Photo by A_of_DooM

Let’s say you’re looking for a thrill, so you jump into a lake. What a rush! But now you want to swim to shore, so that’s what you’re going to do.

But first things first. You’re in the middle of the lake, and you have to keep your head up. So you start treading water, and you find that it’s not too hard to keep your head above the surface. You feel confident that you can keep going, and decide to take a little break and relax for a while.

After some time, you’ve started getting tired, and you remember that you originally wanted to swim to shore. But you’re feeling awfully cold now, and can’t motivate yourself to swim. You have enough to deal with just keeping your head above water while you’re so cold and tired. So you decide to wait for a better time.

Eventually, you start to resent your situation. How did you end up in the middle of the lake in the first place? What did you do to deserve that? This isn’t fair. You don’t want to be in the lake, you want to be on the shore. But you have to spend all your energy just to keep your head up and stop shivering. You can’t possibly be expected to swim now. That will have to wait until later.

But when later comes, you’re now so tired that you can no longer tread water. And so you drown.

Did you really not see that coming? When you stand back and look at the situation objectively, it’s perfectly obvious what was eventually going to happen. And yet when we’re the one in the lake, it looks very different to us.

After you race against a deadline at work, have an argument with your boss, fight traffic on the way home, pick up your dry cleaning, pick up the kids, and do whatever you have to do, do you feel in the mood to:

• Research a potential career change?
• Begin a new exercise program?
• Work on your novel?
• Study a foreign language?
• Take up yoga?
• Rethink your investment strategy?
• Look into starting your own business?
• Learn self defense?
• Plan a trip around the world?
• Start any of the projects you really want to do, but never find time for?

Of course not. You’ve put so much effort into just getting through the day that you don’t have much energy for anything else. If you manage to put any effort at all towards a new project, you probably won’t get very far.

If you want to write a novel, maybe one day you spend a few minutes of your free time thinking about it and even manage to write a whole paragraph. Then you decide you’ve done enough, so you relax for the rest of the day. The next day, you don’t have time to work on it. The next day after that, you try to remember where you were going, and eventually write another paragraph. Then you forget about it for two weeks. When you come back to it, you have no idea why you wrote what you did, and you start over with a new idea. And then you’re too busy to work on it the next day.

When you do this, you’re just treading water, and eventually you’ll give up and drown. If you don’t want to drown, either don’t jump in the lake in the first place, or start swimming to where you want to go.

This means that if you’re going to do something, you should really do it. If you only do it a little bit, you’re not going to get to where you want, and you’ll only waste time that could be better spent elsewhere, while deluding yourself into thinking that you’re actually getting something done.

We only have enough time to do so much, so before starting something new, decide if you really want to do it. If so, figure out how much time you need to devote to it, and come up with a schedule. Will you work on it every day? Five days a week? Will you work on it early in the morning, late at night, or some other time? Make a plan for getting the job done, and decide what you’ll need to sacrifice to make the time.

It’s really helpful if your new project is something that’s fun for you. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do something that’s not fun when you’re low on energy. But if it’s fun, it’s much easier to sacrifice other things to make the time.

You’re probably spending significant amounts of time on things like TV and pleasure reading because you need these things to recharge your batteries. But if you’ve decided to start a blog or learn to tango, then presumably these activities are fun enough that you’ll have no problem diverting some time from TV or reading. If your goal is to find a new job…well, the search is probably not going to be fun, and it will be hard to make time for it. Still, instead of just pretending to look for a job, it’s better to bite the bullet, make the time, and get it done.

There are many great productivity tips out there, but I think it all starts with making the decision that you want to swim instead of treading water. Realize that if you tread water for too long, there’s only one possible outcome. Keep that in mind, and you’ll be much more motivated to start swimming.

Photo by Torchondo

One of the hallmarks of successful people is fantastic time management. With so much information on the internet, the way you manage your information flow will make or break your productivity. RSS is a great technology for helping you make the most of every minute online.

