Meditation for Productivity

Posted on July 19, 2012 by tannage

Photo by clurr

Meditation is a useful tool for spiritual development, but it’s also something of a keystone habit because the effects of it cause other positive changes in your lifestyle. For instance, I’ve noticed that the effect of meditation tend to spill over into other parts of life, for instance staying calm and staying focussed when you’re under pressure. I’m much more effective when I’ve been meditating and less easily distracted or diverted from my work. Productivity goes up because I spend time doing the right things and pushing all of my projects towards forward.

It’s interesting to see that researchers at the University of Washington (http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/gi-12.02.pdf) have found that that the effects of meditation echo my own experience. It’s nice when science affirms experience, and it’s good to know that I’m not alone. I’ve “known” this for quite a while, but it’s only when I read the article that I’ve been able to articulate it.

You can probably get good results from meditating just five minutes a day and apps like pzizz and buddify can help you get into the groove, or at the very least relax.

Posted in productivity | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The “Yes.. And” Approach

Posted on July 12, 2012 by tannage

The English language has a rather final word.. “No”

It doesn’t allow for openness, because once you give or receive a negative it kind of cuts off the flow of the responses there and then.

Rather than saying “No”, we can say “Yes.. And” to keep the flow going and keep the conversation open to newer possibilities. People’s minds don’t close up like when you say “No”

You can even say “Yes.. And” when you’re really saying “No”. Don’t want to do the job you’ve been given, say “Yes, I’ll do it, and you might consider that X, Y and Z will all slip if you do want it done”

That keeps the conversation open, and whoever it is might consider other options if they really need the thing they’re asking for, as it’ll make them think about the things that they won’t get if they ask you to do this thing for them. They might well say, “I really need this, you can slip on X and Y” which opens the conversation to negotiation and increases your chances of coming to an arrangement that is acceptable for everyone.

That’s much better than just saying “No” which closes everything down, and if they really need it, they’re more likely to just tell you you have to do it, and if they’re your boss, you’re back to begrudging obeisance, which isn’t going to make anyone happy.

So, give it a go.. see what happens, keep the conversation open and see if it gives you better outcomes.

Posted in productivity | Leave a comment

How to Get Back into the Productivity Habit (Tomatoes and stacks of paper)

Posted on June 19, 2012 by tannage

Working as well as home life has its own rhythms. Sometimes you’re ultra productive and stuck thick in the middle of it, sometimes you’re not.

Lately I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit, I’ve let a few of those habits slip mainly because all my projects reached a “limbo” stage where they were all waiting for progress from other people. Each initiative was too large so that I couldn’t do something else in the meantime, so I twiddled my thumbs for a bit and eventually ended up getting into a couple of bad habits:

I stopped the 2 minute rule
Inbox wasn’t processed to zero
I stopped reviewing my projects weekly
I let myself get distracted by Facebook, google reader and worst of all… EMAIL!

If you think of a habit as a stack of paper. Every time you do the action (good or bad) that the habit prescribes, you put another paper on the pile, reinforcing it. Over time, those stacks of paper can get pretty large, and it’ll take a lot of energy to clear the bad habits and rebuild the good ones. Initially, breaking down that bad habit is going to feel like looking up at an enormous stack of paper. It’s going to be daunting, it’s going to feel daunting, but the reality is that it’s not all that bad, really.

So, to get back on the wagon again, we need a strategy for avoiding bad habits, and giving good ones the energy they deserve. Pomodoros are good. 25 minutes is an attainable enough time to keep your focus, but if you’re like me and very easily distractable, start with 15 minutes and work up to 25. At the end of the 25 minutes I get to spend 5 minutes doing anything I like, Facebook, Failblog, cookies, anything.

For me it works out, so long as I keep giving those good habits (Inbox zero!) reinforcement and avoid the bad ones, especially by day three of doing this, it almost feels like it’s automatic and effortless.. I’m back on the wagon in bursts of 25 minutes :)

Posted in productivity | Leave a comment

Dig yourself out of productivity guilt – and a lot more

Posted on June 15, 2012 by tannage

I stumbled across this talk from Scott Hanselman, a Microsoft developer on how to dig yourself out of cycles of productivity guilt, manage interruptions and doing the right things.

He offers a good way to map some of GTDs 4 “D”s onto Steven Covey’s quadrants, and delivers a lot of gems along the way too. It’s a talk I found really useful, one because it’s always good to see how other people optimize the way that they work, it gives me ideas on how to improve my workflow, and two, because it’s always good to see what works and validate the way that you’re working.

Anyways, enjoy

Posted in net nerdity, productivity | Leave a comment

The Fifteen Minute Flurry (To eat an elephant)

Posted on June 11, 2012 by tannage

The house of Tannage has recently undergone a rather massive overhaul. Much of the storage that we used to have in jBug’s room has been pulled out and moved around (mostly so he can’t get out of bed and pull it onto himself).

It’s a good thing as we’ve been looking at lots of stuff that we have that we probably don’t need, but we now do have a rather large pile of stuff that we need to sift through and either store, dispose of, or sell. It’s very much like that elephant in the room.

Elephants can, however, be eaten in little bits.

So, the plan is to do a fifteen minute flurry every day, with the following rules:
Both the Mrs and I are going to do this – neither of us gets out of it
The flurry will last fifteen minutes only – we start with the finish line already in sight.
We’ll pick something that we estimate to take 10 minutes, but expect it to last fifteen (adjust for optimism bias)
At the end of the 15 minutes, we just stop, down tools and go have dinner.

The reasoning is to keep doing something every day. It’s going to take a while, so motivation can be kept up by making progress every day, however small and I also use this at work. Some projects are just too big to get done all at one go, especially ones that require you to do a lot of learning, so a little bit a day over a long period of time will get you there. Think of it as a sustained application of a pomodoro.

Posted in productivity | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Don’t be good, get better

Posted on May 2, 2012 by tannage

Photo by Ben Burkland/Carolyn Cook

There is a saying in the martial arts, “The moment you stop trying to be better, you stop being good.”

Like all sweeping generalisations on this blog, this also applies to life. The moment a villan or the hero starts to think, “o have discover the ultimate technique” you know they’re about to get a good kicking. Like all sweeping generalisations on this blog, this also applies to life. If you think you know it all, you’re no longer receptive to any feedback that tells you how you could have done it better.

That one thing is a huge obstacle to any further progress. No performance is totally perfect, there is always room to improve, but to improve you must always keep your mind open to how to improve.

Its a mindset, head fake thing. Concentrating on honing your skills makes you use mistakes as feedback rather than failure, another really important factor in mastery.

There are a lot of other goodies () you get from a “get better” mentality as this 99percent article on Getting Better vs Being Good:

  • The freedom to open to new opportunities
  • The ability to get more ideas out of your head and into action
  • The courage to ask for help

Celebrate incremental progress, it all adds up in the end.

Posted in productivity | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The 5 types of work that fill your day – and what to do with them

Posted on March 15, 2012 by tannage

If you’re a knowledge worker, by and large your work every day falls into five categories according to the99percent:

Problem Solving – where you apply your creativity to come up with solutions to problems and advancing projects that you’re working on. Typically I find this is the part of my day that requires the most energy, as creativity and good thinking is what you need space and energy to do, so I tend to schedule the biggest problem solving tasks for the early part of the day when I have the most energy and are sharpest.

For me, typically most of my problem solving occurs in Steven Covey’s quadrant 2, important but not urgent.

Reactionary – Where you have to react and deal with something urgent in response to a situation that might have arisen, e.g. your IT servers blowing up, or a colleague off sick when an important report is due. This would be quadrant one stuff, important and urgent. You need to get it out the door. Just two things I’d say about reactionary work.
If you spend most of your time doing reactionary work, and it’s taking up most of your day, it’s worth taking a look at how you can clear the decks and start spending more time in quadrant 2. Certain types of work that requires a lot of creative thinking are not best done when under pressure, I find I don’t do very good creative work if I’m under heavy time pressure
If you spend most of your time doing important/not urgent stuff, you’ll be a LOT less stressed and better able to deal with a reactionary task when it comes up.

