You can always make it a little better. In many projects it is simply not possible to reach a point where the outcome cannot be improved. Perfection is a stupid goal to aim for because you will never reach it. If you are looking for optimization, step back from perfection and set goals that are high but reasonable.

Are you really omnicompetent? The sheer diversity of all the projects you are faced with means that it is virtually impossible to achieve perfection in all of them. You are more skilled and talented in some areas than in others. Perfectionism pays off when you apply it where your strengths are. Perfectionism in all fields is plain stupid because you will spend so much time and effort that you reach it in none.

Your perfect is not my perfect. Another reason why there should be little or no perfectionism in you setup for getting stuff done is that it is a subjective phenomenon. Your idea of what is perfect is just that, your idea. If you are working far and hard towards your own interpretation of the perfect outcome, chances are that you will move your project away from what is the optimum in a broader context. Again the key is to set goals. Goals that you and other concerned parties can agree are optimized.

So, skip the perfection and go for true optimization!

I discovered that when sleep was starting to creep up on me, the complications in my personal system for handling tasks and projects became a lot more clear. Trying to work like I would do in my normal alert state made the speed bumps that slowed down my ride on productivity lane obvious.

Normally, I have the energy and focus to overlook hurdles that come in my way, especially the kind of small things that just take an extra second or a few extra mouse clicks here and there. These are typically repeated productivity obstacles that are easy to fix with a very small effort. But since they are so small it is hard to notice them.

In general, I recommend you to use your system in a slightly impaired state from time to time. You can use different tricks, for example being tired, hungry, upset, not using your dominant hand or maybe working after a dinner with wine, to reveal the things that require unnecessary concentration, focus and effort. So try this out and discover what annoys you about your own productivity setup.

• Geographical
• Time
• Activity type
• Tools and support materials
• Mood
• People

These categories also come with their own subdivisions. Location clustering can be by city or by shop for example. Chronological clustering can be done by looking at how much time is needed for a task, when it can be done, or other time factors.

The power of clustering is that it helps you to be more efficient by focusing on a certain kind of tasks when the circumstances are optimal. So you get the best conditions for your task, but you also get the benefit of doing many similar tasks after each other. This benefit of not jumping between different kinds of tasks is necessary if you want to scale up your productivity and get more stuff done.

Finally, let’s look at some real-life examples of productivity-enhancing clustering:

• Blogging – Writing this posts is one of my tasks tonight. It is clustered with drafting two other posts, so I can make the most out of being in my mental and technical blogging context. Writing for the blog is in turn clustered with a set of online tasks, that I can focus on now that no offline tasks need my attention for a few hours.
• Shopping – Clustering errands you might have is a good exercise and it will free up valuable time. When I go out to shop groceries and carry out other tasks in different locations, I try to get as much as possible done at one location and to cluster geographically in such a way that I spend a minimum of time in transit between locations.
• Questioning Bob – Let’s say I work with a this guy Bob. In my job I often come across issues that I need to discuss with Bob face to face. Since the issues are rarely such that they stop me from working just when they arise, I gather them until I have at least three to-discuss-with-Bob-tasks. Then I go to Bob and have a quick meeting with him. This clustering of “Bob issues” helps both him and me to be more productive.

So get creative with clustering and start bringing your tasks together!

Professional memory athletes, competing in the world championships, and their coaches have developed methods to maximize the capacity of the human memory. The basic idea of the methods is to make your memories more structured, but in a creative and visual way. Images, distinct and almost provocative, are key. But these images need an index. This is where the memory palace comes in. The memory palace is a construction inside your head where memories are stored, organized and retrieved. Building a memory palace is a process that looks different from person to person. But generally the trick is to place your visualized memories in a context you are extremely familiar with. The most common type of context is an imagined building in three dimensions, since it is close to our everyday perception of the world.

The benefit of these memory techniques  for productivity are that they help analog memory in general and come in very handy when no memory aids (notebook, pad, phone, computer, voice recorder, etc.) are available. One example situation is when you need to connect names and faces, which actually is a discipline in memory competitions. This task and the memorizing associated with it normally requires a lot of work and tinkering to outsource from your brain to another system. But with proper memory techniques you can optimize your natural capacity for linking names and faces.

