From ‘Nana to Ninja



Guest blogger, Claire Bradford, shares her experience with us following her recent attendance at one of our “How to Get Things Done” Workshops.



When I attended the Think Productive day course, I came away heady with excitement about being ninja-like in my productivity and thirsty for the Zen-like state that would come from knowing that I need not worry about forgetting things again. I was confident about my shiny new system, which would cut, razor like, through my chaos and transform my life. All I needed to do was sort out my projects, my next actions and my weekly reviews and the world, nay the Universe, would be mine!

Then I got home.

Mess reigned supreme, there were bits of to-do lists spread amongst various different apps and notebooks, a big pile of backlog and an overwhelming sense of ‘where the bleep do I start?!?’ I laughed bitterly at what a ‘nana I had been to even think I could be a ninja. Somehow, applying my shiny clean system to this big ol’ mess didn’t seem possible and I resolved to clear the backlog somehow and then begin my initiation into the ways of the Productivity Ninja.

I don’t really need to tell you that didn’t work, do I…?

It took me a few weeks before it dawned on me that I hadn’t even made a dent in the pile of stuff that needed doing. I thought wistfully about the Zen-like state I’d craved, and wondered what a Productivity Ninja would have made of me, sitting in the midst of the chaos.

Then a thought occurred to me. I would be ninja-like about becoming a ninja. The Wise Elders at Think Productive had shown me the mystical pathway. It was up to me to begin the journey. And so I did. And I’m back from my travels to pass on my wisdom to you. The tips below will, in the future, form the ancient and mystical scrolls of ‘nana to ninja mastery, so read them well, young one…

• A ninja uses stealth and cunning to creep up on the enemy

Don’t let your chaos see you coming. Lull it into a false sense of security by adopting a cat-like stealth to adopting productivity habits. One small change at a time should do it, e.g. breaking today’s to-do list down into ‘projects’ and ‘next tasks’. Get into that habit over a few days and, when you’re ready, introduce another one. The effect of these small changes will be like a wave gathering force. It will be swift. And devastating to your backlog.

• A ninja uses many cloaks of disguise

Your chaos gets worse every time you tell yourself that you’re not organised, or that you’re a right ‘nana when it comes to productivity systems. Disguise yourself to fool the enemy. Remember – the walls have ears. Don’t put yourself down or give up, either in your self-talk or to other people. Act (and speak) ‘as if’ you’re a Productivity Ninja, even if you don’t feel like one. Your to-do list won’t know what’s hit it.

• A ninja remains in a Zen state with a clear and focused mind

When feeling at your most ‘nana-ish, it’s likely that your mind is in overwhelm and that you have many things all screaming for your attention. Writing everything down helps to clear the mind and enable you to step back and take a more objective view of your situation. This includes (especially) things that don’t fit on your ‘to-do’ list such as feelings, decisions to be made and reflection. Also, take time each day for at least 5 minutes’ meditation or focused breathing. This will sharpen your ninja’s sword to make you even more deadly to the deluge.

• A ninja has patience and tenacity

On days when the ‘nana to ninja scale is registering a very big NANA, it’s easy to give up and be consumed by the chaos. Don’t concede victory to such an unworthy enemy! Pick your battles and celebrate each fight won. You slashed through 100 unwanted emails today? You are NINJA! You completed a weekly review? You are NINJA! You have learned much, young one. Train your attention on to the journey you have taken so far, not to how far you have to go. The path to mastery is taken one step at a time.

So there we have it. These days, I’m registering much more NINJA on the ‘nana to ninja scale, but I still have my off days. The important thing now is that I don’t put myself back at the beginning of the pathway each time. I’d be a real ‘nana to do that, wouldn’t I…?

Claire is a qualified professional life coach, NLP practitioner and a member of the Coaching Academy.
-Straight Forward Coaching

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November’s productivity tips – Calendars and date-specific actions
Graham Allcott

Graham Allcott










Calendars are perhaps the one part of a productivity system that EVERYONE manages. So ubiquitous in fact, that we rarely think about them at all. Yet when people are developing their productivity systems, a lot of questions crop up about how to maximise the use of calendars and make everything much more effortless as a result. Here are a few top tips!

