Excellence is an attitude

Creativity is a Choice, not a Gift

Beautiful Boomerang postcard, that I found at a diplay in a cinema. I like to complete it with the quote I found in the Metaversemessenger

Excellence is an Attitude, not a Talent”

Now I found at a Dutch blog about inspiration the 19 E’s of excellence, written by Tom Peters.

• Enthusiasm. (Be an irresistible force of nature!)
• Energy. (Be fire! Light fires!)
• Exuberance. (Vibrate—cause earthquakes!)
• Execution. (Do it! Now! Get it done! Barriers are baloney! Excuses are for wimps! Accountability is gospel! Adhere to the Bill Parcells doctrine: “Blame nobody! Expect nothing! Do something!”)
• Empowerment. (Respect and appreciation rule! Always ask, “What do you think?” Then listen! Then let go and liberate! Then celebrate!)
• Edginess. (Perpetually dancing at the frontier, and a little or a lot beyond.)
• Enraged. (Determined to challenge & change the status quo!)
  
• Engaged. (Addicted to MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. In touch. Always.)
  
• Electronic. (Partners with the world 60/60/24/7 via electronic community building and entanglement of every sort. Crowdsourcing rules!)
  
• Encompassing. (Relentlessly pursue diverse opinions—the more diversity the merrier! Diversity per se “works”!)
  
• Emotion. (The alpha. The omega. The essence of leadership. The essence of sales. The essence of marketing. The essence. Period. Acknowledge it.)
  
• Empathy. (Connect, connect, connect with others’ reality and aspirations! “Walk in the other personâ??s shoes”—until the soles have holes!)
  
• Experience. (Life is theater! Make every activity-contact memorable! Standard: “Insanely Great”/Steve Jobs; “Radically Thrilling”/BMW.)
  
• Eliminate. (Keep it simple!)
  
• Errorprone. (Ready! Fire! Aim! Try a lot of stuff and make a lot of booboos and then try some more stuff and make some more booboos—all of it at the speed of light!)
  
• Evenhanded. (Straight as an arrow! Fair to a fault! Honest as Abe!)
  
• Expectations. (Michelangelo: “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” Amen!)
  
• Eudaimonia. (Pursue the highest of human moral purpose—the core of Aristotle’s philosophy. Be of service. Always.)
  
• Excellence. (The only standard! Never an exception! Start now! No excuses! If not Excellence, what? If not Excellence now, when?)

GTD: Mind Depositor

It never stops with blogging about Getting Things Done. Zen Habits had a blogpost full of humor about a GTD-addict; the most interesting statement was:

(…)you may be a productivity junkie if (nr 8 ) sex with your spouse is on your someday/maybe list.

Without bragging too much about my own performance as a lover I can safely state that this is not the case for me However, some other of the signs listed definitely apply to me, e.g. nr 2:

You spend significant amounts of time comparing GTD systems with other life “hackers.”

I have good reason for that: I’m always open to new ideas, to do things better.
Patrick Ng from Hong Kong has an interesting blog about GTD. He designed a new “hipsterPDA” template, you can download it from his website. I’m impressed, not in the least by his generousness for sharing, but for now I’ll stick to my own system.
Patrick Ng’s website is worth a visit for other articles too: it has a powerfull slogan:

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thoughts

and an article about the content of his bag. I just thought about writing myself a blogpost on “Me and My Bag”, but then I realised that this had been done before by other lifehacking geeks.

More on GTD: action management application RememberThe Milk is very popular among GTD fans. I have an account, but I prefer my simple D3 TiddlyWiki. Now you can spice up RTM with user styles. Hm, maybe I should give RTM another try; I’ll put that on my someday/maybe list.

In case, just in case, the continuous stream of GTD blogs will dry up one day, David Allen has recently published a follow-up to GTD: “Making it all Work“. It’s about “the matrix of self-management”

A quote from the last chapter: “Pay Attention to What Has Your Attention”:

If (..) you really want to effectively identify and incorporate those higher-horizon commitments, you must start with what’s taking up the space in front of them. More often than not that’s 22 e-mails you’ve been avoiding, the sitter you need to arrange for your kids for tomorrow night, and buying cat food. If you don’t deal with those effectively, they will undermine your recognition of the bigger stuff or at least diminish your ability to focus on them clearly.

That brings it back to what GTD is all about: The purpose for being productive is to have more time for doing the things you actually want to do with your life.

Getting Things Done and The Art of Procrastination

David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” has infected the Web, especially web 2.0. There are a lot of blogs on GTD, the most famous are probably Merlin Mann’s 43 folders, and Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. The great LifeHacker website has some interesting articles on GTD and, more important, articles on other Life Hacks that make life worth living for a Geek.

I like GTD for it’s logic, it’s clarity, but a serious side effect is the discussion about operating systems (Windows or Mac) and software applications that help integrating GTD into your life. This, and the overkill of blogs with tips and tricks lead you necessarily reading so much about Getting Things Done, that you wind up with getting nothing done at all, or at least getting less done than you usually did before you read the book.

Last month LinuxFormat magazine had an article on GTD organization tools. I’ve tried them all, but the application that works for me wasn’t in the list: it is D3 TiddlyWiki (D3 means: Do, Delegate, Defer), which works perfectly well with Firefox from my USB drive.

In fact this is the only thing I use @computer: I do have a RememberTheMilk-account, with all the necessary add-ons in Thunderbird, Firefox and Gmail, but although I send every task to my RTM inbox, I forget to check it regularly.

I think there is nothing wrong with good old-fashioned pen and paper. So my HipsterPDA is the cheapest (€ 0,90) and smallest (10,2 x 6,3 cm) note-blocks you can buy in The Netherlands. I wear them in the pocket of my shirt. With a four color pen (€ 0,95) I write down my task:

Then I use the following codes:

• Red: Do the task asap.
• Blue: Do task today
• Green: Do task this week
• Black: This goes into my somewhere/maybe folder.

When the task is done I tear it out and throw the piece of paper in the trash bin.

A more high-tech capture tool I use is my Olympus Voice recorder – When cycling to my work (or back home after work) I simply record whatever comes to my mind (a tune, an idea for my blog, a task I may not forget, a present I have to buy) into my voice recorder.

Well, that’s all there is. Quite simple eh? Never a dull moment, but some time left to read a book, to study, to program, to compose or just to have fun; that’s after all the purpose of life.

Don’t live to geek, but geek to live (Gina Trapani)

TiddlyWiki

Two Months ago someone told me about David Allen’s  Getting Things Done. Only two weeks ago I felt like googling the meme and I was amazed about the idea. Best part was the discovery of the TiddlyWiki – concept. Besides the TiddlyWiki by Jeremy Ruston, there are also many offsprings, like TiddlyWiki Plus, MonkeyGTD and d-cubed. These are more written for integration with GTD, but I like it for my information-management. Here you see my personal TW, work in progress. TiddlyWiki is easy-to-carry and easy-to-edit.