sacha chua living an awesome life

Extra value comes from taking notes when learning. Exponential value? From sharing those notes.

When you take notes, you understand things better. You express ideas in your own words. You condense thoughts and expand tangents. You reflect on how to integrate concepts into your life.

When you share your notes, you create value. You build relationships. You learn from what others share.

Someday, I would like to be able to share everything I learn.

Other people are working on this too. There’s even a free e-book on how to make a complete map of every thought you think. The main challenges are: How can I capture the essence of what I’m learning? How can I organize what I’ve shared to make it easy to find? Maybe some of the things I’ve learned about capturing and organizing learning can help you share more effectively, too.

Capturing thoughts

There is no shortage of things to share. In a typical week, I may skim 10 books from the library, looking for key insights. I read countless blog posts. I listen to podcasts and participate in conversations. I experiment. I experience. What I learn provides me with material. The interconnections among things I’ve learned provide me with even more. People’s questions and ideas yield even more.

Capturing the essence is easier than most people think. I scribble a few keywords into a notebook, sketch an idea, type in staccato sentences or mental shorthand. My task list is infinite, although my priorities are few. Then I publish without polishing. Better to have something out there than to have drafts cluttering my head. I’ll learn more about a topic when I write about it again, anyway.

The mechanics of how? A laptop if the words are already in my head, open to a blog editor, a drawing program, or an outliner/mind mapper. A tablet for drawing ideas. Pen and paper if I need to explore. On the go: a notebook and fountain pen. A voice recorder when I need my hands free. An outliner on my iPod Touch.

I think about how I capture what I’m learning, like my book workflow.

Find whatever works for you. Publish early. Publish often. Get something out there. You’ll learn from the questions people will ask you if you’re unclear. Just get enough of your thoughts down so that you can use it for recall.

Organizing notes

I want to build a map of what I know so that people can find things. I used to publish a personal wiki. Maybe it’s time to do that again.

I use search engines and tags to find my old notes. I keep an index in the back of my paper notebooks. I take advantage of similarity and randomness on my blog.

Links and memories from other people help me rediscover myself. They find things I’ve long forgotten.

Every so often, I review what I’ve written and summarize what I’ve learned. The more links there are, the easier something will be to find later on.

I don’t have an index or a table of contents yet. I want to build one. Do you have any role models you can point me to?

—
Thanks to Dror Engel for the question!

While we were chatting about hobbies, one of my mentors joked about my copious free time.

“My carefully protected free time,” I said, and I realized it was true.

“Free” time is valuable. Limiting my work time forces me to work more effectively and efficiently, while giving me the space to explore things that often turn out to be surprisingly useful.

So much depends on how you approach life. Some people tell me I do a lot. Some people say I have too much time on my hands. I think I’m okay. It’s the same life, the same 24 hours.

I try to be intentional about how I spend time. Life is short. There’s so much to learn and share. I think a lot about time. I care about work-life balance. I limit the overtime I work. I plan what to do with blocks of free time. I think about what I do well and how I can do things even better, which helps me free time and smoothen routines.

I play. I relax. That’s important as well. 

There are more things I’d like to do than I have time to do, but I’m happy because I can spend time on what matters to me. In order to do the rest, I help other people learn as much as they can so that they can help make things happen. That’s the superpower I’m working on.

Consciously choose how you spend time and arrange your life to do so, and you’ll probably be happier with the time you have. We all have different priorities and commitments. Some people have fewer responsibilities, and others have more. It doesn’t matter how much or how little other people do. All that matters is what you do, whether you’re happy with it, and how you can be even happier.

I think that’s the difference between feeling overworked and feeling that you have enough time to breathe.

The Hamster Revolution for Meetings: How to Meet Less and Get More Done Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Buress, 2009

(This link is an Amazon affiliate link, but if you’re near a public library, take advantage of it. I borrowed this book from the Toronto Public Library. =) )

Reading voraciously—almost indiscriminately—has its benefits. Despite cheesy gimmicks, The Hamster Revolution for Meetings turned out to have surprisingly good tips that take virtual meetings into account.

