Productivity Ninja Characteristics No 1 – Zen-like Calm

Graham Allcott

“The mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” – David Allen

This is the first in a series of posts defining the Characteristics of a Productivity Ninja….

So you want to be a Productivity Ninja?

The first characteristic you need to nurture is Zen-like Calm. Good decision-making comes from the ability to create the time and space to think rationally and intelligently. The Ninja realises this, remains calm in the face of adversity, and equally calm under the pressure of information overload. 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? I answer this question more fully in my book as well as the practical skills needed for Ninja-mastery of email, tasks, projects and meetings. 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 system, not in your head. Be sure that you’re not distracted and stressed by what you could be forgetting – by using a system instead of your own head as the place where information and reminders live.

Trust your system

You need to have trust that whatever systems you use will work. There is a danger that additional stress will be created by the uncertainty of not knowing whether your systems will help you deliver. Sticking to what you trust and trusting what you stick to are crucial. The way to foster this trust and promote the Zen-like calm you need is to regularly consider not just your work, but the process of your work too. Briefly but regularly reviewing how you work will help you to promote clearer thinking in the work itself.

Lower your expectations

Realise that you’ll never get everything done. That’s not the game anymore. Be safe in the knowledge that you’re in control, selecting the right things to do. This does not mean ‘don’t be ambitious’; it does mean that if you have a sense of ambition, you’ll probably experience some times in your life with more on your plate than you can physically do. The truth is that worry, stress and negative thought patterns are tiring and completely unproductive.

Keep your body in good physical condition

Eat porridge. Keeping fit and healthy will not only reduce stress and give your brain the focus and energy it needs to produce clearer thinking and decision making and it means you’ll look hot. It’s a win-win-win! There are hundreds of theories about why physical fitness positively impacts the brain. I discuss a few of them in Chapter 3 of the book.

Be prepared & organised, ready for when times get rough

“I don’t have the time to be organised,” is a common objection I hear when coaching clients towards Productivity Ninja status. But the truth is that when we experience periods of ‘flow’ – the times in our day or week when we’re most productive – the last thing we want to do is be thrown off track by being unable to find some crucial piece of information or by not having the tools we need readily available.

Usually, those people who naturally resist the idea of being organised are the very same people who experience the greatest mindset shift from getting their paperwork, projects, email inbox and everything else under control. It’s immensely calming if you do it regularly, but probably even more so if you don’t normally experience it very often. The realisation that after each battle comes a period of rest and realignment, and the strategic value of preparedness for the battles to come, are central to the Ninja philosophy.

This is an edited extract from How to be a Productivity Ninja. Read more buy the book….

Like this? try these

Book one of our How to Get Things done sessions for your workplace

Lower Your Expectations – Seriously « thinkproductive.co.uk

Why teams need managers with zen-like calm « thinkproductive.co.uk

Use Your Head – Don’t Use Your Head « thinkproductive.co.uk

Tags: email etiquette, getting things done, Productivity, time management, time management training courses
Posted in Productivity Ninja, Uncategorized | No Comments »

60 Minutes: My Rules of the Road

Graham Allcott

After my long opening post for March, it’s time I shared some details about how I plan to work 60 minutes a day, 7 days a week, throughout the month of March.

Here are the common questions I’m getting and my answers to them…

What time will your “60 minutes” be?

I asked the dice what time my 60 minutes should be, before the end of last month. The dice told me it should be 2.30-3.30pm every day. This is possibly the most annoying outcome in a whole month of dicing. Unsatisfyingly not late enough in the day to mean I can roam off the grid before returning to work, unsatisfyingly still early enough that by 3.30 most of the day’s gone. So I’m annoyed about that one. Luckily, I am no longer bound by the decisions of the dice (!) but I should at least honour the decision where possible. I actually missed my allocated time on Sunday, having already got tickets to see Bobby McFerrin on Sunday afternoon at the Barbican in London. So I’m going to stick to 2.30 where possible, but I’m going to be flexible with myself too.

What’s classed as “work” and what’s not?

