The Other Dave Cameron

Tag: productivity

  • Goals Let You Know If You’re Succeeding

    Goals Let You Know If You’re Succeeding

    Even though Summer is fading, I’m sticking to my #Constructive Summer reading goals. Sometimes projects take longer than you expect, but I’m still learning a lot and that’s what matters.

    At this point I’m still working my way through Carson Tate’s Work Simply and here’s what I’ve learned so far: cultivating awareness of what distracts our attention is the only way to avoiding distraction and maintain focus; our ability to remain focused on tasks until they’re completed is the key to making the most of our finite resources of time and attention.

    I’m thinking of it like exercising at the gym: cultivating awareness is your strength training, building a set of mental and emotional muscles strong enough to keep the force of distractions at bay; focused attention is your cardio workout, building endurance to keep moving forward at a comfortable pace with enough reserve on hand to sprint when we need to. Our muscles, heart, and lungs all work together, and the stronger they are, the more we can do.

    So I’ve taken a look at my distractions, and I’ve begun to improve my ability to focus attention on the tasks at hand. But these are just the foundations to being more productive with our time, because we can have all the control over our attention and focus we want, but if we’re not putting that to a purposeful end, how do we know if we’re succeeding?

    There is no measure of success without goals.

    In general terms, we think of productivity as the number of tasks completed divided by the amount of time it took to complete them – widgets per hour, stitches per minute, etc. The higher the rate, the more productive we are. If we want to increase our widget productivity, we can set a goal that is a higher number than what we have and make adjustments until our output matches that goal.

    But what if you’re not making widgets, but designing websites? What if you’re an editor or producer or photographer or accountant? What if you’re not making anything directly, but managing a whole team of makers? What you have now is project-based work, where the driving factor isn’t quantity but quality, and a deadline for when it should be done.

    Here’s where goal setting becomes more complex and stressful for the modern “information worker” because we don’t have easily quantifiable quotas to meet (10 widgets per hour) but just a pile of tasks and projects that we need to complete by a certain time. In fact, that’s not even just how we work, but how we live, because the projects and tasks of our lives at home are structured pretty much the same way: there are always ongoing projects, chores, and needs of others to meet at home just as there are at work.

    This is why we’re stressed out about getting stuff done. And this is where the latest lesson I gained from Work Simply gives me hope:

    You can’t create an effective plan for getting things done until you know the goals you’re trying to accomplish, and the goals you set should be goals you know you can actually achieve.

    In the book, Carson Tate calls these READY goals, because they should follow five basic criteria if you’re going to actually achieve them: they should be Realistic, Exciting, Action-oriented, Directive, and Yours. In other words, these are things you know you can achieve over time, that you’ll be engaged in, that can be broken into tasks, that keep steering you where you want to go, and that you have a personal stake in. These aren’t someone else’s goals for you, and they aren’t vague, unrealistic fantasies.

    Defining these goals — actually writing them out on paper — is the first step to understanding the why behind how we’re spending our attention each day. It brings intentionality to our actions, and motivates us more strongly than merely wanting to get stuff done just so it’s done.

    Tate recommends setting READY goals for an entire year at a time, right on New Year’s Day if you can. Her four primary categories for goal setting are:

    • Professional (career goals, team goals, improving skills)
    • Personal (strengthening relationships)
    • Health (improving how I feel, exercise, eat, and rest)
    • Spiritual (nurturing inner spiritual needs and values)

    Once you have READY goals within each category, your priorities become clear. And that is when you can get to the hands-on work of investing time, building habits and scheduling your days to reach these goals.

    That’s the next big step I’ve hit as I keep making my way through this book, and the part that I probably need the most. At the rate I’m going, it looks like that will be my big goal for September.

    What’s yours?

  • “Attention Must Be Paid”

    As I have continued to pursue my Summer School reading of Work Simply over the past few weeks, three things have become very clear:

    1. This book is full of simple, practical tips and exercises rather than just advice and theory, which is just what I was looking for. But that also means it’s not a book that can be read through quickly if one is to make the most of it.
    2. Finding time during the workweek to prioritize self-development “homework” amidst all my other daily tasks has not been as easy as I thought it would be.
    3. Finding time to follow-up on that reading and put my thoughts and feelings about it into a blog post feels almost impossible.

    I had been hoping to get through about 20 pages a day in this book, which is a pretty modest goal; I often read as much as 50 pages a day for a book I’m really into. But I didn’t take into account the difference between merely reading a book vs. studying a book. The whole point of this project is to be learning and improving, taking notes from the text and applying ideas, which actually makes Work Simply a great place to start.

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  • Making Ear Contact

    I’ve been thinking a lot about time and attention lately. They are two of the most valuable personal resources we have, and finding the best way to combine them into daily productive outcomes affects a lot of what I find myself writing about here.

    It’s hard to think about attention without thinking of its biggest enemy: distraction. What distracts us from being attentive most? Is it the screens in front of us? Is it the little thoughts that keep popping up in our minds or buzzing notifications on our phones?

    (I’m sorry, can you repeat the question? I wasn’t listening.)

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  • Know When to Doldrum

    Let’s face it: February is exhausting. Every year I seem to hear people joking that this is the shortest month because if it was any longer we’d go crazy. In fact, people seem to have felt that way about February for almost as long as the month has existed.

    Snow Mountain Right now the town where I live and work is smothered in piles of snow that keep growing and won’t melt away. Woveling snow off my driveway is my new part-time job. Our cars are coated with ice and snow, their climate controls left constantly turned to high heat and defrost; black, crusty chunks of road spray freeze into wedges in the wheelwells that we kick off into parking lots and driveways, only to see them reappear like a snow fungus with each drive we take.

    All day and night, an endless mass of freezing air and wind sits upon us like an invisible, empty sea. We don’t walk as much as scurry from building to building, inhaling deeply to brace ourselves before we exit, then plunging into it with our armor of hats and scarves and gloves and puffy coats. Each arrival back in the warmth of a destination is announced with a short dance of stomping boots and exhaled huffs of relief.

    By mid-February, a day above 35F degrees is a joy. You feel confined by the elements, your movements limited, and efforts doubled. You may have a primal urge to stay indoors and burrow deep into a soft nest, envious of all the small mammals you sense curled into a state of torpor or hibernation somewhere in the dark. Everything seems to slow down, stagnate, as if Mother Nature has hit the pause button at the worst time, leaving us in a snowy limbo until she decides to let the seasons advance once more and set us free.

    Welcome to The Doldrums.

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  • How a Hoarder Handles 208 Hours of Reading in One Day

    My name is Dave and I am a hoarder. Not the “piles-of-garbage-in-the-living-room” kind of hoarder but a virtual one. I have an invisible mountain of magazine articles, blog posts, and other random bits of information in a stack that stretches on and on for what feels like miles, with little to no organization or purpose other than at some point I thought I needed to read it or otherwise act on it. And even though these are not physical piles that I am walking past and ignoring, they have grown large enough that I can feel them there, waiting for me to do something about them.

    The primary enablers for this bad habit have been my favorite “save for later” web clipper apps, Pocket and Instapaper. I’ve been using them for many years without any cleanup, and between just those two apps I have enough unread articles saved that I could read for 8 days straight and still not be finished. Many of those articles I no longer even remember why I saved them. And yet I still haven’t done anything about it because it’s “virtual” clutter.

    But tomorrow is the start of a brand new year, and I’m determined that I am going to start 2015 with as much of a clean slate as possible, so it’s time for drastic actions.

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  • The Truly Productive Gift Guide

    This post started out very differently, as yet another list of recommended “gifts for productive people” or something along those lines. I spent a couple hours collecting my list over the past week, finding images to embed and establishing details about each item and why it was on the list and blah blah blah.

    It was looking really good, like a lot of other similar lists I’d been seeing. Which is when I realized that nobody needed that blog post. Not even me.

    All I was doing was adding to the noise, creating another listicle that didn’t really say anything, and I wasn’t really learning anything by writing it either. So instead, I’m happy to present a “gift guide” that not only encourages productivity but is in itself productive because there’s only one suggested gift on it.

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