Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

10 Jan 2009
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Seven Simple Rules for Personal Productivity

An interesting shift has again taken place over the last few holiday weeks.

The need for, and value of, the inputs for my self improvement remain fairly suspended. I am still in a consolidation and gestation mode. Simple structures are however re-emerging from my explorations over the previous years. They are moving into position for seemingly one purpose only: to accelerate my productivity and effectiveness.

So, in this absence of striving for improvement and instead just letting things ‘be’, what are the seven simple steps for my own personal effectiveness?

1. Set objectives/ target/ goals. What is your vision of a successful outcome? Obvious (and a bit of a no-brainer considering my focus with Scarlet Monday), but often forgotten or not explicitly articulated. Write it down or say it out loud for maximum effect. Get your left brain to marshall all your other-than-conscious resources.

2. Set some timescales. You need time for 3. and 4. below and then for your first chunk of action towards your goals. Very important, and the place most people set themselves up to fail. Whether you like it or not, there’s a lazy, pleasure seeking, work-shy version of yourself hidden inside you that suddenly appears as soon as you make something/set something too onerous for yourself to do. Don’t scare the lazy you into resistance. Make it a quick first couple of slots. I find myself working best in 30 or 45 minute max. chunks.

3. Brainstorm within your tight timescale all the things you have to do to achieve your target/ goal: Mindmap/ blank sheet of paper/ write a list. Don’t expand or self-correct. Start a flow or dump. Because you’ve programmed your own internal satnav in step 1., the aim of this step is to get the flow going. Your internal resourcefulness will keep working on ideas long after you’ve stopped this step: just make sure you keep something close to hand to take note of these ideas on. Time-bounding this to a 30 minute chunk helpfully stops you getting stale.

4. Lay out a rough plan or sequence of activity. Again, within the timescale you set in 2. above, do a set of rough prioritisations. The main aim of this stage is not to create a sophisticated decision-tree/ sequential programme plan/ chart. It’s to do enough to stop your brain chatter about the other actions you need to take to complete your goal when you’re actually taking an action. It allows you get on with the very next action you undertake in the next step.

5. Start your very next action (VNA). Just start it. I know that all personal productivity advice tends to say this. There’s a reason. You start and something nearly magical happens. Your lazy work-shy fades away. Your normally fairly silent/reticent creative personality comes to the fore and starts to get to work. And continues working until the task is done – even if you’ve reached the end of the time you’ve given the task. Now this may not sound right to you, but believe me. As long as you’ve taken the steps 1-4 above, you’re in a perfect place to make this magic start. If you leap in at this step then you’ll swiftly slide down the slippery non-productive/ procrastination/ resistance route. Why? Because you’re not in the right mindspace/set. You’ve not done all that your logical left brain needs to shut up and allow your right brain to relax into resourceful action. Past this, overall you won’t have been ruthless enough with yourself on the time and step management to stop taking too long in planning and not enough in just doing.

6. Stop at the end of your first action time chunk/ slot. That’s right: stopping is a step in doing more. From my view, avoiding wasting big blocks of time by trying to maintain your energy, focus and passion on one action past 30-45 minutes counteracts any possible inefficiency from picking up, getting up to speed, starting work again and then stopping at the end of the timeslot.

7. Continue the previous VNA/start another VNA in the next time slot suitable.

Repeat 6 and 7 until goal achieved.

With thanks to the simplicity of a set of project action steps in Tracy’s Eat That Frog (see sidebar) for guiding the above.

Posted in Action Orientation, Creativity, Focus, Habits and Routines, Successful Outcomes, Time Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , ,
24 Dec 2008

How the Different Parts of the Brain Help Vision and Goal-Setting

I’m starting to explore a lot more of the neuroscience behind why vision and goal setting are such powerful tools.

Initial observations are fairly simplistic, but serve as a good build on previous posts (see tags to the right)

As a simple foundation it is helpful to see the left hemisphere of our brain as being the logical, detailed manager of time. It wants to know why, what, how and when. In a lot of detail.

The right hemisphere exists in the sensory moment. It revels in the here and now. It is intuitive, creative, has no sense of time and only relishes the details that improve the sensory experience.

Jill Taylor in My Stroke of Insight explains, ‘By its design our right mind is spontaneous, carefree and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow free without inhibition or judgement’

Immediately an observation is that we are given the capacity; in fact we’re given half of whatever we define as ourselves or ‘self’ to fulfil our creative capacity. And yet how many of us would hand on heart be able to say that we spend much of our adult lives being spontaneous, carefree and creative?

So point one: we are given the capacity to imagine and create. For what purpose? One, arguably, is to imagine our goals and what we want to strive to achieve.

Associated to the above is the fact that ‘the present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one’

So, in imagining and planning for the future using the right hemisphere, does half of your brain starts to merge your imagined future with the realities of now?

The left hemisphere, in thriving in the detail and pulling together all of your experienced moments into a ‘past, present and future’, uses language to ‘break the big picture perception of the present moment into manageable and comparable bits of data they can talk about’

So, the other half of your brain can then kick in if the time is taken to describe your imagined future using all five of your senses. Your left hemisphere understands this way of describing the future. You can set the programme.

Add time, targets and milestones into the process of imagining the future then to all intents and purposes the next step towards your vision and goals just becomes an action.

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Psychology, Successful Outcomes, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
12 Dec 2008

How Things Start to Change When you Attribute True Value to Your Sense of Self

So how does it feel? How does it feel to think that you understand things a bit better? To think that you are a bit more certain about how things work for you and what things mean?

Unsettling is a good way of starting the description. From NLP/ hypnosis/ habit removal experiences I’ve had, it’s a similar awareness of a void. The void is the non-existence of the previous habit.

In my current situation it’s the awareness of the absence of a programme of striving for understanding or meaning in certain areas.

I’m experiencing this change from different perspectives. My interest in the content of a number of previously subscribed blogs has virtually dissipated overnight. I’m not talking here about divine revelations. It’s just a shift in understanding in how the relationship between conscious and other than conscious works. This shift makes me currently feel like I understand more, and have more answers when I look at the subject matter of these other blogs.

My feelings towards other content also feels shifted. My sense of value added by the body of self-help literature is diminished in part because I feel they’re missing the common thread. So many questions postulated without going back to that common denominator of our brains.

We are that common element in all the challenges that we perceive we face in our lives. Yet we don’t start from that psychological perspective of the workings of our brains and the relationship with our construction of ourself.

Just getting stuck into an excellent book, ‘My Stroke of Insight’ by Jill Taylor. A neuroscientist who suffered a stroke and recovered to write about the experience. Excellent, clear explanation of the workings of the brain with a description of a right hemisphere-led view of the world that takes you out of your comfort zone and then mugs everything you previously thought to be true.

Already, what this is telling me is that our approach to many personal development matters are too left hemisphere-led (thinking, rationalizing and logical detail) and thereby doomed to fail when our feelings and emotions kick-in.

So how does it feel? Invigorating and slightly scary when I look at the absence of some of the previous striving. But ultimately? Bloody marvellous……

Posted in Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Happiness, Psychology and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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