One Step at a Time

It’s important to start the morning with an objective for the rest of the day day – a one sentence declaration of what you think you can accomplish in the next 24 hours.

For me, today’s plan was the usual: sit at a coffee shop with all the other laptop junkies and get as much work done as I possible. The question on my mind in this situation is always… how much is it possible to get done in a day?

So, this morning, I had this ah-ha moment while I was brushing my teeth. Not quite Newton with the apple, but genius in it’s own way. I realized that there’s a scientific formula for a productive day. It’s Simplicity+Reward=Productivity First, you must answer the question, “What is the one thing that if I accomplished today would make me feel totally satisfied?” The answer will probably come to you right away – it’s that nagging feeling of guilt and procrastination that you’ve been carrying with you for a couple weeks. How great would it feel to let that go?

Make sure it’s a task small enough to realistically pull off before midnight. Start small, and you’ll be able to celebrate sooner. And, of course, if the project that’s nagging at you is a huge undertaking, break it up into smaller pieces. What part of that project can you finish today? If you want to re-tile your bathroom, but haven’t even started choosing the color of tile that you want, start there. Or better yet, start with a trip to the tile store, just to browse around. No pressure. The hard part is getting out of the “what if” stage. Once you’re actually in front of a book of tile samples, you’ll be totally inspired to do the rest.

So you have the the first part of the formula. Write it down. What is the one thing that is weighing on your conscious, making you feel too guilty to enjoy a day off?

Play with Time, don’t “Manage” it

The age-old adage, “time flies when your having fun” was modified by psychologists Anthony Chaston and Alan Kingstone at the University of Alberta in Canada. They say “fun” isn’t necessarily the right word. Their research found that doing something interesting (and especially challenging) takes our attention away from keeping track of time. They found that people who were more engaged in their task, tended to underestimate the amount of time that had passed.

We often talk about “time management,” but don’t always discuss how to make time fly… or make it slow down. We’d like to speed up the boring times, and extend the fun times. We’d like our life to last longer, but we don’t want the seconds to drag.

The important lesson from this research is that time flies, not just when we’re having fun, but when we’re doing things to challenge us. We stop listening to the tick of the clock when we’re engaged in learning and challenging our minds.

Create your own time machine by spending each day doing things that you love, or work that is challenging. There are 31,556,926 seconds in a year – try to make sure that you aren’t aware of them ticking by.