5 Ways to meet a very big goal

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Last week I wrote about how important it is to pick the right goal for yourself so that you are not banging your head against the wall trying to meet an impossible or insignificant goal. I actually think the reason we don’t meet our goals is mostly because the goals suck. But if you have a really important goal that’s right for you, here are some ways to ensure you see the goal to completion:

1. Think about money.
People who get paid to reach their goals are better at reaching them. This is why we typically can meet deadlines for work but not self-imposed deadlines. And that’s why movie stars can stay rail-thin, while the rest of us have a harder time losing weight: A movie star’s livelihood is based on their ability to lose weight.

So if you can think like a movie star, and decide that your livelihood depends on meeting your goal, then you’ll probably meet it.

Here are some mental gymnastics to that end: People who meet one goal can meet more goals because self-discipline is a muscle that gets stronger and stronger. Additionally, most of our career goals depend on self-discipline. So we can all tell ourselves that if we meet our one goal, whatever it is, we will have more successful careers and thereby make a lot more money.

Goal setting tip: Don’t set a goal about money. It has no intrinsic value beyond your basic food and shelter. Set your goals for things that truly will change your life. The money will come from living life like this.

2. State your goals in a way that encourages sticking to them.
You can’t structure that change if you are telling yourself only what NOT to do. My friend, Jay, points out that kids are a good example – they’re much better at “be quiet” than “shut up.” (Which immediately shows me not only why my kids are never quiet, but also that maybe my most important goals should be in the parenting arena.)

If your goal is to stop smoking, the goal is actually to replace that behavior with something else. One recent goal of mine was about not eating bread, but I reframed it so that I eat only foods that make me feel good. You can’t change behavior if you don’t know what to change it to.

Don’t make your goal so broad that you can’t tell on a day to day basis if you’re getting there. For example, I have a goal to keep my marriage together. On a day to day basis, though, my number-one thing is to keep my computer turned off when I’m home with my husband. It takes discipline and I have to plan for it. For example, at 9am I start making sure that no one is going to be waiting for me to respond to them between 6pm and 8pm. This would be easy for some of you, but I have been responding to email during family time for years, so people expect it. I have to retrain myself to retrain them.

Gender tip: Both genders should follow this advice, but for different reasons. Women get grander success when they tell their goals to a friend. But the competitive nature of men makes them very susceptible to specific measures of success, according to research from Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire (via Idealawg).

3. Write the goal down every day, and put the paper on your wall.
Many books extol the idea that if you write your goal down each day, it makes you more committed. I tried it. It works.

One of the reasons this works is that changing our behavior takes intense focus and writing down our goals reminds our brain. Bruce Wexler is a neuroscientist and author of Brain and Culture. He found that children have brains that can easily change, but adults become more hard-wired and changing their behavior requires a more extreme amount of intense focus than we ever imagine.

Writing down your goals will take about a minute a day. Not that long at all. But it’s a good litmus test. If you can’t commit to thinking about the goal regularly, you probably won’t have the focus to change.

Blogger tip: Susan Johnston told me she accomplishes this through her blog, Urban Muse, where she writes about meeting her professional goals for an audience of readers who are also trying to meet similar goals. She says, “The blog keeps me accountable to my goals.” I think this is actually true of a lot of bloggers, especially productivity types.

4. Commit to three weeks
The hardest part of changing behavior is that your brain is addicted to the bad behavior. For example, when you think about the gym, your brain remembers when you didn’t go to the gym and did work instead and your brain gets happy from having the extra time to work. If that’s what you usually do.

If you force yourself to change your behavior for three weeks, your brain will start to develop more dopamine in response to the behavior that you are trying to change to, according to Monika Fleshner, a neuroimmuno-physiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For example, after three weeks, your brain will start to release dopamine when it thinks about going to the gym instead of when it thinks about ditching the gym.

During those three weeks, you need to know, the night before, how you are going to meet your goal the next day. For example, when my goal was to lose my pregnancy weight, I had to organize every day around going to the gym, scheduling the babysitter, and breastfeeding. Each day required a different schedule, but I worked it out the night before.

When I was starting out as a professional writer, I knew I needed to write an hour every day, but it was really hard for me. I used to put it off and put it off and then it wouldn’t happen. Until I realized that I had to schedule every single day around that hour in order for it to happen.

McDonald’s tip: You also have to organize your days around avoiding the dopamine triggers of the behavior you’re trying to avoid. For example, if you don’t want to eat fries, drive three blocks out of your way to avoid your regular McDonald’s. According Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for some people, just seeing the colors red and yellow makes their brain release dopamine in anticipation of McDonald’s. Your issue might not be fries, but most of us have our own version of the red and yellow trigger.

5. Make some new friends to go with your new behavior
People who don’t change their behavior tend to justify it by saying that it’s socially acceptable, according to Cindy Jardine, professor at the University of Alberta who studies public health. This is why, for instance, if you have fat friends you are likely to be fat. So travel in circles where the behavior you want to change is not accepted. And find like-minded people. They will help you to be the person you want to be.

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How to make a New Year’s resolution that you’ll keep

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The way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to pick a good goal and then overhaul your life to in order to meet it. Duh.

But some of you are saying, hold it, my goal isn’t big enough to require an overhaul of my life. Maybe your goal is to, say, clean out your closet. But look, this is not material for a New Year’s resolution. This requires you to cross a day out on your calendar and tell yourself that’s your closet day. Done.

Do you know why most people don’t keep their New Years’ resolutions? Because the resolutions are terrible. The hardest part of a New Year’s resolution is choosing one, not keeping it.

Most resolutions are goals to change our behavior: Stop smoking, stop eating crap, stop being late. This is not a small change. This is a change that requires a massive overhaul of our daily life – hour by hour.

Most of you are saying that you can’t afford to overhaul your whole life to meet your goal. You have a job, you have kids, you have friends who would think you have lost your mind. But you know what? If the goals you set are not worth overhauling your life for, then ask yourself why not?

Pick only one
We can each meet one or two big goals a year. We can’t change a lot of bad behavior – the more resolutions we make the less likely we are to keep them, according to Roy Baumeister, psychologist at Florida State University. But we can change one. Pick the one that’ll mean the most to you. And, you will be pleasantly surprised to find out that changing one habit actually requires so many small changes in your day that you also end up being able to change other habits, because the patterns of your life change.

A goal is creative, not analytic
I think a lot of the time we don’t let ourselves see what we really want. Maybe because it seems too hard to get. Often we don’t let ourselves really see ourselves living the life we want, and I think this is a failure of imagination.

To that end, I love this art exhibit (not safe at work) by Alison Jackson because it is a bunch of photos of scenes I wanted to see but didn’t’ even realize I wanted to see until I saw them. Then I thought, oh, that is so fun to see. It made me realize how much work it is to be really conscious what I would really want. It takes a great imagination.

A worthy goal means you can imagine life after meeting the goal
Jim Fannin makes a living teaching people how to imagine themselves doing behavior they want. (My interview with him is one of my favorite lessons in goal setting, ever.) Fannin says it’s nearly impossible to meet a goal if you do not know what you’d look like meeting it.

He takes this to the extreme and has his clients (many major league baseball players) play movies of themselves in their heads – movies of them meeting their goals. It’s a good test for you. If you can’t imagine in your head the moment when your meet your goal, then it’s probably not a good goal.

If you can’t meet the goal, consider that it’s not you, it’s the goal
I spend a lot of times trying things out to help me find my core goals. I am a big fan of writing things down to understand oneself. After all, that’s probably why I am a blogger. Sometimes I write lists of things that bug me, and I learn from that. And one year I discovered that writing letters to odd people in my life revealed a core goal.

Even when I have my goal that I’m focused on, I check in with myself frequently to reaffirm that it’s the behavior in my life that is most important to me to change – like renewing one’s vows.

So think very hard before you make a New Year’s resolution. Because setting your goal is much harder than meeting it.

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How to decide if your commute is too long

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The average daily commute in the U.S. is about 25 minutes. The shortest average daily commute is about 15 minutes for people living in Midwest cities like Witchita, Omaha, and Tulsa. New Yorkers have the longest commute — 38 minutes, which is six minutes longer than the average commute time in Chicago. The average commute is increasing across the board, including the number of people who have extreme commutes – 90 minutes or more.

