Zen Productivity Blog

I recently came across this article through Steve Rubel’s blog about a man who works remotely for IBM and has the title, Social Media Evangelist. Fitting to his title, he promotes the usage of social media technologies such as blogs, wikis and twitter as well as instant messenger and the telephone instead of e-mail. To me, this begged the question of what was so bad about e-mail, and what was so great about these other methods of communication.

My work is almost all customer service oriented and I run a one-man shop, so I’ve never entertained using blogs, wikis and twitter as part of my work because those mediums simply aren’t a good place for confidential client communications. However, I have and do use instant messenger, the telephone and e-mail and I have strong feelings about each one.

Using instant messenger (IM) is quite popular in my area of work – online advertising – because almost everyone who works in it is in front of a computer most of the day. It is seen often as an efficiency because you can shoot over a question to someone else and get a response often pretty quickly and using less time than making a phone call. My problem with it? One – it interrupts what I’m doing and breaks my concentration. After responding to the IM, it takes some time to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing and it is frustrating. Two – it makes communicating with someone too easy. I’ve gotta say that about 50% of the time I receive a question via IM, the sender already has the answer and they are too lazy to go into their archive of files or e-mails to find it. Then, a lot of the times, I respond by telling them where they can find the answer (If I know the answer off the top of my head, I give them the answer in order to be polite). I believe that if it’s harder to contact someone for a question, it forces that person to work harder at finding the answer themselves, which I think is a good thing. My response to these findings is that I simply either keep instant messenger off for most of the day, and definitely off when I’m trying to be productive.

The telephone is a disruptor as well. When it rings, it catches your attention and breaks your concentration. If you let calls go to voicemail, you lose productivity as well. However, phone calls are invaluable when it comes to relationship building or getting on the same page with someone on a topic that requires some back and forth. What I do here is I set my phone to silent, so that I can’t get distracted by the ring. I also have the voicemail feature turned off so that no one can leave me a voicemail. If I want to have a call with someone, I can still just call them. Otherwise we set up a call time using e-mail.

E-mail is really the most efficient form of communication in most circumstances for me. There’s a record of each communication, it doesn’t disrupt you so you can read them when you’re ready to and often people will put a little more thought into constructing them (this isn’t always the case as many people know, but at least more so than instant messenger in my opinion).

I hadn’t started thinking about how food impacts my energy level until relatively recently. When I was growing up, I ate based on cravings (sweets) and what my mother put on the table. When I was in college, I ate based on what I knew was healthy and what would make me perform better as an athlete (think food pyramid). In the few years just after college, I ate things that provided sustenance at a low cost (falafel and Chinese take-out).

It’s not until relatively recently that I realized how much my energy level, and in turn my focus and productivity was being affected by my eating habits. I’m not expert on the matter (I’m not even an expert when it comes to my own body), but here are some observations I’ve made and habits I’ve developed when it comes to eating to maximize productivity:

• Mornings: Occasionally (although more and more seldom) I need a strong cup of coffee in the morning if I hadn’t gotten a good night of rest and I need to be peppy for a meeting. Most days however, I have a cup of black tea (Masala tea to be exact) in the morning, which has less caffeine than coffee. This wakes me up a little bit, but doesn’t make me jumpy the way coffee does. I usually cannot function well without some form of breakfast. I find that something with a little sugar gets me going ( I personally like Peanut Butter Captain Crunch).

• Lunch is a crucial meal for a lot of people because it’s the meal that sustains them for the entire afternoon. I know that when I have a big lunch, and especially if it’s greasy, I just want to take a nap afterwards and my brain doesn’t function for a good hour. What I’ve been doing lately is eating a medium-sized non-greasy lunch and then having a snack in the middle of the afternoon. This has done wonders for my afternoon energy level.

• Evenings: In the evenings, I enjoy the calming yet stimulating effect of a decaf tea and I try to work on projects that are more relaxing rather than the vigorous ones.

• Fluids: If I get dehydrated, that makes me drowsy. If you’ve had caffeine that day, it’s particularly important to follow that up with some fluids because caffeine is a diuretic and it makes you lose water.

• Alcohol: Because I have a low alcohol tolerance, even two or three drinks will make me sluggish the next morning. If I get drunk, I spend half of the following day recovering and the other half in a state of 20-50% productivity, so now I avoid alcohol as much as I can. Like caffeine, alcohol is also a diuretic and makes you lose water.

• Meat: red meat is harder for us to digest and so our bodies expend more energy digesting it than other foods. This redirected energy makes you feel tired.

