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productivity

Have you heard that it’s important to reduce your distractions to increase your concentration and productivity? Every day, the Internet is bursting with productivity hacks on reducing your distractions, like writing to-do lists, exercising before work, taking up yoga, etc. etc.

While these strategies may work for some people, there are just as many who get tangled up in fluoro post-it notes, and go cross-eyed writing to-do lists that are ultimately a complete waste of energy and can lead to reduced performance, adrenal fatigue and burnout.

These are the people we affectionately know as “fast paced”.

What does “fast-paced” mean?

Typically ‘fast-paced’ people have limited attention spans, prefer to work in short bursts, value punctuality, and access less emails, more often. For example, when these people have three tasks, they will prefer to work on the first task for a short time then move to the second and will keep jumping until all three tasks are complete.

Fast-paced people hate the concept of a day-long conference or long tedious meetings and are probably nagged by their friends to pay attention.

How do I know if I’m fast-paced?

Do you walk in a hurry, despite not being in a rush, prefer to get to the point, and enjoy being active in times of leisure? If so, and if this description resonated with you, chances are that you are fast-paced.

What should I do if I’m fast-paced?

To maximise your performance and productivity on a sustained basis, it is important to decrease your perceived effort levels and create opportunities to be distracted. If you feel like you are working really hard, chances are your performance isn’t where it could be and you are trying to force yourself into working at an unnatural, uninspired pace. To increase your performance whilst decreasing effort, coordinate your schedule so that you work in alignment with your fast-pace and capitalise on peak times of energy throughout the day.

If you are fast-paced, welcome the distractions and break the glorification of long focus periods because your productivity will thrive in short bursts.

Coordinate your schedule so that you work in alignment with your fast-pace and capitalise on peak times of energy throughout the day

Five tips for Fast-Paced Workers:

Work with your natural level of focus. If you can concentrate for 15 minutes, work on tasks for that long before switching to something else, and then come back to that task later. If you try to push through and focus for longer, the task will end up taking longer than it should, consuming time where you could’ve been productive in other areas, and draining energy unnecessarily.
Limit meeting lengths to 15 or 30 minutes where possible. (Outlook has a lot to answer for having the default meeting length as 1 hour!) You will thrive on short interactions with punctuated information.
After condensing meetings from 1 hour to 30 minutes, block out the remaining half hour in your calendar to create time for sidelined tasks. Within a few weeks, you will advance through the same amount of work in 90 minutes less per day, opening up time for exercise and leisure within your schedule, which will further enhance your mind clarity and productivity.
Diversify your meetings so that you can be productive in multiple areas – lunch meetings, and even walking meetings are in your favour. (Nilofer Merchant does a great TEDX talk on the productivity of walking meetings here).
Access your emails frequently but at your control. Switch off the email alert button and elect to access your emails every 15 to 30 minutes. Firstly delete anything quickly that doesn’t require your action. Then prioritise the remainder of the items and add them to your to do list, jumping between them.

Give yourself permission to be productive

The biggest block on productivity for the fast-paced is the belief that they are failing, as they are set tasks with a deadline they struggle to meet because they cannot focus efficiently until the task is done. Recognising that you have control over your schedule and tweaking just 30% of your daily structure will make a massive difference to your output and related effort levels. Once you embrace the idea that you can be more productive by working in shorter bursts, it becomes easier to restructure your day, find more chargeable hours and enhance your wellbeing. So, let the distractions roll in…

Vanessa Bennett

Vanessa Bennett is a fitness instructor, high performance coach, and CEO of Inside 80 Performance Australia, guiding clients across energy, nutrition and corporate success. Find out your Natural Pace by taking the free Indicator Test on the website. Follow Vanessa on Twitter at @Inside80Aus.

Check out Get Your Life Back ebook by Kasia Gospos, founder of Leaders in Heels, on how you can streamline and automate your business and life so that you have more time for what you really love.

The first question many people have is: why automate? The truth of the matter is, we can waste a lot of time using technology, whether it’s checking our social media, viewing YouTube or Vimeo files, or just general internet surfing. Setting up an automated system can save you a lot of time and effort, not to mention you won’t have to do all those boring, repetitive tasks!

But there are also good reasons not to automate. Setting up a system is like setting up a new habit. If the system doesn’t match your personality or way of doing things, you won’t stick to it, no matter how much someone else tells you that you will!

There are some things you should look out for if you choose to automate your personal life:

1. Devices will fail you. Your smartphone might run out of battery, you might lose your tablet, or your laptop could break down. If you rely on them to manage your life, you will find yourself at a loss while you scramble to find a replacement.

2. Data won’t always sync perfectly. There is nothing worse than trying to go to an appointment, only to find that not all the details are in your calendar – or in the worst case scenario, none of the details are in your calendar.

3. You rely on automation too much. I’ve found that sometimes, if an even isn’t in my digital calendar, then it doesn’t exist. This causes issues when you are expected to be somewhere (and forgot to reply to the invitation or didn’t the data!).

There is no shame in finding alternate ways to manage your data. Many people have gone back to using physical diaries, and making notes on paper instead of on their phone, because technology has failed them before.

But if you decide to automate your personal life anyway – because, let’s be honest, it does save a lot of time – here are two simple suggestions to get you started.

Personal finance

In this past year, our family has been trialing the use of personal finance apps. One of these apps is Pocketbook. This is an Australian app which helps you to manage your personal finances and check where your spending is occurring.

Simply download the app from the App Store (iOS only) and then create a new account via your desktop. It’s much easier to set up Pocketbook on your computer, and create the set categories to manage your finances. For me, the most valuable personal benefit is seeing where spending is going each month. I can also check how much money is in our personal bank account (and yes, I know there are the separate bank apps, but this ties everything together).

The other benefit is that Pocketbook detects bills, especially if they are on a recurring basis. It will even inform you whether you have enough money to cover them!

Calendar events

Another main area of automation is for calendar events. I use an app called IFTTT (IF This, Then That) to automate these tasks. IFTTT is a web and app service that lets you create what they call recipes, based on a trigger (something that happens) and a resulting action. I’ve mentioned it in previous automation articles as well.

Here are three of my favourite recipes for Google Calendar:

For those individuals who need to log their work hours, use this recipe in conjunction with Google Calendar.
This is a ‘DO’ recipe. It allows you to quickly create an event in Google Calendar simply by entering the information in a natural sentence such as “Meeting with Sam at 7pm”.
If you use Reminders on your iOS device, then this recipe automatically syncs them with Google Calendar so you get reminders on all your devices!

Thanks for reading the series on automation. We’ve also previously covered home automation and work automation. What do you use to help streamline your personal, home and work life? Let us know in the comments!

photo credit: iPod Touch add events

If I told a room full of people I could save 4 hours in their working week, most of them would be queuing up afterwards wanting to know the secret to lost time. One of the hardest struggles sometimes in our working lives is how to squeeze out more work in less time, or ‘How can I work with less hours but be more productive’?

Technology isn’t always the answer and it’s interesting to watch a retrograde going back to design with pen and paper rather than using a digital source. But since this article is about automation, here are some key ways of being productive in the online world.

Automate your Email

Lately, I have been using a program called Mailbox, which is both an Android and an iOS app. This helps you to manage your emails by allowing you to choose a time to view them. Sometimes it’s not important to answer certain emails right at that very time, you can choose a time in which they appear at the top of your inbox.

Automate your Social Media

Lately, I have been experimenting using both Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule my social media. The benefit of using automation tools is you can access the analytics for each of these platforms and schedule your posts so they appear during the ‘ideal’ time to post.

Another product on the market at the moment is Meet Edgar which is another social media management tool. It collects your social media content into a library, which can be then re-shared later on.

Automate your Images

When you are creating images either on your iPhone, Android device or via social media, it’s a good idea to be able to save them without individually backing each photo up. This is where a tool like Zapier or IFTTT comes in handy. I love creating images for Pinterest and Instagram and often want them directly saved to Dropbox.

IFTTT uses what they call recipes–rules that tell your apps what to do. There is a ‘trigger’ (what starts the process) and then an ‘action’ (what happens afterwards).

To automate your images, there is a recipe called save your ‘Instagram’ photos to ‘Dropbox. It does exactly what it says it does. It’s just one of many ‘recipes’ already available for you to use. Or, you can also create one yourself. There are many other things you can automate beyond images, so explore the recipes to find out what else you can do!

Automate your files

Did you know there are some great tools that can help you organise the content on your computer whether these are files or images? Sometimes there are files that need to be archived or other tasks to schedule.

Mac

For Mac, the application is called Automator. It has been a way for Mac users to automate repetitive tasks with Apple software, such as Safari, iTunes and Calendar. Now, other third party products such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and text editors work.

This is a great tutorial on how to use Automator.

Windows

There is a similar app for windows called Action(s). Here are some great tutorials for automation with Action(s) that don’t require any technical knowledge to create. One of my favourites is to batch rotate images, which can rotate all your portrait images in one go. There is nothing worse than taking photos and then having to manually turn them all around!

Windows also has an inbuilt tool called Windows Task Scheduler. This requires a bit more technical know-how, but there are some great tutorials for various tasks. You could use it for auto-launching programs when you log on, for example, or clearing your downloads folder weekly.
Featured image: A Murder of Drossels-06

Download Get Your Life Back ebook by Kasia Gospos, founder of Leaders in Heels, on how you can streamline and automate your business and life so that you have more time for what you really love.

Good business is all about communication and how well you do it. Ineffective communication is at the heart of most business problems and research has shown that businesses with leaders who have highly effective communication generate up to 50% better returns than those that don’t. Leaders who communicate well are able to motivate their teams to increase productivity, which in turn will increase profit.

Good communication starts at the top. It creates the culture in your organisation and how you, as the leader, communicate with others sets the standard for everyone in your business. Your team will follow your example and if they don’t, you can pick them up from a perspective of “that’s not how we do it here – this is the way we do it”.

So here are 5 tips for you to communicate as a highly effective leader to motivate your team.

Be authentically you. The only way you can be perfect is to be you perfectly. So believe in and trust yourself and your intuition and say what is true for you. Your team will love you more if they get to see the real you. Just look at Richard Branson. We all connect in a more fulfilling way when we are authentic to our self and we enjoy the relating more too.
Remember all business relationships are personal. Every business relationship is just two or more people interacting and therefore comes down to inter-personal communication and the relationship between those people. Focus on the inter-personal communication of what is being said and how it is being interpreted with empathy as well as the business objectives.
Don’t let your ego control you. We all have an ego and whilst we need it to define our sense of self, we don’t need it to control how we think and the way we communicate. Our ego tells us we are perfect, which we are not and so will try to prove to everyone that we really are. So if you feel the need to prove how good you are to others, pull back on your ego to get it in check and let go of your need to prove anything about yourself.
Give up your need to be right. It doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong. They are just labels you give. This relates to the last point of not being controlled by your ego. If we accept what is, then we do not need to make someone wrong and we do not need to make ourselves right. It all just is. When we let go of our ego’s need to make ourselves right, there will be far less arguments and many more valuable discussions with open sharing.
Always show empathy and respect. The most successful leaders feel empathy for others and show respect to all others. They are then respected in the same way in return. This means they genuinely care about the people in their teams and they show it in the way they treat them. Empathy involves understanding and showing respect for the other person and communicating with them accordingly. When you do this your teams will follow you with loyalty and support for you too.

So think of these things tips every day and check that you are doing these things in your communication and you will develop loyal and motivated teams that are highly productive.

Janeen Sonsie

Janeen is the founder of Get Real Communication and an international speaker, coach and facilitator who is passionate about how people communicate and relate to each other in all relationships – both business and personal.

For the last 20 years Janeen has been facilitating hands-on workshops with some of the world’s leading companies (such as Cisco, HP, Oracle and Microsoft) in over 10 countries around Asia-Pacific, the UK and the USA helping them improve their communication, relationships and profits.

Janeen is available for business and relationship coaching.

Featured image: Credit