Those of you who are already using RSS readers may want to scroll down to “What are the benefits of subscribing via RSS?” to see my opinions on the benefits and costs of subscribing to blogs. First, I’m going to give a detailed explanation of RSS for the many people who aren’t familiar with this technology (which included me until a couple of months ago).

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a mechanism for publishing feeds for frequently updated websites, such as blogs. If you like a blog and want to be sure not to miss any posts, you would subscribe to the blog’s feed in order to keep up with new content. This way, you don’t need to remember to come back every day to see if there are any new posts. In effect, you have a virtual assistant who monitors your favorite blogs to let you know of any updates.

Most blogs let you subscribe via RSS or via email. The email option is great for people who see a blog they like, but who aren’t familiar with RSS and don’t want to bother with it right now. Subscribing via email is very simple. You just enter your email address, click a button, and then you’re signed up to receive all future posts by email. You can unsubscribe at any time, and at least on this blog your email address is kept private and not used for any other purpose (although I can’t say for sure if that’s universally true).

Subscribing to one blog via email is fine. The problem is that when you start subscribing to more blogs, you start getting more emails. When you get too many, they clog up your inbox and become a huge distraction. This is where RSS comes in handy.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need an application called an RSS reader (also known as a feed reader or an aggregator). This application manages all your subscriptions in one place. I use Google Reader because I saw that many people were recommending it, and I already had a Google account. There are also many other RSS readers available, and most of them are free (like Google).

When I come across a new blog, I often make a judgment in a fraction of a second. If it’s totally unappealing, I leave. Otherwise, I’ll take a few seconds to check it out, and if I like it, I subscribe. If I’m not sure, then I read the About page to get a better idea of whether I might like it if I got to know it better.

When I started out, I was pretty liberal about subscribing to blogs. By subscribing to any blog that looked interesting, I quickly got up to more than 50 blogs in my reader (including my own, because I want to be sure that my feed is working). Subscribing to a blog is a very small commitment because you can always unsubscribe later if you decide you don’t like it. So if I’m not sure about a blog, I always give it the benefit of the doubt and take it for a trial run. I do try to quickly decide if I want to subscribe, because if I don’t like a blog then I don’t want to waste time, but if I do like it then I want to subscribe before I forget about it.

You can subscribe to a blog by clicking on the familiar RSS icon you see on most blogs (the image at the top of this post is an enormous example of the icon). You’ll be presented with a choice of readers, but because I’ve already told my browser to use Google by default, I go straight to Google’s subscription page. It gives me the choice of “Add to Google homepage” or “Add to Google Reader,” but Google Reader is the only reasonable choice for managing many subscriptions. You can also subscribe to a blog by clicking the “Add subscription” link in Google Reader and pasting in the URL, but that doesn’t always work.

Some blogs publish a feed for their comments, so if you want to be sure to catch all the comments on a blog, you can subscribe to the comments feed. I never do this myself, because I’d go crazy reading hundreds of comments every day. However, when I leave a comment on someone else’s blog, I often check the box saying “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail,” if there is one. This way, I can see if someone replies to my comment. However, I don’t do this on very popular blogs, because I don’t want all the emails.

When I’m at a point in my day when I’m ready to catch up on my favorite blogs, I log into Google Reader and see which of the blogs I’m subscribed to have been updated since I last read them. Where it says “Show: updated – all,” I select “updated” so the screen isn’t cluttered with blogs that don’t have any new posts.

Most people who use an RSS reader will read the posts right there in the reader. Many people are annoyed with what they call “partial feeds,” where only part of the post appears in the reader, and you have to click the link to visit the blog and read the full post. However, I find that I always want to click the link and read the post on the blog instead of in my reader. I prefer to see the variety of blog themes instead of the same old Google Reader screen, and I want to at least scan the comments that other readers have left (comments aren’t shown in the reader unless you subscribe to the comments feed, which I never do, and most blogs don’t even have a comments feed). I offer a “full feed” on this blog, so you can choose whether you want to read the posts in your reader, or click the links in your reader to read the posts on my site.

What are the benefits of subscribing via RSS? (Some of these benefits apply to email subscriptions as well.)

1. You have a steady flow of good information coming in from blogs you like, so you don’t have to waste any time trying to find things to read that may or may not be any good.

2. You save a lot of time by not having to manually check all your favorite blogs to see if there are any updates.

3. You have a one-stop shop for checking all your blogs, and you can access it from any computer.

4. You don’t miss any updates to your favorite blogs.

5. If you only check your reader once in a while, you only get updates when you’re ready to read them. It eliminates the constant distractions of email notifications.

6. If you leave your reader open, you can get updates sooner. This lets you be one of the early commenters, which means more people will read your comment.

What are the costs of subscribing via RSS?

Just time. But time is a precious commodity. My opinion, although it’s not a terribly popular one, is that most bloggers post way, way too much. A few bloggers report the news and have to post frequently. But other than those people, I think bloggers should generally write no more than 2 long, detailed posts or 4 quick and easy posts per week. I don’t think there should be any minimum posting frequency. Some of my favorite bloggers only post once every couple of months.

I previously said “When I started out, I was pretty liberal about subscribing to blogs.” That’s when I was trying to build up my subscriptions, starting from nothing. Now that I have 50 feeds, I’m much more selective about which blogs I’ll subscribe to. I’m still somewhat liberal about giving new blogs a trial run, but I also need to make room for them by unsubscribing from other blogs. If a blog isn’t consistently good, I have to drop it. That doesn’t mean I think it’s not worth reading, but the reality is that I can’t read everything I’d like to. At some point, I’ll have to unsubscribe from every blog that isn’t consistently great.

50 feeds is pretty much my limit, and the only reason I could keep up with this many is because my situation at work gave me lots of downtime during the day. But that changed today, and now I’ll only have short breaks at work. Regrettably, this means that I’ll probably only be able to keep up with 15 blogs or so, as I don’t have a ton of free time at home either. I wish I understood how people can keep up with 50, 100, 500+ blogs.

As my time for blogs becomes more limited, I’m forced to unsubscribe from some blogs that I would otherwise read. A great way for someone to get me to unsubscribe is to post too much. Post once a week, and I’m likely to stay subscribed if the posts are at least somewhat interesting. Post four times a day, and I’ll unsubscribe the instant I decide that I don’t absolutely need that blog.

I’m actually not following my own advice here. I think I’m going to write a post tomorrow, which will make four posts in four consecutive days. And this post you’re reading now is not exactly a quick read. This is unusual for me, and I’m doing it only because I’ve had a small flurry of time-sensitive post ideas. (In this case, it’s because we’re currently discussing RSS on Are You Part of This Bungling Band of Bloggers? by Catherine Lawson and Spikey Traffic Distorts Visitor Statistics by Barbara at Blogging Without A Blog.)

If you’re not using an RSS reader because you’re not familiar with the concept, I certainly understand, as I was in that boat not long ago. But if you read more than a couple of blogs, you’ll want to start using an RSS reader to better manage your information flow, and greatly improve your productivity.

Photo by sunrise100(deuce)

Shaun Boyd at LifeReboot.com has written about how he recently accepted that nothing he writes will ever be perfect. Falling into the common trap of obsessing over perfection, he scrapped a lot of posts that were probably excellent because he found something wrong with each one. Then he received this comment from a reader:

“well, after almost a month with no new posts, i’m forced to unsubscribe. it’s a shame – this blog had a lot of potential.”

Shaun acknowledged the comment, then responded by writing a post the next day, and another one four days later (which was yesterday). He says he’s given up on perfection.

I can’t say that I’ve kicked the perfectionist habit that cleanly, but I do make an effort to relax my inner editor to increase my output. I think of it as “doing it right vs. doing it right now.”

This is not specific to blogging, but it’s very common with any kind of writing. I notice it when I’m writing software programs, which is somewhat understandable, but I even do it with very simple emails. I always feel the urge to check the spelling one more time, make sure everything flows, that all the bases are covered, and that everything sounds right.

In a way, this is good. After all, if you look around it’s not hard to find plenty of cases where work has been done very sloppily. Paying attention to detail is a good thing.

But one of the problems with too much of a good thing is diminishing returns. When you write your first draft, it might be 85% perfect right off the bat. A small amount of effort is all that’s needed to get it to 95%. If you check it very carefully and pay a lot of attention to how it will sound to readers, you can eventually get it to 99%. But a perfectionist will spend exponentially more time getting it to 99.1%, then 99.101%, etc.

By spending all that time trying to make an already good thing marginally better, you’re depriving yourself of the chance to make many more good things. Which would you rather have: one post that’s 99.44% perfect, or five posts that are 95% perfect? And here’s the kicker: the world probably won’t appreciate your perfectionism. Show someone a 95% post against your 99.44% pure masterpiece, and they might not be able to tell which is which. They might even prefer the other one.

While this principle is commonly observed in writing, it can be seen everywhere. Anytime someone says it’s not a good time to have kids (year after year after year), or they’re not good enough to start competing in some sport or hobby (year after year after year), or they don’t have enough information to try a business idea they’ve been thinking about (year after year after year), they’re stuck in the trap of waiting for the time to be right. Guess what—the time will never be right, so you can’t let that paralyze you.

I’m not saying to be careless. I’m saying to be aware of the trade-offs and strike a balance between “right” and “right now.” People tend to err heavily on the side of doing things “right,” and then realize far too late that they haven’t done very many things. Relaxing your standards a bit can help you crank up the output and get far more done for the same effort.

On another note, can someone explain to me why a low posting frequency would force someone to unsubscribe?

Photo by dbking

In the early 20th century, Thomas Edison was trying to develop a new storage battery, one that was small, light, cheap, durable, and quickly charged. When his first 10,000 attempts didn’t work, a friend showed sympathy for Edison’s failure. Edison replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He persisted and eventually succeeded in creating a battery that was considered by some to be the greatest invention since the incandescent lightbulb.

There are two lessons here: when to give up, and when not to.

Edison had a vision for what his battery would do for the world. He saw electric cars replacing horses and trolleys. He saw cheap electric power replacing steam boilers. He saw electric navigation being used for civilian and military purposes. The possibilities were endless. This was his vision, and he never gave up on it.

However, while Edison did not give up on his vision, he very much did give up on 10,000 specific ways of realizing it. You could say that Thomas Edison was one of the biggest quitters in history.

When one particular method didn’t work, what do you think his response was? Do you think he kept trying the exact same thing over and over again, hoping that the laws of physics would eventually give in to him? Of course not! He noted what didn’t work, and moved on. He might have made other attempts using the same materials in different ways, or using the same techniques with different materials, but he knew that when something didn’t work, continuing to do that same thing wasn’t a viable option.

Edison’s first prototype that did what he wanted used nickel-iron cells and a potash electrolyte. If he had achieved the same results using entirely different materials, do you think that would have been acceptable to him? You bet! What was important was creating a battery that overcame the limitations of other batteries at the time, and made all kinds of practical applications possible. The nickel/iron/potash solution was simply a means of reaching that end, but he would have gladly accepted any other means that accomplished the same result.

Do you have a vision for your future? Hopefully you do, because as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” Set your sights on what you want your life to be like. You’re free to change your mind whenever you want, but if you take the time to come up with a good vision, it won’t be changing drastically from one day to the next. Stay focused on the life you want, and don’t change your mind unless you decide that certain things aren’t as important to you as you once thought.

How will you make your vision a reality? Will you start out on one path, and head straight down that path until it reaches the glorious end? Not likely. The days when people were expected to work their entire lives at a single company are long gone. Nowadays, most people have 8 different jobs between the ages of 20 and 30. Throw in all the business ventures you might try, and this number will be even higher. And remember that a job or a business is not a static, unchanging process, but one that evolves over time and presents many possible ways of performing it. Altogether this means that you’ll probably try many different things before finding something that produces the desired result, which is your vision of the life you want for yourself.

Take a lesson from Edison: stay focused on where you want to go, but be flexible as to how you get there.