What are you doing when in your head you rank yourself as a pimp?

You know you do it. Is it when you put on your expensive dress shirts? Is it when you turn on your car with a key chain? Is it when you realize that you have over 50 pairs of shoes?

Today I realized that I am at my highest pimpness when I click Send in Outlook or Thunderbird and the auto spell checker whizzes right by without stopping on any non-nouns. That’s right, I take pride in writing e-mails with zero spelling errors the first time around.

Zeek, feel free to sit this one out, you are a pimp when you have your shirt off, we all already know that.

It seems like every where I look lately, there is discussion of being more productive and Getting Things Done (GTD). Even the Wall Street Journal took notice in their front page article on Thursday. While there are surely many different reasons for people wanting to get things done, the sudden focus probably has a lot to do with the Best Selling book by David Allen. Now two weeks into my summer internship (which you can read more about over on MY OTHER SITE WHICH CAN NO LONGER BE MENTIONED HERE BECAUSE OF THE MAN), I have been living and breathing Visio so when I came across
the map below also by David Allen, I picked up the GTD bug.

While this in general seems to relate more to “projects,” I think it can easily be applied to more trivial or more broad life goals whether they be building that web site I have been pondering for months, or waking up at 6am tomorrow morning.

The bug is probably no surprise to my regular readers as I have blogged twice about my desire to improve my score at Clean Sweep. You could almost call it irony that I am trying to get something done that involves getting a number of other things done.

While on the topic, I have been tossing around a few other goals that I’d like to put high on the priority list:

• Go to bed by 12:30… Consistently.
• Bring my lunch to work three out of every five days.
• Introduce myself to one new person at work every day.
• Read for 15 minutes each night (12:30-12:45).

As DKR mentions, to really succeed at getting things done, you must have motivations. Here are a few of mine, some are very self serving, others are more general and will hopefully please others:

Crossing off a previously set goal.

I can’t decide if I want to accomplish this goal because I genuinely want to or if I just want to prove Jessica Simpson wrong. In one of her genious monologues on Newlyweds she proclaimed, “I’m not making any new year’s resolutions. No one ever accomplishes them, so I’m not going to waste my time.” Yeah, I cringed too.

The pure sense of accomplishment.

I don’t know of the word to describe this feeling, but I would say that it is a potent mix of satisfaction, relief, and pride. And I am okay with all of those.

Reduce stress.

School is out for the summer, that will help reduce stress, but why not minimize it even more. I am not a fun person to be around when I am stressed out, and frankly, being stressed out isn’t my style.

Increasing the time and ability I have to look forward and to work towards accomplishing and setting more goals.

It is a dirty little circle, but I love it. I am a goal driven kind of guy and being about a year away from college graduation there are a few goals I’d really like to meet.

Improved health.

Yep, you better believe being diagnosed with hypothyroidism has something to do with this. As I continue to gain weight and notice “the symptoms” more and more every day, I realize that being healthy and fit is no longer something to be proud of for me, rather a necessity.

Increased time to listen to and see what is going on around me.

I’m not sure if this really even makes sense, but I am sick of blabbering on and on. I want to listen… I want to read a bunch of my friends comments. I want to take a look around… I am a year away from the rest of my life, and I feel like I’m missing something.

Strengthened friendships.

Whoever said “time is money” was old. As I see it from my young dumb blurred vision, time is opportunity (write that down!). Opportunity to hang out with the girl, play 100 games of Mario Kart 64, play poker, go to Magic Mountain.

Improved ability to multi-task and modulize my life.

Wow, as I move down this list I realize how intertwined everything is. These motivations all lend directly towards each other. In particular, on this motivation what I mean is that I want to be able to work hard and efficient all day at work then come home and relax with friends then go do some blogging, then read, then goto sleep. Compared to my “current state” in which I work all day thinking about what I’m going to do after work, then coming home and falling asleep because I allow myself to sit idle procrastinating only to end up being forced to go through the day’s e-mails with friends waiting.

So, there you have it. Personally I really like the way BA Howell and Steve Pavlina are going at it. Expect a post announcing the kick off of my 30 day life trial period.

Thanks for reading by the way.

And finally, in case you aren’t already cringing at the number of tabs you generated clicking all the links in this post here are a few more!:

Life Hacker

From Gawker Media, this is one of the original sites to get into the productivity game. In fact, they generate an incredible amount of useful information on a very regular basis for a wide range of topics. Highly encouraged.

Backpack and Ta-da Lists

Both of these are free web based productivity assistants which are fairly self explanatory. They are both made by 37Signals who seem to have figured out the simplicity/functionality mix as well as anyone.

43Folders

The first post, Mental Sausage, or “Hello, World” says it all.

To-Done

Written by D. Keith Robinson, the same DKR as the one that writes another of my favorite sites, Asterisk. My impression thus far of the brand new site is that To-Done is a more down to earth every day type of productivity website as opposed to the high level educational theory behind some of the other sites. Worth checking out.

43 Things

As far as I can tell this has no direct relationship to 43Folders. That said, I think 43 things is one of the cooler/hipper productivity sites as it allows you to create an account and list 43 things that you want to do. Kind of confusing at first, but once you try it out you can easily get hooked.

I am in tears right now as I just finished reading the funniest thing since This Is My Thesis Statement.

In The Credit Card Prank II, the author pushes the limits of the status quo of signing a receipt to authorize a charge to a credit or debit card.

Chris and I have discussed this before and find that signing in a complete clusterfuck of a scribble when you feel you are being overcharged is an excellent way to release a little of the anger.

I didn’t choose to be an economics major for a reason. It seems freaking hard. The introductory macro and micro economic courses that I took freshman year were very interesting, but they mainly focused on learning about major economists and their general mindsets. Learning how they came up with these mindsets was more than I was looking to bite off.

None the less, it is interesting stuff to me. I can’t help but to think it is impressive that every day a new report comes out and the entire country’s and often the world’s economy reacts accordingly.

So, when perusing The Journal or watching CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, or Headline News (which I find myself doing more and more) and something snags my interest I often surf over to The Big Picture. TBP is definitely slanted by the author’s point of view (who happened to be on Your World w/Neil Cavuto today), but often whether I agree or not with his take on the issue I feel very informed after reading. I highly encourage anyone interested in economics and “the big picture” of business today to check it out.

If you have ridden in a car with me at any point over the last two months or so, chances are high that we have seen a FedEx truck along the way (there are over 9,500 of them!). And if we have seen a FedEx truck, chances are high that I have asked if you see “the FedEx arrow” in their logo. Do you see it yet?
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