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Idea Management

Lesson 19 from: Time Management 101

Mike Vardy

Idea Management

Lesson 19 from: Time Management 101

Mike Vardy

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Lesson Info

19. Idea Management

Lesson Info

Idea Management

So when you have an idea you wanna compare it so when I when I say compare it I mean compared to what you've got already on the go compared to what's out there right? So if you're going to do a book I guess a good example you guys remember the remember there's the twelve twelve our abs right? That proper product and then it was the eleven hour abs in the ten hour abs and then it wasn't there wasn't there something about marry or whatever the hell seems like you've heard it the six second abs or whatever you know what I mean like like so when you compare it you're gonna want to say hey, can I do that idea of maybe better then what that other person is doing or or or in a different way so that's what the comparing the value of comparing is is to look at it and go what do I bring to this idea that maybe that maybe already out there you know that someone else doesn't so I mean even this even what we're doing here I've quoted a lot of people over the past few days you know, I've talked abou...

t how I have used elements of david allen's gt t system stephen covey's system tony robbins and stuff you know eisenhower uh merlin man you know patrick wrote like it's not like none of this stuff is all necessarily knew but the way I'm bringing it is my own right, it's, new it's to me, it's, it's, there's, that subjectivity right with the objective of helping you guys and reaching that may because you've never heard of some of these people before, right? So when I look at putting something like this together, and of course I've got it, and evernote built the whole I'm like, okay, so how does this compare to this? Oh, okay, well, how how do I want to deliver it compared to how this person was deliberate? Remember, off of the my origin story is kind of the eventual ism thing, right where I was doing like a stephen colbert, you know, productivity's parody site, that was my idea. How did it compare to, like, life hack and lifehacker and stuff like that? It was a parody of them. So that's how I compared it no one's doing that that's what david david said, no one's doing this. I'm surprised no one has done this already, and you'll find that yeah, I'm surprised it was doing this already. You're gonna find that from people, then you share it, right? So that's, when you say, hey here's what I'm doing and share it with like maybe a book like when you call your own personal board of directors right? We're gonna give you you have a sounding board right before I put this together you know and my wife's a great sounding board we're talking about this before because she's not really into this stuff believe it or not, you know s o I'm able to bounce stuff first just now that doesn't work for me like the tent analogy that I've used right? Um I've used other metaphors before and that one was the one that seemed to stick with the most people so by sharing it I was able to actually directed a little bit more but I was able to use that idea and make it a little bit more resonant with more people right and then care for it and by careful means like foster it you know all of this stuff make sure that you know you're paying enough attention to it, right? You want your idea to have quality so you may not have you have a ton of ideas coming your way right get a literal ton of ideas, but the ones you decide that you're going to go forward with, you know, care for those because the more of those that you execute and make it happen and make awesome then the more you're going gonna wanna have that stuff right the more that those non exciting ideas go away and the really exciting ones come to the forefront right in the in the chat rooms about idea management in the challenges everybody was having with it and one of the recurring themes that we're seeing come up was accountability uh for example gregg d said there's definitely a need for accountability buddies and we might touch on this a little bit later is well but are there any kind of aps that help with accountability or anything like that? Is that something that you there are go figure there's an app for that um there's several uh there are lift is a very common one l I f t and it's one where it's actually a crowd you know which one of you so lift is is one where you can say, hey, I'm going to do this I'm gonna drink water every day I like eight glasses of water every day for thirty days like they could be has been now is that um uh there's also and then you can have stuff like write a book like or spend or spend and this is where you can quantify right? Like have a smart goal right? And for those you don't know what's mark als are there specific measurable? Um I never remember with the aye aye is actionable results oriented in time sensitive right? So so basically you can I get you could say I am going to practice guitar for ten minutes every day, right? And then you share that and people go yea rob bra you're doing it or if you don't do you kind of go because it shows you when you don't do it the breaking of the chain right? So I'm going to become a better photo editor and this is where you could say I'm going to become a better photo editor I'm gonna add it I'm going to spend four hours a day editing photos and you put that and left okay? And you use that and then you go with your task management system and you say spent uh spend four hours you know are you know make a project becoming a better photographer, right? And you're signing that context to it and then your your your actual action your task manager would be goto lift update lift you know or you know as I've used before when I'm doing team based stuff, my contacts there is a sauna so when I'm no I have to work on something that's team oriented I'm like, oh, I need to go to a sauna that's the context right? So you could say hey practice guitar for ten minutes ope the context is lift because that's the app that I'm going to show that I did that in right so again there's subjectivity there there's another one called clever routines which is another great app clever routines lift us free clever routines is not uh way of life again these air ios so I think lift does have an android a lift does have an android version um clever yes state is another one yes when there's one who are we talking we were we were talking about this right? The one that if you don't you always you right yeah stick right where uh this one's hilarious if you don't if you say hey, I'm going to go work out every day for x amount of time I'm gonna make you commit to work out and if I don't then I'm going to pay five dollars into the fund and if you don't then you have like it takes it from I think your paypal account or something like that were credit card and like you you're gonna want to make sure you do that or you get broke very fast right? I'm not a big fan of that kind of stuff I think that that goes I mean, if you're if you're having to do that for a lot of things that there may be some other things that you should be looking at beyond an app to help you out but you know stick is another one you're right like that's that's another one that so there's a lot out there path even path is a social networking app that's a very closed environment p a t h it's available on the android it's available on you're you're actually a web service too and it's also available on ios and what I'll do there is I'll share my like today I put like you know, one of the only updates I did a longer form update because you're not restricted to the amount of characters like you know having a really great time with people here awesome eso grateful that I'm able to do this uh what an amazing experience you know like but I only shared that like I've got real personal although now I've told everybody but I got real personal initially with those people that because the that abuses of what's called the dunbar number which means you can only have a certain amount of friends that you can really have real connections with so there's I have real connections with those people on there and that's my you can share ideas that way to look I have a sighting what do you guys think? Right? So that's another way right and I also when I do running I used the nike app so that syncs up to path so that people can cheer you on that way as well. So that's another way to share that kind of stuff and I don't share my nike stuff with twitter or facebook or anything like that because frankly I think there's too many things updated, zaps, imposed to services, but also I don't think people really really care all that much I really don't know when I was doing stand up one of the things that that ah, veteran stand up comedian said, when you first start out, all the comedians attempted to talk about themselves, you know? And even if no one knows who they are like you know, on ly, veteran comedians could do that only guys like bill cosby and jerry seinfeld because they've they've been doing it for a long time, so people actually do care about their specific thought, their specific ideas, their specific routines. But when you're first starting out into comedy that no wonder like, who are you to tell me that? Who are you to understand what I'm going through, right? So that's what I mean that's, how I feel about some of those social networks when you're sharing stuff on there, be beast, be specific, be measured, like understand who you're sharing it with. If it's something big and used for your clients or whatever and you've got client got a facebook page, you want it that way that's fine, but for certain things like just remember, in some cases first off it's out there for everyone to see and secondly, maybe it's, you know that's why I'm not a big fan of the food picture movement for taking pictures of okay that good that looks good now I'm hungry thank you for that, you know or don't you know what it means? So so that and actually I had an idea which eye view which I started and the exciting used the criteria to decide if I was going to do it and I actually started a tumbler block called empty plates of food and all it wass was a picture of what I ate a plate and I said the people could submit and find out what it wass and everyone's like this is really cool and then all this and I got the first few that looks gross I don't really want to see an empty plate and and like you have so many other things on the go, I'm not going out so there's a there's a tumbler bloggers like two plates on it like I literally let it go very quickly but you know that's that's an example of an idea that I shared put it out there compared it I definitely compared it there's lots of food plate sharing picture sites but there's no blog's that are generally doing a what did I eat and here's a here's what the food would have known what was on this plane? How? Imagine how look how good it used to look and then I but I decided not to care for it anymore. And when you decide not to care for it any more than you know what, there's got no value and shut it off to the side. Um, but I want to talk about some of the absent tools do we have any, any other things in there before we move into that o r or do you want me to just jump right into this? We've got an ongoing discussion about accountability, afs and different people, so that the ones I talked about are definitely social, so they're more like, hey, I want everyone to know this, but then there's accountability absent you could keep fairly internalized that I'm going to talk about one's called unstuck it's, an ipad app, the reason that ipad only I'm hoping they do an android version for a tablet, some point or phablet, which is like those bigger phones that corbett part made that quote to me the other day I was talking on and he's like, oh, you've got that samsung it's a fabulous phone and tablet I'm like, yeah, pretty big, but this is this is great because it goes through exercises. So if you're like, hey, I really want to before with us idea, but I don't know what to do next I don't know how to make it happen unstuck is one of those things where put you through this exercise so you can see here I think I'm stuck because I'm having trouble figuring exactly what to do with my life, so they're like gone big time, it mostly makes me feel paralyzed, so they filled in that hazy, uninspired it involves me and it's both, and then it just got a whole bunch of different things. They're so there's a ton of different exercises, and it walks you through fairly quickly it's not an onerous process, so I mean, you could consider it digital therapy if you really want teo, but in some cases that sometimes what you need and you're keeping it internal, right? Because sometimes just that self talk inside your head defeats its that resistance, right it's that thing that seth cohen talks but the lizard brain or like steven press field, who have mentioned talks about the resistance, right? You know, in his in his new book, the authentic swing, he really gets into that, but or even that with the war of the war of art, but this kind of thing once you get it out there like even just in front of you just for you, you can have some breakthrough. So this is an app that can help you with that it's more about getting unstuck, though than anything else. Idea bucket he's like a measurable thing. So if you want to really measure how your ideas are are forming, uh, this one is using trips. Where do I want to take a trip? And they have used these gauges so what's the adventure like in, you know, I won't have an epic adventure. I really want to have a lot of shopping and, uh but I don't want to be relaxing. I want to be super hectic. S o I don't know who would want to do that necessarily especially. I know I'd put it on the other scale after these these days for me, but look, hong kong is at the top of the list, right? So engages it based on where you may want to, you know, and that's just for trips and then there's little buckets so aps to buy so maybe someone's gonna want to use this app once I show them all the apse that we've had talked about it and they can go right which what? And that could help you gauge it right? So there's an app to help gauge you the apse that you would use but idea buckets iowa so it's for iphone and ipad and it's both of those aps I think unstuck I believe is free I believe idea bucket is not but I do not have the price in front of me right now uh clearly eisenhower doubt me right we talked about it the whole notion of hey remember I said it could be used for days of the week it could be used for projects it could be used for you know the year what's important but please for ideas so like how do I move this forward right? Do I do this? Do we not do this? Is this urgent important? What have you so eisenhower dot me will work and because you can also use it in an analog form you could do it that way as well. So it works in this regard and same with the crucial cube right? You put the crucial cuban middle with the idea and go from there and then finally notebooks good old fashioned paper you know my evernote notebook I've used that before to flesh out ideas taking the picture put it in there and remember our yesterday we talked about deliberate practice and you putting that ex spreadsheet at the top of each notebook that you really want to foster I know we were talking about that, remember, uh, so every notebook would have, like, how much time you've spent fostering that? Well, you could do that with with ever know, in terms of hey, I'm going to take a picture of my mind map or my outline of my this idea and put it at the fir as the first note in this notebook, and now I've got when I had that idea, here's what came to mind, right? The reason I've got knock, knock, written down there is that knock knock is like, you guys have probably seen them, they're the ones that have, like, the w t f notebooks and and like, the, uh, file folders in my favor, like things I should look at, but never will. You know, uh, files I look through teo was one of the files I have to look through to show my boss that I'm actually busy when really, I'm not like things like that, so it's jokey, but there are some really practical uses for, and it makes it fun, right when you're starting, because that's, what these ideas should be ultimately is they should be fun. They should have that idea criteria that you're that I talked about, but it should be fun. Um and then creative outfitters, which is the behan store so that's where you could get the action method notebooks, the action pad, the dot grid journal they even have a like a long think they have a white board that you can buy there is, well, then they've got, you know, some bags and stuff, but the notebooks that aaron there and any real notebook like field notes, you know, I've got the field notes, notebooks, and I'll put ideas in there, and I'll categorize them with by, you know, color again, we're going to talk a bit more about color during the power of paper segment, but yeah, so those air, those are some of the elements that you could take to move some, like, what do you when you get ideas? You caption on paper, I guess all of you do that right now, right? And then you kind of maybe foster them out a little bit or or flesh them out a bit on paper and then they end up the goal is to get them into a system that's going to work for you so you could move them forward once they once they've turned themselves from ideas in the projects once you evaluated them, then they become tasks and projects projects with task underneath, and then you've got a whole other obviously layer of okay, now I've got to move these forward and now how do I do know I've got the context or tags that these values thes meetings have attached them so do we have anything else in the chat room? Yeah, we have another question I know it's impossible for you to get to all of them but uh carl again wants to know if you're familiar with neo I think he may have mentioned it at some point g n e o a new task management app for ios integrates task management with the eisenhower matrix tags notebooks ever know and calendar seems like a good solution is I've used it I've been playing with it I have to say that for me uh because I'm very familiar with this stuff I can jump into it and wrap my head around it pretty easily um what I would do if you're if you're just getting started with this kind of time management task manager's stuff is pick it up I think it's on sale still right now so pick it up uh and then have it there is that like visual reminder that you may want to integrate everything at one point at some point but my biggest problem with apse that are that are that scale and have so many compartments is that people like we've talked about with every note and with omni focus and and asana even is that it's too complex and that is being abandoned right? So foster evernote first you know, get familiar with the eisenhower matrix things like that and then bring something like that like neo is great I love what they're doing and they used to have another app that they had for that I think was say that or so I can't remember but they've evolved it into this andi I think that it's it's a great tool once you've got the other basics down, you know it's it's like I think that you need to have those elements first like those different compartments and then you could pack them right pack them into one so you've got one place to go, but right now I think a lot of people here it's going to be better to say here's ever note here's my regular calendar that I'm so used to using and here's my task manager that I'm glad that I'm uncomfortable with okay great great awesome any other questions I hear before we, uh before you guys got a good sense of maybe how you can move some of these ideas forward now? Yeah, yeah where are you deaf? I just giving you a whole bunch of new ideas like on now I don't know what to dio the the sum of the human approaches there are I think, very big in terms of making these things have absolute great but the app all the apple dio is prompt you to have more, more human thoughts about more to think about your approaches. They're not gonna it's like the completion component we talked about when it comes to that. Those steps it's not going to move you forward a b movie a little bit for but it's not going to get it done for you. The absoluto serve, but not too certain, like outright deliver. Okay, I like the idea of transferring everything, transferring the ideas that I have into, like an idea notebook ever known. When I was redoing my ever note a couple of days ago, I realized I had, like, three different were documents, right? Is and in, like, three different notebooks for ideas and are all over the place. So I think I like the idea of putting in an ever note and and then using the idea of framework will help me more quickly compare which ones to act on because I realized I took on a project that I wasn't except as excited about, and I thought, well, help me, and then I realized if I had, like, seen all my ideas in one place, I would have been able to compare this one actually would get me there faster than this one, I just grind right and I mean we talked about paper again use of color during the power of pigment power of paper segment I mean you're gonna be able to make some of those decisions maybe right as you capture them like open, open like that's the kind of thing you're going to be able to do once you have some of these little tools that have been talking about and yeah, I'm big on naps, but I think that there's a there's a point where when you have the human element you could decide what goes into the absent one doesn't write go ahead have fun well, the idea that I'm having it which I have which I'm trying to get to is throwing a party at the new place that I moved to sure so they get some going flesh that out isn't able to generate director passive income now uh well, maybe wine if you have to make it a wine party have everyone bring bottles no one ever drinks all the wine I don't want you and it was like a ton of wine making a wine party that's two red that's that's income in terms of wine I was thinking in terms of relationship capital oh that that there you go that's even better both direct because one two six degrees of separation was both direct and pass it there you go that's a good idea? See, I'm always thinking about wine or beer bourbon ar e I don't have anything else, I think that my ideas to kind of well, uh, we are right there at that time to take a little break, but before we go to break, what do we have in store for us when we come back paper again, this time we're going to devote entire segment to paper and I've touched on it throughout the course of the past couple days, but now we're going to talk about aa system I use called to strike through system that's goingto probably help you with all of the other elements I've talked about, so can't wait to talk about that. I'm very excited, great, we had its, um, paper enthusiasts in the chat room, so we'll be happy to hear that as well on. We didn't want to share a few of our comments from the chat rooms, carriages, santa said. This is my favorite workshop, she just left it at that, and abby lynn said, for me, some of the great takeaways are to go ahead and get the other app is to completely be time organized than to set them up, of course, to work perfectly together and, of course, than to actually use them.

