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.

 

 

Does this scenario sound familiar?

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.

Last night I gave a talk on Zen and Social Media at the Women's Business Club at 44 Portland Place. It was a great evening with a lively discussion on social media platforms, tools and techniques for being effective.

One of the women ran a Pilates practice and was very against the idea of engaging in social media, and was quite vocal about this in the discussion. I responded to this by saying that if you don't want to engage in this stuff, then don't. There are other ways of marketing your services and raising the profile of your business. At the end of the session, this woman thanked me for my presentation and re-iterated her dislike for social media. But then she added:

"But this is the way things are going, so I guess I'll have to get involved even though I hate it".

Hate it. These are strong words. I recall they were accompanied by a visible shiver. Is this really true? Does everybody who is running a business NEED to get involved in social media? I think it's a great question and a complicated one. I am lucky enough that most people who come to me don't need convincing that social media might benefit their business; they have already come to that conclusion and want concrete help with making their efforts more effective.

But what about those who are not convinced. Should they be told to just get over it and get on board? I'm not so sure.

Before anyone jumps into the murky but exciting world of social media, they need to really think about why they are doing it and what their end goal is. Only then can you be strategic about how social media can help you. Social media without a plan and system might be a big time waster for your business at best, and at worst, damage your reputation.

I think that you will agree that a major marketing objective of most businesses is to drive traffic to the company website. Here visitors can find out more about a company's products or services and possibly be moved towards signing up to a mailing list or even directed towards a purchase.

Social media is a great way of driving traffic to your website. Through following a link on a social network such as Twitter or Facebook, or reading a blog post or watching a video, potential customers become aware of your offering. Social sharing especially through the Facebook Like button and the new Google +1 button, adds another dimension to this as we tend to place more weight on things our friends recommend. This is becoming increasingly important as the amount of information we are exposed to on a daily basis increases exponentially. Social sharing allows us to cut through the noise.

Social media is great for increasing profile. This is especially important for individual consultants and freelancers who want to position themselves as experts in a niche area. Through creating or curating content with blogs, videos and podcasts, and sharing this through social networks, the individual starts to become known as a thought leader in their area. The benefit of this is two-fold: (a) their online profile and message is strong and clear with ample social proof for potential clients, and (b) opportunities for projects, speaking and joint ventures start to come their way.

But engaging in all this does take time but perhaps less than people think if done effectively. My advice to the Pilates practitioner would be to identify what's missing in the business and then look to see if social media can help with this, not the other way around. Then I would look at ways of engaging with social media that are fun. Perhaps Twitter bores her to tears but making videos for a YouTube channel might rock her boat.

I do believe that social media is revolutionising the way we do business, letting us connect with a global audience. Yet it’s also the biggest productivity killer created in our lifetime.

How do you reconcile the two? Come find out at my From Apps to Zen Bootcamp on Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 June in London.

Watch this video now (it only takes 3 minutes), and I’ll tell you ALL about what’s in store for you.

I think it's safe to say that I have a bit of a fascination with time.

As someone who helps busy people work better, I am constantly reading and testing ways of saving time and being more effective, especially when it comes to our biggest time wasters in business (email and social media). 

There is an old saying that 'time is money'. But that's not the full story. You can always get more money, generally by working harder or by spending less, but getting more time is a trickier one. Once it's gone, that's it.

If you have ever read any books in the personal development genre from Stephen Covey and his habits to Tim Ferriss and his work week, they all focus on the idea that if you look back on your life, what are the things you are going to remember? The hours you spent at work getting to Inbox Zero, crafting the perfect blog post or being controversial on Twitter? Or do you remember the long weekend you went on with your family, the ebook that you wrote and self-published, or the new sport you took up and found a passion for?

Which are the things we will remember? What are the things that we will look back on with pride and satisfaction?

Tim Ferriss in the 4-Hour Work Week talks about the difference between being active and being productive, something I elaborate on in my ebook From Apps to Zen: 26+ Ideas for Building a Business with Balance. I have a few reminders around my desk to this effect to make me question 'what exactly am I doing right now?' and to test am I really being producive or am I just engaging in busy-work. I also have a sign asking me 'what is the best use of my time right now?'. I find these little reminders helpful when I find myself straying into my inbox or onto social media without a proper intention or goal.

