Employees often make up their own stories when they don't get helpful feedback. The stories they tell themselves are often a problem for them (and for the manager). By giving helpful feedback, you'll give your employees the data they need to do more of what's working, and give them less opportunities to make up their own stories.

Without helpful feedback, employees will make up stories

Most professionals prefer to know what good and not-so-good impact they're having. If satisfactory performance is "not a problem employee", you will probably sit with "non-troublemakers" instead of high-performing, committed and engaged professionals. Instead, let your employees know specifically what you appreciate and value when they meet expectations, and share your perspective on how they could improve if they fall short.

Story 1: “As long as I’m not creating trouble for my manager, I’m doing fine.”

It's the manager's job to create a psychologically safe environment where an employee won't be punished when they make a mistake. If you fear that feedback won't be well-received, it may be that you're falling short:<ul><li>You're not helping your direct report to have more impact.</li><li>You're not modelling accountable behaviour if you don't give feedback because you fear how it will be taken.</li><li>You may be contributing to a lack of psychological safety.</li></ul> Instead, consider why you fear your colleague won't receive feedback well. If you don't have a good reason, go ahead and give feedback. Just do it.

Story 2: “My manager doesn’t think I can take feedback well.”

If you really believe your employee cannot change, you will not offer him resources or opportunities to change. Instead, adopt a growth mindset for your employee and yourself. Employees with growth mindsets welcome challenges and work harder and more effectively, making them better contributors to their organisations. You will give more feedback because you believe they will rise to the challenge.

Story 3: “My manager doesn’t think I can change.”

There are three common stories that employees tell themselves when they don’t get enough feedback from their managers: 1.) “As long as I’m not creating trouble for my manager, I’m doing fine.” If the bar for satisfactory performance is “not a problem employee”, then your bar is way too low. 2.) “My manager doesn’t think I can take feedback well.” If you don’t have compelling evidence to support the belief that your employee won’t receive feedback well, then you need to, as Nike suggests, “Just do it”. 3.) “My manager doesn’t think I can change.” It’s important to adopt a growth mindset, for your employee and for yourself. By giving more helpful feedback, you’ll be providing your employees with the data they need to do more of what’s working, less of what isn’t, and with fewer opportunities to make up their own stories.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

communication

Communication

humanresources

Human Resources

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Assumptions Employees Make When They Don’t Get Feedback

One of the benefits of reading is that you can master the best of what other people discovered. But it is only true if you can actually remember and apply the lessons and insights you read.

How to get the most out of your reading

You will instantly know if you picked up a good book. It is well written, packed with ideas and insights and is well organised. Naturally, you will want to read the next page. Good books finish themselves. Trying to finish a bad book is a grind. Instead, skim a lot of books and read a few. You don't need to finish a bad or mediocre book. When you realise you can quit a book without guilt, you create the space and opportunity for a great book.

Give up quickly

Reading the words on a page or screen is the easy part. The problem is that this is often the only way we learn to read. There are different approaches to reading. <ol><li>Reading to entertain. This is what we are taught in elementary school.</li><li>Reading to inform. You skim to get a feel for the book.</li><li>Reading to understand. You read to chew on things and digest them.</li><li>Reading to master. You read a variety of books and articles on the same topic, evaluating them and forming your own opinion.</li></ol> You don't need to read everything the same way. We spend most of our time in levels 2 and 3.

Levels of reading

If you want to improve what you get out of reading, you have to choose great books. There are only a few new books that might prove valuable, but most will be forgotten. So instead, let time filter the good books. Find the books that stood the test of time. Time is limited, so direct it to knowledge that lasts. Read old books. Read the best ones twice.

Choose great books

The best way to get more out of books is by taking notes with the blank sheet method. <ul><li>Before reading a book, write down what you know about the subject using a mind map.</li><li>When you finish a reading session, add to the map with a different colour.</li><li>Review the page before you start your next reading session.</li><li>When you're done reading, bind the sheets and review them periodically.</li></ul> When you use this method, you will literally see your knowledge grow as you add new information. You'll start to connect ideas across disciplines and develop your own ideas.

Taking notes - The blank sheet

Write in the margins of your book. You bought it. It's your property. <ul><li>At the end of each chapter, write a pointed summary of the main chapter. Then, try to connect it to something in your life, such as a memory or other idea.</li><li>When you're done with the book, pack it away for a week, then revisit it and go through all your notes.</li><li>Write the main idea of the book on the inside cover. You can also make a custom index on the back cover with themes or topics.</li></ul> The idea is to connect new knowledge to existing knowledge and find the gaps in your understanding.

Conventional notes

Goals of reading. Understanding inspectional, analytical and syntopical reading.

books

Books

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How to properly read a book

Reading more isn’t helpful if you can't retain and apply your new knowledge. This guide offers a system to help you read more deeply and remember what you read for years to come.

writing

Reading & Writing

Reading Better - Farnam Street

Overtime is often a symptom of :<ul><li>An overstretched workforce. You may not have enough resources to manage your workload.</li><li>Poor project estimation or time management.</li><li>Unrealistic client expectations. Client's are unaware of how long a task takes. It's a sign that you're selling yourself short.</li><li>Communication breakdown. There are no proper work boundaries or realistic expectations.</li><li>Toxic company culture. Many organisations have a culture of working beyond contractual working hours.</li></ul>

Problems with overtime

There are times when overtime benefits workers. <ul><li>Workers can get paid time and a half or even double pay.</li><li>Workers can take advantage of their individual productive flow. Some may work best in the mornings, and others late at night.</li><li>Employees feel independent and autonomous when they work within their own schedules.</li></ul>

The benefits of working overtime

Some companies have clear overtime policies, such as "time and a half". Other companies offer "payment in kind" or counterbalance overtime by leaving early on another day or putting the time worked towards extra vacation days. A sign of a toxic working culture is when the company offer nothing extra. Overtime can lead to accusations of wage theft. Therefore, it is vital that overtime is met with some form of compensation that is satisfactory for the employee and employer.

The problem with overtime pay

Overtime can harm company culture. When people willingly work late, it can normalise over time. More people will feel obliged to stay late, and resentment can follow. People that continually work late suggest that the productive output is valued above being human. Employees have families, friends and other interests. Good management will recognise the importance of these aspects.

The impact of working overtime on culture

Track overtime. It helps employees manage their working hours and protect against abuses. Actively work against a stay-late company culture. Ensure everyone is clear on the company's overtime policy.

Staying in control of overtime

People usually work overtime because they have to, but it can also present new opportunities. So what should workplaces consider when offering overtime and can working overtime ever be positive?

Working overtime: exploitation or opportunity?

“If your goal is innovation, then your role must instead be to create an environment—a setting, a context, an organization—where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation themselves: to collaborate, learn through trial and error, and make integrated decisions.”

Innovation is often a group effort, not an isolated individual who works alone. Better ideas arise when people with different views can express their ideas and receive feedback. Innovations are discovered after countless experimentation and trial and error. This can take time.

The collective genius

Good leaders encourage discovery and innovation.<ul><li>Leaders ensure their organisations are collaborative and make integrative decisions.</li><li>They help with conflict resolution without providing a solution to a group.</li><li>They encourage multiple opinions.</li></ul>

Leading innovation

Innovation needs paradoxical qualities: Freedom and restraint. Unleashing and harnessing resources like talent and ideas. Harmony in the team and conflict. <ul><li>A good leader encourages people to express their viewpoints. They create an open environment where people feel comfortable contributing their ideas, knowing others will listen to them but also challenge their ideas.</li><li>Good leaders encourage experimentation, iteration, learning and starting over.</li><li>However, learning should be balanced with performance; creative freedom with boundaries (schedules, budgets, rules and procedures).</li></ul>

Collective genius needs leadership

The traditional leadership model tends to squash creativity. The boss creates the ideas, then tells everyone what they should do. This model doesn't work when the goal is to create something new because even the leaders don't know the outcome.To cultivate innovative conditions, leaders should create an environment where people are encouraged to be creative:<ul><li>Increase transparency to build employee trust.</li><li>Make management more accessible and accountable so that employees can flag problems.</li><li>Empower employees so that they will take initiative.</li></ul>

The traditional model of leadership

People want to feel like they're part of a community and work on something bigger than themselves. A brand can be used to unite and motivate employees around a common purpose. Leaders create the space for innovation. They create an environment in which people want to work and can get the work done. For example, De Meo, head of sales and marketing at Volkswagen, established a lab where employees from different departments could work together. He provided little direction and almost complete autonomy. It improved collaboration skills and caused employees to create innovative solutions.

Building a creative community

Values define what is important to a group. They determine the group's priorities. Innovative groups share four core values: <ul><li>Bold ambition: A group with a bold purpose will take on big challenges. Bold groups want to improve the world, and they feel they can improve it.</li><li>Collaboration: Innovative companies intentionally build collaboration into their strategies. Innovation is the result of diverse people working together on a problem.</li><li>Learning: When you try something new, mistakes are inevitable. </li><li> The group shares a sense of responsibility and ownership for the outcomes.</li></ul>

The values of innovative groups

Good ideas are shaped by discussion, debate and conflict. For people to be creative and innovative, they need to be good at disagreeing while staying respectful and treating each other as equals.Creative abrasion is a skill that can be learned:<ul><li>A diverse group of people need to create a lot of ideas and must be willing for their ideas to be criticised.</li><li>Productive conflict requires trust between team members. Conflict that becomes personal shouldn't be tolerated.</li><li>Leaders should not impose solutions on the team but ask questions that help the team create their own solutions. </li></ul>

Creative friction

Creative agility is the groups' ability to continually find out what works. Learning and development are balanced with tangible results. ﻿Constant experimentation stimulates innovation. When the path forward is unclear, the agile team uses a cycle of trial and error, and reflection and analysis until a solution emerges. Each cycle uses the lessons learned from the previous cycle. A certain amount of failure is inevitable, so leaders should learn to accept that mistakes are an important part of learning and should be tolerated.

Creative agility

Ideas are created through discussion and conflict, and solutions are tested via trial and error. The next part is creative resolution. Here it is important to balance perseverance with endurance. At this point, the leader establishes the boundaries and conditions for the work. The leader is the social architect who makes innovation possible, but for the most part, innovation comes from team members.

Creative resolution

Some challenges are so big and complex that they require multiple disciplines to deal with them, often beyond a single organisation. Unlike innovative teams within a single company, teams across organisations often feel competitive or hostile to one another. Leaders may focus too much on the rules and boundaries, but fostering participants' willingness to engage is more important to building community. To build a community essential for innovation, first get everyone to agree on the goal of the effort, then set the conditions for working together.

Creating an innovation ecosystem

A guide to managing people and getting the most out of them

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

The Art of Leadership 

The author argues that the traditional autocratic leadership model does not work for innovative businesses. Instead, innovation requires a different type of leader that can foster a stimulating and supportive working environment.

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

creativity

Creativity

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Linda A. Hill

Greg Brandeau

Emily Truelove

Kent Lineback

Collective Genius

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

Only one profession has developed a comprehensive philosophy on how to work, the culinary arts, and that philosophy is mise-en-place, a French phrase which means “to put in place.”
In the kitchen, it means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking, but it’s also a tradition of focus and discipline, a method of working and being. A way of life.

Think Like A Chef

<ul><li>Part of developing good MEP(mise-en-place) is having a plan of how everything will happen, and a map of where everything should be.</li><li>You should know where all of your tools are blindfolded.</li><li>Chef simply means “boss” in French.</li></ul>

Focus: To Put In Place

“The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent”

<ul><li>A big part of our overwhelm with work occurs because we’ve never been taught how to manage that work.</li><li>Chefs commit to a life of preparation, where you always have to think ahead. Cooking can’t happen without prep coming first.</li><li>A commitment to process doesn’t mean following tedious procedures, it’s about becoming a high-functioning human being and being happier for it.</li></ul>

Working Without Things In Place

We need to work clean with time, which means:<ol><li>Determining our daily actions</li><li>Ordering those actions in sequence</li></ol>For your most important, recurring tasks, log out how long they take so you can make accurate predictions of how long they’ll take in the future. Such as writing an article or preparing an email report.

Work Clean With Time

<ol><li>Select 3 actions to complete for this day.</li><li>Plan those actions on your calendar</li><li>If you truly commit those tasks when and as quickly as you planned, you can do up to 4 tasks tomorrow.</li><li>Keep increasing until you start to fail at completing your tasks.</li><li>Arrive everywhere 15 minutes early so you never feel rushed or stressed.</li></ol>

Apply the Rule Of 3

<ul><li>You don’t need much space if you’re smart about how you use it.</li><li>Cultivate the use of both sides of your body, both sides of the space, both sides of a motion.</li><li>Create checklists so you have recurring recipes for your processes.</li></ul>

Space And Movements

<ol><li>Select a task that you do often.</li><li>Break it down into 10 steps or fewer.</li><li>Determine if you need a Read-Do (read then do it) or a Do-Confirm (do the items then use the checklist after to confirm).</li><li>Test your checklist by using it 3 times.</li><li>Update the checklist each time you use it, as necessary.</li><li>Remove friction.</li></ol>

Checklist: Test Your Tasks

You cook the way you look: the cleaner your station, the faster you work.<ul><li>Practice “coming to zero”: every hour, take a minute to straighten your physical and digital workspace, no matter what you’re currently doing.</li><li>Scan your environment for anything not in use</li><li>Put away everything not in use</li><li>Group all “like” objects</li><li>Align or square all objects to either the surface they’re on, or the studio itself.</li></ul>

Cleaning All The Time

The first moments cost more than the later ones. When a task in the present unlocks a cascade of work that other people do on our behalf, the worth of process time increases and becomes harder to measure.There are two kinds of work:<ul><li>The first is hands-on, immersive, and creative, like writing or designing. This is solo, creative work that is usually your most important work.</li><li>Hands-off, process work that enables other people to do work. This seems less important since it’s more managerial, but since it enables other people to do their work it’s worth doing first.</li></ul>

First Moves

<ul><li>Do similar jobs at the same time to minimize the switching costs between actions.</li><li>Avoid orphaned tasks: tasks that haven’t been tied up in the neatest way possible to enable easy continuation later.</li><li>If you can’t finish a task, tie it up for later.</li><li>Collect all the materials and keep them in one place till you resume.</li><li>Jot down any thoughts you have that are at the top of your mind that you want to remember.</li><li>Schedule your session to resume the work.</li><li>Communicate your progress to a partner or stakeholders to assess what remains to be done and whether help is available.</li></ul>

Finishing Actions

<ul><li>When you hear yourself overtalking or interrupting someone, simply talk slower. It’ll have a calming effect on you and force the other person to pay attention.</li><li>Instead of stopping when you feel distracted, just move very slowly.</li><li>In times of stress or panic, clean your workstation so your visual field is clear. Think about what you need to do next. Batch your tasks together. Close apps. Get to zero. Now resume slowly</li></ul>

Slow Down

<ul><li>Commit to working smoothly and steadily. Use physical order to restore mental order. Don’t rush.</li><li>Commit to balancing external and internal awareness. Stay alert.</li><li>Commit to confirming and expecting confirmation of essential communication. Call back.</li><li>Being polite can get in the way of getting work done, you need to communicate efficiently.</li><li>Communication should be clear, concise, and respectful.</li></ul>

The Recipe For Success

<ul><li>For a day, keep a tally of all the errors you make, big or small. </li><li>For each of the errors, write the consequence. </li><li>At the end of the day, write down one thing for each that you could have done to avoid the problem.</li><li>Commit to coaching yourself, to being coached, and to coach others. </li><li>Evaluate yourself.</li></ul>

Evaluating Your Errors

<ul><li>Conserve space to conserve motion to conserve time.</li><li>Log where you lose time and resources to see how you might make better use of those resources and time periods. How can you plan better to avoid waste?</li><li>Create routines for when you have downtime, for when you’re distracted, for when you know you’re passing through a particular place.</li><li>Commit to valuing space, time, energy, resources, and people. Waste nothing.</li></ul>

Utilize Everything

<ul><li>Commit to preparation with a 30-minute daily planning session.</li><li>Commit to a process which makes you better.</li><li>Commit to being present in whatever you do.</li></ul>

The Commitments of Working Clean

The first organizational book inspired by the culinary world, taking mise-en-place outside the kitchen. Every day, chefs across the globe churn out enormous amounts of high-quality work with efficiency using a system called mise-en-place--a French culinary term that means “putting in place” and signifies an entire lifestyle of readiness and engagement. In Work Clean, Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise-en-place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work. Culled from dozens of interviews with culinary professionals and executives, including world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Alfred Portale, this essential guide offers a simple system to focus your actions and accomplish your work. Charnas spells out the 10 major principles of mise-en-place for chefs and non chefs alike: (1) planning is prime; (2) arranging spaces and perfecting movements; (3) cleaning as you go; (4) making first moves; (5) finishing actions; (6) slowing down to speed up; (7) call and callback; (8) open ears and eyes; (9) inspect and correct; (10) total utilization. This journey into the world of chefs and cooks shows you how each principle works in the kitchen, office, home, and virtually any other setting.

career

Career

The first organizational book inspired by the culinary world, taking mise-en-place outside the kitchen.Every day, chefs across the globe churn out enormous amounts of high-quality work with efficiency using a system called mise-en-place--a French culinary term that means “putting in place” and signifies an entire lifestyle of readiness and engagement. In Work Clean, Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise-en-place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work.Culled from dozens of interviews with culinary professionals and executives, including world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Alfred Portale, this essential guide offers a simple system to focus your actions and accomplish your work. Charnas spells out the 10 major principles of mise-en-place for chefs and non chefs alike: (1) planning is prime; (2) arranging spaces and perfecting movements; (3) cleaning as you go; (4) making first moves; (5) finishing actions; (6) slowing down to speed up; (7) call and callback; (8) open ears and eyes; (9) inspect and correct; (10) total utilization.This journey into the world of chefs and cooks shows you how each principle works in the kitchen, office, home, and virtually any other setting.

Dan Charnas

Work Clean

Many companies have strict policies against discussing salaries with coworkers. The older generation is brainwashed to see conversations about salary as a ‘cloak and dagger activity’.  Millennials have broken this flawed and unwritten rule, making discussion of salaries a common conversation, resulting in increased salary transparency and better negotiation power.

Talking About Salary With Coworkers

Even if your company allows for salary discussion, it might be awkward to some coworkers coming from different backgrounds. One has to reject the taboo and create an atmosphere where talking about money is a common and normal thing. This requires building a strong level of trust.

Breaking The ‘Salary-Talk’ Taboo

Understand that salary transparency is a good thing and gives the power back to the employees. The ‘salary silence’ rule that many companies implement is to ensure that they maintain control, and employees stay aloof in terms of who makes what, making it difficult for them to negotiate or make career decisions.

