Tag: productivity

Podcasts to Change Your Life

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Taking time for yourself with self-help can be just what your week needs

Podcasts have been my faithful companion for about a decade now. As I try and make life more organised and develop my productivity, I have inevitably come across a lot of self-help podcasts along the way. Here are the staples of my weekly podcast diet that can help you whatever you need!

YOU NEED A PEP TALK

Mel Robbins has a series on Audible Here’s Exactly What to Do about everything from stop worrying to having fun. She has this commanding voice and directive style that can really get you ready for action. Since they are standalone, you can relisten whenever you want to improve in certain areas.

YOU NEED PRACTICAL STEPS

No list of my favourite podcasts could be complete without Gretchen Rubin’s Happier podcast. The weekly actionable steps towards a happier life as well as problem solving nature really is helpful and fun to follow along with. Each week it comes up with helpful advice but also many of her books are invaluable. I always recommend her book The Happiness Project as a way of constantly reviewing life and making incremental changes each month.

YOU NEED A SENSIBLE STOIC

If you need something less practical and more philosophical, you can’t go wrong with some stoicism in your life. I recently become obsessed with the Daily Stoic, Ryan Holliday has a series of books based on his research on Marcus Aurelius. The ideas really gives us a way to live our lives. It links too with Essentialism that I have been working on recently as a way to see our time for those things that we value most.

Derren Brown, the master illusionist, psychologist, who always blows my mind, has an incredible podcast called Brain Camp for the Brain. Both explaining why we do things and what we can do to hack. I recommend him as a stoic because his amazing book Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Fine is also a must read for fans of stoicism. He covers both the history and how we can apply it to our lives.

YOU NEED TO THINK CRITICALLY

I love self help up and to the point where it can help and apply to my life but I also remain sceptical. Often the advice does not apply to real life: work a four-hour week, have a miracle morning or live in a magically tidied house are wonderful ideas but maybe they do not suit the economy you live in, the circumstances you are born into or the fact that you have children who need your attention.

So my favourite podcasts that take a critical and comedic slant are Go Help Yourself. Misty and Lisa review the book and give you insight and homework each week but also help us understand the biases that are often at play in these books.

I always devour By the Book episodes. Kristen and Jolenta live by different self-help books for two weeks and apply them to thei lives. Often their work exposes the unreality of these books and gives us also interviews which explain why the self-help industry is such an important part of history, particularly in the United States. Their book How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self- Help Books is a great place to get all the sensible advice.

Have you listened to any great self-help podcasts recently? I’m always looking for new ones!

Productivity Hacks and Where to Find Them

~ MumWriteNow ~ 5 Comments

The search continues for productivity hacks for busy-brained people who have too much to do…

If you have always had a busy brain like me, distractable and often day-dreamy, you will probably have spent years looking for systems that help you “get things done” or “be more productive”. You probably have to work twice as hard to put the any suggestions in place – I can tell you with the added bonus of brain fog for the last 18 months, I have hard-won experience about just how tough this can be. Over the years, I have developed an insatiable appetite for the self-help books that help and here are the productivity hacks that have actually helped:

Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

This book is such a a classic though I haven’t read it since I was an impressionable teenager some of the habits have stuck. It’s definitely quite a dense management-speak book that couldn’t solve all my problems but there is one hack that has stuck – the importance matrix. You probably know to always write a to do list: mine has too many things on it and some on there that “should have dones” that haunt me every time I look at this.

But I am having a tough time, I sit and make a matrix. In essence what Covey teaches you to do is to rank the most important and time-consuming tasks so that you get your priorities done first. When my brain is fuzzed with too many tasks to do, I still use this method after all these years to focus in on what’s got to get done first.

Graham Allcott: How to Be a Productivity Ninja

One book I think that runs alongside Covey’s book which helps you prioritise tasks is The Productivity Ninja. The section that stayed with me was both about knowing your best times of day but most importantly protect your attention. This means working in focus mode on my phone or putting a timer on to work solidly for that time. Now as you will know getting precious time alone with enough energy is my constant battle, but knowing that mornings are the times I can concentrate best and that I work well with instrumental music on helps me keep on task.

Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Essentialism was a book I have found quite recently. It actually seems more of a philosophy – a minimalism for your inner life and I enjoyed this introductory course on Skillshare (link not affiliated). Having thought through a lot of advice, it seems like he is asking you to design your life and I will share more on the project I am working on as part of the course in a future post. The general idea is to really identify not just your priorities but areas of your lives where you can improve so you are always moving in the direction. As part of this work, you really have to identify your boundaries and so that you really are focusing on what is essential.

Manoush Zomodori: Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

I have written my account of trying a bored and brilliant project before. The ideas that have really stuck is taking breaks from our phone. She forces you to go on your commute without your phone or go for a quiet walk. What a revelation that we can cope without the modern crutch. The most difficult part is you might feel weird being the only one looking around, not down at your phone. As well as giving you a break, it allows your restless brain to work and often ideas will form. It may seem the opposite of being productive to let your mind wander, but our problem solving mechanism works hard for us and although I do still often have the crutch of my phone, I am much more aware of taking time without it.

Nir Eyal, Indistractable: How to Control your Attention and Choose your Life

The final book I have found helpful has some startling evidence to share about the impact of social media and the instant access of information on our attention. The message I take from this book, apart from making me horrified about my screen time, is that we need to be aware when we are trying to escape.

Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality

Nir Eyal, Indistractable

For me I acknowledge I need these breaks, often into fiction or even writing itself. The hard disciplined work of being indistractable is not easy but will undoubtedly improve your productivity.

The fatigue recovery that I have had to undertake has taught me a lot about just how much energy focusing and using our brain takes. I am not yet at my full capacity but so much improved now I can see how important it is to be aware of how we spend our attention. As well as using these hacks, I would say we also need to balance. We need these hard and focused moments to work effectively in the time we have but also those things that give us a break.

Have you read any productivity books you think will help?