• Meal frequency: I’ve read that smaller, more frequent meals increase your body’s metabolism. Therefore, I try not to eat huge lunches and dinners, but will eat snacks to tie me over.

My recent diet has had the effect of reducing lethargic periods and all but eradicating desires to take naps. Now when I eat, I often think about how a particular meal/drink will affect my energy level and state of mind – will it make me tired? Calm? When I’m lethargic, I try to think about what I can do to snap out of it – sometimes a piece of fruit or a glass of water (or even some fresh air) does the trick.

I read “The Art of Happiness,” the collaboration between the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist, Howard Cutler a while back and it struck me as an indispensable guide to living a happier and more meaningful life. I found the lessons to really resonate with me and as I was reading it, I was thinking about how much I would benefit from putting these philosophies and practices to work. However, after I was done reading it, I had all these new ideas in my head as to how I could change my state of mind and train myself to be happier, but they just remained ideas and they weren’t put to work to fulfill their potential.

There is nothing that I would change about this book, but the second time I read it, I decided to glean from each chapter, the ideas that I thought were most important to my personal growth and write them down so that I could easily review them whenever I wanted to. Taking the GTD (Getting Things Done) approach, I wanted to take this book of ideas and make it more actionable to me.

The following is the list I came up with. Please note, however, that these notes came out of the points which I thought would be beneficial to me and I felt I needed to work on. As such, there are certain lessons which would undoubtedly be helpful to other people but which I didn’t take note of because I felt that I didn’t need help in that area. An example is the sections on self-worth; I don’t feel like arrogance or poor self esteem is something that I suffer from, so I didn’t jot it down. Furthermore, all of the following ideas are extremely simplified from the way that they’re presented in the book and in some cases the note I took serves the main purpose of reminding me of the larger lesson. In such cases, these notes may seem a little cryptic.

I’m not sure if people will find my posting of this to be beneficial, but I figured that at least it would be a good experiment and perhaps people can think of this as a springboard for their own summaries. For those who haven’t read the book, it will probably be difficult to grasp the lessons just from this outline.

Part 1 – The purpose of life

Chapter 1 – The right to happiness

• Happiness is the purpose of life
• People have the right to be happy

Chapter 2 – The sources of happiness

• External events affect short-term happiness, but then happiness levels return to a baseline
• Feelings of happiness are generally how we perceive our situation; how satisfied we are with what we have
• Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare
• Use inner contentment to fight greed
• Pleasure (i.e. sex), which may provide a temporary sense of happiness is not sustainable

Chapter 3 – Training the mind for happiness

• Once basic human needs are met, no other worldly items are needed to achieve complete happiness
• Negative emotions and behaviors are harmful, whereas positive ones are helpful in achieving happiness
• Motivate yourself for each day and try to assess progress each day before going to bed
• The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart

Chapter 4 – Reclaiming our innate state of happiness

• All people are naturally compassionate

Part 2 – Human warmth and compassion

Chapter 5 – A new model for intimacy

• Intimacy and reliance on other people is important

Chapter 6 – Deepening our connection to others

• Empathizing with people’s suffering is a good exercise
• When meeting someone new, think of what you have in common

Chapter 7 – The value and benefits of compassion

Part 3 – Transforming suffering

Chapter 8 – Facing suffering

• No one is without suffering – it is natural and normal
• Face problems head on – don’t push them aside
• One can be prepared by familiarizing oneself with the types of suffering that can occur to people

Chapter 9 – Self created suffering

• In large part, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation. Dwelling on a painful event, guilt or regret magnifies the suffering
• Don’t personalize pain – it happens to everyone
• Accept the changes that are inevitable in life (i.e. people get older and changes are associated with that)

Chapter 10 – Shifting perspective

• There is a tendency of seeing someone who has wronged you as 100% bad. Try to think of the positive qualities of that person
• Hatred can be the biggest stumbling block to developing compassion and happiness
• Enemies can be great teachers – they can serve as practice for developing patience and tolerance

Chapter 11 – Finding meaning in pain and suffering

• Finding meaning in suffering helps us cope. Example: you can take the stance that your suffering can be used to help other people who are suffering from the same thing

Part 4 – Overcoming obstacles

Chapter 12 – Bringing about change

• Remind yourself of the destructive effects of negative behavior
• Challenge yourself to combat anger and hatred – there is an exercise for this
• Patience and tolerance are antidotes to anger and hatred
• During depression, collect evidence that contradicts the negative emotions (i.e. I’m not a failure because I’ve done XYZ and that makes me not a failure)

