Welcome to Episode 10 of my podcast The view from the crow's nest, and I promise this will be a short one for two reasons. One, because of the subject that I want to cover, and two, because it's 11pm in the evening. And frankly, I want to go to bed. But what I did want to share with you is something I want to share with myself so part of the reason for doing these podcasts is so that I have not just something I can share with you guys but also a record for myself of my thinking, etc. And, as you may know, I've mentioned quite a bit I read quite a lot of nonfiction, and fiction as well but a lot of nonfiction, and sometimes I wonder if I've even read a book before because it might have been a bunch of years and I never wrote down which books I read and which I didn't, and what I thought of them, etc. And so I thought I can use this as a record of also the books I read because there might be some books that you haven't heard of that you think are worth reading or that you can give me some recommendations. And the way I put this podcast together, is I first record it into an app called otter dot, excuse me, otter.ai. And then I transfer the audio into an app called anchor, which is anchor is a podcasting app, but otter.ai is an amazing note taking app from voice it transcribes as you're talking, and one of the great benefits of it is, you can search by any keyword that appears in the text through any of your notes or any of your monologues In my case, which means I can always search for a book title and see if I've ever mentioned it, and I thought, what a good useful thing to have. So that's the purpose of this episode, so I just finished this week. A couple of days ago. I finished a book called start finishing, ironically, by Chris Gilkey, I believe his name is and effectively. It's a bunch of strategies and techniques to get you refocused on finishing projects that you stop and in fact that's one of the fundamentals of the book is to stop thinking of ideas or stop classifying things as ideas and classify them instead as projects, individual projects. And the idea is that you organise yourself, so that you're able to get projects, finished and move on to the finishing line and that is something which I have certainly struggled with in the past, and really want to improve upon it and that's exactly the reason why I read that book. I think I googled books to help you finish projects or something like that. So that made sense. And as it goes I have used something from that all of last week. I spent the week, I have the first part of the day is a block, he talks about blocking your time and a lot of these concepts aren't new or you've heard elsewhere. But he puts it in a particularly focused way. so I blocked out my mornings a couple hours each morning to focus on my most important project, which is at the moment the grip of the sky experience which is my music EP release that's coming out very shortly. And I found it really beneficial. And also, I, at the same time, have been using a project management tool or piece of software called nifty dot. Something might be.fm. COMM member. And so, organising myself around blocks and around shedule at around this product management or project management software has really freed up my, my brain because I know that actually I'm going to get to all these ideas and projects that I want to do. But first, I'm going to keep focused on getting the first one out of the way that's the most important. So, I finished that a couple of days ago, and I found it useful. Again, a lot of it is just common sense a lot of it is stuff that you've heard before but like a lot of advice or a lot of things you read or a lot of things you hear that have an impact on you. It might be the fifth or sixth time you've heard them that they just happen to hit the mark just at the right time and that's when they have the effect. So, start finishing by Chris Gilkey. And then after that yesterday I started reading a new book,
