In Part 3 of this series, I talked about the levels of attention we experience in an average day and the importance of leveraging our proactive attention in particular. We need discipline so we can overcome internal and external resistance. The following tips and tricks will help you achieve that by mastering two main areas: managing your attention effectively and mono-tasking.

Managing Attention

Realising the need to get beyond time management and starting to manage your attention to its optimum capabilities is a huge step forward. Develop a good sense of your daily attention flow so it dictates the rhythm and difficulty of your work at different times of the day. Give yourself permission to handle the low brow and easy tasks when you are flagging at inactive attention lows, but equally be sure to bite off the most difficult tasks when your proactive attention has you salivating for results.

Protecting Attention from Interruptions
Remember, proactive attention is your most precious commodity. The vultures of interruption and potential distraction will circle you, trying to make you a victim. Stay in control. Aggressively and ruthlessly defend your attention.

Self-Awareness and Agility
A productivity ninja is agile. The plan for the day at 1 PM may be entirely different from what it was at 9 AM. Pay attention to your attention levels and change your plan if you are having one of those ‘hitting top form’ kind of days, or of course if you are fading faster than you expected.

Minimise Set-up Cost
With any new activity, whether email, writing a report or attending a conference, there is a high set-up cost in terms of time and attention. For email, you have to fire up Outlook and let the program load and synchronise with the server and open your emails. If returning to a report, you have to reread all the bits that you have forgotten you wrote last time; you have to navigate back through the document. All of these are the set-up costs of doing. The cost is twofold: It takes time and it also takes attention and energy. Working in larger ‘chunks’ (such as writing the whole report in one go, rather than trying to split it over several days) is a great way to minimise the time and attention spent in set-up mode.

Mix and Match
Potential distractions are around every corner. Do not even create the temptation to get distracted because you are bored. Keep your days and weeks fresh by giving yourself variety. So if Monday is very much a solitary thinking day, perhaps Tuesday will be full of interesting people and conversations. Wednesday might be out of the office, but allow Thursday to focus back onto admin and getting your in-tray back to zero.

Mono-Tasking

There is no worse invention in old-school time management techniques than ‘multitasking’. This is really about juggling two or more actions at the same time and requires your brain to switch into one thing, make a small amount of progress, switch to the next thing, react to something else, come back and make minimal progress on the first thing again, and so on. In trying to manage our attention this way, we expend a lot of energy and attention on the costly mental set-up time and create constant drag away from actual doing and completion. A much better idea is ‘mono-tasking’, the art of doing one thing to its natural conclusion and without interruption. Regular mono-tasking makes you feel more present in your work, more engaged, calmer and more at ease with the world around you.

Capture to Continue
As we sit down ready to mono-task, we are reminded of nags, ideas and other actions, which tempts us into checking our email or succumbing to external distractions. We need to be capturing and collecting any potentially useful ideas, allowing us to return fully to what we are working on without the need to disrupt our flow too much. Make your capturing as easy as possible. Capture into your phone or onto a piece of paper rather than change what is on the screen. Experiment with finding the quickest, easiest, most friction-free ways to capture.

The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique observes that short bursts of attention (25 minutes) followed by short breaks (five minutes) are the best way to preserve your proactive attention throughout the day. By splitting the day into lots of 25-minute chunks and using a timer that counts down, you spend the whole day with the constant buzz of being up against a clock. It is a great tool for splitting much larger tasks down into more bite-sized chunks. It can help provide an important sense of focus and can help you resist the temptation to give in to distractions. You can download Pomodoro timer apps or download a desktop timer for your computer.

Scheduled Procrastination
One of the good things about Pomodoro is knowing that after every 25 minutes of work there is a five minute comfort and distraction break. If you find yourself procrastinating, do not beat yourself up for doing so, simply create the right boundary. Think to yourself “OK, five more minutes of this procrastination and we are moving on to this specific thing.” This demystifies and disempowers the procrastination and often moves you along at the end of the five minutes and into what is required of you, now that you’ve ‘had your share’.

Power Hours
The Power Hour idea is simple. Schedule an hour of your most proactive attention to work on what you are avoiding. Add it to the diary so it is not a possible option, but a commitment. It brings focus, and by the end of one Power Hour you will probably have delved deeply enough into the activity to know that it is not quite so scary or difficult after all. Remember, you can only have one Power Hour each day. The focus on consistently doing one thing well is what counts here. Trying to schedule seven Power Hours a day just leads to stress and disappointment. You will also find Power Hours easier if you can tell your colleagues that you are doing it and ask for their cooperation in not interrupting you during that time. Anything else you can do that might subconsciously create a signal that this hour is special and different from all the rest will really help too, whether that is putting on your favourite music or drinking expensive herbal tea rather than the usual ‘normal’ tea.

Conclusion

We hope you have enjoyed this series on ‘productivity ninja’ techniques. Being a productivity ninja is about developing an overall mindset to deal with the enemies of information overload, procrastination and stress. It is about developing your Zen-like calm, knowing your tools and being prepared, knowing when to be ruthless with yourself and your commitments, being mindful and agile, and occasionally practising ninja stealth and camouflage.