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Productivityist Progress Planner.pdf
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Ratings and Reviews

Eve
 

Mike's class was chock full of useful information on streamlining a to do list, digitally and by hand. His process seems pretty robust, and extremely well thought out, to provide maximum efficiency and success with the least amount of effort. Granted there is a learning curve, and one must practice to become proficient and use it effectively, but if you are willing to put in the effort there is a major positive impact on productivity. He goes through his favorite apps (he apparently consults with app developers) and why, which was exactly what I needed at the time. Some of his 2nd choice apps may now surpass the others, but he explains clears how to pick the best app for you. I'm a small business owner and I found the class to be quite helpful. Thanks Mike.

Pavel Voronenko
 

Very interesting class! I would recommend recording it as it based on apps' solutions and since 2013/2014 there are a lot of changes. Al least maybe some wrap-up session. Well done, Mike Vardy and Creative Live team! Jan. 04, 2021

kathy
 

Just finished Mike's course and it was exactly what I wanted and hoped it would be. Nuts and bolts, real life ideas and hands on ways to implement what he shared. If I dedicated the time spent on researching an organizational system on just USING the system, I would be a shining beacon of efficiency. Mike's class and materials helped me let go of the need aka obsession with looking for the Holy Grail of systems and just pick a combo and do it. Thanks, Mike, I'll let you know when I AM that shining beacon of effortless organization...or at least when I quit writing notes on my hand! Great course!

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