Jarkko Laine » Productivity

There is No Substitute for Hard Work

Jarkko — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:36:01 +0000

As I started writing this post, I had just sent out my first ever exclusive newsletter article to my subscribers (read more about why you too might want to subscribe). It was 7:39 AM and I had been up since five. Today, my alarm failed me and I woke up only at six, fired up my computer and got to changing my world. My kids will wake up soon, and I’m a bit anxious to have the post out of the door before they wake up.

With two small children I don’t have too much time to work on my projects, so I keep coming back to the thought of working smart instead of hard. It would be nice to just work an hour or two when I feel like it and then forget all about it. But that’s not how it goes. Smart work is great, but it’s no substitute for hard work.

So, if you are procrastinating on your next big idea, here’s the deal: stop looking for the smartest ways to do it, and just get back to work. If you don’t have a plan for how to work smart, work just as hard as you can and figure out the smart as you go.

How I Work

During July (my summer vacation from my day job), I have been testing my ideal work routine, which I plan to continue when I stay home with my kids starting January 2011. It consists of nowhere close to as many hours of work as that of some of the most hardworking bloggers and internet entrepreneurs I know, yet it is as hard work as it can get for me.

I work every morning, except Sundays when I sleep in. I wake up between five and six AM depending on how late I stayed up the night before — aiming to start closer to five than six, with varying success.
I jump right in. I try to plan my work for the next day in advance before I get to bed so I have a clear plan for where to start. When I forget to do this, I can easily lose half an hour in the morning for surfing the web and looking for inspiration.
Focus. Knowing that I only have the three or so hours in the morning available for my work, I am forced to focus on the things I think matter most. When Oiva wakes up, I turn off the computer and stop my work right there. If I haven’t completed the most important task by then, the task gets postponed to tomorrow.

So, my hard work is about three hours every day. That’s not hard work, you say. And, sure, it’s not optimal yet: if I got to bed a bit earlier, I could probably wake up about an hour or so earlier and squeeze in one more hour.

But that’s not the point.

Work Hard With the Hours You Got

This is where smart work comes to play.

Most office workers spend eight or more hours at the office every day. You probably do too, just like I do, when it’s not July. And out of those eight hours, how many are actually hard work? Four? Maybe five?

When working these three hours, the risk is the same. If I don’t pay close attention to what I do, three can easily turn into one, or even less. That has happened. But when you do pay attention, you don’t need full working days to get a lot of things done. A couple of hours can be plenty.

Blog posts and e-books don’t write themselves. The world isn’t changed in five minutes (although many five minute iterations will ultimately do the trick).

So work hard with the hours you have available. It’s the only thing you can do.

Side Business, Smart Business

Face It, Not Checking Your E-mail All The Time is Hard

Jarkko — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:35:59 +0000

Checking your email only one or two times a day is a topic that pops up in productivity blogs every now and then. I first got curious with the idea through writing from Tim Ferriss. Lately, many minimalist bloggers have brought up the topic again.

The promise is persuasive: by checking your e-mail less often, you free yourself to be more productive and enjoy your life more.

But here’s something that does not get mentioned often: it is hard to stay away from your inbox.

Even, if like me, you are not getting that much email during your day.

So don’t get fooled into thinking that if you manage to do this for a week or two, you’re done and freed from your old habit. I thought so, and then with no warning, found myself going back to my old ways.

Don’t Fight the Symptoms, Attack the Cause

The problem we are facing is that when we talk about email, we assume that there is something better for you to do that will magically replace the time you used to spend in your email inbox. For some people that may be the case, and for them, I believe the idea works perfectly as is. If you are one of these people, start following the tips and become an e-mail ninja.

But if that was the case with everyone, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

If you can’t keep yourself from spending time with e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and all the other quick ways to feel like you are doing something without doing anything, it is probably a symptom for one of these two very real problems: either you are unmotivated or you don’t know how to unplug from your computer. For me, it’s a mix of both.

