How to Stop Being Lazy and Get More Done: 5 Expert Tips Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done. So I decided to call a friend who manages to do this — and more. Cal Newport impresses the heck out of me. He has a full-time job as a professor at Georgetown University, teaching classes and meeting with students.He writes 6 (or more) peer-reviewed academic journal papers per year.He’s the author of 4 books including the wonderful “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” And yet he finishes work at 5:30PM every day and rarely works weekends. No, he does not have superpowers or a staff of 15. Below you’ll get Cal’s secrets on how you can better manage your time, stop being lazy, get more done — and be finished by 5:30. 1) To-Do Lists Are Evil. To-do lists by themselves are useless. Here’s Cal: Great — build that into your schedule.
Benefits of Simplicity to Productivity Simplicity is often perceived as boring, unattractive and unremarkable. Majority of people want something striking and complicated. But as Leonardo da Vinci has said, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Different to the common belief, simplicity is not boring, unattractive or unremarkable. The Misconception of Being Productive The common error of people who aim to succeed at something is the tendency to make the process complicated, such as over analysis and accepting responsibility beyond one’s capacity. Take for an instance when an individual or company spends too much time planning and perfecting a product. However, being productive neither needs too much analysis nor working long hours. The Benefits Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! If you want to be more productive with minimal effort and stress, learn how to simplify and stay focus. 1. Simplicity aids clarity; the directness of expression and purpose. 2. The majority of people are incapable of staying focused. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Mini-Retirement Week 1: Time Management | theOrangeMango The past 4 years have been a blur operating, expanding and managing The Hostel Crowd. I can speak for the entire team when I say that 24 hours in a day was never enough. We just bounced from one crisis to another. Somewhere along the way, a method to deal with the madness began to emerge. The method was not holistic and as ironic as it may sound – I never had the time to write about time management. Now on my mini-retirement, I’ve got sufficient time to analyze and walk you through a few techniques that I’ve come across in the past years. So what is success? The Evolution of Time-Management The First Generation of time-management consists of simple to-do lists which all of us are more than familiar with. The Second Generation of time-management solved this problem with the Calendar through scheduling. And that’s when the Third Generation of time-management brought prioritization to the table. The New Time-Management Paradigm Quadrant 2 – Steven Covey The ONE Thing – Gary Keller The Tools No
Understanding the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population. More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things: 20% of the input creates 80% of the result20% of the workers produce 80% of the result20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes20% of the features cause 80% of the usageAnd on and on… But be careful when using this idea! First, there’s a common misconception that the numbers 20 and 80 must add to 100 — they don’t! 20% of the workers could create 10% of the result. Also recognize that the numbers don’t have to be “20%” and “80%” exactly. Life Isn’t Fair What does it mean when we say “things aren’t distributed evenly”? But that isn’t always the case: The 80/20 rule observes that most things have an unequal distribution. Of course, this ratio can change. Hi!
Achieve More With Less In Life Using 80/20 Principle by Celes on Jan 9, 2009 | ShareThis Email This Post This is part-1 of a 3-part series on achieving more with less in your life using the 80/20 principle. “Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle Today, I am going to share with you the power of applying the 80/20 principle to your life. So, what is the 80/20 Principle? Imagine you are the CEO of a company and you have a sales force of 100 people. However, what if instead of a 1-1 relationship, you found out 80% of your sales is actually contributed by 20% of your staff? What the 80-20 Principle Is About This is what the 80/20 rule is about – it says that 80% of the effects in situations are from 20% of the causes. Examples of 80/20 Principle in Action Below are just a few of the tens of thousands of examples where 80/20 principle can be observed: ….And the list goes on. 1. 2.
Dave Lee — Introducing the Week Chart Update: Thanks Lifehacker for picking up this post. (This is Part 3 in a series about My Productivity System.) In this post I’d like to share with you the Week Chart. It’s part of my recipe to keep focused and release incredible amounts of creativity throughout the week. Here’s what the Week Chart looks like this: The Week Chart’s main purpose is to show all your Desired Outcomes and Daily Focus Areas in one persistent view. So, let’s get started. 1. Pretty simple first step… but seriously you really need to print it. 2. The Daily Focus Area (DFA) is not a Desired Outcome, rather it’s an area of your work/business that you are going to focus on for that day. 3. Do this at the beginning of the week. 4. It’s best to do this at the beginning of each day. 5. The Week Chart must be persistent, meaning that it needs to be “always on”, and it must be visible multiple times a day. 6. Lastly, here are some tips to make implementing the Week Chart more effective. 1. 2. 3. 4.
