Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

To be honest, I didn’t even think about how long this post would take or how long it would be. I didn’t even plan on having the kind of alliteration (P-oignant P-oint for P-roductivity) that showed up in the title. I had an idea, a general principal, and I want to just put it up:

In any context, achieve your pre-set, present objectives before going onto anything else. 

Thats the idea plain and simple. What does it mean in laymen’s terms? It means that if you have anything that you know is “on your list,” and is “highest priority,” then conquer that first. 

Another awesome way to put this is: Accomplish your “musts” like they are “musts.”

If something must get done while you’re at work that day, or before you leave for the gym, or while you’re online – then do those things absolutely first.

So, lets say you go to work with a little list of “musts.” Lets say that this includes:

• Talking to your boss about a new marketing strategy
• Send off 20 important emails to clients
• Set a concrete time for a meeting with the department, and
• Recycle your trash bin. 

These are the blatantly obvious things that you made a note to get done, your priority tasks that you’ll surely knock off for the day. Maybe you want to get it off your mind. Maybe they’re so easy and in your face you feel that its best to get them done now. Either way, they made to the top of your priority list.

..How would you FEEL if you got all of those tasks completed as soon as possible? 

• You see your boss – BAM you talk to him (assuming the timing is fine)
• You sit down on your computer – BAM you smoke those 20 emails
• You see your trash bin – BAM to recycle its contents
• You see the other heads of the department – BAM you find a time that works for all of them to meet

What would that FEEL like?

I’ll bet that if you honestly went through with that kind of rare diligence, you’d feel full of energy, confident, efficacious, productive, and even flat-out happy.

Give this exercise a test on your own terms – find a context to work with, and cover all the “musts” first – instead of doing what most of us (including myself) do, which is rationalize that we’ll get it done in a bit, and then end up rushing.

Maybe begin with an easy context, something like your morning routine. 

You might have as a “must” to brush your teeth, find a good outfit, eat breakfast, check your email, and do 10 minutes of yoga.

Instead of dilly-dallying at the breakfast table, or surfing the web – get all of your “musts” done swiftly and see that you don’t have to rush! 

The principal is beautiful, and it applies to any context that involves priorities (I can’t think of one that doesn’t). It has just as much to do with writing papers and working on creative projects as it does with meditation or spending time catching up with friends – its LIFE management by PRIORITIES, and this little tip is one tool towards that higher ideal.

___

If you enjoyed this post and the material on this site, consider signing up for my RSS feed or bumping this material only StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks a lot!

Combine Tasks:

Even when you’ve learned how to do things more effectively, you may very well realize that combining tasks will be more efficient in certain instances. For example, you may have realized the very fastest route to drive to your fiend’s house… but you can do plenty of other engaging, “productive” things while you drive that best route.

I’ve sometimes heard general statements like: “multi-tasking will only slow you down, its proven that while multitasking people are actually less productive.”

I can see some truth in a statement like this. In fact what I “see” is a hilarious mental image. I see a guy cutting his toenails, replying to emails with his other foot, and trying to hold a corporate webcam meeting and pour creamer into his coffee at the same time. It is obvious that combining tasks randomly will likely result in disaster… and big time potential humor.

However, I pose that:

“Multitasking is only unproductive when different tasks compete for the same limited human resources available us.”

This is my recent realization, and I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with this idea without even realizing that this is the concept I’ve been playing with until recently.

Here’s how it frame it:

Any activity you name can be said to take up a certain amount of your human resources – this usually involves different and potentially varying amounts of use or energy from different aspects of our faculties.

For instance, driving a car usually involves at least one arm, the majority of our vision focus, some of our hearing focus, some other conscious attention to make sense of the scene around us, and at least one foot to push the pedals. 

The vast majority of you make phone calls and listen to music while driving because you’re able to use the rest of your latent conscious attention and hearing capacity to fully draw from a phone conversation, fun album, or audio program. Heck, some people learn most of a foreign language simply while driving.

However, we might all consider an activity like reading books to be “unproductive” (frankly… deadly) while driving, because it needs a degree of vision that you cannot let go of while still driving. Your tasks are competing too much for that key resource (and possibly other resources, like your conscious attentional focus).

Trying to keep track of all of our “resources” and all of our “activities” might be pretty overwhelming, and its certainly not necessary. I’ve made a simple model of distinctions to categorize our faculties:

• Attentional Focus - The faculty of churning and processing ideas in our mind. This is a conscious process and implies our aware involvement, and includes all intellectual activity. For instance, reading a textbook in order to take notes implies an involvement of the intellectual capacities. 
• Sensory – The faculties of touch, taste, smell, see, and hear. Taste and smell are the least commonly used of the  five, and sight is arguably the most important in most people’s lives. For instance, skateboarding primarily implies the use of the senses of sight and feel.
• Physical - The general faculty of our body. This includes the use of our limbs and torso, and the use of our muscles. For instance, the physical resources needed to eat a steak are more than those required to eat a ham sandwich. One involves two arms engaged with utensils and a head over a plate, while the other simply implies one arm an nearly no attention paid to the food itself. 

So how does this apply to increasing productivity? We apply these ideas to pair up tasks that do not involve the same resources within us and so we can accomplish simultaneously.

Most people instinctively have an idea about this, and they take advantage of it when they listen to music when they drive.

However, we might get a little bit deeper. How about making sure that our lunch is a sandwich so we can check emails or look for an online article (or do anything that can be done when one arm and the mouth are being used towards the task of eating) with our time during lunch? With spaghetti or a big salad, we might spill on our work, and at the very least we need to look at the food before we eat it. A sandwich doesn’t require this.

How about eating breakfast and looking at your project list at the same time? Instead of reading the cereal box in front of you (which likely doesn’t further any of your major life goals), you gain a bit of perspective on what you will be able to work on in the day.

The easiest of all of these combinations is listening to educational audio programs while you exercise or drive. This is time when your hearing resource (physical) is usually not taken up, and since your intellectual capacity (attentional focus) is not being used either, you’re able to learn and drive. Brilliant!

It is still very possible that going about multiple activities can work against us. If we are driving in a very unfamiliar place where we must engage our minds fully, listening to audio programs likely will not be effective. If we are cycling so hard of the stationary bike that we are shaking and drenched in sweat, reading a book might be out of the question.

The general rule is:

If you are on the fence as to wether your resources are being competed for, they probably are and you aught to hone in on only one or find a different activity to pair with the first.

Dealing with Intermittently Involved Activities: 

Some activities involve certain resources in oscillation –  they involve attentional focus, then they don’t. They involve some physical resource, then they don’t.

A good example of this would be periods where you are waiting for your computer to load, or you are waiting for another text message.

“Waiting” itself is a dirty word in the productivity world. We aught always to engage ourselves in activity that moves us toward our highest goals is we are interested in achieving them.

If we know that there will be tasks with intermittent engagement, we can plan for them by preparing other activities. 

Examples:

• I am making call to my phone company and I am always put on hold. I may leave my text messaging for the day to be done during that time when I have little intermittent blips of time when I have nothing I can do to move my phone company objectives forward. This way I can do something with my thumbs other than twiddling them – maybe make a few appointments, set some plans, keep in touch, shoot out some invites, gather some information, etc…
• You are doing some online research and you know that most of your time will be spend rummaging through links without doing to much thinking (IE: without much involvement with the intellectual resources). When you find articles that are worthwhile you will read them and make notes. You might plan to listen to an audio program while you “sift” the web. There is no need to keep your intellectual capacities unused when you have the hearing faculty open as well. This way, as you do your research and use very minimal brain capacity, you can be engaged in learning nonetheless. 
• You are cooking a meal, periodically you must wait for the water to boil or let something sit in the over or on the stove. Making a phone call at these times wouldn’t be logical because you wouldn’t be able to gauge the length of the phone call and the amount of time between steps in the cooking process. Instead, you might read an interesting article you’ve been meaning to get around to. 

Applying this simple rule can allow for so much additional productive activity. I’ll give you a few more quick examples from my own life. Take some of these and play around with them, find ways to get things done in your own unique activities.

Lately I’ve been listening to audio programs in my car and periodically pausing to voice record the most poignant points on my phone. Then when I’m on break from my internship I take these “audio notes” and record them into a “keeper” file on my computer.

I’m also always carrying a small notepad with me, one small enough to fit in a pocket. When I’ve got a second at my internship, I jot down things I’ve learned so that I can record them later as well. Its a great way to use up those periods in inactivity.

In summary, it might not be a good idea to try to put on your pants, brush your teeth, and shave at the same time – but if we can understand what we are “using” from ourselves at any given time, we can fill the remainder of our potential with meaningful activity.

