Managing Online Projects in 5 Easy Steps

You have clients, deadlines and tons of work to do. You have to deliver results and stay on top of your lists. You have to be productive. Otherwise you’re out of the game. And being out of the game is not fun.

I had an online business for more than 10 years and I pretty much know all the thrills of it. It’s engaging, passionate and filled with action. You don’t have time to get bored. Unless you step out of the game. Which, as I already said, it’s not fun.

Over the years, I created, implemented and launched more than 25 online projects. Each with its own budget, promotion, human resources and logistic. Some of them had 2-3 years projections and even more. Some of them become market leaders, some of them dropped dead after a few months. And despite their success or failure I enjoyed doing them all.

In today’s post I’ll share the process I used to make all those projects alive. It got refined over the years, adding something here, cutting something from there. It aims to be simple enough to be applied to a niche blog, but sustainable enough for the next huge social network hit. Which is exactly what you’re working on right now, of course.

Online Projects In 5 Easy Steps

Every online project would answer to only 5 questions, and those are:

1. what is it?
2. who’s going to use it?
3. how does it look?
4. what does it do?
5. how can I do it?

Each question has its own role and specific implementation techniques. I told you, it’s not complicated. Let’s take them one at a time:

1. What Is It?

This is the cornerstone of your project. It has to be contained within only one sentence. For instance: google is a search engine. DMOZ is a link directory. Mashable is a social media blog.  You got the idea. Keeping it in only one sentence prevents you from starting mutant projects, with overlapping or even opposite functionalities. Usually, the first answer that pops into your head is the correct one, although you can get some improvements if you brainstorm it a little.

From my experience, if the root of your project is not clearly defined, you will have serious troubles later on. Too many times, on a technological, geeky rush, we tend to skip this step and go straight into implementation details. As fun as it may be for some of us, the development part is only the 5th part of this set of questions. Skipping the first 4 points will be like dining out naked: you can be sure you’ll make a huge impression, but you cannot be sure it will be the desired one.

2. Who’s Going To Use It?

The second question is about the beneficiary: who’s going to actually use your product? This is what I call “role playing project management”. Oh, this is the most entertaining question of all, that I can tell you. Impersonating other people is always fun. Trying to actually picture the portrait of a standard user for your project is enlightening. In a mirroring way, finding the fundamental traits of an ideal customer will reveal parts of your project you didn’t even know you had.

Another interesting segment of this step is to identify at least 3 consumer characteristics of your ideal user, regardless of your project. It’s a very fun exercise. For instance, how often does he goes to the movies? Or what kind of car does he drive? What tooth paste does he use? Does he use toothpaste at all? You may think right now: what’s the link between the toothpaste of an imaginary character and my online project? Well, if you can’t imagine the user of your project, chances are he doesn’t really exist.

3. How Does It Look?

This deals with the actual support of your project. An online project is not only a web site. It can spread unto other protocols, like email, or mobile. Most of the time, your online project will have at least web and email as its basic information support, but with the latest deployment in the mobile industry, including iPhone, you will have to include mobile as standard pretty soon.

Also at this level, you start to identify the type of messages you are going to use. It could be text, images, animations, video or audio. This step is mandatory and it will have an important impact in the final step. Many project managers call this “provisioning”, I used to call it “how does it look”. This stage will also be responsible with the logical structure of your project: home page, content pages and the relationship between them. You’re wireframing. And while you’re wireframing, it’s pretty smart to start designing your own SEO strategy before adding content to your product. Identify target keywords and hot content areas.

4. What Does It Do?

Slowly, we’re getting there.The 4th question deals with the flesh of your project. If wireframing means constructing bones, now you’re adding some flesh and blood. In this stage you’re defining your features list. Starting from the simple ones, like “I want a link bar at the top, containing these links” up to something like “this workflow will enhance user experience and make him stick with our product”. Or something in between.

I often found that in this stage of a project you can create some very basic unit tests. Don’t freak out, it’s nothing complicated, just a list of desired actions and expected results. If you create an ecommerce site, one of your desired activities in your estore could be “putting products in the shopping basket’‘. And the expected result would look like ”updating database with new values and showing this on to the user“. It can get complicated, of course, but this approach it’s a gold mine especially if you switch teams a lot.

