To help you understand how to increase your productivity, I’d like to introduce you to Allison. She manages a team of 12 civil engineers at a large company and she frequently is pulled in many directions; before we met, she used to always feel she was operating in a reactive mode.Attention management now empowers Allison to live a life of choice and intention. She has increased her productivity in both life and work. Learning attention management skills can do the same for you.

Learn to Control Your Attention

Your significant results are the plans and goals you set for yourself, with regard to things like career, health, and relationships. You believe achieving these outcomes will have a positive impact on your life. The significance typically changes with the time horizon.

Determine Your Significant Results

The more progress you make toward your significant results, the more productive you’ll feel and the happier you’re likely to be. So focus your attention on tasks that move the needle toward achieving your significant results. When you perform these tasks, you’ll feel excited about your progress. You’ll feel productive! And there’s a good reason for your internal glee; you know these tasks are helping you to achieve your goals and design your life.

Take Daily Actions Toward Your Significant Results

Once you define your significant results, you have a better chance of doing work that will move you toward what’s important in your life. However, you can’t focus only on your most important results, because there are always tasks that need to get done, even though they aren’t significant. (There are also tasks we’d like to do, even though these tasks aren’t really necessary.)

Identify Necessary but Not Significant Tasks

If you examine your task list carefully, you’ll often find low priority items that you can shift to a ‘someday/maybe’ list. These are items you’d love to do if you had all the time in the world. But realistically, at this moment, these tasks don’t need to be done. Completing these tasks won’t move you closer to your significant results, so doing them will not increase your productivity.

Shift Tasks to Your Someday/Maybe List 

A workflow management system can help you organize all the disparate parts of your work and personal life. This system is a collection of habits and behaviors. A workflow management system helped Allison learn to store, organize, prioritize, manage, and execute all of her commitments, communication, and information. It enabled her to have increased control over all of her responsibilities.

Use a Workflow Management System

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

problemsolving

Problem Solving

timemanagement

Time Management

8 Steps to a More Productive Life

Commutes may still be a little unpredictable as we move between remote and in-office work. But for most of us, there are still a few minutes in many days where we’re in that “in between” space of not at home but not quite settled into the days’ business. How can this time work for you? Is it a quick call to check in on a parent? Or 5 minutes of listening to a new podcast and some deep breathing? Even if this time is short, using it intentionally is a satisfying way to start and end the day.

1. Use Your Commute Productively

Yes, clean it out. All the way! Get rid of half-done replies, drafts that won’t go anywhere, and holiday sales notifications you didn’t happen to shop your way through. Even just 30 dedicated minutes on a Friday morning of filing, unsubscribing, and getting responses off your plate in both your personal and work emails will send you into a weekend feeling refreshed.

2. Clean Out Your Email

Prioritization sounds easy, but it isn’t always simple. To really prioritize, don’t just make a list of tasks that need to be done and pluck off the “biggest,” “hardest,” or even “easiest.” Instead, think of your day as a set of building blocks that all need to fit together. Where’s the causality? What needs to be done first to make the rest of the day or week move better? Using this more connected method of prioritizing also helps us overcome some of the resistance we have around tough tasks.

3. Prioritize Your Tasks

These little tomato timers and their “work then break” method are a fan favorite for a reason! It’s proven that our brain feels more refreshed and focused when we can work in bursts. Set a timer, pick a mini project or a task, and then shamelessly give yourself the built-in breaks to recharge and come back strong.

4. Use the Pomodoro Method

If this one feels uncomfortable, try it boldly for just one week and see what it does for your productivity. It’s a natural inclination to want to respond and jump on tasks when we see an email. Starting your day diving right into the piles of emails you have means that your inbox becomes your prioritization list—in control of you instead of the other way around. Consider blocking an hour to check emails a little later in the morning, and instead, start your day with your priorities.

5. Ignore Your Email in the Morning

Matching the type of work that needs to be done with where you do it is a huge productivity hack. Do you do your best number crunching at a structured desk or the kitchen table? Or maybe your best creative ideas come to you when you’re on a walk and can let your mind reset. Either way, knowing when and where you are at your best for all of your various tasks can be a real productivity boost and help with your work-life balance.

6. Understand Your Work Zones

Who says the Out Of Office email is just for vacation? Get creative with this autoresponder and use it for targeted projects. “I’m on a special project right now, and my mornings this week (9-12) will be dedicated to that effort. Please contact me outside of those hours for the most timely response.” Push the boundaries by setting some of your own.

7. Strategically Leverage Your “OOO” Message

“Scoping” your day is different from planning. When you’re scoping your day, you’re mentally preparing yourself for the various waves of energy and effort you’ll need throughout the day. Can you shift an important call to the morning when you’re feeling a little more fresh? Should you see if a friend can help with after-school pick up if your meeting runs over? Being able to do this assessment the night before a full schedule gives you more options to manage and rearrange the day.

8. Scope Your Day the Night Before

Every little ping, buzz, and blink takes us away from our full mental focus. Get in tune with what nudges kick you out of your zone each day. Is it a blinking instant message? Set a few hours of Do Not Disturb. Does the buzz of the office floor catch your ear? Headphones, please! You may even find that a dimmed-out room (and some blue light glasses!) helps you zone in on a key project or task, without other visual distractions.

9. Reduce Small Distractions

There are all kinds of useful apps and sites to help us control our social media consumption. Almost more important than helping corral its use is to figure out when and why you turn to it during the day. Do you find yourself reaching for a “scroll” when you’ve hit a tough part of a task? When you’re lacking some motivation? Or when you’re burned out and need a break? Understanding your “why” will do an even bigger job of helping you reorient to productive mode.

10. Set Up a Social Media Blocker

While a daily massage would be just the self-care that a lot of us would love, there are many other mini ways to fit this into a day. This could look like treating yourself to a whole tea ritual in the break room, complete with a fancy teapot you keep at the office, or a full walk around the block doing a walking meditation. The point is to identify new hobbies or the thing for you that yields maximum good feelings for the highest value cost and effort to help ensure you keep it up.

11. Book Time for Self-Care

Habit stacking was made popular by the book Atomic Habits, which helps you link new things you want to accomplish to existing habits to up the chances of getting them done. You’ll start to view your new habit goals in a whole new way when you think about the small ways you can link them together to be more productive.

12. Find Ways to Set Up “Habit Stacking”

We all know what our personal “running on empty” looks like. The hack is to know how to recognize it before it completely sneaks up on you and rewire. Do you start rubbing your eyes a little more? Do you get distracted and start poking through your old photo reel? Whatever your personal trigger is, that means you’ve hit top capacity on your bandwidth—become friends with her, and watch out for her more regularly.

13. Know Your Personal Bandwidth Triggers

This may be another counterintuitive approach to productivity, but starting with “no” means that you get to say “yes” to a whole host of other things that are your personal priorities. When someone comes to you with a new project or need, start to think through the lens of putting the burden of effort on them to explain why it is worth your time and should be tackled before the long list of other priorities you have in train.

14. Make “No” Your First Response

Some of us are morning people. Some of us are not. No matter how many mini vlogs we watch with a fresh-faced gal bouncing out of bed for her green juice and jaunting off to yoga, we may just never be the person who is their best self in the morning. Know your own rhythm for when your tasks best match your energy throughout the day and hack accordingly.

15. Trust Your Own Natural Rhythms

Productive never happened without a system. That doesn’t mean that you have to string together some ultra high-tech collection of apps, trackers, and planners. It does mean that you need a consistent way to organize your life tasks so you can get to the goals that matter to you. Whether that’s through a gorgeous paper planner that feels more like a journal or a minimal but comprehensive app to tackle your to-do list, find your sport.

16. Find A Planning System That Works For You

Goals aren’t happening unless they’re broken down into mini-objectives and addressed in small pieces. Think about the ways you can take your longer-term hopes and move toward them even in tiny ways every day. Running a marathon for your next birthday? Great. Even a quick 10-minute jog today puts you on the path to achieving that goal.

17. Tie Your Long-Term Goals to the Everyday

We all do better achieving our productivity goals when we’ve shared them with someone else. This can be formal, as in telling your boss or colleagues what you’re up to this week, or it can just be chatting with a loved one about what’s on your plate lately. Externalizing what we’re doing and what we need to get a job done is a huge part of productively working through our task list.

18. Communicate Your Productivity Objectives

Quality almost always wins over quantity. Whenever you find yourself moving speedily through a task and buzzing on to the next thing, think of that as your trigger to slow down. Not only are we likely to make mistakes that will just take more time to correct in the long run, but we’re also training ourselves to overpack our days and often times not communicating that timelines may be unreasonable or that we need more resources. What do you need to get a great job done, not just a quick one?

19. Slow Down

On that note, productivity isn’t about doing more, faster. We could define productivity with a little more nuance and say that it’s about doing the best job, at the right time, with the right resources, and for the right objectives to get to the best outcome. When that’s the case, “how much” we checked off our list doesn’t matter as much as how productively we used our energy in a day, matching it with the things that matter the most.

20. Define Your Own Personal Productivity Metrics

No Need to follow this shit strictly you can take inspiration from this and make your own rules and define your productivity and success.

While there is no one single path to being productive, there are a lot of productivity hacks we can build into our lives to advance our journey.

health

Health

20 Productivity Hacks To Make Your Day Easier

Knowing what goals you’re working toward is the first step in becoming more disciplined. Without knowing what you’re working toward, it can be difficult – if not impossible – to actually hold yourself accountable. Clearly define your goals and put them somewhere visible. Write them down on sticky notes and put them on your bathroom mirror. Put them on a whiteboard in your kitchen, or on your cell phone’s wallpaper.

1. Make sure you know your goals.

You need more than a goal to develop discipline. You need to look a little deeper and make sure you know why that goal is important to you.Why do you want to earn that promotion at work? Want to stop smoking, eat healthier, or kick that bad habit? Why? By getting really clear on why your goal matters, it becomes much easier to convince yourself to take action and do whatever it takes to get there. If you can remind yourself exactly why you’re running a mile each morning, you’ll be way more likely to lace up your shoes and make it happen – instead of telling yourself it can wait.

2. Understand your why. 

Habits are incredibly powerful tools that benefit numerous areas of our lives – including our ability to develop discipline. Habits are essentially little actions we incorporate into our lives on a regular, routine basis.Consider what habits might help you achieve your goals through discipline – and find a way to incorporate them throughout your day. One effective way to build new habits involves ‘habit stacking,’ or linking habits together so that one triggers the next.

3. Build helpful habits.

Temptation is the enemy of discipline. And while some people are great at resisting temptation, saying ‘no’, and sticking to a plan – some of us aren’t so lucky. If you’re struggling to develop self-discipline because you have too many temptations leading you astray, the answer is pretty simple – find ways to get rid of them. Can’t seem to say no to sweets, even though you’re determined to drop 10 lbs and stick to your diet? Get rid of the temptation by skipping the cookies at the grocery store and keeping your pantry free of the things that’ll derail you from your goals.

4. Get rid of temptation

Do you have goals you'd like to accomplish? Use these tips to develop discipline in your daily life to help you achieve your goals.

habits

Habits

4 Ways to Develop Discipline in Your Daily Life - The Simplicity Habit

I’m surprised how many people still jump onto video calls with their cameras off. Excuses abound, from no excuse to messy backgrounds or hair to more legitimate technical issues. Yet people then complain that they can’t make the same connection with their colleagues as they can in person.New 2022 Habit: Turn your camera on and make it a requirement of all participants to do the same. Then notice how much better you are able to comprehend and be understood by your colleagues. And don’t be afraid to show a little mess in the background — it reveals that you are human, just like everyone else.

Cameras Off 

What’s been lost is the ability to check in and observe how your team is really doing. Make an investment of time and effort into your team. Rewrite the script on the traditional update meeting by focusing the first 10­­-15 minutes on personal talk. Ask broad, exploratory questions such as, “How are you?” and don’t let “fine” be the answer. “Tell me more about that…” is a great follow-up that I often use to get people to elaborate without leading them or making them feel uncomfortable. And most importantly, open up and share about yourself.

All Business All the Time

Embrace change and co-create a solution with your employees. Take the time to learn what they want. Help them understand your own concerns. Share if you are worried about lack of team cohesion, or collaboration, or finding the next brilliant idea. If you have a lease hanging over your head, perhaps they can help figure out the solution. The Great Resignation is showing us just how far this genie is out of the bottle.

Talking About Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle

Stemming the losses from the Great Resignation are a top priority for leaders this year. The changes needed are not all about the employees. Here are three leadership habits to leave in the past as we charge full speed ahead. 

