Being a minimalist, I tend not to buy and collect books but prefer to borrow them from the library or friends or pick them up second-hand in charity shops (the Oxfam bookshop in Bloomsbury is excellent). But there are a few key books that I have bought and that I return to again and again, and I wanted to share a few key ways that these books have shifted my perspectives on work and life.

So if you are looking for a little inspiration or a new direction for 2012, get some of these onto your Christmas wish list!

1. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, David Rock

I first saw David Rock being interviewed at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in February this year. He was speaking about mindfulness and our brains and how we can work with our brain rather than against it to be more effective and productive. I bought this book from Amazon before the interview was even finished (so much for paying attention in the present moment!). Using the characters of a self-employed consultant and a corporate executive, he follows their working day showing on one hand the difficulties of the modern workplace, and on the other how much easier things are when we work with our brain. A fascinating book that will illuminate your working habits in a new way.

Perspective Shift: Our pre-frontal cortex (the thinking brain) doesn't cope well with doing more than one task at a time. To get stuff done, single task don't multitask.

2. Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn

An expert in the area of stress and meditation, Dr. Kabat-Zinn runs the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Written over 20 years ago, this book is a practical handbook for anyone who wants to delve deep into the science and practice of mindfulness and how it can be used to deal with stress in our everyday lives. I read this book a year ago during my month in Amsterdam researching mindfulness at work and its key messages have influenced my work today.

Perspective Shift: You only have moments to live. Every moment is a new beginning. We can choose to ruminate in the past or dream about the future, or, choose to live intentionally here in the present, from moment to moment.

3. Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, Scott Belsky

Scott Belsky is CEO of Behance, one of the most innovative and creative companies in the world. Though his work and his blog, the 99%, he has observed that Edison's statement that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is true. Making Ideas Happen is a guidebook to ensuring your creative ideas happen through getting organized, collaborating and leading effectively.

Perspective Shift: Not all projects are created equal. Create an 'energy line' of your current projects in order of the energy they should receive. Use this when prioritising your work.

4. How To Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson

A funny book with a serious message, How To Be Free asks how can we be free of the absurdities of modern life with its focus on working to buy more stuff and to get a bigger house. While I don't aspire to some of the rural bliss that Tom advocates, being too much of a city girl, reading this book was a key driver in my current minimalist lifestyle.

Perspective Shift: Stop working to buy more stuff you don't need to impress people you don't like.

5. Happiness at Work: Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful - No Matter What, Dr Srikumar S. Rao

Based on his popular courses at top business schools, Dr. Rao poses the question of how we can be happier at work and delivers 35 digestible nuggets of wisdom of how we can get there. A chance find while 'wasting' some time in a bookstore, this book has been a solid companion to me this year.

Perspective Shift: Positive thinking is bad for you. If we stop labelling things that happen to us as 'good' or 'bad' we can start to see that life is just series of moments ebbing and flowing, and that everything, happiness and sadness, passes.

6. Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values, Fred Kofman

I came across the work of Fred Kofman and particularly the ideas in this book again in my month in Amsterdam. One of the owners of The Hub also ran a company called Realize! and there was a downloadable summary of this book on their website. A conscious business is one that operates with integrity and creates value for all of its stakeholders, employees and customers. In these interesting times when the Occupy movement are asking for an alternative to capitalism, conscious business with its emphasis on responsibility and authenticity could be the way forward. I wish every business leader would read this book.

Perspective Shift: The power of Unconditional Responsibility. You have the power to become the main character in your life and choose how you respond to external factors.

7. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, Tim Ferriss

I have written many times on this blog about Tim's book and how it shifted my perspective from a structured career path until retirement to design my business to suit my lifestyle. It was instrumental in my move in Spain in 2008 and my current part time location independent lifestyle (I will be writing my final blog post of the year from sunny Lisbon next week!). You can take parts of this book with a pinch of salt but Tim's new perspective on work is worth a read.

Perspective Shift: Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available. Set yourself crazy deadlines to work faster and better.

8. ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

I love this book so much I dedicated the letter 'R' in From Apps to Zen to it. If you are looking to change your perspective on the workplace, then this book is for you. In fact, buy one for every member of your team. With ideas such as Meetings are Toxic, Long Lists Don't Get Done, and Planning is Guessing, ReWork will debunk some of the persistent myths about what it takes to make a successful business.

Perspective Shift: Good Enough is Fine: find a judo solution one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort.

9. Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork Start the Work That Matters, Michael Bungay Stanier

A little gem, the book inspires us to stop the ‘busywork’ and start the work that matters. With 15 practical exercises or ‘maps’ Michael takes your through step by step how to identify, start and sustain your Great Work. This book was my holiday reading this year in Vietnam and it allowed me to get a fresh perspective on my work and provides daily reminders about how important my Great Work is and how to focus on it.

Perspective Shift: Tap into the power of Role Models – when you are trying to identify what your Great Work is, think about your top 5 role models in your work and life. What are their common or distinct characteristics? What do they tell you about your Great Work?

I hope one or more of these books has captured your imagination so ask Santa if she will bring one : )

Merry Christmas!

Here are 5 tools and tactics to help you harness the power of the web to stay focussed, get more done and work effectively.

1. Gmail Priority Inbox

One of my favourite finds last year was the new feature from Gmail, Priority Inbox which has helped my transformation into an email ninja.

Priority Inbox learns which are your most ‘important’ emails and 'prioritises' them by posting them at the top of your inbox. Next are your 'read' and 'starred' emails i.e. those you have read and designated as actionable/important/stuff I must read etc. Lastly, comes everything else - 'unimportant' messages or important messages that have already been read.

I find that Priority Inbox allows me to see at a glance what needs to be responded to first and what can ‘go hang’ for a while. Gmail is fairly intuitive but you can also teach it by using the ‘important’ and ‘not important’ buttons. This way I can designate any emails directly addressed to me as ‘important’ and any emails I am copied into as ‘unimportant’, along with any newsletters or notifications.

Priority Inbox is a great way of ensuring that those important client emails or exciting opportunities do not get buried in your inbox.

2. Use Filters

In our increasing digital world, I am a big fan of using filters (see "F" in my free ebook From Apps to Zen: 26+ Ideas for Building A Business with Balance) to reduce the number of information streams coming into the day.

Filters are experts in your area who read and filter and best information about an area of interest. For example, a great social media filter is Pete Cashmore from digital blog Mashable. He consistently delivers the most up to date news and features on social media, online tools and the web. If you're interested in location independent living, Cory McKibben from Thrilling Heroics is a great person to follow.

Find out who your filters are in your niche and follow them on social media.

3. Equanimity App

Equanimity is a neat little app for the iPhone. Set a meditation time, for example 5 minutes, and a Tibetan bowl will ring once. Sit quietly, eyes closed and focus on your breathing. Focus on the sound of the breath as you inhale and exhale. Feel the cool air of the in-breath and warmer air of the out-breath as you breathe. After your time is up the bowl rings three times and it’s time to get back to work.

A great way to refresh, take a few minutes away from your screen, and refocus during the day.

4. Work in a Distraction Free Zone

Shutting down your distractions will help to focus your attention and supercharge your productivity, so shut off your email, turn your phone to silent and close down any social media if you have an important piece of work to focus on.

Brower extensions such as StayFocused for Chrome or LeechBlock for FireFox can limit your access to certain programmes such as Gmail or Facebook if you don't yet have the discipline yourself. For writing try WriteMonkey for PCs or OmmWriter for the Mac to provide an application free writing space.

5. Use Evernote to Combat Information Overload

We all suffer from information overload. The daily deluge of blog posts, email newsletters and useful links. You know the scenario where you take a short digital break from your work. One interesting blog post leads to another, and before you know it, two hours have past and you’ve wasted your morning. Sounds familiar? But how do you keep track of information that might be useful in the future without getting sidetracked in your day-to-day work?

Enter Evernote. Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin likens Evernote to having an external brain – it remembers things so you don’t have to. Essentially Evernote is an information capturing and organization system .You can use it to type a text note, to clip a web page, snap a photograph of something, or record some audio. Evernote is cloud-based. So the information that you add from the web, or from your smartphone is automatically synched to your desktop. So you can capture information on the go, as well as at your desk.

Registration on Evernote takes minutes. It’s free, and you can watch a short, and funny, video explaining how to get started.

What tools and strategies do you use to work with the web not against it?

If you want to learn about more tools and tactics for supercharging your digital productivity, join me for my two-hour Build Your Productivity Toolkit workshop at The Cube in east London on Wednesday 21 September 2011.  

Ever have those days when you feel you get nothing done? Sadly, for many of us those days the norm rather than the exception.

With the UK in recession and our 24/7 connected lifestyles, many of us are finding that our workload, email and daily information diet is increasing exponentially, while our capacity to deal with it all is stuck in analogue mode.

At first glance the solution would seem to be to increase our time through reducing our workload or implementing efficient systems. However, adding extra hours to our working day will not fully solve the problem - if we are working ineffectively work will eventually expand to fill the extra time and we'll be back where we started.

Managing our time better is only one part of the jigsaw. To be fully effective, and thus happier at work, we also need to manage our energy and attention. We need to balance our TEA (Time, Energy and Attention) to optimize our workflow.

Time

We can have an impact on our time at work. Most of us have just too much to do - a never-ended To-Do list of projects and tasks. One exercise I do with my clients is a Brain Dump of projects. Try it out:

List all your current projects and commitments. Yes everything! Professional and personal. Critically review your list. What can you get rid of? What's been around so long it doesn’t matter any more? What can you delegate or outsource? What can you postpone for a few weeks or months?

Remember the things you could do are infinite – your time, energy and attention is not.

Secondly, instead of having a massive To-Do list, have a Stop Doing list. Identify areas of your work that are not creating cashflow, opportunities or visibility and stop doing them. Now.

Thirdly, make less time for your work. This may sound counter-intuitive but Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available. If you have two weeks to write a report, you will take two weeks. If you are given two hours, you will get it done in two hours. It might not be as 'perfect' as the two week report, but it might be 'good enough'. Experiment with setting yourself ridiculous deadlines and see how this focuses the mind!

Energy

All time is not created equal. There are times during the day when you are at the top of your game, awake, focussed and in your flow. And then there are the times when taking a nap could be your most productive work.

Listen to your body (and mind). Start to notice when your productive times happen and ring-fence these for your Great Work. Leave the reactionary work like emailing or meetings to other times.

Many things impact on our energy at work from how much sleep we got the night before to that one colleague who just drains you. Be mindful of what drains or adds to your energy and seek to minimise or mitigate against the negative energy and expand the positive. Have a read of 55 ways to get more energy for some inspiration.

Attention

Finally, we can work on managing our attention to improve our effectiveness at work. Practices like yoga or meditation can help to focus our attention as in theses practices we gently focus on bringing the attention to the breath again and again.

Shutting down your distractions will help to focus your attention so shut off your email, turn your phone to silent and close down any social media if you have an important piece of work to focus on. Brower extensions such as StayFocused for Chrome or LeechBlock for FireFox can limit your access to certain programmes such as Gmail or Facebook if you don't yet have the discipline yourself. For writing try WriteMonkey for PCs (I am using it to write this blog post) or OmmWriter for the Mac to provide an application free writing space.

If you would like to learn more about being more effective at work, this autumn I will be officially launching my Mindful at Work programme, an innovative combination of productivity training, awareness and mind/body practices helping employees move from a stressful, reactionary workday towards being proactive, focused and relaxed. To find out about upcoming workshops, do sign up to the Mindful at Work mailing list.

Wu Wei is literally translated as 'non-doing' or 'non-action' but the meaning is closer to 'action of non-action'. What appears to be a clear paradox - how can you have action of non-action? – is actually describing a state of ‘flow’ and ease when our actions are effortlessly in alignment with the ebb and flow of life, the natural world, and the rhythm of our bodies.

