Overview: Personal Productivity

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…

"what people really want is to be treated like individuals and given the tools to help themselves.... Rigour is the cold, hard fact of insight. Magic is the creative talent ... Without great insight, creative may be ill-informed or poorly targeted.... Meanwhile, a data-based body of evidence that isn’t supported by creativity fails to creat…

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…

A good tour of theories of creativity, concluding with results from two recent studies: "With these widely accepted theories of creativity in mind, it is rather jarring to see two brand studies, both of which suggest that creativity is closely linked with inherent neurological and personality traits rather than methodology or practice. The impl…

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

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?

"There are many kinds of intelligence, and many kinds of stupidity. But not all are created equal. The intelligence of a computer is not the stupidity of a human, and vice versa. Which one would you rather be? ... One can be smart in stupid ways... or stupid in smart ways... technology’s making us stupid stupid — not just stupider, but stupider…

"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

"Nice way of bringing creatives in to think (ugh) out of the box - run a science fiction contest: "The Art Of Future Warfare ...is based on the idea that writers, artists and game designers have a lot to offer policy wonks... “Unconventional,imaginative thinking and expression can contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduc…

"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

While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…

"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…

"the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.... in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks..." How our mobile-phone-driven flight away from idletime and interiority damages our psychology, physical…

"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…

Interesting ruminations on the limits of traditional knowledge mgt techniques. "the everyday experiences we have do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions or the Word-documents explaining what we did or what we should have done." - Wh…

"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…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…