Posted in Productivity on December 13th, 2006 | No Comments »
There is a big hype around personal productivity these days. New websites are appearing almost daily, promising to help in the search for the perfect solution.
I am not surprised by this trend. The stress-level of the average business person has become almost unbearable. There is big demand for personal productivity systems to help us cope with our daily workload and all those things entering our lives. Just look at 43folders, DIY Planner, Getting-Things-Done (GTD), Franklyn Covey and Total-Workday-Control (TWC). They are all really worth a look - you will definitely find some great input to increase your efficiency.
But, beware! The search for the perfect system is a dangerous one, because:
1) there is a risk to get over-organized - this is something I experienced myself: you implement a sophisticated system that becomes either very complicated to maintain or which simply is incompatible with your personality
2) you are easily traped by the temptation to keep on trying new systems - as a result you will wind up less productive, because “searching for the system” or “improving it” becomes more time/energy consuming than the productivity gains you get through using the system.
So, my advice on this is very simple (and I admit I am sometimes guilty of not following it through myself): (more…)
Posted in Productivity, Psychology on November 30th, 2006 | No Comments »
Do you know this feeling ? Sometimes you are really struggling to get things done effectively, while at other times you are highly productive and everything seems so easy. Well, at those times when everything goes so easy you are in the state of “flow”.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”; researched this topic and describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”.
Wouldn’t it be great to get yourself into this state, whenever you want ? Nick Smith shares this vision and wrote The little book of flow on his Life 2.0 blog.
The premise of this essay is that those exquisite but all too rare moments when we experience ‘flow’, when we are truly creative, happy and intuitively know exactly what is needed, are simply those instances when we glimpse our original and true nature. It sets out to show how, instead of trying to fathom the conditions for flow, we can realise this ‘true nature’ and make ‘flow’ our normal way of being, wherever we are and in whatever we do.
Nick has some excellent points on how to get yourself into the state of “flow”. A word of warning though: this is not easy to digest. The printed version of this article weighs in at over 30 pages, but its well worth the time and effort.