On Sunday, October 5th, I'll be speaking in Tampa, Florida at Hay House's I Can Do It! conference. This will be the same presentation I did in June at their Las Vegas conference, with improvements based on audience feedback. ICDI is a very popular self-help conference with thousands of attendees. I've ...

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“I’m too busy to exercise.”

Even if it were true, it isn’t a reasonable excuse. Exercise gives you more energy to do work. In many ways, most people are too busy not to exercise. But still, a lot of people feel they don’t have time for starting new habits like exercise, reading or doing extra work. Being able to find time is a big obstacle in starting new habits.

I’d like to make two arguments. These are generalizations, so while they may not be true in specific cases, I’d say they apply to most people, most of the time.

1. Time is never the most limited resource in your day.
2. A lack of attention, not time, is what prevents you from adding new habits.

You Have Enough Time

Even when you’re extremely busy, you aren’t using your time with 100% efficiency. There are gaps in everyone’s schedule where they aren’t doing anything important. Even if your schedule has no gaps, there are probably chunks of time where you aren’t working as fast or as effectively as you possibly could.

Why aren’t you completely efficient? It’s because time isn’t the limiting factor. If it were the limiting factor, people could work non-stop without breaks or any unproductive distractions. Instead people, even those who are highly productive, need to take breaks, occasionally procrastinate and slow down on tasks throughout the day.

The real limiting factor for productivity is your energy levels and ability to pay attention. Energy levels limit your productivity because when you’re tired, you can have ample time and still not get everything done. Your attention span is even more limited, because even if there are a million things that need to be done, you can only focus on one or two at a time.

You might not be able to insert another 4-5 hours into your schedule without making some sacrifices. But even extremely busy people can add an hour or two into their schedule without eliminating something. The reason it’s hard to “find time” isn’t a lack of time. It’s because you don’t have the attention span left to focus on something else that needs to fit into your day.

I first suspected time wasn’t the real problem during an extremely busy period in my life over a year ago. I was insanely busy, but at this time I still exercised regularly. I had daily to-do lists with over twenty items, and I still found time to exercise.

However, after a few weeks off, due to illness, I stopped exercising. I was not busy by any standards, in fact, my schedule was incredibly light. Despite this free time, I found it hard to find time to exercise. It seemed to get pushed later and later into my schedule until it was gone. How could I explain this odd experience?

Paying Attention is Expensive

Some studies estimate that there are close to eleven thousand sensory inputs into your brain during any second, but you only process around forty consciously. This means out of everything you could be thinking about, you are reduced to examining less than one percent.

Even when you do think, you’re handicapped. Your short-term memory, or active memory, can only hold about 7 items at a time (why do you think phone numbers are typically 7 digits long?). Your attention is extremely limited, and given the amount of things you do each day, paying attention is very expensive.

I believe this lack of attention is the main culprit in finding time for new habits. You may have very little time, but you have even less attention. Even if you could find an hour or two to spare for exercising, reading or a new activity, it’s mentally costly to keep reminding yourself to do it. New habits have a start-up cost that you pay with attention.

Finding Time for New Habits

There isn’t much you can do to free up more attention. But you can be smart in your usage of it. Forming a habit makes continuing much easier because, after several weeks, you stop thinking about it. My exercise during the busy period in my life was easy because it no longer required thought. When I stopped for a few weeks, I suddenly needed reminders, which made finding time more difficult.

You can reduce the attention needed to start a new habit by writing it down. Write it into your to-do lists, and place it on Post Its around your house. If you allow the environment to remind you of your habit, you can cut down on the amount of internal attention you need to use to remember it.

The best way to find time is to focus on it. If you can focus on a new habit for a few weeks, you can find the attention to make it a habit. Once exercise, reading, studying or whatever you want to do becomes a habit, it won’t cost you anything to keep going. Attention is the currency of productivity, so if you want to find time for anything, find the energy to pay attention first.

Originally posted at PickTheBrain a weblog dedicated to self improvement and motivation.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

If you could just pick one or two (or seven) habits to create in the next few months — habits that will have the most impact on your life — what would they be?

I often get asked this question, because people are overwhelmed when it comes to starting positive life changes.

They ask me: what one or two habits should they start with?

It’s not an easy question. There are so many changes I’ve gone through, from quitting smoking to simplifying my life to reducing debt to many more. And they’ve all seemed life-changing, and they’ve all seemed important.

But if I were to start again, and had to pick one or two, it would be the one or two listed below. The list that follows is in order of what I think I’d do the first 6-7 months of changing my life … but realize that every person is different. No one should follow my choices exactly — you’ve got to figure out what works for you.

That said, if you followed the program below, and worked to develop these habits, you’d probably do pretty well.

“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.” - Confucius

How to Develop the Habits
I’ve written a number of times about developing habits, but here are the basics:

• Do a 30-day challenge, focusing on just ONE habit.
• Write it out on paper, along with your motivations, obstacles, and strategies for overcoming them.
• Commit fully, in a public way.
• Log your progress.
• Remain publicly accountable — report on your progress each day.
• Have support for when you falter — either in real life or online.
• Reward every little success.
• If you fail, figure out what went wrong, plan for it, and try again.

Read more:

• 13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits
• How to Establish New Habits the No-Sweat Way
• Engineer Life: Set Up Habit Changes So It’s Hard to Fail
• Autopilot Achievement: How to Turn Your Goals Into Habits

The Seven Little Habits That Can Change Your Life
OK, so now you know how to form a habit — and remember, only do them one at a time — but you want to know the seven little habits. Here they are, in my order of preference (but yours may be different):

1. Develop positive thinking. I put this first because I think it’s the keystone habit that will help you form the other important habits. Sure, positive thinking by itself won’t lead to success, but it certainly goes a long way to motivate you to do the other things required.

I learned this when I quit smoking — when I allowed myself to think negative thoughts, I would end up failing. But when I learned how to squash negative thoughts and think positive ones instead, I succeeded. This discovery lead to me practicing this over and over, until I was able to form just about any habit I needed. It’s been invaluable to me, and I think it could be to most people.

Focus on this habit first, and you’ll have a much easier time with any of the others. Start by becoming more aware of your negative self-talk — do a little tally sheet throughout the day, marking a tally each time you notice a negative thought. Soon you’ll recognize them, and you can squash them.

Read more:

• Top Motivation Hack: Positive Thinking
• Can You Spot These 10 Thinking Sins

2. Exercise. People who’ve been hearing me harp on about exercise might roll their eyes. Sure, exercise is healthy and all that, but how exactly is it life changing? I’m glad you asked:

• It makes you feel better about yourself, and more confident. That leads to better success with other positive changes.
• It reinforces the positive thinking habit — you need to think positive in order to sustain exercise.
• It relieves stress and gives you time to think — this leads to better mental well-being in your life overall.
• It helps with creativity. Don’t ask me to prove it, except to say that my best ideas and brainstorming sessions come from when I exercise.

Here’s how:

• 4 Simple Steps to Start the Exercise Habit
• How to Make Exercise a Daily Habit
• 7 Ways to Build the Exercise Habit

3. Single-tasking. The opposite of multi-tasking — you’ve heard me harp on about this one as well. Why is it life-changing? A couple powerful reasons:

• You’ll be more effective with your tasks and get more done. It’s hard to achieve important things if you’re constantly switching tasks and distracted by other “urgent” things.
• You’ll be less stressed overall and (in my experience) happier throughout your day.

Read more:

• How Not To Multi-task: Work Simpler and Saner
• Now Do This and the Single-tasking Philosophy
• The Magical Power of Focus

4. Focus on one goal. Just as focusing on one task at a time is more effective, and focusing on one habit at a time is more effect, so is focusing on one goal at a time. While it might seem very difficult, focusing on one goal at a time is the most powerful way of achieving your goals. When you try to take on many goals at once, you’re spreading thin your focus and energy — the two critical components for achieving a goal.

What if you have 5 goals you want to achieve? Pick one to focus on first. Break it into a mini-goal you can accomplish this month, if it’s a longer-term goal. Pick an action you can do today. Keep doing this until the goal is accomplished — do an action every day, finish the mini-goal, pick the next mini-goal to work on. Then, when your One Goal is completed, focus on the next goal.

Some goals are ongoing ones — like blogging every day, or exercising every day. In those cases, turn them into habits — focus exclusively on turning the goal into a habit, until the habit is ingrained. Then focus on the next goal.

Read more:

• A Simple Guide to Setting and Achieving Your Life Goals

5. Eliminate the non-essential. First, identify the essential — the things in your life that are most important to you, that you love the most. Then eliminate everything else. This simplifies things and leaves you with the space to focus on the essential. This process works with anything — with your life in general, with work projects and tasks, with emails and other communication.

This will change your life because it will help you to simplify, to focus on what’s important, and to build the life you want.

Read more:

• Eliminate All But the Absolute Essential Tasks
• Haiku Productivity: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential

6. Kindness. Yes, kindness is a habit. And it can be cultivated. Focus on it every day for a month and you’ll see profound changes in your life. You’ll feel better about yourself as a person. You’ll see people react to you differently and treat you better, over the long run. It’s karma.

