In week three of our four part interview series with Julie Morgenstern about her new book SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life, Julie talks about the phenomenon of clutter and how it seeps into our lives– whether its physical or mental roadblocks in our life and even in our schedules. Julie goes beyond the normal concept of clutter to even clearly isolate negative life habits which can be a form of psychological clutter that can hold you back.Julie directly links physical and mental clutter to an ancient Zen parable of life which gives her SHED de cluttering process a spiritual quality to it. Knowing when and how to SHED can be often as important as this process of triggered self introspection itself. Warning SHED is not a quick fix, simplify your life, self-help organizing book—its effects are far more deep and profound. If you find yourself stuck in your life, this could be the process that could help you get unstuck and break down that psychological log jam to help propel you forward. If you like the interview, please post comments and pass it on to your friends.

In week two of our four part interview series with Julie Morgenstern about her new book SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life, Julie outlines the key steps to the SHED process. Each step builds on its predecessor and is guaranteed to have a real impact when applied collectively and at the right moment in your life. Knowing when and how to SHED can be often as important as this process of triggered self introspection itself. Warning SHED is not a quick fix, simplify your life, self-help organizing book—its effects are far more deep and profound. If you find yourself stuck in your life, this could be the process that could help you get unstuck and break down that psychological log jam to help propel you forward. If you like the interview, please post comments and pass it on to your friends.

This week we begin a four part interview series with New York Times best-selling author Julie Morgenstern about her new book SHED Your Stuff Change Your Life. In this intimate and personal interview, Julie reveals the life experiences that launched her career in business and productivity coaching. What is sure to impress the listener is not the unique nature of these experiences that triggers Julie’s climb to business success, but the profound shift in perspective they fueled in her life —and which lay the foundation for her life changing Zen like philosophy – SHED.
SHED is not another organizing book nor a call back to basics to live more simply – it’s a unique life perspective that invites you to join her on a personal odyssey of self-examination and self-discovery through the reevaluation of one’s physical and emotional personal space, guaranteed to transform your life forever. The core of her SHED philosophy is its cyclical nature that encourages people to rediscover themselves and embrace life in the moment by regularly releasing physical and psychological baggage that prevent them from moving forward in their life. If you like the interview, please post comments and pass it on to your friends.

As everyone knows, the world of smart phone applications is constantly inundated with new applications, apps promising better features to enhance your productivity and change your life. Sadly to say, some often come with hefty price tags and offer little in return, but empty promises. Time management paradigms aside, the reality is that there is only so many ways that a programmer can create a calendar and a task manager, before it becomes a test in futility. Remember the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and that is exactly what a number of these developers are doing.

Many mobile PIMs  (Personal Information Managers) are either too stripped down or over wrought with unnecessary features and have a user interface that is kludgy at best.  The reality is that a good UI designer when porting an application’s interface to a new environment should take into account the unique advantages of the mobile device that they are designing for, rather than trying to create a one size fits all application. One example of bad design or at least poor programming is the opera mini on the AT&T Blackberry Bold 9000, although fast on a number of other cell phones—it runs painfully slow on the Blackberry Bold 9000, making it highly undesirable. (Note the full Opera Mobile browser on a AT&T Tilt 2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 flies and is utterly amazing.)  Other applications include any number of web applications on the Blackberry and iPhone that simply create a front-door to a preexisting web application, making these free applications often nothing more than glorified web site short cut links.

For these reasons alone, I found a refreshing difference recently when I was invited by Yuriy Savchenko, the Project Manager for WebIS’s Blackberry development team out of Kiev, to join their beta testing team. I found a completely different approach to product management and programming development at WebIS. They are a company that cares not only about the quality of their products, but actually about their end-user’s experience.

As many Blackberry Developers know, there has been serious synchronization issues for third party app developers with RIM’s Blackberry Desktop Manger 5.01 and Yuriy’s  team tackled these problems ferociously  creating what  I have come to see as a world class application.  I believe that Pocket Informant 2.01 for the Blackberry is a serious game changer in the development of RIM mobility applications.  First off,  WebIS CEO Alex Kac and his team under Savchenko have done a superb job of porting  Pocketing Informant  from the Windows Mobile Platform to the Blackberry.

Any long term user on the Blackberry knows that RIM is famous for its shortcut keys  and Pocket Informant’s  speed keys on the Blackberry are where the application begins to shine. Learning these shortcut  keys turn Pocket Informant into a worthy, if not far superior alternative to the Blackberry’s native PIM applications.   Using Pocket Informant’s short cut keys is a  powerful option because Pocket Informant allows  a user to access their tasks, their journal notes, their calendar and their contacts all from  a single highly customizable user interface that can be easily modified to your heart’s content. Here’s the real kicker, Pocket Informant’s short cut keys are also fully customizable allowing the user the ability to define which buttons launch which PIM functions.

Pocket Informant also works with any of the major time management systems from David Allen’s Getting Things Done to Stephen Covey’s First Things First.  In fact, Pocket Informant actually comes with GTD  and Franklin Covey preconfigured settings built right into it. Pocket Informant is the de facto mobile standard application on Windows Mobile and now the Blackberry for Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus mobility solution.  For example, a mobile license for it now ships with Plan Plus. The Franklin Covey tools include the weekly compass, goals, projects, mission statements and daily notes functionality pre-built in. These settings can be turned on and off in the Pocket Informant options tab which is so customizable that the feature list alone could fill up multiple blog entries.  The daily notes actually sync with Microsoft Outlook’s journal application—a feature that some mobility developers actually develop and sell separate applications for.

Pocket Informant 2 can fully sync with or exist separately from the  blackberry native PIM database (allowing for a person to carry around two separate sets of information – one for personal and one for professional information) giving the end user more options.

In conclusion, I encourage every Blackberry user to test drive the new Pocket Informant PIM application as it hands down one of the best blackberry applications on the market today.

One of my favorite web sites that I find myself revisiting is Bruce Keener’s blog Keenerliving and his PDA resource for Palm OS and Windows Mobile users. He also offers a free ebook which is a portable summary of all his suggested best practices and principles from years of experience in corporate America. Keener, as an author, is both practical, humble and highly effective in his writing. He offers real gems of incite covering the finer subtleties of Getting Things Done implementation and execution, devoid of the fluffy egotism rampant among many of the blogosphere’s blog gaggle of new wanna be gurus. Humility in this world is something that we all need more of. In a candid, brief interview with me, Keener gave me his opinions about the Getting Things Done Phenomenon.

Spencer: Why do you think that Getting Things Done (GTD) has been so successful?

Keener: GTD helps people overcome procrastination. It does so through several techniques, with the more powerful ones being:

1. Its emphasis on the distinction between a project and a task …too many people put projects on their task list and keep putting those projects off because they haven’t thought through the next action for
it.

2. Its emphasis on Being Where You Are: that is, in having lists ofnext actions organized by context so that you are not looking over a list of Home actions intermingled with Computer actions intermingled
with Office actions intermingled with Phone Calls and so on. Procrastinators get stuck when they have intermingled lists because they can’t decide what to do next. GTD simplifies by telling you to do something consistent with Where You Are.

3. Its emphasis on Just Do It … that is, the two-minute rule. Why belabor a task if you can just go ahead and do it in short order (presuming that it is one you should do).

4. Its emphasis on Getting Everything Out of Your Head and Into an Appropriate List (or action stream). Admittedly, all time management systems speak to this … GTD just does a better job of emphasizing
it, and emphasizing that it should be a periodic activity.

5. And, of course, its emphasis on Capturing All Actions … again, all time management systems speak to this, but GTD speaks to it best.

Spencer: What is your preference for an approach to time and life management systems Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

Keener: Regarding my preference for a Top Down or Bottom Up approach, my preference is Top Down. I am 59 now, so more of my life is behind me than in front of me, and I realize looking back over the years that I have been fortunate to have worked on the kinds of things I wanted to work on … a lot of
people are not so fortunate. But, it all begins with deciding what you want to be about, who you really are, what you want to accomplish, and then designing activities that let you do that. Oh, I’ve done a lot of things that wasted my time … nobody is perfect. But, if you don’t keep a list of
your priorities in life in front of you, if you don’t periodically examine who you are and what you feel you should be doing, then you are truly susceptible to being a leaf in the wind.

I therefore believe that priorities are important, and I don’t think GTD does a very good job of ensuring you align to your priorities. Some people seem to be able to brute-force it to work well enough for them … for me, I had to blend the Covey and GTD techniques in order to feel balanced on “on target.

David Allen opens Chapter 6 of Making It All Work with an introductory quote from blogger Steve Pavlina on the power of clarity, “If you aren’t yet at the point of clarity, then make that your first goal.” The quote is from Pavlina’s Do It Now post part of his series on time management in which Pavlina portrays himself as a productivity expert and maverick challenging traditional life management systems. In his article Time Management, Pavlina writes that he has read all the books on the subject and that if there were such a thing as a “Ph. D in time management,” Pavlina claims “to have gone over the curriculum many times over.”    Of course Pavlina gushes over Getting Things Done (GTD), writing “I love the standard GTD system” which brings us back to the concept of clarity. Interestingly, helping people gain clarity at the higher levels is something GTD completely lacks, Pavlina argues in the Essential Missing Half of GTD. What is the quintessential Pavlina productivity paradigm and where does it veer off from GTD and the traditional top down systems he abhors?  Where do they connect?

Pavlina believes that GTD will make you more efficient but not more effective.  GTD is for Pavlina primarily a low-level system “that will help you do things right…but it does not help you figure out what those right things are. ” To reinforce his point, Pavlina uses the Covey metaphor of having your ladder up against the wrong wall. Or in nautical terms, he argues that those who practice GTD are like a well managed ship that keeps sailing in circles never reaching port. This lack of top level direction or focus in Allen’s second book Ready for Anything, leads Pavlina to taunt, “Ready for What?”   Whatever your boss assigns you?  For with GTD, you are clearly, “doomed to spend your life working on other people’s goals and losing yourself in the process,” he further argues. People need something more than GTD which he sees as just a “personal management system”, Pavlina says, they need a “personal leadership system”.  Pavlina’s Coveyesque philosophy foreshadows Leo Babauta’s interview with Covey earlier this year on the Zen Habits blog. Covey doesn’t find much value in Getting Things Done and The Secret,” I have read these books and have enjoyed them and believe they contain elements of wisdom and practical suggestions. But for me and my world they are too simplistic and superficial.”  Pavlina’s rhetorical glowing praise of the GTD model  and subsequent criticisms contradicts itself and superficially glosses over the system; missing the true flexibility and power of GTD as an air tight and comprehensive  planning and life management system which we will explore in more detail in upcoming articles.  He never even considers the 6 Horizons of Focus first introduced in David Allen’s Getting Things Done and repeated again in Ready for Anything.  Furthermore, David Allen’s Road Map Seminar and his new book Making It All Work even more clearly delineates and expands upon the 6 Horizons of Focus as preexisting planning models that Allen first introduced back in 2001.   It also makes you wonder what tools and time management paradigms, Pavlina embraces.

Franklin Covey? In his article More On Planning, Pavlina calls the Franklin Covey digital and paper planner systems an inflexible “piece of crap” that forces people to subscribe to an often lousy planning model.  Does he use Microsoft Outlook?  Nope. “Piece of crap,” Pavlina writes.   Anthony Robbins Rapid Planning Method (RPM) paper and digital planning systems? “Utter crap,” Pavlina mocks.  How about a Palm PDA? Pavlina thinks that they are “inflexible and puny” junk too, for his Palm is collecting dust in the closet. (Note David Allen swears by his Palm Treo 755P) Pavlina clearly disdains certain GTD tools and conventional time management planners as too overly complicated and too inflexible forcing you to use a particular planning paradigm.

After criticizing the entire time management establishment Pavlina offers his own take on effectiveness. Pavlina prefers to use a pen and paper and outlining software. Using a digital outlining tool for project planning is also mentioned in David Allen’s first book Getting Things Done as a suggested best practice.   A closer analysis of Pavlina’s system suggests that he actually implements very few of the key GTD principles and suggested best practices. These conclusions can be drawn from viewing Pavlina’s own essays.  It’s not to say that the Pavlina productivity paradigm is not without its merits-it clearly is air tight if properly implemented. Anybody following it could easily experience significant improvement in accomplishing their goals. Needless to say its brilliance lies in its simplicity and mainly its roots.   The Pavlina productivity paradigm is nothing more than a traditional best practices  top down life management system that models all the paradigms that Pavlina ridicules making it a hybrid rather than an original methodology, at best evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In fact, anybody familiar with Brian Tracy’s time management books Eat that Frog, Focal Point, Time Power, and Goals would see an obvious uncanny resemblance between Pavlina’s planning methodologies and Brian Tracy’s own recommended best practices as well as those of Anthony Robbins and Franklin Covey.  Brian Tracy sums it up best in Time Power,”What I have discovered is that it doesn’t matter what time management system or planner you decide to use.  They are all good …the most important part of any time planning system is that you use it regularly until it becomes a habit, like breathing in and out. ”    Another interesting distinction between Brian Tracy and Steve Pavlina is that rather than criticizing his predecessors and influences from who he borrows best practices, Brian Tracy often cites where he takes his methodologies from. Tracy for example even offers readers a suggested reading list at the end of his book Focal Point.  What does not work for Pavlina may work for others which Pavlina even admits to in his articles with a few qualifiers. However, the tone of Pavlina’s mocking attack shows no such restraint or respect for his predecessors nor does his humorous pejoratives.  Could Pavlina learn something from this?  Which raises the question – why does the Pavlina productivity paradigm condemn and criticize all the other time management tools and systems from which it borrows its influences, its methodologies and its best practices?

Despite several attempts at reaching Steve Pavlina with our questions via email and phone calls to his home in Nevada – Steve Pavlina could not be reached for comment. Our conclusions were drawn from his published works.

Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today.  His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can immediately apply to get better results in every area.  For more information, please go to www.briantracy.com