5. How Can I Do It?

And it’s only in the final stage that we’re actually doing it. And we don’t even start with doing it, we start with planning it. Yeap, so far we didn’t have any plan at all. It’s time to create milestones, chose our technologies, start coding and get on with the launch. This is by far the most exciting stage of an online project and many entrepreneurs are starting directly here. Now you understand why we had to chose around question no 3 the types of messages we will use. Because based on those choices we are choosing technologies right now.

From this stage ahead, you can leverage everything you learned about planing, coding and launching. This is pretty much what you do every day, only you can do it now without constantly asking if you’re doing the right thing. You already decided this. You already answered every question which could potentially become a leak in your planing. And that’s refreshing.

One more thing: after you finally launch the project, getting back to the question number 1 ”What is it?“ would be really interesting. You may have some surprises

***

This project management flow was part of a presentation I did a while ago at a local tech event. If you’re interested, you can download the mind map used for the presentation (a screenshot of it is just below this paragraph) Managing online projects in 5 easy steps (1602) - 146.54 KB. Also, feel free to ask any questions about this strategy in comments.

iPhone productivity application reviewed: WhatTasks

The GTD galore is spreading along quite nicely, not only in a vertical direction, by reaching more and more adepts in its traditional western cultural space, but also in new spaces, some of them well over the Atlantic Ocean. One of these days I found the first Brasilian iPhone application which claims to implement the core GTD rules. The application is called WhatTasks and it costs 3,99 USD at the Apple AppStore (on the WhatTasks web page they are advertising a 4,99 USD price, but they also say that “international pricing is available”, so I guess I’ve been included in some kind of discount…). I’ve been contacted directly by the developer, Felipe Belo, a few weeks ago, with a polite request to tell my opinion about this. So, after I finally set up my new 3g iPhone – a white one, you can imagine that? – I thought I should give it a try.

The first thing to know about WhatTasks is that it comes in 2 flavors, a free, limited version, and a full featured version at the price of 3,99 USD. The limited version is called WhatTasks Lite and I installed it on my iPhone 2 weeks ago. What this application is doing is basically a list management. You can create as many lists as you want and add items to them. Once an item is done you can check it out. That’s basically all. It manages the “what” in your everyday activities.

But the real power of the application comes in the paid version (this is somehow predictable, if you ask me). The paid version also gives you access to the “when” and “where” of your activities. This is one of the core principles of GTD: you are doing actions in contexts and at specific dates. You are not just a robot which does everything as it comes, regardless of the specific time or place: you can group your spaces of action into contexts, and you can also group your doing intervals in time chunks: right now, tomorrow or even someday / maybe, if you are not sure of the exact schedule. By adding the “when” and “where” dimensions to the “what” of an action, WhatTasks really comes close to the GTD aware user.

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My Most Downloaded Mind Maps – reloaded

Mind mapping is not only one of my favorite’s way of brainstorming and idea forging, but it was also a constant topic on this blog, since the very beginning. I first published a mind map on 8th February 2007 more than one an a half year from now. It was a Meeting Mind Map Template, which people found quite useful if I look at the number of downloads since then, more than 1000! The most recent mind map was called Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map , published on July 17th this year, and it was conceived as a tool for enhancing productivity and effectiveness of a professional blogger. I was quite pleasantly surprised the other day when I noticed that a StumbleUpon user reviewed it. So I thought it’s time for me to post another list of my most downloaded mind maps just to see how they performed and how and when people found them interesting.

Before going further I’ll remind you that I use the excellent Mike Jolley’s plugin for downloadable content, and the mind maps are in the Mindjet’s Mind Manager format. You don’t have to buy the software in order to see the map presented below, there’s a free viewer at Mindjet website. But you will need to buy a license if you want to create your own mind maps.

So, here’s the updated list of my most downloaded mind maps. Next to each mind map link you’ll see the updated number of downloads, and right after that the number of downloads as on September 4th 2008. That’s for the case you’ll came back to this post after several months and see how the numbers changed.