Salary Transparency: The Power Of Knowledge

A guide to talking to your coworkers openly about your salary—and theirs. Because most of us agree that transparent salary conversations are good for employees. It's time to bust the stigma and talk money out in the open with your colleagues.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

teamwork

Teamwork

How to Talk About Salary With Your Coworkers

The work-life balance broadly refers to the need for more leisure, family time or self-care. Critics of the term think it creates an artificial separation between work and life. Others feel the equation of work on the one side and life on the other is not a balance at all.
In response, the idea of work-life integration is becoming more popular.

The work-life balance

This approach blends all areas of life. The system does not emphasise rigid boundaries but pivots where each area such as work, home, family, community, health, and personal well-being is given appropriate attention.
The flexibility offered by work-life integration allows professionals to shape their own workday while juggling kids, elderly parents, and other activities.

The work-life integration

You may integrate work into every area of your life while not giving other parts of your life the same priority. Or you may only be thinking of your work even when you are with your family.
This is because our work responsibilities may give us an adrenaline rush of handling crises and may seem more important than other priorities.

The downside of work-life integration

<ul>
<li>Create a schedule to ensure you focus on all your priorities outside of work. Put them in your calendar.</li>
<li>Ensure that your schedule complements your partner and family. It should enrich your family life.</li>
<li>Remain committed to some boundaries. Set aside time each day to block out thoughts of work and focus exclusively on your people.</li>
</ul>
Work-life balance is a helpful framework. The secret to prioritizing what we value is in the execution.

How to make work-life integration work

habits

Habits

Work-Life Balance vs. Work-Life Integration: How Are They Different, and Which One Is for You? | Inc.com

"We entertain ourselves to death with social media instead of putting our minds to work and doing what's important."

In Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, the concept of having full concentration and focus on a single task is heavily emphasized, and that the ability to do so has become inexplicably rare that those who cultivate this skill are those who thrive in life.
In order to achieve the goals we desire or to do more than we want to is to rid ourselves of distractions like social media among other things.

Deep Work's Core Message

<ol>
<li>We must set aside time with our projects where we aren't going to be distracted. Let everyone know that you are not to be disturbed during a certain time;</li>
<li>Allow yourself to embrace boredom and stop checking your social media - or you can choose to delete it entirely. Social media is heavily distracting and don't provide much value;</li>
<li>Remove the things in your list that don't generate as many results, and instead focus on the things that will help achieve your desired goals.</li>
</ol>

Making Deep Work Possible

<ul>
<li>"Not every mess is good, but there can be a certain magic in mess." </li>
<li>Tim Harford, the author of Messy, believes that we can find great inspiration within our messes. How we express ourselves in a creative manner isn't always through a pristine desk, some of the most productive people have multiple projects going and messy desks.</li>
<li>We always look and reach for the tidy answers, only to find out that they're not as useful when things get messy.</li>
</ul>

Messy's Core Message

<ol>
<li>If we don't produce anything, we won't be of any value to the economy. Technology is rapidly evolving and staying as we are is not going to cut it. Push yourself to try new things.</li>
<li>Autonomy is the key to getting work done. It is important to have a workspace where you have control over and choose to focus and shut out distractions.</li>
<li>Set quality goals and hold yourself accountable for them. Choose to do things that you have clarity upon whether it may advance your career or change your life.</li>
</ol>

Overarching Lessons Between Deep Work and Messy

Deep Work vs. Messy: How to Balance Productivity and Creativity

People work an average of 45 hours a week; they consider about 17 of those hours to be unproductive.

17 hours of unproductiveness weekly

<ol>
<li>Manage your moods: If you start the day calm it's easy to get the right things done and focus.</li>
<li>Don't check email in the morning.</li>
<li>Before you try to do it faster, ask whether it should be done at all.</li>
<li>Focus is nothing more than eliminating distractions.</li>
<li>Have a personal system; most productive people have a routine.</li>
<li>Define your goals for the day the night before.</li>
</ol>

Tim Ferriss's tips for productivity

If you check your emails first thing in the morning, **you're setting yourself up to react. 
You're not planning your day and prioritizing, you're giving your best hours to someone else's goals, not yours.

Don't check emails in the morning

Want to be more productive? Don't ask how to make something more efficient until after you've asked "Do I need to do this at all?"

Do what is important

Ever feel like you're just not getting enough done? Know how many days a week you're actually productive? About three: People work an average of 45 hours a week; they consider about 17 of those hours to be unproductive (U.S.: 45 hours a week; 16 hours are considered unproductive).

Subtle Things Highly Productive People Do Every Day

In most of the ancient literature and philosophy, boredom is considered a personal, social and moral weakness.
Philosophers talk about boredom as proof that life is essentially meaningless, and that boredom hovers around any secure life like a shadow.

Boredom: Our Old Friend

Boredom is a signal to your body that the current activity is not meaningful and we should be doing something else, or be somewhere else. Many recent studies have associated boredom with the urge to flaunt social distancing rules and quarantine regulations.
Boredom by itself is a neutral signal but can affect a person in varied ways depending on his life situation and the current environment.

The Neutral Signal With Many Outcomes

Boredom by itself does not feel great, but just like pain, it is a body’s emotional call to action. It nudges us to look for an alternate set of behaviours and try to add more significance to our activities.
We normally try to balance paying attention and finding meaning, wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything in particular.

Boredom Is Like Pain

Boredom was called acedia in the Middle Ages and was considered a vice, something that happens to those who neglect their religious duties.
In the last two centuries, boredom has been tagged as an ailment, something which happened due to industrialization or capitalism.

Boredom: Many Representations Of One Feeling

Boredom isn’t about not having something fun to do, but about not wanting to do the activities which are at one’s disposal.
Boredom by itself isn’t a desire, but a desire for a desire to arise. Man cannot sit quietly in a room and do nothing, and that inability to be meditatively still may be the root cause of all problems.
The awareness of boredom is a pathway towards meeting with oneself, and one is much better off being busy in an activity than to get acquainted with oneself.

The Paradox Of Boredom

<ul>
<li>Perfectionists weigh all the factors in their quest to do the best thing, or to do anything in the best way, and eventually feel more boredom.</li>
<li>The people who try to minimize pain are coming up with excuses to not do a certain activity.</li>
<li>Those who want to maximize pleasure are not concerned with the adjacent pain.</li>
</ul>
Both extremes lead to boredom.

Paralysis By Analysis

Studies on human behaviour showed that some people would prefer to give themselves electric shocks than to sit quietly in a room alone.
If people are placed in environments that lack meaning or are having less of a social-ecological diversity, they are more likely to be bored and take that boredom as a call to action towards harmful activities like drugs, violence and alcohol abuse.

Boredom Motivates Action

Many people have been successfully able to optimize and cultivate their boredom into something productive, even leading to self-improvement and growth.
Boredom by itself is not bad, but the negative reactions that follow are the real culprit. Writing, playing an instrument, listening to music and other hobbies are available to a bored person, in most cases.

Intentional Boredom

In the end, it is how society provides basic upbringing to an individual. In most cases, it focuses on maximum productivity, utility and time management, converting time into money-making or pleasure-seeking, rather than just living through time, not doing anything.
People have a lot of time, but they are spending it playing video games, watching television or streaming services, or being on social media. The constant stimulation and the need to be entertained is the root cause of boredom.

Time Is Misunderstood

<ul>
<li>We have long forgotten the big stretches of time when we have nothing to do, as we are never disengaged from entertainment, work, or any kind of frenetic activity.</li>
<li>Having nothing to do is an unfamiliar state to many and is associated with being bored. One does not have to be afraid of having absolutely nothing to do.</li>
<li>One needs to calm down and try to practice mindfulness. It also helps to be less judgemental and more patient when boredom hits.</li>
</ul>

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