Thinking more about Stephen Covey and his 7 Habits for Highly Effective People, the weekend gives a chance to work on Habit 7, Sharpening the Saw, which might be the most important habit since it’s pure “Quadrant 2″.

Covey sets the stage this way.

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

“Well why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire.  “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

Maybe that reminds you of the business cliche, “too busy to plan”.

So, Covey is saying,  the way to make your work easier is to improve the quality of the tools you use.  He’s not just suggesting the guy take a break and then go back to sawing with the same dull saw.  He says improve the tool and then the work will be easier.

Covey suggests that working in these four areas will make the work of life easier.

• Physical
  Taking care of your body, staying healthy, focused on vitality
• Spiritual
  This is at the core, your life’s direction, your inner journey
• Mental
  Taking care of your brain and your acuity
• Social / emotional
  Investing in relationships and interdependence

So what better time than this weekend to take a walk, do a little exercise, meditate or go to your church/synagogue (remember, one of the positives of organized religion is the sense of community as well as the spiritual), read a book, spend time with friends?

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I admit it. When I’m reading web pages I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker. If you don’t have this ADD-like habit, in most browsers if you press the control key and click with your mouse on a link, the link opens in a new tab.

Yikes, after ten minutes or so, I have tabs open from here to the freeway.  These are all pages that I want to take a closer look at but may not want to keep around forever in bookmarks.

Read It Later is a Firefox plugin that let’s me mark web pages for later reading.  It also allows me to sort the pages I’ve collected by date added, alphabetically, sitename or apply a “quality” score to the page, automatically using PostRank, so that when I have time, I can read the most important pages first.

A “Click to Save” mode let’s me collect pages to read just by clicking on the link without having to open the page.  It’s great for a compulsive clicker like me.   Also nice is the ability to synchronize my reading list between computers and an offline mode that let’s me read my pages while not online like on a plane or in my case, at dog agility.

Download Read It Later [via webworkerdaily]

The Huffington Post published some Barrack Obama quotes from an interview he gave Men’s Health magazine that will published later this month.

Whether you plan to vote for him or not (or live somewhere else in this wide wide world besides the US), I like this quote on setting expectations and self improvement.

“I always try to make sure that my expectations are higher than those of the people around me…I never want people to feel as if I’ve overpromised to them. I try to explain in a real honest way how difficult some of the changes I’m talking about will be. But I never want the effect to be that I’m not working as hard as I can on their behalf…that I’m not continually trying to improve. I’m actually glad for the high expectations.”

I often work in a home office environment that includes 10 parrots (including 2 loud Macaws and an African Grey that likes to talk, sing and answer my phone calls), a corgi (likes to bark) and a 12-month old.

Surprisingly, sometimes I have trouble concentrating.

I’ve tried ear plugs.  I’ve tried listening to music.

One answer to noise distractions that works really well for me is to counter the noise with White Noise or better-yet Pink Noise or Brown Noise.

The SimplyNoise site provides free very soothing distraction-prevention, well,  noise.  Just go to the website, move the slider on the continuum from white to brown noise and stop when you can concentrate and start working (or hearing yourself think).

Other uses for White Noise by the noise people:

• Aid Sleep
• Enhance Privacy
• Mask Tinnitus
• Configure Audio Equipment

SimplyNoise also provides downloads of mp3s of a thunderstorm (60 mins. – my personal favorite) or loopable white noise or pink noie.  Download the loopable ones and play in iTunes with repeat track turned on.

One way of having the information necessary to know how to make your day productive is to know how long tasks really take to perform.

Cool Timer can help.  It’s a free Windows digital timer with three modes  — stopwatch, countdown and alarm clock.

Click the stopwatch at the beginning of clearing your email and see how long that takes.  Give yourself 30 minutes to keep up-to-date with industry news.  You can even use the alarm clock to wake you from your power nap.

Download Cool Timer [via lifehacker]

BTW, this very short piece, with interruptions, and gathering graphics has take me 52 minutes already.  I really need help.

Image via Wikipedia

Life Coach, Tim Brownson, on the site, PickTheBrain, has developed a list of five questions that he says, “if you commit to embedding them so deeply into your neurology by constant and conscious repetition that they become second nature”, will make a quantum shift in your life. 

Without even expecting that level of results, they are questions worth considering for changing how you think about events.

Here are his five questions:

1. “What Else Can This Mean?”

2. “Who Can Help Me?”

3. “What Am I Grateful For?”

4. “What’s My End Game?”

5. “What Can I Learn From This?”

#1 would be a big one for me — it might make me stop jumping to conclusions so quickly.

Read the original post for his explanations [Via TheHuffingtonPost]

Michael Wade in his blog, Execupundit.com, lists his nominations for the top ten biggest email sins.

Here’s his top five:

1. Copying people on e-mails that are of remote or no interest to them.
2. Keeping the same subject line even though the actual message has significantly changed.
3. Promising to share part of the fortune that you inherited in the Ivory Coast.
4. Replying to All when you meant to hit Reply.
5. Not checking spelling.

Read his post for the other five.

I would add to the list – ever using BCC  — if you don’t want the person you’re writing to know you’re copying someone else – don’t do it.

Via WebWorkerDaily

There was once a time when it was really cool to say that you “multi-tasked”, it made you sound really busy and really important, hence the need to do two things at once.

The more people thought about productivity, the more it began to be recognized that there really is no way to do two things well at the same time.  

When I read email while I talk on the phone, I miss parts of the conversation and don’t do a really great job of reading messages, either. Now fairly universally, the myth of multi-tasking has been exposed.

One of my favorite productivity guru’s, Merlin Mann recently ran this quote, that he had found, on his 43 Folders site.

“Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.”

Here is a sound clip from a Merlin podcast trashing the concept of multi-tasking.

powered by ODEO

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Here’s a free online productivity tool that can be very useful and even has a certain “fun” factor. Iwantsandy.com is an online personal assistant.

Email your Iwantsandy.com special email address, that is provided to you when you sign-up, using regular natural language requesting reminders of appointments, to do items and things to remember, tell her when you need to know be reminded and she’ll send you by email or text message at the appropriate time.

Email Remind me to call Mom today at 4pm and your Daily Digest will contain a 4pm entry to “Call Mom”.

If you need help remembering a weekly staff meeting or putting the Recycling bin out to the street on Mondays, you can make your reminders repeat weekly or monthly. Sandy can remind you of your spouse’s birthday. Here’s Sandy’s cheatsheet of how to write to her and what she can do.

Sign up for a free account.