How to Become a Productivity Ninja Believe it or not, productivity can be learned, grasshopper. Yeah, I didn’t believe it either..until I transformed myself into a productivity ninja. Today, I’m going to teach you to maximize your time at your computer, dominate your email in-box, and spend less time on unimportant tasks to focus on what really matters. Once you have freed up your time, you’ll be surprised how you’re able to hang out with friends and family, pick up new skills, spend more time exercising, or cook healthy meals. Like Neo learning Kung Fu, today I shall teach you the skill of productivity. My story I am the world’s best procrastinator. For the past three years: I used to think I was justified in my horribly unproductive, time-consuming behavior because I was running a business. I finally came to the harsh realization that I was lying to myself. So I dumped ALL of my effort into building the habit of productivity. Just two months later, my life is drastically different: I actually feel in control of my life now.
Why It's Worth Making Time for This Lengthy Morning Ritual When business owners go looking for productivity boosters, they're generally thinking of small changesthat can help them squeeze more essential business tasks into their days. In other words, tricks and techniques that will speed up their work. But what if the truth was that in order to reach maximum velocity in completing tasks you first had to slow way, way down? That's the counterintuitive idea behind a practice called 'Morning Pages' introduced by Julie Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. Artistry not required Before you panic at the idea and start experiencing traumatic flashbacks to college essay exams and little blue books, keep in mind that this notion isn't just the rantings of one out-of-touch artist. First, these pages need not be well written or artistic in the slightest. Why bother? If the content is so utterly boring, what's the point of brain dumping random nonsense as soon as you get up in the morning? He confesses his first response to the idea was, "Is she crazy?
How To be so Productive You Can't Stand it You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5, and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would have little in common. In fact, the tenets that guide how they – and exceptionally productive creatives across the board – make ideas happen are incredibly similar. Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors: 1. A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. 2. When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. 3. Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life. To avoid ‘blue sky paralysis,’ pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. 4. When working on in-depth projects, we generate lots of new ideas along the way. 5. 6. Part of being able to work on your project a little bit each day is carving out the time to do so. 7.
3 Ways to Learn to Love Yourself lzf/Shutterstock So much popular self-help advice suggests that we must "learn to love ourselves." It’s good advice, but how exactly do we do it? It's not so simple: We often believe that we do love ourselves, and yet our actions and reactions, and our lives, suggest otherwise. Care as much about yourself as you do for others. All of these things will help you to develop a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride in what you are doing and who you are, and a realization that you are a worthy, talented, capable, lovable person who deserves to be loved.
43 Simple Ways To Simplify Your Life Post written by Sherri Kruger. Follow me on Twitter. Simplicity. Reducing complexity in my life has reduced stress, increased free time, and top priorities are actually top priorities. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. There are countless ways to simplify your life, these are but a few. Designing The Perfect Daily Routine: The Ultimate System Harvard’s Positive Psychology Professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, believes happiness is the result of balancing meaning with pleasure. But understanding what gives us meaning and what gives us pleasure is not as easy as it sounds. In this article, I will teach you how to track everything you do and then restructure your activities in the optimal way. You will learn the best way to end procrastination and develop the right habits such as meditation, exercise, and learning so that you can grow every day. You will learn how to work diligently on that which gives you meaning and reward yourself accordingly with pleasure. In this way, your habits will truly stick and fundamental changes in your day to day experience will be inevitable. Work, for example, is thought of by most people as annoying and tedious, but psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre show otherwise. This mismatch between reality and perception is now called the ‘work paradox’. aTime Logger 2 The Meaning Map 1. 2. 3. 4.
A Pattern Language for Productivity, Pattern #3: Checklists by Andre · 4 Comments Checklists are mental inventories made physical. Instead of trying to hold your thoughts on a topic entirely in your head, write them down as a list. Experiment with making checklists for anything and everything that has your attention. Having a list to review reduces the need to rethink what you need to consider about a topic. For instance, a travel checklist would include all of the items you need to take with you on a trip: TicketBoarding passDress suit2 casual shirts2 casual pantsToiletriesEtc… For blogging, I brainstormed a checklist of future articles to write. Checklists are a great way of seeding the mind for further thinking on a topic. Toiletries to takeAirport restrictionsWhat’s already available for free in the hotel roomDrugstores and markets near hotelCommercial toiletry kits The first checklist was meant to be an inventory of what to bring. Checklists are a great way to avoid reacting to problems in a knee-jerk fashion.
Why Efficiency is Overrated – and What to Do About It An awful lot of time-management techniques show an obsession with efficiency. And being efficient – getting tasks done quickly – is certainly important. But efficiency for its own sake is worthless. Sure, you could spend three hours implementing a new system that lets you automatically tag every email as it comes in. But I doubt that you’re going to look back in ten years’ time and say, “Wow, my inbox was always so well organized.” If you pay too much attention to efficiency, you might actually become less effective. Here’s how efficiency is damaging: Playing the Numbers Game Efficiency tends to reduce everything to numbers: How many emails did you answer this morning? Now, I’ll be the first to agree that paying attention to metrics can help you with your time management. What about that long, heartfelt email from an old friend? Change It: Cut yourself some slack, and remember that there are many situations that can’t be reduced to numbers. Shying Away From Challenges Inability to Enjoy Life
Are You Taking Productivity Too Far? Since you’re reading Pick the Brain, I expect that you’ll agree with me when I say that productivity is a good thing. Being productive generally means: You’re living up to your full potential (instead of daydreaming about what might be … and never actually doing it)You’re being proactive rather than reactive, taking control of your own lifeYou feel good about yourself and your life: each day, you have a sense of accomplishmentYou’ve got clear goals, and you’re on track to reach them Pretty great, huh? It sounds like a recipe for a happy life. Except… …can you end up being too productive? The Darker Side of Productivity Like I say, I’m all for productivity. But … I know that sometimes I take it a little too far. Yes, getting things done (or if you’re a David Allan fan, Getting Things Done) is good. When you get overly focused on being productive: Your relationships suffer. Do you need to take your foot off the pedal? Taking a Break From Productivity You could: So … a challenge for you!
The productivity pyramid (give yourself a promotion) Productivity is a measure of output over time. All other things being equal, the more you produce per minute, the more productive you are. And economists understand that wealth (for a company or a community) is based on increasing productivity. The simplest way to boost productivity is to get better at the task that has been assigned to you. To work harder, and with more skill. The next step up is to find people who are cheaper than you to do those assigned tasks. The next step up is to invest in existing technology that can boost your team's output. The step after that? The final step, the one that that eludes so many of us: Figure out better things to work on. It turns out that the most productive thing we can do is to stop working on someone else’s task list and figure out a more useful contribution instead. The challenge is that the final step requires a short-term hit to your productivity.
Square CEO Jack Dorsey Says If You’re Making Decisions, You’re Not Leading The Manager--How Not to Do It Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, is famous for having up to 70 meetings, and receiving 3,500 to 4,000 emails, each week. She has joked about having people in line outside her office and needing a "take-a-number" machine to manage the traffic. This is not leadership, it's management, two very different things. Leaders who figure out they shouldn't make decisions can lead wildly successful companies devoid of command-and-control management. The Pioneer Bill Gore was so far ahead of his time in 1958 that he was ignored. Today, W. With almost 60 years behind it, W. The Maverick In 1981, at the age of 21, Ricardo Semler replaced his father at Semco, a tiny manufacturing company. Ricardo Semler celebrated his 10th anniversary of not making a decision many years ago. Devoid of managers who solve and decide for others, Semco has grown to more than $1 billion a year in revenue and multiples of that in assets, with employee retention at an unheard of 98 percent.
Confessions of a recovering lifehacker | John Pavlus I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. (I’m the son of two librarians, one of whom also worked as an unofficial programmer/sysadmin. There was always a better way to do almost anything. But sometime over the last couple years (around the time I turned 30, not coincidentally), it has begun to dawn on me: Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things. It’s like running on a treadmill: you might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere. This isn’t some unique epiphany. What are you REALLY hacking? They call it “lifehacking” and it’s a damn catchy term. That’s because most of the stuff that pours out of these sites isn’t really about hacking your life. Essentially, this kind of “hacking” is all about trying to make the best of something that is 1. 2. 3.