Archive for ‘Time Management’ Category

Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions

Posted on: March 1st, 2021 by Julie Bestry | 24 Comments

Procrastination strikes for many reasons: perfectionism, fear of failure, lack of inspiration. Sometimes, there’s no apparent reason why we procrastinate on completing a task or working on a project; we just know that do and we wish that we didn’t.

Canadian psychology professor and all-around expert on procrastination, Timothy Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change, explains that procrastination isn’t just delay. He explains that procrastination is “a voluntary delay of an intended act,” one where the person procrastinating is cognizant that the delay is going to have a cost, whether that cost is financial, interpersonal, professional, legal, or otherwise.

When we procrastinate, we know that there’s no upside; we aren’t merely weighing a logical choice between two options of equal value. It’s less, “geez, how can I decide on whether to go on this romantic anniversary date with my spouse or prepare for my presentation this week?” and more, “Eek, I’m feeling icky about doing this thing for some reason and I’ll latch on to any random thing, like   bingeing a sit-com I’ve seen in its entirety three times!”

Experts like Pychyl have found that at its base, procrastination is “an emotion regulation strategy” – a way to cope with a particular emotion while failing to self-regulate and perform a task we know we need to do. We convince ourselves we’d rather feel good now, thereby causing more trouble for our future selves.

And be assured, professional organizers and productivity experts are not immune. I’ll admit that I hit a Pandemic Productivity Wall in February on a project I could normally complete in my sleep, but every time I sat down to attempt it, I couldn’t focus and got anxious. We all know how this feels.

Today, we’re going to look at one particular well-researched strategy for outmaneuvering our procrastinating selves: accountability.

So, What Is Accountability?

At its most basic, accountability is having some external source hold your feet to the metaphorical fire. It can work in many ways.

As professional organizers, my colleagues and I often perform a technique popularized in the ADHD community called body doubling. We literally work side-by-side, often quietly folding clothes or sorting papers while clients sort through their possessions or pay their bills. When you’re on your own, you might find ways to delay or distract yourself, but when someone is there, investing their time in you (and you’re investing your time and money to achieve your goals), body doubling helps you push past the anxiety and be more productive. 

Accountability can be a matter of having someone check in with you. Knowing that someone else is taking an active role in caring whether you get a task done (but who doesn’t directly benefit from you completing the task, so it doesn’t feel like nagging) can get you over the hump. It’s all about support.

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay 

Accountability can be accomplished by dangling the carrot to give you an emotional reward, or threatening with the stick, yielding an unfortunate experience or event even worse than the result of your procrastination.

There are five main ways to get accountability. Not all will work for every person or in every situation, so it’s worth experimenting.

FIND AN ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

The first category for getting accountability support is to seek out one individual at no financial cost. 

  • A close friend or loved one – Getting support from someone close to you works best when the stakes are low and what you need most is a cheerleader. Let’s say that you’ve literally hit the wall in your closet – all the walls – and there’s just too much clothing in not enough space. Every time you attempt to start purging your closet, the prospect of trying things on and discarding much-loved clothes slows you down.

In the parlance of Grey’s Anatomy, call “your person,” the one you could call for anything. 

Youre My Person Cristina Yang GIF from Youremyperson GIFs

Explain to your friend what you want to do. Agree to talk at the start, and set the alarm for a reasonable amount of time, perhaps 45 minutes. When the alarm goes off, you call or text her (or she calls or texts you, depending on what you’ve decided), and you can report in. If you had trouble deciding about a few items, you can have an ad hoc fashion show, or otherwise seek your friend’s advice.

You see, the sneaky thing about accountability is that many of us are bad at doing things for ourselves. But the minute we know that someone else cares whether we accomplish the task, even if they have no inherent skin in the game, we tend to push forward to accomplish it.

Note: this isn’t applicable to everyone. While many of would fall into Gretchen Rubin’s Obliger or Upholder categories, per her Four Tendencies of responding to expectations, there are a handful of rebels and Questioners out there who chafe at fulfilling others’ expectations. If that’s you, accountability may still work for you, but more because of the camaraderie than the idea of fulfilling implied obligations to someone else.

I’ve had a number of accountability buddies over the years, including professional organizer Jeri Dansky, with whom I used to trade daily accountability emails, and my long-time accountability partner, Dr. Melissa Gratias. I have a virtual meeting once a month with Melissa and her dog Dobby, where we review what we said what we would accomplish and set new goals. This isn’t for time-specific tasks, but more for having a partner-in-crime to keep focused on growing our businesses.

Not everyone feels comfortable asking a close friend or relative for this kind of support; sometimes we fear feeling too judged by the people we like the most. (True story: I once told PaperMommy, “I value your opinion too much to actually want to hear it!”)

Sometimes we fear feeling judged by the people we like the most. (True story: I once told @PaperMommy, 'I value your opinion too much to actually want to hear it!)' Share on X

If you’d still like to find just one accountability buddy, whether for an ad hoc task or perhaps for a longer term partnership, you may be more comfortable setting up an accountability relationship with someone you don’t know as well, like a colleague. That little bit of competitive friction may push you through your procrastination.

Other opportunities you might try:

  • Put a post on social media and ask if anyone would like a short-term accountability partnership (for an hour, a day, a week…) 

  • For your professional endeavors, consider Focusmate, a virtual co-working model where you “work by connecting to other professionals who have committed to being accountable for finishing their most important work.”

Focusmate claims that this style of virtual coworking “harnesses pillars of psychology proven to boost productivity 200-300%.” You set the time(s) you want to be productive, and Focusmate sends you an email to confirm your virtual session. (You need to use Chrome on your computer, or Chrome or Safari on mobile.)

At the appointed time, you greet your partner, declare your goal, and work for 50 minutes, quietly but in tandem, approximating the body doubling model. You get three focused sessions in a week for free. Read more about this platform in Mel Magazine‘s I Let A Stranger Watch Me Work For a Day — And I’ve Never Been More Productive. (As an added bonus, I was surprised and delighted to see that Melissa Gratias was interviewed!)

JOIN AN ACCOUNTABILITY GROUP

Support groups are popular for a reason. Whether you’re talking about a Twelve Step program, a lifestyle program like Weight Watchers, or school or professional groups, members support one another toward a like-minded goal. This is ideal when you’re not looking for someone to help you stick with a task, but progress toward a larger life achievement. Consider:

  • Mastermind groups seem like a newfangled option, but they’ve actually been around for almost a century, when they were proposed by Napoleon Hill in his 1925 book The Law of Success, and explained in more detail in his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich. Basically, mastermind groups are peer-to-peer mentoring group; everyone’s a mentor, and everyone’s a protégée. Members present their professional concerns, brainstorm together, offer input…and provide accountability.

Golden Circle, the veteran members of NAPO, offered us the opportunity to form our own mastermind groups a few years ago. I’m delighted to be a member of the PM Crew (we meet in the evenings because Paper Doll is not a morning person), which includes my colleagues Maria White in Ashburn, VA, Nancy Haworth in Raleigh, NC, Yve Irish in Rochester, NY, and Karen Sprinkle (just up the highway from me) in Knoxville, TN. We meet once a month by phone or Zoom, send weekly group emails recapping our progress on the prior week’s goals and setting goals for the upcoming week, and share LOTS of supportive texts. Yve, in particular, is a star when it comes to sending supportive memes, gifs, and bitmojis:

  • Study groups have been around since at least ancient Greece. Law schools and MBA programs, in particular, promote the use of study groups: they study cases, debate approaches, and help one another maintain focus and keep pace. Whether you’re a freshman in college or taking Bible study classes, whatever you’re trying to learn, forming a study group can help you ensure that you’ll hit your goals and gain confidence in both the content and your own skills.

