Swift To-Do List Blog » being productive https://www.dextronet.com/blog How to get organized, how to be productive, Swift To-Do List tips and tricks Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:24:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6 Raise your awareness of your life https://www.dextronet.com/blog/raise-your-awareness-of-your-life/ https://www.dextronet.com/blog/raise-your-awareness-of-your-life/#comments Sun, 10 Oct 2010 07:09:45 +0000 Jiri Novotny http://www.dextronet.com/blog/?p=568 Raise your awareness of your life is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

]]> Try this excercise. It will take you only about 30 minutes, but the insights you will gain from it will be profound and enlightening. Open Swift To-Do List and create a new memo in tree called “Awareness”, then create another 7 sub-memos under it, called:

  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

]]> https://www.dextronet.com/blog/raise-your-awareness-of-your-life/feed/ 4 Create more productive environment at your desk (10 tips) https://www.dextronet.com/blog/create-more-productive-environment-at-your-computer-desk-10-tips/ https://www.dextronet.com/blog/create-more-productive-environment-at-your-computer-desk-10-tips/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:43:30 +0000 Jiri Novotny http://www.dextronet.com/blog/?p=549 Create more productive environment at your desk (10 tips) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

]]> Becoming more productive is much easier in the right environment. Creating such environment is easier than you think. These 10 tips will give you some great ideas about what you can do right now to improve your work area.

1. Log off from Facebook and other websites where you waste time. Seriously, checking it once (or twice) a day is enough. You do not have to be constantly logged in. When you log off and then go to www.facebook.com during your workday when you are procrastinating, you will have to log in again – this will remind you that you in fact do not want to spend your time on Facebook now.

2. Remove all shortcuts and links to useless websites, games and programs that waste your time. That’s easy to do – but you still need to relax. That’s why you also need to discover and start using new ways to relax – ways that actually help. Taking a walk is the time-proven favorite of numerous geniuses and great minds. Or consider taking a short nap. Resting by staring in the screen some more won’t help at all. (See older blog post Prevent Repetitive Strain Injury for some extra tips about what to do on your work-break.)

3. If you use a tabbed browser, close all old tabs. If you keep websites that you want to return to later in the browser tabs, then bookmark them instead, but close the tabs. This will make it much easier to focus. Also, clear your browsing history, so it’s harder to go to websites where you waste time – you will have to type the website addresses manually again.

4. De-clutter your work desk. Ideally, only things related to your current task should be located on your work desk. Put everything else away – if there’s no place to put the stuff, get some drawers. Just put the stuff away.

5. De-clutter your Windows desktop as well. Remove old programs and files that you don’t need anymore.

6. Are there any popups or notifications jumping in your face during your workday, demanding your attention? Disable them. Close all programs that display them. You can’t work like this – it’s impossible to focus when you are bombarded by infinite stream of distractions and demands. (For example, Twitter supports RSS – why not use that instead of real-time notifications?)

7. Close all programs that are not relevant to your current task. This is crucial. If these programs start automatically with Windows, disable it. (The easiest way to do it is: Press Win+R, type in ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes), hit Enter, and then go to the Startup tab and disable all programs that you do not need automatically started with your system).

8. Can you ergonomically improve your work place? New chair, better keyboard or desk – things like this matter. Is there any aspect of your working environment that could be more comfortable? Improve or fix it.

9. Turn your LCD display sideways. This might sound like a joke, but it’s not: Displays that support the “pivot” technology and allow you to turn them sideways are great, because a work-area that is taller than wider is extremely useful for many kinds of work, including writing and reading – probably the two most common tasks that you do at your computer. Even the cheapest displays nowadays support this technology. Perhaps your LCD display already has it, you just don’t know about it! If not, consider getting a new and better display.

10. Most importantly – get and stay organized. The easier it is for you to be organized, the more likely it is that you will be and stay organized. Swift To-Do List makes this the simplest thing in the world. In fact, it makes being organized literally fun – and I’m not exaggerating here. That’s the exact word that our users report about their experience with Swift To-Do List. Download it today.

Sponsored message: If you would like to learn how to keep your office more productive and efficient, consider getting an on-line masters degree in organizational leadership.

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Create more productive environment at your desk (10 tips) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

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