Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Discipline

To be More Productive, Try Doing Less

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The top performers in every field tend to have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and obsess over getting them right.

If you’re struggling with time- and task-management, the solution is not to try to be even more productive by somehow “finding” time to do more things.

Time management advice tends to want you to believe that you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you can unearth by squeezing out more from your time. You don’t need to commoditize every minute of your life and devote it to productive work.

You can’t—and shouldn’t—do it all

More time is not the answer to your time management problems.

You can’t manage time. You cannot control time. What you can control are your actions. You can control how you spend your time on what activities. You are in complete control of what you do and when you do it.

Jog through your list of things to do. For each task, ask,

  • Why is this task necessary?
  • What would happen a month from now if it isn’t done?
  • What would happen if this never gets done
  • Who wants this task done, and who is the right person to do it?
  • Do fewer things that create more value, rather than more things that are mostly empty.

Effective time management is about knowing what’s essential and what’s not. Don’t get disproportionately involved with small things while monumental things are to be done.

Idea for Impact: No point in doing something that doesn’t need doing.

The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.

To get more done, you need to do less. Trying to do it all doesn’t work. In other words, do only those things that really matter. Focus on those activities that drive the most significant results.

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  5. Five Simple Changes That Can Save You the Most Time

Stop Dieting, Start Savoring

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Research suggests that excluding entire food groups, banning your favorite foods, forcing yourself to count calories, and measuring success by a number on a scale may actually make you want to eat more. Restrictive dieting can slow your metabolism down, making it even harder to lose weight over the long term.

You’re more likely to be successful at keeping weight off if you lose weight gradually and steadily. Be more mindful of what you eat and how you eat.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite foods and indulging in your cravings for cookies, potato chips, or ice cream. All you have to do is cut back. Practice awareness by slowing down and thinking about what you’re eating and why you’re eating it.

Don’t gulp your food; you’ll overeat before you realize that you’re full. Instead, rest between bites. Take time to chew your food thoroughly. You really don’t need as much food as you think you do.

When you eat out, keep your food-mindfulness on the right track. Keep hunger under control beforehand. Don’t skip meals. Control portion size. Share your meal or take half of it home.

Idea for Impact: Eating should be a pleasurable activity. No food is inherently good or bad, and there’s no need to build an adversarial relationship with food.

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Real Ways to Make Habits Stick

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Want to make a new habit stick? Try piggybacking or ‘stacking’ it to an existing one.

Choose something you have no problem motivating yourself to do—say, brushing your teeth—then combine it with some habit you want to acquire. The existing pattern serves as the prompt for the new habit.

Most people have robust morning and evening routines; try stacking new habits into those practices. For example, if you want to do some mindfulness meditation every day, do it after brushing your teeth in the morning. Your wake-up routine becomes the cue to build a new meditation habit.

Better yet, associate the habit you want to achieve with a ‘temptation’ (something you love doing,) like sipping your morning cuppa joe. Your habit stacking plan may look like this: “After I meditate for ten minutes, I will have my coffee.” This way, the habit will become more attractive to you, making it more likely to stick.

Idea for Impact: Good habits build automatically when you don’t have to consciously think about doing them. Look for patterns in your day and think about how to use existing habits to create new, positive ones. Stacking habits can encourage you to remember, repeat, and, therefore, maintain a series of behaviors. Set yourself up for success.

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The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

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Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  4. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why
  5. A Worthwhile New Year’s Resolution

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2021

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Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2021. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our RSS feeds or email updates.

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2022!

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Focus on Rituals, Not Goals

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My biggest takeaway from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) is the importance of shifting your focus from your end goal to what your need to do regularly to reach that goal.

Though goals can provide orientation and motivation, Clear notes that committing to the system makes all the difference. Goals aren’t necessarily the best way to ensure things are done. Thinking about only goals tends to make people believe, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.” This impedes their long-term progress.

Instead, Clear recommends centering on the routines and things you need to do regularly to reach the goal. For example: If you’re a swim team coach, and your goal is to win a championship, the system that you should focus on is training every day, “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

Idea for Impact: A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mindset. “Fall in love with the process rather than the product.”

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Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season

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Perfectionism can inspire you to deliver top-quality work, but it’ll cause needless anxiety and slow you down, especially over the holiday season.

Even for the more fastidious among us, a spotless home isn’t always achievable. Everywhere you look, there’ll be something to straighten up—unfolded laundry, kids’ toys on the floor, piles of unopened mail.

Embrace the mess. Recognize that not all will get done on time. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home.

Don’t cling to your perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. Put things away when you’re able to, but don’t feel like you have to dedicate many hours to tidy up, especially when that time can be better spent relaxing and rejoicing with family.

Idea for Impact: Now is a good time you cut yourself a break. There’s no need to feel less-than-great about the state of your home over the holidays.

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Lessons from Airline Entrepreneur David Neeleman: Staff Your Weaknesses

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Airline serial entrepreneur David Neeleman has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD.) School was torture. He couldn’t focus, and he procrastinated constantly.

“I felt like I should be out doing things, moving things along, but here I was, stuck studying statistics, which I knew had no application to my life,” Neeleman once said. “I knew I had to have an education, but at the first opportunity to start a business, I just blew out of college.”

Despite his own struggles, Neeleman went on to build a stellar business career in the airline industry. He started Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue Airways, Azul Brazilian Airlines, and Breeze Airways. He’s even led the revival of TAP Air Portugal.

Through it all, Neeleman made the best of his strengths—original thinking, high energy, and the ability to draw the best out in people.

Far from lamenting his ADHD, David Neeleman celebrated it

Early on, Neeleman realized that he must manage his ADHD carefully. Throughout his career, he got help with his weaknesses.

People with ADHD tend to possess rare talents and gifts. They can be extraordinarily creative and original. They display ingenuity, and they encourage that trait in others. They can improvise well under pressure.

However, ADHD confers disadvantages too. People with ADHD are likely to be incredibly forgetful, disorganized, impulsive, and hyperactive. They drag their feet and miss deadlines. Their performance can be inconsistent. They can drift away mentally unless, oddly enough, they’re under stress or handling multiple inputs.

Sadly, modern society (including parents, schools, workplaces, and career counselors) tends to linger upon the negative symptoms and encourages people with ADHD to learn to cope with them. Strengths are more likely to go unnoticed.

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your weaknesses stop you from reaching your life goals.

In your work-life and outside, seek environments that allow you to bring more of your strengths to play. But don’t ignore your weaknesses (or the downsides of your strengths.)

Staff your weaknesses. Identify two or three key job activities that you don’t do well. Determine how you can delegate those responsibilities to others or seek help. This way, your weaknesses don’t become the Achilles heel that can hamper the strengths that make you effective.

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The Mental Junkyard Hour

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If you can muster up the energy, use an hour or two at the end of your day to crank out all those “functional tasks” that don’t require a totally clear head.

Wrap up anything that you shouldn’t carry forward to the next day. Crack down on all those administrative and life-maintenance tasks—like catching up with email, tidying up your home, and reprioritizing to-do lists. If you’re a student, you can summarize class notes, re-do practice problems, and get the school bag ready.

Making the most of the “mental junkyard hour” lets you spend the time when your head is clearer to focus on those tougher, “conceptual” tasks that need deep focused work.

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You’ll Overeat If You Get Bigger Servings

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So many diets, so little evidence that they work. Many of the better plans boil down to basic strategies: eat lots of fruits and vegetables, stay active, and keep portions under control.

Most people have struggle with portion control

If you’re reading this article, you live in a society with too much food. Food production has become more industrialized and cheaper. Healthy food is not just more expensive than unhealthy food, but less convenient. Portion sizes have increased spectacularly in the past several decades—and that includes packaged foods in the grocery stores, meals served at restaurants, and plate sizes at home.

Dr. Brian Wansink, formerly director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2001,) has shown that plate size prompts portion size. In study after study, he has found (some of his data analyses have been questioned) that the bigger the plate, the more you eat. This trend derives from an optical illusion—the same amount of food on a bigger plate seems smaller.

Whatever size of plate you choose, you’re likely to fill it. As a result, if you reduce your plates’ diameters from 12 inches to 10 inches, you’ll significantly reduce the amount of food you dish up. Besides, per Wansink, using a smaller plate gives the illusion that you’re getting more food. That’s a first step towards addressing your concerns about your health or waistline.

Visual aspects of a meal, such as portion size and plate sizes, can influence how much you eat

'First Bite' by Bee Wilson (ISBN 0465064981) British food writer and food historian Bee Wilson’s brilliant First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015; my summary) states,

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating—and the one that we least often master. The first stage is learning to recognize whether the stomach is empty or not.

The first and most obvious step to weight loss is reducing the portion size—and thus the number of calories you eat. When you’re consuming fewer calories than the body uses, you’re likely to start losing weight.

  • Consider one of those “portion control plates” to help reset and reinforce in your mind what a portion size should be. Sectioned and color-coded, these plates take the guesswork out of getting nutrition from all food groups and reduce the risk of overeating.
  • Slow down when you eat, take time to chew and savor your food, and pause between mouthfuls. Stop when you are already full. You don’t need to eat every morsel of what’s dished out for you.
  • If you’re uncomfortable with not filling up your plate and risking disrespecting a host, say at a holiday party buffet, spread your portions around the plate and leave a bit of space around each food item. Your plate will look full but will have fewer calories.

Idea for Impact: Small plates help make portions look more substantial

If you’re trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, keep the portions down. You certainly don’t need as much food as you think you do.

Wondering what to read next?

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  4. Eat with Purpose, on Purpose
  5. The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails