goals

How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

By on December 29, 2011 in Learn with Humor

photo by raja4u

With the New Year right around the corner, some 100 million Americans will be making Resolutions for the year. Sadly half of them won’t keep those resolutions more than 6 months. However, for those that do make resolutions, they are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t make any resolutions at all. (source)

In a three part series, I’ve shared my process that helped make 2011 one my of most productive years yet. Each part builds off the other (so it’s important to start at the beginning) and by the end, you’ll have a system in place to help make sure you keep your resolutions and achieve your goals for the upcoming year.

Here’s how to do it:

Part 1: Why People Fail New Year’s Resolutions

Part 1 sets the stage for keeping your resolutions by sharing the five main reasons people fail at keeping them.

Part 2: Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions Using Quality Days

Part 2 introduces the concept of Quality Days and the five components that make it successful.

Part 3: How to Set Up Your Quality Day System

Part 3 walks you through the five steps to establishing daily habits through the Quality Day System.

If you have any questions or ideas for improvement, feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email. Have a great productive year!

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Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions Using Quality Days

By on December 15, 2011 in Learn with Humor

Note: Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions Using Quality Days is the second of a three part series on creating and sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions. Check out Part 1: Why People Fail New Year’s Resolutions, or check back soon for Part 3.

In the last post, we talked about five reasons people fail New Year’s Resolutions:

  1. They have an all or nothing mentality.
  2. They make too many resolutions.
  3. Their resolutions are not specific.
  4. They don’t track how they’re doing.
  5. They don’t make adjustments.

So how do you avoid these mistakes and keep your New Year’s resolutions? By establishing “Quality” and “Perfect” days.  First a little history…

photo by ba1969

A New Year of Resolutions

At the beginning of 2011 I decided there were five things I would ideally do every day, five daily habits I wanted to establish:

  1. Wake up without hitting snooze.
  2. Complete a task for Humor That Works.
  3. Do at least 20 minutes of physical activity.
  4. Eat at least 2 fruits and/or vegetables.
  5. Spend at least 30 minutes strategically disengaging.

In years past, I would have considered a day “successful” only if I had done all five habits that day (the all or nothing mentality). The problem is that the #1 habit on my list is the hardest habit I’ve ever tried to instill AND it happens first thing when I wake up.

If I had an all or nothing mentality and hit snooze once in the morning, the rest of my day would be toast. There would be no point in completing any of the other four because I couldn’t be “successful” no matter what I did.

But logically we can see that doesn’t make sense. Doing the other four things, or even one of them, would be better than none of them. So I developed a system that worked for me, one that involves five components.

photo by michelini

The Five Components of the Quality Day System

1. Quality and Perfect Days

Rather than try to strive for perfection every single day, my goal was to shoot for achieving a majority of my daily goals: 3 out of 5. If I completed any 3 out of the 5 habits, I considered it a “Quality Day.” If I completed all 5, I considered it a “Perfect Day.”

The mentality behind this system is that even if I hit snooze in the morning, I still had something to shoot for: a Quality Day. Sure it’s not perfect, but it is significantly better than accomplishing 0 out of 5, or even 3 out of 5 and feeling bad about myself. I changed my mindset to say I don’t need to be perfect, I just want to be “Quality.”

2. Five (and Only Five) Habits

While there are a number of other things I’d love to do every day (play guitar, stretch, and hundreds of other things), I knew that if I tried to do too many of them, I’d likely end up doing none of them. Tracking them would be a pain and there would be no way I could consistently complete 10+ goals every day.

Instead, I decided to be selective and choose the five goals most important to me. Why five? First, it’s a small enough number to easily remember (I can count them on one hand, and yes this was taken into consideration). Second it was a large enough number to challenge me and diverse enough to cover the important facets of my life (business, health, personal).

Finally it gave me variety. Some days you just don’t feel like exercising. On those days, I had four other things to choose from to still get a quality day.

3. Binary Habits

The only criteria I had for creating or specifying my goals was that they had to be binary–I wanted to be able to say at the end of the day, without any thinking, either “yes” or “no” I completed each habit.