  • Virtual study groups are a twist on working with your actual classmates. For example, Hours uses the concepts of gentle social pressure for accountability and the focused attention of having a pre-determined commitment to create a study/work partnership for improved productivity.
  • Professionally led groups are another option. A number of professional organizers and productivity experts lead in-person and virtual membership groups to create a collaborative platform for helping members achieve their goals.

HIRE A PROFESSIONAL

As a Certified Professional Organizer, my colleagues and I are, in many ways, professional accountability partners. We provide physical organizing services and share our expertise on organizing and productivity topics, but clients often say that motivational and accountability support is the key to helping them break through the emotional obstacles to getting things done.

The type of accountability you get from a professional organizer might include in-person or virtual body doubling, homework assignments, or phone/email/virtual check-ins, and the type of accountability format will depend on your needs and personal style.

To find a professional organizer who can help you in-person or virtually, use the search functions at NAPO, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization, or Professional Organizers In Canada.

Other professionals you might consider to help you gain accountability might include a:

  • business coach
  • life coach
  • ADD/ADHD coach
  • fitness coach or personal trainer
  • There are even people who bill themselves as accountability coaches. Although I was unfamiliar with the term, I was intrigued by this provider on Fiverr, who offers three levels of accountability coaching, with goal setting and check-in sessions. 

To find a coach or specialist for your needs, you might wish to search the International Coaching Federation.

DOWNLOAD AN APP OR USE A GADGET

If you’re an introvert (or shy), you may prefer to get accountability without face-to-face (in-person or virtual) interaction. If that’s the case, a number of apps and digital solutions can provide accountability, but these are better for longer-term goals than specific tasks or short-term projects.

  • StickK – This is an app-based commitment platform designed for those for whom the carrot (a reward) is less effective than the stick; in some circles, this is called loss aversion. Users sign “commitment contracts,” stating the amount of money they’re willing to put on the line to achieve their defined goals (for health, career, exercise, etc.). For example, if you don’t follow through, then the $250 you earmark will be given to a politician or charity you would never support. (If you achieve your goal, you get your money back and may earn some.) StickK’s stakes don’t have to be financial; they can be “reputational,” meaning you might have to publicly say or do something embarassing if you fail to achieve your goal. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a bold option.

  • Beeminder – The Core Beeminder level is free, gets you three trackable goals, and integrates with a wide variety of apps. There are three premium levels, which earn you an infinite number of trackable goals, customized goals, and options like text-bot responses and real-time support. You can self-report your achievements or connect the app to other apps, like Fitbit, Duolingo, Strava, Apple Health, and Todoist and let them report your achievements directly. This app has aspects of both the carrot (rewards) and the stick (lost challenges).
  • Go F***ing Do It – This potty-mouthed (and name/logo-redacted) site lets you challenge yourself or others to commit to a task or project (cook every day, publish your book, etc.) by a specified date and pledge to pay a dollar amount of your choice if you fail to accomplish it. This is definitely more of a stick than a carrot!
  • Pavlok – Billing itself as a habit-changing, Bluetooth wristband using tiny electric shocks, I have to be honest, I thought this was an early April Fool’s joke, but it seems to be for real. It tracks steps, activity, and sleep quality, can tell if you’re biting your nails or thinking obsessively about your ex, and uses vibration, sound, and LEDs as behavioral triggers and notifiers. Check out their approach to building good habits and eliminating bad ones via a combined carrot-and-stick approach:

PARTICIPATE IN AN EVENT

A variety of individuals and businesses offer virtual co-working events and platforms that provide group accountability. 

  • Sign up for an existing accountability event.

For years, I’ve been participating in my colleague Deb Lee‘s periodic Action Day events. A group of us register, join virtually, and announce what we intend to work on. We then mute our microphones, minimize the video (so we can still see if someone is making a silly face), and work.

We seek each other out in the Zoom text chat and meet on-camera for periodic breaks. The experience provides camaraderie and accountability, and Deb’s tech expertise means that if what we’re trying to work on involves a website, computer, or online kerfuffles, Deb will probably be able to save our bacon.

Deb has two upcoming events: Friday, March 12, 2021 (which is almost at capacity) and Friday, March 19, 2021 (which has more available spaces), both from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. EST. You can register for a no-cost Action Day at her site.

I’ve noticed that specialists in other fields, including digital marketing, authorship and publishing, and design also offer these kinds of events (either for free or with a fee). In addition, many brick-and-mortar co-working spaces are running virtual events of this kind during the pandemic, so check in with the spaces in your community. They may also be referred to as accountability days, design sprints, or use other industry-specific names. 

  • Create your own accountability event.

Cat Johnson has an excellent blog post entitled 25 Virtual Coworking Ideas for Workspace Communities that might give you some ideas for getting started with an event for you and your friends, members of your mastermind group, or some willing social media almost-strangers.

  • Join an online work gym.

I hadn’t heard the expression “work gym” until I began researching the topic, nor had I heard of “procrastination nannies,” but as of the start of the pandemic, virtual co-working for the purpose of conquering procrastination through accountability has become big business. Focusmate, discussed above, has a freemium approach, but there are two major for-profit players in this field:

Caveday originated as an pop-up program at companies and real-world co-working spaces but easily pivoted to the virtual world in 2020. Caveday offers 40-52 minutes-long “sprints” to optimize the brain’s focus capacity, combined with short, energizing breaks led by facilitators. Try a three-hour drop-in experience for $20, or embrace the full-on cave for $39.99/month for unlimited access.

Ultraworking is the pricier option. Ultraworking offers a rolling schedule of 24/7 Zoom sessions, which they call work cycles, so that users don’t have to wait for a pre-scheduled session. The cost is $49//month, billed quarterly.

Whether you prefer a carrot or stick, whether you’d rather work with an individual or a group, whether you select a free option or pay to increase your commitment), I hope you find one or more accountability solutions to help you push through your procrastination and achieve your goals.

If you have an accountability tool or success story not mentioned here, please share in the comments section. And for more to help you be productive, be sure to check back for my next post, Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek.

Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity

Posted on: February 22nd, 2021 by Julie Bestry | 16 Comments

Background image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay 

Do you know Parkinson’s Law? It says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This is why you may go along having mediocre productivity but then absolutely crush your To Do list in the week before you leave on vacation. Deadlines, whether self-imposed or external, push us to get more done. When it absolutely, positively has to get done overnight (or by Friday, or whenever), we circle the wagons, halt interruptions, and knuckle down to get stuff done!

So, if we’re capable of getting more done (by which I mean, getting more of the important things accomplished), then why aren’t we doing it when urgency isn’t an issue? And what could turn that around? Time blocking!

HOW TO USE TIME BLOCKING

Time blocking is also known as calendar blocking or block scheduling. Mike Vardy called his daily themes “time chunking” and has developed a whole system (and book) on Time Crafting around related concepts. Time blocking isn’t new, but in recent years, people see it in a new light. Today, I’d like to give you the Paper Doll take on what makes time blocking work.

First, Know the Difference Between To Do Lists vs. Time Blocking

You already know how to make a To Do list. There are the things you do every day (which you probably don’t bother to put on your list) and there are unique things that are specific to a certain day (a particular phone call, a project you have to research) that you write down because you don’t want to forget.

The problem is that we tend to have mental lists of the things we innately have to (or want to) do, and they battle for priority and attention with the unique/atypical things on any given day. If we only work our lists, we’ll feel unsettled at some point because we know we’re not doing the things we’re usually doing right about now. 

A list tells you “These are the things I care enough about doing, or think I should care enough about doing, to write down.” But lists don’t tell us when we’re going to do the tasks, and a task without a place to live in your schedule is unlikely to get done with full attention (or get done at all)!

The biggest advantage of time blocking is that it encourages us to commit to the things we claim to care about. If you block time to accomplish something, aren’t interrupted, have all your resources and still don’t do it? Then it’s a motivation problem, not a strategic problem (and that’s a whole other blog post).

Set aside your reluctance to schedule things.

It’s essential to build time into your schedule for tackling all of the work to be completed, or unscheduled but important tasks will be rushed and done haphazardly. If you cringe at the idea of a schedule, fear being too regimented, and think you prefer to go by your gut, ask yourself how effective acting on instinct has been thus far for your productivity.

Think blocking your time will dampen your creativity? I’m a professional organizer, not a creativity coach, but you know who IS a poster child for creativity? Author Stephen King, and do you know what he says? “Amateurs sit around and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.” 

Amateurs sit around and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work. ~ Stephen King  Share on X

And do you know who eats healthily? People who have a fairly defined “dinner time,” — if dinner is at 7 p.m., then you start cooking at 6 p.m., and you probably even plan for it early enough in the day to make sure you have the ingredients and have defrosted the essentials. You know who generally does not eat healthily? The person who has a random package of HoHos at 4:30 p.m., doesn’t think about dinner until her stomach growls at 7:30 p.m., and who has Alexa dial one of the same three delivery places pretty much every night.  

Planning and blocking your time doesn’t mean you can’t be spontaneous. It means that you have some structure in your life so that you can wisely make decisions about doing things spontaneously. You can binge Bridgerton on Sunday, if you know what work blocks are set for Monday, even if you haven’t yet created your slide deck for a virtual presentation on Tuesday. Blocking out time to accomplish what you must do gives you the confidence to make decisions about what you might do.

Blocking out time to accomplish what you must do gives you the confidence to make decisions about what you might do. ~ Julie Bestry Share on X

Make a list of all of your regular activities. 

Begin with a brain dump. Pull up a blank screen and write down every task you regularly do. You can make this more kinesthetic (if less environmentally friendly) by writing each type of task on a separate index card or sticky note. 

My brain dump might include replying to prospective client emails and media inquiries, working with clients (virtually or in-person), researching content for the blog, sourcing graphics, getting my 10,000 steps, connecting with far-flung friends, etc. 

Sort all your tasks into categories. Work categories may not be all that different from school categories. You had math (now it’s bookkeeping or bill-paying) or English (now correspondence, marketing projects, or reading for fun). All of those activities were regulated by a fixed schedule that ensured you had ample time to focus on each subject. A bell triggered transition time. Your schedule even accounted for lunch and phys. ed. to keep your brain and body healthy.

Whether we’re talking about your work day or just your life, it’s all a learning experience; take yourself back to school, when the day was broken up into blocks for getting everything done, and make sure your highest priorities get scheduled first.

High priorities? Blocks rhyme with rocks, so start with your big rocks. You know the story about the big rocks, right?

Next, draft a calendar page.

Make sure all of the essential categories of your work and life have general homes in your daily and weekly schedule. You don’t have to block each day identically; in fact, you probably shouldn’t, or at least won’t.

Instead, consider how much time you usually require for the tasks in each category and how often you need to do them. You might need multiple 45-minute blocks each week for writing your blog or newsletter, plus snippets of time each morning and afternoon for social networking. If you’re trying to master the flute or learn Mandarin, you might schedule smaller blocks each day at the start and end of your day to learn and practice.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a fan of paper calendars and that you use Planner Pads, which offers a unique funnel system to help you organize, prioritize and schedule what matters most to you.

© Planner Pads, Co.

(FYI, through the February 28, 2021, I’ve got a discount code you can use. Just type AFF121 into the discount code section at checkout at PlannerPads.com.) 

If you’re the kind of person who loves color-coding, associate categories with colors that have significance to you, like green for financial, red for marketing, purple for client work, blue for self-care, and so on. Each task doesn’t need its own color; just consider the overarching categories in terms of colors.

© Passion Planner

I love paper planners, but I will note two big disadvantages vs. digital.

First, if you’ve inked in a particular time block but have to move it due to a higher priority project bumping it, your calendar will get messy. You’ll either have to use correction liquid or tape; crossing things out and trying to change color coding will create illegible blobs. Sure, until you get a handle on time blocking, you could make a calendar out of blank wall, using sticky notes for each 90-minute or two-hour block, but that’s not exactly portable.

But with a digital planner, you can drag-and-drop a block to a different day or time slot, make quick corrections easily and get alerted to conflicts. 

Second, it’s hard to replicate time blocks week-to-week on paper without extra labor. (However, this can be an advantage inside of a disadvantage, as the more hands-on you are with your time blocking, the more aware you’ll become with regard to how you use your time.)

With a digital calendar like Outlook or Google, you can usually click on the event and change the recurrence from one time to “every weekday” at 9:15 a.m. to “every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday” with a few keystrokes.

Your time blocking method is always less important than your commitment to it.

Block at least one 90-minute slot each week to focus on an aspirational priority.

Do you have a dream? Maybe you want to work with a business coach to take you to the next level, join Toastmasters to develop speaking skills, or learn how to tango. Block time for uplifting priorities keep you motivated throughout your week.

Bubble-wrap your blocks.

Your brain can’t run at full speed 24/7. It didn’t even do that for an 8-hour workday pre-COVID. There were watercooler conversations about This Is Us, break room birthday parties, and really boring meetings where other people’s projects were being discussed and you just zoned out. (It’s OK. Everyone does it.)

Plan buffer time around Zoom meetings and conference calls. When the world gets back to normal, add in buffer time to account for traffic between appointments or chatty clients. And be sure to schedule time at the end of each afternoon to review your tickler file and action items for the next workday. Don’t know about tickler files? Check out my ebook, Tickle Yourself Organized.

Don’t try to block all your time back-to-back-to-back. Sometimes, you’ll have a 90-minute block that’s all creative work. Other times, it’s catching up on all of your open tabs, literally and figuratively. Sometimes, you’re going to need to have a break to just stare out the window at the first robin of spring or dance to three songs in a row until your face is red and your Fitbit is worried you’re in the danger zone.

Time blocking doesn’t mean turning yourself into a robot. It just means that your life won’t become a continual ooze from from one slothful activity to the next.

Block a section of each day for working on special projects. 

Avoid Mondays for your most urgent and important projects so that long weekends and federal holidays won’t adversely impact your productivity.

For example, use 2:00-3:30 p.m. on Tuesdays for handling financial issues, or reserve an hour on Wednesdays for problem-solving sessions. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be tasks related to finances or problem-solving throughout the week, but having a designated time ensures your priorities won’t be unplanned or edged out.

Consider using Thursday afternoons for catching up on abandoned tasks, including organizing. (It’s not being defeatist; it’s realistic.) If you’re all caught up, you can release the blocked time for something more fun.

Remember to block out time for the “shallow” work.

