Tag Archives: Declutter

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 13th June 2010

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This is another post on autopilot as I have taken my wife away to the Lake District to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Staying in a great little hotel and booked into some awesome restaurants so I am sure I am enjoying myself.

I am also away with my Apple iPad for the first time although the location where I am staying is very remote and I do not hold much hope for any 3G access. Still it will be nice to see how I cope without my MacBook Air, which I sold last week!

Here are my collection of links for this week.

  • My first link for this week is to a great post titled 6 Tips for When You’re Not in the Mood to Work. I am sure we all feel like this from time to time when the procrastination monster moves in and this post has some ideas on what to do when you do feel like doing nothing.
  • My second link is a link to an excellent OmniFocus Cheat Sheet. OmniFocus is an excellent application and one that has a control of in-depth control. This cheat sheet shows you some of the keyboard shortcuts that can be used to make navigating the application a lot easier. Essential reading if you use OmniFocus.
  • My third link is to a post titled The End-All Guide to Getting Out From Under Your Office Crap. This is a great de-clutter post from Lifehacker that covers the importance of a clutter free working environment.
  • My fourth link is a link to a nice post called Ways To Get More Done from Investors.com. This is nice little post that covers some productivity basics.
  • My fifth and last link is to part 3 of a 14 part series from the Christian Science Monitor where they are discussing the Getting Things Done book by David Allen. This third instalment is titled Getting Things Done 101: The five phases of project planning. This is an excellent series and well worth the time investment.

Hope you all have a great week ahead!

Getting Away From it All – Mentally Declutter

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Bamburgh castleI have spent the past week on holiday with my family in Northumberland.

I lead a very busy life and there is nothing I enjoy more than taking my family away for a great holiday. What amazed me about this break was the simplicity of it and the fact that a lack of a fast Internet connection made me focus on other areas, for the better!

I am blessed with a great wife and four great children. They can all sometimes suffer with my busy schedule that often involves time way from home working away.

Northumberland is a county on the North East coast of the UK, just above Newcastle. Northumberland is one of the border counties between England and Scotland and because of this there is an amazing array of castles such as Bamburgh Castle (In the picture), Lindisfarne Castle, and my childhood favorite Warkworth Castle.

I spent many great holidays in Northumberland when I was a child. The beaches are great and it is a great place for a proper family holiday.

We have been to Northumberland for the past three years but we normally go in March when the weather is somewhat cooler. This year we decided to go last week in June and I am glad we did.

Taking time away from my busy schedule is quite hard as I do spend a lot of time online and involved in my business.

Time take out to ensure you have a mental declutter!

I did take my MacBook Air with me and of course my iPhone. I have a Vodafone 3G USB modem which got me a rather unusable connection speed of 20 Kbps. My iPhone was not much better but I could receive email so I could keep in touch with work to ensure I could catch up with and answer any issues that needed my attention.

With such bad connectivity I wondered how I was going to survive a week away from high speed Internet and my various daily tools such as Twitter!

My 42″ HD TV had been replaced with a 14″ portable with only terrestrial channels! No Nintendo, no PS3, no Blu-Ray, how was I going to manage?

The strange thing is that I found it extremely refreshing to be totally disconnected for a week. I took a couple of Moleskine notebooks with me and the down time made me think about different things that enabled me to plan a few projects I had been working on and come up with some great ideas that I may not have had in my usual jam packed day.

I managed to collect about 80 new tasks whilst offline. All of these were recorded in my Moleskine. I never make the time to think so having the opportunity to relax and think made me focus on getting things off my mind and onto paper, a great mental declutter!

My children are aged from 3 to 9. They had a fantastic time. We were a minutes walk from the beach and they were happy enjoying the simple things in life for the week. No mention was made of a Nintendo or Playstation and they were very happy taking it easy and playing on the beach and sand dunes.

I have now been back from my holiday for three days and I am already back into the thick of things but luckily the time spent away was very beneficial and I have updated OmniFocus with a lot of great new projects and tasks.

Only three weeks and then I am on my main holiday in Italy for two weeks!