Productivity hacks: getting the most out of your day

It’s easy to be overwhelmed these days. Our schedules are busier and busier and I for one am a total advocate for people being able to work from home. Think about it, the amount of time we all waste commuting to and from work is ridiculous. Especially if the work is office work and you’re stuck at your computer all day. I personally don’t see the benefit of having people all sit in an office to do their work. I mean, I get that it can be misused and I know there are people out there who are stupid enough to do that, but imagine the productivity from staff if you said, “hey guess what…you don’t need to be losing 3-4 hours daily travelling to work.” I can guarantee you that the masses will be much less stressed and have better opportunities to spend the money required for commuting, fuel, tyres maintenance and parking fees (and the odd speeding fine) on better things.

I mean, it isn’t revolutionary you know. If you want to help reduce household debt issues, don’t force people to drive into work to physically sit at a desk. Everyone has phone, laptops and tablets these days – digital and online security is ridiculously well encrypted and large companies and government agencies have some of the best protection going.

But I digress. I get so fired up about this topic. Obviously there are many professions that require people to be on site, and that’s fine, but if you want to make a difference to not only people, but communities, local councils, road ways, traffic, house hold debt and affordability, guess what, let people work from home where they aren’t congesting the roads, causing accidents, driving tired or other such nonsense. It’s such a simple answer to a question that affects so many facets of our lives.

So considering this, and considering all the extra time you use throughout the day that you don’t have control over, it’s important to be able to schedule our days in order to get the most out of what time we do have. This blog spends some decent time going through productivity, making lists, being more efficient and developing habits and routines. It’s important to be able to manage your life this way, but also not be so strict that you don’t have any fun or down time.

I’ve discussed this before – the importance of making lists, writing in your diary and planning tasks/action is really important especially when you have a lot of things to get to. But some organisational hacks work better than others, so let’s see if we can identify these and implement these into our lives:

1. Use effective tools to helps you manage your time and productivity. There are apps out there these days for time management, social media management, saving articles offline and even those who remember and create new passwords (think LastPass). Many of them are cross platform and have a variety of login options, meaning you can manage your personal, small business or online personas as you see fit! (Buffer, Pocket, Evernote, Wunderlist and StumbleUpon are some that I use for these tasks).
2. Implement the 2-minute rule: the notion is that if it takes less than two minutes to do, complete it immediately. If it is a short task such as responding to an email or meeting request, getting these small tasks done feels very productive and encourages you to have better insight for larger tasks.
3. Get used to planning and try to implement it every day to encourage your next day work to have a head start. Think of certain recipes you make that require a day or two of prep or planning. When you know you’re going to make those items, you put in the ground work to ensure you have all the ingredients, resting time, etc are in place so that your recipe doesn’t fail. The same applies for work tasks – if you know your boss wants a proposal by a certain day and you need to do specific work to it or for it, make sure you nurture that project daily, put in your stakeholder meetings and requests, do your research and write your notes. You never know when, randomly, an emergency meeting will be called or you might have to discuss your preliminary findings with other senior staff. Happens in my profession all the time, but I never go to a meeting with a senior stakeholder not knowing my shit.
4. Have realistic goals in achievable chunks that you can work towards each day.
5. Develop good habits. This includes developing ways of filing things in your brain or in your work station so you can turn back to them, respond to them, provide additional advice on, etc.
6. Turn off your alerts, remove white noise and give yourself time to just work. Dedicate small chunks of time where you do not look at your phone, put yourself on do not disturb and don’t open social media or any other browser. Just work steadily for that space of time to ensure you get some quality work done.
7. If you’re a meeting manager/leader: reduce your meeting times to 15-30 minutes. Be short and snappy and concise and get to the point. There is no need to waste valuable working time in excessive meetings.
8. Don’t get in over your head, or do work that’s excessive or not relevant. And don’t be afraid to say no.
9. Use lost hours to catch up. I have a massive commute every day for work and I utilise that time to catch up on my podcasts. When I get to work, I have a half hour before my shift starts which I use to update my work and personal diaries, plan the week, do some reflection exercises and make lists of tasks that need to be completed.
10. Introduce scheduling where possible. For example, if you spend a certain amount of time managing your finances with regular transfers, see if you can automate some of them. This will automatically send your money where you need it to, saving you time in the process. It might not be a lot of time, but it’s still something you don’t have to remember to do, as it is being automatically done.

What productivity hacks do you use to make your day flow better?

Wasted energy, focus and the basics of habit formation

We don’t often think about wasted energy, and to be honest, the only reason I’ve been confronted with it is because my weightlifting coach is always reprimanding me for getting upset when I fail a lift, or continue to do a bad habit I am trying to stop. I often get pissed off or cuss at the bar or crack the shits right under my breath and all he says is, “walk away, walk away”.

And so many times I say the same thing to him – but I can lift it. And he says to me, ‘’it’s not about you lifting it, it’s about the way you’re approaching it.’ Without fail I walk away, frustrated, squeezing my hands and kicking out my legs and when I come back, something happens…. I’m focused. I’m in my head giving myself steps, number 1, do this. Number 2, do this, number 3, do this….and as I go through these steps I also have in the background the other habits I’m trying to break – don’t wiggle your toes, heels into the ground, elbows up, elbows not on knees (failed lift), push with your legs, get off your tippy toes…..all of these little things which might seem ridiculous are actually things that I currently do in a variety of situations for my lifts. Part of it is habit formation I need to break, and part of it is learning and implementing these new motor skills to help make breaking those habits, easier.

Think about what happens when you have clarity and focus comapred to when you don’t. Things seem blurry, like bokeh pictures from a digital camera. You can see the shapes, but you rub your eyes because it’s all a little bit fuzzy. Now think about when you have clarity, and things seem sharp, in focus, achievable and reachable. This all happens when we have that momentary break from that focus, when something fails. Wasted energy is energy that hasn’t been applied to where you want it to, so essentially, by blowing up or getting upset, you now use that energy to cuss and carry on, instead of doing what you intended. This messes up your focus, clarity, planning and habit formation in a variety of ways.

I can’t recall now which podcast episode it was, but there was recently one I listened to about habit formation. It basically said that it’s very difficult to break old habits, almost impossible. But the way that we as humans have learnt to do this or do something similar is by learning a new habit (there was a specific reference in the podcast to addiction treatment). By learning a new habit our motor skills are fleshed out and doing something new. Think about when you first start some type of new training. I’ll use weightlifting as an example. When you first do the snatch and clean and jerk movements, it is the strangest feeling. You don’t know how your body is supposed to react, you don’t know whether your body is doing a strange movement or not. And then you work through your first program and soon enough, the motions and the positions become more comfortable, so that by the time you’re facing your second program, you are now defining those steps and breaking them down to ensure that each fragment of the lift is the best it can be. By the time you’re inching closer to your third program, (so 3-4 months has already passed), you can now identify sections where you need work or help, or when you fail a lift. All of this is important in developing your skillset, but also in the formation and learning of new habits.

I did an open source search on the phrase wasted energy and failed to find anything relating to self-help or self-progression where wasted energy was better identified. All of the first few search pages identified wasted energy as actual electrical energy and how electrical devices waste energy, but only one 2014 Yahoo! Answers search stated it as the following:

“A wasted energy is an energy which is transformed without significant use…”

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred from one form to another or moved. Energy that is wasted, like the heat energy from an electric lamp, does not disappear. Instead, it is transferred into the surroundings and spreads out so much that it becomes very difficult to do anything useful with it.”

(Search reference: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140101175502AARVxu8)

Think about instances where you get frustrated, upset or annoyed and instead of just walking away and using a few spare minutes to refocus, you probably keep hacking away at whatever it is you’re doing, getting more and more frustrated. Happens to me all the time. So what’s the solution, and how do we learn to move past this?