In the last strategy in this series, we talk about what “meaningful” activity is, and how getting a grip on this idea can skyrocket our personal effectiveness.

Forward to: “Purposeful Action“

Have you ever stopped to think about how much time you spend brushing your teeth over a lifetime? How about driving in your car? How about holding conversations with people you don’t want to be holding conversations with because you are unable to interrupt them? How about checking emails? Organizing your house?

Through my college career, and especially as of late, I’ve looked for ways to get more meaningful tasks done – and at a quicker pace.

In this Productivity article series, I’ll provide (3) Strategies that can be combined to massively increase what you “get done.”

• Cultivate Swift Effectiveness:

I personally find this to be a fascinating and never-ending endeavor. How can we do things very well and very quickly? How can we achieve our objectives as soon as possible and now to held up by other tasks?

Though we can strive for swift effectiveness in any area of our lives, it may be easiest to begin to apply these ideas to things like washing the car, doing the dishes, or preparing and eating food. These tasks might sometimes have a value in themselves, while other times they simply serve as logistics that you certainly might enjoy – but you’re still looking to get onto working on your bigger projects or other activities (wether that’s building a shed, writing a book, or picking up a friend from the airport).

World renouned speaker Brian Tracy calls this “fast tempo” – bringing about a general diligence or briskness in your actions.

By understanding the dynamics of the activities involved, you can find ways to limit your time involved drastically, and provide yourself with far more time on your higher priority tasks.

Here’s some ideas that you can apply at home tonight:

– Preparing and Eating Food: How can you make, eat, and clean up as quickly as possible and reach your objective to supply your body with the proper balance of nutrients and calories? The ideal in this category would be a food that takes the least time to prepare, eat and clean up, and serves our body well nutritionally.

One idea is to cook up a pot of rice (whatever variety you like), and mix it with some black beans and whatever vegetables you like (I like cucumbers and peppers myself). Throw in some olive oil and vinegar and BAM throw it in the fridge. Now you have something that you can eat whenever you want without preparation. In addition, you won’t get your hands dirty or anything else dirty eating it (unlike pizza or spaghetti), and cleanup is as simple as one bowl and one fork.

By taking away time cooking, time preparing before every meal (or having to spend money on take-out), and by making the food easy to eat while working, we can provide ourselves with far more productive time in one small behavior change that will likely also benefit us in terms of money and nutrition (if we play our cards right).

- Car Wash / Wax: You want your car to look good and you’d like to keep the rust off of it. You might listen to some audio programs while washing or waxing, and you might have fun out there with the hose and squeegee. However, its not an activity you’d like to spend the day doing – it doesn’t more you forward on other important projects and objectives.

You might determine the best spot to park the car where you can easily hit it with the hose from all sides, and you might find a specific pattern you use for the washing and waxing so that you can accomplish this objective as soon as physically possible. Maybe you keep all the towels, sponges, buckets and soaps in the garage. With a clean “workflow” on this objective, your wash and wax times might drop significantly, and if you add that up over the course of a lifetime, thats a lot of time that you were able to reallocate yourself to other, higher priority goals.

Those are just two little examples, but you might apply this same idea to finding the best strategy for vacuuming the house, finishing an article you’re writing, or getting in your workout. All of these activities have too to be tightened, and some semblance of strategy and understanding can allow you to develop a better “workflow” in these activities and meet your quality / creative goals while being swiftly effective.

Let it be known that I don’t believe we should live our lives for the sake of seeing how much we can “get done.” I do believe, however, that actively striving towards meaningful objectives that we set for ourselves is an integral component of fulfillment and active engagement with our own lives. Brian Tracy says “Time management is life management.” Agreed.

Hence, the purpose here is not simply to “do more,” but to eliminate time floundered on activities that could be shortened with little additional effort – and at the same time develop the skill of effectiveness (and cultivate the habit of seeking new ways to strive for effectiveness).

