During my recent trip to London, Elizabeth Walshe interviewed me on the why, what and how of personal productivity. Â During this short [4'34"] interview, I explain WHY I have been focusing on productivity, WHAT productivity really is and HOW can you and I increase our productivity through the Productivity Boot Camp.
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Schedule blocks of time to deal with individual items together, instead of sprinkling the entire day with them.
Why?
Because you'll reduce how much you switch-task during the day, meaning the number of times you switch from one kind of task to another kind.
Why is that important?
Because switch-tasking is mostly likely the #1 culprit in lowering your productivity throughout the day. Reducing it can recover 20% or more of your time! Really!!
How do I know?
Because this is what most people who go through the Productivity Boot Camp I now conduct with my clients experience almost immediately.
How to do it?
For example, deal with emails & paper mail only during 2-3 set blocks of time during the day. This will save you considerable amounts of time, thus making you more productive.
Try it for a few days, and then share below what you experienced. Thank you.
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Before the end of the day, prepare your prioritized to-do list for the next day.
Why?
Because …
- You'll get a better rest not worrying about planning your day, AND
- You'll be "background processing" these items for higher productivity next day, AND
- You'll be starting the day strong, with a great certainty about what you are supposed to accomplish.
I learned this from Alex Mandossian two or so years ago, and it has impacted me quite a bit.
When do YOU prepare your to-do list for the day?
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Being recently certified as a Productivity Coach by Dave Crenshaw, best-selling author and the President of the National Association of Productivity Coaches (NAPC), I am in the process of launching a new suite of services aimed at personal, group and organizational productivity. The Productivity Boot Camp is the first such service. It is a package that includes a 1.5 day 1-on-1 Productivity Intensive coaching, a 21-day Productivity Accountability service, and even a copy of Dave Crenshaw's latest book (Invaluable: The Secret to Becoming Irreplaceable).
I am still working on posting the full information about the service, but if you'd like to explore how you can reclaim 20% of your professional time, please contact me at ProductivityForLife.com/PBC. For a Quick Facts Sheet, check ProductivityForLife.com/PBC/info.
Here is what one of my early clients had to say about his experience with the Productivity Boot Camp [2:48]:
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Understanding how we tend to learn is important for each of us if we want to become more productive. If I gain a deeper insight into how my "learning mind" is wired, I can try to emphasize those ways that get me there faster, such as choose between a lecture and a book, a hands-on workshop versus a user's guide, this teacher against that one, etc.
As marketers and business people in general, or as info products producers, understanding how others tend to learn (read: absorb our information) makes us more efficient AND effective in our own teaching. After all, marketing, managing, promoting, and training are all forms of teaching. Making sure that we don't exclude an important segment in our marketplace translates into securing the possibility of revenue from that group. If we don't communicate with (teach to) most prospects in a way that suits their own modality, it's less likely we'll be able to persuade them to act in our favor (such as buy from us, recommend us, etc.).
There isn't one "ultimate" model of learning. In fact, there are several out there that I find quite relevant. For example, David Kolb's model I mentioned in a previous post is quite popular these days, and for good reasons: it is helpful in structuring our marketing and training copy. In other words, making sure that what we say and/or write strikes a chord with both the Why-people, the What-people, the How-people and the WhatIf-people gives us a method of assessing how impactful our copy is.
I recently came across another model I found quite intriguing, and potentially useful. It's called The Felder-Silverman Index of Learning Styles (or ILS). While developed mainly in and for the academic world, I found it particularly interesting also because it comes with a practical tool for assessing one's own "learning styles."
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TRAINING & MARKETING WITH MINDMAPS
Content Mapping for Success
Part 2: Reaching All Instead of Some (WHY)
In Part 1 of this series, we explored two major challenges in delivering effective training and learning-based marketing content:
Challenge #1: Time-Linear Delivery
Challenge #2: Detail-Oriented Delivery
Don't forget: each of these challenges in delivering stems from a challenge in consuming the information.
If you haven't yet, you can read or listen to Part 1 here.
Let's now look at two more.
With the advent of relatively inexpensive ways of creating & distributing audio recordings and videos, lots and lots of trainers, teachers, gurus, and thought leaders have aggressively moved to these new media, and away from print. This has had enormous positive impact on both the consumers and the creators' pocketbooks.
One reason is that sound (and sometimes video, too) is so much better at communicating emotion, and emotion is a highly necessary (and often ignored) ingredient in rapid learning and in quick purchasing decisions. Establishing an emotional bond between the teacher or the marketer and the learner or consumer leads to a much better quality learning and–in the case of learning-based marketing–a higher likelihood of action.
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TRAINING & MARKETING WITH MINDMAPS
Content Mapping for Success
Do you communicate for business?
Ha! Of course you do.
Then keep reading, and you'll learn no fewer than 4 challenges most of us face in doing so, how mindmaps can help, how to go about using them, and where to start.
Part 1: Balancing Time-Linear Detailed Content (WHY)
Whether you deliver your training or conduct your learning-based marketing campaigns live (classroom seminar, teleseminar or webinar), time-delayed (podcast, audio/video blog) or packaged (CD/DVD, book), your students or prospects receive a stream of information in time-linear form.
Let's take, for example, an audio tele-course, such as Alex Mandossian's Teleseminar Secrets. This is an 8-module, extremely rich, highly sophisticated training in the art and science of creating profitable teleseminars for marketing and training. Students consume over 150 hours of audio content. Even the preview session is over 3 hours long. Add to that hundreds of pages of action guides, module summaries, and spectacular presentations. Diligent students will go through the entire material once, perhaps twice. (Many people may not even be that diligent, in spite of having spent thousands of dollars to attend.)
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