Alpha Brain: Does this shit work? How does it compare to other nootropics?
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I will have to check out the availability of Bronkaid - is it avail in the states? I G'd it but it was not clear from the immed results.
ephedrine, ma huang, anything that is related is all illegal OTC. IT first was illegal in all the US, then it was OK everywhere but CA, no illegal throughout the US again.
I would love to find an alternative - a legal alternative. I hope Bonkaid is the find.
Interesting! Can you tell me how you keep track of the amount of work you're doing? I use a macro that opens up a notepad every half n' hour with a do to list so I can see what needs to be done. And a date imprint for that half n' hour sort of like a journal entry so I type out a few sentences of the progress and my thoughts. It keeps me on track very well I've found.
I employ multiple time management techniques while trying to minimize how much time I spend in time management.
I use a modified version of Getting Things Done with Notepad+ having multiple tabs. I have one tab for action items, one for scratch taking quick notes basically, one for project I am waiting on other people.
Then I have a team of 7 so I have a tab for each person...and I have two more tabs for people I deal with almost daily if not every other day.
I keep track of my time using http://toggl.com The beauty of toggl is that I create project depending on what I feel like tracking. So I have a project for my job and a project for websites (still working 9-5) and I have a project for going to the gym. That's pretty much what I track, I don't care about tracking how many hours I sleep or how much time I spend eating or whatever.
My usual work day looks like this:
Start Toggl with Inbox Zero - Work....clean up all email basically
Every time I take a break I mark is Break - Work
When I work on next action items I mark it Next Action - Work
The timer is pretty simple so it takes two keystrokes and a click.
I am also forcing my guys to use todo lists by being stealthy...I used to give them projects and taught them different time management techniques, even though they liked reading about it they never changed. So now I give them daily tasks, basically I give them next action items, which I track in their tabs. Every day they end their shift they have to email me their daily tasks back with completion notes.
Sometimes I stack their next actions (they work 24/7) so I will say person A, create a change management for upcoming upgrade tonight and email out the help desk. Person B, use change management form created by person A, do upgrade. Person C email me with any issues from upgrade....that's the simplified version.
Then when I come home and I work on my webpage stuff I have Research, Coding, SEO, Testing and Break.
I use to use the Pomodoro technique which allows you to work 25 minutes and take a break for 5 minutes, repeat four time then take a longer break...but I find that when coding the 25 minutes comes up too quick and when I am at work it totally depends on what I am doing...
So instead I just take a break when I feel like I am losing my focus.
Anyway with Toggl I can see how much I work and how many breaks I take both in how many breaks in a day and how many minutes.
I will be curious to see if Alpha Brain will make a difference since Placebo or not after a couple of weeks things will normalize.
I can go more in depth about my time management if you want. I kind of gave you the very basic idea. I did not talk about my priority system, how I handle email etc.
wiredniko: Great post! Would love to hear more about your priority system and email. Have you heard of www.workflowy.com ?
Yes....here is the thing about websites and/or programs that help you with time management.
When I first got into GTD I tried Remember the Milk, gtdify, Evernote, DoIT.im, Toodledo, mind mapping my projects with mindmeister. I also tried some project management software as well and some Linux GTD applications.
The problem always ends up being the same, you end up working AROUND your software than the software working with you. The thing is like any system you have to modify to fit the way you work. For example, GTD priorities...I work in the cable video industry. Video everything is priority 1 and maybe 2. So setting up priorities for me does not work in the conventional sense. However most GTD based applications force you to use it.
Little here, little there you end up spending 5 minutes moving projects around and 5 minutes working. In the end keeping is simple works the best. With notepad++ or if you use linux geany or gedit allows you to have a simple text document with tabs.
So all I do in the start of my work is fire up notepad++ and toggl online. Toggl I use for keeping track of time for things that I want to measure. A couple of months ago I was curious to see how much I slept so I measured that. Now I know and do not care about it. Some people get a hold of a time management tool and end up measuring how long they go to the bathroom...who cares? How many breaks I take during work I do care...so I measure that.
As an extra tip save all your to do lists in one folder. Then use dropbox to share the folder between PCs/Laptop/Smartphone. On my smartphone I can take a quick note for a reminder and boom its done.
I tried using Evernote for GTD and it does not work for me. Its too slow. Text document is much faster than going to Evernote, login in. Going to the proper folder, edit, save...blah blah. I use Evernote for other things just not for GTD.
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So some specifics. I will tell you how I do things, but keep in mind that it works for me, it might not work for you. I will recommend two books: Getting Things Done and Eat that Frog. I use a combination of both ideas. A great website is Asian Efficiency – Time Management and Productivity they are straight and to the point, they have a bias towards MACs but a lot of things they talk about are GTD or Eat that Frog based. Uhm I created book notes for Eat that Frog, if you search for it you can find my post here because I shared it.