100% trust?
Most of us trust our calendars much more than we do the rest of our productivity system: if we find ourselves feeling stressed because there’s something on our minds, that thing is usually a ‘to-do’ item rather than a calendar item. We wake up in the night wondering what’s happening with a certain project, but we rarely wake up in the night wondering “where am I two weeks on Thursday”. Why? Because we tend to trust our calendars. But if you can remember times recently where you’ve forgotten where you need to be or worried about having too full a calendar, it shows that there isn’t 100% trust there, and hence there IS some room for improvement – even for something as taken for granted as a calendar! Start to consciously recognise where there might not be trust with your own system and your answers magically appear!

Avoid having more than one TYPE of calendar
It’s difficult to trust a system if it’s not the only system: having a to-do list that doesn’t include your post-it notes or all the things in your head will ultimately create drag on your productivity because you can’t make quick, in the moment decisions about what to do next without checking in three or four places. Likewise, having an Outlook calendar at work, a paper diary in your bag and a calendar on the wall at home makes it easy to miss things. Our newest “Productivty Ninja”, Stuart McKenzie talks here about using Google calendars to keep multiple calendars to separate different roles in your work and life, but viewable all in one place: http://bit.ly/vzLrq7

It’s usually possible to get the data from your Outlook calendar into other formats, for example into Google Calendar or onto your phone or tablet device.
Manual synching if you need it!

Linking calendar data across work and home, personal device to work device, can often be a pain in the backside though. So if you either don’t want to struggle through learning how, or you have an unhelpful IT manager in your office, there is another way! You’ll eliminate a huge amount of double-booking and possible calendar-issues by manually ‘synching’ your calendars once a week as part of your weekly review. If you’re new around here, here’s what we mean by a weekly review – they rock! http://bit.ly/vZuOZ1
By the way, ever feel like the rest of your world needs a ‘sync’ button? Here are some thoughts from Irelands’ Productivity Ninja, Keith Bohanna: http://bit.ly/q0yb1g

Avoid “Outlook Victim” syndrome
Do other people have the ability to book time in your diary? Do you sometimes find you arrive on a Monday and half your week is robbed by other peoples’ meetings? If so, use your calendar to defend your time and attention by booking out ‘1-person meetings’ to do the work needed on your big projects. Mark the time as busy or Out of Office in Outlook. That way, you should avoid reasonable people booking meetings with you about things that for you are lower priority. Creating a restraint around your time will also force you and others into more creative ways of solving the problem than the solution that involves you needing to give up an hour of your time sat in a dull meeting. And what do you do with the UNreasonable people who ignore the fact that your calendar is busy and book stuff in for you over the top of your ‘meetings for one’ anyway? Well, say no gracefully, literally BE out of the office if that’s an option or find a way to bring up that conversation. We work with a lot of organisations where this problem is company-wide and systemic. It’s not a good way to run any kind of business, so perhaps there are opportunities for change within your team, or even for a wider cultural shift too?

Schedule some batching time
Batching similar tasks together is a great way to get things done more efficiently. Think of it as the opposite of multi-tasking (which is largely a myth anyway). Bringing together all of the sales meetings on the same day or getting immersed for a whole day in items that relate to one specific project can reduce the set-up time needed (both physically and mentally) to get into gear on a particular project. Think of how often you do your expense claim receipts or admin filing and you’ll know what I mean. Schedule in a day or half a day to get really focussed in one area and be proactive enough to add these to your calendar.

Leave blank space
Don’t go overboard with ‘batching’ though. Stuff happens to us. It takes time. Emails take time. Interruptions and fire-fighting take time. Schedule in ‘blank space time’ every day to account for these realities…or don’t do this and just stay late at the office again!

Christmas! The Ho Ho Ho deal for December!
Whilst you’re all preparing for Christmas and organising parties and the like, us poor productivity ninjas are sat here twiddling our thumbs. Every year we get fewer enquiries for training in December than for any other month. So we’ve decided to make you a deal!
We’re offering 25% OFF our regular price for ALL OUR IN-HOUSE WORKSHOPS for the entire month of December. So call us and mention the “Ho Ho Ho deal” and we’ll give you a discount for any workshops that take place in December or the first week of January. We think the start and end of the year are actually perfect times to do the digital and mental spring cleaning that our workshops provide, so why not give us a call!

Or come along to one of our public workshops…
Click on the relevant date below to book your place now – with our new 3 tiered pricing system. Fair, transparent and a fantastic return on investment.

The South East
London:
Friday 10th February 2012
Wednesday 28th March 2012
More 2012 London dates

The South West
Bristol:
Friday, 17th February 2012

The Midlands and the North
Birmingham:
Friday, 2nd December

Manchester:
Wednesday, 18th April 2012

Ireland
Dublin:
Tuesday, 7th February 2012

Have a playful, productive month and we’ll see you in December!

Graham and the Think Productive team

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Monetisation, or Write A Limerick
Matthew Brown

Matthew Brown











“Slow down and remember this: most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”

Ah, wise words from Tim Ferriss. And the point he is making is a good one. With our most precious resources – time and attention – we should be obsessively careful about how we spend them. The key is the impact generated versus the time spent.

I think a lot about the impact/time trade-off, and Tim Ferriss provides a useful prism through which we can look at our tasks. For example, if I have to make a series of business development calls that are very unlikely to lead to a sale, why would I bother making them at all? Even if they were very quick (low time impact), my time and attention would be better focussed elsewhere. No impact? Bin it.

Similarly, if I have a mega proposal to write – and it looks like it will take me three days from start to finish – even if I know that it will be well-received, why bother? If I can generate the same amount of “well-received” with a snappy, comprehensive, well-argued one-pager in forty minutes, why would I spend three days on it? Too much time? Bin it.

But there’s a third angle here, and that is monetisation. Say I am working on a task that requires very little time commitment, AND has a good chance of achieving a very high impact. Great, right? Well, only if I have monetised the activity. By which I mean that the vast proportion of the value created by my time and effort goes to me – or, at worst, my employer. If I have done a low-time-commitment, high-impact piece of work and my employer and I are no better off at the end of it, I might as well not have bothered. No monetisation? Bin it.

Don’t get me wrong; there are many activities I indulge in that are low impact and time-consuming and offer no economic pay-off of any kind – drumming along to Led Zep tracks, writing limericks, walking in the cemetery. These are all good, because they don’t come in a bag labelled “work”. My choice.

If you’re doing something that either has no impact or takes up a big chunk of your day, please stop. You’re wasting your time. And if you’re doing something that is low time commitment and high impact but is making someone else money – but not you or those that matter – REALLY please stop.

Go and write a limerick.

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If you’re looking for time management training, our ‘How to Get Things Done’ workshops offer the basics on how to implement the ideas from David Allen, Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss and many more! It’s available in-house to your company or also through our public workshops across the UK.

Time Management Training has changed! Click here to find out about our productivity-focussed Time management workshops, email training and facilitation training.

 

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Next Action Thinking
Rusell Caird

Rusell Caird











Get organised. Get productive.

Imagine the scene. On the early morning train to London, still dark, everybody half asleep…….all except one poor woman who had decided that it was a great idea to leave the sorting out of all her receipts and paperwork until the morning she was due to see her accountant to finalise her accounts.

The lady was travelling with a colleague who was trying to help. There were piles of paper set out all over the small table, much to the annoyance of fellow passengers, who were becoming increasingly agitated by the two of them. It was clear from their stressful conversation that the goal of organising the paperwork before reaching Waterloo was never going to be achieved but that didn’t stop them trying. That was until the colleague knocked her flask of coffee over the paperwork.

Although nothing was said, you could feel the “that will teach them” vibes from everyone in the carriage.

I don’t know the final outcome of this story as I left the train whilst the coffee was being mopped up but my best guess is that neither their journey nor the appointment with the accountant was as productive as it could have been.

Although we may not all cause chaos on early morning trains we are probably all guilty of putting things off until we HAVE to do them.

Why do we do this?

Well it has something to do with our relationship with the task. If we don’t like something, we tend to avoid it. Maybe the task seems too big. Maybe we are unclear in our minds about how to get started.
If that is the case, ask yourself one simple question about the task.

“What is the next action?”

Once you have determined how you can make a start on moving a task forward you begin to gain momentum and the motivation to complete it…..ahead of any deadlines.
Follow this simple formula and you’ll be amazed by how much you can achieve.
I’m sure our friend on the train wished she had!

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If you’re looking for Time Management Training, our ‘How to Get Things Done’ workshops offer the basics on how to implement the ideas from the likes of David Allen, Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss and many more! It’s available in-house to your company or also through our public workshops across the UK.

Time Management Training has changed! Click here to find out about our productivity-focussed Time management workshops, email training and facilitation training.

 

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