Another situation where a memory palace is extremely useful is when you want to register a thought in a container or inbox, but have absolutely no access to them. You can’t even call someone and ask them to remind you later. Imagine for example that you are taking a long swim in open water. In this case you would benefit from being able to efficiently and reliably transfer thoughts from short term memory to long term, where they are stored unconsciously. You could help this process with a memory palace container. If you place your articulated memories in there, you need only to return to the palace and not to each specific memory.  So go on, do some research and start optimizing your memory!

I first ruled out the option of getting a “new” used laptop, since it would mean the same cost and result as replacing the board, but a lot more work in the process of finding one to purchase. So I was left with the task of making a decision on whether to buy a new laptop or repair the old one. The situation was quite pressing since a laptop is an essential productivity tool for me. However, having a decent system of personal organization and effectiveness in place helped me to make up my mind fast, decisively and with attention to a maximum of factors. My system proved useful in three major ways:

Making room for decision making. I can to turn to my system (project and task lists) to find out exactly what I am doing at the moment what needs to be done before I can put the whole system on hold fpr a certain amount  of time to focus on making my investment decision.

Knowing my needs. By scanning certain layers of the system I have set up, I know what projects I will most likely be pursuing in the near future, say during the coming 3-6 months. I also get an idea of my goals in a longer time perspective. Based on this overview I can easily see what my needs in terms of hardware and software will be.

Ad hoc task list for decision. Thanks to a flexible container input surface I could make a quick list of the steps involved in the decision making process. This list then resided, so to say, in front of my regular system until the decision was made and acted upon.

These advantages of my productivity system meant that I had a space free of distraction, all the necessary information and a clear path of action in my decision.

Obviously, there is no absolute way of filtering everything that hits you automatically. It will always be a matter of personal judgement. But here are some basic indicators that a piece of stuff, a request, a suggestion, an idea or a proposal of some sort, is generic junk that you want to filter out:

• It will not help you achieve your goals. You don’t want to get tangled up in something that does not get you where you want. An if this stuff was not made with you specifically in mind, chances are that it will not.
• You get the “Why me?” feeling. Same thing as above. Spam works with quantity over quality so you will definitely be hit by a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make sense for you.
• It has a poor presentation. Spammers don’t mind being tacky or come across with a poor execution of communication.
• The reward is unrealistic in relation the effort required. This is a classic spam characteristic. But sometime the same mechanism is very obvious in stuff that hits you outside your inbox. Watch out!
• Hints of mass communication. If you hear someone pitch the same story to everyone at a party, it is probably not an opportunity tailored for you, even if that is what the person is proposing.
• You have no connection to the source. Some strangers have perfectly valid reason for shooting their stuff your way. But those who trying to get you hooked on generic things normally don’t.

You want to delete this sort of stuff as quickly and efficiently as spam email. Must of those emails we don’t even see, because the filter takes them before the reach us. What we should strive is to have a similar filter operating in our subconscious. Achieving this is quite similar to not paying attention to commercial messages when you are driving. You focus on the road signs which give important information just for you, in your role as a driver. Another method of training you mental spam filter is to refocus on a small task during commercials on TV. Let us know your own tricks and how you succeed in shielding yourself from generic stuff.

1) The decision you have to make is introduced stochastically. Stochastically in the sense that from your subjective point of view the timing appears random. Normally making this decision will require all of your attention for a certain amount of time, it will be on top of your mind so to speak. This could however vary depending on circumstance 2).

2) The decision has to be made, and normally acted upon or communicated, at a point in time that is more or less uncertain. This means that you don’t really know how much time you have at your disposal to make the decision.

3) The decision depends on a number of parameters which is greater than you can realistically process before you’re out of time. The parameters also vary in complexity and importance for the decision.

A quick example of how this type of situation can arise: You are working a Friday afternoon with some reasonably important tasks to finish. Your close and very spontaneous friend Mary calls you up saying she will pass through your town in 45 minutes because she’s going on a road trip to visit some common friends. She offers you a free seat in the car and mentions that she gave the same offer to another friend, whom she will hear from within 30 minutes. You also have some quite important things to do at home during the weekend. When will you call Mary back and what will you tell her?

