THE PRODUCTIVITY ECOSYSTEM: THE SECRET TO UNLOCKING YOUR STRENGTHS TO ACCOMPLISH ALMOST ANYTHING

Kirsten Simmons

Copyright © 2013 Kirsten Simmons

All rights reserved.

To Jay, whose presence and absence bookended this project.

This book would not exist in this form without the hard work, belief, and well-timed ass-kicking from several amazing individuals.

I’d like to thank Steph Holmes for taking the first editing passes when the book was one rambling, run on sentence.  And for calling me up after my concussion and informing me that you were going to help, and I didn’t have a choice in the matter!

Kirsten and Raj Bandyopadhyay, who rescued the manuscript from the awful world of “that thing I need to finish” and pushed it to “that thing I’m finishing.”  Specifically, I owe Raj for the idea of the character guides and for the initial sketch of the guard image that turned into the cover.  Kirsten’s ability to turn long-winded passages into succinct paragraphs makes this entire thing much more readable.  And Kirsten gave me permission to move my self-imposed deadline and use the extra time to take the book from good to great.  Thank you, name twin!

Michael Wilmot from The Conflux Group and Mark Farah from MF Design Shop have been worth their weight in gold for help with formatting!

Marty Whitmore did a kick ass job on the cover, don’t you agree?

And, most importantly, thank you to every person in my audience!  You all have read the early versions, test driven the ideas, and believed that I could do this.  I hope it’s everything you expected, and I can’t wait to hear about everything you accomplish.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

What is Productivity?

A Bird’s Eye View of Your Productivity Ecosystem

How Do the Pieces Fit Together?

Your Goals

External Influences

Expectations

Relationships

Commitments

Internal Influences

Health

Habits

Mental Scripts

Your Personality Type

How to Use This Book

The Personality Quiz

Guided Adventure

Structural: Internal Influences, Goals, External Influences, Personality

Analytical: Personality, External Influences, Internal Influences, Goals

Environmental: External Influences, Internal Influences, Goals, Personality

Fantastical: Goals, Personality, External Influences, Internal Influences

Chapter ONE: Your Goals

Exercises

Write Down Your Goals

Write Down Your Reasons

Write Your Obituary

List Your Big, Audacious Goals

Why Are You Here?

Ten Year Goals

Intermission

Brainstorming (Why Two Minds are Better Than One)

Five Year Goals

Three Year Goals

One Year Goals

90 Day Goals

What Have You Done?

CHAPTER TWO: External Influences

Roles

Relationships

Time Commitments and Expectations

Finances

Environments

Routines

Your Productivity Ecosystem

CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences

Values

Your Core Values

Your Core Values

Day to Day Decisions

Fueling the Body and Brain

Subconscious Influences

Interactions with Others

How to Be An Influence Archaeologist

Limiting Beliefs

Revisiting Your Goals

CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type

Origins of the Theory

Brief Overview: Analytical

Brief Overview: Fantastical

Brief Overview: Environmental

Brief Overview: Structural

Secondary Types

CHAPTER FIVE: Fantastical

So You Think You’re Fantastical

Strengths and Weaknesses

What Drives You: Pushing Past the Unknown

The Best Thing You Can Do: Make Time Melt

Energy Flow

Taking Advantage of Your Energy Cycles

Interpreting Your Results

Using Your Results

Scheduling Your Day

Your Physical Environment

The Home

The Office

Exercise

Getting Along With Other Types

Delegation

Automation vs. Outsourcing

Automating Email

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

Automating Other Online Stuff

Delegation and Outsourcing

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

Finding Things That Other People Want

Purging Your Files

Exercise

Digital or Paper? What goes where

The Freedom to Create

How To Get Where You Need to Be, When You Need to Be There (Without Pissing Off Anyone Along the Way)

Calendar Rule 1: Visible

Calendar Rule 2: Vague

Exercise

Task Management

Planning

Reminders

Make It Visual

Make it Audible and Automated

Make it Someone Else’s Problem

Getting Shit Done

Double Check Your Environment

Make it Into a Game

Find a Rhythm

Use Rewards

Task Sandwiching

The Kamikaze Solution

CHAPTER SIX: Environmental

So You Think You’re Environmental

What Drives You: Living in Love

The Best Thing You Can Do: Find YOUR Freedom

What Matters to You?

What Moves You Forward?

What Energizes You?

Your Rocks

Energy Tracking

Create Your Rhythms

Routines

Keeping Momentum: Moving Forward on the Things That Matter

Intermission

Your Physical Environment

The Office

The Home

Exercise

Getting Along With Other Types

Delegation

Automation vs. Outsourcing

Automating Email

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

Automating Other Online Stuff

Delegation and Outsourcing

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

Finding Things That Other People Want

The Inbox and the Later Box

Vertical Files

Purging Your Files

Exercise

Digital vs. Paper

The Freedom To Create

Things That Involve Times

Reminders

Getting Shit Done

That Damn Word: Should

CHAPTER SEVEN: Structural

So You Think You’re A Structural

Strengths and Weaknesses

What Drives You: Efficiency

The Best Thing You Can Do: Systems Analysis

The Physical Environment

The Home

The Office

Additional Systems to Consider

Files

Digital Storage

Email

Public Calendar/Scheduling

Energy Tracking

Routines

Morning Routine

Planning For Chaos

Evening Routines

Delegation

Start by Automating Everything You Can

Online Automation

Offline Automation

How to Develop Your Delegation Skills

When to Hire a Part or Full Time Team Member

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

Interacting With Others

CHAPTER EIGHT: Analytical

So You Think You’re An Analytical

Strengths and Weaknesses

What Drives You

The Best Thing You Can Do: Delegate

Start by Automating Everything You Can Start by Automating Everything You Can

Automating Email

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

Automating Other Online Stuff

Offline Automation

How to Start (For Cheap) & Develop Your Delegation Skills

When to Hire a Part or Full Time Team Member

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

Cleaning Up Your Environment

Home

Office

Non-Traditional Work Space

Time Management

Energy Tracking

Build Routines That Support Your Goals

Morning

Lunchtime

Evening

Getting More Done

Interacting With Others

CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together

Visualization Techniques for Each Type

Fantastical Visualization

Environmental Visualization

Structural Visualization

Analytical Visualization

The Five Factors of Motivation

Intrinsic

Extrinsic

Values

Interpersonal

Environmental

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Into the Future!

Resources

Author Bio

Introduction?

Hi there. So, you’ve picked up this book. Or maybe someone got it for you in a not so subtle hint that you really could improve in your productivity. If that’s the case, the joke is on them! Why? Well, I guarantee that if you read this book and spend time with the exercises, you will become more productive. But your productivity may not improve in the ways that your friend had in mind when he or she bought you a copy.

You’re going to improve your ability to reach the goals that are important to you.

In my experience, when someone else sets the terms for your "productivity," those terms generally aren’t the ones you would choose to measure yourself by. And while this book will offer some suggestions for improving your ability to perform mundane tasks in a productive manner, that’s not the real focus here. Instead of telling you how to get to inbox zero and what techniques to use to increase your reading rate, I’m going to take you on a guided exploration of the unique individual that is you. Instead of getting tips and tricks, you’ll take a personality quiz and use the results to follow guided adventure as you read through the book. This is productivity as you’ve never seen it before.

What Is Productivity?

What exactly is productivity? We put it up on a pedestal, measure it in companies, worry about it when the economy hits a downturn, and read obsessively about it on the thousands of productivity blogs that litter the internet. If you’ve read David Allen’s magnum opus, you’ll be familiar with the casual definition of productivity: “getting things done.” If you turn to Webster, you’ll get the especially useful: “State or quality of producing something … measured by rate of output per unit of input.”

Is that really it? Increase your output and/or decrease your input? Reading through the literature on the topic, it’s certainly easy to get that impression. This is a selection of post titles from my “Productivity” folder in Google Reader:

- “Pick up the Pace”

- “Why Less is More and How to Achieve It”

- “Is Poor Time Management Limiting Your Potential?”

- “10 Steps to Make Some Motivation Today”

- “How to Tackle Your Crazy To-Do List”

And these are the top hits on Amazon when you search for “Productivity":

- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

- Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-Mail Overload

- Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Decrease Your Hours

- Becoming the 1%: How to Master Productivity and Rise to the Top in 7 Days

- Tell Your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

Notice a theme? Those last few books are starting to hint at why productivity is considered so vital—it’s a tool, a means to an end. That end is to achieve your goals, whether they include spending more time with your family, starting a new career, or having control over what you do and when you do it.

But there’s another problem. Let’s take a look at how exactly you’re supposed to go about boosting productivity. Read a few books or flip through a few articles, and you’ll find conflicting information almost immediately. For example:

- “Pick Up the Pace”—do more, faster!

- “Why Less Is More”—less work will take you farther!

Everyone has their own opinions on how to be productive, and they’re sure that their system will help to skyrocket your productivity, too. Although this advice is offered in good faith, the contradictions can be incredibly daunting to a newcomer. I certainly wouldn’t blame you for covering your ears!

Let’s take a look at one of the most common productivity tips: wake up early. You’ve heard that successful people get up before sunrise, right?

The problem is that this tip is far from universal. For every person who bounds out of bed before the crack of dawn, you’ll find another who thrives in the late evening, after those early risers have collapsed. Everyone has the same 24 hours each day—there is nothing magic about early morning hours.

Imagine you’re one of those night owls, and you hear that getting up early is the key to productivity. Surely you can manage that, you think, so you set your alarm to go off 15 minutes earlier each week until you’re hauling your ass out of bed at 5:00 a.m. It’s pitch black. It’s cold. You stumble through your morning routine, trying to wake up and often forgetting things you need to do because your brain isn’t fully awake yet. That’s not exactly the height of productivity.

Now, does that mean that you can never change your internal clock? Of course not. With enough time, dedication, and (often) external pressure, it’s entirely possible to go from someone who haunts the witching hour to someone who greets the dawn. Parents of young children do it all the time. But if your goal is to immediately increase your productivity, getting up earlier is not going to work!

The legendary morning productivity boost comes from approaching those hours with a clear head, adequate energy, and an understanding of the goal you’re trying to achieve, along with a decreased likelihood of being interrupted. But you can fulfill those criteria at any point during the day. So if you’re not a morning person, does it make more sense for you to change your internal clock, or does it make more sense to make smaller changes to better utilize the hours you do have?

This book is about throwing all the rules, systems, and well-meaning suggestions out the window. Those rules and systems are perfect—for the person who created them. For you, they fit about as well as the clothes you’d get if you walked into a thrift shop and picked something at random from your size rack. You might get lucky and find something that fits perfectly in a color and style that flatters you, but more likely you’ll end up with something that isn’t quite right.

Let's define a few words to make sure that we're using the same language going forward.  For the purposes of this book:

Productivity: What you get done, and when you get it done.

Productivity Systems/Techniques/Tricks/Routines: How you get what you need to get done.

Productivity Ecosystem: The web of factors in your life that influence your productivity. This includes your internal and external influences, your goals, and your personality type.

Your productivity ecosystem is the foundation of your productivity. Your ecosystem determines which systems and techniques you should use. This book will walk you through the connections of your productivity ecosystem.

You’ll learn how to make the most effective and sustainable changes to your productivity habits. You’ll reach your goals faster and with less stress along the way. We’ll examine everything that influences your productivity and show you how to make informed decisions about what to keep and what to change.

The goal of this book is to help you approach your days empowered by the ability to direct your energy to achieve the end results you want.

A Bird’s Eye View of Your Productivity Ecosystem

Have you ever visited a new city and picked up a tourist map from your hotel, only to find that the warren of streets and attractions has been reduced to a neat grid with a few prominent landmarks? The map may be technically usable, but if you want to get off the beaten path and truly experience the place you’re visiting, you’ll need to chuck the map for an in depth guide book—or, even better, a local!

The next few pages are like the tourist map of your productivity ecosystem. You’ll learn how the pieces fit together and how they interact, and you may find a few ideas to test that could boost your productivity. But to truly interact with your ecosystem, you’ll need to take the quiz at the end of the chapter. Your results on the personality quiz are going to serve as your local guide by suggesting how you should tackle the chapters to come.

How Do the Pieces Fit Together?

By this point, you should have gotten the impression that this isn't your typical productivity system. It has way more pieces, for one thing, and they're not the pieces you typically see in productivity. Internal and external influences? Personality type? How does this all fit together?

Let me tell you, I brainstormed for a long time to come up with a simple way to explain these ideas. There are probably half a dozen sketches of various flow charts and figures dotting the pages of my daily notebook. Then I brought the question up while I was over at a friend's house for dinner. The group turned to sketching, and within five minutes Raj had produced the forerunner to what you'll see below—proving that I had clearly spent too long struggling with the process! (This idea of group brainstorming is something I'll come back to in future chapters. For now, suffice it to say that it is incredibly valuable.)

Look at the figure below. Your goals define everything, don't they? Your goals set you on a particular path and bring you to the gatekeepers, internal, and external influences. Important to keep in mind is that the gatekeepers have veto power. Some goals will never even appear in the wilds beyond the gate, simply because your influences are so strong that they prohibit the goals from even forming. Some goals will get through the gate, but will be hobbled by the influences, keeping them from reaching their full potential.

Once goals get past the gatekeeper, your personality type determines the path you take to get to your goal. I suppose you could say that the goal is the why, the gatekeepers are the what and personality is the how. You'll use your personality type to figure out the best way to get from where you are to where you want to be, and in doing so you'll make the path shorter and smoother than it would have been otherwise.

Make sense? Let's start digging into the various pieces.

Your Goals

What are you trying to do with your life? Okay, that’s a little hard for most people to answer. Let’s make it simpler: What are you trying to accomplish this year?

Your goals influence everything in your productivity ecosystem because they are the reason your ecosystem exists. If productivity is a means to an end, your goals are that end. The goals you choose to pursue influence your internal influences, external influences, habits, relationships—everything except your personality type. To illustrate this, let me introduce you to a few people. The stories are real, but the names have been changed.

Mason is a thirty-something engineering student and fencer. Six months ago he won gold at the state fencing competitions, and he’s training five to six days a week to prepare for the nationals. Mason’s goals influence almost everything about his days—his classes come first, followed closely by training. His wife, family, and friends know this, and they adjust their expectations of him accordingly. He keeps track of his sleeping habits and diet so as to keep himself at peak physical and mental condition, and he actively observes his mindset during training and competition to identify any beliefs or mental scripts that might be holding him back. Nationals are a still few months out, so he’s not sweating the occasional fast food meal or training session skipped in lieu of time in with his wife. But as the competition gets closer, he’ll certainly be clamping down on his health regimen so that he’s the best he can be when he walks into his first round. Mason will be guiding the Analyticals through the rest of the book.

Shawna is an outdoor adventure guide, and she’s looking to shift from temporary positions to something more permanent. On each temporary contract, she looks for tasks to take on that will boost her skill set and set her apart from the other guides in the field. She keeps an ear out for other jobs, but she doesn’t devote regular time to job hunting. She spends her spare time writing or taking photos, and occasionally (okay, regularly) gets lost in a new research project, a fun movie with lots of eye candy, or a series of Pinterest boards that let her dream about the future.

Her goal—to be a strong, competent, unique adventure guide—influences her habits to some extent. She tries to eat a Paleo diet for the consistent energy and the ability to go longer without food if she’s out on a trek, but she doesn’t sweat it if she grabs a donut from the staff room. She practices CrossFit regularly to be ready for anything she encounters while leading a group, but if she’s already done a six-mile trek with a vertical climb, she’s not going to worry about missing that day’s workout. And while she definitely has some negative mental scripts holding her back, life really isn’t bad enough to make the effort of identifying and replacing them worthwhile for her right now. She’s young, and her jobs take her all over the world with her boyfriend by her side. Shawna will be guiding the Fantasticals through the rest of the book.

Andy is a single father in his late-thirties, with three children and dreams of starting a business that encourages resilient development in cities and towns around the world. He uses his ex-wife’s child support to cover the essentials, and then supplements the family income with the occasional municipal client or garden design and installation. His business grows while the kids are in school—once they come through the door, he’s a parent first and a businessman second. And he’s always willing to lend a hand to those who need him; he can often be found volunteering time on nonprofit boards, city working groups, and activities in his children’s classrooms. Andy walks the walk when it comes to his doctrine of healthy habits and conscious eating. He knows he has limiting mental scripts, but it’s hard to find and root them out with everything else going on in life. He tries to tackle them as they come up, but they aren’t the first priority. Andy will be guiding the Environmentals through the rest of the book.

Rosa is a doctor in a major metropolitan emergency room, and in the few short years she's been there she's completely overhauled how the department handles incoming trauma cases. Rosa excels at observing detail, identifying patterns, and creating systems, something that makes her both an amazing doctor and a valuable source of insights that save lives and dollars. The hospital is in the midst of reorganizing their administration, and Rosa would love to be given a chance to rework departments outside the ER. She's not sure she'll get the opportunity since she doesn't have a formal management degree, but she's pulled together the documentation of the changes she's made in her time at the hospital and applied to the certificate program at the local university. If she's lucky, she thinks, maybe that will be enough for the administration to give her a chance. Rosa will be guiding the Structurals through the rest of the book.

As you read through these stories, can you imagine how Mason’s, Shawna’s, Rosa’s, and Andy’s goals influence their commitments, habits, relationships, and expectations? Mason’s friends know that he may ask for a rain check on dinner plans if he’s fallen behind on school or if he’s taken a blow during training. Andy knows that his message for the world includes sustainable eating habits, so he makes a point to practice that in his own life. Shawna knows that keeping up her energy and strength is important for her goals, but she’s doing well enough to cheat now and again. Rosa recognizes her talent for systems and wants to use it further, so she's doing everything she can to put himself in a position where others see her value.

Your goals aren’t a one-way stream of influence—your internal and external influences often alter your goals—but when you’re approaching your productivity ecosystem, your goals are the reason why your ecosystem exists in the first place.

External Influences

On occasion, your goals can be so all-encompassing that they overshadow everything else in your life. Someone running for national political office, for example, is going to weigh their every move through the lens of winning their race. Spending a few hours on a Saturday to help their elderly parents fix a broken window isn’t going to happen—it makes much more sense to hire someone to go fix the broken window and spend the day knocking on doors. But someone whose goal is to write a thriller novel may well step away from their manuscript to head over to their parents’ house—it’s a good mental break and an opportunity to connect with loved ones.

Ideally, you’ll have a balance between the demands of your goals and the demands of the people around you. Andy’s role as a father may keep his business from growing as fast as it could otherwise, but he’s able to balance his effort between the two and occasionally find ways for one to support the other. Trouble arises when our interactions with others stymie our goals—especially when we don’t think to question those interactions.

The people around us influence our goals in three ways—through expectations, relationships, and commitments. These are all intertwined into the general category of external influences, but we’ll look at them one by one to see how they can support or hinder our goals.

Expectations

Expectations come in two flavors—individual and societal. Individual expectations come from people you know: your friend on the church flower committee who pushes you to join; your mother dropping hints about settling down and creating some grandkids; your friends giving you grief about drinking water or juice at a party where there’s an open bar.

Societal expectations can influence individual ones but can also stand on their own. Your mother’s hints about grandkids are almost certainly derived from the societal expectation that men and women should have families, probably mixed with a healthy dose of nostalgia, empty nest syndrome, and keeping up with the Joneses. But if we take another common expectation—passing standardized tests to advance in school—we find that the consequences of missing the expectation don’t stem from one single person. Society has deemed that high scores are key to getting ahead in life, and these tests were created to further that expectation.

Expectations influence goals on several different levels, from siphoning your time and energy away to discouraging some goals entirely. If your goal is to compete at the Olympics, start your own business, or walk from Amsterdam to Vladivostok, spending the time and money to get a college degree could be a distraction that delays the achievement of your goal. If you’re a woman in a society that forbids women from leaving their homes unescorted, you may never be able to entertain a goal to become an astronaut, an actress, or even a student.

The problem with expectations, at least within the lens of the productivity ecosystem, is that it tends to be difficult to push back against them when you realize that they’re not serving your goals. Altering expectations can require standing up to people you’ve never stood up to, saying no to something you’ve never questioned before, and risking negative reactions from people who don’t understand why you’re challenging the status quo. Many people choose not to challenge expectations, or only take on a select few out of the many that influence them. Expectations are not low hanging fruit when it comes to increasing productivity, but depending on the situation, the rewards can be huge. That’s why it’s worth knowing how expectations influence our goals—you may never act on the knowledge, but the opportunity for productivity gains never happens if you don’t observe your influences and consider what may happen if they change.

Relationships

Relationships and expectations are closely related, but unlike expectations, relationships offer benefits in return for the time and energy it takes to maintain them. Adhering to an expectation when it doesn’t serve your goal simply allows you to avoid something negative—anger, disappointment, or ostracism, to name a few. Negative relationships almost always swing back around to negative expectations, and in those situations both the relationship and its expectations should be up for consideration if you’re trying to improve your productivity (and your mental health!)

But consider instead a relationship with a good friend. You talk to each other regularly. You act as sounding boards for each other’s ideas and provide support when things don’t go well. There may be a hobby you both enjoy, something that releases stress and gets you ready to take on the world again. The benefits of that kind of relationship far outweigh the time and attention diverted from your goals.

Let’s consider an intimate relationship. While it takes time to nourish, the benefits in the form of mental, physical and moral support, the release of tension, and regular orgasm allow you to focus more intently, make creative breakthroughs, and get more done when you do return to your goals.

Commitments

Within the productivity ecosystem, commitments are the love child of expectations and relationships. Sometimes our commitments feed our goals, like the time we commit to spend with our partners or friends. Other times our commitments emerge from expectations and actively divert time and energy away from what we want to achieve without offering any benefit in return.

Let’s look at the choice to get a pet, and the immediate commitment of time, energy, and money that caring for that animal requires. Ideally, this is a commitment you would plan for, and that you would take into account when you think through your goals. But if you don’t have that opportunity or your goals change after your ex skipped town and left you with the puppy, then your commitment to that animal is something that you have to consider when you think about the most efficient way to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Commitments require time and energy. You need to account for them in your plans, work around them when you decide on actionable steps toward your goals, and consider how the people on the other end of those commitments may act to support or impede your progress. Some commitments are more disruptive than others, but understanding what yours are and how they affect your ecosystem is part of the process of arranging an environment that helps you achieve your goals.

Internal Influences

At the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do to change your relationships, commitments and expectations. You control one side of that equation—yourself. Ultimately, you can’t force anyone to alter his or her behavior. All you can do is control your own actions. On some level, that’s such an amazing realization: you’re not responsible for anyone but yourself. You owe nothing unless you choose to owe it; you give nothing unless you choose to give it; you do nothing unless you choose to do it.

When it comes to your productivity ecosystem, the internal influences are under your personal control and can result in the biggest wins when it comes to reaching your goals. We’re going to briefly examine health, habits, and mental scripts in relation to the productivity ecosystem; as always, remember to observe without judgment and catalog knowledge for potential change later.

Health

It’s a bit of a lie that you have complete control over your health, but I do believe that there are always steps you can take to improve your health. Even if you’ve been dealt a crappy hand—genetic disorders, accidental injury, mental illness—there’s always something you can do to improve your energy, decrease your pain, and increase your overall sense of well-being.

Before you start protesting here, let me say that this is coming from someone who manages chronic illness on a daily basis. I have a genetic disorder that causes my connective tissue to degrade prematurely, a mystery disorder that causes intense muscle spasms, and I’m dealing with ongoing tinnitus, vertigo, and hypersomnia from a concussion I sustained a year ago. I use both conventional and alternative medicine to keep myself running, and I also experiment regularly with changes in my diet and exercise habits to see what leaves me feeling good.

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” In our context, we’re going to define it as “optimizing your physical, mental and social well-being.” This optimization often involves conventional medicine but focuses more attention on how your day-to-day activities contribute to your well-being. How much sleep are you getting? What do you eat on a day to day basis, and when do you eat it? Do you exercise, and if so, how often and what do you do?

Habits

The previous questions encompass what many of us would consider to be habits, but not all of our habits influence our physical health. On an intellectual level, do you regularly seek out challenges and experiences that nourish your mind? Are you in the habit of reading for an hour or so before bed? Do you feel that the work you do on a day-to-day basis is meaningful and important to the world around you?

