‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ ~Blaise Pascal

Post written by Leo Babauta.

I’ll be the first to admit that I fall victim to the trap of the Internet — a wonderful empowering tool that can fill your day with distractions, a million little “productive” tasks that matter little, constant interruptions from messages and status updates.

Who doesn’t fall victim to this?

We are frittering our lives away.

So how do we beat this? How do we make best use of the awesomeness of the Internet (which has given me the power to do what I love) without succumbing to its powers of distraction? This is a question that obviously occupied the minds of the ancients, from Aristotle to Lao Tzu (who was particularly prone to Lolcats), without any good answer.

I have good news. There is a way. It’s not always easy, but I’ve done it, and if I can do it, anyone can.

It takes three little habits:

1. Set a time limit. Pick something important to do, and set a limited time to do it. That might be one hour, or 20 minutes, or even just 10 if you’re having a hard time getting into it. The time limit helps sharpen your focus. If you have limited time to do something, you’ll be forced to decide what’s important. It also means you’re not doing some unlimited task that could take hours, but a very specific one that will be over in X minutes. Setting a limit is good too for when you decide to process your email — only 20 minutes to get as many emails processed as you can, for example.

2. Close everything. This means everything possible on your computer that isn’t absolutely necessary for the task at hand. If you don’t need the Internet to write something, close it. Close email, all notifications and reminders, all programs not needed for your task. If you need your browser open, close all tabs — bookmark them, or save them to a read-later service like Instapaper. You can always open these sites when you’re done.

3. Pause before switching. So you’ve closed everything else, you’ve set a time limit for your task at hand, and you’re getting started … but then you get the urge to check email or Facebook or Twitter. You want to see what’s happening on Instagram or Pinterest or Youtube. Stop. Make yourself pause for 5-10 seconds. This is the key habit that makes the other two work. Take a deep breath. Think about whether you really want to fritter your life away doing those things all day, every day, or if you want to do something great. Choose great, most of the time.

These are little habits, and you can do them. When your time is up, you can give yourself a few minutes’ break to check your favorite sites, and then close them again. But when you’re trying to focus, practice these habits. They’re a small price to pay for a life not frittered away by distractions.

‘Ain’t no tuition for havin’ no ambition.’ ~Buddha

‘Everything you can imagine is real.’ ~Pablo Picasso

Post written by Leo Babauta.

When I wrote the first words of this blog, more than five years ago, I had no idea those few keystrokes would change my life.

I thought I was doing nothing more than reflecting on the changes that had been happening in my life, sharing a bit about what I learned with a handful of friends. I thought those tinkling of computer keys would fade into the void, as most of my thoughts had before that.

I didn’t imagine that a year later, I would have 26,000 people reading my blog (and eventually a quarter million subscribers), that I’d finally be out of debt, that I’d have my first book publishing contract, that I’d happily hand in my resignation for my day job. All of that was out of the realm of possibility.

That’s the amazing realization here: that we rule out the possibility of great change, because it doesn’t seem realistic. For nearly two decades I focused on going to college, and working at a day job that I sometimes enjoyed but often dreaded, because that’s what we expect should happen. Starting my own business, pursuing my dreams, doing something I loved? Crazy talk.

Crazy talk is what I’m going to give you today, in hopes that perhaps one of you will expand your possibilities. It is possible — I did it, all while working a full-time job, doing free-lance writing on the side, and having a wife and six kids. I did it, even if I never dared to dream it for the first three decades of my life.

I am not someone who likes to give career advice, or teach people to be online entrepreneurs. So I’m not going to do that here. I’ll just tell you this: it’s possible. Yes, it absolutely is possible.

And I’ll share what I’ve learned, in small snippets of goodness, about doing what you love.

1. If you don’t think it’s possible, do a small easy test. Don’t think you can start a blog? Sign up for a free WordPress.com or Blogger.com account and do a short post. Don’t tell anyone about it. Just write a post. It costs nothing, risks nothing, takes almost no time. But you will learn you can do that one little thing, and if you pass that test, you now know your theory of impossibility was wrong. You can do this with any skill, btw, not just blogging.
2. Expand your tests. If you pass the first test, do another small one. Then another. Keep going and notice your confidence grow. Your skills grow along with the confidence. It’s amazingly simple. Iterate and re-iterate as long as you are having fun.
3. If you don’t know what you love, don’t worry. There’s no need to figure that out right away. Try something that someone else is doing, and see if you think it’s fun. The real fun part, btw, comes when you start to get good at it, so perhaps stick with it for awhile and enjoy the learning, then enjoy being good at it. If that first try doesn’t work, try something else. You don’t have to commit to one thing for your entire life. You can do a dozen a year if you want, for a decade. You’ll probably find something by then.
4. Find inspiration. Who else is doing what you love doing? Who is excited about it most? Follow them. Learn about them. See what path they took. Watch closely how they execute, what they do right. Learn from the best.
5. Reach out to a mentor. Of the people who inspire you the most, try to make contact with a few of them. If they never respond, try a few more. See if you can buy them lunch or coffee. Don’t pitch them on anything. Just ask for their help, and say you’d love for them to mentor you in a way that won’t take up much of their time. Don’t demand a lot of time, but go to them when you’re having trouble making big decisions.
6. Choose one passion at random. Some people have many interests and don’t know where to start. Pick one or two randomly if they’re all about equal, and just get started. Don’t let choice paralyze you. Get started, because in the end it won’t matter if you started with the wrong passion — you’ll learn something valuable no matter what. Read more.
7. Get good at it. You get good at something with practice. Allow your friends and family to be your first audience, readers, customers. Then take on a few others at a low cost, or increase your audience slowly. But always have an audience or customers if possible — you’ll get good much faster this way, with feedback and accountability. Read about it. Watch videos. Take a class. Join a group of others learning. Find people to partner with. Before long, you’ll be good at it.
8. Help others. One of the best ways to get good at something is to help others learn. Making someone’s life better with your new skill is also an amazing way to get satisfaction out of what you do, to love what you do. Help as many people as you can in any way possible — it will pay off.
9. Find your voice. Eventually, as you master your skill, you will learn that you are different than the thousands of others doing it. You will find your uniqueness. It’s not necessarily there at first, because you might not have the technical skills to express yourself. But eventually, find that voice. Find the thing that sets you apart, that helps you to stand out from the crowd. Then emphasize that. Read more.
10. How can you be valuable? What can you do that is valuable to others? Sometimes it’s doing something that they really need. Sometimes it’s doing it better than others. Sometimes it’s saving people time, or money. Other times it’s just making their lives better, brighter, pleasanter in some way.
11. Become an expert. If you get good at something, and help others, and find a voice, and become valuable — you’ll become an expert at what you do. Others will turn to you for advice. Help them. Read more.
12. Sell your own stuff. I’ve found that the best way to make a revenue, by far, is by selling your own stuff. I’ve tried ads and affiliate links, and while I have nothing against those things, the thing that works best for me is selling my own stuff. I’ve already proven to my audience that I’m valuable and honest and trustworthy, and so they are much more likely to want something that I’ve created than something I recommend made by others. So create something valuable that will help others, and sell it.
13. Don’t be a jerk. Too many people online are so worried about maximizing subscriber numbers or pageviews that they do things that are disrespectful to their readers. Asking me to click “Next Page” five times to read your article? Jerk move. Having a pop-up asking me to subscribe before I’ve even read the article I came to read? Jerk move. Screaming at me to “Like” your page on Facebook, when I could decide that on my own without being asked if the article was really good? Jerk move. Learn to feel what is respectful, and what’s a jerk move.
14. Don’t let numbers rule you. Numbers are arbitrary and basically worthless. How many readers do you have? No one really knows, and in the end the number of readers doesn’t matter as much as things like: how much do they care about your articles, how much have you helped them, how much do they trust you, how excited are they? Pageviews don’t matter, neither do Facebook fans or Twitter followers or the number of people on your mailing list. Instead of worrying about numbers, pour yourself into your work, make yourself incredibly valuable, help people as much as possible, love what you do. The numbers will come as a side effect.
15. It’s the doing and loving that matters. Many people focus on growing, or hitting goals, or making money, but they forget what matters. What matters most is loving what you do. If you love it, and you’re doing it, you’ve already succeeded. Don’t worry so much about achieving certain levels of success — people push themselves so hard to reach those things that they forget to enjoy what they’re doing, and in the process they lose the reason they’re doing it in the first place.
16. Dream bigger. Once you’ve overcome the initial fear and started to become good at something you love, dream bigger. The first stage is small steps, but don’t stop there. You can change lives. You can change the world. Doing so will change you.

‘A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.’ ~Lao Tzu

Post written by Leo Babauta.

There is something about my mind, and many people’s minds, that is overly optimistic.

We think we can do so much each day, and so we overplan. We fill our plans with so much, confident we can do it all, ignoring the evidence of the past when most plans didn’t get done and most things didn’t get crossed off as hoped.