However you choose to approximate your hourly monetary opportunity cost, this amount is then to be weighted against outsourcing any of your outsourcable actions. Simply put – if you have things to get done and these could be outsourced in exchange of money, it’s an instant application of your hourly monetary opportunity cost. Just don’t forget to weigh in non-monetary factors (although surprisingly often dissectable into monetary components). How elaborate you do this is entirely up to you. Two different situations:

1) My hourly monetary opportunity cost is €15. Doing my laundry takes one hour and ten minutes. Using the local laundry firm costs me about 10 minutes of transportation and €10. That means doing my laundry instead of working has an opportunity cost of €5. I.e, I make €5 by working, while still getting my laundry done by paying for that. Time consumed is constant, because going to work instead of doing laundry at home takes 10 minutes.

2) My hourly monetary opportunity cost is €15. Cooking dinner costs €15 i.e one hour of work (excluding eating of course) and €5 in ingredients. Total cost is €20. Buying ready-made dinner from the supermarket (assumed here to take no time in comparison to the one hour of home cooking) costs about €10 in monetary costs and an arbitrary amount in health costs.

To clarify the second example;
The latter cost consists of physical health issues due to bad content in pre-processed food and mental health issues due to the opportunity cost of mental relaxation by cooking food for one hour with family/friends. If you value physical health concerns to €2 (which actually is quite quantifiable), in essence this boils down to paying €8 to cook food with your family/friends. How you value this depends on your individual supply and demand for this kind of activity. Some people spend huge amounts of time with their loved ones, which in effect makes one hour more or less negligible. Other people spend very little time with their loved ones, and a lot of time to create money. They will most likely be happy to exchange money for this kind of extra quality time. Although this is generally hard to quantify exactly in monetary terms, you could often say if it is worth more or less than €8. When starting to think in this way it might seem odd to value family and friends, but if you give this way a shot, chances are you might like it. Often different alternatives in your life boils down to a few emotional activities which are hard to quantify in monetary terms. However – you can say that cooking food with your family is worth more than €12 in opportunity cost ceteris paribus, but going to the movies with a friend is worth less than €75 in opportunity cost all other things equal (you gain five hours by making €75 in opportunity cost, which means you might be able to create a larger sum of positive emotional experience in this time even without the cinema).

Some people will most likely object to the cynical nature of this kind of thinking. But when you get your head around thinking this way, you will realize that a lot of processes in life could be optimized using this tool, and in effect increasing your overall wellbeing and happiness. The latter oftenly implies more time with your loved ones, so in a way it’s cynical not to optimize these kind of equations. More on opportunity cost in later posts. In the meantime, please share your thoughts.

There are alternatives that might suit you better. You want it to be relaxing, easy to learn, and intellectually challenging at the same time. Lumosity is a collection brain fitness games played online built on recent cognitive research that suggest the brain is more malleable than previously thought. Research shows the brain is able to create significant amounts of new neurons even late in life, i.e the brain can be worked out just like a muscle. The games on this site are specifically designed to target and improve certain cognitive thinking applications, such as spatial working memory and visual attention. In addition, the games are designed to increase in difficulty as your abilities improve, which means you will have a smooth curve of brain development regardless if you play half an hour once in your life or half an hour daily. The games are made for all audiences and ages. In addition – they are fun to play! The site claims that Lumosity users have reported benefits such as

Clearer and quicker thinking
Improved memory for names, numbers, directions, etc.
Increased alertness and awareness
Elevated mood
Better concentration at work or while driving

So, if you simply have to waste time playing a computer game, what better way is there than playing brain workout games?

PC, Word and similar word processing software:
Ctrl + left/right arrow, move cursor one word at a time
Ctrl + up/down arrow, move cursor one paragraph at a time
Shift + arrow, mark/highlight text.
Ctrl + x, cut
Ctrl + c, copy
Ctrl + v, paste

The key in optimizing your word processing is combining all of the above. For example, you want to move a paragraph, instead of using your mouse you could quickly just press Ctrl+down to reach bottom of paragraph, then Ctrl+shift+up to highlight the whole paragraph, then Ctrl+x to cut, then ctrl+up/down to move cursor up and down between your paragraph and lastly Ctrl + v to paste the text.

When formatting, the following could be useful:
Ctrl + b, bold
Ctrl + i, italics,
Ctrl + u, underline,

As you will find out, there are literally tons of keyboard shortcuts for most word processing software, many different from each other. It all comes down to what system you are using and what kind of texts you are writing. We strongly recommend you to take time to learn as many shortcuts as you can.

As a bonus, some web browsing stuff:
Ctrl + t, new tab
Ctrl + number, make tab #number active
Ctrl + F4, close tab
Alt + F4, close browser