images-5One of the first things to learn is time management is to write things down - even if you have a good memory. Scientific research showed that we remember much more things when we write them down. According to Baddeley’s model of working memory our memory consists of a phonological loop, a visual and an episodic loop. These loops represent short time memory and it seems that they reinforce each other. This means that the probability to remember something is much higher if you write it down - even if you don’t need the notes later.

The second reason for taking notes is that you free your mind. Permanently reminding yourself that you don’t have to forget this or that simply causes stress. Once you wrote down all items you can focus your mind on achieving the task you are currently working on.

imagesI therefore recommend having a note pad with you where you takes meeting notes, reminders or where you can do brainstorming. Taking it with allows you to also turn idle time into productive time - regardless where you are . Although I am a large fan of electronic devices I believe that there is no alternative to having an A4 note pad, so that you are quick and also have sufficient space. On top of the paper you might also use an electronic help such as evernote in case you travel a lot. It allows you to take quick notes by voice, picture or text through your mobile phone and automatically synchronizes it with you PC at work or at home.

images-3It is absolutely mandatory that you plan a fixed time to review your notes once a day. The best time to do this is when you plan your day. During this time you transfer tasks into your to-do list, update your calendar and schedule other activities related to your notes.

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Nov

14

When is the last time you did some mental arithmetic training - at school? In the digital age computers and calculators are doing all the maths for us creating a generation of mental arithmetic illiterates.

However, we often need to make a quick calculation at work or on the road without having the necessary equipment at our hands. Besides, using the calculator always requires more time than doing the maths in your brain - if, yes if you are used to it.

I know that it is very painful but we need to train our brains regularly to maintain certain skills. I therefore recommend training mental arithmetic skills regularly to keep the small grey cells in good shape. There are a lot of sites on the Internet offering games, so that this training can be some kind of fun.

Here is one of my favored ones: brain training puzzles

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Nov

13

New knowledge is being created at the fastest speed in history of human mankind leading to world of fast and sometimes unexpected change. Although it is impossible for one person to cope with the generation of new knowledge and although the information age overwhelms us with knowledge at our finger tips, lifelong learning is mandatory in order not to fall behind.

Despite the offers on the Internet books still remain a major source of knowledge acquisition. I recommend making reading a habit, so that you constantly update and improve your knowledge.

  • Identify and write down your areas of interest
  • Create a fixed place at home where you read
  • Always keep some stock of unread books at your reading place
  • Keep searching for new books in your area of expertise

 

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Changing habits often starts with high motivation. But we most often struggle in changing our behavior over a longer period of time. This results in feeling guilty and being depressed over our weakness.

A good way to overcome these negative feelings and to keep you motivated is to use chaining. It means that you create a series of positive behavior. Let me explain this with an example:

You decided to improve your health and go jogging every day. Each day you go out to run your chain gets longer. If you manage to run every day for one week you create a chain of seven days. Now it might happen that the weather became very unpleasant and that you missed going out to run for two days. Now the chain is interrupted. You have to start running again starting a new chain and this time you try to make the chain longer than the previous one. 

Chaining is an approach where you compete against yourself. On the other hand the concept of chaining already includes the fact you might not be able to perfectly succeed from the beginning. When a chain ends you look forward starting the next chain instead of looking back and feeling bad.

To make it work it is important to visualize the chain. You can use a meter, or a calender and there even is a website http://www.joesgoals.com/, which supports chaining visualization.

Your target is to make a chain long enough that it just became a habit you don’t have to think about. The concept of chaining is entirely in the spirit of the former athlete Jim Ryun who said “Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.”

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Linus Pauling, a famous chemist once said: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”.

So if it is important to have a lot of ideas, we need to think about a proper way to collect them. There is nothing worse than having a good idea and forgetting it later again because we did not write it down.

1) Use a tool to collect ideas:

The traditional way to systematically collect your ideas would be a note pad, which you carry with you all the time.

I recently found a very interesting website - evernote - , which allows you to collect, store and access your ideas from multiple sources. They can be accessed from a PC desktop application, from a mobile phone or through a normal Internet browser and all are synchronized through a cloud. 

You can add ideas by voice over your mobile phone or sending your idea to your email address at evernote. The search engine even allows to identify keywords inside images. I have started to work with the free version and it significantly helped my to easily collect and organize my ideas.

2) Work on your ideas:

Ideas by themselves have no value. They only get value when you execute them. It is important that you work on your ideas from time to time. A good way to assure that you work on your ideas regularly is to create an assignment in your calendar using the function of recurring schedules. During this time you will go through one or more ideas and refine them. When you feel that an idea is mature enough to be executed you can start the implementation as a project.

3) Connect your ideas to each other:

A major source of innovation is the recombination of existing things to something new. The same applies to your ideas. When you work on your ideas as described in the above bullet point I recommend to systematically look for ideas that fit together and that can be combined to a better and more interesting idea.

4) Share ideas or parts with others:

Communication with other people certainly is a major source of creativity. Look for possibilities to gain more knowledge and feedback on your ideas. It might also be good to see if other people already had the same or a similar idea. One of the most effective way to exchange ideas with others is to use the blogger community. You can have your own blog where you write about your idea or you go into other peoples blog on topics related to your idea and actively participate in discussions.

5) Lean more?

I still feel that I am a beginner in field and I would love to share experience with you. So please let me know how you collect and work on your ideas in the comment session.

 

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Sep

23

Optimizing routine tasks or researching on how you can become more efficient are very important tasks to continuously improve your productivity. With all the staff thrown at us every day, such time is rarely taken. I therefore recommend to plan improvement time into your calendar once month like any other appointment. For every month you can set a specific topic you will think about for one or two hours:

  • How to make routing work more efficient
  • What you can delegate or outsource to others
  • Get started with a new skill you want to learn about
  • etc.
Taking time for these activities might feel like a constraint in the short time, but in the long term it will significantly increase your employability or marketability with positive impact on your value and income.
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Sep

22

When you start a learning or practicing session, start with the difficult subjects first. At this time you are still fresh and you will process new information quickly and be more effective in memorizing.

After concentration starts dropping you can focus on reviewing or focus on subjects which you are more familiar with and which therefore feel easier to you. This is also a good time to learn things by heart in case this is part of your curriculum.

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Sep

13

If you have a lot of books you will have worked out a way of storing them in your bookshelves over the years. You probably never have thought about the best order. A very common mistake is to sort the books by size so that they look nice and clean. The disadvantage is that in terms of author and contents they will be completely mixed up.

The best way to store your books is as libraries or book stores do. They group them by author or by theme so that you know where to search for a book reducing the time to identify it. You might even create a catalogue or inventory of your books.

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Sep

10

Todays society requires us to learn during our whole life and on the leisure side there is so much choice that it hard to find what one is looking for. I therefore recommend to ask people you respect at work and friends on book recommendations. The probability that they have similar professional or private interests is relatively high and it can save you tremendous time in searching for the right content.

With web 2.0 there now also are a lot of new possibilities to be member of communities. I have foudn a few sites where you can administrate your library and share it with people with similar interests:

1) librarything.com

They claim to be the market leader with the largest community. In terms of functionality it seems to em that they are the most advanced. You can search you books in multiple sources including foreign languages and countries, tagging and categorizing are very convenient and the reviews are very professional. The community is very active and you can even subscribe as an Early Reviewer and win free copies of books. The downside is that you can post only 200 books for free. If you exceed this number you will have to pay 10USD per year or 20USD for lifetime.

2) Shelfari.com

This site belongs to Amazon and has very nice graphical and intuitive user interface. It is fun to move the books on the shelve. You can also tag and categorize books, share libraries in public or with friends and also read and write reviews.

Compared to kibrarything it has less sources for getting the book information. This should be no issue if you mainly read English books but if you have a multiple language library it will be difficult to find all your foreign books. It also does not offer the service to preview books.

3) Goodreads

Goodreads is also a book catalogue website without limitations in the number of free books. It has similar functionality as the other two but is somewhere in between. Less comprehensive than librarything on one hand but less graphical fun than shelfari.

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Ask people you respect for book recommendations. Since they might have similar interests or work in similar environments it is likely that these books also will suit you. This will increase your hit-rate and also save you a lot of time searching for good novelties.

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