How to Learn a Productivity System Part 6: Making it Work

Is your work enjoyable?

If it is, then you might be more amenable to call everything you do at home and at the office work.  If not, let’s reframe for a second.

Work = Effort toward a Goal

If the equation holds true, then what you do at home (home maintenance, vacations, personal finance, raising kids, plans of the future, health fitness and hobbies) is also WORK.

What’s interesting about calling all of our life activity ‘work’ is the sense that work is something that you do with purpose.  You want a result for your effort.

The business mind is focused on achieving the business goals, the revenue, the growth, and the sustainability of business.  

The personal mind is focused on seeing how to prepare kids for life in the future, enjoying a vacation, re-training for another career, reducing the stress in life, spending more time with your spouse, changing ingrained habits or starting on a bucket list item.

The business mind has a natural craving to design and execute goals. The rewards are very tactile.  When you do a good job for a customer you might get a thank you, and of course you get paid.  

For salaried folks, you might not see the transaction so vividly, but we want to get the project or tasks done and often we are measured during the year for achieving specific goals.  Achieving goals results in a better review and potential earnings growth, maybe a promotion with more scope.

The personal mind requires a lot more proactive behavior to create the goal.  Personal goals are not laid out by the leadership of the business, they are created through personal leadership.



For specific steps on how to employ personal leadership see the prior articles on “How to Learn a Productivity System.”  Part 3, 4, and 5 are focused almost completely on personal leadership.  Parts 1 and 2 are focused on tactical ways that you can create time in your day so you can spend more hours doing the strategic tasks needed to increase your personal leadership.

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 1: Capture

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 2: Actions

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Planning

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 5: Evaluate Life Dreams

Which is more important, business mind or personal mind?

That is a tough question.

The business mind provides the How-the monetary sustenance.  

The personal mind provides the Why-the Character and the Motivations.

The answer: They are both important.  They both impact each other.  

A personal example of interleaving the personal and business mind

In 2005 I took a role as a “Team Lead/Scrum Master.” My leadership style was centered around high volume and persuasive intimidation.

In 2008, I was promoted to department manager and I WAS SCARED SPIT-LESS. I had engaged in numerous technical and political battles with my peers over the years, and now I was taking over leadership of a team that knew my reputation as loud, overbearing, manipulative person. I had created animosity with a couple of the most senior and respected individuals by forceful getting my way using pushy tactics.

Answering the wakeup call

Faced with managing a team that saw me as an antagonist rather than a helpful resource, I realized I needed to drastically alter course.

In the months and years that followed my promotion, I studied hard to change my mindset and my behaviors (and I still study hard to this day). I read book after book and listened to people in the organization that showed management skills coincident with what I was learning about effective personal and public leadership. I moved my personal style from directive-authoritative to servant-leader.

This personal study to improve character created a deep well of good behaviors and resulted in better quality of life in both my personal sphere and in the business arena.

People in my organizations gave me feedback that they had grown to respect me over time as I demonstrated consistent other-centered leadership.

Personal leadership has a broad impact

Isn’t it interesting that the personal mind has such a great impact everywhere?  It might be the more important mind after all.

The moral of the story is this: No matter if it’s personal or business it’s WORK.  And if it’s work, it needs a system to move toward the goal. 

One of my favorite authors, David Allen, has a great book on this very topic called, Making it All Work.  He provides an entire book dedicated to creating a unified productivity mindset around personal and business goals. David Allen’s previous book, Getting Things Done describes a comprehensive productivity system which is now known globally as GTD.

What is not working in your personal or business system?  Write a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know? 

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 1: Capture

In high school I started writing computer programs to do math and physics homework so I could reduce trivial work.  

I can still remember the first equation I solved using a computer program on my Apple IIgs. It was the quadratic equation. Yes, the quadratic formula was a piece of mathematical beauty to solve for ‘x’.



But, I could not stand to write down all that math on paper and do the calculations.  My bigger problem was that I would rush so fast to get homework done that I would make silly errors. My hurried approach would result in getting the problem incorrect.  

How could I be fast and accurate?

Doing math on paper was neither fast nor accurate.  Doing math on the calculator was faster, but because there wasn’t fancy solver button on my calculator, it was still susceptible to errors.  

Remember Shu-Ha-Ri from the previous article, “How to Pick a Time Saving Strategy or System.”  This is the learning model that describes how people move from beginner to master:

• Shu (shoo) - leaner - do everything in rote fashion without too much analysis.
• Ha (hah) - practitioner - understand the theory and tweak the systems based on reflections, analysis and experience.
• Ri (ree) - master - innovate and create, potentially breaking with previous systems.