In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about focusing without distraction on a mentally demanding task; it’s when you’re fully invested in something. It’s the kind of valuable work that generally fails to get done unless we block time for it. That said, our shallow work, the stuff that isn’t particularly fulfilling but must be completed (filing papers, refilling prescriptions, answering emails, etc.) can also fall through the cracks if we don’t schedule time to do it.

Remember that you need time to be reactive as well as proactive.

Most of our days, we plan to be pro-active: to call, to write, to read, to teach, etc. At our best, we know what we need to accomplish, how we’ll break it down into smaller tasks, and what “success” looks like. Those are easy times to block.

But what about when we have to be reactive? Plan small-to-medium blocks each day to cover those unexpected tasks that become priorities only when someone else puts them on your plate.

Create blocks for a start-up and shut-down routine to begin and end each work day.

Think how your coffee/shower/breakfast combo revs you up for the day, or how a bath/book/bed routine puts little ones in the zone for sleepy time.

Bookend your day with planning tasks. Before leaving your desk behind, make sure you know what you need to accomplish tomorrow, and have all your resources prepared. I like to fill my browser tabs with the links I’ll need to hit the ground running. You might want to open up your CRM page to the first client call of the day, or just write the phone number of the first person you’re going to call on the first blank page of your notebook.

BONUS TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL TIME BLOCKING

When you do sit down to work your time blocks, have a plan for making that block successful.

Get some accountability—If you’re having trouble getting your tush in the chair, have an accountability buddy with whom you can talk, text, or Zoom. Just having someone else know you’re working can make you feel less alone and more focused.

Be a hot tomato—Get to know the The Pomodoro Technique, a beloved strategy for forestalling procrastination and getting things done. At the most basic level, it involves setting an intention, working for 25 minutes, and taking a break, but familiarizing yourself with its many robust features can kick-start your productivity. 

Respect yourself—It’s easy to put other people’s needs first, but if you don’t respect your time, neither will anyone else. Cut interruptions off at the pass: turn off notifications and mute your phone to ensure that for however long you’re working, your attention won’t turn to other people’s priorities.

Reward system—Again, you aren’t a robot. (Unless you are, in which case, welcome, and beep beep boop boop!) Plan little rewards throughout your day to acknowledge successes. Tell your followers what you’ve achieved, have a cookie, or call your mother for praise. (Or call my mother for it; Paper Mommy rocks!)

OBSTACLES TO TIME BLOCKING

Time blocking is not one-size-fits-all, and you may experience obstacles. 

  • Time blocking doesn’t always fit when other people are in charge of your schedule. Time blocking requires flexibility; if your clients or your boss get to determine your schedule, time blocking your work hours may not be possible.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use time blocking for your personal life. Block time on Saturday afternoons for family projects or errands; from 5:30a-6:30a on weekdays, block time to work on your novel or get fit.

  • Sticking to time blocking isn’t always an option when your life or work time will be interrupted, almost by default. If you’re the sole at-home parent of a newborn, you can’t opt to continue doing Pomodoro blocks and just feed or change or attend to your baby during those five-minute breaks. If you work in medical care, you know that you can’t stick to your patient schedule if a true emergency walks through your door.

[Editor’s note: I will never, ever complain again about a doctor running late. In 2009, I walked into my doctor’s office waiting room and managed to say about five words before passing out into the arms of two sturdy nurses; within an hour, my doctor canceled the next several hours of appointments to perform an emergency procedure. So yeah, time blocking in health care doesn’t always work.]

  • Time blocking requires planning, and planning requires self-awareness, and we aren’t all there yet. To effectively use time-blocking, you have to have a clear idea of:
    • what you must accomplish,
    • what all the steps in each project are,
    • how often steps get repeated (so you can create ways to automate them),
    • how long each step will take (including buffer time for potential technical problems and creative dry spells), and
    • when your energy is at its peak for creativity, physical work, etc.

If necessary, I can catch a morning flight; on occasion, I’ve talked about organizing on some very early morning TV news segments. However, they can write all the 5 a.m. Magical Miracle Morning Magnificence books they want, but Paper Doll is never going to have enough caffeine, adrenaline, and cheer to regularly write, create, or even organize at o’dark-thirty. Self-awareness, baby!

Be honest with yourself about time blocking. If you’re not a morning person, schedule sales meetings and conference calls in the afternoon, when your social skills are at their best; if you can’t do math on a full stomach, work on revenue projections or start your taxes before you go to lunch.

TASK MANAGEMENT & TIME BLOCKING VIRTUAL SUMMIT 2021

Obviously, these are just the big-picture basics of time blocking. Are you interested in learning more? My friend, colleague, and former Cornell University International Living Center dorm-mate Francis Wade has brought myriad time management and productivity experts together for the second annual summit of its kind.

Francis is a productivity consultant, the founder of 2Time Labs, and author of the book Perfect Time Based Productivity. 

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Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2021

Over three days, March 4-6, 2021, the summit will cover the foundations of time management and time blocking, present choice electives, and offer interactive, live activities.

Many friends of the Paper Doll blog are set to participate, including: Ray Sidney-Smith, Mike Vardy, Penny Zenker, Dr. Frank Buck, Augusto Pinaud, Deb Lee, Cena Block, Nicole Chamblin, and even yours truly, Paper Doll (as a panelist).

 

If you want to attend live each day (all day), the summit is free, or you can choose your own price to help defray costs of putting it on. But if you want to be able to return to the material over time, or watch at your own convenience – during time periods you’ve blocked out for your continuing education, you can purchase an All Access Pass.

 

 

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How To Make Your Reading Time More Productive With Book Summaries

Posted on: September 14th, 2020 by Julie Bestry | 16 Comments

Over the last few weeks, we took a deep dive into squeezing more reading into your life. In 12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More – Part 1, we looked at creating space and time for reading, creating better habits, and making reading a communal experience. In 12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More – Part 2, we delved into developing reading lists, changing formats, tracking reading habits, and motivating yourself with challenges. We also touched on sampling books.

One problem my clients often report is difficulty reading the right books. There are so many titles on a topic they need, usually for work, that they never quite get to – or through – many of them. 

Today, we’ll look at services offering summaries of important, recommended, and/or best-selling  books that your colleagues (and bosses in the C-suite) may be discussing. You want these people to feel like you’re on the cutting edge. However, (especially during the pandemic, when you’re not only a worker-bee but perhaps also an in-house substitute teacher), it’s hard to make time to read all those buzzy-wordy tomes.

So, consider these options CliffsNotes for non-fiction books. These services give you the birds’ eye view of what they feel are the author’s most important points in any book. If the author’s style resonates with you, continue on to read the actual book. If not, you’re a jump ahead of the person who has only half-read a few reviews.

Book Summary Services

Read It For Me – What do you think of the idea of being presented with the “Best of a Book in 12 minutes?” That’s Read It For Me’s theory, that in under a dozen minutes, each audio or video summary can share the biggest ideas from the best books on sales, marketing, leadership, and personal development.

For over a decade, founder Steve Cunningham and his team at Read It For Me have worked with the leadership development programs at companies like Mailchimp, Zappos, Bank of Montreal, AstroZeneca, and Spotify to develop and tailor educational content, the basis for the Read It For Me summaries.

Each week, there’s one “featured” sample book summary video, available at no cost. Visit Read It For Me’s main page and scroll down until you see the friendly lady holding the popcorn and beverage, and click. The first few minutes introduce the platform, and then you can watch the video summary.

For each book summary in the Pro (paid) version, Read It For Me creates both an audio and a video summary (with an accompanying transcript). Just toggle “Listen” or “Watch,” depending on your preference, and with either version, you can read along with the transcript. (Note: the video does not have closed captioning; if you require it, you can open the summary page in a separate window and read while watching the video, side-by-side.)

