So Sivers claims that we should keep our goals to ourselves. When we tell someone else our goals, they often give us approval and praise right away just for setting the goal. The boost we get from this can actually discourage us from pursuing the goal. We have already gotten the reward.

This idea annoyed me a bit, because it did make some sense. I can think of goals I’ve set for myself recently where I did talk to people about the goal early on. They were suitably impressed and stroked me for just stating the goal. And so far, I have not gotten very far attaining those goals. But the real reason this annoyed me is that it flies in the face of other research too.

I’m reading a book called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman, an evidence based self help book. In one chapter, he specifically says that he has conducted experiments where the opposite is true. In his experiments, subjects who told people their goals publicly were more likely to do them. Wiseman sites other studies which support this hypothesis, so I don’t think it’s clear one way or the other. Perhaps it does help to get support from our friends and for them to hold our feet to the fire a bit when it comes to our goals. The fear of disappointing them and feeling like a failure might motivate us, as will the anticipation of their admiration when we succeed.

So it got me thinking. Would there be a way to publicly commit to a goal without publicly committing to it? What if we could commit to a goal privately, but when that deadline was up, the goal would show up as our Facebook status and our friends would be able to tell if we met that goal. Would the anticipation of that day drive us? Would we fear looking like a failure and work harder? Would we crave their approbation and hit our targets?

If I were a scientist, I’d love to test this. The experiment would be simple, get a pool of people who have a goal. Have half of them post their goal immediately into their Facebook status. Have the other half use an application like Later Bro to set a future Facebook status with their goal on the deadline date. And then see which method is more effective. I suppose you would need another group which would do neither. They would keep the goal a complete secret. After all, that might be the most effective way to do it.

I think this might be a great way to do New Year’s resolutions. Instead of announcing your resolutions on January 1st, you set them to be announced on December 31st of next year. Then at your next New Year’s Eve party, your friends can either tease you for not making your goals or congratulate you on the goals you met.

John “Dr. Wimpy” Ward, was a very dedicated and passionate member of the New York improv scene over the last eight years. He took classes, performed and was a huge supporter of others. He often appeared as an agent with Improv Everywhere. He was a funny man and by all accounts a joy to play with. He started doing improv in his mid 50s. This last Sunday he passed away very unexpectedly.

Auditions for improv teams were held the weekend before he died at the UCB Theatre. It’s a collective freakout the community goes through every year as hundreds of UCB students compete for a handful of coveted spots on Harold teams. And among the hundreds of hopeful 20 something kids, desperately wanting to be on a team, was John Ward, a man in his 60s who looked remarkably like my childhood vision of Santa Claus. He was one of the few that got a call back, and I bet he was as thrilled as anyone to be seriously considered for a team.

It’s hard to resist the urge to reduce a man’s life down to a simple life lesson. I’m sure there was much more to John than his improv career, judging from the stories trickling in about his life before improv. But his example is an obvious slap in the face to anyone who thinks that it’s too late for them to be an actor, a musician, a writer or a comic.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about John, I’ve included some links:

• A tribute on the Improv Everywhere site
• A thread on the Improv Resource Center following the news of his passing
• John’s page in the IRC wiki

If you knew John and have things you’d like to share about him, please feel free to add them to his wiki page.

I first started thinking about this because of Checklist Manifesto, a book by Atul Gawande. I have not read the book yet, but I’ve heard several interviews of him. The book is about how checklists for complicated procedures help minimize mistakes and save lives. He is a surgeon and he has seen how a simple checklist for a surgical procedure can dramatically reduce the number of complications. I don’t do anything as grave as surgery, but there are a lot of things I want to accomplish each day. I thought checklists might help and started using them.

My first checklist was a weekly one. Initially, I drew up a list of daily tasks. I realized quickly that I didn’t have enough time each day to do all these things. So I cut the list of daily activities to a minimum. However, there were plenty of other things I wanted to do, some only once a week, others several times a week. So I added those to my weekly checklist too. For example, I want to practice guitar every day, so there are seven boxes next to it on the list. Other items may have only one box next to it, like doing payroll for my mother’s home health care workers which I do every Monday. I have four boxes next to exercise. I don’t care which days I work out, as long as I work out three or four times during the week. My final task for each week is to review, edit and print my checklist for the next week.

After using that checklist for a month or so, I decided that I needed a separate checklist for my podcast. This is what I’d call a procedural checklist. It contains a series of steps for a single task or project. Usually the tasks should be completed in a particular order. The checklist for my podcast has been evolving over the past few episodes and it now has 28 steps, from the first email to ask someone if they will do the podcast, to backing up all the audio files when I’m done.

It may seem like I’m creating a lot of work for myself, but I think it’s really the opposite. I’ve found that if I do some preparation before the interview, the interview will go much more smoothly than if I wing it. I’ve also found that if I conduct the interview well, the editing goes much better and takes less time. Finally, by codifying the steps for promoting it, I get that part done quickly and painlessly.

Of the two types of checklists, the weekly “To Do” list and the procedural list, I think the latter is more effective and worthwhile. I don’t think there has been a single week where I have accomplished every task on my weekly checklist. Perhaps I have accomplished more than I would have otherwise. But I think checklists really begin to shine when you use them to walk you through a process you do over and over again. I am really happy with the result. A checklist helps me eliminate mistakes, keeps me focused on only the task I’m currently doing, and raises the quality of my work overall. It also provides me with a method to review my work and improve every time I do a podcast, by translating what I learn into new steps.

I think this might have a profound impact on my teaching in the future. I’ve always had a plan for my classes. Sometimes there is a curriculum to follow. Sometimes I come in with a number of options. Sometimes I figure out what I’m going to do on the way to class or drastically change course in the middle. I’m sure there are things I have learned when teaching something that are now long gone from my memory. In the future, I’m going to write out my plans more carefully, probably with branches and options, but definitely with steps. Each time I come back to a particular lesson plan, it will contain within the procedure many of the nuggets I’ve learned from the previous attempts to teach that lesson plan.

Over the last few days, I’ve taken what I’ve learned from the podcast checklist and tried to apply it to other things. I have a short procedure to go through when I sit down to practice my guitar. I’m working on some lesson plans for practicing improv by myself. I even came up with a procedure to write blog entries. This is the first attempt to follow that procedure and it seems to have been beneficial, keeping me focused and on track and producing a post which I hope is more useful than if I used my previous method: stare at a blank page, type stuff and edit until I have something I’m not embarrassed to publish. I’m convinced that using checklists would be beneficial for other creative uses like rehearsal procedures, show checklists, video projects, etc.

A checklist app for the iPhone and iPod Touch

I downloaded a checklist app for my iPod Touch. It is quite useful. It’s called Quick Checklists. This is a great app for those shorter lists that you might use often, like writing a blog post or working out at the gym. You can create a template for a list and easily make changes to it on the fly, or change the template for future use. It’s perfect for my purposes. I’ll keep my paper checklists for more involved projects, but for day to day stuff, this app is great.

My checklist for blogging

For those of you interested in my blog checklist, here it is (some of these only apply to WordPress blogs):

• Choose a topic
• Research via the web, books, talking to others on the subject, etc.
• Brainstorm thesis or basic point of the post
• Write outline
• Write post
• Take a break
• Edit for clarity
• Read aloud
• Edit for readability
• Title it
• Add links
• Find image or media to accompany it
• Insert the “more” code
• Choose excerpt
• Add tags and category designations
• Publish
• Plug it on Twitter, Facebook, etc

In the mean time, I’ve been working on the IRC Improv Wiki. I wanted to get a few more pages going. I realized last week that there were no articles on Tina Fey, Jack McBrayer and Inside Vladimir. I have written a cursory entry for each and hope I can get some other people to chip in and expand them.

There is also a lot of stuff going on which is taking a higher priority right now. In the last couple of weeks, we have lost some of our staff that helps us take care of my mom, so we have been busy finding and training new people. That is somewhat stressful. Our longest standing worker gave notice two weeks ago. Today was her last day. She worked first shift with me and did a terrific job with my mom. It made things much easier for me to have her working first shift. We have found a good replacement, but it will take time getting her up to speed. I will be spending more time here at my mom’s in the interim, and that may translate into some more posts since I do most of my writing here.

