Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead ; follow him on twitter . Our inner world — emotional, mental space — helps determine our outer world, right? But the space we spend the majority of our time in also plays a huge role in our lives. It can influence our actions, our mood, and it can determine whether we remain stuck or achieve our dreams. I want to share with you a few strategies I’ve discovered to design your space to help your achieve your goals. I’ve been using this technique for quite some time to take advantage of my environment’s ability to help my achieve my dreams. The reason this is so effective is because when you design your space in a way that supports your dreams, you’re receiving perpetual subconscious reinforcement. So even if you design your space to reinforce a reality that does not yet exist for you, it is still effective because your environment is constantly introducing the possibility to your mind as a new reality. There are three basic categories for engineering your space to reinforce your dreams. Identity modifiers Style and energy Specific goal reinforcement Let’s start at the beginning… 1. General identity modifiers. If you want to change a part of your identity, changing your space will help introduce a new trait of behavior. Here are some examples: If you want to become a writer, reorganize your space to support your identity as a writer. Make sure there is a bookshelf near your workspace with classics novels and books on writing. Buy some nice pens or make word-processor the only icon on your desktop. Put quotes of famous writers around your workspace. Create a fictional cover for a book with your name as the author and have it framed and placed on your desk. If you want to simplify your life, remove all the clutter from your space. But don’t just remove the clutter; incorporate minimalist reinforcements in your space. This might mean getting a desk without a lot of drawers that forces you to keep it neat. Create a minimalist computer experience, a minimalist home and a minimalist workspace. The more you organize your space in a way that reinforces simplicity, the greater effect it will start to have on your inner space. If you want to become a musician, surround your space with musical instruments. Put up photos or album covers of your favorite artists. Make your space speak music. Design in it a way that if someone were to walk into your room, they would immediately think “this person is a musician.” These are just starting points. There are many other creative ways to implement this simple idea. While these examples are of specific traits, the techniques can be applied to any shift. 2. Influencing style and energy. The spaces we live in can be either creative and inspiring, or dull and suffocating. Imagine the picture of a cubicle colored in mind-numbing grays, fluorescent lighting, no plants, no photos, no personality. Not exactly electrifying, is it? Now imagine a workspace that is completely you. The desk is a beautiful, sturdy wood in your favorite color. The chair is well built and comfortable. You have photos of smiling family and friends framed on your desk. The lighting is warm and inviting. It feels much different, doesn’t it? Here are some ways you can improve the energy of your space. And in doing so, make it more inviting and likely to make you want to be there and in turn want to work there to achieve your goals. Take inventory. Take a second to close your eyes and allow your mind to be still and your body to relax. Now open your eyes and look at the room around you. How does it make you feel? Does it call you to your purpose? Does it excite you or does it bore you? Is it inviting or indifferent? Now think about way that you could change or improve your space to achieve the feeling you would most want it to impress. What could you change to make it more in harmony with who you are? Energize your space . It’s amazing the effects that a few simple changes can make in your space to increase the energy and vibration. A few easy and simple ways to do this are by bringing more plants into your space, putting fresh fruit on your table or your desk, and place photos of yourself and family or friends around where you work. What colors could you change to bring in more energy? Could the lighting be changed? Do you resonate with your space? Everyone has their own individual and unique style. Some people may feel more drawn to classical pieces, while others are drawn to a more modern style. Some prefer the thrashing chords of punk rock to work to, while others are moved by the dramatic art of opera. Your space should reflect on some level who you are as a person, what your tastes are, what your interests are, and what you care about. The more your environment speaks to you, the more of an inspiring effect it will have on you. Your imagination is your only limit. 3. Promoting specific intentions or goals. This is really where the rubber meets the road and we get down to reinforcing specific goals, rather than general space manipulation. Everyone says to write down your goals. That’s a good idea, but it’s much more effective when your goals are an element or a fixture of your surroundings. So the idea is simple, figure out what your most important intentions or goals are. Choose no more than five or six. Now place them somewhere in your space that will be constantly visible. Here are a few ways you can do this: Post it. Print them out in big type and put them on a cork board, directly in front of your field of vision where you most often work. Frame it. Print and frame your goals in a 5 x 7 inch frame. Put the frame on your nightstand or desk. Or both. Desktop it . Create an image in a simple image editor (try pixlr if you don’t have one) that’s roughly the resolution of your desktop. Now type out your intentions, save the image and select it as the background on your computer desktop. Use a digital photo frame (thanks to Steve Pavlina for this idea). Create a few images of your goals with plain text, or combine it with an inspiring image. Plug the images into your digital frame and you’re done. This has the added benefit of animation, which has a natural tendency to draw your eye to the image. I haven’t tried this, so I’m not sure how distracting it would be, but I can’t think of a better thing to be distracted by. Send yourself blank emails. When I want to remind myself to stay focused on something, I’ll send myself a blank email with the subject being whatever my reminder is. If I want to remind myself to focus on writing I’ll make the subject “You write for two hours a day this week.” This strategy has a drawback though, as its effectiveness is dependent on how often you check your email. And I don’t think obsessive email checking with the rationalization of being reminded of your goals is a good trade off, unless you make one of your reminders “Stop obsessively checking email.” Setup reminders. Use a software like Dream Wizard . Dream Wizard allows you to plug in your most important goals, add a picture and voice (if you want), and set it to remind you at certain intervals as a pop up on your computer. I think this could also be accomplished with Gcal or other application to send you email reminders. That would another option without having to pay for a piece of software to remind you. Using this method is a good strategy if the majority of your time during the day is spent on the computer. This article was written by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind .  For more unconventional ideas, grab a subscription to Illuminated Mind.

