lobby art in "The Monarch" condo, downtown Austin

I’ve been juggling a bunch of balls for quite some time now. Here’s a quote from a previous blog post I wrote in 2007: The Law of Gravity: as it applies to Entrepreneurialism:

I compare all my businesses/projects to balls. I continuously throw up as many balls in the air as I can. Right now, all the balls are different shapes, sizes, and colors—-but there’s probably about 6 of them right now. I’ve learned to accept (and to look forward to) the realization that most of the balls will fall, roll around on the floor, and then ultimately get squashed. As a positive, that’s when you no longer have to pay attention to them. But in your heart, you know that you gave them a chance to fly…no regrets on your part. Some balls, though, stay up for longer than you would expect. However, the longer they stay in the air, they gradually grow in size and begin to get heavier and thus, harder to manage along with the others.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed about new “opportunities” that have come to me, that a year ago I would have jumped at—effectively adding them to juggling exercise. I’ve reached the point, it seems, where my mindset has shifted. I’ve now become a lot less interested in picking up new projects and more focused on the ones I’m already working on—those that I’ve grown exceptionally passionate about and have a high potential for sustained success. I still have a tremendous curiosity with the new projects that I’m teased with—and am in fact, admittedly addicted to curiosity. I would even make the bold statement that I’ve never met anyone more curious than myself. So, now as I’m refusing to allow myself to get wrapped up into these new ideas, I’ve realized that what has drawn me to them in the past has been my sheer curiosity of “what if” and perhaps my lack of full belief in my other projects.

Now, though, I’m confident and sure that the projects in front of me right now, are the ones I want to focus my time on. Yes, it stings a little bit to say, “no”, but perhaps the only way to reach massive success with one thing in life is to say no to countless others.

What balls are you juggling right now? Do you find yourself adding more and more to your collection? If so, maybe you should explore the true reason why. And if you’re not adding more and just focusing on one or two, then perhaps you’re a step ahead of me.

Every once in a while I go on a reading rampage. In fact, for a three month stretch during my last year in college, I was consistently reading four to six books per week (non course work related) and regularly checked out 15-20 books at a time from the library. In fact, it was a bit of an unhealthy obsession—and I felt quite consumed by my addiction to knowledge.

I’m able to read pretty quickly because of a speed reading technique my dad taught me years ago that he learned while in the US Air Force Academy.

A couple months ago, I was on one of my reading rampages and went to one of The University of Texas libraries (they have an amazing collection books and honestly, it’s kinda neat to be in there and know that you’re one of the ONLY people in there reading for leisure) and found a bunch of books that facsinated me. I plopped down for a long while and read them all, taking notes of the most memorable passages from each book. Here’s an AMAZING quote from one of them:

Thoughts are cold, but feelings are warm, alive and vital. So don’t “think” I am strong. Feel it! Stir up your nature to its depth until you can really feel you are indeed strong and possessed of the radiant energy of mentative force. - Mind Power: The Secret of Mental Magic by William Walker Atkinson.

This was the quote that inspired me to have the realization that I wrote on previously: Clarity is feeling, not thinking

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN_4EZMYf-E

“Clarity is feeling, rather than thinking. The pureness of existing is feeling the sensation of life, not thinking about its intricacies.”

I pulled this “note to self” from my journal, which is a realization I had on May 14, 2010. Frequently, I catch myself overthinking so many things. Truly experiencing the moment, though, comes only when the mind is completely silent. That’s when you feel the moment. And when this happens, oh my, it feels brilliant.

If there were no limitations or consequences, what would your perfect average day look like?

I learned an interesting visualization technique after watching a video taped speech from the uber internet marketer, Frank Kern. He shared what worked for him to help him realize his ideal future. His words were so impactful to me, that it encouraged me to do exactly as he did.

The key is every day – you could do this stuff every day and not die or get sick of it. Many people visualize their future in order to help it come true. However, in order to fully realize that future, it’s important that you don’t just visualize the physical things like that fancy car you want to drive, but also how driving it makes you feel, what you’re thinking about as you’re driving it, what music you listen to while you’re driving, who’s in the car with you, etc. The more detailed you can get, the more your mind’s eye can begin to piece it all together and realize how possible it is.

I’ve been visualizing my perfect, average day in great detail, from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night. I’ve been writing it all down in detail on a sketch pad about 36″ x 18″. I never expected to write as much as I have so far. In fact, I’ve been working on it for weeks and am only up to 12:30pm. It’s a very surprisingly difficult process, actually.

Photo 1 – Here’s a photo of me working on it while I was in my backyard on my picnic table. This is after having just started, so I haven’t filled up that much space.

Photo 2 – A close up – it reads, “in the future…a day in the life of davidhwalker, if i had to live this day over and over again, what day would make me happy”:

Photo 3 – I moved inside and wrote quite a bit more. I just kept going and going…was an immense amount of fun, actually! :

Note: what you see at the bottom is the word “SLEEP.” Before I had started, I had assumed that I would be able to do the entire visualize from “AWAKE” to sleep on that one page. In fact, at the point that I’ve finished writing in this photo, I’m only up to 10:30am. Didn’t realize how detailed I was going to get, but the more detailed I got, the more real it became, and the more my mind’s eye was beginning to accurately take a grasp of what my future can be.

Photo 3: This is where I am currently–page 2 (I was able to fill up the entire first page before going to page 2). I’m a bit stuck and find myself writing a new sentence every few days. But at this time I’ve having a hard time visualizing what my perfect, average day will be like after 12:30pm. I know what it will begin to look like around 6pm, but for some reason, I’m having a hard time filling that gap.

Here’s a list of some of the questions that guided me along the way. Remember, the key is don’t think about stuff—think about experience. our experiences help shape our identity.

1. Where would you live?
2. What would your house look like?
3. What time would you wake up?
4. What would I do in the morning? Think about? First words of the day?
5. what would i have for breakfast
6. what does the mundane stuff look like – what you’re thinking about, etc
7. what would you spend the first half of your day doing
8. what would you have for lunch
9. who eat with
10. what would your friends be like
11. what would you do for personal fulfillment
12. what life purpose would i strive for
13. what would your business be
14. what time would you start work
15. what would actually do at work?
16. what is your relationship like
17. what would you do for family time
18. what would you have for dinner
19. where would you eat
20. who would you eat with
21. what would you talk about
22. what would you do at night
23. who would you do it with
24. what would your thoughts be as you went to sleep
25. etc

www.youtube.com/watch?v=21mpQQ9COD4

Some comments of interest so far:

• time zone changes are frustrating. In the beginning I thought it would be helpful to have such a dramatic time change between Sydney and Austin, thinking that I’d be able to knock stuff out and have it show up in my colleague’s inboxes when they wake up. Not so easy. I’ve started going out more at night (naturally) so it makes it near impossible to wake up at 5am or 6am as I was before. This morning I woke up at 9, checked the local time in Austin and it was already the afternoon—which kind of deflates my personal motivation—their day is already almost over.
• unexpected interruptions of flow. Whether it’s broken suitcases, discussions about what to do for lunch, or doing laundry, it’s all an interruption. If anything, it is training to be able to leave and then re-enter a solid state of flow. Difficult indeed, but a necessity in this environment. The only way I can think of that would counter all the distractions would be to wake up super early in the morning (which I was doing before) or having ‘closed door’ office hours. I do not want to do that, though, as it really is shutting off other people. But then again, maybe if they understand it’s for the best and only for a limited amount of time, that would be okay. Still debating the best method…Ah, perhaps a good alternative to an actual closed door is for me to put on headphones. I still feel a little guilty about that, though.
• fear of opening my inbox. I’m sitting here without having opened my gmail inbox because last time i was in there it was 276 unread messages. That was after a 4 day hiatus of not having internet access because I was staying at a lakehouse hundreds of kilometers outside of Sydney. Last night when I checked it after coming in from a night out I guess I COULD have processed it all and gotten it down to zero, but I tell ya that’s frustrating just thinking about. I guess the trick is just setting out the time and knocking it out. Not sure how to conquer it otherwise. My 3-4hrs/day of working are quickly dwindling due to extra distractions (mainly my parents have now arrived in Sydney, so there are 6 of us all staying together in a small 3 bedroom apartment.
• Hmmm…Okay, time to start processing so I can close some/all of the open loops. Speaking of, I wonder if this segment of my trip is teaching me to be more comfortable with having some open loops out there…time will tell.

Two days in a row now that I’ve woken up super early. The first time it happened (4am) I thought it was a fluke because of a misaligned body clock, but when I woke up naturally this morning at 5am I realized, perhaps my body is so anxious to “get things done” that I’m jettisoning myself out of bed.

Some people claim that my trip to Australia should be a time of disconnecting and total relaxation. In my opinion, though, that is an old-school escapist vacation mentality. I LOVE my job. I am enamored by the work I get to do, and get paid for, so “disconnecting” for me is not a fun thing to do. I don’t need/want to “escape” from anything, even while I’m traveling.

In terms of workflow a few things I’ve learned thus far:

• very important to get through emails and to-do items just as always. I remember yesterday morning as I was leaving for the day to explore Sydney I had this pain in my gut because I was not taking my laptop with. It was kind of funny as Katrina knew it too. However, it wasn’t because I’m addicted to being connected, it’s because I’m addicted to extinguishing open loops. I had a lot of open loops that morning, despite my waking at 4am. Mainly because I was going through an inbox of 150 emails due to about 72hrs of non-processing—and still didn’t finish. And mainly because I was trying to get through them all–mistake! Point learned: Prioritizing emails responses and to do items is a MUST when traveling.
• I’ve accepted now that I’m not going to be able to do as much as I could before when I was working 8-10hr days. Now, I’m trying to squeeze it all into one 3-4hr block in the morning and a 1hr or so block of casual social networking in the evening. This is forcing me to be okay with not quite being SO responsive to everyone. It’s okay to let a few email fall through, as long as I put them in my to-do list to reply to them later. The anxiety of leaving for the day for exploration is not because of the low priority open loops. It’s because of the high-priority ones, those that I didn’t get a chance to get to because I was focusing too much on the lower ones. So I’m learning priority-level discipline–albeit forced, so that I don’t have that pain in my gut when I leave for the day without my laptop.
• Web based tools. Keeping the clutter low on this little computer is a must, mainly because the hard drive is so small – 12gig. But in all actuality, this is a blessing. I like not having a bunch of applications installed on here—it’s almost like a mental cleansing. I’ve been using Google Docs quite a bit and also instead of installing programs I try and find an web based alternative. For example I always like keeping track of my time I spend doing tasks. This is mainly because when I get into my flow, I totally lose track of time and then find myself frustrated with how many hours I focused on something that was low priority. I’ve been using Online Stopwatch instead of my usual Multitrack Stopwatch. In all honesty, it’s just a small file to download, and I could install it, but it just feels good NOT to.
• Not having a means to digitally capture my life as usual is tough. I normally use twitter and facebook mobile throughout the day to catalog my ongoings. This is impossible here, though, as international rates are a pain with my current cell phone plan. I might change it, but maybe it’s a good thing to challenge myself here. Not sure. It is getting me to blog more after all and post  facebook photos.
• Brainstorming increases dramatically when out of the element. All day—TONS of ideas. Wow, can’t even explain. Just being exposed to so many different elements that only being in a foreign environment can provide is quite breathtaking. My brain impressed me. If anything, that’s a reminder to everyone that we still have the faculties to brainstorm like always, but perhaps we’ve forgotten the path to that synergy. Or perhaps the pathway has changed over the years, it’s just a matter of tapping into it in a new way.

That’s all for now. I’m going to work on a miniature version of a weekly review so that I can make sure that I’m not overlooking anything crucial on my to do list. Lookign forward to it as today will be an AMAZING day of exploration if I can be sure to have closed all open loops. No more anxiety, hopefully.

It’s 4:35AM in Australia and while everyone else (my sister, her roommate, & my girlfriend) are asleep, but my internal clock was aching me to ‘get the hell outta bed!” So here I am sipping tea and writing a blog post.

Before my travels to Sydney I purchased the super tiny Asus eeePC 901 series.

Yes, the thing is tiny. I’ve figured how to type pretty well on it, though!

There are a number of challenges that traveling abroad has already presented and will be presenting soon. I will be here for 6 weeks, so as person who spends about 12hrs/day on the computer (personal + professional) things will be transforming a bit. Hopefully it will teach me to work in a more efficient, productive way. I feel like it’s almost like jumping into the deep end a bit…we shall see.

I will be sharing these challenges and the steps I’ve taken to overcome them over the course of the next few weeks. My girlfriend, Katrina, thinks they sound like boring posts…lol, but I’m really facinated with it anyways.

For the past 1.5 weeks I’ve been adhering pretty closely to the GTD lifestyle. This was all kicked off by a mini gtd seminar I helped organize at Conjunctured. I asked Drew Arnold who I met after being featured in the Statesman a while back about mine and John Erik’s use of GTD in our lives. Drew had contacted John and I in hopes of meeting others who shared his way of “getting things done.” Months after that initial meeting I found Drew at Conjunctured one day randomly and we got to talking and we thought we’d give it a go at having a GTD seminar at Conjunctured led by him. He really knows his stuff—I admire how much in control of his workflow he is. I hope to get to that point someday soon. I feel like I’m on my way.

Anyways, so after that seminar I started getting into it again. I realized the reason I “fell off the wagon” last time was the absence of a weekly review—an integral part to the success of the program. I was convinced that I “didn’t have time to do a weekly review”—apparently I just had too much stuff to do. I’ve since realized this was a horrible oversight and detrimental to the program’s success. I have since had two successful weekly reviews. And I must tell you it helps to provide an endcap to each week’s flow. And it also reinvigorates your trust in your personal system.

So right now I’m writing this post because I’m brainstorming my goals:

• 50,000+feet: Life
• 40,000 feet: Three- to five-year visions
• 30,000 feet: One- to two-year goals
• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
• 10,000 feet: Current projects
• Runway: Current actions

It’s difficult. But I guess something of this magnitude should. I tell ya though, I’m super excited to discover what these goals are and share them publicly.

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” – Vincent van Gogh