I try to keep these posts practical and down-to-earth, but sometimes it’s good to hear from the eggheads more learned among us for a different perspective.  Recently I came across a speech given by psychologist Philip Zombardo  from the TEDTalks series that is worth thinking about.  Here’s the video:

Dr. Zombardo makes makes a very interesting point, backed up by research.  He believes that your “time orientation” determines how successful you will be.

He says that each person’s  orientation is one of these three:

1. Past oriented – Focused on what was, positives or negatives
2. Present oriented –  Focused on what is – hedonism / fatalism
3. Future oriented – Those who anticipate  consequences, costs,  benefits, envision what what will be.  They are goal-oriented and/or  consider life after death.

He then says the most successful people are future oriented because they avoid instant gratification for rewards in the future.  These rewards can be monetary or spiritual.

It makes sense.  I wish he would have explained how we can change our time orientation (if at all), but the how much can you say in 7 minutes?  This is worth more reading.

What do you think?

Yesterday I came across a very interesting 45 minute video about Adult ADD/ADHD at the Canadian Global News Web site. The program, ADD & Loving It, shines a light on this much  misunderstood affliction in a very informative and entertaining way.  I have no idea how long they plan to keep this posted, so if you are interested you may want to view it sooner rather than later.

The program includes interviews with  Dr. Edward Hollowell, who wrote Delivered From Distraction and one of my favorites Crazy Busy. Watching him is well worth the time.  If you’re interested in reading more about ADD/ADHD, I pasted links to these books at the bottom of the page.

I thought this video would be a good resource for anyone dealing with this disorder or concerned they may have it themselves.  I work with a number of clients who do have it and know how confusing this is for everyone involved.

Enjoy!

Photo by ADHD Center

Book Links:

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life

Not long ago I was listening  to one of my favorite podcasts, Internet Marketing This Week, co-hosted by Internet marketing entrepreneur Lynn Terry.

Lynn’s a pretty amazing woman.  As a single mom she built a highly successful Internet marketing business from scratch…at home.  Unlike many work-at-home professionals Lynn was able to become very successful and create balance between her work and family.  Not easy to do when you’re working at home with a 5-year old and 5-month old.

When asked about how she is able to juggle raising a family alone and creating a successful business Lynn said that she learned to identify her “power time… time of the day when focus comes easiest”.  She learned to protect it so that she could be certain that she uses it for the most important thing she has to do each day.

Use A Timer to Define Productive Time

Initially when her children were young she used an egg timer to set aside her productive time without putting of her children with “in a minute” that can easily turn into several hours.  All of us have periods during the day when we are more focused, more creative and most productive.  Lynn realized this early in her entrepreneurial career and began to protect it like money in the bank.

The egg timer or an equivalent is a perfect solution for blocking that high productive time. It forces you to put hard edges around important time blocks to help you use it wisely.

The photo in this post is the Time Timer, a device I use for the same purpose.  It is a little higher tech than the egg timer, but not much.  During my high productive time I tend to become so locked in that I lose all sense of time. I can be involved for two hours and think only ten minutes went by.  I lose my ability to “feel” time (if that makes sense).  This device is very useful because it allows me to “see” how much time remains.

Nobody Is At Their Best All Day, Find What Works For You

Lynn says nobody is “on” 24-hours a day. Her best time is in the morning when she’s having her first cup of coffee.  She gets up early before the kids, and uses that “first cut” time to catch up on e-mail, social networking and prepares for the day.  Then she turns everything off clears her desk and works on the most important thing of the day.  When that is finished it’s time for the rest of the stuff.

To read about her philosophy first-hand here’s a link to a recent blog post on her site ClickNewz.  Even if you have no interest in the Internet marketing world, I highly recommend you visit her blog.  She has a great story to tell.

Enjoy,

Do You Feel Like You Are Drinking From a Fire Hose?

Are you tired of feeling like you’re not on top of things?  Are you frustrated by missing deadlines and appointments?  Are you stressed because you forget to do important tasks?  If so I have keep reading.

If you have ever worked with me as a coach or seen me speak, then you know that I frequently harp on stress the importance of some key fundamentals of productivity.  Last year I wrote a blog post titled the 7 Key Principles of Personal Productivity (I think I need a snappier title) which is still one of our most visited posts.   Not only are these principles key to any time management system  they are also important components in stress management training. I will let you in on a little trade secret,  I use these principles as a guide when I coach clients on time management techniques.  Using this as guide to identify where someone needs help, gives me the ability to quickly zero in on how best to help them.

New Quick Start Free eCourse

To give my clients and friends a jump start I decided to create a short eCourse to help them identify their weaknesses and provide a clear set of actions to overcome them.  The course is designed to help you integrate these principles into your daily work.  It is a 5-part online course taken over a period of 5 days.  Each lesson takes only 10 minutes and includes specific action steps to apply them to your world.  It also includes our popular productivity pointers that will be returning from summer vacation at the end of August.

If you are interested, just CLICK HERE to register (or click that big button on the sidebar).  There is not cost and I promise not to sell your e-mail address, send you spam or any of those other things you hate.

This is a picture of my in basket a few days ago. It’s a collection of random small things was my nemesis for a few weeks. It doesn’t look like much but it really bugged me.

What are they? They’re the result of a recent wallet cleaning and attempt to corral loose pieces of floatsum laying around my workspace. The kind of things that are there so long you stop noticing them.

Like a good processor I gathered these things up and put them in my Inbox to be processed. But something happened. I put new mail etc. on top, processed the mail and continued to leave them in the bottom of the basket. “I’ll get to them later” I thought.

Here you have it, a public confession that I broke one of my own cardinal rules. DON’T USE YOUR INBOX AS A STORAGE FACILITY.

But these items were so insignificant to my daily work they hardly seemed worth my time, attention and decision making prowess. So they just sat.

Why did they sit? In analyzing the situation I realized that first I had no place to put them and didn’t feel like using limited space and my even more valuable time deciding what to do with them. I realized that the process of making two decisions about each piece was just too painful (brain hurting as a colleague always says), so I put it off. I was avoiding the pain of making (a very simple) decision. The result was clutter.

This is a very simple example why we accumulate clutter in the first place. Whether its’ just a few stray pieces of paper in our wallets or piles of paper and folders throughout our entire office. Clutter (any clutter) represents un-made or deferred decisions. In fact each time you look at a piece of clutter you actually do make a decision, which is to do nothing. The problem with this is that you are making multiple decisions about something that could have been resolved with only one. It’s a huge waste of mental energy.

The solution is to set aside time to process (and only process) incoming information (mail, e-mail, meeting notes, a pile of loose notes, etc.). Make a decision about each piece before moving to the next. Use the temptation to put it aside as a trigger to first think about why you are deferring your decision, then force yourself to make it. Maybe, like me, you put off the decision because you don’t have a place to put it. If so time for an action item to create some files (or electronic folders) and move on.

If I was sitting with you at your desk this is exactly what we would do with each item in your Inbox. It can create quite a bit of anxiety. If it does, use that feeling as a red flag and dig into your underlying reason for not deciding.

You may be wondering what happed to my little pile of stuff. About half is in the trash. Some things have been added to my Outlook contacts and the rest are in a folder for little used but sometimes needed frequent shopper cards. I feel better now.

Have you ever received a dope slap? Have you ever given yourself one? Some people call that a “flat head moment”. That’s how I felt yesterday.

Not long ago I promised to write a post about overcoming procrastination. I started to work on it a couple times but didn’t come up with anything new beyond the standard list of six or seven things you can do to take action sooner. We’ve seen it all before so I didn’t feel justified regurgitating it one more time.

Yesterday I stumbled on a post by blogger Debi Zylbermann about actions she’s taking to overcome one of her personal constraints. It’s so simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it (isn’t that true with so many things). Click here to read her post in its entirety.

Debi talks about a technique used by a former boss where he required his managers to write a daily report that consisted of a simple statement about they did that day to move their department forward.

So why not do this yourself? At the end of each day write one sentence in your planner, journal, e-mail to yourself (or significant other) about how you moved (insert whatever is important to you) forward that day. And do it every day. This will be especially helpful to the self employed and home office types who don’t have someone looking over their shoulder.

When you know at the outset of the day that you will be writing the report at the end of the day you will be more cognizant of how you are using your time to make progress. To be effective you have to be brutally honest yourself.

I did it today (Tuesday) and it was a real eye opener. I plan to do it again for the rest of the month and see how I do. Try it yourself.

Thanks Debi.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk]

I love how the media (CNN in particular) leads with a question that they never answer in the story.  I should be able to to it too.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on YouTube lately, probably because I’m a chronic procrastinator.  No really it’s a great resource if you can sort through junk.  so when I sot something good I will share it.

This one’s been making the rounds for a while, but I saw it for the first time this week.  It has no redeeming value, tips tricks or whatever,  just a humorous way to demonstrate that we’re not alone.  Procrastination affects everyone.

I’ll share some procrastination control (it never really goes away) material later.  I’m on an e-mail tear this week and not ready to switch gears.   But don’t let that stop you.  If you have any good procrastination management thoughts or resources feel free to share.

Yesterday I posted some principles that help you take control over the constant flow of e-mail. I’ve seen these simple changes in habit make a difference in many peoples’ lives just by applying them regularly. However some people have a very difficult time implementing even simple changes and I’ve often wondered why.

Over the years as I work with coaching clients I’ve observed those in control of the e-mail flow and those who aren’t (they’re controlled by it). The groups have completely different attitudes about what e-mail really is, their organization’s unwritten expectations and how they should respond to it.

The In-Control crowd views e-mail as a tool to be used when needed. They visit their Inbox when they need to, otherwise it’s back in the toolbox. They view the e-mail Inbox much like a physical paper mailbox (snail mail). They go to it when it’s time to “get the mail”.

The Out-of-Control crowd typically live in their Inbox. They view e-mail as one of the major forces that drive their day. Often their e-mail notifications are activated. They can be observed turning to looking at their screen each time a new message arrives. As the driver of their day, Inboxes are usually full because the “Important” messages must serve as reminders. Often they have a feeling that the organization expects them to respond to each message immediately. To the Out-of-Control group, e-mail is as urgent as a ringing telephone.

Implementing new techniques and tips is easy. Changing an attitude is much more difficult.

What’s your attitude about e-mail? Do you feel that your organization expects immediate response to messages?

E-mail anxiety is one of the major reasons companies and individuals hire me. It comes at us constantly at an ever increasing pace and is not going away.  E-mail should be no more  urgent than paper mail, but it’s turned into a continuous interruption for so many people. Don’t be like this guy suffering from e-mail overload.  Apply the principles below to take control of your Inbox:

1. End every day with an empty Inbox (well at least no more that a screen full)
2. To get a fresh start move all old messages (no older that a week old) to a separate folder. Schedule time every day to process your old messages (see the TRAF process explained in item 4) until they are cleaned up.
3. Process your e-mail at specific times no more than three or four times per day. Tell your co-workers about your schedule to set expectations.
4. Use a repeatable process to work through all messages from top to bottom. I suggest the simple TRAF process. Throw it away. Refer it (or delegate), Take Action do it now if you can do it in 2 minutes of less if not convert  it into a task to get it out of your Inbox, File it.
5. Drag and drop e-mails to convert them to tasks or appointments when appropriate (get them out of your Inbox).
6. Don’t use your Inbox as a task list. It’s a shipping and receiving dock not a long term storage facility.
7. Eliminate distracting “You’ve Got Mail” bells or alarms. Also turn off the Desktop Alert in Outlook that appears in the lower right hand corner of your screen when a new message arrives.
8. Change your default Outlook view to Calendar (by default it’s set to Inbox).  Then only go to your Inbox when it’s time to process E-mail (see number 3).  Looking at your Inbox all day diverts your focus from your real work to reading mail…a major distraction.  When you have to create a new message either use the New drop down box in the upper left hand corner of all Outlook views choose Mail Message or just use the keyboard shortcut key CTL+SHIFT+M to create a message from anywhere within Outlook.

A word of warning. Don’t use these productivity principles to spend more time working. Use them to free up more time for yourself and your family.

Register for our Free eCourse to learn how to integrate our 7 Productivity Principles into your daily work.

Learn to use Outlook to  control your e-mail and manage your time with our premium online training program Master Your Workload with Outlook.

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