Productivity
Give Yourself a Break
If you’ve set goals or made plans and haven’t exactly followed through on them, give yourself a break. Beating yourself up isn’t going to deliver your achievement.
There are all kinds of reasons why progress slows down and sometimes comes to a stop. Maybe your immune system is lowered by the cold and flu season or because of extra stress in your life. Maybe you’re going through a challenge or transition and you have less energy than normal.
You could power through the fatigue and stress – for a while. Eventually your body will overrule your ambition and you’ll find yourself with less energy and strength than you had in the first place.
Instead of blaming yourself for not powering through your body’s requirement for rest, you could choose to accept it. It is only a temporary phase, after all. You could choose to acknowledge what is happening: “I am tired and have less energy. I need extra rest.” Then, you could allow yourself a break while you regain your strength.
This is not laziness. It is demonstrating self-awareness and self-value by placing your health among your highest priorities.
You may have created a deadline in your mind, or hoped for an achievement by a certain timeline. However, your body has its own reactions to your external environment, and its own ways of gauging what your mental, physical and emotional status is.
As a personal example, early this autumn I hired an editor to refine my manuscript. When she sent back her recommendations, I was excited and planned to finally finish my book within a month. Then my cat died, my business demanded extra attention and I had unexpected stressful events to deal with.
I wanted to work on my book. I’m so far past the time when I thought it would be published that I’m embarrassed when people ask me if it is available for purchase yet. Despite my wants and my ego, I decided to listen to my body when it told me I needed a break. I cut back on my obligations, slept a lot more, and stopped thinking about my book.
Two and a half months went by – not my ego’s timeline, but my body’s. Then I was ready to pick up my manuscript again.
As it turns out, putting it aside for a while made editing easier than in the past. I looked at my writing with a fresh perspective. I came up with a method of giving myself a small editing assignment each day that followed the same pattern. I keep a running list of each assignment on a piece of notebook paper and write “done” next to each task when I’m finished. Then I jot down the next assignment.
I wonder how much better my editing is now than if I had tried to force myself to do it when my mind and my energy weren’t ready?
I hope that you are full of good health and making progress in the areas of your life that make you happy. If not, maybe it is time for a break. A break without self-judgment or letting your ego make you feel disappointed. Maybe it is time for a healthy, restful break that you will emerge from better than ever.
Why I’m Not Planning For The Year Ahead and Using My Three Best Productivity Tips Instead
Each December and January I receive dozens of emails from productivity experts, and coaches and authors who write books about how to achieve your goals. They each recommend a system for setting goals for the new year ahead.
Last year I sifted through these choices and decided to use a comprehensive Word document planner. As I wrote my answers to the questions provided, I listed the focus areas of my life, my values, what I care about, how I want to feel and the skills I enjoy using. Then I made a table in my word document and listed my goals in the first column. Then I matched each of the other areas that I’d identified (values, what I care about, etc) with that particular goal.
Then I identified how I use each hour of the day vs. how I want to use each hour of the day, how I will work towards achieving my goals in each month of the year, and on and on. The entire document was eight pages. I was very serious about it, and it took me three days to complete it.
And then I never looked at it again until I opened the file to start writing this blog post.
Almost immediately after I completed the planning document, I regretted that I wasted three days planning out my year instead of getting to work on the projects that I already know are most important to me. I didn’t need to list them on paper.
As I look back at the year that has past, that planning document didn’t help me at all.
Most of my goals turned out just fine. I launched my consulting company and am happy with the results of my first year in business. I took care of my health and my relationships. I launched my blog.
However my biggest goal was also my greatest challenge throughout the year: editing my book and preparing it for publication. The challenges are that it takes intense focus, a block of time to get my head into the work, energy and alertness, and what is often the toughest part: making my way to my office chair to open the document and get to work. Although I worked on it throughout the year, I’m frustrated that I still don’t have an agent-ready manuscript.
This year I am not filling out any annual planning worksheets or setting goals beyond using the best techniques that helped me move my book forward.
In order of the success I had with them, my tips for achieving goals are:
- Creating the smallest habit possible and then committing to repeating it every single day no matter what. For me, this was opening my word document and editing one sentence every day. Making the commitment was enough, but I sometimes used “The Chain Habit”, where you mark on a calendar each day that you complete your goal.
- Allowing other people to push you forward. This isn’t always pleasant. It can feel a little like bullying. But nudges from other people got me to reach out to the one editor that I wanted to work with. She accepted my project and I was thrilled with her edits and suggestions.
- Using self-talk to motivate yourself. Most of us learned in science class that a body in motion is likely to stay in motion and a body at rest is likely to stay at rest. So when I feel inertia, I tell myself that I just have to get started by opening my word doc. Once I get started, everything will be easier.
Whether you enjoy creating detailed plans for the year ahead or reject the whole concept, I wish you the best of luck in achieving your goals this year.
Clearing Your Mailbox Reveals Where You’re Stuck
Yesterday was one of those hectic days when I juggled meetings, appointments and phone calls while my most important task didn’t get addressed until evening. I owed a new client a document that I was excited to work on. I could have approached the project many different ways, and all day long it was in the back of my mind.
Yet when I finally finished my meetings and had time to focus on the document, I did something else first: I cleaned out my mailbox.
I didn’t just deploy the Clean Up feature – I spent an hour overhauling Outlook. I already had a good folder system in place, but was bogged down by hundreds of old mails. By the time I finished, I’d deleted over 600 mails, archived folders that I didn’t want to see anymore, and realized that cleaning out a mailbox can reveal a lot.
Emails that you want to keep but haven’t filed reveal the topics that don’t fit neatly into the rest of your life. Email you haven’t responded to shows what you’re avoiding.
Are you ever going to reread those old articles or click again on the links to interesting websites? If not, it is time to let them go. But if those emails are full of tips that you can use, or ideas for your business then it is time to make a new folder for “Tips” or “Business Ideas”.
Cleaning out my mailbox showed me where I was stuck. When I was finished I felt lighter and energized, like I had freed up wasted space in my mind. I believe visual clutter leads to mental clutter whether the clutter is physical or virtual bits of data clogging up your PC.
When I finally started working on my client’s document, I quickly decided how to approach it and the project flowed smoothly. This afternoon the client told me I’d exceeded his expectations. That’s one of the best compliments I can hope for as a consultant.
I’m going to remember this the next time I want to have a clear, focused mind to start a new project. The first step will be to create space for it.
Clear inbox, clear mind
Fear is a Powerful Motivator
Last weekend I went to a monthly creativity group meeting that I’ve belonged to for about a year. We do fun little art and writing projects that stimulate creative thinking and help get past blocks.
At this meeting, the facilitator gave us a piece of paper with a quote from Jill Badonsky on it. Part of it read, “Many of us think we need to push and pressure ourselves in order to reach goals, and we ruthlessly call ourselves names without much regard to what this is doing to that little spirit inside of us that’s in charge of much of our creativity.”
I don’t call myself names, but when it comes to working on my manuscript I think I do need to pressure myself. I’ve written before about how much I struggle to make progress on my book. For my entire life I’ve been driven to achieve every goal I’ve set, and just plugged away at it until I was done. Until I started writing a book. And it drives me nuts.
At first I established a goal of writing every day, but I ended up with more poetry than book content. I made more progress when I decided to write at least one book sentence each day. Then I used Nanowrimo to push to 50,000 words. And finally I set and achieved the goal of finishing my first draft by the end of 2013.
Since then, I’ve been struggling with my rewrites. I love editing other people’s work, but when it comes to my own, it is so damn hard.
I don’t hate it. It’s more like being afraid of it.
Writing first thing in the morning helps. Eating well and exercising helps. The momentum from the chain habit worked very well for about 100 pages, but after I got sick and broke it, it was easy for me to break it again when I went on vacation last week. And since I’ve been home, I haven’t gotten back into a routine yet.
Part of the challenge is that my revisions take a different type of energy and brainpower than I’m used to using. I have to get my head into my topic without distraction and stay there, laser focused, until I have an idea of what needs to change. The changes might be moving paragraphs from one place to another, filling out a skimpy section, or trying to write a smooth transition sentence. Sometimes I stare at what I’ve written and I know it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all. But I don’t know how to fix it.
My most useful tactic in the past for achieving my goals was simple: I just kept working on it until I was finished. No obstacle was insurmountable. But with my book, I can stare at a page and not know what to do. This can go on for days.
Then I go to my two-sided writing hell, where on one fiery wall of doom are the parts of my book that I don’t know how to fix and on the other is a flaming mass of pressure to just finish the damn thing.
Last night I finally had enough of carrying around the feeling of fear in my chest and decided that today would be better. I got up and started writing this post. I still have to work on my book, an article and some consulting work, but I am determined to channel that tension into productivity.
I would much rather be propelled by positive energy, but I’m not alone. Lots of people are motivated by fear. On Tuesday night I listed to a TED Radio Hour show about Diana Nyad, who at age 64 swam 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. It took her 53 hours and was her fifth attempt.
On top of being cold and exhausting, there were sharks and poisonous jelly fish. But Guy Ross, who was interviewing her, noted, “It seems like you were more scared of not making it.”
Nyad answered, “Bingo…I think the fear of failure is a stronger motivator than any other fear.”
Then I read an article about Robert Kirkman, the writer of The Walking Dead comics. He said he sets an unrealistic goal each day, like writing 12 pages, and then when he is only able to complete half of that he has a “crushing sense of failure”. Then the next day he works harder to make up for missing the deadline.
So that’s where I’m at today. Working harder to make up for the progress that I didn’t make over the last ten days. And feeling surprisingly unafraid.
I Broke the Chain and Lived to Tell About It
I broke the chain! The chain habit, that is. I didn’t do my daily goal of one blog sentence, one book sentence on June 30th or July 1st. And there was no earthquake, as I feared would happen if I broke the chain, although it was ungodly hot in Seattle on the 1st day of July. Not my fault! I don’t think….
I fully expected to repeat the chain until my book was finally finished or I died, whichever came first. But I got the stomach flu in the early hours of June 30th, and that was it.
I’m not even upset about it. I started recovering and picked up where I left off. Better, perhaps, because I got a lot more writing done today than I did any other day in June.
It was a tough month. I hurt my wrist from overusing a standard mouse and keyboard instead of my ergonomic ones. Then when I tried to limit my wrist movements when using my computer, I activated an old carpal tunnel injury.
That meant weekly trips to the physical therapist and acupuncturist and as little time on my PC as possible. It also meant that my regular yoga practice was disrupted since I couldn’t put weight on my wrist. I went to a few classes but ended up doing more watch-asanas than practicing and stopped going. So I wasn’t exercising like I usually do, and that made me feel sluggish.
Then my poor cat got sick and lost 15% of his already tiny body weight. At first I thought it was stress because we’ve had a lot of upheaval on the home front lately, but the vet diagnosed hyperthyroidism.
Add to that planning a two and a half week trip to Italy, finishing my biggest consulting project and bidding on a series of new ones, and it was a long, challenging month.
Through all of that, I still accomplished my daily chain goals. Even on my worst day, when I was exhausted and everything seemed to go wrong, I completed two sentences before I went to bed.
On many days in June, two sentences were all I did. So even though I kept the chain going, I wasn’t making much progress. I comforted myself with the thought that some forward movement was better than none.
And then the flu.
My relentless determination met its match and in a way, I’m glad I broke the chain. I was getting by on the minimum and now I’ve had to reset and start over fresh.
So my little calendar has two days with no checkmarks. That’s ok. I’m back on my feet and neither Milo nor I have vomited in four days. Italy hotels are booked. My right arm is strapped with arm and wrist braces that make me look like a futuristic gladiator, but I can type without wincing. And maybe even yoga tomorrow.
People underestimate the importance of their work environments
Is it just me, or does anyone else find a picture of a person with their laptop and their feet in the sand disturbing? The glare from the sun, specks of sand getting on the keyboard, wind and bugs. And why not get your work done first and then go outside on the beach?
