John Jonas Blog

Isn’t it funny that we do these things we call “New Years Resolutions” where we swear to ourselves that we’re going to do something.

Yet…the whole point of these things is that we’re going to put off doing them until the new year comes.

And, since you don’t start something on a Tuesday, this year we’re going to put off starting our new habits until Monday, January 7.

So, a month ago, you decided to procrastinate losing weight because there was something special about January 1 (well, now January 7 because that’s a monday).

And 2 weeks ago you decided that January 1 was a magical day when you would work on making money outside of your current job, or you would be more patient with your kids, or you would be a better person.

January 1 doesn’t have any magic. That’s why new years resolutions almost always fail.

Procrastination is bad. And generally that’s what a resolution is. It’s something we’ve procrastinated, and something we knew we were going to procrastinate until the new year.

What happens if you need to lose weight in July? You’re going to get fatter until January 1? That really stinks.

I don’t do new years resolutions because when I realize I need to change something in my life, I make a big effort to change it today.

If I need to lose weight (which has happened a few times), I stop drinking chocolate shakes at 9:30 at night today. If I need to stop spending so much time on email, I close my email browser today.

Of course, I always write these things down in my todo list and email them to myself.

Make your new years resolution for 2008 to not need to have any 2009 new years resolutions. Resolve to change your life “today”, every day this year. You’ll have a much more productive year if you do.

Over the past few months I’ve become semi-obsessed with productivity because of my BlackBerry.

After reading David Allens “Getting Things Done” and having his system change my life I have stumbled upon/created a system for personal productivity that uses technology to make me more productive.

If you’re not paying the $20/month to be able to do email from your smartphone, I think you’re wasting the biggest productivity tool you have. I’ve always said that outside of being a phone, most pda/smartphones are just toys. They look cool and sound great, but in the end, they’re just eye candy. Toys to play games with in your down time and keep people’s contacts in.

Here’s my podcast of How To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Million Dollar Tool instead of just having a phone and a toy.

Or you can play it here:

The website I use and talk about in the audio is http://tracks.tra.in.
I also use Google calendar.

Here is the php script I use to email myself the todo’s.

Here’s a video of instructions:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=816501744180957431

[tags]gtd, getting things done, gtd online, blackberry, smartphone[/tags]

My wife just told me she needs to switch to gmail. A few times recently she has deleted a message from yahoo and then wished she could have it back a couple days later.

The archive button in gmail is great in that you don’t need to delete messages anymore. Instead of deleting, simply archive. 2.XX GB is a lot of space.

However, being able to save messages you don’t know how to categorize isn’t the best thing about the archive button.

The best thing about the archive button is how it changes the mental state of email users.

One of the biggest problems with email is having to decide what to do with each email. It’s so time consuming. It’s also a major brainpower consumer.

Not any more.

The archive button can be used to say:

Get this email out of my face, I don’t want to deal with it.

or

I don’t know what to do with this email, so just get it out of my inbox so I don’t have to think about it.

Mentally, it allows you to get your inbox back again.

It allows you to get rid of emails, without having to figure out if you should delete, respond, categorize, group, filter, …, …, an email.

It allows you to think about more important things than a stupid email that isn’t going to help you in life.

If you haven’t read Getting Things Done yet, you need to. It will change how you think about what you keep in your head.

Email is a major contributor to thought garbage (the dumb thoughts you keep around in your head, trying to remember stuff or thinking about unproductive things, things that aren’t going to help you in any way) and the archive button helps get rid of it.

I’m not sure google really realized how effective the archive button was going to be. For me, it’s so effective, that I’ve turned my inbox over to someone else to filter my mail before I see it. I can let someone else safely archive all the emails that they think I shouldn’t see.

If they get it right, great. I don’t have to see the emails I didn’t want to see.
If they get it wrong, ok, that’s fine. The emails are still there. I just have to look at “all mail”, or search for the important email (if it’s really important, it’l get through to you).

If you’re not using an archive button, you should be.

It’l free up your brainpower to think about more important things.

I’m in the middle of Timothy Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week and it prompted me to write this blog entry.

He talks about going on an information diet. Not reading the newspaper, watching the news, reading blogs, talking on the phone, going to meetings…

I decided a few months ago that I was going to do this. I wanted to JUST work on my business and on making money.

Not that I don’t think that being part of society and being informed is important, but for me, right now, getting my business running in an automated way is more important.

And I have succeeded at it.

It took a few months.

But, after a few months of hard work and separating myself from stuff that just distracts from what is really important, I have things running to the point that I can now concentrate on the stuff I want to concentrate on.

For the past 4 months I haven’t blogged. I haven’t read other people’s blogs. I haven’t worked on stuff that doesn’t make me money. I haven’t really gone to meetings. I stopped going to the UVEF luncheons that were fun, but a waste of 4 hours of a day.

I have participated in a weekly mastermind group with some brilliant internet minds and it has been worth every minute of it.

My point in writing this is that I think that sometimes we get too caught up in the popular things people do. The problem with this is that the reason they’re popular is because they’re easy. Easy things don’t often lead to the successes we want.

It’s also much easier to do good in this world when you have money and time to spend.

