Productivity Hacks II

The most influential people on the social network LikedIn, were asked to share their secrets to success and productivity. They all contributed with their stories, creating inspiration for many followers.  Querying trough these articles, we discovered that every story has it’s own uniqueness and every strategy stands out in different way. What got our attention the most, are the following quotations from various entrepreneurs and CEO’s. This article is follow up to Productivity Hacks.   

Zach Coelius experience showed that networking can require a lot of effort, be quite time consuming and it has very uncertain returns. Therefore his productivity hack is all about spending the bare minimum of time necessary to capture the value of your natural network.

“Your natural network is the group of people you get to know as a regular part of your day. These are people you work with, that you meet outside of work, those who you do fun things with and basically the folks you would have gotten to know anyway. It turns out there really is no need to go out and be a superstar networker attending six events a day to build a good network; you already have one without devoting any additional effort.”

However, he suggests that you should take the time to connect with people –  You never know who will start the next Facebook or Starbucks or be a future president.

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Esther Dyson  explains why it’s always useful not just to do things, but to consider what you have done (and how you could improve) and to plan what you will do. Also taking time to think about the outcome of all the possible scenarios when it comes to making an important decision. And the best place to do this, is during exercise.

“I swim every day for 50 minutes – so you could say I automatically save 50 minutes by thinking and getting exercise at the same time. In the pool, I pass over the details and focus on the big questions. What should I get out of this meeting? And if the answer is “not much,” then I’ll simply cancel it (ideally before booking the flights, but not always!). And if I do go, whom should I try to meet? What should I cover on the panel? On other days, I’ll consider: Did I do a good job arguing my point in the meeting yesterday – or how could I have done better? “

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Justin Rosenstein makes parallel between procrastination and the unwillingness to do pending tasks. He doesn’t relate procrastination to laziness, but to the fact that certain chores can make us feel really uncomfortable doing them.

“This task is about writing a letter to someone I don’t know very well and asking them to do something. It feels uncomfortable to ask a favor of an acquaintance. I’ll probably need to employ all these pleasantries in order not to come across as rude, and writing that way feels awkward.” Wow. I felt this sense of relief wash over me. I hadn’t done anything — writing the letter still loomed. But by facing head-on the requirements of the task and the source of my emotional discomfort, it suddenly didn’t feel so scary. In fact, it felt trivial. I can suffer through ~15 seconds of wordsmithing a polite email. Hell, I had probably already suffered through 15 minutes of stressing about the fact that I hadn’t written the letter yet.”

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