These days, it seems all of us are grappling with an increasing number of distractions popping up during our workday. While some can be trivial or annoying, others can turn out to be more pressing and demanding a shift in our focus and attention. It’s the latter that I’ve been dealing with and which gave rise to the thoughts below on how we might better address this fracturing of our time, focus, and attention.

Over the last few days, my girls – and as is inevitably the case, my wife and myself – have been fighting off a bad case of the flu. While taking care of the kids when they get sick is par for the course in parenthood, it can still be a major disruption to one’s work planning and schedule. And although it’s easy for others to sympathize with how such distractions can impact your productivity and focus, it doesn’t change the fact of how it can still be frustrating to see the workload increase because of your diminished capacity.

Of course, this is the very nature of distractions – they distract us from accomplishing what we originally set out to do, by pulling our attention away to other tasks than the one we wanted to complete. As I tried to juggle the demands of work, kids and trying to fight off this bug myself, I came to recognize the following truths we all have to grapple with in this growing sea of distractions: Click here to continue reading »”3 Truths About Keeping Our Focus In A Sea of Distractions”

A few months ago, I decided to update my office space in response to the growing needs of my business. One of these changes involved rearranging one of the office walls to accommodate a new whiteboard and bulletin board for brainstorming and keeping track of client projects. Although they’ve proven to be welcome additions to my productivity arsenal, they left me with a problem – the best layout for these two items left a very noticeable gap on that wall. A white space that looked more intentional than merely a consequence for how I chose to place these wall hangings on that wall.

At first, I decided that I would leave that space as is, waiting until some future need required the addition of some new wall hanging that would help me manage and grow my business. After a few weeks, though, the presence of this white space began to bother me. It was making me feel as though I wasn’t maximizing my new office layout to ensure that there were little or no dead spaces found within the room.

So, my first thought was simply to fill this gap with some type of artwork or maybe even a frame with one of those motivational quotes you find in so many offices these days. As such, I started to wander around various art shops, looking for some print or art piece that would help to fill in this gap on the wall.

Although there were many choices, nothing really seemed to fit and yet I still felt compelled to find something to help fill in this space. At one point while searching for ideas of what I could hang on that part of the wall, my wife looked at me and asked ‘would it really be such a problem to just leave the space blank?’. It was in that moment that I realized that there wasn’t really a problem here. Rather, all I had done was create one of out this misguided notion that leaving blank spaces on the wall left my office in an incomplete state.

Of course, how we perceive these white spaces not only impacts our sense of decorating aesthetics. In our day to day activities, it’s also easy to feel like Click here to continue reading »”Learning To Appreciate The White Spaces”

Every now and then when I sit down to write a post for my blog, I find my mind drifting off to other tasks; things that I could be doing at that moment instead of writing. In these cases, it’s not an issue of struggling with writer’s block, as I know exactly what it is I wish to write about. Instead, the problem has to do with something we all face at one point or another in our daily lives – getting stuck in the procrastination rut.

It’s a common situation that we can all relate to – finding ourselves procrastinating when there’s this pile of work that requires our current attention and focus. Of course, thanks to today’s hyper-accelerated sense of immediacy and drive to increase productivity, procrastinating not only draws our frustration and annoyance, but it’s also become something we feel guilty about doing.

Ironically, part of the problem with procrastination is that we’ve created a negative perception around it, instead of recognizing it as being a normal behaviour. After all, even the most efficient workers among us procrastinate at times. In dealing with procrastination, we need to understand that the real issue here is not so much the behaviour as how we choose to respond to it when it happens.

With this in mind, here are some things you can do that will not only help with maintaining some level of productivity, but which will also change how you look at procrastination: Click here to continue reading »”How to Make Procrastination Beneficial For Your Business”

Like most people, I look forward to that time when we can unplug from our computers and mobile devices in order to unwind, spend time with the family, and recharge my mind and body before we need to prepare ourselves to dive back into the hustle and flow of our workplace.

There are times, though, where that continual push to maintain our productivity through the week takes its toll and we can find ourselves struggling to get out of neutral. This is something that happens to me at times and I know only too well how frustrating these moments can feel, especially when we see that large heap waiting for us in our “To-Do” basket. As such, I want to share some of the strategies I use to recharge my productivity batteries so I could complete my tasks for the week: Click here to continue reading »”6 Tips You Can Use Today To Help Boost Your Productivity”