Productivity

Have you ever had a brilliant idea? The one which seemed wonderful at a time, yet you weren’t motivated enough to make a note of it, or you genuinely had not a chance to jot it down? The regret of not acting immediately on such an idea is capable of causing a major nervous breakdown – simply because you will blame yourself for letting such an opportunity go.

I know I’ve had quite a few of such ideas lost forever, before I had finally decided to never let any of them go. After all, if there is only one brilliant idea I get in many years, I simply can’t afford losing the chance to be proud and successful it gives me!

What are the main reasons you let ideas go away?

For me, these reasons were the following:

• Not being able to write an idea down
  Your circumstances could be different, but for me this was the most limiting factor.Very often, I would list to some music while driving to and from work. Certain compositions might trigger a sudden sparkle of ideas in my mind, and I would usually feel really excited about it. Still, by the time I would arrive at the destination, walk up to my desk and get a moment to type, I would forget the idea and only the residual joy of having a bright idea would stay with me for a few minutes more.

  This is when I get both upset and irritated. Especially if I don’t remember anything about my idea at all. Somehow it would make it feel as if I let the greatest chance of my life go away. The thing is, if I can remember at least some part of the idea, it may be a relieve to realise it wasn’t such a great idea anyway. But when I don’t remember anything, it is very upsetting.

  I’ve narrowed this problem down to not being able to write my ideas down when I was driving my car. By the time I would enter my office, the idea would be lost. Quick change of the environment around you is bound to distract you from whatever it is you were thinking.

  So in situations like this, even a simple trick can make dramatic difference.

  For me it was getting the cheapest kind of a paper notepad with pencil, and putting them into the plastic door pocket in my car. Now, whenever I get a really good idea, I can always write it down if I’m parked, or if I’m not, I know that I won’t have to leave my car and risk forgetting the idea.

  I also make an effort to concentrate on the idea even more. Turn off the music, and start developing the idea – adding more possible features to it and looking for possible ways to make the idea even a greater one will help you remember it better. When I finally arrive, I don’t leave my car until the idea is written down. And if it needs be, I can always tear one of the notepad pages to take the important note with me and then put the task into my electronic ideas repository.

• Not seeing the value of the idea
  This is another very common reason for discarding some really great ideas. Remember: if you have identified a particular flow of thinking as a separate idea, you need to make a note of it.Some ideas are never meant to be easy-to-understand. They’re just not as obvious as some other ideas of yours. This doesn’t mean they’re wrong or useless. All it really means is that you have to save such ideas and review them in a few days (weeks) time. By that time, you’ll likely to have thought up and written down many more ideas, and who knows what meaning and value the original idea would have then!
• Letting an idea go because you think it is stupid
  However small or worthless it may seem, you have to write your idea down and give it a proper thought at a later time.I’ve found it most useful to write down anything which comes up when I’m thinking on a particular subject, and later (usually in the evening) I spend 10-15 minutes just to scan through all the notes and use the most appealing ideas.
• Not being able to identify the use for an idea
  Your idea doesn’t have to be immediately useful or applicable piece of knowledge!Just write it down now, and analyze it later. You’ll thank yourself many times for doing so.

  It is very common that the best ideas come unexpected, and seem irrelevant to the topic you’re trying to think of. That’s okay! Take the note, and you can classify the idea later!

Write your every idea down

Get into the habit of writing your ideas down. Make it one of your first steps towards a really successful life. Never let your ideas go, because:

• this way, you will never feel like you’ve lost the greatest opportunityThere is nothing worse than feeling regret for the rest of your life simply because you haven’t written some idea down. It could be a silly one, too – but it’s the fact that you don’t know this for sure that will make feel like you’ve lost something
• making notes of every idea will greatly improve your chances for success
  
  Not all the ideas have to be successful. Think about it: all it will take to make you successful is just one great idea.Many inventors came up with hundreds of absolutely useless ideas. They invented stuff which made no sense even to themselves, let alone others. Yet, they meticulously documented every experiment of theirs, every tiny detail and though they had. They kept trying, until one day all the pieces came together, and great discoveries and inventions were made.
• you will become more organized
  Making notes of every idea will get you into a habit of reviewing all the ideas quickly and spotting good ideas right away. This will allow you to immediately pay more attention to them, without having to come back later with a proper analysis.

For all the ideas you come up with, there’s a rule of thumb: save them. Write them down, and even if you never feel like analyzing these idea, that’s okay. Someday you’ll read one of them accidentally while looking for some other useful information, and you’ll be shocked at how much sense it will make to you.

Learn the habit of writing every idea down. It could be a short phrase or even a word, but if it inspired or interested you for even a second, write it down immediately. This way, you will never let an idea go, and who knows, maybe one of your ideas will be the greatest discovery of tomorrow?

As you could probably guess from my previous articles, I like plain things and simple approaches. I don’t think there is any benefit in making our lives even more complicated than they already are. And because of this, I’m always looking for new ways to make tasks even easier to accomplish, and things even simpler to deal with.

Today I’d like to talk about some of the incredibly simple tips I use daily for creative writing. Now that I think about it, these tip are good for any kind of writing, really.

 

 

In any kind of activity, you have to find the state of mind where you’re not only committed, but also fully focused on your task. With writing, it’s very important to feel comfortable. Lots of factors will affect your level of comfort, and in this article I’d like to share the factors I found most important for myself. Hopefully, they will help you get more productive too.

• Clean and tidy workplace
  As simple as this factor looks, it’s one of the most important ones for you. If you’re working in your home office, make sure your desk is as clean as possible. It should also be free from any unnecessary objects. Tidying your desk before you start any work is going to pay off, so never hesitate to spend a minute or two doing this before you start working. Put books on shelves and paper notes into paper trays (I’ve got 3 trays for GTD, so when in doubt I just put the miscellaneous paper notes into the “In” tray).
• Quietness or comfortable music background
  It’s highly arguable whether you should leave any music playing at all, so you’ll have to find what works for you best yourself. I’m definitely seeing improvements when I switch from songs to instrumental compositions – when you stop hearing words you concentrate on your task much easier. Find what’s most comfortable for you. I find it best to switch working environment – one day I’ll try writing an article or two in our bedroom, with no music at all. On another day, I’ll listen to some instrumental music while working in my home office. On yet another day I could enjoy the softness of a leather sofa in our living room and listen to some music with my iPod. See what works for you.
• 45 minutes of time
  This is something I’ve started doing only recently myself. Plan for your creativity time. Put it in your calendar and make arrangements with your family that you’re going to have at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to yourself and your thinking and writing.I can’t stress enough the dramatic difference this simple tip will make! When you have nothing else planned for the time and you’re not distracted with other tasks, your productivity level increases and you get into the creative state which makes writing a much easier task.

  Don’t forget to get rid of your mobile. I leave it in another room and ask my wife to answer all the call while I’m writing.

• Go full-screen
  If you have gone as far as booking the time for your writing, you might as well take it just one step further: close all the programs running on your PC, so that you don’t get distracted by your instant messenger program or an incoming email. You can close practically everything, but pay special attention to those applications with built-in notifications – you don’t want any of their reminders popping up while you’re writing.Go full-screen in your favourite text editor, and get rid of all the toolbars. Try and make it all configured so that there’s only your text and nothing else on your screen.

  You can go full-screen in MS Word or Writer from OpenOffice, and few tweaks and settings will help you get a very comfortable full-screen mode. Make sure you go away from the classical “white background-black text” color scheme, as it’s not the most relaxing one possible. Find your combination, if your editor is flexible enough. If it is not, then simply go for ANYTHING different – like white text on blue background in MS Word – feels MUCH better for your eyes.

  Here are the things I’ve done in my MS Word to minimize distractions:

  1. changed the color scheme to “white text on blue background” (Tools–>Options menu, General tab)
  2. got rid of rulers (View->Ruler option)
  3. changed the scale to “page width”
  4. switched to a full screen (View->Full screen)

  After all these steps, there’s only a blue page for your wonderfully white text lines, plus a tiny yet terribly annoying “Full screen” toolbar. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to completely get rid of it; no matter what I did, it would try and get docked to one of the side panels. So if you know a workaround for this – I would really appreciate it if you told me!

Try applying these tips for a few days, and I’m sure you will see your writing productivity, concentration and even creativity levels go up! And as always, if there are any writing productivity tips you feel like sharing, please let me know!

Believe it or not, action shelving is a technique you’re definitely familiar with. You may have used it only a few times and even then did it unconsciously, but you should recognize the concept once I explain it in more details.

Cherish your concentration

In anything you do, your success heavily depends on how  focused and concentrated you are.  It takes a lot of effort on your part to maintain the focus while processing pages and tables of information, and you probably know yourself the frustration you experience when suddenly distracted or interrupted in the middle of such a task. You grow frustrated because you know it will take you some time to get back into the focused state.

