Time Management Tips: How to Find the Right Mindset to Succeed With Time Management. For the past several years I have worked with time management techniques such as lists, prioritization, planning and so on.
But it wasn’t until I adopted a Quadrant 2 mindset that I really started seeing results. The phrase “Quadrant 2” comes from Stephen Coveys book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . Every task you need to do can be split into one of the 4 quadrants:
50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily. Work Environment. This 15-Minute Activity Will Make You More Successful At Work. Productivity Hacks From Startup Execs. Productivity: As a startup CEO, what is your favorite productivity hack. Screw motivation, what you need is discipline. If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.
The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline. This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term “paradigm shift” are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment. What’s the difference? Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.
That’s completely the wrong way around. Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically circumvents the problem by consistently improving them. The implications are huge. Productivity vs. Getting Things Done. This post originally appeared on the Exist blog.
I’ve been a sucker for so-called “productivity porn” for a while. I still am, to some degree, but I’ve been working hard to cure myself of this time-wasting habit and I’m getting a lot closer to that. For anyone who’s not familiar with it, my interpretation of productivity porn is pretty much anything related to productivity as a topic of interest, that doesn’t actually involve getting anything done. For me, it includes things like trying out new task managers, reading blog posts about productivity and stocking up on stationery I don’t need. I’ve known for years that this habit isn’t doing me any favors, but I’ve only recently started to shake it by enforcing some strict rules on myself.
Go back to basics The first thing I did that really made a difference was cutting out all the tools, apps and systems I had been using. I’d never truly understood my own workflow before this. Use MITs Focus on what works Cut out unproductive habits. How to Finish Your Work, One Bite at a Time. “How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.” If you’ve ever ran more than a few miles, you probably understand why you need to pace yourself. Runners that sprint at the start of a race will be exhausted far before they cross the finish line. The same principle applies when trying to get work done. How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done - 5 Expert Tips. Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
To check it out, click here. Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. Just looking at it is exhausting. We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done. I certainly want the answer. So I decided to call a friend who manages to do this — and more. Cal Newport impresses the heck out of me. He has a full-time job as a professor at Georgetown University, teaching classes and meeting with students.He writes 6 (or more) peer-reviewed academic journal papers per year.He’s the author of 4 books including the wonderful “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” And yet he finishes work at 5:30PM every day and rarely works weekends. 5 Ways to Make Your To-Do Lists More Effective.
To-do lists seem pretty straightforward: A list of all of the tasks you plan to accomplish during any given day or week.
And, really, there are few things more satisfying than drawing lines through each entry. Progress! How To Make To-Do Lists Better, Faster, And More Fun. It's the oldest, simplest, yet probably still the most effective method for making sure you get everything done: the humble to-do list.
But is there a way to get more out of your daily check list? We asked the experts: How can we make our to-do lists better, how can we streamline them to get things done faster? Guide to Personal Productivity. Productivity porn (or, for those really in the know, "productivity pr0n") consists of techniques, tactics, and tricks for maximizing personal productivity -- or, as they say, "getting things done".
The techniques that follow work together as an integrated set for me, but they probably won't for you. Maybe you'll get one or two ideas -- probably out of the ideas I stole from other people. If so, I have succeeded. Let's start with a bang: don't keep a schedule. Happiness Makes Your Brain Work Better. Entrepreneurs, in general, are strivers.
We set targets, battle to meet them, and believe that getting to that point, whatever it is, will bring us increased satisfaction. But according to one positive psychology researcher out of Harvard, as commonsensical as this tendency to chase achievement in order to attain greater happiness may sound, it's actually got the equation reversed. In a fascinating (and funny) TEDxBloomington talk, Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, argues that while we may think success will bring us happiness, the lab-validated truth is that happiness brings us more success.
And understanding this is particularly valuable for entrepreneurs, Achor said in an interview. The Busy Person’s Lies. HOW’S life?
Oh, busy. So goes the mindless modern conversation — a constant assertion of the scarcity of time.