But then along comes Derek Sivers with a great TED Talk, citing a bunch of research which proves that “telling someone your goals makes them less likely to happen.”

Here’s the talk, just three minutes in length…

Can’t see the video? Click here.

I can’t knock what Derek is saying. I’ll give that research the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s all true, that most people are indeed better off keeping their goals to themselves.

But here’s the thing: I’m not most people. I’m not the average or the mean or the majority. I’ve tested for me, as an individual with my own unique set of ever-changing beliefs, values, motivations and circumstances. And as that person, announcing my goals to the world has proven to be a pretty good idea.

But that’s just me. You have to test for you. What works for one person or even a group of people at one time and in one place may not work for you here and now. Or maybe it will. But you can’t ever know for sure until you test for yourself.

A few other examples to illustrate this point:

• Back in January there was a great debate on Think Traffic about whether it’s a good idea to allow comments on your blog. Pat Flynn argued absolutely, while Ev Bogue argued definitely not. I have a hard time believing either guy is wrong. Their opposing approaches each work great for them.
• David Damron recently debated Leo Babauta about the importance of goals. David is a big believer in setting goals, whereas Leo has found that his life works great without them. I think they’re both right: David’s way works for David, and Leo’s way works for Leo.
• Steve Pavlina gets up early. Tim Ferriss gets up late. Which is the better approach? Depends on the person. Some folks are at their best while the sun rises, others not so much.

How to test for you

The only way to find out what works for you is via trial and error. No getting around it. You have to jump in, get your hands dirty, throw a whole bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Keep what works and discard the rest.

You can’t stand there waiting to take action until a sure thing comes along, because there is no sure thing. There’s just what works for some people, and there’s what works for you. The former you can spend all day reading about on the Internet. The latter you can only discover through experimentation.

Question: What works for you that doesn’t work for most people?

…

UPDATE: Just came across this excellent TED Talk from Tim Harford, where he talks about the value of trial and error, and the curse of what he calls the God Complex.

On December 21st I decided to start a little sleep experiment. I had read the Perfecting Sleep chapter in The 4-Hour Body and was curious to try the whole polyphasic thing. So I gave it go. Instead of sleeping for 8 continuous hours each night, I cut back to 6 hours and took a 20-minute nap each afternoon.

All was going well until Monday night, when I caved and slept for ten solid hours. In total, the experiment lasted 20 days.

About polyphasic sleep

(Skip this part if you’re already familiar with the concept.)

Most people get all their sleep in one big chunk at night. This is called monophasic sleep. With polyphasic sleep, you sleep multiple times per day. Why? So you can spend more time awake. Studies show that you need less sleep overall when you take a few naps during the day. Here are a several different levels of polyphasic sleep, as per The 4-Hour Body:

• The Siesta — 6.3 total hours — One 20-minute nap, 6 hours core sleep
• The Everyman 2-Nap — 5.2 total hours — Two 20-minute naps, 4.5 hours core sleep
• The Everyman 3-Nap — 4 total hours — Three 20-minute naps, 3 hours core sleep
• The Everyman 4-Nap — 2.8 total hours — Four 20-minute naps, 1.5 hours core sleep
• The Uberman — 2 total hours — Six 20-minute naps

The further you go down the list, the more strict your sleep schedule needs to be. For the Uberman, you need to be taking a 20-minute nap every 4 hours or you feel exhausted and it all falls apart.

Does it work?

I tried only the Siesta version of polyphasic sleep, and it seemed to be working well up until last weekend. I sometimes found it a struggle to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d become quite tired in the afternoons before my nap, but overall I felt energetic and productive despite sleeping 1.5 hours less per day.

I believe I cracked in the end because I was too strict with my sleep schedule. Last Sunday I went for a long workout with some friends, which involved a bunch of aerobic exercises, lots of weights and an introduction to powerlifting. In hindsight, I should have allowed myself more sleep that night, rather than sticking to an exact six hours. When you use up a lot of energy in a day, it makes sense that your body will require more sleep that night.

So on Monday I felt exhausted and decided to break my strict adherence to the schedule. Ten continuous hours of sleep got me feeling right again.