It is important to realise though, that concentration isn’t simply a state of mind and a result of your interest in the subject, but it is also your ability to isolate the task you’re working on from all the rest. Concentration is getting into a state where you pay attention only to things important for accomplishing a given task.

Just think about it: when you’re trying to concentrate on something, what do you experience? Usually you keep thinking about the subject and focusing on the task until all the other things and subjects around you and in your mind start slowly fading away.  And when the right balance is reached and your brain finally finds the level of background thinking noise acceptably low, you see and feel yourself fit for the process – you feel focused and concentrated on just the task you need to be working on, you feel organized and motivated.

Get rid of distractions

The more productive you become in any aspect of your life, the more you will notice that there is a direct correlation between your levels of commitment and focus on a task and how successfull your accomplishments are. And ultimately this brings you to realising once again how vital it is to get rid of distractions before approaching any given task.

For example, do you find it much easier to work when your workplace is nice and tidy? When you have only the essential tools on your desk, and none of your post-it notes or books or pencils scattered all over it?

This is because by tidying your desk you’re effectively getting rid of distractions. You’re physically removing all the things which can distract you even by accident, and by doing this you’re limiting your concentration options to only subjects you’ll be working on.

I have worked out a habit of tidying my workplace every week. It happens so naturally and quickly, that I really don’t mind doing it. Instead, every time I do it, I just feel how much easier it makes any task I will be working on, how much clearer my vision of the positive outcome will be, and all this motivates me a lot.

Action shelving: remove the complexity

Do you ever think about why we like using shelves for storing things? We have many reasons for doing so, but among the most obvious and important ones are:

The same principles work in many other areas, including the one I’m talking about right now.

Action shelving is how I call an organizing approach which makes sure you split any activity or complex task of yours into flat levels of simple and easy to follow steps. Action shelving ensures that no action on your list has any unknown implementation steps.

The idea is really simple: it is in human nature to be afraid of anything unknown. Although it is possible to train yourself overcome such fears and even work out a positive approach to everything unknown, it requires a lot of effort on your part and there is no way to guarantee the positive outcome in such a training.

With complex projects, the fear of unknown implementation steps slows you down. You may not necessarily notice it, but unknown things in your plan affect the way you think about the project and the way you plan tackling it. As long as there is at least one absolutely unknown step in your plan, any task will seem much bigger than it really is.

Just remember now, how often did you have tasks which seemed scarily complicated  at the beginning, and then somehow turned out to be ridiculously trivial to accomplish? This is simply because some elements of these tasks were unknown to you at the beginning of the project, and slowed you down. Once you had progressed enough with other steps of the task to learn more details about the unknown part, you realised how simple this part is, and quickly got it sorted.

Action shelving is thus a proactive approach of asking necessary questions about various parts of any complex task to ensure the simplicity of every step you put down on your implementation plan.

You should apply action shelving few times during any project: right at the very beginning, to ensure a quick and powerful start; somewhere in the middle of the project, to ensure you’re still moving in the right direction and to also get a clear vision of what your next actions should be; and at the very end of implementing a project – to effectively build a flat and easy-to-follow structure of the outcomes and goals of the project. Not only will this help you concentrate better on each of the goals, but it will also make it easier to see when you reach a particular goal.

Just wanted to give you all a quick update on my attempts to break away from an awful habit of checking e-mails every 10 minutes, which I’ve briefly stated in my recent Reclaim Your Time! article.

It’s now been just over a week, and I already see that this experiment was a success:

1. Discipline
   I’m now reading my e-mails only at 9:30, 12:30 and 15:30. There are no exceptions, and there wasn’t a single day when I failed to accomplish anything planned for the day due to a postponed e-mail session.
2. Productivity
   I definitely gained productivity – and it clearly shows in my daily planner, cause I’m constantly getting more and more things done on any given day.
   I also enjoy larger periods of time when I’m fully focused and concentrated on a particular task or just read some documentation. Until recently, all these things were quite possible, but required an additional effort on my part. Why try harder, if the same amount of things can be done in a smarter and relaxed way? ;)
3. Joy
   I’m definitely enjoying myself more, firstly because of the successfull experiment I’m going through, and secondly because I’ve actually managed to reclaim time just like I was going to.
4. Better organization of my day
   Not only I’m learning to align all the e-mail related activities to the designated times, but I’ve also learned to use these times as planning tools. In the morning, I can decide on a pattern for the day, for instane, read e-mail at 9:30 and immediately after this get something done. Some things may not necessarily have been dealt with in time if they were not attached to some simple action like reading e-mails.