I have been running again for the last couple of months, and I’m ready for some 5K races. As soon as the weather warms up a little bit, I’ll be out running different events on the weekend. I hope to run a dozen or more races this summer including some 10Ks and perhaps even a half marathon. Also, I picked up guitar last fall and I’ve been practicing a few times a week. I started a group class with the park district in Peoria. My goals with guitar are simply to keep it up, learn as many useful chords as I can so I can play a few songs. Both of these things are competing with my desire to write more. However, next week I will likely be able to complete a few of the posts I’ve been working on.

You would think that there would be something built right into Windows that allowed you to sync two folders, one on your hard drive and one on an external drive. Why not just drag the folder from your laptop to the drive? Well, when I do that, it copies everything, even stuff that has been copied before. If you have several gigabytes of music, this can take forever. It would be nice if Windows only made copies of the new stuff since the last backup. It would be even better if it worked both ways, if it also copied new files on the external hard drive to the laptop. But alas it doesn’t work that way. At least I don’t know a way do to it with just Windows XP.

I knew there must be some utility out there that would do this, but I waited until today to go looking. So today I went over to cnet and checked the download for a free application that could synchronize folders. I found GoodSync and it did exactly what I wanted. It analyzed the folder on my laptop and the folder on my external hard drive and copied files both ways that were missing. It seems great, but I just noticed that it’s only a free trial. After 30 days, I’ll need to pay $29.95 to keep it.

I’ve only used it once, but it seems to work well, and it was easy for me to figure out. If I notice any problems, I’ll come back here and update this.

Perhaps you have seen this making the rounds on Facebook status updates:

Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.

It seems like a great idea, right? I’ve seen these before for other non-profits, namely various public radio fundraisers. It would seem like a great way to get people to donate. It’s fast and easy, allowing people to give precisely at the moment when their impulse to give is strongest. They don’t have to fire up their computer, find the website, fill out a form with their credit card, etc.

If you have an unlimited texting plan, and want to do this, go for it! But if you pay for each text message you send, keep reading before you donate.

I’m a skeptic by nature and when I see something like this, I become a little concerned. First off, you want to make sure it’s not a hoax. You want to make sure the money is actually going to where it should be and not that some radio station somewhere is getting 1000 texts an hour that say, “HAITI”. That seems unlikely since this meme has been picked up by the news media and by the White House.

The other thing that concerns me is whether the phone company keeps a percentage of the money donated and how much. If you donate to a charity using Master Card or Visa, a percentage of that (probably around 2%-3%) is skimmed off as a processing fee. Is that what is happening? According to snopes.com, it is not:

Callers should note that the $10 donations will be charged to their cell phone bills… It is not true that phone companies keep half the monies donated in this manner — the full amount of each $10 donation is passed through to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.

So that is good news.

However, for some people there could be a big processing cost. Why? Because “Msg&Data rates may apply.” When I donated today using this method, the entire transaction took seven texts:

1. Me: HAITI
2. 90999: To confirm your $10 donation to Red Cross Int’l Response Fund reply with YES. Reply with HELP for help or visit RedCross.org
3. Me: YES
4. 90999: Thanks! $10 charged to your phone bill for Red Cross Int’l Relief. Reply HELP for help or Visit RedCross.org. Reply STOP to cancel. Msg&Data Rates May Apply
5. 90999: Reply YES to receive the latest news about Red Cross Int’l Relief! Up to 4 msgs/mo. Info? Txt HELP, to end txt STOP. Msg&data rates may apply
6. Me: Stop
7. 90999: You will not receive addl msgs or further charges from Haiti Relief $10 donations. Info? Visit mGive.com/a or contact 888-316-2506. Msg&Data Rates May Apply

I have an unlimited texting plan, so it didn’t cost me anything extra to give that $10. For me, it’s probably the most efficient way for me to give. If I were to use a credit card on a website, a small part of that $10 donation would be eaten in fees.

