Gtd_tips. How to Motivate Yourself When You Just Don't Feel Like It. Motivation is a tough thing, especially if you’re in the midst of some difficult circumstances. If you’re at all like me, and things aren’t going the way you planned, you might have a tendency to fall into a funk. Instead of conquering the world, you might just want to put on some pajama pants, crack open some Ben and Jerry’s, and watch TV. This is a poor solution to your problems. Seriously, sitting around isn’t going to solve anything. You’ll end up feeling worse about your situation the less you do about it. And, if you keep up with the B & J, you’ll end up with a weight problem, too. So, how do you motivate yourself if you’re not feeling motivated? Let Fear Take Hold Fear is one of the strongest motivators we have. This sounds a bit hokey to some, but it serves to keep your mind focused on what it is you’re working toward. Recruit a Group In the course of telling people around you about your goal, you may run into a few of them that are excited about what you’re doing.
How to master the art of working remotely. By Gina Trapani | 10:23 AM June 16, 2009 Over the past five years I’ve worked off-site and online for employers across the country using email, chat, and web-based collaboration apps. My work life has been the envy of my traditional nine-to-five friends. While they suit up in an office-appropriate outfit, grab the briefcase, and brave a commute every weekday, I get to work from home (and my employers get to save money on office space). But working with people in different cities and time zones with minimal face time presents a whole new set of challenges. Sharpen your email skills. Be “present” via instant messenger or Web-based chat. Collaborate online with the tools that best fit your client and project. Set up regular voice or video chat check-ins. Have you managed freelancers online only, or worked off-site yourself?
How to embed the contents of Todo.txt onto your desktop with ToD. Top 10 productivity basics explained. These are some things that I've found work for me: Dual screens. Some may view having dual monitors as a luxury, or simply just not necessary, but let me tell you, it makes a huge productivity boost. Put all your non-mission critical stuff on one side (the left for me), such as iTunes, chat boxes, etc,... stuff you tend to keep open and interact with frequently but isn't the core of your work. Then use the other side as pure work mission control. Not only does this give you more screen real estate, but it also has the effect of constantly making you aware of whether or not you're wasting time. If you're spending more time on the non-essential side, the work side is sitting right there staring at you saying, "Love me.... hold me.....
" Multiple input devices. My iMac acts as the first monitor (non-essential on the left) and my second monitor (mission control on the right) is a Wacom Cintiq 21ux mounted on an articulating LCD arm. Take breaks. Keep your space clean. Deal with it. Snap out of it. How to focus on one app at a time with Isolator. 'Leave the Office Earlier' de Laura Stack — Recension. Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. Several weeks ago, I reviewed Laura Stack’s Find More Time – and loved it. It was an excellent collection of specific tactics to apply towards maximizing time in your personal life and I have actually applied a few of the lessons successfully in my own life.
Naturally, when I read an excellent book like this, I sought out other books by the author at the library, and the first one I found by Laura Stack was this one, Leave the Office Earlier. It basically is the logical companion to Find More Time – while Find More Time focuses on time management and reduced stress in the home environment, Leave the Office Earlier looks at those same issues in the professional environment. The two books even have much the same layout and organization. The big question, though, is whether there’s meat on the bone here. Leave the Office Earlier in Detail 5. One key, though, is to not forget this list. 8. 11. 15. 26. How to improve your home office productivity. If you work from home, the central part of your work life is the home office. For some, that means the kitchen table, but most of us assign a specific room to be the base of operations and (try to) do our work from there each day. Given that we must take into consideration strategy before tactics, it stands to reason that we should make it a room we enjoy being in, and furthermore, a room that gets us in a productive mood, and by considering these things provide a strategic framework to the hacks we can apply in the office.
What puts you in a productive mood? That’s a central question to defining your workspace. Perhaps being reminded of your goals – the reason you do this work each day – is enough to get you going, so find a way to remind yourself of those goals at the start of, and throughout, each day. If you can’t identify the things that trigger a productive mood for you, then you’ll have a tough time improving your workspace on anything more than a cosmetic level. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. How to defeat brain drain. How to practice rituals in order to crank up your productivity a.