I attempted to explain GTD and Eat That Frog in a nutshell but there is no way to explain them in a few paragraphs...so I will instead just explain my process and why I do what I do. I will also explain that things that did not work for me.
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In the morning the first thing I do is start Toggl and Notepad++ as I mentioned. I put in Inbox Zero...which means the goal is to have 0 email left in my inbox. In notepad I will type "inbox zero 10". That means I am telling myself that I want to clean up my email within 10 minutes, sometimes if it is a lot I will give myself 20 minutes. I get 150-300 emails a day for work alone so that pretty much means I go through 15 emails a minute.
How do I do it? I have created filters and multiple folders.
My folder breakdown is the following:
- Inbox
- @Waiting
- @Next Actions
- Outages
- EOD
- PTO
- Personal
- Projects
- Reference
- Completed Actions
- Completed Projects
Inbox, is where I receive everything..duh
I have the "@" symbol in front of my Waiting and Next Action folder names so they always sort themselves up top. Waiting has emails for anything I am waiting on from people. Next Actions has emails that I have do things for.
Outages is for video outages, video alert emails that my team sends out, tickets that the help desk or the NOC submits to my team, automated script emails for servers. My team is in charge of about 400-500 servers and devices so pretty much everyday something breaks. This is filtered, emails for outages automatically go here. Mainly because in a bad day I can get 500 emails for outages alone, every five minutes there is an outage email for a 6 hour downtime...its ridiculous
EOD stands for End of Day....I talked about this in my previous post, I am forcing my team to time manage by giving them next actions...I call them daily tasks but basically they are next action items....I keep track of them on my notepad tabs, one tab per worker, I send them out once a day and they reply back at their end of their shift (thus end of day) with their results.
An example of what my current daily tasks are for one of my guys today (using ### for certain things for Non Disclosure reasons):
- #### test for dropped groom. Chris should be forwarding you the info that Joel needs.
- #### server setup - Internet is hooked up but slow. Once speed issue is resolved I will get with EEEEE on the rest of the setup. Scott trying to figure out route from server to ###'s encoder
- Channel map change launch, read Chris email about update steps
- RF level balancing, make sure you coordinate with Dave so you do not end up working on the same stuff
I will point a couple of quick things here. GTD does not address team management very well so I had to experiment on this a lot. I used to assign my team projects...here is the thing if you give people projects they tend to slack off. Giving them specific tasks and they have to do it. So in my head the test dropped groom action item is part of a bigger project...but instead of saying upgrade the server...I say test this issue...which will lead to the upgrade further down the line.
Also note that I am stacking my action items. Chris has two action items as well, he works earlier than the guy that I posed the action items for. His action items were to contact Joel and figure out what captures he needs us to produce and to write a step by step procedure on doing a channel launch (adding new channels to our current lineup). I also reference Dave, he is working on the same project, RF balancing 48 different offices.
At the same time I do not want to micro manage the fuck out of them...so my next action items outline my need not how exactly to do it. They are free to do whatever they want. The end result is what matters.
PTO is for my team requesting time off, its an easy way to see who has asked for what. I also have a calendar that my team puts in their PTO days so everyone can see if someone who is going on vacation when. I use an email filter for this.
Personal is just non work related email that ends up in my work email...I also put positive comments from people as reference.
Projects have multiple sub folders. Each sub folder is the name of the project...when I first started this system I have 111 active projects going on...right now I have 16 and 2 of them are about to close. I basically move anything related to a project to a specific folder. I use filters here as well for some of the projects but at times it gets hard for the filters to work. If its just working with one company I just filter by domain name.
Reference is anything I want to reference, like schedule of sports events, important Pay Per View events that I want my team to monitor, like UFC, Boxing, Wrestling etc. Its basically information that I want to keep but does not belong to a project.
Completed Actions is things I complete or my team completes that are not full blown projects but I save them in case there is ever a question.
Completed projects is where my project subfolders end up to when they are all done.
So back to my inbox zero, I look at my emails anything that is an outage gets moved to that folder. All EOD emails go to my next action folder so I can update my notepad based on what people have done. Emails that are obvious they belong to a project I am working on I move them to their folders as well. I do not read my emails really I just go by titles in moving things around, when in down I put it in my next action folder so I can read it.
I have experimented with the touch it only once principle which means you only touch something once, including reading an email once. I wanted to eliminate the whole read an email, move it...then read it again cause I have to remember what it said, so I literary go by title when I am moving things around. I leave everything unread to keep track of what I have and have not read.
OK, now my inbox is empty, stop Toggl write down how long it actually took me to compare it to my 10 minute target. Update Toggl to Outage...write down Outage 3. I skim my outage emails to make sure there are no roaring fires anywhere in about 3 minutes. I always try to create a target time, something that I think its possible but would also make me rush. Also I write down how long it actually took me so I can go back through my notes and see if I am consistently over estimating or under estimating tasks.
In a nutshell after outages I check my most important project emails and ignore lower priority ones. Then I go through my next action folder catch up with the daily tasks I assigned the day before and then keep going through next action items from hardest/complicated to easiest.
Any next action item that I do not NEED to do I will write it down for one of my guys to work on in their tab. Delegating is key. In reality there is nothing that cannot be delegated. This is also another reason why I tend to not micro manage and just give action items. There is just not enough time to do everything or think about the details.
You have to trust your team to make it work out with minimal supervision.
I do check my email constantly, which is not very efficient but its because of how my job works. If email could wait I would check it probably every four hours. By checking email I mean I move it to the proper folders, if its low priority I ignore it for later.
Every Monday I go through my Waiting folder and re-ping everyone I have pinged before for an update.
I used to move all next actions from email to my notepad, but I realized that it was kind of waste of time. I just have two places to check for next actions. Sometimes its a pain to actually explain what the next action is when having an email makes it obvious what needs to be done.
For emails that I want my team to work on I will forward them saying daily task in the subject. Then when I send my once a day daily task assignment I will say - work on blah blah (email sent on 11/18 at2:55pm) so they can find it easy.
That's kind of it. The key is to always keep your inputs clear and keep up with the process.
I use my calendar pretty extensively. GTD talks about ticklers which are reminders, I do not really find a use for them but I do have multiple calendar reminders. Lets say I have something that would take two days to do but does not need to be done until next month. I will create a calendar invite with a 48 hour reminder so it can come up, I can assign it and it will get done by the day I have marked.
A lot of times there are also advance warning reminders by TV stations...so lets say ESPN says they will be moving satellites in three months from now. I will ask one of my guys to make sure that we are looking at the new bird the station will go to...and also ask them to send a meeting invite for my calendar with the due date any associated files etc. That way I can see it coming up but not worried about it since there is nothing I can do about it right now.
On my personal website stuff things are a bit more simple. I have a Next Action document for things I want to work on, things I want to code etc. I pretty much go through that prioritizing things that make my site better over minor things...I am a perfectionist so sometimes that fucks me up.
======================
Things I have tried and dropped.
- Pomodoro technique. The idea is you work for 25 minutes and take a break for 5...you do that 4 times and at that point you can take a larger break. In theory it sounded like a good idea, did if for about 4-5 months. What I noticed was at lot of times I either found myself ignoring the take a break alarm or I would obey it and then take a couple of minutes to figure out what I was talking about in an email. For my websites it was worse because most of the time I had to stop in the middle of coding and it would be awkward.
Instead I try to take a quick break in between projects or when my trail of thought pauses. I also take breaks if I find myself not producing and just kind of idling around.
- GTD style project management. So in GTD you are supposed to identify your projects and plan them, then you create next action items for them and start going through them.
Problem 1: If a project is simple, remember in GTD if its more than one action item its a project you end up wasting more time in time management than actually doing the project. This gets worse when its a delegated project since it takes me less time to forward and email and make a note in a text file saying "- Do this today" than creating projects planning etc. I delegate planning to my team if its simple. And to be honest at times they plan and execute things better than what I was thinking in my head.
Problem 2: Planning in the television world and the affiliate marketing world does not really work. 70-80% of the time your plan did not account some kind of craziness that shows up
Problem 3: Keeping track of projects. So initially I had a tab with my projects...each project had a list of next actions, what I completed I marked it as such and go to the next one. Well that was awkward since my plans changed (see problem 2), at times I lacked the resources that I needed to complete a certain action so I had to work around my project plans.
In short project planning is GTD is not dynamic. Perhaps if I worked in a Bookstore and the whole idea was simple like get books delivered...uhm re-arrange the Science Fiction section it probably works. For environments that you deal with outages, affiliate offers going stale, server downtime etc...which we deal with projects fall apart.
- Priority systems. I really want to be able to use them...but no way is effective for me. My priorities change depending on what is happening...and I end up having a bunch of high level priorities so in the end if you have a bunch of high priorities it no longer matter that they are high priority since you have to do with all of them.
I attempted to use priorities for my team by marking their projects (before I implementing daily tasks) but they did not seem to get it either. What I think is important might not make sense to them and spending the time to explain why everything is important or not takes too much time. I rather treat them like automatons..I also cheat I put the most important think first. Most people think linearly so they do whatever is up top first...That's just abusing psychological patterns though.
Instead what I do is new Next Action items go last on my list except if its an obvious do this or the world will explode item. So my priority is date based, this is true for both my work and websites.
- Due dates: I used due dates for a while. Problem with that is emergencies, its hard to set due dates for something when 35 emergencies show up in the mean time. Some due dates are hard dates for video migration so I honor them but I never setup due dates for myself or my team.
Instead I do what I mentioned above right when I start my next action I make a determination of how long I think it should take me. In the beginning I was always underestimating how much time I was spending.
Now its a bit more aligned.
Well this ended up being really wordy but hopefully its detailed enough to make you think of ways you can implement time management in your lives....and btw my estimation for replying to this thread was way off...57minutes 17seconds....I wrote down 15 :ticking:
Every Monday I go through my Waiting folder and re-ping everyone I have pinged before for an update.
I used to move all next actions from email to my notepad, but I realized that it was kind of waste of time. I just have two places to check for next actions. Sometimes its a pain to actually explain what the next action is when having an email makes it obvious what needs to be done.
For emails that I want my team to work on I will forward them saying daily task in the subject. Then when I send my once a day daily task assignment I will say - work on blah blah (email sent on 11/18 at2:55pm) so they can find it easy.
That's kind of it. The key is to always keep your inputs clear and keep up with the process.
I use my calendar pretty extensively. GTD talks about ticklers which are reminders, I do not really find a use for them but I do have multiple calendar reminders. Lets say I have something that would take two days to do but does not need to be done until next month. I will create a calendar invite with a 48 hour reminder so it can come up, I can assign it and it will get done by the day I have marked.
A lot of times there are also advance warning reminders by TV stations...so lets say ESPN says they will be moving satellites in three months from now. I will ask one of my guys to make sure that we are looking at the new bird the station will go to...and also ask them to send a meeting invite for my calendar with the due date any associated files etc. That way I can see it coming up but not worried about it since there is nothing I can do about it right now.
On my personal website stuff things are a bit more simple. I have a Next Action document for things I want to work on, things I want to code etc. I pretty much go through that prioritizing things that make my site better over minor things...I am a perfectionist so sometimes that fucks me up.
======================
Things I have tried and dropped.
- Pomodoro technique. The idea is you work for 25 minutes and take a break for 5...you do that 4 times and at that point you can take a larger break. In theory it sounded like a good idea, did if for about 4-5 months. What I noticed was at lot of times I either found myself ignoring the take a break alarm or I would obey it and then take a couple of minutes to figure out what I was talking about in an email. For my websites it was worse because most of the time I had to stop in the middle of coding and it would be awkward.
Instead I try to take a quick break in between projects or when my trail of thought pauses. I also take breaks if I find myself not producing and just kind of idling around.
- GTD style project management. So in GTD you are supposed to identify your projects and plan them, then you create next action items for them and start going through them.
Problem 1: If a project is simple, remember in GTD if its more than one action item its a project you end up wasting more time in time management than actually doing the project. This gets worse when its a delegated project since it takes me less time to forward and email and make a note in a text file saying "- Do this today" than creating projects planning etc. I delegate planning to my team if its simple. And to be honest at times they plan and execute things better than what I was thinking in my head.
Problem 2: Planning in the television world and the affiliate marketing world does not really work. 70-80% of the time your plan did not account some kind of craziness that shows up
Problem 3: Keeping track of projects. So initially I had a tab with my projects...each project had a list of next actions, what I completed I marked it as such and go to the next one. Well that was awkward since my plans changed (see problem 2), at times I lacked the resources that I needed to complete a certain action so I had to work around my project plans.
In short project planning is GTD is not dynamic. Perhaps if I worked in a Bookstore and the whole idea was simple like get books delivered...uhm re-arrange the Science Fiction section it probably works. For environments that you deal with outages, affiliate offers going stale, server downtime etc...which we deal with projects fall apart.
- Priority systems. I really want to be able to use them...but no way is effective for me. My priorities change depending on what is happening...and I end up having a bunch of high level priorities so in the end if you have a bunch of high priorities it no longer matter that they are high priority since you have to do with all of them.
I attempted to use priorities for my team by marking their projects (before I implementing daily tasks) but they did not seem to get it either. What I think is important might not make sense to them and spending the time to explain why everything is important or not takes too much time. I rather treat them like automatons..I also cheat I put the most important think first. Most people think linearly so they do whatever is up top first...That's just abusing psychological patterns though.
Instead what I do is new Next Action items go last on my list except if its an obvious do this or the world will explode item. So my priority is date based, this is true for both my work and websites.
- Due dates: I used due dates for a while. Problem with that is emergencies, its hard to set due dates for something when 35 emergencies show up in the mean time. Some due dates are hard dates for video migration so I honor them but I never setup due dates for myself or my team.
Instead I do what I mentioned above right when I start my next action I make a determination of how long I think it should take me. In the beginning I was always underestimating how much time I was spending.
Now its a bit more aligned.
Well this ended up being really wordy but hopefully its detailed enough to make you think of ways you can implement time management in your lives....and btw my estimation for replying to this thread was way off...57minutes 17seconds....I wrote down 15 :ticking: