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David Seah

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Lately, I've been having a lot of conversations with my friends of a spiritual nature, and today experienced an epiphany that combines my two current preoccupations: improving focus and maintaining connections with people:

Angela, my music teacher, and I have been having some excellent discussions about Christianity and the nature of love with respect to the teachings of Jesus. We both agree that love is a vast and inclusive feeling. This is what "being connected" really is.
I have started making up rituals to get me focused in the morning, and this has led to an awareness of long-standing meditative practices. Breath control is at the root of many disciplines, I've realized.
Ashish had bought me that book I mentioned the other day, The Four Agreements, which has a prayer in the back of the book that equates the feeling of love with breathing:

Focus your attention on your lungs, as if only your lungs exist. Feel the pleasure when your lungs expand to fulfill the biggest need of the human body--to breathe.

Take a deep breath and feel the air as it fills your lungs. Feel how the air is nothing but love. Notice the connection between the air and the lungs, a connection of love. Expand your lungs with air until your body has the need to expel that air. And then exhale, and feel the pleasure again. Because when we fulfill a

Relaxation ManagementJanuary 5

Sunday, on review, was a pretty productive day. It wasn't super intense, yet it was not slack. I got a bunch of things started, even finished a few. I didn't stress out over the projects yet to come or the tasks that I left unfinished for another day. This morning, I feel the anticipation of a new day, and with that some of the good feeling had started to slip away until I remembered the key principle from Getting Things Done: relax. This is the whole point of all those systems. David Allen's particular approach is to target that which causes the most stress in the lives of "busy people": the mountain of things that they're responsible for getting done.

I suspect that part of the appeal of GTD is that it has just enough insight presented in combination with a malleable set of working principles. They lend themselves to endless customization and adaptation, which appeals to self-empowered tinkerers and tool-builders. And why do we tinker? Because we believe that somewhere, somehow, there is the right tool that is shaped to fit me, the magic tool that converts the meager stores of ability I have into pure energy. So far, that ain't happened, and today I was starting to feel the old stress come back.

However, I've gained some new insight since last week through old friend Senia and new friend Ashish, and what they told me dovetails nicely.

First, Senia had tweeted about 5 main contributors to happine

Shaking Myself Out of ProcrastinationJanuary 4

I woke up this Sunday morning feeling chock full of vim and vigor, but after checking email, showering, and feeding the cats I was struck by a wave of lethargy that robbed me of my initiative. Now, this wouldn't ordinarily be an issue, as I would heartily say that everyone is entitled to as many naps as they can squeeze in on a Sunday, but I also realized that this productivity stall was a recurring pattern during the rest of the week as well. Just as I start to formulate a plan of action, I'm struck by a kind of fuzzy-headed feeling and I lose my focus. Hours later, I regain mental focus while browsing some website on the Internet I've never seen before, dressed only in the bathrobe I had on in the morning.

I ticked off the usual suspects: eating bad, not working out, not drinking enough water, depression over lack of clear mission, etc. Yep, these are all possibilities, nothing that a bit of discipline and good habits can't fix. But since I've been over this ground before, I decided to consider alternative explanations and decided to self-monitor my stream of consciousness. When I am steeling myself to take action I listen to a monologue in my head that essentially tries to persuade me into action. These appear as fully-formed sentences, and my writing is essentially the process of writing it all down with a bit of on-the-fly restructuring. This is the means by which I focus my thoughts into a single line of reasoning, which then becomes the basis for a plan of a

Networking and Sales Tracking 2009 UpdatesJanuary 2

There are a couple of esoteric versions of the Concrete Goals Tracker that are specifically designed for sales people and networking efforts. I never really understood the point of cold networking, and I don't really like to push myself on people, but when I have to I do have a particular process in mind. These two forms are designed to enforce that process from both the top-down and the bottom-up.

Top-Down: Network Catch-o-Matic

The Network Catch-o-Matic (NCM) is the top-down tool for making connections and networking toward a lasting relationship. You start by making sure you are at least getting in front of as many people as you can in a week (here I am choosing 50 people, which is kind of arbitrary) for meaningful face time. The goal: some kind of collaboration. There are several steps one needs to go through to build up that relationship, and the NCM recognizes that there are fewer people passing through each subsequent stage. For more information about how it works, read the origin Makin' Rain

Resource Time Tracking 2009 UpdatesJanuary 2

Managing and Scheduling Multiple Projects

After a year break, I'm re-introducing the Resource Time Tracking (RTT) forms I first tried out in 2006. At the time, I was trying to figure out a better way of visualizing future time to a number of different simultaneous projects.

This is a two-part form, consisting of a task scheduler and a task quantizer. The Task Scheduler is basically a calendar that shows what deliverables are due on what days of the week in addition to when production time is allocated. The Task Quantizer is a kind of worksheet to allow you to determine what those deliverables are in the first place, and how long it will take to to them. The Quantizer forces you to measure in standardized blocks of time, which comes in handy when it comes to fitting them into the Scheduler's time grid.

The 2009 update is unchanged from the original 2006-2007 form, other than some updates to contact information and of course the year.

Download 2009 Resource Time Tracking Forms

For more information about the use of the Res