Picture Batman robbed of his utility belt.  He’s still  more than able whoop your ass,  solve the riddle and save the day. You too, should aspire to cultivate your skills to the point that  armed with only the most primitive of tools, locked in an 8×10 room with a magic marker, you (your ideas, filters, lenses and processes) can be just as dangerous and powerful. Do you want more mental clarity, focus, less anxiety and stress? This year, this month, this week, try something different and get back to the basics. Brush the dust off a pen and paper, visit ye olde staples, follow along, get involved, and  measure your gains. Spend the $10 on a pad of paper and something to write with. I recommend a moleskine notebook and a good pen. Just as a fool trusts his life to a weapon, do not place ultimate faith in your gadgetry. I’m not anti-tech. I’m a thrivalist.  Read on if you want to become a bare knuckle  biz champion of  productivity.

The Problem:

• We look to technology to replace thinking processes, and train ourselves to abandon fundamental skills cultivation
• We reach for tools and novel gadgets to substitute and distract us from the hard truth-inevitably, work needs to be done in order to be done.
• Our attention and focus is fragmented over many different devices, services and applications. Rarely are our thoughts and efforts taken from these various places and  brought together in discernible ways.
• Because of this, the tools themselves, whether software or hardware, rarely produce more than marginal productivity gains.
• In many cases, they result in negative returns, as productivity goals and objectives have been thrown out the window for distractions, needless notifications and entertainment.

Writing as a Way

The habit of writing things down on paper and reviewing them from time to time can empower your life and work. Writing in these ways:

• Frees Your Mind – Allowing us to map, explore our thoughts literally and figuratively.
• Gives Things Value
• Creates Reference Points -The #1 Reason to work with pen and paper is it is still one of the best tools to help us retain our most important thoughts.  We retain more information when we are the ones physically doing the writing. The physical activity and practice of writing causes your brain to retain more of the information than if you were to simply use someone else’s work.
• Ensures Clarity Writing offers us clarity.  On paper we can quickly visualize information from all over the place (related and seemingly unrelated) and assemble it on the same place. We are not limited to form or format, and can apply any number of tools to the page.
• Attracts Simplicity – How many new habits/gizmos have you bought or heard of that actually make life simpler and more enjoyable? This is one of the few that actually can deliver on the promise- and it’s dirt cheap.

Writing things down on paper as a habit,  is a great practice to cultivate. It is becoming a dying practice as people enjoy the novelty and distraction of digital representations.

The Power of Paper:

Paper is a great and grossly underestimated medium these days.

• Has a faster boot time, longer battery life (dead sea scrolls seem to still be working, compare that to your computer)
• Portable, recordable, reliable and cheap.
• Tactile- There is a mental trick,  a value, a wealth of information to something with a  texture and physicality to it. Tactility is one of the chief aspects we @Heroik pay attention to when designing products, services, and/or empowering business models. Tactility can reduce the comprehension time. So when it comes to cultivating skills, it’s okay to get touchy-feely.
• It gives us a place to literally draw the road map, direction, a path and plan.
• Provides a unified work environment to pull ideas together, to gain perspective and see the big picture.
• The blank page is a feature rich environment that makes exploration fun and easy.

When we are lucky enough to assemble and visualize data on the same page, it  can lead us to new insight, and  helps us see the big picture, providing direction and perspective. Developing pen and paper habits ensures we’re exploring ideas, goals in a space where we can see the big picture. It’s generally more fruitful for your life than your Instagram/Facebook/Twitter micro-habits.

Back to Bare Knuckle Basics

So let us start with a little trip back to the basics. Many productive habits, skills, can be cultivated with the most fundamental of tools; paper and pen. Even in this age, pen and paper are still among the fastest, most cost effective ways to explore thoughts, ideas, challenges,  and can be far more efficient at figuring things out than the best gizmos and apps. If you  remember nothing else from this post, at least remember to ask yourself  ”Can I do this faster on paper?”

Getting Started – How to Build the Habit of Writing

1. Grab a notebook and a pen. I’ve linked to my recommendations.
2. Commit to writing for every day for one week (7 days).
3. Designate a fixed amount of time to spend writing. I suggest starting at 5 minutes and increasing each day by another 5 minutes (so 35 mins on day 7). You can do it!
4. try these simple, lightly structured but empowering pen and paper exercises:Write this down:Start a note with the title What I need to say… What I need to accomplish…
5. Choose a time of day. Block out the appropriate time on your calendar and honor these appointments as you would any other (think lunch with super-model not dentist appointment).
6. Find a comfortable place where you won’t be interupted. I like park benches and cafes, but your spot might be the bedroom, the office, the kitchen etc.
7. Try starting with one of these ideas: Right now I… What I need to say…What I need to accomplish…
8. After seven days (or whenever you punked out ), review your efforts. Did you make it? What got it in your way?
9. Put writing on your daily schedule- even if only for 20 minutes a day and see where it gets you.

When you add tools and technology combined with an adaptive mindset and creativity, you’ll be one step closer to BAMF status. Be a Thrivalist. Keep it simple. Bring more simplicity into your life.

It’s said that we have over 50,000 thoughts per day. We spend the day barely noticing our inner dialog all sorts of mental gems that are forgotten seconds later. Writing your thoughts on paper allows you to harvest them for future refinement and use.

