.

Since I often use Diigo as a way of summarising long documents and keeping my place in them, I was irritated that I could only highlight one passage per entry in Google Notebook. In Diigo you can highlight as many excerpts as you want and also add your own comments as sticky notes. It is much more flexible.

I also missed the filtered drop-down bookmark list, which is a real time saver in Diigo for frequently used bookmarks.

The plus for Google Notes is that you can enter your own separate notes as bookmarks. But then do you really want to keep your personal notes on-line? I use EverNote for that purpose and there is no clash at all between it and Diigo. To my way of thinking they are different functions and there is no problem having different programs for them.

As I am not interested in the social sharing side of either program, I have not compared them at all from that point of view.

The Future of My Newsletter

Thank you to the many people who commented in the Discussion Forum or by email on the future of my newsletter. There are far too many for me to be able to thank you individually, but I do appreciate your taking the time and trouble to reply.

Without a doubt the winning option was Option B:

b. The newsletter repeats major articles which also appears on the blog. In that case it would be acting as a convenience for people who don’t for whatever reason want to read the blog, but do want some input.

So that is what I shall be doing - but I will also include links to anything else I consider might be worthwhile looking at on the blog.

Just for your information, the newsletter goes to just under 5,000 subscribers. I aim to keep it regularly weeded so that it doesn’t go above that total. By comparison the website is visited by up to 40,000 individuals a month. However, because the newsletter represents the “core” people who are interested in my work, it is by far the best vehicle for publicizing my seminars, etc. Another growing “core” is subscribers to the blog feeds, who number about 750.

And by the way, if you’re not already a subscriber to the newsletter, then you can sign up right here:

Sign up for my Email Newsletter

Email addresses will not be used for any other purpose, and every issue of the newsletter has an Unsubscribe button so it’s just as easy to Unsubscribe as to Subscribe!

Most Popular Articles

I have just updated the list of Most Popular Articles in the left margin.

In are:

Diigo - A really useful program

I’ll just get the file out

To Do lists - how we hate them

Out are:

New technology

What don’t I want?

Structuring the day

What this website contains

It’s too early to assess the results of the request I sent out yesterday about the future of my newsletter, but one fact is coming out very clearly - most people have very little idea of what is available on this website.

There are over 200 articles on every aspect of time management, personal organisation and achieving goals. The website acts as an archive for every article I’ve written which still has some currency.

How can you access this information?

If you’re looking for a specific article or subject, then use the Search Box at the top of the left margin. This is fast, accurate and completely up-to-date (if you don’t believe me then try searching for any word that appears in this posting). You can search by category if you want to narrow it down further.

However the key to the articles is the Blog Archive link in the Navigation section in the left margin. This gives all the entries by Category, by Title, by Week and by Month.

Also in the left margin you will find links to the Most Popular Articles.

Happy browsing!

Future of the Newsletter

I’m gathing people’s views at the moment about what the future of my newsletter should be. Your input would be invaluable.

Please read the alternatives and comment on my discussion forum. So that all the comments end up in the same place, I have turned Comments off on this post.

Update on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 10:04 by Mark Forster

The result of this consultation was published on January 9th.

Writing Blog Entries

Something that I have remarked on often in my books is that when one puts one’s attention on a subject it begins to change. This phenomenon is actually at the root of the “Current Initiative” idea in Do It Tomorrow, where the idea is to give a particular subject a daily burst of attention. Projects and the like resemble houseplants. Ideally they should be watered every day. If you miss a day or so, it won’t matter too much, but anything more than that and they will begin to wither and die.

So I was interested to see that the second that I decided to get writing on my blog again I got an idea which had never occurred to me before.

What I’ve done in the past is collect ideas for articles in one place. I usually keep a list of possible titles on Evernote. Then when I am ready to write an article, I select an idea and start drafting it in Notepad. (I use Notepad because, unlike Word, it doesn’t produce any formatting problems when uploaded). Once I have finished the drafting and editing, I upload the article to Squarespace.

Now the chief characteristic of this process is that there are innumerable opportunities for the articles to get lost. And that is exactly what has tended to happen.

And then I had a blinding flash of the obvious. All I had to do was every time I got an idea for an article or posting, however unformed or incoherent, was to start a new entry on the blog and leave it unpublished. That means that all the ideas are in one place, I can have a number of articles in draft at any one time, and none of them are going to get lost.

Now, as I say, this is a blinding flash of the obvious and is probably the way every blogger other than myself has worked since the beginning of recorded time - but it’s not the way I’ve been working. In fact it’s an excellent example of the way improving a system can make life much easier - a subject which I deal with at some length in Do It Tomorrow.

Once one has improved a system, the next question to ask is “How can this be applied elsewhere?” As soon as I ask the question the answer is obvious: I can use exactly the same system of unpublished drafts on ConstantContact for my newsletter.

Related article: Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way!

Update on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 10:49 by Mark Forster

The above idea is working well, but I found initially that I had so many draft postings that they were becoming difficult to keep track of. I then had another blinding flash of the even more obvious and added a “Draft” category to the category list. This means I can bring up all my draft postings together in one place.

As a visitor to the site, you won’t be able to see this category if you look in the Blog Archive because you can see only published postings. The Blog Archive does not show empty categories.

Getting Going Again

I have been conscious for a while that I have been neglecting this blog and my newsletter, and one of my New Year resolutions has been to get back into full-scale production.

The main reason I have not been writing very much over the past year has been that I have spent most of that year experimenting with some new methods of time management. Unfortunately they haven’t worked very well!

I’ve always seen myself as someone whose main calling is to experiment, rather than to find one answer which I then write about for evermore. The problem with experimenting is that by its very nature more experiments go wrong than go right. But one of life’s lessons is that it’s only by being willing to be wrong that you can discover the right answers.

Towards the end of last year I was beginning to feel that I really am making some positive progress. You will probably be able to judge by the quantity and quality of postings on this blog over the next few months whether the new ideas are actually working, or whether it will have to be back to the drawing board again.

So watch this space!

Google Notes v. Diigo

I wrote on November 22nd that Diigo was a really useful program, which I was finding worked very well. Since then I’ve been using it a lot and have found it invaluable.

Its main disadvantage is that sometimes it slows right down and becomes difficult to access - it’s only an occasional problem though.

However a couple of people commented that they found Google Notes just as good and faster to use. So I’m going to have a go at Google Notes myself to see how they compare.

One can draw up huge comparison lists between different programs, but the real test for me is which one do I end up using?

Changing back to multi-articles

As I’ve decided to remove most of the advertisements from the site, it is now easier to go back to having multiple blog entries on the page. I much prefer that layout, but it made it difficult for the Google Adwords editor to allocate relevant ads to the page.

Should you want to send a friend a link to a specific article, you can either use the “Email” link at the top of each article, or you can click the heading of the article which will have the effect of putting it on its own page with its own permanent link.

Amazon five-star reviews

There are now 18 reviews of Do It Tomorrow on amazon.co.uk and all of them are five-star.

A few extracts:

“It’s simple, profound and it works”

“helped me to find the peace of mind I have been searching for this year”

“I strongly advise reading his terrific little book - you won’t be disappointed”

“The really big thing for me was how much calmer it made me”

“I have read Mark’s first book, which I thought was excellent, but this book is absolutely superb”

To read the reviews or order the book, click here

A Great Way to Get Sacked

It was too good to last! The unbroken run of 16 five-star reviews on amazon.co.uk of my book “Do It Tomorrow” has been followed by a review that only gives it one star (the minimum).

Entitled “A Great Way to Get Sacked” the reviewer R. Lakey gives some trenchant criticisms of the book without, it appears, actually having bothered to read it - since all his (her?) points are fully covered in the book.

Amazon now allows comments on reviews, so I have pointed this out. And so can you, if you’ve read the book and can’t understand what he’s talking about. Of course if you agree with him you can say that too!

Update on Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 16:28 by Mark Forster

Amazon has now removed the review, since I had reported it as “defamatory”. They didn’t ask me why I thought it was defamatory, but I guess words like “idiotic” and “balmy” used by the reviewer probably made the case for me!

Also the book has now gained another 5-star positive review, making a straight run of 17 in total.