Chapter 13 – Dealing with anger and hatred

• Anger and hatred are our biggest enemies
• When anger and hatred come about, analyze the cause of them and combat them with cultivation of patience and tolerance

Chapter 14 – Dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem

• Cognitive intervention – this is done the same way as with anger and hatred: replace anxiety causing thoughts with well-reasoned positive thoughts and attitudes
• If there is no solution to a given problem, there is no sense in worrying about it
• The closer one gets to being motivated by altruism, the more fearless one becomes in the face of even extremely anxiety-provoking circumstances

Additionally, here are the exercises that the Dalai Lama provides us with:

• Meditation on the purpose of life
• Meditation on compassion
• The practice of Tong-Len
• Meditation on Anger: Exercise 1
• Meditation on Anger: Exercise 2
• Meditation on the nature of the mind

I read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done about one year ago, and being generally enthusiastic about improving my productivity while maintaining a relatively stress-free existence, the methods in GTD were a revelation to me. I was particularly excited about the prospect of not having to continually remember to-do items, but rather, have a system to remind me when the appropriate time came to do them. I implemented the methods laid out in the book with one modification - instead of using 43 folders to lay out the next 1 year of my life, I used text files in a folder on my computer desktop at first, and then switched to task managing website – rememberthemilk.com.

Once implemented, I immediately felt a load off of my shoulders. I felt like my life was better organized, I was more productive and that I was on my way to a better and brighter future. For a while, I felt like I had completely mastered the art of productivity and that I couldn’t possibly more so. However, after a little while, I felt a bit of heaviness come over me when I would open the to-do list and the tickler file each morning. For those who are unfamiliar with the tickler file, it is a list or a folder of stuff that you want to accomplish each day for the next 30 days. According to GTD, you should also have a tickler file for each month for the next 12 months.

Looking at the to-do list and tickler file, which was another sort of to-do list each morning was cumbersome to me because they felt like additional responsibilities – both looking at them as well as carrying out the items contained within them. It was like an additional job or a to-do list that would never end. I wouldn’t always finish what was in the tickler file for each day, and when that would happen, I would feel like I had failed. I compare it to being on a vacation but having list of things you want to see or do and feeling like you have to do it. I was forcing myself to carry out the items on the list whether I felt like doing them or not, and whether I was feeling creative that day or not. How about if the weather was nice, and I felt the urge to just take the day off and go sailing? Needless to say, I felt tied to my desk all the time, and going sailing was associated with a feeling of guilt - this at a time when I was trying to free myself from a 9-5 schedule.

I think part of the reason why GTD doesn’t work great for me is that my work ethic and the level of creativity I’m feeling fluctuates on a daily basis. In college, when I would maintain erratic hours, I recall that there were days when I was so lethargic that I would sit in front of the TV for an entire day with my roommates, but there were also times when I felt so motivated that I would sit in a study room with my classmate Bob for 8 hours at a time reading and learning about neuroscience. As I write this blog post, I’m sitting in Tea Spot, a café in the Village in New York City, but this type of post isn’t one that I could just sit down and write at will. As a matter of fact, the motivation to write this came just about 45 minutes ago when I was surfing 43folders.com.

The other day, while watching a TV show about powder skiing in Canada’s British Columbia province, I myself felt the urge to do some research and plan just such an excursion, so I spent the next 2 hours doing research on various ski areas and tours in British Columbia. It was 2 hours spent being very productive in my opinion – I got the information I wanted and I was having fun. Now, what would have happened if I were following the GTD protocol? I would’ve created “Ski in Canada” as a project, then place “Research skiing in Canada” on my to-do list. This would mean that I wouldn’t get to do this research until working through all the to-do items above it. Once the time came around to doing it, however, it would probably feel like a chore rather than the pleasure that it actually was.

The GTD method takes spontaneity and instant gratification out of work and morphs it into lists and order. However, I think that these are valuable elements to life whether you’re working or not.

To me, whenever something is done and completed impulsively, it feels like a pleasure whereas if it’s on a list, it feels like a chore. Furthermore, I’m the most productive when I act on some sort of impulse, get lost in it, and am fully engaged. I’ve recently re-learned to act spontaneously and it has worked wonders for my productivity level. I still make sure not to keep to-do items stored in my head, but I also maintain no sort of timeline associated with getting certain things done.