Tips for all meetings are on page 20, paraphrased here:

• P: Priority: Make sure meetings relate to your top goals for the year.
• O: Objenda™: Make sure your meetings have a clear objective and an agenda that supports it. Use meeting templates to make sure you share the objective, agenda, and other details up front. As an organizer, have someone responsible for keeping the meeting on track. As a participant, take the initiative in helping the meeting stay on track.
• S: Shorten: Shorten your meetings. Schedule 20-minute or 50-minute meetings to give people some breathing space.
• E: E-vailable™: Make sure your calendar reflects all of your commitments. If possible, color-code your calendar to show priorities and balance.

For Web meetings, she suggested a number of things we already do (use Web conferences, chat channels, surveys, etc.). She added a few more tips I’m going to think about and try, including a Mystery team member icebreaker (p61). She also provides an excellent checklist for managing virtual meetings on p77, which include tips for preventing problems and controlling damage. The key ones I’m going to add to my routine are:

• Arrive early: use the 30/15 Rule
• Create a technical difficulties slide
• Determine secondary communication plan
• Have a disaster recovery plan

Worth reading and summarizing in your personal notes.

Why a goal of only a single post a day, when I want to write many more?

I started with the idea of an editorial calendar. Magazines plan their issues; why shouldn’t I plan my blog? Storing ideas in a TODO list made perfect sense. When I separated “What am I going to write about?” from “How am I going to write about it?”, I wrote more.

I used to post blog entries whenever I wrote them. Some days had four posts. Other days had none.

Then I started setting aside 8 AM to 9 AM ET for writing morning pages, which worked out pretty well. Blogging was still a bit uneven, though.

On a whim, I thought I’d try scheduling posts and spreading them out one per day, aiming for publication some time between 8 AM and 9 AM ET.

That made a big difference. I thought about what I was posting, and whether one post was more useful than another. I rearranged posts depending on interest.

There’s so much to write, though! I read Write Like Hemingway and decided to try shorter sentences. Advantages of writing fewer words: I have to focus. I get my point across. I’ll probably go over these posts and rewrite them in more detail someday. In the meantime, writing fewer words means I end up writing about more topics.

But now that I’m better at capturing short snippets of thoughts, I have even more of a publishing backlog. This is not a problem, as it just means I push the things I care about more to the front. On the other hand, if something happens to me, my blog will spookily keep publishing, which could mean that my incapacitation/death would go unnoticed for longer. That would be bad, so I’ll try not to get into trouble.

I still write as much as I can, and I capture the rest of the ideas in my TODO list. Life is much too interesting to let it slip by. Even then, there’s so much that goes unrecorded and unshared. There are so many potential stories. I have to prioritize.

When I have lots of good things in my backlog, I think, “Oh, I want to hear what people say about this!” I learn a lot from what people share, and it seems I help people be inspired or more productive, too. It’s hard to wait. But I’m trying something new out, so I make myself be patient.

Maybe when I get to the point of having good stuff lined up for a month, I’ll think about posting more each day. =)

Who knew bottlenecks could be so useful?

If you blog: have you thought about limiting yourself to one post (or a few) a day? Don’t stop writing. Keep those posts in your pipeline. Just prioritize. It might be a useful experiment.

My next step: I want to show people my post queue, if it’s not too much of a tease. Even cooler if people could vote on which things they’d like to see first. My post queue keeps getting rearranged, but that’s interesting too. When I’ve got a ridiculous backlog (one month of posts I really want to get out, perhaps?), I might move to two posts a day.

Books mentioned:

Write Like Hemingway: Writing Lessons You Can Learn from the Master R. Andrew Wilson

(Disclosure: The link above is an Amazon affiliate link. That said, I recommend checking out your local library. I got this book from the Toronto Public Library, yay!)

(Thanks to @kittenthebad, @luxocrat, @madwilliamflint, and @eric_andersen for nudging this post forward in the queue.)

Making Work Work: New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office Julie Morgenstern, 2004

Making Work Work

In every industry I consult in, I’ve noticed that the top-tier performers are deeply committed to their work/life balance. They may be working long hours, but they are very thoughtful about their leisure, so that they make excellent use of time away from the office. This is a critical skill—especially if you’re working long hours, because you have fewer hours to play with in the first place.

The most successful workers create a balance that ensures they are energized, refreshed, and renewed every day. Their balancing act isn’t perfect, and it requires constant attention — but they are vigilant about maintaining that balance, because they appreciate the continuity between home and rest, work and productivity.

p21, Julie Morgenstern, Leading Out Loud

p136 to 139 have a great table of tips on how to make meetings more effective, whether you’re the chair or a participant.

The book also contains an excellent chapter on mastering delegation. The suggested tasks focus on face-to-face assistance, but there are many great tips that you can apply to virtual assistance as well.

Lots of great advice. Well worth re-reading as you apply tips.

I like the GTD way of managing mail, and I’ve created folders for this. The three folders I use the most are AA Next Action, AA Waiting, and Done. Dragging messages down to the right folder is more mouse work than I like, though. I created three buttons on a custom toolbar. For example, the action that moves the current message to my Done folder runs this:

@Command([Folder]; “Done”; “1″)

I’d love to associate these with keyboard shortcuts, or spend some time hacking my mail template. That would be even awesomer! =)

It starts innocently enough. You’re asked to attend a meeting next Tuesday. You accept. Your coworkers invite you to lunch on Wednesday. You agree. A friend invites you to her birthday party next week. You put it on your calendar. Then another meeting invitation comes, and another, and another. Networking events, coffee breaks, and presentations crowd into your schedule.

If this has ever made you feel suffocated, exhausted, and in dire need of some alone time, you might be an introvert.

I know it’s difficult to say no to opportunities. I’ve accepted too many invitations and tried to attend too many events. Last year’s conference season was particularly stressful. The first week, I was in New York for the Best Practices Conference, giving a presentation on blogging. The second week, I was at the even bigger Technical Leadership Exchange in Florida, giving a presentation on Generation Y. By the time I got to the Web 2.0 Summit (which I was helping organize), I was ready to hide. (And I did, behind the podium.)

As much as I enjoy learning from people in conversations and conferences, needing to be “on” all the time is incredibly draining. I’m learning how to manage my schedule and how to say no.

It’s important to figure out what works for you. For example, I don’t want to be out late two nights in a row. In fact, I’d rather not be out late at all. This means that before I accept an invitation, I look at my schedule for that time and my schedule for the week, making sure that I’m not trying to pack too much in.

In addition to getting better at saying no, I’m also getting better at scheduling time for myself. I’ve blocked off time on my calendar for planning, working on important tasks, and responding to mail. Sometimes people still schedule meetings during those times, but in general, I can be sure that my day won’t be full of conference calls. I sometimes block off time during evenings and weekends for particular projects, too. If I’m going to travel for a workshop or a presentation, I want to have a quiet week before and after the trip, and I plan accordingly.

Does this limit opportunities compared to extroverts who are out there schmoozing? Maybe. But I’ve tried running in extrovert mode for extended periods of time, and I can’t do my best if I feel like I’m coming apart. Besides, the things I do in my quiet time—read, write, reflect—also help me connect with people, although in a more introvert-friendly way. It’s better to work with the grain instead of against it.

It’s important to make time to breathe. If you find yourself running ragged because you feel that you have to say yes to everything, stop and slow down. Schedule introvert dates with yourself. Make time for breaks. Say no. You’ll find that the quiet time you give yourself will make it even easier to connect with people when you do, because you’ll be happier and better rested.

What can you do to free up some time for yourself?