Going forward, I plan to continue my experiments with polyphasic sleep. People like Steve Pavlina and Matt Mullenweg have reported happy times while using the Uberman schedule for five months or more, so there’s no question that it can work.

I love early mornings but I also like staying out late occasionally, so I’m going to try figure out a more flexible version of the Siesta. I’ll aim for 6 hours per night and a 20-minute nap in the afternoon, but I’ll allow for some extra core sleep every now and then, as needed.

Getting to sleep faster

The main benefit I’ve gotten from my three-week experiment is the ability to fall asleep faster. I would often lay in bed at night with my mind racing and toss and turn for hours before falling asleep. Not so much these days. I can’t recall one time in the past few weeks when it’s taken more than 20 minutes to get to sleep. Just yesterday afternoon I set a countdown timer for 30 minutes (10 to nod off, 20 for sleep), and was woken up by a phone call halfway through. I spoke for a minute, then fell right back asleep again.

Testing assumptions

One of my main purposes with this blog is to get people questioning norms and testing assumptions. Who says you need to have a job to make money? Why do we eat highly-processed food-like substances that bear no resemblance to real food? Do you really need to watch the news? Would you be happier with less stuff instead of more?

Sleep is no exception. For a long time, I thought I needed eight hours of shut-eye each night to be at my best. But having learned about polyphasic sleep and running my own little experiment, I’m no longer so sure that that’s the case.

How much sleep do you need?

Are you sure?

…

BTW: On Monday I’ll reveal my biggest secret here on the blog. It’s something I’ve only ever told two people. My mother would rather I didn’t write about it, but I’m going to anyway. Subscribe by RSS or e-mail to make sure you don’t miss it.

Madness ensued, as Travis and I dropped to all fours and unleashed our best dog-chasing-cat act. I barked and growled and pursued. Travis hissed and scampered and threatened me with fake claws. We did this for a minute or two, in a room of 30 people.

And then it was my turn to be master.

CGW4

Last month I attended Steve Pavlina’s fourth Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas. All in all, it was one of the best weekends I ever had, as I got to meet a bunch of exceptional people and learn lots about myself.

The scene described above happened during the first day of the workshop. Steve had the attendees divide into groups of three, and each person took a turn being the master while the other two acted as servants. As servants, we were allowed to refuse an order if it made us feel uncomfortable.

The goal of the exercise was to discover which role we were more comfortable in. Some people had no problem taking orders and preferred not to be in charge, while other folks reveled in their role as master, really enjoying the feelings of power and control.

We actually did the exercise twice, taking about 15 minutes each time. During the first round, the masters mostly instructed their servants to do silly things, like have a dance-off, poke other people in the room or pretend snow ball fight. Afterwards, Steve sat everybody down for a few minutes and had us reflect. We were asked to recognize where our hesitations were, and consider how we could be better masters and servants when called upon.

Then we started into the second round.

What I learned

The master/servant exercise was one of the highlights of the workshop for me. I learned a lot from it. Three primary lessons:

1. Go your own way

For my first turn as master, I fell in with the crowd and got my servants to do silly, trivial things. It was only during the break that I asked myself what I really wanted them to do. This is something I — and I believe most people — often struggle with. It’s easy to just do what everyone else is doing and not question it. It takes a lot of courage and consciousness to decide your own course of action — the course of action that feels most true to you — and follow it.

2. Push people

During the first round, I realized that I was only giving my servants tasks that I knew they would do, tasks they wouldn’t object to. I didn’t try to push them out of their comfort zone. This comes down to an irrational fear I have of rejection, and a weird double standard I have in my head. See, I love it when others push me, but for some reason I hesitate to push others and expect much less from them than I do from myself. Having realized this, I was more assertive and pushed my servants a bit more during the second round, and I know we all got a lot more from the session because of that.

3. Ask to be pushed

When considering how i could be a better servant, I realized that I just patiently awaited an instruction during the first round of the exercise, and then carried it out. The tasks didn’t really push me out of my comfort zone. What if I asked my master to give me some harder tasks, tasks that would stretch me? In the second round, when Travis was master, I asked him to push me. So he did, asking me to take my shirt off in that room of 30 people, then go around asking everyone else to join me in shirtless rebellion. That was definitely out of my comfort zone, so I did it, and it wasn’t such a big deal. I found what Steve Pavlina had told us to be true: “Beyond fear, there’s lots and lots of fun.”

Are you more comfortable being the master or being a servant?

Ideally, you should be comfortable in both roles. There will always be times when you’ll be called upon to lead, and there will always be times when you’ll be called upon to follow. Becoming aware of your strengths and weaknesses in those roles now will help you perform better in the future.

Why prioritize your life?

Most people do prioritize, but they only prioritize things like their work schedule or their vacation plans. Unfortunately, very few people ever sit down and prioritize their lives. That’s a damn shame.

When you prioritize your life, you essentially ask yourself, “What’s really important to me?” In answering that question, it becomes clear where you should be devoting your time and focus.

Since I’ve started using the method described below, I feel I get much more done in less time. Of course, that’s mostly an illusion. What’s really happened is that I’ve cut out the unimportant tasks from my schedule, allowing me to devote more time to meaningful pursuits. It’s not that I’m spending way more time each week working towards my goals; It’s just that I now have a lot more clarity about what my primary goals are, and I’ve eliminated the tasks which weren’t helping me reach them.

Without prioritizing, I sincerely doubt I would have been able to finish in the top 200 of the CCC 10k race last April, build a website for my Dad’s business in less than a month or comfortably write two posts a week for this blog. Prioritizing has made all those things — and many more — possible for me.

How to set priorities

I sit down and do this exercise once every 2-4 months. The first step is to identify the different areas of your life. I’ve stuck with the twelve areas that Pavlina recommends in his podcast, but you can use more or less if you like. Here are the twelve:

1. Work
2. Financial
3. Relationship Intimate Relationship
4. Home & Family
5. Physical Health
6. Mental
7. Social
8. Emotional
9. Spiritual
10. Character
11. Contribution
12. Fun & Adventure

Once you’ve identified those distinct areas of your life, you next need to go through and write a paragraph for each of them. You’re trying to answer the question, “How do I feel about this area of my life right now?” Try to be as brutally honest as you can. Spend no more than five minutes writing about each area (experiment with free writing so you don’t over-think it).

If you’re not sure what to write, here are some notes to help you:

1. Work

Write about your primary job and any side jobs you might have. Is the work fulfilling to you? Would you rather be doing different work? How do you feel about the people you work with? Does your job afford you opportunities to grow? How could your work situation be better?

2. Financial

Income, savings, investments, assets. Where do you stand with those things? Are you satisfied with your current level of income? Are you saving a significant chunk of it each week, or are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you in debt? If so, are you working your way out of it? What about retirement? Do you have a plan for that?

3. Primary Intimate Relationship

Do you have a primary intimate relationship? If not, is that by choice? If you do have a partner, how is the relationship? Are you both getting what you want from it, or are you both just on cruise control, passing the time until something better comes along?

4. Home & Family

Write about your living conditions. This includes the physical place that you live (house, apartment, tent, whatever), and the people that you live with. Is the arrangement working for you? Does it help you achieve your goals, or is it holding you back? Would a drastic change make your life better or worse?

5. Physical Health

This includes diet, exercise, sleep, and your overall energy levels. Are you in the shape you want to be in? Do you get enough physical exercise? Do you get regular deep, restful sleep? Do you depend on things like caffeine or other drugs to function? What ailments do you have?

6. Mental

Write about your knowledge, education, talents and skills. Are you happy with the levels you’re currently at? Have you learned anything new and beneficial in the past three months, or are you stuck right where you were? What do you want to learn?

7. Social

How are your friendships? Are you happy with the people you surround yourself with? Do they help you reach your goals, or do they hold you back? What do you do for them? Have you taken advantage of any networking opportunities recently? What clubs/organizations are you a part of?

8. Emotional

How do you generally feel about your life? Are you positive and optimistic, or negative and pessimistic? Do you control your emotions or do they control you? What sets you off emotionally? How do you feel when you visualize your own funeral?

9. Spiritual

Write about your religious beliefs, philosophy of life, sense of purpose and place in the universe. How do you feel about those things? Do you believe there’s a point to you being here, doing what you do?

10. Character

Where do you stand with character traits like integrity, honesty, courage, compassion, honor, self-discipline? Which of those do you need to improve? Do you consider yourself to be a person with good morals, a person of high-character?

11. Contribution

Is the world a better place for you being here? What value are you contributing? Are you making a positive difference? Do you leave people and situations better off than you found them? Do you give as much as you receive?

12. Fun & Adventure

Are you enjoying your life, experiencing what you want to experience? Are you always playing it safe, or do you take a risk every now and then, putting yourself out there and testing the boundaries? Are you having fun as you work to accomplish your goals?

The next step, after you’ve written a paragraph for each area, is to go back through them and give each one a score out of 10. So if you’re currently about 20lbs overweight, eating a crappy diet and rarely exercising, you might give yourself 4/10 for Physical Health. Again, be brutally honest with yourself here. Don’t pretend everything is rosy and give yourself an 8 or 9 just to avoid a blow to your ego. If you really want to improve, you need to accept your current reality.

As an example, here’s what I wrote for Contribution when I did this prioritizing exercise in April of last year:

How do I feel about my contributions to the world?

My contributions leave a lot to be desired. I do the sponsor a child thing, but that’s a detached contribution. I do desire more direct involvement, but I sometimes believe I should to be smart about it, use what unique skills I have to ensure maximum impact. Just thinking about it now though, that is likely to lead to nothing but procrastination, at least for the foreseeable future. This summer I’ll commit to doing something like Habitat every three weeks. Just get out there and get my feet wet. Must schedule that soon.

Rating: 2/10.

Once you’re done writing and rating, the next step is to look back over everything. It should be obvious from your answers and your ratings what areas of your life you need to be focusing on going forward. Take the three areas you scored worst in and prioritize them. These are the three areas you will be devoting most of your time and energy to in the coming months.

Next, you need to figure out specific action steps that will help you experience what you want in those three areas. So, if your first priority is to improve your social life, you could commit to taking the following action steps:

• Join some local meetup groups
• Organize nights out with your friends or co-workers
• Befriend people who are more social than you

If spiritual growth is your second priority, your action steps might be similar to these:

• Read a book like The Road Less Traveled
• Visit different faith-related community gatherings
• Take time each week to converse with yourself about spiritual matters

Take action

The last part of all this is to actually go out and do those action steps. Set yourself some deadlines to create a sense of urgency, and surround yourself with people who have similar goals and/or will cheer you on as you progress. If you need a little extra help achieving your goals, check out this post.

A friend recently asked me for advice on time-management, she having noticed that I seem to get quite a lot done in a typical week without killing myself. In this post I’ll share a few time-management tips and tricks that work for me. Many of these come from trying and testing different methods I’ve come across, most notably in books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 4-Hour Work Week; others are common sense approaches which most people fail to use consistently.

Before we get into it, I should note that the term “time-management” is a bit of a misnomer. You can’t manage time. It keeps on ticking no matter what you do. It’s a non-renewable resource which can be used either constructively or destructively. All you can hope to do is manage yourself to make the best use of your time. That is, you can decide to spend it productively on the things that are most important to you. You can invest your time wisely instead of letting it go to waste.

On to the tips…

1. Prioritize

Prioritization is of the utmost importance. You need to figure out all your goals and give yourself some targets. If you have no targets, you’ll have nothing to aim at, and so you’ll surely miss.

I like to sit down at least once a quarter and figure out my priorities and goals. I use Steve Pavlina’s method for doing this, as described in his Truth and Awareness podcast. Basically, you write down how you feel about several different areas of your life and score each out of ten according to your level of satisfaction. This gives you a good idea of what your focus should be going forward. (For example, if you score 2/10 for physical health, you know that this is an area where you should be focusing a lot of your time and energy for the next few months.) From this exercise, I usually end up with about five things I want to focus on going forward, and I’ll rank them in order of importance so I’ll know which should take precedence during a conflict.