This is the last article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7)

The post [Productivity Ninja] Staying Disciplined; Overcoming Resistance appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

If you ever need to hold a meeting and you want to make it a success, use the 40-20-40 continuum. Focus 40% of your attention for each meeting on preparation and getting everything right before you meet, then 20% of your attention on the meeting itself — the time you’re all together — and then spend 40% of your attention on the follow-through.

40% Preparation

Get the preparation right, have your audio visual solutions and you will make the meetings you hold seem like magic. Here are a few ways that good preparation can pay itself back in spades.

1. Begin with the end in mind

When planning your meeting, start with the end in mind. Rather than waiting until halfway through a meeting to work out what you think the outcome should be, start there. You can even add this to the agenda, and as a chair, make sure it is part of your introduction. By being clearer from the outset, a lot of thinking will have been done before the meeting even gets under way.

2. Flow

Think about the meeting as a journey. The starting point is setting the scene: Introductions to one another, the topic and to the endpoint in mind. The middle stage is the exploration: Discussion, questioning and beginning to form some agreements. The end of a meeting should be where you are into decisions, actions and agreeing the next practical steps forward.

3. Schedule difficult agenda items immediately before breaks

When working out the agenda and meeting length, it is useful to schedule difficult agenda items immediately before breaks. This will hopefully keep things brief as it is a brave person who delays everyone’s lunch, and if things do get a little heated, the break offers time to calm everyone down.

4. Length — allow time for wiggle room

Make sure you are sensible, yet realistic, with the length of the meeting. If you are a disciplined chair, you can probably get it done in a shorter time than would be expected, though always allow time for wiggle room.

5. Control your Outlook, don’t let Outlook control your meetings

Meetings should rarely be exactly 30 minutes or 60 minutes long — the default times from Outlook — so make it 20 minutes or 45 minutes. It may only seem like ten minutes here and there, but ten minutes of proactive attention time is like gold dust.

6. Prepare — create the culture you need

Print agendas, bring background papers or information and use PowerPoint to provide a professional ‘feel’ and structure. Create a culture where preparation is absolutely expected. I did some interim management work where we were expected to have read all the papers in advance. As a result, the conversations were focused on opinions and actions rather than on clarifications or long explorations.

20% is the Meeting Itself

You have prepared meticulously and encouraged others to do the same. How do you ensure that the meeting is productive?

1. The welcome and the opening round

First, it is important to make people feel welcome. At the beginning of the meetings I chair, I usually ask people to contribute to an ‘opening round’, which consists of three or four questions:

• Name
• Your role (and where you work)
• Why you are here
• One thing that is going well (this can be professional or personal)

2. Pace

It is essential to correctly manage the pace of your meeting: Too brisk and people may feel as though they have not been heard, but too slow and it becomes all talk instead of making things happen.

3. If you have a problem, rehearse explaining it to a five-year-old

Always provide a window in the meeting to openly explore what the roadblocks are and if problems do arise, rehearse explaining them to a five-year-old. Thinking about things in simple terminology is much more likely to help you tweak your thinking to find a solution.

4. Steering the discussion

Ensure that decisions and actions are clarified as clearly as possible by making reference to the minutes during the meeting: “OK then folks, how should we capture this in the minutes?”

5. Create a safe space to make mistakes

Progress often comes from experimenting as much with what does not work as what does. Encourage experimentation and innovation, and think about how to do this as ‘safely’ as possible.

6. Public commitments

Tell everyone what will happen next and make sure everyone is clear on the next step, especially the steps that involve their actions. Ask participants to commit their actions to paper and share these either in pairs or with the group as a whole. This is a great way to hold people to account and ensure that everyone takes on their responsibilities.

7. Closing round — All’s well that ends well

This offers a few moments to turn people’s attention to reflecting on their involvement and begin planning ahead. I usually use the following questions:

• What have you enjoyed most about this meeting?
• Has anything surprised you during the meeting?
• What are you planning to do as a result of this meeting?
• What are you looking forward to?

40% Follow-Through

The follow-through is not only an important point, it is the point — without it, meetings are meaningless. Here are some ways by which you can successfully follow meetings through:

1. Develop an action summary during the meeting itself

Do not leave a meeting until you and everyone else have a clear sense of the actions that need to be taken. This means having an action list. Use the meeting to gain clarity around what needs to be done and make sure there is a commitment to these actions from all involved.

2. The capture email

After the meeting, the capture email should be clear to read and clear on the detail of what is involved. Thank everyone for participating and include a complete and clear list of action points. Use the capture email as a way of being clear about who is now in charge and who actions should be directed towards.

3. Welcome requests for clarification

Clarity is key and its enemies are procrastination and stress. Your job is to create windows for clarification questions, either by follow up emails or just via regular check-ins with people. Offer support so the person does not feel foolish if he or she needs clarification.

4. Send follow-up emails

Follow-up emails are always useful. You could simply reattach the original action list or provide some updates to give an increased sense of momentum.

5. Set deadlines

Where possible, have a deadline. Deadlines produce rabbits out of hats. When delegating actions from meetings, do not be afraid to work under constraints that place people under tight deadlines. The action should be measurable not just by the deadline, but by the substance and its impact. Asking questions about the substance of the action can also be a great way to regularly renegotiate actions if a few weeks after a meeting, a different kind of action is now required.

This is the seventh article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 8) 

The post [Productivity Ninja] How to Run Productive Meetings appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

Friday evening. The end of a long week and for me the end of my first ever days of fasting. Joining Muslims for the first few days of Ramadan has been a really memorable experience. I’ve been touched by the support and love I’ve had from so many Muslims, from all over the world, predominantly finding out about my experiment via our friends at the Productive Muslim site, who’ve been syndicating my blog there too each evening.

Before I started, Mohammed from Productive Muslim wanted me to come up with my productivity advice for Ramadan. So in this final post I’m going to reflect back on Friday (which was a bit of a breakthrough for me) and then give some more general reflections at the end.

Friday didn’t start as I’d planned. I woke at 8am. I realised immediately that my 1.30am alarm – designed to wake me so that I could eat again before the fast begins at 2.34am – had failed me. Damn complicated iPhone alarms! Before I slept I’d obviously eaten a meal, but I’d not gone crazy on the water and by 8am I was feeling marooned in a state of dehydration. Long busy day ahead. The hottest day of the year outside. Oh dear.

I spent the morning with a friend, working on a new business idea. I was dreading it because I expected to feel weak and off my game. She kept eating all morning too, which on Wednesday would have driven me nuts, but honestly, I don’t think I felt tempted or envious by her food even once. Maybe once by her cup of tea. It was a buzzy, ideas-driven three-hour session where we had a couple of big lightbulb moments and I was pretty impressed that I felt alert and on the ball, aside from my mouth being pretty dry and making it difficult to speak normally at times. Perhaps I’d crash and burn in the afternoon when the adrenaline wore off, I thought…

Then in the afternoon I was at home putting final touches to a really important contract (more news next week!) and prepping for a strategy session I’m delivering tomorrow for a board of trustees of a national charity. So I needed to be on the ball and I was expecting a massive struggle. But instead, I felt light, calm and motivated.

I don’t know what’s happened to me physically since Wednesday, but the hunger pangs have been much-reduced today (and this despite me eating much less last night) and I’ve had none of the headaches and shakiness that had me needing naps on the preceding afternoons. I feel as if my body has adjusted to my new metabolism somehow.

It took me 3 days to get to a stage where I wasn’t ever-so slightly panicky about whether I’d faint or whether I’d generally be OK. If you’re reading this as a Muslim who has fasted for years, you probably don’t remember that feeling of uncertainty when you fast for the first time? Or perhaps everyone gets it for the first day or so, every year? Maybe it was the release of that tiny anxiety that also helped me to relax and see fasting as a ‘normal’ state for me. Not just normal, but I’d even say comfortable, peaceful and centred.

So, what did I learn?

The final day was a breakthrough. I felt really alert and productive and actually the elimination of the hassle of thinking about food and drink far outweighed any inconvenience of having to think about it, crave it, prepare it or digest it! My mind felt less cluttered, sometimes a little ‘floaty’ (in a gentle and comfortable way) and really quite focussed.

So before I started, I was expecting to write a bunch of “surviving fasting” reflections or tips. When of course, that’s what Muslims do every single year for Ramadan! “Survival” is the wrong word entirely.  So instead, these reflections are “for a successful fast”, because I’ve truly started to see the positives that can emerge from what on the surface is a deliberate sacrifice to create conditions of “adversity”, but is actually so much deeper than that.

My 5 reflections for a successful Ramadan fast:

1. When it comes to your calories and meals, it’s about quality not quantity

As the days went on, I gave up panicking about how many calories I was ‘under’ for the day and just made sure I was eating well and packing my foods with good nutrients and low-GI energy. I avoided sugar and high fats. My new brain fuel shake  came in really handy and I started trying to drink a small one of those before my main evening meal, as well as one in the early hours.

2. You have to plan your days

One of the nice facets of fasting is that you plan carefully. Experience taught me to be kind to myself: too much time rushing around, getting stressed, getting hot on public transport or rushing in the sun takes its toll very quickly – but if you plan, it works well. This has a nice effect in that it can really boost your productivity, as it encourages the kind of daily review rituals that I talk about in my book. I found myself becoming more conscious of the importance of this – and even doing my daily review before I slept, knowing that as I was digesting food, it was a useful and peaceful time to set myself up for the day that lay ahead when I woke up again.

3. Eat that frog

The proactive attention needed to crack the most difficult work we do is often in shorter supply when fasting. So make sure you start your day by doing what Brian Tracy called ‘eating that frog’ (doing the hardest thing first). This is something that’s good to do every day of the year, as it makes the rest of your day easier and reduces anxiety, but Ramadan has certainly helped me back into the zone with that one.

4. Be vulnerable

You’ll feel irritable and grumpy and confused sometimes. Certainly our Western approach to such things is to deny this reality and… well, just leave people feeling that you’re irritated or confused by them! On the occasions this happened to me this week, I just ‘named’ it. “Oh sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.  It’s the fasting”. Or “sorry I snapped, I was thinking about muffins”. Learning to be vulnerable is the only way of inviting care and empathy into that situation. Pride goes out the window, and it’s freeing that way.

5. Change the view

Often when we’re stuck or feeling sluggish, we’ll grab a coffee or get a drink or a snack to shake things up, but the body and the brain’s performance is not exclusively linked to food. But likewise, fasting does bring periods of quite low attention, so you need to find some ways of ‘rebooting’ that work well for you. Mine were things like mini-meditations, stretching my body and shaking my arms and legs, splashing cold water on my face, brushing my teeth (I know, I looked this up and apparently as long as I don’t swallow the toothpaste or the water, it’s OK!), and breathing in some fresh air.

And finally…

And the final thing I want to say is something about the personal, not the productive. I was slightly nervous that I’d receive some criticism for doing this – I was all too aware that talking about religion and furthermore talking about your extremely limited experience of someone else’s religion can be a sensitive subject, even when your intentions are the right ones. But I’ve been genuinely touched and humbled by the incredible support I’ve had from Muslims and non-Muslims all around the world – in comments on my blog, on my twitter account and via email. I’ve felt a deep sense of connection from it.

It just goes to show that if we strip back or ignore all the hate and fear that our politicians and media trade on, if we approach the world with a sense of curiosity and adventure, if we seek understanding, empathy and acceptance and if we reject the narratives of absolute truth and superiority over others, then the world is full of as much love and community as I’ve experienced these last few days.

I’m quite sad that my 3-day Ramadan experience is now over and in the second half of July’s experiment I’ll be returning to playing around with the theme of ‘Fuel’ more generally. But I’ve seen enough already to change my opinion of fasting from thinking of it as a negative ‘denial’ to thinking of it more as a ‘shifting of state’. And I’ve seen enough to know that it certainly won’t be the last time I undertake fasting.

Ramadan Mubarak!

The post [Productivity Ninja] Fasting Experiment: Ramadan Day 3 appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

Our friend and productivity ninja from Think Productive, Graham Alcott, is on an experiment where he joins us to fast during the first three days of Ramadan. To know more about this experiment, you can read the introduction here. In this series, he shares his reflections regarding fasting and productivity based on this experience. (Read Fasting Experiment: Day 1 | Day 3)

It’s 10.30pm on day two of my Ramadan fasting experience.

In some ways today has been easier than yesterday and in some ways it’s been more difficult. Easier, because I didn’t have much in my diary today apart from admin, so I could keep my own schedule and didn’t need to be out in the sun or dashing around on the tube. But it also felt more difficult: I was really struggling to eat more than my one meal last night, so it was like I had my evening meal to replenish some calories, but couldn’t cram in anything more to get anywhere close fuelling myself for the day ahead.

In fact, at 2am I felt so full and awake that it didn’t feel like sleeping. So I looked at my to-do list for the day ahead, picked a couple of chunky items and got cracking. I ended up sending an important email for a contract I’m negotiating at 3.30am. It felt pretty satisfying to be going back to bed at 4am, knowing that I had a lot less to do when I woke up! Unfortunately, I’d forgotten until I checked my calendar in the middle of the night that I had an 8am Skype call with Australia that couldn’t be moved, so I resolved to get up, do the call and then have a morning nap.

Having fasted all day yesterday, there were no nerves today when I woke up again. I knew what I was doing, I was expecting the hunger pangs and I don’t think my stomach was rumbling anywhere near as much as it was yesterday. But on the other hand, I spent most of the day in a bit of a nutritional and sleep-based deficit dullness.

So Ramadan productivity lesson number one: you have to ‘front-end’ how you organise your work. This can be quite empowering. Knowing that your brain will gradually turn to jelly is difficult to avoid, so you have to pick the most difficult or intense work to do first – either immediately as the fast resumes in the early hours, or immediately on getting started with your working day.

Lesson number two is about napping: I had an hours’ nap late morning/lunchtime and then another around 5pm. It’s strange how waking up for a short sleep leaves you feeling so refreshed.

Grogginess and grumpiness is a big problem. For me, anyway (!). I’m learning to live with it, but I think there are a couple of tactics I’m starting to employ to help with this. Firstly, if I find myself getting irritable, I name it. So it’s not the person’s fault I’m ‘irritated’, it’s the fasting’s fault. I find this depersonalises it. And then secondly, I’m finding on the phone and at my desk if I force a smile onto my face or swing my arms around, it just lifts my mood when my attention dulls. Now I’m not suggesting you can easily do that if you’re fasting whilst in a big open plan office, but that’s what’s worked for me!

And my final productivity fasting lesson is one I’ve learned by me not doing yesterday! To keep your energy up, you really need to be clever about what you eat during the evening, and go for quality not quantity. Have a smaller main meal, peppered with a varied selection of snacks and smaller meals to give variety and balance. So I made sure tonight that once I’d had my dates and water, the next thing I had before my main meal was a brain fuel shake. And by doing this early tonight, I’m planning on fitting in another shake before I resume fasting early in the morning. That way, I’ve had plenty of proteins, anti-oxidants and vitamins on top of the carbohydrates and vegetables in my main meal, rather than having a bigger main meal with less variety and then feeling stuffed.

So I have one day to go. Muslims around the UK and around the world have many more. If that’s you, then I salute you!

It’s certainly a tough undertaking. But I can see just from my couple of days’ experience that it’s also a beautiful and even exciting challenge – and one that provokes a state of gratitude, humility and appreciation for the present moment. It presents a challenge for those people wanting to remain active and productive – but then there’s also something rather wonderful about not just succeeding, but succeeding against the backdrop of sacrifice and adversity.

Until tomorrow, Ramadan Mubarak!

The post [Productivity Ninja] Fasting Experiment: Ramadan Day 2 appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

Our friend and productivity ninja from Think Productive, Graham Alcott, is on an experiment where he joins us to fast during the first three days of Ramadan. 

As I write this, it’s 8pm on Wednesday 10th July. This could easily be mistaken for just another day, but it’s also the first day that thousands of Muslims in the UK fast for Ramadan. So given this month’s productivity experiment is all about ‘fuel’, I’m joining them.

(For three days, anyway).

So how has my first day of fasting been? It’s safe to say it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster:

2am. Up from my bed, in the kitchen preparing omelette and a brain fuel shake, which I was eating on an already pretty full stomach. According to the Muslim calendar, sunrise is less than an hour away, which I can’t quite believe as I gaze out into the pitch black night, but who am I to argue! I’m  perhaps slightly overdoing the preparation with all this extra food, but hey, Ninja Preparedness matters!

8am. Up again. This time my usual routine of jumping out of bed and putting the kettle on is redundant. And I’m already feeling a bit thirsty and peckish, despite downing at least three pints of water before I went back to bed.

10am. Feeling peaceful and serene, sat at my desk and hacking through a backlog admin pretty successfully. There’s something about knowing you’re entering something tough which gets a little bit of adrenaline pumping and there’s something about not having eating or drinking as a constant distraction which focuses the mind.

12 noon. Being on the tube, in the heat before lunch sets off hunger pangs. I cruelly have to walk past several inviting food outlets. A bit like mile 10 of a marathon: you’re under way, but oh so far from the finish. Or like a cake that you’ve slaved away at, but it’s only just entering the oven.

3pm. What should have been a quick errand to pick up some temporary parking permits for when our visitors come to stay in a couple of weeks turns into a 45 minute wait with a deli-style queuing system. Utter inefficiency and one of the worst customer service designs I’ve seen in years, which I stew over whilst I wait. And I’m grumpy about it.

4.30pm. Back at my desk, with the Ashes cricket on in the background. Realise that my hunger pangs are returning. In fact, like for most of the day, it feels like hunger but my urge is always to find some water. Feeling pretty dehydrated now and my brain going a bit fuzzy. I snack on some easy emails and then decide it’s time to stop to watch the Ashes properly with a cup of… oh.

5pm. Nap time.

6pm. Wake up after about 45 minutes of sleep, strangely feeling pretty fresh again! I was told that you do push through the worst of it and get a ‘second wind’. From the research I’ve done, I’m guessing this is your body switching from glycogen stores to fat stores… which means I have work to do this evening in replenishing!

7pm. Back at my desk, wrapping up the day. As soon as I start trying to concentrate properly again I feel hungry. But I’m learning to push through that now.

8pm. Writing this as my relationship with food changes back to my 34 year default setting of “what next” (as opposed to today’s new setting of “don’t think about it!”). I can actually start to plan my meal and even start preparing it.

So what have I learned so far?

It’s too early to start jumping to big productivity conclusions, much as I’m sure our friends at Productive Muslim are itching for me to start coming up with some! Obviously there are things you can do to try and gear your metabolism around slow-release energy foods (low GI, etc) and there are choices you can make to segment your day around when you’re likely to have higher energy and proactive attention. But today is really just a day for me to recognise what a huge and profound thing it is to undertake something like this, that radically changes the normal flow of life and that requires such discipline. I can also see immediately how this sacrifice of the day-to-day helps people to experience their life and their faith more deeply, and feel appreciation for the present moment.

I’m thankful that I have another couple of days to experience this some more, but thankful too that I’m not committed to a whole month!

Until tomorrow, Ramadan Mubarak!

The post [Productivity Ninja] Fasting Experiment: Ramadan Day 1 appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

Of course you didn’t.

And if you did get to those ‘C’ listed items, chances are you got to them because they suddenly started to rise up the ranks, becoming the more urgent ‘A’ and ‘B’ items because they were previously left unattended.

The problem is, a standard to-do list just isn’t enough to give us the agility to manage the various levels of complexity we encounter in our knowledge work – from immediate actions through to those things we could be doing, through to the wider, project-level tasks.

