Fridays are tip days at SimpleProductivity blog.

Most people I know, myself included, have things we want to get done. These are not the ordinary things like “do the laundry”, but bigger things like “write a book”. Yet most of us don’t make much progress on these projects.

The Advice Out There…

I’ve read a whole bunch of advice on how to do this over the years. “Balance your roles”, “only work on the important stuff”, “delegate everything that doesn’t move you forward”,”do your work first thing in the day”. These are all pieces of advice which individually never set well with me.

After all, I can’t delegate everything, because I don’t have a June Cleaver waiting around the corner to take over my household duties. I can’t balance my roles without adding more to an already overburdened schedule. I can’t only work on my projects, because that would leave things like earning a living out in the cold. And I can’t do my work first thing in the day because that is generally when my employer would like me to be working on their projects – the ones they pay me to work on.

The Pickle Jar

A few years ago I heard about an analogy that made a lot of sense. If you have an empty pickle jar, a few large rocks, some pebbles and some sand. If you put the items in the jar in order of increasing size, you will not have enough room to get the big rocks in. The way to make it work is to put the big rocks into the jar first, then fill in the gaps with the pebbles and then the sand.

So goes our projects. If we work on the small stuff which is most plentiful, we won’t have enough time for our big rocks, or the projects that matter the most to us.

So the question becomes, how to get to the Big Rocks?

Getting To The Big Rocks

While I can’t use any method that I talked about above to fit my life, I can apply the principles together.

Identify The Rocks

First, I have to decide what the big rocks are. Unless I can recognize them, I won’t find room for them. My big rocks are taken from my lists that I made with the 2012 Creating Your Goddess Year. These are the things that would rock my world (no pun intended). Writing and publishing a book is one of my big rocks right now.

I also look at these big rocks during my weekly review. I have pages in my planner listing what I want to do and by when (if there is a firm deadline). I make sure that I include these projects on my target list, and I mark them with a star, so when the item is complete, I know to put the next thing to do on my list. In the case of writing the book, I simply have to write every day.

Plan 3 Must-Dos Every Day

My problem with most project and task systems is that there is too much going on. On the flip side, I have seen systems that say once you’ve done three things, you’re done for the day. So instead of going to one extreme of the other, I list out tasks in three categories: Must Dos, Would Like To Do, and If I Have Time.

Every night, I pick out the three Must Dos for the next day. These are usually big rock items, but sometimes a big rock falls into the Like To list. Big Rocks never get onto the If I Have Time list, because they won’t get done.

My rules is that I may not get to the Must Dos first thing in the day, but they absolutely have to be done as soon as my time permits. They take precedence over the items in the other lists, and definitely before any minutiae that repeats itself (such as laundry, cleaning, reading, television).

Evaluate Daily

As part of my nightly planning session, I also look at where I am on the projects. Am I getting done what I want to? Do I need to move in another direction? Do I have the supplies I need?

By asking myself these questions, I am less likely to procrastinate doing something for whatever reason may pop up.

I find that by following these steps I am able to make large amounts of progress on whatever I am attempting to do.

Do you have any tips about how you get your important projects done? Share below.

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This post was written by a guest author. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

If you have not reached your goals, there are different ways to view your situation. Looking at the proverbial cup half-full, you see the knowledge gained while trying to accomplish your goals. Looking at the proverbial cup half-empty, you miss out on many things you learned because your focus is on what you did not achieve.

A cup-half-empty mindset may lead to repeating your mistakes. This mindset may also damage your self-esteem and prevent you from building strong relationships. To improve yourself, start off each day with a positive outlook—a mindset that says anything is possible. You cannot fail; you can only accept before you’ve even begun that you aren’t capable of achieving anything.

To develop your positive mindset, consider these four tips for self-improvement:

1. Look at every person you meet today as a potential teacher. Try not to waste time focusing on a person’s negative attributes. Look for good qualities in a person; what you see might change your life. For instance, you might discover qualities in another person you want to emulate. Develop a plan for building those qualities in yourself.
2. Rejoice in your blessings. Feeling uncertain about the future distracts you from focusing on the concept that your life is filled with good things. Acknowledge good health, family, friends, home, and opportunities for enjoying life. Do not give too much importance to things missing from your life.
3. Look for ways to help people. Helping a person focuses your energy on something positive, meaning you don’t have time to feel negative or miserable. Each time you assist another person, you learn more about yourself. Understanding yourself as a person is a form of self-improvement.
4. Believe that you are a good person. Past choices do not determine who you will be today. Start each day determined to be who you are and take the steps necessary to accomplish your objectives for the day. Believing you will succeed is an important part of a positive mindset. As you go through the day, you learn. At night, reflect on your new learning. Go to sleep knowing you are a good person; making mistakes does not change who you are at the core of your being.

Believe that life is a continual learning process filled with blessings and opportunities. With a positive mindset, you’re prepared to tackle any challenge. Overcoming each challenge and reflecting on what you learn ensure you will become the person you want to be.

D. Offer writes. Daniel owns and manages a Facebook Windows tool called Chit Chat for Facebook.

Photo by Paul Garland

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Fridays are tip days at SimpleProductivity blog.

It’s almost that time of year again, when those of us in the US roll our clocks back an hour. I won’t even get into how pointless I think this exercise is, but the fact remains I have to do it or be hopelessly out of sync with the world around me.

The main reason I don’t care for the roll back/roll forward on the clocks is that I am miserable for a couple weeks while my body adjusts to the new schedule. So I thought I would share with you the tricks I have learned to make it less miserable.

Get Plenty of Rest

For me, the main thing the time change disrupts is my sleep patterns. If I get plenty of rest in the week preceding the time change, I find that the transition goes a bit easier. I also try to start rolling back my own bedtime a few days before so that it doesn’t come as a shock to my system.

Expect To Feel It

One of the worst wastes of energy I see around me after a time change is all the people complaining about how they feel out of it. Yes, we just mass-imposed a new scheduled on our bodies. It is going to take a while to adjust. Don’t spend your time and energy complaining about it.

Limit Sugar And Caffeine

One of the best ways to snap your body into a new routine is to make sure that you have the appropriate nutrition. Extra caffeine and sugar may make you feel better in the short term, but they will not sustain your energy.

Especially go easy on caffeine the day of the time change. The last thing you need is to have a sleep disturbance from caffeine pile on top of a sleep disturbance from the time change.

Get Some Air and Exercise

One of the quickest ways to reset your body clock is to get sunshine and fresh air. As soon as possible after the time change, get out and soak up some rays. It will go a long way in resetting your clock.

If you consistently have trouble getting up because of the lack of light, invest in an alarm clock that simulates the sunrise. I have been very happy with my Soleil Sunrise Alarm Clock.

A Word About SAD

No, I’m not talking about sad as the emotion. I’m talking about Seasonal Affective Disorder. If you suspect that you suffer from it, please investigate the issue. This can be a form of depression, or it can worsen symptoms if you are already depressed. Please talk to your doctor. Appropriate light therapy can really make a difference. Lights are no longer astronomically expensive, and some are even portable (yes, I use one, it’s the Philips goLITE BLU Light Therapy Device. And yes, it does work.)

With a little bit of preparation and effort, the time change can be easier to handle. Do you have any tips? Please share below.

Photo by Dave Stokes

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This post was written by a guest author. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Most of us have probably heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto’s principle. Pareto’s principle states that 80% of effects come from 20% of the cause. Sometimes the actual ratio fluctuates to 70/30 or 90/10 but the main idea behind the rule still holds true.

Humble Beginnings

The idea that only 20% of anything account for 80% of the overall result was first proposed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 1900s. He discovered that 80% of Italy’s landholdings were owned by 20% of the population. The principle was first adopted to explore serious social issues as probably intended by Pareto himself, but soon enough people began to realize that the 80/20 rule is visible everywhere.

Since then Pareto’s principle became a sort of mantra among individuals who want to stay on top of everything that’s going on in their lives. Our hectic modern schedules don’t leave much room for careful planning, and most of the time we’re content doing things on the fly and letting things run their course. However, the 80/20 rule invites us to take a closer look at our everyday activities and to weed out the important stuff from the not-so-important ones.

With the Pareto principle in mind, you can actually change the way you run your household, office and ultimately your life. The idea is that by changing 20% of the things that you usually do, you can improve the overall results of your work by 80%.

The 80/20 rule means that you don’t really have to exert too much effort to bring about the results that you want, but identifying that critical 20% is the challenge. If you want to simplify and declutter your life, you have to focus on that 20% to ensure that you don’t waste your time doing. The key is to find the value in everything that we own or do.
Here are some places where you can apply the Pareto principle to bring about higher satisfaction and productivity levels:

1. Closet. Your closet is home to clothes that you probably don’t use. Are you already short on storage space because of all the clothes you’ve accumulated but have never worn? Identify the clothes that you actually like and use, and then throw out the others or donate them to charity. Other people can use the things that you don’t, so why keep them? Besides, you will have a better experience choosing your outfit if everything is hung or folded neatly inside a roomy closet.
2. Worktable. Your work desk is probably the most disorganized area in your house. What are the things that you really need on that table? What are the things that are just taking up space and accumulating dust but are never actually useful? Put away the things that don’t help you with your work because you’re better off having more elbow room as you take phone calls or answer emails. Besides, these unwanted items can only distract you from the task at hand and slow you down.
3. Kitchen. Your kitchen may be filled with all the fanciest equipment and the most expensive ingredients, but probably cook with only 20% of them. Don’t waste your money and time on things that are just meant to impress guests. If you’re not a professional chef, you don’t really need all those shiny chrome gadgets and copper pans.
4. Bedroom. Some people sleep better with clutter around them, but it’s actually more sensible for to sleep in a room that’s clean and organized. You will be able to get dressed for work faster if everything is where it should be, from your socks and shoes down to your ties and cuff links. You no longer have to spend the better part of an hour looking for your lost briefcase amidst all the clutter of your room.
5. Attic. Most homeowners think that their attics are black holes that simply suck their unwanted and forgotten junk into oblivion. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Instead of putting away unused items in boxes and storing them up in your attic, you have to sort through them regularly and determine which ones should leave your home for good. Otherwise you’ll just end up having a house where all the unwanted stuff collects dust in the attic.

What are the areas you think would have the most payoff for decluttering? Share below.

When not out building relationships with other bloggers, Krisca Te can be found visiting blogs that cover topics about productivity. She is also a personal finance junkie who is currently working with Australian Credit Cards, a personal finance guide based in Sydney, Australia. You can follow ACC on Twitter if you like to stay updated on their latest contents.

Photo bySimon Zirkunow

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Tuesdays are open loop days at SimpleProductivity blog.

I love these tips on keeping things off the table. In my house, the kitchen table is the repository for all things junky. And I’m one of the offenders! I need to remove meal-related things from the table between meals and get a shredder for the entrance. From Unclutterer’s “Strategies for keeping clutter off your dining table”

Great ways to prevent a common summer problem from Stepcase Lifehack: “Easy, Clever Ways to Prevent Dehydration”

This sounds really yummy. I’ve been trying to stay away from dairy and sugar, and this fits both bills. From Everyday Simplicity’s “Great Non-Dairy, Natural Sweetener Banana Smoothie (Stevia Recipe)”

I don’t know about 20 minutes per day, but I do know that when I spend time thinking about how to do things smarter, productivity soars. From Pick the Brain’s “The DIY Guide to Rock Star Productivity |t”.

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Tuesdays are open loop days at SimpleProductivity blog.

For those who find bucket lists to daunting: “Bucket List Got You Down? Try a Thimble List” .

The title on this one says it all: “Six Ways to Stay Motivated during Hideously Boring Tasks – by Dumb Little Man”.

This list of “60 Small Ways to Improve Your Life in the Next 100 Days” from Stepcase Lifehack blew me away. I think this will be printed out and scheduled!

Leo’s been looking into my mind again… “We hold onto books we’ve already read, as trophies of our reading accomplishments. We hold onto books we might read in the future (but probably won’t), with the optimism that our future selves are going to be more amazing readers than we’ve ever been in the past.” EEK! From “Decluttering as Zen Meditation”.

If your schedule is crowded, take a look at WholeLivingDaily’s “Overcommitted? Purge Your Schedule Like a Dirty Fridge “

Photo by TANAKA Juuyoh

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Photo by Olly M Pus

Why backup?

No device is infallible. All it takes is one bounce on the floor, one battery drain, or prolonged heat exposure, and your PDA could be toast. In my case, all it took was inserting an SD card. Kaboom!

I discovered something important that day: the importance of backups.

Shortfalls of Hotsync

One thing I hear people say time and again is that they don’t need to back up because they Hotsync their data daily. This has two drawbacks:

1. If you do not have immediate access to your Hotsync computer, you will not be able to restore anything
2. Hotsync doesn’t back everything up

Yes, you read that right. Certain applications do not automatically save their data locally during a Hotsync; only those with conduits. I found this out the hard way when I restored from a Hotsync, only to lose my ReDo and LookAtMe data outright. And it took days for me to find the rest of the application data that needed to go back on.

Programs for backing up

There are many options for backing up your PDA, particularly if you have a Treo. One of the things I looked for in a package was that it had to backup to an SD card. One of the times I lost my power was at the start of a big trip, and I lost all the notes I had taken regarding places to visit. I personally use BackupBuddy (not affiliated, just a happy customer).

Restoring when you don’t have a full backup

But what if you don’t have a backup and you have to restore? Here are the steps you can take to recover most of your data from a Hotsync.

1. First, set your conduits to overwrite the PDA from the desktop. This should restore most big things, like your date book, contacts and to do lists.
2. Next, see what is missing by doing a visual inventory of your PDA.
3. Look for missing programs in your Palm/Hotsync name directories. Some ones to check are Archive, Backup, and any directories placed there by applications. Missing files will have a .PDB or .PRC extension.
4. Install these found files by double-clicking on them, which should pop them into your Hotsync install manager.
5. Hotsync again.

This should restore most everything; but remember that not everything will restore. Good luck!

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