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Everybody has to get things done.  That's just a fact of life.  However, how you go about getting things done varies tremendously from person to person.

You might say that every time we do something, it consists of two simple phases…planning and action.  You could also say that, in essence, each person cycles through these two phases hundreds of times a day.  Figuring out when to correctly transition from planning to action, then, has got to be pretty important, considering how often the cycle is repeated.

Planning is a vital activity.  It basically consists of researching all your available courses of action, considering various outcomes and trying to predict what will happen, and eventually committing to one of the available choices.  It's obvious, of course, that one has to eventually move out of the planning stage to get results.

Action is vital as well.  After all, nothing happens if you don't take action.  Since there are typically many more ways to do things incorrectly than correctly, you don't want to simply shoot off without any planning whatsoever.

Action, however, has some inherent advantages over planning.  The first advantage is that many people simply learn better in context, while acting, than they do out of context.  The second, and likely the most important, advantage is the fact that action is simply what Scott Berkun refers to as a forcing function.  Me, I just call it a type of reality check or a way to reduce risk.

Let's divert for a second.

Psychologically, humans are not objective creatures.  This fact alone is worth burning into your brain.  You are not objective.  Worse yet, you aren't even wired to realize that you are not objective.  For example, within any company, roughly 75% of the people rate themselves as above average within that company.  In a survey of drivers in Europe, 90% of the drivers rated themselves as above average drivers.  These perceptions are not based in reality.

A forcing function or reality check, then, is some sort of action or process that cuts through subjectivity and exposes reality.  It's a crucial step in any important project.  If you leave these until the end, you're likely to get lots of nasty surprises.

OK, now let's get back to the point.

When activities are disconnected from reality, the return on investment in those activities drops off because the risk of those activities being correct begins to outweigh the incremental benefits of additional activity.  It's analogous to making a bullet fire faster or do more damage when it's not even aimed at the target.  Or looking at the butterfly you can see through your window when there's an elephant hiding behind the wall.  Because planning is significantly more disconnected from reality and rooted more in our subjective perceptions, it is inferior in many ways to simple action.

Now, some of you are probably thinking "This is crazy…planning more is clearly the best thing to do in many situations."  You're not insane…this is absolutely true.  Up to now, we've basically ignored the issue of cost.  Since action often costs more, and planning frequently costs much less, planning more can often be the most cost-effective approach.

Pay attention here, because this is the important part.  The decision of planning vs action is based on the cost of both activities plus the fact that action is a much better reality check and experience builder than planning.  The trap many people fall into is generalizing their approach into "planning is always good" or "acting is always good".  Perhaps it's personality issues that determine where people tend to fall on this issue or a faulty assumption that what worked once should work again…but regardless, the correct approach to a situation isn't determined by personality.

If you act too much, you incur a lot of costs associated with a lot of misfires.  If you plan too much, it costs you valuable time, money, and magnifies the risk involved with not taking action to get a reality check on your assumptions.  Deciding how and when to do both is simply an issue of cost and risk.

In general, from my experience, the usual best approach involves

1. A minimal and considered amount of planning.  The 80/20 rule means you probably want to do a small amount of preparation.
2. A lot of action intended to force reality to the surface.  This is because there are usually courses of action which are fairly cheap reality checks or costs you would have to incur anyway.  You just need to bother looking for them.  Once you realize that the decision is based on cost and risk factors, you know how to look for and spot opportunities.

The most interesting situations are where the exceptions to these guidelines appear.  So, in my next post, I'll present some simple questions to ask when you're trying to figure out how much you should plan before acting.

Thanks for reading!

Well, that’s an interesting title for an article.  While I’m at it, I’ll advise you to eat less.  And make more money too.

Actually, odds are that if you are reading this blog post you probably read pretty quickly already.  But there are some people who don’t…and for them, I’d imagine the information here can make a huge difference.

Reading is probably the fastest way we have to take in large amounts of information.  The words in a book may not resonate with you in the same way that a presentation or speech might, but if you are prepared to make sense of what you are reading, it is undoubtedly the most effective way to learn….faster than listening or sitting in a lecture, for sure.

One thing you’ll also notice in the biographies of really successful people is that they read.  A lot.  Incessantly, in fact.  Just a good data point to have, I think.

First of all, why not try taking a reading speed test and see how you do?  You might find the results interesting.  In case the pressure affects your reading style, you might try timing yourself as you read a book or have someone time you.  A good long chapter in a book will generally give you time to zone out and not worry about being timed.

Now that you’ve done that, let’s talk about the “right” and “wrong” ways to read.

Ineffective reading generally consists of the reader saying each word to himself as he reads. This is called subvocalization, and if you are hung up in this pattern of behavior, you have a maximum reading speed of around 100-150 words per minute. The ineffective reader also tends to focus on each single word in a single line as he proceeds across and down the page.  The reader is focused more on the mechanical process of reading than treating it as an invisible step between himself and the ideas on the page.

Effective readers use a different approach.  They don’t see words on the page; they see phrases and paragraphs.  Their field of vision is taking in about 10 lines at any moment in time.  They are not hearing the words in their head completely in their head or reading them back to themselves.  Rather, they are actually rapidly visualizing the concepts of the text as they proceed down the page.  On average, these folks are reading anywhere from 250-500 words per minute.

Effective readers can also skim information extremely rapidly.  When one tries to find a piece of relevant information, it often is not necessary to read everything in detail.  In such cases, your words per minute can easily rise into the thousands if you are able to scan quickly and pick relevant phrases out of the page as you scan.

Now, I’m not sure I can offer much better advice on this topic than what’s out there on the Internet.  The reason I point this whole topic of reading out is that if you happen to recognize your own style of reading as being in the former camp, this post should be helping you realize that you might be able to learn how to read more effectively, starting with some of the points above.  And if you recognize yourself in the latter camp…well, at least you know more definitively where you stand. Nice to know when you’re doing something right, isn’t it?  =)

It is very difficult to overstate the relative benefit that a person gains when he is able to take information in more quickly.  It’s something that will, like interest, multiply its effects upon you for the rest of your life.  So I’ll leave you with the following link, and a suggestion to use Google to read up on the topic a bit more when you finish with that. =)

Wikibooks article on speed reading

OK, in the previous article I wrote about why audio books are a great alternative to the radio.  This time, I’m going to make some specific recommendations about how to get yourself started.

1. Get an MP3 Player

First order of business…you need an MP3 player.  If you’ve joined the iPod generation already, no problem, you’re set.  Personally, I favor the convergent approach to gadgets…I’ve got a pocket in the back for my wallet, a pocket for keys, and a pocket for one more item…which means a smartphone.  So I use a Secure Digital flash card in conjunction with the excellent Pocket Tunes on my Treo 650 smartphone.  1GB of storage is enough to hold a few complete audio books (although by now there are larger sizes available), and Pocket Tunes is simply the definitive MP3 player for Palm PDA’s, hands down.

What this means is that you can get by with a really cheap 60 to 100 dollar MP3 player if you want to, or simply add some cheap flash memory to most phones.  To really optimize the experience, though, you’re going to want to pay attention to some of the extra details.

Try to pick a player that will remember your position in the book so you can pick up right where you left off when you get back in the car.  For example, Windows Media Player doesn’t remember where you leave off in audio tracks…and so we’ve found that audio books are a bit harder to manage on my friend’s Windows smartphone than my Treo with Pocket Tunes.

2. Choose a source for audio books.

Second, you need the books themselves.  Audible.com is the go to place on the Internet for audio books.  You can also try the ever popular iTunes if you own an Apple branded MP3 player.  In general, I recommend picking topics which you are unfamiliar with but would like to learn more about.  You’re getting some free time here, so why not branch out a little bit?  That’s my philosophy, but if you’ve been dying to read the latest Harry Potter book and haven’t had the time, go ahead and listen to that too!  There’s no wrong answer here.

Podcasts are also a burgeoning category of audio programming.  You can go to places like Odeo or iTunes for these as well.  Podcasts do solve the selection issues associated with radio programming.  On the other hand, they still suffer from the same information density problems.  If a podcast is very narrowly targeted to a particular area of interest, you’re more likely to extract some value out of it..which, I believe, is similar to what makes a successful blog.  But given the choice between a book or a podcast, I’ll usually choose the book.

Finally, friends and family often have books they aren’t using any more.  You can borrow them and return them when you’re done.  Simple and inexpensive!

One interesting thing to note about about audio books is that they can often take much less space than equivalent music.  I won’t get into the whole theory of audio compression here, but suffice it to say that you can squeeze a guy talking down much more than you can a guy singing with a bunch of instruments playing in the background.  In many cases, you can fit more hours of audio book programming onto an MP3 player than you can of music.

3. Find a way to patch your MP3 player into your car

While we have all had images of dancing black silhouettes of people with white headphones hammered into our subconscious, for safety reasons, you should not listen using headphones while driving.  Playing the books back through your car’s audio system will be more comfortable and probably sound better too.

Try one of the following options.

1. A line-in or cassette adapter.  Both of these are easy to pick up at a Radio Shack, but most cars don’t have either of these input options nowadays.
2. An FM transmitter.  This is the option I chose.  You plug the transmitter into your MP3 player, and it broadcasts on an FM frequency of your choice.  Tune your radio to that frequency, and you are good to go.  Nearly all cars have an FM radio, so this approach is almost guaranteed to work.  The downside to this approach is that you have to find a clear frequency to transmit on, and occasionally you’ll get bleed-through interference from other stations if you’re unlucky.  I chose the iRiver AFT-100 because it got good reviews and is cigarette lighter powered to boot.  Changing batteries?  No thanks!  Car powered is the way to go.
3. A Bluetooth audio kit.  If you know what this is, you probably don’t need me to explain it to you.  A few cars support this option, and you’d probably need a smartphone MP3 player to even get started.
4. iPod car kits.  The dominance of Apple’s MP3 player has led to a well stocked ecosystem of accessories.  Too many options here to count, go Google for them.

Once you have all three parts taken care of…the MP3 player, the audio books, and the connection to your car stereo system…you’re ready to dive in to the last part of this guide, which is how and when to listen.

