Week 39: How Do You Treat Your Future Self. I’d like to start with a simple exercise this week: take a few seconds to close your eyes and imagine yourself at this time next year. What do you see? Is your future self calm or harried? Sitting in a clean room or a cluttered one? Doing something fun or scrambling to get through the day?
Does Future You have more time than you do right now? If you’re like most people, you probably imagine you future self in at least a little bit better shape than you are right now. So we feel comfortable delegating work to our future selves. Ironic, isn’t it? Every time you do a craft project but leave your supplies out on the kitchen table instead of putting them away, you’re delegating work to your future self. News flash: that means Future You is going to have less time and more stress than Present You. The obvious cure for this is to be a pessimist about time. So instead, I’m going to try focusing on my relationship with Future Lynn.
You bet she does. How do you think of your future self? Week 36: The Magic Question That Keeps You Moving Forward | You started cleaning out the garage last month, but quit halfway through, promising yourself you’d do it tomorrow–and tomorrow never came. Or maybe you’re stalled on a novel–you wrote the opening in a flurry of inspiration, but when you hit the second act, you stopped finding time to work on it.
When a project is in the procrastination stage, how do you jump-start it? By asking the Magic Question: “What’s the next step?” Often the reason we don’t move forward is that we don’t see the next step clearly enough. Next steps usually fall into one of the following categories: A decision. Did you stop cleaning the garage because you weren’t sure whether to sell your old record collection or pass it on to your Aunt Myrna, who only listens to music on vinyl? It’s possible that you really needed to take some time to make the decision before you continued, and if you genuinely feel that’s the case, that’s okay.
Try making a list of the consequences for each option, both good and bad. An action. P.S. Lynn Johnston. I first heard of Lynn on one of the writing loops we are both members of, and enjoyed visiting her encouraging blog about making changes in life, 10 minutes at a time. I wanted to share her wisdom and strategies with y'all, so I invited her here to visit us. She's graciously agreed to give away a copy of The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating, so comment to enter. I'll choose a winner and post at the end of the night, so be sure to check back! AngelForget About the Glass: Succeed More Often By Being Both an Optimist and a Pessimist Optimists tend to be healthier, happier, and more successful in life than their talents merit.
At least that's what psychological studies show. Optimists are also more likely to dream big, stick to their goals, and keep their sense of humor intact in the face of disaster. Pessimists, on the other hand, are more often right when asked to predict the outcome of a situation, according to those same studies. Glass half-full or glass half-empty? Studies by Dr. 1.
Week 9: Saved by the Timer | Over the last eight weeks, I’ve focused on making small changes to increase my physical vitality. Now that I’m experiencing a significant increase in my energy levels and overall well-being, I’m ready to make some changes that will help me put that extra energy to good use. This week, my small step will relate to time management: working in timed intervals. Many productivity experts recommend setting a timer for 10-30 minutes, and spending that timed interval concentrating on one task only. But why are they so fixated on their kitchen timers? Setting a timer: Makes the task concrete, with a definite ending. When the timer goes off, you’re free to stop working on whatever task you set for yourself. Of course, it’s important that you give yourself a reasonable time period for the task. This doesn’t mean that your entire day should be crammed full of 15-minute tasks, though. How long should your intervals be?
Also, what’s your usual work rhythm? Week 12: How Do You Prioritize – By Quantity or Quality. This week I came across a quote by renowned productivity expert David Allen: “Maximum productivity is making something happen with as little effort as possible.” This was a surprise to me. I was under the impression that maximum productivity is cramming as many things as possible onto my to-do list and then rushing around like a maniac trying to get them all done. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. But this quote made me realize something important: I define “productivity” in terms of the number of things I’ve done. I’m measuring my daily performance by the number of tasks accomplished.
But isn’t that a good thing, you might ask? Isn’t that the goal, to get more things done? Yes and no. For example, I can dust the livingroom, start a load of laundry, water the garden, and unload the dishwasher in an hour. Given that willpower is a limited resource that’s depleted as the day goes on, it’s logical to tackle the hard-but-meaningful task while my energy is up. Week 15: Clearing Virtual Clutter, Part 1 – Email | How much time do you spend every day reading email? How many messages are in your inbox right now? If you’re like me, the answers to those questions are “too much” and “several thousand.” Where did all this email come from, and why haven’t I deleted it?
When I start grouping the messages into categories, I come up with these: Personal messages from friends and family Messages from discussion groups (like yahoogroups) that I subscribed to Advertisements and coupons from companies I’ve bought form in the past Newsletters on topics that interest me, like writing and gardening Notes that I’ve sent myself when I’ve had a brainstorm and only had my cell phone handy Research for stories that I want to refer to later Reminders of things I need to do Spam isn’t an issue — Gmail’s spam filter is so good that only rarely does a piece of spam get through to my inbox.
I’ve opted in to too many things I’m using my inbox as a place to store reference information How much of your email inbox is clutter? Week 16: Clearing Virtual Clutter, Part 2 – Data Files | If your computer’s hard drive died today, what would you lose? Would you be able to restore all that important data — that half-written novel, the photos and video from last year’s family reunion, all the tax-related receipts you entered into Quicken this year? Or would you lose those files forever? You hear it all the time, back up your data at least once a week. But in order to back those files up, you have to organize them well enough to be sure that you’re not missing anything important. Not the most exciting thing to think about, I know, but taking 15 minutes now could save you a ton of misery later.
And I do mean misery. I learned this the hard way myself: in 2004, my hard drive crashed and I lost every poem and every short story I’d written SINCE HIGH SCHOOL. I’d made random periodic backups throughout the years on floppy disk, but many of those disks had gotten corrupted while sitting in a box in my closet. I was depressed for weeks. Week 17: Clearing Virtual Clutter, Part 3 – Productivity vs. the Internet | Now that we’ve decluttered our email accounts and our computer hard drives, I’d like to focus on a different type of virtual clutter — the clutter we create in our daily schedules when we get sucked into wasting time on the Internet. Don’t panic — I’m not advocating that we give up our Internet connections! But I am suggesting that a close examination of how we spend time online might make it easier to cut the timewasters while keeping the fun stuff AND having more free time offline for the things that make life worth living.
Take Facebook, for example…think about the time you’ve spent there this week. How much of that time was spent communicating with people you care about? How much was spent reading and possibly responding to trivial comments made by people you barely know or have never met? Or Twitter. Or blogs. Don’t forget games. When’s the last time you meant to play for a few minutes and ended up rushing to meet a deadline as a result? How much time do you spend online? Week 19: Clearing Mental Clutter | Your thoughts are racing. You can’t focus on the task at the top of your to do list because the other thirty things you need to do are nagging at you.
You can’t sleep, even though you’re tired, because an argument you had this morning keeps replaying itself in your head. You should sit down and work on your taxes, but instead you turn on the television to drown out all the worried voices in your head. You have mental clutter. Me too! Sometimes mental clutter is the result of physical clutter: you can’t find your calendar so you’re racking your brain trying to remember what time your doctor’s appointment is, or the bedroom is so cluttered you’ve got to mentally retrace your steps three times before you realize where you put that belt that goes with your outfit. So, how do you get rid of mental clutter? Do a Brain Dump It doesn’t seem like it would work. Often, just having everything written out is enough to give you the mental clarity to think again. Projects or tasks with deadlines. Week 22: How Do You Keep Yourself On Track. Thanks to Kelly, for inspiring this week’s small step! In her comment on planners in Week 20, Kelly mentioned that one of her problems in getting things done is that she would have tasks written down, but when she sat down in the morning to get started on work, she’d forget to open her planner.
Kelly, you’re not alone. And this brings up a very important point — it’s not enough for us to come up with a plan for accomplishing our goals, we also have to follow the plan. Obvious, but still worth saying, because every day throws new distractions and obstacles at us. How do we make sure we accomplish the meaningful tasks on our to-do list when today’s little emergencies and last-minute schedule changes are screaming for our attention? How do we stay focused on a goal? Say it: Put your to-do list next to the bed, and when you get up in the morning, look it over. Measure it: As my husband is fond of saying, “What gets measured gets done.” Think about a goal you achieved in the past. Week 24: Does Your Outer Space Reflect Your Inner Space. My husband and I love to talk. One of our weekend rituals for the last few years has been to spend a few hours at Starbucks with no other goal than to talk about whatever’s on our minds. It almost seemed magical at the beginning — all week we’d be focused on work and chores and the usual grind, but we’d sit down with tea on Saturday and all of a sudden we’d have tons to say to each other.
Only recently did we figure out why those conversations only seemed to happen at Starbucks. Caffeine, you’re thinking. But no, it was something else. We’ve been redoing all the floors in the house, and since neither of us has any experience doing, we’ve been taking this challenge on in baby steps. Now that we could see the room without all our knicknacks and garage sale end tables, we realized that the problem with our livingroom is that there was only one place to sit: the couch, which meant we were both facing the television instead of each other. What do you use each of the rooms in your house for? The Kaizen Plan for Decluttering Your Computer: Take Control of Your Computer 10 Minutes at a Time - A book by Lynn Johnston.
Breathe. | zen habits. Week 11: Are You Wasting Your Willpower. Have you ever started the day determined to stick to your diet…and blown it by lunchtime? There’s a reason that as the day went on, it got harder for you to live up to those good intentions. Psychological studies on willpower and self-control have revealed that we actually have a limited amount of willpower available to us each day–and once we’ve used it up, it’s gone. Yes, gone. Self-control–the ability to make yourself do the right thing instead of the easy thing or the fun thing–is an exhaustible resource. Or, to quote Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard: “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.” So how do we use up willpower? By… In other words, any time you are not on autopilot, you are burning up self-control. Notice that the energy which fuels your creative process is coming from the same place that fuels getting chores done and resisting the ice cream in the back of the freezer.
How to Get More Willpower Take care of your body. SUCCCESS. The Kaizen Plan: Small Steps to Big Change | Take Control of Your Life 10 Minutes at a Time. 15 Time Boxing Strategies to Get Things Done. Putting it simply, time boxing is the most effective time management tool that I know of. Even if you already know and use it to some extent, there is a good chance that you can make it even better with some of the tips that follow. For those new to it, time boxing is simply fixing a time period to work on a task or group of tasks. Instead of working on a task until it’s done, you commit to work on it for a specific amount of time instead. But don’t let the simplicity of the concept deceive you — there’s much more to this tool than meets the eye. Many people already wrote about it (check Dave Cheong for a great start, as well as J.D Meier and Steve Pavlina).
Although these guys made a great job presenting it, time boxing has helped me so much that I decided to share 15 specific ways that it can help you too be more productive. Here they are: 1. The most obvious use of a time box is to make progress on big tasks. 2. 3. 4. Perfectionism is the flip side of procrastination. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Get Things Done Like a Zen Master. The Link Between Dreams and Reality There’s one item that represents a link between your dreams and reality. One thing that you must do every single day to fulfill your purpose. That one thing is to take action. And the ultimate tool for taking action is a to-do list. Yet it’s more complicated than that.
The bottom line: If you want to reach your potential, and become a more focused person, there are certain principles and characteristics you must understand about a to-do list. A Zen Master Named Barney At one point in my life, I had a wonderful system for getting things done. I tried every single online to-do list application. Before I knew it, almost a year had passed and my old reliable system was long gone. After hearing my challenges about being productive, a good friend of mine suggested I meet up with an acquaintance of his: a Zen Master named Barney. “This could be interesting,” I thought. “How do you get things done?”
“How do you get things done?” Obviously, this wasn’t new. 1. 8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating. “Music helps me concentrate,” Mike said to me glancing briefly over his shoulder. Mike was in his room writing a paper for his U.S. History class. On his desk next to his computer sat crunched Red Bulls, empty Gatorade bottles, some extra pocket change and scattered pieces of paper. In the pocket of his sweat pants rested a blaring iPod with a chord that dangled near the floor, almost touching against his Adidas sandals. On his computer sat even more stray objects than his surrounding environment. There must have been twenty browser tabs open. Mike made a shift about every thirty seconds between all of the above. Do you know a person like this? The Science Behind Concentration In the above account, Mike’s obviously stuck in a routine that many of us may have found ourselves in, yet in the moment we feel it’s almost an impossible routine to get out of.
When we constantly multitask to get things done, we’re not multitasking, we’re rapidly shifting our attention. Phase 1: Blood Rush Alert.