This belongs on a poster:

Have a powerful reason — when things get difficult, “because it sounds nice” or “to look good” aren’t going to cut it.

Start tiny, with a simple but unbreakable promise to yourself to do one small thing every single day.

Watch your urges, and learn not to act on the whim of a moment.

Listen to your self-rationalizations, and don’t believe their lying ways.

Enjoy the habit, or you won’t stay with it longer than a week’s worth of sunrises.

I’ve quoted the whole post because I thought it was important enough to save you the effort of clicking through.

But you should totally be following zenhabits if you’re not already.

Discomfort

I don’t buy into everything I read on Zen Habits, but this post resonates deeply. Please read the whole thing.

I desperately need to become more comfortable with discomfort.

“Hooked on hacking life”

Seth Godin’s latest post wasn’t quite what I was expecting from the title.

Here’s a snippet:

Striving to get smarter, better and faster helps us create our future. The risk is that merely collecting, trading and discussing the tools turns into the point.

It’s possible that your next frontier isn’t to get more efficient, it’s to get more brave.

(See? It has absolutely nothing to do with compromised computers at Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Twitter.)

My 2012 was pretty overrated, so I’m currently doing more “life-hacking” than usual – ditching some of the things I don’t have time to do, removing friction wherever possible, trying to have more fun, etc. It’s all part of trying to make 2013 a better year.

But, as always, I’m finding it easy to focus on the minutiae of optimising myself rather than on Actually Getting Things Done.

Thanks for the timely post, Seth.

To bravery! #drink

I came across these on this post, via Svbtle. I think they’re awesome.

0. Schedule a start, not an end to your meeting – it’s over when it’s over, even if that’s just 5 minutes.
1. Be on time!
2. No multi-tasking – no device usage unless necessary for the meeting.
3. If you’re not getting anything out of the meeting, leave.
4. Meetings are not for information sharing – that should be done before the meeting via email and/or agenda.
5. Who really needs to be at this meeting?
6. Agree to action items, if any, at the conclusion of the meeting.
7. Don’t feel bad about calling people out on any of the above – it’s the right thing to do.

Seth Godin: “You go first”

Another inspirational post from Seth:

… most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

(Then again, I’m kinda copyediting by merely linking to Seth’s work. Whoops.)

“Semantic Notes”

This is going to help me improve the usefulness of my Evernote account.

A lot.

Long but good.

I guess that’s because they’re all offline. Busy doing Christmas-type things. Ignoring their smartphones. (Or pretending to, for the sake of their mothers.)

I’ve had a fairly quiet Christmas, so here’s my gift to everyone else whose blog reader is depressingly empty:

A completely pointless post.

While I’m here, I’d like to mention how much I’m looking forward to my annual self-audit. I’ll be deciding what to quit, setting goals for 2013, improving my workflows, and generally getting my s*** together.

May your holiday be just as refreshing, reflective and purposeful. Unless you’re not getting a holiday, in which case, well, poor you.