Tools

Call them job aids (job aide?), templates, cheat-sheets, exercises, or what-have-you.  I’ll call them tools.  The hammer needed to get the nail in the supporting member of your home… the ruler to measure for the right cut… the laser-level to ensure you’re ‘true’ on your work.

Below are tools that I’ve created, assembled, and have found useful.  I hope they serve you well.

Brainstorming:

• Aristotelian Questioning
  This brainstorming method takes your main problem or challenge statement and absolutely questions it to death in the past, present, and in the future.  You’ll come at it from all possible angles to find a new idea.
• Clearly Paradoxical
  This brainstorming method aims to use paradoxes, usually defined as a statement that contradicts itself, to help address your challenge statement.  They’ll really get your mental gears spinning.  Make sure you’re ready for it!
• Chunk-Around Brainstorming (CAB)
  This brainstorming method utilizes “chunking” up, down, and all around (or finding ‘meta-characteristics’) of existing items in order to find items that share similarities in other walks of life.
• Fruit Root Tree
  This brainstorming method presents a fun and natural (har har!) way to take some drilled-down base characteristics of your issue, challenge, or problem and combines them into an idea-filled meal of possibilities.
• Idea Grid
  This brainstorming method determines key characteristics or parameters of an item and then uses those to find ways to transform the item into something new.  This can produce a lot of ideas very quickly.
• Lotus Blossom
  This brainstorming method starts with a key issue or item, you find 8 main characteristics about it, and then find 8 sub-characteristics off of those.  This method generates a lot of ideas.
• Modified Force Field Analysis
  This brainstorming method takes your main goal or challenge and starts listing the essentials of it down the middle column you think it most aptly fits.  Does it hinder or help your progress?  Write down the positive and negative outcomes of each essential component and fix the problems!
• Opposite Questions
  This brainstorming method gets you to think about a problem, challenge, or issue, figure out your assumptions about that issue, and then flip it completely around in order to see it from a different perspective.  This method is great for getting “hidden gem” ideas.
• Quantum Linguistic Questions (QLQ)
  This brainstorming method takes a problem, challenge, or issue and then rearranges the question into other very challenging structures.  You’d be hard pressed to make it out of this method without a new perspective or two.
• S.C.A.M.P.E.R. Method (SCAMPER)
  This tried and true brainstorming method helps you come up with a bunch of ideas: you substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, and rearrange your challenge, problem, or item into a whole new idea.

Cheat Sheets:

• Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
  This cheat-sheet details the major virtues, questions, psychological crisis, and societal comparisons of each of Erik Erikson’s major stages of development from infants to seniors.
• Feedback Flowchart
  This cheat-sheet runs you through a method of evaluating any type of feedback that comes your way.  Quickly, effectively, and easily handle anything anyone says to you – including yourself!
• Human Fears, Needs, and Desires / Wants
  This cheat-sheet is a listing of psychology, and popular survey, based human fears, needs, desires, and wants.  By keeps these key things in mind, one can better tailor their speeches, actions, writing, scripting, and general interactions.
• Making Ideas that Are Made to Stick
  This cheat-sheet is basically the meat and potatoes of “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  This is a 1 page run down of the steps necessary to make a very sticky idea or presentation.
• SMART and RED-E Goals Setting and Achieving
  This cheat-sheet details setting goals using the standard SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) criteria.  However, it’s also got the brand-spanking new RED-E (Reward, Ecology, Degrees, and Evaluate) criteria, too!  The cheat-sheet starts out with 8 Universal Goal Categories to help guide your achievement and setting activities.
• Writing: How to do 5-Minute Writing, Chapter Outlines, and Book Blueprints
  This cheat-sheet is a 1 page run-down of how to perform 5 minute writing exercises, how to make concrete and useful chapter outlines, and how to make blueprints of existing books for ideas.

Exercises:

• Einstein’s Distraction Index Drill
  This exercise is a very useful, if not annoying, way to systematically force you to pay attention to whatever you are doing – especially when reading or learning.  Good stuff!
• Speed Reading: Perception Enhancement
  This exercise attempts to help you train your eyes to utilize more of your peripheral vision and movement in order to speed read at a better rate with greater comprehension.

Notes:

• Career: Assessing Skills for the Current Labor Market
  A set of information bits I gathered from a training seminar for tuning yourself for the current job market.
• Finances: Comfort Zone Investing
  A very easy to read take on a sound, moderately less-risky way to approach investing.
• Finances: The Intelligent Asset Allocator
  A bit detailed for some, but this book hits home on some very important aspects of investing.
• Communication: Getting to Yes
  Here are my notes on this book about principled negotiations as opposed to the usual positional type.
• Communication: How to Win Friends and Influence People
  This set of notes contains the bits I felt were important from this book on treating people right.
• Communication: Monsters and Magic Sticks
  This is a run-down of my notes for this book on hypnosis, human psychology, and some fine unconscious learning surprises.
• Communication: You Say More than You Think
  This is a run-down of my notes for this book on the ‘New’ Body Language.

Templates:

• Book Reading Helper / Tracker
  This template is a good way of keeping track of what you’re reading, how much you enjoyed it, and some general notes or observations you had about it.  The point is to act as a reminder, or review sheet, in a few months (or days!) when you’ve forgotten all about it.
• Natural Family Planning (NFP) Chart
  This template provides all of the space for information needed to chart fertility information based off of the sympto-thermal method of natural family planning.
• Project Purpose and Planning
  This template serves as THE starting point for all projects: books, ebooks, software, woodworking, you name it.  A problem well stated is a problem half solved – start them out right!
• Project / Task Tracker
  This template captures some of the most important, 20,000 foot above type, information needed to keep tabs on your projects or major tasks.  It serves as a great way to roll-up your year’s accomplishments for self-improvement or performance appraisal activities, too.
• Story Boards
  This template provides for 9 slides, with room for notes, to use when planning out a project, video, artwork, or anything else that could benefit from a visual planning method.
• Timecard Logs
  This template is good for keeping track of your time, and associated project identification or charge code numbers, when you work for companies that require this level of detail.  Would also be good for contract folks out and about.