Tara Rodden Robinson :: The Productivity Maven

How is your sense of satisfaction?

Part of being highly productive is connecting with a sense of purpose and meaning and deriving enjoyment from what you do. As part of my coaching process, I sometimes ask clients to rate their sense of satisfaction on a scale of  one to ten, with one being the bottom of the barrel and ten being on the tip-top. It’s a way of measuring our progress as we go along, a checkpoint to make sure that they’re getting the desired results from our work together.

In rating your overall sense of satisfaction, you might consider:

• Are you being challenged and stretched in good ways?
• Do you experience growth?
• Can you point to accomplishments that you feel good about?
• How do you feel at the end of the day?
• Is your day to day feeding your soul?

If you find that your rating is lower than you would like, you can increase your score by taking some simple actions.

Connect your higher aspirations with specific actions. This is something that should be part of every weekly review. By creating alignment in actions and purpose, you’ll immediately strengthen your sense of moving in the right direction.

Practice gratitude. I often suggest this simple exercise called Three Good Things. Each day for at least five days in a row, write down three good things that happened and what caused those events to occur. By caused, I mean what did you do that allowed you to experience those three good things. For example, I will beat a deadline today and the cause of that was my willingness to set aside an entire day this week to finish the project ahead of time.

Acknowledge your achievements regularly. It’s often easy to check something off and then rush right past it. However, when you don’t acknowledge what you’ve done, you deny yourself any opportunity to experience satisfaction. During your weekly review, take time to enjoy what you’ve achieved and think about what that achievement makes possible that wasn’t possible before.

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What is personal productivity?

  I’m in the process of designing and rolling out a new program. To make sure I and my participants are all on the same page, I spent some time thinking about what personal productivity really means to me. It comes down to three, key concepts.

Being productive means being well organized. In essence, this is knowing where “things” are. Things can cover a lot of ground, from physical objects to thoughts, from your car keys to computer files. You don’t have to know exactly what’s on your list or what’s stored on your hard-drive but to be productive, you do need to know where to look. The other part of being well organized is having things “under control.” This includes your schedule (how you’ve committed your time), your time (how you actually spend your time), and what’s expected. In having expectations under control, you need to know both what is expected from you as well as what you expect from others.

Being productive means being effective. I think of effectiveness as having flexibility and rolling with the punches and responding when the unexpected occurs. In addition, effectiveness means knowing how to get in the flow and access your “zone” where your best work occurs. This includes having fun and finding ways to reduce friction so your work, whatever it is, gets easier. And of course, being effective means getting the right results. It’s simple to check off items on your list but they’ve got to be the right actions that are taking you in the proper direction.

Being productive means being reliable and dependable. When someone asks you to take something on, and you say yes, how is your follow through? The only way to be truly productive is to know what you’ve said yes to and ultimately, to come through. This is trust creation. If you’re not creating trust, then you’re at risk of eroding it--and that’s not productive. Being reliable also means being strategic: knowing what’s in your (and your family’s) best interests, knowing what you can take on, and being able to say (and stand on saying) ‘no.’

When you master these three keys to success: being well organized, exercising effectiveness, and becoming reliable and dependable, you are on the right road to accomplishing your goals as well as reducing your stress and increasing your enjoyment of life.

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Making self-care your number one priority

It’s so easy to put yourself last. Yet, if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of anything else!

Today, that self care should include a breast self exam. Men, I’m talking to you, too. That’s right--men also get breast cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 2,000 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the next 12 months. So while your risk is low, it’s not zero, and early detection is key to successful treatment, just as it is in women.

Not only that, but you have wives, daughters, moms, and sisters to think about. So part of your job is to encourage the beautiful women in your life to make themselves their number one priority by doing a monthly self-breast exam.

The exam is super easy. You can learn how it’s done here.
Right now, this minute, get out your task manager. Add three items:

1. Talk to the important women in my life about self breast exams and yearly mammograms after age 40
2. Read up on self breast exam and perform first one
3. Perform self breast exam (put this one on repeat, using “after 30 days” as the interval)

Congratulations! You are a hero in the fight against breast cancer!

Overwhelm versus Overload Smackdown!

You know the feeling: that sense of being completely swamped and overwhelmed. The other side of the coin, overload, leaves you feeling used up and burned out, unavailable and oddly apathetic. No matter which side you’re on, you’ve got too much to handle and too few resources, internally or externally.

In overcoming these near-twin monsters, it’s useful to keep these three points in mind:

1. Overwhelm and overload are not the same thing. Overwhelm happens when you’re rushed, panicked, and out of control; you’re running, but not in a particular direction or toward a particular goal. Overload stops you in your tracks and leaves you standing still, blocked, or procrastinating. Both are hell on your productivity and your self-esteem. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when you’re trying to drink through a fire hose or burned to a crisp--both because you said yes a few too many times.
2. Because overwhelm and overload aren’t the same thing, you can’t fix them in the same way. Overwhelm responds well to mindsweeps, exercise, and taking time out to breathe. Overload requires carefully thought-out action, engaging in routine, and getting perspective on why you took on these tasks in the first place.
3. Being discerning about what you take on prevents both overwhelm and overload. If you can’t see how an opportunity fits in your wheelhouse--that sweet-spot intersection of your strengths, non-negotiables, passion, time, energy, and resources--then that’s a huge red flag indicating potential trouble ahead.

Where is your favorite place to think and prepare?

Preparation and thinking things through are critical activities on the way to being highly effective and super productive. One way of making sure you get to these essentials is to identify where your favorite places are--locations that allow you to do your best work. Your places for planning and mulling things over may turn out to be different from where you think. That’s because some of them are not places at all, but tools that you can take anywhere and wherever you turn up, they’re right there with you to help your mind get into gear. Here are a couple for you to consider.

A trusted journaling notebook. Personally, I favor the old-fashioned college lab notebooks, narrow ruled, sewn binding variety (The Original Marble Cover-80 sheets, retails for $2.19 at my local university bookstore). I buy them by the half-dozen, and stash the current version in a leather cover (from Levenger, a lot like this one). This has been my best place to think and prepare for years; I’m on Volume XXIII.

Mindmapping tools. Paper and pen, MindManager, PersonalBrain, MindMeister--the list goes on and on. One thing they all have in common is turning anywhere into a dynamite spot for brainstorming and organizing your thoughts. I use two tools that work differently and stimulate very different kinds of thinking: MindManager for brainstorming, organizing a lot of thoughts, and mindsweeps; PersonalBrain for exploring all my horizons of focus, linking roles and areas of responsibility to projects, goals, and my sense of purpose and meaning.

[Many thanks to @rbarberi for the tweet that inspired this post.]