Refocused Living

Lots of people would like to become a more productive person, especially in their area of work. There are only a finite amount of hours in a day, but the litany of projects never seems to let up. The only way to accomplish more is to become more productive by working smarter and working in a more relaxed fashion… otherwise you burn yourself out due to stress. We don’t want that.

This post describes three methods I’ve found to be extremely useful in creating a more productive workspace. By “workspace” I’m referring to your work environment – whether that be at home, at the office, or busking in front of a subway station.

1 . Use a dry erase board to track important things.

One of the more recent things I’ve been doing is using a dry erase board to keep a running log of various things that are going on.

Right now, my dry erase board currently has notes on a future blog post topic that I’m going to be writing. Because I’m doing a lot of prep work for the post (personal trials, research, etc.), I want to keep all of that information in front of me. Whenever I look off to the side, I immediately see my notes and I stay on track – cool, huh? I also have a magnet on the board that has one of my favorite quotes every from Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have!”

You can use a whiteboard to track a lot of different things, such as:

• Your goals - A lot of people use them for daily, weekly, and monthly goals. I’ve done this before, and I do love it – there’s something about always seeing your goals in front of you that spurs you towards action. If you always have your goals fresh in your mind, you have no excuse to procrastinate on something else!
• Quotas that need to be met - “Make ten sales phone calls” would be an example of a quota. When you finish with a phone call, put a tally mark by the quota. Personally, I also love making the tally marks while I’m filling up my quotas. Perhaps because the action of making those marks makes the quota feel much more tangible and realistic; it makes it feel more achievable.
• Dates, times, and reminders – This one should be fairly obvious. You wouldn’t want to miss a date, an appointment, or an important doing, right?

2. Keep your goals in front of you at all times.

The more you work, the more you realize that a thousand things can occur during a day that completely knock you off of course. Also, appearing busy doesn’t always necessarily mean that you’re getting anything valuable accomplished. Don’t try to fool me.

There are lots of ways you can keep your goals in front of you. Some people love and advocate putting up pictures around your house/office/place of work that adequately (and beyond) describe the goal that you’re after. For example, somebody who’s looking at shedding those pre-holiday pounds and wishing to gain some muscle might put up some pictures of people with toned up bodies without an ounce of fat on them. A variation of this theme is typing out, in large print, your goals and aspirations and printing out and using those instead of pictures.

You can do similar things on your computer as well. Change your screensaver to your goals. Change your background picture to a picture of your aspirations. There are programs out there that can act like Sticky Notes on your desktop – perhaps you wanna write a few of your goals down and stick them up on top of your background, as a constant reminder when all of your windows are minimized. (Just what you wanna see before you turn off your computer for lunch – “Don’t eat that slice of cake!” )

There’s really no reason you shouldn’t be reviewing your goals like this every single day. It might sound silly in practice, but it works. Without guidance, most people tend to falter. The pull of everything else going on around you is too great; there are too many things to become distracted by. If you don’t keep an eye on your goals, you’re going to get knocked off balance.

3. Let your desk and office space reflect who you are.

The biggest mistake when it comes to workspace productivity is trying to make everybody’s desk look homogenous. If you’re not exactly like everyone else, don’t try to be like everyone else!

Some people work well with lots of piles and clutter scattered all around their desk and office space with no rhyme or reason. To you, it may look like they’re about to skip town, buy a small trailer out in the boondocks, and live happily ever after with 20 stray cats. To them, it may be a highly efficient way of organizing materials that they need to constantly use. If you tried to use their organizational method, it’d drive you mad. If they tried to use your organizational method, they’d be booking their train ticket out of town faster than you can say “Here, kitty!”

