Some people have accused me of having a time fetish. You seen things that happen in my life I have planned down to the minute. For example my drive to work and my drive home. I know that if leave at 7:02 in the morning it will take me x number of minutes to get there. If I choose to leave at 6:55 in the morning than it takes me y amount of minutes to get there. You might wonder why I seem so anal retentive when it comes to time. But time is the great equalizer of everyone. You see no matter who you are or how much money you have we all only have 24 hours in each day. I choose to spend my time as productively as possible.

No that does not mean I work all the time, in fact it is just the opposite. The more productive I am the more free time I am afforded. So if I can find a way to streamline something generally I will which will in turn provide me with more free time. I have found a secret method that if you follow it you can at least 30 minutes more free time every day. A secret that is extremely simple yet it does require a little work up front. So what is this secret? Increase your typing speed, yes that is it, that is all. By in increasing your typing speed by at least 20% you will find you will have more free time.
Think about how much typing do you do? Even if you do not use a computer for work, you are using one right now which is on the internet. So it is safe to assume you have an e-mail account. Which means you will eventually write an e-mail or too. Most people these days have at least one instant messenger they use to communicate with friends. That counts as typing too. If you are a blogger than you are doing a fair share of typing for sure.
Let’s face it that two finger chicken pecking just does not cut it in today’s technologically centered world. Learning to type faster is not hard, it just requires some discipline. Get yourself a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and spend at least twenty minutes a day using it. You will be surprised how much you improve in little as a week. The Mavis Beacon software is not very expensive to purchase, less that a meal at a nice restaurant. However the tangible benefits you will receive from using it are worth more than a meal at a nice restaurant every day for a week.
In summary if you what to increase your productivity which in turn will afford you with more free time you have to increase your typing speed. How do you increase your typing speed? You go and get the Mavis Beacon Teaches typing software and use it for twenty minutes every day.
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 I am sure just about everyone has heard of Skype and perhaps a lot of you are already using it. Now it is not too often that I give a product rave reviews but once again Skype has performed above my expectations.

 For some time now I have been using Skype as an instant messenger and for some conference calls. Yes that is right you can do conference calls with Skype. Not all your participants in the conference call need to be on a computer either. You can use Skype dial out service (for a reasonable fee) to call participants and involve them in your conference call.

 But what has impressed me the most about Skype is that this morning I used it for an online conference call with two other people. Now this may not sound that amazing, but when you factor in that one person was in England, the other in Japan, and me here in the center of Canada. It is pretty amazing.

 There was virtually no lag time and I could hear each person clear as a bell. In fact the clarity was much better than I have found on land line international calls. It was so clear that when one of the participants cell phone rang I almost thought the phone was right beside me and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 If you are only using Skype online than you cannot beat the price, its free! If you are in North America or most places Skype has monthly packages if you are calling land lines. The price verys from place to place but I find it is extremely reasonable.

 My only complaint is that I cannot get a land line phone number here in Canada for land lines to call me. That’s right if you live in the US or England, and a few other places you can get a phone number that regular phones can call. You can answer these online or have them forwarded to a phone number of your choice.

Hopefully Skype will be offering this service in Canada soon. If you have never tried Skype, give it a try. Oh I also forgot to mention that you can also do video chats with Skype. It is an excellent piece of software that I highly recommend.

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 Contrary to the fact that there has not been a new post in a long time, Tenacious Creations is still alive. I was temporarily overwhelmed with the completion of several projects all at once. Not being the most organized person on the planet my life was completely overwhelmed.

 I was starting to feel like I was on the same road to burn out that I had followed once before. Things were going really well yet chaotic in my life. I could barely find my desk beneath the paper and other assorted items that had built up upon it. I seem to have the problem of once I get started into a field of work I get totally absorbed by it, and nothing else seems to matter. This in itself is a very unhealthy behavior.

 By chance I was talking with a friend of mine. My friend told me that he had this book and audio series that I really needed to read and listen to. I politely told him, “Hey man I don’t have time to brush my teeth let alone read a book.”. My friend being a very calm and collected individual calmly replied to me “That is exactly why you NEED to listen to this and read the book.”.

  The book was titled “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It is known by many people on the web as “GTD“. Well I started reading it (still haven’t finished it completely), and listening to the audio CDs (I have finished these). Well I am not going to tell you things like it has revolutionalized my life or made me a millionaire. But I can tell you that it has allowed me to have a clean desk – everyday. I now also have an excellent reference filing system. In fact for the first time ever (that is with out having an executive assistant) I can find things that I have filed, and have an awesome method for filing things that I want for reference.

 The Getting Things Done Book has also allowed me to maintain an empty in box. Not only that it has trained me to not use my entire office as an in box. I not only get things done in my professional life but also things I want to get done around the house. It has taught me how to set up and use a tickler file (the best thing ever), to process items that need to be processed at a later date. But the best thing ever is it has doubled my ability to be creative and come up with new ideas. I highly recommend you check into it if you are constantly disorganized.

 Getting things done or “GTD” seems to be really popular in the techie geek world even though it emphasizes the use of low tech means. Now if you don’t know about GTD then the next little bit may not mean a lot to you. But currently all my list are paper based and the only high tech means I use is e-mail. David Allen recommends to start low tech. Complicated systems do nothing but steer you away from using the GTD system.

 So for about the past two weeks I have been using low tech means to follow the GTD system. It has worked great. I am getting more accomplished than I ever have before. My mind is much more free to come up with creative ideas. I don’t feel over burden by the enormous work load I have been shouldering. More important than all that I am now able to blog again.

 Whats next on my horizon. Well I am hoping to upgrade some of GTD practices to my old Tungsten E Palm Pilot while I await the arrival of my new Palm TX with wireless keyboard. I am in the process of giving Tenacious Creations a make over, so look for a new site look soon. I have a bunch of posts written that will begin appearing on Tenacious Creations. The Tenacious Creations Word Press AdSense Plug in will become publicly available in the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple other helpful word press plug ins that I have written. So in short the future looks bright for Tenacious Creations. I hope that you my loyal readers will continue to read and respond to my post. Sorry to the long absence of regular posting.

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 While serving in the military I picked up a good number of sayings and expressions that I still use today. One of them was the 7 P’s rule.

 What exactly is the 7 P’s rule. Well it stands for Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This rule can apply to anything you are doing from blogging to taking a trip some where. A little bit of planning can prevent a lot of frustration later.

 Lets’ take a blog post for example and apply the rule of the 7P’s. So in order to write this post I first have to choose a topic, in this case the 7P rule. Then I gather or create any images that I will use. From there I write a brief out line of what I want to say in the post. Now I know we all disliked writing outlines in school but it does help. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just out line the points you want to cover. This is my outline for this post.

 By planning what I need and locating resources before I write I am able to just write. I have every thing at my finger tips and I do not waste time looking for things. I often times have a great idea for a post, so I will write it down and do a quick outline. That way I can be on the look out for relevant resources for that post while doing other things. When I am ready to write my research time has been minimized. To me there is nothing more valuable than time, it is the one resource than I cannot replace no matter how hard I try.

 When you save time you are indeed becoming more productive. For example let us just say that you want to build some shelves in your home. Now you could just go to the hardware store and buy the material that you think you need. But I am quite confident that this will result in you having to make additional trips to the hardware store. This costs you in time, fuel and wear and tear on your vehicle.

 Now lets build the same shelves and employ the 7P rule. First we would take measurements so we know how much material we will need. Then we would make a list of the mounting hardware, screws etc. From this list we could also determine if we will need any additional tools to install these shelves and add that to our list. Now list in hand off we go to the hardware store to buy our supplies. If the store has knowledgeable staff (this is becoming harder and harder to find) we could ask them to go over our list and suggest anything we missed. If we properly planned our project we should not have to make any additional trips to the hardware store. We save the time, fuel and other associated costs. Not to mention the frustration caused by not having everything we need at our disposal.

 A little bit of planning before hand can save time, money and most of frustration. When you start any project remember the 7 P rule.

• Proper
• Previous
• Planning
• Prevents
• Piss
• Poor
• Performance

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