The Ultimate Productivity Habit

I believe if something is important enough to remember, it’s important enough to write down.  This doesn’t just apply to random to-do tasks or events to put on your calendar.  I write down goals, ideas, what I spend money on and useful thinking points from books.  The reason to write isn’t to keep records, but to be more aware.

In the popular productivity bible, Getting Things Done, Dave Allen suggests writing everything down on a notepad so you won’t forget.  The purpose, according to Allen, is to take the burden off your memory.  While I think this is important, it only touches on one of the reasons to write things down.

Writing Keeps You Aware

Writing focuses your thinking.  When you write something down, you aren’t just creating a paper record, you’re changing the way you think about it.  Writing down a goal changes a whim into a conviction.  Writing down your expenses changes excessive spending from a bad habit to a conscious choice.  Writing down your idea turns a vague suggestion into a clear concept.
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How to Practice What You Preach

Life is full of contradictions.  People say they want health food, but McDonalds still makes billions of dollars each year.  People say they want to work satisfying jobs, but end up chasing after the biggest paycheck.  People say they want news on world affairs, but tune into 24/7 coverage of Anna Nicole Smith.

I’m no different.  I have plenty of contradictions between what I truly believe and how I behave.  And I think anyone who says they don’t is lying to themselves.  Practicing what you preach isn’t easy.  It may be impossible to do it completely.

But even if you can’t escape the contradictions of modern living, you can lessen their impact.  You can consult what you know to be true, and use that to guide you, instead of rationalizing your behavior and living a lie.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a fancy psychological term for something incredibly simple: when people hold two contradicting ideas, their minds start to fry.  This can be something simple like, “I believe health is important” and “I just finished eating a bag of potato chips.”
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Why No Response Doesn’t Mean Not Interested

Like it or not, life is sales. Even if you aren’t anywhere near the sales department in your work, I’d bet that almost every day you need to persuade, convince or find an agreement with another person.

A key sales (and life) lesson is simply this: just because you don’t get a response, that doesn’t mean the other person isn’t interested. Although we all dislike the pushy salesperson who goes for the hard sell at our expense, I’d say the majority of people are too passive. The assumption usually is: if people don’t respond immediately or come to me, it means they aren’t interested in what I have to offer.

I can think of countless examples where this kind of flawed thinking plagues people:
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How to Find Time for New Habits

“I’m too busy to exercise.”

Even if it were true, it isn’t a reasonable excuse. Exercise gives you more energy to do work. In many ways, most people are too busy not to exercise. But still, a lot of people feel they don’t have time for starting new habits like exercise, reading or doing extra work. Being able to find time is a big obstacle in starting new habits.

I’d like to make two arguments. These are generalizations, so while they may not be true in specific cases, I’d say they apply to most people, most of the time.

1. Time is never the most limited resource in your day.
2. A lack of attention, not time, is what prevents you from adding new habits.

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How to Stay Productive When You Make Your Own Schedule

Studying for exams, freelance contracts or working on bigger projects can mean freedom with your schedule. But it can also mean procrastination, stress from deadlines and an organizing nightmare. Working on your own schedule can be easier. However, there are more ways to waste your time if you aren’t being paid by the hour.

Setting Up Your Work Schedule

Whenever you start a new project, start taking classes again, or simply run into a block of flexible work time, you will need to set up a schedule. A good schedule is one that accomplishes the work you need to do and you actually stick to it. Unfortunately many people forget the second step and make impossible schedules that would require a machine to follow.

If you need to set up a new work routine, I prefer the top-down approach. The top-down approach focuses you on deciding what work needs to be done, and by what deadlines. Once you know the time limit for the work you need to do, this automatically creates the pressure to come up with a productive schedule.

Many people, however, try to go the bottom-up approach when they need to structure their time. They start by setting aside blocks of time, and micro-managing how time will be allocated to different tasks. This method only ensures you spend a lot of time working. It doesn’t ensure you get a lot of work finished. Bottom-up approaches make it easy to waste time, and they can cause stress if your work doesn’t fit neatly into your pre-arranged schedule.
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Bounce Back From These 3 Causes of Laziness

Everyone can get into a rut. What starts as one day where you don’t get much done, can turn into a week or two. Avoiding these streaks of laziness is the best solution, but what can you do when you’re stuck?

Getting Unstuck

The best way to get unstuck is to figure out how you got stuck in the first place. If you drive your car into a snowbank, the best way to get out is to get outside and look at the problem. But despite this suggestion, the first reaction is often to step on the gas, wasting more energy as you get even more stuck.

There are many ways you can get yourself into a streak of laziness. But I’ve found there are three big culprits that often cause you to get stuck, even though most people only blame one of them.
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Listen: This Habit Will Dramatically Improve Your Conversations

Your non-stop talking makes you seem like a jerk. I’ve never met you before, so if you are perfect at listening in a conversation, I apologize. That message wasn’t intended for you. But a lot of people do have a problem with listening. They fill conversations with the sound of their voice. I know, because I’m one of them. The listening habit has been something I’ve been trying to build with myself. There are plenty of selfish (and non-selfish) reasons why becoming a better listener is useful. I’m sure you don’t want to miss out, just because neither of us run out of things to say.

Some Selfish Reasons to Listen More

It’s easy to think of the selfless reasons to listen. People want you to listen to them. By listening, you can help someone with a problem, or help them come up with new ideas. But listening also has selfish benefits that make it worth the investment.

The biggest selfish benefit is that you learn more with your mouth closed. You’ll learn more about other people, and often, about yourself, if you stop talking. Those ideas are useful if you want to improve yourself. Going without feedback is improving in a vacuum, it’s almost impossible to do.

Listening also helps you think. When you’re truly listening, not just waiting for your turn to speak, you can chew over your ideas more. You can mull on points of the conversation longer. In the end, you’ll appear a lot wiser if you explain a fully-digested point of view, than if you just blurt out the first response that comes to mind.
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How to Find Motivation for the Things You Hate Doing

Everyone has things they hate to do, but need to do anyway. Sometimes it is doing basic chores that need to be done. In other cases, it’s the boring part of an otherwise interesting project. People who get things finished (as opposed to people who just get things started) have mastered the ability to push through the things they hate doing, to work on the things they love.

Getting over activities you hate means combating a special type of procrastination. Everyone procrastinates. Even on things that they normally enjoy doing. I occasionally procrastinate with writing, even though it is one of my favorite things to do.

While a few minutes or an hour of procrastination for a neutral task happens occasionally, you can procrastinate for years on the jobs you really hate. If there are things on your to-do list that never make it to the top, you probably know which jobs these are.

Stomaching Unappetizing Work

There are a few strategies you can use to make bad tasting tasks a little more pleasant. The first is simply to focus on it. You might have noticed that you chew a lot more when you don’t like the food in your mouth. This is probably an instinctive reaction to force you to carefully examine what you’re going to eat before you swallow.
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Attention Introverts: How to Become More Extroverted

Already, by writing this title, I’m sure I’ve annoyed a few people. Extroversion is supposed to be a personality trait, not something you pick, but something you were born with. That might be true. But even if you are fairly introverted, I think you can still capture some of the best parts of being an extrovert:

1. Being comfortable with groups of people.
2. Meeting people easily.
3. Having conversations without wondering what to say.

I used to be incredibly introverted. My social life was lagging behind and I used to blame it on my personality. While I can’t claim to be an expert in charisma, I have made big improvements towards the three skills I mentioned earlier. Best of all, I still get to keep the best parts of being an introvert, like being able to focus during time alone.

How to Boost Your Extroversion

I found there were a couple of key steps I took that helped me learn the best parts of being an extrovert, without changing my personality. Everyone needs to take their own path, but hopefully by sharing the steps that worked for me, you boost your extroversion as well.

The most obvious first step is simply to spend more time with people. If you feel uncomfortable in social situations, that’s probably because you aren’t in them frequently. This advice is so obvious it hardly deserves mention, but it’s a step few decided introverts take on. If you aren’t extroverted, you won’t feel motivated to meet people, and if you don’t feel motivated to meet people, you can’t become extroverted. It’s an unfortunate Catch-22 that can stall self improvement.

If you feel stuck in this cycle of isolation, I think there are two main places you can break it. Both strategies work, and doing both at the same time might be your best option.
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Beyond GTD: How to Keep Productivity Simple

I first learned about David Allen’s famous productivity system, Getting Things Done, several years ago. It’s an excellent book, building off a simple idea: the less you need to rely on memory, the easier it is to become productive. Since being popularized over the web, GTD has been associated with the art of productivity.

But there is only one problem, GTD is too complicated. When I first tried to set up GTD, I found it clunky and hard to stick with. The systems that Allen developed over years were being put in my lap on one day. Some of the ideas were immediately useful, others were wasteful and difficult to maintain.

GTD: The Swiss Army Knife (When All You Want is a Fork…)

Only several years later did I realize the source of my problem with GTD. The organizing system was robust, but it wasn’t tailored to my life. Keeping a notepad and calendar was a great idea. Keeping a set of dozens of folders to track action items over a period of months wasn’t.

To be fair to Allen, it wasn’t really his fault. GTD is a great system, but it’s difficult to create a system that suits everyone. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company has completely different productivity needs than a grad student. One person might need to track hundreds of pieces of information, while the other might need minimal tracking but a high degree of focus on one task.

Just saying “tailor it to your life” is a bit trite too. Obviously if everyone was born with the understanding of what productivity needs they have, they wouldn’t need to read books on productivity.
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