HDDlife Pro: Giveaway of the Day

I particularly recommend today's Giveaway of the Day (see bottom of the sidebar). HDDLife Pro monitors the condition of your hard disk and warns you if there is any problem. You should get ample warning if your hard-disk is in danger of failing.

It couldn't be simpler to install. All you need to do is download it and run it once - and that's it. You will have continuous monitoring from then on.

Even if you miss the free giveaway expiry - it's still well worth buying. If you read this later than today, you can still click on the link and the program will be available to buy at the manufacturer's normal price of $29.

Remember these giveaways are not Shareware, and do not expire after 30 days or any other period. They are full programs which are free as long as you download and activate them on the day they are offered.

The Resistance Principle

Those of you who have read my book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play will know that in the last chapters I mentioned an “advanced” method of time management that I called the Resistance Principle. I even gave an example of how the principle worked out over several actual days in my life, written in real time as I was finishing the book.

I also warned in the book that it was difficult to keep to the Resistance Principle and that, when one wasn’t feeling totally on top of it, it would be necessary to revert to more formal methods of time management. And so it proved: I was never able to keep the Resistance Principle up for an extended period of time. And although I kept coming back to it, I never quite got it to work. I am not aware of anyone else who has done so either, though quite a few people have told me it has been extemely useful in specific circumstances.

I have always remained convinced though that the Resistance Principle is worth further exploration. So now I have decided to give it another go. This time I am going to try to spell out a bit more precisely the theory behind it.

My original idea was that if one always went first for the things in one’s life that one was resisting hardest, then resistance as a whole would diminish and one would end up on top of everything. I found that worked well in specific situations, but if carried on too long my mind fought back and resistance actually increased.

I then developed a rather different concept of how the Resistance Principle might work. My idea was that at any one particular moment of time, there is one right action we humans can take which is perfectly fitted to our individual circumstances and will take us perfectly in the right direction. What’s more, we know in our heart of hearts what that one right action is. I’m not talking high-falutin’ stuff here, like “save the world”. The One Right Action might be something as simple as “get out of bed”, “make a cup of tea”, or “write a blog entry”. As soon as we have done that One Right Action, there will be another One Right Action for us to do.

Now my theory is that, if there is One Right Action that we should be doing at any given moment, in that given moment we are either doing it or we are resisting it.

We can therefore easily identify what the One Right Action is by simply asking ourselves:

What am I resisting?

If I do that, the answer is going to be either “nothing” or whatever the One Right Action is. If the answer is “nothing” then I am doing the One Right Action. If the answer is “Write a Blog Entry on the Resistance Principle”, then all I have to do is carry it out. If I ask the question again while I am writing it, the answer will be “nothing” (unless something else has come up in the meantime).

So there should be two results of asking the question:

1. I learn what the best action would be for me at this precise moment in my precise circumstances
2. I learn what it feels like to be doing the right thing

So I am starting to ask the question continually in my daily life again. The difference this time is that I am going to put my emphasis more on result 2. than on result 1. Let’s see how it pans out.

I want to make it very clear that I am trying this out, not that I am recommending it. I intend to describe how it works in my daily life. It may work or it may not - I’ll keep you informed either way!

What isn't working?

The next question in my series on powerful questions to ask yourself is "What isn't working?"

This is a great question to ask yourself when you don't feel that things are going quite as well as they could. It's also a great question to ask when you are reviewing your priorities with a view to cutting them down.

Negative signals are just as important as positive ones. Indeed often they are more important - because we are much more likely to ignore them than positive ones. When things are going well, we have a natural tendency to ride the crest of the wave. But when something starts to perform less well than expected (especially if it used to be successful), we often prefer to ignore the signs or rationalise them away. It's really important to keep our projects under review. Knowing when to stop something is as important as knowing when to start something.

When we continue to work on a project long after the time that we should have abandoned it, we are only ensuring that our energies are dispersed, and ensure that we are not going to focus enough on what really could be working.

Like most of the questions in this series, this question can be asked in many different ways:

• What isn't working (any longer)?
• What isn’t working (at all)?
• What isn’t working (as well as it could)?
• What isn’t working (and never will)?
• What isn’t working (when such and such happens?)
• What isn’t working (and what could make it work)?

Exercise: Have a look around your office or your workplace and ask yourself each of the above questions. Maybe it's your filing system that isn't working. Maybe it's the way you deal with your email. Maybe it's the way you tidy your desk (or fail to) at the end of the day. Is this something you could put right? If can't put it right, what needs doing instead?

This article is taken from the latest issue of my newsletter

Democracy in Action... and how!

Something seems to have struck a nerve... the petition against road charging has now got (as of 1.42 pm) 303,800 signatures.  That means it's currently rising at over 50,000 signatures a day. In fact during the time it took me to write that last sentence it gained another 159 signatures!

New Look

I have been worried for a while that the website is looking rather cluttered, so I decided to take advantage of a new template from Squarespace. I think the new look is much cleaner and easier to follow, but would appreciate your reactions in the Comments.

The great advantage of using a template is that it only takes about four mouse clicks to change it back again!

