Posts tagged Stephen Covey
Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs – How to Boost Your Personal Productivity
Sep 30th
One of the most common challenges that people face, especially entrepreneurs, is to effectively manage their time. In this information age, there is too much information to sift through and if you let the information control you then you will feel overwhelmed and under-achieve. So what does one have to do to improve their personal productivity? Several ideas have been proposed and here I would like to summarize all the points into 4 main points. So let’s get started.
Point #1: Break free from the Time Management myth: You have to first change your mindset and point of view to understand and acknowledge the fact that Time cannot be managed. Time is time and is a constant. What you have to focus on, instead, is how to manage YOURSELF in time. Stephen Covey once said, “Time Management is a misnomer. The key is to manage yourself.” So from the here on, the focus will be on how YOU can take charge of your time.
Point #2: Tackle Overwhelm effectively: In this age you have too much information coming at you, and one keeps jumping from one topic to the other leading to overwhelm and waste of time. We always move in the direction we look. So if you want to change your direction, then just change where you look. And one keeps looking at different things throughout the day, and guess what they end up moving everywhere – and that means nowhere. So how do you tackle it? Let’s start with you – Don’t complain about too much information. The way you look at it determines how you would react to it. You CANNOT AVOID overwhelm, but you CAN MANAGE it. And this is how you do it:
1.You must form the habit of scheduling everything that needs to be done: You cannot just react to new information. Be a student and not a follower. Your day should have a pattern and everything that needs to be done should be given an appointment. If the newspaper wants you to read it, then you should give the newspaper a specific time to engage you. Your time is important, so everything that takes away your time should be scheduled.
2.Disconnect yourself regularly: Take regular time-offs from your daily grind. Find ways of relaxation and refresh yourself with new ideas and thoughts. Engage in your hobbies regularly. If you like fishing, schedule it every week. It’s said that the most creative ideas come to you when your mind is relaxed. So when once you are back at your work, you are keyed up and raring to go.
Point #3: Avoid the #1 killer of time – Distractions: It’s not social media, emails, etc that causes you distractions; it’s YOU. You are the one who let’s them distract you. You cannot do things when you feel like doing it; you have to schedule it. You have to build a boundary of protection around you. The best solution, what I have experienced, to tackle distractions is to get the most important things done before distraction comes looking for you. That means that most of the distractions start after people have started waking up and getting to work. Roughly after 1000 am things start to take on the colors of distraction. So the best thing to do is to schedule all your important activities early in the morning. By doing this, you ensure consistent productivity. It’s said that great poet Ernest Hemmingway used to finish off all his writing before 1000 am. After that, he used to enjoy life. Use that principle.
Point #4: Choose your environment: My experience shows that I can’t get everything done in front of my work-desk. I also don’t like to exercise in the house. I tend to do better outdoors, sucking in the fresh morning air. What environment you choose is entirely up to you. It helps to assign specific environments to specific activities.
To summarize, if you take a look at the above 4 points, you will see a common pattern – it’s about YOU. It starts with you and ends with you. You have the total power and control to manage yourself and boost your productivity. Try the above techniques for a week, and see how you adapt to it.
All the best and God Bless.
The Simplicity of Tech: 12 Powerful Ways to Keep Your Online Life Simple and Peaceful
Jan 24th
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minimalist geek, it's possible |
I’m a little on the geeky side, I admit. Not a total nerd, but enough that I do alot on the computer and use technology to do everything from communicate to staying in touch to publishing to working to writing to networking to finances and more. And still, it’s very important to me that I keep things minimalist and peaceful. |
I believe that’s the trickiest part of technology: how to use it everyday and take advantage of it, without getting carried away. How to keep things simple but powerful. How to master technology without letting it become our master (to paraphrase Stephen Covey).
Alot of my friends ask me how I manage to do this, so I’d like to post a little bit about it today.
This is my setup
This won’t work for everyone, but it’s working for me and it’s at the very least a starting point and guideline for those that are interested.
First of all, almost everything I do is online. Now that I quit my day job (with the horror of its fax machine), I no longer keep paper files. I can access all of my information and documents online, so I can work from anywhere, from any computer. And there’s no longer any time spent on organizing, as I use Gmail’s philosophy of archiving instead of filing.
I use a Sony Vaio, because of it’s big screen and I’m a sony fan, it works well with my sony digital camera, which even for a minimalist I find it’s a necessity to save the memories. I have a regular pc on my desk at home and nothing else. No drawers for filing or papers. No fax machine, scanner, printer or anything.
Software I use include Gmail for email and IM, WordPress for blogging, Firefox for everything, Google Docs and Spreadsheets for all my document needs (although I do use OpenOffice as well), Google Reader for feeds (yes, I’m a Google fan, but only because their programs do what I want the best). I favor Open Source software if possible.
Now on to the tips.
- Focus on the essential. It’s important to take some time to think about what’s essential to your tech work (and play). What do you really need? What gives you the most benefit for your time? What’s not so essential? What takes up a lot of time without making much of an impact? What gives you the most enjoyment? If you can identify the activities, sites and software that is most essential to you, you can eliminate or at least reduce the non-essential. And from then on, focus almost exclusively on what’s essential. This applies to your work tasks as well – what tasks are extremely essential? Focus on doing those each day.
- Do one thing at a time. I know. This is super hard when it comes to tech. Browser’s on, a dozen tabs open at once, switching between reading and email and work and IM and Twitter … we live in a multitasking world. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While there’s nothing wrong with having multiple tabs open, it can be very helpful to focus on one task at a time. Have 10 tabs open, but do one tab until you’re done, then close it and move on to the next, and so on. If you’re going to do IM, just do IM. If you’re going to do email, just do email. Sure, you can do more than that at once, but it adds to the stress of your day and decreases your effectiveness because of all the switching. Practice doing one thing at a time and you’ll find your work to be much more peaceful.
- Have periods of disconnectedness. While I do most of my work online, I find it extremely useful (and calming) to close my browser and just work offline for awhile. This post, for example, is being written in a text program, and when I’m done writing I’ll go and post it in WordPress. This really allows you to get much more done, because there’s no temptation to go check something just for a sec.
- Don’t live in your inbox. I’ve done this, and if you do it you know who you are. Email is everything to many people. It’s communication, it’s a task list, it’s where you do your work, it’s your organization system. But if you work from your inbox, you are constantly being interrupted by new messages. Get your task list out of your inbox. Do email only at pre-appointed times. Do your work with your email closed.
- Schedule your IM time. Same thing applies to IM. I’m not a huge fan of IM, especially if you have your IM program open all the time. That’s because it encourages people to interrupt you whenever they want, instead of you valuing your time. If IM is important to your work, then schedule IM meetings, or have certain times of the day when you’re available for IM and tell your colleagues and friends about it. And have it for a limited amount of time and then end it.
- Turn off notifications. Again, email and IM and other notifications encourage interruptions and multitasking. Instead, turn everything off so that you check your email when you choose, not when others decide to send you something.
- Set limits on what you do. For example, check email just twice a day. Write emails of only 5 sentences or less. Only check Twitter once a day. Only respond to 4 messages on your favorite forum. Or whatever works for you. Limits force you to choose the essential, instead of trying to do everything.
- Create a morning routine. I’m a fan of morning routines in general, and the same concepts apply to tech. The Morning Coffee extension for Firefox is a great way to set up your routine with a single click. It opens all your essential sites in tabs, so that you can work through this routine one thing at a time and be sure that everything is finished.
- Create a weekly routine. With Morning Coffee, you can also set up routines for different days of the week. This allows you to check a certain site or inbox once a week, for example, instead of every single day.
- Clear out your inbox. Clearing out your inbox is a very calming thing. It also prevents the overwhelming feeling of having hundreds of emails in your inbox — some read and some not.
- Pare down your feeds. I used to have well over a hundred RSS feeds to read in a day. The need to go through them all, every day, was very stressful to me. So I eventually cut them down, one stage at a time, until I got down to 10 essential feeds. Now it takes just a few minutes each day to scan through my feeds, pick out a few articles I’d like to read, and mark the rest as read. Much simpler.
- Simplified filing. As I mentioned above, I use Gmail’s philosophy of archiving instead of filing. I used to be a compulsive filer, as I like things to be organized. I had folders and subfolders, and I’d spent a bit of time each day filing every single email. What an effort! Instead, I archive everything and just search for what I need (I don’t even use tags or labels anymore). It takes seconds to find something. Seriously, there has never been a time when I couldn’t find something through search. I do this not only with email but with all my documents (through Google Docs and Spreadsheets).
