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The 15 Best Productivity Podcasts of 2021

July 21, 2021 by Paige Picard 3 Comments

**This post has been updated with new podcast suggestions for 2021**

Listening to the best productivity podcasts are a great way to spend your downtime. With the average commute time in the United States at 25.4 minutes, a podcast can fit perfectly within that time frame. Rather than tuning out to the same playlist you hear every day, tune into a podcast — specifically about productivity.

Below is a list of the 15 best productivity podcasts to listen to in 2021

Without further ado, here is our list of the best productivity podcasts that will teach you the tips and tools needed to better manage your time so you can get more done each day.

Changing Your Mind Should Be a Process, Not a Reflex

March 23, 2021 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

A background of trees with the words "the only way to grow is to change your mind" superimposed over it

Changing your mind doesn’t have to be impulsive or accidental; you can purposefully choose to put your beliefs to the test too. First, decide what your most fiercely held beliefs are. Then, throw your very best arguments against them until you believe something else. Going out of your way to change your mind in this way is the key to growth. As physicist Richard Feynman explained: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” He also said, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong.” The more you challenge your beliefs, the more accurate they will be, leading you to make better choices. This is the larger benefit changing your mind offers, but there are many more. Continue Reading

A Scientific Guide to Summoning Your Creative Juices

February 22, 2021 by Blake Thorne 4 Comments

Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday, and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter.
“Concentrate!” you’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day, you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawn mower and the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down. Wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly . . . light bulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices and the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

3 Ways Productivity Increases When You Take Control of Your Health

December 18, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Productivity increases when you realize that “productivity” isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect of being a healthy and happy person.

That means the root of the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, but the certainty that we’re human beings and we run out of energy. Our bodies shut down when they’re not treated properly—as do our minds, our motivation, and our productivity.

We’re going to offer a few tips on how to prioritize your health, boost your workplace productivity—and do it all without going completely bonkers.

200 Business Applications For Your Relationship Stack

July 16, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Our relationships with customers are more complex than ever before.

Conversations start months before a purchase and continue for months afterwards. Our interactions span dozens of channels, from phone calls to email to live chat. Increasingly, customers have no single point of contact: marketers, sellers, developers, and support reps all influence our customer relationships.

In the Relationship Era, companies can no longer rely on all-in-one sales suites, and have to provide flexible technology that teams can leverage in any department: Marketing, Sales, Success, Operations, Finance, Creative, Account Management, and more. This has forced the need for every company to build their own relationship stack: a toolkit of specialized, best-in-class applications.

To help you get started on your own relationship stack, we’re showcasing 200 of the most customer-centric sales, marketing and operations products going — each designed to create truly remarkable customer experiences.

25 Jason Fried Quotes That Will Make You More Productive

July 12, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of people out there trying to sell you simple solutions to productivity, as well as their advice, usually involving their latest book, podcast, or video series. They might not be millionaires, but they’ve found the secret to making millions — order now! Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp — a company that makes project management and communication software — is different. Fried is honest about what it takes to get work done and keep your sanity while doing it. He’s the author of several books, including It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work; Rework; and Remote: Office Not Required. Fried has earned the trust of many because of his straightforward takes on productivity and the unhealthy sacrifices some people make in an attempt to get more done. If you want to work smarter, not harder, listen to Jason Fried. Here are 25 of his best quotes on productivity, focus, and decision-making.

(Source) Continue Reading

How to Do a Time and Motion Study to Make Real Change

December 18, 2018 by Matthew Stibbe 3 Comments

The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

As 2019 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses or any idea of what they’re going to do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they feel they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes.

Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker, Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency.

This is where the personal time and motion study can help.

7 Lessons on Survivorship Bias that Will Help You Make Better Decisions

July 24, 2018 by Walker Donohue 2 Comments

Everyone loves a survivor.

We love watching movies like Gladiator, where a muscular Russell Crowe stands tall after defeating wave after wave of enemies.

Sometimes, however, we concentrate on the fact of surviving and fixate on that, and overlook everything else. This is a well known cognitive bias that psychologists refer to as “survivorship bias.”

Put simply, survivorship bias describes our tendency to focus on the people or things that have passed some kind of selection process—whether it’s literal survival in the gladiator pits, or getting a perfect score on a standardized test—and forgetting about other important factors.

Survivorship bias explains why people often believe that cars that were made 50 years ago last longer than those made today—even though these ideas are empirically false. The problem with falling prey to survivorship data is that it clouds your judgment and distracts you from getting to the root cause of a problem within your personal life, your team, or your product. It makes it easy to pattern-match and conflate correlation with causation.

Understanding survivorship bias and how it can cloud your judgment is the key to becoming a sharper, more critical thinking. That can lead to better team-decision making, building a more cohesive product, or making data-driven decisions like a scientist. Let’s walk through some examples!

How to Sync Items from a Kanban Board to your Daily Standup

September 5, 2017 by Cody Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Kim Kadiyala, Partnership Manager at Zapier.

A daily status update is only as helpful as it is complete. If your team struggles to log their dones, goals, and blockers, rest assured you’re not alone.

But if you’re using a project management tool like Asana, Trello, or Basecamp to take care of your team tasks and deadlines, it’s a safe bet that the tasks in your project workspace are the same tasks mentioned in your daily standups. Syncing those tasks from your project directly to your daily stand-up entry could help eliminate the manual effort needed to prep for the meeting.

Sound interesting? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to connect your project tasks directly to your I Done This standup entry, powered by app automation platform Zapier. The best part? It takes just a few minutes to set up these automated workflows and no coding knowledge is required.

Stop Information Overload and Treating Your Mind Like a Filing Cabinet

June 21, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina 1 Comment

In the SaaS startup world, there’s always a push towards self-improvement. Every employee tries to learn, memorize, and have working knowledge of everything even loosely associated with their role in the company.

But unlike the tools we work with, we’re not super-computers and we often face information overload. Our brains aren’t designed to soak up, process, and store all the information that we encounter. Ironically, in order to retain more, we actually have to absorb less. You have to be selective about what you put your mind to.

information overload

You have a limited amount of mental resources, so you have to free up some of that space by outsourcing. Here’s how.