Over the past three years that I have been working with the social web I have learnt many hacks and tricks to reduce my time on social media while still ensuring that it is useful for my businesses. Having a strategy, plan and system for my social media use is crucial to ensure that I know why and when I am going to use social media and how it fits into my wider business goals. 

I've written on this blog before about my personal goal of living a part-time location independent life and I am well on my way to it at the moment with longer term trips to Vietnam and India planned for this year as well as shorter trips to Europe and around the UK. Knowing where my online activities fit into the wider picture of my business allows me to continue this work while I am away and set up automated systems that take care of themselves.

Time and time again (no pun intended) with people I work with or meet, I see the same questions coming up that people are seeking answers for. Questions like 'how do I make time for this stuff?, 'how can I know if it's being effective?', 'how can I get my message heard through the digital clutter' and 'what do I prioritise?'. These are all great questions and there is no one right answer - the solution will be different for each person.

Thinking about these questions and also the question of how do busy entrepreneurs make time for learning and playing around with the social web, gave me one of those light blub moments that I cherish.

And so I pleased to announce that on the 11 and 12 June I will be running a From Apps to Zen Bootcamp at social innovation space The Hub Islington in central London. This weekend intensive workshop will be super practical (bring your laptop!) as we will be putting into place the things we learn about and discuss as a group - everything from Twitter followers, to LinkedIn events, to Facebook pages, social media strategies and systems, videos, podcasting and blogging. All in one weekend.

Spaces for the Bootcamp will go on pre-sale to my 8fold mailing list on Tuesday, 3rd May when it is announced in my regular monthly newsletter. Subscribers will also be offered a time-limited special deal so if you are interested in hearing more, do sign up to the newsletter here (I promise no spam, just free tips and resources each month):

Name

Email

I will leave with the words from one more note I have on my wall which reads:

'Time = Life. Don't waste it.' Wise words.

Most entrepreneurs I know hate the term 'work-life balance'.

"My work is my life" they cry. If you love what you do for a living, and hopefully most entrepreneurs are firmly in this category, why stop working at 5pm? When you are building a business there is always more work you can do. No-one is making you do it. It's your choice.

This attitude completely resonates with me and last year I found myself regularly working until 8 or 9pm until my partner got home (he's an entrepreneur too). There were emails to send, blog posts to read, people to connect with on Twitter. What's a few more hours on the laptop? Is this a problem?

Well, yes and no.

Working long hours, especially if you are building a business, is sometimes necessary. You've got to put the work in to get where you want to go. What can happen, however, is this way of working becomes a habit and our Work-World balance gets out of kilter.

What is Work-World Balance?

Work-World balance is different for everyone but common themes would be maintaining social bonds, looking after our bodies, and fulfilling our minds.

When we are working too hard we can start to neglect our social relationships, whether that is family or friends. We decide to work late again instead of getting home for a family dinner; we cancel after work drinks with friends as connecting with our fans and followers online seems more important; and even when we are with family and friends we are not really present but are continually checking our phone for updates.

Sometimes it is our health we neglect. This is all too familiar in a work-obsessed city like London. In contrast, my month in Amsterdam was an eye-opener - at 5.55pm everyone downs tools and off they head home for dinner! I would suggest that our Work-World balance is off when we start to miss our regular exercise classes or sports due to work or when we regularly don't make time to cook a proper meal and grab a takeaway instead.

Work-World balance is also about connecting with the world around you, doing the things you love (apart from work!) and trying new experiences. Our Work-World balance is off when we don't travel and experience new cultures; when we never get around to reading those books on the nightstand; when we miss a great exhibition or show because we didn't make the time to see it.

As entrepreneurs, we tend value ourselves by how busy we are, by how many emails we deal with, by how many followers we have. When we make a conscious decision to examine why we are working the way we do and perhaps work less, we can feel that our value is threatened. I don't have the answers but it seems to me that we need to find other measures of value and self-worth then just the long hours we put in.

So, what can we do to regain our Work-World balance?

