Leyla Bonilla's List: Productividad

• And those two things are so deceptively simple that you might decide to stop reading after I name them: 1) make things enjoyable and 2) use positive public pressure.
• • Post your goal on your blog and post regular updates. It’s important that you not just post the goal but also stay accountable with the updates. Encourage people to ask you about your goal if you don’t report your progress.
   
  • Join an online forum related to your goal — I’ve done this when I quit smoking and also when I started running. Introduce yourself, make friends, tell them about your goal, ask for help when you need it, and report your successes and failures.
• Post your goal and a chart of your progress up in your office or other public place.
• • Having a hard time exercising? Find exercise that’s fun for you. If you don’t like running, try soccer or basketball or rowing. If you don’t like to lift weights, try doing some primal workouts where you flip logs and jump through tires. Go hiking. Walk with friends and talk the whole time.
   
  • Is eating healthy a challenge for you? Find healthy foods you love. Experiment with new recipes and have fun testing them out.
   
  • Is training for a marathon tough? Learn to enjoy the quiet of the early morning, the contemplative nature of running, or the beautiful nature that surrounds you. Or play some songs that pump you up. Or listen to interesting audiobooks as you run.

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• Everyone has things they hate to do, but need to do anyway. Sometimes it is doing basic chores that need to be done. In other cases, it’s the boring part of an otherwise interesting project. People who get things finished (as opposed to people who just get things started) have mastered the ability to push through the things they hate doing, to work on the things they love.
• The first is simply to focus on it. You might have noticed that you chew a lot more when you don’t like the food in your mouth. This is probably an instinctive reaction to force you to carefully examine what you’re going to eat before you swallow.
• I’ve often found that focusing on work intensely can even make me like tasks I once hated. I normally hate cleaning, but if I invest 100% of my attention towards it, the chore becomes a lot more fun.
• Reconnect with why you started important projects and how any activity fits into your bigger picture of success. If you can do this, you can bring some of the motivation towards your final goal and use it to finish an ugly task.

• there are ways you can get away with avoiding the stuff that doesn’t interest you:

   
   
  • Outsource or delegate it to someone else.
   
  • Eliminate it from your project. (Is it really necessary?)
   
  • Find a better way to do it. Technology and tricks can often help you shortcut boring steps into ones that are more interesting.

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• Organized equals clean

   

  Too many people equate “organization” with the cold, sterile, un-lived-in spaces they see in glossy magazines. That’s not organization – the cleanest-looking space might still take forever to find anything in.
• An organized space is simply one in which the things you need the most are close at hand, the things you need often are easily found, and the things you need rarely are out of the way but easily retrieved when needed.
• The reality is that while most systems take some time to get set up, once you start using your system, the time you use in “maintenance” is more than made up for by the time you save not having to think about what to do – or making up for the things you didn’t remember to do.
• Keeping yourself in a high-stress, always-urgent mode isn’t good for your health, and it’s not good for your business.
• For living things, there’s always room for growth.
• No, you don’t. Inspiration is wonderful, but rarely compatible with getting stuff done. What you need is a system to capture those flashes of inspiration so that, when inspiration is on holiday, you’ve got plenty to work with.

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• An example of an urgent task with relatively low importance would be an upcoming deadline on a small project for a client with whom you’re not likely to do business again. It needs to be completed by the deadline, so there is probably more urgency than importance.

   

  On the other hand, an example of an important task with low urgency would be a high-paying job for a repeat client that is not very time-sensitive.
• the closer the deadline, the more urgency exists.
• Not all deadlines are the same, so if you’re unlikely to get everything done in time, try to gauge the consequences of not meeting each of your deadlines and prioritize accordingly.
• Stage of Development - Although a deadline may not be looming in the immediate future, large projects will need to be well-planned and executed accordingly. If you’re only looking at the deadline you may not see the urgency, but you could still be way off-pace to get everything done in time. One method you can use to help with this is to set several deadlines for smaller milestones throughout the project, which will help you to stay on pace and to be able to easily track your progress.
• Pay - Let’s face it, money can be a determining factor in both importance and urgency. It may be the amount of pay that’s significant, or it could be the timing of when you’ll be paid.
• Client - Is the client a regular, repeat client that is responsible for a considerable amount of business? Is it a new client with whom you’d like to develop a stronger relationship? Is it a problem client that always has issues paying on time? Is it a new client that you’re unlikely to do business with again?
• Your Word - Although you may not have a strict deadline, did you tell the client you would do something by a certain time? Did you tell them you would do something specific that isn’t completed yet? For building a reputation, referrals, and repeat business, your word is obviously important.
• Break Your Projects Down into Smaller Steps - Rather than looking at an entire project, look at what you need to do during a specific day or week to make the necessary progre
• Prepare Ahead of Time
• Estimate Time Requirements - When prioritizing and planning you’ll want to make an estimate of how much time each item will require.
• Know Your Strong Times - I think all of us have some times during the day or the week when we are more productive than other times. If you’re aware of these habits you can adjust your schedule to take advantage of your strongest times and schedule less difficult tasks for your weaker times.
• Follow Your Moods When Appropriate
• I’ve found that I work best when I choose to work on whatever appeals to me most at that moment.
• For example, I do some writing and some design. There are some times where I’ve planned on writing an article, but I just don’t feel like I can be as productive at that moment as I could be if I was working on a design (or vice versa)