How do you decompress? Do you spend time with your family or friends, go exercise, play with the dogs, or sink into the couch with a bag of chips and a comedy?

Are you someone who cooks for yourself or takes the time to seek out food that is organic or local? What do you snack on? What do you drink throughout the day?

When you get up in the morning, what is the first thing you do? And what is the last thing you do before turning out your light at night?

I’ve thrown a lot of questions at you, and you don’t have to answer them now. The point is to illustrate all the little things you may do on a daily basis without thinking. Sometimes these habits support our productivity, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes changing them brings about massive progress towards our goals, and sometimes the difference isn’t worth the effort.

Observing your habits gives you power; it gives you a map with which to navigate and the knowledge to change if you decide to do so.

Mental Scripts

You may not realize it, but many of your habits are dictated by unconscious mental scripts. A mental script is a belief or idea that you assume is a truth. Sometimes these scripts are completely true and help protect us; for instance, I’ll bet you never reach for a pot on the stove without a potholder, or at the very least without being ready to pull away quickly if the handle is hot. But other times these scripts are neutral or actively impede our ability to move toward our goals.

Let’s say you grew up in a loud environment where you had to interrupt and raise your voice to be heard. As a kid, that script may have served you well, but if you’re in a negotiation, an argument or even just a normal conversation, following that script is going to drive people away. Or let’s say you were taught that children should be seen and not heard, or that women should naturally be submissive to men. If you still follow these scripts, do you think they’re serving you as you work on your goals?

I’m dealing with a huge script right now as I write this book—that I’m not qualified to string these ideas together and put these words on paper: “I don’t have a doctorate in psychology. I’m not formally trained as a coach. I’m not good enough.” If I listen to that script, that little gremlin voice in the back of my head, this book will never see the light of day.

Some people call these scripts by different names: mental trash, gremlins, the lizard brain, the resistance. But they’re all one and the same. They can creep up around success, attention, money, happiness, productivity, even scheduling. Ever thought, “I’m just one of those people who rarely gets anywhere on time?” That's a mental script.

If we don’t identify these scripts, they can sabotage our goals without our awareness. We’ll go into more detail on how to identify them and get rid of them in a later chapter; for now, just start turning over the idea in your head and consider what your scripts might be.

Your Personality Type

We’ve talked about the elements of your ecosystem that influence what you do and when you do it. Your personality type is all about how you choose to execute the goals you’ve chosen and the steps you’ll need to take to achieve them. Think back to the figure of your influences as the gatekeepers for your goals—personality is on the other side of the gate, determining the path you’ll take now that you’ve passed through the wall.

Personality infuses how you interact with the world. Your strengths and weaknesses are influenced by your personality, so it would stand to reason that you may be better suited to different techniques than someone with another personality profile. If you had an elf and a troll, and both had the goal of getting to the other side of a mountain, would you question if the elf chose to run over and the troll chose to dig through? Or, to bring this into the human realm, one personality type might choose to take the trail over and another might rig a hot air balloon and fly over. The first personality type is one that likes working within previously defined boundaries, and the other enjoys exploring new ground and solving problems. If both ways get the person over the mountain, do the differences matter?

Unless the situation is a matter of life and death, the answer is: No, it doesn’t. So why tell the explorer to confine himself to the path, or insist that the hiker invent a way to get herself over without walking? Let them each take the path that comes naturally to them, and they’ll reach the finish line in comparable times, having thoroughly enjoyed themselves along the way.

How to Use This Book

I’d like you to approach this book as a guide to mapping your own unique ecosystem. It’s not going to happen in one sitting, or even with several sessions of thought and analysis. There will inevitably be places where you sketch in the basic outlines to be filled out later, or even leave entirely blank with the warning, “Here there be dragons.” And, like any ecosystem, yours will evolve over time and you’ll want to return to revise your map on occasion.

This book is written to be your guide to setting down the basic sketch and filling in the first layer or two of detail. I’d like it to be something you return to again and again as you think through these ideas and identify factors within your ecosystem that influence your productivity. There are exercises associated with each section; please complete the ones that call to you and don’t be afraid to return to redo some of them when you feel that things have changed. Many people find they benefit from keeping a journal to record their responses to the exercises and any other thoughts or emotions that might come up as you work through the book.

I want you to come out of this with something concrete, an illustration of the ecosystem you’re operating in and all the wonderful contrasts and contradictions that your ecosystem includes. In that regard, don’t you dare censor anything that pops into your head when you’re doing these exercises. Even if it seems unrelated, like a sudden memory of that time in grade school when you sketched out plans for a rabbit hutch and tried to convince your parents to let you build it in the backyard, write it down! This process is inherently messy. You are going to flail, to thrash around, and go down dead end paths. That’s entirely normal—when you’re flailing around, you’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on. As you go through this process you will do things that you think are stupid. You will fail. You will say things you don't mean. You’re going to set goals that you're then going to abandon. You’re going to do all of this multiple times, and that's perfectly all right.

Often we think that everything happens due to chance. When events and opportunities come together in a way that you would never have expected, it’s universally connected to something that you have done in the past—concepts you’ve studied, content you've created, goals that you've set, or ideas that you have spent time contemplating. Most everything comes back around to have significance sooner or later. There's no such thing as wasted energy—not when you are exploring yourself.

This is a place where there is no judgment, where there is nobody watching. This is a place for you to write, to think, to toss out ideas, to really come to terms with what you're doing, and why you're doing it. Sections of this book may seem repetitive, and there’s a reason for that. As you go through this process, you are going to change your mind; you'll see things in a different light, and that's completely normal. Some of the exercises are purposely included twice so you can track the metamorphosis of your goals and purposes.

You’ll encounter a lot of possibilities and suggestions in the coming pages; please don’t feel compelled to try all of them! As I’ve mentioned before, the point of this process is to obtain a clear understanding of your ecosystem before you start trying to change it. You may come up with your own ideas that work better than anything I suggest in here. If so: go for it! Or you may consider the potential returns from a suggestion and decide that it’s not worth the effort. As long as you make informed decisions, all I care about is that you come out with something that works for you.

And as part of making sure you come out with something that works for you, the order in which you go through the book is going to be different depending on your personality type. So let’s get your quiz out of the way first and get you set up with the road map that’s best suited for you.

The Personality Quiz

In the next few pages you’ll find the 15 question quiz that I have on my website. People have been taking it for at least two years now, if not more. It has been really, really effective at identifying your primary personality type.

Read through each question and then rank the answer from 1 to 4, with 1 being your least likely response and 4 being your most likely response. Go with your gut rather than agonizing over the differences between various options. If a particular situation doesn’t fit your life at the moment, imagine what you might do when placed in the scenario.

Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Your alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning. You…

A. Get up right away, because if you’re late for the start of the day you’ll be late for everything else.

B. Consider staying in your warm, cozy bed, but you get up because you want to have enough time to make breakfast for your family.

C. Turn it off and fall back asleep within seconds. You were up until 2am working on a project, and have no intention of getting up at 6:30; you just forgot to turn off the alarm on your phone.

D. Hit the snooze button once, but get up the second time. You won’t accomplish your goals if you lie around in bed all day!

2. Ten o’clock, time for a break! You…

A. Walk down to the kitchen to refill your cup and then head right back to your office. Things are tight today, so you want to stay on schedule.

B. Meet up with some friends and chat for ten or fifteen minutes about your respective evenings, the weather, and the latest episode of Bones. Your friend Sheila almost puts her elbow in a small puddle of coffee, but you notice and warn her just in time! Then you grab a paper towel and wipe it up, just so that there’s no chance that anyone else could stain their clothes.

C. Are wrestling with a new problem. —You walk to the coffee pot, but decide that you need some more movement to help work this problem through. You fill up your cup and head outside for some thinking.

D. Have a coffee pot in your office. You pour yourself another cup and get back to work.

3. Your afternoon is a block of blissful, uninterrupted time. You…

A. Know exactly how you’ll spend it—two hours researching the finances for a potential company purchase, and some time purging your files and cleaning out your inbox.

B. Dive into the project that you need to have done in the next few days. You’re a bit later starting it than you had hoped, but it should still be done in time.

C. Spend some time sorting through e-mail and researching a few things that are of interest to you. The big problem for the day has been solved, you can afford to take it easy for a few hours.

D. Look through everything on your plate and decide which is most important to your goals. That’s the one you’ll work on first.

4. It’s the weekend! You are…

A. Spending Saturday out in the yard, since the weather is supposed to be a bit iffy on Sunday, and you want to get the spring annuals in the ground before it gets too hot. Then on Sunday you’ll clean the house, do the laundry, and prepare for the week ahead.

B. Heading out to the state park with your family and some friends for a day of hiking, picnics, and fun!

C. Supposed to be painting the downstairs hallway with your partner and maybe a friend or two. Instead, you’re experimenting with how the paint comes off the roller and tinkering with improvements to the process. The hall will get painted by the end of the day…

D. Dealing with a few housekeeping chores and preparing for the big presentation you have with the top brass next week.

5. The dog just lost his breakfast on the carpet. You…

A. Quickly move him to a hard surface, and then grab the paper towels and the carpet cleaner before the stain has a chance to set.

B. Go searching for the carpet cleaner, but when you find the bottle, it’s empty. Whoops, you forgot to buy another one after the last carpet incident. Damn. How much would it cost to replace just the carpet in that room? You can’t well have your friends and loved ones stare at the stain on a regular basis!

C. May or may not notice, depending on what you’re doing at the time.

D. Lock the dog in a room with tile floor, clean up the mess, and leave a note for your partner to make sure the dog gets to the vet for a checkup.

6. You’ve just logged into your social media account. You see…

A. All of your followers and contacts neatly organized into lists by level of engagement and importance.

B. James is eating a lackluster baloney sandwich, Chrystal was ready to commit grave bodily harm on her boss, Tyrone wants a new iPad, and Sparky the dog thinks his owners should keep throwing him the tennis ball.

C. Several thousand unread posts. Has it really been five days since you last looked at this thing?

D. Updates from all the people you followed because you thought that interacting with them would be helpful to you down the road.

7. It’s Friday afternoon, and you’ve just found out that the Natural History Museum is open late this evening. You…

A. Already have plans. But you’ll put the next late night event on your calendar, because it does sound like it would be fun.

B. Call up your significant other to suggest that you go, and mentally think through the refrigerator to plan out a good picnic meal. You can eat on the lawn outside the museum, then wander through the exhibits after desert.

C. Go, of course! It’s such a fascinating place.

D. Dismiss the idea of going—there are much more productive ways you could spend your time.

8. The people around you depend on you to…

A. Be organized and know what’s going on at all times.

B. Lend an ear or a shoulder to cry on whenever they need it.

C. Come up with unique solutions to interesting problems.

D. Make decisions and see the big picture.

9. Your desk (and the area around it) can be described as…

A. Meticulously organized.

B. Packed full of things that are meaningful to you—photos of your loved ones, souvenirs from trips you’ve taken, letters people have written to you over the years, the rock that became the subject of a running joke during your senior year in high school… you know, the important stuff.

C. Covered in piles of papers and books. But everything there has a purpose—it’s related to something you’re working on. And you can find everything at a moment’s notice—you put it there in the first place, so why wouldn’t you be able to find it again?

D. Spartan, but highly functional.

10. When you sit down to research a topic…

A. You enter the search terms in Google and click on the most relevant links.

B. You search a few terms, then notice that one of your friends has recommended a particular link. That reminds you that you haven’t heard from him in a while, so you switch over to email to begin composing a quick message. But there’s a note from a friend about Friday’s get-together, and oh, you forgot about that message from your financial planner and… wait, weren’t you trying to research something?

C. You can be found several hours later, still clicking through links and pulling up some truly fascinating information. Did you know that dogs curl their tongues backward when they drink?

D. You open the summary document you got from your assistant, skim through the contents, and identify a few areas to request further research in.

11. When asked to list your good points, people are most likely to refer to your…

A. Ability to organize and coordinate.

B. Empathy, listening ability, and sensitivity.

C. Creative energy, unique problem solving abilities, and wide ranging interests.

D. Drive and ambition, logic, and critical thinking skills.

12. When asked to list your not-so-good points, people are most likely to refer to your…

A. Difficulty coping when your plans are altered.

B. Chronic tardiness, state of controlled chaos, and tendency to put everyone before yourself.

C. Tendency to lose track of time, tendency to become immersed in a problem to the exclusion of everything else, and lack of traditional organization skills.

D. Ruthlessness in pursuit of a goal, obsession with getting things done well, and unreasonably high standards for the people around you.

13. Your first reaction to the words “alphabetical filing” is…

A. Yes, I do that, what about it?

B. Meh. Colors are much more fun.

C. That might be a fun project for a rainy Saturday afternoon. What do you mean, it has to be done consistently?

D. Pointless. It separates files that are related, meaning that it takes longer to find what you need.

14. Your grandmother’s birthday is tomorrow and you RSVP'd 'yes' for the party, but you have an important project that you need to finish. You…

A. Have already finished, double checked your references, and passed it on to the appropriate recipient yesterday.

B. Call and order take out to be delivered to your house, so your family can eat, and then barricade yourself in your office to finish this thing tonight. It’s amazing how fast you can work when no one else is around…

C. Write up the first half and send it in. Whoever needs it can go through that while you go to the party.

D. Tell your assistant to order a big bunch of flowers and a nice card expressing your best birthday wishes and your regret that you couldn’t make the party.

15. You’re shopping for a new computer. You…

A. Look up the pertinent specs for the models on the market and use the “compare models” feature so you can cross reference and decide which is most appropriate for your needs.

B. Ask your friends what they have and whether or not they like it. A couple of people mention Dell, but more mention Apple, so you head up to the nearest store and buy the model that the nice salesman tells you is best for you.

C. Ask what your friends have, do a bit of research, then head out to the store once you have a few essential pieces nailed down.

D. Go for the absolute best on the market, no compromises.

All right, done? Tally up your totals:

______________A

______________B

______________C

______________D

A is Structural, B is Environmental, C is Fantastical, and D is Analytical. The category with the highest score is your primary type, and the second highest is your secondary type. Your secondary type will come into play when we get to the personality sections. Some of you will go straight there, but others will take a different path.

Guided Adventure

When working with clients, I often find that the types of problems they need help with correlates to their personality types. To account for that, I’ve structured this book to be read in any order—that way you can go directly to the section that fits your needs. If the area you need help with doesn’t correspond with the paths below, by all means read in the order that makes sense to you. But this is the order I find myself addressing each ecosystem component for the various personality types:

Structural: Internal Influences, Goals, External Influences, Personality

Rosa will guide the Structurals on this journey—CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences, and then look for her comments for instructions about your next stop.

Analytical: Personality, External Influences, Internal Influences, Goals

Mason will be your guide, Analyticals—start on CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type, and he’ll tell you where to go from there.

Environmental: External Influences, Internal Influences, Goals, Personality

Environmentals, Andy will be leading your journey—head over to CHAPTER TWO: External Influences and look for her avatar to guide you on your way.

Fantastical: Goals, Personality, External Influences, Internal Influences

Shawna’s going to take on the Fantasticals—flip to  CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type and keep an eye out for her; she’ll tell you where to go next.

CHAPTER ONE: Your Goals

This is the homestretch, guys! You know what your goals are, so this chapter exists solely to record them and check in to make sure they’re balanced. As Analyticals, we know we have a tendency to fall victim to single minded focus or go a bit overboard on implementation. This chapter will help you ensure that you’re not neglecting anything in your life in pursuit of your goals

Fantasticals, on the other hand, are capable of changing goals over the course of 10 minutes! There’s just so much to learn, and each new fact casts the previous in a different light. Approach this chapter as a snapshot in time – your answers may not be accurate in a month or a year, but the process of moving through the exercises will be part of your path into the future.

For us Structurals, this chapter is like the 500 mile check on a new car. Our routines are essential, but they can also give a false sense of accomplishment. Use this chapter to check in and make sure your routines have a destination!

Ok, we’ve been through the influences – granted, the process of identifying and understanding them is ongoing, but we at least have an idea of the unspoken expectations around us. This chapter is all about you. It’s time for you to set aside those expectations and assumptions, and dream of what you might want to accomplish. Even if your thoughts never leave these pages, it’s important to have them and acknowledge them by recording their existence.

In this chapter, we are going to dig deep into your goals. What are you doing, and why are you doing it? Thinking back to the gatekeeper figure, we're assuming these are goals that have passed muster with your influences.

The goals you set should play a huge role in determining what you’re doing each day, as well as how your productivity ecosystem works for you.

Let’s say that your biggest goal is to run for the President of the United States. If that’s the case, the environment in which you operate is going to be dramatically different than if your biggest goal were to create and market a jewelry line. Not only will the steps toward your goal be different, but you’ll also consider the other aspects of your ecosystem differently.

For example, a friend or acquaintance who expresses uncommon views wouldn’t be an issue if you’re trying to create and market a jewelry line—unless those views somehow keep you from taking concrete steps toward your goal. But if your goal is to run for President, then that person could become a huge liability. Remember all the controversy about the pastor of President Obama's former church? If your goals are that lofty, you would be wise to consider critical relationships when taking stock of your ecosystem and considering potential changes.

That said, many people haven't ever articulated their goals in a concrete manner. Perhaps you're still a student and discovering what your opportunities are, or perhaps you fell into your current situation and you're not sure if (or how) you want to change it. That's part of why this book has a different order for different personality types. An Analytical type, for example will likely have clearly articulated goals and won't necessarily need to focus on this section first off.

If you've never taken the time to think through what you'd like to do and why you'd like to do it, this is going to be an intense exercise. I've tried to break it down into several steps, but feel free to take the time to think things through, even if it means walking away from the exercise for a bit and letting the ideas marinate for a while. If you're reading this electronically, I'd suggest you get a notebook to do the exercises in, or use the voice memo feature on your phone to record yourself talking through each exercise. If you're reading this in hard copy, each exercise has lines after it for you to write in the book, but you'll likely need more space. Turn to the end of the book and you'll find plenty of over flow for your brainstorming pleasure. :)

Several of the exercises in this chapter (and others) use a technique called free writing, which is an awesome way to tap into ideas and emotions your subconscious may be hiding.  Here's how you do it:

Free Write: Start writing when time starts, and don’t stop until the timer goes off. There are several of these exercises in the coming chapters, each with a different time frame. The important thing about free writes is not to let your pen, fingers, etc, stop moving. Don’t censor yourself, edit for flow, or try to ‘get it right’. The definition of ‘right’ in this case is whatever comes when you get past your internal voices and let your instincts start speaking.

One more thing, before we get started—don't worry about being right. Half the value in this series of exercises is the insights that come when we're not constantly censoring ourselves. There are no wrong goals, whether you want to remember to give your partner a kiss or whether you're aiming to start a business. Write down whatever comes to mind, and know that you can always come back to change it if you really want to.

Exercises

Write Down Your Goals

First step: I want you to write down your goals. Right now. These can be short or long term goals—just write whatever pops into your head. Answer this question:

What do you want to achieve?

Maybe you want to put together a nice dinner for your partner or your family tomorrow evening. Or maybe you want to earn a promotion at work. Maybe you want to bring on another three clients—or maybe you want to take over the world.

Whatever your goals are, write them down.

Write Down Your Reasons

Now that you’ve written down your goals, I want you to think about why. Answer this question:

Why do you want to achieve those goals?

This exercise is about finding out what drives you. Maybe you want to provide a nice meal for your partner and your family because you care about them, and you want to create a nice space where you can all have an enjoyable time. Maybe you want to earn a promotion at work so that you can increase your income and help pay down your debts—or maybe it’s because it’s one way to prove to yourself that the market values your skills. There is no judgment here.

Whatever your reasons are, write them down. At your core, what drives you to achieve these goals?

Write Your Obituary

Now that you've done taken your first shot at your goals and your reasons, we're going to do an exercise that a lot of people tend to scoff at, but that I find has a lot of significance. Here's why—it gets you thinking on a much larger level about the life you're living and the world around you. No one wants to think about dying, myself included!

For every one of us, living in this world

means waiting for our end. Let whoever can

win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,

that will be his best and only bulwark.

~Beowulf, 1386-89

When I read Beowulf in 10th grade, this section made a huge impression on me. I knew even then that I didn't want children, and I knew that I wanted to make my mark on the world. The details of that mark have changed significantly since in the intervening years, but doing this exercise every so often has forced me to think through the legacy that I want to leave and consider whether my current actions are supporting or detracting from that legacy.

That's why I want you to write your obituary. Let's imagine that you have lived to the ripe old age of 94. You were active up until the very end, and then you passed away in your sleep.

By every indication, you had a good life and an easy death. What are people going to say about you when you're gone? Write your obituary. Aim for 1,500 words or so. Decide which media outlets are going to carry it. Is it going to be published in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the local paper? Or would it be some other media outlet that we haven't even conceived of yet?

Write your obituary. List your achievements. Explain what changes you brought about in the world. Did you raise three wonderful children to be mature, sensitive, caring adults that contribute to the world around them? Did you start a company that ushered a new technology into society? Perhaps you created a foundation that funded life-changing research around the globe. Or maybe you were financially savvy, and you amassed a vast fortune that you're going to pass on to your children, your alma mater, or your favorite charity.

What did you do in your life that was worth reporting on? Why did you do it? How are people going to remember you?

This is really hard when you sit down and try to do it. It's really hard. I want you to sit down and take a half hour or more. Give yourself the time. Make sure you're not going to be interrupted and write your obituary.

List Your Big, Audacious Goals

At this point, you’re probably in a very pensive mindset. It's not easy to contemplate our mortality, let alone the legacy that we want to leave in the world. So I want you to make a list of your “big, audacious goals.” Some of these are things that you may scarcely even admit you want to do. If any of you have seen my goal of being remembered into the next millennium, it came from this exercise.

Anything that you've ever wanted to do goes on this list. Don't think of time constraints; don't think long term, don't think short term; just put it down. If you want to kiss your mother, if you want to be a circus artist, if you want to own three wonderful dogs and ten acres of land and live entirely off the grid, if you want to live in a loft in New York City's SoHo district and take pictures of the street life below, write it down. There is absolutely no censorship here. Write it down!

Why Are You Here?

Okay. You have your obituary and your list of big, audacious goals. Let's think again about why: Why are you here? What do you bring to the people around you, to the world around you? Why do you care?

Think about it. Free write for 25 minutes. Free writing is an exercise intended to get past your inhibitions and see beyond what your inhibitions may keep you from admitting. There are only two rules. First you have to keep you pen, pencil, or fingers moving at all times. And two, you may not go back and cross out, erase. or change anything you've written, even if it contains spelling or grammatical mistakes. Just set a timer and write. You can write longhand, type, record yourself—the important thing is getting it out, not stopping, and not editing.

Why are you doing what you're doing? Why does it matter? How do you want to be remembered?

Go.

Ten Year Goals

All right. What did you get from your free write? What surprised you? Chances are it was pretty different from what you wrote down initially. And that's okay. If you go back and redo these exercises in a year, they'll be different from what you've written now.

We are, by nature, constantly changing, evolving beings. That’s why I use the metaphor of an ecosystem for productivity. In the physical sense, our bodies are an ecosystem—we have millions of viruses and bacteria and organisms that populate our bodies and have to remain in balance for us to be healthy. In a metaphorical sense, our thoughts, beliefs, values, roles, commitments, and goals affect how we approach our day-to-day lives.

You are an ecosystem. And just like any organism in an ecosystem, you can alter the overall health and operations of the ecosystem, changing any piece of your ecosystem can have positive or negative results.

With that in mind, let's look at a ten-year scale. Ten years from now on this day, what could you be doing? Could you accomplish any of the goals on your big, audacious list? Maybe you've accomplished some of the smaller goals on your big, audacious list? If you wrote down that you wanted to give your mother a kiss, and she's still around to kiss, I certainly hope you've done it in the next 10 years!

If you're still working towards some of your goals in ten years, where are you? What milestones have you reached? One of my goals, for example, is to create a foundation to foster cross-disciplinary research—not something that will ever have a specific end point. But in 10 years, I would like to have paid off my debts and built up enough net worth to begin to put the structures of my foundation in place.

The future is inherently unknowable, but the idea here is to begin to place your goals within the context of your day-to-day life. Over the next several exercises, we'll narrow our scope from barely conceivable to steps you can take in the next days or weeks.

Ten years. Create a day for yourself. Envision your surroundings, the challenges you're working with, the people you have around you. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write.