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Feng Shui On Steroids: Design Your Space to Achieve Your Goals

Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead ; follow him on twitter . Not everone get s GTD (Getting Things Done). I know I didn’t. It made my head spin. I have nothing against the system or David Allen. I’m sure it must be awesome for some people (that’s why it has all those followers, right?). But for others, it just doesn’t fit. Mostly with creative-minded people. When it comes to GTD and other systems, it’s often too easy to get into a habit of over-engineering your system. You “geek out” on your system and lose sight of the point of pursuing productivity in the first place. Plus, there’s a big gap in resources on productivity that doesn’t involve complex jargons and elaborate diagrams (see the GTD matrix ). Typically, this exists in the creative sector. I’m not saying GTD doesn’t work or that it isn’t wonderful. It just doesn’t connect with some people (and makes others want to vomit). Here are seven of the best, simple, and sometimes seemingly upside down tips for being more prolific. Create a “to stop” list. If you’re not getting the results you want, chances are you don’t care much about the things you’re doing. The best way to change this is to create a “To-Stop” list. We often spend lots of time creating lists for the things we need to do, but rarely do we reflect on the things that aren’t working. So create a list of all the things that are sucking away your energy and are wasting your time. Figure out which of those things is having the biggest negative impact on you doing the stuff you really want to do. Tackle that thing head on each day. Focus on short bursts. It’s a bit sad when you realize that the reason most dreams die is because of a lack of focused action. If you’re constantly distracted by the television, surfing the internet, reading blogs, or whatever it is, you’re just dragging your heels. Yet, we think that high levels of focus is something only super-humans can attain. But mental focus is akin to building muscle; it’s something that must be trained with resistance. So figure out how much “mental weight” you can lift, and start from there. Elect to focus for 50 minutes on your most important task, then take a 10 minute break to do whatever you want. Then repeat. If you can’t “lift” 50 minutes, try 20 minutes, or even 10 minutes. Gradually increase your “resistance” (the amount of time you focus) each week. Define your daily ass-kicking. What is your Something Amazing ? Take the time to clearly define your deep reason for moving toward that goal. Now make a post-it note of out of it, or schedule a daily reminder of that deep reason on your email program. Allow yourself to suck. One of the biggest reasons we avoid doing what we love is that we’re afraid we’re going to fall flat on our face, in front of everyone. And then they’ll laugh or think we’re not amazing and all our theories about how we’re not really a genius will be true. Here’s some good news: You probably won’t be as bad as you thought you were. Here’s some bad news: You’ll never be great unless you first allow yourself to suck. So embrace your suckiness. Don’t let the fear of failure keep you from doing what you love . Focus on the Three C’s . When it comes down to it, there are three major groups of things we need to do to succeed at whatever it is we want to do. We need to Create, we need to Connect, and we need to Consume. Or in other words, we need to produce/share, build and nurture relationships, and keep ourselves savvy in our field. An imbalance in these areas will stagnate our progress. If we’re always consuming, but never getting our ideas out there, we won’t make any progress toward our goals. If we’re connecting without creating, we’ll have nothing of value to share. And if we’re creating without continually learning, we’ll become outdated. Defining a focus of one of the Three C’s helps us stay focused on our purpose for the day. It also helps us realize that spending time on Twitter and socializing is just as important as creating. It’s all about balance. Stop caring about things that don’t matter. This advice seems so simple, but it bears repeating. It’s easy to get caught up in obsessing about little tasks and trivialities that aren’t really important. The best way to overcome this habit is to start thinking in terms of long term impact. Every time you start obsessing over the little details, ask yourself how long the results of those tasks will last. If you’re always spending the majority of your time doing tasks that will have little impact after a week or month, you’re always going to be stuck in the same position. Be ruthless about not caring about all the stuff that’s not important. Your life depends on it. Make it stupidly simple. If you’re struggling to make headway on the stuff you really care about, maybe you’re making it too complicated. Try making a really simple commitment, like working on that “thing you love” for an hour a day. One hour, every day. Don’t commit to finishing it or making it perfect. Just commit to doing that One Thing You Love every day for one hour, for 30 days. Complex productivity systems aren’t for everyone, and they don’t need to be. Don’t worry if GTD scares you or hurts your brain. You can still get the things done that really matter to you. Also, I should note a couple of people out there, such as Charlie Gilkey and Mark McGuinness , who are working hard to change the lack of productivity material related to creatives. For further reading and material on this topic, I highly recommended checking out their blogs. This article was written by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind . To learn more about how to live without limits, grab a subscription to Illuminated Mind. — If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg . I’d appreciate it.