Using Rituals to Crank Up Your Productivity and Happiness There are some people who are amazingly organized. They calmly complete their daily tasks in order, and at the end of the day they feel a sense of accomplishment and contentment. They relax in the evening with family, friends, and their hobbies and they turn in for a good night’s sleep right on time. These are people who have rituals. Whether they are conscious of them or not, that’s what is going on.
Establishing rituals is fun. Here are 8 rituals and routines that you could add to your life with examples to help get your imagination sparked and motivated. Rituals 1. List out what you want your morning to be like and assign realistic time frames. By having this written down you’ll be more likely to keep on schedule. 2. Choose a time to do this every day. 3. I do this on Sunday evenings, but you can also do this on Monday mornings. 4. Routines 1. This is much like the Morning Ritual. Click here to download this template for free. 2. How to become productive (eccentric style) From the way it’s talked about on sites like this, you’d think productivity was a long-lost secret of the ages. Really, though, there’s quite literally nothing to productivity: for the most part, it’s just a matter of staying on task and working hard. The problems tend to arise more when self-motivation is required: when there are no deadlines, working consistently isn’t easy.
This guide won’t make you productive: only you can really do that for yourself. Rather, here are some little, specific tips you can follow that might speed up your day without any excessive effort from yourself.Keep things offline. The easiest way to avoid getting something done is this: set up a to-do on some web site, then close the web site down. Instead, find a dark marker and a piece of paper. Shorten your task lists. Right now, for instance, my list consists of three things: “Write post, Write post, Write prompt, Ask question.” Stay minimalist. Time yourself. Use applications. Make a list of dreams. Instant Boss. Instant Boss will time your work/break cycles, reminding you when to work and when to take a break. The defaults are 10 minutes of work, 2 minutes of break, and this is repeated 5 times for a total of 1 hour.
These values can be changed to suit your needs. Instant Boss will remember the values you used during your last session. Start by entering in the values you desire: The first box is for how long you want to work.The second box is for how long you want your breaks.The third box is for how many times you want to repeat this cycle. In the statusbar you can see where in your work cycle you are, followed by how long you have worked this session, followed by how long you have worked since you started using Instant Boss.
Instant Boss will tell you when it is time to take a break. If you decide to take a break now, it will begin your break period.If you decide to work a little longer, it will count up and add this to your total work time. How to take notes that work. Note-taking is one of those skills that rarely gets taught. Teachers and professors assume either that taking good notes comes naturally or that someone else must have already taught students how to take notes. Then we sit around and complain that our students don’t know how to take notes. I figure it’s about time to do something about that. Whether you’re a high school junior or a college senior or a grad student or a mid-level professional or the Attorney General of the United States, the ability to take effective, meaningful notes is a crucial skill.
What Do Notes Do? One of the reasons people have trouble taking effective notes is that they’re not really sure what notes are for. The purpose of note-taking is simple: to help you study better and more quickly. What to Write Down Your focus while taking notes should be two-fold. Second, what’s relevant? Note-Taking Techniques. Do you have a good job? Take the test. Today’s job market favors employees. The attitude of most workers is that they should have a job that makes them happy. So it’s no surprise that at any given time 70 percent of the workforce is job hunting, according to the Wall St. Journal. Everyone is looking for the right position. But what exactly does that mean? Here is something it’s probably not: Prestigious. You might think you’re different – that you have a legitimate shot at fame.
A good rule of thumb when choosing a job to make you happy is to pick one that is based on the following list of attributes. To test a job to see if it’s good, give the job points for each attribute it has: 1. 2. 3. It is worth noting that the primary cause of workplace burnout is not the amount of time spent working, but whether the work you did can make a difference. 4.
So finding a job you like or turning a bad job in to a good job might actually be totally under your control; you can decide you are going to be likable and make friends, or not. How to use the caret (^) to manage file versions. @Darcy: I agree that it is the "neat" way of doing it, but it is too much of a hindrance when you are just updating some documentation, and not doing actual file management: you have to leave your application, go to the appropriate folder, perform your Subversion or CVS command, then go back to your app, instead of a quick n'dirty "save as". This would be even slower if you have to revert something (you can't Diff a *.doc file on the fly). Now if there was a way to include SVN/CVS in a common Save dialog box, as an option (where save = commit file immediately), that would really be a killer feature. Not sure it can be done though... By the way, the caret thing is just one of many "valid" symbols in a file name.
