How to Create a Personal Productivity Scaffold (Blog)

[Steve Pavlina]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

How to Create a Personal Productivity Scaffold

[smartile]

Hi Steve - I think morning routines are powerful.

I have a routine (or scaffold, if you like) that I've been fine tuning and adjusting for the past two years.

I also added something slick this morning to change things up. I heard through a teleseminar about a great way to harness the Law of Attraction. The speaker (I don't recall her name) calls it the, 'Appreciation Sob'.

This speaker was a highschool drop out, runaway and lost her job early in her career. Ten years have past and she has advised 2 presidents, has built and sold 8 companies with a net return on investment of 700%!

I wish I could remember her name.... She was really powerful.

Anyways, the speaker on the teleseminar said to find a quiet space and think about all the things you are grateful for until you start to cry... then keep going. That sort of crying were you're so full of joy that you can't take anything else in. I thought it was a great idea.

I tried it out this morning and cried my eyes out at the parking lot by the train station. Man, it felt good to have a good cry. I feel awesome this morning.

I can't wait to see what happens this week.

Stephen Martile — Personal Development with NLP

[Magnus]

I kind of did this two weeks ago. So far it has worked very well.

I wanted to take walks every morning to get more energy and waking up early in an easier manner (I usually oversleep). I tried 30-day trials etc but since I didn't really know, in my body, that I would feel more energized I always failed. It felt better to stay home and sleep some more.

Then I found this website (joesgoals.com) where you can set up you habits and assign different points to them. Every day you can put one or more checks if you achieved your goal/habit.

I decided to put up a couple of habits (only good ones, don't want to focus on negative habits) and it has worked great so far. I use my computer every day so I have this page as my start page. Ever since I started I go up and go for a walk every morning, not because I will feel better, but so that I would get my point for that day and heighten the total score. It's kind of a competition against myself. I also use the logbook feature every day.

You can achieve the same thing in many different ways. This way worked well for me since I use my computer every day. I also started journaling at the same time (one of my goals/good habits). It is important that you choose the right goals/habits as well (I used the CARVE technique and used the scores to the different habits). Make sure you focus on things that have a longtime net effect.

It would be nice to hear what other people have done with this scaffold technique.

[Dan.Linehan]

Great article Steve. Thanks for the samples too..

[mattmcc]

Hey Steve,

I've recently come across multiple studies and references pointing out that a 3-4 hour work day is natural for humans. The studies reference cultural groups living off the land and also farmers prior to the industrial revolution. The studies point out that the 8-hour work day is a result of the industrial revolution from factory work. Doing more hours of mindless, repetitive work makes you more productive but that doesn't apply to knowledge-based work. The 8-hour work day is something that has just been carried over from factory work without any questioning.

I wonder if you've come across anything similar in any of your research or if you've experimented with shorter work days and your thoughts on it. I find my personal experience correlates to these findings. It is easy to remain focused for three hours but after that my mind starts to wander. Since you're working shorter hours, you do not need to spend as much time forcing yourself to remain focused and your mind is much clearer.

I can post references to the sources I've come across if anyone is interested.

[seeker5]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

I frequently find myself returning to productivity-related scaffolding, but when it to exercising regularly, I don’t seem to need it.

I think that sentence is missing a word or so after the "but when". The sentence is three paragraph from the bottom of the post.

Originally Posted by mattmcc

The studies point out that the 8-hour work day is a result of the industrial revolution from factory work.

I thought people worked longer hours farming before the industrial revolution?

[Keith]

Very handy article, thanks! It's very easy to think of these sorts of plans as permanent and become overwhelmed.

Will there be a follow up article on how and when to transition out of using the scaffold?

Thanks.

P.S. Seeker5, I'd say the missing word is "comes".

[smartile]

Hey Steve - It's me again.

Well something amazing happened after I told you about the Appreciation Sob exercise that I completed this morning. I was checking out my stats on my blog and noticed that someone had come to my site via a search engine using the words, 'how to become rich principles'.

So I searched for this myself on Google and my blog was listed as the first link in the search! I almost crapped myself.... the Law of Attraction really works!

If you want to check out this article it's called, 'The Science of Getting Rich: Principles 1-3'

Cheers,

Stephen Martile — Personal Development with NLP

[Tobias Zimpel]

Originally Posted by mattmcc

I've recently come across multiple studies and references pointing out that a 3-4 hour work day is natural for humans.
[...]
I can post references to the sources I've come across if anyone is interested.

That'd be great!

[ÜberDan]

The first part of the post sounded promising:

Suppose you’re having trouble staying focused at work. Your days keep getting away from you. You go to your desk and start checking email. From there you visit your favorite web sites. Then you check email again. Before you know it, it’s already lunchtime. After lunch you check email again. Then it’s back to web surfing. Perhaps you finally begin doing some real work, but only from boredom with email and web surfing. Since you’ve wasted so much time, you can only address the urgent items with no time left for doing anything remotely significant. You end your workday feeling disappointed and mildly depressed. Your evening is no more exciting. Then you repeat the process the next day.

If you don’t break such bad habits, before you know it, you’ll have wasted years of your life.

And the scaffolding idea sounded great but I was looking for a few more examples and maybe a little more advice.

What other scaffolds are people using to help other than a morning and evening routine? I expected to see maybe a personal coach as a sort of scaffold.

I need some sort of scaffolding so look forwarding to hear what other are using.

All the best.

[droren]

Hi Steve
You mention the assengment template but I didn't find it in the Journal Template... can you please attach it to this thread?
thank you in advance
Dror.

[Kilik]

I concur. I was hoping to find it in the templates, but it was not there.

[Steve Pavlina]

Originally Posted by droren

Hi Steve
You mention the assengment template but I didn't find it in the Journal Template... can you please attach it to this thread?
thank you in advance
Dror.

It's the "Assess Your Life" template with modifications to the list of items to make it more personal. You can clone that template and modify the list of items to rate whatever you want to rate for each day. One good idea is to plug in your particular values to see how you're doing on a daily basis. But you can edit the list to include whatever you want, such as eating healthy food, being friendly, making intelligent decisions, etc. Then give yourself a 1-10 ranking on those factors at the end of each day.

I label this revised template "Daily Postmortem." The reason I didn't include it with the Steve Pavlina Templates is that it would be hard to generalize it to work for everyone. It's really something you need to personalize for yourself in accordance with your values.

[adamkhan]

First post. Like another responder, I did something similar a month ago and it's helping me improve things a great deal. I tried to think of a word for what I did, but didn't come up with anything as perfect as a scaffolding. My cheesy attempt was "chrontext", a play on GTD's context, because scaffolds act like GTD contexts, but rather than being out of necessity (ie, I only have a phone on me so that's all I can do), they are out of design (this is my time to do only this sort of thing).

I think something like scaffolding is missing in the perfection of GTD. Perhaps if you have a job where your time is structured it's not as necessary, but if you don't, you need to create that structure yourself. It's something in between GTD's trust-your-intuition-if-your-system-is-complete and the more conventional calendar. And it's designed to be temporary, which is great, a sort of intuition aid for the wayward. I wonder what Mr Allen would think of scaffolding.

[JudyR]

I found Steve's blog entry interesting and useful. I found the very word, scaffold, to be a helpful way of framing the concept.

Originally Posted by ÜberDan

What other scaffolds are people using to help other than a morning and evening routine?

A while ago I saw that a colleague of mine had hung a four inch diameter analog clock on the wall of her cubicle, right next to her computer screen.

This may sound like such a simple little idea, too insignificant to be worthy of mention. Yet, when I immitated my colleague and did the same thing, I found that it helped enormously to keep me more aware of the speed with which time was passing and how I was using my time. It helped me to track time and to become more conscious of how long it took me to perform certain tasks.

I think the human mind (or at least my mind) can process the information from pictures more quickly than the information from text and numbers. I have found that having an analog clock within easy view is a huge improvement over the tiny digital clock at the bottom right hand corner of my computer screen. It's even an improvement over my wristwatch which, while it has an analog dial, is not "in my face" like the clock hanging on the wall next to my computer screen.

[Rod Logan]

This stuck to me:

Equalize office (decluttering, filing, organizing)

"Equalize" sounds way more inspiring than "cleaning" or "fixing up"! Why the word "equalize" though?

[Steve Pavlina]

"Equalize" comes from Julie Morgenstern's book Organizing From the Inside Out. It's part of the SPACE acronym: Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize -- a system for intelligently organizing any physical space. Equalize is the maintenance part, putting everything away at the end of each day and restoring the place to a state of order.

