I knew two weeks ago I was going to have to punt every non-academic commitment if I was going to successfully finish my semester and earn my Master's degree. In the past, I think I would've tried to keep my commitment to this website and other creative endeavors even while buried in important and time-sensitive assignments. The result would've been the same (i.e. nothing gets written here) but I would've felt much worse for "failing." I think I'm starting to understand myself and my limitations much better which is allowing me to bring my focus to bear on what really requires it in the moment.

Know Thyself

Knowing yourself and your true capabilities (not what you wish you could do or think you should be able to do) seems to be a key component of being happy with your work. I knew I couldn't do a good job on this website while also completing the academic assignments well. Instead of doing both in a half-assed fashion or feeling bad for neglecting one or the other I made the conscious choice that this website could take a backseat until after graduation. I thought I might feel badly for doing this but I actually discovered I felt the opposite. I felt like my attention was freed up to work on what needed to be done and I didn't feel upset about having to focus on academic work.

I think the key component was that I set a specific date to revisit my creative endeavors, including working on this website. In my task management software I assigned everything non-mission-critical to pop up and be reviewed on the Sunday after graduation. By doing this I knew I wouldn't lose anything to the void and that I wasn't making some sort of nebulous half-commitment to coming back to this. Instead, I knew that on the 19th of May everything I couldn't focus on right now would be there waiting for me and I could make decisions about how I wanted to move forward at that time. Until then, full steam ahead on the term papers!

Back in the Saddle

All of this is a bit of a roundabout way to say I finished all my assignments, walked across the stage last weekend, and now officially own a Master's degree in Positive Developmental Psychology. I'm certainly excited to have completed this phase of my journey. It was great to have my parents fly across the country to spend this time with me and I'm excited to start the next leg of my academic journey in the fall.

However, I'm most excited to dive back into my entrepreneurial and creative efforts. I have big plans for this website over the coming months. I'm taking on more coaching clients and I have ideas for all sorts of projects that may or may not ever see the light of day (but the thought of their future existence is exciting). An advanced degree could be seen as a nice ending point; a big slap on the back for a job well done. I disagree. I prefer to see it as a launching pad and I plan to use it to push forward the science of personal development and the art of working. I hope you'll stick around for the ride.

However, I'm currently sitting in a Starbucks in Manhattan after arriving on a cross-country red-eye flight from Los Angeles. That's about 3,000 miles away from where I probably should be a week before finals. Instead, I'm getting ready to attend my first 99U conference. I've been reading 99U (formerly the 99%) for a long time and have always found it thought provoking and developmental in my own work. I first heard about one of my favorite books, The Power of Full Engagement, from a talk that happened at a past 99U conference. When I saw there was an application to become a "99U Fellow" a few months ago I had to at least apply. My expectations were low but it turns out I earned one of the few positions and therefore was able to buy a drastically reduced ticket for this year's conference. And voila, here I am.

If I wanted to be a "good" student I probably wouldn't be here. I'm missing two classes and hours of productive time. That's an undergraduate mentality, though. Coming to an event like this that will expose me to interesting ideas and people is the type of thing that pays off down the road. As a PhD student, my job is to develop good ideas, cultivate them, and see them to fruition. Coming to a conference with the tagline, "Insights on making ideas happen," may be the best thing I can do.

I have lists that organize my work, my responsibilities as a student, and lists that serve as a record of my most audacious plans, goals, and dreams. I can quickly make myself feel better about a stressful situation if I make a list. I feel good while making a list, like I'm gathering all the wispy bits of information floating around my head and collecting them into a logical and complete collection. I feel better after I've created a list and I can see the sum total of everything I need to do, or all the books I want to read, or the areas of my life that require my attention. If keeping lists were something I could be paid to do professionally, I get the sense that I'd have a shot at making the Hall of Fame.

I also think I might be somewhat unique in that I actually use all the lists I keep. I'm not one of those list keepers that hammers out a quick list and then loses it. No sir. My lists are regularly reviewed and updated and ruthlessly maintained. Like a well-tended garden, my lists grow, require pruning, and with enough love and care, produce a bountiful crop of productivity, engaged leisure, and ordered thoughts.

To give you a quick glimpse into my listed life, here's a complete list (ha!) of my lists:

• Projects
• Next Actions
• Areas of Responsibility
• Someday/Maybe Projects
• Books to Read
• When I Start & Finish Various Consumable Products (see below)
• Movies, TV Shows & Music People Recommend
• Board/Card/Video Games to Play
• General Wish List
• Places to Go
• Technology to Learn Better
• Things That Annoy Me
• Things I Know About Myself

I imagine there are probably a couple questions about what I just wrote. The "When I Start & Finish Various Consumable Products" list is a relatively new one with a simple purpose. I eventually want to have certain products (toothpaste, paper towel, deodorant, etc.) be automatically delivered to my house through Amazon's subscription service. However, I have no idea how long it takes me to finish a tube of toothpaste or a stick of deodorant, so I'm keeping track of it.

