Personal Development

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Archives for June 2006

MyLife Organized: Progress Review

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Today I’d like to tell you how some minor tweaks helped me greatly improve my experience with the MyLife Organized software and enjoy managing my daily tasks even more.

This week has been quite controversial for me. I’m enjoying the week because I’ve managed to do so many things already, and it’s not even Friday evening yet. But I also felt somewhat frustrated about the things I had plans to do but never found time to make them happen. It wasn’t a major frustration now, but more like a disappointment of some opportunities you missed without any reason for doing so. Having seen the negative impact on my daily performance imposed by this frustration, I’ve decided to stop and analyze the situation.

You see, what happens quite often is that we get so caught up in doing things, that we neglect the processes of thinking about our tasks or reviewing the results accomplished. We’re so busy that we aim for the immediate result, and because somewhere deep inside we have a rough idea of how effective we really are, we trust this feeling and we skip the review process. We postpone such reviews till “it’s appropriate to have a break” or when we “don’t have so many things to do”. And while we’re conscious enough that such good times may not come in the nearest future, we usually find it an acceptable sacrifice to be made. After all, the things are still being done on time, and that’s what really matters! That is not entirely true. And I’d like to explain briefly why I believe reviewing your progress is a vital part of your personal development, and any area where you’re aiming for major improvement, for that matter.

So, looking back a few days, here is the single thought that I found the most frustrating when reviewing my tasks for each day: I’ve been working really hard, yet there are many things from today left to be done tomorrow.

As you remember, I’m trying to organize my plans and tasks in a form that I have an easy overview of things to be done today, this week, this month, and in some distant future. At the end of each time period, I take few minutes to review it. Usually, I do this review at the end of my day, right after I get back home – this is done so that I finish off the open loops for the working day, and review the plans for the rest of the evening.

The frustration I had was seeing a long list of things which were meant to happen today, but never had the time allocated to them. So these tasks effectively become plans for the following day. Having started day with a certain number of tasks to do, it is very frustrating to finish the day with the same or even bigger number of similar tasks.

But in reality, the only reason for the frustration there was the lack of my focus. When reviewing your day, it is absolutely vital to keep track of not only the things you have left to be done, but also the once you’ve completed. When I stopped for a moment to analyze the frustration of mine, I was surprised to notice that all the frustration was caused by my recent switch to the MyLife Organized software for managing my tasks, and the particular way this software presents the lists of tasks and plans.

What happened is that the default behaviour of MyLife Organized didn’t have few important things:

  • completed tasks are not hidden
    By default, all the completed tasks are still visible there in the Outline view of the software. This means that your to-do lists only grow in size and therefore increasingly irritate (and quite often, even intimidate) you. Luckily, there is a checkbox right there to hide the completed tasks and this makes the Outline view look a whole lot better :)
  • there is no separate tab for the completed tasks
    I was getting frustrated cause I didn’t really have an easy way to see how much I’ve done during the day. Because of this, I was automatically maintaining my focus on only the things not finished, which isn’t such a bad idea, but is definitely not enough to see where you really are. Again, I’ve found out that Outline tab has a number of different views, and one of them is the list of completed tasks sorted by either the day or the project they belong to.

I must say I’m impressed with the software. I definitely appreciate the flexibility it has. While not all the features are obvious and intuitive, it’s still a great joy to finally discover them and realise that they do exactly what you want.

I guess the most important lesson I’ve learned from this week about personal development, is that it’s always important to maintain your focus on things that matter to you most. Given a particular situation or environment, you may want to pay more attention to the list of current things, but generally it’s always a good idea to review what you’ve done to really appreciate the amount of things you ticked off your list.

Organizing Things Online

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Although I’m pretty happy with the success of using first 5-section A4 organizer and then the MyLifeOrganized software for keeping track of my daily tasks and plans, I’m still looking for an even better way to manage tasks. So I thought I’d post a list of things I’d like to concentrate on, and I will either update this entry later or keep coming back to it, or perhaps (even better!) I’ll get some feedback and pointers to things which do just what I need. Here it is, the list of things I need to find a better way of managing:

  1. Accessibility of my notes, tasks, plans and other information I need to find a way of having the information accessible most of the time. One of the nice solutions is the organizer I’ve mentioned already. I can always take it with me, but unfortunately it’s impossible to keep track of everything in an A4 sized 5-section organizer – it has physical limitations, and there is only so much I can always carry with myself. This suggests that I probably need to use computer for organizing and managing my life. And since it has to be portable, it should probably be something online. So please keep this in mind as you read on, I’m looking for an online service (preferred) or a software which could be easily synchronized with an online service. I don’t want to make the task even more technical, but I don’t exclude the possibility of eventually having to write the software myself. Luckily I’m quite capable, so if I don’t find anything really good – I’ll just concentrate on coding. Another thing about accessibility is that I would like to be able to search through my tasks and notes. Search using keywords or filters, like being able to see the list of tasks for today, for the current week, etc. Another vital part of accessibility for me is having a history of all the tasks completed.
  2. Ideas. I get at least 5 or 6 really interesting ideas a day. And while some of them could be immediately converted into some actions waiting to happen, others are just that – they’re still ideas. So I don’t need to act on them in the foreseeable future, but I would really like to store them somewhere. As of right now, I find Google’s Notebook to be one of the best services. It fits perfectly into my lifestyle, and all the notes are finally in one place and searchable. Too bad there is no way to have a tree-like structure, although it’s possible to have multiple notebooks within a single Google account. It’s so easy to use this notebook with my Firefox browser, that I think I can live with some things which are still far from being ideal in this notebook.
  3. Contacts It’s a rather big category. I’m looking for a way of not only keeping all the contacts info organized, but also being able to track my communication in a more effective way. For instance, here should go reminders about phone calls to be made, be it a business or a personal matter. I’m not looking for a daily planner here. I need something more intelligent than that. I would like to have a tool which would remind me to call these friends of mine I haven’t spoken to in a while, and to be able to set some reasonable time limits for such reminders. So that I would be reminded to give a call once, and if I didn’t make it, I’d like to get another reminder a bit later. Do such things exist?
  4. Complex projects I think that all I really need is a flexible way of managing multiple projects and tracking few goals simultaneously. There are tons of project management tools, so I guess the only challenge here is to find one integrated tightly enough with the rest of my wishes outlined above. I’m planning to go and give a try to most of the Web 2.0 to-do lists and project management services, just to get a better idea of the current state of things in this field.
  5. Balancing activities It is very important to maintain a healthy balance of all the activities you’re involved with. The bigger look at balancing means finding the right proportion between your personal life and work, and a more thorough approach requires ensuring that within these big categories of your activities you give equal (or at least, predefined) amounts of time and attention to every aspect of your activities. This is something I’m only beginning to apply in my everyday life, and that is one of the reasons why I feel like concentrating on this. I strongly believe that wrongly chosen balancing in itself is capable of ruining the positive effects of almost all the rest efforts of yours in staying organized and progressing with your self-growth.

I think it’s enough for the first post on this subject. I didn’t want to put any more URLs to external resources, simply because I’m not prepared to do so yet. I’d like to go and explore all the available services myself, and so it may be some time before I get back to this to post some updates. Still, the reason I’m posting it is that I hope some of you could give me valuable pointers to things you like using on a daily basis, so I’m asking for your help here. If you found some online service particularly useful, please let me know. If you want, then give me some explanations, and if you don’t, just post a URL and a single-line description of what the service does. Thanks in advance!

MyLife Organized review

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Just like I promised earlier, this entry is going to give you a brief explanation of what MyLife Organized is and how I'm using it in my daily organizing. Hopefully, this will help you make you own opinion of this software, and easily see some of the benefits it might have for you.

 

I've been using the evaluation version 1.5.06 of MyLife Organized to replace the organizing process I had been using after my recent to-do lists revolution. So far it's proved to be reasonably easy to manage tasks using this software, but I'm still not sure if it's the ideal solution for me, and I'll explain why.

 

First impressions

MyLife Organized is a really nice software for your time, tasks and projects management. It supports most of the concepts you're ever likely to need organizing your time, and attempts to present information in an easy-to-read form.

There are three editions of this software application, the simplest one provided to you absolutely free. The basic differences are that in the free edition you're pretty much limited to managing your time with simple tasks lists, while standard edition ($45.95) adds the idea of places (locations in GTD) and adds flexibility for time management. The professional edition (59.95) supports basic project management and allows you synchronize your lists with Outlook or PocketPC edition of MyLife Organized.

For more details, please consult the MLO features comparison page.

You can get a professional edition 45-day trial, and it takes only seconds to download it. Once you start the application, you have a demo database to work and play with. The main window allows you switching between few tabs, and I'll cover them later on.

 

Outline tab

This is where you'll be spending most of your time working with this program, as it allows you to manage all your tasks and projects. Everything is represented by a tree-like structure, and using the right-click of your mouse you can access all the functionality available to you at any moment and within the current scope. For each task, apart from lots of properties, you can also have a notes section where you put text information. These notes can be printed out along the task when you're printing reports or to-do lists.

MLO-Outline

 

To-Do tab

This is where you'll be looking from time to time just to make sure you're right on schedule. All the tasks are shown as a list, and you can see the dates and times when they have been allocated to a task. You can limit a to-do list to a particular context (place) or a date.

MLO-To-Do

 

Places tab

This is the MyLife Organized way of placing tasks into certain contexts. You create various locations here, and then assign tasks to these locations as you create them (or at a later stage, if you wish). The idea is that places will help you narrow your to-do lists down to something very specific when you need it.

MLO-Places

 

Pros and cons

There are some things I've found very useful, and some others which I don't like at all. And there's probably many more features I simply don't know about this software, so just be warned. As for me, I'll certainly do my best to update this entry later when I discover more about this application.

 

So here are the things I like about this software:

  • very compact piece of software. I've copied its folder to my iPod, and this solved the problem of accessing the same tasks list at work or at home.
  • adjustable appearance. You can change the way application looks to make it present your tasks either as a dead-simple to-do list or as a very useful tree-like structure
  • extensive set of features for time management
  • excellent handling of recurring tasks
  • places support is great for managing place-specific tasks

 

And here are few things I don't like:

  • it's not free. It would be much better if the standard edition was free, and the professional one would cost something like 30$.
  • not all features are obvious – it takes time, some trial-and-error experiments, and, finally, reading the thankfully informational help file before getting some things done the way you want it
  • templates for printing are still very basic. If you're familiar with the freely available DIY planner pack of PDF forms, you'll know exactly what I mean
  • working with groups of tasks (like changing the location or time for all the subtasks) could be improved and simplified

 

Why I don't think it suits me in its current form

While MyLife Organized certainly allows me keep track of all the tasks and projects I have, I really miss some of the features specific to my previous way of organizing things. Here are just a few:

  • To-do lists are cluttered – by default, any tasks which don't have their start date set are going to show up in your to-do list. Unfortunately, I have cluttered to-do lists – that was one of the reasons I tried moving away from them. In my organizing, there are plenty of things I know I'll be doing this month or this year, but I dont' even want to spend time thinking now of a possible date for them. I haven't found the way to make such tasks disappear from the to-do list, cause these tasks would appear on the list even if I try and filter it by the date.
  • Outline is only 1 tab and it's not flexible enough. If you remember, I like having few outlines – one for today, one for the week, another one for the month, and yet another one for all the rest tasks and plans I'll be doing someday. Outline tab gives you only 1 structured list of tasks and projects. The same goes for the To-Do tab, as I would really like to have my to-do list show only the things and plans I have for today.
    UPDATE: Turns out, the tab is actually too flexible ;) If you employ the View feature, this would allow you sort filter and sort your tasks by date or completion (for both tasks and projects). 
  • Lack of history tracking
    Because I'm only developing my own approach to daily organizing, it's vital to me that I keep track of my progress and have the ability to go back and review what I've done or haven't done today or yesterday. This is the part which wasn't excelled in my previous organizing approach, and it's not found in the form I would like in MyLife Organized neither.
    UPDATE: That being said, the View feature allows you to view completed tasks sorted by date.

 

That's it, I think I've said enough to raise your interest and explain how and where this software could be improved even further. Seeing how active its development is, I'm looking forward to reviewing future versions of MyLife Organized. It's definitely one of the best organizers around.

Quick And Effective Reading – Part 1 of 5

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This entry opens one more category of this blog – personal development ideas. Yes, these are the very same personal development ideas which gave the name to this website. And while many of such ideas have been implied and even mentioned in some of my previous posts, it was always the plan to finally have a category like this, so that readers and visitors could quickly review the ideas I personally find worth working on.

 

Personal Development Idea: Quick And Effective Reading

Quick And Effective Reading is a series of 5 posts which will be posted here on GreysPK every Monday. My goal is to provide you with the results of my research of the subject to make the task of improving your speed reading skills slightly easier.

Idea statement: Learn how to read books, magazines and online articles in a quick and effective way. This means aiming at not only the speed, but also the quality of reading – making sure you enjoy the time spent reading a book and remember as much information as possible.

Justification: I find quick reading (sometimes referred to as speed reading) to be one of the most essential skills you can obtain nowadays. With the number of information resources growing exponentially on a daily basis, it is absolutely vital to be able to absorb information quickly and effectively.

In our modern society, we face information overload everywhere. At work, we have to process hundreds of emails daily; not only we are supposed to maintain email conversations, but we also have to browse tens of webpages and go through many presentations. At home, we’re reading daily newspapers and occasional magazines; we’re also buying and reading books, used for education, entertainment or just as a casual reference. While audiobooks sales are definitely picking up in the last few years, they’re still nowhere near the popularity of paper books and ebooks, and this means that the demand for a skill of quick reading is definitely going to be around for some time.

Expected outcome: It is believed that the average reading speed for most of us lies in the range of 200-250 words per minute (250wpm). While there are people who read much slower than that, it is also a well-know fact that it’s possible to train yourself up to a level where you can read 600, 800 or even 1000wpm. It is, of course, important to maintain a healthy level of comprehension – after all, you want to remember most of what you’re reading, at least for the time of reading a given book or an article.

Additional Info: TurboRead website has a very useful table of reading speed interpretation.

 

What you can expect from commiting to a quick reading idea:

  • greatly improved speed of reading
  • comprehension improvements
  • ability to organize and quickly access the most important information from the books/articles you’ve read

 

My personal reasons for improving my quick reading skills

I’m always reading with pleasure. Being a quite ordinary person from the quick reading point of view, I enjoy reading at an average speed of 275wpm. Unfortunatelly, most books/materials I read are technical. And this means they’re more about diagrams and charts, tables of numerical data and short paragraphs of text.

I’ve always found time to read a particular book if I really liked it, but quite often I had to drop reading it half-way simply because my progress was too slow and my disappointment about the speed of reading grew too quick.

 

This led me to finally discover the following few principles of quick and effective reading:

  1. Genuine interest in the subject
    It really helps if what you’re reading is a subject interesting enough for you. I rarely dropped a technical book half-way, simply because if I bought or borrowed a book of this kind, I would probably have a pretty good idea of the subject and would simply be interested in expanding my knowledge of it.With fiction books, it’s not always that you know exactly what the books is about and whether its subject is going to be interesting for you.Quite often you have to be able to pick the book up, quickly glance through few pages and get a rough idea of whether you’re interested or not. When you’re reading slower, it’s easier to lose your interest.The more interested you are in a book, the more commited you’re going to be. If it’s a great book or if you simply have a great interest in it, you will be progressing fairly quickly even if your reading speed isn’t great. You’ll stay focused, you’ll spend more time reading – but you will be making progress.
  2. Paying attention
    For people like me, it’s very hard to concentrate on something unless I’m really occupied. I have to be reading fast enough to always get new information to think about, and this will keep me engaged and help me stay focused. With technical books, it’s easier because I know what I’m reading about and it’s easier for me to see the progress. Each line could be so technical, meaningful and useful, that it will be more than enough to keep my mind occupied.Going through equations, command lines or regular expressions, sometimes you have to read the same line few times all over again, before your brain finally catches up and singals you that it’s okay to continue the reading.With fiction, it’s harder to pay attention because many books use such a style that it takes few lines and quite often whole paragraphs and pages to bring a thought or two across, and this means that if I don’t read through them quickly enough, my mind will be idling and it’s a quite annoying feeling. I’m easily getting bored.

