Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of the internets that we’ve shared this week!
How startups are killing off bosses.
Our Senior Engineer Mike Sun wrote about learning to scale an e-mail based app.
What’s Marc Andreessen’s trick to feeling marvelously productive?
Human Rescue Time!
How VHX uses iDoneThis and leads the video self-distribution revolution.
Advice on how to Network Your Face Off.
What leads to the beaten path?
Get ready for the week ahead by catching up with the best of the stuff we’ve shared this past week!
Gregory Ciotti’s fascinating guest post about the science behind energy management and how it improves your work!
How Wistia uses iDoneThis to get stuff done, the Wista way! Word.
How to deal with psychological fatigue and create more energy and positive momentum.
Finding meaning in your work isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Overcome the blech of unpleasant tasks by checking out these tips.
We live in a culture that seems obsessed with being productive.
While increasing our output and doing more with our time is certainly an admirable goal, according to Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, that misguided approach is actually liable to hurt your productivity.
How so?
Without real restoration and rejuvenation throughout the day, people (knowingly) hold themselves back because they are worried about “pacing” their energy to make it through the day.
This is incredibly damaging to your potential, because it distributes your efforts at 25% across your whole work day instead of reaching 90% output at the moments that correspond with your body’s naturally productive rhythms of alertness. The result is that you aren’t able to do your best work and you aren’t getting the rest you need to rejuvenate yourself either.
I know I’ve fallen into the trap of conventional thinking that to be productive, I just need to work harder. I spend more and more hours at the desk, but when I look back, I’m not sure where the time went.
To Schwartz, not being able to push yourself to 90% output without worry is the biggest impediment holding you back from being truly productive and producing your best work. True productivity is determined by better energy management rather than simply cranking out more hours at your desk.
How To Create Time:
1. Eliminate or reduce media.
2. Work offline.
3. Do less.
4. Don’t make appointments or schedule meetings.
5. Sleep in two shifts.
6. Make time less precious.
A growing body of research suggests that paying attention to the body clock, and its effects on energy and alertness, can help pinpoint the different times of day when most of us perform our best at specific tasks, from resolving conflicts to thinking creatively.
Sue Shellenbarger explores The Peak Time for Everything for WSJ.
Some takeaways: Nap around 2pm. Tired times make for better open-ended thinking. And retweeting chances increase between 3-6 pm.
Circadian and natural rhythms, and thus peak times for doing stuff, depend on the individual. Read on for some pretty interesting ideas on how to set your activity to your inner clock.
Thanks to a study by Japanese scientists at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, titled “The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus”, you can be guilt-free when looking at photos of ridiculously cute animals at work. Published in the journal, PLOS ONE, the study found that viewing photos … Read more
The schedules of some pretty productive people.
Lesson: amidst your hard work, don’t forget to eat well, exercise/take walks, and spend time with your peeps.
Also, I like Monsieur Flaubert’s idea of breakfast.
(via idlethink)
As any incredibly productive person will tell you, it boils down to knowing what your priorities are and systematically attacking your tasks with a focused mind. The one resource in the world that is common to millionaire CEOs and the average Joe is time.
We stumbled across this great tip and illustration of Stephen Covey’s time management matrix from the blog of an iDoneThis user, Eva.
Determining what your priorities are paves the road to getting stuff done in an order that makes sense!
Check out Eva’s Productivity Monday posts for more useful tips.
GetWorkDoneMusic is a webapp by Ryan Ghods that plays music to help you get your work done … fast, or faster. The mostly electronic music is randomly pulled from SoundCloud playlists, and you can replay tracks you like, or skip to the next one. What’s on your productivity playlist?
It’s how [exercise] make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more productive, more engaged and, yes, happier — better able to smell the roses and cope with the inevitable frustrations of daily life.
Jane E. Brody, NYT Well, “Changing Our Tune on Exercise”
Brody writes about how reframing the message of why we should exercise as improving current happiness and well-being is more motivating than using hard-to-see long-term goals like losing weight and prevented disease.
