Category Archives: Productivity

Does LeechBlock Lockdown Improve Personal Productivity?

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When working online are you focused on what needs doing most of the time?

Or are interesting amusements catching your attention and leading you astray?

I’ve noticed that I can easily become caught up in exploring various social media tools (e.g. Marketing and Copywriting Forums, LinkedIn, Twitter and more recently, FaceBook) to the exclusion of getting the actual work done.

This is not good and leads to burning the midnight oil in an effort to meet other deadlines.

So, having experienced this unwanted behaviour I’ve decided to up the ante and have technology come to my aid in the form of the LeechBlock plugin for FireFox which I posted about last June in, “The App Between Your Ears“.

leechblock-lockdown

However, this time I’ve not only blocked my access to a list of social media and news sites Monday to Saturday inclusive, but I’ve also made it difficult to change these settings.

That means there’s now an extra step involved if I wanted to “cheat” on my own productivity rules. Of course, I could always remove the LeechBlock plugin and noone would know :-)

What’s stopping me from doing so are two useful allies:

  • My pride in “doing the right thing“. (It’s rather stupid to blog about personal productivity systems if it’s obvious that I’m uncommitted to making them work. Like many people interested in time management that I know of, it’s often a case of two steps forward and one back. But press on, press on…)

  • My “Primitive Guidance System” (For details of the ‘PGS’, see my post about the good people at ‘Habit Change’.)

My PGS ‘knows’ I have the login details for a ton of sites I visit stored within FireFox on this particular computer. (Yes, I do have secure backups of this data.)

Meaning that it’s a right pain in the rear to start accessing my ‘banned sites’ either via another browser such as Internet Explorer or on another computer (I’d need that login list and have to type in the details at login time.)

The path of least resistance would therefore seem to be to continue to use FireFox.

We shall see.

Anyway, I’m just a few weeks into this ‘lockdown’ experiment so too early to conclude one way or the other.

I have noticed some interesting ‘withdrawal’ symptoms when I try to access Twitter or LinkedIn because someone’s sent me a link or I’ve read an entry on a blog post and want to retweet it.

Naughty! Naughty! No retweeting until Sunday… and by that time I forgot about it or thought that most weren’t worthwhile. (I can just hear the gnashing teeth of sundry social media ‘gurus’. Tough titties.)

Now, what was it you were working on again?
Ouch! Put up or shut up time…

How about you?
What systems and programs (beyond ‘willpower’) help you stay on track and commit to what you know needs doing?

- Mark McClure

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Following Through On The App Between Your Ears

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A guy in an online marketing forum was complaining recently that he couldn’t get much done because of the distractions offered by the Internet.

It was seriously affecting his productivity.

I know this one well – having experienced the same while doing ‘research’ for a product or an article. Very easy to get off track.

Some posters were sympathetic to his plight and suggested various solutions such as working offline (disconnect the Net connection) or get an accountability partner.

My advice was to use FireFox LeechBlock to restrict access to particular sites on a time basis. See my Aug 2008 post about “How To Stop Your Life From Leeching Away” here.

Others adopted more of a ‘tough love’ approach and suggested he examine his own motives and behaviours (the app between your ears!) for being lazy.

As a coach I was pleased to see how supportive the ‘sort it out, mate’ posters were – bearing in mind how some forums can turn into vindictive flame fests. Not this one!

YOU AREN’T LAZY – YOU’RE BEING LAZY!

See the difference?

One poster actually made a point of clarifying this so the guy would know people were calling him out on his behaviour – but not as a person.
Real world coaching, if I may say so myself.

Of course there are limits as to how effective mostly anonymous posters on an Internet forum can be.

To give you an idea of what I’m doing with LeechBlock, take a look at these three screenshots:

Here’s what used to happen when I visited a blocked site:

leechblock-twitter

Yes, I restrict Twitter usage until after 9pm Japan time – this means I have a chance to get some writing or coaching done. (Oh to be a media celeb and outsource your Tweets. Hey, for a suitable fee I’d happily ghost-tweet the banalities of the rich and famous NOT!)

I decided to change the blocking screen, so here’s what I now see when visiting a site on my ‘hit list’:

Tokyo-monorail

The key message (for me) is in the symbolism of the text ‘Do You Know Where You’re Going To?‘ along with the image – the Tokyo monorail, the river and the unusual sculpture.

So every time I visit a ‘banned site’, I’ll be denied access AND this image will ‘ping’ my awareness. Pretty powerful, habit-building stuff to support that app between my ears!

The third screenshot is how I configure the ‘soft denial’ list (‘Block Set 2′) of sites. These are sites I can’t visit between the hours of 8am and 9pm Mon- Sat. (Sunday gets a ‘free-pass’ and I allow everything all day long.)

leechblock-config

I have another list of sites (mainly online newspapers and special interest sites) that I ONLY allow access to on Sundays – because they’ve been real time sinks for me.

THE ‘DESIGN FLAW’ IN THE HUMAN MIND…

Of course people have been ‘battling’ procrastination and laziness since time immemorial:

  • Start my 2009 tax prep? Nah, it’s only June…
  • Update my career resume/CV? Heck no, I’m working now…
  • Go for a health check? I feel fine and anyway don’t have time…

Many of us are filled with the best of intentions – goals and resolutions are evidence of that.

So why do we keep sabotaging our own success by not consistently following through?

These two gentlemen might just have a working solution to that conundrum.

Psychologist, Steve Levinson and Peak Performance Educator, Peter Greider, paid attention to nature and came up with an intriguing theory on what they call “an inherent design flaw of the human mind”.

(I don’t think there’s a single solution for all people and all scenarios – but, as Steve and Pete’s work suggests, there’s a lot we can learn from the instinctual habits of animals such as squirrels.)

The idea that ‘Mother Nature’ might hold some of the answers (after all, she’s been around for a while, is highly adaptable and still gainfully busy …) interested me enough to buy their book (Following Through) and an incredibly useful little device called the ‘MotivAider’.

As this is becoming a long post I’ll follow through(!) with a specific post on my ‘habit change’ experiences with the MotivAider and the book in the next post.

- Mark McClure

PS – I realize that for those of you in the corp world it may not be possible to install ‘LeechBlock’ on computers at work. I had the same ‘issue’ in 2006 although, to be frank, you probably shouldn’t be ‘surfing’ on company time anyway! My use of LeechBlock is because I now work at home and am my own boss. No risk of ‘the sack’ if I goof off all day – but no money comes in either, if I’m selling services… Do Your Own Research!

PPS – My use of LeechBlock follows one of the strategies described by Steve and Pete for following through. Can you guess what it is? (2 words)

Hint: W _ _ _ _ _ _ _ R L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ G

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Hire My Husband

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Although Michael Stearns earned an MBA from Georgetown University in 2008, the recession’s dented his attempts to land a Bay Area marketing job.

To stand out from the crowd, he (and/or his wife) have turned to the online world – and put up the site, myhusbandneedsajob.com (Oct 2011 update: link appears to be broken.)

michael-stearns-job

Five Things I like about his site:

  • 1- Simple and easy to navigate

  • 2- Resume and contact info very visible

  • 3- Social media access to Mike via the business site, LinkedIn.com

  • 4- Interesting marketing angle with ‘my husband needs a job..’

  • 5- We see and hear him speak via a YouTube clip.

Mid-career changers can learn a lot from Mike’s use of the Internet to get noticed – and even if you are ‘computing challenged’, you could have a 5 page web site (or blog) online within a week or so by outsourcing the work to someone on elance.com.

This assumes that you are OK with elements of your personal and work life being online for ever more. Not everyone is.

What I’d also recommend in Mike’s situation:

  • Start tweeting about the ups and downs of the job search (he’s a marketer after all!)
  • Make a longer YouTube clip (max 2 mins) – 8 seconds is too short (IMHO)
  • Put out an online press release and offer to speak to the media about his goal anytime, anywhere.

He’s going to catch some flack from the jealous and the ignorant about his wife fronting the show (it’s already started, see the YouTube comments) – but as a good marketer, I imagine he’ll be able to sell the power of getting noticed first, alongside the strong and loving marital story that’s embedded into the site (and the domain name.)

Remember, his first goal is to get noticed among gazillions of other job-searchers and this site can help do that. Once he’s got a potential employer’s attention, a well-written resume will have a chance of getting him the interview.

Good job, Marketer Mike!

- Mark McClure

PS – I emailed Mike today and offered to write him a 400 word press release pro bono. Hey, all successful writers are marketers first! If you’ve a small business (on or offline), weaving a newsworthy story into an element of your company’s vision, purpose or service can reap dividends.

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If At First You Mess Up… Fess up!

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Well, first let’s get my apology out of the way.

If you came here looking for two posts with ‘article writing and ‘samurai writer’ in their respective titles, then sorry, but I’ve deleted them. If you want to read them in their rightful place- go visit my Samurai Writer’s blog. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Mess #1

By mistake, I posted them late last night to this blog and to my new ghostwriting & copywriting blog – as it turns out, an unintended test of whatever duplicate content policies the big ‘G’ search engine might be enforcing haha!

Mess #2

Remember the mid-life moving overseas report I wrote about on Friday? Continue reading →

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LinkedIn Locked and Loaded

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Linkedin-mark-mcclure

I wrote last month about plans to update my LinkedIn profile.

I just spent a couple of hours doing that – following the guidelines laid down by Krishna De.

In addition to a contact-focussed ‘summary’ section, I’ve also added connection request guidelines, my blog’s feed and some Amazon book recommendations – 2 new ‘widget’ apps released by the LinkedIn team.
All seems to be working.

As things currently stand I don’t have a single, specific brand I want to stamp around the virtual world – my emphasis is on mid-career transition.

(Actually, it’s a form of ‘slash’ (/) mid-career transition, made up of coaching / writing / consulting / teaching. If you’re curious, Marci Alboher has a book – One Person / Multiple Careers – which I haven’t yet read but looks very similar to what I am about. BTW, Marci’s describing her current roles as journalist /author/ speaker. I think she was a lawyer before that.)

Since some of my target mid-career coaching prospects are within the LinkedIn universe – and possibly also future ghostwriting and copywriting clients – I consider it worthwhile to display multiple hats there.

Next task is to get some peeps who knew me to write up glowing recommendations, and I’m all set.

- Mark McClure

PS – How the mind works always amazes me. Look at the top of the image in this blog post. Notice anything naughty? ;-) Funny, how I made a Dec 9th blog post titled “Losing My LinkedIn Virginity” and then, almost a month later, I accidentally craft something a tad embarassing on my LI profile ;-) Don’t worry, I’ve fixed the actual Summary text in the real LI profile!!

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