Once you know what is making you go back to your inbox after only minutes since leaving, you can start fighting the cause rather than its symptoms, and I promise you this will lead to much better results. I won’t claim that I have mastered e-mail, but here’s what I do, and how it’s helping me:

Find something better to do: Say no to good ideas and only do things that make you go “hell yeah“, and you won’t even remember that there is an e-mail inbox you could check. You will get into a state of flow where the task itself absorbs you, and you don’t need any other productivity gimmicks to get things done (it also works as a great way of dieting, by the way). It happened to me for example when writing this blog post. But to be honest, I don’t quite get there when I work on my WordPress plugin, Donation Can (which is probably also why it’s taking so long between updates).
Work at a time that suits your body: If you try to work through your unproductive moments, you are bound to fall into busywork, and e-mail is the number one option for filler activity. It’s fine to do that if you haven’t yet taken care of your email for the day, but after that, it’s better to just disconnect: Turn off the computer, and don’t spend your precious hours just trying to get things done. You will be surprised how this makes your overall productivity skyrocket. An example of this was when, this morning, at first I didn’t feel like writing. I knew that if I insisted on it, I would spend the morning on Facebook. So, I decided to read for 15 minutes instead. That 15 minutes turned into 20, but then, suddenly, I had the inspiration and started typing these words on my computer. What started as a normal, unproductive morning, soon turned into one of the most productive ones I’ve had recently.
Don’t multitask: When working, find a quiet place or time where you can focus. If you know that you can be interrupted at any time, the safe bet your brain takes is to just default to checking e-mail. This makes perfect sense, as it is an activity that doesn’t require too much focus and doesn’t suffer from being interrupted. When working, work. When communicating, communicate. When playing, play. Don’t mix these things with each other.

This is not easy stuff. But when you get it right, it works, and you don’t need to fill your days with recurring visits to your e-mail inbox, and chances are you will even create something meaningful while at it.

So, let’s stop fighting the symptoms and go for the real causes of our collective e-mail addiction! Once we’re done with these steps, then — and only then — is the right time to do the rest of the steps.

Pencils, Paper and Erasers

Jarkko — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:00:18 +0000

One of the great misconceptions about notebooks is that they are only useful for writing things down.

Sure, most of the time, when you write something, you want to keep it, and remember it later. But not always. There are times when an eraser is your best friend and it makes sense to leave your ballpoint at home.

That’s why today, I am going to present you this ode to erasers.

Photo by Hybridotus

I use paper for three different purposes (actually more than that, but the line is blurry, so I’m sticking to this story: three it is):

Notes: I’m always carrying a notebook and a pen in my pocket so that when the sudden inspiration strikes, I can write down the thought before it escapes my mind. Lately, I have increased the number of notebooks to three so that I have separate notebooks for article ideas, stories and anecdotes, as well as one for general note taking.
Drafts: I can’t help it, but when I think, I must waste paper. I draw diagrams that are incomprehensible for anyone other than myself, I scribble down keywords to my ideas, I build mind maps. For this, I try to use paper that would go to waste anyway, like the backsides of prints, ads, napkins, etc.
Tasks: This is what we’re going to talk about today. I have tried using all kinds of computer based solutions. I have used calendars. I have used my phone. But none of them has ever worked for me for writing down and tracking my progress with the tasks that I need to be working on. Luckily, some time ago, I realized that I can use a pencil and an eraser, and have been happily using a paper based task list ever since.

The Problem With Software

I don’t know about you, but I have two major problems with computer-driven task lists:

I can’t carry them with me everywhere. This might change if I had an iPhone, but I don’t, so even the best online options such as Ta-Da List or Remember The Milk are out of the question. If I can’t have my task list with me when I’m away from my computer, what’s the point of having one? It’s not like I would sit at my desk 24/7 (OK, so what if I did? I’d still want to have the task list next to me instead of wasting valuable screen real estate with it).
They are not flexible enough. I like to draw over the borders. If I feel like drawing a web page mockup or logo sketch next to my to do list item, that’s what I want to be able to do, not create an attachment and upload it to my task system. If I feel like drawing a circle around a task, I really want a circle, not a star or some other symbol saying that this task is important. If I… well, you get the picture.

