Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

There are no shortage of ways you can constantly tweak your personal time management, and if you’re trying for that 2% more productivity per week, every little can count.

So these three things put forward by Work Place Life aren’t anything amazing on their own, but they can still have an impact when you add them all together, or perhaps give some inspiration as to how else you might shave off some lost time, even if just by a little.
Here’s three more you might try

1. Stockpile Stationary
   Keeping a collection of various bits of stationary you need in a draw can save you a fair amount of time. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you don’t want to have to get up mid-flow and trek of to find a stapler or something.  For items in limited supply like staplers, keep two - one in common use that you don’t mind lending out. One you keep hold of no matter what, that you only ever use if the common one is AWOL.
2. Send Your Personal Mail Via The Company “Out Box”
   Firstly I’m not saying the company should pay for your personal mail, but my company is fine with accepting people’s personal mail, stamped as normal and dropping it in the Out Box for collection by the Post Office directly. Which saves me 10 or so minutes each time I want to post something because I don’t need to go out of my way to the postbox.
3. Buy Your Lunch
   Sure, it costs more to buy lunch if you look at the just the costs of material. But for me, it’s easier to buy a sandwich from the guy who delivers to the office, then it is to make my own. To make a basic sandwich is fairly quick, but the end result isn’t very interesting, and as soon as you start to make it interesting, the cost raises pretty close to what I’m paying anyway, only I have to spend the time putting it together. In other words, as with any money saving exercise don’t forget how much your time is worth.

You’ve probably heard the quote by Albert Einstein that “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” and you can’t ignore the figures over the long term when it comes to saving your money. But compound increases apply to anything. Including productivity.

I never really though about this before, but I was listening to a Brian Tracy audio book this morning, and it’s mentioned there, and when it was it stuck me as such a simple approach to improvement: If you improve your productivity by just 2% each week, in three months your total productivity will have increased by nearly 27%. And in about eight months, you will have doubled your total productivity. By year end, you’ll be operating at 280% of your current productivity. That’s with just a 2% increase per week.

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Over on his blog, Steve Pavlina fields a question/answer post regarding “Is Covering Psychic Development Unprofessional“. And it’s good to see him air his views on such things so openly.

To be fair, I generally skim over those posts, not so much because they don’t interest me, but because I’m not in the right frame of mind while at work to entertain such things, and usually, I forget to come back to them.

Interestingly he does note he gets negative comments about most things he writes, and I guess thats going to happen any time someone takes a more open minded view on things, but even when I don’t really buy in to things like this my self, it’s interesting to see how other people shape they world view and get a better insight into how other people tick

Over on Get Rich Slowly they have posted up a collection of recommended personal development sites, several of which I haven’t come across before, which is always a good thing.

Personally,  I try to keep the number of blogs I monitor at anyone time fairly small - but keeping a bigger stock to check when I have more time then usual is handy. But my picks right now are probably not all that suprising:

• LifeHacker
  

  One of the most comprehensive blogs for getting the most out of your life with a healthy variety of content to satisfy my craving for some more random entries every now and again.

• 43Folders
  

  Another great blog which I constantly refer people to when they want to get a head start on their GTD systems, as the overview they have over there condenses both a good introduction and good lead points for more discovery.

And a couple that are missing that I read regularly:

• Positive Sharing
  

  A blog for an in development book that focuses on the concept of seeking happiness at work, an often forgotten ideal which takes a refreshing new angle over the usual attention to simply being more productive and efficient.

• D * I * Y Planner
  

  Since I favour paper based planners over digital, then the supply of various templates for printing your own stock for various purposes comes in handy, and the blog keeps up with plenty of articles on general productivity and ideas for new ways to organize your life and planner.

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I felt I might have been a little harsh on Brian Tracy yesterday, so I gave some more of his material a listen, they are fairly short audio books, an hour each and so I gave his “How to become a millionaire” a listen in full, and his “21 ways to earn more and be promoted faster”.
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I’ve taken a bit of a detour in my reading/listening of the “7 Habits” because my audio book is either abridged, or a different edition to my hard copy (I have the latest revision), plus there are clear cuts in sections. Which makes it near impossible to follow since I can’t tell how much I’ve missed by flicking into my book.

So, not to be put off I picked up one of the other collection of audio books I read, “21 ways to be more productive” by Brian Tracy. Wow, was this a different approach, while reading “Getting Things Done” and “Seven Habits” had given me pause for thought on my opinions of various self help styles, this guy just reconfirmed some of the worst clinches. Continue Reading »

Here’s a refreshing new idea, a book about being happy at work. I’ve seen lot’s of things that indirectly lead to been happy at work, as a rule models like the “Seven Habits” result in a generally happier state of being, GTD reduces stress but  happiness is a by-product, not the goal it’s self usually.

What really caught my attention with this book is the fact it looks at a more holistic approach to happy work places, it’s not about building shared visions and mission statements and the normal rar-rar activity that rely more on hype then real genuine contentment with working. Or at least that’s the impression I’ve got from reading that parts available already.

It’ll be interesting to see where the whole project goes.

The second habit is a bit harder to skim over, as Stephen Covey said right in the start, there are no quick and easy solutions. So I guess I shouldn’t try and race ahead.

Habit two, “Begin With The End In Mind” is about self image, reflection and comitment to personal ideals. To take it to heart you can’t just read a few pages and move on, you need to actually think about what is been said. Not so easy to do when clunking along on the train, but the message is clear if you do not create your own reality, other people will create it for you. Continue Reading »

I’ve dug about half way into the first of the “Seven Habits” now, I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it right now, for a start I keep getting told there are no “Quick Fix” solutions. Damn.

Oh well, the first habit is “Be Proactive“. I was a little mistaken in what I though this meant at first, I sort of looked at it in lines of the Next Actions and the art of actually getting down to doing the things that need to be done. But it goes a lot deeper then that, suggesting that you should not just do all you need to do, but all you can do. Continue Reading »