Productivity Hacks – Making Time by Shaving Time If there’s one thing I learned in 2011, it was how to be ultra-productive. I’ve discussed productivity in detail before here on SPI, namely in podcast session #12: Mind Hacks, Physical Hacks and Work Hacks for Better Productivity and Getting Things Done (which was actually posted almost exactly 1 year ago) however, during this past year there was one major factor that contributed to my going beyond just being productive, and becoming ultra-productive: My son. With a kid, especially one who was in his 2nd year of life (from age 1 to 2), the time I had available to work dramatically decreased, as did the time I wanted to spend on work. My son has become the center of my life – in more ways than you can imagine unless you have a child of your own. Obvious productivity tips come into play, of course, such as: Getting rid of distractions in the work environment: noise, the dog, cell phone, etc. The Quick and Easy Math In total, that’s more than 14 hours of life (yes – life!) The issue is this:
13 Strategies To Jumpstart Your Productivity Looking to increase your productivity? You’ve come to the right article. I don’t claim to be a productivity master (I always think there’s room for improvement), but I am very passionate about increasing productivity. I’m always looking for different ways to be more productive – stealing pockets of time where I can, deprioritizing the unimportant, getting system overhauls, etc. And I love it when I see my efforts pay off in the form of increased outputs at the end of the day. In this article, I have selected 13 of my best productivity strategies – tried, tested and validated. Here they are :D 1. Probably half of the self-help articles out there keeps telling us to set goals and set targets. I do regular goal setting to maximize my output. Be clear on what exactly you want to achieve. Further reading: 2. Does your work environment encourage you to work? Those of you who are employed can’t exactly choose the environment to work in. Further Reading 3. Further Reading: 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz by Tony Schwartz | 8:53 AM March 14, 2012 Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour. I know this from my own experience. 1. 2. 3. 1. 2. 3.
Take A Nap In The Afternoon This tip may not work for all - some people just can't fall asleep quickly enough at day time. Give it a try and watch your body reaction. Studies show that 20 minutes of afternoon nap gives more rest to the body than 20 minutes of sleep in the morning. Use this powerful refreshing tool to get energized till the end of the day. It's recommended that you sleep for no more than 30 minutes, or you will feel drowsy after waking up. Once you get accustomed to sleep at day time, you will fell that you need less time for the night sleep, and getting up early will become much easier! Here is couple of links to articles discovering the power of taking a nap (btw, sometimes it called "power nap" :) - At last, an excuse for the afternoon nap Power Napping for Increased Productivity, Stress Relief & Health
Christopher Donohue: Information in a multi dimensional and empowered way By Christopher DonohueIt is such an exhilarating time in which a significant number of the global collective now have access to an abundance of information via the web and social platforms. However, some suffer from information overload. Many also think that information can only reside in books, online text or in documents (Word, Excel, presentations, and databases). But imagine information graphically represented, to help you break through the information flood and enable you and your team to focus on what information and tools are truly needed. Bottlenose assists with information overload with flexible, deep dive feed customisation options and via the sonar visualisation of topics. Written content © 2012 Christopher Donohue, FourBuckets.
How to Commit to a Goal Psychological experiments demonstrate the power of a simple technique for committing to goals. Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it? You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. Work is busy at the moment, the money is OK and your home-life is also packed. Apart from anything else you’ve been thinking about learning a musical instrument. A few months pass. Unfortunately everyday life intervenes again and you do little more than search online for the price of electric pianos. After six months you come back full circle to changing your job, still without having made a real start towards any of these goals. Written like this, with six months compressed into a few paragraphs, it’s obvious the problem is a lack of goal commitment; although in reality, with everyday life to cope with, the pattern can be more difficult to spot. Reality check Hearts and minds
3 Ways to Keep Meetings Short (Every Time) | Inc. 5000 You know the feeling. You're in a meeting, and your eyes hurt because you've been rolling them at people who keep talking about nothing. You wonder if they have any consideration for other people's time. The topic at hand is either irrelevant or overdiscussed. You can amuse yourself with your iPad and texting, but getting caught playing Words With Friends is an embarrassing situation and ultimately won't help get the stack of work off your desk. It doesn't have to be this way. 1. Often meetings are set with only a general topic in hopes that the conversation will take care of itself. Before a meeting, create a one-page agenda with simple bullet points of the items to be discussed. 2. When you think about it, a meeting with six executives could be costing the company hundreds of dollars per hour. 3. I was talking with a consultant friend who schedules her one-hour meetings for 50 minutes. In one sentence, what was your single biggest takeaway from this meeting?
List of Values The following list of values will help you develop a clearer sense of what's most important to you in life, as explained in the article Living Your Values. Simply print out this page, mark the values which most resonate with you, and then sort your list in order of priority. As you scan the values list below, you may find that while most values have little or no significance to you (and some may even seem negative to you), there are those values that just jump out and call to you, and you feel, "Yes, this value is part of me." Steve RecommendsHere are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. Site Build It! Workers, Put Those Headphones On - Scott Berinato - Our Editors by Scott Berinato | 9:00 AM September 24, 2012 Data makes me nervous. In school, I was always more comfortable taking a college course like Physics for Poets than I was taking any class with real math. Even today, I’m uneasy at the thought of a something as simple as an accurate look at my diet. But after editing Jim Wilson’s excellent article on auto analytics in the September issue of HBR I made the reasonably monumental decision to try auto analytics myself. The article is your best primer on what auto-analytics are, but a good working definition for now is that they’re tools that allow you to collect and analyze data about your behavior in order to improve something about yourself — whether it’s how productive you are, how well you sleep or how much you exercise, or even your overall happiness. But Jim’s enthusiasm for auto-analytics was contagious enough that I found myself, with his help, setting up a test. That meant that certain activities weren’t properly recorded.