Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1

OK, back to this.  Johnny B Truant is now on Lesson 3 of The Tao of Awesome (which showed up in my inbox this morning); I am on Lesson 1 (just).  Meanwhile, I have a newly broken rib.  It only hurts when I breathe.

So here we go: Johnny will now take my avalanche of to-do and teach me to turn it into a manageable and less-fuck-up-able working system.  The secret is to do less things that don’t matter, and spend more time on things that do matter.  Cheers, Truant.

But he promises it’ll work, though easier said than done.  I’ll end up doing the important things before they become urgent, and dealing with urgent things according to whether they’re important.  Plus I learned that it’s possible to do business without being a slave to long pointless phone calls and meetings.  By refusing to have them most of the time.  Now that is pure fucking awesome.

The task for this lesson: make a master to-do list and mark everything on it as either “important and urgent”, “important not urgent”, “urgent not important”, or “neither urgent nor important”.

Dude, you’re hurting me.  To make a list of everything that needs doing would require me to integrate my personal Basecamp with my client’s Backpack with my 3 Google to-do lists and my Yahoo to-do list and my hard copy to-do sheets.  And the notes on my phone.  And my appointments calendar.  And all the unactioned items in my various email accounts.  And the laundry.  And the cleaner I promised the Animal I’d hire.

So, I admit I fudged this one somewhat.  My master list lists all my other to-do lists, and some of the most obvious and unavoidable to-dos (like work, pay rent, buy food) plus some special requests (like have sex, read Wired, book a holiday) .   It’s maybe 5% of the wildly disorganised to-do list that’s in my head.  Maybe I’ll build on it later.  Should’ve used my notebook instead of scrap paper.

The categorisation of each list item, though, was actually kinda fun.  Lots of stuff that was important AND urgent, of course.  But not all of it.

My crash test verdict on The Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1

This was pretty painful.  And that’s when I shirked by only listing my to-do lists and my worst to-do worries.  I hope I can catch up.

Let’s see what happens in Lesson 2.

Image credit: moonlightbulb

June 14, 2011 | Categories: All psychology is amateur | Tags: copywriting, quotes, self improvement, Twitter | Leave A Comment »

Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Introduction

A few days ago I was trundling around Twitter when I saw this tweet from @JohnnyBTruant:

I was sufficiently intrigued curious procrastination-inclined that I clicked the link. 

I wasn’t disappointed. Not talking about the course, you understand – it’s barely begun.  But I’ve liked that Truant’s style since the first time I saw his writing: blunt yet tangentially anecdotal, authoritative but not in a you-can’t way, with infrequent use of mild language.  Frequent use of the other kind, which I personally like cos it makes me feel comfortable.

I debated for a bit.  I asked the Animal, who gave his usual “I don’t want to tell you what to do” answer.  I decided the $39 fee might be worth paying if I get even a little bit better at keeping on top of things — work, baby, boyfriend, friends, blog, health, relatives, travel plans, oh godspleasehelpme i’mdrowning — and when I said as much on Twitter, the allegedly awesome dude replied to agree.  So I signed up.  Small fee, potentially good payoff; I’ll take that bet.

The course intro email arrived the other day, and I read it this morning (I’m always behind, with everything – that’s why I want to grok the Tao of Awesome, yes?).

So it goes: “change your life… get things done… get the RIGHT things done”. That’s a bit more interesting.  Some more motivational copy, and here’s the first official task: read the post at http://bit.ly/iupCeN, and grasp that progress is king while mere accomplishment sucks monkeys.  It’s called kaizen, apparently, though to my jaded corporate-whore ears it sounds suspiciously like Continuous Personal Development.

My crash test verdict on today’s The Tao of Awesome:

It brought to mind that proverb, “Thought without action is a daydream; action without thought is a nightmare.”

Which is fucking awesome, because ever since I first heard that saying it’s stuck with me on account of how it describes half my worldly problems in one sentence.  [It may well describe the other half, too; I can't tell because I don't even know what my problem is half the time].

Let’s see what happens in Lesson 1.

Image credit: Kevin.Qiu

June 7, 2011 | Categories: All psychology is amateur | Tags: copywriting, quotes, self improvement, Twitter | Leave A Comment »