Category: Success Thinking

The Super Productivity Stack

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What are the optimum conditions for worthwhile productivity?

Studies of how people build success in reaching their goals and getting things done have found that a state of “Flow” is often involved. In an article on his website, Darius Foroux shares a brief discussion of the concept.

In my experience, you do your best work when you’re in a good mood and you’re focused. You can also look at it as being a state of “Flow,” which is a term the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined in a book with the same title. It’s one of the best tools for productivity.

It’s that state of mind where you’re completely immersed in the task at hand and you lose track of time. You simply feel a deep sense of focus and satisfaction at being productive. 

Many people experience “Flow” accidentally when they happen upon a project they enjoy doing. However, it is possible to create conditions to enhance the probability of “Flow” appearing. Foroux mentions several factors that help, the first two are:

  1. Start your day with purpose: Begin each morning by setting a clear intention for what you want to achieve. This clarity will drive your actions and keep you focused.
  2. Simplify your workspace: A clutter-free environment leads to a clutter-free mind. Organize your workspace to foster creativity and productivity.

Foroux recommends partnering a state of “Flow” with a specific strategy known as Pomodoro. It is a way of structuring time by spending 25 minutes on a specific work and then taking a 5 minute break and then repeating throughout the day. He believes this is the key to success.

What makes both Pomodoro and Flowtime work well is the fact that they make you work with full concentration so you can finish your tasks quickly.

The goal is to divide your tasks into periods where you can fully concentrate. So you can do your work faster.

Read the entire article on Foroux’s website and see if this approach works for you.

The Creative Power of Procrastination

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Have you ever put off doing something important?

There is a natural tendency to procrastinate even on things that we ostensively want to do, including creative projects. While most people view procrastination as a vice, what if there is actually benefit to gain from delaying?

In a recent post on his blog, Tiago Forte explores this topic by diving into the creative power of procrastination. To begin his argument, he first explains the origin of delaying work.

Procrastination stems from our urge to flee the discomfort of an unwanted task. In the brain, this plays out as a war between our logical prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making — and our hasty, pleasure-seeking limbic system. When the limbic system wins, we rebel against the undesirable task and choose the temporary dopamine hit of procrastination instead. 

Tiago believes that our creative endeavors can benefit from a little bit of procrastination. In order to reap this advantage, it is first important to reframe our guilt around it.

Shame is a common emotion when people procrastinate, but self-blame can sap your ability to be creative. Instead, build the habit of being compassionate to yourself when you procrastinate. The process of resetting how you think about procrastination takes time and effort, as you’re attempting to form new neural pathways — but by continually refocusing your thoughts on compassion, blame will cease to be the default emotion. 

When you feel the itch to abandon a task, observe the warring forces in your brain. You’re starting to procrastinate, and that’s OK because you’re about to maximize the benefits through active procrastination.  

He then proceeds to recommend specific strategies to maximize the benefits of procrastination. One of them is to bring structure to it.

If you have multiple projects, you can delay one by working on the other. Philosopher John Perry calls this structured procrastination, and it allows you to give in to the delicious feeling of avoiding your intended task while you make progress on something else. You might even find unexpected touchpoints: switching between different projects, aka “slow-motion multitasking,” is how some of the world’s greatest innovators sharpened their multidisciplinary ideas. 

To learn more about to turn procrastination into a creative advantage, please read the rest of his blog post.

David Allen’s New Book – Team

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The GTD methodology has been out in the world for over 25 years. Millions of people have used it to better organize their work and get more done. However, one challenge people often face is being the only person in their office applying GTD. It can be hard to keep up a successful system when everyone else is doing their work less productively. Aside from trying to get everyone to commit to it personally, can it be scaled to teams?

David Allen and co-writer Edward Lamont believe that it can, with their new book, Team: Getting Things Done with Others. As shared on the book jacket:

By building on the effectiveness of what GTD does for individuals, Team will offer a better way of working in an organization, while simultaneously nourishing a culture that allows individuals’ skills to flourish. Using case studies from some of the world’s largest and most successful companies, Team shows how leaders have employed the principles of team productivity to improve communication, enable effective execution, and reduce stress on team members. These principles are increasingly important in the post-pandemic workplace, where the very nature of how people work together has changed so dramatically.

Over the next few months, I will share teachings from Team. Today I’ll start with a tease of their discussion of moving from one person to a group, which involves a different approach to work.

At a team level, we see the equivalent of “mind like water” to be something we’ve come to describe as “healthy high performance.” This is a way of working together that is not just able to keep pace with, or outrun, the competition, but to do it in a way that is sustainable – fun, even – over the longer term.

With this approach they are aiming to share ways for teams to be successful both in terms of their work goals and also to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit. Stay tuned over the next few months to learn the specific techniques to achieve it.

If you don’t want to wait, get your copy of Team: Getting Things Done with Others and read ahead.

How to Organize a Shared Workspace

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As a fan of GTD, I have been able to organize my personal workspace to match my work style. Having a private office helps me keep control. However, many office workers are stuck in shared workspace situations. While they can control their own immediate spot, the common areas seem to be an unruly land. Is it possible to organize a shared workspace?

Francesca Stracuzzi recently mapped out a way to do so in five steps on the KonMari website. The first step is to take stock of your office’s current state.

“Many desks are overloaded, and both paper and digital archives are not functional, making it difficult to find documents and files,” she says. “A messy and disorganized desk generates stress, anxiety and demotivation, and, in the midst of that chaos, it also reduces our ability to make decisions. I am convinced that space affects our emotions and conditions our performance, so freeing the desk means lightening the mind and working with more serenity and clarity.”

Photo by Marc Mueller on Pexels.com

The next step is to get support from leadership.

“In my work experience, I have seen that the management of space, particularly offices and desks, is left to individual workers,” says Francesca. This may seem logical, but it often leads to a snowball effect, wherein one messy desk turns into many. 

Instead, Francesca recommends encouraging a different perspective within the team, including management, that focuses on how getting organized can benefit the whole team.

By framing the idea of a team organization project to leadership this way, you’ll have an easier time getting them to sign off on the project.  

To learn more about the steps to organizing a shared workspace, including the final three steps, please visit the KonMari website.

Avoiding Burnout

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Do you find yourself constantly thinking about problems at work? Do you answer emails late into the evening? On vacations can you unplug yourself even for a day or two?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are a candidate for burnout. In his most recent newsletter author and speaker Shola Richards addressed what burnout is and how it happens.

Burnout, by definition, is the state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.

In fact, in 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an official medical diagnosis.

My hope is that this distinction will continue to help remove some of the stigma around burnout. 

Constant working is a sure recipe for burnout. Beyond taking meaningful breaks throughout the day, are there other ways to avoid burnout? In his newsletter, Shola suggests three specific ways. First is consistent self-care.

I cannot say enough about the importance of having a consistent self-care routine. It could be daily meditation, taking a walk outside, journaling, curling up with your favorite novel, going to therapy, listening to a podcast and/or TED Talk, getting eight hours of sleep, hanging out with loved ones, or taking a much-needed break from watching cable news and/or from social media. As long as it’s bringing you joy and it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, please keep doing it consistently.

Second is to set boundaries. If everyone is pushing to have your attention, that prevents you from giving attention to the things that lift you up. Some people live this way because they are afraid of how others will view them. One profound sentence from Shola demonstrates the error in this way of thinking.

And remember, the only people who will be upset with you for enforcing your boundaries are the people who benefited from you not having any boundaries in the first place.

Third, he suggests paying close attention to the company you keep. The truth is that some people lift you up while others drain you. The simple equation is to be more around the former far more often than the latter.

The best gift that you can give yourself is to separate yourself from the drama-addicted people in your life, as much as possible. Is it always easy to do this? No, but when it comes to living a positive life, it’s not always about doing what’s easy–it’s about doing what’s necessary. And avoiding burnout is possibly one of the most necessary pursuits on earth for your overall health and sanity (especially now). 

To tap into Shola’s weekly insights, please sign up for his newsletter and visit his website.

Things Great Leaders Do Differently

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Developing leadership skills is a lifetime commitment. While anyone can be placed in a leadership position, it takes practice and a bit of talent to excel at it. Therefore, it can be helpful to study the habits and techniques of great leaders to see how they operate.

Author Kevin Kruse was able to do that and published his findings in an article on the Forbes website entitled 10 Surprising Things Successful Leaders Do Differently. The first discovery on the list seems to flip a popular piece of advice on its head: Close the Open Door Policy.

Open door policies are passive ways to facilitate communication and do more harm than good. They make deep work and strategic thinking virtually impossible for the manager. Worse, research shows that half of all employees won’t go through the open door with problems or ideas because they fear repercussions. It’s time to close your door and open your calendar. Recurring, weekly one-on-one meetings are a far better way to proactively facilitate communication, and pre-scheduled “office hours.”

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Another common perception that Kruse challenges is the idea of treating everyone the same. Instead, he believes that great leaders have favorites and treat them differently.

In a misguided attempt to be impartial and fair, too many managers treat all their team members the same. But it turns out that’s the most unfair thing we can do to people. And it’s the fastest way for you to lose top talent. Instead of treating everyone alike, you need to learn to individualize your leadership approach. You need to take the time to understand each of our team members when it comes to their: talent, experience, attitudes, strengths and goals. Then you play favorites, not based on who you like better, but based on who’s earned it.

To learn the other eight surprising things that successful leaders do differently, read the article on the Forbes website.

A Downside to Efficiency?

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One might think that having a website called the Efficient Librarian would mean that I am all in for efficiency. To an extent, that is true. Most of the time it makes sense to find the simplest way to complete tasks to save time and energy. For example, making a habit of the Two Minute Rule makes sense to move forward on quick tasks as soon as they show up.

However, there are situations in which efficiency has a downside. Too often we get locked into one way of thinking. This leads to doing things efficiently but never questioning why they are being done in the first place! For example, several years back I learned that my library system was compiling a very specific quarterly statistics report. When asked what we did with the numbers, the reply was that the final report was being placed in a drawer and never used. In the past there might have been a purpose, but it no longer applied. I immediately told them to stop compiling this report and everyone was relived.

Photo by Christina Morillo on Pexels.com

Additionally, efficiency can be the enemy of experimentation. If new ideas and approaches are needed, doing the old ways more effectively is worthless. Therefore, it is helpful to regularly take time to reflect on our systems. Asking the following questions may provide insight:

  • Why are we doing this?
  • What value does this produce?
  • Is there something else we could be doing instead that would be more valuable?

Even if the task remains valuable, there may be better ways of doing it, either through technology or a newly discovered best practice. Changing over to a different approach will be less efficient while it is implemented. However, the savings over time as the new approach sinks in reaps benefits.

For example, a dozen years ago my library system went all in on self-check and self-return technology. Staff definitely had a learning curve in understanding the new systems and teaching the public how to effectively use them. However, time savings for staff along with fewer repetitive stress injuries made the transition worthwhile. In fact, it did not take long for staff members to openly wonder why we didn’t make the switch sooner!

For homework, take time this week to look at one of your systems or tasks. Ask the questions above to determine if it is useful to continue doing it. You might be surprised by the results!

Kris McGuigan on Courage

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In these trying times, we all need to build more courage in our lives. The question is how to do it!

As the current Florida Library Association President, I am very excited about our upcoming conference in Orlando May 15-17. At the top of my list for the event is listening to our Keynote Speaker, Kris McGuigan. She is the author of The Requisite Courage, a book designed to help build confidence and clarity in your life in order to overcome any obstacle. As Kris describes of the book on her website.

Life is full of disruption: whether suffering a loss, altering your environment, or gaining a new leader. The Requisite Courage offers the precise know-how for navigating change, taking control of your destiny, and creating long-lasting results.

If you want to align your corporate strengths to personal values or just need to stop clinging to the status quo, The Requisite Courage is the direct and fearless approach to problem-solving you’ve been missing.

I am excited to share that Kris will be doing an exclusive Q&A with FLA members on Tues. March 5, 2 pm EST. This will be a great opportunity to meet Kris for a discussion about courage and other topics.

Also, see highlights of Kris as a speaker by checking out her Speaker Demo Reel on YouTube.

Registration is now open for the FLA Conference. I hope to see you in Orlando.

Choosing What to Do: The Steps for Engagement

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Did you know the secret to getting things done is to do actions that get things done?

I know that sounds like a big “duh”, but in honesty people frequently get hung up on their next move. Even if they have defined their work, decided on next actions, and have their lists available, picking the precise thing to do in any given moment can still trip up overthinkers. Thankfully, David Allen has thought through the process of engagement, which is the fifth stage of the GTD workflow process. On his website he shared tips to help decide which action to do next.

When it’s time to Engage, people often ask how to choose from what may be long lists of tasks to do. That’s when it’s helpful to use the criteria for choosing:

Context – What place, tool, or person will the action require? This is the first limitation for choosing–it has to be. If you’re not in the right place, don’t have the right tool, or access to the required person, you can’t take the action.

Time available – How much time do you have to take the action? If you have 20 minutes, only consider actions that you think will take less than 20 minutes.

Resources – What is your energy like to take the action? Have you been in back-to-back meetings all day and you’re tired? Or are you just finishing your morning coffee and feeling alert and enthusiastic? You’re probably already considering this more than you realize when you choose what to do.

Priorities – What’s the most important one to choose based on your roles, goals, long-term strategy, and purpose?

David then goes to share how to use the Horizons of Focus to narrow down your priorities along with a description of the three-fold nature of work. What to learn more? Click over to the Getting Things Done website to find out!