It seems that every time I check the news these days I’m met with another study that says inactivity shortens our lives. It rots our brains. It wrecks our blood chemistry, even if we exercise every day. Let me be clear: it’s not just that exercise is beneficial – we all know that already….
Category Archives: Productivity
Worth Repeating – February Productivity Posts
The days of talking about resolutions may be behind us for a while, but there is never a bad time to make some small changes that will yield big results. Past February posts from the New Leaf blog suggest a few changes you may want to try now, so you can do more of what…
Floss One Tooth: How Tiny Habit Changes Can Make All the Difference
There are three ways to change your behavior. You can have an epiphany. If you know the story of Byron Katie’s remarkable turn-around, you have an example of an epiphany. These are hard to engineer, so looking for one to show up can be a long and frustrating wait. You can change your context. When…
Delegate to a Task Rabbit: A Little Help, Quick Like a Bunny
Delegation is one of the most difficult skills for many entrepreneurs to pick up. There are a lot of reasons for this – the skills and traits required for long-term delegation make the subject of other posts. But what if we just need a little low-stress help on a temporary basis? We don’t need to…
Why GTD Isn’t Working For You
Getting Things Done (GTD), the time management system based on David Allen’s best-selling book, is loved by many. It’s also no secret that not everyone finds it smooth sailing. GTD can become a cause of pain for some people, maybe for you. I often work with people who have tried GTD and after a while…
How Can a Tomato Give You Time-Management Superpowers?
We live in a world of interruptions and distractions. These interruptions can make it tough to finish the projects that matter most to us. And the answer to this problem is – a tomato. I’m talking about a time-management method called the Pomodoro Technique. First taught in the early 1990s, the technique was developed by…
Want To Save Hours Every Week? Read This Fast!
For years I considered myself a slow reader. But it wasn’t until I began to use an electronic reader that I understood just how slow. Routinely I would dawdle over a page of newspaper text for so long, that my iPad would time out and close up the document, thinking I wasn’t there anymore. I…
Four School Lessons to Unlearn Now
We’ve all been told that studying hard and doing well in school were necessary for our future success. But there are some things you learned in order to do well in school that you really need to unlearn in order to successfully start and run your own business. Here are four school rules that flunk…
The Price of Procrastination
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. William James
How Much Time Is There In An Eight-Hour Day?
Does this sound like a trick question? Let me ask it another way: have you ever planned to get a certain amount of work done only to find at the end of the day that you need another three or four hours to finish what you’d planned? Whether we work alone in a home office…