Know why you are doing what you are doing

Do you know why you are doing what you do every day? Is what you are doing today based on whims and reactions to others, or is it based on a larger goal and plan for yourself?

Knowing why you are doing what you are doing, and knowing that you are working towards a higher goal, or a purpose, is super important. It’s what makes the difference between someone who is stuck in a boring job, hating life, hating his job, and in turn does a terrible job and have no motivation for anything; and someone who works that same job but has a purpose or larger goal. He know that if he can do a great job and save some money, he will be able to quit soon and start a business, or travel, or perhaps apply for a better job with a recommendation from his current boss. The second guy will even enjoy his job because he knows what it means to him.

Personally I sit down and think about this once every week on sundays. I not only think about my work and what I get out of it (I have a great job and I really enjoy what I do), but I also think about my life as a whole:
Where is my social life going? What are my goals and how have I progressed this past week? What do I want to do in life and where am I right now? What do I need to do next week/next month/next 3 months in order to keep progressing towards my goals?

Check resources to read more about this.

The productive mindset

OK, so you know why you are doing what you do, maybe you have set up some inspiring goals for yourself. Maybe you are really pumped up! Well you still need a productive mindset.

The productive mindset is the backbone of every productive human being. Without it, no amount of techniques will help you. It’s hard to just give a short explanation of this, but I think you can probably get a good idea of it if I show you an example of two people: One with a bad mindset, and one with a good mindset.

Bad mindset: “I have to finish something big and do it perfectly while working hard for long periods of time without time to play. I’m a perfectionist and failure is not an option, so I much wait until the right moment and MAKE SURE that I can not fail.” (of course you can never be sure of not failing)
Good mindset: “I choose to start on one small step, knowing I have plenty of time for play. I know I don’t have to be perfect, and it’s okay if I do a less than good job on this, and in any case I will still learn from it.”
(modified from “The Now Habit”)

Basically with a bad mindset you produce so much anxiety towards a task that you just can’t bring yourself to do it. So you keep procrastinating until the anxiety of the deadline grows larger than the anxiety of doing the task itself, then you do the task badly because of all the anxiety.

The anxiety of doing the task can come from fear of failure, fear of success, or maybe you expect it to take a long time to complete (and it will be booooring), or you feel resistance because it’s something you feel you HAVE TO do rather than something you choose to do freely.

Stuff like that creates anxiety. Using a better mindset (like the above example) can make you overcome this. You can go really in-depth with this sort of stuff, and I really recommend reading “The Now Habit” which explains a lot about the psychology behind productivity, and how to overcome procrastination.

It’s a process though and not something you change over night. Here is a simple way to start changing how you talk to yourself, and in turn your mindset:

Replace “I have to” with “I choose to”
Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?”
Replace “This is so big” with “I can take one small step”
Replace “I must be perfect” with “I can be human”
Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play”
(taken straight out of “The Now Habit”)

Remember: You could want to do something really badly, but keep procrastinating just because of a bad mindset. If you know you have a bad mindset, make an effort to change it.

Check resources to read more about this.

Great, you know what you want, and you are aware of your good and bad mindsets. But you are still unorganized, distracted, and can’t seem to get as much done as you’d like.

Habits

Habits is what shapes our days and lives. It’s what you regularly do every day. So you can obviously see how habits affects your daily life all the time.

Become aware of the habits in your life and how they affect you. Do you check your email, twitter, and facebook first thing in the morning? do you watch tv while working?

Replacing such habits with habits that promotes non-distraction and focus can REALLY enhance your efficiency when it comes to getting stuff done.

2 hours worked immediately in the morning without distraction is easily better than 4 hours of work in the evening where you constantly check facebook and have the tv on in the background.

I wanted to talk about habits because a lot of the productivity “techniques” is really only effective if you implement them as habits.

Here is a short list of some stuff I have changed myself (to give you an idea):

1. Removing the habit of checking twitter, facebook, gmail, youtube, etc. in the morning before starting work.
2. Writing a to-do list for the next day before I go to sleep.
3. Using the pomodoro technique with e.ggtimer.com
4. etc.

I recommend that you do your own list of habits that you both want to remove, and implement.

Learn how to replace and implement new habits, and you will learn how to shape your life and future.

Check resources to read more about this.

Actual productivity “techniques”

I find that productivity techniques are very personal, and what works for one person will not work for someone else.

You should create YOUR OWN SYSTEM. Figure out what works for you, what makes you productive, what makes you unproductive, how to combat a lazy day, and so on. Create a system for these situations.

Some people work really well at a cafe, so they go there every day in order to get stuff done. Other people can’t get ANYTHING done in a cafe. You get the idea, just try a lot of different things and find out what works for you.

Here are some good stuff for you to try:

1. Manage your energy. Eat well, exercise, SLEEP.
2. Find out when you are the most productive. Is it in the morning? evening? find it out and make sure you get a block of uninterrupted time to work during those hours.
3. Keep a weekly and daily to-do list. Every sunday, write down what you want to get done the next week. Every day, write down what what you want to get done the next day.
4. When you are working, be in a place where you are undistracted and can focus. Use leechblock (for firefox) or stayfocused (for chrome) or Freedom (for everything, but costs $10) if you have to.
5. Remove pressure by making sure you take time off for leisure time. Set a deadline to be finished with work at 17.00, and even if you have stuff left to do, you have to shut it off and relax.
6. Keep momentum throughout the day by getting REAL breaks without distraction. With that I mean: go out and get some fresh air for 5 minutes, or get yourself something to eat. DO NOT go on facebook or reddit for 5 mins “just to check whats happening”.
7. Decide what you will NOT spend time on. Use the 80/20 analysis of your work and stop doing tasks that just sucks up time.
8. Set short deadlines for your tasks, then reward yourself with something when it’s done. Maybe take the rest of the day off after you get that important task done.

There are tons of “techniques” to use, and it works different for different people. Find out what works for you, then implement those techniques as HABITS.

Resources:

(About implementing/replacing habits)
Scott H Young’s Habit Mastery series
Article about habits from zenhabits.com

(About setting goals, productivity, time management, business, and living a good life)
The 4-hour workweek

(About the mindset of productive and successful people)
The Magic of Thinking BIG

(The psychology behind procrastination, and how to overcome it)
The Now Habit 

Not gonna write a detailed post about it, just go here to download it and try it yourself. Also check out this great article on nettuts to learn more about it.

And here is a list of some shortcuts that you can use within the editor.

Have fun!

They are awesome enough to let you read it for free here.

The perfect instructions on how to build an awesome webapp that people will want to use, and pay for.

The philosophy of this book is simple but powerful, and it all revolves around this: Less is more.

Less provides:

• Better webapp
• Happier Customers
• Easier maintenance and support
• More productivity
• Bigger profits

37signals have used this thinking on all their webbapps, and they are the perfect example of this philosophy in action.

Can’t recommend this book enough.

Ever wanted to know what it is that makes comics so amazing? How they work? Or maybe you just want to get better att communicating ideas and stories? Not only in comics but in any medium?

Then read this book.

It’s brilliant and Scott did a great job with it. The book is a comic itself, and he uses it in a way which makes it very engaging and easy to understand.

Many of the principles he talks about can be applied in other areas as well. So it’s not just a book for people who work with comics, but for anyone doing art work.

Why did I read it?

Apart from liking comics and wanting to understand what goes on in the background, I read it because I wanted to improve how I think and work with art.

Mission accomplished?

Yes. Recommend it for anyone doing creative crafts. It really improves how you think about communicating your ideas.

Favorite parts:

The chapter about closure. How when we observe parts of something, we percieve the whole. In comics that happens between panels, we see two different pictures and automatically percieves what happened between them, and everyone percieves it differently. Using another medium, movies for example, closure happens when you shift the camera away from the subjects/scene and let’s the viewer get closure through the sounds or shadows.

Really interesting book.

Read it here for free!

A short guide to html5. It covers only the most useful stuff and skips the fluff. It has great explanations and examples, which makes it very easy to get an overview of HTML5 and how to use it.

If someone wants to read/learn about HTML5, this is the book I would recommend to them.

I just love it because it is so short and cuts to the chase.

Why did I read it?

After reading Hardboiled Web Design, which had a great section about HTML5, I wanted to check out some other books to see what other authors are saying and what they use it for.

Mission accomplished?

Yes. It gives great explanations and examples HTML5, as well as how to deal with compatibility issues.

Favorite part:

The whole book was good. Probably because it was so short and no fluff, just straight up great stuff all the way through.

This book has two main topics:

1. The “hardboiled” way of thinking, how we should think as web designers, and how we should approach our work.
2. New technologies like HTML5, CSS3, various useful scripts and tools, and how he uses this stuff to create awesome websites.

An example of a hardboiled way of thinking is work from the top down, instead of the down up. That websites should not look the same in every browser, but instead be crafted specifically for the browsers capabilities.

“Some people say that websites must look the same in every browser. To hell
with that. This attitude makes many of us think that we can’t make use of new
and emerging technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 today, and we have to wait
for some day in the future when all browsers support the same technologies
the same way at the same time! It ain’t gonna happen. It’s best that we, and the
people we work for, learn to live with that reality and move on.”

He then goes on to show a lot of the new HTML5 and CSS3 stuff with great examples and tips, and how to use various tools like Modernizr to design specifically for each browsers capabilities.

Great stuff, and there is a lot more of these kind of mindsets and technologies that you can implement in your work immediately.

Why did I read it?

I want to learn more about HTML5, CSS3, and how people like Andy Clarke use it in their work.

Mission accomplished?

Yes. It was very good. Highly recommend it for anyone wanting to implement HTML5 and CSS3 in their work. It also made me implement stuff like Modernizr in my work, which is really great.

Favorite part

There was a lot of good stuff in this book. But if I have to pick something, it’s gonna be the part about the mindset of designing from the top down rather than from the down up.

This book basically covers the transition from the old and inefficient uses of tables and inline styling, to a more standard and better way to create websites.

The main points is all about designing for a web standard, using semantic html structure, replacing inline styling with well thought out CSS in a separate stylesheet, as well as designing with accessibility in mind. .

It’s mainly for beginners (and for the few people still stuck in the world of tables and inline styling), and I would advice against any experienced designers/developers to read it unless you want to recap some basics (or read about the html/css history, which there was A LOT of, and felt like 2/3 of the book).

Otherwise, save some time by searching for more comprehensive articles and screecasts about these subjects online.

So, Why did I read it?

Having basically only read online articles about these subjects, I just wanted to see if there was anything I had missed or could improve upon.

Mission accomplished?

Well, I guess? I did actually get a few things out of the book, but it wasn’t really worth the time it took to sit down and read it.

Favorite parts:

The few parts where there was actually code and examples to look at.

This book covers basically everything you need to know about using and working with wordpress. It’s mostly geared towards beginners, but is still incredible useful for anyone already familiar with wordpress.

Why did I read it?

I simply wanted to expand my knowledge and understand everything there is to understand about wordpress.

Mission accomplished?

Yes. It was a very good book and did indeed explain most of the things you need to know about wordpress. The book combined with their website www.digwp.com has been very useful for me. Even though I had used wordpress for a long time before readin this book, I still got a lot out of it.

Favorite parts:

It’s filled with code snippets and tips. So apart from using the book to understand how wordpress works, you can use it as a reference for all kinds of useful stuff you can just copy/paste.