Productivity

After you stop to discern what’s important, you need to cut out what sidetracks you from focusing on that. Here are three strategies for doing just that.

This post continues reviewing Michael Hyatt’s book “Free to Focus.” Here we concentrate on Hyatt’s advice about “stopping” to to discern what’s important.

Gleanings about persistence, regularity, and a new Greek grammar.

Do you feel like you’re drowning in a sea of tasks? Do you keep your nose to the grindstone and complete to-dos like a machine only to look up and find you’re failing to make the progress you want in the areas or projects that matter most?

If so, then you need to read Michael Hyatt’s latest book, Free to Focus ( affiliate disclosure). The volume doesn’t release until tomorrow, 9 April. But the author and Baker Publishing kindly included me in the group that received advance copies.

Michele Cushatt, Michael Hyatt, and Greg McKeown discuss “essentialism,” which is about saying “yes” to what matters most.

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, discusses at TED the interplay between technology, attention, and distraction.

Freedom has a helpful tutorial about being “more productive in the afternoon.” The same principles apply to whenever is one’s preferred time for focused work.

Kristina Malsberger discusses managing oneself and one’s commitments amid a hectic whirlwind of activity. A time-honored key is the daily to-do list.

Cal Newport outlines the basics of how he reads when working on a project. According to Newport, “The key to my system is the pencil mark in the page corner.”

Digital devices and media can make focus difficult. Freedom provides helpful of “training wheels” to foster better focus amid such distractions.

Valerie Bisharat shares some helpful reflections on “how to avoid focus-stealing traps.”

The Dropbox blog has a short essay on the downsides of trying to multitask. Rather than multitasking,

deep and singular focus is just what the doctor ordered, but in our hyper-connected world, it isn’t always easy…. You could chuck all your gadgets and move to the woods, but luckily you don’t need to get that drastic. Experts say you can begin to retrain your brain and take advantage of deep focus by concentrating on one thing at a time, managing your use of technology, and reframing the “instant-response” expectations of your colleagues—and yourself.

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It’s certainly not new, but I recently came across the GTD Times blog run by the David Allen Company. The most recent entry is the first part of a keynote in which Allen overviews his approach to “getting things done,” as covered more fully in his book by the same title ( affiliate disclosure). If academia should ever manifest itself as an environment with an overabundance of demands, Allen’s advice may be a helpful starting point in adequately coming to grips with that situation.

Michael Hyatt has a helpful interview with Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016). According to Newport,

Focus is now the lifeblood of this economy.

Why? Because focus is rare and distraction abundant. As Hyatt comments,

Even when we think we are focusing, we usually aren’t. When we work intensely on one problem but do quick “check backs” on email, social media, and the like during breaks, we run into the problem of “attention residue.” Those things come back with us when we return to our core work and make it harder to focus on our most important tasks.

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A recent study commissioned by Microsoft Canada found, disturbingly, that the human participants’ average attention spans had fallen to 8 seconds, a shorter time frame than measured for goldfish ( Evernote, New York Times). One of the major suspected drivers of these results is the propensity of the participants to use a mobile device while “paying attention” to something else.

Even comparatively minor distractions apparently have a compound effect on concentration and productivity ( Computers in Human Behavior, Evernote). What is required to avoid this effect will be different in different contexts ( Knowledge@Wharton). But, being as “present” as possible in or to whatever situation we’re engaged in should be helpful in at least raising for ourselves the question of whether the amount of time and life invested into something—e.g., a ding, chirp, buzz, beep, or blink—is actually worth the return that might be expected from that thing.

Michael Hyatt has a new post where he provides seven strategies for remedying or avoiding overcommitment. All seven suggestions are good and worth considering. But, the capstone suggestion, number seven seems particularly key:

I couldn’t go on at my previous pace, and I didn’t have to. I began building new boundaries around my margin. And I started enforcing them to keep myself out of trouble. This is where the rubber meets the road for us all. We must deliberately build margin into our lives, or our busy seasons will become permanent. No one else is going to do this for us.

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Although I’ve moved away from using Evernote, their blog still often features interesting content. Recently they’ve had a three-part series on minimalism that heavily leans on Joshua Becker ( part 1, part 2, part 3). Among Joshua’s reflections that the series provides are a two-part suggestion for “saying ‘no’ effectively:

1. Figure out and write down what your priorities and values are, even if you’re in a hectic environment. Ask yourself some tough questions like “Who is the person I want to become? Would my 40-year-old self approve of this?” 2. Realize and understand this: “If you say yes to something, you’re saying no to everything else. If you want to say no to something, realize that allows you to say yes to something else.” This is the true power of saying no: freeing up time so you can say yes to the things that matter most to you.

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As part of Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus resource set, he’s made available three treat the significance for productivity of adequate, quality sleep:

• Interview with Shawn Stevenson (video)
• Unleash Nature’s Secret Weapon eBook (PDF)
• 13 Essential Keys to a Good Night’s Sleep (PDF)

Shawn Stevenson’s core business certainly falls in an area where probably few biblical scholars will care to follow. But some of the implications of the expertise that he has for broader productivity applications may indeed prove informative and helpful.

Michael Hyatt has a helpful discussion of 10 tips for enabling better focus.  For me, suggestions 5 (“Take email … software offline.”) and 6 (“Put on music that helps facilitates concentration.”) have tended to prove particularly helpful.

For Michael’s discussion of these tips and the other 8 he provides, see his original post.

Going along with his Free to Focus material, Michael Hyatt has a helpful, free resource about eliminating distractions. The material in this resource is designed to work with and complement the content Michael delivers in his webinar, The 7 Deadly Sins of Productivity: The Hidden Habits Undermining Your Performance (And How to Change Them).

Michael Hyatt has a free productivity assessment tool that provides “a free analysis of your overall [personal productivity] score and a breakdown of the productivity areas you evaluated.”

A followup email provides a short set of tips for improving, and the analysis page that displays after the survey is completed provides access to sign up for a free webinar on the “7 deadly sins of productivity.” I attended the webinar recently, and it does provide a good number of suggestions revolving around focus as a primary key to productivity.

If you’ve never read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity (Penguin, 2001), a recent episode of the EntreLeadership podcast has a sit-down with Allen and crash course in the fundamentals of what he thinks makes for effective time management self-management in time.

Via the blog of Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, John Dumas highlights three skills to develop in order to be more satisfied with what’s gotten done amid everything that has come along in a given day: productivity, discipline, and focus.

In How to Write a Lot ( affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it has been helpful thus far, I thought I would make it available with some sample data.

Although it certainly can be used otherwise, a progress tracking system like the one Paul Silvia suggests in his book How to Write a Lot seems to work best for writing that can be open ended: by following a regular writing schedule, projects can regularly and reliably come to completion. What happens, however, if one is working under a deadline (be it self-imposed or not) and, therefore, needs to develop a writing schedule backwards from this due date?