CaptPiper

This summer, I suffered a computer crash. Luckily, I saw it coming — it would have problems, temporarily freeze, then lock up and crash. Despite my efforts to clean out unnecessary programs, processes, and detritus, the problems kept getting worse, and I knew that I’d ultimately have to erase everything and start over.

So, I did what anyone would do. I backed up everything I thought I’d need, made lists of the stuff I’d want to reinstall, and went ahead with the erase job.

Two things happened:

• I erased everything and reinstalled just the OS, only to find my problems remained. It turned out to be faulty RAM that I had installed six months before. Yes, I ran hardware tests, but they didn’t show any problems. Major thanks go out to Mariam, the angel on the Mac forum who saved my bacon. Ever since getting my new RAM, everything has run perfectly, like a Mac does when you don’t put junk in the engine.
• I realized that the way I had been working, managing information, and handling my digital life was way outta whack. I had backups, I’d worked efficiently, I’d streamlined my processes… yet until I had to start completely over from scratch, I had no idea how much fat there was still was left to trim.

Welcome to the butcher shop.

Now, I’m pretty sure—without Googling—that there are umpteen posts similar to this one out there in the world. I mean, productivity “hacks” are a dime a dozen, I realize. And, it’s not my intention to just air my laundry, so to speak.

But along with that little observation, my internal censor tells me I should just stop writing now. But to that censor—and yours, if you got one—I say two things:

1. I don’t care. I mean, I think it’s great that other posts are out there, but since this is my virtual soapbox and my life, and this was a meaningful event that has shaped every day since, I’m going to write about it.
2. I’m not a “productivity guru” writing about getting things done faster, easier, etc., as means to their own end. Gawd knows, everyone who has tried to implement increased-productivity measures in their lives has hit the point where they were tweaking their system more than actually doing things with said system.

But that’s not my intent here.

I don’t write about this to help you shave 0.4 seconds off your email time; I write about this because if you can walk away from your desk/laptop/iPhone with a few less knots in your shoulders and a clearer mind, then I’ve done my part. It’s about peace of mind, clarity of thought, and ease of being. Not to mention creating less waste and saving resources, both external (paper, space, time) and internal (thought, stress, and your creative potential).

That said…

I honestly don’t know if I could track every change that has come into my life since my self-induced electronic colonic, but I’ll share with you the biggies: the ones that I notice many times a day have improved my workflow and left me feeling much more peaceful about how I flow from from one task to another.

The big mind-shift happened as I went to download the software I had been using before the crash. I had taken screenshots of my Applications folder, so I could get everything back to the way it was. As I looked over the list, I realized that:

1. there was a bunch of stuff I had downloaded that I just didn’t use any more (surprise, surprise),
2. there were a few programs that were redundant, because other, better solutions existed… and now was the perfect time to take advantage of them.

Case in point…

Email.

I had been an avid—and satisfied—Thunderbird user for some time, after leaving Eudora years before. But I had also been hearing good things about just using Apple’s Mail, because of Address Book integration.

So, I Googled “mail vs thunderbird”, and I found this post by Dave Moyer, about using Gmail instead. Brilliant.

Why Gmail? Because:

• you can receive, and send from, other email accounts through Gmail. So, you’re not limited to just youraccount@gmail.com.
• all of your mail is automatically archived, just in case. Never lose an email again. And, because it’s all online, it takes up zero space on your own computer.
• there are plenty of helpful features (and extensions, via Google Labs) to manage your mail effectively, from labels to stars to filters and more.
• it runs out of your browser, so you don’t have to have yet another program running, taking up screen real estate, system memory, or time to download new messages. Translation: it’s faster.
• thinking of getting a new computer, ever? No more migration hassles; just log on from you new machine—or any machine, for that matter—and all your stuff is right where you left it. Translation: no fear of ever losing your stuff.

In Dave’s article, he said that everyone he talks to who actually gives it a shot ends up loving it within a week. It only took me a day.

Once I had embraced the “computing in the cloud” concept with GMail, I was curious to see what else was out there that would supplant my previous on-my-machine solutions. Next up…

Task Management.

Here is one place I’d been trying out all kinds of solutions for years, with never a clear winner emerging. I’ll spare you the exhaustive rundown, but the last program I was using to manage my projects and to-do’s was Things. Things rocks. I’m not a GTD’er, and Things is flexible enough to let me keep my projects managed how I wanted.

But again, I wanted something that was stored/synced automatically online, so I wouldn’t ever lose data. And, at the same time, I was examining how I stored the information related to my projects, and tangential snippets of stuff that invariably surface while working on a project. Saving everything to files, folders, and browser bookmarks just didn’t seem like the way to go, not when so much savvier solutions are out there.

And then I found a program that could handle my task management AND my incessant exploration of the web, all synced online, and all free. I danced my everloving jig, bowed in gratitude to the universe, and promptly fell in love with Evernote.

Evernote allows you to capture notes, screenshots and images, and URLs of anything, anywhere, anytime. It works on Macs and Windows, it works on iPhones and mobile devices, and it automatically syncs with a web-based version. It’s simple and intuitive to use, allows you to tag entries, create multiple “notebooks”, and search easily.

And, get this: it even scans the images you put in, and any words that are in the images will also be searched. Daaaay-ang, that’s sweet.

Here’s how I use Evernote:

Click for full-size

• I have a Design notebook that’s my default, and as I browse the web and learn new tricks related to my webdesign business, I grab screenshots and the address of the page for later. No more saving webpages in overstuffed folders on my hard drive, no more endless browser bookmarks, no more “I know I saw a solution for that once… where was that/what did I do with it?” This alone saves me hours. Hours.
• Each note that I make from something online contains a screenshot, for easier visual browsing and memory-jogging. I also make sure to take advantage of Evernote’s tagging and url-linking feature, so I can easily find notes later, and jump to the site I got it from when I need more info (I sometimes save big chunks of code, but typically just save a snippet of the original to save time and stay in the flow of what I’m doing).
• I make a new notebook for each of my design clients, and while I often create individual notes within it to store various chunks of info, there’s one “master” note in each one where I keep lists of what needs to be done. I use sections to keep everything organized, and label them @Next, @Questions, @Waiting, and @Launch. Once glance and I know exactly what’s next for each client.

I can’t imagine working without Evernote, it’s that universal for me. And, sometimes I lose track of how all my projects need to be managed and what’s next. Rather than go through each notebook one at a time, I rely on Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk (RTM) is another online, free-to-use service that excels at to-do list management. It can be used via the web and/or mobile devices, but my two favs are the Mac Dashboard Widget and the Google Mail add-on. My RTM list, made up of the top “@ Next” items from my projects, shows up in the right sidebar of my Gmail page, so not only do I see it every time I’m in Gmail, but I can also easily add tasks that come up as a result of communicating with people.

Oh, and appointments? I ditched iCal, too, in favor of Google Calendar. No more Address Book, either; Gcal stores contact information, too. It’ll even pull data straight from those that email me… I rarely even have to enter anyone’s information in manually.

See the theme emerging, here?

Online, backed-up, accessible from anywhere, one less program running… all these simplifications mean less “mental overhead” for me, faster computer performance, and the peace of mind that I’m not going to lose my data if my machine breaks. I breathe regular sighs of relief, believe me.

Now, it’s possible, I suppose, to lose my data if Google’s/RTM’s/Evernote’s servers were to somehow all crash. But which is more likely… that I’ll mess something up, or they will? Besides, if I was ever really concerned about it, I could always sync their machines with mine, and keep local copies. Ultimately, that’s a great idea, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet (pray that those aren’t famous last words!).

I do, by the way, use an automatic data backup service, too: Mozy. Pre-crash, I used to backup all kinds of stuff. Now, post-crash, I’ve realized that most things I can put on cd’s or dvd’s and back them up myself; it ties up less internet bandwidth that way. But I do backup my applications settings, passwords, keychains, and such through Mozy, because those are the essential bits of information that will allow me to reconstruct my system easily, should a problem arise. And because I’m constantly using, revising, and changing that information, an auto-backup setup is ideal for keeping my backups up-to-date, whereas I can backup photos once a month and still be pretty well-protected.

Your Mileage May Vary

I realize, of course, that these solutions aren’t for everyone. And, I may never have made some of these changes if I weren’t forced to by my crash. In that way, the crash was one of the better things that happened to me this summer.

I’d whole-heartedly recommend that you examine the way you work, and see if any of the kinds of solutions I’ve come up with here could help you be more productive or more at peace. Who knows, moving webward may be one of the better moves of your life.

mrhayata

If you’ve heard of me, then you’ve heard of Merlin Mann. Please tell me you’ve heard of Merlin.

Whereas I am but a small drop in a large ocean, Merlin is a pretty good-sized pebble, to put it mildly. Owner of 43folders, Merlin’s humor and helpful wisdom have spared many thousands of people from the bowels of a boring, monotonous, unproductive worklife, not to mention the all-too-common attempts of the “I’m the new productivity guru on the block!”, please-let-this-blogging-thing-make-me-money crowd.

So, if you haven’t seen what Merlin has been writing lately, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in so long, you really have to go take a look. Seriously.

Now, I’m not about to pawn the explanation of my silence off on Merlin’s shoulders, but he so eloquently puts into words a whole bunch of my feelings about blogging, attention, and the social-media-crack that’s running rampant these days, that it just wouldn’t make sense for me to try to do it any better than he has.

