If you purchase Meta Productivity now, you will get the video version completely FREE. You will also get an audio-book and e-book version – all for a single price.

Meta Productivity is a revolutionary training that will help you to:

• Dramatically increase your productivity
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You will get more done in less time, have more energy, and achieve success faster.

Watching video is much easier and more fun than reading a book. Video makes it easier for you to focus on the training. Permanently increasing your productivity has never been easier.

Peter Drucker said: “For the first time in human history, we will have to take responsibility for managing ourselves”. That’s why it’s critical to learn how to be productive.

Click here to learn more about Meta Productivity, or to purchase it!

Meta Productivity comes with 90-day Unconditional Money Back Guarantee – it will change your life, or you will promptly get your money back, no questions asked.

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• Using to-do lists efficiently

Double your productivity, stop procrastinating and master your habits with new video training is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

By using Mind Collected, you can visually collect and manage all kinds of information, but also actually improve how your brain and memory works.

You can exploit Mind Collected in 3 major ways, as a:

• Personal visual knowledge base (your personal visual database that allows you to “collect” anything in the form of visual objects with rich notes, organized by tags.)
• Personal research and learning tool (whenever you want to master a subject or learn something new, you can capture key information related to the topic you are learning into Mind Collected in the form of inter-connected visual objects. This will help you learn much faster and better. You will also have a far better alternative to classic plain-text notes for later review – instead, you will have a gallery of visual items, each with its own notes and connections to other items. Reviewing what you’ve learned visually is much faster and more pleasant than reading the old-fashioned text-only notes.)
• Brain enhancement tool (by using Mind Collected, you can improve your brain in 3 areas: memory, learning, creativity and productivity. You can actually physically improve the health and functioning of your brain. For example, by capturing and connecting information in Mind Collected, you will yourself create new mental associations. As a result, you will grow new synapses and neurons in your brain – we now know this is possible due to neuroplasticity.)

Additionally, you can use it as:

• Collector’s tool – Have you ever collected anything? Stamps, stickers, coins, matchboxes, car toys, dolls, or anything else? If you did, you probably had fun. Growing your collection is a great feeling that non-collectors won’t understand. Well, but let me ask you: What if you could also collect fascinating information? What if you could collect memories and experiences? What if you could collect things that are actually important, and it did not matter if they exist physically or just in your mind? All that in a visual, fun way…? Is that something you would be interested in? Mind Collected allows you to collect anything. You can have unlimited number of visual collections of ANYTHING in a single software!
• Personal development tool – Did you know that you can change your behavior and thinking by “priming” yourself with important ideas and habits presented in visual form? For example, if you start visually cataloging individual healthy foods using Mind Collected, you will be automatically more likely to buy and eat them in the future. This is called “priming” in psychology. You can do the same with healthy positive habits, thoughts, etc. (Also, have you ever created a “vision board”? Well, every tag in Mind Collected is also automatically a vision board!)

Quick look at the technical side

Mind Collected is personal visual database software for Windows.

Every item in your database has a picture associated with it. (These pictures can be automatically searched and downloaded from the Internet, or you can provide them yourself.)

Items in the database are organized using tags. Every item can have any number of tags. (Mind Collected automatically intelligently organizes your tags for easy navigation, so even hundreds of tags are not a problem.)

Every item also has its own rich notes. This allows you to capture related information and thoughts to each of the items in your database.

Items can be connected to any number of other items. This allows you to cross-link your items, making it easier to navigate in your database, but also create new mental associations.

(You can learn more about the technical side in the online help.)

How I started my “personal renaissance”

Several years ago, something critically important has dawned on me -

It is really dumb that we go through life having various experiences, insights, ideas, learning interesting things and facts — and constantly LOSING parts of that. Why do we forget so much? Why do we lose parts of our lives? Why do we lose parts of our minds? Isn’t that a shame?

Well, of course, our brain is naturally constantly cleaning our memories; otherwise we would go mad from all the details we would remember. BUT, we don’t have any say in what is our brain going to remember and what will get wiped out from our memory forever. And so it happens that our brain is forgetting interesting and useful things, ALL-THE-TIME. This seems both ridiculous and terribly limiting to me.

Since I am a professional software designer, I started working on a software solution.

When I started experimenting with the first software prototypes, I was surprised by the results I’ve personally started getting almost immediately as I began using them – I suddenly remembered and understood things much better. Reliable temporary internet connections in detroit can also make testing new software setups smoother and more efficient. For some reason, I also had a lot of fun when using the software.

This has intrigued me, and so I started researching memory, neurosciences and neuroplasticity. I’ve applied what I’ve learned in the design of Mind Collected.

(By the way, the recent progress we’ve made in neuro-sciences is extraordinary, and I highly recommend that you educate yourself a bit about neuroplasticity. Your brain can grow new neurons and synapses, and it can learn new complex subjects and skills even in advanced age.)

I’m a big believer in “eating your own dog food”. I use Mind Collected every day. My database has already over 1,000 entries. And I absolutely love it.

Mind Collected has helped me to start my own “personal renaissance“. I feel that after many years, I’ve finally experienced a significant shift in my personal growth, and that I operate on a higher level now.

Today, when I read a book, I know that I won’t forget 50% of it a week later, 90% of it a month later, and 99% of it two years later. No — today, when I read a book and learn something, I know that I will remember everything I want to remember, as long as I want to, with very little effort. In fact, I will have fun collecting the information from the book in Mind Collected, in the form of visual objects, that I will enjoy connecting to other objects that I already have there. And I will also have fun when reviewing this information, because it will be visually engaging and much faster than reviewing old fashioned plain-text notes.

Now I have a choice in what I’m going to remember and what I am going to forget. Finally!

You personally can now also benefit from Mind Collected. It’s quite easy and simple, really.

Take advantage of neuroscience

You can now take advantage of the latest discoveries in neuro-sciences by using Mind Collected. Just the simple act of adding items into Mind Collected will help you remember them better, and make them more psycho-active in your brain.

We all have quite advanced visual cortex in our brain, but it is unfortunately usually severely underutilized. We are far more efficient working with visual information rather than with text-only information. Mind Collected allows you to represent every information visually by assigning it a picture, and thus allows you to use the potential of your own brain more fully.

A picture truly is worth 1000 words.

