Comments on: 77 Steps To Serendipity

By: Sheamus

Sheamus — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:10:33 +0000

@ Pete - Tim Ferriss has some great advice on making email less of a hassle in the office/life. Many people have similar experiences to you - email is a bit like a virus; you send one out, and immediately get one or more back.

And the more you check, the more you send.

Several global firms in Zurich don’t allow their bankers to check email more than twice per day. The reason is simple: the more they check email, the more compelled they feel to send email. Technologist Robert Scoble has said that for each email he sends, he gets 1.75 to 2 messages in return. This phenomenon highlights the unscalable nature of most time-management approaches: striving to do more just produces increasingly more to do.

Fifty email messages beget 100, which beget 200 and so on. It’s impossible to manage this with a results-by-volume (or frequency) approach. There are two cornerstone behavioral changes for reversing this trend: check email less frequently (so we send fewer messages) and send fewer messages when we do check (so we trigger fewer exchanges).

Totally agree about the animals.

By: Pete

Pete — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:20:57 +0000

Change the furniture in your house around too. If you can set up the living room a different way then do so. I used to do this to my room at uni a lot to avoid working on what ever I was supposed to be doing, but then usually found that the change of environment and general tidiness was a real boost.

Spend time with animals. Cats are great but so many people just have them and spend most of the time moving them, feeding them or ignoring them. Actually spending time with them is great. Same goes for most animals.

By: Pete

Pete — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:07:33 +0000

Who are you and what have you done with Sheamus?
It’s a great list and I try/have tried to implement many of the things on it.

I’ve also cut down on tv watching a great deal in the last 3 years or so. Since I got rid of cable basically. I’d spend an hour flipping looking for someting to watch! Then I’d end up watching episodes of Fraiser/Friends/Simpsons that I’d already seen (sometimes several times).

One of the best things I’ve done recently was try to limit the number of e-mails I send at work. I tend to find that e-mailing folk about work results in a chain of 20 e-mails and not a lot gets sorted out. One 5 minute phone call will almost always achieve the same as hours of e-mailing and generally skirting around the issue.

By: Sheamus

Sheamus — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:10:15 +0000

I hadn’t, and you’re right - it’s extremely useful. Some of the output is picked up by my Wordpress dashboard but not to such a level of detail. To find out everything that people are searching for that brings people to my site is worth its weight.

It’s funny - I was aware of it and had seen it mentioned on a few sites but I think in my mind I’d got it mixed up with Google’s business solutions page.

Cheers, Cody!

By: Cody Robert

Cody Robert — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:40:44 +0000

This might be the longest list I’ve ever read completely (I hardly make it past #5 with most). But every one was worth it reading this one.

A lot of these examples I’ve previously incorporated into my life and now do without thinking. I discovered google webmaster tools the other day though. A great help there if you haven’t checked that out yet!

By: Things I'm Grateful For

Things I'm Grateful For — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:47:21 +0000

Things I’m Grateful For on Sunday 1 June…

Today’s list of things to be thankful for or appreciate:

I’m off work all day.
I have a bid on an Ebay item I listed last night.
Hot coffee. Though I must admit I’m leaning towards trying Teeccino. It’s a herbal alternative to …