Practical, actionable tips you can use right now to help you be more productive while working from home.
Category: Productivity Practices
30. 5 Tips for Staying Focused While Working from Home
The novel coronavirus has created a new normal in which many people are working from home for the first time. Sounds great! But how do you keep your focus and keep connected in this new environment with all it’s distractions. It can seem overwhelming.
Not to worry. We’ve been working remotely for years, and we’ve got the advice you need to make a smooth transition from the office to the home office. Follow this advice, and you’ll see no letdown in productivity. You may find that you’re even more productive than ever!
28. How to Start and Stop Your Workdays
You love your work, and you can’t wait to get started! But somehow, the day never goes as planned. You get derailed by low-leverage tasks, and half the time you don’t start your big project until after lunch. By the end of the day, you realize you’ll have to finish up at home. By Friday, you’re totally exhausted—and still not done!
In this episode, we show you how you can end the rollover problem once and for all by bookending your day with workday startup and shutdown rituals. You’ll finally quit leaving the office with a laptop full of take-home work. You’ll get your margin back and be more productive than ever before.
27. Two Rituals to Start and End Your Days
As a high achiever, you have the ability to laser focus and put out huge productivity. But it can seem like your life has no boundaries. Good habits slip away and unproductive ones take their place.
It’s time to ditch that feeling that you’re always a step behind. In this episode, Courtney and Blake show you two simple hacks that will get your personal habits under control and set you up for a win every single day.
25. How to Set Up an Ideal Week
You’re focused on productivity, which means that you’re constantly getting tapped for greater responsibility. You start each day with a plan, but you quickly get sucked into “reaction mode.” Urgent requests and demands on your time crowd out your own priorities. It’s exhausting.
Fortunately, we know a great way to take control of your time and direct the flow of work coming at you. It’s called the ideal week. This simple tool will help you take back control of your time. You’ll say goodbye to reactive mode, get focused on your high-leverage projects, and get a lot more done.
23. 4 Questions to Learn from Mistakes
You’re a high achiever, so you like to attempt big things. The problem is that things don’t always turn out the way you planned. That feels lousy. It makes you want to bury last week and just barrel ahead.
There’s a better way. We’ve discovered a simple process for redeeming your regrets, big and small. Your mistakes and even failures don’t have to keep you stuck. You can learn from your mistakes and emerge even stronger by asking yourself four simple questions.
When you do, you’ll no longer feel ashamed of the past or afraid of the future. You’ll gain the insight and confidence you need to make positive changes and achieve better results in the future.
17. Stop Goal Exhaustion with This Simple Fix
Does it ever feel like you’re on a treadmill? One week ends, another begins. One quarter ends, another begins. You hit your goals this month. Yay! Now get back to work. It never ends.
It’s enough to make you sick of the word goal.
Goal achievement should not be that way. The last thing you should feel about setting a goal is dread. We’ve got a simple hack that will make you feel excited every time you set a goal. Do this one simple thing, and you’ll never again dread the start of the quarter. Here’s how to create a reward that will keep you motivated to achieve.
16. How to Get Instant Momentum on Goals
You’ve set some great goals. They’re exciting and challenging. But that creates a lot of complexity. There is so much to be done. Your project plan is solid, but it’s hard to find the time to make progress. The whole thing just seems overwhelming.
Based on achieving lots of big goals, we’ve learned that complex detailed plans are not always helpful. You don’t need to plot the entire course. All you need is the next step. It’s time to stop thinking about “the plan” for your goal and just identify the next action.
11. How to Connect Annual Goals to Daily Productivity
As a high achiever, you love to set big goals. You thrive on strategic planning sessions because it’s a time to dream big.
But daily life is just not conducive to goal achievement. You’re pretty organized, but major goals and projects come on top of your “real job.” It’s hard to make progress on the big things when you’ve got so much other work to do.
Good news: there is one thing that makes you much more likely to achieve your goals. It’s called goal visibility. You’re going to make progress at anything you see or touch every day. So the key is to create consistent points of contact with your most important goals. And we can show you how to do that with three levels of goal review.
10. Keep Your Focus with This One Tool
We know you want to get stuff done. So you sit down to make some calls, or empty your inbox, or write a report. But before you know it, you’re answering Slack messages and scrolling Instagram. What just happened?
What happened is that you fell into the Palo Alto honey trap. Computer software is specifically designed to grab your attention and hold it. Forever.
But we’ve got a secret weapon. It’s one of the oldest technologies on the planet, and it still works as well as it ever did. It’s called paper!