Currently, my desk looks like something straight out of The Devil Wears Prada, and I couldn’t be happier. I have a small lamp which I use at night ’cause I don’t like working in super bright light at night. On the left side of my computer, I have a stack of personal development books I’m currently reading, reviewing, and taking notes on, as well as some other books which I’m reading for fun and information purposes. In the upper right hand side of my desk, I have a layout of some magazines (yes, just like Miranda!) that I flip through occasionally throughout the day. I like reading magazines because they’re often a great source of ideas for this blog, and they’re something very relaxing about perusing through a magazine that you enjoy. I also have a small notebook on top of my books that I use to take notes in. And of course, my laptop and mouse is right in front of me.

That’s it. There’s nothing else on the desk. There’s nothing directly in front of the computer; it’s empty space. There are no pictures of anything or anybody; there isn’t an inbox of any sort to collect random junk that gets thrown at me throughout the day; there’s no plant or decoration adorning the desk at all. In other words, my desk is clean, neat, and absolutely perfect!

You may not be like this. You may need to have a thousand folders strewn across the desk because the nature of your job requires you to constantly flip back and forth between one project and another. Or maybe you’re just passive aggressive with a hidden agenda against us neat freaks.

The point is simply this: let your workspace reflect who you are. Don’t be afraid to radically change your desk to look like somebody else’s if you think that another layout is going to get you better results. The end result is to become more productive – experimentation is your friend.

Now go make some changes!

Are you in a crowded field? Do you want to somehow break into an artistic field but aren’t sure of how to do it? Then this article is just for you!

This article is biased towards the creative fields (I’m a musician with experience, after all) but the ideas and insights can be applied to any field where there’s a low standard for entry with lots of people vying for the same outcome.

This article takes some of the fabulous ideas from Steve Pavlina’s newsletter about the same topic, but with fresh ideas and my own perspective added to the mix. He mentions a lot of great insights, but there’s a lot that can be said and contributed to this topic.

Let’s begin!

So what’s a slush pile?

Ah, the dreaded slush pile. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The “slush pile” – as described by Steve Pavlina – is where all enterers to a crowded, creative field first wind up. It’s the enormous group of wannabes, beginners, and dabblers who wish to make it big in a creative field, such as music, acting, or writing. They all have varying levels of skill, talent, ambition, and so on, but they all would like to leave a mark and become successful in their respective field.

Most people give up while still wading around in the slush pile. They don’t make much progress, so they abandon their hope and move on to something else. “I’ve been at this for so long!” they whine to the nearest person within hearing distance. “Why can’t I get a big break?! Why are so many people passing me by?! Life isn’t fair!”

YouTube, for all intensive purposes, is a video slush pile. It may let you live out your hopes and dreams for a bright future through online video, but with hours upon hours of video being uploaded per minute, do you really have the opportunity to stand out? Perhaps. If you continue to operate how everybody else operates, you really won’t stand a chance. The internet is inundated with videos of countless singers and actors wanting to get their chance in the spotlight. The odds that a talent scout are going to stumble upon your YouTube channel, watch a video, and contact you to be signed to an agency are pretty low indeed. I’d say they’re so low that I wouldn’t bother with YouTube if that’s your only strategy.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace artist profiles, and twitter accounts are all virtual slush piles too. The internet is overloaded with businesses, musicians, and celebrities trying to reach out to the greatest audience possible. As a result, these three things are not as innovative as they once were. A Facebook fan page two years ago would have been clever. A Facebook fan page now… not so much. Simply owning a Facebook fan page is like buying a billboard on a highway. Does it make much of a difference in the long run? Not really. And let’s not get started on the people who still love MySpace artist profiles.

Anyone can pick up a guitar, profess that they have a love of music, and start strumming away. But there’s an incredible difference (and chasm) between being able to play a few pretty songs on a musical instrument and developing the skill set to share a valuable musical skill with everybody.

Stop railing against the system.

You see this with people who are mired in the slush pile. They don’t want to get out of the pile quite yet because they still think they can make strides and break through to the next level… but they don’t see a true way they can do this. Instead of diligently working on their breakthrough, they start endlessly whining about how the system is inherently unfair to everybody.

