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Hit The Ground Running With A Productivity Ritual

Posted on June 17, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I’ve heard many people complain that routines are straightjackets. Yet anyone who has been around a small child for extended periods knows the power of a bedtime routine.

We can harness this power by creating a ritual that will take you quickly into a productive space for any task. Here’s how:

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Power Through Blocks With A “Finish It” Week

Posted on June 10, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I am what keeps me from doing the creative things I want to enjoy.

I started asking myself what I felt was standing in my way.

Here is what I did about it: I declared a Finish It Week.

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Why Simplifying Will Make You More Productive

Posted on June 5, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I believe it is part of human nature to complicate things over time. We want to enhance what we are doing, so we tweak the process. In the best results, the tweaks lead to improvements. Most of the time, the tweaks don’t really buy us anything, but we leave them, and after a period of time, the tweaks morph into a burden of extraneous actions.

This is not an un-doable process, though. Just as we complicate, we can simplify as well. And simplifying will make you more productive.

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Redefining Email Processing

Posted on June 3, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I believe that it is human nature to complicate things unconsciously. We tweak, we add, and suddenly we are left with a behemoth that might not be serving us all that well. Such is the case I found with my email a few weeks ago.

In this article, I will show you where I have been, what didn’t work, what inspired the change, and the result.

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Laziness And Productivity

Posted on May 27, 2013 by LJ Earnest

Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog. I recently had the opportunity to talk to someone about my blog. “Why productivity?” she asked. And my answer astonished her. “Because I am lazy.” Laziness, Defined Merriam Webster’s defines “lazy” as “disinclined to activity or exertion”. I am not universally lazy. Just [...]

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Does Being Connected Make You Sloppy?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I was doing the standard morning commute, listening to Stever Robbins talk about being disconnected when something he said brought me to full attention.

Stever said that being connected all the time had made him sloppy.

I began to wonder if being connected made me sloppy, too.

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Decrease Distractions By Streamlining Reminders

Posted on May 13, 2013 by LJ Earnest

Between the dings, the buzzing, the whirs and the beeps, reminders are everywhere. Each one of them shouts, “Look at me!” And unless we are very careful (or single-minded in ignoring them), each one of those reminders has the potential to pull us off track…

Even if a reminder pulls us out of our chain of though for only a moment, it will take much longer to get back to where we were, due to the cognitive penalty we pay as our brain switches gears.

So what’s a modern person to do in the face of these distractions? By streamlining reminders.

Book Review: Bill’s Imperfect Time Management Adventure

Posted on May 6, 2013 by LJ Earnest

I am always on the lookout for new time management pieces to slot into my current system. When Francis Wade emailed me and asked me to read and review Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure: A Business Fable, I thought why not?