A lot of people try to justify their outrageously long commute. I think this is delusional, and I would know, because I used to have one: Two hours each way between Los Angeles and San Diego. Two hours, that is, if I left home at 5 a.m. and went home at 8 p.m. I thought it would be okay because the money was so good, but actually, I nearly lost my mind.

So think twice about accepting an outrageous commute in order to make outrageous amounts of money. Especially if your extreme commute means that the time outside of work for family and friends is gone – to the car ride. Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London published research to show that if you are going to take a job where you will give up seeing family and friends on a regular basis, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being away from those people.

The idea that you move deep into the suburbs to get a huge house is pretty much over. Gen X and Y don’t believe in McMansions, which is why there’s a glut of them on the market right now. But Gen X and Y do believe in maintaining nimble, flexible careers, so it’s surprising that this trend isn’t the nail in the coffin of deep suburbia. Because Brendan, at The Where Blog, points out that the values we hold highest – marriage, community, and extra time with the family – are falling apart in the face of a long commute as we are in our cars commuting for so long and spending days far away from our communities during the day.

And, if the city is too far to justify driving in for a part-time job, then your commute limits the way you can structure your family. For example, polls show most mothers would rather work part-time than be at home full-time with their children, but Wendy Waters points out, in her blog All About Cities, that the possibilities for part-time work are severely limited if home is a long commute from the city. For both spouses.

But even if you are not killing your spouse’s career potential with your choices for a commute, the amount of stress a commute brings on is bigger than you could imagine and it’s uncontainable.

This is because a bad commute is bad in a different way every day, and you can’t predict it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains (video) that the human mind is great at adapting to things that won’t change: we convince ourselves we will be fine, and then it becomes basically true that we will be. But if things change all the time, we cannot use that adaptive part of our brain. In this way, having a bad commute is worse than losing a limb.

So if you have a bad commute, you are probably not very happy. And you should know that a bad commute spills over into all aspects of your life. Raymond Novaco, a psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that bad traffic on the way home makes for a bad mood in the evening. This is true regardless of age, gender, income, and job satisfaction.

A lot of managing your daily commute comes down to making compromises in terms of limiting where you can take a job, what kind of job you can take, and how big a yard your kids can have to run in. For most of us, a long commute is about getting a better job in exchange for less personal time. But the decision about how far to commute is like most career decision points in that you must consider that your biggest problems will not be solved by getting a better job or more money, they will be solved by spending more time with friends and family, or getting to know yourself better.

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How to figure out which tasks you can ignore

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This week is the one-year anniversary of the week that I became so overwhelmed with my workload that I started to act like a crazy person.

It happened slowly at first. I was taking care of my kids half-time and writing my syndicated column half-time.

Then I added my Boston Globe column, which required reporting. I had no idea how to be a reporter, so I did way more work that I needed to, trying to find my way.

Then I added my blog. I found that I could handle it by getting a little more honest with myself and cutting out all the time-wasters of my life, like phone calls I didn’t want, magazines that added no value, and household chores that we could pay someone to do.

Then my blog traffic doubled and I started publicity for my book and it was no longer an issue of time management. I was totally overwhelmed. That’s when I started to do a few crazy things:

1. I stopped sleeping. For some reason, I was able to go for about three months on three hours of sleep a night and tons of caffeine during the day.

2. I stopped changing clothes regularly. If you know you are not really going to sleep, you don’t bother putting on pajamas. And once you get up after so little sleep, you are too tired to think about a new outfit.

3. I stopped thinking about the future. I had clear plans outlined for my book publicity, but other than that, I had to churn out a column three times a week, and blog posts the other days of the week, and I was thinking only about sixteen hours ahead of myself at any given time.

I think I might have gone on like that for more than three months, but I realized I was not being a good parent. I didn’t sign up for indoor soccer in time. I didn’t know which babysitter was showing up when and often told the kids the wrong thing. And I had no patience for the kids when they did regular kid things, like fill their boots with snow.

So I went to bed. And I changed clothes. And I signed up for soccer. And I even drove my son there and watched him play.

I found the time I needed by deciding which parts of my job to stop doing.

I remember reading that the job of a CEO is to know what to blow off. That makes sense to me. I already had a sense of how to ignore details. I had been practicing that for a while, and though I sometimes got into trouble with it – like when I misquoted my brother -I am mostly good at it. But I had to take things farther.

Here are examples of essential things I ignored in the last year:

1. I ignored search engine optimization for my blog. I stopped looking at how many people came to my blog from Google searches because it’s a very low number and it upsets me.

2. I squandered an invitation from Guy Kawasaki. He offered me the opportunity to write a test on his blog about how to tell if you are a good job hunter. What a great opportunity, right? That was so nice of him. And he even gave me suggestions on how to do it. I never did it.

3. People asked to see videos of me speaking, but since I hadn’t actually launched a speaking career yet, I didn’t have a video. I didn’t make one.

Those three things could easily have been twenty. But what I want you to know is that it was okay. Nothing terrible happened. Maybe Guy Kawasaki would have been my best friend if I had pulled together a test, but he did write about me anyway. And maybe my speaking fee would be $25,000 per speech if I had gone to Hollywood and really outdid myself on a video. But really, I have tons of speaking gigs right now anyway. And my search engine optimization sucks. Still. But I finally have time to deal with SEO now.

I have spent a year learning what I can ignore and what I can’t. And I have learned that I when it comes to work, I can ignore just about anything.

Because what you ignore changes your job, but it doesn’t undermine your job. You define what your job by what you focus on. If we focus on everything, our job is nothing. I dumped things that are essential to some jobs. But just by virtue of the fact that I dumped a task, I declared it nonessential to my job. When you have too much on your plate, and everything seems essential, decide on a job change. Right there.

You don’t need to job hop in order to change jobs. You don’t need permission. You can just change the emphasis on your to do list, and thus decide what you want your job to be about. You will be surprised at how many things are on your list because you decided they were important, and not someone else. Which means, of course, that you can dump them.

And in this way, I redefine my job every day, by how I will spend my time. And I like that. Because I am sleeping well and eating well and being both the mom and the writer I want to be. For the most part. Which is probably all we can ask for.

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7 Ways to be a better delegator

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We all know that we need to be good at delegating in order to have any traction in our careers. We need to be able to learn how to do something and then teach someone else how to do it, so that we can move on and learn how to do something new. This is as true for creative people as it is for management types.

Yet even though we know this, most of us have trouble actually doing it. Many people think they’re the exception to the rule — that delegating is important, but in their very unique, particular case, it’s impossible.

Newsflash: It’s never impossible to delegate — it’s all in the mind of the delegator. Here are seven ways to get started on the road to all-star delegation:

1. Get over your perfectionist streak.
The key to delegating is recognizing that your ability to do things perfectly isn’t as highly valued as you think it is. In fact, perfectionism isn’t valuable in 80 percent of the work we do.

If you think you’re the exception to this rule — which all perfectionists do — consider that perfectionism is so unhealthy that it’s a risk factor for depression. This should make delegating come easier.

2. Decide what’s most important.
In order to figure out what to delegate, you need to figure out what’s most important to your career. This means you need to know what your specialty is, what you’re known for in the office, and what your unique value is to the company. Anything that falls outside this isn’t that important to you.

Once you understand this, delegating most things will be easier. They’re nonessential to your career, so it’s OK if you don’t leave your particular mark on them.

3. Focus on helping people grow.
Your job is to help make people stars. Management is essentially an act of constant giving and constant patience. It entails giving people a little attention all the time instead of giving them lots of attention only when they mess up. In fact, if you’re managing people effectively they don’t mess up, because you play to their strengths and teach them how to move around their weaknesses.

Hands-off management isn’t respectful — it’s negligent. People want mentoring and guidance from their manager. If you give that in a way that helps them grow while also treating them with respect, they’ll love having you around. And when your direct reports love having you around, they do their best work for you out of loyalty. Even younger workers — those notorious job-hoppers — are loyal to respectful, hands-on managers.

4. Give away your most interesting work.
If you think you’re going to be able to dump your most mundane assignments onto the people who report to you, think again. After all, your job as a manager is to help people grow, so you’re not actually doing your job if you’re asking them to copy and collate all day long.

So consider keeping the grunt work for yourself sometimes. Your direct reports will appreciate it, and it’ll probably give you more empathy in general since you’ll have an idea of how soul-crushing mindless work can be.

The real upside to this, though, is that the people you delegate to stay more engaged in the work they’re doing. So if you pitch in on the small, stupid tasks, you get good results on the large, important ones.

5. Blame yourself if no one can do a task as well as you.

A lot of people don’t delegate because they’re the only person who can do a particular task. If that’s you, you’re probably deluding yourself.

First off, the task probably isn’t as difficult as you think it is; it’s just that no one would do it exactly the way you do, which is fine. But in addition to that, if no one can do the tasks you do, it’s because you’re hoarding knowledge and making things needlessly complicated.

The solution isn’t complicated, though: Share the knowledge and let someone else give the task a try. You don’t need to be the only person doing it in order to feel important.

6. Take a vacation.

If you’re really having trouble delegating, go on vacation for a couple of weeks. When you get back, find who did which parts of your job while you were gone. Then distribute those parts permanently.

If someone didn’t do a good job of it while you were away, it’s not evidence that you shouldn’t delegate. It’s evidence that you need to help the person grow into the job.

7. Practice at home.

The last time I moved, it was a big deal — I had to abandon all my stuff and was out of my mind with stress.

I’m typically good at delegating, but that time I went outside even my own comfort zone: I couldn’t deal with picking the color to paint the walls of my new house, so I told the painters to pick colors that would calm me down. They did. I wouldn’t have picked the shades of yellow they picked, but it was fine — I got used to the yellow. And if I hadn’t been able to delegate as much as I did, I would never have gotten through the move.

We can all get through the good times. The test of our skills is getting through the bad ones. So when you think about delegating, recognize that, done right, it can mean the difference between enduring the rough patches and making yourself crazy for no good reason.

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Make training a priority

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Don’t jump so fast for that promotion or raise you’re about to win. Today’s workplace is largely unstable — people get laid off and job hop constantly, and in general, staying anywhere more than five years is a career liability. Your learning curve flattens out so much that you’re not gaining skills fast enough to stay competitive in the field.

In this environment, training is worth more than a promotion or a raise, and in fact, you’d do well to make a trade if someone offers you either. Training is the new currency of the workplace. Here are four reasons why:

1. Promotions are stressful.
When you get offered a promotion, it’s supposed to be a reward for good work. But in fact, most promotions derail you.

Think about it: You’re creating a career path that’s customized to your skills, strengths, and personal goals. How could anyone else create a path that’s right for you? Unfortunately, most companies structure a single corporate ladder and promote people upward whether it’s good for them or not.

In fact, most people do good work and then get promoted into a position they’ve shown no aptitude for. This is most pronounced when, say, a creative person or technical person gets promoted into management. In fact, most promotions are so misguided they’re more stressful than divorce.

2. Raises are negligible.
What do you get in exchange for taking the huge risk of leaving something you’re good at to do something you’re unproven at? What do you get in exchange for derailing your personal plans to follow someone else’s path? A 3 percent raise (on average), or 10 percent if you’re lucky.

Let’s say you get a 10 percent raise. If you’re earning $50,000, that’s $5,000. After taxes it’s around $3,500 — if you even stay in the job for another year. That amount of money won’t change your life, and even if you think it will, consider all the extra hours you’ll be working because you got promoted.

3. Mentors make a real difference.

What will change your life? Mentoring. People who have a mentor are more successful than people who don’t, across the board. For example, people with two mentors are 50 percent more likely to reach their next career goal than people who don’t have mentors.

So one thing you could do is spend less time gunning for that promotion and more time focusing on what you need to do to get a mentor. For example, ask good questions of the people you admire, and spend extra time getting to know people outside of your core group of coworkers.

It would be great if you could take your money from a promotion and buy a mentor, but life doesn’t work like that. (Although you could take the money and hire a career coach.)

4. Training creates stability.

You can trade money for training, though, and that’s what you should do. Your career trajectory and your ability to create a stable income are dependent on your skill set. There’s no job stability in the workplace today, so you have to count on yourself by being very desirable to employers. You do this by getting lots of training, and mentors to guide you on how to use that training.

There’s a huge range of training available today — you can get trained in how to deal with your email, how to connect better to people you speak to, and how to transition from college to adulthood. Have your company pay for this sort of training — it’s the kind that changes your life.

While a promotion actually makes your life more unstable, training creates more stability in your life. And that, rather than more money or a promotion, should be the real reward for performing well in your job.

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Don’t get too comfortable at home after work

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For those of you who graduated from college before happiness courses were available, you’ve got some reading to do. But luckily, almost all of the books I have seen on this topic are very interesting.

One of these books is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Burns, a professor of psychology at Emory. His research includes athletes, S/M practitioners, even sex with his own wife. And he concludes that doing something outside your comfort zone makes you happy — it can trigger a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a mood-lifter.

You already know this intuitively at work. You look for interesting, challenging projects, and you have a fit when work life becomes routine and your learning curve flattens. When someone asks you why you job hop, tell them about this research – about how it is abnormal NOT to job hop.

But what about at home? You watch TV, surf from your sofa, cook dinner but don’t venture past pasta. Instead, use the same standards at home that you have at work: If you are not challenging yourself and learning to do new things at home, Burns’ research suggests that satisfaction with your life will be elusive.

This conclusion is supported by the research that says we don’t get happiness from our jobs alone – it’s something bigger than that. I quote this research a lot when people tell me that they are unhappy and they think they would find happiness if they could just find that dream job: Think harder about what you do outside of your job.

When I graduated from college, I was really, really lost. I had strings of stupid jobs. I was in a new city. And I had no friends. It would have been a great time to watch TV after work, but I didn’t grow up with a TV, so it never occurred to me to buy one. Instead, I read books.

I read a book a night because I was so worried that I was wasting my life and I thought if I read a new book each night, something would happen. And it did. I felt satisfied with how I was spending my time. Sure, I was lonely, and scared that my life would never turn out to anything meaningful. But I learned a lot at night. I really stretched myself and read difficult novelists, big ideas, and non-fiction that was out of my comfort zone.

More recently, I found myself vegetating in front of my always-overflowing email during the nighttime. And I realized that I wasn’t feeling very good about it. So I switched everything up and started running at night. It is hard to motivate yourself to go running at 9pm after putting unruly kids to bed, but I did it, and I felt great. And I’m convinced that it’s partly because the run is challenging and, at some point, the email is mind-numbing.

So stop using work as an excuse to not do anything challenging after work. You grow when you challenge yourself, and you need to grow in ways that can only happen outside of work in order to be able to grow at work as well.

But this does not mean you have to go, go, go. In fact, I would guess that for many of us, sitting silently doing nothing would be very challenging. I actually know a bit about this because sports psychologists love meditation as a way to overcome obstacles.

When I was playing beach volleyball, I couldn’t get my jump serve to be consistent. So I spent twenty minutes each night imagining myself going through each step of my serve: Sitting on the floor, with my eyes closed, not moving. Some people learn to meditate by saying a mantra. I learned to meditate with a visual manta – my jump serve. And even now, when I imagine the serve in my head, I feel my body relax.

Visualizing my jump serve became my favorite part of my day. And one day I hope I can sit still for that long each day again. But for now, that’s an after-work challenge that is probably too much for me.

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Forget email bankruptcy; try Getting Things Done bankruptcy

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I used to write a lot about productivity, until I started reading blogs and discovered David Allen’s world of Getting Things Done. I discovered that some of the most popular blogs are about productivity, and my blog audience is full of productivity gurus. They gave me a lot of recommendations to improve my productivity ignorance, and each person mentioned the book Getting Things Done.

This was a little after the time that my blog started taking off, which meant three things: I was changing my job from a columnist to a blogger, I was writing five columns a week instead of two, and my email load went up about 500%. For a few months I was sleeping four hours a night. Crazy, right? In fact, many readers who caught me emailing at both 2am and 7am commented that maybe I needed to take a break. Especially after I posted about how important sleep is.

So I tried Getting Things Done (GTD). I went whole hog: In less than a week I changed my whole to-do list and whole filing system. I was the Queen of Outlook, with more folders to choose from than Imelda has shoes.

I had a A list a B list and a C list. I also had a spreadsheet of links that I had collected over six months as a blogger. I had links filed by topic and could sort my topics and links in ten different ways to come up with quirky, linky columns that addressed questions readers had sent to me – which were also searchable.

I was also adhering to the GTD holy grail of the empty inbox. But the empty inbox, I confess, made me crazy. I found myself deleting emails in the name of that cause, and not because I had actually dealt with them. Also, I was filling in my Outlook calendar religiously, by moving emails directly into my schedule. But I was not looking at my calendar religiously. So I often missed meetings.

I was getting things done. Sort of. I was probably annoying a lot of people along the way.

And then the worst thing that could happen for a GTD-er happened to me. My hard drive crashed and I didn’t have Outlook backed up.

Please, do not send me smug details about your great backup system. Of course I know how to back things up. Everyone who didn’t back their stuff up knows how to back their stuff up. It’s like telling someone who eats French fries that your system of eating salad is healthier. DUH!!!!!!

At first I panicked and imagined that the email of my lifetime was somehow locked in that Outlook view that will never come back. But then things got sort of cushy. For one thing, my B and C list totally went away because people reminded me about stuff on my A list, but no one said a word about the other stuff and I couldn’t remember most of it.

Have you ever read about the joys of declaring email bankruptcy? Well I think my situation was like inadvertently declaring GTD bankruptcy, and it was marvelous. I slept well. I opened up a gmail account, and I had an empty email box all the time – maybe because I also had no record of email addresses, so my outbound mail slowed down significantly.

So, this week, my hard drive came back. I looked at my old to do list and I laughed. I did not need to save all that stuff. I needed to get some perspective. And GTD bankruptcy gives you just that: Perspective. And getting a clear picture of one’s work is really what GTD is all about, right?

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Five ways to make yourself a workplace superstar

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It’s fun to be a superstar. You get a lot of accolades. But the real benefit to being a workplace superstar is that you have more control over your life. A superstar gets flextime. A superstar gets to take a five-month sabbatical and have their job held for them. Superstars are so top-flight that they’d be very hard to replace. Average performers don’t get those benefits. Aim to be a superstar so that you can have more options in your career for creating a life you want.

1. Have gaps in your resume
You want to be known as a good thinker, right? But good thinkers need time to think, and that’s what gaps in resumes are for. Sure, for the unemployable, the gaps are times of financial terror and emotional doom. But if you feel confident that you can get another job, then taking time off to think, get perspective, try something totally new — all these things actually make you more employable.

If you’re in the middle of a gap in your resume right now, and you think it might be the not-so-good kind of gap, and might make you unemployable, then start doing something exciting and rejuvenating with your time while you are job hunting. Then the gap will look intentional and exciting.

It’s all about spin, really, so take time to think and then hire a resume writer to help you turn your resume into the kind that tells the story of a great thinker.

2. Cut corners at work to make time for the gym
Most people who don’t get regular exercise say that job interferes with their exercise time. This is absurd reasoning, because people who don’t exercise do worse at work than people who do.

People who exercise perform better at work than people who don’t exercise. People who exercise think more clearly and are more even-tempered. And the self-discipline that it takes to exercise regularly spills over into other areas of life, making people who exercise more able to reach work goals than people who don’t exercise.

So cut corners at work to make time to exercise. Your work performance will go down a bit at first. But on balance, your performance will go up once you start reaping the benefits of exercise throughout your life.

3. Start a side business
One of the best ways to stand out in your career is to make sure you always have a lot of options. A great way to create options is to build your skill set so that you’re adaptable within your field and on the cutting edge of your specialty.

But there always comes a time when the opportunities all look bad. When that happens, you should know you can start something of your own. Entrepreneurship used to be starting a company in your garage and growing it to be big and take over the world. And most people failed, because not many people can take over the world.

But today, entrepreneurship is often about microbusinesses you can do at home, while you have a day job. And success is about creating a work life that accommodates your personal needs. Success is also about keeping your learning curve high, no matter how much money you make.

For all these reasons, starting a business while you work in a cube at someone else’s business is a smart way to go. It ensures that you’re never stuck. And it’s not actually that hard to do.

4. Turn down promotions
The raise you get when you get a promotion is absurd. It’s usually less than 10% of your salary, and it’s not going to change your life. Surely you can find something to ask for that is more meaningful than that.

Also, when a company offers a promotion, the company says, Here is the next step in our ladder, and we’d like you to climb it. But why would you follow a path laid out for you by someone else? You should customize you career according to your workplace strengths and your personal needs, Laying out a path for yourself is difficult, but necessary. You need to understand yourself, and then you can tell your boss what you really need. Think about mentoring, training, getting on a really interesting project, or asking for flexible hours. These are things that will make a long-term difference in your career.

Not convinced? The process of giving someone a promotion is usually watching them succeed in one type of work and then giving that person new responsibilities that they do not necessarily have talent for. And that is why a promotion is more stressful than a divorce. So ask for other rewards instead. Really.

5. Start a blog
Superstars distinguish themselves from everyone else by being known for their ideas. This doesn’t mean they sit in a room and think all day. Execution matters. But you need both. That’s why a blog is so great for putting you at the top of your field.

A good blog presents your opinions on a wide range of issues within your chosen specialty. If you can post regularly you show not only that you have the self-discipline to produce, but you can make a plan and execute it over time, and, most of all, you show everyone the way that you think about issues in your field.

One of the most exciting things about specializing is taking part in a high-level discussion about cutting edge topics. Someone needs to lead that discussion, and increasingly, it is the bloggers who are doing that.

So, here are some easy instructions for starting a blog.

As with many things in life, it’s harder to make the mental commitment to seeing yourself as a superstar than it is to take the steps to get there. The core of being a superstar is not about what you do in your work, it’s what you do in your head: Believe in yourself and your ability to stand out for your ideas and then focus on being that person in whatever you do.

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Twentysomething: The safe route is overrated

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By Ryan Healy – Safe for me is a cushy, decent job that pays well. Safe is making a steady paycheck that will cover my student loans, rent and living expenses with a small amount left over to put in the bank. Safe is having the spending money to eat out on Tuesday, go to happy hour on Thursday and buy a couple of rounds at the bar on Saturday.

Safe sounds really fun. So why do I find it so boring?

I have an intense desire to know what its like to scrounge for a month’s rent. I want to know what it’s like to say I can’t afford to eat out tonight, and really mean it. I truly do believe that living like this builds character, and everyone should probably experience it at some point.

But more importantly, I want to know that every action I take can result in my success or my failure. A safe job does not provide this dynamic. If you make a great presentation to a group of stakeholders for your company, you may receive a pat on the back and your boss might consider you for promotion. If you bomb the presentation, chances are you will still receive your paycheck every other Friday.

It sounds a hell of a lot more exciting to make a great sales pitch to a group of investors and convince them to fund your business for the next six months. Or you could bomb the pitch and be forced to get a part time bartending job just to pay rent. If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.

Many people my age feel the same way. They think safe is boring and they want to take a risk. The problem is, safe is comfortable and risk is scary. Not many people can handle dropping everything and starting a business with no immediate source of income. Many people don’t even want to run a business, but they still want some excitement from their jobs.

So I think there can be a compromise. Most young, single, ambitious people would probably do a little gambling with their salaries if the opportunity arose. It would be a lot of fun and incredibly motivating to wager $10,000 of my salary on whether or not I can bring the company an extra $50,000 in revenue through my actions. Systems would have to be set up to measure this sort of thing, but the increase in output could definitely cover the costs. Not to mention the massive savings from increased employee retention rates.

Maybe this option is a little too out there for most employers, but the bottom line is a safe, steady, paycheck leads to boredom for entry-level workers. Boredom leads to job hopping or uninspired work, both of which affect a company’s bottom line. If companies can figure out how to make a paycheck a little more interesting, and the job a little less “safe,” they will undoubtedly gain some more inspired, productive employees.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution

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