Intermission

What came out of your ten-year free write? Were there elements that surprised you?

The purpose of these exercises is to begin to narrow down your focus. You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want at the same time. Sometimes by pursuing one goal, you’re cutting off another. You're leaving that possibility to wither on the vine. And that's okay. It's healthy. Not all of our ideas are good ones. Actually, most of them are terrible.

But by letting your gut and your heart control your pen, chances are that you’ve created scenarios that feel pretty good to you. Hopefully you’re looking at what you’ve written and thinking, “Yes, it would be a stretch, but I could accomplish this. I want to accomplish this.” Let’s start the process of figuring out how you’re going to get from here to there.

Brainstorming (Why Two Minds are Better Than One)

What if I'm still very confused? How can I narrow these things down? Or what if I don't feel like I'm anywhere near a place to figure out how to get from here to there?

It's all right. Really. I promise.

Goals are squishy things. They can change on a day-to-day basis, sometimes, depending on the information we run across and the situations we're in. They vary based on our ambition, our influences, our interests, and what we think is possible.

Remember what I said earlier about not censoring? Don't think about the practicality or the logistics of getting from A to B. We'll get to that later on in the book, and I promise you'll have a full understanding of all of these pieces when you finish.

If you are confused about where to go next or feel conflicted about your goals, it's often very helpful to talk with a coach or supportive group of friends. If you have some positive-minded friends, invite them over to spend some time tossing around your possibilities.

Why do I specify "positive friends?" Think about it for a moment. We all have folks in our life that feel obliged to tell us why we can't do things. Sometimes they say it's in the name of keeping you realistic or protecting you from disappointment. Sometimes it's just mean dream busting. But listening to these people guarantees you'll never change the position you're in.

They’re arguing for you to stay where you are, where the variables are all known and it’s safe. They’re reflecting their own fears of change on you, and holding you back in the process. Often it can help breed negative mental scripts.

The people you need to invite over for brainstorming are the ones who have their own goals. Maybe you’ve seen them make changes in their own lives, or they’ve told you about their hopes and dreams and what they’re doing to get there. These folks will help you grasp the enormity of everything you could do with your life. Talking with them is energizing, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

Don’t have any of those folks in your life? That’s when it’s worth hiring a coach or joining a mastermind group. The people you surround yourself with have a huge effect on your perception of your possibilities and potential. A mastermind is a group of like-minded individuals who commit to supporting each other to reach their goals. The group can provide accountability, spend time discussing concepts of common interest, offer brainstorming and advice for individual members and simply provide the comfort and support that all of us need as we grow.

My website has more information on coaching options and mastermind groups, including one designed specifically to help you work through the concepts in this book. If you’re lacking positive people in your life, you should definitely check it out.

Feeling a bit more confident? Let’s keep breaking down these goals!

Five Year Goals

Ready? Let's zoom in. Five years. If you are going to achieve your ten-year goals, what are your milestones? What would your halfway point be?

Let's say in ten years you want to be leading a multinational company that grosses $3 billion a year. What needs to happen? Where are you now? Do you have a consistently profitable statewide business? Maybe you'll need to expand nationally.

Or let's say you have a bakery. You're the only baker. You make amazing apple pies, and you want to grow that bakery to be an international corporation and bring the amazingness of your pies to everybody around the world. What needs to happen five years from now? Do you need to be distributing throughout the US? Canada? Europe? What pieces of that ten-year dream are you going to try to accomplish in the next five years?

Start to think about it. Make it logical. Don't censor, but try to think of a halfway point. Audacious goals often take a lot of time to get started. Maybe in five years, you'd like to be distributing your pies at the state level, or along the east coast of the US.

Do some brainstorming for where you'll be in five years. Toss some ideas out on the page. What would you need to do? Don't discard anything. Create the scenarios, all the pathways you could take to get from here to there. Make it specific. Take as much time as you want. Go.

Three Year Goals

All right. Same exercise, but let’s make it three years. You have one pie shop right now. What do you need to do to expand it in the next three years?

Consider it in the context of your five-year goals. Maybe you expand to five locations around the city you're currently in. What are those locations? How much does the land cost? How many staff will you need? What sort of permits might you have to get? Don't worry about not knowing the details right now. Just think through it and take notes.

If you want to expand to the vacant lot on North and 17th, you would think, "I need to buy the land. That means I need to get a loan. Once I buy the land, I'll have to build a building. What happens there? What permits do I need?"

Think along those lines. Don't worry about looking up the actual permits right now. Just think about all the things you might need. You'll probably include some things you won't need, and you're guaranteed to miss a hell of a lot of the things you will need. But just do the thinking. We're essentially working backward here, zooming from the grandeur of your goal to the details that will be required to achieve it.

Once again, I can guarantee you that the steps you're going to take are going to be ridiculously different than the steps that you're planning out right now. But by planning them out at this level, you know they can be accomplished. It's not going to happen the way you think it's going to happen. But because you think it's going to happen, you’ll take the steps to make sure that it does.

Three years. Plan it out.

One Year Goals

One year—we’re stepping into tighter territory.

You currently run one pie shop. What needs to happen in the next 365 days? Do you need to hire more staff and build systems so that you can step back from the day-to-day running of the business? Do you need to start scouting out land and locations for your second location? Do you need to start talking with your bank, with your lawyer, with your accountant?

In the context of your three-year, five-year and ten-year plans, write down what needs to happen in the next year. Make a list. Toss your ideas out on the page. Draw arrows to connect them. This is where you're going to start to get more granular. Don't censor. You're making yourself aware of what needs to be done.

One year—go.

90 Day Goals

Now that you have your year, we're going to look at 90 days.

What needs to happen in the next 90 days? If you are going to open your next location in the next year, what do you need to do? Do you hire another staff member? Do you fire that cashier, the one that’s never really quite worked out to your expectations? Do you premiere a new recipe in your shop? What do you need to do?

Write it down, toss it out there, put it on the page, get it out of your head.

What Have You Done?

OK. Now, it's time to ask yourself a really hard question.

Look at your big, audacious goals. Look at your ten year, five year, three year, one year, and 90 day plans. Look at all of the pieces.

What have you done recently to move yourself towards finishing one of those pieces?

This is hard. If you're like most people, you haven't done much.

That’s okay. It's normal. It is completely normal. In the next chapters, we're going to explore why that is, and what you can do to help yourself move forward.

Analyticals, it’s time to pull this all together. Head down to CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together to bring your journey through your productivity ecosystem full circle.

Ok, Structurals, we’re headed to CHAPTER TWO: External Influences! Turn the page and read on.

Environmentals, we have one more stop before we reach the end – follow me to CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type and the moment we’ve all been waiting for: our personality analysis!

We Fantasticals will also be headed for CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type, but we’re just beginning our journey – guess we’ll cheer on the Environmentals as they approach the finish line.

CHAPTER TWO: External Influences

Analyticals should consider this chapter from two angles as well, though only one of them overlaps with our Structural friends. We also sometimes place blind expectations on those around us, but we can also be blind to the expectations our loved ones direct towards us. Use this chapter to take a hard look at your relationships with the people you love the most. Are they as strong as they could be? Could you be doing more to nourish them? If you’re not sure, ask! Much better to ask and change now than to be blindsided by a problem you could have seen coming long before, if you’d only thought to look. Not that I’m, you know, speaking from experience or anything.

External influences for Fantasticals run the gamut – you may not even acknowledge them, or they may have led you to make decisions that denied your personality and made you miserable. Unless you have a strong secondary Environmental type, though, your threshold for an external influence is higher than the general population. That’s a good thing – it means you don’t spend your time worrying about whether the neighbors will complain if you don’t mow your lawn each week. If that sounds accurate to you, proceed forward and don’t worry about keeping anything else in mind as you do the exercises.

For Structurals, this chapter has two levels – the external influences we experience, and those that we place on others. This was such a huge realization for me when I was working with ER flows – it didn’t matter how logical I thought a change was, if it didn’t work for the people executing the change, it didn’t get done.

So as you go through this chapter, think not only about the influences you experience but also those you send out. You may be surprised at your insights.

Environmentals, we tend to understate the expectations placed on us by others because really, they aren’t asking for much and it’s not that big a deal, right? Maybe, maybe not. How often does a little request turn into something that takes you an hour or a day? How often do those tiny deals leave you frazzled and unable to work on what you’d planned to work on?

Remember, we’re not changing anything at this point – the idea is just to understand what’s going on in our ecosystems.

When you were growing up, was there a point where your parents tried to shape the path you took? Perhaps they vetoed your desire to study art or literature in college and pushed you towards a more “practical” degree such as engineering. Maybe your tenure in little league was entirely based on your father’s love of baseball, or your acting classes were your mother’s excuse to indulge in her own love of the stage. Or perhaps you grew up in an era or culture where your gender or sexuality wasn’t supposed to get an education, work outside the home, or even exist at all.

When we talk about influence, we generally split influence into internal and external influences—those pressed upon us by someone or something, and those that we carry within us. But the boundary between the two is incredibly porous, and often our own limiting internal beliefs originate from something external.

By placing external influences before internal for all personalities, my intention is for you to see the links between the two. As you go through this chapter, consider how the external influences you identify might also affect your internal beliefs. Doing so will put you in the best mindset to identify your internal influences when you get to that point in your journey.

Ready? External influences, here we come!

Roles

It’s time to define who you are in the context of the rest of the world. Are you a mother, father, mechanic, friend, scientist, caregiver for your parents, a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife? Are you a student? Are you a teacher? Are you a writer? What do you call yourself? Make a list of all of those—all of the roles you play in your life.

Let's take me for an example. I am a learner, a coach, a worker, scientist, researcher, dog owner, gardener, author, creative fiction writer, crafter, cook, leader. Make your list. Who are you? What roles do you play? Write them out below.

Relationships

Now let's look at your relationships. Who is important in your life? What time needs do they have? Do you have a partner? How often do you see them? How often do you need to be in contact with them? How often do they disrupt your plans? What about children? Pets? Friends? Bosses? Co-workers? Clients? What people do you interact with regularly and what time requirements do they have? Write them all down.

Look at all the people you just mentioned. How important are they to you? I'm not suggesting that you go as far as to rank them, but think about their significance to you. In the grand scheme of things, you’d expect your partner to be pretty damn important. On the other hand, the co-worker in the corner desk who is sometimes nice and sometimes gets on your nerves, they are probably a little bit further down on your list of people that you care about. So just give it some thought. Who's important? Who do you spend the most time trying to please? What time needs do they have? Write your thoughts out below.

Time Commitments and Expectations

What are your commitments? What have you told others you would do? Do you volunteer? Do you work somewhere where you take on extra projects, or do you take on other projects that other people give you? Do you have a commitment to pets, to children, to parents—to take care of them?

Be aware of your commitments without judgment. Observation is the key to understanding and effectively manipulating your productivity ecosystem. So sit down and observe yourself. Observe what's on your plate. Observe those commitments, the deadlines you've agreed to, and where they those commitments originated—who asked you to do them?

Approach yourself the way an anthropologist would approach studying a population. An anthropologist wouldn’t write, “Clearly this working mother is irresponsible. She has way too much on her plate. Her children are on welfare, and she’s just gotten pregnant with another!” The anthropologist would write, “Lucy counts pennies until payday, then collects her welfare stamps, and wakes her three children at 5:00 a.m. for a trip to Wal-Mart. Their carefully planned purchases have to last them two weeks, and the shopping trip must be completed with time to drop the kids off at her sister’s so Lucy can get to work by 7:00.”

What would an anthropologist write about your commitments and deadlines?

Now let’s look at those commitments and deadlines and try to discern the expectations behind them. For each commitment you listed above, try to track down the expectation.  Is it internal or external? Does your boss expect you to stay extra hours until the job is done, or do you expect yourself to be the type of person who does what it takes, no matter the obstacles? Do your friends in your congregation expect you to serve on the flower committee, or do you expect yourself to do something to contribute?

Really think about this one, because we often disguise things we expect of ourselves by calling them external pressures. If you wrote that your boyfriend wants you to play video games with him, what is the expectation behind that—and whose is it? Is it his expectation that a good girlfriend will want to spend time with him? Or is it your expectation that you should share in something he enjoys even if it doesn’t do much for you—since he does the same for you?

Examine the origins of your time commitments.

As we move through these sections, you’re going to notice that some of them are quite closely related. That’s good, because everything in your life is closely related, and everything in your life influences your productivity. The more angles you think through, the more likely you are to see connections and potential tweaks that you can test to increase your productivity.

This next one is touchy. If you had trouble with the anthropology exercise in the previous section, I want you to go back and do it again. Or find a friend who’s willing to be a subject for your budding anthropological observation skills. Ask your friend to describe his or her commitments and deadlines, and write up a report the way an anthropologist would, without bias for practice. Sometimes it's easy to turn the spotlight onto someone else.

Ready? Feel confident about your ability to look at your situation without judgment? Turn the page and go on.

Finances

What is your current income? Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Do you have debt? Do you have excess? Do you go out to eat a few times a week, a few times a month, or a few times a year?

If something breaks, do you have the money to replace it? Where is your money coming from? Are you confident in the amount that you bring in each month? What would you do if you lost that income source? Do you have multiple streams of income?

Money is a huge source of stress for most people. Sometimes it can be a productivity booster—if I don’t get this done I won’t be able to pay rent and will get evicted—or it can be a drag on your productivity. Especially if you depend on your mind and creativity for income, the threat of losing your home or having your power cut off can be enough to make your muse bolt for the hills and your lizard brain advocating for a position at Starbucks.

Think about your income. Just look at it. Just observe it. Write down your true debt. Don't lie to yourself. It's easy to lie to yourself. I did it all through grad school, when the student loan money just showed up in my accounts. Let me smooth the way and show you my anthropological money report, written in third person:

Kirsten currently has $100,000 in student loan debt from her graduate degree. She also has $22,000 in credit card debt from the months after graduation, when she wasn’t able to get a job right away and didn’t want to move back in with her parents for a second time. She tried to build her business during that time, but factors beyond her control resulted in growth that was encouraging but not consistent enough to live on.

Now she makes $4,100 a month from a scientific fellowship, but only takes home about $3,200 a month after taxes. She has a consistent editing gig that pays $80 a month, and her business can produce anywhere from $300-900 per month. She’s unable to donate eggs or plasma, but she has been known to join research studies when the pay is good and the requirements aren’t so bad.

Ok, now it’s your turn. Write your anthropological money report:

Environments

Here’s another area to observe: what are your living arrangements? Do you live by yourself, with roommates, with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife? Do you have a family? Do they live with you?

Are you living in a loft, a studio apartment, or a house? Do you have space to squeeze in an office, a desk, or a meditation nook? Do you have space for yourself?

Where do you work? Are you working out of your own office at home? From the computer on a desk in your bedroom? Do you rent space elsewhere outside of your home for your work? Do you go to your own cubicle at work, or do you have your own office with a door that closes? Perhaps you don’t have a physical office at all?

What environments do you work in? Are they noisy or quiet? Are people likely to interrupt you? Are the walls totally white and bare, or have you put up posters and painted them? When you walk into your workspace, do you feel inspired to sit down and work?

When you walk into your bedroom, do you feel relaxed, refreshed, and ready to sleep? When you walk into your living room, do you see a comforting space that lets you relax and ease your stress? Or do you see a messy space with dog toys, Legos, papers, and other miscellany scattered all over the place?

Again, no judgment. You are observing from a neutral position of simple curiosity, as an anthropologist observes the cultures they’re immersed in.

What are the spaces that you spend time in everyday? Write about it. Go through your house, room by room. Go through your day. Go through your car, your office, your bedroom, your bathroom, your kitchen, and your living room. Take notes, even if the ideas don’t make sense to you. Think about the good and the bad, the future potential, and what’s in front of you now. What do you notice about the space that you live in?

Routines

The last thing to observe requires you to think back. You have a routine that you go through on a daily basis, even if it might change on weekends or days you do versus don't work. You have plans. You may or may not stick to them, and you may not even write them down. But, subconsciously, you have them. You set an alarm, you know what time you need to be up by. You have deadlines that you know you need to meet (even if you don’t always get there in time).

When discussing this point, I’ve had often had clients tell me that, no, they don’t have a routine; there’s no one time that they always do X, Y, or Z. And my response is, “Yes, but routines are larger than just schedules and repeated actions.” Perhaps one morning you get up and get ready right away, but on another morning your baby is crying and you feed him or her first. That doesn’t mean that you don’t get yourself cleaned up and dressed later, simply because you didn’t do it straight off, right?

Think about your routines as things that you always do. You may not do them in the same order or at the same time each day, but chances are you always eat breakfast or lunch. Most days, you’re going to change out of your pajamas. I certainly hope you’ll brush your teeth at some point, or take a shower or walk the dog. Those actions are your routines.

Your routines are ways that you try to set parameters on your interactions with the world around you. How do you feel when something interferes with your routine, and, for example, you have to run out the door without a shower?

If you’re especially well organized, your routines will extend to creating a schedule of what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. These more traditional parameters are the ones that everyone thinks of when we try to get more organized and productive with our time.

Think back to the last five times that your parameters have been breached, when something that you have planned hasn’t happened due to something external or internal. What was the cause of that change in plans? Was it because somebody else had an emergency; someone forgot their keys and needed you to bring them? Someone forgot a form and needed another copy? Your child got sick and you had to drop everything, and you had to go get them from school?

Or was it a more positive? You had the opportunity to spend a weekend in the mountains with your boyfriend and so you did it. Maybe it was a gorgeous day and you decided that you would rather go read a book on a blanket in the grass with your dogs lying beside you. Maybe it was just simple procrastination; something else was more interesting, and you spent the day on the couch reading a romance novel. No judgment, none whatsoever. Just think about it. Write it down. What are the last things that caused you to drop your plans in favor of doing something else?

Your Productivity Ecosystem

So let’s think about this. Think about all the lists you’ve made and the options that you’ve wrote out. Why does any of it matter? It matters because this is your reality. These are the gatekeepers for your goals and the boundaries of the ecosystem you exist in. If you want to change those boundaries, you need to know where they are.

You may not want to change your ecosystem boundaries. That’s perfectly fine! There’s nothing wrong with making a conscious decision to keep the status quo if it currently serves you. And even if the status quo doesn’t serve you, you could still decide to keep it because the effort needed to change your boundaries isn’t worth the rewards. Or perhaps you would like to change a boundary someday, but it’s not worth the time at the moment.

Some of your boundaries may not even be changeable, and it’s worth having a rough idea of what boundaries may be good targets for change if you choose to move in that direction.

Let’s say that your living conditions are less than ideal. Your downstairs neighbors are constantly waking you up at odd hours, or you don’t have the space to indulge in the activities that you enjoy and/or that make you money. The ultimate solution would be to move, but it’s a significant loss of time and income to do so.

Would it be a better option to speak with your neighbors about the noise, complain to the property manager, or invest in flooring options that mute the noise from below? Maybe it is easier to improve your living space by cleaning out a closet or small room within your current setup and making it your own. Identifying and exploring these options helps you to find potential action points where you’ll get the maximum return on the minimum investment—moving you more efficiently toward your goals.

These are the kinds of decisions that that you’ll be making over the course of this book. When you are informed about your productivity ecosystem—what your commitments, expectations, finances, environment, and routines consist of—you have the power to make decisions that benefit you. You can see how to reach your goals without wasting time and energy, without feeling like the entire thing is a fight. If you are informed about the decisions you are making and the reality you are operating from, you can save yourself a lot of heartache—and headaches. You may even be able to make the path to your goals and dreams something that comes naturally, something that is even and paved. Yes, it has challenges, and yes, it requires work, but, to return to our previous metaphor, it’s the difference between blowing a tunnel through solid rock underneath a mountain and or taking the trail through the pass above. What would you rather do? If you want to be the one to blow your way through the rock, be my guest. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to go through the pass.

Analyticals are moving on to internal influences – just turn the page to CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences.

We’re also heading to internal influences, Environmentals.  Follow Mason and turn the page to CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences!

Traffic jam ahead! The Fantasticals are going with the crowd on this one. Turn the page to CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences and keep reading.

Ok, Structurals, we're going to start by diving deep into your personality type. Turn to CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type and let's hit the road!!

CHAPTER THREE: Internal Influences

At this point, Analyticals, we’ve gotten through the hardest parts. Not to say that evaluating your internal influences will be a walk in the park, but most of us have identified the big internal scripts keeping us back on our own. There’s always room for improvement, though – start reading.

Last stop, Fantasticals! Resist the urge to rush through this one. I know it’s tempting to, but in this case we’ve saved the best for last. Take your time thinking through the exercises and scenarios in this chapter, and open yourself up to whatever your subconscious might want to tell you.

This isn’t an area that we Structurals tend to think much about. And it’s one that gets easily buried, especially if we’ve internalized other people’s routines. Think about it – how many of your systems are based on things your parents or grandparents did? Those systems have their own biases and limitations, and you may or may not have considered them. That’s why we start our journey here, so that we have the whole book to mull over the influences that we never realized existed.

My fellow Environmentals, there’s something in this chapter that you need to be very aware of – the tendency to pull all your answers from the previous chapter and reassign them from external influences to internal. Resist the urge! If you convince yourself that your external influences are actually internal, you not only hide your own internal influences, but you indulge in an internal script that will keep you permanently at a disadvantage. You may choose to indulge in other people’s expectations or not, but if you don’t acknowledge them as someone else’s, you’ll never be able to understand your own desires and reach your own goals.

I once dated a logistics officer in the Marines, and we spent many an hour haunting coffee shops and digging into any number of fascinating stories and conversations. He told me one once that had me in awe of the power of our internal habits, influences, and scripts.

His unit had recently returned from a tour in Iraq, and several of the men were suffering from insomnia due to PTSD. They were given a standard treatment—a prescription for Lunesta. Most adapted to the drug without issues, but soon concerns grew about one particular soldier.

It was hard to put a finger on exactly what was wrong. He showed up on time and did his work, but there was something of a dichotomy between what he did in the mornings and afternoons. In the afternoons, he tackled complex work, made valuable contributions, and generally performed as expected. But he was unusually brusque in the mornings. He’d send choppy emails and aggressively steer conversations toward routine tasks. No one could quite figure it out—and in the midst of readjusting to being posted back in the States, no one had much time to wonder.

It wasn’t until my lover happened to walk past this soldier at lunch time that the pieces began to fall into place. The man was sitting in front of his computer, staring around him with a look of utter horror on his face. It was 12:30 in the afternoon and he’d gotten up at 6:00 that morning, driven 17 miles to the base, participated in drills, showered, and dealt with the routine contents of his inbox, and he had no recollection whatsoever of doing any of it.

Everything this man had done that day, and had been doing for several mornings previously, had been completely controlled by his pre-set routines. His mind wasn’t actually waking up until sometime in the afternoon, even though his body had been moving throughout the day. It’s astounding to consider that so much of what we do could truly be done without thinking. That said, the unit was scheduled to go to the target range the next morning, and the thought of what this man’s instincts might have prompted in reaction to gunfire is truly terrifying.

Even without the dubious benefit of Lunesta, many of us move through our routines without questioning why we do them. It’s a way for our brains to filter and process the enormous amounts of data that we get from our senses in any one second. Sometimes this is a good thing, like when we instinctively pick up a hot pad before lifting a hot pot, but other times our subconscious habits can sabotage our goals and our productivity. Consider how you react to stress, your first instinct when you’re criticized, or the first thing that crosses your mind when you think about something you’d love to do or have but that is too expensive.

This chapter is intended to help you shine a light on your habits and the influences behind them. We’ll observe them, record them, and understand how they're influencing your life. We're going to look at your influential values (what you do with your down time, your food, your exercise, interaction that you have in groups), your mental scripts, and your preconceived notions. We’ll consider whether these widely varied influences are serving your goals and which ones, if any, make sense to change.

While you’re working through this chapter, it’s useful to have a way to jot down observations. You’ll be doing exercises and making lists as you read through this chapter, but you don’t often recognize an internal influence while you’re sitting with a book in front of you, reading about it. They pop up when you’re out and about, interacting with the world. So this would be a good time to start carrying a small notebook or making use of the voice memo feature on your smartphone. Whenever you notice something about yourself, write it down, or hit 'record' and note a few sentences about your observation. That way you’ll have the information you need to understand how your habits affect your productivity and which habits and influences, if any, should be candidates for change.