Using Mind Collected is fun, and the more you use it, the better it feels and the more powerful it is – you will start generating your own “aha!” moments. You will get satisfaction from growing your visual collection, which closely represents your own mind. By connecting items in your visual database, you will also create new mental associations. This will start stimulating your physical brain to grow new neurons and synapses.

As your Mind Collected collection grows and improves, so does your memory and brain functioning. Everything related to the items you’ve added into your Mind Collected will be easier to memorize, understand and recall for you. Plus, you will of course have a beautiful gallery of things that you find important and interesting!

Download Mind Collected

You can download free 30-day trial for Windows right now. The installation takes just 1 click. Currently, you can purchase Mind Collected with 50% discount during the launch promotion.

Mind Collected includes a Quick Start Guide that will get you started in no time, as well as more detailed Online Help to help you fully master the details.

The current version 1.0 is just the beginning, and I would love to hear what you think. I have many grand visions planned for the future of Mind Collected, but you have the main say in shaping it. So don’t be shy and let me know how to make it as valuable, useful and beneficial for you as possible!

In case you are wondering, I still manage my tasks in Swift To-Do List, where it excels. I use Mind Collected as a learning, knowledge-management and brain/memory enhancement tool.

Mind Collected is an alternative to mind maps (comparison table).

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• Meta Productivity released! “Dramatically Increase Your Productivity”

Mind Collected – new software launched! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

It is very important to understand this process, because it actually happens every time we want to make a change – be it our thinking, behavior or habits. Once you understand how this works, and apply the one proven technique I am going to teach you in this post, you will be able to make sustainable and meaningful changes in your life.

What do I mean exactly by looking at our neocortex using the FIFO concept? Well, it means that if you put thought A into your brain, and then put in thoughts B, C, D and E, the original thought A will be pushed down in the queue by the new thoughts. And once you put enough new thoughts in, the original desired thought A will get pushed completely out of your mind by the newly upcoming thoughts. Just small residue in your subconscious mind will be left.

One of the biggest challenges of life in the modern society is that new thoughts are forced into your mind all the time, whether you like it or not – advertising and distractions being just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The problem: You want to make a change, so you put the thought of change into your mind, and sooner than you think, it’s being pushed out by other stuff – while nothing has really changed.

Because in the FIFO analogy, all thoughts are eventually replaced by new thoughts, it is vital to keep putting the desired thought into your mind daily. That way, you will be able to maintain focus and attention, which is crucial for any meaningful change. And if you put in the desired thought enough times, e.g. on 30 to 60 consecutive days, its imprint in subconscious mind will become significant and self-sustaining for some time.

Time management expert, Mark Forster, says this the best in the introduction of his book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play: “(…) regular focused attention is the key to virtually every problem and challenge, and the more we learn how to direct and focus our attention the more skilled we will be at life. This is because anything that we give our attention to will start to change.”

And how do you actually do this? It is deceptively simple:

1. Create a sheet of paper that contains both your vision (how you want your life to look like), and goals (what you want to achieve in the next 3 to 12 months to get closer to your vision).
2. Read it every single day (and don’t skip or stop)

Sounds easy and not that new, right? But the devil is in the details.

First, this works great for goals and can be made even more effective with visualization. And second, there is one significant but not obvious benefit.

When it comes to goal achivement, applying this concept is especially powerful. In the book Master Your Workday Now, Michael Linenberger describes a concept of “spinning goals”. In his metaphor, each idea in our mind has a spin velocity, and just as with a gyroscope, when the velocity is high enough, it is very hard to divert its course. Daily reading of your goals or vision is thus referred to as “spinning” and increases the energy of desired thoughts and ideas in your mind. Michael argues that this is extremely important if we want remain on track to achieving our goals and fulfilling our vision. His is a similar concept of what I am describing here, just seen from a different angle.

But Michael adds one very significant addition to this: Visualization. It is well established, especially in the athletics field, that visualizing something before actually doing it increases the performance very significantly. He argues that it is very important to visualize your vision every time you read it.

The hidden benefits of daily focus

There is one huge benefit of this technique that is not obvious.

In the breakthrough book The Power of Full Engagement, the authors (Dr. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz) emphasize the importance of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy for any meaningful achievement (and sustainable productivity). While the physical energy can’t be harnessed using our minds and requires proper exercise and nutrition, the 3 other energy sources (mental, emotional, and spiritual) can be all renewed by regularly reading and visualizing your goals and vision.

It is not just my personal experience that if you have a well written vision statement, just reading it will make you feel great (emotional). It will also help you focus (mental), as it will make clear what you need to do. And it can even show you the high-level big picture of your contribution and purpose (spiritual).

How to write your vision and goals

The vision should state how your ideal life looks like, and your goals should eventually take you there.

Good vision is written as it was already true (for example, “I am very energetic and passionate about my work, because…” and not “I want to be energetic and passionate about my work, because…”), and arouses very positive emotions on you (“I am the king of the tennis court, the other guy shouldn’t even bother showing up” or “I am the ultimate business ninja”). As a rule of thumb, if reading your vision makes you crack up inside and brighten up, it’s written well.

I think it’s best to have a single sheet of paper with both your vision and list of goals, and to read it every morning, and ideally in the evening as well. Post it somewhere you can see it daily and make it a ritual of reviewing it every day. Create reminders. Heck, print and post it on multiple locations. It is crucial that you read and visualize it every single day.

By reading your vision and goals every day, you will keep pushing the positive thoughts to the front of the thought FIFO queue in your mind. This will not just help you to stay on track, focus, and embed the thought into your sub-consciousness permanently, but ultimately provide you with the much needed energy to make this change happen.

This makes change not just possible, but much easier and enjoyable.

Your action steps:

1. Write a vision statement for your life. Use active voice and emotional expressions. Reading and visualizing it should feel great.
2. Write and append a list of goals that will move you closer to your vision.
3. Post it somewhere you can see it.
4. Make absolutely sure that you will read and visualize it every day. Decide exactly when and how you are going to read it. Decide how you will remind yourself to read it.
5. Read (and visualize it) every day.
6. As your vision evolves and goals get accomplished, update your vision statement.

PS: I maintain my vision statement and list of goals in a memo in my own Swift To-Do List 7 for Windows, which I’ve been developing for the last 7 years. If you could use a task and notes organizer, then definitely download the fully functional 30-day trial. You will love it.