We believe that, sure, we might have failed to meet our expectations in the past, but this time will be different! This time, we will do better. This time, we will be disciplined and productive and get more done.

Yes, that’s an excellent plan. Let me know how that works out.

Hint: It never works out for me. I’ll give you a good recent example.

What I Learned on Vacation

As I said last week, my family and I recently went on a short vacation to sunny and sublime San Diego for four days. As usual, I had lots of goals and expectations (I can’t seem to help it):

• I bought a book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) and planned to finish it in just over 4 days of vacation — which meant about 150 pages per day. No problem!
• I brought a yoga DVD, planning on doing yoga every morning as the kids slept in.
• I thought I could do some beach running every morning too, as we were staying a block from the beach.
• I had lots of work I thought I could get done too.
• And of course, we were going to walk around and explore San Diego all day, hang out at the beach for hours, and eat at lots of restaurants.

Guess how much of that got done? I did read a fair amount, but only about half the book. I didn’t even open the plastic wrapping on the yoga DVDs. I did almost no work. I ran for maybe 10 minutes at the beach once. We did a lot of walking and exploring and eating, and hung out at the beach a fair amount, but little else.

I overplanned. I was overly optimistic. I had lots of goals and expectations.

Yes, I’ve been mostly going without goals for awhile now, but I slip into my old habits frequently.

Not Overplanning in Real Life

Sure, many experienced travelers know that I made a basic traveling mistake — overplanning is common among travelers, and the best of us plan very little on most trips. I know this, and usually follow that advice. I guess the plans above were subconscious plans and goals that my mind was making without me really trying. It was only during the middle of the trip that I realized I’d had high expectations of myself for the trip, and had set goals without realizing it.

But here’s the thing: travelers know we should travel without goals and too many plans … but what about in the rest of our lives?

Most people who travel with few plans and goals ignore this wisdom in regular, daily life.

In our daily personal and work lives, we overload ourselves and overplan. We are overly optimistic about what we can do, despite past evidence. We set too many goals and have too high expectations.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my vacation (and the last couple years) that can help with overplanning and goal setting in our daily lives:

1. Leave plans to a minimum. That’s not to say you won’t do anything, but plan as little as possible — most of what you might plan won’t get done anyway. Why create a fiction? Leave wide open blocks with few scheduled appointments when possible.
2. Learn to act fluidly. If your day is mostly wide open, how do you fill it? Flexibly. You don’t have plans or goals, but know how to pick your priorities fluidly, in the moment. At this moment, what is the thing you’re most excited about? What is the most important thing you can do? What can you do that will change your life the most? This is a skill that you learn by practice, but planning ahead what you should do makes no sense when the landscape is changing constantly.
3. We are not walking a path, but surfing a sea. Most people look at goal setting as picking a destination, then figuring out a path to get there. That assumes you’re walking on land that will change very little, and that while you will have unforeseen obstacles, you’ll be on stable ground and the destination won’t move. That’s not at all true — life is more like the sea, ever changing with no fixed paths or destinations, with swells and currents and waves that change everything at every moment. The ultimate skill, then, isn’t setting a destination (goal) or a path (plan), but surfing. In surfing, you take whatever waves come, learn to judge the waves as they come, learn to ride the wave as it changes, not as you planned. It’s going with the flow (literally), and changing what you do depending on how the flow changes.
4. Your plans might fall apart, but life will be greater for it. While nothing went as I’d apparently hoped it would on our trip, I was completely happy. We still filled our days with exploring and trying new things and play, and living in the moment meant I didn’t care that I didn’t get the work done or do the yoga or accomplish the massive amounts of reading I’d hoped. Life changes things, and it’s when we cling to our goals and plans that we are unhappy or stressed — when we learn to surf the wave as it comes, we can be very happy, no matter what comes.

I have to confess: I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. Until this year.

It’s always been something that I’ve wanted to do regularly, and over the years I’ve started journals in many different forms. I have bits of journals in several notebooks and in several computer files, but while they’re interesting, they’re more a testament to my failure to keep a journal going for very long.

But this year has been different. I started a journal on January 3, 2012 and have an entry for just about every day since then — nearly 3 months might not seem like a lot to you, but it’s about six times what I’ve ever done before, and at this point I have confidence that I’ll keep it going for at least a few more months.

What has changed? I instituted a few “tricks” to keep the journaling simple, easy, and sustainable.