Once you’ve completed a summary, you can mark it as read to help track your progress. Clicking a little heart icon works just as you’d expect to let you know that it was one of your faves.

Inside your book summary library, you can view all books, or sort by those that are most popular, the ones that you’ve already read, the ones you’ve marked as favorites, or by specific categories, which Read It For Me keeps fairly broad:

  • Human Capital
  • Innovation/Trends
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Personal Development
  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Leadership

Monthly pricing for Read It For Me Pro is $10, with no contract and a free first week. An annual contract is $110, payable in one lump sum. (Keep your eye on the site, as they often offer great discounts on lifetime memberships.) The app is available for iOS and Android, but the site is also well-formatted to access in your browser.

I’ve been a subscriber for about six months, and find the Read It For Me videos make a great (and educational) mental palate cleanser when transitioning between projects, especially in the late afternoon.

I use the summaries both to get a clearer picture of books that I’m not likely to read in full (generally on sales) as well as to get a sense of which books on similar topics would be the best fit for my reading and learning style (like Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone vs. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson and Joseph Grenny vs. Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and Life, One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott). 

So far, my favorite summaries have been for Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic and Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.

A few final notes: all of the audios and videos are narrated by the founder, Steve Cunningham, so if you listen often, that can get a little repetitive. (But he’s got a conversational style of summarizing and a fun Canadian accent.)

Also, and of greater concern, the majority of titles are by white men, meaning that there’s a paucity of diversity of thought leaders, in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. While this is attributable to which authors make it to the best-seller list, and this is common across all of the platforms discussed below, it’s worth noting at the outset.  

Blinkist – Based in Germany, the app’s editorial team pulls the key ideas and insights from 3500+ bestselling non-fiction books and transforms them into 15-minute (or shorter) read-or-listen offerings, called “blinks.” Created in 2012, it’s one of the oldest subscription-based book summarizing services and has more than seven million users.

Blinkist offers 27 different reading categories, ranging from productivity and personal development to entrepreneurship and corporate culture, to marketing and economics, and has created a wide variety of intriguing booklists. Not all of Blinkist’s categories are business-oriented, as philosophy, religion, science, politics, history, and more also get the summarizing treatment.

You can view recently-added titles (Laura Vanderkam’s The New Corner Office caught my eye) as well the community’s most popular titles. Every Blinkist summary is created in two versions, so you can read or listen. Personally, I process what I learn much better if I can read it, but some people might prefer to listen first, then read to get the full experience.

In addition to key takeaways and insights, the Blinkist app features curated book lists to help you select the best titles in specific categories. It also suggests new titles based on your reading history, presents new and trending titles, and makes it easy to discover your next preferred summary (or actual book to read). In addition to the app, Blinkist has a podcast, as well as a digital magazine with some compelling content like:

Becoming More Productive Isn’t a Goal, It’s a Habit

Why Are So Many People Struggling With Loneliness

Dare to Read: 8 Non-fiction Books Recommended by Brené Brown

Blinkist has a 7-day free trial, which gives you access to all of the summaries. After that, you can choose the Basic plan, at no cost. This grants you access to one Free Daily Read, but it’s selected by Blinkist, so you’re at the mercy of what they select for everyone. (On the plus side, you and a friend could discuss each daily title, augmenting what you get out of the experience separately.) The Basic “blinks” are read-only.

Alternatively, there are two pricing options for the Premium plan, either $15.99/month or $99.99 billed annually (for $8.34 month). The Premium plan includes the following features:

  • Unlimited access to every title
  • Audio summaries
  • Offline library access
  • Highlight the portions of the text summaries
  • Forward your highlights to Evernote
  • Send your text summaries to Kindle

12 Min – Short for 12 Minutes (because who has time to read the whole word?), 12 Min is similar to Read It For Me and Blinkist. They offer a tiny bit more about their editorial process, noting that the team members “[r]ead the books several times, highlighting and writing down everything, searching for key ideas. Our team meets, discusses and summarizes the most important concepts and ideas” and creates what they call a “synthesized, optimized…microbook” available for consumption in under 12 minutes.

The platform covers thirty non-fiction categories, from standard business fare (like corporate culture and communications, management and leadership, and marketing and sales) to self-help (like health and diet, investment and finance, sex and relationships, and productivity and time management). 12 Min also offers summaries of children’s books, biographies, and memoirs. Search by category, author, or title. The website itself is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and appears to be a Portuguese company.

Each 12Min “microbook” can be read as text or listened to as an audio in the app, and as with podcasts, you can adjust the speed, rewind ten seconds, or fast-forward thirty seconds.

Subscribers can create a new account with Facebook credentials or by creating an email/password combination, and 12 Min is available for iOS and Android. Compared to other platforms, the free trial period is pretty short at only three days, and, frustratingly, the website is not-at-all transparent regarding subscription costs. The iOS description indicates that subscription plans are available as Lifetime (full access to the library “forever,”), “Semestral” (for a six-month semester), and Yearly (for an annual membership).

The Android page indicates that in-app upgrades range from $12.99 to $144, but do not specify further. Eventually, by Googling “12Min pricing” I got to a pricing page to which one apparently can’t navigate from within the site, where it indicates a $69.30 annual price, and states that if you choose not to upgrade to from the free trial, you’ll be place on a “free plan” (also not referenced on the main site), able to read one free summary per day. I’d be eager to know if Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking readers can find more detailed information on the translated pages (linked at the bottom of the site).

Sipreads – This platform claims to offer “Takeaways from the best books, for free.” Categories of books summarized tend to focus on personal development, career success, startups, mindfulness, and happiness. 

Launched in the past year by Ali Salah and Basile Samil, this email-based subscription service sends you a notification each week with the announcement of a new title’s summary. Each text-based summary will take about 5-10 minutes to read, and is printed in vision-saving large text with bulleted and numbered lists, bolded key points, and easy-to-read language. For example, here’s a summary of Nir Eyal’s best-selling Indistractible. The individual summaries are  archived on the website.

The biggest advantage? Obviously, the $0 price tag. Sipreads has an affiliate relationship with Amazon, so if you find a book intriguing, click through, and buy the book, they get a tiny portion. While it doesn’t increase the book’s cost to the reader, it allows Sipreads to run the service for free.

The biggest disadvantage right now is a question mark. It appears that Salah and Samil write all of the summaries, and there’s no information regarding their professional experience in curation or librarianship, so the reader is left to trust that the summaries are accurate. Thus far, they seem to be. And again, spending no money and no more than 10 minutes reading the summaries means, at worst, you may not get everything you want, but you likely will get a sense of whether a book is for you.

These are only a few of the platforms and apps available for obtaining non-fiction book summaries. Others you might consider include:

  • Sumizeit – ranging from a free 3-summary option to $5.99/monthly, 39.99/yearly and $69/lifetime plans
  • getAbstract – $99/year for access to 5000 book summaries or $299/year for 20,000 titles 
  • Four Minute Books – free access to 800 book summaries
  • Headway – Often compared to Blinkist for summary quality, it’s considered more user-friendly but has fewer titles; a monthly subscription is $14.99. 

Pros and Cons of Book Summary Services

A summary is just that, a summary.

On the upside, you cut out the fluff and focus on the most salient points. If you need to have passing familiarity with the concepts of a buzz-wordy book in your profession, a summary can give you the key insights to keep from embarrassing yourself in conversation.

