Month: February 2016

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Actionable Growth Mindfulness Procrastination

The “Productivity Equivalence” II

As promised here’s the second part, maybe we’ll have to stretch this out even more, but I think it’s worth it. We saw last time the Productivity Equivalence, this one:

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

We talked about the first two components, Sleep and Diet. I’d like to finish with the diet entry fast with this.

Diet, part 2 and ending. When we talk about diet and productivity we also need to talk about our immediate intake of food and drink and our immediate productivity. It’s clear that a three martini lunch on a daily basis not only will destroy our liver in the long run but our productivity that afternoon, as a matter of fact, even if we don’t do it ever again, that afternoon is gone. So, to bring this more down to earth, we need to seek foods that are good for us in the long run, but also we need to have at our disposal foods that can help us immediately. A cup of coffee will help you be more alert, a lunch heavy on fatty food and meat will have the opposite effect, but I am not a dietitian and know nothing about nutrition, just about productivity so go see a specialist before doing anything “crazy”. Seek their help, after all, they have all those student loans to pay, you’ll be helping them too.

Exercise. Another no brainer, wow, all the things we know we should do but somehow, we don’t, we keep putting them off and… you’re right, procrastinate, you’re a smart bunch, that’s why I like you. Now, not only need you to get your weekly cardio, and you need to make muscle, you need to activate your body at the gym if this is something you can afford, there’s more to it. We need to move, upstairs and downstairs, up the hall and down the hall, take periodic walks, stand up as much as you can because, drum roll, latest studies have found that sitting is killing us. Yes, you read it right. Sitting is the new smoking, so they say. The studies are very compelling suggesting your are doing a horrible disservice to your insides by sitting down on a chair, just by doing what seems to be nothing. This is where the standing desks craze comes from, then some smart guy figured out that since he was already standing he might as well do a couple of miles and incorporated a treadmill to the mix and there you go, the treadmill desk was born, and then this guy came with this idea and the “rat race” was finally materialized with this HamsterWheel Deskhamster wheel desk…
But I digress. Don’t sit down all day, it will kill you, get your body moving and you’ll be better off.

Meditation/Prayer/Silence. Now this is where the juicy part is on this whole Equivalence is. You might say “what does standing still have to do with doing more? You make no sense!” so glad you asked. Meditation, oh sweet meditation. I’m a new but fully convinced convert on the value of meditation. I’ve been doing it on a daily basis for the last 6 months and it has changed my life, or at least my perception of my life. I’m now more calm, less irritable, and those of you who know me know what I mean, am I right? I don’t get angry as I did before, and most of all I’m more aware of my role in my life and that of others. I’m a much better listener also, because I can much better stop listening to my own inner narrator, I have a much better grasp of reality around me. If you don’t like meditation I suggest you give it a try, and then another, at least 6 months of daily practice. I am not kidding, you know you need to slow some things down, mainly in your head, and this will help you, I am positive about that. What’s that? You don’t want to do it even after what you know about it? You’re like a smoker who won’t quit! But OK. Are you religious? Try praying, yes, pray, but don’t enter in a dialog with the supreme being of your choosing, no, just say your prayers, don’t think about them, don’t try to find a meaning, no nothing, while you’re praying just pray, that’s it. What now? You won’t meditate and won’t pray either? Sit in silence then, don’t lay back because you’ll fall asleep, sit, on the floor preferably, and stay in silence. Don’t try to think about your day, or the stuff you have to do, or what you need, or nothing. Silence around you and in you. You’ll need to concentrate on something, use your favorite tree from when you were a kid, concentrate on it. Do it again and again, get distracted? Back to the tree, remembered something? It can wait 5 minutes, back to the tree. Visualize in your head all you can remember from that tree. Do this five to ten minutes everyday for at least 6 months. Your life will change.

Well, there you have it, we’re out of time, and when I say we I mean you, I want to keep this posts as informative but short as possible because I know time is of the essence. Please share this on your Facebook wall if you found it informative, and comment, here or on the social media app of your choosing, have a great day.

Categories
Actionable English Mindfulness Money Procrastination Self-confidence

The “Productivity Equivalence”

Since the last quarter of 2015 I’ve been changing my habits to positively change my life. I’ve changed the way I see time and also what I do with it. All of this to start applying the “Productivity Equivalence” or SE for short.

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

This simple equivalence tells you where to put in and were to take out to attain a higher level of productivity. Higher levels of productivity give you more results, whether your goal is being healthier, spending more time with your family, being wealthier. What this means is simple. You can’t get better results by removing where you should be adding and adding where you should be removing. Also, you can’t eliminate any of the components totally, either the good ones or the bad ones. The good ones have minimums you have to try to achieve and the bad ones, no matter how hard you try to eliminate them they find a way to creep up again if you ever take your eye off of them. You can’t, for instance, stop sleeping altogether and use that time to exercise because that would not work, the result would be a lesser PE value than before. And remember, this is only an equivalence, it’s not a complete equation for Productivity, you can think of things missing here that are important to you. You should put them in and evaluate for yourself what is better. I use it as a reminder and as a guide of what to look for if I suddenly notice a drop in my productivity, so I can make an introspective assessment of what might have changed on this equivalency and work on that.
Let’s take a moment now to view the components.

 

  • Diet. This one is obvious, we need to eat right, I don’t need to tell you that, again. Now, maybe something you didn’t know is this hypothesis that says that our willpower is like a gas tank, we can use it again and again and again until it’s drained and then we succumb to temptation much easier. What does that mean? That we need to be careful on what we use our willpower. If we have to refrain ourselves from taking a donut instead of a piece of fruit from a platter in a conference, then we will have used some willpower to do that, if we have to choose from taking the elevator instead of the stairs then again, willpower. What to do then? We need to save our willpower for really important things. We can remove this decisions in two ways. Always make a decision in advance, we talked about triggers before, well, here’s an example of one of them. “If I have to go up I always take the stairs” “If I want a snack I’ll never eat pastry” We decide beforehand what we want. We can compound that with physically removing temptation and get as far as we can from those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

So, as I’ve accustomed you to this before I won’t change it today. I’m going to stop here for length but I’ll continue tomorrow, how about that, a two day piece. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you, please comment down here, even if it’s only to say hello.

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English

If I wrote a book, would you read it?

Hello reader. I’ve been playing with an idea in my mind. I’d love to help more people overcome procrastination. Some I can reach from here, and that’s awesome, and I’d would love your help there, If you think this site deserves it, please share it with your friends. Now, I’d like to put this help in ebook format, what do you think? If I wrote that book, would you read it? Would you find the information valuable enough  to part with some of your hard earned dollars to get it?  Please let me know in the comments, thank you!

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Actionable English Mindset Procrastination

Resistance

I’m not going to talk about Valentine’s day.

I am doing this even though I don’t really feel like it today. You know the feeling. Sometimes your head wants to be in another place. You can’t seem to find the drive that just yesterday you had to accomplish something. You start having doubts again “Is this worth it?” “Am I good enough?” “Am I the real deal?” It’s a real emotional see saw, am I right? All of this happens to all of us, if it doesn’t happen to you you might be a psychopath, but that’s another story. OK, we all feel this, but what is it then? Glad you asked. This feelings, even though they are not equal, can be bundled in the same space. You can see they’re not equal because the “Am I good enough?” feeling is from someone who is yet to make his mark, but the “Am I the real deal?”, technically called “impostor syndrome”, comes from someone who is already crushing it yet she fears she will be seen for what she is, to her doubting self, a fraud. All this comes from one simple force, Resistance.

“Resistance: the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.” Resistance is a force of nature, of human nature. It’s always there, when we are awake, when we sleep, when we feel cheerful, when we feel gloomy, when we are “in the zone” or when we are “in a rut”, Resistance is always there. We might think we’ve beaten it, but we haven’t. The same way the eagle doesn’t defeat waterfall-984180_960_720gravity when it soars through the sky, because it will have to face it again after sleeping and needing to hunt for another meal. And that is a good thing. It’s a good thing because fighting Resistance is what builds us up. We lift weights in a gym because they cause resistance to our movement and we build muscle from that. We memorize, and have some trouble doing it, because we want to be able to access information later on, and use it, but there is resistance in the memorization process, at least for me.

 

Resistance is. Resistance will always be there. And it’s relentless. And, as Steven Pressfield said “Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.” Resistance seems to want things to stay the same, but in reality, we know things can’t stay the same, ever. Resistance then wants us to stop moving, to prevent us from provoking that change and produce something. Resistance wants to let things rot. We want to help things live. We want to create. We want to help others create. We want to fight Resistance on every opportunity we get. We fight Resistance every time we decide to write another word, brush another line, talk with one more person, send one more business email, review one more expense report. We fight Resistance all the time we move forward on our creative space. And that’s all there is to it, with Resistance. We only need to know that it’ll never, ever, go away. It will always be there to hold us back. And that is good to know. It’s good to know because we can count on it as we can count on gravity. We can use it to make us go forward. We can use it to make us stronger. We can use it to produce better work everyday. We can use it to force us to stop procrastinating. What? You thought I wouldn’t be able to make a reference to procrastination? It was implied all this time and only in the end did I allow it to show it’s head here.

When you go on this morning, minding your own business, and you feel Resistance, I hope you’re able to recognize it. When you do, first thing before fighting it I want you to recognize it. I want you to see it curiously, and acknowledge it’s existence and power. Then you fight it. You’ll find this way is clearer, you will have more options and you’ll be more successful. Tell us how Resistance has been trying to get you? We’d all love to read it down here in the comments.

Categories
English Growth Money Procrastination

“Second hand procrastination” is it a thing?

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A few weeks back, in my post titled “What kind of procrastinator are you?” we talked about the different kinds of procrastinators. I want to revisit and expand on the ones that have the “student’s syndrome”. We’ve seen how they leave until the last possible moment their tasks, and then rush on to do them, their bodies full of adrenaline, cortisol, from within, and from the outside they might use stimulants such as caffeine, taurine or even others even more intense substances. In the future I will refer to this type of procrastinator as “The Rusher”, because, he rushes to get his job done, sometimes even regardless of the consequences.