Edit (Jan 10, 2007) – The comments to this post made me think that my understanding of GTD wasn’t the same as some other people’s and prompted me to re-read it keeping in mind many of the comments. Here is where I think I fell short:

• The first time I read GTD, the concept of context-separated lists didn’t really resonate with me I think because none of the examples given really pertained to me. Due to my line of work, I’m usually at home and in front of the computer and contexts such as @computer, @home, @work, @phone don’t really apply to me. One of the commenters pointed out that contextual lists can be based on energy level and frame of mind as well and this was a lot more applicable to me. I now have such contextual lists as work:next, research:fun, research:work and web development:next.
• For some reason, I didn’t understand that the lists are for when you want to be productive as opposed to something that has to always be in your hand and you are constantly working off of it and checking off things as you accomplish them.

Sometimes, I will read something and take it perhaps too literally, and I think that might have been what happened here. In any case, thank you all for the comments.

I’ve been using Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for about 1 year now and have tried out 3 different services and I’m the happiest with my current one. I’ve used Vonage and Gizmo Project and had issues with both of them. Then I started using Skype and found the connection to be very clear and the price to be right (free for domestic calls to U.S. phone numbers until 2007, at which point I think it goes up to 1 cent per call).
The problem I had, however, was that I was using a USB headset, which is fine if all you want to do is make a couple of outgoing calls per day. However, if you make many calls in a given day, and you have people calling you, it’s terribly inconvenient because you have to put the headset over your head each time you make or answer a call.

Then, I recently learned that I could get a device like the one above - a Linksys CIT200 - that would connect to my computer and allow me to make calls using Skype but would feel like you’re using a landline. The device you see above is cordless and it comes with a base station which connects to your computer’s USB port. When someone calls you, the phone rings, and you lift it off the cradle to answer it. Making calls is almost like a reguar phone - you just have to dial + and 1 before the area code and then press the button with the green phone on it.

Worth noting is that I paid Skype $12 to get a phone number for 3 months. However, I’m saving a bundle over what I would be paying for an actual land line. If you’re interested in the phone that I bought, here’s a link to the Newegg listing.

Yeah, I really think that they are. Maybe it’s because I have mildly OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies so if there is a clock in front of me, I’ll check it incessantly.

About a year ago, someone told me that they got rid of the clock from their computer desktop, and relied solely on alerts to keep them on top of things. I tried it, and I think my productivity must have risen 15% as a result. Clocks are a distraction. You don’t need to know that it’s 12:30 and that it’s time to go to lunch or that you have only 15min of time remaining for you to work on an analysis before you have a meeting. All you need is to be alerted when you have to switch gears.

A natural question is whether or not you might want to know that you have only 30min to work on something, so that you can work faster. My response is that if you work at a pace that is different from what your regular speed is, you are prone to errors and outputting something that is less than your usual quality. You shouldn’t rush work. It leads to stress. If someone is asking you to move quickly, then push back or ignore them. If it takes you 1 hour to do something, don’t agree to do it in 45min. The result is more often bad than good.

The question arises as to how to set up alerts. I do mine in Microsoft Outlook, since I always have it open for work purposes. If I have a meeting at a certain time, it’s always in the calendar, but also if I want to go to lunch at a certain time, I’ll put it in there too. That way, I don’t have to think about lunch until I’m actually alerted. If you’re unfamiliar with Outlook, the program will just pop up a window and make a sound when your appointment time comes up. An important point to note is that if you have meetings on your calendar, and want to set alerts for those, you shouldn’t set the reminder to pop up 15 min before the meeting time unless you actually intend of getting up from your desk 15 min before the meeting. I generally set the reminder to pop up either right when the meeting is supposed to begin or 5 min before depending on how far the meeting is from my desk.

Just like I currently say in my intro, I like to be efficient and I feel that although blogging best practices stipulate that you post often, in doing so, you may be performing a disservice to your readers - that is, making them waste their time re-checking your site or reading multiple posts when they could just read one and get the same thing out of it.

In the advertising industry, where I work, there is a lot of e-mailing. Tons of it. In lieu of conference calls and meetings, people e-mail. However, there is such a thing as e-mailing too much. Many people I work with will shoot off an e-mail or respond to one at the drop of a hat and without thinking it through. They do this because it’s easy. Just open a “compose” window, type out your thought, and press “send”. This is a very reactionary and inefficient most particularly to the people who are receiving your messages. Sometimes people will type out an e-mail, and then follow it up with 1 or 2 additional e-mails containing other thoughts on the same subject. Then on the receiving end, people have to open and read each one. If you have someone who is equally reactionary on the receiving end, you can easily get into a rapid-fire back-and-forth. Unfortunately, there are all too often people CCed on these e-mails who then have to open and read each e-mail in order to follow the conversation.

I’m not saying that one should stop e-mailing. I myself send out about 50 e-mails per day. However, efficiencies can be gained by simply being more careful and thoughtful when e-mailing. Limiting the people you CC (to only those who are directly involved) also helps, although this is at your own discretion as CCing is also seen as covering your back. I tend to be very minimal when it comes to CCing, and it has never gotten me into trouble.

Here’s a good article from 43Folders on e-mail and voicemail efficiency.

This week, I experienced stress caused by other people who you work with, but don’t keep their end of the bargain. One is related to work and the other is for a sailboat share, which I am a part of.

At my day job, I’m currently responsible for the launch of a particular project. There are a number of people who have responsibilities towards this, both internally and externally. However, this job is fairly new to me, and I found that people haven’t been very responsive, especially since the person this comes down on in the event that the launch gets delayed, is me. I would have to follow up with people numerous times, and the pace at which things are moving is generally slow.

I manage a sailboat share so that several of us can make use of my sailboat and share the expenses to make it less expensive for all of us to sail. I’m the only one in the group with any responsibilities (I know, I probably should’ve handed some off), and although the sailing season officially starts in May, the boat yard where I have been keeping the boat has been very slow, and the boat has finally gotten to a useable place one or two days ago. Meanwhile, the other people in the share want to go sailing, and have probably been wondering what’s been going on, even though to this point they’ve been patient.

These types of external stressors are hard to manage, especially if they’re sporadic. I’m not sure if there is a great way to prepare for them, but it goes to show how important it is to work with people you enjoy working with and trust.

I believe that workplace unhappiness is generally caused by one of two things: anger and stress. When I find myself to be unhappy at work, I try to decipher whether it’s due to anger or stress.

Stress happens because you feel overwhelmed. It’s a matter of managing your projects and workload. Everyone has their own way of working, and I have a lot of processes in place to keep me organized. I’ll get into these at length later. Basically, the more on top of things you are, the less stressed out you�ll be, and there are a bunch of ways of ensuring that you�re on top of it.

Anger results when people you work with do things that you think are irrational, and which have an impact on you. You might think, how can you not get angry when someone asks you to do something where it would be simpler if they did it themselves, or when someone places the blame for an error on you when they were the ones who made the mistake. Well, these sorts of things are inevitable when you work in the corporate world, so should you let it anger you every time it happens? The answer is no. Why let these occurrences make you unhappy? Is the day-to-day of your job so important to you that it should affect your state of happiness?

I think that it’s immensely important to learn to manage these two culprits. Otherwise, you’re bound to spend at least a portion of the time you’re at work in discontent. Over the next month or so, I will try to focus mostly on being organized and as a result, being less stressed, or perhaps even being devoid of stress altogether while at work.

So many people are unhappy because of their job. Either their job makes their entire life miserable, or they’re just unhappy while they’re at work. They may find their job to be boring, work with people they don’t get along with, feel underpaid or underappreciated; they may feel that they aren’t given enough responsibility, or don’t find their line of work to be meaningful to them.

Any of these things can make someone unhappy at their job, and if you spend half of your awake hours either at work or commuting, this unhappiness can easily carry over to your personal life. However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. As a matter of fact, I think that people should strive for workplace happiness, and not give up in this pursuit. There are some people who are able to just ‘leave work at work’ and not carry any of their workplace stress with them when they leave. However, I think that since it’s possible to achieve happiness at work, we should aim for that.

I think that the key is in how you approach work. It’s different for each person, and different things motivate each person.

Here’s a list of things that have irked me in the past and they still bother me sometimes when it happens

• Someone who isn’t my boss trying to delegate their work to me (i.e. colleagues who are at the same level as me, but think that they’re entitled to have me ‘help them’ because they’re ‘busy’)
• Getting blamed for something which isn’t my fault. I led a meeting with clients once, and my boss’ boss didn’t think it went well. I personally thought that it could’ve gone better, but the results were the same. What bothered me is that although I led the meeting, my boss should be partially responsible for work that I do. He didn’t assume any responsibility.
• Creation of unnecessary work. I’ve worked with some people who had the authority to mandate firedrills that clearly would achieve nothing and just create more work for the rest of us.
• Lack of common courtesy
• When someone asks me to do something, when it would take the same amount of time for them to do it themselves as it does to explain what needs to be done. I currently work with someone who does that, and it pisses me off to no end.
• People who are reactionary and don’t think things through before acting on them. I’ve come to accept that this is more or less the norm.