I’ve been heartened and flattered by the many requests to tell people when my book tour will take me to their city.
Help me find a way to make it possible!
It turns out that in this day and age, unless you’re a celebrity, book tours are little but an excuse for an author to pay to travel around and indulge themselves in an appearance here and there.
This morning I did a brief segment on FOX News 25 in Boston discussing tips from Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More. It went quite well.
Sadly, the video has expired. FOX clearly doesn’t understand the need to keep any and all appearances of mine forever. You can see other videos of me on my media page.
Wow! Today’s a day full of media love. An article about my book and personal productivity is featured in Investors Business Daily. A guest blog post by me is featured in the Downtown Women’s Club.
I said to my friend, “I’m so happy!!! I have DropBox configured so I can access my important files from anywhere. What in the world did we do before the cloud?”
Then I stopped. I realized I was alive before the cloud. How did I access my important files back then? Oh, yeah. They were in a notebook. I popped it in my $29 knapsack and carried them around with me. All my important files, available everywhere I wanted to go.
These days, I pop my laptop into that knapsack. The laptop is heavier than the paper files used to be. Then I add the power cords. And the wireless USB dongle. And my headphones. Then I lug it all until I find someplace that has WiFi, pay $14.95 for the privilege of accessing their WiFi, and access my files that I can view 2/3 of a screen at a time. And by the way, I now pay a substantial monthly fee for my internet connection at home for all this convenience.
“But this way, you don’t have to think about what to put in your knapsack! Everything’s at your fingertips,” my rationalizing gadget-loving brain cries. Uh, huh. That sounds good, but when I watch my actual behavior, literally 30 seconds’ thought before I leave would be all it takes to figure out which files I need for a given day and pop them into my bag. In fact, I could do that faster than the time it takes me to pack up my power cord. And stopping to do that thinking would probably result in me doing more targeted, more important work, rather than just spazzing from thing to thing in a frenzy of mock-productivity.
Help me understand. Every individual step from there to here felt like progress. But I’m hard-pressed to consider the additional cost (in dollars, complexity, etc.) of the current state of affairs worth the additional output (mainly printing with proportional spaced fonts).
Progress? Or is there a high tech marketing person laughing her head off in some hidden back room, as she jots down notes in pencil, on her yellow pad, that fits neatly inside her thin, lightweight, fashionable backpack?
One of the biggest interruptions of my work life is when my printer (a Brother MFC-7840) decides that it’s out of toner. Note that it really isn’t out of toner, it’s just that the printer itself decides when I’m no longer allowed to use the toner cartridge and stops printing.
I’ve finally decided to start tracking this puppy to find out when I really need to replace the cartridge. Pressing MENU-6-2 will show me the print page count. It claims I’ve printed 700 pages so far (interesting, since I haven’t even gone through a 500-sheet ream of paper since buying the printer).
The starter cartridge is supposed to print 1000 pages. The regular replacement toner (TN-330) supposedly prints 1,500 pages, and the high-capacity TN-360 supposedly prints 2,600 pages.
Well, I’m going to find out. I just taped a little piece of paper to the printer where I’m recording the current page count every time it gives me a warning or an “out of toner” message. I have a suspicion they are inflating the numbers for marketing purposes. Not only do I want to get my money’s worth, but given what a horrible environmental impact toner has, I really want to use every bit of it. I’ll keep you posted.
This is my Time Management Tips video that I did as part of Harvard Business School Publishing’s Harvard Manage Mentor product, you can see it here.
A critical part of getting work done is getting the rest of your life done, too! If you aren’t playing, having fun, and enjoying life, you won’t be able to get things done when you need to. You’ll just go through the motions, waiting for a freedom that never arrives.
This week’s Get-it-Done Guy podcast is all about how to set boundaries at work. Listen and enjoy!
Earlier this week, I began a series of articles on the Harvard Business Review blog site that will deal with the job description of the entrepreneur. The series arose because while people talk a lot about what qualities make up a good entrepreneur, the world is strangely silent on how an entrepreneur should actually spend their time. They always run around like the sky is falling, and they’re busy beyond belief. But doing … what? And how do they know what they’re doing is actually moving the company forward, versus just being whatever activity caught their eye at the moment.
Read my HBR.ORG blog post on Advanced Entrepreneurship: The Entrepreneurial Job Description.
Many programs check to find out if they have an available upgrade when you run them. If so, they have a little upgrade notice that pops up then and there to tell you. Helpfully. This is convenient, courteous, just-in-time behavior, right? Wrong.
When you start up a program, there’s a 99% chance that you’re starting it because you want to use it. You have some task that requires the program in order to accomplish. You’re in work mode, with a specific goal in mind.
That’s exactly the wrong time to distract you with a software upgrade notice that forces you to think about a choice: Not Now, Install, or Cancel (what does cancel even mean in this context?). If you should decide to install now—after all, who’s going to remember later—then you’re treated to six hours of debugging when this minor upgrade from v 5.62 to v5.63 accidentally wipes out your hard drive. Your original task gets lost.
As a user, don’t let upgrades hijack your mind! Adopt a simple, yet effective habit: when a piece of software offers to upgrade, immediately jot down at the very end of your to-do list, “Upgrade silly program” and choose Not Now. Then treat the upgrade as you would any other to-do item: do it only when it fits into your schedule. If it’s an urgent upgrade, fine, put it on your calendar for a free time block today or tomorrow. But keep your focus on the task and hand and don’t let upgrades hijack your mind!
(Author’s note: This blog post was inspired by an offer for me to upgrade that interrupted my train of thought for a blog post I was going to write. Sadly, I don’t recall what the original post was going to be. See how those offers can knock us off course?)
Someone just subscribed to my YouTube channel. Yay! Now I feel more pressure to get more videos prepared and posted. YouTube helped out by sending a notice telling me someone has subscribed. It went on to suggest that I “return the favor and subscribe to person?”
The favor? Excuse me? Subscribing is something you do because you find my content valuable. Subscriptions to the Get-it-Done Guy productivity tips newsletter and the Stever Robbins YouTube Channel are staples of every good, productive, worthwhile, competent, achievement-oriented, life-fulfillment-seeking, smart, insightful person on the internet. It’s only a favor to me in the sense that I’m trying to build an audience. If someone is subscribing to “do me a favor,” that suggests they aren’t subscribing because they find my content useful. Thanks for the insult, YouTube.
And now that YouTube has insulted me, it wants me to subscribe back as a favor. Now YouTube is insulting my viewers. Bad, YouTube! Show more respect! My viewers, as noted above, are good, productive, smart people.
When a web site suggests you subscribe to something without knowing if you like it, you’re being asked to promote the web site’s agenda, not yours. Every subscription you have means more stuff piling into your inbox. Sometimes, that makes sense; you can never get enough Get-it-Done Guy content. But that doesn’t mean you should subscribe to every person who subscribes to you.
If you think a person’s content is relevant and useful, subscribe. If you don’t, then don’t. Subscribing isn’t a favor to be returned; it’s something a person does because they find it valuable. Keep your information manageable!
(Subscribing to the Get-it-Done Guy newsletter will help you do that… 🙂