Read it? Good.

Now, on to my side of the story.

When I stopped writing over at Viverati in June, it wasn’t really a planned hiatus. I just woke up one day and realized I didn’t have anything else to say. At least, for the time being.

As faithful readers know, I transitioned from Monk at Work to Viverati with the intention of expanding my scope, to include all kinds of stuff about all kinds of stuff, and not just about spirituality and personal development, and how they interface with our work life.

But, as it turns out, expanding my scope meant losing my focus. And that exposed an underlying issue that needed to be dealt with.

Namely, that I was blogging for the wrong reasons.

When I got into blogging, it seemed like a great marketing idea. I thought, “I’ll write about healing, personal development, and spirituality, and people will like it so much, they’ll hire me as a healer, take one of my workshops, or buy one of my products. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Did it work? A little. Not as much as I’d hoped, and it turned out that feeding the blogging-and-social-media-beast took more out of me than I wanted to admit. Arbitrary (and sometimes grueling) publishing schedules, and the pressure to post!post!post! took precedence over listening to the inner voice than wanted to speak. It ended up taking more than it gave, at least on the outside.

But what did come out of it was priceless; the realization that community is really important to me. That people come first, and everything else second. And that I no longer wanted to hawk my spirituality for money.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is. But the deeper I got into realizing what worked for me on a heart-level, the more I saw that I wanted to separate my income from my searching. And, since I had been deriving my family’s income from being a healer for over ten years, there was a lot to unravel and rework.

Hence, the hiatus. I couldn’t put words to what I was going through, and I still don’t know if I can. But what ensued was a complete re-tooling of my business, my spirituality, my interests, and my writing here.

On the other side…

As you can see, I’m now putting a many-year hobby into use and doing web work full-time. But, once a teacher, forever a teacher… the focus of my work as a webdesigner is less about designing, and more about teaching people how to use their sites to do whatever they want to do (which, from what I hear, is a far more precious commodity than webdesign).

And the blogging? Yep, I’m back to blogging, but no longer am I blogging to feed the beast, and no longer will I hold myself to someone else’s standards of what I should be writing, or how often, or the number of links per post needed to get to the front page of whatsawhoosit. Screw all that.

If I can’t write authentically, in every way, then I can’t write.

If I’m writing by rules that aren’t my own, then I can’t write.

And if I’m not writing something that matters to me, then I doubt it’s going to matter much to you, either.

So thank you, Merlin, for once again paving the way, for helping me open the door that I’d closed and held shut for so long.

So, what now?

We’ll see, really. I’m not pretending to know how this is going to go, nor am I promising that everything is about to go back to how it was. Quite the opposite, really, in case you couldn’t guess.

What I do know is this: I’m committed to writing about what I care about. It’s going to be from my perspective, as all writing is, if the writer is being honest. Some of you will stay, and some will go, and that’s fine. Community is a fluid thing, and I get that.

And, as Vitor said, it’s about the person, not the URL. Monk at Work, Viverati, whatever… the door has opened again, and I’m walking through it.

derrickT

Think about where you get your information, and who you trust.

• When you’re looking for news, do you read small blogs, or big newspapers?
• When you’re looking for spiritual advice, do you look to ‘churches’ (the established central authorities of various religions), or individuals (authors, travelers on the path, spiritual leaders, etc.)?
• When you’re looking to educate yourself (or your kids), do you trust “official” organizations and government agencies, or independents (authors, websites, how-to books, etc.)?
• Yellow pages, Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, or Google?

On one hand, you’ve got the “authorities” (of course, they’re the ones saying they’re the authorities, and we often trust them just because they do). On the other hand, you’ve got individuals, those who are drawing on the wisdom that comes from their own experience and learning, to the voices who have trodden the path and stand to speak about it.

(And just so you know that I’m not just talking out of my elbow, I do realize that many well-experienced individuals often make up the rosters of those big authoritative organizations. And, I also know what being a part of big authoritative organizations can do to squelch the voice of the individual within it…)

If you saw the movie “Sicko”, you’ll remember the interview with Tony Benn, the British socialist politician who so eloquently described how the grassroots movements in the UK created healthcare reform sixty years ago.

In addition, he spoke about how in England, the government fears the people (and does right by them, by and large), because they realize the people have the power. In the US, of course, the people fear the government (which doesn’t do right by us), because they—and us—have forgotten that it is the people who have the power. (Not to belabor this point too much, but another great documentary in the same vein is “Why We Fight”, about how Eisenhower’s presidency ushered in the first standing military-industrial complex… and before that, the government was less feared.)

So, who do you listen to?

Where do you look for answers? To the “authorities” that say they’re the authorities, or to individuals, to the wisdom in our collective, to the voices who have trodden the path and stand to speak about it?

And I’m not just talking about global political issues, or national social issues… I’m also talking about who you trust for information about everyday matters, like toothpaste, transportation, and tea. Sources of information are more plentiful now than ever before in history, and so is our access to them. Because of this, it’s our individual duty to strengthen our BS detectors, and come to understand what separates truth from falsehood.

I realize, it’s never quite so cut and dry as ‘big vs small’, either. Some organizations are amazing. Some individuals are wacko. It’s up to you to follow your heart and decide for yourself.

And really, that’s the point of this entire piece.

It comes back, again, to self-responsibility. To honoring your own sovereignty. To taking the initiative to “front the essential facts of life” with open eyes, and open heart, and an open mind.

Because when it comes down to it, you have to decide for yourself. When authority (be it a group or an individual claiming to have it) speaks, you have to question it — even when it takes you against everything you’ve ever been taught — because then, and only then, will you have the peace that comes from following your own internal sense of what is right.

And that quality, the quality of certainty, is rarely afforded to those who aren’t willing to challenge convention and trust that sense of inner knowing that permeates the deeper reaches of the soul. Stay on the surface, and you get only superficial confidence. Dive deeper, and you get abiding resiliency, self-determination, and inner strength.

sleepysparrow

If you want to make an impact in the world, you have to express yourself. And the way you’ve expressed yourself so far has been good, in that it has gotten you to where you are now. But if you want to go beyond where you’ve come, you need to make a shift. And making a shift in how you express yourself is one of the toughest things to do. (Spinning plates, juggling knives, doing a back handspring? Child’s play.)

Expression isn’t about words, and it isn’t about style… even though these factor into it heavily. It’s easy to get into ruts with your language, your catch-phrases, your metaphors. Expression is about viewpoints. It’s about perspective. It’s tied fundamentally to the eyes through which you see the world around you, and all the filters between your brain and the world it’s trying to make sense of.

Try this: think about your business. Think about who you serve, and what you do for them. Write it down. Keep it simple. Got it?

Now, come at it from a completely different angle, and do it again. Try seeing it as you’ve never seen it before. (Go ahead, take a minute and do it. I’ll wait.)

See how frickin’ hard that is?

You might have come up with some different phrases, or maybe a different way of languaging your process. Good for you. But did you notice how easy it was to slip back into your old way of seeing things? Did you feel how hard it was not to trudge down the same road as usual?

What does any of this matter?

It matters because it’s necessary. It matters because, in order to stay on top of the wave of a world that’s in constant flux, you have to constantly be reinventing your view on yourself. Why? Because people are constantly re-evaluating you each and every time they come in contact with you, and if you keep on spouting the same old tired platitudes, you’ll slip gently into the good night of obsoleteness.

As Hugh McLeod (of gapingvoid.com) wrote in his HughTrain Manifesto,

It’s no longer just enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they’ll go elsewhere if they don’t.

It’s not enough for the customer to love your product. They have to love your process as well.

Now this isn’t some isolated business-speak, devoid of deeper implications or the need for actual human intimacy, here. Hugh goes on to say, “It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage. It?s about why you?re on this planet. To make a dent in the universe.” In other words, if you want to reach people, you have to dig deep. You have to extract the essence of what you’re about, and offer it up on a platter to anyone and everyone who reads you, gets in contact with you, or even remotely thinks about hiring you. And if you hope for being referred to others, be prepared to share your soul.

And, my friends, none of this can be done without some open-hearted introspection, dogged determination to strike to the core of who you are and what you do, and the genuine desire to connect with your fellow (wo)man. If you insist on mamby-pamby’ing around with superficialities, you’ll marginalize yourself. There’s too much ambient noise these days to just whimper, and expect to be heard. If you want to be heard, you’ve gotta yawp.

I know, I know…

This is tough stuff. This is bare-naked, raw-to-the-bone stuff. But it doesn’t have to be ugly. It can be a glorious sharing of your innermost desires, an arms-wide-open invitation to the world to glimpse the essence of who you are. And sharing of that magnitude rarely goes unrewarded.

Some may not like what they see. Some may object, driven by their own fears and doubts, and blame you for their pain. Others may counsel you to take a safer road, or keep hidden, or “appear professional (i.e. do ‘the ostrich routine’).” I say, let them have their way. You forge yours. Let them leave. You stay. And shine.

Some people—the right people, the people who matter—will love you for it. Why? Because you’ve given them something to love, something to wrap their hands around and hug. Those who stay hidden can’t touch, or be touched, like this.

It takes courage to step outside of your comfort zone. But that’s okay. I know you can do it. I believe in you.

I’m twittering now… are you?