I wrote an article about that book and some other organizing ideas here:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles...-organized.htm

[mattmcc]

Originally Posted by Tobias Zimpel

That'd be great!

This is from "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominiguez and Vicki Robin (pg 221-223). It was the first time I had come across statements like this which really got me thinking.

WORK THROUGH THE AGES

Let's begin by taking a brief look at the history of "work," for it is through looking at history that we find new opportunities to shape our own personal stories. Where do our concepts about work come from? Why do we work? And what is the place of work in our lives?

Minimum Daily Requirement of Work

As human beings we all must do some work for basic survival--but how much? Is there a "minimum daily requirement" of work? A number of diverse sources, ranging from primitive cultures to modern history, would place this figure at about three hours a day during the adult lifetime.

Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, discovered that before Western influence changed daily life, Kung men hunted from two to two and a half days a week, with an average work week of fifteen hours. Women gathered for about the same period of time each week. In fact, one day's work supplied a woman's family with vegetables for the next three days. Throughout the year both men and women worked for a couple of days, then took a couple off to rest and play games, gossip, plan rituals and visit....It would appear that the work week in the old days beats today's banker's hours by quite a bit.

Dr. Frithjof Bergmann states:

In his study of numerous utopion communities of the nineteenth century, John Humphery Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, noted that:

Moving on to the twentieth century, in 1934 Paramahansa Yogananda, Indian sage and visionary, spoke of self-sufficient, spiritually oriented worldwide communities in which:

These quotations all suggest that three hours a day is all that we must spend working for survival. One can imagine, in preindustrial times, that this pattern would make sense. Life was more of a piece back then when "work" blended into family time, religious celebrations and play. Then came the "labor-saving" Industrial Revolution and the compartmentalization of life into "work" and "nonwork"--with "work" taking an ever-bigger bite out of the average person's day.

In the nineteenth century the "common man," with justified aversion to such long hours on the job, began to fight for a shorter work week. Champions for the workers claimed that fewer hours on the job would decrease fatigue and increase productivity. Indeed, they said, fewer hours were the natural expression of the maturing Industrial Revolution. Fewer hours would free the workers to exercise their higher faculties, and democracy would enjoy the benefit of an educated and engaged citizenry.

But all that came to a halt during the Depression. The work week, having fallen dramatically from sixty hours at the turn of the century to thirty-five hours during the Depression, became locked in at forty hours for many and has crept up to fifty or even sixty hours a week in the last two decades. Why?

The original sources of the material are:

Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicage: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1972), p. 23

"From Joblessness to Liberation" (an article on Frithjof Bergmann), Green Light News, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1984, p. 19

John Humphrey Noyes, The History of American Socialism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870)

Paramahansa Yogananda, unpublished papers, 1934.

Hunnicutt, op. cit., p. 311

Also after reading this I came across a few articles on the web that stated similar claims:

Our Technological Future: Shorter, 4-6 Hour Workdays Would Benefit Us All
Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past

And the Wikipedia article on working hours which has more in depth comments:
Working time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I thought people worked longer hours farming before the industrial revolution?

Unfortunately I didn't note the article where I read that. I recall the point being that yes, at certain periods of the year farmers would put in a large amount of daily work but this was for a short period of time. After all, there is only so much one can do with a farm.

A section of the wikipedia article seems to argue this as well:

Popular belief depicts pre-industrial life as grim and full of toil. While the standard of living then certainly does not match that of today, several labor historians have pointed out that "full of toil" fails to describe pre-industrial life accurately. In those times, non-enslaved people generally worked fewer hours per year than they do today, though on a less regular cycle: their workweeks exceeded the modern standard during seasons when the extra work would be useful, but fell short of it during others. This depended on the productive system of the land. Intensive agriculture and pastoralism demand a variable amount of effort over the course of the year.

Hope you find this interesting. It sure is interesting to me.

[zeloc]

I really wonder whether we could all get by on only 3 hours of work/day. It seems inconceivable to me to consider all jobs, especially healthcare, being run on 3 hours a day. Certainly greater hours dramatically increase economic prosperity and that would a tradeoff to a shorter workday, but I wonder if there would be any other ill effects. Theoretically, if people could get by in preindustrial times by working three hours a day, we should be able to get by in even less time due to technological advancement.