I’ve published a post at The Change Blog called “How To Build a Longer Attention Span.”  It’s about how practicing holding your attention on an object, or on your breathing, as meditators often do, isn’t just helpful for getting centered as you meditate — it can also help you stay focused on a project at [...]

 
We hear a lot in business literature about how it’s important to have an “elevator pitch” — a prepared speech about our business that’s so concise we could deliver it to someone on a brief elevator ride.  We’re often told to memorize our elevator pitch and practice it in the mirror, making sure we look [...]

You may have heard the old story of Sisyphus — the man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down and be forced to start over, for all eternity.
I think this story is a wonderful illustration of how human beings often suffer.  We’re convinced that, [...]

To help us find a compelling direction in life, self-development writers often tell us to ask ourselves “what we’d do if we couldn’t fail.”  For example, we might ask, what kind of book would we write if we knew that whatever we produced was destined to be a #1 bestseller?

I’ve taken to asking myself basically [...]

I’ve just published a guest post at The Change Blog called “Productivity and Owning Our Shadow.”  It’s about how we’ll often put off working on a project when making progress requires us to tap into part of ourselves we aren’t fully okay with — maybe the part that’s ambitious, sentimental, childlike, or something else.
I sometimes [...]

I’ve written before about how it’s helpful, when you’re facing writer’s block, to just sit with that sense of creative emptiness, and allow it to pass away on its own — rather than beating yourself up for being uncreative, or distracting yourself from the emptiness by playing Minesweeper.  When we learn to just let the [...]

Ready to get off the “time management treadmill”?
You’ve tried all the usual productivity advice:  make to-do lists, reorganize your e-mail, color-code your folders, and so on.  You’ve probably bought more than enough books, CDs, planners, special notebooks, and “apps” as well.
So why do you still find yourself procrastinating, getting distracted, feeling anxious, and not [...]

“The strife is o’er,” as the hymn goes — I’m all done recording the Work Consciously Audio Course.  I’m writing up the “liner notes” right now — that’s what I like to call them, anyway, because it has me feel like I’m releasing a rock and roll album.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you [...]

I want to share a few videos from a talk I gave recently at a job-seeking group.  I’ve revamped my “Transcending Procrastination” presentation to add some more techniques and ideas, and these videos offer some samples of the new content.  I hope you find them useful and fun.
In this first video, I talk about how to [...]

I’ve published a new guest post at The Change Blog, “Mindfully Moving Beyond Multitasking,” which is all about how mindfulness practices can help us stay focused on a single task at work, even when we’re confronted by boredom, frustration and other kinds of discomfort — rather than jumping around from task to task in order [...]