Much of our time at work, and in our lives, we are taking action. We are setting ambitious goals, deciding on priorities, and writing long to-do lists of tasks. As a productivity geek I will admit that I am as guilty of this as the next person - in fact this is part of what I teach!

However, sometimes I feel that I am pushing too hard up against the world, constantly striving, continually running. Can Wu Wei teach me another path?

This is what I have been experimenting with this week. Whether it's a summer slump or post-holiday blues, for some reason I have been finding it hard to get though my Big Rocks and daily allocated tasks. As a pretty focused and motivated person, this was initially worrying. But a strange thing happened. When I started to deeply listen to what I wanted to do, rather than what I thought I should do, things just got done. They may not have been exactly my planned priorities for the week, but there were still important work.

In the practice of yoga, this concept of non-striving is very important. Yoga is a delicate balance between effort and relaxation. Too much effort and you will hurt yourself. Not enough effort and you will not progress in your practice. One of my teachers talked recently about not falling in love with the shape of the pose. What he meant was that with the right effort the shape will come, but if we focus on just throwing ourselves into the shape, we have lost the benefit of the pose.

So in our busy and action-orientated world, how can we incorporate a little Wu Wei into our life? Here are seven ideas I have been playing with:

1. Instead of being a slave to the alarm clock, get up when you wake up naturally. (Obviously don’t do this if you have a train to catch or an important meeting first thing!)

2. Kill your to-do list and implement the One Thing System. Get up in the morning and decide what it is that you are excited about. Do that One Thing while your energy and motivation is high. Spend the rest of the day doing other tasks.

3. Rest when you feel tired. Don't keep working because it's work time. If you feel like a nap in the middle of the day, take a nap. Go to bed when you are tired, not before.

4. Work on setting an intention for your business (read my previous post on Intention, Alignment and Letting Go) but then letting go and not being too attached to the outcome.

5. Practising 'non-doing' in meetings; instead of trying to fill the space with words, try to use the space to really listen to what the other person is saying. You might be surprised at the insights you will gain.

6. Listen to when you are trying too hard. Take a step back and breathe.

7. Take the motivational signs and project reminders (or is this just me?) down from the walls around your desk and work in a clear and Zen space. (This is something I have been trialling since I got back from holiday and I like the headspace it’s giving me, especially when it comes to writing or thinking.)

Do let me know your thoughts on Wu Wei in the comments. An interesting idea or a waste of time?

 Image by Eneas

This is a guest post by Harry Mylonadis, Creative Thinker at minimoko. Harry loves simplicity and spends his time solving problems and building brands. To read more of his thoughts you can visit his blog.

I speak to a lot of people about simplicity, to the point that they have started calling me a simplicity guru. One of the topics that always comes up, is how to deal with the enormous streams of information that continuously come our way.

The truth is, that there is a lot of information. Websites, blogs, twitter, facebook, books, magazines, newspapers and the list goes on and on. If you decide to consume anything that comes your way then your entire lifetime won't be enough. Before the invention of the printing press, people had a problem with access to information. Now we have moved to having a problem with the huge amount of available information.

Because information is always available and grows in an exponential way, we think that we need to always consume information. If you fall into this mentality, then you will eventually end up in trouble. You will never have time, you will overload and eventually you will burn out.

The way we should approach information consumption is very similar to the way we enter a library. When you enter a library, you don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of books in there. Instead, you find the section that interests you, let's say Business Economics. Once you are at that section, you either search for an author or you browse the topics until you find the one that looks most interesting. You collect a few books and then you browse through them to see what is relevant and best for you.

Taking this analogy to the digital age, it all comes down to searching, filtering and curation. If you are looking for specific information you can use the different sources to identify articles and pages that can help you. If you just want to get an update of what is happening in a sector, you can use filters or find a site or person that curates content for that sector.

Simplicity is all about removing the unnecessary and keeping the meaningful. Applying simplicity to information consumption means that you only consume information that is relevant and useful. To do this, focus on what you need based on what you are working on and the problem you are trying to solve. Instead of passively consuming information, decide on what can help you and start researching on it.

The most important thing is that you need to be very relaxed about information consumption and be willing to let things go. If at any point you feel overwhelmed, then close your browser and any windows, and do something else. Information is there to help you achieve things. So focus more on creating things and less on consuming.

What does the word conjure up in your mind? Best invention in the world? Overflowing inbox? 24/7 connectivity? Great way to communicate? Creator of stress?

At a recent talk I gave about Mindful at Work (video link), the topic of email overload reared its head and totally divided the audience. There were those that felt that their inbox was out of control. Those that didn’t care. And those that happily processed work email on the couch in the evening.

There is no question that email is a significant issue for many knowledge workers. Research shows that the average worker receives 126 emails per day and spends more than 41% of their time managing e-mail. The amount of email also rises 10-20% each year so this is not a problem that is going to go away.

Ray Tomlinson is the chap responsible for all this. In 1971, he developed the code that enabled him to send an e-mail between two computers for the first time. He says about his invention:

"I do feel proud of this accomplishment. In some sense it was such a simple thing to do at the time, but it has had ramifications through many people's lives. What I didn't anticipate is how fast it would grow once it started growing."

Professor Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University advises the government on stress in the workplace. He believes e-mail is a major source of employee stress:

"E-mail inboxes are causing employees concern, because of the number of e-mails and the poorly written e-mails. They really want to find some sort of solutions for these problems. We are 24/7, we are interfaced by the mobile phone, by Blackberrys, by e-mails, by a whole range of technologies, so that we are almost on call all the time. For me, e-mail is one of the most pernicious stressors of our time."

What is Inbox Zero?

Inbox Zero is a term that describes an empty email inbox. Merlin Mann of productivity site 43 Folders (named incidentally after part of David Allen’s GTD system) was the first to coin the phrase. The system views every email as something to be ‘processed’ rather than left festering in your inbox. Emails are deleted, delegated, replied to (if they take under 2 minutes), read and archived, or send to an Action folder (which then gets processed). The idea is to see your inbox as a waiting room for email rather than a final resting place.

Sounds great until you actually try to implement the system which I did a few years ago when I first started learning about and practicing productivity methods. Like GTD (which I have also written about on this blog), I think that Inbox Zero focuses too much time and energy on the system rather than the outcome. Email is a constantly flowing river that we have, to an extent, a limited amount of control over. I like to think of email as being a set of other people’s priorities being pushed towards us when we open our inbox. Clearing your inbox on a Friday might make you feel good but by Monday it’s just going to be full again.

What we can change is our relationship to email. We can examine our use of email and see if it's really serving us or if we are a slave to its ebbs and flows.

Becoming an Email Ninja

An Email Ninja recognises the distracting power of email and uses mindfulness and awareness to avoid wasting time on email busywork.

An Email Ninja uses tools, applications and hacks to process her inbox fast so she can get back to her Important Work.

An Email Ninja knows the power of well crafted emails and subject lines to get her message across.

An Email Ninja has a relaxed and Zen attitude towards her inbox as she knows all the important emails have been dealt with.

An Email Ninja takes advantage of the convenience of mobile email without getting caught up in a 24/7 working culture.

If you want to become an Email Ninja, join me for a practical three hour workshop in London on Wednesday 20 July. We will be looking at:

• How a mindful approach to email can give you a new perspective on your email.
• Knowledge of tools and applications that will help you supercharge your email and your productivity.
• Ways to reduce the amount of incoming emails without reducing your effectiveness.
• Strategies, hacks and tips for processing your inbox fast.

Social media is such a well worn topic, so I wanted to give it a fresh spin. I have been learning more about The Buddha recently though reading Karen Armstrong's well researched book on his life and teachings, so I thought I would try a take on how The Buddha might use social media if he was alive today.

Who was The Buddha?

For those of you who may not be acquainted with him, The Buddha was an ordinary man who was born around 583 BC in what is now modern day Nepal. He came from a rich family and lived a comfortable but sheltered life. The stories of his early life tell us that disillusioned with all the suffering in the world he left his family and home at the age of 29 to see if he could discover the meaning of life that could transcend everyday suffering. Famously, one night while meditating under a bodhi tree, he achieved Nirvana or enlightenment and spent the next 40 years of his life teaching others how they could do the same. 

Commentators have said that if The Buddha was alive today he would probably be a world-class psychologist and famous author rather than a religious figure, as Buddhism is a practical philosophy and method of mind training unlike the 'divine' worshiping doctrines of the Christian faiths.

What is the Eightfold Path?

One of the major teachings of The Buddha is the Noble Eightfold Path. The Path describes a way to achieve enlightenment. It is a Middle Way between the extremes of excess on one hand and asceticism on the other. In essence, it provides a balanced methodology for living a better life. (You may also notice that this is where I got the inspiration for my company!).

OK, so how does this relate to social media? Social media is about connecting people to people. Can we use the Eightfold Path to be more consciously connected and to have more authentic connections online?

The Path has eight components each of which has a core lesson which I think we can apply to our online lives:

1. Right Understanding

Right Understanding is the foundation for the rest of the path. In the Buddhist tradition it means seeing and understanding things as they really are. In practical terms this means having a flexible and open mind to what arises and also to realise that nothing is permanent - everything in the world is in a state of flux.

In my experience engaging with social media can be very stressful for some people. We worry that we are not doing it right, that we are not in the right places, and that we are saying the wrong things.

Everything is impermanent. So you put out a tweet that your colleague thinks is rubbish. It will soon disappear into the ether. Having a playful attitude to social media, just like having a playful attitude to life, can take some of the stress out of it.

Lesson: Not to take it all so seriously!

2. Right Intention

Right Intention describes the mental energy that controls our actions and in Buddhist terms it means not harming and acting compassionately to others.

This is a beautiful sentiment for mindful social media. If our intention in using it is authentic and aligned with who we are, then everything will flow from there - content, conversations and connections. There will be no disconnect between who we are and what we are saying.

Lesson: Use social media from an authentic heart-centred place and everything will flow effortlessly.

3. Right Speech

Right Speech asks us to tell the truth, speak friendly and to talk only when necessary.

A lesson we could all learn and apply to our social media use (and I am including myself in this!). Speaking the truth is important. When you start to put forward your opinion and ideas, interesting things start to happen. Followers and fans appear and opportunities start to come your way. But the critics come too. And that can be a hard thing to deal with. Should we openly criticise others on social media or recognise that our perspective is only one point of view? I don't have the answer but it's an interesting question!

If we talk only when necessary, we can remember to pause before we hit the retweet, post or publish button? Is what we are sharing creating value for the reader or are we just adding to the noise?

Lesson: Think before you hit post.

4. Right Action

Right Action asks that we do not harm others and respect the belongings of others.

Social media is a smorgasbord of content and ideas and sharing is part of the game. But we need to respect other's ideas and intellectual property. Good social media etiquette (and karma!) comes from acknowledging the ideas of others. In a practical sense, this means using images from Creative Commons and name-checking the author when I share content on Twitter.

Lesson: Keep your karmic levels high and acknowledge the hard work of others.

5. Right Livelihood

Right livelihood asks that we earn our living in an ethical way.

The online space has attracted many people who act unethically and who use social media to persuade people to part with their hard earned cash. We should be using social media to create value for other people and to engage and help others without always seeing a return.

Lesson: Use social media in an ethical way, create real value for others and do not exploit other people.

6. Right Effort

Without effort nothing can be achieved. But misguided effort distracts us from our task.

Wise words. This is probably one of the most important lessons with can learn from The Buddha for our social media use. We need to work at social media for it to have an impact on our business or life. Just setting up a few profiles and waiting for the fans to come is not going to work. You must get out there and engage.

However, knowing where to focus your efforts is crucial. If you are spending all your time in the wrong places, than this misguided effort is a waste of your time and distracts from what you should be doing. Don't be using a social media platform just because everyone else is.

Lesson: By all means have a play and experiment with different types of social media but also know when to decide if something's not working.

7. Right Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the Buddhist practice of paying attention in the present moment. At its core, it is having a constant expansive awareness of what is actually happening, not what we may think is happening through our own narrative.

I believe that a mindful approach to social media is crucial. Social media, by its nature, is addictive. The anticipation of a reward or a feeling of belonging is a powerful pull that can distract us and take our focus off task. 

Lesson: Be mindful of your social media use. Question your time spent on it to ensure that you are using it in a useful and authentic way. Be present.

8. Right Concentration

Buddhists develop their concentration and powers of focus using meditation. We can use social media to also develop our powers of concentration and focus just as we use the breath as an anchor in meditation to bring our focus back to the present moment. Blogger Alexandra Samuel talks about Twitter as being a mini-gym for the mind:

"At its best, Twitter can be a tiny gym for your attention: one that continually strengthens your capacity to focus on what is crucial to accomplishing your personal and professional goals. The very qualities that often make Twitter feel so distracting — its brevity, its ubiquity, its irresistibleness — also make it the ideal platform for developing a practice around using social media with intention."

Lesson: Use social media as a daily practice and training ground to improve your concentration and focus.

PS: If you liked this post, don't forget to subscribe to receive posts direct into your inbox every Friday.

[image with thanks to timparkinson via CC]

You enthusiastically start your day with a long list of priorities. You feel awake and focussed and ready to have a productive day. You think to yourself "I’ll just check my email quickly to see if there's anything urgent."

Tick-tock. Suddenly it’s lunch time and you haven’t done anything on your to-do list.

Sadly, this is a common phenomena. It’s one I recognise in myself before I started practicing mindful productivity. And it’s not one that’s going to go away. The amount of email we are consuming rises 10-20% each year but the ability of our brain to cope with increasing information is still playing catch up. And it’s not just email. The modern worker has a myriad of distractions to deal with from the phone to social media to instant messaging.

So, how do we actually get any work done? 

Let me share with you 3 tips for practising The Art of Focus:

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Minimise distractions.
3. Manage your energy.

1.  Do one thing at a time.

As human beings we think we are brilliant at multi-tasking. In fact any job description will usually look for multi-tasking as an essential attribute in a candidate.

But humans are not like computers. On a typical PC, the operating system can move quickly from task to task but human beings don’t function the same way. We think we are multitasking BUT actually we are SWITCHTASKING which has implications for using up the energy in our brain faster than doing one thing at a time. The more we attempt to do things in parallel, the more energy we invest in switching tasks and juggling.

Research has shown that multitasking is an extremely ineffective way to work. In 2007, in a study of a group of Microsoft workers, they took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as writing reports or computer code, after dealing with incoming email, as they wandered off to reply to other messages or browse the Web. 

Action: Try this for today. Do one thing at a time and complete it before moving onto the next task.

2.  Minimise distractions.

We live in the age of distraction. 

Research shows that 28% of our day is wasted on interruptions that are not urgent or important and the time is takes to get focussed again – an average of 2.1 hours each day.

When you want to get focussed work done, you have to cut out your distractions. Literally TURN THEM OFF! Put your phone on silent, sign out of your instant messaging service, do not open your inbox and don’t event think of looking at Twitter or Facebook. 

The urge to switch tasks will come. Something will catch your attention or you will become frustrated/bored with the task at hand. But we don’t have to be slaves to our brain impulses. The wonderful thing about human beings is that we have the capacity for choice; we can feel the tantalizing pull of the inbox or our social media and choose to ignore it.

Action: Try going half a day with no distractions and see what a difference this makes to your productivity.

3.  Manage your energy.

All time is not created equal.

There are times in the day when you work brilliantly and times when you would be better off having a nap under your desk. Be aware of your energy patterns and when you work best. Ring fence this golden time for your focussed work.

Action: Spend a day being aware of your energy patterns. When do you work best? When are tired and unfocussed?

Do let me know in the comments how you get on with these actions.

If you are anything like me, the Christmas break usually brings its share of pleasure and terror as I anticipate my ever-growing email inbox awaiting me on my return to work in January. In previous years, it has taken a good week to fully deal with its contents and get it back under control.

This Christmas was an exception. Over the past year I have been trialling tactics and tools for a stress-free inbox, five of which I would like to share with you today.

1.Gmail Priority Inbox

One of my favourite finds this year has been the new feature from Gmail - Priority Inbox. Released in beta in August 2010, the application has helped my transformation into an email ninja.

Priority Inbox learns which are you most ‘important’ emails and 'prioritises' them by posting them at the top of your inbox. Next are your 'read' and 'starred' emails i.e. those you have read and designated as actionable/important/stuff I must read etc. Lastly, comes everything else - 'unimportant' messages or important messages that have already been read. I find that Priority Inbox allows me to see at a glance what needs to be responded to first and what can ‘go hang’ for a while.

Here's a video of how it works:

Gmail is fairly intuitive but you can also teach it what is important and what is not by using the ‘important’ and ‘not important’ buttons. This way I can designate any emails directly addressed to me as ‘important’ and any emails I am copied into as ‘unimportant’, along with any newsletters or notifications. Priority Inbox is a great way of ensuring that those important client emails or exciting opportunities do not get buried in your inbox.

2. Filters

Filters are another Gmail feature that I heavily use for processing my inbox quickly (they are similar to Rules in Microsoft Outlook).

Every email I receive is set up with a filter automatically labelling it with the project name so that after reading it or actioning it, it can be archived immediately. Filters can be used to automatically forward emails to team members for action; to send emails to other 'inboxes' such as Action, Reading, Waiting On etc (if you are a fan of the David Allen's GTD method). I use filters heavily to keep unwanted email out of my inbox in the first place such as newsletters that I have tried, unsuccessfully, to unsubscribe from.

Filters are a great way of reducing the amount of email that you have to process in the first place and secondly, increasing your ability to process it speedily allowing you to get on with your important work.

3. Mailinator

Mailinator's tagline is "let them eat Spam" - a playful take on the infamous Marie Antoinette quote. Want to try out a new app or access a free report but know you will be deluged by marketing messages? Try Mailinator instead.

You don’t even need to set up an account. Just use your Mailinator email address (e.g. SineadHatesSpam@mailinator.com) to sign up for those free goodies and keep the autoresponders out of your inbox for good.

Mailinator is a genius little app that can save you the time and hassle of unwanted marketing messages flooding your inbox and drowning out your important email.

4. Canned Responses

Ever find yourself writing the same email response over and over again? Save time with Gmail's Canned Responses. Simply write out your set reply and save it as a Canned Response. Next time you get asked the same question, use this feature to instantly reply either manually or by using it as an autoresponder.

If, like me, you use Gmail for multiple email accounts, you can also use Canned Responses for inserting different email signatures for each email address.

5. AwayFind

AwayFind is one of those apps that you wonder how you ever lived without it. It is one of the best ways I have found of getting out of your email and getting on with your important work without the fear of missing that important request from your boss or client. If my clients are suffering from email overload but feel they cannot neglect their email for more than a few minutes at a time, I always recommend they take a look at AwayFind.

AwayFind works by sending you an update by phone, SMS or Instant Messaging if you have received an email that you have designated as 'important', for example, from your boss, from a particular client, or perhaps marked Urgent.

A great new feature introduced last year was a free iPhone app which sends push notifications direct to your phone with the details of the email so you don't even have to open your inbox to take action.

These are my current favourite 'hacks' for super-charging your email. Do feel free to share yours in the comments.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. In this recent talk for TEDWomen in Washington, she proposes a radically simple solution to success: let's stop bragging about how busy we are and get more sleep.

She argues that it is these outdated, and mostly male, models of working that got us into the current financial mess. If the (mostly) men in charge of the financial institutions had had a good nights sleep, would they have made better decisions? Like many evangelists, she came to this conclusion after the awakening experience (pun intended) of falling asleep from exhaustion at work and breaking her cheek bone when her face hit the desk.

Time for a nap?