Let’s start with the admission first. I got into blogging after reading some articles on Steve Pavlina’s blog about how to create your own blog. He made it sound fairly simple and so I thought that I would have a go, not knowing what I was letting myself in for. I didn’t have much more intention than to be something of a Pavlina clone, only talking about my own personal methods for getting things done. So I followed his model very closely. One of the first things to do was to come up with a name and here I made a big mistake.

I used a pen name that I had devised some years before. I did this a) because I had no idea what I was letting myself in for and I didn’t know if there would be any unpleasant spill over from my online world into my offline world b) because I thought it was a cool thing to have an alter ego. Or, more precisely a) because at that time I was a coward and b) because cool can often equal dumb.

I didn’t know it at the time but it was a big mistake to make. There has been lot’s of spill over into my offline world but all of it pleasant and so I find going by a pen name more and more irksome - it’s just not me. I have decided to bring that episode to a close. It was a mistake and I apologize for it. I hope that you can accept that it was done out of very poor, naive judgement.

It’s not the end of the journey though. All of the good things that I learned were turned into a book and I have spent much of this year turning the book into a robust system for managing the mind - so that emotional upset is eliminated or easily dealt with - and for getting things done in the most pragmatically effective ways that I have been able to devise.

The result is the Personal Operating System. It’s a set of procedures that allow you to get through your problems systematically and without fuss and bother and lots of wasted time. This system allows you to solve problems and organize yourself for productive action so well that you can create new, productive habits in just 1-day. Hence the name of the new site: http://1dayhabit.com

I’m very proud of the result. After decades of going nowhere and messing up my life, I’ve finally cracked it. I understand how my mind works, how the massive resistance to doing good things is created and how those awful painful emotions are created and hence can be eliminated. I also understand the practicalities of what it truly takes to turn a desire into a reality from initial impulse through to successful completion.

This is not just knowledge, this is a system that makes applying that knowledge as easy as painting by numbers, or following a recipe from a cookery book.

If you’d like to find out more then please visit the About page of the new site. There you can view 6 introductory videos that explain the principles of the Personal Operating System and the 1-Day Habit. The videos explain in greater detail and in an entertaining way the basics covered in the book ‘How To Operate Your Brain Perfectly’ and they expand upon them greatly.

So take a look - you’ll even find out what my real name is….

Thanks for your support and if this is message is a parting of the ways for us then I wish you a sincere “Fare-well” and if you want to continue the journey with me then subscribe to the new newsletter on the new About page and “Welcome Aboard!”

I think of productivity as doing what you want to do, i.e. you are not immobilized by emotional or mental resistance nor by an inability to do what you want to do. It also commonly means getting more done than you did before, or getting more results than you did before.

It struck me that there are two kinds of productivity improvements - efficiency and effectiveness - and that they have a very different emphasis and a very different outcome.

Efficiency is about more of the same kind of thing done than you did before. It’s about a greater usage of time.

Effectiveness is about getting better results than you did before. It’s about getting more output per unit of time given.

GTD is almost entirely about efficiency and it worries me that it has gripped the imagination of so many people because making an ineffective process more efficient multiplies the rate at which it operates ineffectively. It worries me that people who think that efficiency is the key will work ever more efficiently (which I tend to think of as ‘harder’) and yet end up disappointed because they aren’t making the overall result in their lives better.

Hence the title, you can run faster around the hamster wheel but you’ll never leave the cage.

It’s effectiveness that makes the radical breakthroughs that change your life. You achieve that by looking at the root cause of the problem and you respond to that and not the symptom of problem.

In the book, GTD, David Allen gives a story of an executive who got so many emails that he had to come in at the weekends to get through his inbox. This was stressful and time-consuming for the exec and his department didn’t run smoothly because of the bottleneck. Most of the emails required him to make a decision for his staff.

He then applied GTD methods. The inbox became easy to manage and he could respond quickly to his staff’s needs. Performance went up and everyone was impressed with his ability to manage.

This a very good way to manage the situation efficiently but it’s not how I would approach the problem.

The symptom here was a full inbox. The root cause of all the emails was the fact that his staff were not empowered to make decisions. My advice would be to work out processes by which the staff members could reach the same decision as the executive. It wouldn’t work 100% of the time but it would drastically reduce the number of emails and decision points for the executive in total.

The risk in such an approach is that it might make the executive redundant (see my minor victory in this article). A bright and motivated executive, however, could turn her mind to other areas where she could make things work more effectively too.

Of course, I haven’t had the opportunity to solve problems for executives, so I’m speculating to an extent. Tim Ferriss, of 4 Hour Work Week fame, has empowered his staff with responsibility and decision-making processes and spends about an hour a week on emails and the remaining decisions. He’s a man who left the cage. The executive did not.

That’s the power of effectiveness over efficiency.

If you have an effective process already in place and you don’t want to change it then by all means apply greater efficiency as this will increase your output. Even more effectively, delegate that task to someone else

Yours,
Nick
P.S. I’m gnawing at the bars of my cage. Hope to be on the other side very soon…

Life was easier in the past for several fundamental reasons. It used to be that most people made their living from the product of using their hands and bodies. It might take a long time to learn the skills necessary to track and hunt animals, to make tools, to work with natural materials, to prepare and cook food or husband animals, but once learned there was very little more that needed to be learned.

Information and solutions could be handed down from one generation to the next. Little or no understanding of the underlying principles was needed if the method worked time and time again. A lot of new developments simply came out of trial and error and chance results that were noted and acted upon. Problem solving was rarely carried out by anyone other than the rare analytical thinker.

Thus for generations, most people spent almost no time or effort on solving new problems. They learned their necessary skills, maybe studied a trade, and then repeated those processes year after year. The additional advantage of learning skills that are predominantly based upon hand, eye and body coordination is that after a while, you can reach a level of unconscious competence, whereby you no longer have to consciously think about what to do or how to proceed. This meant that the ‘monkey mind,’ that free ranging voice inside of your head, could do more or less whatever it pleased unhindered.

Of course, boredom was ever present, but because so many basic skills could be carried out without conscious thought a lot of other entertainments could be enacted at the same time. For example, the work songs of laborers and sailors, or the dances that came forth from work activities and that form the basis of some traditional folk dances, or just general tittle-tattle.

The only way that you can truly multi-task is to do one subconscious physical activity and another conscious activity - such as singing, whistling, humming or talking - at the same time.

Today, we have to do activities that are very different to those good old days. More and more of us (and probably most readers of this blog) do work that involves a lot of distinct analysis, problem solving and decision making and very little physically repetitive activity. This places a great strain upon our mental capacities. We rarely get to a stage where we can do the bulk of our work subconsciously.

Years ago as a student, I stumbled upon a method that makes revising incredibly simple. I had forgotten about it until I saw a young lady highlighting her way through a text book on the train the other day…

The traditional way of revising for an exam is to read books, highlight passages, write notes and continuously review things. The aim is to remember important information. It’s boring, frustrating and highly ineffective. With a little knowledge of how the brain works, you can make a very clever improvement in how you prepare for exams.

The traditional method is ineffective for two reasons:

1. Remembering through repetition alone works on a very short term basis only.
2. Memorizing things doesn’t prepare you for what you have to do in the exam.

With the following method you can memorize with greater effectiveness and train yourself to sit exams at the same time.

If You Want a Better Answer, Ask a Better Question

Whenever you revise and go through books or papers, stop highlighting or writing notes and instead create questions.

For example, using the old method:
(History) 1960 Nixon fails to become president of the USA.
(Geography) A volcano is formed of a magma chamber, a pipe, a vent and a crater. A branch pipe and parasitic cone often forms.
(Science) Gas expands when heated. When constrained by volume the pressure increases.

New method:
How many presidential elections did Nixon fail to win? In what year were those elections?
What components make up a volcano? In what order are they formed?
What happens to a gas when it is heated? What if you do that in a sealed container of fixed volume?

If learning facts alone is not enough, then ask questions that get you to speculate, or ask questions of the same type that you will be given in your exam. For example:

If Nixon had won the presidency in 1960 what would probably have happened in Vietnam? or to the Space Program? or….?
If you wanted to prevent a volcano from erupting what could you do? What technology would you need?
What would you need to know to work out the maximum internal pressure that a can of soda could withstand before rupturing?

And that’s it. Simple and effective. You can kill two birds with one stone. This method allows you to remember with greater ease and precision than the traditional method and it simultaneously gets you to think as you will have to in the exam.

Now for the explanation, so that you understand why this works and why it is a superior method.

In traditional fashion for this blog, let’s look at the root cause of the problem - the exam itself, or more precisely, the purpose of the exam.

The Purpose of an Exam

It’s a method of measuring how much knowledge you have. Even more importantly, it’s a measure of how much skill you have with manipulating the knowledge to solve a problem.

Imagine it this way: you are a potter and you receive an order to make a pot. You are given some clay by the customer, but it’s not enough to make the whole pot, so you add some more clay to do the job. You take all of the clay and form it into the pot ordered.

In an exam, the order is the question, or problem to solve.Your clay is the information that you are given and what you already have. The pot that you make is a result of your skill at forming the clay to satisfy the order given.

When you revise in the traditional manner, all you are doing is identifying the clay that you might be required to use and where it is. That is not enough to do well. You must practice forming the clay into pots. Since you don’t know what the orders will be on the big day, you must practice forming lots of different types of pot: round ones, square ones, tall ones, short ones, plain ones, colorful ones and so on.

If you don’t do this then when you actually sit the exam you will have clay but little or no skill at creating what the customer wants. Trying to develop that skill during the exam is going to give you a poor result.

Why Questions are the Answer

Asking a question is a stimulus that demands a response. It’s a customer order to your brain and it will always respond with some kind of answer. Asking questions engages your mental capacity to solve problems. It forces you to work with the material at hand. In doing so, you develop the skills that you need to create satisfying solutions, products, or answers.

When you create questions instead of notes, you immediately start to manipulate information. It puts your brain to work. It demands mental activity. Creating notes or highlighting things does almost nothing for you. It’s too passive. That’s why it’s very ineffective.

The Naturally Easy Way to Improve Your Recall

It is very difficult to remember things in isolation. We remember with greater ability when we connect a new item to something that we already know and can remember without fail. When you work the information by answering a question, you naturally connect it with things that you already know in order to create the answer. This increases your likelihood of remembering things by default. It saves you the hassle of trying to specifically remember things (if you are like me, then you find that boring, frustrating and very ineffective).

So there you have it - an easier method than rote memorizing and a superior method for exam preparation.

If you are a student or a teacher, then please let me know if you will use this method and the results that you get.