This tip is part of an automation series I’m running to showcase 24 of my most useful computer automation tips.How long on average do you spend finding a particular file or a document? What if you don’t remember the location where you placed this file? How long will it take you then?
No one really measures these kinds of things, but you’d be surprised to learn that I’ve personally watched countless people (including my mom) navigate mazes of complex folder hierarchy to get to some file or a document they’ve been working on. Worst yet, some of my very own coworkers still manage to use this old-school way of accessing files. And for the record, I work in a software development house. Imagine my frustration when I ask someone I’m working with to find me a file or an e-mail in their archive and they spend the next 10 minutes or so going through their folder mess, most of the time giving up at the end and asking me: “do you really need it?”.
So I decided enough is enough. Hey everybody, there’s a much much … much faster way to find and access any kind of file in your entire hard drive in a split second, even if you don’t recall the name of the file! Stop for a second and take a wild guess what that is. (Hint: it’s not this stupid dog)
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I realized something a couple of days ago by reading an article that came as a sort of a wake-up call for me: being productive doesn’t necessarily make you an accomplished person!
I will elaborate on that so it makes little more sense to you:
There’s a common phrase I use quite often (especially at work) to describe the thing where you pretend to do something by acting as if you were really doing it, but never actually getting it done. It’s called going through the motions.
It amazes me how often we find ourselves inadvertently going through the motions of achieving things, doing everything we know we’re supposed or told to do, but eventually not reaching the finish line, or reaching it a bit too late.
I wasn’t aware of how guilty I am of this until I started my current job a couple of years ago and started to learn about the environment and work culture. Two years down the road, I’ve realized that what we actually do here at the company is far from trying to get projects done. We obsess very little about end results and a lot more about methodologies, frameworks, work policies, clearing our responsibilities and basically just getting the ball on to the other side.
Make no mistake, we do like to feel accomplished, and we’re actually getting paid to do so. But we’re lousy at that, and you know why? Because we think that by going through the motions of working on various projects, clearing many seemingly important tasks, being all productive and punctual, we’re bound to drive projects to the finish line. The only problem is, we usually don’t. Our projects carry on for years (I’m not exaggerating!). So what is it we’re doing wrong? Or to put it in a more general way:
How does going through the motions of accomplishing things not help us accomplish them?
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I think I'm on a roll here with this whole productivity-related posts. Thanks again to Ben from the Instigator blog for "instigating" this meme.
For a while I've been wanting to share our cool way of sharing stuff at work. In any typical office working environment, you've got a lot of e-mails flying back and forth between desktop workers. The e-mails are mainly forwards of interesting videos, pictures, articles or documents found on the Web or received through personal e-mails. Most of them are non-work related. Hell, when I got back from my vacation last week, there were 215 e-mails sitting in my inbox, of which about 10% only were related to my project. Most of the others were simply links to interesting sites and articles from my friends (honestly, some of them weren't even that interesting).
The Problem
While I appreciate the gesture, sometimes it gets really annoying to mix work- and non-work-related stuff in the same inbox and having to sort them out. Furthermore, getting frequent new-mail notifications can be very distracting and it often breaks my creative flow.
The Solution
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Since we’re in the subject of being productive, I wanted to share with you yet another productivity tip that is especially important for me since, as you can see, I’m a music addict.
You might be asking: what’s productivity got to do with music? The simple answer would be: it takes the hassle out of finding, playing and organizing music, and keeps it a pleasurable experience! Does this sound like something you want to have?
I reckon that lots people are either using the default media player that ships with their system (e.g., Windows Media Player on Windows PC), or are using third party music players either because they have to (read, iTunes) or because they chose to.
When you have the choice of which media player you use to play music on your PC or Mac, it amazes me how many people settle for the default media player, and it really makes me feel sad seeing how many hoops they jump through to try and do the basic things like playing and rating songs, building play lists and managing their music collection. So if you’re that person, then take a couple of minutes today to read and find out about the world’s best media player.
Everybody, I want you to meet Winamp. A brilliant free media player that will rock your world with its super-friendly user interface and ease of use. If I had to describe Winamp in one sentence, it would be:
What Winamp is for music is much like what Firefox is for the web!
