After my last post about the review of The Magic of Thinking Big, I have just found this amateur video on YouTube about the book that I thought I would share.

One book that I have read quite recently was The Magic of Thinking Big, by Dr David J. Schwartz.

The book is written by Dr David J. Schwartz who was a professor at Georgia State University before starting a consulting firm that focuses on leadership development.

The front cover of the book drew me in with the blurb of “Set your goals high then exceed them!” Being one for believing in the importance of setting goals I thought the book seemed like a good read and the reviews on Amazon where non too shabby so I decided to invest the time in reading the book.

The book is around 350 pages in length and is split into what I would call mini section chapters. There is no real flow to the book with no clear sections and each section/chapter seems to address a specific issue, for example their are chapters called “How to overcome the fear of other people“, “Think as big as you really are“, and “Get the thinking big view of your job“. The benefit of this type of structure is that you can pick up the book and just read one of the 30 page or so chapters and then put it down. I have also found that I have gone back to a few of the chapters since reading it to re-read and the organisation allows you to do so as a reference manual.

I must admit that I found the book quite old fashioned in its thinking and it seemed to cater more for corporate America, people working for large corporates and happy to do so. Being more of an entrepreneur I found some of the advice against my core values, but we are all different, and I did find the book a positive use of my time. The book does utilise real world examples for every aspect that is covered. This helps the reader relate to the advice given as the author explains situations which he has experienced where somebody has benefited from the advice in the book.

The book is very similar to the famous Think and Grow Rich from Napoleon Hill in the fact that it instills the confidence in the reader that you are what you think, and the mind is the strongest muscle in your body that when trained and utilized correctly can bring with it results.

So, in summary, worth a read but not up their with the best books and I would give it a 3 out of 5.

Just a quick post as I am writing this blog post from my Hotel room in Winchester as I am working away for a while with a client.

The cool thing is that I am writing this using the brand new Wordpress App for the iPhone.

The App allows you to add multiple blogs and view, edit, and write new posts.

This will be great for me to write little Twitted type snippets to my blogs although adding images and links may prove hard with no copy and paste yet on the iPhone.

Well, I am going to start my day now. Have a good one!

I think Zig Ziglar is just great.

If you do not know who he is, he is a Southern American Motivational Speaker and has been on the speaking circuit since the 1980s. I have blogged about Zig before and his Motivational Podcast.

One of the videos on Zigs podcast is one with his very famous Water Pump. This was Zigs trademark in the early days and I urge you to watch this, and hopefully you will make the connection to the words that Zig is saying.

I think there are many truths in this video, ones that can help you in a lot of aspects of your life.

Watch the video, and I would love to have your comments and feedback.

Just been reading a great review of OmniFocus over at the Apple Briefs website.

I had never come accorss the Apple Briefs website before but my Google Alert that is set to Track for OmniFocus brought it to me.

it is a pretty good and true review of OmniFocus and is worth a read.

Just watched this little video from YouTube. It is the Freeline Report for free online GTD Apps.

Worth a watch and the Freeline Reports are actually pretty good for 2 minute snippets.

One of the books I read whilst away in Portugal was the How to Get Rich book by Felix Dennis.

I bought this book a few months ago following an Amazon suggestion. The title intrigued me as wealth is something that I am constantly striving for and I read many books on the subject.

I must admit that I had not heard of Felix Dennis before reading the book although I had come across Dennis Publishing. Dennis Publishing has published magazines such as Maxim, Micro Mart, PCW and others including a range of Kung Fu magazines and books on people such as Bruce Lee. Felix has amassed a fortune of over $700,000,000 from his publishing empire and he now spends most of his time writing poetry on the island of Mustique in the Caribbean.

Now, when you look into Felix, the word eccentric comes to mind. He also slightly reminds me of George Best, and the way he led a lot of his life. Felix admits to spending around $100,000,000 on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He was addicted to cocaine and high class whores for a good part of his life. Luckily, he has put all of this behind him.

The story goes that he wrote this book after reviewing “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell, which he thought was utter bunkum and snake oil, just like every other self-help book he had ever wrote. He has an extremely low opinion of the self improvement lot and you can tell that a lot of his comments are directed towards Tony Robbins. So, he set about writing an anti-self-help book, one that told people how hard it was to make it and “bugger the glib insights!”.

The opening chapter proclaims that the book will improve your sex life!. It claims that if you make more money, it acts as an aphrodisiac and people are attracted to this so yes, it will improve your sex life.

The opening chapter really intrigues you to see what else is going to come later on in the book and I will tell you that it is all good.