Only today I purchased the book “Focus” by Daniel Goleman, so I can come back and revise this. His specific examples of refocusing however, can be found here, at the mindful.org post he did in 2015. However, this is what I’ve been doing to stop the wasted energy flux and have the ability to refocus on my task:

1. Stop and think about what you’re doing. Actually witness the action play out like a movie so you can observe what it is that is upsetting you. Use your ability to analyse the situation quickly, and identify your trigger point.
2. Now that you’ve found the source, minimize it. Make it small, make it change color, make it diffuse. Do whatever it is you need to, to remove that issue.
3. Give yourself some breathing space and do some of your own self soothing or self meditation. For me, I find just walking, pacing has always been my thing. My late grandfather used to do it, my dad does it, and I do it. Somehow pacing lets me count, and the count is like a background noise, or a beat, like a heartbeat that I can start numbering off.
4. Work back through what failed – for example, in the weightlifting example I gave, it might have been a failed lift. Go back and revisit the lift and see what it is you messed up. By doing this, you play it out visually, and can make the change where the issue was in the first place. Think of it like those time travel movies, where they show them going back and changing that one thing that changes the course of nature, and of the future. You sort of do the same, but it allows you to rectify the problem for the next go.
5. Go back to counting – and count your way through the steps. Break down your action – this is what I do first, this is what I do second, this is what I do third…
6. Re-attempt the action or activity, and you will find not only are you focused, but you’ve also planned steps, and are self aware of what you need to do to break the habit, or break the activity from occurring again.

Now that we’ve spoken about wasted energy, refocusing, and a little bit about habits, what do you do when confronted with situations like this? Have you found certain methods help, and others don’t?

Coming up: habit formation and habit foundations, and hopefully some downloadables for your journals!

Until then.

I’m baaaaaaack!

Well, well, well….

It’s been a hot minute or two warriors! Damn, I totally neglected my blog and just got so ridiculously busy with life. Not that that is an excuse, but I barely have time to even sit down in my study and do the tax papers, let alone blog.

And the worst of it all is, when I had the time to blog I sometimes felt as if I were scrambling for ideas, looking around and trying to plan, and when I am not planning on writing, I have a million and one ideas, challenges, and photo ideas I want to do.

I think I should buy myself a journal and actually make time to write things down throughout the day. I mean, how often do you see a great story on the news or a funny picture, or something interesting when you’re out and about? All-the-time. There goes six months’ worth of content because I think I can remember it all and I actually can’t. Journaling is such an amazing thing to do, and I believe it has about it a sense of tradition, of something “old school” that we can still do in this modern, digitalized era.

I guess the point is life doesn’t have to be a catalogue of the same things, but it also doesn’t have to be a mirror image of others people’s lives and other people’s blog post ideas, when really, so much goes on in our day to day that we should be just writing our thoughts on that. That’s the whole point of being an individual I guess, standing independently in the world with your feet on the ground, and in the clouds, all at the same time.

So, thatfitologylife still means what I said it would mean when I first started this blog. I love it, truly. My life has gone through such an enormous change in the last year and me personally as well. I mean, to think about how I felt this time last year compared to now is absolutely chalk and cheese. My own personal transformation and the things I feel I have learnt about just, well, life in general makes me feel as if I have come out of a cocoon somewhat. It’s like I’ve shed old skin and replenished new skin. My mind feels different, my heart feels different, my body even feels different. I’m different, and I like how I’ve grown.

Lots of things have changed also, and I attribute it all to this personal journey and transformation I’ve gone through. What would’ve absolutely made the cake is if I had made it to UPW (Tony Robbins seminar, cos he is like an idol to me regarding personal change and growth), but I will be aiming for that next year instead.

For now, I have training, a new job and a new way of eating which takes up a lot of me time, and I am enjoying every second of it.

So I promise, tomorrow I will be going to the cute stationary shop and buying myself a journal. I am going to plan my new content schedule and blog post ideas and go back to posting. I might go back to once a week for now, to make sure I can make the commitment to write regularly. I have been so out of touch even with my promotion of the blog and all, that I’ve let slip a few good months of blog work slip away.

Until then.

Blog update – Happy New Year 2017!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

It has been a crazy busy few months. I mean, my life in general is ridiculously crazy at the best of times but it feels as if now things are starting to settle back into their own routines.

That being said, a lot has happened in terms of my diet, lifestyle, training etc.

The most difficult part has been getting back into the grind. I realised this as I scoffed down two cupcakes today at work and then felt ridiculously sick.

Part of this craziness at the end of last year also meant that I got burnt out – seriously burnt out. I just needed to have a break from everything. I didn’t really get the opportunity to go away, but just being at home and focusing on stuff around the house was awesome.

We’ve been productive enough to have a lot of work done around the house which is giving us both an exciting vibe and helping plan things for the future. It gives you perspective, and something to look forward to and plan towards. I’ll add some images soon.

I’ve had three injuries in the last four months, so that has stifled my training and the fact that I had a heap of job interviews meant I was also totally focused on these processes and hoping I portrayed myself in the best possible light, every.single.time. It’s a difficult time – I’m waiting to find out if I was successful for one of these jobs that will hopefully, probably, likely, take me back to my roots and give me peace, finally. Once that is done, then I know that training will be easier, because I will be able to focus entirely on it again. I’m looking at getting into some crossfit also, to give me that high intensity, anaerobic touch that my workouts are lacking. And as for food…./sigh…I totally neglected that too. There is no time like yesterday to get that back on track.

So in general, trying to keep my life in order and blog became difficult. I wanted to write, I truly wanted to, but I just couldn’t pick myself up to do it. The heat as well – my god….the heat in SEQLD lately is horrific. We’ve had multiple heat waves and no aircon at the back of the house….which we were going to buy one, until we were told by the electrician that we are on one phase power, and should be on three, and that our total usage is like 40kw, and our aircon in the guest area alone used 22, not including all the other standby appliances that use the power. Our house was at serious risk of catching fire, if the wrong circumstances, i.e lightning, summer storm and bad wind all happened all at once…

So fixing this issue in the house has been a priority, and when that’s done, and the new aircon is installed, then blogging from my room, study or main lounge room will be a piece of cake.

I will consider dropping back my post schedule though temporarily, to at least two posts a week. It will lengthen my posting schedule and give me time to sit down and write quality content until everything else in my life is back to balance. My issue has always been that I don’t want to have an ad-ridden blog that takes you to a million other pages before you get to mine.

So, hopefully the update is sufficient for now. I will be back to Tuesday and Saturday postings for the next couple of months.

Until then. XO

 

Getting the most out of your time!

I’ve already delved a little into this theme when I’ve discussed how to stay organised, how to motivate yourself, ways to stay motivated and even in the discussions about learning new things as a blogger (found in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the new blogger series). Getting the most out of your time is so important. Our lives become increasingly busy every single day. I look at my own example of simply commuting to and from work over an approximate 2 hour period everyday and that’s 2 hours I lose, sitting in my car doing nothing else. I use this time to catch up on podcasts and lectures and to speak with friends (who are also early risers).

That being said I absolutely detest losing time and wasting time. It’s the one thing we can never get back. Every minute, every second that passes is already the past. Just these words that I’ve written now will already be in the past by the time I get to the end of the sentence.

Thinking of the world in that way I believe encourages us to be the best that we can be..to utilise every single moment and to capture every memory. It can be hard to be everywhere, all the time, every time but we have to start somewhere.

There are important points to note about making the most out of your time which can include things I have already discussed like:

• Pre planning meals, events and activities. Scheduling time for blogging or other activity. Scheduling you time, gym time, family time…it doesn’t matter what it is but keeping a schedule (not too rigid of course, you still need to have fun!) ensures you are making the most of your time.
• Other things include itemising and listing, using time management skills to structure your days and activities.

• Not procrastinating and being productive. Setting your mind to a task and schedule and keeping it.
• Training yourself to be consistent, developing new habits and breaking bad ones.
• Staying positive. Being in a negative state reduces the amount of progressive and active events you actually do.
• Not wasting time with toxic people, friends or family who do nothing else but put you down or make you feel bad because of their own issues and insecurities. If they’re not worth your time, fuck them off.
• Be effective with the time you have. Focus on what you need to achieve, tackle the harder sections of the task first and give yourself deadlines for when it needs to be done. Be accountable.
• Use an organiser or a planner. This will allow you to prioritise your free time and down time to be more productive.

Time management is something we all already do in our work and home life. It’s just a matter of prioritising activity and events relevant to your goals and deadlines and reviewing them often. I usually make daily, weekly and monthly goals for work. This gives me a clear time to progress each task and work towards larger style reporting where I can compare and contrast result types for advice and recommendations to senior management. I carry this activity on in my personal life because it is already an ingrained skill I use all the time, and I find it helps me really categorise my free and working time to the best of my ability.

What are some of the things you do to get the most out of your time? How do you prioritise your days, events, activities and schedule for work, home, school or free time?