I can’t emphasize the importance of prioritizing enough. Once you’re clear on what your top goals are, you’ll be able to plan your time better to ensure you achieve them. Think effectiveness rather than efficiency. Busy people are often very efficient, but not always very effective. Doing something efficiently doesn’t make it important. Prioritizing helps you make effective use of your time.

2. Eliminate

Having figured out your priorities, you should now be in a better position to eliminate as much fluff as possible, keeping only the important items on your task list. The Pareto principle states that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes, meaning that a lot of the things we do have very little impact; the majority of our investments produce poor returns. We need to weed those out.

Since I’ve started prioritizing and setting goals, I’ve found that I’m much more self-assured and able to make good decisions quickly. I just have to ask myself if the action/inaction I’m considering will move me closer to one of my primary goals. If the answer is no, I drop it and move on to something else. If the answer is yes, I plunge ahead with confidence.

For this reason, I never play video games anymore and I spend very little time watching television or following the news. Those activities don’t move me closer to my goals at all, so I mostly consider them a waste of my time.

What are the things that you spend a lot of time on? Could that time be better invested?

3. Say No more often

Perhaps even better than elimination is prevention. We can free up more time for important tasks by saying No to unimportant tasks. I’ve gotten much better at this over the years, and it’s amazing how much free time it has opened up for me. Sure, there’s often some sacrifice (and occasionally some backlash or hurt feelings) involved, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run. An example for me would be helping friends and neighbors with their computers. Because I’m “a computer guy,” I often get asked to troubleshoot various problems, but fixing computers is something I’m not very good at, nor do I get much enjoyment from it. So I started saying No, and now I have more time to spend on other, more meaningful and enjoyable activities.

If you sometimes feel guilty for saying No, realize that your time is your time and nobody else’s. You get to spend it however you like, and it’s okay to be selfish every now and then.

4. Let bad things happen

This is good advice from Tim Ferriss. To achieve your goals, you occasionally need to let bad things happen. For me, that means ignoring help requests for the Coda-Slider gizmo I built. I could reply to all the posts in the forum and to all the e-mails I receive about Coda-Slider, but that would take time away from other things I’d rather be doing.

The skill here is the ability to tell which stuff you can let slide without suffering serious consequences later on.

5. Automate

Automate whatever you can then forget about it. A simple example for me would be my finances. I used to have to write a rent check every month, but then discovered that my bank can send out a check to my landlord automatically. I also have automatic savings transfers and bill payments. It didn’t take much to set all that up online, and the result is a nice chunk of extra time (and peace of mind) each month. Here’s a good post to get you started on automating your finances like I did.

What else can you automate? Can you subscribe to a magazine instead of going to the store to pick up a copy every week? Could you use Amazon’s Subscribe and Save service to have frequently used grocery items delivered to your door? What online tools can you use to speed up your browsing activities?

6. Use lists (to-do and not-to-do)

To-do lists are a no-brainer for productivity, but so many people fail to use them regularly. I use three lists at work to help me keep on track and stay productive:

One big job list. Every job I get goes on there, and I check them off once complete. I review this regularly to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

A daily to-do list. This I prepare every day right before I leave the office, quickly writing out at least a half-dozen tasks that I want to complete the next day. This eliminates procrastination and indecision in the morning because I know right away what project to launch into.

A daily not-to-do list. Like the to-do list, I prepare this quickly every evening. It usually contains items like “don’t check e-mail until 10:30 at the earliest” and “no Facebook except at lunch time.” Essentially it’s a list of mini self-discipline challenges for the day, and it helps me cut out distractions and stay focused.

7. Set Reminders

Ever forget to do some small thing, and suddenly it’s a month later and that small thing has become a huge problem that needs your undivided time and attention? Or you’re just left kicking yourself because you missed out on a great opportunity?

That rarely happens to me, simply because I set reminders. See, I don’t trust my memory very much, and so I’ll set up regular reminders and be safe in the knowledge that I’ll be alerted long in advance of any possible emergency. I use Memo To Me and sometimes Google Calendar for my reminders. Just last week I got an e-mail from my past self reminding me to pay my vehicle registration, and yesterday I was reminded that it was about time I changed my extended-wear contact lenses.