Unlocking the Power of Paper- Success and Productivity

Ready for Kung Fu? The habit of writing is just the beginning,  like the habit of showing up to class. You are in the right spot but now it’s time to invite knowledge, experience and discipline. We must understand the relationship between our intentions, the paper, the tools we use to mark it, and our behavior to get the most out of the experience.

1. Start With a Blank Page. Have the courage to attack blank pages. Get on the crazy train and leave the lined works for the college kids who need to cling to the rails.  Use note books with blank pages. Don’t limit yourself to writing in any direction or method. Use color and imagery. Go to town. It should be fun and enjoyable and meaningful ultimately to you. A picture and doodle is worth a thousand words (See Back of the Napkin reading reference below). It’s scary at first, but like hiking in back country, you get to carve your own route and learn the lay of the land. Don’t be afraid to Develop your own visual language.
2.  Avoid the abyss of untitled work.  The more organized you are, the better. A good starting point for organization is simply to place the date and title on everything that you do. Trust me on this. As an author of countless untitled works, I can admit to a mess of piles of work I’ll not likely to revisit unless bed ridden, sick, bored or suffering from writer’s block.
3. Study yourself- review your own notes. Take time to revisit your notes. This is where many people fail. Just as the act of writing is important, the act of review is equally important. Develop the habit of reviewing and revisiting what you’ve written down. Often times, when left expressed on paper, we tend to leave our thoughts on the page to die without acting on them. You don’t have to act on all of them, but simply reviewing them can lead to new insights, deeper understanding and keep you on track with your goals and aligned with principles.
4. BREAK THE RULES.  Keep notebooks for yourself and yourself alone. Your productivity, ideas, training, clarity, and personal Tao. Develop your own Way. The important thing to do is to make note taking and the idea capture process your own.
5. GTD -(Getting Things Done) in a 2 Words: Make lists. Write down lists of projects, goals and actions. Schedule them on a calendar. Organize them in folders. It reads like a haiku doesn’t it? I just saved you $15 and 5 hours of reading this book. It is that simple and far more efficient than purchasing 100 apps that do half of what you want them to and don’t play nice with each other.

Power Moves: Goals &  Action Plans

This is a brief overview, but please read Setting Goals & Creating Action Plans post.

Begin by setting  very specific goals. Try refining the goal several times by making it more specific. Break those goals down into smaller goals and objectives and pursue them with specific action plans.

In a personal, weekly action plan:

• You state a specific goal, and break it down into smaller goals.
• List a few steps you can take each week to achieve it. Use 2 questions if money/time were no object, how would you do it, and, in a middle of the road approach, how can you go about achieving it.
• Designate the time and which days of the week you are going to do the steps you’ve chosen

More

Now it’s time to take your writing habit to a whole new level. Below are classic exercises that most people know but few actually take the time to do. Add these to your writing habit, try one at a time and measure the productivity gains. By visualizing your ideas on paper you can clarify your thoughts, making them more concrete and giving you a clearer sense of vision and direction. Blank paper makes focusing on these things easier. Try these, especially if it’s been a while:

• Take some time to lay out thoughts, and goals for the week, month and year
• Create lists of  current projects and main tasks for each
• List and compare pros and cons for important decisions.
• Journal/Notate your reading and observations. Flow writing can help you hone ideas, understand your dilemmas and sort your life. Period.
• If you’re a creative or more artistically gifted, create a vision board. Draw with symbols/pictures. Visual aids will help you retain the notes. Those who doodle on their notes actually tend to retain more than those who do not.
• Use it as a fitness Journal. Track progress, thoughts, weight, and other metrics. See my example-and yes I use a Batman notebook. I’m that awesome. There are several competitive advantages for the simple writer. They are more focused, honed and creative, than the distracted all-digital competition.  There is shorter boot time, longer battery life and lower overhead in many instances operating with pen and paper for  personal skills cultivation, productivity and empowerment.They are faster on their feet; leave a lighter footprint and have less requirements to be productive..

Feeling Sheepish? Here are a few books that can help you master pen and paper.

It’s all too tempting to jump on our tablets, phones and laptops, intent on doing some real work only we end up checking email, playing Angry Birds, catching up on Facebook, Netflix, Pandora and doing anything but precisely the things we know need to be done  pursuant to goals. We end up missing out on opportunities to do the very deeds that will bring us greater returns, prosperity and happiness.

Need More Convincing?

Too often we reach for novel tools, hi-tech gadgets and solutions to substitute and distract from the hard but necessary work of cultivating new skills and knowledge. We look for and purchase every book of shortcuts, every “time-saving” gizmo and program, that ultimately amount to little to no gains in terms of productivity, efficiency and greater satisfaction at work and at home.

• How many books have you read with your new e-reader?
• How much has your productivity increased on your iPad?

For most people, I bet the gains are marginal if they exist at all, and the original productivity and empowerment goals have been tossed out the window for greater pursuits of blind consumption. The problem with all the gizmos is that they are too distracting. There is too much visual information, the push notifications, battery status, reception, the clock, the lure of all the applications and it’s all on the same screen in the same moment. How are you to get the important work done when you’re being bombarded with all this information in real time?

Don’t get me wrong. I love my gadgets, but I also recognize greater returns from practicing simpler habits.  At Heroik Media, while we recommend and share many tools of the trade, we emphasize and encourage the cultivation of skills and discipline to higher degree. Products, services and all these wonderful tools can be great time saving assets, but without the fundamental skills and understanding required to get the most out of them, they are useless.

 

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