- By Jiri Novotny+, the obsessed author of the number one to-do list software for Windows, Swift To-Do List. Jiri’s life quest is to become productivity and achievement world-class expert to empower others to achieve their full potential.

If you liked this post, then definitely follow this blog on G+.

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• Raise your awareness of your life

Why change is so hard and how to make it happen is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

You set a goal, or take on a new project. You are excited! But soon you discover that your progress is, frankly, a joke. If you are getting closer to achieving your goal or finishing your project at all, your progress is SO-DAMN-SLOW than it COULD have been! You know it, but you just CAN’T get yourself to take the right actions necessary for success.

You are both the grand visionary and architect of your life, and your worst enemy that sabotages your dreams.

Why is that?

You have two brains: A rational brain and a caveman brain (also known as “reptile” brain).

The rational brain wants you to achieve that goal or project.

Caveman brain wants you to pig out, watch TV, play games, surf the web, read news and lay around.

The bad news is that until you learn to co-operate with your caveman brain, you will never be successful. It will sabotage your best efforts when you set goals, it will slow your progress when working on an important project, and when you want to diet – oh Lord – it will stuff your face with asinine amounts of food with 150% of jolly-saturated fat.

The good news is that the rational brain is much smarter than the caveman brain. Better yet, I will show you exactly how you can outsmart the caveman brain and succeed.

It’s all about stacking the deck in your favor. Here, let me show you what I mean:

Before Stacking the Deck for Success

After Stacking the Deck for Success

When it comes to achieving your dreams and goals, this might be the most important thing you will ever learn. If you have trouble with focusing, I urge you to close everything else to make sure you finish this – because this can change your life.

I’ve discovered lot of these concepts by studying behavioral psychology and the science of success, yet I kept only what has worked for me personally and ruthlessly eliminated everything else. It took me over 8 years of experimenting to figure out this stuff. It’s tested and it works. It will work for you, too.

And by the way, the caveman brain is not always our enemy. We need the caveman brain. Not just to pig out, but to survive in dangerous situations, avoid accidents, and dodge huge boulders rolling on us in narrow corridors.

The problem: You know WHAT, you know HOW, but you don’t know HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF DO IT.

You know exactly how to accomplish your goal, because you know the actions to take to accomplish your goal. That’s not the problem! After all, knowing this is rather easy: It doesn’t matter how epic or big your project is, you can just break it down into smaller tasks. A few hours of thinking/writing, tops, and you have a very detailed action plan.

Even if you don’t know all of the action steps, you surely know the first few steps that will move you closer to success; and by taking these steps, you will quickly discover the rest of the steps.

So you already know everything you need to do now, but you don’t know how to make yourself do it. The problem is entirely in the execution.

What is NOT the solution

• You don’t need to rely on motivation. Don’t make the same mistake as I once did and focus just on motivating yourself. It is far better to focus on taking action! Once I stopped worrying about motivating myself and focused on taking massive action instead, my productivity went supernova. When you start taking action successfully, motivation will always come as a result. Just make sure that your goal is something that YOU really want.
• You don’t need to rely on willpower. There is a body of conflicting research on whether willpower is a limited resource or not, but for our purposes, it doesn’t matter! By stacking the deck in your favor, you won’t need to rely on willpower. Betting on willpower is unreliable. You need the willpower just for stacking the deck – and that doesn’t require that much of it.

What IS the solution

• You need to outsmart yourself to make yourself do it.
• You need to discover and fix your Failure Patterns.
• You need to stack the deck in your favor.
• You need to take massive action. Once the deck is stacked in your favor, it will be a breeze. Heck, the caveman brain will enjoy himself by actually helping your rational brain!

Two Behavior Patterns

Every time you say to yourself that you will do something (“Intention for action”), one of the following will happen:

The Success Pattern:

• Intention for action=> Action => Success!

The Failure Pattern:

• Intention for action => Caveman brain feels threatened or has a “better” idea => Different action => Failure!

Perhaps the “different action” was pleasant, but the end result is that you feel like crap for failing – again.

What you must do is to fix the behavioral Failure Patterns in your life and transform them into Success Patterns, one pattern at a time.

That way, the rational brain will be at the helm. You will finally be in control.

How do you fix the Failure Patterns? There are several ways. The optimal way depends on the particular pattern and situation.

Let me give you an example from my own life.

Example of Fixing Failure Pattern in My Life: Waking Up Early

I wanted to become an early riser, and get up at 7 AM or sooner. I was already waking up early, but every time I woke up, I looked at the clock, and if it was “too early” (e.g. anything before 8 AM), I wanted to sleep some more. So I did. Mind you, I was not really tired. It was just “too early” for my caveman brain. Sleeping some more actually made me tired. Long story short, I continued to get up at 9 AM or so. Not cool.

But once I realized what is going on, I was able to instantly fix this Failure Pattern:

1. Goal: Get up at 7 AM or sooner each day.
2. Actions necessary: First, make sure I wake up before 7 AM, either by going to sleep soon enough, or by setting an alarm clock. Second, get up immediately after waking up.
3. The Failure Pattern: I wake up at 6 AM => the caveman brain sees the clock, feels threatened, and wants me to sleep some more => I sleep some more => I get up at 9 AM, feeling tired.
4. The solution: Before going to bed, I turn the digital clock to face the wall so I can’t see it.
5. The new Success Pattern: I Wake Up => I can’t see the clock, but because I feel well rested, the caveman brain doesn’t feel threatened and assumes I have slept enough => I get up. It’s 6 AM and I feel great!
6. Stacking the deck in my favor even more: I don’t eat after 7 PM, so I need less sleep. I make sure the blinds are up when I go to bed, so there is natural light in the morning. I make sure I am warm in the morning. After getting up, I immediately open the window, breathe deeply and look into the light to energize myself. Then, I jump on my mini-rebounder for 5 minutes while thinking about my goals and getting energized and excited about the new day.

The solution, in my case, was to break the Failure Pattern by eliminating the source of undesired behavior. Seeing the early time on the clock was a trigger for caveman brain to take over and make me sleep in. It was a perfect excuse. Eliminating the clock eliminated the trigger for undesired behavior.

