By generating enough internal force with our habits, we can push back against the external pressures that threaten to crush us. Here are a few to get started with ... - Survive the Hard Things with Habits — Better Humans — Medium

In this edition I highlight only one post, and mention a few others. Topics: truth, authenticity & trust, but also productivity and digital transformation.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the time. I couldn’t find the attention. My mind fills up with a few key projects and that’s it. I’m absorbed by those. That’s where my attention is. - The difference between time and attention – Signal v. Noise

Long periods of uninterrupted time is needed to properly process new information... Our devices, always being online, constantly interrupt these sessions... Our devices are a collection of multinational companies competing for our attention... They purposefully design their applications to distract you for their goal of selling more ads. - O…

social media platforms are ... the main avenue through which we make comparisons with our peers, acquaintances, celebrities ... those comparisons are often what we base our life-expectations on, these platforms can lead to anxiety about our place in the world... Most of the content on social media wasn’t improving my life — in fact, by taking u…

The inexhaustible flood of information flowing into your PC, phone and brain is not going away... and neither are your ToDos... A recent article in HBR presents two techniques to cope — either undertake behavioural change or use technology... But why not use technology to create space for behavioural change?

"If organizations want to enable workers to bring not only their hands but also their heads to work, then jobs need to be redesigned to give people ownership of (1) how they perform tasks, (2) their identity, and (3) their time.... managers complain that their employees don’t think for themselves. Yet ... punish their subordinates for failing …

In case you didn't already know, consecutively sitting for long hours of the day can do damage to your body.... use these easy tricks to remind you to get up off your rear end - 7 ways to get off your ass and stand more

@We start the day with the best intentions... But at the hand of ineffective habits, we inadvertently leave our productivity behind... Daily routines mold our intentions into successes or failures more than we realize... Our morning habits are the most powerful opportunities to jumpstart a change.@ - Morning Habits That Are Killing Your Dail…

How many meetings did you attend last week that lacked a specific agenda, started late, and then ended late? How often did you attend a meeting without knowing why you were even there? How many meetings actually resulted in a new idea or an actionable decision? - 3 Steps Toward More Efficient And Valuable Meetings | Fast Company | Business + In…

Control the digital overload rather than letting it control you. But how, exactly, does one do that? We asked two experts: Larry Rosen, a psychologist, and Alexandra Samuel, a technologist. We suspected that their disparate backgrounds would lead them to offer dramatically different advice, and we were right. - Conquering Digital Distraction - …

Meetings can be the biggest waste of time. Combat that perception by encouraging brainstorming, removing chairs, and yes—offering treats. - 5 Ways To Make Your Staff Meetings More Engaging | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

"a great deal of recent research suggests that interpersonal intelligence may be as important in business ... social sensitivity, or being attuned to other’s moods, feelings, and psychological makeup." - How to make groups more productive? Add women. — Work Futures — Medium

"If you would like to make more effective use of your time, maintain your energy levels throughout the day, and achieve your goals faster — read on." - The Complete Guide to Productivity

"many of us tend to sabotage creativity more than we cultivate it. Here are some of the self-sabotaging things you’re probably doing every day. "

"Margin is the space between our load and our limits ... something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations ... the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating." Not just for designers. A seriously good piece for all interested in boosting their personal productivity, with a whole bunch…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…

Of them all, I particularly like the look of Write Or Die, Wridea & StayFocused, which possibly says more about me than my 5 latest blog posts combined: "These tools will not only provide you with a way to write down your ideas whenever they hit you, but will also enable you to organize your time better and start writing more content through a re…

"If you spend a lot of your everyday moments and time in the future or the past or you have difficulty focusing and you feel this may have a negative effect on your life then maybe you want to learn to live more in the present moment. Here’s what works for me to do that. Just a few simple things that I use in my normal day." Particularly relevan…

"multitasking... is a powerful and diabolical illusion... When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost... "multitasking... can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking ... creates a dopamine-addiction feedb…

"If your schedule is filled with Time Debts, then it doesn't matter how hard you work. Your choices will constantly put you in a productivity hole. ... Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you sen…

Last year I decided to get Information Overload under control, setting up a GTD system with a DoIt-driven morning routine and Pocket, Diigo and IFTTT to queue, store and share useful stuff. I was all set. For what, I wasn't sure. But I was sure as hell organised. And then, a couple of days ago, an article on Aeon - What good is information? -…

"the brain is a muscle that, like every muscle, tires from repeated stress. ... more hours doesn't mean better work. Rather, like a runner starting to flag after a few miles, our ability to perform tasks has diminishing returns over time. We need breaks strategically served between our work sessions. So what's the perfect length for a break? Seve…

"... outside communications such as Gchatting and texting while you work don't count as multitasking. Every time e-mail comes in, every time a text messages goes in, a little time goes ... People think they can work and be productive in the face of all those interruptions. This work suggests that they can’t.”" - Interruptions at Work Make You Way…

"While you may spend just a minute or two scrolling through cute cat photos, it'll take much more time for you to truly recover from that distraction ... workers are interrupted -- or self-interrupt -- about once every three minutes, and it takes them about 23 additional minutes to get back on track.... here are some ways to take charge of the ti…

Excellent article. Would implement it all if I wasn't so busy ;) "How many hours we work every day is barely important any more in today’s creative economy. Instead, “Manage your energy, not your time ... we have 4 different types of energies to manage every day: - physical energy – how healthy are you? - emotional energy – how happy are you? - …

Part 2 of my second weekly roundup, where the overriding theme is innovation.

Good advice for me here. "once you've established that heroism is required to hit deadlines ... work will expand to fill the available space ... more and more weekends and late nights are required to meet the expectations you've set yourself on what you and your team can achieve... by doing lots of out-of-hours work you're over-estimating …

"Things that may distract us without actually capturing our conscious attention (for instance, a mobile phone left on the desk close to the keyboard, secretly "reminding" us that a new text or a new call may just be about to arrive), can have a detrimental effect on performance" - Work Smarter: Close Those Damn Tabs! -- Science of Us