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Seven Productivity Tips For People That Hate GTD

Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead ; follow him on twitter . “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” - Bruce Lee Bruce Lee was a paragon of cool and an icon of the ultimate bad-ass. Not only were his martial arts skills incredible, but he had such an impressive physique that even bodybuilders in the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger admired him. What’s more impressive is that Bruce trained his body without ever stepping into a gym and with very little use of weights or machines. Here are just a few of Lee’s physical feats : Performed one-hand push-ups using only the thumb and index finger . Could hold an elevated v-sit position for 30 minutes or longer. Could throw grains of rice up into the air and then catch them in mid-flight using chopsticks. Could break wooden boards 6 inches (15 cm) thick. Performed 50 reps of one-arm chin-ups. While you may not get to Bruce Lee’s level overnight, you can start getting in shape without the use of a lot of fancy (and expensive) equipment. You can do it from the comfort of your own home, in a space as large as a bathroom. Part of the reason I started training without a gym was because I began training in Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee’s method of martial arts). But I also got tired of paying monthly gym dues. At the time, I was looking for things I could cut out of my monthly budget to save a little extra money. I thought about getting rid of my gym membership altogether, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my health or physical fitness. So I found another way. For months, I haven’t had a gym membership, yet I’m getting stronger and faster than I’ve ever been in my life. You don’t have to buy lots of weights or machines, either. The most expensive equipment you’ll need (a simple doorway pull-up bar) will cost no more than $35.00. Bruce Lee was a big proponent of holistic or total fitness. His workouts included strength, speed, endurance, and flexibility training. Here’s just a few of the ways you can start getting stronger, faster and more toned without ever stepping into a gym: Calisthenics . There are so many different bodyweight exercises out there, but we’ll start with the basics. For the lower body : lunges and squats are a good start. For upper body : pull-ups , push-ups, and shoulder press ups . For your core : crunches, chops, and reverse crunches will get you going. What’s great about bodyweight exercises is that they build functional strength. They’re natural movements you would use in real life situations like sports, self-defense, gardening, or doing chores. Plus when you do bodyweight exercises, you force your body to use more supporting and balancing muscles than you would on machines. For more bodyweight exercises check out these great resources: The Ultimate Guide to Bodyweight Training: 100 Killer Resources and for an awesome list of bodyweight exercises with illustrations check out Combat Fitness . Bonus : Top 10 Best Bodyweight Exercises for Advanced and Beginners . Isometric exercises . These are basic bodyweight exercises, but where you hold your body in a static position. Examples of these are the frog sit , v-sit, horse stance , hanging from a pull-up bar, and the plank . Calisthenic exercises will improve muscle strength over a range of motion, but isometric exercises are great for joint and stabilizing strength. Range of motion and flexibility . The best exercise I’ve found for range of motion and flexibility is yoga. The best thing about yoga is that no equipment is required and you can find tons of free resources online for yoga routines. Check out Anmol Mehta’s Yoga Illustrations to get you started. Balance. Balance is the ability to keep your equilibrium when your center of gravity is thrown off-balance. There are many ways you can practice balance every day (we won’t get into tight rope walking here). When you’re putting on your shoes or getting dressed, do it on one foot. Walk on the curb and try to walk in a straight line without stumbling. Or if you’re really ambitious, there’s always pogo sticking and unicycling. Dynamic exercise . Dynamic exercise is anything where you’re not performing routine after routine. Things are in flux and constantly changing. You’re moving in more natural movements, rather than continuous repetition of fixed patterns. I recently started doing Jeet Kune Do in the park every weekend. It’s a great way to get a good work out and learn self defense. Not to mention, practicing martial arts tends to make you inspired to further pursue and achieve higher levels of physical fitness. If you’re not into martial arts, you can always pick up a sport like tennis, handball, basketball, or take dance classes. Do whatever you’re naturally drawn to. Or if you struggle with seeing fitness as an enjoyable activity, you might consider getting a Wii Fit . There’s a lot of other opportunities for exercise that don’t include a gym that I haven’t listed here. Hiking, jogging, skiing, yardwork… The list could go on. Just use your imagination. Make it fun and change it up. That’s the great thing about exercising without a gym, there’s so much to choose from. On a side note, I will, however, say that for me, it took a lot more discipline to work out from home. It was easy for me to just go to the gym. Once I’m there, there’s not a lot else I can do other than work out. But at home, there’s always distraction, always other things you can do besides working out (like laying on the couch or surfing the internet). For me, practicing martial arts inspires me to be physically fit. While you might not have this problem, I thought it only fair to be upfront about this issue. The other motivator for me to work out from home — besides saving money — was the variety of workouts. There’s just so many more options with bodyweight exercises than machines. You can always do something to further challenge yourself. If push-ups are a breeze, you can try doing them on your fingers or in a close grip (with a medicine ball). If pull-ups become too easy, train for a one arm pull-up (insanely difficult). Attaining Bruce Lee like fitness isn’t just about doing the types workouts he did and eating the same diet. What made Bruce so great was his natural curiosity and drive to constantly explore and learn more about fitness and personal growth. (His personal library contained over 2,000 books!) Tap into your own curiosity and make fitness enjoyable. Challenge yourself to new levels of fitness. Go beyond what you think you can do. “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” - Bruce Lee This article was written by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind . To learn more about how to reclaim your life, grab a check out his book - Reclaim Your Dreams. (Note: If you’re interested in learning more about Bruce Lee’s training methods, check out: The Art of Expressing the Human Body by John Little) — If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg . I’d appreciate it.

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How to Get Bruce Lee Like Strength Without Ever Going to a Gym

Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead ; follow him on twitter . Not getting enough items on your To-Do list checked off? Do you feel guilty because you’re not doing enough? I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t always remain calm, zen and un-phased when I don’t get everything done. Sometimes I get distracted; sometimes unforeseen events happen which get in the way of my ambitions. Sometimes I have a hard time not caring about unimportant things. I want the dishes to be clean and the house spotless, all my errands to be finished and everything neat and tidy. The problem is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, things don’t usually work like this. In fact, they almost never work like this. There’s always something to be done, always that “thing” in the back of your head that you forgot about that needs to be taken care of. There’s always something else that needs to be finished, and then you can feel happy. (Or so you think . ) But then you remember another task, and the cycle repeats. Of course, there’s only one problem… Nothing is ever complete. Not for long, at least. So if that time and place is impossible to reach, we have to stop caring about unimportant things. The constant desire to want to be done, then be happy , creates the background feeling of anxiety. If you’ve ever found yourself doing the dishes as fast as possible, when you have no reason to be in a hurry (like I have), you know what I mean. If we’re ever to get at that feeling of peace — being OK with taking things slowly — we need to start enjoying our lives. We need to start being instead of just doing . Here are a few of my (humble) suggestions on how to create more space in your life: Realize that not having everything done is a good thing . “Blasphemy!” you say. I know, I know. This sounds awfully backwards, but it’s true. Having things in your inbox means that your time is in demand. And that’s a good thing. You don’t need a two week vacation to create space . When you pull up in your driveway after work, take a minute or two to just relax and breathe. Turn off the radio, and just sit in silence for a moment. Enjoy the space. Two minutes is all you need. Now don’t tell me you don’t have time. Look for the gaps . Between your thoughts, there lives little gaps. They may not be huge, but they’re there. Start paying attention to those gaps. Allow them to grow by just letting go of thinking all the time. You might think that you need to think about things in order to work or to live. But the opposite is usually true. Most of the time, thinking is completely unnecessary. Most of the time , you’re just thinking about the same things over and over. That’s called a pattern. Or brooding, whatever label you prefer. Listen, feel, engage… be there . The reason we’re usually in such a hurry is due to a mind-created obsession with finishing things. So the way out of that is to be where you are. Listen to the ambient sounds you hear, feel your feet on the ground when you walk, feel your hands running through the water while you wash the dishes. Let go of the need to become . Sure, there will always be things you want to change about your life. There will always be goals, dreams, desires and all manner of wonderful experiences to seek out. Great, seek them. Desire them. But don’t sacrifice the present. Don’t sacrifice the place you’re in right now. There’s too much beauty. With that, I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from one of my favorite lectures by Alan Watts : “Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you’ve missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has ’seen the light.’ That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you’re seeing it. Like you see aureoles around Buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante’s ‘Paradiso.’ Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s beyond light, it’s so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great Mandela appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there’s black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the Yang comes from the Yin, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can’t hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you’ve been watching a kind of thing radiating out. ‘But,’ it says, ‘you know, this isn’t all I can do,’ and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you’ve been looking at this as I’ve been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let’s add a third dimension; it’s going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we’re not going to just do like this, we’re going to do little curlicues. And it says, ‘well, that’s just the beginning!’ Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little sub figures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing’s going, going, going, and you think you’re going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into… Why, us, sitting around here.” See, when we’re always in a hurry, always looking to achieve a goal, we miss out on the miracle that’s around us. Right here. Right now. This article was written by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind . To learn more about how to reclaim your life, grab a subscription to Illuminated MInd.

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How to Create Space and When You’re Always in a Rush

I’m excited to announce The Power of Less New Year’s Challenge — it’s free, and it’ll help you form a new habit in 30 days, in just 10 minutes a day. It’s a great way to start the New Year, and to make 2009 a great year. Forming a new habit is better than making a resolution, because if you use the effective habit-change principles in The Power of Less, the habit will stick with you much longer than the resolution. How It Works Here’s how The Power of Less New Year’s Challenge works: SIGN UP for the Challenge by joining THE POWER OF LESS Challenge forum … it’s free and easy to sign up. Read the FAQ for the forum when you sign up for more info on how to use the forum. PUBLICLY COMMIT . Once you’ve joined the forum, go to the section that asks you to post your new habit. Start a new topic, introduce yourself and tell everyone what your habit will be for the 30 days. This is a public commitment that will hold you accountable and motivate you. FOCUS on the new habit for just 10 minutes a day, EVERY DAY. No exceptions. No excuses. Everyone has 10 minutes a day. You might need to plan your schedule to ensure you’ve set aside the 10 minutes for the day, but do not make exceptions ! Read more: 9 Rules to Form a Habit (pdf format) . REPORT your progress each day on THE POWER OF LESS Challenge forum. It’s simple and takes 2 minutes: log in to the forum, go to the daily progress thread (there’s a new one each day) and That’s it. Just four simple steps: sign up, publicly commit, focus on the goal for just 10 minutes a day, and take 2 minutes each day to report your progress. In 30 days, you’ll have a new habit! See 9 Rules to Form a Habit (pdf format) for strategies that will ensure your success in the Challenge! Go to The Power of Less New Year’s Challenge for more! My New Year’s Challenge: To Become More Present To get things started, I’ll report my New Year’s Challenge: For January I’d like to practice mindfulness — being more present as much as possible. To start small, I’m going to create the new habit of doing Zen meditation for 10 minutes every morning . I actually want to be more present in everything I do — from washing dishes to showering to walking to driving to talking to people — and I’ve been practicing this more and more the last few weeks. But as always, I will start small — if I start with 10 minutes of zazen (sitting meditation) then I can use the progress there and carry it to other parts of my life. My trigger : first thing in the morning, after I have my cup of coffee, before I go on my morning run. To increase accountability : I’m going to tell my friends and family about this and of course post about it here on Zen Habits. I’ll post about it in a couple weeks to let you guys know how things are going, or check out the Challenge to see my daily progress. Wish me luck! And best of luck to everyone participating in the Challenge! Leo

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Make 2009 Great: Join The Power of Less New Year’s Challenge!