From the category archives:

Productivity

10 Question to Ask When You Get Asked to do Something

July 22, 2010

How much of what you do during an average day is purely volentery? I mean how much of it is the decision 100% with you over whether you do it or not, with no adverse concequences to swing your decision? My guess – less that 1%. Either your boss, your wife, your son, your neighbour, [...]

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The Four Phases of a Productivity Process

July 20, 2010

Rubbish title I know. But it is important. A productivity process is something we use to help ourselves become more productive. It might be a to do list. It might be the way we arrange our desk. Even the time we get up in the morning and start working. These processes go through a four [...]

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How to be an Expert

July 15, 2010

We live in a world of ‘experts’. The sheer amount of freely available information out there, especially on the ‘interwebs’, mean we are all ‘experts’. In any field we want. All we need to do is read the Wikipedia article and a couple of forum posts and we know all we need to know. There [...]

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When Do You Have Capacity to Work?

July 12, 2010

As human beings we have a finite capacity to get things done. This is limited by time, attention span, motivation, priorities, and a whole heap of less nagging, but equally as disruptive things. Our limited capacity varies through the day – the graph below is utterly fictitious from a numerical point of view, but the [...]

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An Old Hack, a New App, and Why I Got More Done

July 5, 2010

I have a new toy. Courtesy of Minimal Mac I have a new productivity tool on my iPhone – tenplustwo. It is based on an old Merlin Mann productivity hack, which I have be inspired to revisit here. In one of the less original names around, Mann’s (10+2)*5 Hack is a clever way to squeeze [...]

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The Decision Maker

June 24, 2010

If you have a look at the Downloadable Tools section of this blog, you find my Decision Making Tool. It is an Excel tool you can use to think about how you make decisions – it is not actually for making decisions, but for thinking about how you do that. But you’ll understand that if [...]

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Consumption vs Creation

June 23, 2010

As human beings, we spend our time either consuming or creating. Consuming experiences, sustenance, and feelings; and creating those things for others and ourselves. Both are important, and both can be enjoyable. There is however a time for one, and a time for another. When we talk about productivity, and ‘being productive’ we are usually [...]

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What to do When the World is Against You

June 10, 2010

Life is tough sometimes isn’t it? You get home from work, collapse on the couch with a warm can of soda, and as it sprays it’s contents over your face and up your wall, you conclude that things are pretty much lined against you. And it is not just that things have gone wrong for [...]

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The 3 Truths of Office Politics

June 8, 2010

In my very humble opinion, the biggest loss of overall production in most people’s lives is in office politics. And I don’t make that sweeping generalisation lightly. Or not that lightly at least. It might not be politics that you see as the immediate cause to any inefficiency, but in 8 out of 10 cases, [...]

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Don’t Believe the Slogans

June 3, 2010

Slogans are powerful tool. Advertising agencies are paid millions to come up with new ones which may capture our imagination, or even go viral on the world’s e-mail system. They are used increasingly in personal development and productivity too. Look at the last couple of books you may have read in these subject areas and [...]

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