I expect – and hope! – that this will become one of the learnings of the month as a whole, and my definition may even change along the way. But for the moment, my definition is along these lines…

> anything to do with Think Productive is work, whether I enjoy doing it or not (this includes emails, phone calls and so on. If people call me outside of my regulation hour, I may choose to take the call if that’s the time that suits them, but the time spent comes off my total for that day.)

- anything to do with my personal life – is NOT classed as work, whether I enjoy it or not. So working out in the gym, training for my marathon isn’t work, tidying the house (we’re moving at the end of April so there’s plenty to do!) and so on. All of these things are probably to most people very squarely in the bracket of “non-work” anyway, but to lots of people running businesses, there’s less of a “work-life boundary” as all of these things are a drain on the attention. To be honest I usually don’t make this distinction so clearly and I don’t mind sitting in the office booking gig tickets or sitting at home sending important emails – it’s usually more important that I manage my attention well than I keep a firm boundary. So this will be interesting as the month progresses.

Won’t you just do stuff off your personal to-do lists?

Well, maybe. But I also want it to be a month of being open to possibilities. I think if I finish the month with an empty ‘@home’ list and nothing more substantial than that, it’ll be a failure of a month. So I really want to go beyond that and focus on quality downtime, or Ninja Preparedness as it’s otherwise known!

How will the company’s ‘Daily Huddle’ be affected?

At the moment, we run Daily Huddles every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I will continue to do these either at the normal time of 9.40am, or at 2.30pm when I first log on. However, if we do it at 9.40, I’ll subtract the minutes from my daily 60?

Will you have weekends off?

No. This is going to be a strange habit to break. I very rarely work weekends. In fact, I rarely even think about anything work-related during the weekend. I’m good at switching off and tend to be an all or nothing sort of guy. So this new routine of never having a day off will be strange, even if I probably won’t need weekends in quite the same way, having only worked 5 hours that week by the time Saturday arrives!

What about Think Productive workshop delivery?

Well, I have a short (one hour) workshop booked in during that month. So I will class that the hour for that day. Beyond that, there won’t be any workshop delivery for me. This isn’t actually that unusual these days: we have a fabulous team of Productivity Ninjas stationed all around the UK (and even now in Canada too! In fact, it’s our Canadian Ninja Dawn’s influence which means I have picked up using the word ‘fabulous;, which is… nice!) so my role in the team has been changing a lot over the last two years. Thankfully, I’m much more focussed on strategy and growth than on the day-to-day. Don’t forget I spent most of last year squirreling away on my book so we’ve had to consciously build a business that doesn’t just survive, but grows without me. And we’ve got a fabulous team of people at TPHQ whose brilliance makes that actually happen.

The truth is, I love delivering our workshops. Even after delivering them so many times in the last four years, the changes that our work brings about is wonderful to see. But at the same time, it’s unsustainable to have me trying to work IN the business as well as ON the business. This month will be a firm reminder to engage only where I add value, and get out of the way to avoid being a bottleneck with everything else.

Wish me luck! And I’d love to hear from you….

Whilst your boss may not sanction exactly the same experiment as I’m undertaking here, what are some of the ways you could play with your working hours and the boundaries between work and play?

Like this? Try these

Attend one of our time management workshops, to help you get things done

Read all of Graham’s blog posts on his 60 Minutes experiment

The four-day week: less is more | Money | The Guardian

Tags: 60 minutes, getting things done, time management, work life balance
Posted in Grahams 2013 Experiments, Time Management | 1 Comment »

One last throw of the dice

Graham Allcott

February has been a strange month. With the dice man experiment, I’ve made decisions big and small by the throw of the dice. Am I glad it’s over? Maybe. Would I do it again? Maybe. Will I miss the dice? Definitely.

Such is the nature of the dice, it’s difficult to be feel fondness or resentment towards the inanimate object that has guided so many key moments during my last month. The dice have brought rushes of excitement and feelings of liberation, as well as moments of dread and regret.

So as I sit here writing this – because the dice told me I needed an ending – at 10pm on the last night of February, I say farewell to the dice. And I thank the dice for what I learned. The dice confirmed many of the assumptions I made here in my original hypothesis. In particular, here are some highlights from my learning:

Action in any form trumps indecision

Action brings momentum. Even if you make a poor decision, you can change it. Even if you get started and start something badly, it’s easier to see something to disagree with on a page than see a blank page. Sometimes the dice are all you need to get over the hurdle and get started. Movement matters.

Perfection and order is a cultural disease

It was fascinating to encounter so much resistance to the whole notion of randomness. People didn’t even like the idea of me making a random decision, let alone the idea that they might make one themselves. We’re programmed at school to be sensible, to do things conventionally and to blend into the background. The dice have assisted me in making the everyday just that little bit less beige, and have helped make boring work less boring. And it’s helped me explore and appreciate all the possibilities we never usually see. That can’t be a bad thing, can it?

Habits are engrained

Possibly the biggest failure of the diceman experiment was that I didn’t use them more. I never set out to make every decision by dice, but there were days when my rolling was on a roll, and days where I made only a small number of decisions by dice. What I think this proves is that we spend so much of our time not thinking about the process of what we do. We just…do stuff. We get up, go to work, do our work in the usual way, go home in the usual way and so on. I had some odd experiences and some disjointed days thanks to the dice, but if I had the month again, I might well commit more of the design of my days to the dice. In hindsight, perhaps that was a missed opportunity.

Living is easy with eyes closed

Decisions that you don’t feel responsible for don’t feel like they really matter, even when the decision has a negative consequence. If I make a bad decision myself, I curse myself for getting it wrong, whereas when the dice make a decision, you can blame the dice and focus on the experience of the negative consequence or focus on rectifying it. This perhaps illustrates how central pride and ego are to our work and indeed our whole lives: I am particularly passionate about good ideas, so good decisions become a source of professional pride, probably much more than is probably healthy. I think this probably hinders productivity because we tangle identity with success, making what should feel easy and emotionless seem important and dangerous. If you’re someone who spends most of your time in control and taking responsibility for things, there’s something wonderful about going from leader to follower, even just for a short moment. It helps us remember that there’s really “nothing to get hung about” after all.

Decisiveness is easy when you have a gun to your head

On the flipside, what was interesting and very positive was the effect the dice had on my ability to make my own decisions. Knowing the dice would be asked the question if I didn’t make a decision straight away, and learning from the dice (which always makes a decision in an instant), certainly sharpened my ability to follow suit and play the game of life with just a little more freedom and a little less ego.

So, aside from being a month fraught with “danger”, the diceman experiment has been a lesson in being present, thankful and grateful – in the good and in the bad. And a lesson in taking things just a little less seriously. After all, what have we all got to lose anyway?

So then, it’s goodbye to the dice.

Or is it… Double or quits?

Let me go and ask the dice.

Like this? Try these

If you need help getting things done, try one of our workshops. Book onto one of our time management courses here

Read all of Grahams Dice Man posts here

Pick up the book that inspired the experiment, The Dice Man, here

———————————————————————————————————————————

Tags: diceman, experiment, getting things done, time management
Posted in Grahams 2013 Experiments, Productivity, Time Management | No Comments »

One Chance

Graham Allcott

“Every painting we don’t paint will not be made by someone else”.

Edgbaston Reservoir - hut with graffiti - Carpe Diem

Those are the words of George Passmore, from the artists Gilbert and George. That one line quote is one that I think about often. Every moment we spend pretending to work rather than creating, or checking Facebook instead of creating, or worrying instead of creating means that stuff isn’t happening.

Whatever your work is, your job is to create things. Your gift is unique, as is every chance you have to give that gift to the world. It’s true that tomorrow you’ll have another chance, but you won’t ever get today’s chance back.

Ever.

So seize every chance you have to give your gifts to the world.

Starting…now.

Why not attend one of our open workshops?

London

Manchester & Halifax

Birmingham

Bristol

New Years Resolutions Kit [FREE Download] | thinkproductive.co.uk

Task: Get a Grip on Guilt | thinkproductive.co.uk

Tags: getting things done, motivation, procrastinating
Posted in Productivity | No Comments »