Sometimes you just don’t feel like doing stuff. You sit on the couch and your body doesn’t seem to respond to your thoughts. No matter how hard you try to think yourself into action, you just sit there. Watching television, wasting time, idling along. How do you snap out of it?

If you don’t recognize this state of mind (or body), you’re lucky! I talked to quite a few people and this seems to happen to the most of us once in a while, and a lot to some. There are a lot of reasons why this might happen to you. In this article I’m making a list of helpful tips that have helped me overcome this phenomenon. The tips are both short term (immediate) hacks and habits that prevent it from happening.

Drink a glass of water (or two)
Mild dehydration takes away your energy to a great extent. To quote the Wikipedia page on Dehydration: 

Symptoms of mild dehydration include thirst, decreased urine volume, abnormally dark urine, unexplained tiredness, lack of tears when crying, headache, dry mouth, and dizziness when standing due to orthostatic hypotension.

Recognize some of these? The solution is simple, drink a glass of water or maybe two. Wait for 10 more minutes while you’re body rehydrates, refreshing you and releasing energy to go do stuff.

Since a couple of weeks I adopted the habit of drinking a big glass of water first thing in the morning. And about two hours later, when I have my first coffee I drink another glass. It really works.

Take a short nap
Another cause of inertia may be that you’re just tired, or even edging on sleep deprivation. The cure for this is simple, take a short nap. You can try a meditation nap, a power nap or use the salesman trick.

The latter you can use when you don’t have the time to take a long nap, but do have a spare moment. Just sit in a chair and take a your keys in one hand, now let the hand with the keys dangle over the side of the chair and doze off. When you get to deeper stages of sleep, your muscles will relax and you will drop the keys. That in turn will wake you up again. A simple yet effective way of taking a short nap. But it’s best to avoid the need for napping altogether.

Exercise in the morning
Doing a workout in the morning is very satisfying and helpful to maintain energized throughout the day. Even having done the exercise makes you feel good about yourself the rest of the day, but your body is also powered up and ready to go (that is, if you don’t overexert yourself).

Be sure to replenish your body after the workout, drink water, eat some fruit (if the exercise was cardiovascular) or eat some protein (if it was about building muscle mass).

(I really should do this more often…I’m no star on this habit)

Tell others
Make a public commitment of the things that you’re going to do (like your goals). This makes sure that you have an external and internal motivation to get going.

Avoid sugar rushes
When you’re feeling low on energy it’s tempting to take a dose of sugar, often in the form of a candy bar, or a high energy ’sports’ drink. It helps, but the effect is only temporary and aggravates matters mostly. Since they are ‘fast’ sugars it will result in a sugar rush. It will release a lot of energy in your body, and it will induce a spike in insulin to transport that sugar throughout your body. But as fast as the supply of sugar appeared, it disappears. This short spike leaves a surplus of insulin that needs to be fed with sugar.

Avoid this by eating foods with the right carbs: the ones with a low Glycemic Index. One of the ideal snacks in my opinion is a banana.

Just take the first step
Sometimes getting started is as simple as taking the first step. Stuck behind the television, just decide to turn it off (and do it!). It’s a small step, but it breaks the cycle in which you’re stuck. Stuck playing games on internet? Just hit that little red cross in the upper red corner, or the red dot in the upper left corner (if you’re on a Mac). Nobody cares about that high score anyway.

Have some tips of your own?
These are just six tips that I use regularly, but there are plenty other possibilities. What do you do to break out of idle mode? Please share in the comments.

True productivity is about getting things done efficiently. To be able to be efficient you need to be focused at the task at hand. But focus is fragile in this fast-paced world with an abundance of interruptions. Eliminate these 10 sources of disturbances and interruptions and your focus will improve, as will your effiency.

1. Email 

Email is a major disturbance. Every visible or audible notification (no matter how subtle) is a direct disturbance, because you are distracted by a signal taking away the focus from the task at hand. And unread messages are like small little voices whispering “Read me! Read me! We need your attention. Someone thought of you. Read me!”.

So even if you have the discipline to not read the new email, you will get distracted nevertheless. You will put energy in sustaining that state of discipline, when you need to put that energy in focusing on the task at hand instead.

Solution: Disable all notifications for new email. Done? Now close that client too!

2. Phones 

Phones are so intrusive. When the phone rings or vibrates it draws all the attention to it, even if you’re in the middle of a conversation. And if you don’t pick it up, it persists in disturbing you for half a minute or so. And you know there is someone, right at that very moment, putting in time and energy to get in contact with you. It takes discipline not to pick it up, not to listen to the voice mail afterwards and not to look at the text messages that are coming in.

Solution: Switch it off. Or if you can’t: relay your calls. If that’s also no possibility: find a phone-free location, or unplug the phone.

3. Instant Messaging (IM) 

This is like the phone but even worse. With phones you might not know who is calling and about what, but IM answers that instantly. Out of nowhere a message pops up in front of your work (if you’re behind a pc), and you see who it is and what they need you for. Your focus is gone instantly.

Solution: Switch off those IM clients.

Click to continue »

I’ve been using technological solutions for my calendering and for managing my To Do’s (or Next Actions) for a long time now. The last paper planner I owned and used is pre-2000. My last solution was a PDA I used for planning, contacts and for my Getting Things Done system. But the PDA was stolen recently.

Time for a brand new start, and I’m switching back to paper. I know, I couldn’t believe it myself either, but it’s true.

Drawbacks of the PDA-based system

On my PDA I mainly used the standard software to manage my contacts and appointments. For my GTD system I used ListPro and SOTI pocket controller (a setup inspired by gtdfrk) and it worked out quite nice, but it had some drawbacks that made me dislike it:

1. Entering data was painstakingly slow. (tap - tap - tap - tap -…)
2. The screen was too small. Both for displaying lines of text as for getting an overview of the lists.
3. Synchronizing was a horror. Two-way synch errors made me redo all kinds of work.
4. Loss of ALL data when it got stolen. To overcome #3 I had decided to keep all data for GTD on the PDA
5. No battery = no system. No system = no ubiquitous capture tool.
6. Calender and contacts did synchronize with Microsoft Outlook at home (which I do not use), but not with Lotus Notes at work (which I do use).

To solve most of the issues, I’m switching back to paper. That obviously won’t solve #4, all data is still in one place, nor #6, but I did that by hand anyway. And I discovered that I like writing a lot, old-school handwriting. It’s a lot better than tapping on a screen with a stylus anyway. 

Requirements for a paper based planner

Before starting to look at the different options, I made a small list of requirements for my new planner.

• Must fit in my pocket anytime
  So it must have a small size (about A6-size) and it must be thin.
• Week in one overview
  I don’t have a lot of appointments, so I don’t need a lot of space for them. Preferably there’s also no timescale to the day, let me decide myself upon my working schedules please.
• Ample space for notes
  I do have a lot of thoughts and things to do, so I need a lot of space for them.
• Simple and no clutter
  I don’t need inspirational quotes, pictures and other clutter. I need a simple system as one of the ZTD habits prescribes.
• Not expensive
  I prefer not to spend a lot of money on it. The PDA was expensive, but it had navigation on it too

So the best solution is small, simple and cheap.

Comparing different planners

I’ve limited myself to commercially available ready made systems. There are a lot of DIY planner systems out there as well, but I left them out of the scope. Partly because a lot of those systems assume you have a binder available, because you owned one of the systems already. And partly because I just didn’t want to go DIY on this one, I have already enough on my mind as it is.

Before I dive into the details, I’ll give you the table with the final results. Scoring is pretty easy: Get a requirement right, you get a point. Only the first and the last requirements are a little different:

• Fitting in my pocket is divided into two sub-requirements: Small and Thin. Both score half a point.
• Price is divided in two scores: Cheap ($0 to $50) and Average ($50 to $100). Cheap scores a point, Average scores half a point.

Now onto the details and the final result.

Click to continue »

Yesterday I was watching a fascinating show on Dutch television with medium Derek Ogilvie. He’s a Scottisch guy that uses his telepathic capabilities to communicate with children that can’t talk themselves (either because they’re too young, or because they have an ailment that prevents them from talking).

In the show last night he was working with a three year old that did not talk or walk yet. One of the messages he got through went something like this:

“There are so many words in your house…so many words, but nothing gets done.”

“It’s making your son confused, he thinks: if you want a new car, get a new car! If you want the house redecorated, redecorate it! Don’t talk talk talk, but do.”

“So many words, you talk but don’t decide, the words… YOU ARE WASTING WORDS!”

“There’s no fun in words, they get wasted and lead to nothing…”

Wasting words

The scene struck a chord in me, and especially the phrase “wasting words”. As a writer and a NLP enthusiast I know the power of words, and I use and choose words deliberately. What words you choose to use can make or break a message or result in an entirely different response than intended. Click to continue »

About two weeks ago, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits released an e-book on his concept of Zen to Done. ZTD is a series of habit changes associated with productivity systems. Combined they form a productivity system by itself. At only $9.50 the 83 page book is a steal!

Productivity systems are a series of habit changes
Leo states in this e-book that adopting a productivity system is in fact a series of habit changes. Usually this is true, you have a couple of habits that are not compliant to sticking to the system, and you have those habits for many years already. The system won’t change them, you have to.

If you fail to change the habits, the system won’t work and you’ll get disappointed. Yet another system that looked promising and doesn’t deliver. Back to square 1. I should know, I’ve been there (and it sucks!).

One habit at a time
Leo advocates to change only one habit at a time, using habit changing techniques. Changing multiple habits at the same time can be done, but takes a lot of determination and energy. I tried it when I started with GTD, and subsequently did not manage to keep up with all the aspects of the system.

I have experienced first hand that this is the best way to change habits. So I did try to change all my habits at the same time when implementing GTD…and failed. After a month or two, I noticed that I picked up one habit of the system though: Keeping my inboxes empty. And I was getting pretty solid at this too! One habit changed, and other habits followed. One at a time.

Zen to Done: changing habits to be productive
Zen to Done, how is it different from GTD? Well GTD focuses mostly on the system for productivity and ZTD focuses more on the habits needed to sustain that system. There are more differences, but this is the most notable in my opinion. Click to continue »