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

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Corporate Culture

teamwork

Teamwork

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

3 Bad Leadership Habits to Leave Behind This Year

No matter how small a task is, creating a list of all the things you need to accomplish throughout the course of your day will help you stay on track. Being able to cross off some of the simpler tasks you need to handle will keep you motivated.

Step 1: Create a list. 

If you put the tedious jobs at the top of your to-do list, it’ll be harder for you to avoid them throughout your day. Remember to remove distractions like your TV, and try to take care of the daunting stuff before handling the easier tasks on your list.

Step 2: Tackle the tedious stuff first.

It’s important to take short breaks about every 15-30 minutes when taking on a boring, time-consuming task. Procrastination is all mental, so trick your brain by breaking that one monumental task into several simpler ones that you can accomplish in between breaks.

Step 3: Take breaks.

When you finally scratch something off your to-do list, be sure to reward yourself. Indulging in a temptation you removed, such as Netflix, or treating yourself to a little online shopping is all you need. Just be sure to not give in until the job is completely finished! Most jobs today are accompanied by some larger, more boring tasks that need to be done, and real estate is no different. However, with a game plan and a little perseverance, you can boost your productivity and break these procrastination habits.

Step 4: Reward yourself.

How to Break Your Procrastination Habits and Boost Productivity

Creating a plan for your morning the night before will help you actually follow through the next day and is one of the most important ways to make your mornings more productive. You can keep this note in your head, or jot it down on your phone, planner or even just a piece of paper before laying down for the night. Try incorporating something you enjoy into your morning plan. Perhaps that is treating yourself to your favorite new coffee blend, food (my favorite right now is overnight oats with protein powder) or time for a morning meditation.

1. A plan

The best way to activate your body’s natural alarm clock is to incorporate natural light into your morning routine. Sunlight activates your body’s circadian rhythm and tells your system it’s time to wake up. Once you set this biological process in motion it can be hard to roll it back, making it more likely you’ll actually get out of bed and get your morning started.You can leave a window open to allow natural light to stream into your room as the sun rises. Or, you can make an effort to venture outside to soak up some rays before starting with any difficult tasks.

2. Natural light

Over 40% of adults in the U.S. are vitamin D deficient. Natural sunlight is the best way to curb deficiencies, but a vitamin D supplement is also a good way to improve vitamin D levels, especially during the winter months or when you spend most of your day cooped up in an office.Vitamin D deficiency leads to fatigue, among a host of other side effects, which can negatively affect your productivity in the morning and the rest of the day. Taking Vitamin D, along with a daily dose of sunlight, is one way to help combat fatigue and become the best version of yourself in the morning

3. Vitamin D

Getting your blood flowing early in the morning is another way to physically tell your body it is time to wake up. Incorporating physical activity into your morning routine will help you feel alert more quickly. For some, a morning commute will do the trick. Try biking to work, or take the stairs instead of the elevator. These simple changes will get your day started and give you an early morning boost of energy.

4. A morning walk 

Consistency is the key to success. It’s especially true with your morning routine. Wake up at around the same time each day to condition your body to naturally wake up at that time. This can make waking up early less painful the longer you keep up the habit. Our circadian rhythm thrives off of consistency, so try to stay on track with your sleep schedule even on the weekends.

5. Consistency

Blue light is not good for your sleep cycle. Social media is usually not good for your productivity. Set your phone aside at least an hour before closing your eyes for bed. Instead, try reading a book, stretching or listening to a podcast. It also might be worth investing in some blue light glasses to help mitigate the harmful effects of the light from our devices. In the morning, try to resist the urge to instantly grab your phone and check your email. Give yourself space to ease your way into the day and ditch your phone for the first precious few moments.

6. Time to unplug

A good bedtime ritual is just as important as a morning routine and should go hand in hand with your resolution to have more productive mornings. I've met entrepreneurs who write down what they are grateful for in a journal just before bed. They claim this leads them think about those same things they're thankful for first thing in the morning when they wake. If that's not a welcome addition to a morning routine, then nothing is.

7. Sleep

If productivity is what you're after, then a little self-care will be the biggest step you can take to get more done and feel great while doing it.

7 Things to Add to Make Your Morning Routine More Productive in 2022

Ivy Lee told each manager to write the six most important tasks they must do the next day in order of priority on a piece of paper and leave it on their desk ready for the following day. When they arrived the next morning, they began work on the first task and, once completed, crossed it off and started on the next one.[1]I

1. The Ivy Lee Method

Time blocking is a method of time management where you block out time on your calendar to do focused work. Let me give you an example from my system. I write a blog post, a podcast script, and plan, and record two to three YouTube videos each week. I can only make sure I have time for these tasks if I block time out on my calendar for doing them. So, I have a two-hour time block on my calendar for writing my blog post on a Monday morning. I also have a two-hour block on a Tuesday morning for writing my podcast script and a three-hour block on a Friday morning for recording my YouTube videos.

2. Time Blocking

The Pomodoro Technique is where you set a timer for 25 minutes and work focused and undisturbed for those twenty-five minutes. Then, once the alarm goes off, you take a five-minute break and set your alarm for another twenty-five minutes of focused work.The Pomodoro Technique is an excellent method for people who struggle to focus on one thing at a time and are easily distracted. At the end of twenty-five minutes, you know you can look at something else for five minutes, which gives you the motivation to push through until the end of the twenty-five minutes.

3. Pomodoro Technique

This is not so much a method of time management but more an observation that can help you to work on the things that give you the most significant positive results: The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).When applied to time management and productivity, this means you first identify which tasks will give you 80% of your results.

4. Pareto Principle

Similar to the Ivy Lee Method, the 2+8 Prioritization Method has you to select two must-do tasks and eight other tasks you would like to complete the next day. The two must-do tasks must be done no matter what. For the eight remaining tasks, you will do whatever you can to complete the tasks, but it would not be the end of the world if you cannot complete them.All you need is ten minutes before you close out the day to look at your list of things to do and choose your priorities for the next day based on what appointments you have and where you will be.

5. 2+8 Prioritization Method

One of the most effective ways to become more productive is to get control of your time. Here are 7 methods of time management to maximize productivity.

7 Most Effective Methods of Time Management to Boost Productivity

How should entrepreneurs prioritize their to-dos? Health is the first thing on your to-do list. If you go down, the whole business goes down, so prioritize exercise and taking care of yourself. I exercise and take care of myself in the morning. No. 2 is any tasks connected to money. Money causes stress and anxiety, and it’ll sneak up on you and pile up. Many people hide from money, and then they don’t make good choices.3Putting out fires—like the website’s down. And then after that, you prioritize what on your list will benefit you in the future, and fit in those future tasks.

The Secret to Peak Entrepreneur Productivity  

What are the biggest mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making? They make ginormous to-do lists that overwhelm them, and they neglect critical long-term tasks, like marketing plans and putting aside income for estimated taxes. I call it not being kind to your Future Me.

What are the biggest mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making?

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Once upon a time a professor went to a zen Master. He asked him to explain the meaning of zen. The master quietly poured a cup of tea. The cup was full but he continued to pour. The professor could not stand this any longer, so he questioned the Master impatiently: “ Why do you keep pouring when the cup is full?” “I want to point out to you,” the Master said,”that you are similarly attempting to understand zen while your mind is full. First, empty your mind of preconceptions. Before you attempt to understand zen.” “ if your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything;

Keep Your Mind Empty.

it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.”We are all full of preconceptions all the time. We are constantly judging and trying to relate things, actions, disasters to one another but this is wrong our mind must be empty. We should not have any preconceptions and we should take every event, every word, every feeling as what it is. Keep an empty mind, and your heart will always be full!

empty your mind,empty your mind quotes
empty your mind be formless
empty your mind be formless shapeless like water meaning
i said empty your mind...

philosophy

Philosophy

mindfulness

Mindfulness

keep your mind empty.

<ul><li>Always say less than necessary.</li><li>Win through your actions never through your arguments.</li><li>Use absence to increase respect and honour.</li></ul>

Important Concepts.

Draws on the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Von Clausewitz, and others, combining them with the legacies of powerful people throughout history to offer essential ideas of the ways of power.

books

Books

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.   Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.

Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature.

8 Steps to a More Productive Life

20 Productivity Hacks To Make Your Day Easier

4 Ways to Develop Discipline in Your Daily Life - The Simplicity Habit

3 Bad Leadership Habits to Leave Behind This Year

How to Break Your Procrastination Habits and Boost Productivity

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