Comments like “Teamwork is the glue that binds losers together” pretty much sets the scene for this book. It is a hard hitting no-nonsense guide that will scare the living daylights out of the majority of people who succumb and accept a life of wage slavery. However, the more entrepreneurial of us will nod our heads in agreement to many of Felix’s statements.

Now, I totally loved this book and have already read it twice. There are many truths in the book that ring true and the book was ideal reading for the place where I am at in my life right now.

So, if you are unhappy with the drudge of wage slavery and think you fancy taking the risks of going alone, then the book is definitely for you and I urge you to stop what you are doing and buy it right now. If not, it probably equates to a slouch potato reading a commando training manual!

Here are a couple of videos from Felix that I found on YouTube about the book, Check them out.

Felix on How to Get Rich

Reviews of How to Get Rich

Being a Moleskine and iPhone fan I thought I would share this neat little video with you.

Not much use that I can think of but 2 minutes of light fun

I have just been reading a great post over at 43Folders about the impending release of OmniFocus for the iPhone.

It is worth a read as Merlin Mann from 43Folders.com has acted as a consultant on the OmniFocus project.

One new thing that this post brings is information about location aware contexts. So, this means that the iPhone can prompt you what needs to be done based upon where you are. Now, that sounds very cool to me and a feature that I am sure will be great to use. I eagerly await this release, hopefully on the 11th of July although I have not seen any firm dates yet.

If you are not already, now is a great time to subscribe to this blog in your favorite RSS reader so you can keep up to date with all the posts.

Well, after a great two weeks in Praia Da Luz, Portugal, I am back!

Normally, as we all find, any lengthy absence from work results in a return where we dread turning on our computers to see how many emails have arrived and how many tasks we have to plan once back. In fact, it is true that most people need a good few days on their return just to catch up with processing the emails and also processing tasks that have arisen during their absence.

I am sure this has happened to you. And this, is only for the motivated and organised. The darker side to this is what happens to the not so motivated and organised people whom I seem to meet along the way. These people just leave the unread emails in their mail application. Every time the connect to the mail server, the number in bold increases letting them know how many of their emails still need to be read. Until, one day arrives where they select all of their emails with a CTRL-A or Command-A and then mark all as read, using the excuse “Well, they would have got back to me if it was important” type of attitude. I was amazed that a senior employee at my last company who was in an operational capacity had such an attitude. I once glanced at his email client and noticed that he had over 500 unread emails, and this is somebody who we were paying to run operations for a growing organisation. This made me re-evaluate my thoughts towards the employee and their effectiveness.

Mastering the art of email is a critical step in the quest for self organisation, and one which we are going to really promote here at DidIGetThingsDone.com.

So, how did I do?

Well, thanks to my EeePC and the fact that my Vodafone 3G card worked a dream in Portugal I did very well. I covered what I was going to do in a previous post which is worth a read if you are just joining me for this post.

I was able to check my email around three times a day without it affecting my family, and remaining under the radar of my wife, who understands that I lead a busy life but who cringed at the thought of my laptop invading a family holiday! Now, since I was on holiday I applied the 2 minute processing rule of the Getting Things Done methodology to my emails, that is, if I could action the email in two minutes I did, if I didn’t I processed it.

Now, I get a lot of emails, but a lot of these are junk due to the length of time that I have had my email account and some of these get through the Spam filter. So, most of the emails I deleted, some I replied to, and some I processed.

Now, since I was away with my EeePC and there is no OmniFocus for Linux so I wanted a way where I could process my emails in one shot, rather than having to do it when I arrived home.

In a previous post, I covered how to email actions directly to OmniFocus. By doing this, you can send an email that when Mail.app picks up, it automatically processes the mail based upon its content within OmniFocus.

So, I set up a mail account that OmniFocus processes but I did not collect whilst in Portugal, then, every email that needed processing got forwarded to this email address with the correct fields where appropriate.

In conjunction with this, I carried my Moleskine Cahier where practical. I collected quite a few tasks all of which I processed using the same process by emailing them to myself so that OmniFocus would process them on my return.

On my return from Portugal, I launched Mail.app and OmniFocus. After a few minutes, all of my tasks from my vacation where processed, and placed into the correct contexts. All ready for me to start actioning.

I have been home a few days now and already making great progress into these tasks.

So, overall, a great experience and nice to come home fully organised thanks to my simple Vacation Getting Things Done system.

How do you manage your tasks whilst on holiday? Would love you to comment so that we can all share this information.

Thanks, and look forward to hearing your comments…