Matt's Idea Blog

I'm working on a roadmap for the Personal Informatics movement (you'll find a quick summary of the emerging field below), which I'll post later this week. In the meantime, as readers of my site (i.e. people who actively improve themselves, either via productivity or more generally) I'm sure many of you are already tracking data about yourselves. I would love to know about what personal data you have coming in, and how you use it. (Well, not too personal ;-) The topic is all categories about the human condition, such as health (diet, sleep, mood, medicine), relationships (friends, family, dating), work (I shared a bunch of productivity ones in Micro-Experiments), finances, parenting, and so on.

Who is going to control your destiny, the "past you" or the "present you?" [1]

Recently I've been drawn to the notion of how our actions are informed by our past, and how they impact our future. I've particularly found it helpful to think of myself as three people: my Past Self, Present Self, and Future Self. I haven't found a solid reference for this from psychology (I'm sure it's out there [2]), but I want to share my thinking, and to get your impressions.

The perspective I'm trying for is that of asking how well we treat them. What if someone could hear your conversations? Would they think you're a saint? A genius? A jerk? Let me give it a shot.

Talking to your Past Self

I can think of three reasons to visit the past: Nostalgia, self-esteem, and insight.

(In a big departure this week I'm going to risk sharing an experience I had a few months ago. I was playing "cut-throat" racquetball [1] for the first time with two friends, and had a Think, Try, Learn breakthrough. I humbly submit my unedited journal entry from this experience. Have you had any similar experiences? Share! -- matt)

A HUGE, formative experience today seeing the methods in action playing the three-man version of racquetball called "cut throat". I had the absolutely best time of my life. I was able to enter the experience with an experimental attitude: "This is an experiment! I'm new to it, I don't know what the game is, how it's played, or any strategy. I am happily ignorant."

These last few weeks have been nutty as I implement my workship plans (see Testing The Classics: A Time Management Experiment: Time Blocking), so I'm going to cheat and share some quick bits I've been collecting on Twitter. Comments?

• Should every performance be an experiment? It depends. If you are beta-testing new ideas, then yes, experimentation is important. It's also risky. However, for mature performances, less experimentation makes sense. But with minimal experimentation comes complacency.
  

Nothing beats project anxiety like a plan. -- me :-)

You know me - I love experimenting on myself almost as much as on you. Or my clients. Kidding aside, I've studied many, many techniques to manage ourselves as we work, and a classic on is time blocking, AKA time mapping (see [1] for more). It's a simple idea: Schedule regular chunks of time with yourself for important tasks. The experiment I've tried for the last few weeks is applying it to three largish projects coming up (higher education workshops) with a relatively short timeline (less than a month). The advantage is it forced me to make steady progress on projects to prevent last minute scrambling, stress, and failure. The result: Worked great!

Following are the details, along with a few rules and caveats when time blocking.

(Updated 2009-06-08 to remove confusing project plan image.)

Planning and estimating

What I like about you,

you hold me tight.

Tell me I'm the only one,

wanna come over tonight

(With apologies to YouTube - The Romantics)

The results are in from the fabulous IdeaMatt survey [1]. A big congratulations to the 12 lucky winners; enjoy your Amazon booty!

At the risk of making sweeping overgeneralizations, I will tell you a bit about yourself based on my sample, and how I plan on changing (or not) as a result. Let me know if this sounds like you.

• What you do: You do all kinds of work [2], in all sizes of organizations, with a correspondingly wide range of responsibilities. I'll continue to keep the ideas I write about generally applicable.
  

I am delighted to announce the first in my series of productivity and living guides, You Did WHAT? 99 Playful experiments to live a healthier and happier life. While there will be plenty of productivity ones coming soon (including a forthcoming one on procrastination), this one popped out first. (As Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art, "But the muse had me. I had to do it.")

This one is my guide to small activities you can easily try that help you be more engaged with your world. Unlike other books on improving your life, our approach uses small observations to foster change naturally through awareness.

Our last ExperimentLab was That's Not MY Garbage. Or Is It? where you picked up someone else's garbage. I'd love to know: How did it go?

(Reminder: There's still time to take my survey and help make this blog work better for you. Not to mention getting to enter to win an Amazon gift certificate :-) Click here to get started. I'd sure appreciate it!

As I continue developing my consulting practice and simultaneously move my Think, Try, Learn (TTL) philosophy ahead, I've seen an important cycle I want to share with you. This comes up because sometimes during projects I'm frustrated when I don't feel like I'm getting traction. Some examples of when this happened/is happening: Writing the TTL book, creating new workshops, building the TTL platform, getting a handle on productivity metrics (see How Do You Measure Personal Productivity?), defining my blog's topics and style, and deciding my consulting market. What was going on?

I'm working to make this blog a better experience for you, and you can help tremendously by taking a quick survey. It'll take about 10 minutes, and at the end you can enter to win one of a dozen $10 USD Amazon gift certificates I'm giving away. I'll leave it open for ten days, so click here to get started!