So far, I have never found a piece of software that could fill both of my requirements.

On the other hand, there is this age old technology known as paper. It does it all. And more.

Todoodlist – and Tapping to the Power of Paper

I read a lot, but it’s rare for a book to have as big of an impact on my every day life as Nick Cernis’ fabulous little e-book, Todoodlist.

Todoodlist, taglined “Technology is great. Pencils are better”, is a book about simplifying productivity and giving up on gadgets that only complicate the tasks that they are trying to help us track. That’s an idea that resonates perfectly with me. But even better than that, the book also presents clearly defined blueprints for a paper based task tracking system: the Todoodlist.

I decided to give the Todoodlist method a try, and ever since it has stuck to me. I can’t do back to regular to do lists any more, instead I always doodle my tasks in the form of this more organized, more visual structure.

This is where erasers come handy.

I always try to doodle my Todoodlists with a pencil so that when a task is done, I can erase it from the task list. This way, the list won’t get crowded with old information that I no longer need, and I can see my status with just one glance at the piece of paper. But whenever I make the mistake of using a pen, my task list is full of remarks and deprecated notes in less than half a day of work, which means that the list has already become unusable.

So, as you can see, erasers can not only help to hide your mistakes, they can also save space, both on paper and inside your mind. Not to mention saving paper, and nature.

What about you?

Do you use pencils and erasers? Or are you a die-hard pen fanatic? (I used to be like that, and I still have a weakness for black pens)

How about paper in general? Have you tried the Todoodlist method, or are you happy using online task tracking tools?

Eliminate Distraction: The 8 Things to Let Go First

Jarkko — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:27:29 +0000

If you want to achieve a lot, you have to give up on some things. That’s a bit of a contradiction, but there lies wisdom in these words. If you want to do many big things, you can’t be caught up doing tons of small, seemingly urgent tasks that don’t get you anywhere.

You have to get rid of distraction.

Today, I will share with you the eight biggest distractions that I fight with and take a look at what we can do about them. But before we get started, there is one important thing that I think is crucial for all kinds of elimination we try to do. Here’s a quote from E-mail Zen:

When I debugged my email habits, one surprising fact was that I often used email as a way to take a work break. With email batched to the start of my day, this option was gone. Although I saved time from procrastination, I needed to find new ways to get the same psychological benefits I got from email overuse.

Although this quote is about e-mail, the same idea applies to everything we try to eliminate.

Sure, the things we are dropping do no good for us, but still, we are attached to the feelings we get from them. That’s why it’s not enough to just try to fill the time with work and getting things done. Instead, we need to replace the time spared with some real living!

But now, let’s get started with the distractions.

E-mail: This is easily the biggest productivity drainer for most people. It’s just too easy to look busy and important (doing nothing) by reading and replying to e-mail. And the worst thing is that in most cases you even fool yourself! Check out the E-mail Zen e-book by Scott Young for practical tips on making e-mail a tool for productivity rather than procrastination.
Excessive web browsing: A healthy amount of web browsing gives you information you need, new ideas, and a feeling of participation. But when you do too much of it, the benefits start to feel smaller and smaller as you are missing on the other things in life that really matter. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to check out next and just wander to a news site, or worse yet, something like YouTube (don’t get me wrong, there is some good stuff on YouTube), it’s time to turn off the browser and do something different.
Playing games: A small dose of great games can in fact be good for you. It’s the overdose that makes you lose on the bigger things in life. The problem with games is that they are designed to take hours, and yet more hours from your life, so be careful!
TV: A few months ago, when our old TV became too old to support the modern, digital TV, my wife and I decided to get rid of TV. I have never regretted that decision.
Reading: This may sound strange coming from me, but yes, you can read too much – or more specifically, read the wrong stuff. The world is full of things to read, and you just don’t have enough years in your life to read every word ever written, so you need to prioritize. Newspapers have to go (as Tim Ferriss points out, you’ll get the same information from your friends anyway), so do bad magazines and bad books. There are enough great books, magazines, and blog posts to fill the space!
Work: Don’t go give your resignation just yet, but instead, at work, drop the work that is getting between you and your goals. A common tip is to avoid meetings at all costs, but they are not the only things to avoid. I once spent a month writing a coding conventions document for the company I work for – organizing meetings about the coding style, asking for everyone’s feedback, polishing the style of the document. It was fun. But still, as no one really used the document after it was completed, I don’t think it was worth the time.
Material wants: The bigger your house is and the more possession you have in it, the more time you spend cleaning and maintaining it. The same applies to money: the more you want to buy, the more you have to work. That’s why it’s good to remember that to every material need (or desire) there is an additional cost beyond the price tag: time.
Planning: This happens to me a lot. I love to plan my life, think about my dreams and visions, and that also takes time. If you notice that all your planning is not turning your dreams into reality, it might be a good idea to plan less, and live more (Check out Todoodlist for some brilliant ideas on planning).

