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You’re reading 4 Unexpected Habits That Will Supercharge Your Productivity, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
“Focus on being productive, instead of busy” – Tim Ferriss
You’re busy.
Maybe you wake up early. You work hard and long hours.
All in all, you must be productive.
Right?
Wrong!
Work hours and the amount of tasks you accomplish have nothing to do with productivity.
Instead, productivity is all about results.
You could literally be working 2 hours and accomplish more than you do in 8 hours.
The key is having the right habits in place.
And these habits are not always that obvious.
In fact, most people get them wrong.
With this in mind, here are the top 4 habits you need to have in place to supercharge your productivity.
Most of us think that by working more, we get more done.
In fact, the opposite is true:
By working less, we accomplish more.
A lot of data points to this.
For example, according to an OECD report, countries that work less are more productive.
This in itself is not news.
Back in the day, Henry Ford cut workers’ work day to 8 hours to increase productivity.
But today, this established work day might be outdated.
Research shows that elite performers rarely work for more than 4.5 hours a day. When they do work, they are extremely focused and work uninterrupted 90 minutes at the time.
In other words, to be truly productive, you should work in 90-minute sessions and allow yourself to take breaks between those work sessions.
In the afternoon, you can do general maintenance tasks.
Multitasking kills your productivity.
There are several studies that underline this:
A study by the University of London shows that when you get distracted by phone calls, text messages, and email, your IQ suffers a fall of more than twice compared to marijuana smokers. A study by the University of Stanford reinforces that multitasking is bad for your work productivity. Furthermore, your brain gets overwhelmed when faced with multiple tasks.
But how can you stop multitasking?
Focus.
When you work, ignore everything that’s unrelated to the task at hand.
For example, turn off your phone and shut down any email notifications.
When you’ve finished one task, you can move on to the next.
And that’s how you get results.
We have this weird idea that we fail when we quit.
But did you know that quitting can increase your productivity?
What you should do is quit strategically.
For example, there are things that aren’t worth your time because your time could be used in a way that yields more results.
Instead, quit these things.
Delegate or outsource them to others who do them more cost effectively.
This saves you time and energy.
At the same time, you can use your time to accomplish those high-value activities.
You might think that being productive means you should constantly accomplish tasks that take you closer to your goal.
For example, your productive time should consist of things like sales calls, research, answering emails, writing, and so forth.
But the truth is that you should reserve empty time every day.
This is something that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner does to stay productive.
This empty time is the time when he reflects on things that go on around him, and he takes the time to solve problems.
You should schedule at least an hour of empty time every day.
You can break it into 30-minute blocks and combine it with a walk out in fresh air.
Over to You
It’s time for that one thing that determines whether you’ll be productive or not…
Implementation.
Start implementing these unconventional habits today (otherwise, you’ll just procrastinate on them).
And let me know in the comments:
What’s the first step you’ll take to be less busy and more productive?
Camilla is a freelance writer & enthusiastic about productivity and performance optimization. Get the free worksheet “20 Steps to a Productive Life” to supercharge your productivity.
You’ve read 4 Unexpected Habits That Will Supercharge Your Productivity, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
As I stood in the swamp I didn’t care one bit about my wet feet since the light was so damn good illuminating all the fine details in the foreground. It took some time to align the camera precisely in the right spot to get an additional sunburst reflecting from the surface. The light was so intense that it created a nice warm glow all over the image but unfortunately it also caused a lot of flare that was not an easy task to remove. This is a panorama of three horizontals with some manual exposure blending to avoid clipping the highlights.
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From the architect. Located overlooking the proposed Metro Sports Facility at the Western end of Moorhouse Ave on the fringe of the Christchurch CBD, the brief called for a new commercial development with a mix of bulk retail, office space and hospitality.
As the new building is on a major arterial route in Christchurch, it primarily experienced while driving. Our design approach was to generate the building as a billboard that shifts dynamically as you drive East or West along Moorhouse Ave, capturing the motorists’ attention.
The building is cast as collection of characters and references to Christchurch’s architectural canon. Amongst others, the cast includes the striped façade of the Antigua Boat Sheds, and the zigzag verandah of Paul Pascoe’s, now lost, Christchurch Domestic Airport Terminal.
During demolition of the previous earthquake damaged building on site a large hand painted sign was revealed, ‘The Farmers’. As this sign would be archived again, between our new building and the neighbours’ existing building, we decided it should to be translated into the design of the façade of the new building.
An abstract machine was created to manipulate the vertical sun shading fins and gloss/matt Alucobond panels of the façade through Binary and Morse code to give the impression of a random fin and façade pattern, allowing the ‘The Farmers’ sign to be coded within the new façade.
Functionally, the ground floor consists of a café/restaurant space at the entrance corner. This space opens an outdoor dining area underneath the faceted mirror stainless soffit of the cantilevered floor above.
The remainder of the ground floor consists of large format retail and office space.
The first floor is accessed via a dramatic double height foyer space, which is capped with a large skylight. A faceted wall battened with cedar cascades down from the skylight to the ground.
The foyer staircase is defined a blackened steel balustrade which folds into flush into the tiled floor at the base of the staircase.
Stereotomic architecture is characterized by two strong themes: the continuity of the forces of gravity to the ground, into the soil; and the search for natural light, which drills through the massive, solid walls to illuminate and allow habitation by the human being. It’s from these themes that this project takes its power.
Today we present to you May’s Project of the Month, the San Bernardo Chapel, which in its search to transform ecclesiastic symbolism uses nature as a way of ritual expression. The client required a place in a remote location that accommodated religious acts and rituals, in a context in which time is reflected by the use of recycled materials—materials that have been a part of the place for more than 100 years. This established construction criteria based on ancient masonry techniques. However, the project also involved the use of new materials in the interior of the work, creating an interesting play of textures.
San Bernardo Chapel / Nicolás Campodónico
Through the careful selection and arrangement of materials the architect creates two key effects: one in which the outside of the building gives testament to the passage of time, and the second one in which a warm atmosphere is produced by the light illuminating the new interior bricks.
The main idea of the project is in relation to the incoming horizontal grazing of light and the projection of the cross on the inside. – Nicolas Campodónico, Architect
The interior vault system—which references the historic coal ovens used to fire bricks in Argentina—is used to allow light to enter without any interruptions, and at the same time to generate a contrast between the red bricks and the shadow created by the beams, forming a cross at a certain time of the day. Alluding to the Via Cruces, the architect brings the elements together with a simple gesture, using nature to complete the project’s symbolic element and transforming the architecture into something higher than a human act.
The sensuality of the materials, and how nature is introduced into the project, tells us that this is a place of timelessness; it brings our consciousness into a holy place, where even surrounded by modern architecture it returns to its origin.
See the full project post here:
Capilla San Bernardo / Nicolás Campodonico
Located in the Pampa plains, in the east of the province of Cordoba, Saint Bernard´s Chapel (the local patron saint) rises in a small grove, originally occupied by a rural house and its yards, both dismantled in order to reuse their materials, especially its one-hundred-year-old bricks.
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How was the design process? What technologies did you use to design form and stability?
The design process was based on certain assumptions, some from the commission itself and others on issues that we wanted to develop. Some of these issues are more specific as those related to the site, and others were more conceptual such as the idea of replacing symbolisms for rituals. The spaces (indoor and outdoor) were conceived and designed to be instruments of the concepts raised. The interior form was developed with analog tools (hand drawings and physical models). The project’s location must respond to a given solar position, it was calculated with a physical model scale 1:20 placed in site on August 20, 2011, day of Saint Bernard’s day. The stability of the structure was taken from the base of the argentinian coal oven, also called “half orange” although for the chapel, a section of it was removed to allow horizontal natural light inside. This operation is the greatest challenge, both constructive and structural. All this led us to investigate ancient technologies that are already obsolete and try to reconstruct empirical knowledge.
How the arrangement of bricks influence the structure? Can you illustrate with a diagram or detail.
The bricks are arranged in radial way, each brick is directly aligned to the center of a sphere of 6 meters diameter inscribed in the chapel. This spherical condition of the structure lets te structure work primarily to compression. The biggest challenge was to give structural strength to all those parts of the project that were outside of this system. To plan and direct the masonry work we developed a ‘compass “(inspired by the table used for coil ovens) which draws a curved level for each course and at the same time gives the slope of each brick so that the small side of it is flat with space.
Beyond the inscribed sphere, as main idea of spatiality and structure, and inspired by the Pantheon, the space’s final composition is the combination of a cylinder section, two straight walls tangent to it that extend it to the west, a segment of a sphere or a conical dome and vault.
Did you use some form of formwork for the installation of the structure? Is there a photographic record of this process?
The project’s main idea is the relation between the income horizontal evening’s grazing light and the projection of the cross inside. For this reason it was very important that the interior surface was continuous and smooth avoid shadows that interfere with the cross. This line of work led think that if we use formwork we were risking to find defects that were impossible to repair later. Remember that under a raking light a few millimeters gap can cast long shadows. We decided to use two associated techniques (Half orange oven and Mexican vault) with which we could build the shell in a self sustained manner and monitor every day progress of it with the setting sun as the shell itself was being terminated and permanently exposed.
Sig Nordal 