I’ve gotten pretty good at remembering birthday’s, too

8. Set deadlines

Remember Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Back in college, we’d be given two weeks to write an essay, and the vast majority of the class would end up rushing to the printer on the final afternoon, having just pulled an all-nighter to get the damn thing finished. Of course the two-week time frame had little to do with that panic. It would have been the same story with a one week or a one month deadline. We humans just have a tendency to put things off as long as they’re not deemed urgent. And then, when they do become urgent, we magically find a way to get them done.

So, if you want to be more productive, give yourself deadlines on tasks and goals. Giving yourself a deadline forces you to prioritize and hustle. Last summer, I’d been slacking for months on getting this and my dot biz website coded and launched. Then, on September 1, I decided that I’d have the two sites completed before the calendar flipped to October. Lo and behold, what I’d been putting off for so long got done. The deadline made all the difference.

It’s important not to set easy deadlines, too. You’re looking to create a sense of urgency, to set yourself a challenge that excites you. That will get you focused. If I’m slacking at work, I’ll sometimes halve my deadlines to ensure I don’t sit around wasting time all day.

A good question to ask yourself: How would I handle this task if it had to be done in 15 minutes?

9. Be proactive

Laziness is a snowball rolling down a hill. If you sit down and watch TV for half an hour, you’re not likely to want to go and do something productive afterwards. But fortunately, productivity works the same way. Getting things done begets getting things done. Hence the saying, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”

Now that’s not to say you should always be busy. Obviously there’s a lot to be said about taking time to relax and recharge (see the next point). But don’t cheat your future self. Make the most of idle moments to tidy your desk, do the dishes, send that e-mail, etc. Use those idle moments to invest in your future, even if it’s something as simple as doing your groceries during Thursday lunch so you can sleep in an extra hour on Saturday.

10. Energize

If you have more energy, you can get more done. Now how do we get energy? Mostly we get it from food, rest and exercise.

Food. Fuel for your body. Put good fuel in, get good performance out. Try to eat foods that don’t require too much digestive energy. That is, mostly plants. Cut back on heavily processed foods, and drinks like alcohol, coffee and soda. Try not to eat late at night. Pay attention to how your energy levels rise/fall after consuming different types of food. There’s no one diet out there that’s perfect for everyone, so you’ll need to experiment to find out what works best for you.

Rest. Not just sleep, but also things like meditation, vacations and deep breathing fit in here. Basically, anything that allows your mind to relax and your body to recharge. Allowing yourself ample time to rest and recuperate is crucial if you want to be able to perform consistently at a high level. There’s a fine line to walk here though; be careful not to slip into lazy territory.

Exercise. It’s easier to win the race when you’re in great shape. You only have one body so treat it well, take it out for a run every now and then, play a sport, dance, have fun. You don’t have to become an athlete, but keep your body active. It’s a sound investment. You can also use exercise as a way to socialize, relieve stress and practice goal setting/achievement.

11. Batching

Do you put a small amount of fuel in your car each morning, or fill it up once every few days? Which makes more sense? Which saves more time? Apply that logic to more areas of your life.

Here are a few examples of how I use batching to save time:

E-mail filters. One of my Gmail filters is for Facebook alerts. Anything that comes in from Facebook skips the inbox and sits in a folder waiting for me. That way I don’t get distracted by Facebook messages when I log in to check my e-mail. At lunch I’ll take a minute to go through all those alerts and be done with them. I use Gmail filtering excessively for this type of thing.

Movies and TV. I don’t watch much TV as it is, but when I do, it’s rarely in real-time. I’ll record basketball games and TV shows and watch them later, allowing me to fast-forward through all the ad breaks. That way, an hour-long TV show can be watched in less than 40 minutes. For movies, I save time by using Netflix (no need to go to the store).

Lunch. I’ve been making my own lunches and bringing them to work for a couple of years now, but just recently I started batching them. That is, I make all my lunches for the week in one batch at the weekend. So instead of getting out all the ingredients and utensils five times a week, I now do it just once.

Mail. I don’t check my mailbox everyday. More like twice a week, and I try deal with everything right there and then.

12. Measure, then manage

What gets measured gets managed. Try to boil things down to cold, hard facts. Think you might be spending too much time on trivial tasks? If you recorded your time vigilantly for a week, you’d know for sure.

If you work with computers, RescueTime is a good tool for tracking your productivity (the Solo Lite version is free). Away from the screen, you may have to resort to the old pen and paper approach. Be careful not to go overboard though. Remember that the long-term goal here is to free up more time to do fun stuff, and the payoff shouldn’t be obsessively counting seconds and stressing out for 30 hours a week.

Measuring before managing isn’t just applicable to time either; you can use it to get ahead in many other ways. For example, a few weeks ago I calculated all my financial expenses and figured out how much cash I can afford to play with each week. I now know exactly where I stand with my money, and can make decisions accordingly.

What measurements can you take to help you manage your time/finances/health/whatever more effectively?

13. Ride the wave

Go with the flow when you can. Doing something when you feel like it is much more effective than forcing yourself when you’re really not in the mood. As such, recognize when you’ve got a good flow going and ride it for as long as possible. This often applies to me when I’m writing. Sometimes the words and ideas flow out easily and other times it can be a gigantic struggle to write a single paragraph. When I feel that flow, I’ll do my best to milk it, moving things around on my schedule to accommodate if necessary.

This isn’t to say that you should just admit defeat and give up if you’re not in the zone. As Liz Gilbert talked about in her TED speech, you have to show up for work every day regardless.

14. One thing at a time

Don’t have the TV on while you’re trying to study. Don’t talk on the phone while reading a book. Don’t have one on eye on your inbox while writing an article (I’m always suspicious of people who e-mail me back in a hurry).

Multitasking has been proven to be ineffective. Some people might get more done by simultaneously juggling several tasks, but the quality of their work suffers at the expense of quantity.

Focus hard on one thing at a time. Block off a chunk of time, give that one thing all your attention and see how fast you can rip through it. Once it’s done, check it off your list and move on to the next thing.

I didn’t think that was such a good idea. In my view, having an attitude like that hurts only you.

To illustrate my point, let’s take Steve Pavlina, one of those three people who inspire me. Steve believes in and sometimes writes about psychic phenomena and the paranormal. For example, about eighteen months ago he wrote about the spirit of a dead friend helping him win at blackjack. My reaction to that article was probably similar to the reaction of most people: “Man, this guy’s crazy.” However, I wasn’t about to let that one disagreement stop me from reading and appreciating other articles on Steve’s site. Instead, I just filed it away in the “Things I don’t necessarily agree with” part of my brain, and continued on. Good thing, too, because I’ve since received many valuable insights from other articles Steve has written.

It takes effort

Writing people completely off because you disagree with something they say is nothing short of laziness. When you do that, you’re effectively saying, “I couldn’t be bothered getting to know this person completely, so I’ll just make a sweeping judgment about them based on the few things I do know.” Granted, nobody has the time or the capacity to truly know everyone they come into contact with, but we can be conscious of those snap judgments we make about others and how we may deprive ourselves of important lessons because of them.

Nobody’s perfect

It’s important to realize that nobody is perfect. If you’re holding out for an infallible mentor to show you the light, you’re in for a long wait. Consider these brief descriptions of two famous historical figures:

1. The first man was a charismatic leader and a decorated war hero. He preferred a vegetarian diet, never smoked, rarely drank alcohol and was faithful to his wife.
2. The second man died without a penny to his name. He regularly defied laws and was imprisoned many times. He often appeared indifferent towards his family and had an especially strained relationship with his son.

The first man is Adolf Hitler. The second is Mahatma Gandhi. Obviously the above descriptions are extremely selective, but they go to show that even the best of people have their flaws while the worst have their redeeming qualities. I like to believe we can learn valuable lessons from both these men — even, in the case of Hitler, if those lessons are mostly of the “what not to do” variety — and from everybody who falls between them in the spectrum of good and evil.

