Overview: Personal Productivity

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…

Lessmeeting looks like a cool tool. Even if you don't try it: "Below is our best practices guide to writing meeting agendas, capturing meeting minutes and following up on action items:"

"The worst part about meetings? Usually, they lead to more meetings." A lot to like here. I have 3 meetings with upper mgt per month, and a short Skypescrum with my colleagues every morning. The rest of the time I work from home. Sounds like many have a worse time: "weekly meetings ... often have no justification for existing and usually can be …

Enjoying this excellent guide to ideation by Krysta Curtis. Something for the weekend: admit it, you won't have time for this much fun during the week: - Paint-by-Idea — Medium

"... 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…

Fascinating account of a leading scientist's decades-long investigation into creative genius and mental illness. creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... creative people have shown stronger activations in their association cortices ... This pattern h…

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? - …

"In the end, meetings turn out to be a waste of time — just people sitting around, chatting, wasting hours of precious time (even preparing for it). Approximately 15 percent of your time working in any company is spent in meetings. That number is more than doubled for middle managers, while executives spend 50% of their time stuck in meetings."

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

No fremium model - minimum price $19/m - but it looks worth it: "Meshfire turns Twitter into a dashboard of tasks... The tasks can be to reply to different tweets, or to block someone or follow someone. Every twitter account is a mission inside Meshfire, and every mission has a goal. You define the mission ... a virtual assistant inside Meshfire…

Excellent intro to @buffer team's toolkit. Many I'll definitely check out, particularly Sqwiggle "... a video chat tool that helps you stay in touch with your team when you're working remotely. Every few seconds, Sqwiggle takes a screenshot of you so your colleagues can see that you're around, and just by clicking on another person you can join a …

At first glance, Overtask uses Chrome’s new tab page into a project or task management tool, depending on how granular you want to go. But in reality its approach makes it an excellent productivity enhancement:each task is managed via a tab, which stores all sites and pages associated  with that taskopening a task opens all the related sites for t…

Latest post on my shiny new LinkedIn blog. Read it, and resolve to stand out of the herd ;)

A long, excellent read, with practical tips and tools. More people should read this! "A badly managed meeting can suck away time, energy and money without being productive for anyone. But it is avoidable: Here's what you should and shouldn't do when meeting in a group at work, whether you are leading the meeting or not." - How to Have a Meeting …

A timely post, for me: "... losing one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. You can get fired for coming to work drunk, but it is deemed acceptable to pull an all-nighter." - 7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science — Business & Mar…

Some good tools to check out "Some of the exciting new tools for productivity that you can use today include: Quip, Evernote, Box and Box Notes, Dropbox, Slack, Hackpad, Asana, Pixxa Perspective, Haiku Deck, and more below. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new tools are showing up all the time. Some tools take familiar paradigms and piv…

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…

"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!

"Since ancient times people have held the notion that there's something mysterious, unpredictable, and even divine about where good ideas come from. But according to David Burkus, assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, today researchers are studying the heck out of creativity and much of what we think we know about the topic…

With BlogActiv feeling a bit creaky, I spent the summer taking a hard look at Google+ and Tumblr, and integrated my GTD (Getting Things Done) system with my online presence.

"Trello's a fantastic free app which is fun to use, and makes planning content workflows a snap. The video outlines a workflow, and you can download the Trello board shown"

An update to a post first published in 2013, as I created a first version of MyHub on Tumblr.