Tag: Productivity

Use Rituals To Engineer Your Perfect Day

Posted on by Greg

Rupert is having a perfect day.

A powerful way to start living the life you want to live while making progress toward your grandest goals is to map out what your average perfect day would look like (via). Not your fantasy perfect day, but a perfect day that you can engineer out of the raw material of reality.

Naturally this perfect day should include doing the things you love, even if only for a little while. Writers should want to write everyday. Musicians should want to play. Painters should want to paint. Athletes should want to run. If this is not the case, perhaps revisit your “passions”.

On Monday we discussed converting your routines into rituals. The use of such rituals can help you stick to your map of an average perfect day on an ongoing basis.

What differentiates routine from ritual is intent. Routines are undertaken passively, sometimes unconsciously, while rituals are ceremonial and intentional. Assigned the proper meaning, rituals grant us passage to a desired state of mind or place. A cup of stale coffee from a vending machine is mindless and routine but a flat white made by your own hand and enjoyed in your favorite chair can be so much more. It can usher in creativity or kick-start intense productivity – it’s really for you to decide.

Such rituals should be installed as cornerstones within your average perfect day. In this way you can piece together great, productive days one ritual brick at a time and see them through to live the life you truly desire.

Convert Routines Into Rituals For Meaningful Progress

Posted on by Greg

Rupert is a creature of habit.

You might not think that you’re a creature of routine but consider the course of your average day for a few seconds. Maybe you always have a cup of coffee in the morning and try to wait until noon before having another. You iron your shirt for the next work day just before you go to bed. Maybe you can’t fall asleep without some light reading. The first thing you do in the morning is mindlessly scroll through your Facebook feed while you will yourself to rise from bed and face the day. You probably always have lunch around the same time.

With the same person.

In the same room.

You might be realizing that you have a lot of routine activities that you don’t actively consider. Imagine how much more your day would mean if you did actively consider them; if you engineered your routine activities into a set of daily rituals. No matter what your idea of success looks like, meaningful rituals can help you get there.

Drive The Plot Forward

Where a routine is mechanical and rote, a ritual is ceremonial and injected with meaning. A daily ritual can’t be a ‘token’ activity that you do merely because you feel like you should or because you’ve seen other people do it – it must mean something to you and that meaning should ideally relate to whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

It is common wisdom among writers that each word of a story should drive the plot forward. The same rule applies to your daily activities: if the activity at hand isn’t getting you closer to your goal, why are you doing it in the first place?

A powerful enough ritual can set the pace for our entire day, so it is important to consider the pace that we want to set. This begins with knowing yourself and your natural rhythms. If you’re developing rituals around writing, for example, you would want to tee these rituals up at a time that you are naturally more creative. The ritual, then, serves to maximize and enhance your natural rhythm.

My own rituals that lead into my creative work (usually writing) involve a cup of coffee, reading and – depending on the type of writing I’ll be doing – a walk around the neighborhood. I am naturally more creative in the afternoon and early evening so if I were to deploy these rituals at 5 A.M. they would be less effective than if I started them after lunch. Likewise, a walk only fuels my creativity if I’m going to be writing a blog post. If I’m going to be writing fiction, it’s best for me to get right into the work with my coffee in hand. Once I’ve followed the given pattern of rituals, I am well and truly in the ‘zone’ for creative work.

Your own rituals should likewise suit your own personal and specific needs. It’s interesting to know that F. Scott Fitzgerald arose at 11 A.M. most days, but that doesn’t mean you’ll write the next Great American Novel if you also wake at that time. Rising at 11 worked for him, but only when combined with any number of other rituals that fell in line with his own creative rhythms. There is no formula for creativity and maximum productivity – there is only what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Your Rituals Evolve Along With You

I was raised on a lot of colloquial wisdom in West Virginia. A saying that I heard pretty often while growing up was “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s true that constant tinkering eventually (and sometimes rapidly) reaches a point of diminishing returns. In the same way that you can only coax so much power out of an engine, you can likewise only derive so much power from a ritual.

Life-hacking your cup of coffee, in other words, won’t make the muse any more forthcoming. Your ritual will only ever be what it is until – one day – it’s not.

The day that it’s finally ‘broke’ and needs fixing.

Your rituals will evolve along with your personality, goals, rhythms and surroundings. A walk around the neighborhood might inspire you around your current suburb but if you move across town it might cause anxiety. The ritual will be broken and need to be adjusted or jettisoned.

It is important to remember that rituals are not end states – they exist on a continuum along which they must serve your needs for the moment (via). They may eventually stop serving your needs as you move toward your goal. Your rituals of the moment must always be helping and not hindering, otherwise they become rote and you guessed it: routine.