Shu - the Learner

With programming, I started from scratch without google, without help, just a computer manual and a desire to get simplistic, accurate answers without a lot of manual effort.

Knowing that programming can be fast and accurate, I spent a couple days creating my first simple program to save the quadratic equation.   A re-creation of the old Apple basic code is shown below along side of the terminal output.

The first version was simple and solved quadratic equations quickly.

While programming this first iteration I learned how to create non-trivial math equations in Apple basic.  I also learned how to navigate and fix bugs and how to print out the values so I could easily extract the results. 

Ha - the Practitioner

The next version of the program dealt with the dreaded case where the roots were imaginary.  Remember these types of numbers? They are numbers that don’t exist in the real word, but we still have to deal with them in the universe of math.  

In this particular case, if you try to take the square root of a negative number, normal calculators and computer libraries will give you a big fat error.  “OVERFLOW” or “NaN” which stands for Not a Number.

The code had to be modified to address this concern and even more fancy attributes were added later to allow me to type in the values of A, B and C at the console and avoid re-writing the program for every input.
Even with this program, I hardly taxed the computational and power of my Apple II. 

Apple Basic:

Ri - the Master

And after many years of programming, I learning Java and C++ and one could say I became a master by applying the learning of my first program in two totally different programming languages.

Java:

C++:

Shu-Ha-Ri as Applied to Productivity Systems

You want to adopt a productivity system to make life efficient.  To remove the trivial and accentuate the important.

And I believe that adopting systems for productivity can be similar in nature to the Shu-Ha-Ri experience of my first program on my Apple IIgs.  

We can adopt and system and it can take a while for us to actually understand how to make very adaptable and powerful system work for us. 

Patience is required when we adopt a system that has so much to offer and we are an apprentice or a newbie.  The initial effort may seem too high.  We may expend more energy in the beginning and not reap results until much later.

Patience with self if probably the toughest challenge because when learning is hard it feels inefficient and that friction leads us to believe that we are going backwards instead of forward toward our goal.  

Take heart.

Start Simple with Capture

Let’s assume you are adopting GTD as your starting point. David Allen suggests that you do a 1-2 day deep dive and gather all your assets, thoughts, ideas, muses, every itty bitty mental trace into lists.  Then organize those lists.

This may be an appropriate way to do a comprehensive all-in adventure.  I’ve had real problems trying to embraced GTD in that manner.  I’ve had more luck with starting the system by “Capturing” everything starting from today.

The key in capturing is to simplify life for your brain. David Allen suggests that when you have a thought about “I should probably do …”,  “Your subconscious brain never forgets, even if you conscious brain is no longer thinking about the ’todo’ item.”  Since we have tens of  “I should probably do …” moments in the day, your brain is compiling a big list of items.  This is my definition of stress.



Stress is when the “I need to do …” list in your brain is too full and the consequences of not doing the items on the list creates emergencies in your real personal and work world.
And perhaps that’s a place that capture is at it’s best.  The goal of capture is take the list and put it somewhere that gives your brain a little relief.  

Capture does not come easy. It’s a habit that really takes a time to develop.  The inputs in your life include internal and externals sources.  Internal sources are all things generated from within your own consciousness: your thoughts, your feelings, your desires and your goals.  Externals sources include things hear (a verbal request from someone, a comment in a business meeting), things you read (e-mail, post mail), or things you see (broken dishwasher, something in the sporting goods store).



So this week's tips is to get a notepad (any size) or sheets of blank paper and write down your thoughts and actions one per page.  If you have a notepad, I suggest keeping a lot of white space.  Keep notes for each meeting and/or thought on separate pages.  If you have 5 meetings, you should have five (or more) pages.  

That way you can FOCUS on these items independently later on. Or if you have thoughts about individual items, you can also FOCUS on this type of item one at a time.
That’s it for this week.  I’ll talk more about how to deal with your new stack of items next week.

I would love to hear your feedback.  If you had one thing you could do consistently that would make your life better, what behavior change would that be?

How to Pick a Time Saving Strategy or System

Have you looked at the number of breakfast cereal choices at the grocery store? I get dizzy when I walk down that aisle. 

I almost prefer going to Costco to buy breakfast cereal because I they have at 1/10th of the selection.

Doesn’t it drive your brain crazy trying to pick out a strategy for saving time? There are so many choices.

And then when you try one, it feels like you are broken or the method is broken or something about the whole system doesn’t flow.

Have you had the experience where you adopt a system and immerse yourself in the system and get overwhelmed and then quit because it’s too hard to keep up. Ever had the feeling like you are a weakest link because the “system works” but you can’t make it work consistently for you.  


Wow. I let's take deep cleansing breath.

Where are you with your productivity system

• happy with where you are (which means either you reached a level of productivity that is meeting you goals or you don’t know if the investment in a productivity systems is worth the effort, so your good with where you are)
• frustrated with where you are (which could mean you want to pick a better system, or just want to go on vacation for the rest of your life)
• optimistic that you can find better ways (which means you probably found a system, but are looking for some tweaks)

First let’s be real about learning stuff.  It takes time.  We are engrossed in a  world that wraps up difficult murder cases in 1 hour or creates massive inter-personal conflict then resolves the issue into forever-love in 1 1/2 hours or even 30 minutes for really good plots. There is an expectation that good things can be embraced and achieved in a short time window.

This is mostly a big fat lie.

So let’s reach back into some ancient philosophy to get a glimpse of how people really work.  This is in stark contrast to modern media.  Please enjoy this as if it were a breath of fresh air.

Shu-Ha-Ri

Shu-Ha-Ri is a concept from Japanese martial arts describing the stages from ’leaner’ to 'master’.  And it is directly applicable to developing personal habits and mastering productivity systems.
The short summary of this is as follows…

• Shu (shoo) - leaner - do everything in wrote fashion without too much analysis.
• Ha (hah) - practitioner - understand the theory and tweak the systems based on reflections, analysis and experience.
• Ri (ree) - master - innovate and create, potentially breaking with previous systems.

The the cycle of failed productivity systems that I described earlier in this article is really part of the Shu experience - a natural part of learning.  But how do we move to the next level.

I’m going to let that question hang in the air for now and I’ll talk more about that in a future article.  Right now, we need to pick a method to start with so we can begin the journey at Shu.

Here is a productivity system short pick list

• Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen
• Zen To Done (ZTD) by Leo Babauta http://leobabauta.com/
• Promodoro Technique http://pomodorotechnique.com/

In order to “Save a Million Seconds in a Year” or "Save a Million Minutes Minutes in Your Life Time" you’ll need some consistency in your time savings methodologies.

Please leave a comment on your latest experience in working with a productivity system.  How did it go? 

P.S. for some serious depth read this article “Shu-Ha-Ri"

Close the Open Loops: Keep Track of Your Meeting Outcome then Followup

As a parent I understand the extensive effort in following up on chores and tasks.  Its time consuming to audit the quality of a job after the bathroom has been “cleaned” by a teenager or the room has been “cleaned” by the middle schooler.

As a project manager keeping track of numerous commitments and an extraordinary number of moving parts is also on the order of difficult and time consuming. 

Recently I completed a key milestone for one of my projects. The project required the collaboration of multiple departments, multiple distributed teams and external contractors (including managed service partners for those of you who know what that is).  The gist of the project was to replace an aging database infrastructure with the latest hardware and latest release of database software.

The process took months of preparatory work and collaboration.  It started 3rd quarter 2015 and culminated in a successful cutover on 7 Jan 2016.

In order to make this happen I provide a lot of oversight and I facilitated numerous meetings. I highlight only a few of the key of meeting below:

• 1 day facilitated session with consultant to create a new architecture
• 1/2 day facilitated session to create a step-by-step plan for the upgrade
• 2 hour facilitated session with IT security and networking team to identify all networking and security changes
• 1 hour planning session for the week of the upgrade
• 15 minute weekly meetings with external DBA consultant
• 15 minute daily standup during the week of the upgrade
• 2 1/2 hour cutover conference call with the multiple teams and external partners participating
• (It went super smooth by the way)

This project required a lot of hard work by many technical folks and those technical guys deserve kudos’ for their efforts.  I’m highlighting the meetings because I am about to give some tips to on how to take these key meeting events and get the most of them through good follow-up.

In my previous article, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life,” I introduced Better Meeting Magic, a way to change the culture and productivity of a team, department, division or company that embodies the spirit of collaboration, inclusiveness and focus.
This installment is all about FOLLOW-UP:

Here are my tips to following up: 

Tip #1: Get the minutes out as fast as possible

To enable faster minutes capture, use visible formats such at sticky notes or a whiteboard. I describe some options for highly visual collaboration in the article, “In a Meeting What is Best for Creative Problem Solving? Total Freedom or Well Defined Process?”. 

When the meeting is done, you the following apps to take pictures and send them to yourself and/or the meeting participants.

• Microsoft Office Lens - best for whiteboard with drawings
• Post-it Note(r)  Plus - best for anything with post-it notes of any size and also 8x10 or 11x17 pieces of paper

Tip #2: Get the next step or meeting schedule as soon as possible

At work I use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail and meetings. When I get back from my current meeting and I need to schedule a followup meeting, I will do one of two things:

1. Write an e-mail to myself to schedule the next meeting and put it into my GTD ‘!Action’ folder (I actually have Outlook rule that automatically puts the e-mails from me and to me into my !Action’ folder)
2. or simply schedule the next meeting right when I sit down at my desk.

Tip #3: Make sure you have a good capture-processing-resolution system in place

I use Getting Things Done by David Allen as my capture-processing-resolution system.  If you read more about GTD, you’ll find it’s actually got 5 phases of processing for everything in your life. 

In the previous tip I hinted at my GTD system for schedule a followup meeting. I use that same system for capturing and executing all actions. I use David Allen’s suggested e-mail boxes called ‘!Action’, ‘!WaitingFor’ and ‘!ReadReview’.  I also take any date sensitive actions and create an ‘all day’ meeting on my calendar.  The ‘all day’ meeting shows on the calendar as a small banner for the day it’s due. To make it easy to create these calendar banners, I created a Outlook quick access rule to copy e-mail contents to calendar appointments, so I can execute this whole step in 1-click. 

In the morning and many times throughout the day and in the evening, I review the calendar, the !Action folder and !WaitingFor folder and make sure I follow-up and I ping other people to follow-up as well.

Close your Open Loops and Use good meeting practices coupled with GTD to succeed in your work and at home.

Having problems with follow-up?  Share our issue in the comments or send me an e-mail. I’ll be glad to talk about it with you.

http://www.steveteske.com

Best Way to Plan Your Vacation Itinerary - A Thanksgiving Story

Inside of the Governor’s Mansion in Colonial Williamsburg

My family went to Colonial Williamsburg for Thanksgiving.  It was a great time to gather with my Mom and her Husband and my Aunt and Uncle.  We had 9 people from ages 11 to 72.

We spent a total of 7 days and 6 nights at a timeshare and we had way to much to do…below is a sample of the activities for 1 week Colonial Williamsburg…what an eye chart.  Events start at 8 am and end around 10:30 pm.  In addition to events, there is map with four quadrants of the town that includes about 40-50 houses, shops and restaurants.

These are different from the events and entering each shop is an adventure into the past with authentic tools for carving silver or walk through the 18th century legislative building with a knowledge host guiding you through the history of the chambers and talking about the famous people or important events that were part of the building’s past.

How does one go about making decisions about this type of family adventure: Use a process that is collaborative and inclusive. In other articles I’ve introduced the concept I call Better Meeting Magic.

In the family vacation situation, you definitely need to be more relaxed about structure and rules and more lenient with time constraints, because you don’t want to spoil the vacation feeling.

I’ve done a similar exercise in past Thanksgiving vacations and you can read about that in my article, “How to Plan Your Family Vacation Using Post-It Notes (aka Sticky Notes).”  For this particular activity plan, I found a prominent wall to being our planning and put daily heading across the wall.  I always recommend using 8”x 6” post-it notes(tm).

Initial Wall 

I began to post numerous stickies on the wall with places and events.
This wall was edited in the morning and evening as we dynamically changed our minds about what we wanted to see during our stay in Colonial Williamsburg.

As Stephen Covey recommends in the 3rd Habit of his excellent book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we put all of our Big Rock (important things) on the wall first.  You can see “T-Day Dinner” is clearly identified early in the process.  You got to have awesome food on Thanksgiving.

Wall After Day 2:

As you can see, there a a number of items that have been checked off.  
   
You can also see there are also a few new items on the board.
  
SUN is now on the board.
   
The order of things is also shaping up as we became more familiar with the map of Colonial Williamsburg.



 We probably spent about 5 minutes each morning and evening updating things.

The Final Wall

And the final board before on the day we left.  



This had most everything checked off and some new things we added.


A great success in terms of getting everything done that we wanted.  


Or at least most everything.



I encourage you to read through some of the articles on Better Meeting Magic for a deeper immersion on how to utilize good processes to make every collaborative and creative engagement better.

Tell me about your planning for vacation.  How did it go? What were the challenges?
Visit http://www.steveteske.com for more tips and tricks.

Harness Siri to Capture Your Thoughts and Seamlessly Put Them Into Your GTD System

If you experiment with Siri you will find her both super helpful and terribly insufficient.  I both love and hate Siri for a number of reasons.  Let’s talk about the Siri love.

What I love about Siri for my GTD Productive Lifestyle

As a highly mobile person, I need someone to follow me around, sit in my car while I drive, walk beside me while stroll along, run beside me while I jog and basically capture and transcribe my shallow thoughts and deep thoughts throughout my daily routine.

No one in my house has volunteer for this job and I believe the salary that I’d need to pay someone to be my personal assistant is beyond my current budget constraints.  Therefore I have found Siri to be suitable pseudo personal assistant (in part).

Siri and the First Step of Getting Things Done: Capture Everything

Searching the web to find the perfect Getting Things Done capture application for the mobile device is a simple task because there are many to choose from.  But the daunting task is find the right one that really works for a particular user and routine.

As a busy professional I want technology to be my seamless and effortless servant in my Getting Things Done process architecture.  For the majority of GTD implementers the biggest challenge with Getting Things Done architecture is the Review step.  The second biggest issue is capturing the content in as few inboxes as possible so that you don’t wear yourself out trying to find all the things that you’ve captured.  The intention of making capture seamless and creating fewer inboxes is to make Review easier. 

Therefore GTD implementation would ultimately be easier from start to finish by automating capture as much as possible.  You know that every little simplification in life creates a little space for breathing, so let’s save a little time and reduce complexity in capture.

Siri and Simplification

This is where Siri comes in.  She does an OK job at capturing voice and turning that voice into text for future processing in your Getting Things Done implementation.

Remember that David Allen says the calendar is golden and should always be followed rigorously. your calendar is your highest priority list, so this list will always be a pillar in your system.  So the “Create Appointment” command to Siri is the pathway to organize your time sensitive events.  I often mix capture with process when it comes to the calendar.  In other words, when I realize I have something to schedule, I do it right then and there.  The alternative is to add an item to your inbox so that you will then add an event to your calendar later. I'll use paper when I'm in a meeting, but I use voice commands when walking, running or driving.

If you don’t instantly add something to your calendar in a capture/process moment, then you’ll just want to capture for future processing. Future processing might occur in the next 15 minutes or next 24 hours, but the important thing is to capture seamlessly and Siri does this through “Take Note” command or “Reminder me" command.

Prior to iOS 9.0 IO was a big fan iOS notes because I could combine it with IFTTT to synchronize my personal notes into one single tool.   Notes were great because you could dictate to Siri to capture a note and then an IFTTT rule would run to synchronize the notes with Evernote or Trello or a variety of other tools.  Here’s the weird part. After iOS 9.0, the synchronization only works with hand typed notes but does not work with dictated notes.  Wow that is frustrating.  In iOS 9.0 apple made Notes similar to Evernote by allowing notes to include fancy fonts and pictures, but apple broke the most effective tool that I know which is synchronizing with a GTD inbox such as Evernote or Trello or OmniFocus.

Reminders to the Rescue

As a technology aficionado and mobile app early adopter, I would not give up easily on the voice capture feature because I desperately needed to take notes with voice while on the run or driving.

Through some experimentation I determined that iOS Reminders work almost exactly like Notes.  In some cases even better than notes for my GTD implementation.  Here’s how it work.

Instead of “Take Note…” say “Make Reminder…” or “Remind me to check out Smart Passive Income podcast episode 172” (BTW, that's my current favorite episode).  Siri creates the reminder.  That’s OK, but it’s not in my GTD workflow system (e.g. Evernote, Trello, Omnifocus, etc).  What we need is a mechanism to put every captured thought or action into our regular system.  Let’s say the system we use is Trello (my favorite at this time).  You need an assistant to seamless transfer items from Reminders to Trello, Evernote or something else.

IF THIS THEN THAT Completes the Loop

If This Then That (IFTTT) is an incredible service that can help you connect various systems in your life. Technology has not aspired to the level of Star Trek where I can ask the computer to create an entire life management system and connect all the pieces together, but IFTTT is a serious step forward.  A core component of IFTTT is the recipe and within these recipes a person can literally plug together an amazing amount of disparate systems.  IFTTT is truly amazing in terms of the permutations of functionality that is achievable.

To close the loop I used IFTTT to synchronize my iOS reminders with a specific Trello Board and specific list.  If you were using Evernote, you would select a specific folder to drop in new reminders.

IFTTT runs in the background as intervals you decide and collects your Reminders into the target application.  In the meantime, you can continue to use Evernote to capture typed notes or you can convert all your typing and dictation to Reminders and only use Evernote for picture capture.  I find Evernote to be couple taps longer than Reminders, so I just use Reminders for everything except photo capture.

Review Your Inbox

After fixing up the IFTTT recipe and capturing your notes verbally or hand typed, you have a collection of things to process. This collection of stuff is in one place instead of possibly two or three.

Please try Reminders audio capture and let me know your experience?

Please subscribe to this blog and keep productivity improvements flowing into your life.

How to Grow Your Personal Productivity

In 2014 at age 44 I ran the Marine Corp Marathon in Washington, DC. It was my first Marathon (I made a goal to run a Marathon before I was 45 ... achieved!!!). But this was not something that happened overnight. In fact it was a long process that started 4 years earlier.

In 2010, I started a couch-to-5k running program and successfully ran my first 5k about 4 months later. Between 2010 and 2014 there was a lot of running and some injuries and some time off and then lots more running.  Running is very similar to learning productivity frameworks and tips, it takes time and it's not always easy

Let's discuss the basics of a productivity road map.

1. Awareness

There is the need to be aware of your surroundings and your personal behavior.  That means that you must know that you crave change and you are willing to see some of the ugly underside of your current situation.

If you start to forget something important or you have a constant sense of stress in your gut, this is an alarm bell that something is going on that is disturbing the normal operation of your life. You have choices.

• You can ignore it (this only work for a little while).
• You can numb it (e.g. TV or drink; this will defer but not solve the situation)
• You can analyze it (this would be the recommendation of this article)

2. Sense of Control

Once you have an awareness, you need to know that YOU can do something about the situation.  This is where a change in thinking is required.  And it really is more a mindset change than a change in your title or your capabilities or your status in life.

If you were to go to a party at a friends house and your friend was busy meeting and greeting guests and you sat in the corner and played with your iPhone and felt lonely. Who's fault would that be?  One mindset believes it's your friend's fault because he or she didn't spend time with you.  Another mindset would suggest that this is your fault because could make different choices.

What was the difference in those two mindsets.  The first mindset was a sense of no control and the result was inaction.  The second mindset suggests that you had control but chose inaction.  If the second mindset is true, then you actually had control of the situation.  In which case, you could now turn the lonely evening into an opportunity to meet new people or help your friend.

The power of your mindset  is incredibly strong and will give you the sense of control to attack situations with an outlook of control and confidence.

3. Be Proactive and Plan

Now that we understand the power of our mindset, we can do things differently in life. This notion of control of self is a muscle that needs exercise in the form of being proactive.  In the party situation above, being proactive would be to say hi to a stranger or perhaps ask your friend if he or she needs help.

In the larger scheme of a busy life, being proactive is taking time to analyze and understand your commitments and then put things in place to get your commits done a little earlier or set up things in life so you can make less decisions on the fly because you've done a little planning.

The best example I can think of is morning exercise. Here's how the proactive part fits into this.  The act of putting shoes, running shorts, running shirt, watch, heart rate band, iPhone airband and headlamp in a pile in my bathroom the night before enabled me to overcome the friction of sleep and lethargy.  It's a small act that took 5 minutes or less, but it made all the difference because I primed my mind for exercise through the preparation and I removed friction when I tired and weak willed in the morning.

Being proactive is the action you take or the thinking you do that precedes an outcome you want to change.  The results of being proactive is usually removing friction to do something or a smoother outcome for you and those around you. 


Another example of changing an outcome would be meeting preparation. If you create a goal and agenda for a meeting, you can more easily keep people on track and you are much more likely to achieve the expected outcome.

The cycle of Awareness, Sense of Control and Proactivity & Planning will continually feed itself.  There are so many more steps to take in the game of productivity.  And so many additional frameworks and tactical approaches.  A good starting point is 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.  This is book covers mindset and many practical approaches.

Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen is one of the most well known and effective frameworks.  Unlike the 7 Habits, GTD is very tactical and can be directly applied.  The 7 Habits is actually a meta-framework and is a useful philosophical framework no matter what choices you make in daily life.

For those who love to read and can consume information with unbelievable speed, check out the 50 best productivity blogs.

Please let me know what your greatest struggle is when adopting a productivity philosophy and framework?  Send an email or comment below.

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