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Posts Tagged ‘mindful’

  1. Book Review: The Productivity Project

    July 9, 2017 by Diane

    The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and EnergyThe Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy by Chris Bailey
    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    A guy takes a year off from work to experiment with ways to be more productive, but experimenting to the extreme. Like meditating for 35 hours a week. Or taking in no nourishment (because it’s too time-consuming!) other than a powdered drink called Soylent, which sounds like something made from humans, but isn’t. And isolating himself in a basement for 10 days. Is this guy a monk yearning for a cave? No. He’s Chris Bailey, and he’s come up with a whole new way of looking at time management, procrastination, and being more productive which, to my mind, is refreshing.

    For starters: evidently, it’s human nature to procrastinate. Chris looks at this bad habit as, basically, putting something off for your future self to deal with. Personally, I never thought of it that way. And he offers suggestions for connecting to that future self. Like a nifty website called FutureMe.org, where you can send yourself an email that arrives days, weeks, months, or years from today. How cool is that!?

    Time management gets a new spin with Chris, too. He talks about scheduling three things a day, releasing the unimportant, plowing through chores on a “Maintenance Day,” rather than getting sidetracked with them throughout the week, and working on projects in less time to force yourself to focus.

    To be productive, we need to manage more than our time. We need to harness our energy, too. We need to track our most energetic times of the day and schedule important tasks during those times, and unimportant tasks when we’re brain-dead (like at 3:00 in the afternoon). We need to eat, exercise, and sleep well, and Chris covers tips on how to do all three (which doesn’t involve Soylent).

    The third ingredient of productivity, along with managing time and energy, is managing attention. Here, Chris brings up the benefits of a meditation practice, and reassures the reader that meditation doesn’t require sitting in a lotus position for hours. He talks about working slowly and mindfully to work more deliberately, and introduces the twenty-second rule for avoiding distractions. He busts the myth that multi-tasking makes us more efficient, and hails the art of doing one thing at a time.

    This is the best book on productivity I’ve read, and I’ve read many. Not only does the author shine new light on the subject, but through his year-long experiment and the knowledge gained through interviewing productivity experts, he’s put together a program that’s imminently doable. As a bonus? He starts each chapter with an estimated reading time, down to the second. And it was spot-on, for me.


  2. How to escape the tyranny of time

    April 2, 2017 by Diane

    Gone Fishing

    I had it all figured out—the scheduling, the getting things done. I was determined to master my time.

    First I listed what tasks I needed to complete. Then I scheduled them into a calendar program, printed out the schedule, and hung it up. Every day as I completed the tasks, I marked a bright pink “X” through the day with my fancy marker.

    I had it all figured out.

    For about a week.

    The second week, the fancy pink marker sat in the ceramic pencil jar on my desk.

    The third week, I crumpled the schedule and replaced it with a To-Do list. Every day, as I completed a task I crossed it off the list. I was making progress.

    For about two weeks.

    The third week, I had so many undone tasks on my To-Do list it drove me squirrelly. I knew I needed to complete them all by Sunday night so I could put up a new list, but I cheated, transferring the undone tasks to the new To-Do list and hung it up. I had it all figured out.

    Ah, who was I kidding? The new list didn’t propel me to get things done, any better than the old list, any better than the calendar. So I tried a pink post-it, jotting down the things I needed to do the next day. I scheduled them to the minute.

    From 8:00 – 8:30 I’ll do X.

    From 8:30 to 9:00 I’ll do Y.

    From 9:00 to 10:00 I’ll do Z.

    Problem is, I didn’t wake up until 9:00. I was already an hour behind schedule. Did that make me leap out of bed? No. I lay there, my face smushed into the pillow, reconfiguring the timeline. And I was so tense! I felt awful.

    So I crumpled the pink post-it.

    I meditated. I felt the need to reconnect to myself, to get a handle on why I felt so overwhelmed. But I was too tense to get a good read on myself, so I pulled down a copy of Full Catastrophe Living and read a chapter about the tyranny of time. Jon Kabat-Zinn says that if you schedule all your time, you won’t have any left.

    D-uh!

    That’s why I felt like I didn’t have enough time. I had scheduled it down to the minute!

    Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to live according to my inner time clock? Set everything aside for two weeks (except work, of course, because a gal’s gotta eat, right?) and just be in the moment, living each moment to its fullest, which I know from experience makes time seem to expand. Wouldn’t it be nice, when it gets dark, to sit around the candlelight and then go to bed, and wake up with the sun, like our ancestors did before the internet and smartphones and television and the electric light?

    It seems to me, at first I’d get antsy, thinking about what I should be doing. I’d get anxious, withdrawing from the technology “high.” Then I’d get bored. And then, quite possibly, I’d start noticing what’s important to me, what I want to invest my time and energy in, and what’s in the way of my taking action. All that busywork, I suspected, might be my way of avoiding something else. Something big. Something my heart is craving.

    So I’m doing the two-week experiment. That means no blogging. No Twitter. No GoodReads. No  website-browsing. No rewriting, no copywriting, no webinars. Just work, walks in nature, and downtime.

    To escape the tyranny of time, sometimes we need to take time out. Just unplug, and reconnect to our inner clocks.

    I invite you to join me. For a day. Half a day. A space of time. Allow yourself to set aside all but the essentials, and breathe. Listen to your inner stirrings. Whatever needs to get done, will. Later. Or you might discover, in the big scheme of things called life, some of those tasks weren’t all that important after all.


  3. Random Thoughts While Meditating #5

    October 16, 2016 by Diane

    Yogi meditating under a tree

    You are the moment.

    I have no idea what that means.