I’ve heard people say to knowledge workers, “you should be able to work anywhere.”
Sometimes this is said to employees who sit in ugly, gray cubicles with bad lighting and lots of noisy distractions. Or to temps and consultants who are asked to be productive in cramped vendor bays with six other workers and slivers of desk space, with chairs and desks that don’t adjust in height. One team that I worked with asked a vendor to do his work from a table squeezed in a narrow hallway until the fire marshal said he had to move.
It is true that you can take your laptop anywhere with a wireless connection and be able to send email, and work on documents, spreadsheets and PowerPoints. But there’s more to it than that.
I’ve met many consultants, writers and entrepreneurs who love to work out of coffee shops. Some of them hunker down in their favorite café, day after day, until they are so familiar with the staff and other regulars that they are almost like coworkers.
Other people I know – the writers especially – have a series of hangouts that they’ll visit throughout the day. They’ll write for a couple of hours at one spot, then move to the next.
For me, my home office is the best place for me to work. I constantly refer to the marked up printed pages of my manuscript on my bookshelf. The sticky notes that outline my chapters are in rows on my filing cabinet. Each time I make a change to the order or content of each chapter, I update the notes. Technically, these things are paper and I could move them from place to place. Psychologically they’re the structure of my book and I need them in order and easy to reach.
For my consulting work, I also have hard copies of files that I refer to frequently. I have headphones for conference calls, a smart card reader, backup drives and my printer/scanner. Plus, an ergonomic mouse, keyboard and footrest. Anyone who’s had carpal tunnel, tennis elbow or wrist injuries from overusing a regular keyboard and mouse will understand how non-trivial these things are. Non-trivial and not very portable.
Beyond the physical elements that make me productive in my own office, there is the benefit of a consistent routine. When I sit down at my desk, my brain knows it is time to get to work. It’s where I’m able to focus most consistently and repeatedly, day after day.
So while technically it is possible to work almost anywhere with a laptop and wireless connection, how effective is it? And more importantly, do you want to?
Employee Stress vs. Entrepreneur Stress
I had stress when I worked a full-time corporate job. I have stress now. What’s the difference?
Corporate stress came from unrealistic workloads, office politics and being asked to participate in business decisions that I disagreed with. Working in a stressful environment is like breathing in low levels of poisonous air every day. It won’t kill you all at once. It is a long, slow decline.
Entrepreneur stress is completely different. It is the flip side of the positives parts of working on my own. It comes from the pressure I put on myself to spend more time on my projects. It’s learning Quickbooks and all kinds of marketing and operational tasks that I used to have corporate resources to help me execute. It’s the uncertainty of not having a scripted career path.
This kind of stress is much easier to live with. I can decide how many hours to spend on my business and writing projects. I can outsource tasks that aren’t my strong points and that I don’t enjoy doing. I can tame my thoughts when I worry.
All stress is not created equal.
Making Progress
I recently completed my first month of the Chain Habit. It was so easy that I wish I started a long time ago. It’s as simple as making a commitment to take a specific action every day, no matter what. My commitments are “one book sentence, one blog sentence.” Small and achievable.
Admittedly, some days are easier than others. My best days are when I get out of bed around 6AM and get right to work on revising my manuscript or writing a blog post. Other days, like yesterday, I feel such resistance that I didn’t open my word document until late in the evening. I’m working on a chapter about being financially prepared before quitting a job, and the individual topics aren’t flowing together easily. All day instead of working on this chapter, I imagined myself staring at the pages, not knowing how to fix them. It was overwhelming.
That reluctance carried over into everything on my to-do list. I felt immobilized all day, unsure of which project or task to work on from one moment to the next. I didn’t feel like doing anything, yet was propelled by anxiety to do something. Finally, at 9:30PM last night, I opened my word document and worked on my manuscript. I deleted some sentences, moved paragraphs around, and created a completely new worksheet to help people estimate their current and future expenses. Progress.
Revising my manuscript isn’t the hardest thing I’ve done – not even close. I like the process of editing. In fact I recently revised two bulky process documents as part of my consulting work, and enjoyed doing it.
You know what the hard part of reworking my book is? Sitting in my chair, opening my word document and doing it. Finding the inner motivation is the hard work.
As I mentioned, it’s easier when I get started first thing in the morning. It also helps when I take a piece of notepaper and write down what I want to accomplish the night before. And receiving a compliment about my writing is often enough to make me stop whatever else I’m doing and start working on my book or a blog post. Is that a character flaw that external praise makes me get to work? I don’t care if it gets one more page out of me.
As an aside, I took Samuel Delaney’s workshop at the Summer Writing Program last summer. His perspective was that criticism is a better motivator than praise. His reasoning? After one of his books got outstanding reviews, he did nothing but walk around smiling for three days. And then he read a harsh review that was so unsettling to him that he immediately went to his desk and got to work again. He’s one of the most prolific authors I’ve ever heard of, so clearly that worked for him. I’m going to stick to the positive reinforcement.
As another aside, it was in Delaney’s workshop that I started writing my book.
Another character flaw is that it motivates me when I read something that I don’t like from an author who has sold a lot of books or who has great endorsements. It makes me think that my own book doesn’t have to be a masterpiece; it just needs to be published. And then I get back to work.
It took me thirteen hours before I did any writing and editing yesterday. And I suffered needlessly all day while I put it off. But I finally revised a few pages, and worked on a blog post and now I get to make two check marks on the calendar propped up next to my desk. Whatever works.
An Abundance of Time, No Time to Waste
I had an abundance of free time.
After I quit my job and returned home from my summer writing program, I had things to do. Those things just didn’t take up much time. The startup business that I co-founded moved very slowly. I met with my business partner once each week and I completed the tasks I was responsible for in a few hours in between those meetings. And, I started writing a book. But I was only able to write for an hour or two a day before the part of my brain responsible for getting coherent sentences onto my PC would shut off.
That left a lot of free time.
I’d wake up in the morning, make tea, meditate, and then…
Exactly. And then what?
Exercise most days. Go to a writing group, visit a friend for lunch, read, or take a walk. Attend meetings for associations I belong to. Read poetry at open mic events. A little consulting and volunteering here and there. I took an eight-week improv acting class, visited three wild animal rescue centers, traveled to Idaho for a retreat and took two trips to California.
It wasn’t that I was wasting time. In fact I refused to waste time by watching tv, aimlessly surfing the web, playing games on my phone or doing anything that didn’t feel meaningful. I refused to be busy for the sake of distracting myself. And so without much distraction, I had A LOT of time to experience a full range of thoughts and feelings that otherwise I wouldn’t have time for.
It felt like I was on an endless silent retreat, left alone with my thoughts and feelings.
Some feelings were positive. Getting plugged into the Seattle writing community was fun and interesting, and sometimes I felt happy and excited about the projects I was working on. But I often felt uncertain and doubtful about whether I was spending my time on the right things. Should I be traveling more or volunteering overseas, since I had so much flexibility? There were plenty of hours when I was restless and wanted something else to do besides work on my business or write, but I didn’t know what.
Then I felt guilty for not enjoying the luxury of time that I had.
I made a list of activities that I felt were justifiable ways to spend my time. The title of this word document was “Meaningful Ways to Spend My Time that Align With My Values.” I’m not kidding. The list wasn’t all about work; it included options like gardening, hanging out at the park and emailing friends. Having an approved list of activities was an attempt to feel OK about how I was spending my time but it didn’t help much. I had a relentless sense of needing to be productive and make a positive contribution to the world. It’s both grandiose and deeply true.
I had great days when I got a lot of writing done or took an inspiring class. I had many more days when I felt like an unanchored boat being tossed by the waves.
All of that changed when I started a full time consulting position. I am much happier now, no question about it. I still write, work on my business, go to yoga and see friends. I have plenty of time, energy and the flexibility for those things beyond my day job. I didn’t need that list of approved activities – I needed predictable work that took up more time, gave me structure, earned income and allowed me to contribute on a daily basis.
Some people might do well with a lot of unstructured free time. Those people are either more enlightened than me or less driven. Or maybe they just like tv.
Recent Comments