How do you develop the kindness habit? First, make it a goal to do something kind for someone each day. At the beginning of the day, figure out what that kind act will be and then do it during the day. Second, each time you interact with someone, try to be kind, be friendly, be compassionate. Third, try to go beyond small kindnesses to larger acts of compassion, volunteering to help those in need and taking the initiative to relieve suffering.

Read more:

• 18 Practical Tips for Living the Golden Rule
• Faith in Humanity: How to Bring People Closer, and Restore Kindness
• A Guide to Cultivating Compassion in Your Life
• 25 Ways to Help a Fellow Human Being Today
• The No. 1 Lifehack You can Implement Today to Make the World a Better Place

7. Daily routine. It’s so simple, but creating a daily routine for yourself can make a big difference in your life. The best routines, I’ve found, come at the start and end of the day — both your workday and your day in general. That means, develop a routine for when you awake, for when you first start working, for when you finish your workday, and for the end of your evening.

How will that change your life? It will help you get a great start to your day, and finish your day by preparing for the next day. It’ll help you firmly root the productive habits you want to firm in your everyday life. It’ll help you focus on what’s important, not just what comes up. It’ll help you make sure you get done all the things you really want to make sure gets done everyday. And that can mean a lot.

Read more:

• Tips to Establish a Morning and Evening Routine
• 12 Ideas for Establishing a Calming Routine

“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” - John Dryden

—
You can now follow me on Twitter — the great experiment continues!

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

One of the traps that's easy to fall into is filling your life with too many incompatibilities -- people, places, objects, circumstances, and activities that just don't mesh with the person you are on the inside. When your external reality is out of sync with your inner self, your inner self ...

Computers. If you work – heck, if you live – in these times, you gotta use them. You gotta master them. More often, it seems, computers master us. Perfectly competent, intelligent people shudder at the thought of backing up their files, configuring their email clients, or setting up a website.

Today’s prizes are meant to make your computer easier to use, and to make you more productive. ActiveWords turns every word you type into a potential command, allowing you to lookup information, launch programs, or even set up series of actions that can be triggered with a single word. Files, Folders, and Tags allows you to add tags to any file or folder on your desktop, so you can browse your computer’s files that same way you browse your bookmarks at del.icio.us.

ActiveWords

ActiveWords functions are almost endless. Type the word “weather” and hit the designated ActiveWords key, and up pops a site to look up the weather. Type “Word” and hit the ActiveWords key and Word opens. Create a script automating your entire backup, defragmentation, and disk cleanup routine, type a word you designate (say, “maintenance”) and hit the designated key, and voila – the whole routine is run.

ActiveWords also brings you system-wide AutoCorrect functions – no more correcting DOuble CAps at the beginning of words, or misspelling anything. And you can create your own text substitution strings, so that you could insert your entire name, title, address, and contact info with a single word or phrase.

There are over two dozen sets of pre-programmed actions and text substitutions, including plugins for popular programs and services like Outlook, Palm Desktop, and SalesForce, as well as specialized text substitution/AutoCorrect dictionaries for, say, legal writing. And you can always add your own. Activewords is easily one of the most powerful ways you can improve the way you interact with your computer! (Windows only; Retail Price: $50 US)

Files, Folders, and Tags

Folders are so Windows 98! The 21st Century is all about tags – and Popular Productivity brings tags to your desktop with Files, Folders, and Tags. Tagging is a far more powerful way to organize your data, for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, you can add more than one tag to a file or folder – perhaps you have a file that is both a financial record and essential for a project. Where do you put it? In the past, you would have had to choose whether it goes with your business’ financial information or the project folder, but with Files, Folders, and Tags, you can stick it in either and tag it with both – it will come up when you browse files by either tag.

Second, you can add tags “on the fly” – if a new project comes up later that might need the same file, just add the tag instead of worrying about copying it or moving it or having to find it every time it’s needed. And third, you can give more natural names to files and folders – perhaps your workplace has a project naming convention that creates folders with names like “Proj00084284SK1AAB-Cl142”. Tag it “Gutter cleaning” and don’t worry about the gobbledygook.

Files, Folders, and Tags includes several tools to make working with tags easier, including a tray-based search tool, the ability to generate tag clouds, an an auto-scanner to help automate file tagging. With very little effort, you can be tagging and getting more done today! (Windows only; Retail price: $30 US)

How do you win?

To enter, tell us about the tool you cannot live without, the piece of hardware or software that makes your worklife easier, more efficient, or more fun. Leave your entries in the comments on this post.

The winner will be chosen by random drawing from everyone who has left a link in the comments on this post by 12:00 Noon PST on Wednesday, September 3rd. The drawing will be done by random number generator within a few days of the close of the drawing. All links will be verified.

The prizes will be sent direct from our sponsor.

Stay Tuned!

We’re kicking off the second week of the Lifehack Great Big Summer Giveaway with a great prize, but there’s still plenty of other great prizes on their way! We’ll be giving away prizes related to the working life every day this week, including:

• Copies of PhraseExpress v.5, a text snippets program to help you save time with repetitive tasks.
• Two years of hosting from powerMonster under their monsterSlayer plan: 10 GB disk space and 150GB of traffic with an included domain name.
• The Ultimate Guy’s Computer Bags, made of Rawlings baseball glove leather, from Sports Accessories.
• A $100 Amazon gift credit from Ubernote.

Don’t forget to enter last week’s contests in the Lifehack Great Big Summer Giveaway. And write a blog post about work and style to win the Careerbags.com JoJo Laptop Tote in Monday’s contest! We’ll be announcing winners for the first week early next week, after Labor Day. And check back every day this week for more chances to win!

Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

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Customer relationship management software is important for businesses that are both small and large. Freelancers and small businesses need such a system as much as large businesses and enterprises do. Well, maybe you need it a bit more if you have millions of customers, but that said: managing your customer relationships is not only tricky and often complicated, it’s essential to running a successful business.

Software makes such a complicated and time-consuming aspect of your business easier to handle and more efficient. There are many web-based CRM applications available, so let’s take a look at a few of the options available to you.

Highrise

Highrise is the popular CRM from 37signals, developers of many other popular productivity web apps. There’s no free option, and the prices are a bit marked up - you’re probably paying for the storage space more than anything. Perhaps they’re only targeting enterprise users, but for my uses I’d only want to plonk down for a plan if it had more power than the cheapest option while costing less than the $50/month option.

Highrise’s main features are a shared company address book, built-in task management, contact histories and cases, which allows you to keep case notes on a contact, along with other files.

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals delivers a sigh of relief with a monthly cost of $15 per user, and unlimited data storage is included in that price. PipelineDeals is very sales-oriented, as the name implies, focusing on tracking your sales, keeping a sales calendar, tracking your leads and organizing sales documents, so if you’re in a sales environment this may be one for you to look at. They talk about your sales pipeline a lot too. Who would’ve guessed?

Salesforce

Salesforce is perhaps the most popular CRM in the field, and prices start at $9 a month and go up higher than you can count. There’s also a pretty restricted free account called Personal Edition, which infers that it’s useless for anything business-related. Salesforce tries to integrate the process of managing customer relations with the process of funneling new leads into the system, using Google AdWords integration.

While it’s popular and quite powerful (and the fact you can manage AdWords campaigns from the app is enticing), it’s another CRM that is highly focused on making sales and not so much on customer relations management.

Oracle CRM On Demand

Oracle’s CRM On Demand starts at $70 a month per user. What you get for that $70 is not incredibly clear, with a convoluted website design that makes finding decent information difficult, and copy that’s just badly written. Oracle has some built-in analytics tools and call center integration features that will make it more useful to quite large businesses.

I couldn’t find any sign of whether data storage was limited or unlimited, and the website claims that the app requires “Microsoft Windows compatibility.” What kind of a hosted CRM requires you to be on Windows?

Unfortunately, when a web application’s sales pages are poorly designed, it’s a good indicator that the web app itself is just as bad.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM has an on-premise product, but we’re looking at hosted CRMs, so I’m going to look solely at their hosted option, Sugar On-Demand. The cheapest option is $40 a month and will allow you 300 users, though it requires an annual commitment. It also demands that you have five users or more, which is a fairly odd and restrictive move (as if the requirement for an annual commitment was not enough).

That said, SugarCRM seems to have a better balance between sales and marketing than some of the other options that focused far too much on one or the other to be an effective CRM. Furthermore, part of customer relationship management is good customer support, and SugarCRM is one of the few hosted options that offers decent customer support features.

Zoho CRM

From a perspective of price, Zoho CRM offers one of the best deals. The first three users are free, and after that, the prices are $12 and $25 per user per month for the Professional and Enterprise Editions respectively. The free edition isn’t lacking all that much from the paid versions; it doesn’t let you send email marketing material and there’s no SSL. There are a few other disabled features, but aside from that it’s fairly intact.

Zoho does a good job of balancing the marketing, sales and support triad, and includes an inventory management system that integrates with the sales process — this obviously prevents any embarassing sales of a product that is out of stock.

Offering a unique perspective and insight on productivity based on his experience as a writer, musician, family man and manager, Joel Falconer has been published online and off, and brings to Lifehack's readers practical advice you can use to be more efficient and effective.

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