7 Self-Development & Productivity Catalysts at the Bleeding Edge

“Everything has [already] been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.”
-Raoul Vaneigem

In 2005, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman injected a bestselling hit, The World is Flat, into the national psyche. The book’s 5th “flatting” factor is outsourcing. Friedman argues that the practice enables companies to componentize manufacturing and service efforts, thus making each component more efficient and cost effective.

In August of 2005, author A.J. Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically) read Friedman’s book and thought to himself, “why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun?” “Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century?” “Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?” He then goes on to write a notable piece of cultural history for Esquire called My Outsourced Life (notable because it later catches on in a big way). In My Outsourced Life, Jacobs outsources everything from worrying and spousal relations, to email and work related research. It’s an entertaining read and one that I recommend.

Jacobs’s piece was re-published as a section of Tim Ferriss’ Bestselling book, The Four-Hour Work Week. But Ferriss doesn’t stop with Jacobs’ anecdotes, he takes it one stop further by showing readers how to effectively hire a personal assistant for $5 to $15 per hour from places like Croatia, India, Angentina, and the United States.  Ferriss’ outsourcing advice has been the most highlighted aspect of his somewhat controversial book.  And with personal outsourcing being implemented by everyone from soccer moms to busy professionals, companies offering virtual assistance seem to be springing up everywhere.

Getting a remote personal assistant is a huge departure point and marks the moment that you learn how to give orders and be commander instead of the commanded. It is small-scale training wheels for the most critical of [Four-Hour Work Week Skills]: remote management and communication. It’s time to learn to be the boss. It isn’t time-consuming. It’s low-cost and it’s low risk.

-Tim Ferriss

While I don’t fully endorse Ferriss’ commander vs. commanded perspective, I have experienced the benefits of personal outsourcing.  The practice doesn’t just free up more time, it strengthens your entrepreneurial muscle, hones the skill of delegation, and allows you to focus on your strengths.  After just a week of outsourcing, I developed a heightened sensitivity to tasks not requiring my involvement, and subsequently learned to write rule based (if-then) procedures around such delegable tasks.  Whether you’re a college student, a busy professional, or a retiree, YOU can learn to do this.

Personal Note: My virtual assistant is a brilliant college student from California who I found on Elance. She’s dam smart and has excellent research and writing skills, and she charges less than many firms in India (let me know if you are interested in a reference).

Related resources:

• Tips for Working With a Virtual Assistant
• Elance (I suggest poking around the site for advice on working with virtual assistants)
• Workaholics4Hire
• Get Friday
• GlobeTask

In case you were wondering, "Having Thing Done" (Personal Outsourcing) was #1.  On to the next one . . .

2: Supermemo

Dr. Piotr A. Wozniak’s Supermemo system is quite remarkable. Using spaced repetition to ossify knowledge into memory, this system has garnered stellar reviews and raised more than a few eyebrows. Dr. Wozniak will be featured in an upcoming issue of Wired, but In the meantime, check out the Supermemo website, and the Supermemo library (it’s a treasure-trove which merits a full review in itself).

Related resources:

• My Experience Using Supermemo
• Pros and Cons of Supermemo
• Antimoon.com’s Review of SuperMemo
• The Supermemo Website
• Introduction to Supermemo

3: Increasing Productivity by Decreasing Time

Here’s one of way measuring productivity:

P = W/t

Productivity (P) is work accomplished (W) divided by time (t). We’ve traditionally tried to increase productivity by amping up work output (e.g. Getting Things Done by David Allen).  But there’s another means to skyrocketing productivity: leaving work right where it is and decreasing “t” or time (see here). This focus on increasing productivity by decreasing time is, I believe, what differentiates Productivity 2.0 from it predecessor.  And, ironically, mechanisms used to decrease time — like automation and personal outsourcing — often increase work while simultaneously decreasing time.

Related resources

• The E-Myth Revisited
• The Four-Hour Work Week
• The Blog of Author Timothy Ferriss
• Bit Literacy

4: Thoughts Become Things

By now, many of us have heard of the Law of Attraction.  Some think it’s a bunch of nonsense. Personally, my B.S. detector starts flashing anytime someone invokes quantum mechanics to claim a new metaphysical law. Regardless of the scientific basis for the Law of Attraction,however, it’s an insanely useful principal. The basic tenant is that you get what you think about; thus, if you live in fear then those fears will manifest as reality, and if you dwell on abundance and believe good things are coming, then good things will come.

I like Josh Clanton’s take on it:

The law of attraction, if construed as an actual law, is ridiculous. If, however, it is construed as a psychological game which motivates people to take action and/or see the opportunities which have been around them all along, it is useful.

The old saying, “When the student is ready the master appears,” shouldn’t be understood to mean that the universe magically flings teachers at students who are ready, but rather that being ready as a student gives you the ability to recognize someone worth learning from.

Related resources:

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
• The Secret
• Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction: A Simple Guide to Creating the Life of Your Dreams
• Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t

5: Visual Goal Setting: Vision Boards & Goal Movies

Visual goal setting is basically Steven Covey’s “beginning with the end in mind” on steroids.  I wrote about visual goal setting in a previous post, but the essential idea is that images can be used and manipulated to help your subconscious believe you can attain things previously thought impossible.  Getting your subconscious to buy into a goal radically empowers you to materialize the goal in real life.

Photoshopping a goal is a frequently used technique that involves manipulating digital images to visually represent your goals as if they already existed. An example would be taking a PDF version of your bank statement and adding a couple of zeros to the balance. A low tech (i.e. non-photoshop) implementation might involving having a picture taken of you in your dream car (even if it doesn’t belong to you), and then meditating on the resulting picture while holding thoughts of ownership.

I’ve seen visual goal setting take on two major forms: (1) goal movies, and (2) vision boards.

This video by by Malcolm Cohan does a great job of explaining goal movies (thanks Caron!) . . .

And here’s a good example of an actual goal move. . .

Vision Boards

Creating a vision board or dreamboard involves taking a surface a placing on it pictures of the life you envision, the happiness you seek, the body you desire, etc. It’s important to place the vision board in a place where you’ll regularly view it.  Dream board advocates encourage us to intentionally feel the feelings of possessing the vision board items, as if they already existed, and to feel gratitude for them. As goals are manifested, you can remove the associated items and add new ones.

Vision board items are by no means limited to material possessions.  Please see my previous post for more details.

Free Resources (hat tip to Caron)

< li>Photoshopping Your Dreams: Visual Goal Setting, Goal Movies, & Vision Boards
• Irfanview (for creating slide shows)
• Photostory 3 (also for creating slide shows)
• The GNU Image Manipulation Program (for "photoshopping" your goals)

6: Un-digitizing

People are consciously taking their lives back from the digital sphere with tools like whiteboards, sand timers, the hipster PDA (or the tongue-in-cheek hipster PDF), and traditional planers. The paper revolution will not be digitized (hat tip to Gilles Scott Heron).

By giving physical form to virtual things, they become more real, more salient. And with everything from calendars to bank statements on the computer, one way of purposefully enlarging the psychological presence of essentials is un-digitization. In the golden years of productivity software, I’d put a task in Outlook if I really wanted it done. Now the most important tasks are written down.

Resources

• Your local office supply store

7: Radical Lifestyle Reconfiguration

For the last 100 years or so, non-rural life has been much the same: get up around 6:00am, work from 9-5, come back home. Freedom was had during weekends, week-long vacations, and retirement.  Things are really starting to change, however, and books like The Practical Dreamers Handbook, The Anti 9-5 Guide, and The Four-Hour Work Week striking a chord in many. The time has come for radical lifestyle reconfiguration and intentional lifestyle design, and entire families are doing things like working from RVs, taking mini retirements, freelancing from exotic locales and living on much less than U.S. costs.

Technology has come a long way, and I’m glad that our lifestyles are starting to catch up.

Resources

• Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
• My Tropical Escape
• Anywired
• The Four-Hour Work Week

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
-Harry S. Truman

I’ve surely left something important off this list. Whadda I miss?

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Technorati Tags: A.J. Jacobs, cutting edge of productivity, Four-Hour Work Week, goal movies, Law of Attraction, lifestyle design, mind movies, My Outsourced Life, personal outsourcing, Piotr Wozniak, Productivity, productivity 2.0, self-development, Supermemo, The Anti 9-5 Guide, The Practical Dreamers Handbook, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman, Thoughts Become Things, Tim Ferriss, Un-digitizing, virtual assistant, vision boards, VISION Statement, visual goal setting