Productivity Supercharged
This week at one of my mastermind groups an issue was raised of how is it possible to get more done in a day while reducing stress at the same time. So as per their request during following five days I will post activities that will aid you in establishing foundation which we’ll use in the group meetings to develop skills in order to significantly improve social and professional life balance while drastically increasing daily productivity.
Mission 1: De-clutter your life by de-cluttering your mind;
These who struggle with organizing their life generally show it in the most obvious places like their working space, their bathrooms and the clothes that they wear. These who seem to be always running late, forever stressing over looming deadlines and complaining about lack of time more often than not are the ones with the most messiest desks and over cluttered working spaces where mess is often laying on a top of another mess, right next to the “to do” pile. Hardly a productive and stress free environment! Similarly how can you be productive or think of good ideas and keep your mind open to new possibilities if your head is clustered with disorganized and emotionally charged thoughts?
Use this week activities as a foundation to set yourself on a path to establish new habits for success and stress-free lifestyle. Use the support and knowledge gained in mastermind groups to further develop your skills and solidify these habits in to powerful tools in order to bring your life to the level of efficiency and productivity that at this stage you probably don’t even realise you are capable of.
Activity 1:
1) Switch off any possible distractions such as mobile phone, TV, radio… and spend next 15 min. making a list of everything that’s on your mind: everything you’re worried about, everything that concerns you, anything that you think when you’re about to fall asleep, etc…
2) Underline from the list these items that are within your immediate control of influence.
- Copy what you have underlined to a new list in a dot point format. (These are the things that will get you real results if you are to put effort in to them.)
- Prioritize everything you have listed that needs to be addressed within next 3 months or maximum within 1 year.
Note: while prioritizing consider the underlying needs behind each item. For example people don’t stop smoking because its bad for their health. Out of these who choose to stop such bad habit do it because of more fundemental reasons. For example smoking can prevent you from spending quality time with your children or friends, something that might be very important to you because maybe you have high family and social values. These are the values that would not only encourage smokers to stop their bad habits, but also would dictate most of their daily life decisions (e.g.: what job to take, what social activities to participate in, how to dress and so on…)
Consider exploring what are your fundamental values behind items that you have selected. We will dive more in to it further down the track.
- Make sure that your action list contains maximum of 10 items. If there are more than 10 things on the list, then either group some of them together or only select these with the highest priority. Main reason for being selective is that there are probably only a few underlying reasons for each activity that really matter. (more on that later)
3) Review every item that have not made it on the previous action list and by crossing each one off consciously start to let go. Let go of any emotional attachment to these items that are not within your immediate control and influence. Do so because they are no longer relevant at this stage of your life as your energy and effort from this moment on is to be focused only on the things that you have selected to be within your control and of high importance.
Take a moment to consciously give yourself permission to let go of each item that you cross off and do so for each one on the list that is no longer relevant to you.
Review the action list of 10 most important things that you have selected as we will be using it soon. Come back to the blog tomorrow for the 2’nd out of initial 5 core activities that we will use as a foundation to drastically improve your productivity, reduce stress level and develop a healthy social and professional life balance.
None of the things that were on my mind were actually irrelevant, except “meaning of life,” which I realised a while ago, is far too time-consuming and probably energy-wasting.
However, I probably am focused on too many things at the moment, and my thoughts begin to interfere with each other.
The good news is that each one does DIRECTLY contribute to enriching my life and promoting my core values.
As we discussed too many things are on your plate Owen… If you start to juggle too many plates at once you are guaranteed to drop all of them eventually.
But for the sake of this exercise its fine to be where you are right now. In the group over the next few weeks you will gain more clarity to support your identity and values while accomplishing a lot more in a day.
Nicely written. I really appreciate the effort in putting the post together.
The activity has given me more clarity in what is most important.
Glad it helped Phil.
Some activities offer immediate clarity, others need to be processed by subconscious before you start to see their relevance.
So just do the activities within 15 or maximum 30 minutes time frame to the best of your ability, but don’t try to get them perfect, as there is no need for it right now.
We’ll dive in to more breakdown of each one and more in the groups.
Heh… Listen to what you think about… how simple! I have the same stuff going through my head over and over again but because I haven’t really paid attention to it, I haven’t really done anything about it!
What I had found is that I had control over all the major things I worried about.
This could be because I have control over them and I’m finding it hard to make the decisions that I need to make concerning them. I procrastinate but desire a result. It shows a bit of cognitive dissonance that hasn’t been addressed. I want to change that.
I’m surprised to find how small the quantity of things that I worry about is but how much and how often I worry about them… and how they haven’t been changing for a while. It almost seems like I haven’t been addressing these things.
Good activity.
Oh and by the way… you’ve described my desk so well!
Lilhater (Mr P. I presume?) it’s all goes back to good old 20/80 rule where 20% of things in our heads consume 80% of our energy.
So by making a decision (to do something about it or to dismiss it) and most importantly acting upon it, you eventually get so much more clarity and energy that you can invest elsewhere.
For the sake of my contribution to the post, I had previously mentioned to Anatoly the benefit I receive from keeping a journal – something I hadn’t previously even thought of prior to joining the mastermind group.
The simple task of taking the thoughts in your head and placing them on paper almost resembles taking data from one medium and moving it to another, thusly freeing space where you need it most. I’ve also found I sleep a lot easier as I don’t spend time dwelling on thoughts in my head.
Now I must decipher the noise in my head and decode the underlying factors hindering my productivity.
unfortunately am am mostly to blame for the size of my chore list due to bad decisions in the past. But now I just have to do these jobs.I think I need to plan more time for them.Categorizing them has helped though.
Very useful post. Switching off the mobile was probably the hardest 2 do which takes up a lot of energy. NO TV for the last 3 weeks or so has been easy 2 live with. I’m sure there are more people who figured out veging on their couch is taking over main priorities.
Should become a daily ritual. Does this mean I might actually start getting some sleep now??? lol
Lefty, you are a bit behind with the program. Get your act together
In regards to mobile, I generally put it on silent and hide it when I need to focus on task at hand. Works great.
Kyle, yes “unloading” is the powerful way to keep your mind fresh and open to new opportunities. Keep up with the program.
Carlo, also keep in mind that in order to maximise productivity and effectiveness of these activities, they have to be done daily. Not all at once.
Its important because it seeds the ideas in to your subconscious mind which works away gradually on integrating techniques learned in to the new skills.
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