Playing with LinkedIn's Answers feature - Goals, saying no, changing careers (part 2/2)

This is the second half of my answers to interesting LinkedIn Answers (I posted part one last week). Enjoy!

• How do you reach your goals?
  
• How Do You Say, "No."?
  
• How do you stay motivated and productive... all the time?
  
• I want to shift my career to game development field. What are the things i want to do for that?
  
• How do you work?

How do you reach your goals?

I am curious how do you guys reach your goals?

In these days both work and personal life gets more and more blended.
How do you reach the goals that you set for yourself both personal and professional?

Do you use certain methods, lists, use coaches or perhaps something completely different?

1) Get clear about what you want, and 2) make it happen, step-by-step. The catch: These days it's very difficult to get your head above water long enough to do 1), when you're being overloaded with requests, email, commitments, etc.

What I recommend to clients is the first get on top of all their day-to-day communications, commitments, and information, which gives them the clarity to ask the bigger questions. Luckily, once they're up and running with the system (I teach David Allen's "Getting Things Done"), it's straightforward to fast-track your goals by breaking them down into projects, and ultimately into concrete, specific actions.

Hope that helps!

How Do You Say, "No."?

"No" is one of the smallest words in English.

But, "No" is one of the most difficult words to master, whatever language you speak.

Yet, there is a time - an absolute time - when we are compelled to say, "No."

If you've ever said "no" to an invitation, a forwarding request, an endorsement, etc., how did you say it?

Did you say it so that you could preserve the contact for a prospective future relationship?

Or did your "no" include everything: No invitation, no forwarding, no endorsement, no future relationship?

I think it's difficult to *know* when to say no, unless you know everything you've committed to. Otherwise, you'll have no sense of whether the opportunity you're presented with is worth pursuing, and therefore worth giving something else up for.

If you've decided to say no, I find the most direct - but compassionate - approach is refreshing. It's still a no, but if I ask someone for something, and they come back with "I won't be able to help at this time because ____," I feel OK about it. This is *much* better (and clearer) than not answering at all, or putting off saying no by beating around the bush.

How do you stay motivated and productive... all the time?

I am not a lazy person. Perhaps quite the opposite. I prefer having more things to do than I can physically handle (more things get done), which has somewhat become my motivation to keep going. However, I must admit - this sort of schedule-based overload started to get to me. Sometimes it would take away my desire to do any work whatsoever, knowing that in the short-term it is unattainable no matter how hard/fast I try.

So I figured a change is in order. A new set of daily routine is up for adoption. So I come to you, managers, CEOs, project managers, executives, career advisers...

We all have rules that we live by (in our professional life). However, what keeps you motivated to stay productive? How do you keep yourself going 100% of the time, every day?

Great question, Artashes. First, I think it's natural for our motivation and creativity to vary - we're not machines, working constantly and steadily. That said, there are ways to monitor and adjust your motivation and productivity. Productivity is the easier one - it has to do with efficiency, and choosing what you work on. I use David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (AKA GTD) methodology to manage that. It's based partly on the notion of needing to have a complete inventory of your possible actions. Otherwise, how can you know what the most important one in the moment is? It's a radical approach, and very different from traditional ABC models.

Stepping up a level, motivation stems from values, and a lack of motivation can indicate a disconnect between what you care about, and what you're expected to do (your commitments). Going back to GTD, once you have every commitment listed in front of you, you can then then start asking questions about purpose and values. Often, however, we're so swamped with the day-to-day overload that we can't get enough air to even *ask* those questions...

I want to shift my career to game development field. What are the things i want to do for that?

I am a software professional working in a company as a developer. Now i want to shift to Gaming Industry

A few general approaches:

• Learn who the leaders of the field are - individuals and companies - and become and expert in them. What the business is like, what changes are happening, etc. If you see an event that's relevant, send them a short "I noticed that ..." email. Keep it brief, and it's best if you can offer some insight that would be helpful to them. The point is to not ask for something, but to offer something of value instead.
  
• Start your own "skunk works" project, maybe open source, to demonstrate your talent.
  