These are the distractions I fight every day. With some of them, like the TV, I have been really successful, but with some, like planning and e-mail, it’s a constant struggle. But even struggle is better than surrendering and letting them rule my life.

What distractions are you ready to fight today?

Face It, Not Checking Your E-mail All The Time is Hard

Focus Your Big Picture Every Day

Jarkko — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:00:56 +0000

If you don’t have a clear big picture, you are lost. Every activity seem just as important as the next – and none of them seems to lead anywhere. So you end up working on the easy ones that call for your attention with the loudest voices.

Is this how you love to spend your days? If not, you might want to consider adopting a new habit.

What follows is not my invention. It’s just pieces of advice that I have gathered during the past year from books, other blogs, and by trying the ideas in practice. While not always easy, cultivating this habit makes a difference.

All you need is a cup of coffee, a good book, a piece of paper, and a few minutes just by yourself.

The Morning Ritual

Scott Ginsberg calls it his best habit. Fave. Numero uno:

I’ve been practicing this technique every single day for five years, and I submit to you that it’s the most valuable habit I’ve ever developed.

Ever.

It was this blog post by Scott that really got me excited about the idea of having a daily appointment with myself. But Scott wasn’t my only influence.

The list of things that Leo Babauta uses his early mornings for differs a bit from Scott’s, but the overall idea is the same:

[...] not only does it instill a sense of purpose, peace and ritual to my day, but it ensures that I’m getting certain things done every morning … namely, my goals. I’m setting aside morning time as a time of peace and quiet, and time to take small steps each day towards my goals.

To me, what matters most in a morning routine is how it helps me focus on the big picture. When I spend time thinking about my long term goals, my faith, and the things I want to achieve later that day, I feel much more energized and productive than on the days when I skip the routine.

Being focused just feels so much better than being out of focus! And it helps me get more done.

How To Do It?

There is no one right way to do your morning ritual. But to make things easier, I have collected a framework that you can use as a model for building your personal routine.

Find a time slot that suits you: I like early mornings when most people are still asleep, the excitement of getting up with the sun makes you feel energized, and the daily stress hasn’t yet got a hold on you. But if waking up early isn’t an option for you, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t do a daily routine: maybe you can take a coffee break around 10 AM, or do your ritual while having lunch?
Get a cup of coffee: Take some time to make breakfast (or go to a café) before you start. It could be as simple as a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, but still having it makes this feel more like a real meeting with yourself. The time it takes for you to eat your breakfast is also a pretty good time for the ritual. When you run out of coffee, you are ready to greet the day.
Read: Choose a book that makes you think. Something inspirational. Something that gets you excited about life and the possibilities ahead. Inspiring quotes work well, so do books like Make a Name for Yourself by Scott Ginsberg, or profound ones like The Bible.
Journal: Write down your thoughts. What have you learned lately? What gets you speechless? Is there something you don’t understand? What are you thankful for?
Review your big picture: Think about how you see your big picture today. Do adjustments according to things you have learned, and write down what part of it you value the most right now.
Most important tasks: After finishing with your big picture it’s time to start getting ready for the day. Pick and write down the few most important tasks for the day, making sure that you don’t select too many of them. You can write them down in form of a regular to do list if you want to go a step further, create a Todoodlist!
Pray / Think about the day
Get to work: You are ready now. Focused. You know where to start your day from. You know what you want to get done before getting to sleep. Wait no longer, but get the day started!