“Why isn’t anybody watching my YouTube video? I spent so much time crafting this perfect viral video that I skipped eating for three days!”

Please don’t be like these people. Otherwise I’m going to have to ask you to leave the slush pile once and for all. Or I’ll buy a pair of ear plugs just to use when you’re around.

The pile is only unfair to those who think it’s unfair. You can’t get ahead by cursing the system to Hades and back. The system exists for a reason – many people have used it, and many more people have gotten it to work for them. It’s like if you started a brand new blog and then whined that there are no amazing posts. The only way to get more posts is to write them yourself, ding dong.

A lot of people like to choose YouTube as their choice punching bag when it comes to systems they dislike. YouTube is somewhat democratic in the way that it lets you choose which videos you want to watch, and it also gives you a wide way to share those videos. More interestingly, part of YouTube’s uniqueness and appeal is that anybody can create a video of any quality and put it online for the world to see. In a perfect world (and YouTube’s likely ideal), the best videos would be sifted from the mediocre ones and would be seen by many people on the basis of how wonderful they are. But this isn’t how it works.

And so that’s when people who perceive that they are more talented than other video makers start rattling up a big brouhaha over the unfairness of the YouTube system. “My video is better than hers!” “I’m much more talented than him!” “Our mini-movie was funnier than theirs!” becomes their pathetic battle cry. I can already feel my ears starting to bleed.

If this is you: FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD AND HOLY, STOP.

Sometimes the systems we get to work with aren’t ideal. They may be extremely close, such as with YouTube, Facebook, twitter, and the like. But they aren’t perfect.

You’ll never get ahead and move out of the slush pile until you accept the fact that yes, some people are going to have lucky breaks, and no, maybe you won’t ever get that lucky break that you dream of like Justin Bieber serendipitously did. The sooner you come to terms with reality, the better. Only then can you move on to actively working yourself out of the slush pile.

Whining about how awful you think the situation is will never make the situation any better. And let’s face it – the only people who are going to agree with you are the people who are in the same situation. The people who’ve moved on to greener pastures are going to look at you while pointing and laughing. Not exactly a position where you want to be, is it?

Build up your strengths.

The slush pile is full people on various walks of life. Thus, they all have a varying degree of skill and talent.

This isn’t such a bad thing. When everybody possesses a different skill level, you can see where you stand against other people aspiring to have a similar career to what you’d like. (I don’t advocate turning your comparisons into this huge competition where you feel like you have to best every single person you run into, as that only gets you deeper into the pile. But knowing where to stand allows you to figure out what specific skills you can work on.)

However, when entry to a field is so ridiculously low that all you have to do is literally show up, certain people are going to automatically be weeded out. It’s like watching a really terrible singer on American Idol. There’s a certain baseline that all of the contestants generally have to meet before they can go from being someone who auditioned to an actual contestant on the show. The people who are tone deaf, cannot carry a tune, are woefully unprepared, and don’t look the part are not going to make it through to the next round. If you decide to go into a field and you notice that you belong into this latter group, you know you need to start working. Hard.

Across the board, there are similar patterns in every single creative field. For example, blogging has the same way of weeding out people like American Idol does, albeit in a different fashion. There are lots of “okay, eh, I sorta like what I read there” bloggers, but there are very few “Wow, this dramatically changed my life! I must share this with other people as soon as I calm myself…” bloggers. It’s difficult to go from being the former to being the latter. That’s what happens when there isn’t any entry level requirements. To be a blogger, you simply have to open up a blog. You can do that for free at lots of different sites. It takes no time and no effort. To craft amazing posts that get shared all around the world… well, that’s a different story. That’s a skill that can be learned.

The people who have the skills and talents that their field requires are the people who are going to succeed. The people who don’t are going to falter and drop out.

Unfortunately, building up skills and talents takes time. Being able to play Christmas carols on the piano when your family comes over for the holidays is pretty simple. You could probably do it with less than six months of piano lessons if you were dedicated. Performing a beautiful Chopin nocturne that’s technically and musically brilliant, however, is not easy. It’s rather difficult.

If you’re a musician, an actor, a blogger, or anything that requires you to consistently produce creative value on a regular basis, you must build up your skills. Find out what you’re amazing at, and make those talents shine bright. You don’t have to be the best at everything. But you need to excel in something that can produce value to other people. You can’t get around it in any other way.

If you’re a personal development blogger, learn how to craft your posts to produce the most value and most emotional impact to people. If you’re a singer, find the genre that you love the best and nail it down.

Build a platform for yourself and your works.

Once you know what you’re amazing at and you’ve built it up to a level where you can start producing real value from it, you can begin building a platform to get you out of the slush pile. Use everything you have to create a great platform for yourself that separates you from the crowd of people who are already clamoring for attention.

There are two ways you can go about building up a platform for your works: through the front door, and through the backdoor.

Building up a platform through the front door means putting yourself into the slush pile, but seriously differentiating yourself from everyone else. For example, say you’re an aspiring director. If you’re amazing at creating videos, perhaps YouTube would be the best place for you to showcase your talent. This method works

Building up a platform through the backdoor means you completely evade the slush pile and you work yourself into your field through a completely different, unique route. If you’re great at building web traffic, maybe you want to start a website on how to create movies, directed at amateurs, and gradually build up your traffic while showcasing your own skills. Eventually you’ll be so networked that other people are going to come in contact with your works that they’ll want to work with you.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you notice other people getting similar results that you want, feel free to use what’s working for them for yourself. Now, don’t copy them. That’s not nice. (And remember, lightning never strikes in the same place twice.) However, if you’re a blogger and you notice someone creating blog posts that seem to resonate with their audience, why don’t you try a similar style? If you’re an opera singer and you love the tone of a particular singer, why not try something in the same vein for yourself? If you’re a pop song writer and you love Lady Gaga… well, maybe you should find someone less famous to get inspiration from, copycat.

Me and the Slush Pile – My Tale

As readers of this blog know, I play the piano. A couple of years ago, I wanted to begin to do more piano accompanying and performing, but I wasn’t sure how to break into the field.

Musical careers are unique ones; you don’t necessarily need college degrees to become successful (just look at any pop star), but as I mentioned before, there’s a certain baseline of talent that’s required before you can start earning decent income from your abilities. Because there’s no formal training involved, ability levels range wildly – from people who just piddle around on the keyboard to people who can play Beethoven sonatas in their sleep. Now that’s talent.

I quickly realized that while “being the best pianist” was an interesting goal that was motivating, it was a useless goal for me. Being the best pianist at what? At classical music? At accompanying? At teaching other people? At jazz improvisation? It was such a big, vague goal that I could spin my wheels forever towards an end result that I didn’t care much for. Piano playing has so many subsets that you can take lifetimes exploring each route individually and still never be finished fully investigating what you chose. I needed something more specific.

At the time, I realized I was in some kind of slush pile, but I didn’t have a name for it. All I knew was that I needed a real way of differentiating myself from the others.

After some thinking, I figured my best way to escape this slush pile was to make myself so different that other people would hire me because I offered skills that nobody else had. If the baseline was low, I just had to figure out what kinds of things they couldn’t do, and then do them myself.

Yes, this was hard. It was probably the toughest way I could have went about making myself stand out. When you go against the grain and you do everything that nobody else wants to do, you’re signing yourself up for a lot of difficult work.

Fast forward today, a few years later, and I’m pretty well networked in this area. All the accompanists know each other, and when one of us can’t perform at an event, we just call up another person who’d be most likely to fill in.

* * * * *

If the slush pile didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be such a high demand for great, unique creative talent. It doesn’t exist to beat you down and make you feel like you can never aspire to a creative career. It’s there to serve you. The systems are in place to give you the greatest chance to get your works out there. It’s up to you to make that happen.

Don’t fear the slush pile, because you’ll never have to step foot in it again.