The philosophy of listening to books while driving

It’s wise to remember that when listing to books and driving, your primary focus is still driving.  For the sake of being illustrative, let’s replace the word “driving” with the phrase “careening around town in a two ton block of metal at 70 miles an hour”.  Safety must be priority #1.

1. Don’t be stupid.  People cause accidents every day because they fumble with cellphones, try to eat, put on makeup, or do any other number of silly things while trying to stay in control of a speeding car.  Messing around with your MP3 player while driving is pretty high on the list of dumb ways to go.  So keep your eyes on the road, jack.
2. Build up a playlist beforehand.  You can avoid messing around with your MP3 player while driving by building up a nice long playlist of the files comprising your audio book.  And if you’ve followed some of the above tips, you also have an MP3 player that retains your position in the playlist.  Combine the two, and the only time you’ll have to touch your MP3 player is when you get in the car and when you get out.
3. Listen when you have time and when you are driving “routine” routes.  If I’m traveling to a less familiar place where I’m not familiar with all of the turns and lane changes, I prefer to keep the books off and my attention on driving.  By the same token, I also don’t dive into my audio books if I’m just taking a 5 minute trip to the grocery store.  That’s too much context switching and not enough flow time.  I
   generally listen to audio books on my commute, where I know every inch of the road.  Interestingly enough, for me this creates a pretty good balance where I still get to listen to the radio without being saturated to the point where I’m completely bored by it.

Well folks, that’s all I’ve got.  Audio books are a great way to expand your horizons, and I hope this article has lent some clarity to the steps involved in making audio books a daily part of your commute.  Thanks for reading!

In my last article, I talked about what kind of tasks we can successfully combine together to save time.  This article discusses one specific way to multitask that I find useful, which is listening to audio books while driving to work.

Best use of time – drive less

First things first.  The top thing to figure out about your commute is how you can shorten it.  Who wants to spend time trying to get to where you’re going instead of actually BEING there?  It is my sincere hope that one day someone invents the transporter from Star Trek and we all start blinking to and from work in no time flat.

With that said, plenty of people, including myself, need to drive to work due to wacky real estate prices and other life priorities.  That isn’t going to go away any time soon.  In fact, plenty of people just take the commute for granted…they’ve become used to it as part of their daily grind.  Well, this article is all about NOT taking that time for granted.  Let’s take a considered approach to how we can get the most out of that fixed time allotment.

How we drive

When we drive in a car, we’re somewhat of a captive audience.  Obviously, our main priority is to get wherever we are going, and, beyond that, our options are limited.  After all, we’re stuck in a car and most of our attention is on the road.  What are we going to do?  The only real options we have are listening to something and taking occasional glances at the environment passing by.

This is why one of the most frequent driving activities happens to be listening to the radio.  Unfortunately, there is very little inherent value to radio programming.  In fact, in most cases, the radio is only turned on because it’s better than the next best alternative, which is being bored outright while you drive.

Radio talk shows, for example, are by their very nature incredibly light on information.  They have to be, because most of it is formulated on the spur of the moment.  Plus, the shows you might be interested in listening to aren’t necessarily on when you are driving.

And let’s talk about music stations.  Music stations are fine as a source of entertainment.  After all, watching television doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, but it’s fun, and often social.  Entertainment is a good thing.  But let’s be serious here.  Do you really need to hear the same song 100 times?Are you getting anything out of that song, or are you just using it to fill dead air?  For example, I certainly wouldn’t watch the same TV shows over and over again.  But maybe if I had nothing better to do…which is exactly the category that the radio falls into. I would argue that the radio, past a rather low bar, is less about truly entertaining oneself than it is about filling up sunk time.

And that’s where audio books come in.

Audio books vs the radio

Make no mistake…listening to an audio book is slower than reading that same book.  When you’re driving, however, listening is the only reasonable way to take in information.  Listening to audio books during your commute is all about getting everything you can out of all that you’ve got.

Here’s why audio books are a better alternative to radio programming.

1. You can choose what you want to listen to.  Oh, how important this is!  Let’s say you don’t know anything about managing your money, but you’d like to learn.  What do think the odds are that this topic is going to come up during your daily commute?  Just about zero.  On the other hand, finding an audio book on that topic is incredibly easy.  You can target your own specific needs and address them proactively.
2. You can progress on your own schedule.  Even if you found out about a money management radio show, it’s probably not going to be on when you can listen to it or as often as you would like.  On the other hand, if you have the audio book, you can just cruise through the book at your own pace, consuming as much or as little as you like.
3. You generally get much richer, denser, and higher quality content from an audio book than any radio program will provide.  A large quantity of books are not written to be fluffy or created on the fly.  Most books are edited with some degree of care and are intended to communicate serious concepts.   Radio programs, on the other hand, are produced with different objectives in mind.  You’ll simply learn more from audio books in less time.  Who can argue with that?

Obviously, there are some pretty good reasons why listening to audio books has advantages over daily radio programming.  I’ve listed them here, so it’s up to you as to whether or not you decide to take the plunge after reading them.  Next time, I’ll get to the nitty gritty details and make some concrete recommendations about equipment and best practices that will help anyone interested in getting rolling.