The "Things That Annoy Me" list is my ongoing list of terrible purchasing decisions that I never want to repeat and bits of self-knowledge I've gleaned from 26 years of life. For example, the first item is "pleated shorts." I once bought pleated shorts and I hated them. Sure, maybe it was traumatic enough an experience that I'd always remember the edict to never buy pleated shorts again, but I feel better knowing I've stuck it on a list.

My newest, and current favorite, list is "Things I Know About Myself." Every once in awhile I realize I'm repeating the same silly mistakes or noticing the same consistent behavior. For example, a couple of the items on this list include, "If I don't work out before dinner, I probably won't," and, "I rarely wake up from a 20 minute nap feeling worse," and, "I rarely wake up from an hour long nap feeling better." Handy things to know, for sure, and the exercise of trying to add to the list every couple of weeks always keeps me on the lookout to understand myself better (my latest entry is, "You will feel like shit if you eat a lot of bread in one sitting, idiot.")

I think lists are so powerful because they represent a stake in something you think is important. I want to understand myself better because I think by doing so I can become a better person. Hence, the "Things I Know About Myself" list. If my birthday is coming up I want to be able to give my parents a couple of ideas for gifts that I didn't just randomly come up with but consciously chose to keep on my Ongoing Wish List. Caring enough about something to keep it on a list, and to keep that list updated and easy to find, represents a psychological commitment that is hard to ignore.

Is it possible to go overboard with all the list making? Of course. Hell, having one list is too many if you never look at it again or don't try to keep it updated. I recommend building a step into your Weekly Review where you take a few minutes to review and update your lists.

Remember, lists are like a garden. Tending and maintaining can be fun, but the real reward is in the harvest at the end.

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I'm writing for 99U's new blog, Workbook. If you like bite-sized nuggets of creativity and productivity insight then I highly recommend you check it out. I'll also be attending the 99U Conference in NYC next week. I'd love to meet any SamSpurlin.com readers who might be there as well. Connect with me on Twitter and I'll buy you a coffee, eh?

Photo by puikibeach

"Within 20 years, he wondered, will students manage to muster the dozens of hours of attention necessary to get through a lengthy novel like Tolstoy's 19th-century classic? If not, what does that mean for works of history that are even harder to read?" -- from "You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help."

I love that mindfulness is coming mainstream. The mindfulness research being done in psychology is producing fascinating results. I'm no guru, but I've seen the benefits that increased mindfulness have had in my own life. I predict there will be more classes like the one described in the article offered at more universities in the future.

Why?

The attention span that's mentioned in the quote that starts this article scares me. In a world with incredible technology and unsurpassed connectivity it can be tempting to think that everything can be done quicker. But, I don't think that's the case. Truly creative and important work will always take deep practice, deliberate effort, and patience. Our current reality does not do much to cultivate these characteristics. Which makes it even more important that we develop them for ourselves.

Two weeks ago I conducted my second A Week Without challenge. This time I challenged myself to not buy any convenience food for an entire week. I noticed that I had gotten into a lazy habit of buying snacks and lunch on campus and hitting Subway for dinner. This is a pretty nutritionally dubious thing to do. Ironically, I had lapsed into this routine in the name of productivity and I noticed I had been less productive and energetic ever since doing so. I thought staying on campus and picking up something quick to eat would allow me more time to work and therefore would elevate my productivity. I thought wrong.

In a nutshell, the challenge was embarrassingly easy. Embarrassing because it made me realize how absurdly lazy I'd become. With only a tiny bit of effort and planning I was able to reduce my on-campus food expenditures to zero while also taking better care of my body. I made a couple large batches of food early in the week (bean and sweet potato burritos!) and then could easily grab one when I was short on time. In other situations I just forced myself to stop working early enough to go to the store to buy groceries and make something delicious.

I also realized that thinking about food prep (shopping + cooking) as non-productive time is really short-sighted. All the work I do as a coach and a student starts first with a healthy body. Therefore, anything I have to do to support that healthy body is really quite productive. I may not be putting words on paper or conducting a coaching session, but I'm preparing myself physically to do so by preparing high quality food. As I began to view these tasks in a more positive light I found it easier to make the time to cook good meals and prepare snacks ahead of time instead of waiting until I was hungry and on-campus and therefore looking at crappy convenience food to satiate me.

Being serious about the work I do has to begin well before I ever open a word processor or start a coaching call with a client. It has to start with the way I take care of myself and this week has helped solidify that for me.

Next week I'll tackle another Week Without challenge. Have something you'd like me to try? I'm taking suggestions on Twitter.

Photo by NickNguyen

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.

This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy. -- James Surowiecki, "Later"

One of the more surprising things I've learned as I study Positive Psychology is just how terrible we are as a species at predicting what will make us happy. Tied to that, why do we willingly do something that will make us unhappy? Why do we seem to be such an utter mess when it comes to living a good life? Don't you think we would've figured this out by now? Thanks a lot, evolution.

I don't know the answers to those questions but I keep coming back to the idea of building structures into my life that support making the right decisions. That's why I created my Weekly Review Checklist, why I have a recurring reminder to think about my longterm goals and overall vision, and why I put things I don't want to forget directly in front of my door. I'm working on embracing the fact that I'm an idiot instead of fighting it. By embracing it I can take steps to mitigate it and that's much more preferable than feeling smart but doing dumb things.

The Allure of the Lifehack

There's only so many ways you can tweak a workflow or utilize a new app to make yourself more productive. Lifehacks can be so alluring because the first couple you adopt have huge positive returns on your life with almost no cost. The problem is that you quickly run into the problem of diminishing returns. It takes more and more effort to reach the same kind of benefit. Next thing you know you're cleaning your debit cards or creating a filing system for your socks. Trying to increase your productivity by actively focusing on your productivity is a path that will hit a dead end. Then what?

The Renewal Approach to Productivity

Attacking the problem from the other end, from a restoration viewpoint, opens up new avenues for growth. Systematic renewal builds up the raw material, the willpower, chutzpah, motivation, whatever you want to call it, to make things happen. To increase physical strength you introduce your muscles to stress. If you properly restore them by eating well and getting enough sleep you're rewarded with increased capacity to lift things. It works the same way with your ability to do things in general, too. You introduce yourself to stress by taking on scary projects, working under pressure, dealing with difficult clients or bosses, and pushing yourself to learn something every day. The part that most of us seem to forget, though, is that just like our fatigued muscles from going to the gym, we have to allow ourselves to renew after experiencing stress. If we do, then we will build our capacity to resist stress in the future. If we don't, we will quickly burn out.

Ideas For Becoming a Renewal Champion

Over the past few weeks I've been more mindful about the ways I renew. Here's a handful of my latest observations.

Create the Structural Framework

The first thing I noticed is that renewal is something I don't automatically think about. I have to build in reminders to my day otherwise I'll just fly from one activity to the next and then wonder why I'm exhausted by the end of the week. One structural thing I've done is utilize a timer and work in 25 minute blocks with 5 minute rest sessions (or the Pomodoro Technique, for you productivity nerds out there). The second thing is to leave my default meeting length in my calendar app at one hour. Most of my meetings don't last that long but by making it appear as though all my meetings each take up an hour block I usually have a few minutes to relax and recharge in between appointments.

Get Outside Your Context (and Literally Outside)

In addition to these two techniques, I've tried to spend more time outside. Research tends to show that spending time in nature is a great way to recharge your metaphorical batteries. Another thing I've learned is that it's important for me to get away from the context in which I've been working during my 5 minute renewal blocks throughout the day. Meaning, if I've been working at my computer then I shouldn't spend my 5 minutes of renewal also sitting at my computer. If I've been reading then I shouldn't flip over to another activity where I have to read, even if it's for my own enjoyment.

Set Limits (And Follow Them)

Finally, I've learned that perhaps the biggest key to building restoration into my day is setting, and sticking to, limits. The end of my workday shouldn't be when I've become so tired I can't keep my eyes open or my work is suffering terribly. Most days, I try to wrap up the main productive part of my day around 7 or 8 PM so I can eat dinner and ideally relax a little bit before going to bed. Granted, this isn't something I'm always successful with (considering it's 11:01 PM as I write this). However, I've definitely noticed the difference in my own energy levels when I'm the one in charge of deciding when my work is finished instead of my work deciding when I'm finished -- physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is something I think people with creative careers marked by longevity have usually mastered.

Conclusion

In a world of pervasive communication, 24-7 connection to work and entertainment, and a sometimes disturbingly masochistic attitude toward the sheer number of hours we should spend working, a healthy respect for restoration and renewal may help set you apart from the masses. Sure, feel free to keep tweaking your workflows and productive habits to improve the way you work. Just don't forget about the quieter counterpart to productivity, namely being quiet and taking a break.