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A recently launched group project started by Ben at the Instigator Blog aims to collect the web's most comprehensive list of productivity tips. Everybody can chip in with their secret productivity tips. In the end, we're going to compile one huge list (and hopefully publish it in a downloadable e-book) that anybody would find immensely useful.
What's my secret?
One word: automation.
Let me elaborate on that a bit:
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Have you ever had an "Aha!" moment after reading an insightful article that explains something that you've long experienced but weren't exactly sure whether it was a "real" thing and a known phenomena? I recently had this kind of moment after reading couple of articles about one's "creative flow" at Steve Pavlina weblog and I thought: man this stuff is so dead on, I gotta share it with everybody! But here's the kicker: I'm going to put my own visual illustration twist on this subject and give you a nice, concise and memorable step-by-step guide to relive your creative moments based on Steve's brilliant 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output. Reliving your creative moments isn't just for the fun of it, it will help you get your creative fluid juices running again which will let you tap into your creative potential to create awesome works of art in whatever it is you do professionally.
Some Background
Turns out this phenomena we're talking about, one's creative flow, or simply the "flow", is a long-known one studied and proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Wikipedia's entry on this subject states that the:
Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
So you'll know you're in the flow when..
- you're resistant to anything that tries to interrupt you or put you out of it
- you lose all sense of time
- you forget about your basic needs like hunger or sleep
- you don't feel like what you're doing is work as much as trying to achieve that goal you set out to achieve
Rings any bells? I bet everyone of us has experienced all or some of these symptoms at some point in time. I know I did. At my previous job, I used to diss off people who'd interrupt me during peak working hours for trivial matters. I got a reputation for being cranky or having "the bad day", but really what it was is just me trying to keep the pace of my flow going in order to fix that nasty bug or roll out that long overdue feature. But now I know better, because with these rules, I know exactly how to initiate and maintain a creative and productive working session. So let's explore these rules in details, shall we?
Preparation: What needs to be done beforehand
Because maintaining a steady flow of creative ideas requires complete focus on your goal and ultimate objective, you will need to take care of the following 3 things first:
- Set up your own conductive environment. It depends on your preference whether you want to work within stimulating and active environment or prefer secluded and quite environments (like me). Also you might want to play some music along, you know the kind that gets you going.
- Master the tools of your trade. In my opinion, nothing kills creative flow of ideas like getting stuck on some technical issue related to the tool(s) you're using during your creative session. A basic competency of these tools is a must to minimize disrupting your flow.
- Allocate enough time that you think will take you to finish the task at hand
Define your scope
Some people have a habit of drifting out of their real goal when they follow their natural progression of ideas. You know what I'm talking about: you're trying to do something and it leads to something else seemingly related, and before you know it you're tackling a whole different problem than the one you set out to do. While this is clearly a prospect for innovation, when your creative energy is shattered among several different problems, it quickly wears you out and you end up achieving none, or at least not the one you were meant to achieve. This is why you need to consider the following 3 points which will help you "tunnel" your creative ideas into something productive and worthwhile:
- Define a clear purpose. You're going to need a clear goal to focus on. Decide on what you want to create and by all means avoid vague goals. This is your ultimate objective and achieving it will likely trigger the end of your creative flow and make you feel good about yourself!
- Identify a compelling motive. Why is your goal important to achieve? When you answer this question, you align this goal with your real-world objectives which will give you powerful driving force towards achieving it. You know, most short- or long-term goals, like our new year's resolutions, fail to see the light not because they're impossibly unattainable, but because we failed to associate them upstart with a compelling motive that keeps us going at times of weakness.
- Architect a worthy challenge. There are tasks that are just too darn easy to need your full creative energy. And then again, there are those that are too damn difficult that makes you want to kill yourself. More so than often, we get to choose how challenging our tasks should be. If so, then you need to know that on a scale of of 1-10, where 1 is trivially easy and 10 is impossible, the optimal creative range is 5-9 with a 7-8 being ideal. A wise man once said:
Achieving flow is a fine balance from feeling bored to feeling overwhelmed.
Ready? Go!
That's it! If you have all those elements (preparation + scope) figured out and accounted for, then you're ready to start. It will normally take you 15 minutes to begin to enter the flow state. Within 45-60 minutes, you'll be riding the waves of your creativity! But then again, it all depends on you and the nature of your task. Save and use the following figure to help remind you of the stuff we talked about today. Wish you all the best!
