10 Productivity Habits

10 Habits Successful People Give Up to Increase Their Productivity by Carl Preston at Life

What are you willing to do in order to reach success? It is common among people these days to be average and not stand out too much. But those who are successful do not fall under this category.

In order to stay on top of your game and reach the level of success you want, you need to follow a certain set of self-induced rules. Success is not something that happens by accident; if you want it bad enough, you will get it. Learn the habits that successful people have given up in order to reach their own success.

1. They don’t work in their comfort zone.

What is your comfort zone? Your comfort zone is defined as “A psychological state in which a person feels familiar, at ease, in control, and experiences low anxiety.” When you get outside of your comfort zone, it doesn’t mean that you should strive for a constant state of anxiety and stress. It simply means that, in order to grow, you should try new things and expand your horizons.

The reason we are comfortable in our comfort zone is because we are not taking risks when we are in this state. When we live in our comfort zones, we are living life like hamsters on a wheel, going around and around in a constant cycle, but going nowhere in our lives.

Famous motivational speaker, Les Brown, said it best with, “If you put yourself in a position where you have to stretch outside your comfort zone, then you are forced to expand your consciousness.”

2. They don’t do without first learning.

Learning is what we do best. The greatest thing about learning is the benefit that we receive in all aspects of our lives. Successful people strive to continue learning new things and expanding on things that they already know.

If we stop learning, then the only thing we can do is settle with what we already know; if we settle for that, then there is no way to expand our minds. Expansion is essential on the path to success. Since our minds require learning for expansion, we must never stop seeking new knowledge.

Imagine what would have happened if Bill Gates stopped learning and growing. The internet would be much more primitive than it is today. But because he followed his dreams and continued growing, he founded one of the biggest companies in the world and it is still flourishing and growing today.

3. They don’t fear asking for advice.

Richard Branson, a famous entrepreneur, stated, “When you need to make hard decisions, being able to discuss your ideas with entrepreneurs and business leaders who have solved similar problems can make all the difference.”

Asking for advice is not always easy. We think that we have the same opportunity as everyone else and sometimes feel insecure and dependent, so we decide not to ask for advice, and try to figure it out ourselves. But this could be greatly limiting us from reaching our full potential, because the advice we might be seeking could be something that somebody knows very well.

4. They don’t get lost in the small details.

When life gives us seemingly endless opportunities, it is very easy to get lost in the small details. The small details are very easy for us to become focused on, thus causing us to miss out on the overall vision, also known as the “big picture”.

Focusing too much on the smaller details constricts your ability to see how everything ties together. Much of our lives hinge upon the connections that we make with others and with ourselves. If we get lost in the small detail, it is like having missing pieces to a puzzle. How are we supposed to solve that?

Imagine what would have happened if Henry Ford only saw the small details. When building the company that Ford is today, he knew that he must do something different if his company was to succeed. After many people told him it couldn’t be done, his company continued improving upon the smaller details until they got it right.

Henry Ford didn’t focus too much on the small details, which were the hundreds of times he failed; he saw the overall goal and knew that it could be accomplished. It required seeing the bigger picture to make it happen.

5. They don’t multitask.

Multitasking is typically viewed as a skill that only certain people possess. But truth be told, nobody actually has the ability to multitask. Multitasking is known to actually decrease productivity. Those who are successful focus on one specific task and do that task to the best of their ability without interruption.

Undrstanding Context

"All meaning is context dependent" is a phrase that has been very helpful to me. Therefore, I appreciated this article by Joel Gascoigne at Buffer - The Habits of Successful People: They Work To Understand Context. The material below is quoted from the article.

I’ve had a few different experiences in my past that made me reach a big realisation. What I’ve discovered is that the context of any situation is very important.

Hiten Shah clearly already understands this very well. This Tweet from him is what tipped me over the edge to share some of my further thinking around context:

                      Get context before you give advice - @hnshah

Why we should seek context at all times
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood” -Stephen R Covey

The above quote is Habit 5 of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I’ve read the book a couple of times, and I’ve read other content around the topic of gaining context, but it’s something which has only just “clicked” for me as to why it’s so important. Also, after now understanding the importance of context, I’ve found it to be very difficult to actually practice.

The premise is quite clear as to how vital context is: without context, we immediately jump in our heads to what we want to say next, based on the very first few words we hear from the other person. This is something I find myself doing far too frequently.
Most of us listen to someone with the intention of replying, and therefore as soon as we have a “reply” in mind, we stop listening and wait our turn to reply. No matter what remarkable new insights are uncovered in the subsequent words from the other person, it is likely that we now have a strong desire to share that initial thought we have about what to say back.

With context, on the other hand, we can achieve so much more. If we truly understand the background of the other person, we can tailor the approach for each occasion. I believe gaining or having context can be useful in so many scenarios:

• giving advice
• receiving advice
• meeting a stranger
• making friends
• getting press
• raising funding

The conversation that shocked me

A while back, I was in a Skype call with someone to try and help them with their current startup challenges.

