ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

First, you have digital information hanging out on several devices if you start to think about it For example, whatever device you're listening to this podcast, which may be your computer, laptop, mobile tablet, or smartphone, you have stored information about yourself. This includes passwords, profiles or personal metadata and files. Think about where you interact daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Visit your most often browsed websites, smartphone apps and electronics. Write them all down (or the ones with the most important information about you). You may want to write down next to them what information is stored and available to you.

Next, we need to assess where you currently create data. This may have begun in the first step as you realized that the places where you access information about you. However, you may have different applications at work and home that you regularly create data (think text documents, photos, video, and audio/music files). Don't stop there, though. If you volunteer, have a hobby, or work with analog data (vinyl records, microfiche, photo negatives and more), you may want to consider this part of your digital information. Also, don't leave out places that are temporary holding places for information, perhaps your desktop or in work-in-progress folders that may not be on backup drives or cloud storage accounts.

Finally, applications, websites, financial institutions and more are collecting or collaterally making more and more information about you every day. This isn't to frighten you over privacy issues, but empower you to take control of that data, know where it is, and use it to your advantage should you desire. Review all the digital tools in your life and see whether or not they are creating information about you. If they are, take note of them and note if you can easily export or back up the data.

With your new current digital inventory, you will now have the knowledge to start purging, organizing and harnessing the power of your digital data. 

 
In future episodes, I will talk about some strategies to reduce digital clutter.

I frequently throughout my youth heard about the Golden Rule. This universal dictum that said to do unto others as you would have done unto you. Of course, this adage, also known as the "ethic of reciprocity" dates back to the Ancient Babylonians and likely even before that. Over the years, I've found the Golden Rule (and it's sister, the Silver Rule) to be missing an element, perhaps lacking empathy. So, I've come up with what I've coined the Diamond Rule: do unto others as they would like done unto themselves.

You see, in this day and age, it doesn't make sense to try and be so "me me me" about how to treat others. We can learn so much about others so quickly today. There's Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and, *gasp* asking the person how they'd like to actually be treated.

One example of how I apply the Diamond Rule is by tracking how people with whom I interact actually want to be communicated. Want to know how I know? I ask them!

It turns out that people appreciate not only being asked how best it is to communicate with them, but additionally when and how to best communicate certain types of information. For example, while I tend to write long email correspondence, I know that I best receive email messages in single-topic, bite-sized ones. If more people wanted to get responses from me, they would email me one email per topic. They'd make it easy for me to give a decision back to them with their question right at the beginning of the email. This way, I can be pondering what they want from me as I read through the supporting points in the email. 

How do you best like to be communicated, and when, and in what format? How can you be a better communicator by making it a practice to ask others? Where else can you apply the Diamond Rule?

In Episodes 53 and 54, I gave a brief overview of my "Pull Method" for more productive relationships. And, in the last episode I discussed Collecting Data for More Productive Relationships. So, in this episode, I am covering some thoughts and questions on analysis and synthesis of productive relationship data.

As part of a regular review, perhaps monthly, you should review your major relationship events I discussed in Episode 65 and review the emotions triggered by them. I recommend that you not have more than three emotions for each positive and negative event. I have seen a steep rate of diminishing return by the third emotion for any particular event.

Next, some questions...

Are you seeing any patterns you should address with a specific person? Are you seeing a pattern across all your major relationships? Perhaps something is occurring in your life which is causing these positive or negative patterns. What can you do to increase the opportunities of more positive events, and what can you do to mitigate the unhealthy patterns?

A few questions to also ponder from Episode 54: what is the ratio of must-have relationships to those positive relationship events you're experiencing? Are there more not-good than feel-good contacts in your dossier system? Does the happiness of the people you listed correlate to your relative happiness in life?

I'll close with this...

Have perspective that your data collection and analysis is very subjective; so, where I would normally tell you that data doesn't lie, in this case, it can be very misleading if you collect solely with your emotional mind and analyze and synthesize exclusively with your logical mind. Consistent tracking and balanced perspectives will not lead you in a wrong direction.
 
A fun project is to take the ten closest friends in your life, add up their annual salaries and take the modal average. Does it look familiar? 

Did your parents ever tell you that you were hanging out with the wrong crowd? As youth, we don't realize sometimes how the people around us affect our development and our long-term life choices. It turns out, as several studies have reported, how happy the people are around you dictate quite a bit of your own happiness.

For many years now, I have kept what is called a dossier. For me, that's a digital repository of all the information I have about the most important people in my life, both personal and professional. You can simply store that information in the Notes field of your contact manager, while others may have a separate notebook (as I do in Evernote) dedicated to my personal contacts and Trello board dedicated to the people in my professional world (specifically for its Google Drive and Dropbox integration to attach files). Now, I have a base of information at my fingertips wherever I am when I need to address issues. For those GTDers out there, this isn't an @Agendas context. It's purely a reference file of information I find to be pertinent to that person, especially for major emotional events with that person. Did I just have an amazing meeting with that business contact and want to relate the experience? It goes in my dossier for them. Did I just have a fantastic dinner at my favorite restaurant with a good friend? Yup, into my dossier for that good friend it goes. The same goes for negative experiences. In Evernote and Trello, I select for each experience the "event" and one of a series of emotions tags that I've created for both positive and negative events. If you're using a manual system, just noting these emotions at the top of each event entry will work as well.

If you'd like to be more productivity, it behooves you to eat well, of course, to nourish your body's energy stores. But, as I recently realized, if you pay attention to plants not just as food or landscape design elements, as living creatures plants are amazingly productive. Here are nine plant-based productivity paradigms to ponder.