Productivity | Justin Levy

Developing Routines and Finding Time

November 25, 2011 By Justin Levy 1 Comment

Making anything a routine is hard. This becomes harder as the demands on our time increase. And with increased demands on our time come increased stress to accomplish it all and it becomes easy for things to fall off of our plates, even when we have the best intentions.

It can feel like you’re in a never-ending struggle of trying to always make something in your life a routine. You may work hard at making getting back to the gym part of your daily routine and once you do that, you’re now working at trying to get more sleep or spend 20 minutes reading a book every day. In my case, it’s working on making writing part of my routine again.

When I look at my blogs and see that I haven’t written in several months I let out a deep sigh. It’s not that I haven’t had ideas to write about. It’s not that I’ve given up on writing. It’s that writing fell out of my routine, then eventually dropped off of my calendar and to-do list and I stopped making time to sit down and write, even if it’s just jotting down my thoughts for the day.

On the flip side, this year I have focused on living a healthier lifestyle. I’ve always been a health-nut having managed a GNC for several years during college and always interested in vitamins and supplements. But, I let the demands of work and travel get to me and over the past few years didn’t put a priority on sleep, eating as healthy as I could or getting to the gym as regularly as I should. Around the start of this year I made a commitment to myself that these would become part of my daily routine. I began eating healthier only having one cheat meal per week, sleeping a couple extra hours per night and working out 6 days per week. Because of that focus and commitment, over the past 10 months I have lost 50lbs and 20% bodyfat while making significant increases in strength and tone.

What’s important when adding something new to your routine is to try avoiding drastic changes. When possible, make small changes. For example, I’m going to focus on writing for 15-30 minutes a few times per week. I’m not making a lofty goal of writing a new post every day for multiple blogs. That’s unreasonable and will result in failure. Writing for 15-30 minutes a few times per week is achievable and it’s better than not writing at all so that’s where I will start as it becomes part of my routine again.

We’re always working on developing routines. Sometimes these tasks or projects will fall by the wayside to make room for something that’s a higher priority. That’s ok. It’s an ongoing process. Don’t be hard on yourself. Just work it back into your schedule with small, achievable victories along the way and before you know it that task or project will be part of your routine.

Photo Credit: Dalo_Pix2

Filed Under: Motivation, Productivity Tagged With: Motivation, Productivity, Routines

Recharging and Disconnecting

February 5, 2011 By Justin Levy 6 Comments

How important is recharging to you? No, I’m not talking about the importance of keeping your gadgets charged. We already know that we should always be charging all of our digital leashes. What I’m talking about is taking downtime away from the constantly connected worlds that we live in and allowing yourself to mentally and physically recharge. Many of us work long hours, often times deep into nights and over weekends. Even when we do get some downtime from the office, such as on the weekends, that time is usually filled with everything else in our lives that demand our attention whether they be household projects, cleaning, errand running, or a number of other to-dos. All of this slowly wears us down, especially if you’re adding a lack of solid sleep, high stress environments, business travel, a lack of exercise or a sound diet to the mix.

Even when we do get an opportunity to take a vacation, we’re usually still very much plugged in and connected though albeit on a slower schedule. When I take weekend getaways or domestic vacations I know I’m guilty of this. I might not spend all day on email, Twitter, Facebook and RSS as I do during a regular workday but I’ll still check in a few times throughout the day. Even if I don’t take action on the emails coming in, I still know what’s going on and therefore may be adding stress into the getaway because of knowing what’s awaiting me when I get home or feeling an urge to deal with the situation while away.

That is why I’ve become an increasing fan of taking sailing vacations over the past few years. Two years ago I went on my first sailing trip down to the British Virgin Islands. Not only was it an amazing vacation but I was completely disconnected from the world for 10 days. Not just from my connected world but from everything. And guess what? Everything was just fine. It took about a week to get back into the saddle and caught up but it was well worth it. When I came back I was incredibly productivie because I felt clear-headed and organized. I had just come back from over a week of spending nights laying under the stars letting my mind wonder about anything and everything.

In between leaving New Marketing Labs and before starting at Citrix Online my family took another sailing trip, this time to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, along with a couple days on the way back in Barbados. It was the perfect opportunity to disconnect from everything and spend quality time with my family. It was one of the first times, if not the only time, so far in my career where I went away on a vacation without a corporate email account. Granted, I do have my personal email accounts and my Caminito email account, all of which receive a lot of emails on a daily basis but still not anywhere on the level of NML or now, Citrix Online. It was an absolutely incredible trip filled with laughter, swimming with turtles, hiking expeditions, exploration and everything that involved not being connected.

Since returning from vacation I have been thinking more about recharging and how important it needs to be in all of our lives. Sure, recharging won’t always be taking a sailing trip around remote islands, but it doesn’t have to be. Recharging could be taking a date night once per week with your spouse where you’re completely disconnected and ban the talk of bills, honey-do projects or any of the other stresses in your personal and professional lives. No matter how you do it, we all need to take time to recharge.

How are you finding ways to recharge?

Oh and if you wanted to see photos from my sailing trip, check out the below slideshow:

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: killermonkeys

Filed Under: Personal, Productivity Tagged With: Disconnecting, Personal, Productivity, Recharging

Finding Fresh Voices

December 20, 2010 By Justin Levy 2 Comments

As we wind down 2010, I’ve begun assessing what I’ve accomplished and what new challenges I’m going to take on in 2011. The end of a year and the beginning of a new one is always a good time to do some cleaning whether it be reorganizing my office, cleaning out file folders, changing up how I stay organized or anything else to introduce a little shock into the system and prepare for the year ahead.

In addition to keeping our physical and virtual systems and spaces organized, updated and refreshed, every once in a while we need to do some pruning and make tweaks to our sources of information.

I have been seeking out fresh voices in two main ways:

Google Reader – A few days ago I went through all of my feeds, analyzed the stats and unsubscribed from blogs that weren’t providing value to me any more. I then reviewed what blogs my community were often sharing content from and did some searches around specific topics that I want to dive deeper into over the next few months.

Twitter Lists – It’s easy to build your own echo-chamber if you rely on the same Twitter Lists and searches without ever switching things up a bit. To help find new people to connect with I headed over to Listorious and found a few new lists to follow. I then created searches for 3 sets of keywords that I want to monitor in the coming months. Besides the new lists and searches, I went through the lists that I’ve created for myself and did some shuffling around, as well.

I’ve been excited at the new content and people I’m being introduced to over the past week since I did some house cleaning of my RSS feeds, Twitter Lists, and searches. The voices are fresh, new and a welcomed addition to my addiction to the consumption of information.

Are you regularly seeking out fresh voices? If not, use the end of the year as a good excuse to start doing it.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: goal setting, organization, Productivity

Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

November 24, 2010 By Justin Levy 4 Comments

It is common to hear people, especially nowadays, complain that they have so much work to do that they’re pulling long night and weekend hours just to stay near the surface. Are these people working anywhere between 10-18+ hour days because they really have that much work? Maybe so. Or maybe it is because we’ve become accustomed to not being able to get actual work done while we’re at work.

This inability to get work done during the workday isn’t because of laziness or procrastination. It happens for many reasons but the main culprits include broken meetings and our addiction to interruptions. We’re also a society that is constantly connected and tools such as Twitter, Facebook and email make it even harder to disconnect.

A recent survey from Xobni even shows that 59 percent of employed Americans will be check work email during traditional family holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas while 79 percent report receiving work-related emails during these holidays.

It leads me to question how we actually break this cycle so we can get back to doing work at work and spending more time disconnected, recharging and spending time with our friends and family. Even if you’re not disconnecting, if you’re going to be doing work outside of the office, it shouldn’t be because you’re stuck in meetings all day. If you’re working after-hours, it should be because you’re putting in extra time on your projects or on improving the service that you’re providing to your clients and customers.

Jason Fried of 37Signals and the author of Rework (affiliate link) recently tackled this topic during a TEDxMidwest where he discusses that the main problems are M&Ms (yes, M&Ms but not what you’re thinking) and offers a few suggestions on how to breakthrough this problem and get back to getting work done at work.

If you can’t view this video, you can find it over on the TED website here.

What’s your take? Do you have this problem at your office? Do you need to be
workshifting to get anything done?

While you’re at it, don’t forget to realize the value of time and that being a big deal really isn’t such a big deal.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Productivity, Videos Tagged With: disconnected, drive, focus, Productivity, work

Realizing the Value of Time

October 17, 2010 By Justin Levy 2 Comments

An underlying theme of some of my recent posts have been the value of time. One of the main reasons why meetings are broken are because they take too much time and distract you from what is important. The reason why I was able to say “I love you” to my mom before she passed away was because my friend was a few minutes late picking me up. Both of these examples rely on the difference of a few minutes. If you could regain 15 minutes back from every meeting, you’d save hours per week (or more!) into your schedule. If my friend had been on time to pick me up, I would’ve regretted my last words to my mom.

Have you ever taken the time to break down time and realize how valuable time really is, even down to a millisecond? This Tungle video, produced by my friend Scott Stratten, breaks down time by providing powerful examples that will cause you to look at time in a new light after watching it.

If you can’t view this video, you can watch it over here.

A powerful underlying concept, eh? “Stop wasting time on things you can’t control, and focus on the things you can.”

Now, if I didn’t tell you earlier that the video was created for Tungle or if you didn’t watch the last couple seconds of the video, you would’ve thought it was just a motivational and inspirational video. One of thousands available across the internet.

But, go deeper than that and realize what Tungle and Scott Stratten have done by publishing this video. They have created emotionally compelling content based around the subject of time, the very issue that Tungle helps us to manage.

If you’ve never heard of Tungle, they are:

“…a calendar accelerator that let’s you easily schedule meetings and share with people inside or outside your business, even if you use different calendars. Tungle is not a calendar – it integrates with your current calendar, giving you the flexibility and control to connect, collaborate and get more done.”

Instead of a video about how to use their service, Tungle has created a video that illicit emotion thus causing you to want to share the video with your social graph. Think you’d have the same feeling if it was a video about how great Tungle is and how much time their tool will save you? Probably not.

The 71 videos that Tungle currently has uploaded to their YouTube channel, they have received a total of 83,428 views. Of those 83,000+ views, the above video has 25,132 views or 30% of all views and it has only been live for 2 weeks, as of this writing.

Looking for the underlying lesson here? Find ways to create compelling content that don’t just pimp your product. Tell a story, illicit emotion and give your community a reason to share your content.

Oh, and if you haven’t tried Tungle yet, go try it because not only does the tool rock, they’re team is pretty awesome, too. I f you want some more info about Tungle, I interviewed Tungle’s CEO Marc Gingras earlier this year.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.