1. Meeting Mind Map Template (3412) 1040
2. The Procrastinator Mind Map (3121): 771
3. Project Management With A Mind Map (2694): 748
4. Blogging With A Mind Map (2100): 516
5. Review My Software For A Free License (1498): 438
6. Ghost Action Blog Post (1474): 420
7. Managing online projects in 5 easy steps (1602): 192
8. Put your blog into a mind map (2807): 87

As you can easily see, the Meeting Mind Map Template is still the star with over 1000 downloads in around 500 days, which gives an approximate of 2 downloads per day. For such a specialized type of content I think it’s quite impressive. Second in place come the Procrastinator Mind Map, a funny way of using productivity techniques in order to procrastinate more. It was also an interesting exercise for me.

I’ll jump to the last 2 places, because the rest are just scaffolding mind maps for some of the posts I published and their main purpose was to show a real life application for mind mapping.

The 7th position is a mind map I created for a presentation I had in Bucharest several months ago. It is a little bit more complicated, yet pretty easy to follow. It was a very successful presentation and the mind map was also many times requested at the event.

And the last position is the mind map I constantly use in my blogging activities. What’s downloadable here is just a model, and in order to use it you have to fill in the blanks with your own posts, categories, social networking profiles, etc. But I use the same model filled in with my own posts, categories and topics. I must say that this tend to become one extremely useful mind map for me. And the number of downloads is showing this pretty clear, it has the highest download rate, more than 2 downloads per day, and I expect this to become the new mind map star.

But that’s, of course, entirely up to you, the readers of eDragonu’s blog .

[tags]mind map, mind mapping, blogging, productivity, procrastination, fun[/tags]

The Road To Office 2.0 Conference

…Might start right here, right now, at eDragonu’s blog. Let’s be brief about this one, because I’m so excited: in a short note received from Ismael Ghalimi, the founder and producer of the Office 2.0 conference, which will start September 3rd in San Francisco, I am invited to support the conference. I would be so happy to attend in person, but as you already know, my plans are a little bit fixed now, because I recently decided to switch countries, from Romania to New Zealand, and in the next 2-3 months I will be focusing mainly on this. But the very good news is that you, the reader of eDragonu, can attend the Office 2.0 conference, and with a special discount. Yes, you can shave a good 100 bucks from the ticket value by clicking on this link.

And that means you could meet The David in person, because David Allen, the GTD father, will give the opening keynote at the event. How exciting is this for a convinced GTD’er? Well, I wish I could be there, but chances that I will be on the plane for my first trip to Auckland will be more than 100%. I will be following the updates via twitter though, because they already established a twitter feed for this one.

And meeting David Allen will not be the only thing, so to speak, you will find there a good pack of good speakers, like David Colleman, founder of Collaborative Strategies, and Oliver Marks, independent consultant for Enterprise 2.0 strategies. 

Not to mention the fact that all attendees will receive the sexiest collaborative device yet: the HP2133 Mini-Note PC, which can be enough reason to be there, if you ask me. Two years ago, the attendees received an Apple iPod nano, and last year an iPhone. I think the choice for this year is so inspired, knowing that every one of us, the iPhone sick people, already hired all the available mobsters to get the 3g iPhone even before Apple will take it on the market.

So, let’s keep it brief, because you people have to make airplane reservations, pack things up and complete the forms in order to get your discounts. Remember, just click here, and you’ll receive a 100 dollars discount for the Office 2.0 conference.

Have fun and write me a note about the event …

GTD one liners: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

The GTD one-liners are just short sentences that synthesizes in a very simple way some of the GTD concepts I found interesting or somehow become especially close to my activity. There are already 3 other GTD one-liners available and I also started a new section, available directly from the menu bar. The whole one-liner concept comes from the early stages of bash programming in Linux, when programmers started to write incredibly complex or useful programs in only one line of code. There are times even right now when I look for some specific one-liner in bash that could save me dozens of minutes of maintenance performance on my servers.

For now, let’s stick with our GTD one-liners. Today: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

One of the most interesting things I’ve incorporated in my behavior from the GTD system is the way I feel about things I’m not doing. You can only do one thing at a time, you know? Even your brains works in sequentially patterns, one thought after another. At a very high speed, I agree, which can make you think sometimes there is some form of parallelism, but I assure you, the thinking is always done in a sequentially way: one synapse after the other. But because you’re not keeping everything in one place, as GTD requires, and your Inbox is not zero, you tend to split your focus among different thoughts. Trying to organize as you go. Or even worse, trying to do many things at once. That’s right, most of the time you try to focus about what you’re doing, but you can’t really make it because you’re thinking at something else. Something that you’re obviously not doing at that specific moment.