Products to Support the Habit

The morning ritual is such a powerful tool for the insanely interested to keep their lives focused that I felt I had to do more than just write a post (or two) about it. That’s why I’m working on a new product to be sold through my Insanely Interested Store, the Morning Ritual Guide Book.

It’s a simple, practical handbook that will consist (among other things) of the following parts:

More detailed morning ritual instructions, tips and tricks
40 pages of morning ritual template sheets for writing down your thoughts, most important tasks, and other daily information
Space for sketching your big picture
A master task list
A list to hold your 100 big dreams and wishes

The book is work in progress, so if you want to make sure you won’t miss it, you can now subscribe to my store’s RSS feed and get the new product information popping straight to your news reader!

Also, as I mentioned above, Todoodlist by Nick Cernis is a great product for organizing your actions and things to do, and a perfect companion to your morning ritual. Todoodlist is already available at the Insanely Interested Store.

Focus: The Big Picture

Jarkko — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:26:01 +0000

We live in a world that does its best to keep us busy all the time. We go to work, rushing to get our projects done, then get home to take care of urgent tasks like paying bills, shopping, and in the case of the insanely interested, to juggle between the different things we want or have promised to do.

In the middle of all of this hassle it’s really easy to get lost.

We end up just going through a “to do” list without realizing that many of the things on the list shouldn’t be done at all. Day after day, our e-mail inboxes keep us busy with urgent requests that capture our attention. And from sunrise to late at night, we just keep moving – not really knowing where we’re headed to.

Life is a bit like canoeing in dangerous, big river rapids. And too often equipped with no understanding of where the river is leading us, and where we should be headed to. Paddling like crazy, just to keep ourselves from drowning.

(Photo by Joshua Davis)

When I find myself in that situation, I wish I could press a pause button and take a deep breath. There is no pause button, but what I can do is to leave my tasks aside for a short while and work out a new, clearer vision of the big picture.

You need to have a big picture

In this series, I will share a few ideas on how to maintain focus even if you are one of the people to whom concentrating in just one thing is right next to a dreadful nightmare. I will cover topics such as outsourcing, picking the most important tasks to work on, and planning your days.

Great topics, but all worthless if you don’t have a clear, focused big picture to guide your decisions.

For someone insanely interested in many things, finding focus can be more challenging than to the rest of the mankind. But it’s not impossible. It all boils down to seeing the big picture behind your actions. You may have a lot different ventures (projects, tasks, errands, jobs, businesses…) but when you look from far enough, they do have some common denominator – and a common goal.

I have to confess that my tag line (“Insanely Interested in Everything”) isn’t completely true: I’m not interested in everything. Just in more things than the average Joe.

That makes a big difference.

It means that there is a big picture to be found: a common denominator to my preferences, a reason for the choices I have done in life, some values that guide my decisions, a story about who I really am.

The big picture of my life.

And I believe your big picture is there to be found as well – you just need to zoom out far enough to see it.

How to find your big picture

If you could only do one thing, what would it be?

As you think of the question, zooming out from the details, you will see that the definition of “that one thing” can be a much broader concept than for example C# programming or selling furniture. When you understand this, you will notice that being insanely interested in everything isn’t really that far from being an expert. It’s just a matter of how you define your expertise.

But how do you know what your big picture is?

I can’t give a final answer to the question as I don’t know the whole answer yet.

All I know is that it is a continuous process that you need to keep coming back to every time you feel lost in the river rapids. Through every successful or failed choice you assess your understanding of what your big picture is, slowly taking out the ideas that don’t belong to it and tying together the ones that do belong. Focusing your big picture from a fuzzy mess into a beautiful image full of life experience – and vision.

In the next posts in the series, we will talk more about the different methods I use to make sense of the world and to get to know my personal big picture.

But right now, I want you to start thinking of your own big picture:

Take a big, empty piece of paper and some pens in different colors, and start drawing.

Write down the things that you do every day.

Identify the ones that you love and the ones you hate.

Write down the things you would like to do.

Think about why you love some things, why you hate some, and why you’d like to do the things you dream of.

And finally, ask yourself the big question: What do all of these things have in common?

This is the beginning. If it was your first time plotting down the big picture, don’t worry – everything might still seem like one big happy mess. But what matter is that you have now taken the first step towards focusing your big picture, and becoming the expert in living your life!

(Photo by Yersinia)

How To Triple Your Week Without Anyone Noticing

Jarkko — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:57:31 +0000

Balance is a lot about simplifying: deciding what is worth your effort and cutting out what just eats your time and gives nothing in return. But there is only so much you can cut out – you’ve got to do something. That’s why balance is also about finding the time for doing the things you want to do.

I have found one extra day.

Sure, it’s a bit shorter than the others (just seven hours), and it’s scattered throughout the week. But what can you expect from a virtual day that most people don’t even notice?

Yep. It’s a virtual day. A day that runs inside a normal day – just like a virtual machine is a computer that runs inside another computer. For the not so technically inclined readers, or the ones who just want to hear more details, I’ll explain.

How does the virtual day work?

You are probably familiar with the term multitasking? It means doing many things at once. Something computers are good at – and that humans just can’t do effectively.

But there is a secret: a big part of computers don’t do real multitasking, either. They just switch between tasks as they go. They give some processor cycles to the Microsoft Word you use for writing your book, then some to fuel your browsing experience, and so on.

So, adding a new program to the multitasking routine means finding some free CPU cycles for it and hoping it can be run without slowing down the other programs running.

We can do the same.

Just different.

The computer plays on a nanosecond level. We can’t get there, and neither should we (multitasking can damage your productivity by 30 percent or so…), but we can emulate the idea by using the free processor cycles we have every day.

Why does the virtual day work?

We spend a lot of our time doing something that doesn’t get us anywhere: watching TV, surfing the web, waiting for something to happen, sitting in a bus (technically that gets you wherever the bus is going…), or sleeping.

The idea behind a virtual day is one of the simplest ever – and that’s why it works so well:

Take one hour from any of those unproductive activities every day – and in a week you will have acquired seven hours more than the rest of the world!

Seven hours is almost a full working day, so it’s enough for some pretty big achievements.

And it’s enough for almost two full 4-hour work weeks (meaning that by using this method you actually get two extra weeks every week – tripling your productivity!)

How you can get one too

You know best what the idle moments that you can spend for your virtual day are, but here are some tips from my own experiences:

Mornings: I try get up at 5 AM whenever I didn’t stay up for too long the night before. This way I not only get one extra hour before the rest of my family wakes up, but I also get to use some of my most productive time of the day working on my side business.
The commute: If you have a laptop and manage to get a seat in a bus, the commute time is a great time to get some writing or planning done. Plus you’ll do some good for the environment while stealing time.
The lunch break: Eat while working. That’s another half-an-hour. (Whether it’s healthy or not, that’s another story)

Unfortunately I haven’t yet mastered the four-hour work week so this virtual day is not quite enough to keep my side business rolling but I also need to do some work during the weekends and some evenings.

I still have learning to do before I can triple my week (right now I have just added one extra day to it) – but I’m working on it! Join me in trying it out!

This was the fourth article (1, 2, 3) in my series on building a profitable side business that doesn’t break your work/life balance. There are still three more articles coming, so if you don’t want to miss any of them, subscribe to my RSS feed!