Values

Let’s start with the obvious influences. Many of our decisions throughout the day are governed by our values—where you choose to spend your time, your money, what is important to you. I’m not here to tell you to change your values, just to be aware of what they are and how they influence your actions and time.

We’ll start with an exercise to identify your core values—the deeply held beliefs that govern your gut reactions. Then we’ll dig into how those values affect your day to day decisions.

A quick note before we get started—as in the last chapter, I’m going to give a few lines in each area for those who are reading this in hard copy, and there is additional space in the back of the book. The exercises purposely start out simply and escalate in difficulty, so don’t skip the initial questions because they seem too obvious. There is a method to the madness.

Your Core Values

Coming up you’ll see a list of words describing various values. You’ll likely see several that jump out at you immediately as fitting your life and others that make you want to shudder. Your task is to select 64 values from the list.

Once you have your 64 values, create a bracket like in the image below and fill them in on the outer edge (this is also available in PDF form on the resources page of my website, http://www.rethinkproductivity.com/resources). This exercise has a lot in common with playoff brackets, but instead of teams, you’re going to curate competitions between values. Which will win out, fairness or adventure? Wealth or gratitude? Each matchup leads to the final round—which of the 64 that start will be the most important one of all?

Give yourself time to think this process through, but don’t spend more than a few minutes on each matchup.

accountability

achievement

advancement

adventure

affection

authenticity

autonomy

balance

beauty

belief

caring

challenge

change

cleanliness

collaboration

compassion

communication

community

competence

competition

connection

consensus

conviction

cooperation

country

courage

courtesy

creativity

curiosity

dedication

decisiveness

democracy

development

dignity

discipline

diversity

duty

education

effectiveness

efficiency

empathy

empowerment

enlightenment

entrepreneurship

environment

equality

ethical

excellence

excitement

expertise

fairness

faith

fame

family

fidelity

flexibility

forgiveness

freedom

friendship

fun

God

gratitude

greatness

growth

happiness

harmony

healing

health

home

honesty

honor

humility

humor

imagination

independence

individuality

influence

innovation

integrity

involvement

joy

justice

kindness

knowledge

leadership

learning

legacy

life

love

loyalty

meaning

mercy

merit

money

nature

nirvana

openness

order

partnership

passion

patience

peace

perfection

perseverance

personal development

philanthropy

pleasure

positive attitude

power

privacy

productivity

professionalism

prosperity

purpose

quality

recognition

relationships

religion

respect

responsibility

risk-taking

safety

sanctuary

security

self-esteem

serenity

service

sex

sharing

simplicity

spirituality

stability

status

stewardship

strength

success

teamwork

tradition

trust

truth

understanding

uniqueness

variety

vision

vitality

wealth

wellness

wholeness

winning

wisdom

work

Done with your tournament? Which value came out on top?

Regardless of which value “won”, the ones that made it into your top 8 and top 16 are important in your day to day decisions. You may not consciously realize it, but these values drive your actions and reactions, how you spend your time, how you interact with others, and even how you go about handling the details of daily life, such as the products you buy or the tasks you do (or don’t) do.

For example, in my own brackets I value curiosity over discipline, meaning that I’m more likely to explore a new skill or cultivate focused practice time than I am to spend time revisiting subjects I’ve spent time with previously. I also value connectedness over cleanliness, so I’m more likely to leave a pile of dishes in the sink in lieu of time spent with my friends or boyfriend.

Consider comparisons like this in the next section, where we’ll examine a number of common value-based decisions that you likely make on a regular basis. Think through the questions and the values behind them, and jot down some notes in the space provided. Again, this isn’t intended to be a prompt for you to change your values—simply to be aware of them and how they affect your days.

Day to Day Decisions

Do you cook in or eat out? Do you go for pre-made packaged food, or do you go for more natural food that requires additional preparation?

Do you clean your own house or do you have somebody come in to clean? And if you have somebody come, why? Is it because you dislike cleaning? Is it because you feel your time is better spent elsewhere, and it's more valuable for you to spend your time doing something else than it is to clean your house?

Do you have other sorts of help? Do you have an assistant? Do you have somebody that does your yard work? Do you have somebody who helps you with projects that are difficult for you to do on your own, such as web design or Photoshop projects?

When you go to the grocery store, do you choose to spend extra for organic food? Do you choose to spend extra for organic meat? If you choose to spend extra, how are you making that decision? Are you going for the "dirty dozen", or do you have a different perspective?

What do you do in your down time? Do you have hobbies that you like? Do you read, write, garden, or watch TV? Do you spend extra time with your significant other, with your family, with your kids if you have them, with your pets? What do you do? Do those down time activities add to your energy and time, or do they detract from them?

That last question is especially important, because some of your hobbies can do double duty by boosting your energy and preparing you mentally for additional work toward your goal. If you know that you get an energy boost from spending a half hour outside, you can consider finding ways to incorporate time outdoors into your day so that you have that energy boost at the most convenient time.

Fueling the Body and Brain

You may not think of food as a habit, but there are lots of subconscious influences that inform our thinking when we’re debating between a salad and a cup of ramen noodles. Food, sleep, and exercise fuel our bodies and brains, which means that attempting to boost our productivity without considering them is akin to missing the forest for the trees. We are what we eat!

Let’s start with food: what are you eating? Are you eating the standard diet from the country that you are from? Are you eating a lot of processed foods? Do you go for something more specific like a Mediterranean Diet, Raw Diet, or Paleo Diet? Do you jump from diet to diet? Do you do juice cleanses? Do you fast? Do you eat when you are hungry, or do you stick to the set meal times of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? When you are caught up in working with something, how long to you wait to eat? Do you skip meals? What are your comfort foods? How often do you eat them and are they healthy foods that are adding to your energy levels? Remember this just an opportunity to simply sit and observe without judgment.

I’ll give you an example. Generally I try to eat Paleo, but one of my huge comfort foods is boxed macaroni and cheese. Growing up, I’d come home from school, let myself in, and make a box of macaroni for a snack. Since I was underweight and nerdy, I got picked on a lot, and I somehow began to associate mac and cheese with comfort. Of course, boxed mac and cheese is about as far from Paleo as you can get. And I know when I do eat it, that I’ll get a drop in energy levels, an increase in digestive upset, and an extra patch of eczema or two. But I’ll occasionally eat it anyway, since it is a comfort food, and we all have days when we need that comfort.

Let’s move on to exercise. Are you one of those people who sits behind a desk all day, or do you make an effort to get out and move around? If you are desk bound, are you sitting or are you standing? Do you have a walking desk? When you do get out and exercise, if you do get out and exercise, what do you engage in? Is it yoga, running, weight lifting, capoeira, karate? Walking back and forth to your house or your place of work or your school?

How often do you exercise? Is it a daily thing? Two times a week? What's the frequency? Does exercise really energize you? If you go out and exercise, do you feel better afterwards? Do you feel better the day after?

For the longest time I thought that exercise just didn't help my energy levels. I'd go out and exercise, and I would feel absolutely drained—sitting-on-the-couch-and-I-don't-even-want-to-raise-my-hand-to-shift-channels-on-the-TV drained. First I tried running, then yoga, but there wasn’t a difference in how I physically felt afterwards. I still exercised because I enjoy pushing myself and liked the sensation of generally being stronger as I went about my normal life, but I scheduled my workouts in the evening and accepted that I wouldn’t be doing anything that required effort afterwards.

Then I went on a three week trip and didn’t have time for yoga. I came back and spent a week or so settling in, and then ventured back to my studio. I felt awful that night after I had done my first yoga class, but the very next day I felt so much better.

So think on a time scale that isn't necessarily traditional. If you are exercising and you are one of the people who is exhausted after exercising, what happens the next morning? What happens later on that day? Can you see patterns in your energy level with regards to exercise?

Now, let’s tackle sleep. How many hours do you sleep? Does your sleep cycle change between the weekends and weekdays? Are you a morning person or a night owl? Do you fall asleep easily, or do you stare into the darkness for hours before you drift off? Can you get out of bed when the alarm goes off, or do you hit snooze or not hear it at all?

When you get to the individual personality chapters, there will be an entire section on energy, with type specific worksheets available for you to track your energy levels, tasks and food consumption. (For the Fantasticals groaning in the background, relax, I said they were type specific! You might even enjoy the process.)  You’ll also find some ideas for tests you might try to determine the relationship between your food and your energy.

Subconscious Influences

Thus far we’ve focused on influences that come easily to the surface when you think about them. Chances are, you’ve spent time thinking about your food, sleep, and diet choices already. But what about the actions you don’t think about? The influences that led the marine in my lover’s unit to move through his routines without being conscious of doing them?

Those influences are much harder to identify, but there’s some real gold in there when it comes to potential changes that can turbo-charge your progress toward your goals. It’s hard to delve into these areas. These are routines that you created at one point or another because you felt threatened, likely when you were young. These are influences that your subconscious perceives as protecting you, even if the situations you needed protection from no longer exist.

Over the next few sections, I’ll lead you to identify first the actions you typically take in various situations, and then the influences and beliefs that underlie those actions. Sometimes the truths you reveal here can be painful, and you may notice voices in your head criticizing you for what you do, what you don’t do, and even the very fact that you’re doing these exercises in the first place.

Christ, you’re such an idiot. This isn’t going to help at all! Who are you, trying to be more productive, anyway?

These voices—call them gremlins, demons, the voice of judgment, the lizard brain, the resistance—they’re all the same thing, and they hold clues to the subconscious influences that support or detract from your goals.

Ready to start?

Interactions with Others

When you are in a group, are you dominant? Do you tend to direct the conversation, or do you defer to others? If you end up talking at the same time as someone else, do you stop and let them go on, or do you continue talking and wait for them to stop?

What makes you jump in when you are in a group? What will make you stand up and say, "Wait a minute, I don't agree with this"?  Consider different situations. If you’re discussing something work related with a group of coworkers, would you speak up if you disagreed? What if the group included your boss? Let’s change it up: now you’re talking with your partner about finances. How do you act if you disagree? What if the situation involves talking with your friends about the acting in a movie you’ve all seen? How do your reactions change between all of these settings?

When there's a situation and you're going around a group and introducing yourself or taking turns in an activity, what’s your behavior like? Do you volunteer to go first, or are you the person that waits to be called on, or are you the person that hopes that  you're not going to get called on?

All of these are habits that we tend not to think of as influences; they're just subconscious scripts, and we run them every time we are in a situation. So, start to pay attention to those scripts. What actions are you taking, and what are the inspirations for those actions? What are the assumptions that underlie those actions? Take a few days to observe how you interact with others. Find a few trusted friends and ask them for their observations. Pull it all together, and write up a summary in the space below.

How to Be An Influence Archaeologist

Next, we want to dig even deeper into these subconscious scripts. It’s one thing to examine the scripts that determine how you interact with others and present yourself to the world, but it’s another entirely to discern the scripts that kill ideas and actions before they even begin to form. These are really hard to pinpoint, because they’re often buried under layers of memory, family prejudice, and unconscious decisions that once protected you but are no longer needed.

It can take lots of time and conversations with a coach or counselor to unearth all of them, but we can begin the excavation by imagining ourselves in various situations and examining the thoughts that come up. I’d like you to take ten minutes with each of the following scenarios. Read them, and then put yourself in the scene, filling in the details to make it vivid and real for you. Write down your thoughts. What fears come up in this situation? Are there pieces of each scenario that appeal to you in ways you didn’t expect? What would you do if you found yourself in this situation?

Scenario One: The mayor of your city or town has just been arrested on charges of corruption. The deputy mayor has also been implicated in the scandal, and your town is now without a leader. You’re discussing the situation with a neighbor who suggests that you should run for office and volunteers to nominate you himself. The conversation draws the attention of others nearby, and you’re soon in the center of a group of neighbors who believe you would make a much better mayor than your predecessor.

Scenario Two: The circus is in town, and you’ve got a temporary job as a groom in the barn. You enjoy spending time with the horses and hanging out with the trick riders. As the end of the circus approaches, the leader of the troupe suggests you come along when they leave town. They’ll provide your room and board, and even train you to become a performer.

Scenario Three: You’ve noticed that there’s a need for a good software program to organize and track research for literature reviews. You’re decent at hacking together code, so you make one for yourself. One day you’re using it and your advisor asks where you got it. In the ensuing conversation, he suggests that you market and sell your creation, estimating that your profits could be in the millions.

Hopefully, as you’ve thought through these scenarios you’ve noticed that you hold some beliefs which may or may not be true. Perhaps you believe that you aren’t an effective public speaker, and couldn’t garner enough support to win an election. Maybe you think that you couldn’t possibly leave your family, pets, and home to join the circus. It’s possible that you believe that making millions off of a bit of code is impossible, and that sort of success requires cheating at some point along the line.

Sometimes our beliefs are rooted in our own experiences (i.e. all political races are popularity contests and require money; that’s how it was when I ran for student council in fifth grade) and sometimes they come from those around us. Did your parents ever complain about money as you grew up or state opinions about successful people? You may well have unconsciously adopted those beliefs and never stopped to question their veracity or usefulness.

There used to be an NPR segment called “This I Believe.”  As I was growing up, I would listen to it and be so in awe of the people who could concisely state what they believed. The question “What do you believe?” is so broad and intertwined with everyone and everything around you, and it’s coated with layer upon layer of subconscious programming. This last exercise is optional, but well worth doing.  Take ten minutes and write down what you believe. Do it as a free write where your pen doesn't stop moving, never leaves the paper. Explore the good and the bad, the beliefs that you display proudly, and those that hide even from your own consciousness. Don’t censor yourself. The point of keeping your pen moving is to provide an outlet for those weird things that are hugely important but would never make it past your internal censor under normal circumstances.

Limiting Beliefs

As you thought through the three scenarios in the previous section, you probably ran across a number of preconceived notions. I’m not popular enough to run for office. I’m not coordinated enough to be a circus performer. I couldn’t possibly have created something worth millions; I’m not smart enough!

Notice the theme here? I’m not _____ enough to do _____. This is a specific type of influence—a limiting belief. These are classically effective gatekeepers, keeping your goals from even approaching your conscious mind during your daily thought processes. If you never even think about something, then you’re certainly never going to actually do it.

The previous exercises should have brought any number of preconceived notions to the front of your mind, so let’s take the opportunity to examine them in the light. These things may be remarkably powerful, but they’re also astoundingly easy to flip on their heads. By doing so, you take back the power and make a decision for yourself about whether that limiting belief serves you or not.

Let's think about the preconceived notions that you have for yourself. Do you consider yourself to be a productive person? Do you consider yourself to be a middle class person, a low class person, or an upper class person?

What standards do you measure yourself against? When you think about what you are now, what would you like to change? What would you like to become?

Let's do another free write. Sit down for ten minutes and write about what you would like to become in 10, 15, and 20 years. Go back to your goals. What person would you like to be? What person would have accomplished the goals that you have set up for yourself? How is that person different from the person you are right now?

Now, I’d like you to pick one of your preconceived notions and spend a day with it purposely flipped. If you believe you are always late, spend a day getting to everything five minutes early. What did you have to do to achieve that transformation? How did the people around you react? Is this something you could do again, or is it too much effort for the reward you observed?

Write down your observations, and then email them to me at kirsten@rethinkproductivity.com. You’ve just changed your first habit, even if only for a day——that’s totally worth celebrating!

Revisiting Your Goals

In this chapter, you’ve completed several free writes and made lots of observations. From these, we’ve begun to identify some conscious and subconscious influences. This process of exploration can continue until the day you die, but at this point we should have enough information to begin thinking about whether these influences are supporting you.

Take a moment to go back through all the exercises you’ve completed. Now that you’ve identified some of your internal and external influences, do the goals you initially wrote down still make sense? Do you see changes you could make that could help you get to your goals faster? Maybe you even see goals that you couldn’t dream of before.

If you’ve added or changed goals, take a moment to summarize that thinking below.

Next, let’s highlight some of your influences that could support your goals more effectively than they’re doing now. You should have noticed at least a few internal and external influences that aren’t helping you—write them down below and spend some time thinking about what would need to happen for them to change in a positive way.

Now, don't go overboard here and decide that you are going to change everything at once, because that is just a recipe for disaster. Just start to think about and flag certain habits that you would maybe like to change. What would it take to change them if you wanted to change them? If you wanted to change your diet and start eating Paleo, what would it take to do that? If you wanted to start exercising, maybe starting with once a week or twice a week, what would it take to do that? If you wanted to change your role within a group, what would it require you to do? How would you have to change your reactions? How would you have to move forward and take action rather than reacting?

Over time you may change some or all of these influences, but for right now let’s pick one. Out of the influences you’ve written above, which one would you like to try to change first?

Decide on one aspect of this influence that you could test in order to start changing it. This isn’t a test like in school where you pass or fail——think more along the lines of a scientist gathering data and ruling out potential explanations for a phenomena. You’re trying to figure out what drives your actions here. What is the belief or need that triggers the behavior you’re trying to change? That’s a really hard question to answer, and you’re likely to run through several hypotheses before you hit on something that seems to work.

But each inaccurate hypothesis is a data point, one that helps push you in the right direction. So take your influence and think of five tests you can run on it as you begin to tackle changing it. Write those out below, and then start testing them, one by one.

The process of changing your influences is very much like the tortoise from the old fable—slow and steady wins the race. But the effect that those changes will have on your goals is entirely like the hare. You’ll have stretches where you feel like napping, then the pieces will fall into place, and you’ll sprint forward like someone lit a rocket under your tail. Which, in many ways, someone has.

Analyticals, we’re also going to CHAPTER ONE: Your Goals.

All together? The Structurals are heading to the Goals chapter next. Turn to CHAPTER ONE: Your Goals.

Three’s a crowd, Environmentals! Onward to CHAPTER ONE: Your Goals!

Fantasticals, this is it! Let’s head to CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together please!

CHAPTER FOUR: Personality Type

Analyticals, we know you want the hands on stuff first, so here’s your chance. This chapter covers the theory behind the personality test, and then we’ll dig into ideas you can test today to improve your progress toward your goals.

It’s time, Fantasticals – time to learn how to turn those Fantastical strengths into awesome, boundary busting achievements! Read on to learn how…

Structurals, we saved the best for last! This chapter is where we find out what we can do, right now, to harness our strengths and achieve our goals.

This is the best part, Environmentals – now that the mental work from the first few chapters is done, you’re ready to tackle the grand finale! In the coming chapter you’ll find ways to improve your productivity and keep yourself working toward your goals, no matter what they are or who is around you!

What does your personality influence? The short answer is pretty much everything. If you think back to the image of the productivity ecosystem that was in the introduction, the personality type was what determined the path you took after your goals had made it past the gates guarded by your internal and external influences. It’s true that in the end, your personality determines the specific techniques you might choose to use. But it also affects your influences and, to some extent, even your goals themselves.

Your personality is what drives how you approach the world and how you choose to react to the pressures around you. Let’s take a scenario in which a teen is deciding what to study at college, and her parents are pushing for medical school. A Structural personality type might look at that advice and trust that her parents have experience that she doesn’t, making her more likely to enroll in pre-med coursework. An Analytical would build on that reasoning with her own goals and desires, and choose whether or not to follow her parent’s advice depending on how well it lines up with what she wants to do. A Fantastical would likely look at the type of learning required for medical school—systematic memorization, large amounts of information, the reality that routines are essential—and decide that this path wasn’t for her. And an Environmental might look at that same information, have the same concerns, but decide to give pre-med classes a try because her parents would be really proud if she could succeed, and she wants to give them that satisfaction.

In the context of this book, those differences in how you approach the world and adapt your strengths can mean the difference between thriving with a structured step-by-step system or spending hours trying to maintain that same system and pulling your hair out in the process.

So, let's dig into this. We’ll start out with some background of this system and where it comes from scientifically. Then we'll dive into the four types.

Origins of the Theory

This personality system has its origins in Jungian philosophy. It's based on the idea of the four quadrants of the brain. Chances are, you’ll see similarities to Meyers Briggs, True Colors, The Whole Brain Model—they’re all based on the same philosophies that Carl Jung put forward during the first half of the 1900s.

Why are there so many different theories, when they all say essentially the same thing? Well, why are there so many stories using the hero’s quest, or so many business books about marketing? At the end of the day, each person’s way of presenting an idea is slightly different and adds value to the conversation. You may or may not resonate with any one presentation, but there are certain to be others who do.

I began my research with Jung, and then moved to the work of researchers who have taken Jung’s work further. In particular, Katherine Benziger’s work was the jumping off point for what I’ve created at Rethink Productivity.

Dr. Benziger’s doctoral research involved correlations between personality type and brain quadrant strength with regards to employment opportunities and fields in which various types should thrive. She approached her study through the lens of which tasks were best suited to each type, and in doing so she studded her entire thesis with little gems on how these different personality types should organize and manage their time.

I’ve taken that, extrapolated to fill in areas she didn’t focus on, and confirmed my extrapolations while working with my clients. I now understand how different strengths and weaknesses within a person’s personality profile relate to systems, techniques, and tools that work best for each type. So, without further ado, let's dig into the four types.

Brief Overview: Analytical

The first type we’re going to cover is the Analytical thinker. This person is an excellent big picture thinker—he or she can be in the midst of a situation and understand exactly how the details of that scenario tie to their long term goals and the goals of others in the room. They can make these connections quickly and act on them in ways that prompt others to look back and swear that the person in question must have had advance warning of what was going to happen. They didn’t, but their strengths can sometimes make it seem as if they did.

Since Analyticals can take in and process information very quickly, they tend to prefer numbers and figures to executive summaries and multi-page reports. An Analytical, when reading a scientific manuscript, will go straight to the results section, or will skim a news story for the numbers and the relevant details. Woe to the person who brings an incomplete report in to their Analytical boss—their boss will immediately see the holes in the work and rip them wider during the meeting to come.

Speaking of bosses, Analyticals are often found in or close to leadership roles in their communities or the organizations they work with. I say “work with” because the Analytical doesn’t really work for anyone—they work in positions that serve their larger goals and have the potential to propel them forward. These individuals are ambitious and know how to get from where they are to where they want to be. The strongest expression of this personality type can be ruthless when others get in his or her way.

More often, however, Analyticals neglect their interpersonal relationships in the pursuit of their goals. The Analytical is the person you see working late on a Friday to prepare for an upcoming event, a big report, or an important meeting. Their significant others often have to work to get them to take a break, and their children (if they have them) may or may not know their parent all that well. Analyticals want to leave their mark, be it on a local, national, or international level. Depending on the arena they choose, their legacy can be decidedly mixed, but they rarely fail in their drive to make a difference.

Brief Overview: Fantastical

Our second type of person is a Fantastical thinker. A Fantastical thinker is incredibly visual. These people are excellent problem solvers. They are able to pull from disparate fields to create solutions other people would simply not come up with. These are people that will dive deep into a problem for four, six, twelve hours on end. They’ll come out victorious, but will have completely forgotten to eat, answer the phone, take the dog out, meet their friends for a scheduled outing—everything other than the problem they were working on is completely tuned out.

So this person, as you probably would imagine, has significant trouble with time management. Part of this is the tendency to do those deeply dives and focus in on the problem, but the other part is the visual nature of their mind. In extreme cases, items that aren’t directly in front of a Fantastical don’t exist in their mind. If you’ve ever walked into an office covered in piles of paper and wondered how the person could possibly find anything, the answer is that by keeping those papers in sight, they’re able to remember the projects that those papers relate to. If you ask them to produce any specific piece of paper, they're usually able to go to it almost immediately.

Given that, a Fantastical thinker tends to struggle within traditional systems that require non-visual, routine interactions. Think about it—does it really make sense for a visual thinker to remember to write down or enter appointments in a planner or digital calendar, to keep a schedule within 15-minute increments, and keep their files in alphabetical order? Should they file papers away at the end of a day, knowing that they’ll have difficulty getting back into the project the next morning because they’ll need to remember to pull the files back out and get everything in the order it was before?

To people whose personality allows them to easily do this, these questions sound ridiculous. But for those who don’t naturally take to those systems, it makes no sense to force them to maintain those systems.

Brief Overview: Environmental

Now, our third type, the Environmental, is an amazing people person. This is somebody who has emotional intelligence and people intelligence that far surpasses any of the other personality types. This is the person who, when you walk into a group, is immediately able to hone in on the fact that something's bothering you. They’ll say or do something, and you’ll look at them and think, "How the hell did you know?” The answer is that they are able to pick up on those ridiculously subtle cues—physical, emotional, and energetic.

An Environmental person is incredibly connected to their surroundings and the ambiance of their surroundings, deducing whether or not the people around them are comfortable and enjoying themselves and pinpointing what the emotions are in a room. They are incredibly good mediators. They are able to work between people, smooth out conflicts, work out compromises. These are the people that you want in the negotiating room at the UN; that is, if you're actually looking for a compromise instead of just looking to really stand your ground and get your particular goals met. If the US had a Congress that was full of Environmental types instead of Analytical types, I think we would be much better off as a country, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

The disadvantage that Environmentals tend to face comes from their strength. They’re so deeply connected to the people around them that they often tend to stumble when it comes to time management. They have the best intentions of keeping the appointments they’ve set, but when something involving the people around them comes up, they’ll place priority on helping with that situation. If they're about to go out the door to a doctor's appointment and the phone rings, they're going to answer the phone, regardless of the importance of the appointment or how late they’re running at the time.

The Environmental personality also tends to have issues with organization because, in their natural tendencies to help out, they can save anything that could ever be useful to somebody. Now, at times this can be incredibly useful, but mostly it just leads to an enormous problem with clutter. Like the Fantastical, the Environmental can also have piles everywhere, but unlike the Fantastical, the Environmental doesn’t always know what’s in those piles. Those piles can consist of everything from forms to fill out, takeout menus from previous years, months’ worth of magazines and newspapers that contain articles of interest…you get the idea.

You may be reading this sequentially, and if so, you'll probably notice that the Environmental personality and the Fantastical personality have some similarities. This is because when you consider the four quadrants of the brain, the Environmental and the Fantastical have strengths on the right side. The difference is that one is a frontal strength and the other is a basal strength or rear strength.

This isn’t intended to be a book about the science of personality, so that’s as far as I’ll go on that topic. Instead we’ll move on to our final type, the Structural.—If you think back to the Analytical type description, you’ll probably notice similarities and guess that the Analytical and Structural personalities originate in the left side of the brain. If so, you'd be correct!

Brief Overview: Structural

And now, for our final personality, we saved the best for last. Or perhaps I should say the best known—the Structural.

The Structural is an amazing systems thinker. This is a person who is able to think through all of the possible outcomes, all of the possible paths, and plan for them. If you’re tasked with emergency preparedness, you want a Structural on your team because they are able to plan for almost any eventuality.

Structurals generally like their tasks to be defined and parameters set because they gain satisfaction from creating detailed systems that fit the situation perfectly, and then leaving those systems to run independently.

The main drawback issue that Structurals run into is when the situations change after they’ve created their systems. Sometimes they’re able to come back and tweak things to get the system moving well again, but other times they never return to adjust the system to current events. Unfortunately, the system can then evolve past its capacity. The Structural is then left stuck with a system that doesn’t serve their current reality.

That said, Structurals are very creative within the boundaries of the scenarios they work in, and they’re almost always able to find a way to finish their work in the most efficient way possible. It’s partially because of this, I think, that Structurals dominate the productivity sphere. When you see someone struggling, it’s human nature to want to help, especially if you have a system that works great to get you the results you want in a similar scenario.

But there are two pitfalls here—first, the system being offered is rarely one that was created for exactly the situation that the other person is struggling with. And second, the other person is almost certain to have another dominant personality type, making their approach to the system completely different from the Structural who designed it.

The productivity sphere is full of people saying, “Here, I’ve got this awesome system, you should use it.”  Even the folks advertising productivity for creative people are offering a specific system, not a framework that incorporates the entire productivity ecosystem. If I, as a creative person, offer my systems to another creative person, I’m doing so without understanding their goals, personality, habits, and commitments. My system, then, only has a half-baked shot at being at all useful to the person I’m trying to help.

Now, to pull this back around to the Structural type, there’s a full chapter coming up that examines the psychology in detail and solutions for some of the common Structural system issues. But first, I want to expand this theory a bit, to cover the objection that I know is in everyone’s heads—what if you have elements of multiple types?

Secondary Types

As I just said, none of us are purely one type or another—we all pick up pieces of various types from our surroundings, societal conditioning, and familial expectations.

For example, chances are when you brush your teeth in the evening before you go to bed, you leave your toothbrush in the same place each night. That's a trait that is very Structural, but almost everyone does it, because we're trained as kids; our parents say to put your toothbrush back so we're in the habit of doing it.

Likewise, if you’re in a comfortable situation, and someone you know asks you for help, you’re likely going to do what you can to assist. You may not go above and beyond and donate a kidney or run into a burning building, but generally society expects us to offer kindness and common courtesy to the people around us. That expectation can be very Environmental yet most of us make the attempt when the situation calls for it.

The collection of influences that we experience as children has a lot to do with the secondary personality traits we express as an adult and how those traits influence our lives. To use myself as an example, my primary type is Fantastical, but my father is primarily Analytical. Since I usually asked him for help with schoolwork when I was growing up, I picked up on his Analytical thought patterns and internalized them to the point that I have an almost even split between Fantastical and Analytical when I take the full assessment. It’s also possible to display different traits in different situations; I worked with a client who was strongly Structural when he was working as an employee in logistics, but became much more Analytical when he was leading his own team.

As you’ve seen, personality type influences just about every aspect of our world view, how we interact with others, how we set our goals, and what steps we should take in pursuit of our goals. By knowing your primary personality type, you can make huge strides forward in crafting the frameworks for productivity that work best for you. Chances are after taking the short quiz, you have a decent idea of what your secondary type is—or types, since it is possible to have more than one secondary type.

Based on your quiz score, go read your primary type chapter first. Then look through your secondary type chapter and consider whether any of the suggestions there appeal to you. With some testing, it’s usually simple to get up and running with a system that works way better than what you had before.

That being said, it is possible to get a much closer read on your secondary type profile. I created a 50 question quiz that goes into much more detail, with questions that are designed to determine how the secondary traits influence your preferences for environment, time management, scheduling, tasks, and productivity. That version isn’t included here, for several reasons—everything from me not wanting to overwhelm you to the fact that I’m still documenting all the connections and information that each question provides insight into. But it is available as part of a coaching package on my website, http://rethinkproductivity.com/coaching, if you’re interested in digging deeper into your full personality profile.

Analyticals, CHAPTER EIGHT: Analytical.

And Fantasticals, turn the page to CHAPTER FIVE: Fantastical!

We’re not neglecting primary profiles, though – Structurals, turn to CHAPTER SEVEN: Structural.

Environmentals, come with me to CHAPTER SIX: Environmental.

CHAPTER FIVE: Fantastical

In the late 1930s, an incredibly smart young physicist was recruited to join the team at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on the atomic bomb. Richard Feynman was a classic Fantastical, and he made the world into his own visual palette. He was constantly playing with bits of code, mathematical constants, and doodles of atoms and equations. You can probably imagine what his office looked like at the end of a day! But we also both know that those doodles and scribblings were essential to his thought process, and he needed them to stay in the same places from day to day.

Unfortunately, those notes were on a sensitive subject and, as such, were locked away in a safe each night. Feynman protested, but to no avail. “You asked me to leave my job and move 3000 miles to help you because you need my brain, and you insist on handicapping it!”

Now, in addition to his skills as a theoretical physicist, Feynman also cultivated a lifelong sense of social irresponsibility, and as part of that, he knew how to pick locks and crack safes. So rather than continue complaining about his papers being locked up, he took to sneaking back into the lab every night. He would slip past the guards and their dogs, pick the locks on the way to the safe, crack the code, and leave a note on the top of his pile: “Feynman was here.”

Ultimately, after much bluster and threats on the part of a military command not used to working with scientists, Feynman and his handlers worked out a compromise. Rather than lock his papers up at the end of the day, they constructed an entire safe room for Feynman to work in! He spent his days working in the safe, which was locked up at the end of the day and opened in exactly the same state as he left it the next morning.

So You Think You’re Fantastical

Your doodles may not hold state secrets, but I’ll bet you were smiling and nodding all the way through that story! As a Fantastical, you’re an incredibly visual thinker. In many cases, if something isn’t in front of you it may as well not exist—at least when it comes to what you’re working on. I had a Fantastical friend who would go so far as to store non-perishable foods in the fruit and veggie drawers of her refrigerator, because if she put the actual fruits and veggies there, she couldn’t see them and she’d forget they were there.

As a Fantastical, you’re an incredibly creative thinker. That visual mind of yours approaches problems in a way that none of the other types do, and that works out to your advantage time after time. Complex problems are fascinating for you, and you love chasing an idea down the rabbit hole and coming up hours later with a solution. Granted, you may have missed dinner and a planned movie with friends during those hours, but generally your buddies know to let you go when your mind is elsewhere.

Of all the types, Fantasticals fall the farthest from traditional time management and productivity systems. You simply don’t think in terms of schedules and to-do lists—you may not even think in terms of hours!

The Fantastical was, in some ways, my impetus for starting Rethink Productivity. I didn’t understand the theory at that point, but I knew that there was something about the way I thought that didn’t fit with any productivity system I’d found (or even most of the people I met!). At first I started putting my own methods and techniques out into the world, but then I worked with a few people and realized that talking about my system wasn’t helping anyone. I needed to focus on the theories people could use to create their own systems.

And now, with that philosophical moment out of the way, let’s take a look at how the Fantastical can thrive in a world dominated by hours, schedules, and deadlines!

Strengths and Weaknesses

Fantasticals are spontaneous, passionate, and imaginative. Have you ever sat down with a challenge and mapped out how you would solve it just because it was interesting? Chances are you’ve kept various notebooks throughout your life, and those pages have held everything from blueprints for triangular houses to snippets of poetry to thoughts on the physics of planets in a solar system with eight stars, along with everything in between. You find the world to be inherently interesting, and you love exploring it.

For Fantasticals, if the materials for a project aren’t in plain sight, they’re as good as forgotten. You tend to store things in piles, and you know exactly what’s in every stack. It’s not that you're incapable of filing—when it catches your interest, you can run through two years of filing in an afternoon. But you don’t do well with repetition, and it will probably be another two years until filing becomes novel enough for you to experiment with it again. But when you’re working on something, all the pieces have to be in front of you. If it’s filed away, you likely won’t remember that it’s there until someone points it out to you.

Given all this, you may think that it’s not likely that you’ll ever fit into anything resembling a system. Au contraire, my friend! The trick is to treat your productivity process like a fascinating challenge, then brainstorm and test techniques to figure out what works for you. My primary type is Fantastical, and most of the people I’ve partnered with for various projects have also been Fantastical. So it’s entirely possible to come up with loose routines that allow you to work with your strengths and still be productive.

I say “loose routines” because there’s very little in what I do on a day-to-day basis that would fit into a typical book on time management or productivity. My desk and shelves are covered in piles. My schedule is built around energy cycles instead of hours. My friend Stacy (also a Fantastical and the genius behind EthicalLaunch.com) works in a three day pattern that can be baffling to outsiders, but her schedule lets her consume an amazing amount of information and be ridiculously productive.

So let’s toss the rule books out the window. From now on, the only thing we’re going to worry about is whether it works for you. And by works, we mean whether it reduces stress, increases productivity, ensures that you can find what you need within three minutes, and get you to time sensitive events within five minutes of the start. Sound good? Let’s get started!

What Drives You: Pushing Past the Unknown

Fantasticals are driven by discovery. As long as there’s an element of the unknown, the task at hand is the most fascinating thing in the world. But as soon as it becomes at all familiar, you’re going to want to move on to something new.

As an aside, do you want to know how long it took to edit this book, versus writing the first draft? I dictated the original draft in 30 days, had it transcribed, and was “ready” to edit within another month. But as a Fantastical, this was a project I’d already completed, and I wanted nothing to do with going back through to make it pretty! Six months, a team effort, and a LOT of tea and chocolate later, the book is headed out into the world.

Continuously seeking out new discovery is part of what makes the Fantastical such an awesome problem solver. More than any other type, the Fantastical is the most likely to be a polymath—someone with expertise in multiple areas. In addition to the subjects you excel in, you also can converse on any other number of topics. It’s just the cumulative effect of years of discovery—reading interesting news articles, listening to the radio, going to classes and events simply because they sound fun.

You don’t know how that class in pottery might connect to anything else you’re doing, but that’s not the point. It’s interesting and challenging, and that’s enough reason to attend.

Keeping that element of discovery in your life is essential to maintaining your happiness and sanity. It’s the best thing you can do to increase your productivity and move you toward your goals.

The Best Thing You Can Do: Make Time Melt

When a Fantastical is fully immersed in discovery, time falls away. You enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has termed “flow”—a state in which you are completely immersed in what you’re doing, and the rest of the world may as well not exist. Each action follows the previous one naturally, without excessive thought or worry. You’re working on the edge of your skills and with something challenging, and if you stopped to think about it, you’d feel like you were on top of the world.

Now, the Fantastical is not the only type who can obtain this flow state. Any person can work at the edge of their abilities on an interesting challenge and slip into flow. But in my experience, the Fantastical is the only type that naturally seeks out this flow state through their pursuit of discovery. Flow is exhilarating, but also uncertain because you are, by definition, pushing yourself past the boundaries of what you know how to do. That uncertainty makes flow less instinctive for Environmentals, Analyticals, and Structurals.

Here’s the thing, though—you make your best breakthroughs during flow. Your broad knowledge base plus the desire to explore allows you to connect the most unconventional ideas in ways that would never occur to others. Flow state puts you in a mindset where you can connect those ideas, where you’re free from the second guessing you might experience at other times. You can run down rabbit holes, hit dead ends, and go off on tangents, all without judgment.

So regardless of what you’re working on, whatever your goals are, you’ll benefit from giving yourself flow time. A Fantastical gains energy and insight through discovery, so even if you decide to dig into something unrelated to your current goals, you’ll benefit from the time spent. In fact, while flowing on problems related to your goals can be a powerful progress booster, non-goal flows let you return to your goal-related work with a fresh perspective.

How often do you enter flow state now? What are the last three areas of discovery that led to flow for you? If you haven’t let yourself flow lately, give it a try and observe the results.

How to Enter Flow:

- Give yourself a good chunk of time—at least a few hours, and really, it’s best if you can have the flexibility to go for several if you wish.

- Pick a subject that you find fascinating, related to your goal or not.

- Commit to it, if only for the next few hours—nothing will kill flow faster than thoughts of what you should be doing.

- Turn off all distractions, up to and including the people around you (put a “Do Not Disturb on Pain of Death” sign out if you have to.)

- Start exploring and discovering! Let your curiosity go where it will, and see what you find.

Energy Flow

Before you read any further, go to http://rethinkproductivity.com/fantastical-resources and download the PDF of the Fantastical Energy Tracker.

There’s one more factor that can help you flow like a leaf in a river—your energy levels. If you try to flow at the end of a long day where you’ve had to do several hours of paperwork and a round of meetings with self-important bigwigs, your energy levels are going to be about as high as a puddle. And your attempts to reach flow will be about as inspiring.

On the next page you’ll find a tool that will help you turbo-charge your productivity—an energy tracker. It’s been specifically customized for Fantasticals, and by using it for a few days or a week, you can identify how your energy changes throughout the day in response to the tasks you do, the food you eat, and the amount of sleep you get. The energy tracker is the key to the most fascinating mystery of all—you!

You’ll notice that the tracker has three layers—one for energy, one for tasks, and one for food. It’s based on a 24 hour time scale, but it’s broken into two hour chunks because it’s much easier to grapple with that way. Keep a copy of the tracker nearby for the next several days, or even set several copies around and condense them at the end of your baseline tracking time. If you visit the resources page on the Rethink Productivity website (http://rethinkproductivity.com/book/Fantastical-Resources), you’ll find a PDF version that you can download and print out or edit digitally.

Whenever you see the tracker, record your stats. For energy, use high, medium, low and sleeping (or green, yellow, red, blue). For tasks, just jot down the general outline of what you’ve been doing lately—email, paperwork, research—just enough so that you can discern a pattern. And for food, likewise, keep it general for now. You can record your meals and snacks with the names, with categories like carbs, fruits, veggies, sugar, etc., or with more detail if you suspect you may have food allergies. I’ve found most people record their energy on the innermost portion of the tracker, their food in the middle, and their tasks on the outside. But go with whatever feels right to you.

Spend at least four days with your tracker. At three days, you should begin to see patterns that indicate when you typically have the highest energy during the day. Look for at least one energy peak, and possibly a second one later in the day. At five days, you should begin to see patterns between your energy levels and the tasks you’re working on. And if you stick with it for a week or more, you may be able to see connections between the food you eat and how energetic you feel.

If you aren’t seeing patterns after a few days, keep at it for at least a week. About 10% of Fantasticals have multi-day energy cycles. This can be especially difficult to schedule around, so most of the folks in this situation have learned to conform to a daily schedule. If this is you, you’ll probably see less defined patterns on a daily scale and additional patterns when you have enough data to look at a multi-day scale. We’ll get into what this means and how you can harness it later, but for now just keep an eye out.

Like everything we’re doing, the purpose of this isn’t to push you to make changes now. I simply want you to understand where you are and give you a foundation to build from there.

Decide on how you’ll set up your energy trackers and go implement what you need to implement right now. When you get back, we’ll talk about how you can use the information you’re about to gather.

Taking Advantage of Your Energy Cycles

Ok, so you’ve got yourself all set up to track your energy. At this point I’m going to pretend that we’re one week in the future, and you’ve got your first data set to work with. Go pull out your trackers, and let’s start digging into these results!

Interpreting Your Results

First off, have you noticed any daily patterns? Do you start off the day brimming with energy, or is your first surge 3 or 4 hours after you get up? Do you have the classic after lunch lull, or do you see a mid-energy period in the early afternoon? What about evenings—are you dead to the world at 9:00 p.m., or do you get your second wind at 10:00 p.m. and run until 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. in the morning? Jot down your observations about your daily cycles.

Now let’s turn our attention to the broader scale. Are you seeing any evidence of a multi-day cycle? Do you start off the week on a high note, barely hit mid-range energy on Wednesday and then pick back up to finish off Friday strong? You may or may not see these sorts of patterns, and if you do, it could just as easily be related to what you’re doing as to your natural cycles.

What you do on a day-to-day basis affects your energy. I’m sure you’ve all had those fun experiences where you have to spend a day doing paperwork, entering data, cleaning the house, or something equally mind-numbing in its purest form. What do you feel like at the end of the day? Even if your cycle normally offers you a high-energy rush in the evening, chances are you’ll just come straight home and crash. You may even end up with physical symptoms—spinning head, slight nausea, a headache—I know I do!

My last job was entirely data entry and cleaning, eight hours a day. I could feel my energy sap as I got out of the car in the morning, and after work it would take a yoga class and/or an hour or so playing with the dogs or vegging out on the couch before I felt mentally ready to take anything else on. Some nights, I would go straight home and fall into bed for an hour or two, causing great consternation among the resident canines!

Since your tasks can have such an immense effect on your energy and general physical wellbeing, it’s worth tracking how much of your day is spent doing things you don’t do easily or well, and how that’s affecting your energy. So take a look at the second circle in the energy tracker. Can you see any correlation between your tasks and your energy? Jot down any observations.

Now, last but not least, let’s tackle food. This is the hardest area to see connections, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t have conclusive results with a week’s worth of data. Just take another week to continue tracking food and energy, and you’ll likely see a pattern emerge.

There are two aspects of food and drink that influence your energy levels—when you eat, and what you eat. As with anything in this book, the purpose of tracking your food isn’t to push you to change your diet, but to encourage you to be aware of your food intake and experiment with changes that might help you increase your energy (and productivity!)  Since there are thousands of dietary theories and a significant number of people who can do a better job than I of helping you to understand and decide on the best food options for you, I’m just going to mention a few ideas worth testing and point you towards resources for more info.

Intermittent fasting is a theory that typically accompanies the Paleo diet, and involves consuming your meals within a set period of time each day. For men, the recommendation is typically 8 hours with food, 16 without; for women, it’s 10 with, 14 without. The benefits of this are reported to be increased metabolism, increased benefits from workouts, and higher energy, but there are questions about its effectiveness and safety, especially for women. Check out the resources at the end of the book and do your own research before you try this one.

When it comes to food frequency, there are many schools of thought. It’s generally agreed that eating breakfast is a good thing, so if you’re waiting to eat until you’ve been up for a while, consider testing a week where you make a point of eating each morning. Past that, consider experimenting with small snacks every 3-4 hours—or go to the other extreme and try intermittent fasting.

In terms of what you eat, there are some rules of thumb that we can all adhere to. The famous words of Michael Pollan—“Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—are a good start, but there are a few additional considerations from there.

I firmly believe that everyone will benefit from cutting gluten from the diet.  Clearly, the choice is yours, but I encourage you to at least try a month without gluten and see how you feel. The evidence that gluten is inflammatory is overwhelming, and when your gut is irritated, it is a much less effective barrier between your partially digested food and the rest of your body. For more on this, look in the resources section at the end of the book.

Let’s take a closer look at what Pollan terms “real food.”  He’s been known to explain that with something along the lines of, "If your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, it’s not real food.”  Do a quick experiment—take something processed out of your cupboard, dampen it down in a tupperware, and leave it open on top of your refrigerator for a few days. Does it grow mold? Wait until it does, or until you’re disgusted by the amount of chemicals that must have been pumped into that processed item to keep it mold-free after X number of months. Now go look at the ingredients of that processed item, and google a few of them to see what sorts of safety tests have been done on them. See why processed food is best left untouched?

My high school biology class did this with a pre-cut Thomas bagel. We tried all year to get that thing to mold, and it steadfastly refused while everything else around it (cooked pasta, apple slices, a blotch of ketchup, and a slice of pie from the Kroger bakery) eventually bloomed fuzzy and colorful.

There are lots of great resources in the back of the book to help you explore and decide on your personal food experiments. For now, just observe your habits and how food is affecting your energy.

Using Your Results

At this point, I’m sure you’re thinking something along the lines of, “Come on, lady, let’s get to something I can actually use!”  Yeah, I know. A lot of these concepts are long term changes, and it’s way more fun when you can see results right now. Let’s see what we can do about that. ;)

Scheduling Your Day

The word ‘schedule’ is a bit of a misnomer here, because what you’re really doing is throwing things into your high and low energy blocks. Unless you have a meeting that absolutely has to happen at a certain time, avoid setting times to anything. Instead, consider what needs to get done over the course of the day and whether or not those tasks require high energy or low energy. Then dive into them as appropriate.

I’ve yet to meet a Fantastical that jumps out of bed perky and ready to take on the day. Perhaps it’s because so many of us have a second high energy period at night and are usually up late. But regardless, if you’re not in a position where you can sleep in, it’s useful to have a way to get your energy up in the mornings and get ready for the day. Consider using what you’ve learned about your personality type to cultivate a morning rhythm.

You want your rhythm to include things that allow you to engage your sense of curiosity and tease your energy out of the fog of sleep and into the sunlight.

Personally, I enjoy a long, hot shower where I can ponder through the problems I worked on the day before and probe whether sleeping on them provided any answers. Then I go out with my dog and watch him romp around in the field across from my house. Other Fantasticals may enjoy a run before breakfast or some time in bed with an intriguing book. Whatever your preference, putting that first thing in your day will help you charge up and meet the day with gusto.

As you move through your day, try to make sure that you’re spending at least half of it working on things that are natural to your brain type—solving problems, creating new ideas, or learning about a new subject. When you have to complete tasks that are contrary to your type, try to sandwich them between things that are complementary to your type and use the natural energy boost to propel yourself through the things that aren’t.

And before you turn in for the evening, take 15 minutes or so to do something that nourishes you. Whether it’s reading a few pages of a good book, looking at a friend’s notes on a project you’re both working on, or even sketching out a new idea of your own, going to bed with that satisfaction of having engaged in something you do well will help you to sleep soundly and give you the best possible start the next morning.

What’s High and What’s Low?

High energy tasks are high value. These are most important to your goals, or most important for the project you’re working on at any given time. Anything you work on in your high energy period is going to move smoother, and your output will be of higher quality. These are tasks that play to your strengths and require you to be at your best to do them.

Lower energy tasks don’t require as much thought or energy input from you. If you try to maintain a social media presence, for example, those interactions don’t need to be happening during your high energy periods. You’ll be much better served by using your low energy time to do low energy tasks.