I hope to write some of the insights I’ve gained over the past months at some point. No guarantees. I’ve seen a lot of good…I’ve seen a lot of bad.

I’ve seen that if you really concentrate on the most important things to get done, you can make a lot of progress towards the things you want to get done.

Stop answering email as an excuse to why you aren’t successful!

Read Tim’s book.

A few weeks ago I saw “The Secret” dvd, a movie put together by Rhonda Byrne with a bunch of successful people in it including Jack Canfield, Bob Proctor, and Joe Vitale.

When I saw it, I immediatly identified with it because I have seen the “law of attraction” in my life over and over again. If you seek out good people, good people will seek you. If you look for certain things in life, they’ll find you.

Since I haven’t blogged for a while, I thought this would be a reasonable way to get back into the swing of things. The secret dvd is worth watching. You can rent it at blockbuster.

While it alone won’t change your life, the principles they’re teaching are good. (There’s also a really good lesson to be learned from the whole movie)

[tags]the secret, the secret dvd[/tags]

Here’s the picture:

6 inches!

IT’S SEPTEMBER 16!!!

Help me out a little!

This morning I was feeling a stomach ache and I thought it might have been because of some bad water I drank over the weekend.

After a little bit of moaning my wife asked me:

“Did you miox yet?”

Mioxing to us means mixing up a batch of extra strong water using my miox water filter and then drinking it immediatly. I love the miox filter because it will kill anything, supposedly including a lot of viruses.

Normally you’re supposed to mix the solution according to how much water you’re purifying and then you’re supposed to wait 15 minutes before drinking it. When I “miox” I mix the solution twice as strong as I’m supposed to and I drink it right away. The thought is that it will kill whatever is in my stomach that’s making me sick.

Sure, it probably also kills all the good bacteria in my stomach, but they’ll come back, and it’s worth it to me to try to kill whatever else is there.

So far it has worked two of the three times I’ve done it.

Today wasn’t one of them!

If you’re into emergency preparedness or anything of the sort, the miox water filter is a must have.

After my last blog entry about GTD I did some more research and came across tracks.tra.in, a hosted tracks service.

It turns out that tracks is a web based application that was specifically developed with GTD in mind. From what I can tell, and from the research I’ve done, tracks is the perfect online implementation of David Allens book Getting Things Done.

Tracks has lists that are context based (@home, @work, @phone, @car, @whatever you want) and it has projects so that each task is assigned to a context and a project. When you do your weekly planning, you can easily look at each project and decide what the next actions to do are and assign them to their appropriate context.

What’s even better is that it has a sweet ajaxy interface which is very uncommon of most open source projects, and even more uncommon of a project that was done for something so specific as this. I mean, this project wasn’t meant to be the end all todo list online, it was meant to be the perfect implementation for GTD online.

I think they’ve accomplished it.

And, it gets even better.

The owner of tracks.tra.in is very open to suggestions. So, in the past week he added a feature to his hosting service that allows you to post todo’s to your lists via email. And, even better than any other “post todo’s via email” implementation I’ve seen, this one allows you to easily assign a task to a context and project from your email subject. It’s so sweet!

So, for my specific implementation right now I have about 30 projects and 8 contexts:
@computer
today
@home
@phone
@car
@waiting
@someday
@email

Daily I go through the tasks in all the @ context lists and add them to my ‘today’ list. That day I try to get those things done. This saves me the mind power of having to review my other lists all day long and keeps me focused on what I should be doing, instead of wandering through the rest of my todo’s.

I’m a happy camper.

One more thing…Right now his hosting is free!

[tags]GTD, Getting Things Done, tracks, Best GTD Implementation[/tags]

Update: I found what I believe to be the best GTD implementation online.

This post was supposed to be detailing my implementation of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.

Instead, it’s going to be a plea for help with it.

See, I’ve been using Backpackit for my implementation for the past few months. Then, over the last few weeks I got away from it a little. A few days ago I picked up Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, Allens second book. It inspired me to get back into the system.

However, when I went to get back in I realized some weaknesses in the backpackit model for implemting GTD. It doesn’t have an easy way to move things between lists on different pages. It doesn’t have an easy way to have things on multiple lists (like, I want to create an action list for a certain project, and I want those actions to show up on my @actions list. I also want to be able to seperate them onto my @home, @car, @phone lists.).

I’ve read the blogs about GTD with Gmail (which I find very compelling), backpackit, rememberthemilk, voo2do, and tiddlywiki.

They all seem to have advantages and disadvantages.

So, before I go spend days figuring out how to use them all, I figured I’d ask others how they implemented it.

I have a few requirements:

1. It must be online. I don’t want to lose my lists because of a computer failure.
2. I must be able to send emails to the list from my blackberry. I love being able to send todo’s to my backpackit page, but I don’t like that it’s not easy to categorize it after that.
3. Must have an ajaxy interface.

Any person implementation thoughts/experiences?

[tags]GTD,Getting Things Done[/tags]

This is going to be my first podcast.

I’m not sure I’ll do this all the time, but I thought I’d try it and see how people like it.

To tell you the truth I wasn’t totally comfortable with recording it, but sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zone.

This is about hiking in Zion National Park with my kids.

Hiking in Zion National Park with small children (mp3)