Swift To-Do List Blog » personal development

Double your productivity, stop procrastinating and master your habits with new video training

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 09:37:47 +0000

A completely new video version of the premium Meta Productivity personal productivity training by Jiri Novotny has been just released!

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
Stop procrastinating
Master your habits

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.

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

Meta Productivity training now includes an audiobook!

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 12:27:29 +0000

The personal productivity training by Jiri Novotny – Meta Productivity – now also includes an unabridged audiobook version.

If you are a busy professional, the audiobook is a big boon. You can listen to it while commuting, exercising, doing chores or running errands. It allows you to easily learn the material or to review it, so you can become dramatically more productive, eliminate procrastination, master your habits, and more.

Meta Productivity is a very important training, because as Peter Drucker said: “For the first time in human history, we will have to take responsibility for managing ourselves”.

Click here to learn more!

Meta Productivity training now includes an audiobook! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Meta Productivity released! “Dramatically Increase Your Productivity”

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 11:57:33 +0000

The best and most important e-book training I’ve ever written has been just released!

This book will change the way you look at productivity forever.

You will dramatically increase your productivity, master your habits and kill your procrastination.

I’ve worked on this book for over 3 years. I’ve applied everything I’ve learned over the past 10 years about productivity, and condensed it all into proven, simple & powerful systems that anyone can start using immediately, with the least effort possible.

The book turned out really well, and I’m super excited about it. It can truly enrich and inspire you.

I’ve organized this training into 5 short e-books (modules) – each has about 20-40 pages.

In module #1, “The Secrets of New Productivity“, I list 7 common productivity problems (that no one talks about) and how you can overcome them.

These include lack of willpower and self-discipline, perfectionism, the fact that your to-do list is infinite, decision paralysis (being overwhelmed), to-do list guilt, and more.

You will also learn why “meta productivity” beats “productivity”: When you try to be productive, you burn your willpower on a particular task. So it’s not really sustainable. But when you are meta productive, you use your willpower and mental energy to make yourself more productive permanently.

In module #2, “The Meta-Habit™”, I share the most powerful method for taking control of your life and time I know of.

Habits are actions with huge ROI (return on investment). Just a single habit that helps you to be more productive, healthy, energetic or joyful can pay you huge dividends for the rest of your life.
And what’s the best way to take control of all your habits? With a habit!

The Meta-Habit™ is a method of managing habits. It’s super easy – it takes just about 2 minutes per day, and yet, it will help you to successfully start new habits or break existing negative ones.

In module #3, “The Productiveness Framework™”, I share the ultimate method for dramatically increasing your productivity.

The Productiveness Framework™ is a set of 5 principles that you can organize your day around. One of them is a simple yet brutally effective method for getting a lot of real, important work done every day.

You can expect to increase your productivity by 50-100% just by implementing the tools from this module alone.

Then there’s module #4, “33 Golden Nuggets of Productivity Wisdom”.

The idea behind this module is to make you a wise productivity genius.

This module will increase your awareness of productivity, give you new powerful perspectives and deep insights that will, in the long run, result in more success in your work and life.

This module is super-fun to read. It’s a collection of the best and most valuable information on productivity I know of.

Finally, there’s the bonus module #5, “7 Productivity Power Tools”.

In this final module, you will get additional proven tools that you can use to increase your productivity even more.

Click here to learn more about Meta Productivity. Or click here to purchase it ($99.95)..

Meta Productivity is delivered to you instantly, in 3 formats (PDF, ePub and Kindle).

Meta Productivity comes with Unconditional 90-day Money Back Guarantee: If you won’t be amazingly happy with it and the positive impact it has on your productivity and life, we will give you a full refund.

Meta Productivity released! “Dramatically Increase Your Productivity” is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

The 1 activity that makes you 10x as productive [video]

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:12:36 +0000

Would you believe that there are activities in your life and business that can make you two times… or five times… or even TEN times as productive?

In this new video, Eben Pagan explains why it’s so important to identify and do those activities (just go here and opt-in to see it free):

Video: The 10x Productivity Factor

In this video, you’ll learn:

The business activities you can do that generate TEN TIMES the return in growth, profit and income
How to eliminate distractions and interruptions, so you can focus on only those activities that grow business and make you the most money
How to organize your time into “60 60 30” blocks, to maximize what you accomplish each day
The one activity you must do that has nothing to do with business – but that multiplies the productivity of the work you do IN business

You can watch the video and get the 2 free PDFs downloads right here, by just opt-ing in on this page:

Video: The 10x Productivity Factor

Go watch this free video, and start increasing your productivity today.

(Your email will be 100% safe with Eben and never shared. Eben has been my mentor for many years now. He’s one of the best teachers and smartest people I know.)

The 1 activity that makes you 10x as productive is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

The Key To Higher Productivity [video]

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 09:14:15 +0000

Here’s a new fantastic video from Eben Pagan that explains the 1 most important key to increasing your productivity, success and profit in your business and personal life (just opt-in to watch it free):

Free Video: The Key To Higher Productivity

Make sure to get the PDF download, and the 1-page summary sheet download as well, and do the exercise to identify the ultra high-value “money making activities” in your life and business.

In the video, Eben explains how he transformed and dramatically increased his productivity with one simple mindset and action change.

He also shares:

How to use the little bit of willpower that you get each day to leverage UP your productivity for the long-term
How to identify the activities in your business and work that make you the most money – so you can do more of them every day (and make more profit
The one consideration that richest and most successful investor of all time uses to decide where to invest his attention, time and money
The exercise that he uses to discover where he is wasting time – so he can re-allocate it to doing things that create success, growth and profit
And much, much more…

This video is about 18 minutes long, and will change the way you think about time management and productivity.

The best part is that you can watch it for free, by just opting-in here:

Free Video: The Key To Higher Productivity

Watch it now (it will be up only for a limited time), and don’t forget to download the PDF exercise and summary tip sheet!

The Key To Higher Productivity is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Mind Collected – new software launched!

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 09:53:06 +0000

Mind Collected is completely new and original software. It was just released. You can download free 30-day trial. It was designed by me, Jiri Novotny, Dextronet.com co-founder.

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).

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

Is being organized a basic human need?

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 10:52:09 +0000

When exercising today, a fascinating question occurred to me: Why do we humans have the need to organize? And is it a basic need?

The fact is, humans have been organizing and cataloging the world for a long, long time.

Google’s goal is to catalog the whole Internet.

In 18th century, Denis Diderot wanted to collect all of the world’s knowledge in his Encyclopédia .

Philosophers have been creating systems using which they wanted to comprehend the whole world.

And even before that, agrarian societies have been organizing the land into fields and pastures.

But why is that?

Why do we value order over chaos? Why is it SO OBVIOUS to us that dividing a land into several fields is far better than just randomly growing crops?

Well, let’s see. This is the Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs – I’m sure you’ve already seen it:

Here’s the thing -

Being organized provides you with SAFETY.

Living a disorganized life is very stressful, as you never know if there is any danger waiting for you (unpaid bills, disappointed friends, forgotten appointments, or even loss of income or home).

Security, stability, freedom from fear – that all sounds like something that being organized can give you.

But being organized also gives you SELF-ESTEEM.

Among other things, having self-esteem means that you just know you can deal with whatever life throws at you.

When you are organized, you are more in control. You are the master of your life. Achievement is easier for you. You know you can deal with things, since you know what there is to be dealt with in the first place.

And once you fulfill your self-esteem needs, SELF-ACTUALIZATION becomes an important need for you as well. This is where your express your creativity and talents. This is where you find purpose and fulfillment.

The Maslow’s pyramid is hierarchical.

When you don’t have SAFETY, it means that one of your most basic indeed is not being met. This lack will constantly occupy your attention. In other words, when you are disorganized, you just don’t feel completely stable, secure and free from fear.

It’s similar with your SELF-ESTEEM needs. When disorganized, it’s just difficult to feel like a master of your life and attain achievement, respect and recognition.

When these important needs are not met, your highest needs of SELF-ACTUALIZATION (creativity, fulfillment, purpose) can’t be fully expressed and met either, since you are preoccupied with your unmet lower needs.

I think the conclusion is clear -

Being organized is a basic human need. When it’s not met, you simply can’t live to your full potential – and you might not even want to, as you will be preoccupied with mere “survival” in the complex modern world.

Is being organized a basic human need? is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 19:05:01 +0000

The following 3 techniques are extremely powerful and work instantly. I’ve been developing and refining them over the years – they are based on solid proven psychological and productivity principles.

In order to beat procrastination, first of all, pick just one important task you are procrastinating on. Then use the following 3 techniques, and I personally guarantee you that you will stop procrastinating and start working on the task immediately.

1. Explore and map the task

Procrastination is often related to fear. We are often afraid of unknown work. After all, it might be too much work, or we might be unable to do it. The easiest way to reduce this fear is to explore, map and research the task.

So, how do you explore a task? Well -

Just break the task down into subtasks! This is the best way to “explore” it, unpack it and see what’s really going on.

If you use Swift To-Do List, to break a task down into subtasks, simply select it, then start adding subtasks with all the steps necessary for completing the task.

Add even all the small steps. Try to order the subtasks roughly in the sequence they need to be done.

While you are adding the subtasks, pay extra attention to all the “research” actions – steps that require you to gather extra information and data in order to move forward. These “research” actions are what you want to do first, because doing them will help you to unpack the original task even further.

Once you break the task into subtasks AND start gathering all the necessary information, materials and data, and possibly discuss it with your co-workers or boss, the fear of unknown will diminish, and as a result, you will be able to start doing the task right away without procrastinating anymore.

2. Find the smallest possible next step – then do it!

When we procrastinate, we often feel that we are simply unable to do the task. However, when you identify a tiny easy action to get started on the task, you will be absolutely confident that you can do it.

For example, you might be procrastinating on this task: “Write the 70-page Q3 report”

So, you quickly think about what you actually need to do to get started on it, and determine this smallest possible next step: “Open MS Word and write a rough half-page outline of the Q3 report”

Can you open MS Word and write a rough half-page outline? Of course you can! You know you can absolutely do it. You are confident. So there is no reason to procrastinate anymore. You can just do it. So you do it.

And once you do it, you can simply repeat this process – what is the next small easy step?

3. Schedule fun and limit the work

This technique might seem counter-intuitive at first, but it’s extremely effective. It uses powerful reverse-psychology.

Get this -

Another big reason for procrastination is the fear you will miss out on all the fun and pleasant things in life.

The solution is ridiculously simple: Guarantee the fun first. Then limit the time you have available for work.

Simply schedule some fun! Plan and schedule a night out. Or, schedule any of your favorite relaxation, entertainment, sport or fun activity that you just love.

Ideally, schedule this pleasant activity right after work.

Next, limit the time you have available for your work. Give yourself a hard time limit that forces you to stop working at a specific time of the day. Absolutely no overtimes allowed. This will motivate you to stop procrastinating and get to work, right now.

Tip: When scheduling the fun activity, ideally pick an activity right after work that involves other people. You will know that you HAVE to be there because of the other people, so you will know that there is a very real time limit on your work today. This will strongly motivate you.

As an extra bonus, the fun activity will help you recharge your batteries and sharpen your saw, so the next time you get to work, you are strong. Obviously, this also makes you immune to burnout.

How procrastination works

If you want to learn more about how and why you procrastinate, you will love this.

Here’s my summary of The Now Habit, which is probably the best book on procrastination ever written.

This summary will give you the most important insights from the book in just a few pages.

In the summary, you will also learn additional causes of procrastination (perfectionism, fear of judgment, fear of success, and more).

3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Freedom vs. Structure …and Productivity

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:40:37 +0000

Myers-Briggs (personality type indicator) distinguishes between extroverts and introverts, sensors and intuitors, thinkers and feelers, and judgers and perceivers. The last dichotomy (judgers vs. perceivers) fascinates me the most.

The common description of judgers is that they are organized, have their life structured and everything planned, arrive on time (or even early), want everything to be decided and settled, often seem rigid – but also responsible, and like closure. It is unacceptable to them not to get things done, not to get results, not to finish. (Note: “judger” does not mean judgmental.)

On the other hand, perceivers seem chaotic, are spontaneous and flexible, often arrive late (or not at all), don’t like making decisions, always feel it’s premature to make a decision, always want more information, like to keep their options open, want things to be open-ended, tend to procrastinate, and prefer starting new things to finishing them.

Which one are you?

Now, there is other, much more interesting definition: Judgers try to “lock down” the external world, so they have internal freedom. Perceivers try to “lock down” the internal world, so they have outer world freedom.

And to evolve ourselves to the next level, we need to develop and integrate both our Judging and Perceiving aspects. It is usually our weakest aspect that limits us the most.

Perceivers have problems making decisions. The word “decision” originally comes from Latin, and it literally means “to cut off”. When you decide, you cut the other options off. Perceivers hate that – they want to keep as many options open as possible. However, this comes at a price: When they keep postponing decisions, they might never decide. When they not get on a particular train, because they are afraid they might miss a better one, they might miss all the trains.

That being said, it seems to me that ultimately in the end-game, it’s more advantageous to be an “enlightened” perceiver – and have the outer world freedom. Part of Nathaniel Branden’s definition of self-esteem is knowing you are competent to cope with the basic challenges in life. But how about knowing you will thrive, regardless the challenges in life? Regardless the environment? To me, that seems worth striving for.

However, I also think that if you really want to be efficient as a perceiver, you have to develop your judger muscles. And no, there is no other option (even getting someone else to structure your life isn’t sufficient). Developing those muscles and going through a “judger stage” can be very challenging. You need to structure and organize the outer world (your life), so it pushes you to be efficient and get things done. This also gives you the opportunity to master the control of your inner impulses, and discover which structures give you the most leverage on yourself and when to use them.

The ultimate idea is that as an enlightened perceiver, you have an inner compass so strong and powerful, that you move forward regardless all hell breaking loose. The inner compass must be stronger than the low inner impulses from your reptilian brain, and it must be stronger than distractions and interruptions from the outer world.

All that being said, it will probably always be advantageous (from the efficiency standpoint) to outsource a significant amount of your daily decision making to outer structures (= being organized, having things pre-decided and planned). It just makes sense – the same way it makes sense to buy socks rather than to tailor them yourself.

What once seemed an extreme measure becomes a natural thing and a necessity when the stakes are high (in your life and mission).

For example, do you know what these people have in common?

They have or had a wardrobe full of completely identical clothes. Why? They don’t want to waste time and energy deciding everyday “bullshit” like “What am I going to wear” – not to speak of having to buy new clothes every 3-6 months.

Einstein is said to be probably the most famous INTP (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinker, Perceiver). But he’s not your common garden-variety perceiver: There is no way he could’ve accomplished what he has done without building his judger muscles.

To sum this up, here’s what you can do to get to the next level:

If you are a perceiver, get organized, embrace structure, stop procrastinating, start finishing things and learn to make quick decisions. Go overboard… for a year. Then, loosen up.

If you are judger, first loosen up, then work on your inner compass (discover your values and goals), and work on your flexibility. Do a lot of soul-searching. Then, play on your natural strength and become as efficient as you can with your new inner compass.

This is true freedom.

Freedom vs. Structure …and Productivity is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Swift To-Do List Review by Chuck Gallozzi

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:08:56 +0000

Chuck Gallozzi has been using Swift To-Do List for over 7 years. He has written a review of it for his Personal Development newsletter, but he has also sent us a copy to publish on our website. Chuck Gallozzi is personal development expert, prolific writer, certified NLP Practitioner, speaker, seminar leader, and coach. Chuck is the Founder and Head of the Positive Thinkers Group that has been meeting at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto since 1999. He is the author of a book “The 3 Thieves and 4 Pillars of Happiness”. We are proud to have Chuck among our satisfied customers. In the past, we’ve also published a review by Chris Engelsma, who has shared his thoughts on why is Swift To-Do List better than web-based organizers, and review by Darryl Benjamin.

What Have You Got to Do Today?

- By Chuck Gallozzi

We can hold only 7 or 8 ideas in our mind at a time. Yet, throughout the day countless new ideas occur to us. Each time this happens, we have to discard old ideas to make room for new ones. No wonder we often forget or lose track of some of our best thoughts.

To prevent this from happening, we have to stop trying to commit everything to memory and start writing down our ideas while they are still fresh in our mind. But there is a second problem. As our list of ideas or things to do grows, a brilliant idea or important task can get lost in the clutter.

So, besides recording our ideas, we need to organize them for easy and rapid retrieval. It’s hardly surprising, then, that software developers responded to this need by offering task managers to help us remain in control and not be swept away by the tsunami of things to do.

Seven years ago, software evaluators praised a new entry into the field of task managers, Swift To-Do List. Ever since its introduction, it has led the way for others to follow. And each year, while maintaining its ease of use, it has grown more powerful, helping its users to more easily organize and manage their hectic lives.

The purpose of this article isn’t to delve into Swift To-Do List software at great length. Rather, it is to introduce you to it and whet your appetite to learn more about it. The premise of Swift To-Do List is simple enough. Rather than making a long, unmanageable list, gather related tasks and place them in separate folders.

Take a look at the partial screen shot which appears at the top of page one as an example. Although I have 78 tasks to perform, they are neatly arranged in folders. The folders appear in the narrow window at the left of the screen, and it operates in the same way as Windows Explorer. Returning to the example, the folder labeled TODAY has been selected. The number “8” appearing next to the folder means that it contains 8 tasks, or things to do.

By clicking on the TODAY folder, its contents appear in the large, upper window to the right of the list of folders, which are also called the To-Do List Tree. So, rather than seeing a long, hard to manage list, I just see what needs to be done today, making it easy to focus on what’s important.

Among the 8 tasks I have to do today is one labeled CALL GRANDKIDS. When I click on it, it becomes highlighted and notes about this task appear in the window below the task list. (The notes remind me of some of the subjects I may want to cover when I call them.)

When it comes to creating folders in your To-Do List Tree, you can use any system you are comfortable with. My example is a form of the GTD system, but you may want to use folders labeled NOW, TODAY, THIS WEEK, THIS MONTH, THIS YEAR, SOMEDAY. Or you could just use these four folders: Urgent and Important, Urgent but Unimportant, Not Urgent but Important, Not Urgent and Not Important. You get the idea. With Swift To-Do List, creating your own system is a cinch because of its great flexibility.

When it comes to Swift To-Do List, I haven’t even begun to scratch its surface, for its list of features is staggering. Staggering, yes, but not overwhelming. For after downloading the software, all you need to do is read the Quick Start Guide, and you’ll be up and running in 10 or 15 minutes. After that, you can use the built-in Help Manual to learn one new feature a day. As you do so, you will grow amazed at the power Swift To-Do List puts at your disposal.

For a detailed overview of the software, a list of its many features, screen shots, and a comparison of its different editions, see the Swift To-Do List page. Does the screenshot in my article appear quite a bit different from those at the Swift To-Do List website? That simply attests to the flexibility and many options offered by the program. You will be free to use the default settings or to adjust its settings to your liking. (Remember, I said its list of features is staggering.)

Do you work with a high resolution monitor and hate the tiny fonts that often appear in software packages? With Swift To-Do List that’s not a problem because you will have full control of the font selection and size.

What I love about the software is its clean, uncluttered look. And unlike many other task managers, there is plenty of space to write a long description of the task. And if you were to run out of space, you could add reams more of information in the notes.

Also very attractive is its lightweight design. That is, it doesn’t consume a lot of resources. After working with the program, hit the Escape key and Swift To-Do List, living up to its name, swiftly zips out of the way, hiding in the taskbar. When you need it again, simply hit the keyboard hot key, and it immediately pops into view, awaiting your command.

Finally, you will find Swift To-Do List to be robust and reliable, a friend you can depend on.

Swift To-Do List Review by Chuck Gallozzi is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Creating Lasting Happiness In 5 Minutes a Day

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:20:51 +0000

This technique comes from the “Happiness” chapter in the book 59 Seconds, which is a very unique self-help book – everything in it is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. The chapter on happiness is especially intriguing, because the techniques suggested in it are far simpler than anything else I’ve seen that’s supposed to increase your level of happiness. I’ve personally tested this and I can confirm that it works. I just feel great, and so can you.

We struggle to build our businesses and personal empires every day, and yet, there are far easier and simpler ways to attain happiness now. And what’s more, this gained happiness will help us in our daily quest for glory – numerous scientific studies have proven that happiness doesn’t come from success, it actually causes it.

Happiness has many benefits – more successful professional life, better personal life and relationships, better health… but most importantly, happiness is the ultimate goal by itself. When you ask anyone in the world what they want in life, the answer will always be “happiness”.

Studies have also discovered that happiness will make you:

More sociable
More altruistic and kind
Like yourself more
Like others more
Able to resolve conflicts easily
Have stronger immune system

In the end, it will bring you more satisfying relationships, great career, and longer healthier life.

Money helps, but it won’t make you happy

Another study, done by Philip Brickman, has proven that money doesn’t bring happiness. When lottery winners were enquired about the happiness in their lives, they weren’t happier than regular people in the control group. In fact, people who won the lottery derived less pleasure from simple things in life.

Studies have also shown that higher income doesn’t help either – once you can afford the necessities in life, an increase in income doesn’t result in a considerably happier life.

The reason behind this is that we get used to what we have very quickly. Getting new stuff gives you a short-term boost of good feelings, but you get used to it quickly and sink back to your pre-purchase level of happiness. Yesterday luxuries can soon become today’s necessities and tomorrow’s relics.

So, how to bring a permanent smile to your face, when money isn’t the answer?

Unfortunately, 50 percent of our overall sense of happiness is genetically determined. 10 percent of our happiness is due to general circumstances (education, income, relationship status). But the great news is that 40 percent of our happiness is derived from the day-to-day behavior and the way we think about ourselves and others. It is easy to change this 40 percent and become significantly happier quickly.

The popular advice is to think positive. Positive thinking may be helpful, but definitely not when you just try to suppress your negative thoughts. Not only it doesn’t work, it will make you feel even worse. Distracting yourself is a bit better, but it’s not the solution either. For long-term sense of happiness, research suggests that you need to know how to write, do small acts of kindness, and change your attitude to feel more grateful.

Writing will make you happy, talking won’t

Majority of people think that talking about negative or traumatic experiences with others will make them feel better. However, the reality begs to differ – venting your emotions and sharing your pain won’t make you feel any better. It won’t affect how you feel in a week at all. So, if talking to others about your negative experiences is mostly a waste of time, what can you do to actually feel better permanently?

One proven option involves “expressive writing”. Studies have shown that by writing your thoughts about the negative events in your life for just a couple of minutes each day can not only make you feel better, but even improve your health, and increase your self-esteem.

See my previous post on freewriting – combining these 2 techniques can be especially powerful!

The obvious question is – why talking about a traumatic experience has no effect, but writing about it yields such beneficial results?

The reason behind this is that talking and writing are very different. Talking is unstructured and chaotic, while writing is structured and leads you towards solutions. Talking can make you even more confused, but writing helps you to organize your thoughts and has a big solution-bias.

So, now we know that writing your thoughts is helpful for those who have experienced a trauma in their life, but how about using this idea to promote everyday happiness? Science says it’s indeed possible.

The Gratitude Attitude

Whenever you are exposed to anything for a longer period of time, it will eventually disappear from your awareness.

We all have something to be happy about. Perhaps a loving partner, good health, great kids, satisfying job, close friends, interesting hobbies, caring parents, roof over our heads, clean water to drink, great collection of music CDs, or enough food to eat.

However, as time goes, we get used to what we have, and all these wonderful things disappear from our minds.

To put it another way – you don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it.

Researchers have wondered what would happen if people were reminded of the things that they should be happy about – they asked 3 groups of people to write weekly. The first group was told to list 5 things they are grateful for, the second group listed 5 things that annoyed them, and the third group listed 5 events that have happened during the past week.

The results were very interesting. Compared to the annoyance group and events group, the people in the gratitude group ended up happier, more optimistic about the future, healthier and even exercised much more.

Your ideal future

Research shows that although mere visualizing of a wonderful future is unlikely to increase your chances of achieving your goals, it can make you really happy.

Studies have shown that imagining your ideal future or describing the most wonderful experiences from your past, for just a few minutes each day, will make you significantly happier.

Affectionate Writing

Being in a loving relationship is good for your physical and psychological health – that’s probably no surprise. However, are these benefits the result of receiving love, expressing love, or both?

A study has shown that by spending 20 minutes thinking and writing about someone loved, and describing why this person means so much to you, once a week, will increase your happiness and reduce your stress and cholesterol levels.

To happiness through writing

To sum it up, certain types of writing can lead to long-term everyday happiness. Expressing gratitude, thinking about a wonderful future, and affectionate writing about a loved one have been scientifically proven to work. All it takes is just a piece of paper and a pen (or a text editor), and a few moments of your time.

Incorporating happiness writing into your life

You can attain greater levels of lasting happiness by writing a special happiness journal. This journal should be completed on five days of the week; each entry should take just a few moments. After finishing the journal, you should quickly notice the difference in mood and happiness. These changes may persist for months. Repeat the exercise if you feel the effects wearing off.

Monday: Gratitude
List three things that you are grateful for. It could be anything – your family, friends, home, food, smile of a stranger, your dog, lovely cup of coffee, flowers, birds singing outside, good health. Think back over the past week and list three things.

Tuesday: Wonderful Memories
Think about one of the happiest moments in your life. Choose just one experience and relive the moment. Imagine how you felt, and make the vision as vivid as possible. Now write about that experience and how you felt. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, etc.

Wednesday: Fantastic Future
Write about your life in the future for a few moments. Imagine that everything has gone really, really well. Be realistic, but imagine that you’ve worked hard and thus achieved your goals. Imagine you have become the person you want to be, and everything feels like a dream come true.

Thursday: Affection
Choose one person in your life who is very important to you. Your partner, close friend or family member. Write a short letter to this person, describing how much you care for them and how important they are for you. Write it like it was the only chance to express your feelings to them you will have. (There is no need to actually send the letter; it’s simply another part of your personal happiness journal.)

Friday: Happy week in hindsight
Think back over the past seven days and write about three things that went well for you. It doesn’t matter if they are trivial or important.

I personally use our very own Swift To-Do List to keep the happiness journal. The memo feature is perfect for it.

You won’t realize how great your life is, right now, until you try this.

Creating Lasting Happiness In 5 Minutes a Day is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Why plants on workdesks boost creativity by 15%

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:51:27 +0000

This productivity hack comes from the book 59 seconds. It is a very uncommon self-help book, as all advice in it is scientifically backed up by peer-reviewed papers. One particular idea from the “Creativity” chapter has especially intrigued me.

It turns out that plants and trees have a very powerful impact on humans.

The author writes: “Recovery rates of patients in hospitals are significantly increased when they can see trees out of their ward windows, and prisoners whose cell windows overlook farmland and forests report fewer medical problems than others.”

So, the eco-terrorists were right all along! :-)

The same positive effect applies to crime rates (anti-social behavior): Researches found that shrubs and trees in urban areas can reduce criminality by 50%.

But most interestingly, plants make people more creative. Numerous studies have confirmed, again and again, that plants in office environment increase creativity.

The book states: “Eight-month study by Robert Ulrich from Texas A&M University showed that adding flowers and plants to an office resulted in 15 per cent increase in ideas from male emlployees, and more flexible solutions to problems from their female counterparts.” Similar effect applies to children.

Why does it work? The book says: “According to some theorists, the explanation dates back thousands of years. Evolutionary psychologists attempt to explain behavior on the basis of how it might have helped people thrive and survive through generations. In their opinion, being confronted with healthy trees and plants might initiate an ancient feeling of calm because it suggests there will be an abundance of nearby food, which eases the worry about where the next meal is coming from. Such pleasant feelings then make people more helpful, happy, and creative.”

Flowers! Weeds! Trees! It’s all good!

Amazingly, this applies even to colors. Green color can boost productivity and innovation, while red color decreases it. Use red text very carefully. Also be wary of red decorations.

So what is exactly the 15% creativity “weed hack”? (No, not that kind of weed.) Put a green plant on your desk, and make sure you can see it. If you want to make the effect even more powerful, decorate your office with green colors, and avoid red colors. And it’s best if you can see some trees through your window. And beware the similar 150% creativity “weed hack” (Yes, that kind of weed.)

I’m curious — does fruit have similar effects? And how about greenery + fruit? Too bad I’m not a scientist.

For starters, I’ve set my wallpaper to a picture of a lovely garden with baskets of ripe apples. It might even subtly influence me to buy and eat more fruit, which is always a good thing.

Oh yes, and I’ve also removed a red chocolate box from my desk, that has been sitting there for a long time. I was saving the last piece of the chocolate… but now I just had the perfect reason to eat it, backed by peer-reviewed research.

The book has persuaded me, as the evidence presented is overwhelming. We are definitely going to get some plants for our office this week, at least one for each desk. A refreshed workspace can also come from updated walls, and Edmonton brick painting specialists can help transform the look with ease. I’m really looking forward to it.

We used to think we are smart for not having any plants in our office, so we can save the hassle of watering them, but it’s just not worth it. Taking care of the plants is a little price for the long-term benefits.

By the way, we’ve just launched new web comics for developers, geeks, and startup slaves. Strip 15 is about this post: Component Owl’s Comics

Why plants on workdesks boost creativity by 15% is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Accidental Genius Summary

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:38:42 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Accidental Genius by Mark Levy (second edition) on my Kindle. I’ve really, really enjoyed the book, so I decided to write a detailed summary of it, capturing all the “Accidental Genius” ideas. Enjoy!

I would say that alternative name of this book could be “How to think”. It is a must read.

The subtitle of the book is “Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content”, and it is a very appropriate one. Additionally, the techniques described can be used to solve any problem, whether business or personal. I believe that the ideas found in “Accidental Genius” are extremely powerful.

Accidental Genius will rock your world if you need to do any of the following:

Think deeply
Create great content (article, book, speech)
Solve any problem
Come up with awesome ideas
Get unstuck
Get creative
Organize your mind and thoughts
Help someone with any of these things

The core idea of the book is Freewriting

Freewriting is a fast method of thinking onto paper. It is basically about spilling your mind onto paper or computer, without any judgment or stopping – just fast continuous writing, going with the flow. You can even talk to yourself in your writing, or write “blah blah blah” repeatedly when stuck.

Writers block? Pffff. That doesn’t exist in the realm of Freewriting. Just write – even if it’s crap. You are thinking already, so write the thoughts. Even if you have to write about how you don’t have anything to write, you can write.

The Freewriting technique in allows you to access and exploit your subconscious mind – that’s where the “genius” lives. It enables you access the raw stream of thoughts directly from your sub consciousness. The results are almost always incredible.

And it works for everyone. Even if you hated school writing assignments, you will love Freewriting.

About this summary

I will summarize all chapters of the book here, so you will get all the main ideas.

If this summary intrigues you, I wholeheartedly recommend you to get the book, as it contains many stories and additional material that vividly illustrate the techniques presented and their application.

The book is divided into 3 parts:

Part 1 talks about the six secrets of Freewriting.
Part 2 adds additional ideas, tools, and techniques.
Part 3 talks about publicizing the written content (as blog posts, speeches, books, etc).

Part 1 – Six Secrets of Free Writing

Secret #1: Try Easy

You do not have to try hard. In fact, it is best when you give only 90% effort.

Begin your writing by reminding yourself to try easy. Remind yourself that you do not want produce perfect prose that will be cherished and treasured for generations to come; you just want to write some decent words. You just want to dump your brain.

Lower your expectations, and be pleasantly surprised.

Secret #2: Write Fast and Continuously

When you write fast and continuously, you will adopt easy and accepting attitude, which unblocks your subconscious mind.

If you write slowly, your talking mind will creep in. We don’t want that. The talker in your head sucks. There is only so much mental resources, and the talker will eat too much of them. The talker shuts down your genius sub-conscious computer, which can access all your memories, thoughts, experiences, ideas.

Writing continuously is also important. You want to suppress the editor (a.k.a. censor) in your mind, so the idea-producer can do its job unchained. The “inappropriate” thoughts can often be the key, so you want to make sure they can appear in your writing.

When you get stuck, you can:

Babble nonsense onto the page
Repeat the last word again and again
Repeat the last letter you’ve pressed on your keyboarddddddddd
Write anything that comes to your mind, even if it is completely unrelated to the writing

Your mind will quickly get unstuck and come with a new thought to write about.

It’s all about the quantity, uncensored. Think of yourself as word/thought producing factory.

Secret #3: Work Against a Time Limit

Pomodoro technique works brilliantly with Freewriting.

When you are Freewriting, set a short time limit for yourself – e.g. 10 or 20 minutes. You can use a kitchen timer or some software for this.
The time limit is important for two reasons:

The limit energizes your writing effort by giving you parameters. You can go “all in”. Deadlines motivate.
The limit keeps you writing, so you’ll have a chance for a genius moment. You will write even if you’re feeling uninspired, which is a very good thing: Paradoxically, you can get the best ideas when writing the worst junk.

Secret #4: Write the Way You Think

You need to get your raw thoughts.

Don’t write the way you speak, write the way you think. Your speech is already censored.

If you really write the way you think, your writing will probably make no sense to other people. That’s a sign you’re doing it right. (Don’t show it to other people, though. Write for yourself. Knowing that someone else might see the text would activate the little totalitarian censor in your mind.)

To achieve this kind of writing, do:

Use your language.
Keep quiet about things that need no explanation.
Jump around just as your mind does.

You’re the only person that needs to understand what you write.

Freewriting isn’t really writing, it’s a means of watching yourself think.

Secret #5: Go with the Thought

When doing an improv theater, it is a golden rule to always accept the situation and agree with what other actors say. Think “YES, AND”.

Go with what you’re given. Always go with the thought that you’ve just written.

It’s all about “agreeing and extending”. It’s a great way to get “far”.

When you go with a thought, you assume that the thought is true, and you can take a series of logical steps. Just like this: If A is true, that means B is true. And if B is true, that means C is true. And if C is true, …

Secret #6: Redirect Your Attention

When you run out of things to say, you can use “focus changer”. Focus changer is a question you ask yourself on paper that requires you to comment on something you’ve just written. It keeps you moving, and helps you focus on the yet unexplored parts of a situation.

Examples of focus changers include:

What was I thinking here?
How else can I say that?
What am I missing here?
What I am wrong about here?
What I am doing right?
What does this remind me of?
How would I describe this to my grandmother?

Etc. The book includes many more such example questions. You can (and should) also invent your own focus changers.

Part 2 – Powerful Refinements

The second part of the book talks about Freewriting applications, exercises, and techniques that allow you to get the most out of it.

Idea as Product

This chapter talks about why is the conversion of your thoughts into a paper product important.

Having your ideas written is important because as the written product shows you where you’ve been, it also suggests where you haven’t been. It’s a map of your mind.

Prompt Your Thinking

Prompts are Freewriting exercise. When doing this exercise, you begin the Freewriting session with a pre-determined prompt.

Prompts are open-ended phrases to warm you up and to send your mind into unanticipated directions.

Prompts allow you to find many hidden jewels that you wouldn’t otherwise discover.

Some examples of prompts include:

The best part of my workday is…
Yesterday I saw a curious thing…
If I didn’t have to work, I’d…
I threw a stone and it landed…
I remember….
I’d love to learn about…
If I did the opposite of everything I normally do, my day would look like this…
I love…
I hate…
I should do more…
You know what I’d like to do again?
If I were guaranteed success, the project I’d take on would be…

The very generic ones can work wonders:

The storm
It was getting dark…
The birds were singing…
I opened the door…
Three days from now…

Prompts are somewhat similar to one of my long-time favorite techniques – question answered on paper. Basically, you write a question, and then start answering it. That’s it. It’s like querying your mind.

When you make the question very open-ended, you are not looking for specific answers, and it’s a prompt. The result will be a surprise. On the other hand, when the question is very specific, so will be the answers.

Open Up Words

When you “open up a word”, you redefine it and give it a personal meaning. The way the world sees that word and its meaning might not be the same way you see it.

The first step is to pick the word. You’ll often come across words whose definitions are taken for granted, no-brainers. These are great words to open up. Some words might always seem negative and others positive, and yet, the true meaning might be entirely different.
The second step is to write the common definitions of the word. What the world sees.
In the third step, you ask yourself if you agree or disagree with that definition, and go into detail about your opinion. Write your personal definition.
In the fourth final step, you summarize what you’ve learned. Just a couple of sentences should do. This helps you integrate the newly gained knowledge.

Exercise to try is to make a list of 5 common jargon words from your industry, and open up each for five minutes.

Escape Your Own Intelligence

When you are Freewriting, you should reach for obvious facts. Don’t overlook the truth hidden behind complex mental constructs of the problem you are trying to solve.

We humans have the tendency to make things really, really complicated. Sometimes, this is a bad thing.

When you write all the obvious facts about the situation, you will quickly see what makes sense and what is important. The ridiculous bullshit will be naked in the lights of the obvious.

The obvious facts can help you cut through the fog. Let one fact suggest the next.

The Value in Disconnecting

When you write long enough, your handwriting will really relax, and the internal editor will completely disappear. It’s the total uncramping of the hand and brain. The raw mind can finally shine through.

What is long enough? When you start getting tired, it is long enough. 30-minute session of fast non-stop writing should do the trick.
Never be afraid to turn your back on what you’ve already written. Disconnecting from the material can be just as valuable as connecting to it. Feel free to write “All what I’ve written up to this point is bullshit. The truth is that…”

Using Assumptions to Get Unstuck

One way of making a breakthrough is by trashing a paradigm. For example, people once believed that Earth is flat. That was a paradigm. All that was needed to ditch that paradigm was a perspective shift.

The perspective shift allows you to approach your problem using an entirely different perspective.

A structured approach to do this is to ask yourself:

What problem am I trying to solve? (Be as general as possible. Nothing specific. For example – “How do I build a fan base for something unknown?”)
Who has solved it?
How have they solved it?
How can I apply their solution to my problem?

(This might require some research.)

Getting a Hundred Ideas Is Easier Than Getting One

The name of this chapter pretty much sums it up. When you have to come up with an idea, don’t try to come up with a single perfect fabulous idea. Instead of one 100% idea, go for hundred ideas of varying quality.

When you go for a single idea, you need to create and judge at the same time. When you go for hundred ideas, the quality is a non-issue. This allows you to focus entirely on the creation. One idea leads to the next – but not if you judge it and discard it.

You can’t create a killer idea from thin air anyway. You need material to work with.

You want to look for ALL the ideas first, and only then for the ONE single best idea.

Learn to Love Lying

Problem situations can often seem like closed environments. Everything is set, there are no options. But this is usually an illusion; things are seldom set in stone.

One way to overcome this rigidity which often prevents you from seeing the solution is to simply tell yourself a lie about the situation. A single lie can lead to a chain of thinking that will solve your problem.

Some examples:

If an element in your situation is small, think of it as micro or huge
Tall, think skyscraper-high or subbasement-low
Clever, think genius or completely stupid
Nuisance, think of it as intolerable or a blessing
Abnormal, think freakish or natural

Lying can help you discover the false limits that we set for ourselves in order to be “realistic”.

Hold a Paper Conversation

This one is fun.

You can talk to anyone. Steve Jobs, your local grocer, your grandmother, Oprah, talking owl, yourself 20 years ago or 20 years in the future. Or, you can remove yourself entirely from the situation and produce a discussion between others.

There are two rules to make these conversations successful:

First, when holding a paper conversation with a character, it’s important to make the character as real as possible. Before holding a paper conversation with a character, take a couple of minutes to write about the character. Be as specific as possible. Go as far into detail as you want. Also, don’t forget to think about the place where the conversation is taking place.

Second, get the characters to make you speak. Let yourself do the majority of the talking during the conversation. The character should act mainly as a gentle guide which draws fresh observations from your own words.

Drop Your Mind on Paper

Freewriting is a component-based system.

Mix the techniques, exercises and session lengths.

Talk to yourself on paper about any resistance you might be feeling about your problem or the Freewriting method.

Save all your written material, so you can re-read it or continue later.

The Writing Marathon

A ten minute session of Freewriting might not sometimes quite cut it.

Sometimes, you might even need six hours or more.

The bad part is that you might feel physically uncomfortable at the end of the marathon. The good part is that you might discover answers that have been hiding from you for a lifetime.

Very long stretches of continuous writing certainly work for some. For example, popular blogger Steve Pavlina often writes very lengthy posts that take up to 10 hours of continuous writing to create.

The Freewriting marathon is not just 6 hours of non-stop Freewriting, it works a bit differently.

First, you need a starter thought. The process is then as follows:

Write for 20 minutes non-stop
Go through what you’ve written and underline or bold the most interesting parts.
Ask yourself – what do I want to explore next? (It should send you in a new direction. If you get what you expect, it isn’t good enough.)
Repeat.

Doubt Yourself

Recognize when you are stuck, and get unstuck.

Not everything you write will be brilliant. There will be a lot of great stuff, but you will undoubtedly find many bad or wrong thoughts in your writing. Also, there will be thoughts that you will become tired of. You can recognize them because it will seem that you come across them far too often.

These thoughts might be important indicators of areas where you need to change.

If you always come to same thoughts (“I really should finish X”), or the same people (“Peter is the key to finding a way out of this”), or the same language, or you are continually critical of yourself or others, and in many other cases where you repeat yourself, your thinking is clearly stuck.

However, that’s fine! Even if you are stuck in life, you can describe just exactly the way you’re stuck. Once you do that, you will immediately realize that you can’t go on like that anymore, and gain a new way to freedom.

The Magic of Exact Writing

Exact writing allows you to get to the core of any problem or situation.

The case with exact writing is similar to the concept of “100 ideas”. It is impossible to exactly describe the situation in a few brief
sentences outright. You need to flood the page with words. Include lot of detail and use your own language.

If even that doesn’t help, try to describe the situation to a certain person. Just begin your writing using salutation, for example, you can use “Dear John” and describe the situation to your best friend John as accurately as possible.

Extract Gold from a Business Book

When you come over to a business book and have a hunch that you could get a lot of value from it, try this Freewriting technique.

As you read the book, add underlining and write notations inside it. Customize the book, make it your own. Write insights and questions into the book, even if you need to write over the existing text. Don’t be stingy with your customizations.

Now, once you finish reading the book, go through it again, and write the most interesting underlined parts and notations into your computer. Then, do a 20-minute Freewriting session about these ideas and questions. This will allow you to add real personal meaning to the most important ideas in the book, and internalize the knowledge presented.

It makes no sense to be lazy here. It took you a couple of hours to read the book anyway, so why not do the 20-minute Freewriting session, to get ten times more value from the book than you would normally get?

You Are What You Focus On

There is a great example in this chapter:

Without looking up from your computer, create a mental list of all the red objects in the room. Do this now.
Now look around. How many additional red objects do you see? Before you started reading, you weren’t focused on red objects, so you’ve probably missed a lot of them in the initial list.

Now, if I tell you that I’ll pay you $1000 for a list of 100 red objects in the room, you will get really creative! Perhaps you will think “If I unscrew my telephone receiver, I see red wires. If I cut my finger, I see red blood. If I break this red bookcase into its parts, I have six red shelves.”

The objects are extremely “evasive”, even if they are very close to you. Focus is everything.
What you focus on determines how you lead your life. Therefore, you should use Freewriting to focus on things that are important for you in your life. Don’t get overwhelmed by the grind of the daily existence.

Part 3 – Going Public

When Freewriting, you must always assume that no one will see what you’ve written. It should be a strictly private matter. This is necessary so you can really let go and let the inner censor recede.

However, you still can (and should) use the fruits of your Freewriting effort for public documents – books, blogs, articles, anything. This chapter talks about the ways of doing that.

Share Your Unfinished Thoughts

Sometimes, no polishing or editing is necessary or desired. You can just take a part of your writing and send it to someone.

If you are blogger, this could work great when querying for an interest in a guest post. If the host blogger says yes to your thoughts, or gives you extra thoughts of his own, you can deliver a piece that he and his audience will be happy with. Another advantage is that the chance you will procrastinate is much lower. You can just sit down and Freewrite.

You can also create a large collage with all your ideas and thoughts about the subject, and send it to someone. This works in many situations, even when writing a proposal for a book.

It’s good to share what you are thinking and feeling, even if you are not sure about what you are thinking and feeling yourself. “Talking” document allows you to share these thoughts. Just think aloud on the paper.

You can either write a letter, or assemble a collage. Don’t forget to tell the recipient what kind of feedback you would like.

Help Others Do Their Best Thinking

When working with a client as a consultant, or when helping a friend or relative with a difficult problem, you can teach them Freewriting, and any related techniques useful in their situation. They will thank you later :-)

Notice Stories Everywhere

Stories happen only to people who can tell them. Or, I would say, to people who want to tell them.

Always keep your eyes and mind open for stories and material as you go about your day. Become a walking library of stories. Write the stories down, you never know when they will come in handy.

Build an Inventory of Thoughts

This chapter fascinates me.

If you write regularly, you will generate a huge amount of material. You can then chop the material up and divide it into separate documents. For example, you can have “Marketing” document “Childhood” document, “GUI Design” document, “Fitness”, document, etc. You can have as many documents as needed. The documents should be based on themes you most commonly write about.

The chunks should be complete thoughts, not just fragments. Even if you read these chunks 20 years from now, they should still make sense.
If you build such a library, you will have myriads of material to work with. Whenever you will be writing something, you can dive into the appropriate documents and fish for chunks to use.

You are basically stockpiling thoughts, ideas and stories in your computer. Sure, they all reside in your head in one way or another, too, but having them already written is something completely different. At any given moment, it is impossible to recall all the relevant thoughts. However, it’s easy to go through the relevant documents.

This also helps you to write better, because you will be using material that you had time to think about, not just making stuff up as you write.

Yet another benefit is that you will remember all your stories and thoughts better, even when you are not at the computer.
Another use of chunks is to use them as a thought-starter for something entirely new.

Write Your Own Rules

Many famous writers have their own rules that help them with their writing.

For example, Hemingway had a rule of never finishing the last sentence at his writing session end. He wouldn’t finish the sentence until the next day.

Another of his rules was to write 500 to 1000 words every day.

Ray Bradbury also had a lifelong habit of writing every day.

Yet another great rule is to keep the writing and editing (revising) steps separate. Generating prose is one task, making it sound good is another task. Don’t overload yourself.

It’s a good idea to give yourself a couple of rules (goals) at the start of the day, before you get overwhelmed by the daily business.

You can have rules for different parts of the process: Warm up rule, ideation rule, writing rule, etc.

Many of the exercises described in Accidental Genius can be made into rules.

Good rule enables you to write more.

The Fascination Method

This method can help you when writing a book, or preparing a speech, etc.

When writing a book, you are basically a filter. As you’ve lived your life, you’ve gained millions of experiences and thoughts that are unique to you. Your book should begin from this material.

To get to the really good stuff, create an inventory of everything that has fascinated you at any point of your life. A list of:

Facts
Insights
Anecdotes
Philosophies
Experiences
Memories
Surprises
Websites
Dreams
Myths
Books
Conversations
People

Literally anything that has ever fascinated you! Don’t wonder why a particular item fascinates you. Don’t worry if it has any relation to a book you want to write. Items on the fascination list have energy for you.

Take your time. Divide the writing of the list to multiple Freewriting sessions spread among a couple of days.

Once the list is done, think about the audience and what you could tell to that audience. Who might the audience be? What book demands to be written? Just brainstorm, based on the material presented to you.

Group the items from the fascination list. There will be several themes.

A book that has begun through this process will be something that:

Will be joy to write
Will be uniquely yours (one of a kind)
The audience will be able to use and appreciate

The main idea is that you do not look into the market first. You look into yourself first.

Freewrite Your Way to Finished Prose

There are multiple ways of using Freewriting to create finished prose (articles, blog posts, etc.)

One way is this one:

Do several Freewriting warm-ups
Do focused Freewriting about the relevant topic
Delete what’s not working
Arrange what’s left
Write any missing thoughts and transitions
Edit like mad

Also, if you have some written material that you haven’t used yet, check it out. Can you use something? (See: Build an Inventory of Thoughts)

So what do you think?

Have you ever come across Freewriting or similar techniques before?

Are you going to try this?

Do you think on paper?

Remember any situation when Freewriting or thinking on paper has helped you greatly?

I personally regularly think on paper and the results are wonderful. I use my own software Swift To-Do List to organize my writing (notes) in a nice tree structure.

Also, I’ve recently decided to use Freewriting to write a book, and I’m really excited about it. I’m pretty sure that Freewriting will work really well for me in this case – I plan to use The Fascination Method.

PS: Go get the book.

Accidental Genius Summary is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Best Of This Blog (Part 1)

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:44:25 +0000

This blog has existed for some time now. Today, I would like to bring some of the older posts to your attention. These posts are still relevant and contain useful information. Here is a brief overview of some of the older posts.

Posts related to Swift To-Do List contain useful tips for more effective usage of the software, while the productivity posts contain often ageless information for greater personal achievement.

Swift To-Do List related:

Notes hotkeys overview – did you know you can create numbered lists?
How to attach emails from Outlook to tasks (Video) – also works for some other email programs
Recurring Tasks Explained – a complete guide
How to join two different task types – works also for priorities, statuses, contexts, assignees
Embedded Attachments Explained – a complete guide
How to print a single task – or export it
How to change the default reminder time
How to paste plain text in notes
Using portable Swift To-Do List on a USB thumb-drive

Productivity and personal development tips:

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks Explained – do you know the difference?
5 Ways How To Deal With Low Priority Tasks – low priority tasks can drain your energy
Raise your awareness of your life – the starting point for better life
10 Tips To Create more productive environment at your desk
Deal with procrastination with 100% success
10 Benefits Of Being Organized: From Chaos To Freedom
How to upgrade your brain
How to achieve your goals in 5 steps
How to fully focus on the task at hand – just print it and put it in front of you :-)

Best Of This Blog (Part 1) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Raise your awareness of your life

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 07:09:45 +0000

Try this exercise. 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:

Work & Finance
Relationship
Home & Family
Health
Social Life
Personal Development
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. If you have valuable items at home, you may pawn for cash and fund your investments.

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:

What is my weakest area?
What is my strongest area?
Am I sacrificing any areas for other areas?
What area do I want to focus on in the next 6 months?
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“.

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

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks Explained (Finally!)

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:06:08 +0000

What Is a Reactive Task And What Is a Proactive Task?

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:

Reactive Tasks	Proactive Tasks
Not important	Important
Seem to be urgent	Usually not urgent
Little or no long-term benefits	Significant long-term benefits
Come from the outside world	Come from you
Not planned by you	Planned by you
Results lose meaning quickly	Results don’t lose meaning
Likely to be done when you are procrastinating on proactive tasks	Likely to be procrastinated on
Pay off immediately (but not much)	Pay off over time (big time)
Boring, not exciting	Courageous, often exciting
Routine	Imaginative and creative
Safe	Scary
Feeling of overload	Feeling of accomplishment
Backward-looking	Forward-looking
80% of time is usually spent on them	20% time is usually spent on them
20% of time should be spent on them	80% of time should be spent on them
One-eyed (read on :-))	May be a part of a larger strategy

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.

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

How to achieve your goals in 5 steps

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:04:52 +0000

Goal achievement – many people find it very difficult. However, with the right tools and attitude, achieving your goals can be not just possible, but even fun!

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:

Are you willing to pay the price?
Are you sure? Are you willing to accept all the consequences and responsibilities that come with your goal?
By looking at your past, is it likely that you will succeed? What could you do to change that?
Are you willing to start today? If not, then perhaps it won’t change tomorrow.
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!

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

10 Benefits Of Being Organized: From Chaos To Freedom

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:31:45 +0000

This is a motivational post. The simple truth is that being organized can bring you more time, money, success and happiness. We happen to have a great organizer to help you to get organized in no time.

Getting organized with Swift To-Do List 7 is really easy, and has many benefits:

1. You will upgrade your brain to version 2.0

If you take all the work-related stuff and to-do’s from your head and place them in Swift To-Do List 7, a wonderful thing happens – suddenly, your mind has 100% resources available and 100% focus just for the current task at hand.

2. You will advance in your career faster

Stop wasting time on tasks with zero impact and go straight to the juicy, meaty stuff that really matters and that can move you forward in your career. This is possible only when you are organized using a great task list manager like Swift To-Do List 7 that allows you to prioritize your tasks.

3. You can double or triple your productivity

With less time and mental resources wasted, you will have more time for the important stuff. The real game changer comes from your upgraded brain though – if you can finally fully focus and always know what to do next, you can double your productivity easily. If you are unorganized or stressed, you are much less productive than you think.

4. You will be more motivated

Success brings motivation. It is so much easier to achieve success when you are organized! In fact, work can sometimes feel like fun.

5. You will have more time

It’s really simple: If you are more productive, you get more done, and you have more time.

6. You will have more money

We all know that time is money, but success brings you money too, which can be a really significant benefit. By using trusted gold trading platforms, you can turn your time and effort into smart opportunities that help grow your wealth even faster. For example, exploring opportunities like wholesale gold bullion Melbourne can also complement a well-planned financial strategy by adding long-term value and stability.

7. You will eliminate any possible stress

With all your tasks and notes in one place, safely stored in reliable task list management software like Swift To-Do List 7, there is nothing to worry about. You can even use inbuilt reminders and recurrent tasks to make sure that you will never forget anything again. Liberate yourself from clutter and stress.

8. You will reach your full potential

If you get organized, you can achieve much more than if you are limiting yourself by being disorganized.

9. You will be able to achieve your goals more easily

All the benefits work together and give you more power to do what you truly want, and that is the real freedom.

10. You will love your work and life

How can you NOT love your life when you are successful, happy and without stress?

With the right attitude, Swift To-Do List 7 can literally change your life. I personally use it myself every day not just to run and manage our whole business, but to take control of my own life.

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10 Benefits Of Being Organized: From Chaos To Freedom is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

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Accidental Genius Summary

The core idea of the book is Freewriting

About this summary

Part 1 – Six Secrets of Free Writing

Secret #1: Try Easy

Secret #2: Write Fast and Continuously

Secret #3: Work Against a Time Limit

Secret #4: Write the Way You Think

Secret #5: Go with the Thought

Secret #6: Redirect Your Attention

Part 2 – Powerful Refinements

Idea as Product

Prompt Your Thinking

Open Up Words

Escape Your Own Intelligence

The Value in Disconnecting

Using Assumptions to Get Unstuck

Getting a Hundred Ideas Is Easier Than Getting One

Learn to Love Lying

Hold a Paper Conversation

Drop Your Mind on Paper

The Writing Marathon

Doubt Yourself

The Magic of Exact Writing

Extract Gold from a Business Book

You Are What You Focus On

Part 3 – Going Public

Share Your Unfinished Thoughts

Help Others Do Their Best Thinking

Notice Stories Everywhere

Build an Inventory of Thoughts

Write Your Own Rules

The Fascination Method

Freewrite Your Way to Finished Prose

So what do you think?

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