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Clay

My mom is awesome (see Disneyland picture to the right).  But awesomeness just isn’t correlated with knowledge of RSS, and my feed hasn’t seen hide nor hair of mom since day 1.

So how does my mom read The Growing Life and other productivity blogs?  Not via email, because she never checks it.  She checks my feed with Alltop (hopefully before rushing over to Zenhabits :-), which is an interesting project started by Guy Kawasaki.  (If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Guy wrote the book on business evangelism and was one of the original Apple employees responsible for marketing the Macintosh; he’s also a well-respected blogger).

Mom’s only recently been able to pick me on Alltop, after Guy graciously added me to the lifehacks section. Here’s a little more information . . . Read the rest of this entry »

 
photo by Krelic

You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
–Morpheus in “The Matrix”?

In the cyberpunk classic, The Matrix, protagonist Neo lives in a simulated reality created — by machines — to subdue and pacify humans. At one point, the film’s central character, Neo, is given the opportunity to take either a blue pill or a red pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, his life goes on as before. But if he takes the red pill, his eyes open up to the false reality that is The Matrix and he becomes exposed to the parallel universe that’s been his entire known existence.

Because of advertisements, political spin, cultural peer pressure, biased dogma, and even some of our own outdated biological instincts, we all live to at least some extent with one foot in a false reality. The decision to take the metaphorical blue pill (blissful ignorance), or red pill (the truth, no matter how painful it may be), isn’t as cut and dry for us as it was for Neo. The red/blue pill analogy, however, is still an important one that represents a key decision we continually face: do we live according to unquestioned patterns and modes of existence, or do we continually press for the truth, no matter how damaging it might be to our ego, to our nest eggs, and our social status?

The truth is that truth is the only path down which long-term and durable solutions to personal and societal problems can be solved. Here are 7 practices meant to aid you in continually taking the metaphorical red pill:

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Attentional Feng Shui is the practice of purposefully and beneficially architecting the attentional landscape of a room to emphasize your priorities. The how-to section is at the very end, and you’re welcome to skip directly to it. In the mean time, let’s talk about…

False Dichotomies

In a self-help climate that favors the mind over the body, the non-physical over the physical, and heaven over earth, it can be easy to forget that physical environments have a very real affect on us. And they should. While The Secret tells us that “thoughts become things,”? it is also true that “things become thoughts.”? And whereas the Emerald Tablet is often quoted as saying “as above, so below,”? authors too often neglect the tablet’s follow-up: “as below, so above.”?

People are quick to point out that our environments are products of our creation, and that we should look past external circumstances. They are right, of course, but this is only a partial truth that ignores the dynamic interchange between physical and non-physical realms. The influence and casualty runs in both directions (from physical to non-physical, and vice-versa) and I’m glad it does.

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[Editor's Note: In an effort to avoid reinventing the wheel, I've taken this post's introduction partly from an earlier post.  Apologies if you've read the earlier material.]

In 2005, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman injected a bestselling hit, The World is Flat, into the national psyche. The book’s 5th “flatting”? factor is outsourcing. Friedman argues that the practice enables companies to componentize manufacturing and service efforts, thus making each component more efficient and cost effective.

In August of 2005, author A.J. Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically) read Friedman’s book and thought to himself, “why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun?”? “Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century?”? “Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?”? He then goes on to write a notable piece of cultural history for Esquire called My Outsourced Life (notable because it later catches on in a big way). In My Outsourced Life, Jacobs outsources everything from worrying and spousal relations, to email and work related research. It’s an entertaining read and one that I recommend.

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Modern life has us enmeshed in a web of unwanted and unnecessary commitments.  Most of us spend the majority of our time doing things we don’t want to do.  We join committees because we think they’ll look good on our resumes, go to birthday parties out of obligation, attend inane meetings, stay in bad relationships out of fear, take on unwanted work projects to gain favor with our bosses, stay in jobs we don’t like instead of quitting.

Unwanted commitments seem to beget more unwanted commitments.  They’re like lies: they multiply fast.  If you take on an unwanted project to please your boss, then the next time a similar project comes by she’ll throw it in your lap.  If you unhappily go to an acquaintances birthday party out of sense of obligation, they’re likely to invite you over for dinner, or call you more often.  You get my drift.

What Does this Have to do with Productivity?

Well, it’s common knowledge that productivity naturally emerges from passion: when we love what we’re doing, productivity becomes irrelevant.  The corollary is that being unproductive results from doing things you’d rather not do.

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Photo by Sunfox

The Growing Life emerged 7 weeks ago sporting a tag line that read: "Durable Evolution, Meaningful Productivity."  The ever-so-wise academic in me thought "durable evolution" was both catchy and sophisticated.  A real show-stopper.  Turns out only one person liked it, and I’m pretty sure that they expressed this opinion while drunk.

At the same time that my hopes of "durable evolution" entering the common parlance were being shattered, I also discovered the beginnings of the voice for this blog.  Articles like this and this were beginning to define The Growing Life.  Additionally, I found myself questioning GTD and the role of wildly-successful sites like Lifehacker, and thinking more and more about counterintuitives as well as ideas at the so-called "bleeding edge."  In light of this, I’ve decided to change my tag line to "Alternative Productivity, Anti-Hacks for Living."  Here’s a little on what these two phrases mean to me…

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