Old Productivity Articles

How to ensure you achieve your goals

I decided to launch my new blog to coincide with the latest group writing project over at ProBlogger.net.

You can read my article, entitled “How to ensure you achieve your goals” at my new blog “PhilNewton.net”.

Related posts:

• Keeping a progress log
• Keeping a progress log, part II
• New Year’s Resolutions
• A New Look, And a New Direction
• Progress Log Feedback

Printable CEO Scoring

Jana recently asked an interesting question relating to my progress log system – specifically about my modified version of the Printable CEO:

“My question: do you use your modified PCEO just for work-related activities or also for non-work goals (i.e., the activites to ensure ‘balance’)?”

The short answer is “It’s mostly business”, and to be honest I never really thought about adding many non-work activities to it. The “b-Alert” tracker takes care of making sure I’m balancing my day, and the PCEO gives me a way of measuring how productive I’ve been. So far it’s helped overcome the problem of doing lots of small (and important) tasks and feeling like I’ve wasted a day, because I can look at the scores and see that I achieved a lot. I like that.

This question came at a good time, as I’ve recently modified some of the activities on my score card to reflect a slight adjustment in focus. I’ll compare old and new, and walk through a few of the decisions I made when creating my score card.

Old vs New

How I created the original score card

When I first started using the PCEO, I was a little unsure of what activities to use, so a lot of the points are similar to Dave’s original system. Looking over them, you can see they’re divided into four major sections:

• “Visible” work – The high scoring activities are all visible work. “Concrete Project Work” can cover anything on a project, from documentation to coding some fancy particles.
• Things of value – The next scoring band concentrated on things that are of value to other people, such as sharing source code or writing an article for the blog. It also covered business/personal development work, such as writing goals or creating something that helps with business work.
• “Smaller” business tasks – “Concrete business work” covered most business tasks, such as tweaking the website, doing accounts or anything else not covered higher up the chain.
• Contribution – I do volunteer work for the Scout Association, and I felt planning activities for that deserved rewarding on the PCEO chart. “Misc. Contribution” covers helping other people on forums or newsgroups.

The new and improved version

There aren’t any radical changes, but I think the small tweaks I made will have a positive effect. I was quite happy with the original scoring, but I felt it had a few weaknesses which I’ve tried to address:

• Promoting volunteer work – I removed the somewhat redundant “Project Proposal”, and promoted volunteer work into its place, because I felt that I was neglecting this area a little.
• “Strengthening/Creating relationships” – Going back to Dave’s version, I liked the section on relationships. It’s all too easy to overlook the important relationships in our lives, whether they’re business or personal. Again, that’s a weakness in my original system that I wanted to address.
• Other tweaks – I changed the focus on a few items slightly. “Site promotion” went to “business promotion”, and “publishable code” went to “publishable resource”. This gave it a broader scope, and means there is a reward for sharing any resource of use, such as a template.

That’s all folks!

So that’s my PCEO scoring system in all its glory. If you’re just getting started with the Printable CEO, it can be difficult to work out a way of scoring your activities, but hopefully seeing my version will inspire you to create something cool.

Related posts:

• The Printable CEO
• Quick update
• The Best of the Sodaware Blog
• A New Look, And a New Direction
• Keeping a progress log

30 Days of Positive Affirmations – Conclusion

So, my thirty day trial of affirmations is now over. How did things go?

What was it all about?

My “experiment” was to use positive affirmations on a daily basis, to see if they made a difference in my life. The initial idea was to repeat my affirmations once in the morning when I woke up, and then again at night just before I went to bed. I started with six affirmations, most of which were inspired by content on bmindful.com.

What went wrong?

The first week went well, but I noticed something of a slow down in week two. I tweaked my affirmations to make them shorter and easier to remember, and I also increased my exposure to them by carrying them around on a small card in my wallet. I found the article “Creating Effective Affirmations” at bmindful particularly useful when rewriting my affirmations.

What went right?

As I touched on in But I Can’t!, sometimes I will mentally talk myself out of a situation through a negative self voice. I’ve found that using daily positive affirmations has stopped me from using this negative voice, and I’ve often found myself overriding my negativity with my new affirmations.

It’s refreshing to be in a situation that would normally cause anxiety, and to hear your “inner voice” repeating positive affirmations instead of negative ones, and needless to say it makes a difference to mood and productivity.

I found that shorter affirmations worked best, so I modified my original six accordingly. I also found that more focussed affirmations worked better, so I kept each affirmation focussed on a single subject. The increased exposure was also quite effective, especially as some affirmations tend to stick better than others.

Was it worth doing?

Undoubtedly, yes. I’m sticking with these affirmations for the foreseeable future. Whilst they haven’t completely transformed my life, they’ve made a noticeable improvement. As with everything I do, I’ll continue tweaking my system to get the best results.

If you’re thinking of using positive affirmations in your life, I can highly recommend “bmindful.com“. It has a selection of well written articles about affirmations, and also has a list of affirmations that you can add to your own custom list.

If you like this article, you’ll like my other site, philnewton.net. It’s dedicated to productivity, time management and other personal development tips.

Related posts:

• 30 Days of Positive Affirmations
• Affirmations – Week One
• Affirmations – Week Two
• But I can’t!
• A New Look, And a New Direction

New Year’s Resolutions

For me, New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection, as well as a time to look to the future. I don’t set New Year’s Resolutions in the “normal” sense, such as “Get Rich” or “Get in Shape”, because to me they’re not useful as goals. I do set large goals for the entire year, and as with my 90 day goals (described in Keeping a Progress Log, part II), I divide them into 7 categories.

What went right in 2005?

The main highlight of 2005 was gaining my BSc in Software Engineering. I also started this blog, and learnt some interesting and useful personal development strategies. Despite there being little to show, I feel this has been a good year for me.

What do I want to do in 2006?

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve not updated this blog for a while, so in 2006 I want to develop a regular posting schedule. I’ve already got some topics I want to cover, as well as a few more experiments I want to run. I also want to release the rest of this website, and start my own business.

Goodbye 2005!

Related posts:

• I am it, apparently
• Protean goes free
• My First Steps with Linux
• About Phil
• Five utilities that make my life easier

Affirmations – Week Two

I’ve finished my second week of using daily positive affirmations, which wasn’t as eventful as the first week. Here’s a look at my observations so far:

What’s working?

I still get a positive boost when reading them in the morning, and they’re still helping me through sticky situations.

I’m still surprised by just how effective they can be at times, and I often find myself repeating my affirmations if I’m feeling low. They don’t completely remove the negativity, but they certainly make a difference.

What’s not working?

Although I look at my affirmations twice a day, they’re still not as ingrained as I’d like them to be. There are still times when they don’t seem to work, and I think this problem could be solved by exposing myself to my affirmations more often.

Some affirmations are working much better than others, and I’ve found that short, simple and focussed ones work much better for me.

What’s going to change?

I’ve got six affirmations, which I’m going to tweak slightly. A few are a little too verbose, and some overlap a little in their intent. I’m also going to increase the regularity at which I read them, and make a small card to carry around with me.

So far this experience has been quite eye-opening. I always suspected affirmations would have a positive effect, but I never got around to trying them out. The results I’m getting so far are certainly encouraging, and I’m hoping these tweaks will improve my performance.

If you like this article, you’ll like my other site, philnewton.net. It’s dedicated to productivity, time management and other personal development tips.

Related posts:

• 30 Days of Positive Affirmations – Conclusion
• Affirmations – Week One
• 30 Days of Positive Affirmations
• But I can’t!
• A New Look, And a New Direction