However, if I didn’t have a texting plan, the effective processing fee would be enormous. On a basic Verizon plan, text messages cost $0.20 for both sent and received messages. It would have cost me an additional $1.40 to give $10. This is effectively a processing fee of 12.3%, much higher than a credit card. Notice too that if you don’t stop the texts you will get 4 more messages a month, with more text charges.

If you are going to be charged extra for these texts, I highly recommend that instead you go directly to the Red Cross site and donate there. I wonder also if it would be possible to get some figures about just how much the cell phone companies are making off this and if pressure could be brought to bear on them to donate all extra fees they collect as well.

For instance, I have long wanted to be a runner. I have many times started exercise programs and incorporated running or walking into the program. Last winter, when I was working out at the gym I realized that I especially like walking or running for long distances. Once I was on the treadmill, I preferred going for 45 minutes rather than just doing 20 and being done with it. But what I really wanted was to run and walk longer distances outside. I tried a few times to run outdoors in winter and I couldn’t stand it. The cold was simply too much.

Later in the summer, I decided once again to give it a try. This time I was walking and running outside and I was enjoying it, but what really got me hooked I think was when I started using Nike+ with my iPod. To use it, you need a small chip which you put in your shoe (or put inside a little pouch that attaches to your shoelaces). The chip acts like a pedometer, transmitting a signal, presumably whenever you take a step. You have several choices for a receiver to keep track of your progress. iPod Touches and iPhones have an app built into it that you can use to track your runs. You can also buy an attachment for other iPods or you can buy a separate bracelet to track your runs.

The Nike+ system will keep track of your distance, time, and even calories spent. Every time you sync your iPod, your data will be uploaded to the Nike website where you can graphically see your progress, set goals, and participate in challenges with other runners. It does need some calibration, but it’s accurate enough to at least tell you when you are making progress. For me, it’s just the kind of nudge I need to keep going. So far, I’ve run or walked over 200 miles with Nike+ and my goal is to do another 700 – 1000 miles this year with it. In part because of the Nike+ system, this fall I ran my first 5K and 10K races.

Anyway, there are a number of things that I’m working on that I’d like to keep at it, things that if I did every day, I would see significant progress in the next year. I’d like to practice playing guitar each day (a new hobby I took up in the fall). I’d like to keep up better with my online business, making sure to do a few key tasks each day. I’d also like to keep this blog up (I’ll refrain from stating a goal, since I think it will be doomed as soon as I choose to make such a blogging goal public.). There are a few other things I’m sure I’ll want to include.

This brings me to a story I heard today on the radio. It was about some research that indicated that if surgeons followed some simple changes to their procedures, like instituting surgical checklists (similar to the checklists that pilots use when preparing to fly), they would likely have better outcomes and fewer mistakes. It got me thinking that I may want to develop a simple daily and weekly checklist for myself. That’s what I intend to do. I’m going to keep it simple at first, with a minimum of things to do and then slowly add things to it. Perhaps I’ll publish it after I’ve revised it a few times.

The first interview is with the author of the novel on which it’s based, Walter Kirn. Recorded in 2001, Kirn talks about the genesis of the novel and what he thinks about “air world”, the setting for the book. The second interview was with the director, Jason Reitman, who also directed Juno in 2007. He talks about his own experiences with air travel, getting George Clooney to do the film and the interviews with real people who have lost their jobs which frame and punctuate the movie.

Here is one of the trailers for the film:

• Misery is a Butterfly by Blonde Redhead
• Blood Bank by Bon Iver
• He War by Cat Power, also check out “The Greatest” which is also at the same link
• Tomorrow by Ladytron, I like the Great Northern Remix
• Star Witness by Neko Case
• My Rights Versus Yours by The New Pornographers
• Such Great Heights by The Postal Service
• Crazed by Rondo Brothers
• For You by Sharon Van Etten
• The Underdog by Spoon, you might also like “I Turn My Camera On” which was used in a car commercial a few years back.
• The Engine Driver by The Decemberists
• GFC by Albert Hammond Jr.
• My Girls by Animal Collective

This really just scratches the surface of the site. There are lots of other great bands… and of course lots of stuff you won’t like, but who cares? You can listen to it all for free and download whatever songs you like. By the way, here is a video of Crazed by Rondo Brothers: