Link of the day: "Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player"

I follow Cal Newport's blog, whose theme is something along the lines of how to live your life, so that you are creative and get a lot of (real) work done while staying sane.

I liked one of his recent posts where he discussed a piano player's strategy to becoming better. The strategies of "Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy; To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder; Systematically Eliminate Weakness" -- they all fit the general strategy of deliberate practice, which I've discussed in the past here and here.

The last strategy "Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness" fits into the general strategy of visualization. In sports, coaches talk a lot about visualizing your success or visualizing your strategies to deal with a particular situation. For example, if you are a forward playing ice hockey, you could visualizing the three different moves you'd use to score a goal on a breakaway. But visualization can be extended to so many other situations beyond athletic and musical performance. When you get up in the morning, you can script your day and visualize how you want things to go.

Link of the day: Program your daily tasks on your calendar

I was glad to learn that I'm not the only one who puts mundane tasks like "gym" and "schedule haircut" on my calendar.  Whitson Gordon (who seems to be the best writer on Lifehacker these days) wrote a very nice post about how he schedules basically everything on his Google calendar. 

I like doing this for many reasons.

1. You don't have to waste your cognitive energy on worrying about when to do these boring, routine tasks.
2. The calendar tells you when to do it. Think of it as your electronic mother. If you tell yourself, maybe I'll clean the bathroom this week, it's not going to get done. If your mother tells you to do it this afternoon, you are much more likely to get it done.
3. The calendar enables you to get the chores done on a regular basis so you keep your life in order.

Link of the day: Hacking your own job

Michael Ellsberg wrote a fantastic essay explaining how to become a self-made freelancer. Summary of the essay:

• Something like 80% of jobs are obtained through networking, not resume dropping.
• You can't "hack" the credential oriented jobs like being a doctor or lawyer, but you can hack all other jobs (side step formal credential requirements) by reading books, talking to people, networking.
• There are many successful people who have pulled off this hack through self-discipline and devotion to learning on their own.
• This post outlines a plan on how you can achieve success without formal credentials.

But what I like most about the essay is that it alludes to the American ethos of the self-made man:

Most people who drop out of school also drop out of learning... However, there are people who drop out of formal education, while still maintaining an absolute passion and discipline for learning—informally, non-institutionally, in the real world... I’ve interviewed almost 40 millionaire and billionaires, all self-made, and none of them finished college. In interviewing them, I was consistently struck by one thing they all had in common: a complete lack of regard for socially-sanctioned formal “requirements” for bringing success into their lives.

Sports analogies to deliberate practice

Being an athlete and training for a sport confers skills that are easily transferred to many kinds of work. Many employers like athletes because they know how to be part of a team (unless it's a solo sport), and they understand what it's like to work towards a goal.

The nice thing about sports is that training and the results of that training are tangible and easy to see. When you train for a sport, you aim to be consistent in your performances. You also pace yourself so that you peak at competition time. Each sport is different. For instance, playing basketball requires you to peak several evening a week for games, but a marathoner might only run a race every few weeks. However, the ideas are the same. Pacing is important because you don't want to get injured. This is just like in a knowledge worker type job. If you work too hard, you'll burn out. So pace yourself.

The reason that athletes become really good is because athletic training is a form of "deliberate practice." The idea is that you figure out what are the key things you need to work on so that you can perform at the highest level during competition. For a hockey player, that might mean trying to take shots from many different angles, off different feet, in awkward positions, so that during a game, you can score. For more information about deliberate practice, check out this post about deliberate practice at Psychology Today and this discussion of Geoff Colvin's book on the subject.

Link of the day: "How to Find More Time in Your Day by Putting Your Chores on Auto-Pilot"

Lifehacker has a nice feature on how to schedule and organize household chores so that you can concentrate on more important things in your life.

I'm interested in this topic since I want to uphold a certain standard of cleanliness and organization in my life, but I don't want it to be distracting. I already put my chores on a Google calendar, just like the author of the Lifehacker article.

Link of the day: "Build Your Own Productivity Style by Remixing the Best"

Over at my favorite website Lifehacker, Alan Henry has written a really nice article summarizing the most popular and effective productivity methods and explaining the core principles of being productive. He emphasizes that you don't have to follow a particular system, but you can mix and match to find whatever works best for you, hence the title of the article "Build Your Own Productivity Style by Remixing the Best."

I really like this piece because there is so much stuff out there about productivity, but the article really cuts through all the crap. It's a fantastic introduction to productivity that was sorely needed.

Link of the day: Schedule time to worry

Exactly what the title says. An interesting idea is to schedule time to worry (originally mentioned on MSNBC). Scheduling a specific time to worry may actually reduce stress and anxiety. I've personally postponed strong feelings, but I know that only comes back to haunt me because I'll just experience it later at some inconvenient time. I should try scheduling worry time.

Thoughts on deliberate practice

Lately I've been intrigued by discussion of deliberate practice. Cal Newport has a nice post explaining what "deliberate practice" really is.

Looking back at life, I can see where I applied deliberate practice. It’s really easy to do deliberate practice with sports since they are so structured and well-defined. I think that’s a good area to start with, to see how it’s done and to gain confidence. That's right: learning a sport is a good way to "practice" deliberate practice. In college, I spent about a year learning skating and hockey so I could make the varsity hockey team. I went to a couple PE classes and then spent as much time as I could at public skate and intramural hockey.

Here are my general thoughts about how to apply deliberate practice. The obvious factor everyone has already mentioned is practice time. (Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on something.) Then read as much as possible about your subject. That could mean reading books, talking to people who are good at what you want to learn, or watching videos on the internet. Learn good technique and learn good taste (why do people think successful person X in your field is so great?). If you really want to get good fast, move to a place where you can fully immerse yourself in the topic. For example, if you want to become an artist, move to New York. If you want to learn a foreign language, move to that country.

Then refine and tailor the learning technique to yourself. Not all training methods will work for everyone. Find a way to maximize the efficiency of your learning technique. In hockey, professionals don’t practice hours everyday. They practice one hour at maximum intensity, just like a game situation. It is better to practice small amounts of time at high intensity then for long periods at low intensity.

If you want to become decently good at multiple things (as opposed to the 10,000 hour expert), I think it’s best to choose a hard fundamental area of the topic. If you want to become a scientist, physics is a great topic because it forces you to appreciate deep understanding. Physicists find it really easy to jump into other sciences like biology or linguistics. (Disclaimer: I am a physics grad student.) If you want to become a great visual artist, I would pick drawing/painting over photography. I’ve studied bits of both and I can already see that the technical aspects of photography are really easy to pick up. Drawing is much more skill-oriented and really forces you to think hard. There are plenty of self-taught photographers, but that's not really so true of painters.

Deliberate practice can be done in different amounts. Malcolm Gladwell's figure of 10,000 hours is intimidating because it means spending 20 hours a week learning for ten years. Committing ten years of your life isn’t really realistic. What I think one should do is do deliberate practice on one thing for a year at a time and evaluate at the end of the year.

Link of the day: The Pomodoro Technique

I can't remember where I found out about this technique (Lifehacker?), but the Pomodoro Technique seems like a very nice time management system. It was invented by Italian Francesco Cirillo, but his book on the system was only translated into English two years ago. From my speed reading of the text, the system has been tested with real subjects and shown to be effective. The main idea is to quantize time into 25-min chunks. During each chunk or "pomodoro", one focuses on a single task. The word pomodoro is Italian for tomato and comes from the fact that the first timer the author used was made to look like a tomato. The goal is to finish a certain number of pomodoros each day, say 8. I haven't tried the system, but the system seems to make time more manageable because you only have to keep track of 8 pomodoros instead of worrying about how much time you spent on each task, or losing sense of time and spending wrong amount time on a task (or worse wasting time on an unplanned activity). Cirillo claims that quantization changes our perception of time (which we normally think of as a continuum) and allows us to relax and focus on our work.

Link of the day: The ghost telecommuter

Everyone knows about telecommuting, but this guy takes the next step. He syncs his home desktop monitor with his cube monitor. He sets up a webcam and speakers in the cube as well. Co-workers can go into the cube, talk to him, and look at what he's doing on his monitor as if they were working with his ghost!

Link of the day: How to declutter your Facebook homepage

An essential link for heavy Facebook users -- "How to De-Clutter Your New Facebook Homepage." I didn't know about the feed preferences page. There's a person who posts updates that I'm not interested in, but I don't want to hurt the person's feelings by de-friending him. So I went to the feed preferences page and put him in my "less about these friends" list.

Lifehack tip: Save install files and information

For last few years, I've been saving all my install files on an external hard drive. Doing this has really helped me whenever I have to re-install my operating system. I've had to re-install Windows XP twice, not counting the time that the Lenovo repair depot needlessly wiped my laptop back to factory state.

Starting over from scratch, it's handy to have all my install files on-hand without having to download them again or even remember what I had on my computer [1]. More importantly, if you buy software that's only available online, you can only download it once. If your computer crashes and you have to re-install your operating system, that is not a "valid excuse" for getting another copy of the software. Believe me, I tried.

If the install files require license codes, make sure you save those, too. And don't forget to backup the install files!

