One of my favorite authors and podcasters, Greg McKeown, talks about how he visualizes the way people budget their time and energy. He sees the areas that we budget time and energy to as concentric circles. In the middle, the bullseye circle is self. The next ring around the bullseye is important relationships: family and close friends. The outermost ring is other. Greg observes that many people, when budgeting their time and energy, start from the outside of the concentric circles and move in. But what if we reverse the direction and start at the inside and move our way out?

I have a very realistic and manageable to do list every day. On days when I overestimate the amount of time my tasks will take or if a meeting gets canceled or if it’s just one of those days when my mind is on fire and I’m completely in flow, I’ll work ahead on tasks that I don’t have planned until future days.

If you have taken our training, you may be witnessing the guilt of having and maintaining balance on a team or in an office where frantic show and speed working long hours is the norm.

When I was in my early years of high school, I was still figuring out my time management habits. In Mondovi, Wisconsin, where I grew up, there was a TV show called TV-13 Outdoors that came on later in the evening on Sunday nights. And every time I heard that show’s theme song, I knew that my procrastination period for that weekend was over, and I had to do start my homework then or I wouldn’t get it done.

I'm listening to an interview with one of my favorite comedians (JP Sears). For those of you who don't know him, he's got this huge red mane of hair which he often likes to make the subject of his content. In this bit, he was playing the role of the lion (with his hair all up and crazy looking like a lion's mane). With his razor sharp wit, he discussed how lions need to wake up other lions with their influence.

Were you aware that in applications and websites like YouTube, Spotify, and Audible (heck, even Netflix sometimes), you can adjust the playback speed of the content? You have the choice to listen to YouTube videos, podcasts, audio books, and shows at their normal speed or 2, 3, or even 3.5 times faster than normal.

Often times we'll have a discovery conversation with a prospect about our balance and productivity training and see very clear marks and low hanging fruit for major gains. When I advise that we can literally double their meaningful output in the same number of hours and human resource and they still decide not to proceed with the training, this image comes to mind…

My brain really dislikes inefficiency in my life. It will tolerate me struggling with something that is challenging but new to me. After all, I’ve never done that kind of activity before, so it makes sense that it will take time to figure it out. But once I have figured it out one time, if I then encounter that same task again and struggle a second time, my brain finds this state of affairs unacceptable.

Before I worked at Focus to Evolve, I had a job in the financial industry. The clients that we serviced at that job had our phone numbers and email addresses and had direct access to us. We frequently received emails from clients, and often those emails had multiple instructions. I have been surprised throughout my professional career by how often other people didn’t see or address all of the requests in the emails they received.

As the months go by in this remote working era with schools oscillating between in school and remote learning and no end in sight, the number of distractions and general loss of routine have resulted in an unprecedented decline in getting meaningful things done with efficiency and craftmanship.