However, with summaries, you also lose the color, nuance, and richness that anecdotes in non-fiction books deliver. Are you the kind of person for whom insights come from declarative statements or from vivid stories? It’s important to know what kind of learner you are to get the most from a summary experience.

How to Make Book Summary Services Work For You

Don’t multitask. Seriously, it’s 10-15 minutes. Sit at your desk, snuggle on your couch, or otherwise make yourself comfy, but don’t try to dash off emails while you listen or work out while you read.

Take notes. You’re more likely to remember what you learn when you engage. There’s no need to make a transcript of the summary, but try creating a skeleton outline of the main points (or a mind-map, if that’s your thing), and write down any key words or phrases coined by the author, or which you otherwise find unfamiliar.

Develop a learning schedule. As we discussed in 12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More – Part 1, creating a specific time in your schedule for reading (after breakfast, before closing up work for the day, etc.) ensures that you will make time for expanding your knowledge. As none of these platforms take more than a quarter of an hour to embrace, you could explore five books each workweek (to get ahead on your backlog).

Read the actual books. If a book summary intrigues you, read the book. For full enjoyment, there’s really no substitute!

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation

Posted on: May 4th, 2020 by Julie Bestry | 22 Comments

Does anybody really know what time it is? (I don’t)
Does anybody really care? (care about time)
If so I can’t imagine why (no, no)

Chicago, Chicago Transit Authority, 1969
©Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Spirit Music Group
 

This is not a post about time management. 

In full disclosure, I started writing this post in February for Time Management Month. Paper Doll strongly believes that we cannot manage time; we can only manage ourselves. But we do need to better understand time, to have a sense of how it passes. And for most of us nowadays, it’s passing…well…weirdly.

We don’t know what time it is. We don’t know what day it is.

In case you were worried that it was just you, even the news media has been talking about it.

Once we settled into sheltering-in-place, many of us, especially those working from home, found it speeding by as we added work-from-home tasks, family tasks, and self-education tasks. We sought anything we could to stop April from feeling like the sluggish month of March. And what does May hold?

Why We’re Losing Track of Time

It’s not that strange that we’ve lost our sense of time. Think about the week between Christmas and New Year’s, where every day feels vaguely like Sunday. We’re not working, or if we are, there’s a strange hum of quietude. Is Grey’s Anatomy on tonight? Is it Trash Day? 

Vacation days are like this, too. For the first day or so, we’re on “real” time, not only hyper-aware of what day it is, but when it’s 10:30a, even if we’re on a beach or in a museum, our internal clocks tell us that our colleagues are stepping away to the break room or the coffee truck. Vacationing parents may be dressing for a late romantic dinner out but be subtly aware that normally, they’d be corralling the tiny humans for bath-time.

But by a few days into the vacation? All of that gets swept away. When I went to Italy in 2018, I realized that by the time we left Rome, it was no longer Friday, but merely “Day 7.” My real life was a hazy memory.

We’ve Lost Our Sense of Routine.

There are no daily markers. We’re not going to work on weekdays or having our Monday stand-up meetings. We’re not attending religious services on weekends, and we’re not driving our kids to piano lessons on Wednesday or soccer practice on Thursdays. We’re not going to yoga. We’re not going anywhere!

We are used to marking time by space – weekdays mean work or school; weekends mean stores or attending religious services or restaurants with friends. Now, our dining rooms are schoolrooms; our kitchens are offices. Our living rooms become gyms. We’re in the same few rooms doing everything. Our surroundings aren’t changing even when our activities do, so even if we’re substituting virtual activities for the “real” ones, everything has an otherworldly, dreamy quality.

Further, we’re not doing any of the little things that mark the time advancing in smaller increments (minutes, hours) toward the bigger events. If we’re not getting up to go to work or school in the morning, there’s no reason not to read until the wee hours. If the kids aren’t going to school, there’s no rush to finish dinner and clean up the kitchen we can pack their lunches for the next day.

There’s a sameness to our days. There’s no ebb and flow to our hours. We’re moving through molasses and then we’re our own time-lapse videos.

We’re Busy, But We’re Not Being Satisfied

As a professional organizer, I split my time between working in clients’ homes and offices, usually in four-hour blocks, helping them achieve their organizing and productivity goals, and working in my office on the administrivia of small business: researching and writing blogs, providing organizing advice to media outlets (speaking of which, check out page 58 of the May 2020 issue of Real Simple), talking to prospective clients, marketing, bookkeeping, and so on.

Although some clients are opting to avail themselves of my services virtually, my workdays are now spent primarily in the 8-foot square box of my office. I’ve done enough webinars and classes, including Yale’s The Science of Well-Being, that I’m probably only a few webinars away from getting a pandemic diploma. I’m busy, but I don’t feel productive.

If you’re doing the work-from-home thing, you still have emails and phone calls and Zoom meetings to replace your “real” life, but deadlines are more amorphous. You may be actually getting more work done because you’re not getting distracted by Katie’s birthday cake in the break room or back-to-back meetings or getting cornered by Doug, who wants to talk about the cute thing his cat did.

But even if you’re busier (heck, even if you’re more productive), nothing has the same sense of immediacy, and sometimes that means we lose that sense of satisfaction what we’d otherwise get from having made it through Hump Day or having finally reached the weekend.


via GIPHY

When There’s No Difference Between Tuesday and Saturday, Why Do Anything Now?

The Dowager Countess of Grantham has a point. What is a weekend anymore?

Why scramble to finish a project by Thursday afternoon if nobody will see it until Friday morning? Or Monday? Or May 73rd? Why focus your time and energy to complete your work by 5 o’clock if there’s nothing to separate from 2 o’clock in the afternoon from 9 o’clock at night?

Why? You know the answer…from the before-times. You know that it takes until about Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to feel like you’re back in the rhythm after a winter holiday break. Most of us have been sheltering-in-place six or more weeks. We need to have an accurate sense of time to be productive (whatever that means to you) both now, and later, when life returns to normalcy. We need to keep ourselves and our kids from becoming temporally feral, wildly eating and sleeping (or not sleeping), starting projects without finishing them, and generally feeling unmoored.

Allostatic Load and Lack of Novelty, or What the Heck Happened to Our Brains?

Our brains are getting mushy. In ‘Allostatic Load’ Is the Psychological Reason for Our Pandemic Brain Fog, the research indicates that our body’s physiological reactions to emotional stress can be powerful. Even though we’re sitting around not doing much of anything, our stress hormones are building up, exhausting our bodies. But we need physical energy to do mental labor, which (in addition to the emotional stress we’re already carrying) means that our brains are slowing down while we shelter-in-place.

Additionally, our brains are hungry for novelty. Every day looks and feels very much like every other, so when we’re not seeing new people, visiting new locations, or engaging in novel activities, our brains go on autopilot. We stop noticing details, so we stop making new or vivid memories, so everything blends together. Tuesday is Saturday is Everyday.

Our Body Clocks Are Borked

This isn’t all just psychological. There are physical reasons why we’re not sensing the passage of time the way we ought.

  • We’re not sleeping normally. The weirdness of our schedules makes it tempting to stay up reading, or binge-watching, or gaming, and also makes it more acceptable to sleep later, getting us out of our normal habits. When we’re not going to bed or getting up at our normal times, it messes up our circadian rhythms and it distorts how short or long (or interminably long) any given day feels. If you sleep until lunchtime, it feels like it got dark awfully early. If stress-monsters woke you at 5 a.m., then by mid-afternoon, it feels like bedtime should be approaching. And because sheltering-in-place while we’re not getting a lot of new stimuli coincides with anxiety, we’re having weird dreams.
  • We’re not sleeping, period. It would be weird to not be anxious right now. We’re worried about our health, and the health of our loved ones. We’re worried about our personal finances—Will unemployment benefits will ever kick in? Or if we’re still working, will our companies survive with everyone intact? — and the global economy. (Whatever you do, don’t check your 401k or IRA statements!) 
  • We’re not eating normally. OK, some of you are cooking Alison Roman recipes and making sourdough, and still setting the table, but most of us are grazing and not eating normal foods (or amounts) at what could only charitably be called “mealtimes.” 
  • We’re not getting fresh air. One of my colleagues lives in New York City and hasn’t been out of her apartment – not her building, but her actual apartment – in more than 45 days. She has no balcony, no roof access, and she’s avoiding her beloved, coughing doorman. Those of us with porches or backyards may be getting out more, but the weather around the country has been unpredictable. There were snowstorms in April. We’ve had tornados in Tennessee. And there’s pollen. So Much Pollen!
  • We’re not getting sunlight. If we’re not getting outside, unless we have skylights or floor-to-ceiling windows, we’re just not getting a lot of the goodness provided by that big, yellow ball in the sky that helps us regulate our circadian rhythms and our moods.
  • We’re overexposed to blue light. We’re Zooming and WebExing, in front of our computers all day without the break-room parties and water cooler convos that get us away from our screens. We’re texting with friends and reading Coronavirus news, binge-watching Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hulu. And some of you are gaming or playing Animal Crossing. All that blue light is wreaking havoc on our circadian rhythms, along with all the other things it’s doing to our eyes, or mental health, and our hormones.

5 Tips to Reconnect to Time

1) Put structure in your life. 

Create the kinds of daily rituals that you wouldn’t bother with if this were a staycation. Have mealtimes at set hours. Living like we did before, where lunch came at 12:30 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. makes it less likely that we will graze our way to the Pandemic 15, but it will also put some definition in each day. 

Develop buffer habits. If you can safely go for a walk before dinner, knowing you’ll do that between work and cooking gives you a “commute” of sorts. Listen to the podcast you’d normally dial up, or get back in the habit of calling your mom “on the way home” from work.

Time block to create boundaries in your day. I know I said this wasn’t a time management post, but time-blocking is a key strategy from the world of productivity. Block off specific times in your schedule for overarching categories: passive work projects, creative/active work projects, self-care, self-education, entertainment. A place for everything – in a schedule where everything has a place. 

Even if your life doesn’t have any natural boundaries, you can create them to work as transition periods. Have one or two things on your schedule every day where you are honoring obligations to others so that you’ll wind up one task so you can show up for the next. Meet a colleague for a Zoom lunch. Hold an accountability call with a friend to help you both manage to shower and dress well before the day is half over!

Consider creating daily time blocks in which you work on a particular project most weekdays:

  • 45 minutes of housework (laundry, cleaning, organizing, etc.) early in the day for a sense of accomplishment
  • an hour and a half of working on your taxes (because the delayed due date of July 15th will be here faster than we expect)
  • two hours of researching blog posts or sourcing graphics or planning meals
  • a one-hour block, daily, of calling or video-chatting with someone

Micro-block your time with the Pomodoro Technique to conquer your tasks list. In case you’re not familiar with the Pomodoro Technique, it’s a time management system designed to battle procrastination and increase productivity. The very basic concepts? Identify what you want to work on, set aside 25 minutes to do so, and then do it – and that time in inviolable. If you let yourself get interrupted, you have to start over. Every 25 minutes, you get a five-minute break. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We’ve talked about doing pomodoros on the blog before, but for a more robust look at this incredibly effective method, my colleague Stacey Harmon has created a How to Focus in Uncertain Times Using the Pomodoro Technique® training, which she has made available at no charge.

Theme your days. Handle financial tasks on Monday Mondays. Solve problems on Weirdness Wednesday. It doesn’t just have to be activities. Celebrate Taco Tuesdays and have a meal you’re looking forward to eating…and even making. 

2) Enhance novelty.

Go through your address book, your contact list, and our LinkedIn contacts. When you’re bored, or weary, instead of texting your BFF or your mother, with whom you’ve already spoken 43 gazillion times, pick two new people to contact each day.

Touch base with a professional contact and you never know what brainstorms may occur. Chat with an old friend just to find out what’s happening. Novelty can make each day more vivid and distinct from the day before.

Use different spaces. Do you have a guest room you hardly ever use for anything except piling up things that don’t have a home? Consider pushing the bed to the side to create floor space and do your workout routine there.

Is the idea of a guest room laughable?

Search your home for an underused space, maybe with the help of a tiny human. (They have a natural gift for such treasure hunts). As a toddler, I used to like to sit on the small steps from the kitchen down to our side to wait for my sister to return from school. In my current home, I’ve found that sitting and reading at the landing at the top of my stairs gives me good light and a feeling that my reading nook is a special place. Find a new space for an old task. Play cards in the laundry room. Picnic in the backyard.

3) Create vivid sensory clues for the passing of time!

The timer on my Fitbit buzzes at fifty minutes past the hour, reminding me to take 250 steps. Use that as your cue not only to walk, but to take your eyes off the screen. Fitbit’s reminder to move is built into the app, and most fitness trackers have a similar function. You can also try a movement reminder app like StandUp! to prompt you to take a break at a predictable time.

Whether you are bored or absorbed in an activity, a vibrating reminder that another hour has passed can help you acclimate. Similarly, you can set chimes or alerts on your phone to play hourly at 17 minutes past the hour, or set auditory alarms for every three hours, to remind you to take meal and longer activity breaks.

Go Analog. Digital clocks don’t give you the same sense of the passage of time as old-school watches and clocks. Start by looking to see which of your digital clocks you can change to an analog appearance. Android phones allow you to change your lock screen from digital to analog easily. On the iPhone, the clock app icon is a working analog clock, but the lock screen stays digital. There are apps like FaceClock Analogue to give you a working clock, but they can’t be added to the lock screen.

If you have a digital screen (like the kind for a rear-facing camera), your car will also probably let you change from a digital to analog clock.

Put a clock in places where you tend to lose track of time. Do you dawdle in the shower or while putting on makeup? Attach a small waterproof clock to your bathroom mirror with a suction cup to keep tabs on how long you’ve been debating cutting your own bangs. (Don’t do it. Just. Don’t.)

 

Embrace Time Timer – One of the favorite time management tools of professional organizers is Time Timer. I’ve written about many updates to Time Timer over the years, but the key thing to know is that the sweep of red helps your brain recognize time as it passes.

Please note, per Heather Rogers, the Co-President of Time Timer, “Until this crisis is over, the Time Timer apps for iOS and Android (available on the App Store and Google Play) will be free for everyone to help create some comforting structure wherever you are.

Also, all products at timetimer.com are 20% off with code HOME2020 and all US shipping is free while schools are closed.” 

Of course, if analog isn’t retro enough for you, you could always take the sands-through-the-hourglass route.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. Share on X

You won’t know what time it is, but if you take a few breaks to watch the time pass through a beautiful hourglass, you (and your kids) will have a stronger sense of how long five minutes or five hours really lasts.

 

4) Get what you know you need! The first month or six weeks of sheltering-in-place, we could be excused from letting everything devolve into an extended summer vacation, but now it’s time to get serious.

Get daylight. If you can get out and walk in nature (or your neighborhood) without encountering another unmasked human being within six feet, go for it. If you’re using the Pomodoro Technique, use your five-minute breaks to go outside. Jump rope or play hopscotch in the driveway. Run around the backyard. Dance to Lizzo on your balcony.

Get sleep. Close friends know that it’s ironic for me to give this advice, as sleep and I have a bitter and lifelong enmity. But the internet is chockfull of advice for getting enough sleep, even (and especially) if pandemic anxiety is keeping you awake.

Get exercise. Jumping to conclusions and stress-pacing aren’t enough. There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of online workout options, from free to OMG-I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-Paying-Peleton. The standard go-to these days is Yoga With Adriene, but there are dozens of free live-streaming exercise classes (as well as recorded videos) to help you keep in shape. Or just run around with your kids or your dog.

Get dressed. Seriously. I know the jammies are comfy, but even having day-PJs and night-PJs isn’t enough. You don’t have to put on shoes, but if you shower, groom yourself, and actually put on underwear and real clothes each morning and change for bed each night, your sense of time will improve.

5) Take a Technology Break – There are all sorts of ways to get some social distance from your devices.

Give yourself a tech timeout every time you realize you’ve lost an hour to social media or cable news. (That’s where the fitness tracker reminders come in!) Leave the devices in a separate room during mealtimes. Talk to the people in lockdown with you, or if you’re alone (or just don’t like your peeps all that much after six weeks in the same house), read a book.

Put yourself and your family on a tech curfew. There’s nothing that happens after 8 p.m. (or 11 p.m., or whenever you’ve set the curfew) that you can’t catch up on the next morning. Give you eyes a break from the blue light.

Consider taking a Tech Shabbat. In 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week, Tiffany Schlain makes an excellent case for the physical, mental, and social benefits of stepping away from the technology for a whole day.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Paper Doll really cares.

You Are Invited to the 2019 Productivity Summit!

Posted on: September 13th, 2019 by Julie Bestry | No Comments

What did you accomplish today? Was it everything you’d hoped?

What do you think of when you hear the word “productive” bandied about? There’s a commonly-held but false belief that productivity is just about getting a lot of things done. But productive has two definitions: it can mean both prolific (quantitatively measuring how much gets done) and useful (qualitatively measuring how worthwhile and valuable an endeavor is).

Being productive means not just accomplishing a lot, but accomplishing the right things.

How many times have you gotten to the end of your day and realized that you’d been incredibly busy, completing many tasks (both the ones you planned as well as putting out small fires), but you didn’t feel fulfilled? Perhaps you read lots of blogs (like this one) and books, and have incorporated some of the advice. Maybe you theme your days or time-block your work projects. Hopefully, you eliminate as many interruptions as possible. But you know there’s more you could be doing. You know you could be doing better.

I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be participating in a special project, the brainchild of my colleague Ray Sidney-Smith, whom I met a few years ago when we were getting certified as Evernote consultants. Ray knows how to figure out what someone needs to know and presents that material in a way that’s easy to absorb. So Ray came up with the Productivity Summit!

Ray says “The 2019 Productivity Summit is going to be the most productive two days of your life,” and from what I’ve seen, I believe it!

I’ve attended a variety of internet-based conferences and summits on topics ranging from organizing and time management, to ADHD and hoarding, to writing and publishing. The material can be great, but it can often feel a little hokey, as it’s obvious those other virtual summits are just pre-recorded presentations released on a “drip” schedule, with no opportunity for attendees to ask questions or interact with the speakers.

The 2019 Productivity Summit is a LIVE, two-day remote conference with more than 40 expert speakers presenting in real-time about personal productivity, technology, organization, and business development. And your own Paper Doll will be one of them!

PROGRAMMING TRACKS

The 2019 Productivity Summit has four concurrent tracks of programming:

  • Productivity – This track focuses very specifically on how to be more personally productive using the speakers’ recommended principles, strategies, and techniques.

There are some real powerhouse talents in this group, including Canadian rockstar and friend-of-the-blog Mike Vardy, the author/coach/podcaster known as The Productivityist. Where Mike is, the fun follows. I’m also excited to hear what Keep Productive’s Francesco D’Alessio has to say about Notion, a (geeky) up-and-comer that some people thinks give Evernote a run for its money. And Thanh Pham from Asian Efficiency is also on-deck, and his take is always a must-seeand must-listen.

  • Technology – This programming track is focused on what and how to use specific technologies to get things done. 

As much as I’m truly a Paper Doll, I know how technology is key for making work and life run more efficiently. My colleague Stacey Harmon is my go-to for Evernote coupled with David Allen’s GTD. From the ergonomics of productivity to leveraging systems to specific technologies, this programming track is for those who want to geek out as well as those who just want stuff to work so they can get on with their lives.

  • Organization – For this track, it’s about the nitty gritty of getting your home or office more organized – it will cover the physical, intellectual, and psychological skills for dealing with clutter and disorganization.

Hey, that’s me up there!

If you follow organizing blogs or the professional organizing industry, you’ll recognize most of the people participating in this programming track. There’s industry standard-bearer Barbara Hemphill, fellow Certified Professional Organizers Kim Oser, Dawn George, and Kacy Paide. We’ll be joined by sharp and savvy NAPO colleagues like Andrea Hancock, Terri Blanchette, Penny Bryant Catterall, and coach Alexis Haselberger. Topics we’re covering range from the economics of clutter to how to organize your digital resources, from conquering fear of letting go of what’s on your desk to trying to go paperless when you can’t let go of the paper. Me? My presentation is called Organize for Maximum Productivity When You Work From Home.

  • Business Development – This track is for those looking to build or grow their businesses more effectively and efficiently.

This is another power-packed lineup. These speakers will cover general business leadership topics like improving focus, growing sales, and developing entrepreneurial mindsets, but also delve into niche issues like video marketing, podcasting, and publishing. My longtime colleague, Nicole Chamblin is first up on Saturday morning, so I’ll be checking her out while I wait in the wings.

PRODUCTIVITY PANELS AND KEYNOTE AND DIGITAL INTERACTIVES, OH MY!

In addition to these concurrent programming tracks, there will be panel discussions across specific time slots. On Friday, October 4, 2019, summit host, Ray Sidney-Smith, Google Small Business Advisor for Productivity, will lead a panel of productivity technology experts entitled, “The Future of Productivity Technology.” 

Then, on Saturday, October 5, 2019, Demir Bentley of Lifehack Bootcamp and Lifehack Tribe, will be keynoting the Summit with his presentation, “The Biggest Cover Up In Productivity History.”

There will also be a Digital Interactives area where speakers will be placing education-oriented quizzes (not the Facebook-style kind), polls, and more so you can engage with what you learn at the Summit. Finally, each day will end with with live, virtual networking events for summit attendees. 

THE DETAILS

The 2019 Productivity Summit is free to attend live, and it’s all accessible through your Web browser. Visit the 2019 Productivity Summit page to see all the participants and topics, and I bet you’ll be as impressed as I am.

Register and get complimentary replays of the sessions through Sunday evening (Eastern time), October 6, 2019 , so you can watch missed sessions or rewatch sessions you found especially helpful.

Want more time to watch? You can buy access to the 2019 Summit video replay library. As I write this, early bird pricing is still available (until 9/13/19 4:59 PM US EDT); it goes up as the summit nears, and will rise again after the complimentary replays end.

Reach the summit – the 2019 Productivity Summit – and learn how to get more of the right things done.

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