If you’re not sure about a request of your time, start with no.Yes is your default response when you feel guilty. It’s your time you’re giving up. Don’t feel guilty.

Give up Starting with ‘Yes’ to a Request of Your Time

<ul><li>Overworking isn’t productivity.</li><li>Inspiration comes from rest.</li></ul>The work you do when you’re tired and pissed off from working too hard and aiming for productivity perfection will be terrible.During your time off your brain resets; your brain organizes all your thoughts and helps you reflect when you do menial tasks like washing the dishes.<blockquote></blockquote>

Give up Overworking Yourself to Death

Deadlines make you superhuman.Without a deadline, you’ll dream about your productive future and doing the task you’ve been putting off until “tomorrow.” Tony Robbins says it best: “When would now be a good time?”Use deadlines to give yourself a sense of urgency about your work.

Give up Working Without a Deadline

Jump on a trampoline while you’re on the phone. Walk if you don’t own a trampoline. Movement is life. When you move, you feel good. You can make time to move (exercise) or you can exercise while doing tasks that must be done, like chatting to other humans.

Give up Taking Calls While Sitting Down

They can find a problem with everything. “The world is coming to an end.” We’ve heard it all before, pal.<a href="https://medium.com/the-ascent/do-not-fall-for-the-work-of-a-man-who-only-preaches-chaos-bbfc308fdca5">Preachers of chaos</a> take up your time because they haven’t dealt with their negative thoughts. Consuming chaos is anti-motivation.

Give up Preachers of Chaos

A process beats focusing on an outcome.An outcome requires finite willpower. A process is a proven strategy you can follow that puts most of the tasks on auto-pilot for you. Writer, Nicolas Cole, has a writing process he has used to become one of the most-read writers on the internet. I used parts of his process to do the same.

Give up Focusing on Outcomes

Leave blank space in your calendar to think.The goal isn’t to have a full calendar. The goal is to have a calendar that lets you read, learn, and speak to new people when you want.

Give up a Calendar Without Blank Space

“Don’t spend (free) time you haven’t earned. The disciplined earner can be a guilt-free spender”

The grandiose moments you think about in your dreams, that will shape your destiny, rarely happen. One-off, big time, one-hit wonders are a fantasy. Chase small moments. Chase small actions, taken daily.It’s the little actions you take every day that ends up changing your life.

Give up Chasing Grandiose Moments

<ul><li>What do you eat today?</li><li>What do you wear today?</li><li>How will you get to the office today?</li><li>What route will you take to the supermarket?</li></ul>These decisions take away energy from you. Decisions are energy leaks. Productivity that fuels a rock-solid process requires energy.

Give up Making Lots of Decisions Each Day

You won’t get lucky and find time. The holidays are not the answer to your unfinished dreams. Retirement isn’t either.Productive people don’t get lucky. No, they get intentionally lucky by doing the tasks that matter each day to them and what they want to achieve in life.

Give up Luck

Delete a message or archive it if you think you’ll need it later — you probably won’t. A full email inbox is a distraction. The joy you get looking at an empty inbox is worth every second of ruthless prioritization of emails

Give up a Full Email Inbox

If you feel like you’re achieving nothing in your life, experiment with having less goals. Your heroes who achieve seemingly impossible goals focus on doing one thing when you look closely.

Give up Having Too Many Goals

Ever used Microsoft OneNote? Kill me now.Some of the best Productivity apps out there are:<ul><li>Trello</li><li>Notion</li><li>Roam Research</li><li>Keep Notes (by Google)</li><li>Pocket</li><li>Deepstash (see what I did there ;) )</li></ul>

Give up Bad Productivity Apps

Delete the drama from your life, and you’ll have more time to do cool shit.Evil plans are exhausting. Revenge takes the focus off your goals, and onto meaningless goals. You can’t right every wrong. You can’t fix every broken person. You can fix yourself, though.

Give up Being an Asshole

These are a few of the things my productive friends have taught me over the years through giving up. I don’t follow all of them and you probably won’t either. But these thoughts act as the potential for future thoughts you might have. Being productive towards a goal you care about helps you find meaning in your life.Finding meaning in the work you do is the ultimate productivity hack.

Conclusion

The couch, with chocolate, chips and a movie feels pretty good on most days. Thankfully I have a few friends who are highly productive. A few of them even create productivity products. They’ve spent…

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

14 Things My Highly Productive Friends Have Given Up

<ul><li>Present-forward thinking means building an organization in increments, building upon the rules and procedures that work today.</li><li>On the other hand, future-back thinking visualizes what an organization could be, starting from a clean sheet.</li></ul>

Think future-back, not only present-forward

One thing to remember is that future-back thinking must not replace present-forward thinking — they should always be complementary.

One thing to remember is that future-back thinking must not replace present-forward thinking — they should always be complementary.

<ul><li>One of the reasons that digital transformation programs fail is that teams will return to their old habits soon after the change happens.</li><li>One may think that the crisis will end someday, and things will come back to normal. But for some businesses, this might not be the case, as this crisis is different.</li></ul>

The business landscape has changed; deal with it

Some users were hooked on the idea of online shopping and may prefer to keep doing it, and offering only offline shopping might not be a viable option anymore.

Concerning COVID-19 (Part 1)

Agile methodologies have become a must for innovation labs and product teams. Companies have come to understand that they need to find a way of validating their ideas fast instead of engaging in months’ worth of development to discover they have built a product that no one wants to use.

Be agile and validate your ideas quickly

In the beginning, we had no clue how long the crisis was going to last, and the best we could do was to come up with a hypothesis:&nbsp;“If I were a customer stuck at home, working remotely for weeks, I would be more open to buying shoes online.”

Concerning COVID-19 (Part 2)

Whether it’s an external or internal customer, those are the people that pay your paycheck if you work in the innovation field.&nbsp;Innovation teams now have the responsibility for increasing the chances of building products and services that succeed in the market.

Know your customer...really!

While at the beginning of the lockdown, customers were more forgiving as far as user experience is concerned, now it’s no longer the case.

Concerning COVID-19 (Part 3)

"Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake."

Companies that not only haven’t stopped hiring during the crisis but also secured the future of their top team players are the ones that are going to have the advantage in rolling out the most innovative products and services.The right talent is crucial mainly due to three things now: <ol><li>Speed</li><li>Quality</li><li>Will to experiment</li></ol>

Invest in the right talent


As humanity, we have been through different times of crisis, but for the huge part of the current workforce, it’s the first major crisis as they weren’t workers in 2007 during the Great Recession. This is something to have in mind when dealing with the New Normal.

14 Things My Highly Productive Friends Have Given Up

The Next Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovating in the times of New Normal | UX Magazine

Amine Kemicha