Strange & Charmed

Today I am continuing with my Productivity Myths series where I explain why some common productivity advice isn’t accurate and uncover the truth hidden beneath the myth so you can actually improve your productivity!

Productivity Myth #2: To Do Lists Keep You Focused and On Task.

The advice is pretty clear on this; make a to do list, complete the tasks, be a productive person. Hmm, more like clearly confusing, overwhelming and just plain wrong! Have you ever made a to do list? Grab a sheet of paper and write out all the things you need to do. Some of us can write tasks for pages on end, and then what? We just get started tacking this endless stream of work? Wrong!

To do lists are often touted as being the ultimate strategy of productivity. If you need to get things done, make a list of what you need to do and get started working. But this advice could dig you into a productivity hole if you are not careful and discerning.

You see, the big problem with to do lists is that when you make one, it likely isn’t prioritized or organized in any way to indicate to you which tasks are more urgent or important than others. Often, when we makes to do lists, our natural inclination is to start from the top and work our way down. Or we sift through the list and cherry pick tasks we think we can do easily or quickly just to get them off the list. But without a sense of organization, without a hierarchy that indicates which tasks truly are necessary and which are optional, we can fall into the trap of wasting our time on work that gets us nowhere!

It actually takes a tremendous amount of discipline and knowledge ahead of time to make a to do list work- which most of us aren’t employing when we execute on this false productivity strategy. Not to mention how complicated getting things done actually becomes when we work off of numerous to do lists or create a fresh list every single day. It’s like we are changing the game plan each time and not necessarily to optimize it. It can become a mess for most of us!

On top of that, did you know that research has shown that just the act of making a to do list makes you feel more productive, even if you never take action on anything on that list? So you can just make a list, and go take a nap and you just feel like you’ve done something even if you haven’t and then when the high of the list wears off, you are more behind than you were before the list was made. I hope you can see where I am coming from exposing the problematic nature of to do lists!

Finally, I dislike to do lists because I feel as though they often stand in the way of manifesting success from a place of ease and flow. Essentially a to do list is a step by step of what we think we should do or what we think we need to do to reach desired objectives, but as I explained in my post yesterday, that’s the hard way of doing things. Making a to do list and sticking to it, even as someone making a list with a high amount of knowledge and sense of priority, can still lead you to a longer road to achieving your goal.

What To Do Lists Actually Do for Your Productivity

All that being said, there is of course a vein of truth that does run through the advice and strategy of making a to do list, which is causing some people to benefit from the practice. Chiefly, sitting down and writing out a list of all the tasks and items you are storing in your mind is essentially executing on a truly productive strategy of brain dumping. Brain dumping, or a brain dump as I call it, is when you take everything you are thinking of and trying to remember in your brain, and listing it out. The practice unpacks ideas, tasks and memories and puts them in a more reliable and concrete storage method like a sheet of paper or even a digital list, which causes an instant sigh of relief for your brain. Despite popular misconception, our brains are not where we store information. They aren’t akin to the hard drive of a computer. There are intended for processing, like the RAM of a computer. Yes, you can hold onto some information in your working and short term memory, but as you learn new information, that old info is pushed out and lost. So, brain dumping relieves your mind of the burden of holding on to information. This is where the affect of feeling more productive comes from. It’s literally your brain feeling a weight lifted and redirecting energy towards fully processing tasks. It makes me think of when you sit down to watch tv and are still playing on your phone at one time. Your attention is split, so you aren’t fully enjoying either activity but you have a vague sense of what’s going on in both places. Then once you put the phone down and start paying full attention to the tv, you feel more focused on the show and may begin realizing there were things you missed that you need to go back to. That’s how your brain feels after you make a list. It has been paying attention to older information you are telling it to remember while at the same time trying to actively engage in the moment. So when the information is dumped out of your brain, suddenly it starts experiencing reality in the moment with a greater sense of focus.

Now, obviously, to do lists also work to help you remember tasks as well. Having a list on hand when you go to the grocery store is a great idea so you don’t forget what you went to buy. This is an example of the right time and the proper usage for a to do list. But these examples are few and just because a to do list helps you be more productive running errands, doesn’t mean it will help with productivity in other areas of your life.

So, moving forward now that you understand the myth of the to do list and how it actually affects your productivity, what I want you to focus on is how making and creating a to do list can become your step one in planning and organizing a productive day, but through the process of a brain dump. So, you can sit down and unload all the information you are storing in your working memory, but then you need to take some time to organize that information before you act on it. If you aren’t aware, the Charmed Life Master Planner contains an entire section of inserts dedicated to brain dumps where you can create your list and then using the structure of an Eisenhower matrix, prioritize the information by urgency and importance. From there you can integrate the more priority tasks into your day as you also functional plan to integrate them alongside other time obligations for a productive day. But never, ever, ever should you just make a to do list for the day and get to work on it… at least not if you are trying to manage your time and day productively!

I hope this information has been insightful to you and helps you to master the practice of true functional planning. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and how you are using this information to benefit your life!

xoxo,

Hello dear friend!

Lately, there has been a lot of stir in the productivity community about the link between happiness and productivity. Specifically, that measures of productivity indicate happier people as more productive than their unhappy counterparts. Although this point is getting a lot of attention right now, this is not new information by any means. A 2015 study conducted by the Social Market Foundation and the University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, demonstrated that when a subject was shown a 10-minute comedy clip before starting their work, it resulted in a 12-20% increase in their productivity as compared to a control group who were shown no clip before they began working. This study has been cited over the past few years as evidence to support workplace practices for creating a more positive environment for employees as a means to increase their productivity. Now, all that is great and I hope that this trend continues changing the way companies treat their employees and the company culture that they create, but I don’t think most of us needed a study like this to understand the role happiness plays in our productivity.

One of the most popular questions I receive from my community revolve around how to be more productive with a long term illness, anxiety, depression or other physiologically related challenge. I think many women are keenly aware of how unhappiness has negatively affected their productivity. It’s hard to get your mind in the right state to be productive when you are not feeling the most confident or are experiencing pain or discomfort. Living with a regular challenge like that can absolutely become a mood killer that would inhibit your happiness.

It isn’t just physiological challenges, however that can kill your mood and therefore your productivity. Stress, overwhelm, comparison and unreasonable expectations really seem to be the number one killer of female productivity as far as I’ve witnessed within my community. This is why I’ve been working to integrate more metaphysical practices and principles into my content across the board. It is no surprise to me that happiness and personal contentment are the key to unlocking our productivity. This concept is woven throughout world religions, ancient wisdom, modern physics, and new age thought. You’ve probably heard me talk about cultivating a high vibration for yourself during your morning routine as a secret to success. I even designed a daily manifestation journal called the High Vibe Bible around this essential truth; your level of happiness (vibration) dictates your ability to succeed.

When you feel happiness and contentment for your life in the moment, no matter what goals you have set for your future, or what you have experienced in your past, you are creating a high vibrational set point within your mind. So, moving forward from that moment, as long as you are able to keep your level of happiness the same, or even increase it, you are programming yourself to work with a positive momentum, overcome obstacles with ease and you allow your day to flow from task to task through an inward sense of guidance where you don’t need to stop and pause to ask yourself, what’s next. Happiness, a high vibration, turns your mind into a receiver for right action automatically because this is our instinctual state of being.

Once you reach this state, which is apparently as easy as watching a 10-minute comedy clip, you are programmed into the mindset that I call “manifesting success with less stress.” This mindset is my personal be all and end all of productivity. It’s the mindset that programs you to easily achieve your objectives with minimal effort or challenge because you have kept yourself in the right vibration to receive a divine inward guidance for what to do and when to do it. An analogy I commonly use to describe this is that of a chess game. In chess, two players guide a set of pieces across a board in a series of moves in order to strategically “capture” the king piece of their opponent. Games of chess are notorious for lasting a very long time with players making a long series of moves in order to outwit each other. But, experts at chess who reach the level of grand master are able to play a lesser skilled player and win by making only a handful of moves. So, it is possible in chess for you to play against an opponent for hours on end, making countless moves in order to reach your desired objective (winning), or it could take just a few moves. The difference is in the mind of the player. In chess, it’s quite literally knowing the strategy of the game so well that you can win without all the time and effort that might be required of a less skilled player.

This is what manifesting success with less stress is all about. Understanding that whatever your desired objective is, you have two choices; to do it the easy way or to do it the hard way. The hard way is starting off with the mindset that you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you and all this work is going to be hard but that if you put in the hard work and stay focused long enough and sacrifice time with other things to devote more time to this thing than you will reach your objective. This is the mindset of setting expectations for what you think you should do to achieve your objective, and then working diligently to check off each step until your objective is reached. It works, most of the time, but it’s a buzz kill of a mindset isn’t it? Instead, what I am offering to you and what the study on the link between happiness and productivity is really illustrating is that there is an easy path too. When you shift your mindset into happiness and contentment, even gratitude and joy and then approach your objective thinking about how great it’s going to be when you hit your goal and how excited you are to finish your work, and what you can’t wait to do after all the work is complete- then suddenly your mindset is in alignment with the vibration of success for that objective, and like a grand master, you will instinctually know what the next right move is from exactly where you stand, and as long as you listen to the feeling inside that urges you to do x next, and as long as you keep your emotions in a state of happiness then you will complete your objective in far fewer moves overall. Manifest success with less stress. Get what you want with less effort expended.

Now, if you’ve been around the block with me, you may recall that I often suggest that if you are working towards an objective and don’t know how to get started, that the first thing you should do is some research on how to achieve your objective. I make this suggestion knowing full well that if someone is really ready to achieve that objective but are not yet in alignment with a higher vibration, that doing the research becomes the first step, the first action they take to put them in alignment with achieving that objective. Many times, when we go to do research on how to achieve an objective, we find information that confirms what we already believed was the right action to take. Isn’t that interesting? We already kinda knew what to do before we got started, but instead of acting on what we felt was right, we needed confirmation from another source. This is a very common situation people find themselves in when they are not yet used to being in alignment with a high vibration and don’t trust their gut yet! In psychology there is a concept called confirmation bias that is a tendency humans are afflicted with. This is the tendency to seek out and trust information that confirms what we already believe to be true. So, humans are programmed instinctually for this alignment, and when you take the step of doing the research on your objective, it aligns you to that objective and confirms those feelings you already had about what to do to achieve it. So once your done getting that confirmation you start to feel better don’t you? You feel more confident! You feel like you are better prepared to start and as long as nothing else stands in your way, your vibration is rising into alignment with your objective.

But, I assure you, the research step wasn’t actually necessary as part of this mechanism. All you actually need to do is get into a high vibration and align with your objective- make yourself feel happy and clearly identify what you want to achieve- and you will automatically start receiving insight for what the right action is to take! Then it’s up to you to trust that information you receive. Trust your feelings. Try acting on what you feel is the right thing to do first, and then next. See where it takes you. If you stay in the high vibration and in alignment with your objective, meaning you don’t change the objective and you don’t start doubting the objective, then you will absolutely achieve it quicker and with less energy expended than had you tried the hard way. It does take practice and mastery to get into a high vibration, especially if you aren’t the healthiest or most confident person, but with time you can build a new neural net of experience. Practically speaking, deciding to be happy and finding simple ways shift into happiness requires very little work and is something anyone can do. It does take discipline and focus to stay in alignment with a goal, but over time those mental muscles can be trained as well. So really, what we need to develop is the discipline of controlling our mind, not the discipline of controlling our actions, in order to become productive and successfully achieve our objectives.

Now, I realize this discussion may bring up more questions for you- specifically around the metaphysics of how this all works. How do we receive the information for the next right action and where does it come from? I will get into this idea in future posts, but for now I will ask you not to focus on any lingering questions but instead to focus on practicing the process I have shared. After all, I don’t know how my television works, but I know how to turn it on and change the channel, and that’s enough for me to use it to meet my needs.

Of course, I would love to hear what you think of this information and your experience with it. If you have any questions, of course also leave those down below in a comment so I can address those for you because this is truly a very important skill to master for productivity and I’m committed to helping you build and use this skill successfully!

xoxo,