One of the most important aspects of being able to do the things that you want is being able to remove obstacles from your path. If you are able to do this well, you will be able to get a lot more done.
There are three main ways of removing obstacles from your path.
Turn Back!
1. Change the path you are walking.
In simple terms this means letting the fact there is an obstacle determine that you are no longer going to walk that route. The effort needed to overcome the obstacle is more than you are willing to expend in order to reach the final result.
Note that this is a perfectly legitimate response where the outcome is not that important to you, or the effort required is too great for you to be able to cope with at this point in your life.
2. Walk around the obstacle.
Walking Around
This is a technique that can be used where the end result is more important than the means of getting there. For instance, if there is a road accident up ahead, it would be most sensible to find a different route to get to your destination instead of turning back, or trying to drive straight through the accident point. You arrive at the same destination, but have taken a slightly different route to get there from the one you desired.
3. Move the obstacle.
Moving Rocks
This may be potentially the most effort, but also likely the most rewarding, simply because the outcome is worth the effort of moving the obstacle. If you imagine being in a car with a few friends driving down a country lane, when suddenly you encounter a tree that has fallen in the middle of the road. You pull to a stop, jump out of the car and go to work hauling the tree out of the way so you can continue your journey. That tree will (probably) not bother you the next time you drive down that road.
All of the above assumes that you are using the achievement-as-journey metaphor, which of course you may not be doing. I would be interested to see how other people frame problems, how they look at obstacles, and what metaphors they use.
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I just thought that I should mention the great Escape Pod. This is a sci-fi podcast, which has such classics as Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
If you like sci-fi stories and are interested in listening to them in an audio podcast, you will absolutely love Escape Pod.
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Omnifocus for iPhone
I have recently started using Omnifocus on my iPod Touch in order better manage my tasks. What follows is a short review of the application – what it does well, where it could be improved and my general impressions of it.
Firstly, from the Omnifocus site itself to give you an idea of what the application does, and what it is designed for.
“OmniFocus for the iPhone brings task management to your fingertips. Keep track of actions by project, place, person, or date. Bring up a shopping list, agenda items to discuss at work, tasks for home, and any other lists you need.
Using your location, OmniFocus can create a custom list of actions to complete nearby. Buying groceries? OmniFocus can show you the closest grocery store and create an instant shopping list.
Capture tasks anywhere, anytime with OmniFocus: you can enter text, take a picture, or even make a quick voice recording.
Synchronize OmniFocus with your Mac using the OS X version available separately from omnigroup.com/omnifocus.”
Read more »
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“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.”John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.
This quote from John Naisitt illustrates how much of a problem information overload is for today’s culture.We live in a world that now has a potentially unlimited amount of self-perpetuating videos, media and writing all available at the click of a mouse. This generation has more information available to it than any other previous generation could have dreamt of.
In this short, but hopefully informative series I will show you some ways in which you can avoid the fire-hose of information that is blasting you from all directions, and show how you can keep yourself sane, whilst still being able to enjoy life.
Read more »
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Google Chrome
Google Chrome was released yesterday for windows, and google have promised that Linux and Mac versions are in the pipeline. I downloaded it on my laptop and played about with it for around 1/2 an hour.
Initial impressions are that it is very fast and doesn’t seem to hang up on flash content quite as much as Firefox, rendering being very similar to Safari’s (being based off WebKit, this is to be expected), but I did not see anything really compelling that would make me switch to it when the Linux version comes out.
I’m sure that I will download the Linux version and play about with it when it finally makes it way out of the googleplex, but in this particular incarnation, I think that there is very little that it offers over firefox and safari – certainly nothing worth writing home about. Your opinion may vary from this depending on how important flash is to you, whether you run Linux, and whether you rely on Firefox extensions. Still it looks better than the IE8 beta in terms of memory usage.
Edit: Security vulnerability in Chrome has been found already.
As usual please post your thoughts on Google’s new baby below.
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Letting Go
I recently have begun looking to see what I can let go of in my life. The reason for this is that I seem to be taking too much on, with not enough time to do it all.
The end result is that there are a number of things I have decided are not worth my time and energy, and therefore should be let go. These include various projects I have started but never got round to finishing, as well as activities that add no value or meaning for me.
What is it that you need to let go of in order to improve your experience of life, or make room for other activities?
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Roasted Coffee Beans
Since Douglas Adams has reserved the number 42 to represent the meaning of life, I have decided that in order to reserve my own number and ensure that coffee is meaningful too (which we all know it is) the meaning of coffee is now 43.
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iPod Touch
I have recently downloaded the Wordpress client for the iTouch and iPhone and started playing about with it.
First impressions are that it is very straightforward to set up your blog for use with it. I was running a slightly out of date version of wordpress, which the application warned me about. A quick upgrade to the latest version and we were good to go.
Writing on the iTouch is not the most pleasant experience, but the Wordpress client is easy to use in spite of this, providing a means to compose offline and update when safely back within range of a wifi network. Interestingly it has everything working that you can do through the web version, with the exception of being able to add pictures to a post. I’m going to try it for a bit longer before passing any judgement, but it seems a very promising app, with the added bonus of being zero cost.
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I want to tell you about a technique that I have been using in order to replace journalling, which I have found does not work very well with me. This technique is similar to journalling, but has a few important differences. Both “stream of consciousness writing” and journalling have the emotional and “From the Heart” aspect to it, where the feeling is important, perhaps even more than the content. Both allow you to sort out, and put down on paper [or computer] what you are thinking and feeling at the time.
I have never been a fan of the Steve Pavlina school of journalling, whereby it is used as a problem solving tool. I believe that it is better not to think of it as a tool for problem solving, but rather as a means of expression. That is not to say that it cannot or should not be used in that manner, but that I have found that it is better (in spite of what Steve says on this subject) to actually go back and read what you have written. Sometimes I find something in there that I never noticed whilst I was writing. However, there are no “Journal Police”, to paraphrase a popular expression, so I wouldn’t recommend that you take what I have said here as an absolute. There is a lot of scope for manoeuvre on this.
I should probably tell you what is different from the standard sort of journal keeping that is normally(?) done, at least from what I’ve read about it. Firstly, I should point out that I am using Tomboy as the note taking application, which probably makes it a little bit different from conventional journals already, in that hyperlinking is supported, as well as various means of categorising the notes thus created. The major difference between journalling and the “stream of consciousness” that flows from my typing is that revision of the notes is perfectly legitimate thing to do. However, there are some caveats to the way that I handle this, which can probably be surmised from the title of this post.
There are two steps in the process, both of which are vital for the process to work successfully. They are detailed below. Read more »
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