• Of course in many instances in our lives, speed may not be a priority or objective whatsoever. This might include a dinner with the family, where your objective is to have exciting and interesting conversation and share warm human contact. Maybe its a walk on the beach, where your objective is to find a few unique stones and enjoy a sunset. If you’re objective is something other than speed, thats great! I’d say go for it and really make of it what you want. With the family, maybe structure some fun things to do before people arrive and entropy sets in, or at the beach, apply some of your meditation ideas or choose to let your mind go while you’re there.
• It should also be stated that swiftness and “done”-ness is only in reference to our own standards. For instance, getting dressed quickly might take one person 5 seconds, and another person 5 minutes. The first person may have no concern for dress, and so the nearest items will be thrown on. The second person might value their attire and their image (possibly for professional reasons), and might iron their shirt and pick out a pair of pants and shoes that fit perfectly. All of these ideas are just continuations of living in accordance with our values and purpose. “Productivity” and “doing things in the shortest possible time” just happen to be one little aspect of that life equation that we’re isolating and looking at here.

On to the next article: “Combining Tasks“

Before getting into the nitty gritty of productive skill, I’m going to start this article with a poignant example from my own life. 

When my father moved to Rhode Island from New York state, he continued to travel to and from upstate New York to see his parents. He had a route all set up, and he would embark on a 4 hour 30 minute journey Hudson. It wasn’t a short drive – and it wasn’t always an easy one when he had to drive up there in his big clunky work van – but it was worth it for him to see his parents and his sister.

12 years go by after his move to RI, and my father continued to make these regular trips. One fateful night, he took a different turn by accident and continued on his way as best he could. He got there in 3 hours and 30 minutes.

He did not get a faster car, he did not drive more aggressively, and my grandparents certainly didn’t move any closer to Rhode Island. 

He had found a new route, a much better route – after over a decade of taking the “long way.”

He stumbled upon something so obvious now that he looked at it. With a little bit more homework, the driving time was dropped to just above 3 hours. Take a second and think about the magnitude of this pathfinding realization. Lets draw up the rough math:

12 years x 4 trips/year x 2 hours/trip (1 hour saved by new route, one hour saved going down) = 96 hours.

Thats 4 entire days on the road, because the most direct route wasn’t known. The strange thing is, all of us have an issue like this – we’re doing activities a specific way when in fact putting forth a bit more energy would produce so much more in terms of results – and probably green paper.

In this article I’m going to identify a handful of these potential slow factors in your life:

Proper Driving Routes:

      Like my father, you might may be driving the “long way” to get where you want to be. This might be visiting family a few hours away, or it might even be the route from the grocery store to work. It odds are, there are at least a few routes that you take on a regular basis that are in fact taking you out of your way. 

      This might be the way from your house to the bank, or from the bank to work, or from work to your friends house. We can probably all think of one or two routes that we “wing it” with, I know I used to have my share of mine. If we took just a bit more time to find the quickest way, we’d shave hours and hours off our annual driving time. If you run that same incorrect path 30 times in a year, how many hours and ways is that ending up to be.

      For this reason, it makes sense to double-check your routes on longer trips, especially trips you do regularly. You might check a few online directional sites, an even experiment with different paths to the destination. It might help you on a more daily basis to know your local town’s roads like the back of your hand. This doesn’t have to involve any more than a map (which again you could print easily from one of many directional sites, including Google Maps).

      Then when you get home from the bank and think “I feel like that’s not the quickest way…”, its not going to fade into the background – you can look it up and check. Knowing that you’re running your daily tasks through the absolute best routes is comforting, but more importantly you’re spending less hours “in car,” burning less gas, and getting more done, quicker. 

Speed Reading:

      Do you mouth out words while you read them? Do you often backtrack to re-read what you’ve already read as a kind of double-check? If you’ve got habits like these, its unlikely that you’re reading much more than 200 words per minute. 

      When you think about the volume of email and reading material that’s likely in your life, reading at this speed shouldn’t be acceptable. In fact, more people should be able to double their reading speed without loosing comprehension. I did it in a month or so (check the “Life Experiment” category). 

      Reading twice as swiftly not only translates to getting more done at work, but also to learning more in your personal studies and snatching info off of highway signs more effectively as you’re driving by. I would recommend buying a peed reading book and practicing at least a few times a week for a few hours, you will see massive jumps in your reading speed within the first week.

In many ways, reading slowly is much like driving the wrong route. You’re going somewhere – but much less efficiently than you should. Just like finding a new route, learning to read more effectively takes a little effort at home – but far less than you’d be spending driving the wrong roads or reading entire books at a molasses-like pace. 

Part 2 coming up soon!

___

If you enjoyed this post and the material on this site, consider signing up for my RSS feed or bumping this material only StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks a lot!

Jeez, first we covered “Parkinson’s Law,” now we’re turning our focus to another potential hindrance to our productivity – “Student Syndrome”. So many unproductive tendencies, so many blog posts!

The good news is, with the understanding of these human tendencies comes a degree of freedom from them. When you come to see the effects of this “syndrome” on your life – you’ll probably want to understand this one well.

• Student Syndrome - 

“We tend to only apply ourselves when we believe we have to.”

This tendency is closely related to “procrastination”, but not synonymous with it. Procrastination deals with a series of habits and ways of avoidance, “Student Syndrome” is just one.

How can we deal with this tendency and keep it from holding us back in important areas of our lives? It may not matter that we did our middle school geography project the night before, but continuing that habit forward into our careers and relationships isn’t likely to be the most direct route to tapping our human potential.

——-

Before understanding methods of dealing with “SS” (notice the abbreviation, I’m keeping you on your toes here), it will serve us to understand its origins:

      Reserving Energy- This may be argued to be part of our innate programming. We’d rather expend less energy if at all possible. As we know, this will often come back to bite us. It is much easier to come up with a happy little mental picture of us accomplishing the task in the future than it is to get it done now.

      Pain and Pleasure- Arguably the basis of any decision, this facet of “SS”’s function is important to understand. Right now we do not accomplish a certain task because we associate more pleasure to NOT doing it, than to doing it. Alternatively, might we associate more pain to doing it, than to NOT doing it. It boils down to the fact that we do what we believe will be pleasurable – and we often neglect a long-term view.

——-

Dealing with “SS” – like genuinely dealing with any challenge in our own conditioning – involves grabbing life by the horns.

I do NOT aim to regurgitate traditional “procrastination buster” information here, though I have nothing against it. Ideas such as: chucking large tasks into manageable smaller ones, or writing definite to-do lists – are not useless pieces of information (though I believe some of the common knowledge in this regard needs to be refined), but you’ve heard it before.

Here are some things that I find particularly useful for overcoming our habit of only applying ourselves when we feel as though we must. Essentially, these are ideas to keep things from “blowing up on us” – which in this case means having to pull off the last minute hustle. What I keep in mind, enjoy:

      Unexciting Tasks First- I like this rule, I like it a lot. Here’s how it goes. If you have 10 tasks you want to accomplish in a given day, chase down the one’s you aren’t as excited about first.

      If you plan to work on some writing, visit a friend, do some research in an area of interest, and do the dishes – you’re likely to go to bed with a pile of dirty dishes in the sink if you don’t make a point to do them first. You will find reasons to drag out other tasks forever.

      Instead, understand that the dishes are a necessary task, and use the other exciting tasks as leverage to do the less exciting tasks swiftly and effectively. Don’t wait until the plates are growing mushrooms the size of a cocktail umbrella.

      Exemplify Excellence : Its almost ironic how effective we can be in the last minutes of accomplishing something. The thing is, it was not the external world that brought out our efficacy, it was our perception of what needed to be done.

      Make a habit of diving into your tasks at your best at all times. Take the time to look at yourself while working on any task – a homework assignment, house cleaning, studying, et cetera – and compare your efficacy to when you are at your absolute best.

      When you forgot about the test until the night before, you aren’t half studying, half surfing youtube. You’re (bleep)ing studying. Hopefully you’re taking notes, reviewing important chapters, and diving into the information. What if you studied like this all the time? That would be what I call ‘exemplifying excellence’.

——-

Implement these ideas the next time you feel like you’re putting something off or vaguely puttering with it when you could be getting things done big time.

___

If you enjoyed this post and the material on this site, consider signing up for my RSS feed or bumping this material only StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks a lot!

Whose "deadlines" drive us - ours or theirs? Ultimately that boils down to your perception.

Lets talk about a single idea that is PROFOUND in its relevance to human achievement. With a basic understanding of this principal, we can learn to structure our own lives towards optimal productivity – and (hopefully) we can bring about the best efforts from others.

• Parkinson’s Law - (coined by C. N. Parkinson in his 1955 essay “The Economist”)

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” 

Take a second to think about this one as I give you an example from my own life. I’ll bet that if I had 8 hours to take out the recycling, finish an essay, design a new website page, edit a video, and organize my room, then these tasks would take me 8 hours. If I only had 4 hours to get these things done, I’ll bet I would get them done in 4 hours – without a significant drop in the quality of the work.