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Time Management

Priorities in Threes to Spur Your Productivity

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Named by Business Insider as one of the 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, Stacy-Marie Ishmael is one of the most productive people we know. Currently VP of Communities at The Financial Times and creator of the #awesomewomen newsletter, Stacy-Marie offers one of her most effective productivity tips.

Top Three Priorities

I think a lot about lists (a side effect of an ongoing and enduring fascination with GTD) and I make quite a few of them. One of the most valuable lists I make is my top three priorities for the day.

I’ve long been an advocate of taking a moment every morning — after coffee, before email — to set my top three priorities down on paper or in pixels. This simple process that takes no more than ten minutes has had a consistently profound and positive effect on my productivity.

Why after coffee? Because part of my morning ritual is brewing coffee or steeping tea before I get down to the business of the day. This ritual is one of the highlights of my day, and it makes waking up at unreasonable hours that much easier.

And why before email? Because once you get into your inbox, you’ve handed over control of your schedule to other people, and priorities are about what you want on your agenda.

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The most productive thing you’ll do today is practice

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I wasn’t originally sold on the idea of blogging.

Even when I tried to get in the habit of posting, I found it hard to stick with. Blogging took time — time to write essays daily, put in links, clean up spam, and respond to the comments that trickled in, time that was uncompensated. Why, I wondered, would I take time away from paying assignments to put my work out there for free?

Even after my book, 168 Hours, came out in 2010, and I realized I needed to interact with readers, I still thought blogging was a side venture to my real writing. More days than not, I’d take 30-60 minutes to write a post and publish it, but I still viewed it more as a labor of love (or at least PR) than anything else.

Then something funny happened. About a year into daily blogging, I’d carve out time to write a draft of an essay for a newspaper or magazine. I’d give myself until lunch, but by 10:00, I’d be done.

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Video: John Cleese Discusses Innovation

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug

The hilariously creative John Cleese shares how interruptions and busyness are the biggest barriers standing in the way of innovation.

If you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day ticking things off your list, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.

His solution? Make boundaries of space and time.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

3 Reasons to Shut Up and Listen Well

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The way you listen is telling, a compass that points to the true focus of your attention. For good listeners, that needle points to the person talking. For bad listeners, that needle points to themselves.

The thing is that it’s really obvious. Great listening requires you to show that it’s happening, and that it’s happening sincerely. Much of that sincere communication comes down to lighting up to show “message received”. Instead, some people fall into a bad habit of putting on a show of listening, mumbling sounds of non-contextual agreement, or interrupting with “yes, but —”, or pretending to be attentive but mishearing everything.

Listening isn’t simply waiting for your turn to say something or show off your brilliance but engaging with what’s being said, building on it, reacting with thoughts and emotions, and showing that you understand or want to know more.

While the art of listening is touted in business, it’s rarely practiced. Bad listening is bad business, and here’s why:

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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!

 

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.

Take Charge Of Your Life

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When you are overwhelmed, overworked, and overinvested in maintaining the status quo – when you find yourself resisting change even though what you’re doing right now isn’t really working – that is a sign you are not fully in charge of your life. You are letting things happen to you by accident.

Lauren Bacon, on shifting gears, accepting discomfort, and living on purpose, not by accident.

Harness the Productivity Power of Automation

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All too often, to-do lists end up with more things to do and less things getting done. Humans are awful at completing lists. We often convince ourselves that we can complete our to-do list if we just buckle down and try harder.

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Yet tomorrow, or next week, or next month rolls around, and the list is just as bad as it has always been. Probably worse, if you are like me.

So when we found iDoneThis at Zapier it immediately clicked.

– No more over bearing to-do list? Check.
– Transparency into what everyone on the team is doing? Check.
– Email based? Check.
– Built-in motivation to do meaningful things each day? Check, again.

I loved it.

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Busyness is Not a Virtue

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People who often say they’re “too busy” or “crazy busy” sound like buzzing busy signals. And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you. My reaction to your busy signal is much like that of Mindy Kaling, who sees stress as non-conversation:

No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.”

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Likewise, going on about how busy you are isn’t conversation and doesn’t lead anywhere — except making your conversation partner bored, or worse, peeved. People who act super busy send the same message, making time spent with them never feel quite whole. Interestingly, I find that most people who are legitimately occupied — with their work, or family, or art, or what-have-you — rarely play the “too busy” card, or go out of their way to make time for meaningful connection exactly because they’ve been busy.

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