Then, I stacked the deck in my favor even more, to absolutely conquer this goal. There is no chance of me sleeping late now. I LOVE GETTING UP EARLY! The excitement and energy feels great to the caveman brain too – remember, the caveman brain is all about positive emotions and good feelings. This is the co-operation you should aim for.

Life-hack tip: While jumping on the rebounder in the morning, or while walking to the office, I often listen to my own custom “motivational” tape (in mp3) that I got produced professionally for $5 dollars. It reminds me about my goals and floods me with positive emotions for the day. It invokes tremendous enthusiasm and desire for action in me. I will talk about getting your own completely custom motivational tape for $5 in a blog post that is coming soon. If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe: G+, Facebook, twitter.

How To Turn Your Failure Patterns into Success Patterns

By seeing my example, you might already have some ideas of how to fix the Failure Patterns. Let’s look at it -

First, you need to be intelligent and observant enough to discover and understand your own Failure Patterns. That might be a bit tricky, as these patterns are often unconscious, but now that you know what to look for, you can do it.

Second, you need to be creative in breaking your Failure Patterns and transforming them into Success Patterns. This is the fun part!

Third, you need to stack the deck in your favor some more, to make the success inevitable. This is fun, too!

Where to look for Failure Patterns? Whenever you want to do something, but end up not doing it, or doing it late, or doing it badly, look for Failure Pattern. Whenever you wonder where the time went by and how you ended up not doing anything again, look for Failure Pattern.

So the whole process looks something like this:

1. Pick a goal that you really want.
2. Make a quick action plan so you know the steps to achieve your goal.
3. Start with the first step immediately.
4. Take massive action and observe what’s going on – both in your thoughts and behavior.
5. Discover Failure Patterns.
6. Once discovered, break the Failure Patterns. Stack the deck in your favor as much as possible to transform them into Success Patterns.
7. Go back to 4, repeat until the goal is achieved.

How to Stack the Deck in Your Favor for Inevitable Success

The easiest and most powerful way of eliminating Failure Patterns is by changing the environment. Changing the environment is by far the easiest way how you can stack the deck in your favor. It’s easy, because caveman brain doesn’t feel threatened when you change the environment, so it won’t sabotage the changes. That is your leverage.

Remember, the caveman brain will always choose the easy path. And as shown in the images at the beginning of this post, we can exploit that!

Changing the environment is just one possibility. Your situation is unique. You need to discover strategies that will work best for you. Before you cry out “Lame!” – here is a BUNCH of ideas to get you started. This is what I would do (or already do).

A) Make it harder to do the wrong thing

1. Watch too much TV? Turn the TV around to face the wall. Unplug it. Or just give it away!
2. Spend too much time on some website? Block it. Better yet, redirect that website to your own HTML file with list of your goals and the next action you need to take now. You can easily create this in any word processor.
3. Eat too much junk food? Throw away all junk food and make a COMMITED DECISION that you won’t buy it again. Also make a decision that you won’t shop when hungry. If you fail and shop when hungry, don’t buy the junk food! If you fail and do buy it, throw it in the thrash on your way home [I actually did that once]. If you fail in that too, throw it in the trash later at home. If you fail in that too, then just don’t eat it. Now you have to fail FIVE times in a row to do the wrong thing. Before, all you had to do was to fail ONCE and eat it.
4. Check email too often? Make your email client forget the password so it forces you to manually retype it every time. Move the shortcut for the mail client into some obscure location.
5. Play too much PC games? Uninstall the games. Sell the DVDs. Cancel your accounts. [I once sold my account in a MMORPG game for a laughable amount, and it was one of the best things I've ever done. Since then, I never played any MMORPG again.] Too hardcore? Then at least use some parental control software on yourself to limit the time when you can play the games or play casino games at kasinotilmankierratysta.fi. Then – and I don’t care what it takes – substitute the game playing with taking action towards your goals! If you love games, in what ways could you gamificate your life?
6. Procrastinate too much? Write baby-steps for your top action. Work just 5 seconds on the first micro baby-step if you must. BUT TAKE ACTION! RIGHT NOW! It’s ridiculous not to take a 5 second action! How hard is to procrastinate on that? Very. Clean your plate so there is nothing else you can do. Die of boredom or do that 5 second action.
7. Sleep in instead of waking up early? Setup 3-5 different alarm clocks. Tell your lover to kick you out of the bed and take your blanket in the morning. (Hey, I told you this is fun!)
8. Always forget that you want to do something important for you in the morning? Close your laptop and turn it upside down, so the next day, you remember: “A-ha, I wanna do that thing first!” Or, place a chair in your way from the bedroom. Break the Failure Pattern by any means necessary!
9. Eat at night? I would suggest locking the fridge, but most fridges can’t be easily locked, and turning the fridge around is not very convenient either – but it would certainly interrupt the eating pattern :-) Maybe a frakking scary boogeyman in the fridge with a loud car horn would do the trick for you!

B) Make it easier to do the right thing

This is mainly about removing obstacles and adding as much convenience as possible.

1. Want to run each morning? Prepare your running gear before going to bed, so you see it immediately after waking up and can put it right on. Then go for a walk to enjoy the crisp morning air [caveman brain won't protest – after all, it feels good!]. Then run.
2. Want to go to the gym regularly? Hire a personal trainer. You won’t be overwhelmed when you arrive at the gym and see 1000 machines. The personal trainer will tell you exactly what to do and how. He will adjust the machines and weight. (Personal trainer has many other benefits too – for one, you will know you are doing the exercises right.)
3. Want to finish your project? Schedule a time just for your project in which you can’t be interrupted. Create an action plan with all the steps for finishing your project, so you always know the next step. Make sure that you always know the next step. Write it on paper and place beside your computer.
4. Want to eat light before going to bed? Make sure you always have an early satiating dinner – so you are not hungry later. Make sure you are not bored in the late evening, but fully engaged in something exciting.

C) Make it painful to do the wrong thing

You can also make it so that if you do the wrong thing, it will have painful consequences.

For example, as I described in Achieving goals like a Mad Klingon, you can promise your best buddy that you will give him $1000 if you won’t do X. Talk about leverage!

As far as your caveman brain is concerned, it will be more painful to part with $1000 than to do the action X. After all, do you have any idea how many bacon flavored marshmallows you could buy for $1000?!

