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This is the first part in the series I've been writing about getting my life together.

My biggest challenge, even now, is to start my day well. Starting is almost the only deciding factor in whether or not my day goes well and I am a productive human being.

1) Use inertia in your favor

One day I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how I was being a slacker at that moment in time, and how I felt powerless to change it. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion until an external force acts upon them. The converse, unfortunately, is also true. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest until an external force acts upon them. This is true for people, too. Especially me.

For what it's worth, I didn't magically figure out how to stop slacking that day until it was time for me to go to work… at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I wasted 7 hours. Looking back, I could have gotten so much accomplished I wouldn't have had to do a 12 hour essay-writing marathon later in the week.

Unfortunately though, it is much easier to stop the ball than it is to start it going from zero.

2) Examine your routine

What do you do in the morning? What is your daily routine? For most plugged-in people, it involves showering, eating, checking email, reading the news, and getting dressed. In what order is a big thing. For years, my typical routine has been to roll out of bed and plop myself in front of my computer and catch up on email, the news, discussion forums, blogs, etc. I would get sucked in and before I knew it, two hours would have gone by. I have fought this in several ways.

The first is simply showering and dressing before letting yourself sit down at the computer. For some this is painfully difficult at first — it certainly was for me. It's easier now; I found that as I interacted with people more in the offline world, I sought the online world much less.

3) Managing information input

On days that I don't do this — like today, for instance — I use a timer. There are so many feeds in my aggregator that on a Monday, it can take me up to an hour or two just to go through and sort out the content that I want to read. A quick scan can often reveal whether or not a particular article or journal entry is worth reading later.

Long ago I discovered that I can't read large bodies of text on the screen (though I have no problem writing them, as you can see ), but I did nothing to overcome this problem, until last December. In December of 2005, I bought a laser printer. I found that every time I loaded Opera, I would have 12-15 tabs left open from the last session for content that I never read. Eventually I would get annoyed and simply clear them all out. But when I bought my printer, I went looking, and I discovered that most major publications have a "printer friendly" option. I became friends with this option and I started reading more than I had in years. I must have printed out (and consumed) 40-60 pages in the first day of usage.

I would copy multiple blog entries into a single word document, shrink the font, and print them out for reading on the train or bus. In this way, I allowed myself to be more efficient with my time later. And I find reading things on paper much more enjoyable, which is why I keep a stack of 500-1000 pieces of used-on-one-side paper loaded in my printer at all times since this sort of printing constitutes the bulk of the pages I print. You won't find blank paper in my printer; I hate waste. (I recycle the paper when I'm done with it.) For large volume printing, a laser printer will save you money because toner is much less expensive than ink page-for-page, and laser printers can be had for a very reasonable price.

Back on track here… when you are at your computer, use a timer. Now that I have a Mac, I use Minuteur (which is unfortunately not available as a Universal Binary), which has a countdown egg timer, and a stopwatch feature, which is very useful when I'm using something like David Seah's printable CEO, and I want to keep track of 15 minute intervals.

I limit my daily sorting and reading to 30 minutes. One time, I let myself go longer, just to see how much time I would spend if left to my own devices. It ended up being 2 hours. (Minuteur turns into a stopwatch if you let it exceed the timer countdown.) I wasn't happy, and I try not to let myself go longer than this 30 minutes. 30 minutes for email and blogs, then it's time to continue the rest of the day.

If I can accomplish these things when I get out of bed, I am on a roll for the rest of the day. If I am worried that I won't be able to get going quickly enough, I involve other people in my morning, for instance planning a trip with someone else to Home Depot for the morning rather than the afternoon to force me to get out of the house.

Start the ball rolling as soon as your feet hit the floor, and it'll stay in motion almost by itself.

~Written 5/5/2006

Getting things done, personal development, productivity, GTD

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