The harder thing is to freeze, not do anything and have a Zen moment.

But the Zen moments are quintessentially important.

Piling on more miles with that burning chicken makes you feel like you’re getting places, touching base, getting things done. It’s medal to the metal efficiency.

But it’s the Zen moments that tell you if you’re running in the right direction. In the Zen moments you get to think. You’re looking at the map. And you might just dare to change course as a result.

To stretch a seriously cuckoo metaphor further, Fire Chickens run faster, further, while carrying more and more on their shoulders. Zen Chickens pack light, carry a compass and have a map marked with the destination.

Namasté.

“Productivity” isn’t about about making more widgets per hour or being efficient and organized for its own anal-retentive sake. Real productivity means getting faster at moving the crap off your desk so you can have room to focus on the creative work that only you can do.

Merlin Mann

Christine Kane has a better way for you to start your year: choose a word.

Just one word.

That’s it.

And this word will be your guiding focus for the next 12 months.

Last year, I chose the word courage. Looking back, I think I’ve done pretty well. I faced my fear of talking to strangers over and over and even made friends with a few. I also kept stretching the boundaries of my comfort zone by doing new things like getting my driving license, and facing my fear of heights by jumping off trees.

I achieved a lot, but I also pushed my health to its limits. I kept getting remarks about how tired I looked, and knew I had to do something to take care of myself. So this year my word will be vitality and health will be my primary focus.

Capoeira Arte Brasileira by Fábio Pinheiro.

What’s your word for 2008?

2. Know What’s Important

For any goal-setting and time management to work, it must be personalized to meet your individual values. Have you discovered what’s truly important in your life yet? If not, you might find yourself climbing the ladder of 2008, sometimes very productively, only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall.

Life’s too short, you don’t want to be distracted by the sirens of the urgent, the glossiness of the meaningless, and lose sight of the important.

What’s important to you?

Is it your family? Achievement? Health? Wealth? Security?

If you’re thinking right now of something material, like a car – ask yourself why that’s important. Is it because you feel it brings you status, or freedom, or happiness?

Photo by MegElizabeth.

Goals are tangible, values are abstract. Reaching your goals bring you achievement, but living in alignment with your values brings you fulfillment.

Keep it simple. Discover or decide on your top 5 towards values; things you want most. Then discover or decide on your top 5 away from values; things you do not want most.

Your values will be your guiding light for the year 2008. They will serve as your ultimate litmus test; whenever something comes up your values will help you say yes or no to a new commitment. Ultimately, you want to work only on what’s truly important to you.

(Here’s another way to make sure the important gets done.)

3. Lose the Dead Weight – Simplify & Slow Down

Sketch Zen by tico24.

There is no place in your life for anything that does not support you.

If it does not bring more joy, beauty & happiness into your life, throw it out.

If you haven’t seen, used or thought about it for months, you already don’t need it – you just have to accept that you can live without it.

Drop the dead weight.

Unclutter your life, emotionally, physically, mentally, socially, spiritually.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

When you do that, you’ll find a lightness of mind and clarity of thought. What you thought used to be a big deal drops away, while you’re better able to focus on the truly important without distraction.

There’s only so much time, there’s only so much space, there’s only so much attention.

Choose to spend it on the important, the beautiful and the uplifting. Only keep that which brings more positivity, effectiveness & fulfillment in your life. Keep your life lean, light – make it a graceful pirouette instead of a thumping, mad rush.

What do you no longer need in the new year?

Even people with the highest levels of self-esteem feel unsure of themselves at times. Consider how difficult it is to be confident when you first start a new job and you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you don’t feel fully comfortable with the routine, and you haven’t developed strong relationships with your co-workers yet. You probably don’t appear very confident.

There are a few simple tricks though that can help you boost your confidence at work, even when it’s down in the dumps. Whether you’re new to a job or just suffering a momentary fit of self-doubt, give these tips a try:

Fake it till you make it

Remember that confidence is all about perception. Acting confident is the first step to feeling confident. In the process of convincing others, you may actually convince yourself. Have you ever felt really down but you had to pretend like nothing was wrong? What happened?

Most of the time, you’ll find that demonstrating a positive attitude (whether or not you really feel it inside) will actually help lead you to feeling the same way. Project the confidence you want to feel and it will come to you. It’s all about your thought patterns. See yourself as a self-assured, outgoing, successful professional and eventually that is exactly what you will be.

Soak up knowledge and don’t be afraid to ask questions

I believe confidence comes very naturally when you have a great deal of knowledge. Some of the best sales people are those who know their product inside and out. They feel secure with even the tiniest details. Soak up knowledge and don’t be afraid of showing others that you’re doing it. Don’t be shy about asking questions & you’ll usually find that others respect your inquisitiveness. It shows that you’re thinking, not just going through the motions.

Delete negative self talk

Nothing brings you down quite like an inner monologue that says “you’re not good enough”. Take a moment to listen to that voice and see if you’re guilty of negative self talk. When you’re faced with a challenge, do you hear yourself saying, “There’s no way you can do that”? When you make a mistake, do you hear yourself chide, “There you go again, you dummy”?

If so, you need to reprogram your brain. And lucky you; the Life Coaches Blog is an amazing resource to help you do it. It takes a lot of time and some dedicated, thoughtful activity, but the first step is to recognize what’s happening in your head. Go ahead and listen to the voices; take not of negativity and stop yourself. You and your brain are in this together and don’t let your inner critic run the show.

Avoid saying “I can’t”

Just saying these words makes you that much closer to failing. These words scream; “I don’t believe in myself! I see my limitations! I am afraid of failing!” Those are not the words of a confident person.

Confident people look a challenge in the eye and say; “I can.” Just saying “I can” makes you that much closer to success. These words scream; “I believe in my abilities! I am capable of achieving anything! I am not afraid!” Remember that failure is not a crime, but not trying is. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Again, mindset is half the battle. In the famous word of William Ward; “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”

Look the part

This is a fundamental rule of confidence. When you dress for success, you feel much stronger, more powerful. Also, how you present yourself has a big impact on how people perceive you. When you feel confident about the image you are projecting, you automatically project that confidence with it. It’s not vain to take pride in your appearance; it’s just good business sense.

For more articles on professional and personal development, check out The Executive Assistant’s Tool Box, where popular articles include Energize Your Work Day and How to Speak Your Mind (and Keep Your Job)

Which 20% of my efforts are producing 80% of my results that I need to focus more on?

And which 80% of my efforts producing 20% of my results can I eliminate from my life?

The 80/20 Principle, also known as the Pareto Principle, discovered by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, says that for many events, 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes.

While Tim isn’t the first person to apply the 80/20 Principle to life, work and productivity, The 4-Hour Workweek makes an extremely powerful case for it – and is one of the reasons why its in the top 3 of must-read productivity books I recommend (the other 2 are First Things First and Getting Things Done).

How I Eliminated 29% of My Information Overload

Tim recommends cutting down the amount of unnecessary info that flows into your life for two main reasons: information consumes both time and attention that you could be spending elsewhere.

I couldn’t find the answer to Tim’s questions above, so I decided if I couldn’t find a more effective way to maximize my results first, I could at least shed some extra weight. So I decided to free up as much time and attention as I could.

If you know me, you’ll know I’m a big fan of streamlining and decluttering life and environment. I’m also a big fan of knowledge, which explains the 64 RSS subscriptions in my RSS reader!

Taking an honest look at my feeds; I asked myself which of my feeds I got the most value from, to focus on the 80% value from the 20% input, and which I got the least value from to cut down the 20% value from the 80% input, through my reading experience over the last few months. Being as ruthless as I could, I managed to streamline my subscriptions from 64 to 45. Not ideal, but I still managed to reduce 29% of my information load!

Reduce and simplify. Photo by Nathan.

(An unexpected surprise: I actually deleted the granddaddy of all problogging blogs from my subscription list, Darren Rowse’s Problogger. I’ve found that I’ve been getting more value from these 2 blogs about pro-blogging; Performancing and Successful Blog, instead.)

If You Work Smarter You Get to Work Less, Work Dumber & You Have to Work More

I also started thinking about Life Coaches Blog and my restarting a blog project. I’ve been honest from the start; I began this blog to create a positive impact, I also did it to make a profit – wanting one day to make enough profits to do this full-time so I can create even more positive content.

I’ve been toying around with starting another blog for the last year. But what always stopped me was the fact that Life Coaches Blog was already keeping me busy, together with my full-time job and life, and I wasn’t sure I would have enough time for a new project.

But in the last few weeks I decided to say; ’screw it, if I never do it I’ll never know’, and started a new project – only to have this realization hit me like a rock: was I still suffering from my old belief about money that in order to make more money, I had to work even harder?

I realized that if I were to start a new blog now, with all the demands on my time, I’d still be stuck in the old cycle of trading money for time, instead of the more profitable formula of trading money for value.

That got me thinking about the 80/20 Principle as it applied to Life Coaches Blog. Which 20% of my efforts got me 80% of my results? And then it hit me: marketing my blog actually got me better results than focusing on my writing.

Don’t get me wrong, writing quality content is essential – it’s what people come to your blog for in the first place. But its ultimately useless to write the best content in the world when nobody will ever see it!

Focus on Creating Value Not Creating More Effort

The goal wasn’t to haul more and more work onto my plate, it was to eliminate the unnecessary 80% of effort and maximize on the key 20% of value. I realized that a key way to do that would be to keep actively encouraging reader submitted articles.

That solution dovetails very nicely into the future of Life Coaches Blog I envisioned in May of this year: to have Life Coaches Blog not just be about me but also about other guest bloggers’ articles.

That way, I can get the extra time to work on and improve Life Coaches Blog itself. Ultimately everyone benefits; the readers get more perspectives on how to change their lives, contributors get a bigger audience and I get to maximize my efforts and work on making a better Life Coaches Blog.

This exercise in lifestyle design following The 4-Hour Workweek is turning up some interesting results indeed.

That rings very true. So how do we get more enjoyment and less pain in our lives? The art of decluttering is obviously about removing all the unnecessary bits of our lives that cause us more pain than we need; the undone task lingering in the back of our minds for two weeks, the stiff doorknob we keep putting off oiling, the pile of old clothes we refuse to throw out.

While streamlining our lives this way, how do we fine-tune it so we get more enjoyment? I think we can do that by decluttering our schedules to do more of what’s important and less of what’s not.

Urgent unimportant tasks are like fast food; quick, tasty and filling but ultimately empty of nutrition – they don’t power your body and improve your health. Important tasks, on the other hand, tend to be more like tending to a garden, when planting and caring for your seedlings results seem to be far and few between. But it’s the planning, doing in advance and constant care that reap you a bountiful harvest in time to come.

What’s one thing that you know, if you did consistently, would make a significant difference in your life – and are you doing it?

Photo by withoutform.

P.S. I’ve recently discovered 2 blogs about living the decluttered life that have quickly become part of my favorites; Zen Habits & Unclutterer. Check them out, I think you’ll love them too.

This is a screenshot of my desktop at work. I thought it’d be a great idea to have my task list displayed (via Samurize, method here), together with my calendar appointments and the local weather via widgets (my office has no windows). And a kick-ass wallpaper.

I realized after a few weeks though, that it was adding to the mental noise that was going through my head. Every time I glanced at the screen undone tasks were screaming at me even when I had no way to do them then. It was time for a more elegant solution.

I minimized my weather widget and dock. I got rid of my Samurize tasks list even though it was a fast and easy method to keep track of them. I opted for the excellent and free Thinking Rock GTD program to keep track of my tasks. Lastly, I got rid of my wallpaper for this super minimal look.

After a day though, I found it was too dreary and settled with this beautiful landscape from Desktopography.

Two days later I find this desktop a lot more relaxing. I have to remember to input new tasks into Thinking Rock and review it two to three times a day but it’s a lot less anxiety inducing than having my to-do list stare at me all day long.