| Date Posted | Article | | 9 hours ago | How to be Insanely Productive and Still Keep Smiling | | Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Mary Jaksch of Goodlife ZEN.
Do you want to be more productive? Maybe you do, but I’m sure you don’t want to feel stressed, overwhelmed, or unhappy – which happens to many super-productive people. But there is good news:
You can be insanely productive – and still smell the freesias, savor a Pinot Noir, or enjoy a languid hug.
A few weeks ago Leo Babauta said to me, “Mary – you’re one of the most productive people I know. And you still keep smiling and seem so relaxed. How do you do it?”
Most stuff I’ve read about productivity is about doing things differently. Like getting up at 4 a.m. each morning, or drinking eight liters of water a day, or keeping a notebook under the pillow. Sorry, folks – I don’t do any of those things.
High productivity isn’t about doing, it’s about being.
If you want to be highly productive – and still enjoy life – you need to look at how you live, and how you use your mind. Check out the following five suggestions:
- Make peace within.
Most people live in a constant state of inner conflict and suffer from a barrage of negative thoughts that sabotage productivity.
Here’s a scenario: Imagine that your car has landed in a ditch. A group of helpers gather, attach ropes and start to pull the car out. Unfortunately, they’re not all pulling in the same direction. Some try to pull the car toward the road, whereas others try to pull it deeper into the ditch. It’s absurd.
That’s exactly what happens when we’re divided within: everything is a struggle, nothing much happens, and it’s frustrating. But what if your mind, body, and soul are all aligned?
When our energy is aligned, we are in a state of flow. |
| | Sep 4, 2010 | 7 Simple Ways To Say “No” | | Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Celestine Chua of The Personal Excellence Blog.
Do you have difficulty saying “no”? Are you always trying to be nice to others at the expense of yourself?
Well, you’re not alone. In the past, I was not good at saying “no”, because I didn’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings.
For example, whenever I get requests for help, I would attend to them even though I had important work to do. Sometimes the requests would drag to 2-3 hours or even beyond. At the end of the day, I would forgo sleep to catch up on my work. This problem of not knowing how to say “no” also extended to my clients, business associates and even sales people.
After a while, I realized all these times of not saying “no” (when I should) were not helping me at all. I was spending a lot of time and energy for other people and not spending nearly as much time for myself. It was frustrating especially since I brought it upon myself. I slowly realized if I wanted personal time, I needed to learn to say “no”.
Why We Find It Hard To Say “No”
To learn to say “No”, we have to first understand what’s resisting us about it. Below are common reasons why people find it hard to say no:
- You want to help. You are a kind soul at heart. You don’t want to turn the person away and you want to help where possible, even if it may eat into your time.
- Afraid of being rude. I was brought up under the notion that saying “No”, especially to people who are more senior, is rude. This thinking is common in Asia culture, where face-saving is important. Face-saving means not making others look bad (a.k.a losing face).
- Wanting to be agreeable.
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| | Sep 3, 2010 | The elements of change | | ‘Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.’ ~Shunryu Suzuki
Change can be a difficult thing. Most people want to change their lives, in some way, but find it difficult to either get started or to sustain the change for very long.
I’m happy to report that after years of studying it, I’ve become fairly good at it (though happily failing all the time). I actually relish change, not because I feel I need to improve my life, but because in change, I learn new things. Constantly.
What have I learned from my changes? I could write a book on this (and probably will someday), but the essence can be found in the space between the inevitable fact of change, and in the incredible resistance to change inside ourselves and in the people around us. We want to change, and yet we don’t. How do we resolve this tension?
It can be incredibly difficult, or it can be wonderfully joyous. I’m here to show you the elements of the joyous path to change. The difficult path … I think we can each easily find that on our own.
My Recent Changes
I’ve made dozens of changes over the last few years (read My Story for a partial list), but here’s a short list of a few I’ve made just this year:
- Lost over 40 lbs since last year. I’ve not cared as much about losing weight — it’s just a number — but more about losing some fat and getting fit. The weight loss has really been
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| | Sep 3, 2010 | The Wastefulness of Decluttering; or How to Make Less Count for More | | ‘It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.’ ~Bertrand Russell
I know there are many of you who want to declutter, or who have already gotten started … but you hit a roadblock.
And it’s a big one: you don’t want to be wasteful. Your gut tells you that getting rid of perfectly good things — things that cost a pretty penny to get in the first place — is wasteful as hell.
I recently received this letter from Marissa, a brilliant reader:
“I am currently going through my possessions for the umpteenth time to have/own less. My issue I am having now, is that when I donate/throw away items I don’t “need” I feel like I am wasting money. At one point in time I used my hard earned money to buy this item and now I just want to get rid of it. Though this does help in my future shopping habits so I don’t buy anything on a whim or just because I want to have it, I feel like I am throwing away money into the trash/donation bins.”
This is such a common question that I thought I’d address it here — if you’re holding onto stuff because you feel it would be a waste of good money if you got rid of it, here is the answer you are looking for:
I hereby release you of your burden.
You are free. You bought these items with hard-earned money, and you don’t want that money to go to waste, so you’ve been holding onto them. It’s a burden that keeps you from freeing yourse |
| | Sep 2, 2010 | find stillness to cure the illness | | “Silence is a source of great strength.” ~Lao Tzu
It’s a busy day, and you’re inundated by non-stop emails, text messages, phone calls, instant message requests, notifications, interruptions of all kinds.
The noise of the world is a dull roar that pervades every second of your life. It’s a rush of activity, a drain on your energy, a pull on your attention, until you no longer have the energy to pay attention or take action.
It’s an illness, this noise, this rush. It can literally make us sick. We become stressed, depressed, fat, burnt out, slain by the slings and arrows of technology.
The cure is simple: it’s stillness.
Pause
Take a minute out of your busy day to do this little exercise: pause in the middle of all you have to do, all that’s going on around you. Close your eyes, and sit still. Breathe in, and breathe out, and pay attention to your breath as it comes in and goes out. Just sit still, for about a minute.
This stillness might seem like inaction, which we’re taught is a bad thing. It’s lazy, it’s passive, it’s against our Puritan work ethic. And yet, this simple inaction can change our world.
Stillness calms us. It gives us a small oasis of quiet that allows us to hear our thoughts, that allows us to catch our breath, that gives us room to breathe at all. It is the antibody to the stress and rush we feel daily.
“Activity conquers cold, but stillness conquers heat.” ~Lao Tzu
The Strength of Stillness
Stillness has a calming effect on the world around us as well. By becoming still, we cause others to pause, to pay attention. Our quiet also quiets others. We set |
| | Aug 31, 2010 | The Minimalist’s Guide to Cultivating Passion | | Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Cal Newport of Study Hacks.
“I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years,” Steve Martin recalls in his 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up. “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” If you do the math, this sums to fourteen years of hard work before Martin saw returns on his investment.
Fourteen years.
That’s a long time to remain focused on a goal without reward, especially when the path is ambiguous (“The course was more plodding than heroic,” Martin recalls). But as he makes clear in his book, Martin found a Zen peace in the simplicity of his pursuit. He describes with relish, for example, the importance of “diligence” in becoming a star — a term he redefines to mean the ability to not work on unrelated projects — and he labels “loss of focus” as an “indulgence” that success cannot afford.
Martin’s story should resonate with those of us interested in the minimalist lifestyle preached here at Zen Habits. He injected minimalism into his life by orienting his world around a single passionate pursuit: innovating stand-up comedy. For Martin, there was never any doubt what his Most Important Task would involve each morning, and jettisoning unrelated commitments and distractions came naturally. As he discovered, when you know what your life is about it’s easy to sidestep all that threatens to clutter it.
In other words: passion breeds simplicity.
Even if we agree on their value, however, how do we find these simplicity-generating passionate pursuits in our own lives? This is the thorny question I address in this post. |
| | Aug 28, 2010 | the best goal is no goal | | “With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The idea of having concrete, achievable goals seem to be deeply ingrained in our culture. I know I lived with goals for many years, and in fact a big part of my writings here on Zen Habits are about how to set and achieve goals.
These days, however, I live without goals, for the most part. It’s absolutely liberating, and contrary to what you might have been taught, it absolutely doesn’t mean you stop achieving things.
It means you stop letting yourself be limited by goals.
Consider this common belief: “You’ll never get anywhere unless you know where you’re going.” This seems so common sensical, and yet it’s obviously not true if you stop to think about it. Conduct a simple experiment: go outside and walk in a random direction, and feel free to change directions randomly. After 20 minutes, an hour … you’ll be somewhere! It’s just that you didn’t know you were going to end up there.
And there’s the rub: you have to open your mind to going places you never expected to go. If you live without goals, you’ll explore new territory. You’ll learn some unexpected things. You’ll end up in surprising places. That’s the beauty of this philosophy, but it’s also a difficult transition.
Today, I live mostly without goals. Now and then I start coming up with a goal, but I’m letting them go. Living without goals hasn’t ever been an actual goal of mine … it’s just something I’m learning that I enjoy more, that is incredibly freeing, that works with the lifestyle of foll |
| | Aug 27, 2010 | a brief guide to life | | ‘A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.’ ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life can be ridiculously complicated, if you let it. I suggest we simplify.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s quote, which I’ve stolen as this site’s subtitle, is the shortest guide to life you’ll ever need:
“Smile, breath, and go slowly.”
If you live your life by those five words, you’ll do pretty well. For those who need a little more guidance, I’ve distilled the lessons I’ve learned (so far) into a few guidelines, or reminders, really.
And as always, these rules are meant to be broken. Life wouldn’t be any fun if they weren’t.
the brief guide
less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more |
| | Aug 27, 2010 | The importance of enjoying the habit | |
I’ve written a lot about habits — it’s in the title, after all — and after all these years, and after all the questions that people have asked about forming habits, there’s one thing that seems more important than anything else.
It’s simply this: enjoy the habit.
That might seem obvious to some of you, but you’d be surprised how many people try to force themselves to do things they don’t enjoy. They try to instill “discipline” because they think it’ll make them a better person or give them a better life, but what kind of life is it if you force yourself to do things you hate all the time?
And here’s the thing: if you try to make a habit of something you don’t like doing, you’re almost sure to fail. I know, because I’ve tried it many times. If I find myself saying, “I hate this, but I can do it!” then it’s an uphill battle, and one I almost always lose. Because after a week or two of doing this, you’ll lose enthusiasm. You’ll run out of the incredible energy required to form a new habit, and then miss the habit one day, and another day, and soon it’s over.
But look at the opposite scenario — you do something you love doing. Well, how hard is it to motivate yourself to do this? You look forward to it. You are excited about it. When you actually do the habit, you’re happy, and your overall experience is positive. That’s a habit that is much more likely to stick.
I’ve done dozens of experiments in creating habits in my own life, and I’ve helped hundreds if not thousands of others form habits, and it’s a common theme — when the person doesn’t en |
| | Aug 26, 2010 | The Clean-Slate Guide to Simplicity | | Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Jeffrey Tang of The Art of Great Things.
When we think about simplifying, we usually think about subtraction. Getting rid of excess stuff. Clearing away obligations. Deleting old emails.
We simplify by paring away the layers of something until we find the core. Too many books on the shelf? Give them away, one by one, until you’re left with a manageable number of the volumes you really enjoy.
But decluttering this way is hard. For example:
Do you really want to pull dozens of books off the shelf one by one, trying to decide whether to keep or sell each one?
Do you have the time to go through hundreds of backlogged emails, choosing which to save and which to delete?
And there’s another obstacle. When you’re forced to choose to keep or discard something, uncertainty rears its ugly head. “Can you really afford to throw this away?” it whispers. “Are you sure you won’t need it eventually? Sure, you’re on a simplification kick now – but will you regret it later?” Playing the willpower game with uncertainty gets exhausting.
Simplifying Backwards is Easier
If you’re having trouble deciding when to hold on to something and when to let it go, try doing things backward. Learn to add responsibly instead of subtracting.
I call it the clean-slate approach to simplifying. Here’s how it works, in three steps.
Step one: Take all the clutter you’re facing, useful or not, and put it away. All of it. Put the pile of clothes in a box; put the old emails in a hidden folder. Now you have a “clean slate” to work with, but you don’t have to throw anything away. Yet.
Step two: Go about your business as usual. As you discover |
| | Aug 24, 2010 | How to Summit Life’s Everyday Mountains | | “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” ~Confucius
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Scott Dinsmore of ReadingForYourSuccess.
How can a mountain better prepare us for life? At over 14,000 feet, there’s more to learn than I would have thought.
Last week I sat on top of Mt. Shasta, a 14,179 foot mountain in Northern California. It was my first real summit and I was proud. Getting there took me through two days of snow, ice and below-freezing camping conditions, using crampons, an ice axe, and more layers than I thought I owned.
As I climbed, and especially on my way down, I began to realize the lessons required to reach the top and make it back down safely. As it turns out, the most important rules are just as relevant in the snow as they are in conquering our everyday challenges.
When was the last time you reached a mountain summit, whether outdoors or in life?
We face our own mountains everyday. Some small. Some big. There’s always a summit we want to reach. Maybe it’s running those few miles before work, making that intimidating sales call, or running your business. Goals, no matter the size, require a strategy for success.
A cold tall mountain reinforced an approach that can convert life’s everyday challenges into gratifying accomplishments.
A Guide to Reaching Life’s Summits:
Pack light. I wish I took this more seriously. Every unnecessary piece of gear complicates things and detracts from the experience. Aside from the bare necessities, things do not make life better. They often cause more stress and keep you from what’s most important. The lighter your pack the better. Life is too short to be burdened with excessive possessions, emotional baggage or regrets. Positive thoughts, |
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