Posted inQuick Tips and Tricks

How To Get Back On Track After Time Off

One of the hardest things to deal with after taking some time off from work is getting yourself back on track.

Hopefully you’re refreshed, feeling creative and ready to rock! But it’s probably also true that you’re buried under a mountain of e-mail, have lots of calls to return and, if you’ve just spent a weekend in Vegas, you feel like you’ve been run over by a cement truck.

What’s worse is that any good habits you had before you left are in jeopardy of being broken if you can’t get back on track quickly.

Well, as a veteran of many a few days off, and luckily a few longer vacations as well, I do have a few tips that could help make your next transition back to reality an easier one.

Posted inMethodologies

How To Deal With Burnout

Every now and again we all hit a wall. For me it happens fairly regularly and I’m usually able to recover fairly quickly. But it’s not always been like that. I’ve had to train myself to recover from burnout. Unfortunately it’s a largely intuitive process and even recognizing burnout can be tricky.

I’m a fairly creative person and I go through regular creative highs and lows. It can be difficult for me to tell the difference between a down day, or creative low, and something a bit more than that. Sometimes it’s easier when it hits like a ton of bricks.

Either way, burnout, creative or otherwise, is a common problem, especially for those who work hard and function at a high level. You simply can’t keep working without resting. Burnout happens for a reason. It’s your mind and body telling you to take a break and as a first step towards getting back on track, that is exactly what I think you should do if your dealing with burnout.

Posted inQuick Tips and Tricks

Be A More Productive Blogger 2

Be a more productive blogger was quite a hit with y’all and it caused some very good discussion as well. I’m very glad to have give many of you ideas and I’m glad to say y’all gave me some good ideas in return.

Because of that post I started a new site, Successful Blog where I’ll focus on all sorts of issues related to blogging, and I’ve decided to write this follow up. I figured I had to know of more than 13 tips to becoming a more productive blogger, and sure enough, I have quite a bit more.

As a bonus, this time I’m also going to throw in a few ways you can use your blog to be more productive in other parts of your life.

Posted inMiscellaneous

A GTD Shopping List

How about a little fun on this Friday?

A friend of mine and I were talking a few nights ago about productivity and all the little gadgets and “things” that people get to help stay organized and be more productive. The funny thing is that, in general, I seem to do better with less. Stuff, in my world, doesn’t usually equal productivity. However there are a few things it seems everyone who’s into GTD wants to have.

So I decided, for fun, to create a shopping list of personal productivity items. Don’t take this to mean you, by any stretch, need any of this stuff to be more productive at all. It’s just a little Friday fun.

Posted inMiscellaneous

On Change

Today I was pointed in the direction of an article in Fast Company by Alan Deutschman called “Change or Die.”

It stuck a chord with me right away because I’ve been working on a piece about doing something great and one of the biggest barriers to getting something great done is fear of change. In my line of work I’m forced to change constantly and yet still I’m fearful and uncomfortable at times with change. At other times I feel I’m one of the lucky people who can embrace it and even force it.