Small changes. Big results. last week, in my discussion on how to improve your daily rituals, I talked about my creative vs knowledge days and the power of "managing your interruptions". Today I am discussing how to get things done more effectively. As far as I am concerned, I use lists and personal weekly reports. -By Philippe Mora (@philippemora) Philadelphia, 04/14/14 - When you're a knowledge and/or creative worker, besides being interrupted when you are in a state of flow, another potential slow down to getting things done is simply yourself. For example, you may procrastinate a little when you start your day. Say an hour. Google+ this, Foursquare that. Well, at the end of the week, that's 5 hours (almost a full day) lost - which amounts to 42 days in lost time per year. At my rate, that's about $10,000. Or you don't know how and when to stop working - you're in your flow, everything is really doing well, so how about just getting "this" done and next thing you know, you put on a 18 hour day. Only to be sluggish and uninspired in the morning, and wasting your next day. The techniques below will help you being effective in having structured, productive and efficient days. If you combine this with my advice on "creative" and "knowledge" days, add your little personal secret sauce, you'll be a high achiever, without putting the inefficient long hours, in no time! Happy experimenting! Regular readers know I definitely believe in the power of hard work. As Jimmy Spithill, skipper of Team Oracle USA, says, "Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy." But we can all work smarter, too. And clearly we all want to, as evidenced by the popularity of this recent post, 5 Scientifically Proven Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder. The tips were provided by Belle Beth Cooper, content crafter at Buffer, the maker of a social-media management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social-media updates. (Cooper is also the co-founder of Exist.) That post was so popular I asked Cooper for more ways anyone can make a workday more productive without putting in extra hours. Here are five: 1. Rework your to-do list. I've written about the history of the to-do list before, and how to write a great one. One of the most counterintuitive but effective methods I've found for increasing my productivity is to limit how many items I add to my to-do list. One way to do this is by choosing one to three most important tasks, or MITs. These are the big, tough tasks for your day that you really need to get done; the ones that will keep you in the office past the time you planned to leave, or working after dinner if you don't get through them. Leo Babauta advocates doing these before you move on to other tasks: "Do your MITs first thing in the morning, either at home or when you first get to work. If you put them off to later, you will get busy and run out of time to do them. Get them out of the way, and the rest of the day is gravy!" The rest of your to-do list can be filled up with minor tasks that you would do as long as you complete your MITs. Make sure you work on those before you move on to less critical tasks and you'll find you feel a whole lot more productive at the end of the day. Another to-do list tip that can reduce work anxiety is to write your to-do list the night before. I often end up in bed not only thinking about what I need to do the next day but also planning the day; obviously, that makes it difficult to sleep. Writing my to-do list before I go to bed helps me relax and sleep better. And rather than wasting time in the morning because I don't know what to work on first, I can jump straight into my first MIT the next day. One more to-do list tip: Focus only on today. My most recent and favorite change to my to-do list has been to separate my "today" list from the master list of everything I need to get done. I often feel anxious about all the things I know I need to do at some point. I need to write them down somewhere so I don't forget them, otherwise I worry about when or if they will get done. But I don't want those items cluttering up my list for today; that will just make today seem even busier than it already is. My solution is to make a big list of everything I need to do. Then, every night, I move a few things to my to-do list for the next day. (I use one big list with priority markers so that anything "high" priority moves to the top and becomes part of my "today" list.) That lets me focus on what I must do today, but it also gives me a place to dump every little task I think of that someday must get done. Take it from David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done: "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them." Park your ideas on your to-do list, but make sure you create a "today" list and a "someday" list. That way you won't waste energy trying to remember important ideas and you'll ensure today won't feel overwhelming. 