Tag Archives: productivity

Tips for squeezing the best out of the last few months of 2020

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By Sid Madge, author of the ‘Meee in a minute’ series of books 

2020 is proving to be the toughest year that most of us can remember. We’ve got through so far and can now look at how to adapt and get the most we can from the remaining few months of this year.   

According to a YouGov poll only 8% of Britons want to go back to life as it was before the pandemic.  

Let’s create something better for everyone instead of some watered down ‘new normal’. The first step for squeezing the best out of the rest of 2020 is to embrace uncertainty. There isn’t going to be some miracle vaccine by December, so what do we do now and for the rest of the year?  We grab the remainder of the year by the scruff of its neck and focus on changing for the better. 

Your Innate Growth Mindset

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck became obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures and setbacks. Initially her research looked at kids and how they reacted to puzzles they couldn’t solve. The outcome of Dweck’s research is now world famous and she proposes that our success and happiness in life comes down to one thing – mindset. According to Dweck there are two – fixed and growth.  

Individuals with a fixed mindset, have a fixed idea of what they are capable of, believing that what they are born with is the finish line. They tend to be more defeatist. Those with a growth mindset believe that what we are born with is just the beginning. What we are capable of is determined by our own aspirations, effort and determination. 

Interestingly, Dweck believes we are all born with a growth mindset. We get trained out of it. We’re taught that failure is unacceptable – even though all great success comes through failure not by avoiding it. If ever we needed to re-assess that growth mindset it’s now. 

Take a minute to consider whether you have a fixed or growth mindset?  Has Covid-19 made it more fixed as you sink into a gloom? If you imagine you had a growth mindset instead – what would you do? Looking at your life and the rest of 2020 – what could you try? What have you always thought of doing but never got around to it? Lean into the uncertainty and adapt. Use it as a springboard to try things you’ve been putting off. Is there a different market you could approach? Stay curious, flexible, and open. 

Changing Your Today to Change Your Tomorrow

What have you done today? Is that getting you closer to your business and life goals or further away? If you want a different tomorrow so you find a successful way through the pandemic, you need to take steps to change what you do today. 

Stop for a moment and reflect on how you spend your time. When did you get up this morning?  How much TV do you watch?  How much time do you spend on social media? How much time do you spend learning something new? Do you spend time with family or friends?  Are those exchanges enjoyable or stressful? How much time do you spend on your health?  How much sleep do you get most nights? 

Take a minute to draw a circle and divide it up into slices that represent how you spend your time during a typical day. Now draw another circle and divide it up to represent how you would like to spend your day. If you spend a lot of time at work but don’t enjoy it, what could you do today to find a something that you might enjoy more? Or what could you change at in work/home life today to improve your day? Identify the things you like or can live with and the things that you don’t like and can’t live with. How can you change the aspects of your day that bring you down? 

Often, we don’t need to make big sweeping changes.  Subtle little shifts can accumulate to bring about change.  

Growth from Trauma

In 1967 psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed a list of 47 stressful events that could impact health and happiness. The assumption is logical – we get more stressed when bad stuff happens to us, start accumulating stressful experiences such as a job loss, illness or divorce and you are more susceptible to physical illness, disease and depression. Global pandemics and economic uncertainty don’t help either.

However, the fly in their theoretical ointment was the fact that not everyone who experienced really tough life events were negatively impacted by them. On the contrary, some of those people actively flourished. This field of study is called post traumatic growth or adversarial growth and studies have shown that great suffering or trauma can actually lead to huge positive change. For example, after the Madrid bombings of 2004 psychologists found that many of those affected experienced positive psychological growth. A diagnosis of cancer and subsequent recovery can also trigger positive growth. 

The people in many of these studies found new meaning and new purpose from surviving something terrible. Instead of seeing their situation as a failure or a problem they believed it could make them stronger. How can you use Covid-19 to find new meaning and positive growth?

Take a minute to think about exactly what you are worried about most in your life and identify one thing you can do about it right now. Set that in motion. What positives could you pull from the turmoil? Get creative – think of at least three positives that Covid-19 could give you. It might not be fun but if you can find the silver linings you can often move on quicker.

These suggestions are pulled from my Meee in a Minute books, each offering 60 one-minute micro-ideas and insights that can help us to shift our perception in life, family and at work.  We can all use tiny interventions to adapt and change and make the very best we can of the months ahead. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sid Madge is founder of Meee (My Education Employment Enterprise) which draws on the best creativity and thinking from the worlds of branding, psychology, neuroscience, education and sociology, to help people achieve extraordinary lives.

To date, Meee has transformed the lives of over 20,000 people, from leaders of PLC’s and SME’s to parents, teachers, students, carers, the unemployed and prison inmates.

Sid Madge is also author of the ‘Meee in Minute’ series of books which each offer 60 ways to change your life, work-, or family-life in 60 seconds. 

Web: www.meee.global

Web: www.meeebooks.com

Twitter twitter.com/Meee_HQ
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MeeeHQ/
Instagram www.instagram.com/meeehq
YouTube https://youtu.be/fISupZWZMQc
TEDx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3Cyjs62c8

 

Five Essential Goal-Setting Habits for the Entrepreneur By Emine Suleyman, author of Aliya

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Ever wondered why some people get ahead and others tread water? It’s not luck, says life coach, mindfulness expert and career mentor Emine Suleyman – it’s about how well they spend their time. Here, Emine offers her own top 5 habits that every budding entrepreneur should practice to realise their ambitions in 2018. Her new book Aliya, a practical day-to- day productivity diary for 2018, is available now priced £25.

Habit #1: Clarify & Regularly Reaffirm Your Life Mission  

We spend the majority of our adult lives working, so we owe it ourselves to spend that time doing something we love and that we feel is a reflection of who we are and what we want to say to the world.

Finding our element – living a life of purpose – is crucial to our wellbeing and to our success. This has been well documented. The sooner we can clarify our life mission statement the sooner we can begin a fuller more satisfying life.

So how do you start? Kick back with a pen and a diary and write down what it means to be successful in your life and on your own terms. Make lists of all that you love doing, what all your skills are, what problems you feel connected to in your community or in the world.

Upon regular reflection of your purpose and these three lists, your day-to-day life will reveal a common thread where you can creatively tie aspects from each list into new ideas and projects. The side projects you pursue could well evolve into a great income and lifestyle over time.

Habit #2: Self -Reflection

Self-reflection is the school of wisdom. It is no secret that a regular practice of self-reflection is necessary for mental and physical health. Allow this to be a humbling process and use it to look back over your last year. Life must be understood backwards before it is effectively lived forward. At the end of each year, ask yourself: what were all my highlights? What challenges did I face and how did I grow through them?  Writing your answers down is a great way of extracting them into physical form and owning them.

In addition to annual self-reflection, regular monthly reflection throughout your year is a habit worth cultivating. We can do this is our diaries each month. Self-reflection helps to build two components to emotional intelligence: self-awareness and self-regulation. This gives us the ability to understand our emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values and goals, and to recognise their impact.

Habit #3: Set & Monitor Goals

You have more efficacy to create your life than you may realise. What matters most is right now. You cannot change the past and the future hasn’t yet happened, so the only thing we can change is the moment. How you feel right now and the story you’re telling yourself will transcend as your future. Put aside all limiting beliefs and ask yourself, what would I do if I knew couldn’t fail? Literally make an inventory of all your dreams in your diary. Remember that we go only as far as our imagination takes us. Include a range of short, mid and long-term goals over the next three months, one year, three years, five years, 10 years and 20 years.

After listing all that you would love to have a go at in life, review your list and pick your top 3- 5 priority goals to get started on. Break each chosen top goal down into 5 actionable steps. Then simply give each step a deadline in your diary. You can include a reward for each goal if you wish. At the end of each month make it a habit to reflect on the previous four weeks and review your progress.

Habit #4: Identify Two Priority Tasks Daily

Before you go about your day or perhaps from the night before, take a moment to pause and decide what two things you can do today that will have the biggest impact on getting you to your goals. This habit is so simple yet so powerful and has the ability to focus your mind each day. Forget checking emails and running small errands until your two priority tasks for the day are done.

Habit #5: Keep a Gratitude List

The benefits linked to gratitude are one of the most beautiful things about life itself. Whilst a whole book can be written on all the endless benefits, I would just outline a few. It opens the door for better relationships, improves physical health, psychological health, enhances empathy and reduces aggression, helps you sleep better, increases mental strength and boosts self-esteem. It just simply makes us happy; if there were a key to happiness, this would be it.

Saying ‘thank you’ for all that we have and experience, doing it often and actually writing it down is the most important habit of all.

Aliya by Emine Suleyman is out now, priced £25 in hardback. Visit www.planmyvision.co.uk

 

Improve the Workflow of any Business by Improving Organisation by Matt Rawlings

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When you’re looking to take a business of any genre to the next level, the main stumbling block is quite often the level of organisation. It can be absolute chaos in some industries with paperwork here, there and everywhere, products being shipped all over the world, employees at various different company locations, the list could go on and on.

As a result, keeping your staff not only in order but in a positive mood to ensure that productivity is at its highest can be difficult; but nowhere near as difficult as keeping productivity and efficiency to the standards desired by those paying for your goods and services. This is where technology can come in handy.

Let’s look at an example that might not immediately spring to mind when you think of computerized organisation – the construction industry. You could have a head office on one side of the UK, in Newcastle for instance, and you could have a project in progress in Taunton, the complete opposite end of the country.

Communication between the two locations is simple – you can just ring from the site to the office – but paperwork needs to be signed off at the end of each stage of the process, and when it has to be mailed from one location to the other this can take days, even longer, slowing the whole construction process down, decreasing productivity.

If the company were to install some form of documentation controlling software, they could store all of the papers in one central location on a computer and provide access for all relevant parties, whether it’s those in the head office, those at the site, or the company they’re building for – allowing them to monitor progress and make sure that the deadline will be met.

As with any business, the more organised a company can be, the more efficient the essential processes can become, helping you to take your business to the next level in terms of productivity, customer service and also reducing the stress levels of those involved!

Matt Rawlings