• Buy copies of games that are like what you'd like to write. Become an expert in them, comment on user forums, find bugs, suggest improvements, create add-ons, etc. Let your passion and creativity shine!
  
• If you're flexible, ask for an internship, even volunteer - maybe as a tester.

How do you work?

Time management is something I take seriously. When presented with opportunity, I study how other executives, CEOs and professional managers manage their daily time routine.

Could you please share how you spend your day and what set of rules make it the most efficient?

You'll find as many answers to your wonderful question as you desire, depending on how much time you're willing to invest in the search. There are many styles of self-management, and finding one that works for you may be a good goal.

I became fascinated with the question after adopting the methodology in the book "Getting Things Done" (AKA "GTD") by David Allen. The results blew me away, so much, in fact, that I'm now consulting in it. I think Allen's primary contribution is the realization of the role a full mind plays in our daily stress, and reduction in our ability to focus and re-focus during the day.

Another Allen contribution is identifying five phases that "stuff" has to go through in order to be transformed into "work," something many other books miss. For example, getting organized has to do with tools, but that's just one piece of the puzzle.

I think you've taken the first step toward improving your self-management - asking the question. Just by being *aware* that there's room for improvement, you've opened the door - good show!

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Playing with LinkedIn's Answers feature - Time, cutting costs, and the meaning of life (part 1/2)

I've been trying out LinkedIn's new Answers feature in the two obvious ways (asking and answering) to see if a) I can help people, b) establish myself as an authority, and c) open myself up to networking and potential clients. So far I've asked one question (How did you get clients when you started your consulting practice?) and answered a dozen or so of the deepest or most interesting ones.

In this post I'd like to share some of my answers (more next week). None were voted "best answer," but hey - maybe folks found them helpful.

In a future post I'll look at if and how this is valuable to self-employed consultants. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from anyone who's had luck with this feature, or LinkedIn in general.

• Are you getting the time to get your job done?
  
• What do you value in life? And how do you create value for yourself?
  
• What type of work would you do to attain a higher degree of work and personal-life satisfaction?
  
• What are some creative ways you have cut costs for your company or for your clients?
  
• What type of strategies do you have to manage and reply to all of your email every day?
  
• What is the meaning of life

Are you getting the time to get your job done?

Specifically, I have been involved with three turnaround situations. Short of it, business has been performing poorly due for years to a number of reasons: lack of focus/direction, goals and objectives, etc.

However, when there is a taste of change and the balance sheet shows a positive trend, the leaders tend to get greedy, and demand more in a shorter time. This causes a stress on the organization, the process, and the people. Once the trend slips on the goal of "taking the mountain", there is a sour taste in the leader's mouth.

Your thoughts, opportunities, risks, suggestions?

I think there are two factors - how much you've committed to doing, and how much time you want to allocate to doing it all. Given the hectic pace of modern work and life (much as you indicate in your description of the turn-around) not being totally clear on either of these can lead to problems, either leaks in your system (things you committed to but didn't follow-up on, or were waiting for, but didn't get), or terrible work/life balance issues (stress from being over-committed, not enough time at home, etc.)

Once you're 100% on top of your life (i.e., you know everything you said you'll do), you can start figuring out what's most important, and making the most mature choice possible in the moment. In addition, you start getting clearer about what you can delegate, and what you *don't* want to do. This may also enable meaningful conversations with CEOs, partners, etc. about what's realistic. ("Here's what's on my plate, here's what I have time for, what do you want me to focus on?"

Hope that helps!

What do you value in life? And how do you create value for yourself?

I am looking to gain insight on others on what they value in life, be it their relationships at home, at work, in social settings, in nature, in the quality of their life.

Big question for all, but good to think about.

Determining value is a personal choice, and requires introspection. Personally I like this list of values (from a progressive think tank - see URL):

Empathy, Opportunity, Responsibility, Prosperity, Strength, Community, Protection, Service, Fairness, Cooperation, Fulfillment, Trust, Freedom, Honesty

But the trick, as you point out in your second question, is how to *live* those values. As Jacob Bronowski puts it, "The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation."

In other words, there needs to be a direct connect between values and actions. In fact, I'd argue that the opposite (a disconnect) is what leads to much internal suffering.

And how to connect them? Adopt a self-management system that brings the "rubber to the road," i.e., one that captures those actions that move your values ahead, and facilitates your moving forward on them. The methodology I teach (based on the book "Getting Things Done") is ones such approach.

Good luck!

• How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff, A new DVD documentary
  
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

What type of work would you do to attain a higher degree of work and personal-life satisfaction?

I'd say it depends on what you love, and what you are good at, which varies from person to person. Life's a balance between ideals and reality, but a first step might be getting clear about what you love - where your passion is. Often we compromise - I like this quote from the story "Is Your Job Your Calling" (URL below):

Everyone tries to do something that seems like the wise thing to do-but that you shouldn't do: compromise. You've got two competing needs or desires-say, independence and security-and you try to find the position that's halfway between them. Typically that doesn't work.

The reason I'm thinking about this is that I just resigned from a steady job to do something risky, but which I care about. Will it be a mistake? I hope not! (I wrote about it in "Commitment Time! (Taking the big leap)"

Best of luck.

• Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)
  
• Matt's Idea Blog: Commitment Time! (Taking the big leap)

What are some creative ways you have cut costs for your company or for your clients?

At the individual level, helping people to become more efficient (and therefore more effective) can both cuts costs and generate more income. Why does this happen? Consider time/money wasted:

• looking for information (vs. doing something with it),
  
• responding to inquiries/commitments slowly (or not at all) (vs. quick turn-arounds)
  
• working on the wrong (low-ROI) tasks (vs. ones that impact bottom line and goals)
  
• etc.

Why do I care? I teach people how to work on the most important things, with a sense of relaxed control. However, the big picture is that, once a client gets on top of all of her work and life commitments, she often has some "aha" moments at the forest (vs. tree) level, which can translate into the innovative/creative ideas that she's great at - new product ideas, improved ways to do things, etc. Fun!

What type of strategies do you have to manage and reply to all of your email every day?

I set my clients up using the "Getting Things Done" methodology, which applies to *all* inputs in life, including email. It has you emptying your inboxes every 24-48 hours, but not necessarily *doing* everything in them (impossible), but making decisions, and putting reminders of actions in appropriate places for when you have time to do them.

Email is tough due to the volume, and the addictive nature of it. There are good resources listed below, including the 43 folders links.

Finally, you should consider how quickly you really need to respond to emails, which will depend on your job, and your business. Checking too frequently can stop you from doing the "heavy lifting" work that might be more valuable to you and your organization. I've included a link to my article "Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time" in case you'd like to read more.

Good luck!

• Matt's Idea Blog: Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time

What is the meaning of life

That depends on the framework(s) you use in interpreting life, and what your goals are. If you choose a religious framework, then you can tap into their questions/answers.

If not, you have to determine your own meaning, which usually involves tuning in to what you love - your passions - as well as your skills. There are many books on the topic. One I like is "Is your genius at work" by Dick Richards, but anything that gets you asking questions and thinking is good. You might also enjoy Steve's post "How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes".

The catch? Often that internal voice that knows what you love and what you're good at is very soft, and can only be heard when you quiet down your mind. Some people find meditation helps, but for me I needed something more applied/mechanical - which is exactly why I teach the "Getting Things Done" methodology for getting on top of everything in your work and life. I found that once I cleared my head of the low-level things, I had mental room to ask (and answer) the bigger questions. Good stuff!

• Is Your Genius at Work?: 4 Key Questions to Ask Before Your Next Career Move
  
• How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes
  
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Information provenance - the missing link between attention, RSS feeds, and value-based filtering

The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, "Which feeds should I pay attention to?" They are great at collection (one of the five GTD workflow phases I teach clients - gathering new feeds, and sorting them by source, date, number of unread, etc.) but that's just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).

And this leads us to the real problem:

The links from source to value are one-way, with no feedback.

Here's an example. You're reading through your feeds, and find a post that takes you to an interesting idea (The Rule of Least Power, for example). You jot some notes, save the URL, then move on. Repeat. The problem is the feed reader doesn't know that the article did something important to you - gave you an idea, changed your perspective, made you angry, whatever.

