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: Psychology
Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area: Want More Time?
You know how it can be: You have an overwhelming to-do list as long as your arm, and it never gets any shorter. There are some things you want to accomplish, but weeks, months and even years slip by with no progress. You are tempted to laugh out loud when someone suggests adding daily exercise,…
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…
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…
What’s In It For You? How to Reward Yourself For Meeting Your Goals
How can I motivate and reward myself when I am both the boss and the employee? So, one of the skills I teach in my Plan to Thrive productivity program is how to use a four-month rolling plan to keep up your momentum. And one essential part of the rolling plan is a way to…
The Planning Fallacy: Why You Don’t Know How Much You Can Do This Year
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. – Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid As you make your plans for 2011, do you feel that you didn’t do much, or enough, last year? Do you feel that you really want this year…
No Regrets
When I asked my father, then aged 85 and about to move out of the home he’d built with his own hands 25 years earlier, whether there was anything more he really wanted to do, his response was memorable: “You can always think of more things to do in a day than you can get…
Strengthen your success with a gratitude journal
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but also the parent of all the others. — Cicero For years I had kept a gratitude journal — a notebook in which I recorded things large and small in my business for which I felt grateful. I knew that great thinkers from all ages and traditions…
Recipe for productivity
Like a featured recipe in a cooking magazine, productivity has many ingredients. Some are obvious (oh, there’s beef in the beef stew!) while some are subtle (who knew that excellent doughnuts actually require a whisper of nutmeg??) We can leave something out, we can make substitutions, but the dish won’t achieve the same heights without…
The Ins and Outs of Burnout
In the past two weeks I have spoken with two professionals, both highly capable and generally cheerful people, who are facing genuine cases of burnout. We sometimes hear the tern “burnout” tossed around to indicate a variety of unpleasant conditions, so let me clear about what I mean. Burnout is not the same thing as…