This forced me to make specific, yet simple goals. Rather than just say “do physical activity” I specified that it was “20 minutes of physical activity.” That way I didn’t waste time trying to decide if whatever I did was “enough” physical activity to count. Was it at least 20 minutes of physical activity? Yes or no.

Similarly I specified that it was at least 2 fruits and/or vegetables a day, but I didn’t count how many I ate. Sure there were days I had 4, 8, 12 servings of fruits and vegetables, but I didn’t want to add the cumbersome process of tracking how many I actually I had. At the end of the day I just ask, did I have at least 2, yes or no.

4. Daily Tracking

By using binary goals, it was easy to track my progress for each day. At first I started tracking on a paper calendar in my office. I created an icon for each habit and would mark that icon for each day I completed it. Half-way through the year I switched to using Excel (this allowed me to calculate the number of Quality/Perfect days more easily). Now I’m using 42goals.com to now track my daily progress (more on 42goals in the next post).

The point was I wanted a system that would allow me to quickly and easily track my progress for a day. For the most part, I tried to track my status at the end of each day (when it was fresh on my mind), but I’d be lying if I said I did it every day. There were many a-time where I had to go back and add how I did for the last 6 or 7 days (another advantage of only having five to track was actually being able to remember what I completed).

5. Weekly / Monthly Reviews

The last part of the system was to review my current progress during my weekly and monthly reviews (I take 20-minutes every Sunday night to review the week / take a peak at what’s to come the following week; I take about 40-minutes to review my progress on the first day of every month).

By tallying up the totals and reviewing them by habit, I could see which habits were consistent and which ones were tougher to complete. As a result, I could make adjustments.

During one particularly bad stretch of hitting snooze, I decided to make sure I was going to bed earlier just to try to get back on track (more intentional focus on that habit). It meant missing out on physical activity on one or two nights, but I wanted to make sure I gave dedicated attention to snooze so I could re-establish my no-snooze ways. And since I was shooting for “Quality Days” it was OK for me to miss some physical activity in lieu of more sleep.

photo by Egahen

The Success of 2011

So has it worked? Considering I’m writing an elaborate article on what I did, you probably already assumed that it did, and you’d be correct.

My goal at the beginning of the year was 250 Quality Days. Notice that it wasn’t 365. Again, I didn’t want to miss one day and then never come back to it because I couldn’t achieve my goal.

Why 250? Because that’s the assumed number of “work days” in a year (if you assume 5-day work weeks and 2-weeks of vacation, you get 5 days a week X 50 weeks = 250 days). That would give me license to take off the weekends if I wanted to.

Also I didn’t set any goals for Perfect Days. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on achieving perfection, I merely wanted to track it for analytic purposes (what was my hardest habit, easiest, etc). It’s nice to know but it isn’t my goal.

So, with a goal of 250, how have I done this year? Not counting today, there have been 348 total days in 2011 so far. Of those 348, I’ve had 345 Quality Days (99%) and 175 Perfect Days (50%). The three days I missed were days I was sick and couldn’t have cared less about completing three of five goals.

But this hasn’t just worked for me. I’ve shared this idea with some friends and family and they too are finding success. Not everyone is accomplishing everything they want, but they’re all making progress towards their goals and they’ve all said it’s been a helpful process.

Why It Works

Is this process guaranteed to work everyone? No. This might be too simple for some people, or too complex for others. But for me and the people I’ve shared it with, it seems to work. And for good reason too.

First, it helps to re-frame the definition of success from “perfect” to “quality.” Sure perfect is great to achieve, but quality is pretty darn good too. Second, it forces you to choose your top priorities and limit yourself to a manageable number of daily goals. Third, it ensures you have specific goals that are easily measured, and fourth it creates an easy way to actually do the measuring. And finally, it allows you to see where you need to make adjustments, and gives you the flexibility to change your priorities based on your needs.

If you’re ready to give the Quality Day System a try in 2012, be sure to check our next post on How to Set Up Your Quality Day System.

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Why New Year’s Resolutions Suck (But Why You Should Make Them Anyway)

By on December 28, 2009 in Learn with Humor
photo by biewoef

photo by biewoef

Every year, over 100 million Americans make a New Year’s Resolution; only 18% of those people will actually keep it.  If less than 1/5th of the people that make a resolution actually keep them, why even bother coming up with a new goal to start working on the first of year?  We’ll get to that, but first…

Why New Year’s Resolutions Suck

New Year’s Resolutions have a number of things working against them, but it comes down to three main reasons of Suck.

Reason of Suck #1 – Procrastination

The big problem with New Year’s Resolutions is that we wait until the “magical” date of the first of the year to start them.  You might think in October, “you know, I should start exercising,” but then think, “oh, well I’ll just wait till the New Year and start off fresh.”

This is just a way of procrastinating.  Why not start working on the new goal when you first start thinking about it? January 1st is just another day on the calendar, yet we wait for it to come to do things we could start doing today.

Reason of Suck #2 – Lack of Preparation

The second reason New Year’s Resolutions suck is that we push off even starting on our resolution till the first of the year.  The problem is that if you want to actually succeed at your goal, you’ll need to do some planning.  Research tips on your new goal, read about success stories of other people, find like-minded people that can keep you committed.

Waiting until the day you want to make a change to even create a plan on how to make the change is what lands you in the 82% of people who don’t make it.

Reason of Suck #3 – Intimidation/De-motivation

The final reason New Year’s Resolutions suck is that they are too intimidating.  Generally, when we set a goal at the beginning of the year, it’s for the entire year.  We assume that we can go from behaving one way (such as smoking) on one day, to then behaving another way (not smoking) the next.  And we think we will behave the new way forever.

Thinking about making a change for the rest of your life is intimidating; it’s daunting and scary.   Plus when we mess up, it becomes de-motivating (“I’ll never learn to eat the right number of fruits and vegetables every day.”) Instead, think in smaller chunks.  First try to work on your resolution for just a week, or 30 days.  Then link those weeks together and you’ll eventually get to that full year with the new behavior.

Why You Should Make Them Anyway

So if New Year’s Resolutions suck, why even make them?  Because they’re better than nothing.  They’re better than sitting around  and accepting the status quo.  If the change of the new year is what motivates you to do something, then take advantage of it and do it.

Because even if you don’t succeed at never hitting snooze again in your life, you’ll do better than if you never set the goal to begin with.  And that’s why you make a New Year’s Resolution.

How to Improve Your Chances of Success

So now that you know some of the pitfalls of New Year’s Resolutions, but why you should make them anyway, you may want to get some help so you can be one of the successful ones.  For some articles with helpful tips, check out:

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5 Productivity Tips from the Stand-Up Comedy World

By on May 12, 2009 in Learn with Humor
photo by Carooo

photo by Carooo

Unlike the corporate world, the realm of stand-up comedy is less structured and requires more personal discipline to be productive. There is no boss to assign you something to do, and there’s no one looking over your shoulder making sure you do your work. And while some comedians are blessed with the ability to just “be funny,” many others spend years perfecting both their craft and their work habits–Jerry Seinfeld being a perfect example.

While you may never need to step on a stage to make a room full of strangers laugh, you do need to get things done. Here are 5 tips from the stand-up comedy world to make you more productive.

1. Write Everything Down

“Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” – Mitch Hedburg

Stand-up comedians are notorious for having jokes written down on napkins, envelopes, or backs of receipts. It’s not because comedians hate notebooks or lined paper, but because comedians know that inspiration can strike at any time. It’s so easy to get distracted by something else and lose that idea forever, unless we write it down.

The same is true for every type of work–great ideas or new items to add to your task list can pop in your mind at any time.  Getting these ideas off your mind and into your note capturing device ensures it won’t be forgotten and frees you to think about other things.  This is one the keys to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (he calls it the “Collection Habit”).

You can save yourself the time from searching for something to write on by always carrying a note-taking device such as a small pen and pad, a voice recorder, or a phone you can takes on. Most comedians have archives of notepads full of ideas–some that make them famous (such as George Carlin’s 7 Words you can’t say on TV) and others that don’t quite make it. But the key is they have them recorded to be reviewed and expanded or discarded later.

