ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

In episode 102, I introduce the idea of managing up and discussed one leg of it--managing expectations and delegation. Here in this episode, we’ll cover the next two legs of managing up--managing collaborative time wisely and managing your manager. Read/listen more.

I’ve read extensively and have been honing my management skills over the past two decades, and something I’ve found to be universal is this: unless you’re at the top of the organizational chart, everyone must manage up in order to be most productive. Here’s what I mean by everyone manages up.

In the last episode, I spoke about using mind maps as a productivity tool. And, one of my favorite mind mapping tools is the free, Web-based software, Mind42. (Note: it is free and ad-supported.) Mind42 is a comprehensive mind mapping tool that allows you to create as many private and public mind maps as you’d like. Read on.

Mind maps are a method of capturing thoughts and ideas, dating back as early as the 3rd century BCE in Ancient Rome. The mind map is simply a diagram where you have a single, central thought in the center with branches off it in a freeform fashion. You can draw thoughts, use different colors, use symbols, and more, to be as creative with your mind map. This creates a highly visual and flexible tool for productivity. Read more.

In comics, television, film, and now Netflix, there are superheroes who come to save the day when villains attack or bad circumstances befall the vulnerable, the voiceless, and the innocent. Superheroes give us hope, and they empower us with moral fortitude to do the right thing even when the going gets tough. Over the years, I have noticed a trend among some highly productive people that has me understanding a bit more about why they get things done, even in the face of great adversity. And, it all has to do with a bit of surreality and a smidgen of gamification (even if they can’t explain it in such terms). Basically, these highly productive people, when they need to, become the superheroes of their own lives. Here’s how you can too. Read on.

Have you ever entered a competition, or a race, of some kind? Whether it’s a science fair, marathon, triathlon, March Madness, or almost any kind of contest, you know the feeling of competing. You have a period of time that focuses a large portion of your time, attention, and resources in achieving something. These short-term challenges have a way of motivating you to action thanks to your competitive nature, accountability to others, and the potential rewards (including gratification in pushing your own personal boundaries). Read more.

In the last episode we covered the descriptions of time thieves, thugs and terrorists. Now, I’d like to detail how to counteract these time wasting personas so you can get back to your productive life. Read on.

Using your time productively means not only managing your time but also protecting it from others who may not have your most productive interests in mind. You may know who I mean generally, when I speak of categories of people I call time thieves, thugs, and terrorists. They’re not the only ones, but they are the majority categories I see in work and personal interactions. Let me explain to you the specific differences between the three so you can identify them in a moment’s notice. Read more.

While Robert’s Rules of Order may seem outdated, outmoded, prescriptive, and even restrictive, you’d be surprised what a little bit of parliamentary procedure can do to make meetings much more highly productive. In this episode, I continue my discussion on Robert’s Rules of Order and how this can be incorporated into your meetings. In the last episode I gave some productivity principles for effective meetings. Continuing on the Robert’s Rules of Order theme, I want to cover some steps you can take to run more effective meetings in the modern era. Here they are.

While Robert’s Rules of Order may seem outdated, outmoded, prescriptive, and even restrictive, you’d be surprised what a little bit of parliamentary procedure can do to make meetings much more highly productive. The episode is the first part, giving some context with important productivity principles for using parliamentary procedure in meetings. When Brig. Gen. Henry Martyn Robert proposed the use of parliamentary procedure for common meetings back in 1876, he likely didn’t foresee the future of meetings as they happen today. However, while seemingly an anachronism or overly formal to some of you listening/reading (unless you yourself are a parliamentarian), Robert’s parliamentary law was as needed back in the 19th century as it is relevant today for the future of work to be done in more transparent, collaborative, and productive ways. Here’s why and how.

A gamified life. For the productivity and technology geek that I am, it sounds like a pretty cool existence. I’d get to live the superhero lifestyle (minus the superpower-enabling lab experiment gone wrong) I should’ve been living all along. But can I live a truly gamified life? Over the past several years, that is something I have sought to find out, and here’s what I’ve learned.

One of the most unproductive outcomes of the last century’s shift from the Industrial Age to knowledge work in the Digital Age has been the loss of seeing the fruits of our labor firsthand. In the Industrial Age, Americans made things and saw them come to life. There’s an inherent satisfaction in creating products that come off an assembly line. Contrast that to our daily lives in the Knowledge Worker Age, and you may start to notice this missing element in your life. And, I think an example of a cultural response to this lack of tangible outcomes is the Maker Movement. People need extrinsic as well as intrinsic motivations. And, while not a perfect solution, I have found that establishing a tiered reward system for completing mundane tasks, habit development and reaching big goals in a Digital Age society increases productive output by pairing difficult-to-achieve outcomes with physical rewards. Read the full blog and listen to the podcast here.

Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all your worldly possessions in one day? I have. It’s a life-changing event, even for someone not too attached to material things, to find out it’s all been burned away, water-damaged or otherwise destroyed in a catastrophic event. Other than the insurance covering my personal property providing little emotional relief for lost baby pictures and irreplaceable artwork, I had one piece of solace--my home inventory. Before or if calamity strikes, you too should have a home inventory. Read full post and listen.

When the idea of self-actualization developed in the mid-20th century, far before the field of positive psychology was fostered by Dr. Martin Seligman, there was a desire to study and cure illness, mental and physical. Dr. Abraham Maslow tried something different; he studied the role model, the talented and the ingenious. By doing so, he hoped to unlock how we all could do more, better. He developed the hierarchy of needs (which most know by the pyramid with our biological needs at its base and self-actualization at its zenith), and expounded the theory of motivation starting in 1938 and in his 1954 publishing of Motivation and Personality. I’ve always found criticism of Maslow’s pyramid’s order as constructively lacking, but I thought it would be good in this episode I’d like to discuss my thoughts on how you might look at the pyramid through a different lens for greater productivity. Read more.

Humans have five common senses. (We actually have several more senses not commonly discussed.) Your sense of touch is mostly dedicated to your largest organ, your skin, comprising 22 square feet (or, 2 square meters), which holds millions of touch receptors of various sensitivity to map your physical surroundings. Your five fingers on each hand alone contain 3,000 touch receptors of the highest sensitivity on each finger tip. Then, there’s your sense of sight, which is the reigning champion of information collection for the brain, provided for by your eyes’s millions of light-sensitive cells. Next up, we have our hearing from our ears and second-most valuable information-gatherer. Finally we have smell and sound caught by our noses’ six million receptors and our tongues’ 10,000 taste buds. Altogether we have a sensory experience unrivaled by any other animal on the planet because of our remarkably curious neurocognitive abilities. Thanks to this, I think we should pay more attention to how we can be more productive in multisensory ways. I’d like to provide the benefits and some examples in this episode. Read more.