Productivity

Jul 12

Written By Rein Trotzuk

Our Vialchemy team transformed their productivity skills by instilling key insights from these 3 life-changing books!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Author: Stephen R. Covey

Key Learnings:

Habit #1: Be Proactive!
- Response-ability. We have the ability to choose our response and proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances or conditions for their behavior.
- Proactive people focus their time and energy on things they can control (circle of influence) vs reacting to or worrying about things out of their control (circle of concern).
- Honor your commitments! The commitments we make to ourselves and others is the clearest manifestation of our proactivity.
Habit #2: Begin with the End in Mind!
- We spend our life planning out activities and projects and so why don’t we do that with our lives. Instead of planning a vacation or escape from reality, plan a life that you truly enjoy every day where don’t have a life we want to escape from. Get clear on our highest end goals and align your day to day activities with these goals in mind. Real success is success with self, its not about having things but having mastery and victory over self!
Habit #3: Put First Things First!
- How do you spend your days? Do you waste your time and energy doing stuff that simply isn’t that important? Identify the things that are the most important in your life and do them first.
- Understand what your highest priorities are and have the courage to pleasantly, unapologetically say no to things that don’t fit within those priorities. It’s ok to say no to things when you have a bigger yes burning inside. "The enemy of the best is often the good"
- Think efficiency when dealing with time, think effectiveness when dealing with people.
Habit #4: Think Win/Win!
- When entering a relationship with anyone in life (business or personal) think win/win. Come to an agreement on how both sides of the party can benefit. Don’t think about succeeding in terms of other people failing. Be happy for others success!
Habit #5: Seek First to Understand!
- Slow down and see things from the other person's perspective. Listen with the intent to understand vs to just reply or preparing to speak.
- We all have emotional bank accounts and we need to focus on making more deposits than withdrawals. Making deposits into a person can help build a meaningful long lasting relationship.
Habit #6: Synergy!
- Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated.
- Seek out view points from those that think differently than you. Show courage and discuss all points of views.
Habit #7: Sharpen the Saw!
- Have a balanced systematic program for self renewal in the 4 areas of your life:
  - Physical: To live
  - Social / Emotional: To love
  - Mental: To learn
  - Spiritual: To leave a legacy

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Author: James Clear

Key Learnings:

Four steps of forming a habit
- Cue: Prompt your brain to start a behavior.
- Craving: What you crave is not the habit itself, but the state changes your habit brings.
- Respond: The habits that you execute.
- Reward: the final goal of your habits, which satisfied your cravings.
A behavior won't become a habit if any stage is missing. Without cues, a habit won't start. Without cravings, there's no motivation to take actions. If the action is too difficult, we won't execute it. If the reward doesn't satisfy cravings, there's no reason to repeat the action. Without the first three steps, a behavior won't happen. Without the fourth step, an action won't be repeated.
To help form a new habit make concrete plans: I'll do "this action", at "this location", at "this time".
Try habit stacking: Make your existing behavior a hint to trigger the next behavior. For example, Wake up -> Arrange your bed -> Put a bed on the pillow -> Take a shower
What makes us take action is the anticipation to a reward, not the realization of a reward.
Temptation bundling: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
The costs of your good habits are in the present. The cost of your bad habits are in the future. As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long term goals.
Reprogram your brain to enjoy hard habits: Changing just one word, You don't "have" to, you "get" to. Reframe your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

Key Learnings:

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Shallow Work: Non-Cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Rule #1: Work Deeply
- Move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
- At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
- Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
- To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. Working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine
- Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
- The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection:
  - You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
  - One problem: These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals
  - Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
- A deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.
- Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.