Archives for September 2013

For a little now I’ve been “stuck” in my life. Things were great, then I got too comfortable, then things started to stagnate.

It happens to everyone.
It can be caused by things being too good, or too bad.

And lately I’ve been trying desperately to get OUT of it and back to my PRODUCTIVE life.

Well I did a lot of soul-searching kind of stuff and talked to a lot of people….and that helped to an extent, but dammit….there’s nothing like taking some good-old ACTION STEPS to get out of it!!

SO here’s my Guide to getting your life back on track:

I feel like if you do some/all of these, things will slowly start to spin around for you again.  The underlying concept is getting momentum.  I’ll try to back up each example with my own actions:

 

HEALTH WEALTH LOVE (3 minutes)

Quickly evaluate three main areas of your life and rank them from 1-to-5.
Health: Your health situation.
Wealth: Your money situation.
Love: Your relationships with family/friends/spouse/partner.  

Before I was:
Health: 3
Wealth: 5
Love: 5

Then it became:
Health: 5  (+2)
Wealth: 2  (-3)
Love: 2  (-3)

So I can obviously see where I need to concentrate on.

Try doing this for your own life, and it’ll shine some clear idea on where you can get started improving.  Here’s more about this concept.

 

 

Your Top 5 Influences (10 minutes)
This is one of my favorite concepts:

“You are the composite average of the top 5 people you hang around.”

This doesn’t mean your favorite people to hang around, it means the people you LITERALLY SPEND THE MOST NUMBER OF MINUTES WITH PER DAY.

So if you live at home with your parents, just by the nature of that arrangement, your parents will be some of your top influencers. Or if you have a husband/wife….they will be one of your top influencers.

So take a look around, and write out who your top 5 influences are (aka who you are physically around the most):
1.) __________________
2.) __________________
3.) __________________
4.) __________________
5.) __________________

Now…..
Are those people the kind of people you wanna become?
Are they as successful as you wanna be??
Do they have the kind of attitudes about life that you want???
Are they going to places you want to go????

If you’re hanging around a bunch of losers with crappy attitudes…..it’s likely you’ll pick up those traits too.

If you’re hanging around a bunch of positive people with great attitudes and ideas……it’s likely you’ll pick up those traits too.

So check your list to see who is negatively influencing you, and try to cut down the time you spend with those people so they don’t take you down also.

I dare you to cut out at least ONE of those people. DARE YA!!
Here’s more about your top 5 influences.

 

 

To-Do Lists (5 minutes)

You KNOW I’m obsessive about to-do lists.  But I’ve been a little unfaithful to my dearest to-do lists lately, in that I haven’t been completing them everyday.

I have since returned, and the productivity has begun.  Here is my to-do list when I started writing this blog post:

I actually took some of my OWN advice to get back on track:

Watch that to-do list video for some inspiration on how to make your own to-do lists.
You can find out more about to-do lists here.

 

 

Stack your calendar (10 minutes)

Simply GOING to events that interest you will help get some momentum going.  I started to skip a lot of tech events and conferences….and this bad, because those usually motivate the hell out of me (meeting other people doing cool things always makes you work harder).

I still use a physical calendar to track all my stuff like this:

I went to my bookmark bar of “Austin Events” and started adding things recently.

All good spots to start: Meetup.com, Yelp.com, Craigslist Community.

Wanna go to tech meet ups? Then search “tech meet ups Austin” (or wherever you are).
Nearby universities generally hold a lot of cool events.
I have a whole bookmarks tab of websites/museums/charities etc that hold cool events.

 

 

Re-connect with friends by giving to them

Next thing I did was throw a small party (not a typical party though). I only invited 1 or 2 other people.

It was called the “Early Morning Blog Post Writing Party From Nev’s Pool Party!”

The rules were:

• We start at 8am
• We go to the shallow end of the pool at my apt
• You bring your laptop
• You write a blog post from inside the pool

I wanted it to be like “having your own writing island.”

So me and Billy (Forever Jobless) hit up the pool at my apartment at 8am with laptops for a “Blog Post Writing Party”! It may have been the nerdiest party in the WORLD at that moment!

I’m literally writing this post from the pool right now!!

It was actually damn fun, and Billy even said:

“I got more writing done today than I have in 4 months!”

If there’s any Austinite’s out there interested in joining me for this every once in a while, lemme know.

 

 

Changing your living space

I think changing your living space often signifies changing your life in some way.

I bought a super-kick-ass “Float” desk from HumanScale a few weeks ago, and it just arrived.

It’s awesome in several ways:
1.) It can quickly adjust to any height with a small lever.
2.) The work area is clean, all-white, and HUUUGGEE.
3.) The engineering behind it is awesome (it uses a counter-balance system that uses the weight of the stuff on your desk to move it up and down)….yet it’s all hidden inside the desk and you’d never know it. Basically it’s like a desk Apple would make!

It’s super-neat to go from standing to sitting in less than 2 seconds with this desk.  Sometimes I prefer moving around and standing, but sometimes sitting down is necessary and more comfortable.

Screw all those “Standing” desks…..this one can do both!

The large size of the desk isn’t really conveyed in that picture.  I’ve had it for a while now….and I can honestly say it’s been an awesome investment and really helped with productivity!

Also in the “changing your living space” department…….I needed some art for the loonngggest time but couldn’t find any. So I sat down and ordered two of the BIGGEST pieces of art from Ikea I could possibly find.  I stuck one of them over a boring white wall above my bed:

It doesn’t look that big in the picture, but that picture is HUGE.  It’s like 6.5 feet across.

I’m also making sure I make the bed every morning.  I learned this trick from Gary Halbert:

Make your bed as SOON as you wake up in the morning, and you will already start the day off with a small win!

“Messy bed, Messy head.”

 

 

WELL…..
Those are a few things I’m doing to “get my mojo back”.  Most of these things are more to mentally-psych myself into being productive once again.

Perhaps if you’re going through a period of time where you need this, you could take some inspiration from any of these tips.

 

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora

P.S. From my last Superpowers post, these people won NevBox’s: Dave, Dave H, Allen T, Jacqueline P, Robin W.
Thanks Sithana for helping me decide. I’m sending YOU one too for that!

 

P.P.S. Comment on this post with actions that helped your snap out of a sluggish phase in your life….I’ll physically ship 5 commenters NevBox’s (worth $97 each…and you can’t even buy them if you wanted to). Not only that, but your comment might give some poor soul trying to “figure things out” an idea that could change their life!

 

P.P.P.S. Please share/send this to anyone who could use a little “jump-start” in their life.