The Writers Coin

I wanted to highlight a post I wrote for Wisebread a while back that I really think flew under the radar when I first published it.

For whatever reason, it didn’t seem to ring true with many people even though I keep seeing more and more instances that remind me of this question: are you a swiss-army knife or a hammer at work?

The question is simple: when it comes to the workplace, are you really good at one specific thing or pretty good at a variety of things? And which is more valuable in the long run?

Check out the post to see what other people have commented.

Image by Basheertome

The other day I was flipping through the complimentary Men’s Health Magazine that I got from running the Urbanathlon last weekend.

One of the sections included tips to battle bad habits. Habits like spending too much in front of the boob tube.

As someone who’s had his own personal struggles with TV watching, I was curious to hear what Men’s Health Magazine had to say about this.

I assumed it would say something like “Get off your fat ass and go run 10 miles instead of watching the Bears game for three hours while eating avocado-flavored potato chips.”

So I was surprised to see that Men’s Health wasn’t as draconian as I assumed it would be: their tip was to DVR/TiVo what you want to watch so you spend less time in front of the TV without missing your show.

And you skip those annoying commercials.

Makes sense, right? The reason I like the tip so much is because it’s realistic. Will most people stop watching their favorite TV shows to go out and run some miles? Nope. But this is a very easy, actionable tip: if you have TiVo or a DVR, this is a tip you can’t turn away from.

And on Sunday, I put it into practice. Instead of watching the Bears get destroyed by the Bengals in real time, I watched them get dismantled on my DVR.

• Average NFL game length: 3 hours 30 minutes
• Time I spent watching the whole game: 1 hour 41 minutes

That’s 1 hour and 20 minutes that I spent doing relatively productive stuff instead of watching commercials of switching to another channel.

Think about how many shows you watch and how much time you could “create” with this tip. For heavy TV watchers, this could mean an extra two or three hours a week to read a book, write a blog, or sit in the dark and scare your wife.

It’s your time, use it as you see fit.

Does anyone else have some good, realistic tips to make our TV watching more efficient and less of a waste of time?

That’s the question I’m asking in my latest post over on Wisebread. The gist is this: with so much information available on the Internet, can’t we do most of the things real-estate agents claim to do ourselves?

I like the analogy of the travel agent—are any of those still around? If so, business is probably pretty slow—the Internet has made us all our own travel agents.

There are some good comments for both sides of the argument, so feel free to chime in with your thoughts.

This past Saturday, I ran the Chicago Urbanathlon for the second year in a row. It’s basically an 11-mile race with an obstacle course mixed in. You see that pretty wall in the picture? That’s the finish line.

I ran the race last year for the first time and it was quite the experience. My final time was 1:39 and I was GASSED at the end. I almost puked right before I crossed the finish line.

I thought I did pretty well for someone that had never run a race before.

This year I knew what to expect and I knew what I needed to do differently to improve my time. I didn’t train as hard as last year because I knew what was coming. What I did have was a plan.

Thanks to the experience I gained from running it last year, I would be doing two things differently:

1. Calm down: when you get to each one of the obstacles, there are people cheering and you get all pumped up. You want to speed through the obstacle as fast as you can. After all, it is a race. But I learned my lesson from last year—doing that takes a LOT of energy. And running 11 miles after speeding through these obstacles means you’ll be in pain at the end.
2. Go faster at the end: I dragged during the last leg of the race last year. A LOT of people passed me and I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I’m losing ground pretty fast here.” I was hurting, but I knew I could’ve gone a little bit faster here if I knew how I’d feel before hitting the stairs.

So that was the plan: don’t use up your energy by blazing through the obstacles and use some of that saved energy on the last leg to really step it up. Sounds simple, right?

Well, coming up with the plan is easy, it’s following you own instructions that’s hard. Because once you’re out there and you see that first obstacle, it’s very tough to control yourself. I managed to execute.

I took it easy and had some gas left at the end, which I used to pass a whole bunch of people during that last leg (running with my iPod helped too).

The result? I ran the race in 1:35—an improvement of four minutes from last year’s time. And I probably trained half as hard as last year.

What Does This Have to do with Anything?

I used my experience to formulate a plan and I stuck to the plan when I was out there. It sounds simple, but this formula will take you far in anything you do. Whether it’s trading stocks or setting up your budget, using what you’ve learned from a previous experience and executing a plan based off of it will usually pay off.

As long as you get incrementally better at what you’re doing, you’re moving in the right direction.

And don’t forget to save a little something for the wall.