My Journal Rules

I wanted to make sure the journaling was as easy as possible, so I have no excuses. So I instituted a few rules that have worked very well for me:

1. Only write a few bullet points. I don’t write full sentences — just a bullet point for interesting or important things that happened each day. I only have to write 2-3, though sometimes I write 5-6 if I did a lot. I mix personal and work stuff together. By keeping each day’s entry short and simple, I make it so easy to journal that there are no excuses — it only takes a few minutes!

2. Keep my notebook where I won’t miss it. I put my notebook where I have coffee in the morning. I’ve been using an old Moleskine that I found in my closet that I’d started using as a journal in 2008, on my trip with Eva to Thailand. It really doesn’t matter what kind of notebook you use, but I’ve found a physical notebook is best because on the computer, I’ll tend to forget or be distracted by other computer tasks (damn the Internet!). When I see the notebook as I sit down to drink coffee, I remember to journal. Btw, one of the lapses in my current journal came when I changed my morning routine and started drinking coffee on the couch instead of at my desk — my journal stayed on the desk and I forgot to journal for more than a week. I had to fill it in later, which wasn’t easy. Which brings me to my next rule.

3. Don’t miss more than 2 days of journaling. I missed almost two weeks once, as I just mentioned … and later when I had to fill in back entries, I had a hard time remembering what I’d did. I had a couple other lapses like this, usually because visitors change up my routine, and I’ve found that looking in my calendar and emails helps jog my memory so I can get most of the main things into the journal. But it’s far better to journal the day after the events happen, when things are still fresh. I’ve found that two days later is also fine, but at three days, you start to mix up the previous few days and forget some things. So if I don’t journal every day, I will make sure not to miss more than a day or two.

That’s it. Those three rules work very well for me, and have helped me keep a journal for the last several months.

Bonus Tips

And here are a few more tips (some were said in the paragraphs above as well):

• Physical notebooks are better than computer journals, as you tend to forget computer programs or get distracted by the Internet. I also like the physical act of writing pen on paper, which I do far too little these days. That said, if you prefer a computer journal, keep it simple. I like text files rather than a dedicated journal program, because text files are pretty much forever, while other data formats can become obsolete if the journal program gets discontinued.
• What physical notebook you use doesn’t matter. I use a pocket Moleskine notebook witha  soft cover. I use a hard cover pocket Moleskine for my workout log, which I’ve been using since last year so I can see my progress. Those are my only two notebooks. I’ve used other notebooks too, and they work well. I like the pocket notebooks because they’re easy to carry around if I want to journal on the train (which I don’t do often) and don’t take up much space on the table next to where I drink coffee.
• Journal before you get on the computer in the morning. Recap your previous day. If you start on the computer, I’ve learned, you’ll forget about the journaling. Don’t put it off!
• If you forget to journal for a few days, use your calendar and the emails you sent as reminders for what you did.
• Remember, keep it short! Just a few bullet points of the main things you did. Here are my bullet points for Wed. Mar. 21, 2012 for example: 1. gym – end of week 6; 2. drafted ZH post on 3-step happiness algorithm; 3. wrote mnmlist post on being OK with things as they are; 4. bought groceries, gifts, decorations for Noelle & Chloe’s birthday party.
• I like that I can look back and see what the highlights are of each day — this helps me to know if I’ve been focusing on important stuff, or frittering my days away.

I highly recommend keeping a journal. It takes minutes a day, and looking back on your life is something that seems deeply satisfying.

Once upon a time, there was a farmer. This farmer lived in a different age than his forefathers, who were also farmers.

Instead of specializing in tomatoes or cotton as his ancestors had done, our farmer was gifted with the ability to decide every day what to plant and nurture. By the time the next day rolled around, the previous day’s crops were ready for harvest. (In these fields, crops grew very fast.)

While making decisions about his daily planting priorities, the farmer also thought about the meaning of life. Was the purpose of his existence all about ears of corn and bushels of strawberries? No, of course not. The farmer knew he wanted something more than the tasks he worked on while the sun was coming up.

The farmer also knew that in some areas of his life, he wanted to slow down and breathe easy. He did that already, reading Zen Habits every day on his mobile device while plowing the fields. He did not check email until the sun reached high noon, and he maintained few possessions that did not bring joy to his life or regular maintenance for his tractor.

The farmer was in good health, had a loving family, and kept up a routine of picking through carrots and alfalfa each week.

But the farmer knew that this routine was not enough. Deep inside his soul, the farmer wanted a challenge.

The farmer decided he should set out to build something that would improve the state of the world. But what would it be?

At first he was perplexed. “I’m just a farmer,” he thought. But then, as he was bringing in a bumper crop of sweet potatoes one afternoon, he began to understand that there was much more he could offer the world than the vegetables he harvested during his day job.

Once he started to think in this new way, the ideas kept coming. Should he begin a community tractor pull, bringing together the neighbors for a friendly competition? Write a highly-trafficked blog on cotton pesticides (“7 Simple Ways to Keep Production High”)? Distribute his excess starter crops to an enterprising young farmer in a land far away?

He wasn’t exactly sure which project he would choose, and he knew he might change his mind later. But in determining to begin something, the farmer felt a surge of confidence rush over him. The possibilities were as plentiful as the colors in the sunset he viewed each evening from the rocking chair on the porch.

What would the farmer build? How would he ultimately change the world?

As the moon rose over his latest crop and the farmer sat in the chair, he thought about the possibilities and said to himself, “I’m ready.” And then the farmer got off his porch and went to work.

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non-Conformity blog and bestselling book. You can download his new manifesto on creating a legacy project, The Tower, for free.

I never thought I would laugh at how busy I used to be. I was serious about my ability to be superwoman. I could work 40+ hours a week, raise a child, volunteer when anyone asked, exercise, travel, cook, and clean. I could do it all, and then some.

Everyone was doing it all, so I did too. I didn’t want to do it all. Doing it all made me exhausted. Doing it all cost me friendships. Doing it all cost me my health. My busyness wasn’t even a little bit silly.

Becoming less busy was not an accident, but a decision I made on purpose. I made the decision that a busy life wasn’t a life for me. Being a good person, loving wife, mother and friend…that was the life I wanted. Next to that, I wanted the freedom to do things that made my heart sing instead of things that weighed me down.

Until I intentionally left a life of chronic busyness, I couldn’t see how silly it really was. The silliness of busyness is that sometimes you are so busy, you can’t recognize you are in trouble. You are so overwhelmed that you can’t figure out how to change. You are so used to being busy that you create more work to make your life even busier.

You may be lost in the silliness of busyness if…

• Your usual response to “how are you?” is “so busy”, “crazy busy” or “busy but good”
• You spend time worrying about how busy you are going to be tomorrow
• You get angry when your spouse or friends aren’t as busy as you
• Your busy life keeps you up at night thinking about everything you didn’t get done
• You make a point of letting people know that you stay at the office after hours
• You check email several times a day
• You zone out during conversations thinking about everything you have to do
• You volunteer for things you don’t care about
• You spend time complaining about how busy you are
• You make list after list to make sure you don’t forget anything during your busy day
• You allocate time each day to clean your desk or organize your stuff
• You regularly eat in your car
• You use a phone in the car because “it’s the only time you have to talk”

If you are anything like me, you are busy because you want to be or because you don’t know how to be un-busy. You are busy out of misdirected guilt because you think if you do enough, you will be enough. When you decide that it is ok to live life your way, you can stop being busy and start doing things that matter. You can talk about your meaningful day instead of ranting about your busy schedule. Decide today that you are enough, even if you never do anything, accomplish anything or produce anything ever again. You are enough.

How to be less busy

• be unproductive on purpose
• only check email 2X per day
• delete email and toss mail that you don’t need to read
• turn your phone and computer off when you aren’t working
• turn everything off in the car (except the car)
• put your ipad down
• read The Power of Less
• help someone
• do less, be more
• stop trying to keep up, measure up or catch up

While you may think that you are making sacrifices for others by being busy, you are likely sacrificing the same relationships you think you are saving. Get real, make time and consider what is most important to you. Then do that first. The rest can wait.

Courtney Carver is the author of Simple Ways to Be More with Less. Read more from Courtney at her blog, Be More with Less, or follow her on twitter.

Your first thought as you look at this article will be, “I’ll read this later.”

But don’t. Let the urge to switch to a new task pass. Read this now.

It’ll take you two minutes. It’ll save you countless hours.

I’ve written the book on ending procrastination, but I’ve since come up with a very simple technique for beating everyone’s favorite nemesis. It is incredibly easy, but as with anything, it takes a little practice.

Try it now:

Identify the most important thing you have to do today.

Decide to do just the first little part of it — just the first minute, or even 30 seconds of it. Getting started is the only thing in the world that matters.

Clear away distractions. Turn everything off. Close all programs. There should just be you, and your task.

Sit there, and focus on getting started. Not doing the whole task, just starting.

Pay attention to your mind, as it starts to have urges to switch to another task. You will have urges to check email or Facebook or Twitter or your favorite website. You will want to play a game or make a call or do another task. Notice these urges.

But don’t move. Notice the urges, but sit still, and let them pass. Urges build up in intensity, then pass, like a wave. Let each one pass.

Notice also your mind trying to justify not doing the task. Also let these self-rationalizing thoughts pass.

Now just take one small action to get started. As tiny a step as possible.

Get started, and the rest will flow.

A little while back I ran into a friend, Susan O’Connell (Zen Master and Vice President of the San Francisco Zen Center), and she did something old fashioned.

When I said we should have tea sometime, she immediately went to her bag and got out her paper calendar, and suggested we make a date right then.

I said, “No, you’re busy, we can set a date later.”

She said she tries to only deal with something once.

It’s an old-fashioned piece of productivity advice, and something that I’ve done in the past, but it works.

Deal with something once. Do it now. Then it’s off your mind, and you can fully focus on the next matter.

Do most of us do this? We might read a bunch of emails, and say, “I’ll reply to those later. I’ll decide later.” We might see a bill or other piece of mail, and put it aside for later.

We put off small decisions and tasks for later, and they pile up, weighing on us at the back of our minds, pulling on us until we collapse under the weight of “later”.

Try dealing with it immediately.

If you open an email, make a decision on it immediately. Schedule the appointment in your calendar, reply, do a small task it requires, or if it takes too long, then you can put it on a to-do list — but avoid this if possible. David Allen suggests a two-minute rule: if the task can be done in less than two minutes, do it now. I suggest five minutes, even up to 10, as that means you have one less thing to worry about.

At any rate, archive the email once you’ve dealt with it, or delete it. You’re done with that. Move to the next, and repeat.

This applies to everything else: mail, paperwork, phone calls, requests from others. Deal with them immediately, or schedule a date to deal with it later if necessary.

When you are finished using something, put it away immediately and avoid a mess later. This is also how I keep clutter at bay. When you’re cooking, wash the items as you go to avoid a huge kitchen mess.

When your child asks for attention, give it to her now.

When your wife starts talking to you, put away the laptop, iPad or mobile device, and talk to her now.

What this means is that you deal with each thing in the moment, and then move to the next. Your mind isn’t pulled in a million directions at once.

It’s contrary to advice I’ve given before, because what it sometimes means is that you are often moving at the whim of other people’s requests — what they think is important, not you. And this can be a problem. You don’t want to just be reactive. I prefer to do what I think is important.

But a balance can be struck. When you deal with email or other types of communication, do it now. When you decide to work on something important, clear everything else, shut down communication, and just focus on that one important task. Don’t bounce around.

I’ve been doing this, mostly, ever since Susan reminded me of this little productivity trick, and it works beautifully. I’m not perfect — there are a couple tasks I’ve been putting off, mostly because I don’t have the ability to do them immediately, but for the majority of things I’ve been pretty good at dealing with things now.

Try it, and practice throughout your day, and let me know how it works for you.

For the past three weeks I’ve been standing while I work, instead of my usual sitting. I have some interesting results to share with you in a moment, but first let me tell you why I’ve been doing all this standing.

It all started after a couple of tweets came across my radar in the same day about the negative health effects of sitting. It turns out that sitting all day every day for work might not be good for your health and wellness. Who would have thought?

The studies and experiments I found really caught my attention, partly because I’ve been sitting through 40- to 60-hour work weeks every week for the better part of 15 years. Now that I’m in my mid-30s, I’m starting to really consider my current health and habits and trying to do a better job of giving myself the best shot at living a long and active life.

Here’s the evidence about what sitting can do to you:

• Multiple medical studies (like this one in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise and this one in the American Journal of Epidemiology) have shown that sitting greatly increases the rate of all-cause mortality, especially from causes including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. In particular, that first study showed that people who sit for most of the day are 54 percent more likely to die of heart attacks.
• Even if you exercise, the longer you sit the greater the chances you will die.
• Sitting shuts down the circulation of a fat-absorbing enzyme called lipase. In another study, scientists found that standing up engages muscles and promotes the distribution of lipase, which prompts the body to process fat and cholesterol, independent of the amount of time spent exercising.

It turns out that some of these studies of how sitting down can negatively affect your health have been around for a while. I seem to remember hearing about them a couple of years ago, but brushed it all off, thinking that my modest exercise regimen was counteracting all the sitting.

These studies seem to show the opposite. No matter if you exercise, sitting too much is dangerous to your health.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. Too much sitting may kill you, but what about too much standing?

A review of 43 studies by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found only a weak correlation between sitting and mortality.

In a Time Magazine report, a researcher on Ergonomics from Cornell noted that “Standing to work has long known to be problematic, it is more tiring, it dramatically increases the risks of carotid atherosclerosis (ninefold) because of the additional load on the circulatory system, and it also increases the risks of varicose veins, so standing all day is unhealthy.”

OK, so it may be a little more complicated than just sitting vs. standing. As always, personally I’m going to assume that too much of either is probably a bad thing.

Given that I was sitting through 100% of my work day, and probably 85% of my total day, after reading all these studies I decided to try doing a lot more standing.

About three weeks ago I rustled up some boxes from around the house, put the boxes on my desk, perched my laptop on top of the boxes and pushed my chair out of the way. I’ve since been standing up for the majority of my work day for the past few weeks.

There are also purpose-built desks you can buy to set up a standing (or even treadmill arrangement), but I’m happy now with my boxes at a height where my arms bend at about 90 degrees while typing.

At first the standing was rather uncomfortable. During the first few days I could only get through a couple of hours at a time before taking a sitting break. Now I can stand most of the day if I decide to, with little breaks to walk around every hour or two.

There’s no question, standing takes more energy and tends to make you sore compared to sitting. For a little foot cushion I’ve folded up a yoga mat and have been standing on that, which is more comfortable for me than just standing on the hard wood floors.

So far, my standing desk experiment has had several positive outcomes, with just a few slight negatives. Here are my results:

• This is the most exciting and useful benefit so far: I have more energy during the work day. I haven’t experienced the same mid-afternoon lulls that I used to while sitting. I’m also more energized during phone calls, Skype sessions and while recording video and audio. This is a huge benefit and adds to the energy gains I found after quitting my coffee habit last year.
• I have lost three pounds over the past three weeks, despite exercising less than usual (due to a cold) and making no changes to my diet. I’m not sure if this is directly related to standing, but keep in mind that an average person will burn 60 more calories an hour when standing versus sitting. That’s 2,400 extra calories a week if you add 8 hours of standing, 5 days a week. A pound of body fat equals about 3,500 calories, so the weight loss actually makes sense.
• I’m more likely to be working while in front of my laptop as opposed to the occasional stretches of sitting like a zombie I used to fall prey to. It’s harder to nod off or lose focus when standing.
• On the slightly negative side, I definitely feel fatigued in the legs and back after a long day of standing. On the other hand, it feels great when I do sit down, I don’t have that numb in the rear end and legs feeling anymore, and I can stand without fatigue much longer when at concerts and other standing events.

In all, I’m really happy to have made the change and recommend that people try standing at least a little bit throughout the day. The increased energy and focus is worth the effort, even if the long-term health benefits don’t turn out to be so major.

If you give standing a try, remember that you’ll need to ease into it for about a week before standing becomes more comfortable. Reach out on Twitter and tell me (@CorbettBarr) or Leo (@zen_habits) about your results.

Read more about sitting (and standing) and the associated health implications:

• The Dangers of Sitting at Work — and Standing (Time Magazine)
• Infographic: Sitting is Killing You (Medical Billing and Coding)
• Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk (Smarterware)
• Prolonged Sitting Boosts Bad Health (WebMD)
• Sitting is not bad for you (i-thought.org)

Corbett Barr writes about lifestyle businesses at CorbettBarr.com and about how to get more visitors for your website or blog at Think Traffic. Follow him on Twitter.

Imagine getting a full day’s work done by noon. Sounds impossible, right? But it really shouldn’t be. If you eliminated all the time you spend procrastinating, distracted or stalled, getting a full day of work done by noon could be realized.

But being so productive is easier said than done. Most productivity advice comes in one of two flavors. Either slogans like, “Do it now!” which rarely work long-term, or complex systems like GTD, which work well, but require dozens of lists and obsessive dedication to pull off.

I want to share with you a third alternative. An approach that uses the psychology of procrastination to keep you focused while being simple enough that it needs little effort to maintain.

The Psychology of Procrastination

Before I explain the cure, let’s look at the illness. Everybody procrastinates. But if you ask why, most people will shrug and say something about lacking self-discipline or motivation.

Maybe that’s true in some cases. But for most people, I wouldn’t blame laziness or apathy. Instead, I want to suggest some non-obvious causes of procrastination that I’ve found create the biggest problems.

Procrastination Cause #1: Not Knowing When to Stop

Procrastination isn’t mostly about knowing when to start. It’s about knowing when to stop.

At first, this doesn’t make much sense. You need to begin in order to finish, and if you began, you would no longer be procrastinating. But this logic is misleading.

A big cause of procrastination is fear of the infinite to-do list. This is the underlying stress that comes from feeling that there is too much work ahead, and so any effort won’t make much of a dent in the short term.

You can short-circuit this stress by having a clearly defined end-point for your work. With a finish line in sight, it is much easier to summon up the energy to sprint ahead and cross it.

Procrastination Cause #2: Measuring Work in Hours, Not Tasks

Measuring work by hours spent, not tasks accomplished, is an accounting simplification from the industrial age. If you work in a creative or knowledge-based field, work completed matters infinitely more than raw hours invested.

The saying, “what is measured, improves,” applies. When you measure your work by the hours spent, you don’t invest the same energy and focus that you would if you measured by tasks finished.

Even if your job forces you to work on the clock, you can use your personal productivity system to get more done. Switching to a task-based system allows you to focus on work finished, not hours wasted.

Procrastination Cause #3: Using Time-Management

One book changed my life. It was a relatively unheard-of title, The Power of Full Engagement. In it, the authors show why time management is a lousy way to get work done. Instead, they suggest an alternative: energy management.

The basic concept is that your energy, not time, is what matters when getting work done. It only takes a casual observation to realize this is true. With a lot of focus and enthusiasm you can often get done triple the work in the same period of time. Whereas, working a 16-hour day instead of an 8-hour one is just a recipe for burnout.

From this perspective, procrastination isn’t always a character defect; it often happens because you’re exhausted. If you manage your work in bursts of extreme productivity followed by energy recovery, you’ll perform better.

The Really Simple Productivity System

Taking these three principles: know when to stop; tasks, not time; and energy management, I’ve managed to build an extremely simple system for getting work done.

When I first started using this approach, my productivity doubled. Before I adjusted to my new level of productivity, I quite often finished a formerly full day’s work before noon. Now I’ve been using it for over three years without difficulties, and I’ll share it with you here.

The system breaks down to just three rules:

1. At the end of each week, make a new to-do list entitled, “Weekly Goals”. Write everything you want to accomplish in the next seven days.
2. Every night, make a new to-do list entitled, “Daily Goals”. Pull from your weekly list and routine every task you want to finish tomorrow.
3. During your workday, focus only on completing the daily list. Pretend your other work doesn’t exist. When you’ve finished the daily list, you’re done for the day and you’re not allowed to add more work.

Three rules and two to-do lists is such a brainless system it’s easy to miss the psychological power of it.

First, by making your daily goals the entirety of work you can accomplish, you develop a laser focus to get everything done. Knowing you can relax guilt-free after finishing makes you far more motivated to work hard than traditional, infinite to-do list systems.

Second, the weekly goals avoid meta-procrastination, in making deliberately small daily goals lists which miss your important work. This also helps minimize the guilt for relaxing, by knowing you’re on track throughout the week, even if you finish early on one day.

Finally, it’s easy to maintain. Systems such as GTD work well for hyper-organized individuals, but I’m just too disorganized to keep it up. I wanted an approach where I spent time focusing on getting work done, not worrying about all the lists and action item folders I had created.

Can You Use This System in a 9-5 Job?

For students, freelancers, entrepreneurs or employees in a results-only work environment, this system will work as-is. But what if you can’t end your day at 2pm, just because you’ve finished all your daily goals?

First, your employers are paying for you to accomplish work, not just sit at a desk. In Tim Ferriss’ bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, he discusses a lot of negotiation tactics to enable you to work less, provided your productivity increases. It may not work for everyone, but it’s worth considering.

Second, you can modify this approach to subdivide your work into hard and important tasks and easy, less important tasks. Similar to Leo’s own most-important-tasks idea, you can make your daily goals consist of the hard, difficult work you normally find yourself procrastinating on. Then, if you finish early you can do the easier work that typically fills your distractions.

Stress Less, Accomplish More

An unexpected side-effect from starting this system was my stress levels went way down. Because I was no longer feeling guilty about finishing my workday, and I was procrastinating less, a lot of stress vanished.

Simple tools are often the best. This one can be done with a single piece of paper, pencil and three rules. But it encapsulates a lot of the tricks to avoid procrastination that more complex systems possess, without the stress of maintaining them.

Scott Young writes a popular self-improvement blog. If you liked this article, you can join Scott’s free newsletter, Learn Faster, Achieve More, to get your free copy of his rapid learning ebook.