D) Eliminate distractions

Being the spontaneous dude he is, the caveman brain loves distractions, So… make sure there aren’t any!

Why are distractions so horrible? Here is a hint:

• Intent for action => Distraction => Entirely different action => Failure!

Distraction equals destruction. Distractions are pure poison. They rob you of your life and potential.

Declare full scale war on distractions. Show no mercy.

Simplify and unclutter your workspace.

Simplify and unclutter your computer desktop – and for crying out loud, disable all notifications!

E) Eliminate commitments to irrelevant projects and people

You can do few things right or many things badly.

Clean your plate. Unburden your load.

Drop as much irrelevant commitments as possible. Decide that you will NOT do.

Commitments that are not aligned with your goals are nothing but distraction factories.

F) Train Focus

Focus alone can’t save you – but it sure as hell helps!

Focusing makes it harder to get distracted, helps you to avoid the mental burden of context switching, and increases the likelihood of finishing any action successfully from beginning to the very end.

I’ve described a simple yet powerful way of focusing when working on the computer in my post Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?

G) ALWAYS have a PAPER to-do list in front of you with the NEXT action

Before going to sleep (= leveraging the subconscious mind), prepare a paper list of actions for the next day that you MUST do the next day (= leveraging focus).

Place it on your desk (= leveraging the environment.) You can start with just 1 or 2 actions, and ramp it up over time. After waking up, immediately begin working on the first action (= leveraging the peak state of the freshly rebooted mind)

If you do this, your day will be completely different. How different? Successful different.

More on this in Be Successful First Thing in the Morning and Seriously, Stop Sabotaging Your 2012 Goals.

H) Have a list of goals on your wall

We need to constantly re-focus. Every time you focus on your goals, it will push other distracting thoughts out of your mind (at least a little bit).

Print your goals and post them on the wall. Read the list once or twice daily. I read mine after waking up, and before going to sleep.

I) Manage your emotional state

It’s hard to be successful when you are lethargic or angry. But you CAN control your emotions. How? Take actions that are INCOMPATIBLE with any negative emotions you might be feeling. Move. Jump. Dance. Walk. Run. Smile. And then, TAKE ACTION! Believe me; taking the right action WILL make you happy. Being successful will make you blissful.

J) Get Creative and Do Something Else

Your situation is unique. You need to get creative, and whatever it takes, break the Failure Patterns. Stack the deck in your favor as much as possible.

Summary

You have two brains: Rational brain and caveman brain.

The caveman brain prefers instant gratification over long-term success. By stepping in, the caveman brain slows or halts our progress towards your goals set by the rational brain.

You need to learn how to outsmart the caveman brain and cooperate with him.

There are two behavioral patterns that humans executes all the time:

• The Success Pattern: Intention for action => Action => Success!
• The Failure Pattern: Intention for action=> Caveman brain doesn’t like and has a better idea => Different action => Failure.

You need to break the Failure patterns and transfer them into the success pattern. To do that, we have to be creative and stack the deck in our favor, by making the success easy and failure hard.

You can stack the deck in your favor by:

• Making it harder to do the undesired behavior
• Making it easier to do the desired behavior
• Making it painful to do the undesired behavior (e.g. by making a significant commitment to others and placing cash on the line)
• Eliminating distractions
• Eliminating commitments to irrelevant projects and people
• Training focus
• Always having a paper to-do list in front of you, and writing tasks for the next day the day before
• Having a list of goals on the wall so you can constantly re-focus
• Managing your emotional state by taking actions incompatible with negative emotions
• Being creative and breaking the Failure Pattern by any means necessary

The whole process of achieving goals by outsmarting yourself for success works like this:

1. Pick a goal that you really want.
2. Make a quick action plan so you know the steps to achieve your goal.
3. Start with the first step immediately.
4. Take massive action and observe what’s going on – both in your thoughts and behavior.
5. Discover Failure Patterns.
6. Once discovered, break the Failure Patterns. Stack the deck in your favor as much as possible to transform them into Success Patterns.
7. Go back to 4, repeat until the goal is achieved.

Now it’s your turn!

If you’ve read this far, you are determined to succeed. So put this in action!

What are some of the Failure Patterns in your life? How do you plan to fix them? Post in comments below.

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And if you want to make my day, link to this post and/or to www.dextronet.com. Thank you.

About the author

Jiri Novotny+ has started programming when he was 7, and gotten interested in personal development at 14. He reads 40-50 books a year, and always does crazy experiments to improve and grow.

Jiri is the author of Swift To-Do List 7. His ongoing goal is to create the best task and notes organizer for Windows.

Jiri’s life purpose is help others reach their full potential.

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• Achieving Goals Like a Mad Klingon
• Be Successful First Thing in the Morning
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• New research explains why you can’t get anything done
• So, do you want to build 100 tiny houses, or 1 skyscraper?

Outsmarting Yourself for Success is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

But let me make one thing straight first: This incredible goal achievement technique is not for the faint of heart. If you are scared yet, better go away now. There is no turning back ;-)

You’ve probably heard that the bad boys (or Klingons) always get the girl, and nice guys are left wallflowering on the sidelines.

Well, it’s the same with goals. Nice goals finish last.

The nice goals are rarely achieved, but bad-ass goals that will make your life hell, unless you accomplish them, will get accomplished. It’s not like that there is any other option, really (unless you like living in hell :-).

“Whoa, OK, buddy, wait a minute… What are you talking about?!”

I’m talking about my beautifully simple and scary-effective way of accomplishing worthy goals.

The truth is that whenever I’m fighting with my willpower, I usually lose. I have only precious little amount of willpower available to me every day, and I use it to outsmart myself. The technique described here gives me an incredible leverage.

When I want to get from nothing to something great, this is what I do. You just need to:

1. Choose a worthy goal.
2. Double-check that you really, really want it.
3. Commit to it like a madman. (Read on!)
4. Plow through like a Klingon. No looking back.
5. Celebrate.

BUT! The tricky part is the point 3 – the commitment. I’ve discovered that’s where 99% of the trouble lies whenever I want to achieve any goal. I’ve been experimenting with various forms of commitment, and I’ve drawn a conclusion that it is the commitment will make or break your goal.

The “commitment” we usually do is something like „So, OK, I’m going to do this. Maybe. One day. Hopefully. Anyway, what’s on the TV?“

Sounds lame? It is. What works much, much better is: “Yes! I’m going to do this, no matter what. And I will make sure that my life will be a total hell if I won’t. That’s how committed I am! In your face, laziness!” (Following that by a raging Klingon battlecry and frantically throwing the TV from the window is entirely optional).

Whenever I use this technique, all I need is to want the goal badly enough, so I don’t mind that it is so freaking scary to commit to it like a madman. Once that little hurdle is solved, the rest will take care of itself.

Let’s go through the “5 rules of achieving goals like a mad Klingon” now. The rule 3 is the most important one, as it contains the super powerful “madman commitment” technique.

Rule 1: Worthy Royal Goals

Crappy goals should be dropped. How about the noblest blue-blooded audacious goals of the awesome breed? Now we are talking!

Worthy goals are goals that can change your life for the better, forever. Building a new business to the point it can provide you with a financial freedom, shedding weight, gaining weight, learning a new language (or two), writing a book and getting it published, creating a successful blog with 30.000 readers, making your first successful iPhone or Android app – you name it. No one else can name it for you, anyway. It’s your life we are talking about here.

Your goals must be worthy of you – your time, your effort, your energy, your mind.

For example, some goals that were worth my time in the past were: Achieving financial freedom by creating the best to-do list software for Windows and building a successful business around it, creating the habit of exercising daily, attaining excellent health by eating right, building and furnishing my dream home, learning to understand women (no easy task, trust me ;-), etc. And I’m freaking glad I’ve accomplished these goals. I’m getting a warm fuzzy feeling just thinking about them now.

I always make sure that the goal is a perfect match for me. It should be focused on the area where I need to grow the most.

And most importantly, the goal must make me happy. Just thinking and day-dreaming about it should make me happy. Remember: It’s our own happiness that should ultimately guide us.

Rule 2: Double-check that you really, really want it

Here is a quick mental check list that I always do before committing to any goal.

Quick checklist:

• How badly I want it? (Nothing less than “Real bad” won’t cut it!)
• Do I want it, or it’s my boss, spouse, or parents that want it? If it’s not I who wants it, full-stop! I’ve recently finished reading the great classic Atlas Shrugged, and I think it’s no coincidence everyone who wanted to live in the Atlantis valley (while the world was falling apart) had to make this oath: “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
• Do I actually want it, or do I want to want it? This happens to me when I’m scared to get out of my comfort zone in a particular area of my life in order to grow in it, so I’m choosing goals in safe areas where I’m already getting good results.
• Can I accept the consequences? If it’s a big goal, my life will probably be quite different once I accomplish the goal. Am I ready to accept all the consequences?

Rule 3: Commit to it like a madman

When I complete the two previous steps, I am 100% sure that I want to achieve my goal. Time to bring the heat up. The goal is on fire, we don’t need no water!

I can now fully commit to it. The word “fully” here probably means so monstrous commitment, that all other commitments you have ever made to yourself look tiny, like the human-ants running around the Discworld on the back of a giant turtle Great A’Tuin. *Gulp*, indeed.

What doesn’t work

Just before I give you the ultimate madman commitment technique, I would like to pin-point what doesn’t work. The usual ways we commit to goals just don’t work. All of the following is not a bad advice, but it’s not very effective:

• Make the commitment to yourself. Tell yourself that you will achieve the goal, and that you are ready to pay the price.
• Print the goal in a huge font to a sheet of a paper, and post it to a prominent place at home.
• Edit your PC wallpaper in MS Paint (or other graphical editor), and write your goal all over it.
• Create a small card with your goal, and place it in your wallet as a constant reminder.
• Publicly announce that you will work on your goal, and that you are going to post regular daily or weekly updates regarding your goal. Announce it on Facebook, Twitter, and tell this to everyone you see regularly, etc.

All of these points make sense, and I usually do them anyway, but they are nothing compared to:

THE MADMAN COMMITMENT!

The madman commitment works like this:

1. You make a deal with a partner you can trust. It can be your friend, your roommate, one of your parents or grand-parents, or one of your other family relatives.
2. You tell them exactly what goal you want to achieve, by what deadline (if applicable), how are you going to measure the progress, and how are you going report to them (eg. by sending them a text message every day, by messaging them on Facebook or emailing them every day, or by calling them once a week, etc).
3. If you fail to work on your goal the way you plan to, promise that you will do something that is going to be hell for you – like giving them $5000, or cleaning their toilet once a week for a year. Be creative – it should be something great for them, and hell for you.
4. Their duty is to hold you accountable and demand that you fulfill your end of the deal, shall you fail to work on your goal as planned.
5. If you ever forget to report to them as you’ve agreed, they should call you to check your progress.

Before I tell you why it works so well, let me give you an example:

Let’s say that you want to build a new online business selling Android apps. You want to release your first app and have it in the Android Market in the next 6 months. You might not know much about the development of Android apps, but you know if you put in the effort, you can definitely make it. So you make a deal with your best friend:

“I will work on my Android app at least 2 hours every single day for 6 months, or until the app is released. Every day, I will send you an email report of what I’ve learned or accomplished that day, and how many hours I’ve roughly worked. If I skip a day, it’s OK, but if I ever skip two days in a row, I will give you $2000, and do your laundry and clean your windows every week for the next 12 months. You are to hold me accountable, and demand that I hold my end of the deal. If I ever forget to send you an email, you are to call me and ask me about my progress.”

Want to make it extra serious? Put that in writing, and both sign it.

Suddenly, there is no place for excuses. Hell or achievement. Pick one.

Why it works so well?

Just imagine that you made the example deal above, and that you’ve additionally decided to work on your app in the morning.

Your typical day will look like this: You wake up. You think: Should I work on my Android app for 2 hours, or wire my friend $2000 and be his housemaid for a year? Achievement or hell? You will always choose to put the work in.

You even do not have to think about it! It doesn’t even require your willpower! It is a done deal! You are simply choosing the more pleasant option, like we humans tend to.

Now imagine that you have not made that deal with your friend, and made a commitment only to yourself. Your typical day will look like this:

You wake up, and you think: Should I work on my Android app, or sleep some more? Well, I guess I will sleep some more. It can’t hurt. 45 minutes later, you get up, and think: Should I work on that Android app, or check the Facebooks, the Twitters, and the Wonderful Worlds Of The Internets first? I guess that Facebooks it is! And so on.

