I suppose it’s kind of like zero-based budgeting:

In zero-based budgeting, every line item of the budget must be approved, rather than only changes. During the review process, no reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. Zero-based budgeting requires the budget request be re-evaluated thoroughly, starting from the zero-base.

So if I was starting again, knowing what I do now, what would I need?

Everyday bag

• Laptop (+charger)
• Mobile phone (+charger)
• Kindle (+charger)
• Headphones
• Notebook
• Pens
• Bank cards, library card, gym card, passport, etc.
• Card case

Clothes

• Shoes
• Trainers
• Thick socks
• Coat
• Underwear x7
• Jeans x2 (+belt)
• Trousers (+belt)
• Shorts
• Shirts x3
• Jacket
• T-shirts x5
• Swimming shorts (+goggles)

Health/hygiene

• Towel
• Sports towel
• Contact lenses
• Glasses
• Flannel
• Migraine medication
• Inhalers x2
• Toothbrush
• Toothpaste
• Multivitamins
• Deodorant
• Moisturiser
• Razor/beard trimmer (+charger)

My aim with #divest12 isn’t to go ultra-minimalist, but rather to reflect upon what is absolutely necessary to maintain my current lifestyle.

58 items, I reckon.

Have I missed anything?

Just look at this:

But it’s difficult, isn’t it? You collect things that are necessary at some point in your life (or that you desire) and then end up hanging on to them. Usually the reason we do this is because they have monetary and/or emotional value.

Back in 2009 I decided to spend a week ‘divesting’. Amongst other things I got rid of hundreds of CDs and books as well as really focusing on the software and hardware I use day-to-day. It was a liberating feeling getting rid of so much. I realised that, in effect, I was a librarian for my books rather than a reader of them. The relationship was the wrong way around. The same went for CDs, DVDs, and other stuff I owned.

Now fast-forward to last week when I ready about Andrew Hyde’s extreme minimalism. Never mind 100 things or 50 things, he owns 15 things. Yes, fifteen. Here’s his ‘floorderobe’:

If what I’m doing is the thin end of the wedge, this is very much the thick end of it!

I suppose the question everyone wants to ask is What counts as ‘one thing’?

The “rule” of ownership is the express-lane checkout rule. If you were checking out in a grocery store, what would be counted as one item in your bag? A six-pack of beer would be one, right? I count my things as resellable items I would be pissed if someone took.

Coffee cup? No. Jacket? Yes. iPhone and headphones? One thing. Simple enough?

Whilst 15 things is not my ultimate goal, I am making a conscious start to declutter and divest. Yesterday alone I took two bin bags full of clothes to the recycling bank, identified 52 books from my study to get rid of, and made an inventory of my electronic gadgetry with a view to consolidating.

I’d like to:

• Reclaim some physical space
• Feel less of a ‘curatorial’ burden
• Be less concerned about the monetary value of my stuff

Want to join me? Add a comment below, write about it on your own blog or just use the #divest12 hashtag on Twitter or Google+!

Image CC BY Andrew-Hyde

Note: This is an update to a previous post.

During the summer holidays before I headed to university I worked in a secondhand bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. And then, to help support myself during my MA in Modern History I worked in Waterstones bookshop in Newcastle. I love books.

But, despite my affection for the printed word, I still prefer, on balance, reading on my Kindle. One of the main reasons for this is the ease by which I can highlight sections of text (non-destructively) which are then available at kindle.amazon.com.

Whilst I’m waiting for everything that’s ever been written to be digitised I need a solution for physical books that is:

• Quick
• Accurate
• Citable

I think I’ve got that with the following system. Here’s what to do.

The Basics

1. Sign up to Evernote. You can experiment with a free account but, like me, you’ll no doubt go Premium for the added data storage/transfer and functionality.
2. Install the Evernote app both on your computer and your smartphone (I’m using the iOS version)
3. When you start reading a new book, create a new notebook for it and take a photo of the front of the book. Title this first note something like Author (Date of publication) – Title, Place of publication: Publisher
4. Every time you come across something you want to make a note on, take a photo of the text. Add any comments or thoughts you have and title it something like Author – page number(s)

After syncing, Evernote provides OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the text of images, so you could stop here as you’ve now got searchable notes from books (as promised in the title). However, I’ve gone one step further.