    So, if you’re paying attention to the book, it will be easier for you to read. Your speed of reading will be higher as well, simply because you’ll keep more details on the subject in your mind if you’re paying attention. Paying attention will make sure you don’t let any details get out of your focus, so they’ll be there for your consideration right when you need them. For many pieces of intormation, you will simply have some ideas at hand, rather than having to go back few pages to read a paragraph or two once more to refresh your mind.

  3. Knowing the outcomes
    For any kind of information resource, you need to have a set of outcomes you expect from your reading. Having a list of such outcomes, it’s easier to maintain a focus because you can always take few seconds to review the outcomes and compare your progress against the plan.When you’re busy studying, it’s easier to know your outcomes, because often they’re already lined out for you right there in the book.Lots of learning materials come with ont only the thorough list of contents and index, but also have some useful points of focus at the end of each chapter, so you can read then and simply follow the instructions to make sure you remember most of the chapter correctly.

    With technical documentation, it’s even easier, cause you’re usually looking for some kind of answer. When I’m thinking of buying a new technical book on a certain subject, I usually know what this subject is, and have a short list of most interesting questions – the ones I would really like to know answers for. I don’t even have to write this list down, I just know that I’ll be intuitively aligning all the reading process against this list, automatically concentrating on the most relevant parts of the book.

    With fiction books, it’s also important to know the outcomes. Sometimes you’ll be reading to pass some time – that’s a valid outcome. Or you will be trying to expand your knowledge about some country, coulture or science.It is always important to have at least a few of such outcomes at hand – cause no matter how vague they seem, they’ll be the ones helping you stay focused as you read.

 

My reasons for improving the speed of reading:

  • being able to consume more information in the same or even shorter time
  • improve my ability to quickly assess a certain book or article and decide if I want to read it in full or not
  • shift the most of my reading focus from the reading technique to the book subject to improve the comprehension

As I said, I will be concentrating on the quick and effective reading idea for the next few weeks, so I will be updating you on my progress and findings along the way, and hopefull we’ll have a quick reference for anything to read and easily improve reading skills. Next post of this series is going to be posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006.

Discover Your True Self

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Discovering your true self is a crucial stage in your personal development

Just think of this: how well do you know your true self? And what is it exactly that you know? How many personal facts or character features do you know? What do you think of your true self? Is this the ultimate pride you’re feeling, or maybe shame or even fear? Your self-growth and the success of personal development efforts are entirely dependent on how well you know yourself and how you feel about your personality.

I hope you will forgive me for starting my entry with questions yet again. It seems to me that I quite enjoy starting some of my personal development articles this way. Probably, because no matter how much further I progress in my self-growth, I always get to some next level of self-understanding only to ask the next round of questions. It seems impossible for me to reach a point where I’m going to run out of all the questions and just sit there not knowing what should be done next, feeling that the quest for personal growth is over. I’m always full of questions. I’m always keen on learning something new. And sometimes it’s not clear at all whether it’s my questioning that makes me learn more or it’s my learning which makes me question everything.

My true what?

Yes, you’ve read it correctly. Your true self! And if you think you don’t know what I’m talking about, think again. Your true self is how you feel yourself when nobody’s watching. It is where your deepest thoughts live. It is what you ultimately think of yourself, how you treat yourself and what you fear others might see inside you. It is your most native and real personality.

Strangely enough, up until some quite recent point, I honestly believed that your true self is something you’re always aiming for as a person. It is the much better you which lives in your dreams – a successful guy or a beautiful girl which you always wish you could become one day. I thought becoming your true self is only about improving or gaining something about yourself. Turns out, I was wrong.

Your worst fears

Have you ever done something you wish no one could ever find out about? Chances are, you have. Do you still remember what exactly it was, and why you didn’t (and maybe still don’t) want anyone to find out about it?

Quite often, we do something and then try and justify our behaviour using things, events and people we see around us. A little bit less common but still very popular is to go through this process the other way around – justifying our actions, and then actually making them.

We do something only to realise how stupid it was, and this is when you can easily hear the inner voice of yours. That’s your true self talking there right now. This is the voice which, depending on your character, will either encourage you to take even more actions or discourage yourself as much as possible. This is the inner voice which easily controls a great part of your self-esteem. And like it or not, your true self is absolutely right in most cases.

So what happens then? We hear ourselves thinking about some events and we hear quite reasonable explanations inside our heads on the subject. We get to hear all the truth on the topic, and nothing but the truth. And if we’ve just made a mistake, most likely this is the moment when we feel ashamed. We look at what we’ve just done again and again and we simply can’t comprehend how something so stupid could be so easily done.

What’s the next usual step you take? Honestly now? Most of us will try and cover the tracks. We’ll pretend we didn’t notice something, or we’ll make it look like we don’t feel so good and we can’t possibly be held responsible for whatever just happened. Sometimes we won’t even bother with inventing or showing anything, we’ll just try running and hiding away. And we succeed at this, too! So quite often after doing something, it is really only ourselves who know what really happened and have the power to explain or fix the things done. But we very rarely do.

Why? Because that’s the human nature. We always have this fear. The fear of showing our real self, the fear of being exposed, the fear of being rejected for what we really are. This is because on top of our true selves, we’ve always got some layers of our personality – and as we go through our lives, these layers just keep adding up unless we do something about them.

Layers of personality and your personal growth

I personally don’t think it’s very important to know how many layers your personality has. As long as you’re conscious about having SOME layers, you’re fine. This means there is still hope that you can try and lift these layers, slowly and carefully peel them off and see (and maybe even show, if you’re adventurous enough) your true self.

You see, your true self is always right about everything. But our personality layers make us hide this truth, disguise it and then explain why we did it in such a way that we can live with it.

For instance, if you’re at work and you’ve got some task on your to-do list which you hate even thinking about, you’ll definitely try reasoning with yourself and explaining why it is very important that today you’re busy doing something quite different. Anything, in fact, except this one task you hate thinking about. It takes some training to finally find the courage to accept and explain things the way they really are. To absolutely agree with your true self and to accept what your course of actions should be.

We all have layers of personality for various reasons. Not all the layers serve the only purpose of making you look better in someone else’s eyes. Sometimes you need these layers to feel (to appear) less vulnerable to others. Quite often people add negative layers simply to hide how really weak or fragile they are. But it’s important to stay conscious about having few sides to your personality, and even more important to learn how to skip some of these layers and avoid their demonstration. You will make a great progress in your self-growth as soon as you master dealing with your personality layers. You don’t want to be hiding them. Instead, you should probably make it one of your personal development goals to ensure you take a closer look at every side of this personality of yours, and to analyze how much of a benefit it is to maintain or cultivate it, and to decide what parts of your personality are better for you to show and to hide.

Rediscover yourself

You can still probably remember the times where you could speak or act freely, without any fears regarding the impact your behaviour may have. Do you remember how good you felt back then? And can you spot what exactly have changed since then?

While I’m sure you have your reasons for changing over the past years, not all the changes you’ve gone through were really that necessary. And luckily for you, there is still time to revert some of these changes. And here are just a few steps which will help you rediscover yourself:

  • Listen to your heart
    You still get these moments in your life where you face some difficult situation and you even when you see the next logical step to the resolution, there is some resistance which makes you stop and think more before taking the action. I’m talking about the moments where your true self suggests you should do something, yet you know you can’t do just that due to some reasons imposed by the environment or the situation you’re in. A good example of this is any difficult argument with your better half or a true friend, especially when somewhere deep inside you know and you feel you’re not right.

    How many times did you have to force yourself into such an argument and you couldn’t let yourself get out of this simply because you were thinking that if you give in, this would show you’re a weak person? There are many other reasons of the same kind, and if you actually take some time and go through them after the argument, many of them would make no sense whatsoever. They seemed to be important to you at the time of an argument, but they’re suddenly not anymore. This is exactly the situation I’m talking about.

    When your heart tells you to stop arguing because what your opponent feels is much more important to you that what this person thinks, trust your feelings and stop. You’ll be amazed how many times such an act of yours will be greatly appreciated by the person you were arguing with.

  • Focus on giving value
    No matter what you’re working on, focus on giving value, and not on what impression you’re going to make. There are many prejudiced people around – no matter what you do, they will not change their opinion about you. As long as they have the slightest suspicion you’re doing something for you, and not for them, they’re not going to change their point of view.But what if you could just forget about the impression? Forget about people who might find your questions or actions silly. Focus on the value you’re going to give my taking some actions. Focus on the people who will benefit from your actions, and how exactly they’re going to appreciate the value.

    This is true for many aspects of our life. If you forget about yourself, and concentrate on giving value to others, you’re bound to improve their attitude. People like getting value, and they appreciate it even if they don’t openly tell you.

  • Maintain your integrity
    There are many situations when doing something conflicts with your inner feelings or thoughts. Get into the habit of analyzing such situations.Quite often we conflict with our principles for the sake of looking good or making some progress. That’s why it is very important to always make sure you know if such a sacrifice is really necessary. If it’s something not important, you should never conflict with yourself, because in many situations you’re acting in a certain way simply because of the situation you’re in. What happens then is that the situation will change, while you will be left on your own with your thoughts and conflicts.

    Maintain your integrity – many problems are not worth the self-conflicts you’re getting into.

  • Respect your goals and values
    This is probably the most important aspect of staying in peace with yourself. If you don’t respect what’s important for you in long term, you’re putting yourself under a risk of becoming a slave to other situations and people who will manipulate you.Yes, it’s always good for you to give value to others, but you should avoid doing it at your own goals and values expense. If you know that helping someone else make things worse from your own goals and values point of view, take some time and reconsider.

    In many cases, the little value you’re going to force yourself give to someone else will not be worth the personal goals of yours which you may not meet as the result.

That’s it for now. These are the principles I live by, and they really help me feel better about myself. Thanks to my better knowledge of my own personality, it’s easier for me to achieve my personal development goals and to progress with my self-growth. Now that you know these principles, please consider applying this knowledge in your personal growth and telling me what your principles are. I’m always interested to learn, so if you have time to post a comment or even simply share a useful link – please do so. Thanks!

Update from 05/06/2006: Welcome, dear StumbleUpon visitors! I’m really glad someone thought this entry was worthy of your attention, and I hope you like it here!

LookOut – Extremely Fast Search for Outlook

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This post marks the beginning of another category on this blog: Useful Software.

Being in IT for the past 10 years, I’ve accumulated many useful tips and tricks – and more importantly, a hunger for new and more optimized ways of doing things. Nowadays, if you want something done in a computerized way, you’re very likely to find a piece of software which does just that. We’re facing challenges daily, and sometimes the solution is just few mouse clicks away, so hopefully you’ll find it easier to decide whether you need something or now and how you can use it, by just reading this category of my blog.

Meet lightning-fast email search: LookOut

LookOut is an amazing add-on to your Microsoft Outlook email client, and it allows you do all kinds of searches in any emails you have ever sent or received.

MS Outlook is mostly a corporate tool these days – you’re most likely to be using it at your workplace. And while some of us are blessed by having only a handful of emails a month, other people like me are facing hundreds of emails on a daily basis. And so as the volume of useful messages grows, so does the time it takes to find something unless you’ve got a perfect email filing workflow in place. Which I don’t. Not yet, anyway :)

So LookOut helps you improve your productivity by minimizing the time and efforts to find a particular email in your inbox or any other folder. It takes 15 minutes or so the first time you start it, because LookOut has to index all your emails before it can speed up your searches. After the index is generated, all new emails are being indexed automatically.

What LookOut can do for you

  • index all your emails AND documents to ensure everything is accounted for when you search
  • make any search return results in just few seconds. What this really means is that you’re going to save lots of precious time simply because you’ll never have to wait on a search again
  • empower your searches with a flexible search query language
  • easily limit periods or places you search in: limit search to last month or last week, or search only emails or contacts. You can also specify a certain folder you’re interested to search in

Search query examples

This is really just to give you the idea of how powerful the search is with LookOut:

from:gleb – this will find all the emails which have “gleb” anywhere in their “from” field
from:alex yesterday – this will find all the emails you received yesterday from all the people with “alex” in their name
from:alex nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and word “nice” anywhere in the email body
from:alex subject:nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and “nice” in the subject

LookOut: why you need it

So, if you:

  • hate waiting longer than 2 seconds to find an email
  • do lots of email searching daily
  • like the idea of having intelligent searches (LookOut has a very simple yet flexible system of queries)

then this is definitely a tool for you. Go on, download it and give it a try: Lookout for Outlook