Max Marmer

Most personal development is crap. I’ve heard 95% of the industry is crap. I think that is a good number. But it’s such a big pie that the other 5% is huge and there are a lot of valuable ideas out there. Even within the 5% you can easily waste your time, if you read it without attempting to implement anything. You just feel productive instead of actually being productive. Which is actually probably worse than not having read something on productivity at all, because then you mistakenly feel you are making progress on that aspect of life.

I think it’s important to always have a few things you’re working on implementing. If you have bitten off reasonable chunks then prioritize within the 5% of quality advice.

It’s also very important to regularly reflect. I spent a lot of time doing that while I was in Hawaii this last week with my family. And I used a book a friend gave me, LifeManual by Peter Thomas, as a jumping off point. I identified my values and the things that are most important to me and made a plan to invest energy proportionally into the things I value most.

Another thing I adopted to try to sustain progress once I’m back in the swing of everyday things is to have regular rituals. I’ve tried those a few times the last few years but I haven’t been able to make rituals a habit. The problem was that it took too much will power, and we get a very limited amount of will power everyday. So to make it stick, I automated it, eliminating the need for will power.

My ritual involves a PBWorks wiki page that prompts me to do a variety of things each morning: list the top 3 things I want to accomplish today, reflect on the previous day, visualize what I want the day to be like, read my personal mission statement, and a personal commercial to pump me up. It opens automatically every morning with iCal and applescript. I also decided I should put in an evening ritual that is similar but with different prompts.

And every Sunday I automatically pull up a page that lists my goals for each of my values. I  reflect on the progress I made each week. Sunday is a good time to do reflection and I’m going to try to make it a habit of focusing on personal development projects predominantly on Sundays.

I just started most of these habits during my vacation in Hawaii so we’ll see how it goes.

By far I think the highest leveraged productivity book I’ve come across is the Power of Full Engagement.

It says the key to high performance is managing energy not time. I fully agree. There are four areas of energy that must be grown, strengthened and maintained independently: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual. I read the book a few years ago for understanding. Now I’m going back through it for implementation.

Productivity is of huge interest to me right now because I think it’s one the most important skills to learn while young because it’s basically setting the strength of the engine for the rest of my life. Of course I can do it later in life, but I won’t be going as fast in the meantime. And I’ll have more ingrained habits that are difficult to change, in addition to my time being less flexible.

I’m building the capacity to go really fast. Once I’m ready to get on the freeway I will fly.