The consequence for this is something trivially simple: you really can’t do your job anymore, or at least in the initially agreed parameters. Or, in a more corporate-like form: your productivity is dramatically declining.  All of this because your focus is somewhere else.

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Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map

There were several posts here at DragosRoua.com, related to mind mapping, over the last two years. In fact, there were so much posts about mind mapping that I had to create a separate category for them. From an introduction of how and why to blog with a mind map, up to a recap of my most downloaded mind maps, I wrote extensively about this. For the newcomer, mind mapping is a writing technique, which expand the linear thinking by letting you write in different “directions” or “nodes” of a mind map. This seems to be the brain’s most convenient way of representing reality, and it is often used as a creativity enhancement tool.

I found mind mapping very useful when it comes to speed up my management activities. Such as maintaining a blog. Like this one. You know, writing on your blog is a completely different beast than maintaining it. It requires a different set of skills, it takes a certain amount of time, and, like all other activities, can be optimized. If I can use mind mapping to streamline my blogging activity as a whole, why not do it?

My blogging process is the result of several different things: the software I use, the ideas that I want to write about, the posts, the categories, the plugins, the downloads, the revenue strategy… Quite a bit of stuff, right? And is not from the same league, as you already saw, it’s a mix of information, skill, activity and strategy. The challenge is to keep this in a manageable structure.

One very important management principle says: keep everything visible. If there are things on your business that are not visible to you, chances are that your customers won’t seem them either. Keep a broader perspective, try to always look at whole picture. And there is nothing more convenient for the “whole picture” than a mind map.

So, I put my entire blogging process on a mind map, and started to unfold it. Here’s the result:

As I already told you, blogging is a mix of different activities, information and tasks. Must be all visible in order to keep a consistent perspective, right? Must put together all items that create the blogging process and my whole blogging process look like this:

1. headline
2. categories
3. posts
4. revenue
5. promotion
6. plugins
7. downloads

As you may see, there is no specific order in which I added them, and no consistency, some of them are information, like posts and categories, some of them are activities that I have to perform, like promotion and monetization, and some of them are pieces of software, like plugins. Not all blogs may have all the items listed above, but my specific setup does, and I’ll take a wild guess that the vast majority of blogs are pretty much like this.

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7 simple GTD rules for bloggers

We all know what GTD can do for top managers or busy businessmen, this is what David Allen is doing all day long, training big guys to get things done. But GTD is not necessary a business-only process. It can be used with great results in other activities, such as blogging. If you are not familiar with the GTD concepts, you can start by reading articles in the GTD category of this blog. Feel free to also look at the series about GTD one-liners. Now let’s see how 7 simple GTD rules can improve your blogging effectiveness.

1. Write with a mind like water

Try to keep your subjects inbox at zero, all the time. That means you should organize your subjects, your ideas, your thoughts and blog development plans as often as you can, until your thoughts are no longer tied to them. Separate your blogging sessions into several patterns: collecting data, processing it, and writing. Collect your ideas about future posts, process them, and never start to write unless your mind is freed from the noise of “generating new posts”.

2. Renegotiate your writing commitments

Renegotiate your writing pace each month, if possible, if not at least at three months. As a blogger you establish a monthly or weekly goal for the number of posts you want to write. But you’ll soon find out that you are either writing too fast, exhausting yourself, either too slow, and your readers are not coming back. Renegotiating your commitments should become a regular habit.

3. Do the 2 minutes rule on your comments

You are reviewing your comments on a regular base and try to keep close with your readers. Great, but when you do that, try to apply the 2 minutes rule, meaning you don’t spend more than 2 minutes on a comment. In GTD, if you think an action should take more than 2 minutes, you are either postponing it, either moving it to a Someday / Maybe tray. Do the same with your readers comments, or you’ll be soon writing more comments than blog content.

4. Use the drafts folder for Someday / Maybe items

The drafts folder is a great functionality of every blogging tool, including the one I use here, namely WordPress. Use it constantly as a placeholder for all your Sometime / Maybe items. Even if it’s just a thought, or a small piece of an idea, put it there, and let it stay until you decide that you’ll do it sometime, or you won’t . The constant habit of keeping a healthy drafts folder was a great way for me to become more productive, and sometimes even more inspired.

5. Never have the same subject again

Unless you really love that subject… In GTD, they say “Never have the same thought again, unless you love that thought“. Diversity is the queen of content. If you are repeating yourself too often the audience will drift away. People are looking for nice subjects and good writing, but if you write the same thing in 100 quasi-identical ways, they will eventually realize that and leave your blog.

6. Do only what is doable

As a blogger you will spend a lot of time surfing the net and promoting your blog through social networking websites. It’s very easy to get caught in new mini-projects like reading somebody’s tags on del.icio.us, or making a new lens on squidoo. That will suck your time away. Identify any doable item in your activities and do only that. You can easily postpone dreaming and play after your work session was finished.

7. Stick to it

Well, that’s not directly GTD but it’s pretty useful. And pretty simple also. Once you managed to keep a fairly normal discipline on that, keep doing it. Over and over again, even if the results are not showing right away. It will surely pay off in the near future, Discipline is not a state, or a quality you have, it’s a process that you enjoy all of your life. Don’t get out the wagon too soon, or you’ll lose all the fun in the trip.

[tags]GTD, getting things done, blogging, motivation, success[/tags]

Do It For Yourself – who’s benefiting from your actions?

Remember that we started this series with a fundamental sentence: you are the most important person in your life. You, and only you, are responsible for your actions, for their outcome, and for the level of energy that fuels you as a result. You’re responsible for your wealth or poverty, for your relations, for your mistakes or successes. Or in a simpler way: you’re the only one responsible for your life.

In the first post we formalized the way you interact with the world, which is based on a 4 steps path:

1. intention
2. energy
3. action
4. outcome

And each of your action will respond to 3 simple questions:

1. how you do it?
2. why you do it?
3. who’s going to be the beneficiary?

The answer to these questions have a direct impact on the energy you can use at every moment in your life. Each answer can influence dramatically your overall energy as human being, or, to be simpler again, it will shape your entire life.

If you just come here I recommend that you should first read the other posts in the series, although they wouldn’t be mandatory for this post. And in this post will talk about the third question, the final one:

“Who’s going to be the beneficiary of your action?”

The third answer is the most easy to understand: who is going to actually enjoy what you’re doing? Who’s at the end of the line? Who you try to reach? Who’s the target? If the second answer was about the “because”, the third is about the “for”: you do things because somebody drives you to, but those actions are for somebody also.

Most people tend to think they have a clear understanding of their targets. They think they obviously know the actual goal for their actions. And at the beginning of your life this is entirely true: a kid is always crystal clear about what he wants. You’ll never have doubts about that one.

But as you grow up, as you adapt to different communities, habits or beliefs, you tend to blend your action goals in a much larger picture. You start to do things for the benefit of others, just because you’ve been thought that. Is wonderful to do things for others, but as a result of a direct, non-biased experience. Do things for others because you feel good about it, not because they told you it’s good to do it. You start to do things because it’s an established habit, or because “it was always like this”. You start to do things sometimes not really knowing why you do those things.

And here comes what I call the fake-targets, or the fake-beneficiary: those persons, or concepts, or things for which you do things in your life, without even knowing that. Take a moment and think about all your actions and try to answer to this simple question: “who was the real beneficiary of that?”

It might happen that all you’ve done in your career was not entirely for you. All those extra hours of work were beneficiary not for you, because they failed to give you that promotion, but for the company. You even got a worse health after that…

In relationships, you do a lot “for the sake of the relation”. You compromise, you pretend not to see things, you accept situations or words that you shouldn’t accept, but you do this “in order to stick to the relation”. Guess what? Those relations never work.