[1] Alternatively, you could run Belarc Advisor on your Windows machine to get a list of all installed programs on your computer. Belarc Advisor is also handy for getting hardware model/ID numbers.

Lifehack for separating clean and dirty sponges

A while ago, I learned on Unclutterer about a way to separate clean and dirty sponges.

I tried it today and it worked like a charm. The idea is that as your sponge gets dirtier and nastier, you cut off a corner. The more corners that are cut, the dirtier the sponge. So you can use the dirtier sponges for nasty business like cleaning showers and the cleaner sponges for washing dishes.

Write notes on your cellphone as text messages

I had an idea a few days ago. It's a variation of the email important to-do items to yourself. If you're out and about, you probably don't have a pen and paper, but you do have your cellphone. You can text message yourself and save it as a draft. (Hopefully, you remember to look at the draft later.) If you don't mind spending a few cents or if the content of the message is important, you can actually send the text message to yourself.

Maybe this idea will become anachronistic when cellphone manufacturers decide to put more PDA functions in their phones...

Calendar setup

In a previous post, I described how I use my calendar to send myself "strategic reminders." Reminding yourself to take your vitamins, look at your finances, schedule a haircut, etc is a pretty obvious idea and it's not surprising that Gina Trapani wrote about it in an article called "Tickle yourself with Yahoo Calendar."

I thought people might like a more detailed look at my calendar. I used Yahoo Calendar for over two years and it worked very well. However, recently I wanted to transfer my calendar from one Yahoo account to another. There was no good way of performing the transfer because I had too many events (Yahoo should fix this!). I became very annoyed and switched to Google Calendar.

One nice thing about Google Calendar is that I can manage many calendars and label each calendar with a different color. I have different calendars: "Daily reminders," "Weekly reminders," "Monthly reminders," "To do," "Appointments," and "Special events." I chose colors for the reminder calendars in the bluish-purplish part of the spectrum, allowing for easier identification.

Reminders are exactly what they sound like. They are to-do items -- reminders to do something. In general, I only require that the reminder be done the same day but I put a time on the reminder so that I get the reminder at the time-of-day when I should do that item. I should go to the gym in the morning, so the reminder email gets sent at 5 am. I don't want to worry about cleaning my room in the morning, so that reminder gets sent out at 7 pm. Often, I am so used to doing certain items on a daily basis that I will just do them without the reminder. Whenever I complete a to-do item, I delete the corresponding reminder email from my inbox.

Now for your amusement, here is my calendar for all of you to see. The first screenshot is only the daily reminders. There are a ton of them, which is why I turned off viewing for the other calendars. Most of the items are self-explanatory. "Temptation blocker" is a piece of software that prevents me from wasting time on the internet. You probably noticed that I track various information including my bedtime, wakeup time, my mood that day (on a numerical scale), and the work I planned and actually did that day (which I call a "worklog").


There are too many daily reminders, so they get cut off in the monthly view. Here's a detailed view.


As I already mentioned, these same daily reminders show up in my inbox. Since I use Gmail for personal communication and don't want to mix that up with to-do items, I setup a Gmail filter to forward calendar reminders to my Yahoo account.


Here's a view of my other calendars. The "To do" calendar consists of to-do items that don't reoccur, e.g. that only happen once. The "Appointments" calendar consists of to-do items where I need to be somewhere at a certain time. The "Special events" calendar current includes birthdays, though I might decide to add other types of events later.



Not everyone may agree with this method, but I always associate an email reminder with every calendar item. I like to be able to open my inbox and look at what needs to be done that day. I don't want to open up Google Calendar and look at the big picture unless I'm doing a weekly or thirdly review. My calendar operates on a need-to-know basis, which I believe is the most efficient setup.

Alarm clock setup - August 2008

I wrote about my "new alarm clock setup" back in January 2008. I claimed it worked. Well, I lied. I would simply get up and turn the alarm off.

Fortunately, I have a new and improved setup! My sister bought me a very expensive sun clock. It's a special kind of clock that simulates sunset and sunrise. At a preset time, the bulb attached to the clock will diminish or increase in intensity. The idea is that the simulated "sunshine" will help you in the wintertime when there isn't much light.

My particular sun clock is the BioBrite Digital SunRise Clock - Advanced Model with White Noise. The BioBrite can simulate sunset and sunrise in 15, 30, 45, and 60 minute durations. I use the preset 30 minutes.

So here's my new alarm setup. My bedtime is 9:30 pm. Around 9 pm, I pull out my sun clock and put it on a chair by my pillow. I turn the sun clock lamp up, all the way to full intensity and set it to sundown in 30 minutes. You can see I was a little late getting to bed last night. The clock reads 9:37 pm.



This is what the clock looks like at 9:52 pm.



At 10:01 pm, the clock is really dim. And I should be in bed by now.



The sun clock is set to wake me up at 5:25 am. The lamp brightens gradually. This is what it looked like at 5:07 am this morning. Yes, the sun clock woke me up earlier than 5:25 am. I decided to get up and take a picture before hopping back in bed.



The lamp is really bright at 5:33 am, 8 minutes after the alarm was supposed to "go off."



At 5:30 am, my iPod alarm clock kicks in. When I hear my iPod, it means I have to get up. Currently, my iPod is set to wake me up to the opening number of Sondheim's Company. Too bad the actors sing "Bobby, Bobby." I think I should edit the mp3 to have them sing my name in the morning. Wouldn't that be cool?!

I didn't actually take this photo at 5:30 am. The picture is just to show you what my iPod alarm clock looks like.



Yes, there is a radio alarm clock (the thing with the giant green numbers) next to the iPod stereo. I *could* set the radio alarm clock for a third alarm, but I find that two alarms is enough.

The current setup works pretty well. (Thanks, sister!) Independent of technology, it helps that I am finally putting my body on a regular schedule -- bedtime 9:30 pm, wakeup time 5:30 am. I find that once you get a regular schedule started (at least 7 days of waking up at the same time), it's much easier to keep it going.

The streak board

I started a five-day-a-week gym habit about a month ago. To inspire myself, I bought a piece of foam poster board and write a mark for everyday I went to the gym. The idea is to not break the streak. I read about this idea in a Lifehacker post. Apparently, Seinfeld wanted to improve his comedy skills and decided that he should write new jokes everyday. To pressure himself to keep up the habit, he bought a big wall calendar. He would draw a big "X" on each day that he completed his habit. The positive motivation was to make the chain bigger and bigger; the negative motivation was not to break the chain.

I call it the streak, rather than the chain. It really helped for the first three weeks of the habit. I've kind of gotten used to going to the gym now, but on that one slow day of the week when I don't really know, I think of my streak and that helps push me to go to the gym even though I don't feel motivated. I don't want to break the streak!

Here are a couple photos. Notice I don't use the standard tally where you draw four vertical lines and then complete the tally with a diagonal slash across the vertical lines. I use the Chinese method which is to write a 正 character, stroke by stroke. It looks nicer and it's easier to track of where you are when you tally for a long time.


You can see that I've kept up my gym habit for five weeks, the start date being June 17th, 2008. The missing mark in the third week is because the gym was closed on the Fourth of July.

Grad Hacker

I found a new productivity blog (yes, I know, yet another one). It's called "Grad Hacker" and written by a graduate student in the natural sciences. I like his view on productivity:

Let me start of by declaring this outright: my goal in personal productivity is not to minimize the amount of time I spend “goofing-off” it’s to maximize the amount of time I spend in the focused, imaginative, stress-free “flow state”. I spent some time walking the first path and it just made me tired, bitter, and sick. But, now, changing the way I view productivity has made life absolutely splendid.

Here are some posts that caught my attention:

• "My views on productivity" - the above quote comes from this very post
  
• "Getting up early: Week 1" - logging and reporting on his experiment to get up early. As he says and also in my own experience, it's really hard to keep it up because one day you stay up late and screw up the next morning.
  
• "Simple GTD: Do you really need need contexts?" - an interesting opinion, that graduate students don't need GTD-style contexts. I agree. I always end up organizing my todo list by project (that is, when I was using my todo list).
  
• "Reading natural science papers: A method I swear by" - I suck at reading papers. Maybe I'll try his advice.
  
• "Notecard for the week" - Yup, I love the one-notecard, one-pen in pocket method. I have three posts just on that very topic.

Overall, a great blog! I look forward to more thoughts from Grad Hacker.

Link of the day: Upgrade an unproductive day

Via Lifehacker, I read an interesting post called "Upgrade an Unproductive Day by Mentally Rehearsing a Better One." I agree; there is considerable value in replaying the "tape" of how your day went and figuring out why it went wrong. For instance, I found that it was hard to get up in the morning. I finally realized the reason was that after I turned off the alarm clock, I didn't know what my next step was. So I decided that my next step was to make coffee/tea and that has really helped.

Creating a knowledge vault

Cal Newport blogs about writing down what you learned so all that studying doesn't go to waste.

I've been having exactly the same thoughts lately. I moved my website to siteground.com because they claim to make it easy to install and use MediaWiki, the wiki software used by Wikipedia. I suppose I could have used something free like pbwiki, but pbwiki uses proprietary software. I want to have control of my data and be able to back it up and move it to other servers if necessary.