The Bible

Not so long ago, if you had quoted a bible verse at me, I would have considered you a brainwashed lunatic who could never teach me anything worth knowing. Then I came to this realization that everybody and everything has at least some truth. Gradually I came to see that the bible was no different. Sure, it calls homosexuality an abomination (Leviticus 20:13) and encourages you to burn witches (Exodus 22:18), but it also contains great lessons about love, truth and self-discipline.

As A.J. Jacobs concluded in The Year of Living Biblically, it’s impossible and often immoral to follow every word of the bible, but the book can indeed enhance your life if you focus on the right parts and live by the lessons contained in them. You just have to persevere through many inconsistencies and a bunch of stuff you’ll probably disagree with. You must use that mind you’ve been blessed with to separate the wheat from the chaff and arrive at your own truth.

Against the grain

If you tend to focus on the negative rather than the positive, don’t worry, you’re not alone. As humans, we’re predisposed to give more attention to the bad things in life. It’s a survival instinct. Scientists have proven that something we perceive as bad will have a stronger and more lasting affect on our brains than something we perceive as good (see author David Rock talk about it from the 20-minute mark of this YouTube video). That’s why you can thoroughly enjoy the first ninety minutes of a movie, only to have the whole experience ruined by an implausible ending. Somehow those last few minutes negate the previous ninety and you come away disappointed.

Again, it takes effort to focus on the good rather than the bad, but that effort is worth undertaking, because there’s no growth if you choose the lazy way out. With laziness you limit yourself to seeing problems instead of opportunities.

Learning from everyone

You don’t have to agree with everything someone says or does to learn from them. In fact, I’d argue that you learn the least from the people you agree with the most. Think about it: how much can someone really teach you if you’re already nodding your head in agreement before they finish a sentence?

Deepak Chopra

“If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.”

As Wikipedia puts it, “Deepak Chopra is an endocrinologist, lecturer, celebrity and author of books on spirituality and mind-body medicine.” His self-described life purpose is to reach critical mass for healing, personal and social transformation, and enlightenment.

Chopra appeals to me because he blends science and spirituality effectively; his teachings makes sense from both perspectives. I’ve read two of his books: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and Life After Death. I still read summarized chapters of the former weekly, while the latter completely changed my beliefs about the afterlife.

It was my cousin who turned me on to Chopra about eighteen months ago when he sent the following video and subsequently blew my mind:

Chopra links:

• Follow him on Twitter
• Youtube: Lecture on The Mystery of Consciousness (1h 15m)
• Take the vow of nonviolence in your speech, thoughts and actions (not to be taken lightly)

Tim Ferriss

“Fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn’t do; more often than not it shows you exactly what you should do.”

Tim Ferriss does a lot of things well. His talent lies in deconstructing all kinds of skills and mastering them in no time. Among other things, he speaks six languages, holds a world record in tango, and in 1999 won the Chinese national kickboxing championship after just a month of training.

Fortunately for us, he’s keen to share tips and ideas, and does so via his blog and his book, The 4-Hour Work Week. I first read the book a little over a year ago, and learned a lot about developing an entrepreneurial attitude, efficiency vs. effectiveness and the Pareto principle.

In this TED talk, Ferriss talks about quickly mastering swimming, languages and tango:

Ferris links:

• Follow him on Twitter
• The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen
• The Karmic Capitalist: Should I Wait Until I’m Rich to Give Back?

Steve Pavlina

“Life’s problems do not exist to beat you down. They exist to help you grow.”

Steve Pavlina runs a blog called Personal Development for Smart People and last I heard he was the highest-earning personal development blogger in the world, pulling in in excess of $100k per month. He doesn’t do things by halves when it comes to personal development, preferring to immerse himself in experiments such as polyphasic sleep and a 100 percent raw food diet.

Through reading Steve’s blog, I’ve been inspired to make many positive changes in my life, such as moving to a plant-based diet and working to improve my public speaking skills. He’s also made me reconsider much of what I believed to be true about the world and introduced me to a whole bunch of different concepts that have proved beneficial.

In short, he’s helped me become a better person.

Pavlina links:

• Follow him on Twitter
• 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
• Podcast: Truth and Awareness (20 minutes)