MiraNous Coaching & Consulting

Professional Development for Groups and Teams

Reclaim Productivity, Flow, and What Matters with a Master Weekly Schedule

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“Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.”
― Carl Sandburg

There are many productivity hacks. Few of those hacks ensure that you are being productive with things that truly matter. Reclaim productivity, flow, and what matters with a master weekly schedule.

You are likely to benefit from a Master Themed-Weekly Schedule if:

 ·         You have asked yourself, “What should I be doing right now?”

·         You have wondered if you are using your time well.

·         You begin to work on one task only to find yourself switching back and forth between three different tasks.

·         You have felt that you worked on many things but accomplished little and actually feel more behind than when you started to work.

·         You spend most of your time on tasks that have little to do with your vision and goals as well as the progress you desire to see.

 

 

Imagine having a guide that informs you how to use each day and each section of the day, in a way that keeps everything progressing. Imagine all the energy you would save by not constantly second-guessing yourself. Each time to make decisions regarding what would should be working on, you contribute to decision fatigue. The more energy and time you spend on making small decisions the more you deplete your precious reserves of cognitive ability, decision-making, creativity, problem-solving prowess, and energy.

 Getting in Flow for Productivity 

Themed-days are your key to peaceful productivity because they allow you to get in a “flow.” Mihály Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.”

 I treasure those times when I am in a state of flow with my relationships, with my work, with a creative endeavour. After a flow session, I feel that I have truly accomplished something and used my day well. I can see that I made progress in the things that matter most to me.

 Staying out of Spotlights 

However, the busy-ness of life can cause us to be less in a state of flow and more in a state of “spotlights.” In neuroscience, an activity that is manifested sporadically and briefly throughout the brain has been coined by some researchers as “spotlight”. When you are in a state of “spotlights” you are making your brain frantically switch between several activities including eating, writing emails, texting, talking, doing paperwork, tending to children, and redirecting the dog, all at the same time (That sentence just created anxiety in my chest. Moreover, that is how I operate more often than I would like to acknowledge when I do not have a clear plan). A brain scan during this type of multitasking would show-up as “spotlights” on the brain.

In a state of flow, the brain is much more efficient. A brain in a state of flow maximizes energy and can distinguish between what matters and what does not matter. In other words, a brain in a state of flow is highly-focused.

So how do we step out of “spotlights” and move into flow to have peaceful productivity? Well, there are several things that you can do. However, the first suggestion that I have, is to encourage you to give your days a theme and create a master schedule. These will help you have peaceful productivity. You can give an entire day a theme. Alternatively, you can divide your day into two or three themes.

 Do What Matters When You Have Little Control

 An immediate objection might come to mind. Specifically, there might be some of you in fields or leadership positions in which your days can easily be usurped by others. You may conclude that you may not be able to stick to a theme. I challenge you to give this a try.

Even if you feel that you can’t control your days with themes related to your work, you can choose portions of your day with themes such as: Critical, Progress, and Maintenance. Critical Tasks must be taken care of. Progress Tasks are those that move you forward on your goals and vision. And Maintenance Tasks help things keep moving smoothly without falling through the cracks. No matter what you do, you will deal with tasks and activities that align with those categories.

 Furthermore, research indicates that you would do well to know and work with your chronotype. Daniel Pink explains more about chronotypes on a podcast produced at Art of Manliness. My chronotype, and that of most people would have us working on Progress Tasks in the morning, these tasks tend to be creative, require high- cognitive demand, and move our goals and vision forward. In the afternoon, we would work on Critical Tasks which include tasks that are important, require our attention, but may not require high-cognitive and energetic stamina. Many times, Critical Task have little to do with advancing vision and goals and are usually externally imposed. Then, in the late afternoon and evening, we do well to work on Maintenance Tasks or routine tasks. By completing these tasks, we will not get behind and things will not fall through the cracks.

Possible Themes for the Master Weekly Schedule  

Here are some examples of themes for various roles, to give you some ideas. 

 

 

Applying Themes to Meetings  

If you want to start small, how about establishing themes for your meetings? Instead of trying to tackle sundry issues at each meeting, use themed-weeks for your meetings. Here as some examples:

 Week 1 – Meetings related to Cost

Week 2 – Meetings related to Safety

Week 3 – Meetings related to Delivery/Quality

Week 4 – Meetings related to People Development

 

 A Gift for You – Master Weekly Schedule Template 

Now it is your turn. I made an excel sheet that you can use as a template to create themes based on your roles and responsibilities. You can batch your day based on Critical, Progress, and Maintenance tasks. Or you can do both. The goal is not that you will hit this perfectly every single day, but imagine what it would feel like to have a successfully planned and executed day 50%, 70% or 80% of the time.

I have had a few inquiries from individuals wanting more support with customizing the Excel template. So I created this video. 

 

 What Would You Add? 

Second, let us learn from you. What other theme ideas do you have? Please share in the comments section of this blogpost to help inspire others.

 

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1998). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Kahn Academy. (n.d.) The spotlight model of attention and our ability to multitask. Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/attention-language/v/the-spotlight-model-of-attention-and-our-ability-to-multitask

 

 

 

Journal to Increase Your Growth Mindset and Grit

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“Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.” — Stephen R. Covey

At this time of year, there is a plethora of advice on how to set and achieve your goals. Knowledge, motivation, intent, and desire serve as a weak catalyst for the changes you want to make and the goals that you want to achieve. You are guaranteed to face obstacles to the improvements that you want to make this year. The best weapons you have against those obstacles are having a growth mindset and having grit. Therefore, let us explore journaling to increase your growth mindset and grit.

I can almost hear a collective suspire and the words being spoken “who has time for that?” Try my structured journaling process for four to six weeks. Then you can compare your growth and progress to where you would be without that practice.

Growth Mindset & Grit

Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, brought us the concept of growth mindset. In her research, she discovered the impact of having a “fixed” versus “growth” mindset. Dr. Dweck summarizes her findings as follows: “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more those with a fixed mindset…” Because of that, it is important to explore how one can journal to increase growth mindset.

Dr. Angela Duckworth, is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She delivered a popular TEDtalk: “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”.  She defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” It is important to know how to journal to increase grit.

Imagine what would be possible for you if you had an ingrained belief that you could grow, change, achieve. And imagine that you coupled that belief with an unrelenting passion and perseverance. I believe half of your success equation would be in place.

Further anneal your success with a daily, conscious, deliberate, reflective, experimental, and persistent effort towards achieving your goals. Now, any success that seemed elusive has transformed into success that is highly attainable. Daily journaling about your goals and how you are investing your time and energy in your priorities, forces you to align with and course correct as needed in order to do the small daily, weekly, monthly actions that your goals require present every single day.

If you still feel ambivalent about investing time to journal, it might help to know the numerous benefits that journaling affords. The benefits of journaling can be:  increasing cognitive abilities, increasing mindfulness, goal achievement, increase in emotional intelligence, boosting memory and comprehension, strengthening self-discipline, improving communication skills, healing, exercising creativity, increasing self-confidence, increasing clarity, deeper self-awareness, stress reduction, improvement in problem-solving, and helping with improving relationships.

 

Journaling Template

It is a lengthy template, but I journal twice a day. I rarely go beyond one page (front and back in my 9X7 journal). So it is not much writing. There are many areas, but my reflections are brief. I synthesize. I have adapted my template from the Michael Hyatt’s daily journal template.

Frist page of Journal: One of the first pages in my journal lists my goals in each key area of my life and at least three sub-actions (commitments) that must happen in order to achieve those goals. My areas for goals are Spiritual, SELF, Spouse, Children, Family and Friends, Home/Finances, Business, University Work, Coaching Skill Development

 

Morning Journaling Session

Sleep: I note how much sleep I obtained the night before. This compels me to ensure that I sleep the hours that I need to function optimally. Moreover, there are interesting correlations between sleep and outcomes of the day based on adequate or deficient sleep.

Word of Day:  – I am a logophile, and I love learning new words.

Spiritual Reflection:  A short reflection based on Scripture or a short spiritual reading.

“Yesterday I…”: I describe the events that happened yesterday…sometimes in as little as two or three sentences.

“What I learned…”: Here I reflect on the insights from yesterday. How can I leverage yesterday to be better today?

“Today I am grateful for…”:  It is always good to start the day with gratitude. I do this by writing one sentence of gratitude  (meaningful or seemingly inconsequential things that make life beautiful).

Today’s Goals: My daily goals are 80% informed by my goals for the year, which are recorded on the first page of my journal. As I create my daily goals, I look at my goals’ page and draw from there. I only allow myself three goals. I accomplish (work towards) more than three things. However, the ones designated as goals for the days take precedence over everything.

 

Evening Journaling Session

I write the word Examine and then reflect on the following:

“I am reading/learning about ….”: I always want to be learning, reading something, listening to a podcast, thinking deeply about concepts. Moreover, I record a couple of sentences for that.

Review of Clarity, Focus, and Intensity: This is where I reflect on my time and energy use. My three words for the year are clarity, focus, and intensity. So I reflect whether I approached my three goals with clarity, focus, and intensity.

“Tomorrow, I want to be mindful of …”: I desire to do better tomorrow than I did today. My intent is to grow. Therefore, I set an intention based on my insights of the day.

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison

My win from today:  Always, always end on a positive note. So no matter how small or grand the win –document it.

Some people sleepwalk through life. When you are investing time to journal about life and reflect twice a day you will awaken. You will become conscious of all the unconscious things that are working against you. You will not only awaken to internal factors that hinder you, you will also awaken to external factors that hinder your progress. Moreover, you will be able to avert those.

Lastly, next year, it will be easy to closeout 2018. You will have your journal replete with entries documenting your life, how you gave of yourself to others and to your work, of your struggles, and triumphs. You will have your goals and the works that you did towards achieving them at your fingertips. Moreover, you will have documentation on the progress of those goals. I hope that your year-end synthesis and refection will amaze you and fill you with gratitude because you lived the year well…with a growth mindset and with grit.

References

Dweck, C. (2016). What having a “growth mindset” actually means. Retrieved January 9, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means

Nguyen, T. (2017). 10 Surprising benefits you’ll get from keeping a journal. Retrieved January 8, 2018, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/thai-nguyen/benefits-of-journaling-_b_6648884.html

Purcell, M. (n.d). The health benefits of journaling. Retrieved, January 7, 2018, from  https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/