I’ve always believed that peak performance is determined by you choice. Success is not by chance, it’s by CHOICE! And you choose your life’s design for success.

Cheers!
Making The Best Better Team

It amazes me again and again how software engineering techniques can be easily reverse engineered and applied in our own lives. I am both performance and security engineer. I use security engineering techniques in my life too. Take threat modeling, for example. I try to model the threats and their impacts on my life, just like with software. If the threat has low risk I leave it alone and move my energy to something more productive, If the threat has high risk I invest my best to mitigate it completely. This is part of my prioritization technique. It helps me prioritize my energy for high impact results over just completing another task.

Makes sense?

Very interesting stuff…I’m not familiar with J.D. Meir, but I love how you’ve incorporated his ideas and translated it into personal development!

state management – sometimes tough for me to isolate one state from another. i.e. my finances spill over and affect my relationships, etc.

resource management – i believe this. One’s attention can only be focused on one item at a time.

exception management – goes with my thoughts on adversity: http://www.rx4life.info/what-is-adversity

algorithms – working on setting schedules and plans – and following them.

coupling/cohesion – i like this one. It reminds me of the paradox of life. The more tightly you hold onto something, the more likely you are to lose it.

caching – i’ve always had a problem with this. no matter what system i use – the trick is to be consistent with any system.

Good stuff,

Tola

BTW, Rob, I liked your music samples very much!

I’m the artist type who’s been looking for a method that helps me be flexbile while still making more effective. I’ve used a number of different types of planners from other people and those that I’ve made up myself.

The irony is that I’m anal-retentive in many ways. I’ve worked at organizing content for the last 10 years. Personally, I’ve moved all my bills and things online and have over 10,000 pages scanned into the computer to get rid of my information clutter.

During this time I’ve found two things that are relevant to this post.
1) that it’s easy to get lost in the inflexibility of a system. The simpler you can keep it, the more portable it is to other tools. The benefits of a simple system like J.Ds is that it’s highly portable to other mail products (not just outlook).

2) J.D. concept of friction. The more friction you have in any area, the harder it is to overcome it, just like in physics. Friction is equal to
perceived difficulty of the task
x
the number of times you need to perform it in a given time period

Note the “perceived” part.
a) This may be high at the start, but it gets easier as patterns become automatic.
b) The perception is partially controlled by how easy it is to try a different method. For example, on the web, everything is a click away. If you have to travel someplace to start something, there may be as much friction to leave and try something else as there is to just complete the task where you are. The task in front of you can seem “easier” simply because you’ve decided to do it.
c) Depending on your skills, some things are easier than others. For example, I’d rather fix a computer than cook something. My girlfriend is the other way around.

Also note that something that has just a little bit of friction will seem very painful if you have to repeat it 20 times a day.

How this relates to the post – Low friction methods can be learned and implemented at a lightening pace, overcoming perceived time savings from more complex systems.

Thanks for the feedback!!

I’ve thought about a system that has the notions of interrupts. These are the most high priority things that you just jump to whenever a flag is raised. They are so important that you always handle them before you go back to what you were originally doing.