Diet Report

Since the British unit of dieting is the stone (14 lbs), it is important to celebrate the significant markers on the way. So today, since I have been on the diet for 7 weeks, I have officially lost half a stone (7 lbs). In fact I was a pound under target this morning, so I have actually lost 8 lbs. This means that I can remove one of the two rules currently in force. So today all my diet consists of is that I am not allowed second helpings. Easy peasy!

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Democracy in Action

If you are a citizen or a resident of the United Kingdom you may be unaware of the 10 Downing Street petition site. This is an official inititiative of the Prime Minister by which ordinary citizens (i.e. you and me) can petition him about any subject.

Downing Street is working in partnership with the non-partisan charitable project mySociety to provide a service to allow citizens, charities and campaign groups to set up petitions that are hosted on the Downing Street website, enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.

The most three most popular open petitions at the moment are:

Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.   248,161 signatures (as at 1.57 pm today). This reached 200,000 votes at 4.30 pm yesterday.

Repeal the Hunting Act 2004. 18,490 signatures

Scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards. 10,217 signatures

If you support a petition you can sign it very quickly. If you are against a petition, you can start a counter petition.

Having started this site with a fanfare of trumpets, the Government will have a problem if it is seen simply to ignore very popular petitions. So sign up to your favourite petition today!

P.S. Apparently they gave some thought to allowing people to vote against a petition, but rejected the idea. However it does open up a vision of subjecting proposed Government legislation to a Digg or Reddit type vote.

Want to solve problems while you sleep?

An interesting post on lifehack.com today by Tony D. Clark about how he solves problems in his sleep by drinking half a glass of water before he goes to sleep and the other half before he gets up. He claims it is a great way of providing eureka moments.

I discovered a trick about 12 years ago that has served me well - and I’ve recommended it many times, to clients, friends, and family. I can’t remember where I first learned about it, but it’s one of my favorite techniques for using the power of sleep to work out problems. And all you need are a pen, paper, and a glass of water.

I think I'll try it out. Though not tonight, as I've got to be up early tomorrow morning because I giving a seminar in the City. Has anyone else tried a similar method?

Read my Blog - without your boss knowing!

You can now read my blog at work without anyone being able to identify what you are reading. You will see the following icon now appears in the left side-bar. If you click on it, it will give you a text-only version of my website.

Please note the Boss Key which will remove all the text if your boss gets too close (you don't have to click on it - just move the cursor over it).

And when you've finished reading my blog, you can go on to surf the rest of the web in the same way!

Time management in the 1840s

As those of you who read this blog regularly will know, I am reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre at the moment through DailyLit.com. I was fascinated to come across the following passage:

Eliza still spoke little: she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what she did: or rather, to discover any result of her diligence. She had an alarm to call her up early. I know not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after that meal she divided her time into regular portions, and each hour had its allotted task. Three times a day she studied a little book, which I found, on inspection, was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said, "the Rubric." Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth, almost large enough for a carpet. In answer to my inquiries after the use of this article, she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church lately erected near Gateshead. Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of her accounts. She seemed to want no company; no conversation. I believe she was happy in her way: this routine sufficed for her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity.

How many lessons about time management can you draw from this passage? Answers in the Comments please!

Decision Making

Having recently written an article on this blog about making decisions by instinct rather than conscious thought, I was interested to see in today's papers that recent research has shown much the same thing. 

The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision — even when it is correct – leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage.

Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions.

Finished for the Day!

I am totally amazed at the effectiveness of the 90-20-90-20 sequence which I described earlier today (see Focus and Rest). I've just finished my entire Will Do list for the day. Time now 2.40 p.m.

I'm off - enjoy your work, suckers!

Cite Bite

Cite Bite is a great little application which allows you to reference any text on any website.

If you click on this link  it will take you to a highlighted paragraph on the lifehack website (the same one I quoted in my last post). All I had to do to generate the URL was to highlight the text and press the Cite Bite button on my browser.

Full details here (and the highlighting is mine!) http://citebite.com/y6k0s2p3yuqu

Forget How You Feel

There is an excellent post today by Adrian Savage on lifehack.org entitled “To be motivated and successful, first forget how you feel.”

You can’t make yourself feel happy or sad, nor can you send away whatever feelings do have, however hard you try. So waiting to do something until you feel “in the mood,” or basing your choice of actions on how you feel at the time, is to hand over control of your life to the varying state of your stomach, the effect of the weather, or the dizzying gyrations of your love life. Forget about your emotions. They’re no sensible basis for living well or pursuing a successful career.

Read the rest of the article.

Focus and rest

Recently I’ve been having trouble maintaining as much focus as I’d like on my work during the day, with the result that getting through my Will Do list has taken me far longer than it should. Today I am trying out a new method (for me) of alternating focussed periods of work and periods in which I let my mind freewheel and do whatever I feel like without any particular focus. The idea is that the unfocussed periods will make it easier to maintain focus when I’m supposed to be focussing.

The rhythm I am doing is 90 minutes focus, followed by 20 unfocussed. I started quite early today, a bit before 8am, and am getting close to the first 20 minutes of rest. So far I’ve noticed a definite improvement in how well I have been able to maintain my focus on my Will Do list.

Of course I have been recommending definite work periods followed by definite rest periods for years. The difference here is that the 90-20-90-20 sequence is not tied into any exact time. I can start the sequence when I am ready to and the idea is that I maintain it throughout the day, until I have finished my Will Do list. I’ll be interested to see if that is earlier or later than usual.

This technique is mainly suitable for home workers such as myself who can control their own work time. For others who are constrained by the demands of an office (or children!), it would probably be difficult to implement.

I’m interested to see how it goes though, because research has shown that 90 minutes work followed by 20 minutes rest is the optimal balance between work and rest.

Learning Italian

As I will be in Italy in a few months time, I though it would be a good idea to brush up my nearly non-existent spoken Italian. Although I've never studied Italian formally, it's very similar to other languages which I have studied (Latin, French and Spanish) and I've had a lot of exposure to it one way or another over the years. So I'm in the strange position of being able to read and understand it fairly well (well, ok, not that well) but being almost completely unable to speak it.

Since it's spoken Italian that I want to learn for my visit to Italy, I decided to go for the Pimsleur Italian course. I've always heard good reports of the Pimsleur courses but have been put off firstly by the expense, secondly by the fact that I've never in the past found that I can remember language unless I can see it written down. Pimsleur is very much based on hearing and speaking the language, initially without seeing it written at all. My experience with other auditory based courses such as Rosetta Stone and Michel Thomas is that my retention was very poor and they didn't go nearly far enough into the language to be useful in practice.

I've got enough time  (and probably just about enough money too) to get through the entire Pimsleur course (all three sections) before I leave for Italy. So this will be an excellent chance to see if the Pimsleur course lives up to its hype. Will I be able to waltz effortlessly through Italy, charming waiters and contessas alike with my perfect Italian, or will I as usual collapse back into English after my initial "Buon giorno"?

My initial impressions of the first few lessons is that they are very well produced and thought out, the audio is high quality (I'm using the downloaded version), and that after four lessons I feel confident in the material that has been covered so far. That's a lot more than I've been able to say about many of the other language courses I've tried. But there's a long way to go, and the proof of the pudding will come when I try to put it all into practice in Italy.

Old Articles

I have uploaded the following articles from my newsletter archive:

Countdown

Practise!

Write It Down!

How Hard Has My Diet Been?

I've been doing my diet for just over a month; so I thought now would be a good time to have a look at how severe it's been.

During the 32 full days in which it has been in force:

• On 14 days I have had no rules in place at all; so I have been able to eat exactly what I like, when I like, in what quantities I like. This included Christmas Day!
• On 18 days I haven't been allowed second helpings.
• On 13 days I also haven't been allowed to eat more than 3 meals a day.
• On 6 days I also haven't been allowed to eat anything sweet.
• On 3 days I've also had to eat small portions
• On 1 day I also had to skip a meal.

Total weight loss during a period which included the Christmas festivities: 4.5 lbs, right on schedule!

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Fitness: The Easiest Way?

Yesterday I wrote about how I would like to develop a fitness programme which would be as easy as possible and involve no great efforts of willpower. One in fact that would fit nicely with my Do It Tomorrow time management system and my (so far) extremely easy and effective diet method (must think of a name for it!). After all if you can come to this website and learn how to control your time effectively and easily, to control your weight effectively and easily and to control your fitness effectively and easily - more effectively and easily than anywhere else in fact - wouldn't that be something?

Anyway, I've been thinking about how I might develop this fitness programme, and for each of the three areas of fitness which I mentioned yesterday (aerobic capacity, strength, flexibility) a word has come into my mind:

• Aerobic capacity: dancing
• Strength: isometrics
• Flexibility: stretching

So can I combine dancing, isometrics and stretching into one system? Hmm... I think so!

More soon.

New Ideas?

Having developed a diet which seems to be really working for me, what's next? My aim is always to develop things (or recommend things) which make the basic framework of life as easy as possible.

Many people find their lives are limited because the business of being alive in the modern world is so time consuming in itself. How does one find the time to do one's work, to keep fit, to stay at a healthy weight, to keep abreast with knowledge, to pay attention to one's family and friends, to manage our computers and our web presence, and so on? The list seems never-ending.

Part of the answer is to find ways of doing these things which work as simply as possible, while taking up the minimum time. The time management system I describe in my book Do It Tomorrow is reasonably simple and works well. The diet I have developed is working great for me, and takes the absolute minimum of time and fuss.

So what's next?

I would really like to develop a way of keeping fit that takes as little effort as possible, and has a high "stickability" factor - something which does not involve gym subscriptions, equipment, boring repetitions, leotards, forcing oneself out into the cold and wet, huge amounts of time, record keeping, instruction books or any of the other paraphanalia of most exercise programmes, even the simplest. I want something which is natural and enjoyable, takes little time, can be done anywhere in any dress, is progressive and deals with all the main areas of fitness, such as aerobic fitness, strength and flexibility.

That sounds like an impossible dream. Can it be done?

I think so.

I'm working on something at the moment which I think will fill all of the above. Once I've satisfied myself that it is at least a starter, I will write it up and give regular reports on my own progress.