That’s about it for the moment. I’m sure I’ll write a summary article on this experiment few weeks later, but even now I can see it’s been one of the best ideas I’ve chosen to follow through.

A natural step in my personal development and self-improvement is concentrating on the things that really matter to me, and reclaiming the time I currently spend on things which are not important at all. I mean, wouldn’t it be so much better to spend your time on things you like, enjoy a company of your family, or simply bring more value to others, instead of wasting precious time doing things which are much less important to you? This article will show you my approach to increasing my productivity and reclaiming my spare time.

Find out what activities require a regular commitment

This is the first step towards reclaiming your time. You’ve got to find out what is it that you’re required to do on a regular basis. Some things, you will be surprised enough to find out, are not required to be done at all, yet you’re following a habitual pattern and do them anyway.

Like with so many things, the Pareto Principle can be applied to finding the time parasites as I call them. In context of the search for things which regularly take up your time, you will most likely realise that 20% of your tasks would be consuming (wasting, if you take a closer look at some of them) 80% of your time. This means that if you find only a few of the major offenders, you’ll be able to reclaim a substantial amount of your time by changing very little – like consciously fighting one of your bad habits, etc.

For example, I haven’t been entirely happy about my e-mail processing habits. Not only have I got a habit of replying to almost every e-mail very quickly, but I’ve also gotten into the terrible pattern of checking my e-mail almost every 10 minutes. A quick research has shown that I’m by no means alone with such e-mail problems – Dave Lorenzo has recently been reporting his progress in fighting e-mail patterns in his Making The Most Out of E-mail article.

Now, it doesn’t really take you this long to check your e-mail, it could be done in just a few seconds. But the real damage is done not through wasting my time, but through distraction from other activities. If I’m working on some task, like writing a document or  reading through some technical manual, or simply working on some problem, it is best solved with my full attention.

And every now and then there are these moments when it’s slightly harder to maintain your focus – I could be stuck with a problem not seeing what to do next, or I could be taking some time to analyze the command output I’m seeing on the screen – it could be anything, really. But during these moments it’s very easy to get distracted, cause you’re in some kind of suspended mode – not very focused at all. It is during these moment that you can be tempted to switch the task and do something else “for a change”. Now, please don’t mix these moments of weakness with powerful and conscious multitasking – it’s very different.

Now, what happens is that I start checking my e-mail, and even if there’s nothing new there, I’m still going to be distracted enough that it’s going to take me some time to fully focus on the original task again. And that’s the real damage I’m talking about.

Make a decision to reclaim your time

Once you’ve come up with the list of things you think are taking too much of your time, it’s time to build a strategy. You need to make a decision to stop spending more than a certain amount of your time for a certain activity. If you want to make it easier, write your decision down somewhere – when written, it automatically becomes a very powerful commitment, and it will help you stay conscious and focused when fighting your habits or behavioural patterns.

In my case, I’ve decided to change my e-mail patterns completely. Instead of constantly checking my various e-mail boxes, I’m now checking my e-mail only few times during a day, and plan e-mail-related activities to happen during the designated periods of time only. I’ve made a decision to do so, and I’m documenting all my attempts to break the old pattern and adopt a new.

Generally, you want to find as many ways to optimize your time, as possible. One great idea I’ve got from Peter Kua in his Triple Your Free Time article, for instance, is that you have to make free time a goal, and plan for it!

Sometimes this will involve giving bad habits up, in other cases this will be a radical change in your approach to a certain task, and obviously this will require more  discipline from you. Steve Pavlina did a great job sharing his thoughts on this in his Do It Now article, which I consider to be one of his most influential posts.

Stick to the plan. Enjoy your results!

It’s been a couple days for me fighting my e-mail patterns, and I must say I’m thrilled with both the general feelings and the results I have. It wasn’t hard at all to wait for the agreed times of the day to read and write e-mails. Once you have a plan, it’s easier to see that it’s not really so hard to follow through.

Secondly, it was great to see that nothing critical went wrong because I’ve changed the pattern. This confirmed that my plan was reasonable, and reassured me of the positive change I’m fighting for.

What’s left now is to make sure I stick to the plan and confirm the new pattern to be the only way of processing e-mails. Once I’ve done this, in just few weeks times, I’ll be able to move onto a next time consuming task to optimize or even get rid of.

I encourage you try the same: reclaim your time now, and you’ll be amazed how easy it is!