2. Measure your results, not your time. The whole idea of working smarter rather than harder stems from the fact that many of us put in more and more hours only to find we don't get more done. That's why we want to find methods to be more productive in less time. One way to do this is to adjust the way you measure productivity. If you evaluate yourself by what you actually get done rather than the time it takes to get something done, you'll start to notice a difference in how you work. For example, if you have a big project to complete, try breaking it down into "completable" sections. For instance, I like to break down my blog posts into sections and small tasks like adding images. With a set of smaller tasks making up a big project, I can check off what I get done each day, even if it takes me many days to finish the whole project. I get a nice little rush every time I check off a task within a blog post, even if it was just a 200-word section. It helps me maintain momentum and keep going until the whole post is done. Another way to measure what you get done each day is to keep a "done list," a running log of everything you complete in a day. I scoffed at done lists for a long time until I joined Buffer, where we all share what we've done each day using iDoneThis. If you start keeping a list of everything you get done in a day, you might be surprised how much more motivated you are to do work that matters and stay focused so you get even more done. Focus on measuring by results, not by time on task, and you'll definitely get more done. 3. Build habits to help you start working. If I don't have a plan for what to work on first, I tend to procrastinate and waste time in the mornings. You might have a differentdanger time for procrastination, but getting started seems to be a hurdle for most of us. One way to overcome this problem is building a routine that tells your brain and body it's time to work. Your routine could be something as simple as your daily commute or grabbing a coffee on the way to work. I usually sit at my desk with my coffee and check up on my favorite sites to see if there's any news. Once my coffee is finished, that's my cut-off point: It's my trigger to start working. Other ways to get into a working mindset can include sitting down at your desk or workspace, turning off your phone or putting it away, exercising, stretching, or eating breakfast. You could even have an album or playlist that gets you in the mood to work and listen to that as part of your routine. The same technique works on weekends, too. Although you might be tempted to let go of your routine entirely on your days off, our CEO has found that maintaining a weekend routine that doesn't differ too much from his weekdays works well: The more he let go of his routine on the weekends, the longer it took him to pick it up again during the week. Routines aren't a sign of boring, regimented people. Routines are a sign of people who have goals and have found the best way--for them--to actually accomplish their goals. 4. Track where you waste time. If you're struggling to be productive, it's tempting to change your routine or try new solutions before you uncover the real problem. (I've done this in the past and found it never leads to a long-term solution.) The first step in becoming more productive is to identify your regular time-sucks. Start by tracking what you do every morning to get ready for work. You might find you're spending time on things such as choosing your clothes, something you could do the night before. (Or like our co-founder, you could just wear jeans and a white t-shirt every day.) Then, keep going: Track how you spend your time during the day and look for patterns. A tool like RescueTime can help. Maybe you'll find you're getting caught up on Facebook too often. Or that what should have been a two-minute work conversation regularly turns into a 10-minute chat session. Once you know what takes up your time or leads you to procrastinate, start making specific changes around those habits. I used to waste a lot of time in the mornings checking out my favorite sites for news or updates. Now I factor it into my routine; as I mentioned, I do it while I drink my coffee, and when the coffee is gone, it's time to start working. 5. Build habits to help you stop working. This one might seem a bit strange, but it really works. Some of us struggle to stop working, rather than (or as well as) start working. It's easy to just keep going for another hour, or to get your computer out after dinner and work until well after bedtime. The worst thing about these habits is that they encourage us to put off our MITs; we figure we'll be working long enough to be sure to get them done. (But, of course, we don't.) Here are a few ways to switch on at-home time and leave work behind: Quit while you're ahead. Take it from Hemingway: "The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day...you will never be stuck." His advice can apply to all kinds of work. Stopping in the middle of a project can work well: You know what you've done, you know exactly what you'll do next, and you'll be excited to get started again. Set a firm cut-off time. Sean Ogle wrote a great post about this. Most days he has a (pretty extreme) strict cut-off time of noon. You could make this work with an evening cut-off time to get you out of work by, say, 5 p.m. Ogle gets up early, so he has five to six hours of work time before his midday cut-off point. But because he's strict about stopping work at noon, he still needs to be ruthless in prioritizing his tasks. Another benefit of a strict cut-off time is you'll be a lot more motivated to complete your MITs first; the pressure of a looming deadline will help keep you focused. Another way to limit your work time is to unplug your laptop power cord. Then you can only work as long as your battery lasts. It's great motivation to get important things done more quickly. Plan something cool for after work. Another tip from Ogle is to plan an activity or event for after work. In Ogle's case, he plans to catch up with friends or attend events around 12:30 or 1 p.m., which helps reinforce his noon cut-off time. If you want to get out of the office around 5 p.m., you could set up a dinner date, a quick after-work drink with a friend, or a family visit. External forces and peer pressure can give you motivation to get things done within the time you have. Create a wind-down routine. Having a routine to help you wind down from work can be helpful if you often struggle to switch off. Light exercise works well for me, so I like to walk home from the office or take a walk after work. Our CEO goes for an evening walk as part of his going-to-bed routine because it's such a good winding-down activity. Journaling can be really relaxing, as can talking through your day with a partner or friend. Something Benjamin Franklin used to do was ask himself every night, "What good have I done today?" Writing about your day can be a good way to reflect and keep a log of what you've done, as well as to transition out of your work mode. If you're getting into the habit of planning your day the night before, this can be a good way to cap off your workday: Pick out your MITs for tomorrow and create a task list, so you can relax once you leave work. What do you do to increase your productivity without putting in more hours? Share in the comments below. [Read More Here > Thank You Inc.]
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When starlings flock together, wheeling and darting through the sky in tight, fluid formations, we call it a murmuration. These murmurations can range from small groups of a few hundred starlings in a small ball, to undulating seas of millions of birds, blocking out the sun. Week-End Reading: http://philippemora.us > Also, find more on my pinterest boards. > By Philippe Mora (@philippemora) See More Here. Thank You The Atlantic 2014/02]
Have you ever been overwhelmed by paper clutter in your physical mailbox and at home? Counters, tables, desks covered with receipts, bills, legal documents that seem to always pile up faster than you have the time for organizing and filing them ? And then, when you are looking for an important document (say, your mortgage papers), you have no idea where it is ? Have you ever wondered when would be the time you'd be able to go "fully paperless" and pro-actively save a few trees per month ? -By Philippe Mora (@philippemora) San Francisco, 04/09/14 - Back in 2005, I decided that I was done with all the paper clutter in my house and decided to go totally paperless. At that time I only had a very slow HP scanner connected to my mac and it would take about 2 hours per week to scan all my bills, receipts and other important papers to PDF. It took me two years to go fully digital - vendors from insurances to credit cards were just starting with online, paperless statements, and retrieving them from the gazillions of accounts online was a cumbersome exercise because of too many passwords and logins. Today, my statements go directly from the vendor to a designated folder in my dropbox, so do all the receipts (restaurants, parkings, etc) that get scanned from my phone. The operation is seamless effortless and costs me less than $100 per year. From a business standpoint, FileThis and Expensify have understood the B2B aspect of the equation: Businesses have a direct customer service opportunity with their customers, in any vertical ranging from banking to insurances, hotels, brokers, in fact, anybody who sends statements to their customers. Also no need to reinvent the wheel: we already have secure and effective cloud storage services like dropbox, so no need to yet get there. In fact, FileThis potential is almost infinite when it deals with document organization and curation. We can also think about more verticals and types of documents that FileThis can cleverly stash for you - movies, pictures and other non-text-based digital assets. Lastly, the white labeling and corporate opportunities are endless and FileThis is really well positioned for an Evernote or Dropbox acquisition .... So go stash everything in your life today! FileThis Comes To iOS To Automatically Gather And Organize Your Personal Documents FileThis, the cloud-based document filing service that works something like Mint.com, in that it automatically logs into your online accounts then gathers data on your behalf, is now taking its service mobile with the introduction of the FileThis iOS application. The service was first announced at MacWorld in 2012. Today, FileThis can access your documents saved online, like your bank statements, bills, and