Photo via me in my backyard

"The value of reading a textbook (or, better, doing an online course) is that it gives you a baseline for examining other aspects of that field. Taking one physics course would be enough to know why perpetual motion machines are scams. Similarly, if you’re going to read books on the financial crisis, political blogs or start investing money—maybe it makes sense to have read one book on basic economics… Ditto for psychology. One psychology textbook will hardly make you an expert. But it will at least make you aware that truths can’t be concluded from a single study, or that generalizing from a very narrowly designed experiment is dangerous. The point of reading at least one textbook is to give an awareness of (a) the fundamental concepts most people agree with in a field and (b) where experts disagree." -- Scott H. Young, "Why You Should Read Textbooks"

I agree with Scott -- I doubt many people will follow this advice but I think it's nonetheless pretty good. If you really care about something then you should strive to understand it at a very basic level. Textbooks are designed to give you an accessible and direct route to that basic understanding. I think this is one of those pieces of advice that really sets apart people who say they care about something and people who really care about something.

You can usually buy older edition textbooks, which are nearly identical to the current edition, for extremely reduced prices on Amazon (years of being a student and looking longingly at the 4th edition when the professor insists on the 5th edition, because she wrote it, has made me very aware of this).

"Plasticity, the propensity to be shaped by experience, isn’t limited to the brain. You already know that when you lead a sedentary life, your muscles atrophy to diminish your physical strength. What you may not know is that your habits of social connection also leave their own physical imprint on you." -- Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson in the New York Times

So much of positive psychology and effective coaching is built on the idea of plasticity -- the ability of the brain to change. Science has shown that the neurons used to do the things you practice more often become better at functioning the more you practice (hence your ability to get better at things over time). While that's an awesome capability of our brains, it can work against us when we inadvertently spend an insane amount of time practicing something detrimental to our optimal functioning.

Fredrickson makes an good case that keeping our faces buried in our smartphones might be seriously harming our ability to connect with other people, and given the social evolutionary history of our species, may be harming our overall health in general.

Let's assume you recognize that you're in a rut already. You feel like you're failing in one or more areas of your life and aren't making the progress you think you should. Instead of steadily getting better you've hit a plateau or are quickly sliding down the metaphorical hill. Here are a few techniques from my own arsenal that I'm happy to share with you:

1. Knock out the most annoying thing on your list: For whatever reason, seeing a hated task get scratched off my list, even if it's not super important, feels really good. It usually leads to a sense of momentum that I try to apply to the second and third most annoying tasks on my list. If I can suck it up and knock out a couple annoying tasks I've usually ended up feeling so much better I can naturally move out of the rut.

2. Stay up all night and work: I'm a huge proponent of making sure you get enough high-quality sleep every night to fully function. However, sometimes drastic times call for drastic measures (and obviously this only works if staying up all night isn't your modus operandi). When I'm feeling stuck sometimes I'll make an audacious to-do list, brew some good coffee (or hit my favorite 24/7 cafe), and put my nose to the grindstone. If you use the time wisely and get a lot of work done then you might be successful in snapping out of the rut. Being tired the next day is definitely worth being rut-free.

3. Go work somewhere completely new: This tip works similarly to the last one. By going somewhere completely different from your usual locations you can sometimes snap yourself out of your typical routine. Sometimes being in a rut is just a matter of falling into too much of a habit. Drive to a nearby city you never visit and find a library or coffee shop to work in, look up a coworking space and book a day to work there, or go hiking and take your school books with you for some adventure studying.

4. Step back from your work: A rut can form when you're constantly hammering away at your work for weeks on end without ever coming up for air. Instead of just continuing to chip away at a task list or project that has gone stale it can be worth a couple hours to step back and get perspective on your work again. Ask yourself some deeper questions about what you're working on, why you're working on it, and how it will help you professional or personally. Reading a book like David Allen's Making It All Work or another one that encourages you to look at your work from a holistic viewpoint can be incredibly helpful.

5. Axe something: The result of tip #4 might be identifying a project that is more trouble than it's worth. The best feeling of all is finding a project that has been weighing you down and just shaking it off for good. Obviously, you can't just throw away everything that's weighing you down all the time. However, if you've got a project that's thoroughly stuck it might be time to just leave it by the side of the road. What's the worst that can happen if you decide to stop working on a project? Where could that energy be better spent?

Ruts suck. However, they will always happen. It doesn't matter how productive or efficient or happy you are. You will eventually feel like you're not moving forward with work, personal fitness, personal growth -- with something. It's up to you to identify when that is happening and then apply the proper tool to snap out of it.

I'm always curious about the tactics other people use. Please share them with me on Twitter.

Photo by Creda's Hill