The Zeigarnik effect: uncompleted tasks stay in mind until you finish them If you, like us, are constantly looking for more efficient ways to work, then you will really appreciate what the Zeigarnik effect has to offer. It carries the name of Bluma Zeigarnik, a Lithuanian-born psychologist who first described this effect in her doctoral thesis in the late 1920s. Some accounts have it that Zeigarnik noticed this effect while she was watching waiters in a restaurant. The waiters seemed to remember complex orders that allowed them to deliver the right combination of food to the tables, yet the information vanished as the food was delivered. Zeigarnik observed that the uncompleted orders seemed to stick in the waiters’ minds until they were actually completed. Bluma Zeigarnik, 1921. Zeigarnik didn’t leave it at that, though. If you look around you, you will start to notice the Zeigarnik effect pretty much everywhere. As writer Ernest Hemingway once said about writing a novel, “it is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.”
Who s Got The Monkey Now? How to find out how well you manage your time Copyright © 2006 Bob Selden, Used with permission of the author: Author: Bob Selden Managing Director The National Learning Institute www.nationallearning.com.au Are you a manager? Would you like more available time? Yes, then read on . . . How come you’ve worked hard all day but haven’t started the one task that was most important to you? Who’s got the monkey? “Management Time: Who’s got the Monkey” has been the second most popular management article ever published by the Harvard Business Review (“Management Time: Who’s got the Monkey”, by William Oncken and Donald Wass, first published by Harvard Business Review, 1974) and has been reprinted several times. They suggested that there are three types of management-imposed time pressure – Boss, System, and Self. Boss-imposed time pressure Activities, which must be accomplished, or we’ll suffer the consequences! System-imposed time pressure Those activities/requests which come from peers and colleagues. Self-imposed time pressure Summary …
GTD in 15 minutes – A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework for organising and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting things happen, which often turns out not to be very cool at all”.) Its aim is to make you have 100% trust in a system for collecting tasks, ideas, and projects—both vague things like “invent greatest thing ever” and concrete things like “call Ada 25 August to discuss cheesecake recipe”. Sound like all other run-of-the-mill to-do list systems, you say? One of the basic assumptions of GTD is that you are dumb—or, rather, that your subconsciousness is quite dumb when it comes to thinking about things you should have done. Jessica Kerr put it perfectly: Pretend your brain is a white board. A great part of the “magic” is to convert both tasks and whims into physical and visible actions as you soon will see. Awesome! Agenda contexts But… why‽
11 Practical Ways To Stop Procrastination You have a deadline looming. However, instead of doing your work, you are fiddling with miscellaneous things like checking email, social media, watching videos, surfing blogs and forums. You know you should be working, but you just don’t feel like doing anything. We are all familiar with the procrastination phenomenon. Don’t let procrastination take over your life. Break your work into little steps. Which tips work best for you? Image 5 Performance Management Trends for 2015 - OKRs and Continuous Performance Management | 7Geese Are you ready to transform your workplace in 2015? Or are you doomed to repeat the same performance management process that failed to deliver value to your employees and your organization? Revamping your performance management can be frightening for some. The good news though is that there is still time to change. Here are a few trends we see for 2015 and beyond: 1. Performance management is no longer the responsibility of a manager. 2. No one wants to be ranked. “unless you’ve already including coaching, feedback, motivation, engagement, and improvement in your performance management process, you’ve failed.” 3. To change how we work, we first must change our philosophies. 4. Remember when managers hung out amongst themselves? 5. HR may be late to the game when it comes to big data, but they’re quickly making up ground. What changes do you plan on implementing in 2015?
Chunking Information for Instructional Design If we ran a contest for the favorite esoteric word of Instructional Designers, the term “chunking” might win. It’s a concept embedded in the world of instructional and information design. Chunking content is critical because of how our brain appears to work. Chunking Defined Chunking refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information. Why We Chunk Content George A. The pearl of wisdom here is that if a learner’s working memory is full, the excess information will just drop out—as in disappear. Chunking Information for eLearning Chunking information is particularly important for online learning. Four Steps to Chunking Information Now that we can proudly say our working memories are basically sieves, what strategies can eLearning designers implement to overcome this? Step 1: Start at the highest level. Start with large chunks of conceptually related content and use these as your modules. Turn Bits into Chunks.
The Engagement Effect: Human Performance Improvement What is Human Performance Improvement? The Human Performance Improvement process is very similar to Human Performance Technology. HPI provides you with a systematic process to follow on what can often be a not-so-systematic path. In addition to identifying human performance gaps and their possible solutions, this standardized approach offers the ability to measure the success of your efforts and eliminate the guesswork that follows when a performance gap must be evaluated. HPI is results-based and systematic. Rather than focusing on a ‘wants-based’ or ‘needs-based’ approach, HPI follows a ‘results-based’ approach to improving performance, distinguishing it from many HRD (human resource development) activities. The Human Performance Improvement process is very similar to Human Performance Technology. Top HPI for Your Business The process of analyzing performance begins with a analyzing your business, which allows you to focus on the goals for your business. HPI Begins With Your Goals