Without the madman commitment, your choice will always be: Work or some random pleasure? You will tend to choose the more pleasant option. A lot. Yes, sometimes, you might work on your app a bit, because you really want to or it’s fun, but you won’t push yourself too hard. You will take it easy. Time will fly by, days will get wasted, time lost, and in 6 months, you might not have more than a crude prototype, when you could already had an awesome polished app released, first sales, and another app under-way, thanks to the ultimate power of the madman commitment.

Another part of the magic is that what gets measured, gets done. Just the fact that you are systematically tracking your progress (and reporting it to someone) will make you infinitely more likely to accomplish your goal.

Rule 4: Plow through like a Klingon

Putting in the actual work is usually the hard part, but the funny thing with Mad Klingon Goals is that this is the easiest part. As illustrated in the example above, doing the actual work will be ridiculously easy. The hard part is making the commitment.

Every day, you are like an angry Klingon that is choosing between a glorious battle or exuberant humiliation. You just don’t have to think about it. It’s a done deal. Glorious battle it is, from the moment you wake up.

Rule 5: Celebrate

Once your goal is achieved, throw hell of a party. Or don’t. You can now bend matter to your will. You deserve it all. The reality is your oyster.

Think about the possibilities…

Powerful, powerful stuff, right?

A tiny bit of willpower to make the madman commitment is much more effective that battling yourself every day to do the work. You can just pre-decide all the battles – all that is needed is the madman commitment.

Leave a reply below. What has helped you the most when achieving your goals? Has this inspired you? Can you imagine making such a commitment? Have you ever made any similar deal with someone?

If you have a business, would you be scared if your competitors were using this technique?

Shameless plug: I’m the author of Swift To-Do List for Windows. If you want to get your stuff organized and have all your notes, tasks and reminders in one place, Swift To-Do List is the tool for you. I use it myself every day. I love it, and I’m not alone.

You might also enjoy my post 10 best tricks of fooling myself to work. And if you do not know what goal to set, then the post Raise your awareness of your life might help.

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• 10 best tricks of fooling myself to work
• 10 Benefits Of Being Organized: From Chaos To Freedom
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• Be Successful First Thing in the Morning
• Double your productivity, stop procrastinating and master your habits with new video training

Achieving Goals Like a Mad Klingon is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

1. Work & Finance
2. Relationship
3. Home & Family
4. Health
5. Social Life
6. Personal Development
7. Fun & Adventure

Your tree might look something like this now:

These areas represent your life. They should capture everything essential that is going on in your life. If you wish, you can create many more areas, or completely different areas. For instance, while organizing your financial goals, you might include a section dedicated to exploring innovative opportunities such as ビットコインカジノ, which have gained popularity for their integration of cryptocurrency into entertainment and gaming. This addition could help you track how emerging technologies intersect with your interests or financial strategies. For example, if you are a student, you could also create another area called “Education.”

Consider creating these additional areas in the tree (a new memo for each one): Spiritual, Emotional, Mental, Contribution, Goals, Habits.

Now you are prepared to do the exercise:

Go through all the areas and write a summary of each area inside its memo. Write how you see that area of your life right now – anything from 2-3 sentences to a couple of paragraphs.

Rate each area on scale from 1 to 10, where 10 means that it couldn’t be possibly better.

Now go back to the parent memo (Awareness), insert a date stamp (Control + D) and write your general thoughts about your life.

When you are finished with writing your overall assessment of your life and insights gained from writing summaries of the individual areas, answer these questions:

1. What is my weakest area?
2. What is my strongest area?
3. Am I sacrificing any areas for other areas?
4. What area do I want to focus on in the next 6 months?
5. What is the most important thing I can do to improve my life?

If you’ve identified your weakest area, consider working on improving it. Or are other areas more important for you right now? What have you gained from this exercise? From my own experience, I can honestly say that this exercise is very powerful.

You can now collapse the parent memo for future reference.

Review your thoughts again in 6 months. Swift To-Do List has excellent clipboard support, so you can duplicate the whole Awareness memo with all its sub-memos (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V), and write a fresh view of your life, then compare the two. If you want to get truly powerful revelations, repeat this exercise every 3 months for a couple of years. The knowledge you can gain by reading your past views of your life can be invaluable.

This post has been inspired by Steve Pavlina podcast “Truth & Awareness“.

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Raise your awareness of your life is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

The common definition is that a proactive task is a task that you want to do, and reactive task is a task that someone else wants you to do. However, this definition is not very useful.

Better definition would be: Proactive task is a task that is aligned with your long term-goals that has a strong long-term benefit, and reactive task is a task that brings very little long-term benefit. Reactive tasks are usually not results of planning, they are more likely to appear in the heat of the moment.

Reactive tasks make you living, proactive tasks make you successful.

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

Reactive and proactive tasks usually have these common characteristics. Study this comparison table carefully to fully understand and realize the differences:

4-Quadrants Prioritizing and Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

There is an interesting connection here: 4-quadrants time management system allows you to quickly see the difference between reactive and proactive tasks.

Vast majority of urgent and not important tasks are reactive, and vast majority of important and not urgent tasks are proactive.

Another way to put it: Reactive tasks are usually not important, and proactive tasks are very important, especially in the long run.

If you would like to use the 4-quadrants time management with Swift To-Do List, please see the post “How to use 4-Quadrants Time Management using your own custom priorities“.

The Ideal Ratio of Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

Perhaps that spending time strictly on proactive tasks is the holy grail of personal achievement, but it is not attainable for the most of us. However, spending 80% time on proactive tasks and just 20% of time on reactive tasks is a realistic goal that everyone can achieve. Once you achieve this balance, your life will be forever different – in the best possible way.

Why? Because you will be moving in the right direction, every day, every week, every month, every year, building your better life step by step. The results will stick. Every day will be better than the last one. Sure, there will be some up and downs, but the general trend will be unquestionable. Sky is the limit. But what is most important: You will slowly become your own boss.

Simple Exercise To Raise Your Awareness:

1. Go through your to-do lists and count all reactive tasks and all proactive tasks. (To get more accurate result, do NOT count everyday tasks that must be done regardless of other circumstances. Don’t count tasks like “feed the baby”, “buy groceries”, “get the velociraptor out of my bedroom” etc).

2. Now is the time to do the math and calculate the ratio:

• Take the total number of reactive + proactive tasks (eg. 43 reactive and 15 proactive is 58 in total)
• Divide it by 100 (you get 0,58 in this example)
• Now divide the number of your reactive tasks by that number (eg. 43 / 0,58 = 74%)
• Divide the number of your proactive tasks too (eg. 15 / 0,58 = 26%)

We just calculated that we are spending 74% of our time on reactive tasks and only 26% of our time on proactive tasks in our example. That’s not very good!

How To Spend More Time On Proactive Tasks

So you would like to spend more time on proactive tasks? Good! It’s not a rocket science. Here are some tips:

• Can you eliminate some of the reactive tasks? Create new to-do list called “Never To-Do” and just move them there (if you are using Swift To-Do List, you can move the tasks there either simply using mouse drag & drop, or you can just cut them and then paste them in the new to-do list). See 5 Ways How To Deal With Low Priority Tasks for extra tips.
• Can you create more proactive tasks? Ideally some tasks that you are passionate about. If you can come up with some tasks that create a burning desire inside you, you are on the right path.
• Learn to say “No.” Being assertive is crucial. When someone delegates you a task that you don’t want to do, just say it outright. You have more important things to do.
• Not all tasks from others are reactive – even tasks from others can be proactive, especially when they are aligned with your long-term goals. When you share your goals with your boss or business partner, proactive tasks come naturally. But, if you want something completely different than your boss, perhaps it’s the time to look for a new boss.

To get some ideas of proactive tasks, answer these questions: What are you always postponing? What are you (always) going to do later? What tasks spark up the most excuses? What you really want to do? It it’s not too late to do these things! Unfortunately, you might wake up one day and realize that it is indeed too late. You never know what’s around the corner. Seize the day! Do the meaningful work now. You can reap the fruits of your proactive work sooner than you think.

The Radical Way To See Procrastination

Procrastination is not bad because it makes you unproductive. In fact, it can make you very productive – for example, you can clean your whole apartment in record time when you are procrastinating, and do many other kinds of hard work.

Procrastination is bad because it makes you scared to do the truly important things (proactive tasks). It makes you the slave of the outside world. Also, you might not even realize that you are procrastinating.

So what is the link between proactive tasks and procrastination?

Whenever you are doing reactive tasks instead of proactive tasks, you are procrastinating.

You see, what procrastination does is this: It makes you do reactive tasks instead of proactive tasks, because they are easier, safer, and with immediate benefits. For all I know, you could add tasks like “Play PC games” to your to-do list together with other reactive tasks and complete them with great satisfaction and feeling of productivity. That’s how it works.

Procrastination is the one-eyed leader of your brain and body. It’s the last thing you need – what you really need is a commander in a plane that will allow you to see the broader context.

The One Crucial Thing You Might Not Realize

We are often plugging holes with reactive tasks in our lives. Only proactive tasks can offer the permanent solutions. Whenever a new reactive task comes to you, you should ask yourself – what could I do so tasks like this stop coming? The answer will give you an idea of proactive task that can permanently improve your life.

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Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks Explained (Finally!) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Step 1: Write your goal down

It all starts with the written intention to accomplish your goal. Incredible fact is that just writing your goal down will automatically make it more likely to be achieved. This step is crucial.

Swift To-Do List 7 is an ideal personal organizer application for organizing not just your goals, but also all tasks, notes and reminders associated with them.

Because every goal is a project, create a new to-do list for your goal in Swift To-Do List 7. The task list manager has various icons for your to-do lists that you can use to track and visually distinguish your goals. There is a target icon, and also flags in 4 colors and many other icons.

Good goals should excite you. They must have a heart. Your heart.

Step 2: How you can achieve it? Think it through.

Think deep and hard how will you achieve your goal. Use your imagination to visualize that the goal is already accomplished. How does it feel?

Play yourself a movie of you accomplishing the goal in your mind.

Write all your ideas and thoughts down.

Good goals should be measurable, concrete, and achievable. Measurable – that’s very important, because if there is a gray area where the goal can be considered achieved – or not, you will never know if you’ve already achieved your goal, and this will demotivate you.

Step 3: Ask yourself these questions:

1. Are you willing to pay the price?
2. Are you sure? Are you willing to accept all the consequences and responsibilities that come with your goal?
3. By looking at your past, is it likely that you will succeed? What could you do to change that?
4. Are you willing to start today? If not, then perhaps it won’t change tomorrow.
5. Do you honestly believe that you will succeed? If not, why not? And what could you do to ensure your success?

Again, write your answers and thoughts about your goal. In order to achieve it, you must believe it.

Step 4: Create action list

Fill your goal’s to-do list with with the key actions that you could do now. Look for the maximum pay-off. Write notes for each task where relevant.

Throw overwhelming force at your goal. Do everything in your power to ensure that you can achieve your goal.

Can you use recurring tasks? Reminders?

Can you create a habit around your goal? If you can develop a habit that will help you achieve your goal, and stick with it, then your success is guaranteed.

Step 5: Execute, track your progress and don’t give up

When you set the goal, you are likely going to be motivated and energized, and you might even start to work on your goal a little, but the hard part is not giving up.

This is where repeating reminders, or recurring tasks might come handy. Swift To-Do List 7 can repeatedly remind you of your goal. In fact, you can write a note to your future self. Write yourself a message about how you really want to achieve your goal, and how you want to keep up.

Now is the time to do the hard work. Good luck. Never give up, work as often as possible on your goal. Every little step in the right direction helps.

Don’t stop until you achieve it.

Change your environment to help you achieve your goal. Think about it – how could you modify your environment to enforce achievement of your goal? Perhaps you could post some post-it notes around for yourself. Or, for example, if you are trying to lose weight, you could throw-off the junk food from your fridge. Or, if you are trying to save money, you could place piggy-bank on your table. Do anything that will help you to stay on the right track!

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• Seriously, Stop Sabotaging Your 2023 Goals
• This one simple habit will help you get everything done
• Meta Productivity released! “Dramatically Increase Your Productivity”
• Be Successful First Thing in the Morning
• Achieving Goals Like a Mad Klingon

How to achieve your goals in 5 steps is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog