Rules of action

One of my favorites productivity blogs is ZenHabits by Leo Babauta. While I may not agree 100% in his views on minimalism, I feel that many of his points are valid and really helpful. Personally, I tend to find the most inspiration and help through his posts about action and procrastination. As a matter of fact I'm going to talk about a post he wrote called The little rules of action. I’ll run down these rules and talk about how they relate to my own life or what they mean to me.

1. Don’t overthink: Oh, How much I fall for this one. I have this tendency of trying to get down every minute detail of what I’m trying to do. And, what happens is that I don’t do anything. Too much preparation and analyzing get in my way of doing things.

2. Just start: Another biggie for me. I plan and think things through so much things don’t get truly started. I believe that I might be confusing the planning stage with the doing stage. In other words I feel that because I’m planning I feel that I’m really working on something. The solution to this is really to do start by doing something really small related to the task and this will get the ball rolling.

3. Forget perfection: “Forget perfectionism? But that’s the defining trait of a Norman.” Well this little trait is a double edge sword with the sharper edge pointed towards you and you have to deal with it carefully. Perfectionism doesn’t mean you do things perfectly it really means to over-plan, over-prepare things you do. The task might get done well, but that doesn’t mean that you could have gotten the same result by just starting with a little (actually a lot) less preparation.

4. Don’t mistake motion for action: Like I said in “Just start”, Confusing the planning stage with the action stage is a problem of mine. Felling worried about the project, planning things over and over, does not get the project at hand done.

5. Focus on the important actions: Sometimes you might be worried as to were to start, sometimes choosing to do the most important thing first is the way to go.

6. Move slowly, consciously: You’ve chosen your task. But how to work on it? Well, if you move deliberately and slowly you’ll probably get the task done without unnecessary mistakes. Like the Puertorican saying goes: Dress me slowly that I'm in a hurry.

7. Take small steps: You’ve chosen your task (the most important one), you know you want to work on it slowly, but how to start? Well, starting out small seems to help. If you need to write a paper for college then maybe writing the introduction or reading it over will help.

8. Negative thinking gets you nowhere: Ahhh the I-can’t-do-this-it’s-too-difficult syndrome we meet again. Think about all the time you are wasting by having all those doubts and second thoughts. Instead eliminate those thoughts by thinking positively and starting the task at hand as fast as possible.

9 - 12. Meetings, talking, planning, reading (about it) are not action: I combined 9 through 12 because they deal with the same idea. Confusing certain aspects of a project with actually doing it. An example of this would be creating a blog post. Meeting and talking with someone about the fact that I want to write the blog post is not the action required. Planning how to write the blog post is not the action needed. And reading about writing a blog is not the action required either. To write a blog post you need to write.

13. Sometimes, inaction is better: Now this is revolutionary! But think about it. Sometimes the feeling of accomplishing something (or anything) gets in the way of asking ourselves wether or not the task or project is really necessary.

[via Zenhabits]

Video of the week: Kiwi

Oh my... this is a sad one, isn’t it.

Video by Dony Permedi

But what amazes me the most is what wasn’t shown. That little kiwi spent I don’t know how much time of his life putting all those trees on the side of the mountain, all by himself. And even if the author doesn’t show it you can just imagine what else he tried before he decided to go through with this route. It really is inspiring to see animations like this one.

In terms of the video itself, I particularly like how the perspective of the scene changes when he falls. You really do believe he is flying. There might be aspect of the animation that might not be perfect (like the texture or the lighting) but I find great that he chose to focus on what I feel are the more important aspects of this video which were the animation and the music.

For more information there's an interview at ISFAT.com with the author of Kiwi!, Dony Permedi.

Mac app: Marsedit

I’m mac fan. I admit it. I love how things work on a mac. I like how simple it is to do what I want to do and how simple it is to understand. Another thing I love are all the Mac applications that are around. The Mac developer community is a large one and I love the work that they do. So I’ve decided to start a blog section to showcase some of my favorite mac applications.

MarsEdit



On my first attempt to write a blog I went with using the blogger back-end for creating and managing the blog. Not a terrible experience but I found that organizing my ideas was a bit of a hassle. So when I returned to blogging later on I decided to see if there was any piece of software that would help me. After trying several I ended up with MarsEdit.

I loved that because it wasn’t WYSIWYG it forced me learn a bit of HTML and to think about the code that needs to be used to manage images. Another of the selling points was its preview option After tweaking the blogger template and putting it on MarsEdit I was able to see clearly how the layout of the post would look like before posting it on the blog.

However I would say that the main advantage to using MarsEdit over the Blogger back-end is managing your posts without having to reload thae page ever time you want to change or create new posts. I also find that using the preview option in MarsEdit is more accurate than the one Blogger has.

If anyone has tried any other Mac blog editor out there they want to recommend, I would love to hear about them.