Procedural – Admin/maintenance – this is the stuff that we all need to do but don’t do enough of as it’s never fun. Paying bills, tax returns, tracking communications and reviewing projects. This is mechanical stuff, put lots of processes and habits in place to get through these things as quickly as you can with as few errors as possible. Technology helps.

Planning – Scheduling, prioritising time, managing energy, allocating your two most precious resources, time and energy. This goes with the Problem Solving to some extent, because creative use of time can be something that gives you a significant edge.

Insecurity – This would be the time that you spend not advancing anything, it’s mostly checking stuff to ease your emotional state, and doesn’t add value. Most of the time you’re not aware you’re doing this.

It’s very useful to figure out how much time you spend doing each of the above. Ideally the bulk of your time should be spent doing problem solving, because it is the solutions that really add value and advance everything you do.

Posted in productivity | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

What You Don’t Know About Marriage

Posted on March 14, 2012 by tannage

Jenna McCarthy gives an interesting talk on TED about staying together in marriage.  The short version is to:

  • Marry someone who’s slightly more attractive than you are if you’re a guy
  • If you’re a guy, do the housework
  • Stay away from divorcees

Whilst its entertaining and funny, it does highlight a few things that we could all probably do to spruce up our marriage.  She’s right, if it were all easy they’d call the whole damn thing a honeymoon.  I’ve not looked into her work too much, but she does seem to know a fair bit about what successful couples do to stay together for a long period of time, and I liked some of her insights into what it’s like to be married.

We’re all different, but we’re all more similar than we think we are (after all, how would fortune tellers make any money?) and so I think there’s a lot to learn from the experience of other people, especially if it’s something that’s as important as your (my) marriage.

Posted in net nerdity | Leave a comment

Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates us – Dan Pink

Posted on January 7, 2012 by tannage

Motivation is one of those unintuitive things. The obvious ways of motivating people, e.g. reward the behaviour your want may or may not work depending on the task at hand. Dan Pink sheds some light on the surprising truth of what motivates us in his book Drive.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the discovery that carrot and stick methods of motivation do not work. I’d known this for some time, as the motivation to progress certain projects of mine always started high but waned as the project matured, but there were projects for which the motivation was always fresh, and now I know why. Intrinsic motivators e.g. Personal interest, quest for mastery are more effective motivators an extrinsic ones, e.g. I’ll give you more money of you work harder.

There is a strong scientific and behavioural basis for all of this, studies have been undertaken all over the world to test performance and motivation with the carrot on stick model. They rewarded people small sums of money for their performance at different tasks. If the task was a manual one, the size of the reward motivated people to perform better, however if the task require any cognition at all, the largest rewards produced the worst results. This study has been replicated again and again all overt the world, and this phenomena appears to be a behavioural thing, innate to humans rather than anything cultural.

The book also details ideas for motivating yourself, your organisation or your children. I for one am going to apply this to my child, and also to myself. The knowledge is so valuable because it is presented in a way that allows you to run with it. Reading this, I could see ways to use the knowledge to motivate myself and my son.

5/5 – valuable information, more valuable if you find ways to implement these ideas

Posted in review | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to Adapt in the Workplace (and anywhere else)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by tannage

This may just be me, but we’re very good at getting comfortable in what we do. Marshall Goldsmith explains that What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

We’re going to have to adapt, especially in today’s workplace and adapt fast to changes that are happening around us, not only to keep up, but also to progress and keep ourselves moving forward.

The INO method, Investment, Neutral and Optimise is a good way to structure how to go about doing this. You identify what activities in your workflow require Investment – to progress yourself, e.g. acquiring new skills and new knowledge. These have the potential to return many times your time and energy investment.

Neutral tasks give as much as you give them, and Optimize tasks like paperwork don’t add value for lots of hours spent on them.

I think it’s a good idea, to analyse and structure your areas of development because we’re not always good at looking at the next step we need to take when we get comfortable

Posted in productivity | Leave a comment