You could also use a comma: ireallyshouldbeworkingnow,1.txt ireallyshouldbeworkingnow,2.txt Or better yet: ireallyshouldbeworkingnow,0707161729.txt ireallyshouldbeworkingnow,0707161730.txt ireallyshouldbeworkingnow,0707161731.txt And so on... How to become more productive and happy at work. How to maintain a consistent workspace across multiple computers. My flash-drive setup is a little different from most, I think. True, I use the USB drive to shuttle documents and applications between my laptop and desktop. However, I never actually work with the files on the USB. I have "PortableDocs" and "PortableApps" folders in the "My Documents" folder on each machine. These are mapped using subst to drive letters Q: and R:, respectively, on each machine. I also have an AutoHotKey script running on each machine (in the PortableApps folder, by the way), that checks for "PortaTodo" (the label of the USB drive) to be connected, and runs the SyncBack profile to synchronize the USB docs and apps folders with the local docs and apps folders.
The advantages are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Number 6 is even less of an issue than you might think, since I also have FolderShare syncing the "PortableDocs" folders on each machine. The biggest disadvantage is that it can get damned confusing if you forget to sync once. How to find your information oasis. The Internet Age allows you to get whatever information you want, as much as you want it. This, however, may do you more harm than good. The reason is simple: there is usually far too much noise in the information we consume. It becomes increasingly difficult to get the gems out of it, and it takes a lot of time and energy to deal with. Besides, increasing noise means decreasing clarity, and that means decreasing effectiveness. An information oasis – where you can get only the gems of the information without the noise – is the dream land of Information Age.
It is the place where the information you consume boost your personal effectiveness rather than decrease it. But how do you get there? News is probably the most noisy kind of information you could get. 2. Rather than reading news, I believe it’s a good idea to read another kind of information which has much less noise: history. Why is it important? 3. To find your information oasis, it’s important to reduce your information intake. How to increase your productivity. Editor’s Note: I’ve been a fan of Glenn Wolsey, a young up-and-coming blogger for quite some time. I’m still amazed he’s 15 years old! I’ve asked Glenn to contribute a guest post to this fine blog. And here he is with his five favorite productivity tips. Get even more juicy tips & tricks via our RSS feeds: Glennwolsey.com (RSS)LifeClever (RSS) 1.
Set times & plan your day Not many people are going to work well without some structure. Start scheduling or setting daily milestones. 2. When you’re juggling half a dozen projects at once, you’re just asking for trouble by keeping a to-do list in your head. The solution is simple. 3. In addition to your newly developed to-do list, start setting goals and milestones.
Goals are very important, not enough people set them. 4. This falls under focusing on a single task. You don’t have to close your email program, practice ignoring notifications. 5. Multi-tasking can be fun, and can be rewarding. How to add more hours to the day. A twenty five hour day isn’t coming any time soon. As long as your feet stay planted on the ground here, twenty four is all you’re going to get. However, with a bit of skill you can squeeze out a couple more hours to add to your day. Here’s how: Step One: Remove Big Chunks The first step to reclaiming more time from your day is to get hold of the big chunks that aren’t being put to good use. Television – This is a good starting point if you need more time. Step Two: Reclaim Gap Time Anywhere from 2-5 hours of your day is probably spent in “gap time.” Books - Bring a book with you at all times and get a few minutes of reading in. Step Three: Triage The final step is to use the principle of triage to focus on what’s important and ignore what isn’t.
E-mail - Consider an autoresponder for common messages. Final Tip: Prioritize Work The final question isn’t just of doing things faster, but of doing the right things. Ten things your IT department won't tell you. Get productive with the best Facebook Apps. Top 5 Productivity Tips Most People Know But Do... How to rock the keyboard. A Few URL. Web 2.0 backpack. How to increase your productivity. How to use your free time productively. I want my attention back. How to do more by focusing on the essentials.
How to boost your productivity. How to solve your problems more easily. How to study smart and save time. How to figure out the most important book to read next. How to avoid email bankruptcy. How to cure email addiction. How to use AutoHotKey to rock your keyboard. Top 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity.