ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

In the last episode we covered the descriptions of time thieves, thugs and terrorists . Now, I’d like to detail how to counteract these time wasting personas so you can get back to your productive life.  Read on .

Using your time productively means not only managing your time but also protecting it from others who may not have your most productive interests in mind. You may know who I mean generally, when I speak of categories of people I call time thieves, thugs, and terrorists. They’re not the only ones, but they are the majority categories I see in work and personal interactions. Let me explain to you th...

While Robert’s Rules of Order may seem outdated, outmoded, prescriptive, and even restrictive, you’d be surprised what a little bit of parliamentary procedure can do to make meetings much more highly productive. In this episode, I continue my discussion on Robert’s Rules of Order and how this can be incorporated into your meetings. In the last episode I gave some productivity principles for effect...

While Robert’s Rules of Order may seem outdated, outmoded, prescriptive, and even restrictive, you’d be surprised what a little bit of parliamentary procedure can do to make meetings much more highly productive. The episode is the first part, giving some context with important productivity principles for using parliamentary procedure in meetings. When Brig. Gen. Henry Martyn Robert proposed the us...

A gamified life. For the productivity and technology geek that I am, it sounds like a pretty cool existence. I’d get to live the superhero lifestyle (minus the superpower-enabling lab experiment gone wrong) I should’ve been living all along. But can I live a truly gamified life? Over the past several years, that is something I have sought to find out, and here’s what I’ve learned .

One of the most unproductive outcomes of the last century’s shift from the Industrial Age to knowledge work in the Digital Age has been the loss of seeing the fruits of our labor firsthand. In the Industrial Age, Americans made things and saw them come to life. There’s an inherent satisfaction in creating products that come off an assembly line. Contrast that to our daily lives in the Knowledge Wo...

Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all your worldly possessions in one day? I have. It’s a life-changing event, even for someone not too attached to material things, to find out it’s all been burned away, water-damaged or otherwise destroyed in a catastrophic event. Other than the insurance covering my personal property providing little emotional relief for lost baby pictures and irr...

When the idea of self-actualization developed in the mid-20th century, far before the field of positive psychology was fostered by Dr. Martin Seligman, there was a desire to study and cure illness, mental and physical. Dr. Abraham Maslow tried something different; he studied the role model, the talented and the ingenious. By doing so, he hoped to unlock how we all could do more, better. He develop...

Humans have five common senses. (We actually have several more senses not commonly discussed.) Your sense of touch is mostly dedicated to your largest organ, your skin, comprising 22 square feet (or, 2 square meters), which holds millions of touch receptors of various sensitivity to map your physical surroundings. Your five fingers on each hand alone contain 3,000 touch receptors of the highest se...

As I’ve written about before , “happiness” is a terrible word to me. It’s my version of a four-letter word in regard to positive psychology and personal productivity. And yet, we continue to keep using it; I’m guilty of it as well from time to time. While it seems like a universal term, it’s actually a rather confusing word. If the purpose of communication is to convey information clearly to anoth...

Learning, in the way that humans can, is one of the fundamental ways that set us apart from all other species on Earth. Skills acquisition is one of those kinds of learning that we do really well, and many of us want to do more of, better and faster. I’m one of those people, and when I picked up  The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast  by Josh Kaufman, I was skeptical. However, he outlin...

Welcome to Episode 86 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt here for Part 2 of our discussion of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by psychologist [ http://amzn.to/1lKpijP ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. We’ll be covering the elements of Kaizen. Sally, take it away.  Read full transc...

Welcome to Episode 85 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have  Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt  back on ProdPod to tell us about  One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way  by psychologist [  http://amzn.to/1lKpijP  ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. So, Sally, what is The Kaizen Way? Read full transcript.

I first became aware of Shawn Achor as the funny, charismatic presenter of the popular TEDxBloomington Talk, "The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance.” And, subsequently, I came to know his eponymous book,  The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work . His book’s premise is, I quote, Conventional wisdom hold...

If you are familiar with Getting Things Done by David Allen, or the GTD methodology, you probably know about the 43 folders concept. If you don’t, basically, it’s a tickler file-like tool where physical, time-based items can be managed. There are, you guessed it, 43 folders, constituting 12 file folders for the 12 months in the year and 31 folders representing the maximum number of days in any giv...

There’s a common misconception about procrastination that it only means you’re not doing something you planned to do. Many times we are unaware that procrastination is usually coupled with doing something, if not the thing we planned. This is what I call “procrasti-doing.” And there are some practical measures you can take to procrasti-doing when you want, and when you don’t, so I thought I’d expl...

Thanks to the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and father of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, the scientific community has a deeper understanding of well-being. To wit, Kahneman revealed that humans live with two minds--our experiencing and remembering selves. In this episode I'd like to discuss these two selves and how it relates to your personal productivity. EXPERIENCING SELF The experien...

Having just finished the ProdPod series on Hoarding, I've got workspaces on the mind. And, when it comes to personal productivity, there's nothing like showing up to your home or work office workspace and seeing it set up just for you. So, in this episode, I'm going to discuss a method for making your workspace work for you every day. Assess Your Workspace Organization doesn't naturally happen. So...

Ray: In this final episode of this ProdPod series on hoarding, I asked  Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt  to detail how hoarding is treated and managed. Sally, take it away.   Sally: The treatment and management of severe hoarding is very complex and needs to be addressed by a comprehensive team that can include mental health professionals, professional organizers, as well as junk removal an...

Ray: We're discussing hoarding in the ProdPod series…and I have  Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt  here to define hoarding and how it's classified.  Sally: Hoarding is considered compulsive if it meets three criteria. First there is accumulation accompanied by great difficulty in discarding items that most people would consider useless or of limited value. The second criteria is that the clu...

These next three episodes will be on hoarding and I have with me to help explain hoarding, Sally Reinholdt, owner of  Commonwealth Organizing Solutions  [  http://cosolva.com  ]. Sally is a Registered Nurse and professional organizer who uses many of the skills she learned as a nurse to help her clients become more organized and productive. Sally: The short answer is that it can be anyone. Hoardin...

“When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.” ~Anthony Robbins Tony Robbins should know a thing about being thankful. When he speaks to audiences, he tells frequently of his humble beginnings, the gratitude he had in those who helped him survive then thrive, and the self-beneficial results of his giving back to his community and others. During this Thanksgiving holiday week, now'...

Steps for Setting Up Your Personal Advisory Board:1. Perform a strategic analysis of your situation, including a business and personal SWOT Analysis.2. Set clear, written goals and objectives for your PAB: Vision and 6-month missionstatements.3. Make a list of potential board advisers. Be broad in your list; think of all yourrelationship categories (academic, personal, professional, extracurricula...

Decide on a communication platform with which everyone can be comfortable and explain how you will communicate to them en masse (via email, text, Google Drive sharing, or otherwise). Try to keep your communications effective by being consistently substantive, positive and as few as needed (but no fewer).Try to schedule the meetings and circulate the agenda with any preparatory materials to be revi...

A Personal Advisory Board is a group of persons who know you, your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, and who you feel comfortable sharing your goals and unique vision, and individuals who are committed to your success. There are several advantages that people (as well as companies) with advisory boards have over theircolleagues. A PAB offers you:• An unbiased outside perspective.• Increa...