In fact, one of the reasons our standard to-do lists don’t work is that they’re often trying to do what we will separate here three different lists – and they’re failing at all three.

Projects List
Master Actions List
Daily To-Do List

The Projects List

We’re going to use a single ‘Projects List’ to keep track of all the projects we’re working on. I would define a project as a collection of actions that is designed to achieve a particular aim, e.g. buying a phone – which involves visiting a phone shop, assessing current usage, reading reviews etc.

Therefore, a project is any piece of work that either requires more than a couple of action steps to complete. Even with only a couple of action steps, if the desired final outcome will take more than one week to achieve, I would still classify this as a project.

One of the problems we often face with the standard to-do list is the fact that, with only one list there is no sense of scale. We therefore mix the tiniest of actions with the largest of projects, all on one list, and then wonder why we feel overwhelmed!

Your Projects List is really just a checklist of all the current projects you’re working on – it doesn’t need to be hugely detailed. Its function is primarily to ensure that you have some focus at a more strategic level at least once a week.

The Master Actions List

The largest, most important, most dynamically changing and most used list is your ‘Master Actions List’.

It contains every single action you could currently do, for each and every project. We’re only interested in the things that could be done right now, so there’s no need to track future items that are dependent on the outcomes of more immediate things.

The language of the Master Actions List is deliberately designed to encourage action rather than the need for more thinking. So, instead of “call Chris”, try “Call Chris with latest sales figures before next Mondays meeting”. You need a Master Actions List filled with the thing you can actually do when you next have some time, so that you can make the most informed choice when that time arises.

What you don’t want on your Master Actions List are a whole bunch of actions that are either not actions at all (because you haven’t yet defined them properly!) or that you can’t do next because there are interdependencies i.e. waiting for confirmation back from someone before doing that action.

The Daily To-Do List

It’s useful to have a plan at the start of every day. With the Master Actions List to scan, you can make some much clearer and cleverer decisions about where to put your limited time and even more limited attention. Think of the Master Actions List as a wardrobe full of clothes, and the Daily To-Do list as the clothes you want to wear today.

My Daily To-Do List is usually a Post-it note but you could underline or highlight certain items on your Master Actions List, or marking them as “high priority” if you are using a digital list.

This small step, practiced at the start of every day, will increase your focus and help you say “No” to a myriad of distractions that are just about to come your way!

Be warned though – at the start of the day, when you’re feeling fresh, it’s all too easy to start the day with a great plan and great motivation, only for that to be destroyed by 11am as other more urgent tasks come along. Under such circumstances, how do you imagine you’ll feel at 5pm when you look at that Daily To-Do List again, into which you haven’t made a single dent?

The key is to be sensible – presume things will come up and make your Daily To-Do List practical and achievable.

With your three levels of lists, the Projects List, Master Actions List and a Daily To-Do List, you’re well on your way to having everything you need to be more productive!
This is the sixth article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja.  (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 7 | Part 8)

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We’re going to use the CORD model and the Organise and Review habits in particular here to develop a ‘second brain’. Your second brain is designed to replace your real brain when it comes to memory (our woeful short-term memory is a major driver of stress and unproductive behaviour). Your second brain is also designed to support the good decision-making – intelligence and intuition – that our real brain is really good at already, but which we perhaps aren’t currently using to its full potential or aren’t as able to do unless we’re in periods of proactive attention.

What Does a Second Brain Look Like?

The second brain is, of course, a metaphor! I’m not going to ask you to go out and kill someone and put their brain in a jar. The second brain is made up of the following basic elements:

Memory

• A list of the tasks you’re working on
• A ‘bigger picture’ list of the wider projects these tasks relate to
• Other lists and reference information – basically, things that could be useful in the future

Intelligence

• A series of questions to help support good decision-making and force the clarity that reduces your stress; Checklists and a routine to support regular review – both daily and weekly – of everything held in the second brain.

Intuition

• Checklist questions designed to enhance mindfulness, self-reflection and the regular discipline of being conscious of your competence – or incompetence
• ‘Thinking tools’ designed to aid ruthlessness, by keeping you focussed on the potential impact of what you’re doing, rather than just filling the need to be ‘busy’

The CORD Model

The CORD model describes the four distinct elements of knowledge work.

• Collect/Capture
• Organise
• Review
• Do

These are the four things that always need to happen to add value or impact to any single piece of information. It’s a model that you can use both to think about how you manage your personal workflow and also how you structure your days and weeks to remain as agile and adaptable as possible to whatever comes your way. It also gives you the confidence to know that whatever you’re working on is the best possible thing you can be doing at any given moment.

The CORD model’s four phases also provide the structure to separate thinking from doing in our work. Organise and Review are where the thinking happens, where the psychological heavy lifting takes place. So the Capture and the Do habits are to help you to trust that the second brain has it all under control and will be doing that thinking in due course, so that you don’t have to worry about it right now.

Trust and Your Second Brain

Your aim is to focus on developing a second brain that you trust. If you trust it, you’ll use it. If you use it, you’ll trust it. Without that trust, you’re putting time and attention into developing something that only serves as a distraction. For your real brain to relax, it needs to know that the second brain is taking care of all of those stressful decisions and things that need remembering.

Trust in your productivity systems and practices tends to work in either positive or negative bursts of momentum: either you feel on top of everything, which feels great and means you’re even more likely to continue doing the things that keep you even more on top, or things have started to spiral out of control and you feel worse and worse, thinking that it’s all so difficult.

Once you trust your second brain, what you’re left with is a profound feeling of Zen-like calm. You’re able to be present and in the moment: focused on the current thing you need to do, not worried by all the other possible things that you know you need to work on.

This is the fifth article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)

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Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth about the way that we work

As soon as more than one thing has our attention and we experience information overload, our instinctive reaction is that we want to feel busy to feel like we’re making progress. Because as a species we’re inherently lazy, we gravitate to the easiest way to achieve this illusion of progress.

We open our email inbox, check for what’s new, we scroll up and down, we check for what’s new, we scroll up and down, we fiddle around creating archive folders, we check for other new information (for example on our social media profiles or the news or our phone) and generally begin to develop an addiction to being connected. What we’re addicted to here is the illusion of productivity for a minimal payoff of thinking.

Getting your inbox to zero breaks out of this bad habit and forces Ninja-like decisiveness and discipline. This is needed for you to make the difficult decisions about emails as soon as you read them, reducing procrastination time, increasing clarity about your work and vastly reducing the stress that email overload causes.

Email changes from being a task that seems like an amorphous mass of work that will never be finished, into a quantifiable conveyor belt where every single email has a possible decision that can be made about it straight away. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, the good news is that is really is – and these 3 mindset changes are a great starting point!

Your Inbox Is Just A Place Where Emails Land

Your inbox is not your to-do list. I cannot emphasise this enough. Your inbox is not your to-do list. It is nothing more than a holding pen for where new inputs land. We often try to keep emails in our inbox because we don’t want to lose them or we want to come back to them. But the really meaningful work goes on outside the email inbox and using it as your primary to-do list reminder will mean either that things from elsewhere are missed or you end up having to email yourself. A lot.

In addition, using your inbox as a to-do list mixes your to-do reminders with all the other noise that your inbox throws at you, so it can be difficult to know what’s ‘to do’ versus ‘what’s happening’ versus what can be ignored.

We need to create new holding pens (@action, @read, @waiting and a simple archive system) for these very differently categorised items otherwise we’ll keep having to make the decisions about what’s actionable and what’s not over and over again.

Don’t Let Your Inbox Nag You All Day

Your inbox is full of potentially exciting information to get distracted with and this information is piling up all the time! “What if there’s something vital in there? Better quickly go and see what it is!” Checking too often can become a deadly disease. Turn off every sound and graphic. That way, you can revisit the inbox when you’re ready to, not when the inbox is nagging you to return. Here is a link to the best email verifier.

Don’t Check Your Emails, ‘Process’ Your Emails

This might sound really simple, but it’s one of those subtle changes that’s actually profound. Every time you open your inbox, your mindset is not to check what’s new, but to make the decisions and create the momentum needed to move those emails to where they need to get to. You can only get it out of your inbox if every option you need has an obvious next step – otherwise your mind will do what it probably does now and say, “Err, not sure where that goes. I’ll come back to that one later”.

Regular Review

Making time to follow up, double check, print, clean up and generally do some housekeeping on your email system provides a regular chance to do some routine maintenance and a little bit of strategic-level review. You can check out our email verifier for you to see which emails are the legitimate ones and the ones that are fake to dispose it.

After all, it’s important that we measure the effectiveness of any system; one of the key problems with how most people use Outlook or Gmail is that they don’t feel there’s any way that they can gain control, so they don’t think there’s anything to measure.

The great thing about Inbox Zero is that, once you reach it, it’s pretty easy to stay there as there’s no mountain left to climb, just today’s molehill.

This is the fourth article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)

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It’s often thought that good ‘time management’ is the key to productivity, success and happiness – but somewhere along the line, the game changed.

We now live in an age of constant connection and information overload with inputs that would have been staggering to comprehend even ten years ago: 24/7 email, social media, voicemails, instant messenger, texts, intranets, conference calls, collaboration tools and the burden of staying connected.

So, there’s a new game now, with completely new rules.

Put simply, skillful attention management is the new key to being a productivity ninja.

WHAT DOES ‘ATTENTION’ REALLY MEAN?

Your attention is a more limited resource than your time.

Have you ever got to the end of a day when you’ve still got loads to do, you’re still motivated to do it and you have all the tools or information that you need, yet find that you’re just staring into space?

Under those circumstances, you’ll often tell yourself you ran out of time, but actually you just ran out of attention to give.

Your attention is a currency to be spent, and if you choose to give away as much as 80% of your attention to meetings, don’t be surprised if that final 20% of your attention amounts to little more than dealing with a few emails, followed by time spent staring into space and feeling overwhelmed.

LEVELS OF ATTENTION

In an average day, you will have different levels of attention. For ease, a crude analysis might highlight three different types of attention:

Proactive attention: This is where you are fully focused, alert, in the zone and ready to make your most important decisions or tackle your most complex tasks. This level of attention is extremely valuable.

Active attention: This is where you’re plugged in, ticking along, but perhaps flagging slightly. You’re easily distracted, occasionally brilliant, but often sloppy too. This level of attention is useful.

Inactive attention: The lights are on but no one appears to be home. There’s not too much brainpower left and you’re likely to really struggle with complex or difficult tasks. Your attention here isn’t worthless, but its value is limited.

You will have your own ideas about when your attention spans are at their peak.

Maybe you’re not much of a morning person: it takes you a while to get any momentum going. Perhaps you pick up mid-morning, have a slump after lunch and pick up again towards the end of the day.

The key is scheduling your work according to the attention level you’re operating on.

SMART USE OF YOUR ATTENTION LEVELS

Every job will have within it a range of tasks. These will often range from making huge decisions about what to do and when to do it, through to updating contact information, filing things away or changing the printer cartridge.

Once you start to focus on your attention levels, you’ll start to realize that it’s a criminal waste to be changing the printer cartridge during a period of proactive attention. It’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, though in that moment it probably feels no different to when you change the printer cartridge at any other time.

It’s also worth thinking about your natural strengths and weaknesses here. Save tasks that you find particularly difficult for when your attention level is proactive, leave the intense-but-easier stuff for those active attention times and try to save up the easy or dull stuff for when you’re capable of little else.

GET READY

While there will be patterns to your proactive attention, it changes from day to day and sometimes from minute to minute. Therefore, to be able to schedule or select your work appropriately to your attention level, you need to have all possible options available to you so that you’re always free to make informed choices.

Being caught in a period of inactive or active attention and not having a clue about all the possibilities of what’s out there to do next very quickly leads to a lack of clarity, stress, procrastination and bad decisions.

This is the third article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)

The post [Productivity Ninja] How to Manage Your Attention and Get Things Done appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.

Great decision-making comes from the ability to create the time and space to think rationally and intelligently about the issue at hand. Decisions made during periods of panic are likely to be the ones we want to forget about.

The Productivity Ninja realises this, remains calm in the face of adversity, and equally calm under the pressure of information overload, and one option for this is the use thc products like Delta 8 flower as these are great for this option. You might not believe this, but it is entirely possible to have a hundred and one things to do and yet still remain absolutely calm.

How do we beat stress and remain calm? Are stress-relieving products like CBD UK effective?

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Here are a few basic principles:

Use Your Head, Don’t Use Your Head!

Be sure that you’re not forgetting important items by keeping all of your support information in a proper system, not in your head. Be sure that you’re not distracted and stressed by what you could be forgetting, by simply using a system instead of your own head as the place where information and reminders live.

This is certainly easier said than done, but once mastered, really works.

Trust Your System

You need to trust that whatever system you decide to use will work. There is a danger that additional stress will be created by the uncertainty of not knowing whether your system will help you deliver.

Moving to a new computer or new software brings with it a few days of uncertainty, but many people live for years without ever really asking themselves if their systems work to the point that they really trust them to work. Sticking to what you trust and trusting what you stick to are crucial.

The way to foster this trust and promote the total calm you need is to regularly consider not just your work, but the process of your work. Briefly, but regularly reviewing how you work will help you to promote clearer thinking in the work itself.

Lower Your Expectations. Seriously.

Realise that you’ll never get everything done all at once. That’s not the game anymore.

Be safe in the knowledge that you’re in control, selecting the right things to do, and that you’re doing as much as one human being possibly can. This definitely does not mean ‘don’t be ambitious’; it does mean that if you have a sense of ambition, you’ll probably experience times in your life when you have more on your plate than you can physically do. What you need to know once you get into this situation, is that you physically can’t do it on your own. Once you recognise this, there are three things you can do:

1. Worry about it and beat yourself up with stress.
2. Identify a ‘route through’ – work like a horse until you get to the end, keeping sane in the knowledge that you’re moving as productively and effectively as you can.
3. Get some help. Hire someone. Call in some favours. Delegate. After all, many hands make light work.

I’m a fan of numbers two and three, but I see number one far too often when I’m working with people. The truth is that worry, stress and negative thought patterns are intensely tiring and completely unproductive.

Keep Your Body in Good Physical Condition

Keeping fit and healthy will not only reduce stress, but will also give your brain the focus and energy it needs to produce clearer thinking and decision making, that will enable you to stay on top of your work. It’s a win-win-win!

Exercise that increases the flow of endorphins to the brain, eating protein-rich foods like nuts, beans, fish and chicken and, cutting down on your use of stimulants like caffeine, will all help you regulate your attention span, stay happy and promote a positive outlook and thinking.

Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re so true.

This is the second article in a continuing series about how to be a productivity ninja.  (Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)

The post [Productivity Ninja] How to Achieve and Maintain Total Calm appeared first on ProductiveMuslim.com.