Your Physical Environment

The physical environment is one of the most overlooked areas of personal productivity. Let’s be honest here for a moment: can you be productive in a less than optimal environment? Of course! If you have the proper self-discipline and motivation, you can accomplish some amazing things, regardless of your surroundings.

But can your surroundings support your efforts and boost your output? Yes! And sometimes the changes can be so simple and inexpensive that you’ll wonder why it never occurred to you before.

We’re going to be going into two physical areas in this section—your home and your office.

The Home

The home is a crucial domain for all types—it’s where you spend most of your time, and it can either support you or drag you down. Of all the types, the Fantastical is most likely to have a home that looks ‘unconventional.’ This is due to your visual thinking style, combined with the projects that you throw yourself into. For the Fantastical, problem solving isn’t something you leave easily at the office, so in a lot of ways your home is simply an extension of the space you work in—sometimes to the chagrin of your partner!

When designing for a Fantastical, the mantra to remember is “Out of sight, out of mind.” If you don’t see something in front of you, it may as well not exist. For people with a strong Fantastical type, this can extend even to forgetting about the fruits and vegetables she puts in the opaque drawers in the refrigerator. Someday perhaps a manufacturer will wise up and make clear veggie bins—or even better, a clear-door fridge/freezer—but until then, my very Fantastical friend Stacy will continue to line her perishable items on the top shelves of the fridge.

This concept can extend to dry storage as well—use clear bins instead of boxes, even take the doors off your cupboards if need be. With the Fantastical, we’re looking for functionality rather than form, because if it doesn’t work for your brain type, then it’s just there for decoration.

If you balk at taking off the doors to your cupboards and closets, make them single-use instead. It will be much easier for you to remember that your spices are in this cabinet if that’s the only thing in that cabinet. Sounds insane, I know, but trust me, it helps. (And, for the record, my spices sit out on the counter at all times. I’d never use them if they were tucked away into a cabinet.)

Even more so than Environmentals, Fantasticals need areas for collection of easy-to-lose items. Hooks or tables in the entryway can catch keys and coats, and a recycling bin by the door can catch junk mail and other paper. For less tangible things like ideas, consider a notebook in a pocket or purse. Of course, that notebook may just become another thing for you to remember, so consider using the voice memo feature on your phone or use something like Dragon Dictation for Apple phones, FlexT9 for Android, or Dragon for Email on the Blackberry.

If you have the flexibility and the money, consider painting your walls with whiteboard paint and placing dry erase markers at strategic places throughout the house. It’s not necessarily effective as a reminder, but it does ensure that you’ll always have plenty of space to capture your latest idea. Chalkboard paint is another alternative, as are large rolls of paper mounted on the walls.

A cheaper version of this is the giant Post-It sticky pads, which is what I use in my own office. They’re big enough to let me sketch out almost anything, portable when I want to take a finished idea somewhere and non-permanent so my landlord doesn’t protest.

I’ve also recently added an awesome advance in whiteboard technology—the Whitey Board. These are removable sheets of white board material that stick to the wall and are way cheaper than regular whiteboards. I was able to combine two 2 x 3 foot sheets to create a 4 x 6 foot whiteboard space for under $100! I find myself using the Whitey Board for mapping out my own projects and the Post-It Notes for ideas that I collaborate with others on. That way I can take the Post-It brainstorms with me easily.

The Office

Whether your office is in your home or somewhere else, it’s likely a place where you spend a significant chunk of your time. In some ways, it’s much more central to your productivity than your home is because you actually do your work in your office. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your office supports your productivity needs.

For the purposes of this book, an office doesn’t necessarily have to be a separate room with a door. You can be a freelancer and work out of coffee shops or a co-working space and still have an office—just consider it to be the space where you organize your thoughts and physical equipment in addition to where you set your rear down for a day’s worth of effort. If you work out of coffee shops, your office becomes your messenger bag, laptop, and headphones you wear to dissuade others from approaching. It’s also the table where you spread out your notes and research, even if you don’t carry that material with you from place to place. It’s also the strategies you use to keep track of your commitments, which is an area we’ll cover in another section.

For the Fantastical office, the overriding goal is space, space, space! A Fantastical can never have too much space to spread out and brainstorm. Turn your walls into a giant whiteboard or cover them in paper so they can add to your brainstorm. Add shelves at eye height so you can put the piles you aren’t working on in a place where you’ll see them regularly. Get as big a desk as you can so that you’ll have space for what you’re working on right now, because you need to see the piles to put all the pieces together. Contrary to popular belief, you know exactly what’s in each pile as long as you can see it in front of you.

Since you’re now embracing your piles, your filing cabinets are really just there for decoration. Once you’re done with a project, it’s much easier to scoop the entire pile into a box, label it, and toss it in a closet than it is to try to sort it into the proper files. I suppose for smaller piles you could label entire folders with a project name, but for larger projects that will get impractical fast. Once you finish a project, there’s very little chance you’ll go back to it, so you’re really just saving your pile on the off chance that someone wants it. Since you won’t be going back into it, the time it might take to find the page needed really doesn’t matter all that much. If you can say that it’s in the box labeled “Indie Press”, you’ll likely be able to find what you need within a few minutes, and that’s good enough.

Fantasticals often have a lot of books, simply because they pick them up in the course of their various projects and keep them because they’re interesting. A book purge may not be a bad idea, but the more pressing matter is how to find those books if you do want to refer back to them later. Since you tend to play around with ideas and may combine aspects from different disciplines, referring back to the books is a real possibility.

The best way for Fantasticals to shelve their books is to do it by category, but your categories may not look remotely like any system you’ll find elsewhere. To give you an example, I have five bookshelves in my home, and the approximate categorization looks something like this: cookbooks, non-fiction (generally grouped into science, math, psychology, and business), gardening (on the shelf below where I keep all the seeds!), art/painting/origami, fiction that I’ve read and want to keep, fiction that I haven’t read, old journals and notebooks, plus an entire shelf of Terry Pratchett. I don’t bother to keep order within those categories; as long as I keep the books in the same general spaces near their peers, I can find them within moments of starting to look.

It’s not a bad idea for a Fantastical to have a couch in their office, if they have space for it. The reason for this is two-fold. One, the problems that a Fantastical will tackle on a regular basis often require research, and it’s much more comfortable to curl up on a couch with a book than to try to settle into an office chair, no matter how ergonomically correct. And two, Fantasticals often keeps irregular sleeping hours because you have a tendency to lose track of time while you’re working. A couch provides a good place to catch a nap on the days when you didn’t get around to bedtime until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.

One last piece of Fantastical advice is to get a clock in your office that makes some sort of sound to mark the hour. I’m fond of chimes, myself, but I’ve known Fantasticals to have everything from barking dogs to coo-coo clocks. The sound will help keep you aware of the passage of time when you’re immersed in something interesting. Plus, the more clocks you keep around you, the more likely you are to remember that time exists and that you do have time-based commitments.

Exercise

Go through your home and office and make a list of the ways in which it could be improved to support your energy and productivity. Then decide which of the improvements you’ll be implementing over the next few weeks and make plans to do so.

Treat the project as a game—how can you create something that lets you find things quickly without requiring lots of time to keep it running?

Getting Along With Other Types

The rest of the world is caught in something like a love-hate relationship with Fantasticals. While you're unlikely to encounter anything quite so restrictive as having your notes locked away while working on an atomic bomb like Richard Feynman, you are likely to encounter legions of well-meaning family members, friends, and coworkers who think that all you need is a good system to follow, and then you would have no problems with organization at all. Working out a polite but firm refusal now will save you hours of time spent reconstructing your piles and getting back to a point where you can think clearly again.

At the same time, there’s no need to be deliberately antagonistic. Remember that the people offering their advice think differently from you and don’t understand the importance of spatial thinking to your creativity and productivity. Approaching a situation calmly, clearly explaining your needs and offering a potential solution will go a long way toward diffusing 95% of tensions you might encounter. And for those other 5%, put your creativity to work! I knew of one doctor who couldn’t get out of writing his patient charts, but he worked out a number system to remove the bulk of the repetitive portions. Upon leaving a patient, he jotted down the numbers and any additional items of interest, and his secretary translated the numbers into words later that day.

Delegation

Why would a Fantastical bother to delegate? There are a number of very good reasons—and none of them are ones that you’ve likely read about online.

1) Fantasticals are idea people and problem solvers. They love the process of getting something started, but not necessarily the routines of maintaining it. Delegation allows Fantasticals to keep their ideas running after the major kinks are worked out—and to keep earning income from them!

2) There are tasks that actively drain energy for Fantasticals. Outsourcing those tasks, if at all possible, is a huge productivity booster because it saves not only the time needed to do the tasks, but the time needed to recoup the energy lost in doing them.

3) Some of those energy draining tasks are essential if you want to grow your idea past the infant stage. Delegation allows you to sidestep those essential tasks and get them done to a higher standard than if you had done them.

The bottom line when delegating as a Fantastical is that there are so many things you could be doing with your time—things that you a) enjoy, b) are high value, and c) you’re good at! Why not delegate some of those things to someone who would actually enjoy doing them?

Every set of delegation instructions I’ve ever seen tells you to identify the tasks you want to outsource, write down the instructions step by step for each task, and then pass those instructions to someone else. For a Fantastical, this process can be so intimidating that it never gets done. So I’m tossing it out the window. Really, given this book, would you expect anything else? ;)

Instead, we’re going to tap into the essential productivity ecosystem skill—observation.

Go back to the section on energy cycles and pull up your records and notes. Also, go find any to-do lists or calendars that you’ve made recently. As you look over them, I want you to keep an eye out for a few things.

1) Are there to-do items that keep appearing on your lists? What are they? Do they appear consistently because you have to do them regularly, or because you keep putting them off from day to day?

2) Did you notice any tasks that significantly sapped your energy levels?

3) Do you have tasks that you have to do consistently?

Automation vs. Outsourcing

For Fantasticals, it’s usually easier to tackle tasks that can be automated before tasks that need to be done by another person. In the vast majority of these cases (unless you have a super cool advanced home electronics system that can turn on the coffee pot and start making toast when your alarm goes off), these tasks are digital. Think sorting through email, handling calendars and scheduling, or synchronizing posts across various social media platforms.

As you go through the process of setting up automation, I want you to approach it as a problem to solve. More than any other type, you’re the most likely to have idiosyncrasies that require a bit more attention and customization to ensure your automation systems run smoothly. Dig deep into the capabilities of the programs I’m suggesting in this section, and challenge yourself to set up the perfect, hands-off system.

Automating Email

There are several ways you can approach this. The free option is to take advantage of the rules and filters in your inbox. Every email provider offers you the option to set up rules for your incoming email, from flagging messages from certain senders as 'urgent' to sorting others into the folders or categories you specify. I’d suggest you sit down, and make a list of emails that you definitely don’t want to miss and create rules to apply to those. Run the rules as you create them, so that you can see how they affect what’s already in your inbox.

Once you’ve got the important messages covered, consider sending all subscriptions, newsletters, sale announcements and coupons, straight to their own folder. You can flip through this folder as often as you want, but the idea is to keep these non-urgent messages from taking up space in your main inbox. If you’re specifically looking for something from these nonessential items—say you’re in the market for a new mattress and don’t want to miss any sales—you can set up a temporary rule to scan for keywords and override the previous rule to send the relevant messages straight to your main inbox.

After taking care of the far ends of your email spectrum—the important and unimportant—you can turn your attention to the middle. These messages are typically important, but don’t require action on your part. For me, these are things like receipts and shipping notices for things I’ve bought online, the occasional high value newsletter that I want to make sure I read, and financial notices of various sorts. For these messages, consider setting up rules that trigger on arrival or after the message has been read. For example, I always want to read Christopher Penn’s newsletter, so I have it set to always show up in my priority inbox (I use Gmail, but you can do this with any email client). I also have all of my financial messages set to be tagged and archived as soon as I mark them as read, and they always show up in my priority inbox. The sorts of messages in the middle of your email spectrum will be different than mine, but you get the idea.

If you’d rather not set up email rules, there are any number of third party inbox managers out there. I personally like Sanebox because you can customize your subscription to get the extra features you need. Everything from getting digests of newsletters to hiding messages until you need to see them. I also combine Sanebox with Boomerang. There’s a bit of an overlap, but Boomerang offers one awesome feature that I use on a regular basis—drafting a message and setting it to send at a specific time. I can time my messages to send when I know someone will be at their computer and going through their inbox—even if I’m nowhere near my computer at that time. Sanebox and Boomerang are both available for free or for monthly fees of less than $10.

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

There are lots of options in this arena, but for Fantasticals one stands out: Doodle. Doodle is an online service that syncs with your current calendar and allows you to take a hands off approach when scheduling time with friends, clients or work appointments. It also lets you poll large groups to find times that work for everyone to meet so that you don’t have to play phone tag or keep track of lots of emails. Most of Doodle’s services are available for free or for very reasonable fees (less than $10/month).

Doodle is simple to use, has an attractive interface, and an amusing name. (Hey, don’t deny that you crack a tiny grin whenever you hear it!) If for some reason Doodle doesn’t work for you, consider TimeTrade or Schedule Once.

In addition to your calendar, there's a new app out for iPhone users that was made for Fantasticals.  It's called Donna, and it monitors your calendar, location and current traffic patterns to tell you when you need to leave to get to your next meeting!"

Automating Other Online Stuff

This category is going to vary by person, since the tasks you do are going to vary. But two services cover 95% of the online tasks that you could do in any given day: Zapier and IFTTT.

Both of these have the same basic formula—you’re creating if/then statements, for example: If I mark an email as 'important, add it to my to-do list. If I pin a photo to Pinterest, upload it to Dropbox. If I receive an email with the word “Support” in the title, create a service request on ZenDesk.

The brilliant thing about these is that they offer a drag and drop interface. Simply find the icon relating to the triggering event, authorize the service to access your account, specify what the event will be, and then do the same for the action.

I recommend you sign up for both services, because they cover different areas. IFTTT tends toward social media, capturing information and synchronization across platforms. Zapier is more business oriented, offering options relating to customer service, lead generation, analytics, and financial management.

We’ve now covered the majority of tasks that can be easily automated. At this point, you should be saving at least a few hours a week, if not more. For some people, that may be enough. But if you have goals that require more targeted actions, keep reading.

Delegation and Outsourcing

If you’ve automated everything you can automate and you still find yourself with more than you can handle, it’s time to consider bringing on others to lighten your load. This would be where the typical advice tells you to document your steps and hand them to someone else. Here’s what I’d like you to try instead.

First, consider this—80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Look at the tasks you do regularly through the lens of your goals. Which ones offer you the most return on your time? Which ones move you closer to where you want to be? Which ones are essential but routine—you do them regularly and follow similar steps each time?

I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle—one column will be labeled '20%' and one column '80%'. Keep it in sight while you work, and take the time each day to jot down the tasks you do and whether they produce 20% of your results or 80% of your results. You should have a decent list of 20% tasks after a few days, and these are going to be your candidates for outsourcing.

Next, I want you to go through your '20%' list and pull out the tasks that you think you could teach someone else to do. Pay attention to my wording here—you’re going to teach someone else to do them. You’re not going to reduce them to a set of steps or record your actions. You’re going to sit down with your delegatee (either in person or virtually), and you’re going to teach them how to do these tasks. Not only how, but you’ll also teach them why. You’ll show them the end results, and you’ll help them connect the pieces they’ll do to the overall outcome you’re looking for.

Then you’ll let them try it for themselves. You’ll step back and give them the space to play with the process, maybe even find a better way to do it. You’ll still require that they tell you about their progress, successes, failures, and questions on a daily basis, but you’ll trust that you’ve chosen an intelligent person who can do the job well, and you won’t hover over their shoulder.

Teach your tasks one at a time—maybe maximum two at a time. You want to offer your assistant the space to master the work before they take on additional responsibilities. This process is slow to set up, but will save you days of effort over the months and years to come.

At this point, you’re probably asking how you’ll find this intelligent, trustworthy person. It’s a valid question. For tasks that can be handled virtually, I can’t recommend the Rethink Productivity VA Matchmaker Service highly enough. I created it just for people like you, who didn’t know where to find 100% trustworthy, intelligent assistants. The service comes with a consultation to identify your needs, a match with one of our pre-screened virtual assistants whose skills and personality fit yours, and ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition to delegation.

For tasks that have to be done in person, reach out to your network. You may well have friends who would love some extra cash to help you keep track of files, invoices, and expense reporting. Or you may know someone who’s hired someone in the past and can offer recommendations. For smaller tasks, TaskRabbit is an awesome option if it’s operating in your city or town. You could also try putting up a notice in a location where you trust the people—the neighborhood list serv, the co-op bulletin board, etc. There may even be temp agencies or head hunters who could take on the task of finding you the perfect assistant. Let the people around you know what you’re looking for, and the perfect person will appear.

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

1. Make sure the person knows and understands exactly what you want them to do. Have them summarize the task in their own words, and make sure you can be available in the beginning as the person learns and has questions.

2. Communicate well and often—good communication is probably the most important thing when it comes to effective delegation. This can mean face-to-face meetings, Skype calls, or webinars—but whatever you do, make sure you do it consistently. One thing that has worked well for me is to have my VA send an email at the end of each day with what they have accomplished, what they’ll be doing tomorrow, and any questions they have.

3. Identify the outcome or measurements you will use to determine that the project was successfully completed.

4. Determine in advance how you will thank or reward the person for the completion of the task.

5. Establish a time limit. If you want the delegated work completed within a certain time period, make that very clear. If you say “when you have the time, work on this” the project may never get finished.

6. Establish a follow-up schedule. Use meetings to monitor progress and determine if there is any need for assistance. This means that you will avoid discovering three days before the due date of a huge project that things just aren’t on schedule.

7. Stick to it! It may be hard at first, but it’s an important tool in your productivity arsenal. At first it may seem tempting to take the task back and do it yourself when your employee seems to be struggling, but really try to only do this in extreme cases. You want to make sure that the employee can learn and grow within his or her position.

8. Chase it down! If the work has not been completed by the deadline you set, make sure you chase it down immediately and request it. If not, they will think it’s not important.

9. Trust that your assistant is capable and trustworthy. Don’t hover over them while they work and give them the leeway, if appropriate, to experiment and find better ways to do the tasks. Ask them to explain what they learn from failures, and give them opportunities to expand their skill set and responsibilities if they prove themselves able to handle the challenge. This allows you to cultivate a team member over time, and that team member will be much more valuable to you than a robot that can only do what you’ve trained them to do.

Finding Things That Other People Want

For Fantasticals, files are something of a necessary evil.  The standards for filing are anathema to the Fantastical thought pattern, but to interact with other types on a regular basis, you still need to be able to keep track of certain documents.  Fortunately, you can do this without having to force yourself through alphabetical filing or some variation of the same!

The first question to consider when approaching your files is: How you have them set up now, and what aspects of that system are working? It’s not our intention to completely deconstruct what you have now unless it’s a total disaster. Our motto: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

As a Fantastical, however, I’m guessing that your filing system isn’t exactly in the best of shape. No worries, mine wasn’t either. As a matter of fact, let me share with you a photo of my inbox after a week or two of trying to adhere to the Getting Things Done methodology...

(If you’re wondering, I was supposed to cut the barcode out of the little boxes.)

Fortunately, little Fantastical me has come up with a system that works much better than this! You’ll make your own adaptations, but let’s use this as a starting point.

Here are the basics:

Don’t bother to file anything before a project is finished. We’re very visual people, and we need to see all the pieces in front of us, otherwise we’ll forget they’re there. How many times have you filed something important, only to lose track of it completely?

Piles are your friends. Most Fantasticals think that their piles are a sign of failure, when in reality it’s a sign of a healthy brain hard at work. Embrace your piles!

Remember all the space and shelving we emphasized in the office and home section? This is why. You need space to have at least one pile per project you’re working on. One solution that works well for many Fantasticals is to place piles for active projects on their desk and then have a shelf above for additional piles.

You can see this in the photo of my current office setup—my actual desk has a pile of financial and medical papers that I need to deal with, plus my two notebooks and the book I’m currently reading. My shelf has my writing brainstorm notebook, the book I’d like to dive into next and a pile of loan statements that I’m mostly ignoring because I can’t do anything about them and the numbers are alarming. I also keep some office supplies and an orchid on the shelf, along with my shrine to Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. You can also see my inspirational quotes and images, placed so that I can see them every day. (And yes, the plate – I eat at my desk just like we all do. Or like we all pretend not to!)

This works primarily because I can see exactly what I’m working on at all times. My spiral notebook contains my notes and to-do lists, which track all my businesses and school work. The financial and medical pile stays in prominent view, and I can see the piles on the shelf whenever I walk in or stand up from my desk. This lets me visually see what's important.

When I finish a project, I rifle through the stack of papers and decide what to keep and what to toss, then create a project folder and toss the entire thing into my filing cabinet. Someday I might have a larger cabinet with drawers for all of my businesses plus personal items, but for now everything fits quite neatly in one drawer. The thing to remember when filing items is that, in all likelihood, you’ll never need to look at the pages again. So your goal is to be able to find what you need within three minutes. Trying to optimize your paper files to find information faster is just a waste of time.

Now, I treat everything in my life as a project, but some Fantasticals prefer to have a separate designation for things like financial and medical paperwork. In that case, I like to suggest something that I call a Later Box.

Find a box with low sides that can fit a normal size sheet of paper, and put it on a corner of your desk. Anything that’s not associated with a project can go in this. Date the top of it when you put it in, and then return to the box as needed. Chances are, this will collect things you don’t need to worry about, so when it fills up run through everything and toss the stuff you don’t need.

Another option that works well for Fantasticals are those stands that hold important items vertically—my parents have one that I particularly like.

You can use this in conjunction with a Later Box, or use it on its own. The point here is to find a way to highlight the items that require action, contain the items that don’t, and leave space for the piles that your brain needs to function.

Purging Your Files

Honestly, for Fantasticals, it’s rarely worth the time needed to purge regularly. I suggest you limit your purges to once every few years, perhaps when you run out of space in your cabinets, or when you move. By doing it so rarely, the activity becomes something amusing rather than something to be dreaded—you can do this by making a game of seeing how many pounds of paper you can remove from your files, or invite a friend over and have a contest. Find a way to have fun with it once, and then don’t worry about it again.

Exercise

Assess your current set of piles, and use the techniques from this section to find a way to highlight the action items, contain the miscellaneous items, and leave space for your piles.

Digital or Paper? What goes where

We all know that the world is getting more digital. My paternal grandmother has even heard of the cloud (though granted, she did refer to it as “that cloud thing”) and my maternal grandmother moved from a 90s era Dell to an iPad after her stroke a few years back.

So given that, what is a Fantastical to do when it comes to keeping things organized across the paper/digital divide?

Many Fantasticals find themselves overwhelmed when trying to work out a digital system, but digital storage really offers a significant amount of freedom. In almost every case, your system can be anything that you can dream up. If you need a system optimized for sharing files between people, it can be done. If you want something that is as secure as the crown jewels, it’s not out of the question.

So what would work best for you? Let’s start by deciding what should go into your digital files.

There is a good rule of thumb that many Fantasticals find useful when deciding what should be digital and what should be paper. If someone could do serious damage with a document then you should think twice before making it digital.

Now, there are several common items that break this rule. Online bills and banking, for example, could result in quite a headache if someone else accessed your account. And you hear about security breaches at banks and major retailers on a monthly basis.

It’s really up to you whether you want to make your financial information digital, but there are easy ways to increase the security of your digital files. Trusteer Rapport is a program supported by most banks that runs in the background and provides an additional layer of security for your browser when you log into various accounts.

Another handy option is RoboForms, a software package that interfaces between you and your passwords, allowing you to enter in one master password rather than having to remember several dozen strings of numbers and letters. This is great for all types—there are enough things we have to remember without keeping track of the increasingly complex and regularly changing passwords for all our logins.

Outside of financial information, other items that you might want to keep in physical form are contracts, medical information, certificates and diplomas, warranty papers, user’s manuals, maintenance documents for cars and the home, and letters or other memorabilia. You’ll also probably have books that you’d like to keep, but those don’t exactly count as files. Lots of Fantasticals also rely heavily on handwritten notes, and unlike the other types, we tend to actually look back at them. This can turn into a huge problem when you’re trying to find that thought you jotted down six months back.