The Rusher goes to extremes to get the things done at the last possible moment, just when the pressure, exhilaration and anxiety surpass his content and calm brought by doing something else. Now, this would be the end of the conversation if not for the fact that, more often than not, this rush brings unwanted results. As he sprints to the finish line The Rusher might want to cut some corners, maybe not on the job he’s doing if he’s got high standards, but on the other aspects of his personal and professional lives.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Rusher, is by his procrastination a risk taker, as he won’t be taking into account that Murphy may break havoc with his plans of finishing the task. That’s when an unexpected outage in the Internet, an empty printer cartridge, a late delivery all become life or death emergencies that have to be handled at any cost. The procrastinator suddenly starts asking for favors left and right, and his relationships might suffer from this or he might end up indebted much more for this help for much more than the value of the favor entitled in other more normal situations. Also our Rusher might, for example, neglect his commitments to other people or other projects, stressing unwittingly those relationships. All of this without the need of there being an extra setback on the task at hand. The simple fact of having to set everything aside because all available time, every ounce of energy, all of the attention have to be concentrated on the task can cause problems with others. A commitment previously engaged, could be even previous to the assignment or existence of the task, might have to be canceled because it’s priority suddenly drops, as the task’s rises. That commitment is now a casualty of The Rusher’s procrastination. The Rusher is no longer harming himself, he’s harming others who now suffer from this “Second Hand Procrastination”. As second hand smoking is unhealthy second hand procrastination is also harmful to the ones around the procrastinator. It cost them his time, his affections, and it can even have a monetary cost with things as late fees, non refundable tickets going to waste and others. In his professional life The Rusher might even be affecting his coworkers and subordinates, by making them miss important personal activities because of having to rush to finish some task that was waiting on his desk for 2 weeks but now has to be finished by morning. This is one of multitude of reasons why reducing our procrastinating is important. It gives us more clarity, more options, improves the chances of success and might even save a relationship or two.

Has this nudged you to work on your procrastination issues? If so, or even if not, I’d love to read some comments bellow, in the mean time, have an excellent week, and remember that on Sunday it’s Saint Valentine, so better be prepared so you don’t have to cancel it with a work emergency, lack of reservations or whatever other thing you’re putting off.

Categories
Actionable English Procrastination

“Setting your schedule” or “Back to School”

Hello everyone. Today I bring you another tool that will help you take control of your time and therefore be less prone to procrastinate. Remember when you where young (you shone like the sun) no no, really, remember your school days? Remember how you used to get all this things done, at least in the morning? And then, in the afternoons, if you where left to fend for yourselves time slowed down? Maybe you wasted the afternoon watching TV, or some went outside to play. Some might have had extracurricular activities, most didn’t. Try to remember how time seemed to change its pace from morning to afternoon. One reason that might have been was the existence of the school schedule. Give it a thought. In the mornings all of your activities were planned beforehand. You woke up everyday at the same time, had a morning routine and then you went to school. Once in school you had a clear schedule. And it was great. It was great for your productivity, maybe not very fun but you got stuff done. On the other hand, the afternoons were loads of fun, when you could figure out what you wanted to do with them. In the end it mostly turned our to be same old same old, am I right? If your schedule wasn’t prepared by an adult for you had to think of something yourself and that could take some time. Well, we are the adults now. We’ve got to take care of our schedules. And that can be a daunting task. I know that some parts of our day are fixed, most of all the mornings, but that’s only because we tend to get up as late as possible. After the morning rush we are set free to go on with our day. Whether we work a regular job, we are independent, we don’t work or whatever it is that we do with our days we still have the day ahead of us. We still have all this time that has to be filled with, if we do it right, meaningful activities. And that’s where procrastination comes in, because if we don’t figure out, with preparation, what this activities are going to be we can be drawn to other tasks less important and more urgent, or so they seem at the time, or we can end up wasting our time because we haven’t solved the puzzle in our head of what it is we want to do. I recommend then that we schedule our days. Like when we were in school. We can schedule our tasks for every hour of the day. Sounds a little crazy I know, but the bigger procrastinator you are the more help you need. You need to do your schedule at least the day or night before. Mixing your daily routine with the distinct tasks that your have to accomplish that day, giving them even less time than your estimation thus forcing yourself to concentrate harder at them, remember Parkinson’s Law from a couple of posts ago. Remember that every task that you put in there is a commitment to somebody, maybe only to you but a commitment nevertheless.

Schedule

Once you’ve got your schedule for the next day I bet you’ll even sleep better. By doing this you are helping yourselves in two ways. You’ll define what has to be done, and that gets you thinking about the task. You’ll establish if the task is relevant, if it’s meaningful, if it’s feasible, if it’s pertinent, all of this help you choose the task to be done, if it’s the better use of your time right then and there. The second thing you’ll accomplish is the ability to focus and not get distracted. As the tasks have been already chosen, by yourself, your only duty then would be to do them to the best of your abilities, and as fast as possible. No second guessing. No waiting for inspiration or other muses. So my dear reader, do you schedule your day tightly or loosely or not at all? I’d love to hear from you on the comments and if you think this blog is interesting then please share.