Dig deeper into your life and try to find out all of the actions that you thought you’ve done for you, but actually they had another beneficiary: starting from school, from your job, from your friends or so-called friends, from your family. You’ll discover – with a little bit of bitterness, in the beginning, I have to warn you about it – that most of the time you’ve been acting for other peoples. You’ve been feeding with your actions other beneficiaries…

Those are all fake-targets, as I already told you, they pretend to be something but they aren’t. Most of the time they pretend to be you, your desire for success, for a relationship, for a family or for prestige. But at their core they are nothing but cultural habits that you embraced without judgment. And that you’re actually feeding by giving them all your energy in your current stream of actions. Making them stronger and even more appealing as they grow.

It’s true: you cannot live in a society without adapting to it. And adaptation is nothing but a compromising process: you give something from you, part of your freedom, most of the time, in exchange from something from the society, wealth and respect, most of the time. Those actions are taking your energy and putting it back into the society. It’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you are doing in consciously. As long as you know every second who’s the real beneficiary.

You have to always observe what you do. You have to always know who’s the real beneficiary, in order to identify all of your fake-targets, induced either by the social conditioning, either by early thinking patterns or whatever context you want, but not you. You always have to chose your personal path, and most of this blog is about that.

It’s about learning how to do things for myself, because I am the most important person in my life. It’s about how to overcome my obstacles, being them simple but devastating habits like procrastination, or deeper things like my twisted roots. It’s a constant witness of my efforts in doing better and better. And is also a witness of my mistakes in the process. We’ve been born with a dark side too.

I admit, this requires more than average skills and ambitions. This is not a thing that you may do on a moderate level, because you cannot perform with your greatest potential without investing all your energy. It takes time and patience to learn how to do your actions, to find out why you do what you do, and to identify without mistake the real beneficiary of your life.

But the reward is huge. Is a life of unparalleled richness and fulfillment. A life of freedom and achievement. Of love and understanding. I’m not enjoying this life right now, I’m only glimpsing at what it can be. But I’m already on my path to it.

Are you on the path for the life that you deserve? If not, you can start right now. Just watch the way you act and put all your attention to it for a while. Soon you’ll be finding your own way to do things for yourself. As I told you, this is not an easy task and requires a lot of discipline and energy. There will be times when you’ll fell out of the wagon. But even if you’ll have your breakdowns along the way, you can always start over.

As long as you’re the most important person in your life.
[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, motivation, success, productivity[/tags]

Do It For Yourself – who’s driving your actions

My first post in the series “Do It For Yourself” was about the “how” in your actions. If you come here directly, and didn’t have the chance to look at the whole series here’s a little recap, to help you better understand the concepts. First, and foremost, you are the most important person in your life. This is the fundamental concept in these series, and starting from this point we designed a simple action workflow. This workflow is really just a 4 steps path that you follow on every conscious act that you perform:

1.    intention
2.    energy
3.    action
4.    outcome

And for every action I saw 3 fundamental questions that you must answer every time you do something:

1.    how you do it
2.    why you do it
3.    who’s going to be the beneficiary

In this post I will talk about the “why”, and that “why” is usually the response to:

“You are doing that action to please you or to please somebody else?”

Every action you perform (or, to be a little more understandable, every thing that you do) has a cause, you do it for a reason.  That reason can be inside you, or outside you.  By “inside” and “outside” I understand two very simple areas: your conscious being is the “inside”, and what you can observe from this conscious being, without acting on it, is the “outside”. In a more simple definition, the “inside” is you, with all your integrated beliefs, and the “outside” is the others: people, social beliefs, concepts that you can observe but do not necessarily embrace or accept.

Every time the reason for an action is inside you, chances for the energy level to grow after the outcome of the action are greater. Because most of the time you preserve the energy in yourself. If the reason is outside you, chances that the energy level to go down after the outcome are greater. Because most of the time you are directing your energy outside you.

Let’s put it like this: if you do something because you really want to do it, the result will always be part of yourself. But if you do an action driven by an outside factor, your outcome – and, subsequently, your energy flow – will follow that factor, being it a person, a social belief or a concept that you don’t agree.

If this sounds to fuzzy right now, let’s have an example. We will talk about your required actions when you chose – and follow – a career. The choice of a career is always based on your beliefs about it. You know in your mind what a career is and, based on that knowledge, you chose the most appropriate one for you. Suppose you think a career should be something fulfilling, something that will not limit your freedom and something that you’ll be happy doing it. And, apparently, you chose your career based on this set of beliefs.

But instead of doing this, you focus on other things, like making as much money as you can in as little time as you can get, having much more properties that you can actually use, and hunting a social status based on your car, clothes and so-called friends. Doing this requires a lot of energy. You put as much energy as you can afford into this set of beliefs, and, before you know it, you really start having all those things. And to act upon a second set of beliefs, different from your initial one.

But, strangely enough, you don’t feel happy about it. You have more and more money, more and more stuff, and more and more respect from those who share the second set of beliefs, those based on money and social acceptance. Your time is more and more limited because you have to manage all this, your freedom is surrounded by more and more properties that starts to act like walls, and your fulfillment feelings are starting to fade away.

You do believe that your career should be nice but you do the opposite. Why? Because your actions are driven by the other set of beliefs, the set based on money and external proof of well-being. The “why” in your actions is outside you. Without even noticing, you succumbed to a social pattern and replaced your internal driver of your career with an external one.

Where is all the energy that you put in this flow of actions going? Well, outside of you, sustaining the second set of beliefs. Every time you initiate an action related to your career, you give away your energy, because the real reason is not congruent with your real self. And yes, you will soon start to be tired, bored and sad. Your drain yourself out of energy.

The real drivers of your actions are as important as your beliefs about the reality. Even if you have and follow a positive set of beliefs about reality, you can – and most people do – follow other action triggers that your internal ones. This is why the “why” of an action is a fundamental question. By following only your internal reasons you are constantly add to your energy field. Your outcome will always be part of you.

But let’s be honest about one thing: you can’t really and always act only and only by your internal reasons. Sometimes you are on “auto-pilot”, sometimes you are consciously and deliberately choosing an external reason, or sometime you are just compromising. But most of the time you are confused, and you really delegate your power to an outside event, letting it trigger your actions.

How can you know that you are acting upon an internal reason and and not upon an external one? Well, to be short, you will have to learn this all of your life. It’s a process in itself, because you are continuously changing your internal reasons and the external are also in a constant process of change.

The rule of thumb here is: follow your emotions. Follow them with trust because your emotional feed-back system is one of the most precise and precious tools that you’ve been blessed with. If you are doing something out of joy, with enthusiasm and passion, chances are that you are driven by an internal reason. If you are doing something with sadness, fear and pressure, your actions are most probably triggered by an outside reason. Whatever fuel your optimism, must come from within your real self, and whatever feed your pessimism most come from an external source.

One other thing you may do is checking against your beliefs. If an action is performed in congruency with your general beliefs, must be coming from the inside. If you are driven to do something that is not in sync with your beliefs, chances are that you are forced by an outside driver.

The edge between inside and outside triggers is a very delicate thing. Because is very easy to be dragged in what I call “in and out traps”: things that you do for others, but you think you are doing for yourself. In other words, you are deluding yourself. And a vast majority of people can earn a master degree in deluding themselves.

All of the actions you are doing over and over for helping your friends, co-workers or other mates, but you don’t feel any positive emotions in doing them are “in and out traps”. You do them “because of them”, and not for you. There are outside reasons for doing it, and your inner self doesn’t really feel any positive emotions out of it. These types of traps can be identified when you are being excessively polite, extremely socially fit or just shy. Most of the times all of these situations are triggering an outside driver for your actions. You can do them, of course, if you want, but your energy flow will be drained.

At the opposite, there are “in and out traps” that you may consider outside drivers, but they aren’t. Suppose you are doing something nice for your family, like taking them to a walk, or giving them a present. This might look like an external driver, because the family might look like and outside trigger, but it really isn’t. Why? Because you are doing this with happiness and love, most of the time. Your emotional system is telling you: do it, I love it. So, even if this is looking like “outside reason” it really is an internal one: you’re doing it for yourself.

Basically, the “why” question is about your ability to circumvent all the “in and out traps” that you may encounter along the way, and follow only your heart.

In the next post of the series I will be talking about the last question an action should respond to, and that is:

“Who is the real beneficiary of that action?”.

[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, success, productivity, motivation[/tags]

eDragonu.ro on Top 50 Productivity Blogs of the Year

Well, it looks like I will have a wonderful spring: today I was notified about being listed on Top 50 Productivity Blogs of the Year on Evan Carmichael‘s website. The top, divided in several sections, like “Getting Things Done”, or “Life Hacks” puts me near icon bloggers like zen habits or Steve Pavlina. I’am also very happy to find there a fellow Romanian, a famous blog called Ririan Project.

EvanCarmichael.com is the Internet’s #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies. With over 270,000 monthly visitors, 2,500 contributing authors, and 48,000 pages of content no website shares more profiles of famous entrepreneurs and inspires more small business owners than EvanCarmichael.com.

GTD: identifying your contexts

One of the key factors for a good GTD implementation is the context management. There are many key factors, I agree, but context management is one of them. As you may already know, one of the basic concepts of GTD is to spread your actions over all the contexts you are acting in. You are not doing work in an absolute world, an absolute time and an absolute space, but instead you are acting in some very clearly separated areas, called contexts: @Home, @Work, @Computer. You can tag your action with the required context at the processing stage, and when you are in a specific context list only the tagged action on that context. Focus and preserve energy.

If you have read the David Allen’s GTD book, you remember that there was a default set of contexts: @Computer, @Work, @Home. The @Computer context was so present for the sake of the presentation, maybe, for readablity, etc. This might be one of the reasons GTD was such a hype (and still is) in the techie / webbie world. But in real life there are zillions of contexts in which one can act, not only their computers. Contexts in which you are actually doing your next actions.

Having a proper implementation of your context list, regardless of your technical skills, is one of the secrets of mastering the fine GTD art. You can – and, according to David Allen, you should – act with a “mind like water” regardless of your computer expertise. There are tons of paper-only implementations of GTD out there, and just because they are not based on our beloved computer, we should not reject them.

So, what are your contexts? How can you have a flexible enough context list, without compromising your GTD implementation? How can you properly identify your contexts, without taking into account every time your @Computer context?

Being a GTD-er for more than one year, I’ve used a number of context implementations. Each time I changed my GTD software I changed them. And each time I felt that I was making a leap forward. But in the last few months, since I started to move all my GTD implementation to my iPhone – based on, but not limited to the ideas presented in the iPhone GTD blog post – I found out that my contexts are in reality just a few specific places where I actually do stuff.

I made an exercise for a few days, and tried to identify all my GTD contexts. Not a very complicated experiment, after all, GTD is meant to simplify our lives, and here are three main criteria for doing this operation.

1. Frequency

OK, how often are you in that context? How often are you doing stuff in that context? The rule of thumb is that needs to be a daily place for you. Sometimes you will use places with a lower frequency, but perhaps only for special occasions, like traveling, taking a course, or just holiday. Identifying your contexts based on the usage frequency will give you something like @Work, @Home, @Computer. Simply enough. But still, not enough.

2. Importance

There will also be an importance you will assign to a specific context, regardless of its usage frequency. For an accountant, @Bank context could be more important than @Office context, because you will need much more focus when you are talking directly with your account officer. For a salesman person, @Phone context could be more important that @Office context, since he’s using much of his energy trying to convince people by phone to buy products. So, try to identify not only the frequency of your activities, but their overall importance, that would be an important step in the context identification process.

3. Tool accessibility

You can have contexts in which you are actually doing work, but you don’t have access to the tools you are using in your GTD implementation. For instance, @Car, when you are on the move. You don’t have your laptop (@Computer) available, or your file folder (@Office), but you have to answer important calls, or make appointments, etc. (Using a iPhone as a GTD tool is one way to circumvent this problem. And this is why I came up with a context like @Car, where I actually read email, make phone calls, or even micro-web interactions like updating my twitter account (feel free to follow me, by the way, since we are talking about that ). I do not do this, however, when the car is moving, that I can assure, nor do I advise anybody to do it, let’s be clear on that, right!) One example of a context in which you don’t have access to your GTD tools (presuming you are NOT using an iPhone for this) might be @Holiday context, a very important one, if you ask me.

Well, this is it, only 3 criteria to use, but, at least for me, great results. I came up with a much smaller, yet flexible list of contexts. Which, by the way, looks like this:

• @work
• @home
• @car
• @shopping

What do you think that are the advantages of having a slimmer context list, by the way?