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Self-Reflection

Connecting The Dots In Your Life

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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours – long hallways and unforeseen stairwells – eventually puts you in the place you are now.

— Ann Patchett, What Now?

A little bit of reflection and connecting the dots can lead to insight, an honest overview of where you are, and perhaps, a clearer picture of where you’re headed!

Schedule Nothing: The Best of the Internet

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Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! 

We make a lot of mistakes at work. This is how you stop repeating them.

Schedule nothing.

Don’t confuse busyness with business.

Manage your energy instead of your time.

Don’t buy dissatisfaction created by someone else’s criteria.

imageDundee’s Tip of the Week:  Did you know you could use an Alfred app extension to record your dones? Now you can update dones throughout the day with this shortcut!

 

Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes

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We make a lot of mistakes in life, and a lot of those mistakes take place at work. Elaine Wherry, founder of Meebo, even made a mistake diary to remember and review her mistakes, such as time management and perfectionism issues. “I wanted to be able to reflect on them later,” she explains, “so I wouldn’t beat myself up during the week … It was a way to get more sleep.” As she saw her employees make many of the same mistakes she did, the diary developed into a manual to share what she learned with others.

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Luc Levesque, founder of TravelPod and General Manager at TripAdvisor, decided to guide his employees with a boss blueprint. Luc shares his particular values, dislikes, and quirks to prime new employees for great performance in short order. With swift, effective communication rather than protracted information asymmetry, employees — and the company as a whole — are able to sidestep a period of trial and error, as well as lots of trials, tribulations, and stress.

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Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts

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Frequently take stock of what’s working and what’s not — because it’s always changing. Put that on your calendar.

Cali Williams Yost, author of Tweak It: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day, shares simple work-life balance shortcuts.

One thing people do to “have it all”? A regular practice of checking in and reflection.

What’s happening at work and in the other parts of my life? What do I want more of? What do I want less of? What do I want to continue? They realize that the actions that keep them healthy, their career network and job skills up to date, their personal relationships strong, and their personal finances in shape won’t happen by default and are always changing.

Taking Risks Through Doubt

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Strangely enough, doubt need not impede action. If you really become friends with your doubt, you can go ahead and take risks, knowing you will be questioning yourself at every turn, no matter what. It is part of living, a healthy evolutionary adaptation, I would imagine. The mistake is in trying to tune out your doubts. Accept them as a necessary (or at least unavoidable) soundtrack.

Philip Lopate, in the NYT’s Opinionator blog’s “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt”.

A Year of Good Things

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Jar

“Start on January 1st with an empty jar. Throughout the year write the good things that happened to you on little pieces of paper. On December 31st, open the jar and read all the amazing things that happened to you that year.”

Here’s a great idea from imabookshark to start off the new year. Make a Good Things Jar! Capture the positive things that happened to you and that you accomplished in your personal and work life! They’re worth remembering and acknowledging.

Of course, you can always use iDoneThis as a Good Things App — a super simple way to keep a record of and look back at all the amazingness over the year!

Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

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I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among productive people: they often overlook their own productivity.  The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”

Because ambitious people measure themselves by their progress towards achieving audacious goals, they often can’t appreciate a single day’s worth of tiny, incremental advancements that they’ve made.  Plus, the fuller your day is with activity, the harder it seems to pinpoint what exactly it is that you did at all.

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Between starting Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen has done monumental work in his career and seems particularly at risk to fall into this trap.  To arm himself against the daunting imperative of making meaningful progress toward his big objectives, Marc came up with a system: the Anti-Todo List.  It’s his way to stop and recognize his own accomplishments, measured not by a project’s impressive success, but in increments, to fuel his motivation for getting stuff done day after day.

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The Ultimate Productivity Instrument is You

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In this modern age of gizmos and gadgets, the best productivity app is you.

Benjamin Franklin, that historical grand master of productivity who did pretty well without an iPhone, knows why:

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

Our capabilities for self-analysis, awareness, and perception are what separate us from robotic worker drones, punching in and punching out without rhyme or reason. But our limited notion of productivity ignores those capabilities, focusing simplistically on output and end results, on just doing it and getting it done. We know the destinations in our work are important, but all too often, we ignore the journey and the process. We ignore ourselves.

Passing time

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When Procrastination Becomes Useful

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Life might be a race against time but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause.

Frank Partnoy, “Waiting Game”, Financial Times.

Partnoy, author of the forthcoming book Wait:  The Useful Art of Procrastination, writes about the value of delay and taking the full time we are given to make better decisions.

Maybe the best way to think about time management is in terms of delay management!