Going Further

Now that the notes you want are in Evernote, it’s time to tidy them up and make the text copy-and-pasteable. Here’s what to do after carrying out steps 1-4 above:

1. Create a Book Clippings notebook
2. Sort the notes in the notebook to make ensure the note with the front cover is at the top
3. Select all of the notes, click on ‘Note’ in the top menu and then select Merge Notes
4. Type out the text you want from each photograph underneath it. Add the page number in brackets afterwards and delete the photo and references.
5. Repeat. Yes, this takes time.
6. Drag your tidied-up note into the Book Clippings notebook.
7. Start reading your next book.

Conclusion

I’ve found this an extremely effective way of getting searchable notes from physical books. As a bonus, you might want to try using Evernote’s Web Clipper to import your Kindle notes so that everything’s together in one place.

Have you tried this? Have you got a different system?

Last year I took a personal digital hiatus better known as Belshaw Black Ops. I got plenty of stuff done, really appreciating the time out of the constant digital attention stream.

This year I’m planning to do the same for the month of December. It’s slightly difficult given my role at JISC infoNet, but here’s what I’ll be doing (and not doing):

1. Spending time with family.
   
2. Not responding to email. If you email my personal email address you’ll get an auto-response. Other than work-related emails on my JISC accounts, the only other way to contact me is my mobile number. Ask for it if you need it.
3. Avoiding social networks. Yes, even Twitter. And Google+, Facebook. The lot.
4. Not blogging. Or moderating comments.
5. Collating and curating. Change doesn’t come through one person having a good idea. Change comes through ideas being packaged in such a way that they become memes and alter the status quo. I’ll be going back through what I’ve written and created over the past year and thinking through how it connects with other stuff.
6. Playing Battlefield 3. What an epic game!
7. Migrating web hosts. I’m sick to death of Bluehost. They used to be great, but now they’re slow and unreliable.
8. Researching ancient monuments. Visiting Ggantija Temples and Hagar Qim on Malta has rekindled my interest!

Depending on when I have to defend my thesis, I may also need to spend time making clarifications and changes to that. All in all, if you need to contact me, ask my advice, or invite me to speak somewhere, you’ve got four weeks before 2012 to do so…

Image CC BY-NC BaboMike

Recently I rediscovered the excellent free planners by Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing. You can find them here. I like breaking out the crayons, so had a ball colouring in the productivity heatmap!

Unsurprisingly, the most useful on a day-to-day basis is the daily planner which is certainly comprehensive but needed tweaking for my context. So below is my effort, for what it’s worth. I’ve only been using it for the last few days but, in conjunction with Google Calendar for weekly/monthly planning it’s been awesome.

(Embedded doc not showing? Try direct link to PDF)

If you want to want to fill it in electronically or tinker with it for your own context there’s a Microsoft Word version below:

Dougs Daily Planner (172)

If you like this, you may also appreciate my (free!) e-book entitled #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

Productivity, to my mind, is about doing more of what of what you enjoy doing and doing less of that which you don’t. It’s highly context-dependent, although there are some things that work in most situations – as I outline in #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

What I’m concerned about is a condition just shy of Digital Taylorism, that twisted notion of productivity that Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘performativity’. It’s a cancer in the knowledge economy:

According to Lyotard, postmodernity is characterised by the end of metanarratives. So what legitimates science now? Lyotard’s answer is – performativity. This is what Lyotard calls the “technological criterion” – the most efficient input/output ratio. The technical and technological changes over the last few decades – as well as the development of capitalism – have caused the production of knowledge to become increasingly influenced by a technological model. It was during the industrial revolution, Lyotard suggests, that knowledge entered into the economic equation and became a force for production, but it is in postmodernity that knowledge is becoming the central force for production. Lyotard believes that knowledge is becoming so important an economic factor, in fact, that he suggests that one day wars will be waged over the control of information.

Lyotard calls the change that has taken place in the status of knowledge due to the rise of the performativity criterion the mercantilization of knowledge. In postmodernity, knowledge has become primarily a saleable commodity. Knowledge is produced in order to be sold, and is consumed in order to fuel a new production. According to Lyotard knowledge in postmodernity has largely lost its truth-value, or rather, the production of knowledge is no longer an aspiration to produce truth. Today students no longer ask if something is true, but what use it is to them. (Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy)

The reason that performativity is dangerous is because it strips out all of the enjoyment and self-actualisation that work can bring and reduces it to a commodity. Instead, as Seth Godin often gets across in his books and his blog, work should be hard but a fundamentally creative endeavour. Talented people leave jobs if they’re overly- constrained:

Whoever says artists can’t deal with corporate pressures because they have frail minds, is missing out on the potential the artistic mind has to boost company morale and increase productivity. Most artists would just as soon quit once they become conscious of their exploitation and that is a sign of strength not weakness. (Martin Dansky)

Our working lives, even if we are self-employed, involve both physical contracts (I will do X amount of work for £Y) and unspoken, tacit contracts. The latter can sometimes be pre-judged on a visit to a potential future workplace, but certainly understood in the first few weeks on the job. It’s the old “that’s the way we do things around here” chestnut.

Whether you’re a manager or not, make sure you’re focusing on productivity rather than performativity. Sometimes the internalisation of such rhetoric ends up having more of an effect that external factors. Focus on truth. Focus on creativity. Focus on happiness. Our time here is short.

Image CC BY-NC tarotastic

If you’re looking for help improving user outcomes, head over to Synechism Ltd.

Last October I published a book entitled #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity using a publishing process I devised called OpenBeta. It’s based on the principle of a book being cheaper the earlier you ‘buy into’ into the creative process. I always intended to make it free after a year, but I’ve decided to do so earlier as I’m increasingly referring to it in my interactions with people: I’d like everyone to be able to read it for free!

#uppingyourgame – Download PDF (free!)

It looks great on the iPad. It’s also available as cheap as I could make it on the Amazon Kindle Store (which might take a while to reflect price change) and as a physical book at Lulu.

Do pass the link on and let me know if you find it helpful!

#uppingyourgame is about personal productivity, not about applying somebody else’s system to your life. It’s about finding what drives you, discovering your ‘well of motivation’ and using this to create an ever-upwards virtuous circle. Above all it’s about doing more of what you enjoy doing and less of what you don’t.

The guidance, ideas and tips contained in #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity range from coming up with a philosophy of productivity upon which to base your system right through to helping others become more productive.

#uppingyourgame is helps you develop productivity for life. It’s not just about ‘getting things done’.

PS If you’re looking for a shorter (also free) read, try my #onfire: ignite your productivity

There’s an underground religion at work in every institution and most organisations. It’s something that pervades meeting after meeting and interaction after interaction. People everywhere are worshipping the Status Quo.

Whilst for those of a certain age this will immediately bring to mind an ageing rock band who can be seen in arenas worldwide miming their hits from a bygone era, that’s not what I’m talking about. The type of Status Quo I’m talking about is a nebulous force akin to what Steven Pressfield identifies in Do The Work as ‘The Resistance’.

The problem is that, unlike Pressfield’s quasi-religious (objective) malevolent force, Status Quo is a monster of our own creation which can, under the right conditions, spread like a virus. Status Quo is an idea. It’s a meme. And as with any successful meme it’s a shapeshifter, having a common core whilst being able to take on many different forms. The Status Quo is an unvoiced set of assumptions that allows new ideas to be dismissed by appeals to ‘common sense’ strong emotions.

Status Quo is manifested in many different ways and in many different places. In schools it might be the idea of desks in rows. In businesses it could be detailed branding regulations. In universities it’s possibly the physical location of students. However it manifests itself, the important thing to remember about Status Quo is that it’s the very thin layer, the crust, on top of a much deeper set of opinions, policies, prejudices and practice.

So if the question is ‘How do I change the Status Quo?’ you need to ask the associated questions: ‘The Status Quo according to whom?’ and ‘Why did this Status Quo take hold?’ Once you can answer these, you’re ready to do battle. You can’t win by fighting directly, only obliquely: presenting an alternate reality is the only way to win.

You replace one Status Quo with another Status Quo.

Good luck.

CC BY UggBoy?UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD //

The opposite of auto-blogging is curation. I’ve been using Licorize to turn bookmarking into projects (see my Research section) but it can do a whole lot more than that. What I’ve done below is to cherry-pick some resources relating to user outcomes and productivity for your delectation using Licorize’s ‘send draft to WordPress’ feature.

Do let me know if they’re useful.

Go Off the Grid Stress-Free with Quiet Hours [Lifehacker] “When you shut down your email or IM client so you can actually get things done, it’s easy to forget to turn them back on again. That’s likely great for the task at hand, but not so great when the boss is looking for you because she can’t find the report you were supposed to send her. Quiet Hours lets you shut down your communication apps stress-free, and automatically re-opens them after a user-defined period of time.”

The Downtime Learner theory Dean Groom on immersion by downtime. Draws on gamer theory.

WorkSnug “Connecting mobile workers to the nearest and best places to work in the major cities of the world.”

How to write 1000 words a day (and not go bat shit crazy) « The Thesis Whisperer

10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance — PsyBlog

I do a lot of research. Not only is my day job Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet but when I go home I’m researching and writing as part of my doctoral thesis. Quantity and quality are different measures, but I’d hope that I’m at least half-decent at something I spend a fair amount of my life doing.

Being a researcher before the internet must have been a very difficult occupation. Much less access to information but, I suppose, on the other hand, it must have been a much more ‘embodied’ existence than spending hours mediated by several different kinds of screens. Without a focus it’s very easy to become confused very quickly and be like a dog chasing after shiny cars.

My focus at the moment, as shown by dougbelshaw.com/research is upon:

• Open Educational Resources
• Mobile Learning
• Digital Literacy

I use several tools to stay up-to-date in these areas and to discover new resources. Here’s five of the best:

Twitter + Storify

This goes without saying: Twitter is my social dashboard and an absolute treasure trove of useful information. The important thing is that it’s a network (of networks) of people who have expertise, influence and opinion.

Recently I’ve started using Storify to, for want of a better phrase, ‘curate tweets’ about stuff I’m researching. Here’s an example for iPad mindmapping apps. Asking a question, getting replies, curating them and re-sharing helps everybody.

LinkedIn Signal

This feels like, in a phrase Ewan McIntosh used five years ago, giving away some kryptonite as LinkedIn Signal is truly amazing for researching specific terms. It’s based on your LinkedIn connections, which I’m careful to keep based on people I’ve met. It shows your relation to that person but also the most discussed links about that search term.

Try it. You’ll love it.

Amplify

Amplify is for ‘clipping’ content from websites and adding your comments to it. You can find my most recent clippings in the sidebar of this blog. The power of Amplify, however, is twofold: (i) the people you follow who often post things you wouldn’t come across, and (ii) the search functionality.

Futurelab’s EducationEye

The ever-innovative Futurelab have recently announced EventEye, a paid-for version of EducationEye for (unsurprisingly!) events. EducationEye is a service that pulls in posts from blogs (including this one) and arranges them in a visually pleasing and useful way.

Again, there’s a search function available but it’s also handy for serendipitous dipping in and out of in order to keep up with the zeitgeist.

Quora

I use Quora about once per week. It’s a social question-and-answer site where people can vote answers up and down and summarise answers once there’s plenty of responses. It can work very well and there’s an extremely diverse mix of people on there. It’s certainly worth ‘tracking’ questions to see what kinds of responses they get and from whom.

Conclusion

So there we are! Five recommendations of tools that help me be a better researcher. What have I missed?

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stuck in Customs