2. Break Projects into Smaller Tasks

As a nationally touring comedian, you’ll have anywhere between 45 minutes to 2 hours worth of material. But no comedian started out writing a 2-hour show.

When you first get started in stand-up, you are generally performing 5-minutes at a time. As you improve and get bigger and bigger shows, you naturally build up to having a 45-minute show.

Whenever we start a new project, such as writing a book or implementing a new system at work, the end goal can be intimidating. But if you break your project into “5-minute sets” or smaller tasks, the project becomes more manageable. Then, as you complete each task, you’ll be closer and closer to your 45-minute set.

3. Do Your Time

If you ask any professional comedian what the key to success is, they’ll tell you it’s getting on stage as often as possible. The idea is simple–the more you perform, the more you’ll work on your material, hone your craft, and improve your performance. But there’s a tendency among comedians to spend most of their time watching or reading about how to become better.

And while this certainly is advisable when first starting out, it often becomes an excuse for not doing the work, a cleverly disguised form of procrastination. It’s also the least effective way of learning or improving.

“Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.” – Luciano Pavarotti

Watching other comedians perform will help, but it doesn’t replace actually getting on stage. The same is true for any project. That doesn’t mean working long hours toiling away, but it does mean doing something. If you’re remodeling your kitchen, you can find inspiration by looking through renovation magazines, but you won’t be any closer to your goal until you actually take action.

Get on stage, do your time, and get stuff done.

4. Get Feedback

Comedians live and die by the laughter and responses they evoke from the audience. If a joke consistently elicits a huge guffaw from the audience, a comedian knows it works and will continue to do it and write more jokes like it. If the joke results in silence, it’s clear something needs to change.

This immediate feedback is invaluable as a performer, and in any project. Stopping to ask for ways to improve a presentation or what went well in a particular meeting can guide you in finding what works and what doesn’t. Then you can start working on the right things–working smarter and not harder.

One key thing to note is that feedback doesn’t just have to come from other people. Comedians record their performances all the time so they can go back to evaluate a performance. Checking in with yourself periodically or tracking your daily progress can help you find what it is that makes you productive.

5. Plan to Improvise

Most comedians make a set-list before every show of all the jokes they are going to tell–essentially a task list for the stage. This list is crucial to being succinct and clear, and is the equivalent to having a well-oiled GTD system for to do items.

The problem is that things don’t always go according to plan, and the skillful comedian is able to improvise when necessary or when an opportunity arises. An unusual answer to a normal question or a beligerant heckler can be great launching points for a comedian to improvise a hilarious bit on the spot.

In the real world the same is equally true. While we may have a great 5-year plan of what we are going to do, sometimes it’s necessary to sieze an opportunity and go off script. This mentality and comfort in improvising when need be can lead to life changing events and improved productivity in a direction you never imagined.

“I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances, gets on.” – Samuel Goldwyn

Standing Up for Productivity

Stand-up comedy may not be rocket science or even project management, but the craft calls for and creates a valuable set of skills. These same skills, when applied to work and personal goals and challenges, can improve productivity and help you get things done. So take a page from the comedy world and start using these tips today–turn this information in to knowledge.  After all,

“There’s a difference between information and knowledge.  It’s the difference between Christy Turlington’s phone number and Christy Turlington.” – PJ O’Rourke

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Why Stress Isn’t a Bad Thing

May 5, 2009

I recently posted an article called Creating a Sense of Urgency that talked about how to be more productive by creating a sense of urgency for yourself to get things done. In the comments, someone asked why I was encouraging more stress, and what I meant by saying “stress isn’t always a bad thing.”  This [...]

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Life Lessons Learned from Watchmen

March 8, 2009

With the release of Watchmen this weekend comes a lot of hype and anticipation for the graphic novel turned movie.  The graphic novel, originally published as a series in 1986-87, has long been heralded as the best novel of its kind.  Time Magazine even listed it as one of the 100 Best Novels. I recently [...]

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