As normal, I asked about the founder’s startup and what stage he was at. After uncovering a tiny amount of context about his previous experiences and where he was now at, I unfortunately slipped and switched to my own thinking about what the best next steps were for him.

I proceeded to advise him based on my previous experience. The experience I based my advice on was the following:

• I had worked on an idea for a year and a half which I never charged for
• I therefore generated no revenue, and consistently had to work on the side
• While I had a few thousand users of traction, I failed to raise funding

I advised him to charge for his product from Day One, since that worked for me the after the first failure. I also advised him to aim for revenue and not worry so much about user numbers, since that’s what truly freed me from working on the side.

He was very receptive of my advice—even thought it was the wrong advice for the situation he was in. Luckily, he went on to share extra information that changed everything:

• He had a previous startup for which he had hundreds of paying customers and good revenues
• He was still making money from the idea and had runway to last almost indefinitely working on a new idea
• He got into an incubator with the idea
• He went to the Valley to raise funding, but since he had low user numbers (even though they were all paying) he struggled to raise funding

I could now completely understand why, in fact, he shouldn’t just follow the advice I gave him. He had almost entirely the opposite previous experience to me, yet equally valuable and foundation building. He was perfectly poised to try an idea which could gain massive visibility rather than simply making money. Making some money was not his biggest challenge, as it was for me when I started.

Our opposite contexts meant that in fact opposite choices for next steps made complete sense. I was genuinely taken aback when I realised this....

More at the link.

Secrets to Awesome Weekends

Everybody loves the weekend. Everybody needs a break. So check out How Can You Make Your Weekends More Awesome, by Eric Barker;

What’s the research have to say about making Friday through Sunday that much better…?

For The Most Part, Don’t Trust Your Instincts

Ever eat or drink too much, feel awful, then do it again… and feel awful again? As counterintuitive as it may sound, we’re actually pretty bad about remembering what really makes us happy.

Reading Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert’s bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness my main takeaway was this:

"Much of our unhappiness springs from the fact that we’re terrible at accurately remembering how things made us feel in the past, so we make bad choices regarding the future."

In Gilbert’s own words (and backed up by many studies):

"We overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays, we underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings, and we make these mundane but erroneous predictions again and again, despite their regular disconfirmation."

When most of us have leisure time, do we do what truly makes us happy or do we opt for what’s easy? Easy wins it most of the time.

Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:

"Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies. So what gives? Or, as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it more eloquently, “Why would we spend four times more time doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good?” The answer is that we are drawn—powerfully, magnetically—to those things that are easy, convenient, and habitual, and it is incredibly difficult to overcome this inertia. Active leisure is more enjoyable, but it almost always requires more initial effort—getting the bike out of the garage, driving to the museum, tuning the guitar, and so on."

The things we frequently choose to reduce stress are often the least effective:

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

"The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Another study found that women are most likely to eat chocolate when they are feeling anxious or depressed, but the only reliable change in mood they experience from their drug of choice is an increase in guilt."

So What Works?

Spending time with friends on the weekends definitely helps:

"A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%."

But you knew that already. What are we missing?

Serendipity of Creativity

What Happens When I Surround Myself With Creative People- By Ryan Smith at Adam Smith's website:

As I’ve mentioned before, your creativity is highly influenced by your environment. The way that you see the world is through the lens of your experiences, both past and present. All that you’ve been through and all that you know shapes your perception of what it takes to be different.

So when it comes to being different, to adding your own uniqueness to the world, it dramatically helps to bring together others who are interested in doing the same thing.There are classic examples of great thinkers, innovators, artists, and other creatives who were only able to do what they are known for because of the company they kept.From the discussions between Plato and Aristotle, to the letters of J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to the joint efforts of the impressive actors Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, collaboration and discourse led to improvement and inspiration.

Some of the biggest movements in history stand out not for individual accomplishments, but for the way that individual innovators drew from each other to create their own individual works that reflected what they as a community faced. Looking at times like the European Renaissance during the 14th through 17th centuries, to the Harlem Renaissance in the early 20th century, to what I would call the “Technology Renaissance”, occurring as we speak, it’s through relationships, the sharing of ideas, and building of bonds that these were possible.

It’s no coincidence that historical and modern-day figures of those eras were all present during the same time period, making waves. It’s actually through the discussions, the arguments, and the observations they made that they were able to build off of each other and create something novel.

If you’re looking to become more creative, work with others who are doing the same. They don’t have to be at your level. They can be just starting out if you’re a veteran, or vice versa. One of the great things about creativity is that it doesn’t really have a hierarchy. You can be just as creative today as you were 10 years ago. There’s always something to learn from others, and always something to gain from trying new things together.

I try to spend time surrounded by creative people whenever I can. It’s an amazing feeling to be with those who are also interested in creating something new and just see their approach to not only the creative process, but their entire lives. I always come away with something new. It could just be the way I think about my ideas or it could be entirely fresh ideas built on the topics we discussed.

If spending time with creative people is not something you regularly do, I would strongly suggest that you make that a priority. Creativity is a multiplier; you will see massive changes in the way you approach your work and the way you approach your life.