A gamified life. For the productivity and technology geek that I am, it sounds like a pretty cool existence. I’d get to live the superhero lifestyle (minus the superpower-enabling lab experiment gone wrong) I should’ve been living all along. But can I live a truly gamified life? Over the past several years, that is something I have sought to find out, and here’s what I’ve learned.

One of the most unproductive outcomes of the last century’s shift from the Industrial Age to knowledge work in the Digital Age has been the loss of seeing the fruits of our labor firsthand. In the Industrial Age, Americans made things and saw them come to life. There’s an inherent satisfaction in creating products that come off an assembly line. Contrast that to our daily lives in the Knowledge Worker Age, and you may start to notice this missing element in your life. And, I think an example...

Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all your worldly possessions in one day? I have. It’s a life-changing event, even for someone not too attached to material things, to find out it’s all been burned away, water-damaged or otherwise destroyed in a catastrophic event. Other than the insurance covering my personal property providing little emotional relief for lost baby pictures and irreplaceable artwork, I had one piece of solace--my home inventory. Before or if calamity strikes,...

When the idea of self-actualization developed in the mid-20th century, far before the field of positive psychology was fostered by Dr. Martin Seligman, there was a desire to study and cure illness, mental and physical. Dr. Abraham Maslow tried something different; he studied the role model, the talented and the ingenious. By doing so, he hoped to unlock how we all could do more, better. He developed the hierarchy of needs (which most know by the pyramid with our biological needs at its base...

Humans have five common senses. (We actually have several more senses not commonly discussed.) Your sense of touch is mostly dedicated to your largest organ, your skin, comprising 22 square feet (or, 2 square meters), which holds millions of touch receptors of various sensitivity to map your physical surroundings. Your five fingers on each hand alone contain 3,000 touch receptors of the highest sensitivity on each finger tip. Then, there’s your sense of sight, which is the reigning champion...

As I’ve written about before, “happiness” is a terrible word to me. It’s my version of a four-letter word in regard to positive psychology and personal productivity. And yet, we continue to keep using it; I’m guilty of it as well from time to time. While it seems like a universal term, it’s actually a rather confusing word. If the purpose of communication is to convey information clearly to another, why circumvent the process with vagaries? Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who I’ve written about before,...

Learning, in the way that humans can, is one of the fundamental ways that set us apart from all other species on Earth. Skills acquisition is one of those kinds of learning that we do really well, and many of us want to do more of, better and faster. I’m one of those people, and when I picked up The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast by Josh Kaufman, I was skeptical. However, he outlines successfully a 10-step process for rapid skill acquisition and I think he’s onto something...

Welcome to Episode 86 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt here for Part 2 of our discussion of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by psychologist [ http://amzn.to/1lKpijP ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. We’ll be covering the elements of Kaizen. Sally, take it away.  Read full transcript.

Welcome to Episode 85 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt back on ProdPod to tell us about One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by psychologist [ http://amzn.to/1lKpijP ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. So, Sally, what is The Kaizen Way? Read full transcript.

I first became aware of Shawn Achor as the funny, charismatic presenter of the popular TEDxBloomington Talk, "The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance.” And, subsequently, I came to know his eponymous book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. His book’s premise is, I quote, Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be...

Personal Productivity Lessons in Two Minutes or Less

There’s a common misconception about procrastination that it only means you’re not doing something you planned to do. Many times we are unaware that procrastination is usually coupled with doing something, if not the thing we planned. This is what I call “procrasti-doing.” And there are some practical measures you can take to procrasti-doing when you want, and when you don’t, so I thought I’d explain them here in this episode. One of the frequent stories I hear is something like this: “I was...

Thanks to the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and father of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, the scientific community has a deeper understanding of well-being. To wit, Kahneman revealed that humans live with two minds--our experiencing and remembering selves. In this episode I'd like to discuss these two selves and how it relates to your personal productivity. EXPERIENCING SELF The experiencing self is that which answers the...

Having just finished the ProdPod series on Hoarding, I've got workspaces on the mind. And, when it comes to personal productivity, there's nothing like showing up to your home or work office workspace and seeing it set up just for you. So, in this episode, I'm going to discuss a method for making your workspace work for you every day. Assess Your Workspace Organization doesn't naturally happen. So, the first step is to assess your situation. Do you feel like the way things are set up in...

Ray: In this final episode of this ProdPod series on hoarding, I asked Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt to detail how hoarding is treated and managed. Sally, take it away.   Sally: The treatment and management of severe hoarding is very complex and needs to be addressed by a comprehensive team that can include mental health professionals, professional organizers, as well as junk removal and environmental clean-up companies. From a mental health aspect, traditional talk therapy has...

Ray: We're discussing hoarding in the ProdPod series…and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt here to define hoarding and how it's classified.  Sally: Hoarding is considered compulsive if it meets three criteria. First there is accumulation accompanied by great difficulty in discarding items that most people would consider useless or of limited value. The second criteria is that the clutter is to the point that the intended use of living spaces is severely limited or not...

These next three episodes will be on hoarding and I have with me to help explain hoarding, Sally Reinholdt, owner of Commonwealth Organizing Solutions [ http://cosolva.com ]. Sally is a Registered Nurse and professional organizer who uses many of the skills she learned as a nurse to help her clients become more organized and productive. Sally: The short answer is that it can be anyone. Hoarding doesn’t discriminate. In some cases it appears to have a genetic component as hoarding can...

“When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.” ~Anthony Robbins Tony Robbins should know a thing about being thankful. When he speaks to audiences, he tells frequently of his humble beginnings, the gratitude he had in those who helped him survive then thrive, and the self-beneficial results of his giving back to his community and others. During this Thanksgiving holiday week, now's the time to think about how your productivity is enhanced by being...

Steps for Setting Up Your Personal Advisory Board:1. Perform a strategic analysis of your situation, including a business and personal SWOT Analysis. 2. Set clear, written goals and objectives for your PAB: Vision and 6-month mission statements. 3. Make a list of potential board advisers. Be broad in your list; think of all your relationship categories (academic, personal, professional, extracurricular and more) and make note of individuals you believe have skills that complete weaknesses...

Decide on a communication platform with which everyone can be comfortable and explain how you will communicate to them en masse (via email, text, Google Drive sharing, or otherwise). Try to keep your communications effective by being consistently substantive, positive and as few as needed (but no fewer). Try to schedule the meetings and circulate the agenda with any preparatory materials to be reviewed as soon as practicable to your TAs. Remember, they have personal and professional lives in...

A Personal Advisory Board is a group of persons who know you, your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, and who you feel comfortable sharing your goals and unique vision, and individuals who are committed to your success.  There are several advantages that people (as well as companies) with advisory boards have over their colleagues. A PAB offers you: • An unbiased outside perspective. • Increased accountability and discipline. • Enhanced self-management effectiveness. • Help in...

The late Dr. Stephen R. Covey wrote in his 1989 best-selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [ http://amzn.to/15mtOXK ], Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or...

Veteran social psychology researcher and professor at Florida State University, Roy F. Baumeister, with journalist John Tierney, joined forces to write Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength [ http://amzn.to/1eTrs7h ]. This is supposed to be a definitive guide on self-control, which many consider the heart of personal productivity. If you can control your self, then performance improvement potential is a sky's the limit proposition, right? Well, here are the most salient points...

Over the past decade I have heard people talk about their rising stress levels. More information, more responsibility and the same 24 hours a day to get it all in and done, respectively. What I don't see many people doing is distinguishing the unhealthy stress from the healthy stress. Much of what positively motivates us is stress not its absence. As Barry Lenson writes in his book, Good Stress, Bad Stress [ http://goo.gl/3zDTK0 ], there are two types of psychological stressors. He...

Most days I awake feeling gratitude for having another day to be alive and that alone is motivating to get my day going energetically! However, there are days when things just don't go well. You've probably had those days, and will in the future. The opera of family, professional and personal life mess with our productive and contented mindsets. Well, in this episode, I'd like to offer three steps to restarting your productivity day when things aren't going your way. The most valuable...