Thread: Double Your Productivity

Never heard of a few of these.... Care to expand?

Originally Posted by wildambitions

6. Practice the Law of Forced Efficiency

9. Practice Single-Handling With Key Tasks
10. Eat that Frog

15. Re-engineer Your Work (I can guess at this one.... but am curious about what he means...)

17. Practice Zero Based Thinking

Have you been implementing these things? How has that been going for you?

Originally Posted by vr4playa

Solution- take Diane Kennedy's advice and be sure to something within 72hrs of listening to such inspirational material.

Sounds interesting, but why is it 72 hours, exactly? If that's the 'window of inspiration', I'm envious! I'm lucky to be inspired for 72 minutes.

Originally Posted by fanocks2003

I would say the opposite: If you want to become successful and earn money "watch TV and watch movies and waste some time". Because it is very often when you waste time and don't think a bit about doing anything worth while that you get the best ideas to progress productively. Leasure shall be cherished.

Hmm... I try to relax each day to bring my brain to a state of passive daydreaming, basically. Hot showers or baths work best for me. I can't quantify how much it affects productivity, but it makes my think box literally feel better. If there's a way to make the brain more youthful and vigorous, this is it.

Originally Posted by andviv

Think once, write it down, then never think again.

I call this the "We don't think" motto.

Document the process and save the document in a place where you can always find it (Google Docs, for example) and then, a few months later when you have to do it again simply read the step-by-step instructions you created for yourself, no thinking needed.

Could I ask you for an example of the kind of thing you would do this with?


@LondonLife: Your post from March 19 is possibly the only hour/money thing I have ever found myself agreeing with.

Well, many systems I've tried have failed me, due to lack of discipline and time sense. It wasn't until very recently I began doing something about the time thing, which is having a positive affect on my discipline.

I downloaded an alarm system, Alex Burturuga. I set it for an hour. After that hour goes by, it'll come to the foreground with the message: "What have you done this past hour?"
To be entirely honest, sometimes, if I'm not doing a productive task it won't dissuade me the first time it comes up.

However, since implementing this, I haven't been doing things like saying, "Alright, I'll play this game for half an hour then do some work!" then only realizing six hours have gone by because of hunger pangs.


Oh! Writers block! I think writers block is a very specific form of procrastination. You want to work, but you just can't get into it. Basically, your mind isn't able to focus on it. I don't know why, but I do know what works:
If you've ever had writers block, or sat there twirling your mouse in circles while looking at your tasks, you probably realize the hardest part is getting started.
So what I do is insincerely work at the task. Using writing as an example, it might go like this: "I'm writing an article about cheese crackers. This article might make people hungry. Cheese crackers are usually yellow. I'll use a cheese-yellow font for the headline." then I'll wind up putting a temporary headline of "Yellow cheese crackers declare war on inferior snack foods!"
... Before long I'm into it, and you get to sink your teeth into all the cheese cracker knowledge my tartrazine coated fingers have to offer.

Originally Posted by FDJustin

Originally Posted by andviv

Think once, write it down, then never think again.

I call this the "We don't think" motto.

Document the process and save the document in a place where you can always find it (Google Docs, for example) and then, a few months later when you have to do it again simply read the step-by-step instructions you created for yourself, no thinking needed.

Could I ask you for an example of the kind of thing you would do this with?

* Anything that you don't do that often (for example, how to download your bank statement and import it to your accounting software, which you may do quarterly; Steps to reset passwords or create user accounts on your server, which you don't do that often).

* Anything that you do, but are targeting to outsource/delegate to others for them to do. Example: Steps to send a mailer from a list of contacts you have in an Excel Spreadsheet or some CRM software;

* Steps you follow to create a new web site

See the idea? The plan is, and it works for me like this, that I have these docs on my Google Docs account. If I need to share them with others I simply do so from their Sharing settings for that document with Read only access so only I can modify them. Or I give them Editing permissions when I need somebody to modify what I have.

Yes, that helps a lot, thank you.

Since I don't just want to say one line, I'll share something: I use truecrypt to make encrypted folders to hold sensitive things, like my document that has all my user names and passwords. It looks like google docs lets you upload those folders, so that might be a good backup source in case of hard drive failure, or having your laptop stolen.

It might not directly improve productivity, but we should still take measures to make sure what we produced isn't ruined... In fact, I better make some backups today. Don't have anything recent, and this hard drive does have hundreds of hours of service.