We all want to change our circumstances; we want to make more money or get a better job. For most of us, it’s simply a fantasy, something we’ll imagine ourselves doing, something we may even try for, but more likely than not, it’s something that will never happen. Why? We don’t do what it takes to make that happen. Brett Kelly of Bridging The Nerd Gap made that happen when he got his job at Evernote. Many of us sit around and scheme. We try to find any easy route to improve our circumstances. What most of us don’t do: the work. We don’t do what it takes to get ourselves noticed and get in the door. Brett did. Brett wrote the user guide that was missing, Evernote Essentials. It was downloaded 12,000 times and caught the attention of the team at Evernote so much so that they hired Brett full-time to write and maintain their user documentation. It was a chain of events that enabled Brett’s wife to be a full-time mother, empowered him to work from home and helped them get to a place where Brett was no longer working two jobs (or when he is, it is now in pursuit of his own projects). Brett’s story is more than a bit of hard work or a spot of good luck; it wasn’t just about writing the right book at the right time. It’s about consistently looking for ways to make things that matter and delivering the goods. Evernote Essentials is a great resource and the site he created to support it, “Bridging The Nerd Gap” is consistently a useful site. Brett is a hell of a writer, especially for those of us who enjoy our Mac geekery. He brings the goods, but he is also grounded in a way that is rare amidst us Apple and GTD fanatics. Look no further than his recent take on minimalist writing apps. Where most of us get excited and exuberant, Brett finds clarity and makes sense. Without further ado, here’s a look at how Brett Kelly consistently does what it takes to make things happen.
Creativity
Have you always considered yourself a creative person? What mediums and inspirations do you gravitate toward to realize your creative goals? If you had to point to one thing, what specific posts or creations are you most proud of and why? The inspiration part is easy: people who are better craftspeople than I am. Thanks to the Internet, you can hardly swing a dead eCat without hitting somebody who is a hell of a lot better than you at just about everything. Having ready access to the works of my heroes—both writers and programmers—is like looking out toward what I may become one day, if I work hard and take every opportunity to improve. Any suggestions for those who feel they may not be creative enough to unlock their inner artist?
Productivity
Can you describe your current personal and professional responsibilities? You’re a unique little snowflake of a person that’s walking around having had different experiences than everybody else. These experiences combined with your personality give you a particular take on any number of problems or topics. After all, a butcher’s apprentice is going to be a very different hunting partner than a taxidermy student. Use your specific brain and emotional makeup to take a look at existing situations/problems and see if you don’t have different spin on it (because that’s exactly what creativity is — a different spin on the stuff we all see/feel/use). How do you go about balancing the personal, professional and digital? Personally, I’m the undeserving husband to my first wife and we have two great kids. I also write a blog called Bridging the Nerd Gap where I talk about all sorts of different things, mostly relating in some way to technology or productivity. I also co-host a weekly podcast with my good buddy Myke Hurley called Cooking with Brett and Myke where he and I talk about anything and everything that happens to tickle our fancy on a given day. Lastly, I’m the one-man show behind my little ebook business where I handle everything from marketing, customer support, product development and—most importantly—the office coffee equipment. I’ve got other self-imposed responsibilities in the form of unannounced projects and such, but those are the biggies. What tools and techniques do you find yourself counting on to get through your workload? The more tactical parts where I need help involve getting to bed at a reasonable hour and doing a better job “defining my work” (to borrow an expression from David Allen). I’m routinely bitten in the ass by a poorly defined project or task, so I’m trying to make fewer mistakes there and spend less time tuning my task manager (which will lead to knocking more tasks out in the time I’ve got and not crawling into bed at 1:30am). What is the best starting point for the unproductive amongst us, who are looking to get more organized? As far as tools, you’ll almost always find me in one of these applications: OmniFocus for tasks on my Macs and iOS devices, Evernote for all sorts of different things, Vim for writing code and prose and Apple’s Mail. Without OmniFocus and Evernote, I’d probably be 40 pounds heavier, single and in therapy. Tactically, do what David Allen calls a “mental sweep”; essentially, sit down with a big stack of paper and a pen and completely empty your head of every single thing that’s got your attention, one item per sheet. You can read his seminal book for more info on what to do after this, but the point is that your brain is really good at solving problems and creating things, but it positively sucks at holding information such that it can be called back up on command. If I’m ever feeling overwhelmed, I’ll sit down and do exactly this mental sweep activity until I’ve cleared everything out of my brain and it can relax.