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• Consolidate. There are many things you do, scattered throughout your day or your week, that you might be able to consolidate in order to save time. A good example is errands — instead of running one or two a day, do them all in one day to save time and gas. Another example is email, or any kind of communication — batch process your email instead of checking and reading and responding throughout the day. Same thing with meetings, paperwork, anything that you do regularly.
• Re-think your routine. Often we get stuck in a routine that’s anything but what we really want our days to be like. Is there a better way of doing things? You’re the creator of your life — make a new routine that’s more pleasant, more optimal, more filled with things you love.
• Keep your list to 3. When you make out your daily to-do list, just list the three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Don’t make a laundry list of tasks, or you’ll fill up all your free time. By keeping your task list small, but populated only by important tasks, you ensure that you are getting the important stuff done but not overloading yourself.
• Do your Biggest Rock first. Of the three Most Important Tasks you choose for the day, pick the biggest one, or the one you’re dreading most, and do that first. Otherwise you’ll put that off as much as possible and fill your day with less important things. Don’t allow yourself to check email until that Big Rock is taken care of. It starts your day with a sense of major accomplishment, and leaves you with a lot of free time the rest of the day, because the most important thing is already done
• Cut out distractions. What is there around your workspace that distracts you from the task at hand? Sometimes it’s visual clutter, or papers lying around that call for your attention and action, or email or IM notifiers on your computer that pop up at the wrong time, or the phone, or coworkers.
• Outsource. If you can’t delegate, see if you can outsource. With the Internet, we can connect with people from all over the world. I’ve outsourced many things, from small tasks to checking email to legal work to design and editing work and more. That allows me to focus on the things I’m best at, the things I love doing, and saves me a lot of time.
• Make use of your mornings. I find that mornings are the absolute best times to schedule the things I really want to do. I run, read and write in the mornings — three of the four things on my Essentials List (spending time with family is the other thing on the list). Mornings are great because your day hasn’t been filled with a bunch of unscheduled, demanding, last-minute tasks that will push back those Essentials.

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• Delegation is one of the secrets of good time management.
• 1) Ask yourself which parts of your work can only be done by you. Then aim to delegate as much of the rest as possible so that you are free to make the most of your own work.
• 2) Never delegate even the simplest task without saying when you want it completed by.
• Always put a follow-up reminder in your schedule or Task Diary to check that the work has been done
• Break down large tasks into stages and set deadlines for each. Spell out what should have been achieved at each deadline.
• Remember you can delegate upwards and sideways as well as downwards,
• When someone overruns a deadline don’t say “Why haven’t you done it?”. Instead say: “I’m not interested in why you haven’t done it. What I want to know is when you will have done it.”

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• Faffing - The art of doing something without achieving anything”
• Know your outcome – Always keeping the goal in mind is not as easy as it sounds. I find it helpful to verbally remind myself what my outcome is: “Got to finish washing the dishes”, that kind of thing
• Turn off all things that may distract you –
• Allow yourself time to finish the job at hand – Don’t try and cram two hours of work into one hour
• Let others know your timescale – I have told my wife and children that I will be writing for about 90 minutes so if it’s possible, not to disturb me for this length of time. This way the responsibility is mine to get the article done and I can’t blame anybody else for it not being completed in time.
• Allow time for a quick reward

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• Your brain doesn’t want to be remembering all the things you haven’t done. It wants to be doing them, so it can feel good about itself. The neurology of all this is a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.

• It’s helpful to write not just the task but the reason for the task, to give you a pointer to what’s next after you’ve finished any particular task. I use a formula like this:

   
   
  • [Action verb][task] for [project or goal]

• For example:

   
   
  • Call Caroline at 555-xxxx to transfer insurance into my name (for car registration)
   
  • Write “Back to Basics” post for Lifehack
   
  • Grade papers for WMST 113.210 by Wednesday
• Note that I put in all the information I need (or as much as I have available) to complete the task. I don’t want to give myself an excuse not to do it, because I have to go find the phone number or I can’t remember which class folder I need to get
• It’s crucial to have your list available under any circumstance. For one thing, you never know when you might have a few minutes to work on a couple of tasks; if you don’t have your list, you might waste those opportunities. Second, you never know when you might have to add something to the list.

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• When I worked for someone else, I spent a lot of time working on their projects. Consequently everything else took a back seat and was allocated to the early and late hours of the day, and only received a small portion of my energy.

   

  When working for yourself, you have mastery over your hours, how you divvy them up and what you spend the lion’s share on.
• To gain mastery of your own time, you sometimes need to sacrifice now for gains in the future. I took a major 6 month hit of working terribly long hours for two full-time jobs – my regular work and building our start-up – so that I could achieve the platform that would give me more freedom later on. My wife will tell you it really wasn’t much fun and there was some real lows, but it was a sacrifice we both think was worth it. Now I am able to work for myself full-time while travelling the world – and those six months of sleepless nights and heavy stress seem a small price to have paid for this lifestyle.
• If you want to make the most effective use of your time, you need a plan. Without one, trying to do a lot will give you a major stress attack. Whether it’s daily to-do lists, business plans, or a productivity system, choose your weapons and put them to use.

• Personally I have two planning tools that I use constantly. Next to me I keep a notepad with daily to-do lists. They usually span two A4 pages because I like to do some serious multi-tasking.

   

  I also carry a Moleskine notebook with me literally everywhere I go. I spend a couple of hours a week writing ideas, goals, plans, and lists in it. What’s coming up next, how to increase income on a website, lists of actionables to launch a new project, the chapters for a book, points to write in an article. You name it, it’s in there, combined with enough squiggles and doodles to impress the most idle mind.

• I have found the best way to think of it is to ask yourself this one question:

   

  If you only had a year left to do the things on your lists, would you be satisfied with what you’re spending your time on today?

• You won’t get a lot done if you don’t try to do a lot. For every person the number of tasks, projects, and things they can keep in their heads at one time is different. So it’s important to find your ideal load where it’s enough that you’re a bit uncomfortable, but not so much that you find yourself feeling overwhelmed.

   

  It’s important to be a little uncomfortable because you need stress for peak performance. A little stress will bring out your A-game. This is called “eustress” and if you think about a time when you’ve delivered a great speech, run a race, or pulled out a top performance at work, you will find you’ve been in this sort of stress zone.

• One person no matter how optimised, skilled and driven can only produce a fixed amount. If you really want to get a lot done, you need other people on board.

   

  Working with other people increases the amount of resources in both time and skill that you have at your disposal. It will help you to achieve much, much more.
• You need to accept that you can’t do it all yourself. Because it’s hard to let go of things, oftentimes you will put up the most resistance to plans to work with others. I often have to forcibly tell myself “I can’t do this, it’s just not physically possible to be everywhere, doing everything.” Realise that it is a choice between doing less and holding on to it all tightly, or letting go and accomplishing your goals.
• You need to accept that others might not do things the way you would. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle for many people in working with others. You know that you can do a certain thing just so, but someone else will inevitably do it his or her own way. Accept it, and you’ll come to realise that you also open up to things being done much better than you could have done them! And even when it’s not as good, it’s often a sacrifice that is worth it in the long run.
• Realise that working with others needs to benefit everyone involved.
• If you are teaming up with someone, you need to figure out how everyone can win out.
• f you aren’t ready for it, adding more people to your endeavours will have the opposite effect and slow you down. You need to plan and be systematic in how you work so that everyone knows what they are doing, and works together efficiently and productively.
• Don’t be Bound by What Others Tell You Is or Isn’t Possible
   If you don’t think something is possible, guess what? It isn’t. People do some pretty wild and unbelievable things. You’re a person, what makes you think you can’t do them?
• Start Small. There’s no need to take on the whole world in a day, and building up to things is the best way to get over low confidence. Tackle a set of smaller projects or milestones, and accomplish them. Give yourself some positive feedback to build on and then go upwards from there.
• Just Start. If you spend your time looking up at the top of a mountain, the climb seems a lot more daunting than if you just start with the bit in front of you. I often just jump into projects and ideas, deliberately not thinking them through, because I know that once I start, things inevitably work themselves out.
• Give yourself time. Everyone needs time to accomplish their goals, and as a general rule, things usually need more time than you would think.
• looking back, none of that matters. There is only what you did and what you didn’t do.

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• I ask myself to process questions:

   
   
  • How did I get nothing done today?
   
  • What will I do differently tomorrow?

• It’s not enough to know our worst practices in general. To make tomorrow a more accomplished day than today, we need to rewind the film strip to the precise moment where we got derailed.

   

  For instance, I noticed that whenever I boot a computer and don’t seem to get straight to business, the problem usually starts at boot time. Since I can’t do anything on the laptop for two or three minutes, I start to zone out. What I would be doing if boot time wasn’t a factor is doing a daily review on the Palm Desktop, looking at each of my action lists.

• Asking myself, “What would I do differently?”, it took about 10 seconds to realize that I needed to have my lists — especially my @Computer list — available before the computer was. So I started scanning my at least my @Computer list on my Palm Centro, so that by the time the hourglass on my laptop’s screen disappears, I can hit the ground running.

   

  If I get a call before 9:30 am, it may take me 15 to 30 minutes to regroup after the call and get back to writing. So I’ve set my phone to turn on only after that time (an application called Phone Technician allows you to set your Palm smartphone’s connection times).
• • The basic idea is to mentally step through the day, looking for the forks in the road that compelled you to do X when you know in hindsight that you should have been doing Y. When was the precise moment what your attention shifted to the path of less resistance? What precisely was the distraction?

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• Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less.
• ———————————————————————-
   Q: Why is this email 5 sentences or less?
   A: http://five.sentenc.es