1. Bracket your work

One of my major strategies this year is that of 'bracketing'. Instead of just scheduling your work commitments, try scheduling your 'play' time as well. Make appointments, preferably with others, that you will want to keep. Book for that show on a Tuesday evening with your partner, invite friends around for a mid-week supper, go running with a buddy every Friday before breakfast. Personally, by bracketing my work in this way, I have found that I am actually getting more work done as I have a self-imposed deadline most evenings.

2. Plan, Don't Barcode

'Barcoding' is when we fill our day with back to back activities, tasks and meetings (our diary looks like a barcode, hence the name). This leaves little space for our daily digital activities such as dealing with email or connecting on Twitter, or for the unexpected tasks that naturally crop up, pushing these tasks into the evening. I find it helpful to leave space everyday so that work does not feel overwhelming.

3. Be Mindful

Another strategy is mindfulness and paying attention. We need to continually question what we are doing at work and see if it is creating value for us and our customers. Set little reminders for yourself to ask "am I being productive or just active?” By starting to examine my work in this way, I can see more clearly what my high leverage activities are and what I am wasting time on.

Over to you

How is your Work-World balance?

What strategies do you put in place to ensure that you keep balanced?

[Image with thanks to D Sharon Pruitt via Creative Commons]

 

Arguably, one of the most famous and well known speakers at the Do Lectures in Wales which I attended in September was David Allen, the author of the infamous book ‘Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity’. David’s talk focused on his process of getting things done which has made him a world famous author, consultant and speaker.

I first came across David Allen, a couple of years ago, when I read his book. The book and the methods contained within are used by many corporate executives and managers in organizations as well as smaller businesses and freelancers. David admitted freely that he created a lexicon around ideas that were already out there and synthesized other peoples’ ideas to come up with his world famous system.

He made an interesting point about so called “information overload” in this era of continual information streaming through our digital devices. People have said (including myself) that we’re constantly being overloaded by information. He made the point that we don’t walk into a library and die which would be one amusing example of information overload. As human beings we are capable of dealing with significant amounts of information, however, we get stressed and worried about missing the meaningful information within all the other information that comes across our consciousness on a daily basis. The second problem he identified is having the strategic problem of clear space within your working day, something I tackle in my From Apps to Zen mentoring groups.

To get around these two issues, he has come up with the ‘Getting Things Done’ method also known as GTD which has two core ingredients of self and organizational management: firstly, having things under control and secondly, the issue of perspective.

Read the rest of this post »

Everett Bogue is currently one of my favourite bloggers. He blogs at Far Beyond the Stars on minimalism and location independence living - two subjects close to my heart.

Today sees the release of a free ebook entitled Minimalist Workday: 50 Strategies for Working Less. In true minimalist style, Everett outlines 50 ways that you can start to streamline your workday from old chestnuts such as stop checking your email and batching tasks to more controversial but worthwhile suggestions like firing your bad clients and creating scarcity for your work.

Everett comments:

"The average American works 7.9 hours a day, that’s just under 2,000 hours a year. I’d like to argue that much of that time is wasted, sitting at a desk, doing stupid work that doesn’t matter.

Also, two weeks of vacation a year is a crime, and you know it.

I think this is one of the most important issues of our time. The world changed, and how we use our time is much more important than how long we sit at a desk.

It’s time for a revolution in the way we think of work."

 

This book is well worth a read - go grab a green tea, dive in and join the revolution.

Download your free copy here: Minimalist Workday: 50 Strategies for Working Less

 

 

 

[This is a guest post I wrote for Brighton-based business training organisation, Integration Training]

Broadband, 3G networks and social media are changing the way we work, and the way we communicate. But the pervasive nature of these digital technologies and our increasingly ‘always connected’ culture can result in digital overload, leaving less time to get things done, and to make an impact with our business. In this guest article, Sinead Mac Manus from social enterprise 8fold looks at how we can use digital strategies and tools to improve our time management.

……….

Thinking back 15 years ago, the distractions we had at work were limited to being interrupted by phone calls, long meetings, or our annoying colleague rattling on about his weekend.

Today things are very different. The pervasive nature of digital technologies means an ever-growing stream of communication during our working day. We are bombarded by calls, voice messages, texts, emails, tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, news feeds, instant messages… And that’s before we get to the tantalizing content on the Internet – which can distract us from the task in hand, and fragment our productivity.

I propose that we can work with digital technologies and harness their power to create those all-important pockets of focus, in our day. In this article I’m going to focus on three digital strategies that you can implement for better time management.

1. Managing Your Email

If you ask any busy person what is the one thing they wish they could change, they would probably say their email Inbox. Email as a method of communication has transformed the way we do business and interact. However, it leaves many people feeling overwhelmed and out of control.

For busy clients, I always recommend a switch to Google’s Gmail as its growing list of easy-to-use features and shortcuts mean that you can whiz through your Inbox in minutes. With Gmail you can use filters to automatically label incoming emails. You can forward them instantly to a colleague, or automatically delete them – useful if you’ve asked to unsubscribe from lists and are being ignored.

With threaded conversations, your Inbox stays uncluttered, and with the clever use of gadgets such as ‘Send and Archive’, you can save time filing your emails. Gmail’s search functionality is second to none, which can save you time hunting for that important email. I use the ‘Add Star’ and ‘Archive’ for emails that don’t need action, but that I will read at a later date. These leaves the few emails in my Inbox as actionable items to either transfer to a ‘To Do’ list for actioning another day, or just work through to zero each day.

With a clever use of Gmail’s features, soon you’ll be in full control of your Inbox on a daily basis.

2. 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.

An excellent addition to Evernote is the Google Chrome Evernote Web clipper, which can save entire web pages to Evernote, or just highlighted sections. Evernote can also integrate with your Twitter account, so you can save tweets of interest for reading at a later stage. Registration on Evernote takes minutes. It’s free, and you can watch a short, and funny, video explaining how to get started.

The groundbreaking thing about Evernote is its search functionality. Not only does Evernote search for text within text notes, it also has character recognition software, so it will search for characters or text within an image, such as a JPEG or a PDF. This means finding that photograph, or business card, or a blog post, is instantaneous, and can save you a lot of time.

3. Social Media Time Management

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are the Holy Trinity of social media, and the ones that I recommend to most clients to focus on for their business. TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com) is a web, desktop and smartphone application that syncs between all three, and can be used as your social media hub for your business. I’ve tried most Twitter applications, and TweetDeck consistently beats all the others due to its integration with other social media, and also its ability to sync between your desktop and your phone.

Setting up TweetDeck is easy, it takes a few minutes. You can add different social media accounts and manage everything from the one area. So for example you can add any number of Twitter accounts that you are managing, you can add your LinkedIn account, you can add your Facebook account, and you can also add any Facebook pages that you are an admin of.

This social media integration means that you can post the same message one time to a number of different social media avenues. For example you might want to post a tweet about an event that you are running, to your LinkedIn profile, and to your Facebook page as well. A note of caution though – do be aware that you might have different audiences on each network. So do choose where to send your updates, wisely. Does your LinkedIn network really want to know what you’re having for lunch?

Use TweetDeck to set up different columns for the different information that you’re going to manage. Essential columns to add are one for your Direct Messages, one for ‘Mentions’, one for ‘@replies – and also if you’re using them – one for your LinkedIn network updates, and one for your Facebook updates. These will keep both of these out of your Inbox, and keep your Inbox clean.

A second strategy is setting up different groups of followers. So for example if you’re following a lot of people who work in social media, you could set up a ‘Social Media’ group. If you’re following people who work in the arts, you could follow an ‘Arts’ group. This means that you can scan vertically through your groups everyday, and get through a lot of tweets in a short space of time.

Another strategy I use, particularly when I’m looking at TweetDeck on the iPhone, is having a ‘Top Tweets’ column. Some people call this their ‘A List’, and these are my 10-15 favourite friends – these are people that I’m following that give me the best content. So on a daily basis, if I don’t have enough time to look at all of my groups on a busy day, I can glance at this list, perhaps do a Retweet or two, or post something.

Using a social media hub such as TweetDeck can really save you time on a busy day, keeping your email Inbox clean of different updates, and keeping all your social media activity in one place – both receiving and sending out as well. I view TweetDeck in a similar vein to using email, something to be dipped into once or twice a day – not to be opened constantly in the background.

If you use this strategy for both your email and TweetDeck, you will free up a lot of your time for concentrating on the great work you need to do to move your business forward.