It's like loosing the Chain of custody, or not knowing a painting's provenance. Without completing the cycle back to the source, the reader can't filter feeds by importance, leaving it to us to do manually. (For example, see Bob Walsh's 80/20 Your information feeds idea - though determining which 20% is valuable is hard - and Marshall Kirkpatrick's Open Sourcing My TechCrunch Work Flow.)

Naturally there is work going on in this area. Google has its trends feature (click here if you're a Google Reader user - found via Robert Scoble's article 25,000 items read on Google Reader), and NetNewsWire's neat Sorting by Attention addition. But without having note-taking integrated in the information stream (which suggests standards, or an OS-based solution), tools are limited to impoverished metrics (e.g., clicked-on-post, flagged-feed, sent-to-someone, bookmarked-it), and can't do a good job for us.

How would this work? I haven't thought it through (suggestions anyone?), but maybe a cooperative set of browser plug-ins, sort of a "Zotero meets PageAddict, gets married, has kids" mashup.

The bottom line is I want something that knows when an information stream - podcast, web page, blog post, email, or video - passes the scribble test.

Thoughts?

Notes on using a digital voice recorder for taking reading notes

In October I asked your advice about using a digital voice recorder for transcription, primarily to smooth out my reading workflow (see How to read a lot of books in a short time). I bought one and I've been using it since mid-November. Following is a report on my experiences and recommendations.


WS-300M: A nice product

I opted for the Olympus WS-300M, a combined voice recorder and music player. It's about $80 on Amazon, and is compatible with Dragon Naturally Speaking (I took Eric's advice to check hardware compatibility).

The unit itself is great, though a tad pricey and pretty small - so I have to be careful not loose it. Main likes:

• USB mass storage - Just plug it in and voice files (WMA format) are immediately available. No drivers, etc.
• Music player - I admit I haven't used this, but I like the option. Not sure the output amp has enough power...
• Nice selection of features - record quality, mic sensitivity, folders, etc.
• Recording time - Long! I use the HQ mode, which provides over 17 hours. (You can get 66 hours in LP mode.)

There's really not much to dislike. The built-in mic has a lot of handling noise (understandable, and you can buy an external mic), and having only two mic sensitivity settings is a bit all or nothing, but overall it's not holding my reading workflow back.

Sadly, the same isn't true for Dragon.


Dragon: Not so good

The program is pretty good in some ways, but I had a number of issues with it, primarily:

• Recognition rate too low - I had to make a lot of corrections.
• Making corrections was too slow - The program learns via corrections, so this is important. However, waiting for the menu to pop up was excruciating.
• Slow overall performance - Start up, recognition, etc. all took a long time. Clearly one needs a very modern machine to run this on.
• Poor quality headset - The included headset broke after only a few uses. Official replacement price: $30.

Ultimately, performance was a deal breaker, and I've concluded that manually transcribing and typing is faster.

As an alternative, you can have someone else transcribe for you. Some possibilities (I haven't tried them): CastingWords: Podcast Transcription Service and SpeakWrite: Voice to Document Dictation Service.

(You can find more on typing vs. recognition on the Davidco forums: Typing at 300-400 words per minute?, Best Voice-Recognition Software??, voice recognition, Voice Recognition Software, Help! Touch typing software?, and Alternative to Mavis Beacon's Typing?)


Reading Workflow

So how does it all come together? It's simple, really. I record notes as I'm reading into the recorder, usually during exercise or those "between" moments (waiting for an appointment, etc.) Longer reads are broken up into separate recordings, one per session. The recorder has five folders (each capable of holding tons of files), and I use one folder for each book/video/podcast I'm absorbing. Once I finish, I create a "transcribe ____" action.

When I get to the transcribing, I fire up my editor (see My Big-Arse Text File - a Poor Man's Wiki+Blog+PIM), download the audio file, and start listening and typing. To make this efficient, I never use the mouse. Instead, I switch rapidly between the two programs (alt-tab), using the pause/play shortcut (ctl-p) to catch up on the typing. Simple!


Surprises

This approach works great, and has led to a few surprises.

First, I like having the five folder limit - It keeps my eyes from being bigger than my stomach. Otherwise, I tend to keep reading (i.e., creating more work), and avoid the (more difficult) transcribing part. However, once they're full, I "heat up" those transcribe actions to make some room.

Second, because the recorder's so small, it's easy to have with me, so I'm not having to capture reading notes in multiple places - it's all in the recorder.

Third, I used to abhor transcribing - it was one of those actions that seemed bigger than it was. However, I've trained myself to look at the play times for the files, and they're just not that long! I'm more likely now to just jump in and do it.

Finally, I've found I really want the recorder with me all the time. Not just for reading, but because I'm noticing sounds I want to share with others, especially my six-year-old's delightful impromptu singing, which is really precious to me.


Future

For the future, I need to improve my typing speed and accuracy.

Also, I'm experimenting with ways to make sure I use what I learn from the reading. Specifically I've created a script that nightly selects a random entry from my text file and emails it to me - a kind of "brain blast from the past." More later.

Commitment Time! (Taking the big leap)

It's official - I've given my two week notice and I'm quitting my research programming job to put full effort into my workflow coaching practice. Joining the ranks of the self-employed is exciting and frightening, and I'm sure it'll increase my rate of lessons learned per day (see Some thoughts from tracking "lessons learned" for a year).

After hearing the news, a friend asked me why in the world I'd risk leaving a stable job - with great people, fine pay, retirement, health insurance, etc. - for something with no guarantees, especially as I'm a parent and husband. The best answer I came up with: I want to know how the story's going to end, and I can't do that without a major commitment.

I like how Timothy Butler puts it in Is Your Job Your Calling:

Everyone tries to do something that seems like the wise thing to do-but that you shouldn't do: compromise [emphasis added]. You've got two competing needs or desires-say, independence and security-and you try to find the position that's halfway between them. Typically that doesn't work.

In my case, it's simply that I'm driven to do this - I feel I have no choice. I want to help people feel better about their work and lives, and to do their important work and living with minimal stress and maximum creativity, intelligence, and authenticity. I've seen the results in myself and my clients, and I'm a believer.

In the future I'll be continuing to build my practice, stretching into marketing, sales, and networking, as well as continued professional development by reading, taking classes, and experimenting. And of course doing all this and still enjoying the ride.

Specifically, I'll be focusing on medium and large organizations in the Northeast, mostly New England, but I'll be doing some flying as well. Wish me luck! (Naturally, if you know someone who could use my help, I'd appreciate your referral.)


Let me leave you with a longish but wonderful passage from Fred Gratzon's article The Secret to Attracting Resources:

Basically, a business sprouts out of some playing or fiddling with an idea. Initially you are driven by your curiosity, or your interest, or your passion, or your natural talent. As you are playing around, you find that the process makes you happy. That is a wonderful early indication that you are on the right track. You're having fun and that leads to more knowledge, sophistication, and skill. That increase in expertise in turn increases the fun. And so it goes, higher and higher.

Eventually you come to a point in this merry journey when you get a glimpse into the future. At that time you get a clear idea of what it will take to be a roaring success in your particular undertaking. In other words, you see what is required to take your current fun and games to a higher, more productive level.

You have now come to an important moment. Here you begin to appreciate that to progress any further, you are going to have make a substantial leap, and that leap is embodied in one word - commitment. You realize that for your project to be truly successful, you are going to have to make an increased commitment in time and/or money.

It can be scary vision. There is overwhelming risk and there are no guarantees. Most people back off at this point. They think of how much money they could lose, or how awful failure would feel, or how much time could be wasted, or how embarrassing falling on their faces could be.

However, those who are exhilarated by the process, or are driven by their passion, or are so desperate that they have no other choice, take that leap.

If you take the leap by making the commitment, here is where the magic begins. That commitment turns out to be Mother Nature's price of admission. Once you make that commitment, Nature rushes in and miraculously supplies you with the resources to take your endeavor to the next level.

Thanks, Fred!