Periodic reflection is necessary to prevent your rituals from leaving you in a rut. It’s important to pause every so often and consider the purpose of your rituals, the same way you did when you considered your daily routine at the outset of this article. What activities in your day are filled with meaning and which are just examples of you going through the motions? Lose the meaningless ones and substitute in ones that will actively bring you a step closer to your dreams each time you perform them.

If we are all floating downstream, daily rituals are our paddles. Without them we have less control over our path and are ultimately at the mercy of the current. By empowering ourselves with rituals we give ourselves the freedom to choose our path; to chart our own course. Don’t settle for going with the flow – make your activities mean something.

Self-Awareness, Being Provocative, Shaking Up The NFL

Posted on by Greg

Rupert is reading 'No Country For Old Men'.

An unintentional theme developed as I compiled the links for this weekend: moving confidently forward and shaking things up. The first link shows us how to establish a foundation for development before the second challenges us to not just question the status quo but to take action toward changing it. A piece on Chip Kelly, coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, rounds out the links with a practical example of these ideas in action and the results that have been achieved.

Why Self-Awareness Is the Secret Weapon for Habit Change

The dedication required to change our mind and behavior is the fight of our lives.

This fantastic piece by Paul Jun about self-awareness underscores the importance of understanding yourself and then using that understanding to further your development. He begins by challenging us to stop fooling ourselves with excuses before encouraging reflection on our mistakes (and successes) that should eliminate the need for those excuses. He also prescribes a “philosophical foundation” for your actions that will help keep you centered and focused.

Unlock Your Creative Genius: 4 Steps To Being Provocative With A Purpose (via)

Following from the first article about knowing ourselves and moving confidently forward, here are a few thoughts on being disruptive in a productive (and creative) way. The premise is familiar – the 9 to 5 doesn’t inspire us, children are more imaginative than adults, etc. – but the recipe for innovation on offer here is a practical one that you can put into practice immediately (and without quitting your day job). Resting on your laurels certainly isn’t moving you forward, so click through for a few easy tips on how to stave off stagnation.

The Influencer

Rounding out a week of innovation is an interesting examination of the ways in which Chip Kelly, coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, has tackled (pun shamelessly intended) the status quo in the NFL. His innovations extend beyond playcalls (there is some football nerdery in the middle of the piece but handy GIFs illustrate the plays being described) and into the way the organization is structured and operates in regard to practices and meetings. His implementation of sport science advances (such as monitors that track player health vitals) resulted in the Eagles having the second-fewest injuries among NFL teams last season. For (even casual) sports fans and productivity nerds, it doesn’t get much cooler than this.

ToVa Rewind:

Build A Custom ‘Inflow’ To Stay On Top Of Things
‘Create’ Free Time By Being Early

Rupert is reading: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Have a great weekend!

‘Create’ Free Time By Being Early

Posted on by Greg

Rupert is waiting.

Here’s a great way to develop a positive trait and steal back some precious free moments all in one move: get comfortable with waiting.

Punctuality is never looked upon poorly, no matter what your fashionably late friends may try to tell you. However, being early can leave you in the awkward position of having nothing to do while you wait.

Be a bit more intentional than that – look at this downtime as free time that you created and use it productively. Plan to be early and utilize your inflow. Catch up on reading, check your feeds, or listen to a podcast. You’ll find yourself getting more done while also developing a positive reputation for being punctual.

Accomplishing two great things in a row? That’s called a winning streak.

Build A Custom ‘Inflow’ To Stay On Top Of Things

Posted on by Greg

Rupert has a lot to process.

The internet is full of interesting things (including this blog!). So many interesting things, in fact, that the line between staying informed and falling into a bottomless pit of distraction is sometimes difficult to distinguish. How can you stay on top of the things that matter most to you and avoid the distraction trap? By establishing your own custom ‘inflow’ of content that presents content only from trusted sources.

The methods that I’m presenting today are my own so my usual disclaimer applies: this is what works for me – your mileage may vary. That said, my aim is to highlight the logic of the very practical nuts and bolts of my own system so that you can design a system that suits your own needs.

Read on! Unless you want to save this article to Pocket and read it later, that is.

Setting Up Your Source(s)

As I mentioned last week, a productivity system is only as effective as its inbox. After all, if items are not being input into the system, where are they going? The ‘inflow’ is the step before the inbox – it is the fishing net with which you catch items that you might want in your inbox and also the sifter with which you uncover the nuggets that will enter your system.

In the same way that you’ll want to minimize your inboxes, I would recommend also that you minimize the sources from which you catch content. I have three main sources that I monitor regularly:

It is incredibly rare that I would discover content outside of these three sources and usually doing so is a happy accident (for example: an interesting article shared by a friend on Facebook who doesn’t usually share such things). In a constantly buzzing world, how can this be? How am I not missing something?

The key to my system is intentional design. There are no redundancies (so I’m not following a site on Twitter and also subscribing to their RSS feed, except as noted below) and all of my bases are covered. Speaking generally, the way that I allocate sources to either Feedly or Twitter breaks down like this:

  • Sites on my RSS reader (Feedly) are sites that post valuable enough content that I don’t want to miss anything. Feedly shows me everything that’s new since I last checked, so missing things doesn’t happen unless I intentionally skip ahead.
  • Twitter is where I go for breaking news. Here I follow newspapers and specific organizations (such as my favorite sports teams). I’m not on Twitter often enough to read everything, so I would miss things if it were my only source of content. I don’t tend to miss the big picture in terms of current events, as the bigger stories continue to appear often enough that I’ll eventually see them.
  • The only time I would follow a source on both Twitter and Feedly would be where the site adds value on Twitter (usually through curated links and retweets) but I don’t want to miss any of their regular content. Ghostbusters taught us that crossing the streams is bad (except when it’s good) and that advice holds true here.

Downcast, meanwhile, updates my podcasts and downloads episodes automatically. It’s low maintenance in that way – even syncing across your devices – and you’ll always have the latest episodes ready to go.

This intentional design allows me to trust my system and thus I minimize my fear of missing out (FOMO – a concept I’ll be exploring in greater detail in an upcoming post). I’m not seeing anything I don’t want to see and I’m not missing anything I’m not willing to miss.

Consuming Your Content

Once you’ve cast your net, it’s time to mine out the nuggets: those bits of content that you actually want to consume.

If I only check Feedly once a day I usually find anywhere between 150 to 200 articles to browse. Of these I will actually want to read roughly one from five, so that would be 30 to 40 on any given day. Depending on my schedule and the length of those articles, it’s not reasonable that I’ll read everything at that moment. I may never get around to reading some of them. The GTD two-minute rule comes in handy in these situations: short articles that can be read in a few minutes or less are usually read right away as is anything ‘breaking’ that would lose relevance over time. Everything else gets saved to my read-it-later app, Pocket.

Pocket saves my content to a master reading list (in the order in which I save them) so that I can read them at a time of my choosing. Pocket offers a few advanced features:

  • A night mode theme with serif text that makes reading on a tablet (which is my standard device for consuming text content) a lot easier on my eyes.
  • Heaps of sharing functionality – including all major social media platforms and email.
  • Cloud storage, so my list of articles can be pulled up on any of my devices or with any web browser.

Feedly also carries these functions on board but everything comes together a little better in Pocket. Additionally, Pocket plays nicely with Twitter. I can save links within tweets straight to Pocket and when I read the link later, the original tweet is displayed at the top, making retweeting or favoriting a breeze if I end up finding the content valuable and/or worth sharing.

Pocket, then, operates as a landing place for both Feedly and Twitter – almost qualifying as an inbox in my system. However, only the best content makes it to the real inbox: Evernote.

Only The Best Survive

Once I’ve read an article, one of two things will happen to it:

  • I will tick it as ‘read’ in Pocket and it will disappear to the archive.
  • I will find it valuable enough to archive for potential reference in the future and it will be saved to Evernote.

Evernote is my big fat online filing cabinet that (yes, I’m about to tease again) I will explore in greater detail in an upcoming post. Once I’ve sent an article to Evernote, it lands in one of my system’s true inboxes and from here it will be actioned. Most of the time it simply gets filed away so I know I have a copy of it somewhere. Yes, Pocket also archives my articles but Pocket archives a link that may eventually die while Evernote archives the actual text. In this way the content can never be lost, even if the site where it was featured eventually dies or the link changes.

Occasionally an article will contain an ‘action’, like a piece of software I might want to check out or a recipe I might want to (*cough* have my fiancée *cough*) whip up. In these instances, it actually gets added to my to-do list and categorized appropriately. If content is too good to file away and forget in the short-term, I take notes in the moment and link the notes to the article within Evernote. In a way Evernote acts like my own personal internet (and has accordingly fewer trolls).

Whatever You Do, Be Intentional

Again, you don’t have to incorporate my system exactly as I have described it. My hope is that you’ll be able to read between the lines and build your own system around an intentional plan that will eliminate FOMO and reduce the time you would normally spend aimlessly wandering the internet in search of content. There are other apps that perform similar functions as the ones I use, but I know what works for me and that’s what I’ve shared.

When you’ve built up your RSS and/or social feeds to the point that you get all of the content you want without visiting any other site, you’ll know you’ve built a durable inflow that will keep you informed on the things that matter most to you. If anxiety lingers, look for the cracks (or redundancies) in your system that make you feel as though you’re missing out. Your inflow may need this occasional massaging but a few minutes organizing things every few weeks is far preferable to countless wasted minutes spent wandering the wasteland of the internet at large.