Editor’s Rating: 7.1

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

Mark McGuiness begins his free e-book, Time Management for Creative People with a stereotypical "day-in-the-life" depiction of a designer trying to work on a creative project but facing disorganization in all of its facets: distracting emails, interrupting phone calls and important files lost on a messy desk. One might argue that this is a stereotype — that most creatives can handle a bit of basic organization, but there is a grain of truth in there somewhere. There are plenty of creative professionals who could do with some organization.

The real value in McGuiness’ e-book is what he doesn’t suggest. He makes no effort to impose some sort of order on the actual creative process; there is no effort to turn every creative into Thomas Kinkade. Instead, McGuiness focuses on managing the little details that often intrude on a professional’s time, but that cannot be ignored.

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This morning I woke up in silence, smiling in the wake of a great dream I can’t remember. I woke up mid-stretch. My eyes opened and I immediately got out of bed. There was no hitting the snooze button, there was no grogginess, there was no loathing my morning routine. There was also no being ripped from slumber, mid sleep-cycle, against the better judgment of my body. There was just peaceful morning silence.

A week ago I ditched my alarm clock and after a week of alarm clock-less nights, I don’t think I’ll be looking back, at least for a very long time.

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Editor’s Rating: 8.7

Editor’s Note: This review is a fifth entry in a series of e-book reviews.  The review is by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

One page into Alexis Dawes’ e-book, “Desperate Buyers Only,” I was fully prepared to hate my reading experience. I noticed a typo, and for someone who has worked as a proofreader, a typo in final copy can be the kiss of death.

I was more than pleasantly surprised as I made my way through “Desperate Buyers Only,” however. I can tell you know that I’ll be rereading it multiple times — the sheer quantity of information Dawes has collected has made her e-book the go-to resource when thinking about selling a report.

Dawes goes far beyond simple advice on how to prepare such a report: she guides her readers through every step of the project from brainstorming a topic to affiliate marketing and targeting keyword ads. She’s written to a level of depth that I can’t help comparing to John Chow’s blogging but his depth comes from years of blogging on the topic of how to make money online, while Dawes does it in less than 100 pages. Dawes manages this by drawing on her own, highly successful experiences — she has reports that have been selling for years but still bring her in a daily income of at least $200.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Good goals are living breathing statements of who we are becoming, they should not be static and rigid representations of what we once longed for. Still, many of us have had the experience of writing down goals, only to feel alienated from them weeks later, as if they were a historical document from the past.

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"If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting."
-Benjamin Franklin

Today in Madison, Wisconsin, it was -35 °F degrees; needless to say, the heating bills for this ol’ home-on-an-isthmus have been excruciating.  Here are eight killer tips from J.V. Endres: they’ve helped him reduce his annual heating bills from $1,000 to $500 in a 35-year-old house! Check ‘em out.

1. Do not heat any unnecessary rooms. Close and seal heat registers and air returns. Be sure to whether-strip doors to these less-heated areas.

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Whether it’s someone smacking their gum or an acquaintance who won’t stop calling, everyone has to deal with frustrating distractions getting in the way of their goals.

Tennis player John McEnroe was a master at leveraging his frustrations (usually directed towards chair umpires) to motivate him to battle through difficult matches, helping him win 17 grand slam titles.

McEnroe went too far, but he teaches us that frustrations can be harnessed to increase performance. The trick is to know when and how frustrations should be leveraged.

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Among the normal array of equipment in David Allen’s office, one item stands out. It is an hourglass with two minutes of sand. Any clock would serve equally well to mark the strict interval GTD gives us to process something the first time we handle it, but Allen’s hourglass is as much a talisman as a practical tool. In a medieval painting, it would symbolize death. Here, the hourglass is a symbol of virtue. It regulates our attention. It guards our self-esteem. The guru of Getting Things Done is living by the standards of the future, and his hourglass is an icon of an emerging civilization whose exacting demands we may all someday be expected to meet.

-Gary Wolf

Like an 800 calorie bag of potato chips unwittingly polished off during CSI, we often scarf down large quantities of time when we are unaware. Psychologists have demonstrated that the brain has a terrible sense of time when it is paying attention to something else, and as a result, we are most likely to mismanage and misuse time when we are the busiest.

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