other files from your credit card companies, cable/Internet provider, your mobile operator, insurance company, online trading account, health insurer and more. Those files are then synced to the cloud storage service of your choice for safe keeping, including Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Personal and, now, FileThis’s own online storage solution called FileThis Cloud. In addition, users can also scan and upload their own files using a desktop application designed for Mac. The idea for FileThis came about after co-founder Brian Berson and his brother had to move their mother to an assisted living facility and were faced with having to work through 20 years’ worth of her documents. They didn’t know what to save and what to toss, and it was an overwhelming task to say the least. “Going through all of that, I realized that we’re living in the 21st century – we’re living in a digital world – and yet, as consumers, we still deal with a lot of paperwork,” says Berson. Documents come to us in the mail in paper format, while others are made available digitally, but not easily accessible to us. It’s the latter that is FileThis’s main focus. It’s trying to make it easier for us to collect, organize, archive and search across those online files, which are today scattered around the web. To get started with the service, U.S. consumers sign up for an account, add their preferred archival destinations (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, etc.), then add their connections to their online accounts at their utilities, financial services, online retailers like Gap or Amazon, and others. There are now around 350 supported institutions you can connect with, and the company is adding 20 to 25 more each month. Berson says that once FileThis supports 3,000 institutions, it will reach roughly 85 percent to 90 percent of most used services on the market. (It’s currently at 75 percent, he estimates, because the 350 it supports now are the largest ones.) The average user on FileThis has 12.8 online connections, he also notes. The product is a freemium service, with up to six institutions available for free, and a paid tier ($4.99/month, 30 connections) for those who need more. Though the company declined to provide exact user base figures, it’s now in the “five digits,” we’re told, and is seeing an 18 percent conversion rate from free to paid. Now available on mobile, FileThis’s application for iPhone and iPad lets users connect to their online accounts, configure their cloud storage preferences, and view their saved files while on the go. But it also adds a key feature that works around one of the service’s earlier pain points: file uploads. Before, users would have to scan their paper files to digital format — a time-consuming task, at best, and certainly a cumbersome one for those who don’t have an at-home desktop scanner. With the mobile app, you can instead snap a photo of a file or receipt and add it to your FileThis online collection. That will see the service competing to some extent with another newer startup, Mustbin, a mobile app that last winter raised $4.5 million in Series A funding for its personal data organizer. I’ve personally found Mustbin very handy for keeping track of all the random paperwork I’m still handed out there in the real world, from receipts for new tires to vet bills to financial statements and more. But FileThis’s app now offers a compelling alternative, especially because I know my files can be archived on a platform that will probably stick around for a while, like Google Drive or Dropbox. San Francisco-based FileThis, co-founded by CTO Trent Brown, is a 10-person company backed by $2 million in funding from undisclosed strategic investors, including an unnamed Fortune 500 company. (FileThis’s SEC filing only reveals John Wortman of Valeo Financial Advisors is involved). The new iOS application is available as a free download here. An Android version will be available in May. [Read More: "FileThis Comes to iOS" Thank You TechCrunch 03/26/14]
My ideal daily routine is most likely different from anyone who is reading this. I "check my emails" last thing in the day. Not first thing. My first activity of the day, at 5am, is to go train at the gym or run on my favorite trail. Three days a week, my time between 5am and 2pm is uninterruptible: communications are down to "favorites list" and social apps are off. During my "creative" workdays, I go down my "MIT" (Most Important Tasks) list until 2pm. Then back to the gym for strength training and meditation. In the evening, I review my daily "achievements", prepare my next day and do my "email/social/blog/mechanic" activities. Two days a week, I do the opposite: I lead highly interrupted, unscripted, interactively and socially rich and unpredictable days. - By Philippe Mora (@philippemora) Philadelphia, 04/07/14 - This is what I call the #workinprogress life. For creative and knowledge workers, the "microsoft project"-style sequential tasks (with dependencies) approach to "getting things done" has never worked and it really took me a very long time to figure this out. Before, I was stuck with keeping up with always being told to achieve those bloody "milestones" before the dreaded "deadline" ... Thing is, my mind did not, and still does not, work that way. I don't have a creativity on/off switch that is on from 9 to 5 every weekday. My mind does all those tasks in parallel, and my mind works 24/7. My mind is project-based, not sequential-tasks-based. Even computers have not been sequential since the 70s. Now the real difficulty for me was to harness this 24/7 parallel work in a meaningful way, which meant not to be stuck in a perpetual #workinprogress state. I adopted the project based approach to my work about 7 years ago. At that time, I was traveling for months at a time, spending most of my time alone in hotel rooms and airplanes. An ideal time: it was not expected that I would be "interruptible" at any moment, for my time zone was never fully known and most people had the decency to avoid waking me up in the middle of the night, say, in Sydney, Sao Paulo or Paris. So I was the one who pro-actively initiated phone conversations, meetings, and fully organized and controlled my personal and digital lives. Ahh. Control. When I ended that period 4 years ago, it became clear to me that it was expected from me to be interrupted at all times, day and night. I ended up in a world of constant noise, disorganized and slowing me down. I have written last week that I now view "being interrupted" as an opportunity for mentoring and "owning the issue". What I did not explain is that today I do organize my vibrant creative life around those interruptible times, which I call now "knowledge" times. So two days a week are "knowledge" and three days a week are "creative". I now work on "matrix-based projects" instead of "sequential tasks with dependencies". I am not a "team player". Industrial-age "teams" are little pyramids of passive-aggressive, meeting-prone, pecking order incompetency. Today I am a responsible node with commitments to my most direct nodes in my project network. In other words, today, "the boss" is the network associated to the project I am a part of. Like in a movie, my talent and others' are the only thing that matters for the successful completion of the project. The number of projects I participate in is of my own choosing, and the associated networks, nodes, and interactions are driven only by the commitments I make to the only nodes in the project network that interact with me. Think about it: I have effectively ended the industrial-era organizational paradigm - and with real-world success as at Hughes Creative this enables us to effectively run the Hughes Network and take on multiple large projects with as few as one node, or 4 creatives, something that cannot be achieved in any other organizational structure. Juan Ponce de León spent his life searching for the fountain of youth. I have spent mine searching for the ideal daily routine. But as years of color-coded paper calendars have given way to cloud-based scheduling apps, routine has continued to elude me; each day is a new day, as unpredictable as a ride on a rodeo bull and over seemingly as quickly. Naturally, I was fascinated by the recent book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Author Mason Curry examines the schedules of 161 painters, writers, and composers, as well as philosophers, scientists, and other exceptional thinkers. As I read, I became convinced that for these geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury — it was essential to their work. As Currey puts it, “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” And although the book itself is a delightful hodgepodge of trivia, not a how-to manual, I began to notice several common elements in the lives of the healthier geniuses (the ones who relied more on discipline than on, say, booze and Benzedrine) that allowed them to pursue the luxury of a productivity-enhancing routine: A workspace with minimal distractions. Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge never be oiled, so that she always had a warning when someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, just detached the doorknob and brought it into the room with him — something of which today’s cubicle worker can only dream. Mark Twain’s family knew better than to breach his study door — if they needed him, they’d blow a horn to draw him out. Graham Greene went even further, renting a secret office; only his wife knew the address or telephone number. Distracted more by the view out his window than interruptions, if N.C. Wyeth was having trouble focusing, he’d tape a piece of cardboard to his glasses as a sort of blinder. A daily walk. For many, a regular daily walk was essential to brain functioning. Soren Kierkegaard found his constitutionals so inspiring that he would often rush back to his desk and resume writing, still wearing his hat and carrying his walking stick or umbrella. Charles Dickens famously took three-hour walks every afternoon — and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing. Tchaikovsky made do with a two-hour walk, but wouldn’t return a moment early, convinced that cheating himself of the full 120 minutes would make him ill. Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a pencil and paper with him in case inspiration struck. Erik Satie did the same on his long strolls from Paris to the working class suburb where he lived, stopping under streetlamps to jot down notions that arose on his journey; it’s rumored that when those lamps were turned off during the war years, his productivity declined too. Accountability metrics. Anthony Trollope only wrote for three hours a day, but he required of himself a rate of 250 words per 15 minutes, and if he finished the novel he was working on before his three hours were up, he’d immediately start a new book as soon as the previous one was finished. Ernest Hemingway also tracked his daily word output on a chart “so as not to kid myself.” BF Skinner started and stopped his writing sessions by setting a timer, “and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.” A clear dividing line between important work and busywork. Before there was email, there were letters. It amazed (and humbled) me to see the amount of time each person allocated simply to answering letters. Many would divide the day into real work (such as composing or painting in the morning) and busywork (answering letters in the afternoon). Others would turn to the busywork when the real work wasn’t going well. But if the amount of correspondence was similar to today’s, these historical geniuses did have one advantage: the post would arrive at regular intervals, not constantlyas email does. A habit of stopping when they’re on a roll, not when they’re stuck. Hemingway puts it thus: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.” Arthur Miller said, “I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.” With the exception of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — who rose at 6, spent the day in a flurry of music lessons, concerts, and social engagements and often didn’t get to bed until 1 am — many would write in the morning, stop for lunch and a stroll, spend an hour or two answering letters, and knock off work by 2 or 3. “I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,” wrote Carl Jung. Or, well, a Mozart. A supportive partner. Martha Freud, wife of Sigmund, “laid out his clothes, chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush,” notes Currey. Gertrude Stein preferred to write outdoors, looking at rocks and cows — and so on their trips to the French countryside, Gertrude would find a place to sit while Alice B. Toklas would shoo a few cows into the writer’s line of vision. Gustav Mahler’s wife bribed the neighbors with opera tickets to keep their dogs quiet while he was composing — even though she was bitterly disappointed when he forced her to give up her own promising musical career. The unmarried artists had help, too: Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, took over most of the domestic duties so that Jane had time to write — “Composition seems impossible to me with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb,” as Jane once wrote. And Andy Warhol called friend and collaborator Pat Hackett every morning, recounting the previous day’s activities in detail. “Doing the diary,” as they called it, could last two full hours — with Hackett dutifully jotting down notes and typing them up, every weekday morning from 1976 until Warhol’s death in 1987. Limited social lives. One of Simone de Beauvoir’s lovers put it this way: “there were no parties, no receptions, no bourgeois values… it was an uncluttered kind of life, a simplicity deliberately constructed so that she could do her work.” Marcel Proust “made a conscious decision in 1910 to withdraw from society,” writes Currey. Pablo Picasso and his girlfriend Fernande Olivier borrowed the idea of Sunday as an “at-home day” from Stein and Toklas — so that they could “dispose of the obligations of friendship in a single afternoon.” This last habit — relative isolation — sounds much less appealing to me than some of the others. And yet I still find the routines of these thinkers strangely compelling, perhaps they are so unattainable, so extreme. Even the very idea that you can organize your time as you like is out of reach for most of us — so I’ll close with a toast to all those who did their best work within the constraints of someone else’s routine. Like Francine Prose, who began writing when the school bus picked up her children and stopped when it brought them back; or T.S. Eliot, who found it much easier to write once he had a day job in a bank than as a starving poet; and even F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early writing was crammed in around the strict schedule he followed as a young military officer. Those days were not as fabled as the gin-soaked nights in Paris that came later, but they were much more productive — and no doubt easier on his liver. Being forced to follow the ruts of someone else’s routine may grate, but they do make it easier to stay on the path. And that of course is what a routine really is — the path we take through our day. Whether we break that trail yourself or follow the path blazed by our constraints, perhaps what’s most important is that we keep walking. [Read More: "The Daily Routines of Geniuses" > Thank You HBR 03/19/14]
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