There are two really easy ways to eliminate this problem. The first is simply to use a spiral notebook for your notes, and number the pages before you start. Leave the first page blank, then as you fill up the notebook, jot down your noteworthy thoughts in the front, along with the page number.

The second way is for those of you who fall into the tech geek category (here's where I raise my hand). There’s an awesome little thing called a Livescribe Pen. It records what you write along with the sounds you’re hearing, and links the two together to allow for instant, relevant replay. You can export your notes to your computer, tablet or smartphone, and the text is searchable. There are even programs available to turn your handwritten notes into editable type. Digital note storage doesn’t get much easier than that!

You might notice that I haven’t included pictures, business cards, receipts or articles in my list of things that should remain in paper form. With the ease of digital cameras and tools like the Brother Portable Scanner, it’s simple to create digital copies of all of those things that you used to save because you had to or you felt guilty throwing it out. Or you can pass on the task entirely by using a service like Shoeboxed to handle it for you. All you need to remember to do is toss it in the mail!

The Freedom To Create

Digital storage offers you the ultimate freedom to create exactly the system you want. That said, for those of us who don’t want to mess with coding our database from scratch, there are some really good options for getting you most of the way there.

My absolute favorite for Fantasticals is a program called Personal Brain. It stores almost any file type in existence, and it does it in a web network that allows you to create visual connections between the ideas and information stored in your 'brain.' I’ve never run across any other database program that doesn’t use a strict hierarchical layout, and the difference for Fantasticals is amazing.

That said, if a program like Personal Brain isn’t in the budget, there’s also an incredibly effective system built right into your computer—the folders.

When opting for the folder method, it’s easiest to structure it to mimic your paper files. That way there will be minimal difficulty transitioning between paper and digital, especially if you have a copy of an item in both forms. One trick that works particularly well for Fantasticals is to change the icons of the folders on the desktop—pick something attractive and distinctive, and you’ll not only enjoy looking at them, they’ll also tell you what’s in them. There are simple directions for doing this on a Mac and a PC.

The other factor to consider when using the folder method is to make sure you’re making use of your desktop to “see” the important files you’re working on. Where an Analytical may prefer the look of a completely pristine desktop image, a Fantastical will work much more effectively with the folders containing their primary projects directly on the desktop, perhaps with a few important ongoing documents also taking up real estate. The trick is to make sure that you’re not keeping so much on the desktop that you can’t find what you need, because unlike in the physical arena, Fantasticals seem to lose their ability to know exactly where that icon is on the desktop. I’ve found that one row of icons, two at the most, is where the limit falls for myself and many of my clients. But experiment on your own and see what your personal needs are.

Even though digital files take up less physical space, you’re still going to have to purge them from time to time. I advise doing so on the same schedule as you would purge your paper files, i.e. when the mood strikes. Unless you’re paying premium for extra storage, it’s not worth the stress that comes with trying to maintain a scheduled purge.

How To Get Where You Need to Be, When You Need to Be There (Without Pissing Off Anyone Along the Way)

Before we dive into this section, let’s get a bit of vocabulary out of the way.

Calendar: the physical object that holds your schedule.

Schedule: the arrangement of things that you have to be at or get done during the day.

For Fantasticals, we have two rules for your calendar—visible and vague.

Calendar Rule 1: Visible

This one should be somewhat self-explanatory—you need to see the things around you in order to remember that they’re important, so you need to see your calendar on a daily basis in order to have a snowball’s chance in hell at getting anything done on time.

The obvious way to do this is a wall calendar. Make it big and colorful, and put it in a place where you’ll see it on a daily basis, or preferably more often. You can go for a traditional calendar, but there are more effective options. You could keep a large whiteboard, for example, with your week mapped out in detail and commitments further out noted at the bottom. But a physical calendar has one big limitation. It needs to be updated regularly. And you need to keep it updated, often times transferring items from electronic format to paper or remembering to transfer an item that arose while you were away from the calendar.

Digital calendars solve some of these issues. If you have a smartphone, iPod touch, or tablet, you can easily sync your desktop calendar with a mobile version and have access to it at all times without having to make multiple entries. But digital calendars aren’t inherently visible, which can cause problems. In a few years, we’ll be able to project our digital calendars onto blank spaces and interact with them in the physical world, but until then, we’ll need to find some way to keep things visible.

There are several solutions to this. You can embed your calendar into your desktop background, so it’s the first thing you see when you turn on the computer. It’s also possible to pin an app tab in your browser and keep your calendar there, or to have Gmail show you your calendar first thing when you log in to your account. Personally, I use a Mac with Spaces, and I keep iCal open in the same space at all times. That way when I need to enter or check something, it’s right there.

Your calendar shouldn’t only be visible to you—often it’s handy to let others see your calendar and make appointments without having to communicate directly with you. For this, Doodle is the number one free place to go, and it syncs with almost every calendar system out there. People can see your available times, pick a time to meet, and the system automatically syncs across time zones and notifies all parties before the specified time.

Calendar Rule 2: Vague

When it comes to calendars, Fantasticals really don’t need the detail. For you, the only entries that should have a specific time are the ones that involve other people. Instead, pick an option that lets you break time into AM and PM segments. It’s enough to generally know that you’ll be doing project planning between 1:00 and 5:00, perhaps along with a couple of other tasks. We’ll dive into this in much more detail, but for now, just know that you don’t have to find something that lets you plan to the quarter hour. In fact, in a paper format, that’s exactly the type of planner you shouldn’t get.

So what paper formats are good for Fantasticals? We’ve run across two that work really well. First, you can let your creativity run free with an UnPlanner. This one has movable pages and tabs so that you can turn it into almost anything you’d like. And second, check out the Daily Planner from Moleskin. I it has a full page for each day, but no time slots. You can use the space however you desire.

Exercise

Take stock of your current calendar setup. Are you digital? Paper? A mix of the two? How is it working? What isn’t working? Identify your problem areas and develop a plan for fixing them using the resources in this section.

Don’t confuse your calendar with your schedule—we’ll be going into that later. For now, I just want to make sure that the physical object holding your schedule is working smoothly.

It’s entirely possible that your calendar is working fine and you won’t need to make any changes. If so, great!

Task Management

Unless you’re working under a deadline, you’ll probably be more productive with multiple tasks on your high and low energy lists. Having options to switch between them when you’re stuck on one project allows you to continue working while still mulling over the problem in the back of your brain. Chances are that when you return to the original task, you’ll find that the block has been resolved and you can move forward.

Fantasticals are great at coming up with ideas. Sometimes too great—we can create enough work to overwhelm an entire team. When you find yourself with too many potential projects and not enough time, write them all out on index cards, and find somewhere to spread them out. Invite a co-worker or friend to help you go through them, and make a game out of estimating the times and importance of each item. Move them around as you discuss, and at the end you should have a decent sense of the priority of all your ideas.  When you understand where ideas fall in your general priorities, it’s not anywhere near as difficult to decide what to work on!

How many ideas should you take on at once? I’m not going to give you a set number because that’s a question that only you can answer. Where do you find yourself starting to neglect certain projects, and what levels do you personally find overwhelming? Once you figure out those values, judge each new idea in terms of what you’ll have to give up to take it on. If the cost of doing so is too high right now, file it away to revisit at a later time when you’ve finished something else.

If you find yourself rebelling against the idea of writing down your projects, let me offer you this quote from the master of observation, Sherlock Holmes:

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” ~A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Perhaps the attic is somewhat expandable, but it’s much easier to be discerning in what you store in it in the first place. So get those ideas, those projects, those tasks that you can’t forget otherwise your spouse/girlfriend/mother/etc will kill you in your sleep, get them out of your head. There are a number of really neat and effective ways for you to keep those ideas managed and organized so you can find them again, but only if they’re outside of your brain.

What are some of those ways, you might ask? Let’s investigate.

Planning

As a general rule, Fantasticals do better with physical than virtual systems. Why? Because you can see them.

For longer term planning, you have a couple of options. I particularly like the Branch Calendar, but that’s partially because I created it myself! It allows you to flow from larger annual goals to quarterly, monthly and weekly tasks, giving you a clear path from what you’re doing right this minute to the larger goal that you’re working toward. Look at the example below.

Another option that works well on a long term scale is a Post-It Planner—get yourself a sturdy folder and a pad of Post-It notes, and write one task on each note. Each column of notes is a day, thus forcing you to keep your tasks focused.

For projects that don’t have a particular deadline, consider setting up a random task jar. Just get literally a big pickle jar, and when you have projects that you'd like to work on at some point in time but don't have a specific deadline for, write them down, put them in the jar. When you have time, pluck something out.

For little tasks and things that pop up in day to day life (i.e., remember to get green beans and chicken thighs on the way home) consider audio transcription. If you have a smartphone, there are any number of apps that let you record a quick blurb and then transcribe it and send it wherever you want it sent. iPhone users with Siri should take full advantage of it, and folks with Androids can use Skyvi, Iris, or Speaktoit Assistant.

Another awesome option, one that isn’t quite ready for prime time but will be really cool when it gets there, is JotIt. This site lets you take a snapshot of something you’ve written and automatically searches out hashtags for instructions on what to do with the image. For example, using the hashtag #todo followed by a list will trigger the service to transcribe your handwriting and transfer your tasks to whatever task management service you’re using—or even send it to your inbox or phone.

Reminders

Ok, so now you’ve got your calendar and your schedule, and you’ve made it as vague as possible so only scheduled events with other people appear on the calendar. Now how do you remember to actually make it to those events?

There’s a bit of a Catch-22 here. The more unusual you make planned events, the more likely you are to remember them because of the unusualness. But—and this is a big but—it can be really difficult to make get rid of so many planned events that you hit this point. You have to become an expert at pushing back and saying “no,” but you also have to be in the position to push back in the first place. In a work or academic environment that can be difficult.

So how do you remember that the events on your calendar are actually happening? And what about events that repeat—like taking the trash out every Tuesday morning?

There are two extremely effective techniques that you can use.

Make It Visual

This one should sound pretty logical—you’re a visual thinker, so you need a visual reminder. I’m a personal fan of on the computer monitor or the occasional writing on the hand. But feel free to get creative with it.

I’ve had clients who put Post-It notes on their bathroom mirrors, the back of the toilet tank, their steering wheel, and even the inside lid of their trash can. By putting notes in places that are unexpected, you can jolt your mind into remembering. Make sure the connection is logical—the client who put her note on the inside lid of the trash can was reminding herself to pick up her child from a once-weekly after school program that happened on the same day as trash pickup. So when she took the trash out, she would see the note and be reminded.

Other options include a vertical calendar that can display your commitments or a large cork board or whiteboard that sits somewhere you look regularly. That can be the door to your office, the inside of your front door, the wall behind your computer—you decide.

The only problem with some of these options is that if they never move, you’ll eventually stop seeing them. Consider this a challenge for your problem solving skills. How can you move or otherwise change the visual reminder often enough that it will always catch your attention? Your tools include color, shape, texture—even electronics, if you’re so inclined. I knew one client who rigged up a motion detector to his office door, then hooked it to his electronic calendar, and set his next three commitments to be spoken aloud every time someone passed through. Which leads us to our next technique...

Make it Audible and Automated

If you have any sort of smartphone or tablet, this is simple—set all external commitments on your calendar to give you an alarm 5-10 minutes prior. Make it impossible to ignore, and have it require input from you to turn off. This way you can ignore your schedule until it beeps at you, figure out where you’re supposed to be, and go there. It requires a bit of adjustment, say for off-site meetings or things that require prior preparation, but it’s not that hard to make it fit without extra work.

Another option is to turn toward a favorite Structural tool: the kitchen timer. The trick here is not to overuse it. Set it to go off in advance of your next meeting, and then sit down to work until it goes off. Just don’t fall into the trap of using it to track every minute of every day—you’ll last 2-3 days, and then your mind will rebel.

Make it Someone Else’s Problem

This last technique is incredibly simple and incredibly effective—if you can find the right person. If you’re in a position to have employees or an assistant, give someone else responsibility for making sure you get to the right place at the right time. This can be as easy as a simple head in the office door or as complex as full on schedule management.

The dynamics associated with this technique can take some getting used to, and we’re going to be covering some of the intricacies of delegation. For now, just be aware that if you have the option, the right assistant can be an enormous boon for your sanity and your productivity.

Exercise

Make a list of at least 10 creative reminders that fit with the items you need to remember.

If you would like to include some semi-permanent reminder method like a cork board or whiteboard, make arrangements to get it in place.

If you have an assistant or employee who could help remind you of where you need to be and what you need to remember to do, speak with them about doing so in a way that won’t interfere with your Fantastical tendencies too much. You don’t want a slave driver; you want a reminder!

Getting Shit Done

Now we're going to dive into some of the specific productivity techniques. Some of these I've mentioned previously in the chapter, some I haven't and these are things that tend to work best for Fantasticals:

- Plan around your energy cycles and use those high energy times to their best advantage to accomplish tasks and goals.

- Make sure all your project components are visible, and that you have easy access to them, you can see them and put the pieces together.

- Give yourself time blocks to work in and enough time to really dig into what you want to work on.

- Give yourself permission to work at odd hours if that's how your internal clock is regulated. Out of all of the types, the Fantastical is the most likely to be up working at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

- Take notes with a Livescribe pen, like I mentioned before. This is a fantastic way to keep track of what you're working on, easily search what you've, worked on and recall the details of discussions that you've had.

- Plan to have regular discussions with your coworkers, with your peers, with your collaborators and, even just other people who want to talk about interesting ideas with you. Your ability to come up with awesome ideas and cool solutions to problems is multiplied a hundredfold by talking with other people who are working on similar projects—or even who are working on other projects. Ideas come from the intersections and the overlaps between fields, and the more you can expose yourself to those intersections and those overlaps, the more productive you're going to be.

- Either the night before when you're wrapping up or when you sit down first thing to work on something, identify one all-important task to finish. That can be writing a portion of a paper or setting up a marketing campaign—whatever it is, identify it and commit to getting that one task done.

- When you sit down and start working on something commit to working on it for ten minutes. That's ten minutes without checking your email, without being on Twitter, without talking to coworkers, without answering the phone. Just commit to working on it for ten minutes. If you are not feeling in the flow after ten minutes, stop. You have permission to stop. You don't have to keep going. But for most Fantasticals that ten minute period is enough to get started.

Every so often, despite all our efforts, we’re faced with a mountain of work and no choice but to dive in and do it ourselves. It happens to the best of us—something unexpected comes up, you get sick, you have a family emergency or maybe you just didn’t realize that the project you signed on for was going to require so much damn time. Regardless, the end result is the same: the work needs to be done, and it’s either incompatible with your type or so much that it’s overwhelming, and there’s no one to do it but you.

This scenario is frustrating for all of us, but it’s particularly problematic for Fantasticals because most of the time the work that needs doing runs counter to our strengths. It also tends to require some sort of routine or plan of attack to get through, thus piling one weakness on top of another.

I’m not going to lie here—it’s gonna suck. But there are ways to make lemonade out of your pile of lemons.

Double Check Your Environment

There are some standard things you should do if you’re going to be diving into a pile of disagreeable tasks. First, turn off your e-mail and phone so they won’t provide you with an excuse to divert to something else. Put up a “Disturb at Pain of Death” sign on your door, or move entirely away from people who might want to interrupt you. You can get a boatload of work done at a coffee shop or a co-working space, and you’ll find the change of scenery (or the imagined eyes of others upon you) can often motivate you to do the tasks you wouldn’t normally take on.

Make it Into a Game

This is one of the best techniques for Fantasticals, and the first one I turn to when things get rough. Construct a story around your work. Perhaps you’re a CIA agent encoding messages from top diplomats around the world in a time of global unrest, and the data you’re entering is of vital importance. Maybe you’re an emergency room doctor and the paperwork you’re filling out will be passed on to the next shift and help to save the patient’s life. When I swam competitively, I became a troop ship ferrying men and supplies between the allied nations while we swam laps during practice, and the various ports were the sides of the pool. The point here is to let your mind run wild while your hands do the work, and you’ll be able to emerge at the end with a completed task and an entertaining story.

Find a Rhythm

Put on a playlist with a good beat and see how much you can power through before the songs run out. This technique works best when you’re doing something really repetitive, like filing or data entry. (I personally like Lady Gaga for numeric data entry and Billy Joel for text based.) The idea is to let your fingers fall into the beat and then keep up with it until the music stops. Your mind can be engaged in the music, and the time (and work) passes much more quickly.

Use Rewards

Pick out a few fun rewards, and space them throughout the process. It can be small, big—whatever you want, although some sense of scale would be preferable. Then as you’re working through your pile, use each reward as a carrot to pull you forward. This works best for tasks that require lots of brain power and personal engagement, where the rhythm or game techniques would interfere.

This is also something that doesn’t have to be reserved for your “Just Do It” moments. For Fantasticals, there are tasks where we desperately want the outcome but wish we could skip over the process of getting there. For example, when I tried to launch a group productivity class two years ago, there were countless moments where I just wanted to drop it all and hide under a rock until the launch was done, and then emerge to a crowd of enthusiastic, engaged students. While I wanted the outcome, I disliked the daily minutia of guest posts, e-mailing the list, checking the stats, and realizing that I’d overlooked some important component of the process because I’d never done it before. So I promised myself that I’d buy a second dog when the launch was over, and now Blake the Sheltie has joined Tyler the Sheltie and me in my little tree house condo.

Blake (top), Tyler (middle), both (bottom)

I also use this technique for getting through busy times like the weeks before final exams. In that instance, I’ll use small pieces of candy to keep myself moving forward throughout the day and a trip to the local used bookstore at the end of the process.

Rewards are worth considering whenever you’re facing something that requires mental stamina and runs counter to your Fantastical personality. Make them fun and unique, and they can be amazingly effective.

Task Sandwiching

This method takes advantage of the fact that your energy levels often rise when you’re doing something that you enjoy or that comes naturally to your type. If you have a few tasks that don’t agree with you and several more that do, sandwich each disagreeable task between two that you enjoy. That way you go into your weaker task with higher energy, and you have the second fun task as a reward to lure you forward. Another variation is to sandwich 2-3 weak tasks between 2-3 fun tasks on either end and get everything you dislike over with in one fell swoop. This option works best for those who can see over the disagreeable tasks to the fun ones to come, and some Fantasticals take to it like a fish to water.

The Kamikaze Solution

This option is extremely effective, but it comes at the cost of torpedoing your high energy period and sometimes your entire day. Therefore it’s something best reserved for emergencies, and even so it should only be used sparingly. Doing this for too many days in a row puts you at risk for an overall depression of your energy and will require some time off for recovery.

Put your disagreeable tasks during your high energy period. By doing so, you’re harnessing your natural increase in energy to blast through the piles of crap that you’ve found yourself in need of clearing.

Your energy will be drained. Instead of a natural transition into your lower energy times, it will be more like a sudden drop off the edge of a cliff. Once you hit that cliff, you’d do well to stop and break for a few hours, preferably the rest of the day. Otherwise you’ll be putting out subpar results and you’ll be extending the time you’ll need to take off to rejuvenate.

Let’s talk about rejuvenation time. It’s essential if you’ve used your high energy for draining tasks. Your energy is not a boundless resource. You need to give yourself the time to recuperate on a regular basis—at least one day out of the week, or a few weeks spread out over the year. On a day when you’ve used the Kamikaze solution, you’ll need to take at least a few hours to get away from your office, get some food, maybe take a nap or read a book. Ideally you would take the rest of the day off, but most of the time the situation that brought you to using the Kamikaze solution won’t permit it.

The Kamikaze solution isn’t an option you want to use, but if you have to, it’s there. And in the meantime, let’s head over to CHAPTER TWO: External Influences.

CHAPTER SIX: Environmental

When I was young, we always went to a grandparent’s house for Thanksgiving. While my paternal grandmother is a classic Structural, the women on my mom’s side are all Environmental.

To this day, I still get occasional letters from Oma with cartoons and news stories clipped from various magazines or papers. She’s constantly on the lookout for things that the people in her life would appreciate seeing, even after she’s been partially paralyzed from a stroke and is the one who needs the help that she’s given others for so many years.

One story in particular sticks out—my family had driven down to Florida for Thanksgiving, and my sister’s handicapped placard had finally shattered under the assault of years of sun exposure and rough handling. My dad was piecing it back together on strips of clear packaging tape, and had gotten to the point of looking for scissors to improvise a hook so the placard could hang on the rearview mirror again.

“Wait, I know the perfect thing!” Oma said, and she disappeared into the kitchen. I could hear her rummaging through drawers while my parents glanced at each other, mystified.

A few minutes later, Oma emerged carrying a handful of thick strings, each fastened into a loop with a little colored plastic circle. As we watched, she made a small slit in the packaging tape and pushed a piece of string through, then held the placard up in triumph. The plastic circle caught on the tape, and the length of string was perfect to fit over the rearview mirror.

“That’s great!” Mom said. “Where did you get those strings?”

“Those are the twines that hold the turkey legs together each year,” Oma replied.

“The what?” Dad said.

“The turkey twines! I always knew they were the perfect size for something, so I run them through the dishwasher each year,” Oma said.

“Err…How many of those have you saved?” my Mom asked.

“I don’t know, but they hardly take up any space at all,” Oma said. “And see, it’s perfect for the placard.”

Despite my Opa’s exclamation of, “Gee, whiz!” from the living room, she was right—we couldn’t have come up with a better fix. That piece of turkey twine held up the handicapped placard for the next few years—until the placard expired and was replaced with a new one. I never asked if she ever used the rest of the pieces of turkey twine, but to Oma, it didn’t matter—she had saved them because she knew they would be useful someday, and they were, so she was happy. At least where the turkey twine was concerned.

So You Think You’re Environmental

As an Environmental, you are an amazing, caring, people oriented person. "People oriented" doesn’t necessarily mean "extroverted," though many Environmentals are. Instead, Environmentals are gifted with the ability to read slight changes in body language and facial expressions. You are able to understand the unspoken emotional dynamics in a situation and what actions you can take to bring about harmony between the people you care for. You love connecting with others, creating environments that nurture and welcome, and especially supporting and caring for those you love. If you’ve ever been called a "mama bird," the description suits you to a T.

Environmentals thrive on connection and touch. To you, observing the face, eyes, and slight twitches around the mouth during a conversation is second nature, and you can interpret those subtle signals. When you look up "emotional intelligence" in the dictionary, the description might as well be you!

When it’s time for the office holiday party, you’re the one who jumps in to coordinate food and decorations. Whenever someone needs a hug, you’re there to offer. If there’s talk around the water cooler, you’re there, and if there’s conflict between parties you’re likely to be found in the middle, trying to mediate a solution.

We need more people like you in the world. But we also need you to take care of yourself—if you’re not careful, the needs of the people around you can build until you’ve become overwhelmed by all the demands.

Think of your filing cabinet, either at work or at home. Can you tell me what’s in it? Chances are it’s bursting with everything that you’ve ever thought might be needed by someone at some time in the future.

Let me pose another question—have you ever missed or been late to an appointment because you were helping someone else and lost track of time? It’s often difficult for you to keep your commitments to doctors or personal trainers because someone inevitably shows up who needs you right as you were getting ready to leave.

We don’t want to change these types of habits. The information you’ll get in this chapter should allow you to act as you would normally, but still provide a framework to keep you from drowning in the needs of those around you. We’re not going to be working with 15 minute planners or alphabetical files, but we will be setting up some simple frameworks and maybe tackling a few of those items you set aside fifteen years ago because you were sure someone would want it.

What Drives You: Living in Love

If you read the previous paragraphs and felt they depicted someone subsumed by the needs of those around them, that’s not an entirely inaccurate description. Strong Environmental personalities can become so caught up in caring for those around them that they lose track of caring for themselves.

But in most cases, the Environmental envisions empowering everyone around them with their goals. You seek to contribute new knowledge to the greater good, to lift up not only yourself but those around you, to make the world a better place through your life and work. Consider the business Andy has chosen to start—by combining his knowledge of permaculture, sustainable living and spiritual wellbeing, he’s making a huge difference in the lives of his clients and, in turn, in all the lives touched by those he works with.

Whatever your goal is as an Environmental, you see it as a beautiful possibility that’s tantalizingly close. But you can also feel that the very things that make you who you are—your connections and interactions with the people around you are also holding you back from turning that possibility into reality.

The Best Thing You Can Do: Find YOUR Freedom

Let’s go back to that tantalizingly close goal. You can see it, right? You can envision what life would be like with this accomplishment under your belt and what it would mean for you and the people you love.

Getting to that goal is a matter of keeping it in your sights, but also understanding how the people around you are either helping you or inadvertently holding you back. Goals don’t happen simply because we wish for them; as much as it sucks to say it, there are going to be times where you’ll need to decide whether you’re going to work toward your goal or put your energies toward an immediate need. That’s not to say that you’ll make the same decision each time—each situation and person is unique. There will be some situations where your needs and goals will immediately be set aside without question and others where you’ll have to consider which path to take.

The next few exercises are intended to help you identify the factors that will play into those decisions. Consider them to be your touch points as you move throughout the day. Once you’ve identified them, you might even create physical representations to keep in places where you can see and touch them daily. By doing so, you’ll be able to keep a balance between nurturing your goals and nurturing the rest of the people in your life.

What Matters to You?

Spend 10 minutes thinking about this question in the broadest sense possible. Who are the people that move in your orbit? Where are the spaces in your life that you consider sacred, or that allow you to rest and recharge? What are you working toward, and how is that goal larger than yourself?

Take the time to really dig into these questions and write your answers down in the space below.

What Moves You Forward?

Now let’s consider the goal you’re working towards. It’s so close you can almost touch it. What needs to happen for that goal to become reality? Don’t worry about specific steps here, but focus instead on times when you’ve wanted to work toward your goal and been blocked somehow. What are those blocks? What would it take for you to remove them? What do you need to move forward—a full night’s sleep, a block of uninterrupted time, access to a particular resource?

Spend as much time thinking about this as you need to, and boil it down to specifics. If you need uninterrupted time, identify how much, what is likely to interrupt you, and how you could shift that interruption to another time or eliminate it entirely.

What Energizes You?

Many Environmentals assume that if they can lock themselves up for long enough, they’ll be able to accomplish what they need to accomplish. While it’s true that you can get an amazing amount done with some solitary time and a deadline, I’m guessing your goal is probably larger than a few hours of work. And not only that, but your goal is intertwined with your surroundings and connections, right? So while you may need quiet time to knock out certain pieces of the project, enforcing extended isolation is going to starve you of the very interactions that are fueling your goal in the first place!

Take some time to think about the people in your life and how they connect to your goal. Which connections nurture and support you? Who prompts you to bubble with energy, even when you’re otherwise feeling down? These are people you’ll want to keep close as you work toward your goal. And this may extend past people—perhaps you have a pet or a special place that never fails to relax and center you. Write down your observations below.

Your Rocks

A professor of philosophy stood before his class with some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks about two inches in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was full.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly and watched as the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The professor then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They chuckled and agreed that it was indeed full this time.

The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. The sand filled the remaining open areas of the jar. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this jar signifies your life. The rocks are the truly important things, such as family, health and relationships. If all else was lost and only the rocks remained, your life would still be meaningful. The pebbles are the other things that matter in your life, such as work or school. The sand signifies the remaining “small stuff” and material possessions.”

Take a step back and take stock of your conclusions from the previous three exercises. These are your rocks. If you start with putting sand in your jar, you’ll never have space for the pebbles and rocks. But if you start with the rocks, then add the pebbles, and then pour the sand on top, you’ll end up fitting everything together. You’ve just identified your rocks, so now let’s dig into how to make sure those rocks are part of your days.

Energy Tracking

Before you read any further, go to http://rethinkproductivity.com/environmental-resources and download the PDF of the Environmental Energy Tracker.

Have you ever noticed that your energy is great mid-morning, but by mid-afternoon you’re ready to take a nap under your desk? Or maybe your energy surge comes midday and you might get another peak later at night.

Everyone has a unique cycle of energy, times when they’re bouncing off the walls and times when they feel like a slug. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that you’re probably going to work more effectively during your bouncy times than during your slug times.

You start out with your basic energy cycle, but the decisions you make throughout the day also influence your energy. Ever heard of the carb crash? It’s not just an excuse for school kids to snooze through the class right after lunch—what you eat fuels your energy, for good or ill.

And I’m sure you’ve had the experience of working on something in isolation and emerging completely drained and spent. The tasks you take on over the course of a day will affect your energy levels as well.

On the next page you’ll find an energy tracker specifically designed for Environmentals. It’s intended to make it easy for you to track your energy, food, sleep, and tasks for the next few days. After a few days you should be able to see patterns in your energy cycles and how they’re influenced. The key here is to establish a baseline—something with which you can make deliberate changes and measure their effectiveness.

Once you have that baseline, it’s time to start creating your rhythms.

Create Your Rhythms

Many gospel songs originated during slavery in the United States, and the beat of the music helped the people keep moving through the work. While your days are (hopefully!) nothing like those long days in the fields, you can still use the analogy of creating rhythms to keep yourself moving forward.

In any song, the time signature establishes the forward motion of the piece. Think of that one-two-three, one-two-three beat that signifies a waltz, or the standard one-two-three-four of the vast majority of rock and pop songs. On top of the time signature, the composer layers individual rhythmic bars to create the sound that we think of as the song itself. Now, before my jazz guitarist brother decides to disown me for my butchering of musical theory, let me tie in the analogy.

Your rocks are going to become the time signatures of your day. These are your constants, the things that keep pulling you toward your end goal. On top of that time signature you’re going to layer individual rhythms—tests of new ideas, techniques, and ways of working that give you information on how you work best. Perhaps you’ll choose to test out different foods and how they affect your energy, or perhaps you’ll spend one week working in a coffee shop and the next in your home office. You’ll find lots of ideas for tests scattered throughout this chapter, and even more in the resources section at the end of the book.

And then the final flourishes of your life song—the lyrics, the instrumental choices, the notes you sing—these are the sand and pebbles that flow around the rocks that you’ve already placed in your jar.

Routines

Now, at this point you’re probably thinking something like, “All this talk of rocks and time signatures is great, but how does it translate into my life?”

I get it. It’s so easy to read about someone else’s story, but when it comes time to apply the ideas to our own lives? It’s a mess.

Let’s go back to the exercise where you identified your rocks. What were the places and people that mattered most to you?

Now, think through your day. Can you find a way to weave those emotional touch points throughout?

Let’s say that your partner was one of your emotional touch points. Spending time with him or her will help you to center and get ready to face the day. So can you arrange for a morning routine in which the two of you share a cup of coffee and conversation?

Next, take a look at your energy levels. What time do you usually have your first high energy period? Whenever it is, can you match your high energy time to the steps that will get you to your goal?

Keeping Momentum: Moving Forward on the Things That Matter

That is the essence of combining rocks and energy. You’re not ignoring the other things you care about or refusing to spend time with the people you love. You’re simply trying to commit one high energy period to your vision for the future.

There will be days when you fail, and that’s all right. Sometimes other things take priority over your vision.

One very close friend of mine who is strongly Environmental had been working toward defending her dissertation. I was so proud of her for implementing the ideas in this book and making tangible progress towards her proposal defense, and so when she called me at 8:00 a.m. one morning I expected to hear some exciting piece of news regarding her thesis.

Instead, she relayed the news that her mother-in-law had died the night before, and asked me to house sit for them while they went to the funeral. I agreed and asked when they were leaving, thinking it would be in a few days. “Tonight,” she replied, “and we’ll be gone for three weeks.”

Dissertation work, plans for a dinner party, time we had scheduled to co-work—she was able to pivot within an hour and put it all aside when something bigger came up.

This story is still unfolding, but when my friend gets back I have no doubt that she’ll be able to rebuild her momentum and reach her goal of obtaining her PhD. Momentum comes from small steps over days and weeks. It comes from keeping track of your rocks and arranging them so that you can spend time with them each day. It comes from the hours of banging your head against a problem and the frustration of wondering if you’ll ever figure it out, and then the cosmic leap forward in your understanding when, inevitably, you are able to break through.

But, most importantly, momentum comes from picking yourself back up. It comes from moving past your mistakes by learning from them and trying again. It comes from the day you return to your notes and your half drafted dissertation proposal after three weeks of mourning and autopsy reports and dealing with the aftermath of unexpected death, from the act of figuring out where you were when you left off, and from picking back up to continue forward again.

Intermission

It’s entirely possible that you finished that section and shed a tear or two. I know I did. The intensity seemed to come out of nowhere, but it also feels 100% right.

Your goals may be entirely different from my friend’s, and the storms that blow you off course will take entirely different forms. But the intensity is the same. Your goals are just as vivid and important to you as hers are to her, and the connection to the people you care about is just as intense.

In fact, if I could use one word to describe the Environmental type, it would be intense. Out of all the types, you have the most vibrant connections and vivid desires, in part because of the deep love that you hold for the people in your life.

You can rest assured, however, that the rest of this chapter isn’t nearly as intense as this first half was. I’m going to be offering you ideas for the physical environments that you work in. We’ll also handle aspects of traditional organization and time management that will help you avoid conflict with other types without draining your energy or wasting your time.

So if you’d like, feel free to put down the book and walk away for a while. Spend some time with someone you care about. Do something nice for yourself, be it a massage, an opportunity to be creative, or an afternoon spent outdoors with a sketchbook or a novel. When you get back, we’ll dive into optimizing your physical environment to support your efforts toward your goals.

Your Physical Environment

The physical environment is one of the most underappreciated areas for improving productivity. Now, let’s be honest here—can you work effectively in an area that’s less than ideal? Of course! If you waited for the walls to be the perfect color and the ambient noise to hit just the right frequency, you would never get anything done.

That being said, there are often simple changes that you can make to your environment that will support the work that you need to do. We’ll explore changes you can make in your workspace, in your home, and when you’re out and about to ensure that the time you do devote to your big rock goals is as efficient as possible.

The Office

The Environmental thrives with open floor plans, places where office doors are open or cubicles clustered in the center of the space where people can walk around and interact with each other. Environmentals work best in teams, and they can be just as innovative as a Fantastical if they have a team to talk ideas through and bounce ideas off. Environmentals also tend to work best in locations or environments where time is more relative, where there are no penalties for being late, and also where they have the freedom to decorate, personalize, and really use color and texture to create spaces around them that energize and excite. These are the strengths of an Environmental. If they are in a position where that tendency and that strength is really allowed to shine, it benefits everybody around them.

Whether your office is in your home or somewhere else, it is, after your home, a place where you spend a significant chunk of your time. In some ways, it’s much more central to your productivity than your home is because you actually do your work in your office. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your office supports your productivity needs.

Just like your home, your office needs to be an expression of you. Leave space for pictures, mementoes, bright colors, and kooky office supplies.

Like a Structural, you tend to use filing cabinets to store your paper files. Unlike Structurals, your cabinets are probably disaster areas in a box. Take a peek in there and take a guess at whether you’ll need to have some space to expand. We won’t deal with it right now, but storage should be on your radar. Likewise, if you have a collection of books, take a look through it and see whether you should be keeping an eye out for another bookshelf at some point in the future.

You’ll want to keep that eye out, because the furniture you surround yourself with needs to be pretty to look at and comfortable to be around. If you’re stuck with some industrial desk, go down to the fabric store and get a few yards of some pretty pattern to drape over it. It you have the option, a walking desk can be fantastic for you because, let’s face it, exercise is something that can fall by the wayside pretty easily when someone needs your help.

Another fantastic option for you is to work from a laptop, perhaps connected to a desktop monitor. Much more than any other type, you work best when you can move around the office and take your work to other people for feedback and collaboration. You need a machine that lets you be mobile.

The Home

The home is a crucial domain for all types—it’s where you spend most of your time, and it can either support you or drag you down. As an Environmental, your home is the ultimate expression of your personality. You want it to be warm, welcoming and nurturing for yourself, but more importantly, for everyone who walks through the door. Allow your personal items and mementos to take center stage in your decor, and make use of bright colors, candles and aromatherapy oils to create a beautiful environment.

For Environmentals, the biggest problem with regards to the home is clutter. You can think of someone who would enjoy or might possibly need just about every item you have, and as a result you rarely throw anything out. All of that stuff can build up until it threatens to overwhelm you and those around you. It’s a painful situation, because you saved all those things for a reason, but you and your loved ones need the space to breathe and relax more than anyone needs the items you might be saving for them.

You probably have a tendency to clip articles and comics out of newspapers and magazines to give to people. That’s fine—the problem comes when those papers build up, and you can’t remember who was supposed to get what. You can solve this by keeping a pen with you while you clip and jotting down the reason you cut it out at the top of the page. You may run into the same issue with bookmarks online—consider using some sort of bookmarking service like Delicious or utilizing the tags feature on most browsers. The trick here is not to stop what you’re doing but make tiny changes that let you remember your intentions later so that you can move those links and papers on to the people you were going to send them to in the first place.

Two other clutter areas that Environmentals typically have trouble with in the home are clothing and mementos.

For clothing, here’s a simple rule that should be easy for you to follow: Go through your closet and dresser, and if you haven’t worn it in three years, donate it to someone who will use it.

For mementos, you’ll need to take an assessment of your space. I’m not going to ask you to throw anything away, but it is worth considering whether some of the pieces you’ve collected might be better suited to a seasonal rotation of items. Decide which ones you’d like to display when, and put the rest into storage. This gives you the extra bonus of being able to do a mini redecoration a few times a year. You can also designate some items to be sent to your office.

Now that we’ve worked through what’s inside your house already, we need to come up with something to deal with the stuff that comes in. You know the story: you walk in with your keys and a handful of mail and the phone is ringing, so you dump your stuff on the couch and go to answer it. Your partner later moves the mail to the coffee table to sit down, thus pushing your keys behind the cushion and ensuring you’ll spend a half hour looking for them in the morning. And the cable bill that was in the pile of mail sits on the coffee table for a few weeks until you finally get around to straightening up—by that time, it’s overdue.

I have two words that will change your life: catchment areas. These are places that you designate along your normal traffic routes for placing things that you often lose. A small table in the entry for your keys. A wicker basket next to the phone where you can drop the junk mail. A laundry hamper in the bathroom for immediately catching the dirty clothes. Spend some time thinking through your patterns and identify places where you can put catchments and save your time and sanity.

Exercise

Go through your home and office and make a list of the ways in which it could be improved to support your energy and productivity. Then decide which of the improvements you’ll be implementing and make plans to do so. This process can be much easier if you do it with a friend who can offer opinions, help and motivation as you work.

Getting Along With Other Types

For you, getting along with other types isn’t nearly as much of an issue as it can be with other types. That’s because you’re truly concerned with others, and you’re often around to lend a helping hand. There are a couple of things you can keep in mind during your interactions, however.

Sometimes you can be oblivious to opposing viewpoints, particularly if it’s something that you feel passionate about. As odd as it feels, there is a lot of value in agreeing to disagree with those that don’t share your worldview. Speaking as a Fantastical with some dramatically differing opinions than my Environmental relatives, please take my word for it that a fourth, fifth or sixth conversation with someone is not going to change their mind unless you are able to truly listen to and understand their views.

The other thing you can be oblivious to is the clock, which is a particularly egregious sin for your Structural friends. When you know that you have an important engagement, enroll your Structural friends to help you get out the door on time. A quick call or tap on the shoulder can do wonders to get you where you need to be, and you’ll find that most people who want you to be somewhere will be more than happy to help out.

Delegation

When I talk with Environmentals about delegation, there’s one objection that inevitably comes up.

“But if I hate doing these things so much, how can I possibly ask someone else to do them?”

This is a valid objection. If there were truly tasks out there that were so despicable that no one would ever want to do them, then it does seem wrong to pass them off to someone else. And I’ll admit, there are some things that are hard to find folks who enjoy doing them—monitoring the decomposition of pig waste comes to mind, or cleaning up crime scenes after the police have left. But I’m willing to bet that your day-to-day tasks don’t involve anything that unpleasant. So let’s start by simply being open to the idea that there are people who truly enjoy the tasks you hate.

Every set of delegation instructions I’ve ever seen tells you to identify the tasks you want to outsource, write down the instructions step by step for each task and then pass those instructions to someone else. For an Environmental, this process can be so intimidating that it never gets done. So I’m tossing it out the window. Really, given this book, would you expect anything else?

Instead, we’re going to tap into the essential productivity ecosystem skill—observation.

Go back to the section on energy cycles and pull up your records and notes. Also, go find any to-do lists or calendars that you’ve made recently. As you look over them, I want you to keep an eye out for a few things.

1) Are there to-do items that keep appearing on your lists? What are they? Do they appear consistently because you have to do them regularly, or because you keep putting them off?

2) Did you notice any tasks that significantly sapped your energy levels?

3) Do you have tasks that you have to do consistently?

Automation vs. Outsourcing

For Environmentals, it’s usually easier to tackle tasks that can be automated before tasks that need to be done by another person. In the vast majority of these cases (unless you have a super cool advanced home electronics system that can turn on the coffee pot and start making toast when your alarm goes off), these tasks are digital. Think sorting through email, handling calendars and scheduling, or synchronizing posts across various media platforms.

Now, I’ll tell you how to set up automation for your tasks. But for many Environmentals, this is the sort of project that drops to the bottom of the priority list. It can take a few hours. So before I tell you how to do this, let me suggest that you either find a friend who also needs to set this up and do it together with them, or hire someone to set it up for you. If you choose to do the latter, please check out the packages we offer at Rethink Productivity.

Automating Email

There are several ways you can approach this. The free option is to take advantage of the rules and filters in your inbox. Every email provider offers you the option to set up rules for your incoming email, from flagging messages from certain senders as urgent to sorting others into the folders or categories you specify. I’d suggest you sit down and make a list of emails that you definitely don’t want to miss and create rules to apply to those. Run the rules as you create them so that you can see how they affect what’s already in your inbox.

Once you’ve got the important messages covered, consider sending all subscriptions, newsletters, sale announcements, and coupons straight to their own folder. You can flip through this folder as often as you want, but the idea is to keep these non-urgent messages from taking up space in your main inbox. If you’re specifically looking for something from these nonessential items—say you’re in the market for a new mattress and don’t want to miss any sales—you can set up a temporary rule to scan for keywords and override the previous rule to send the relevant messages straight to your main inbox.

After taking care of the far ends of your email spectrum—the important and unimportant—you can turn your attention to the middle. These messages are typically important, but don’t require action on your part. For me, these are things like receipts and shipping notices for things I’ve bought online, the occasional high value newsletter that I want to make sure I read and financial notices of various sorts. For these messages, consider setting up rules that trigger on arrival or after the message has been read. For example, I always want to read Christopher Penn’s newsletter, so I have it set to always show up in my priority inbox (I use Gmail, but you can do this with any email client). I also have all of my financial messages set to be tagged and archived as soon as I mark them as read, and they always show up in my priority inbox. The sorts of messages in the middle of your email spectrum will be different than mine, but you get the idea.

If you’d rather not set up email rules, there are any number of third party inbox managers out there. I personally like Sanebox because you can customize your subscription to get the extra features you need—everything from getting digests of newsletters to hiding messages until you need to see them. I also combine Sanebox with Boomerang. There’s a bit of an overlap, but Boomerang offers one awesome feature that I use on a regular basis—drafting a message and setting it to send at a specific time. I can time my messages to send when I know someone will be at their computer and going through their inbox—even if I’m nowhere near my computer at that time. Sanebox and Boomerang are both available for free or for monthly fees of less than $10.

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

There are lots of options in this arena, but for Environmentals one stands out: Doodle. Doodle is an online service that syncs with your current calendar and allows you to take a hands off approach when scheduling time with friends, clients or work appointments. It also lets you poll large groups to find times that work for everyone to meet so that you don’t have to play phone tag or keep track of lots of emails. Most of Doodle’s services are available for free or for very reasonable fees (less than $10/month).

Doodle is simple to use, has an attractive interface, and an amusing name. If for some reason Doodle doesn’t work for you, consider Google Calendar or Schedule Once.

In addition to your calendar, there's a new app out for iPhone users that was made for Environmentals.  It's called Donna, and it monitors your calendar, location and current traffic patterns to tell you when you need to leave to get to your next meeting!

Automating Other Online Stuff

This category is going to vary by person, since the tasks you do are going to vary. But two services cover 95% of the online tasks that you could do in any given day: Zapier and IFTTT.

Both of these have the same basic formula—you’re creating if/then statements. If I mark an email as important, add it to my to-do list. If I pin a photo to Pinterest, upload it to Dropbox. If I receive an email with the word “Support” in the title, create a service request ZenDesk. Etc.

The brilliant thing about these is that they offer a drag and drop interface. Simply find the icon relating to the triggering event, authorize the service to access your account, specify what the event will be, and then do the same for the action.

I recommend you sign up for both services, because they cover different areas. IFTTT tends toward social media, capturing information and synchronization across platforms. Zapier is more business oriented, offering options relating to customer service, lead generation, analytics and financial management.

We’ve now covered the majority of tasks that can be easily automated. At this point, you should be saving at least a few hours a week, if not more. For some people, that may be enough. But if you have goals that require more targeted actions, keep reading.

Delegation and Outsourcing

If you’ve automated everything you can automate and you still find yourself with more than you can handle, it’s time to consider bringing on others to lighten your load. This would be where the typical advice tells you to document your steps and hand them to someone else. Here’s what I’d like you to try instead.

First, consider this—80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Look at the tasks you do regularly through the lens of your goals. Which ones offer you the most return on your time? Which ones move you closer to where you want to be? Which ones are essential but routine—you do them regularly and follow similar steps each time?

I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle—one column will be labeled 20% and one column 80%. Keep it in sight while you work, and take the time each day to jot down the tasks you do and whether they produce 20% of your results or 80% of your results. You should have a decent list of 20% tasks after a few days, and these are going to be your candidates for outsourcing.

Next, I want you to go through your 20% list and pull out the tasks that you think you could teach someone else to do. Pay attention to my wording here—you’re going to teach someone else to do them. You’re not going to reduce them to a set of steps or record your actions. You’re going to sit down with your delegatee (either in person or virtually), and you’re going to teach them how to do these tasks. Not only how, but you’ll also teach them why. You’ll show them the end results, and you’ll help them connect the pieces they’ll do to the overall outcome you’re looking for.

Then you’ll let them try it for themselves. You’ll step back and give them the space to play with the process, maybe even find a better way to do it. You’ll still require that they tell you about their progress, successes, failures and questions on a daily basis, but you’ll trust that you’ve chosen an intelligent person who can do the job well, and you won’t hover over their shoulder.

Teach your tasks one at a time—maybe maximum two at a time. You want to offer your assistant the space to master the work before they take on additional responsibilities. This process is slow to set up, but will save you days of effort over the months and years to come.

At this point, you’re probably asking how you’ll find this intelligent, trustworthy person. It’s a valid question. For tasks that can be handled virtually, I can’t recommend the Rethink Productivity VA Matchmaker Service highly enough. I created it just for people like you, who didn’t know where to find 100% trustworthy, intelligent assistants. The service comes with a consultation to identify your needs, a match with one of our pre-screened virtual assistants whose skills and personality fit yours, and ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition to delegation.

For tasks that have to be done in person, reach out to your network. You may well have friends who would love some extra cash to help you keep track of files, invoices and expense reporting. Or you may know someone who’s hired someone in the past and can offer recommendations. For smaller tasks, TaskRabbit is an awesome option if it’s operating in your city or town. You could also try putting up a notice in a location where you trust the people—the neighborhood list serv, the co-op bulletin board, etc. There may even be temp agencies or head hunters who could take on the task of finding you the perfect assistant. Let the people around you know what you’re looking for, and the person you need will appear.

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

1. Make sure the person knows and understands exactly what you want them to do. Have them summarize the task in their own words, and make sure you can be available in the beginning as the person learns and has questions.

2. Communicate well and often—good communication is probably the most important thing when it comes to effective delegation. This can mean face-to-face meetings, Skype calls, or webinars—but whatever you do, make sure you do it consistently. One thing that has worked well for me is to have my VA send an email at the end of each day with what they have accomplished, what they’ll be doing tomorrow, and any questions they have.

3. Identify the outcome or measurements you will use to determine that the project was successfully completed.

4. Determine in advance how you will thank or reward the person for the completion of the task.

5. Establish a time limit. If you want the delegated work completed within a certain time period, make that very clear. If you say “when you have the time, work on this” the project may never get finished.

6. Establish a follow-up schedule. Use meetings to monitor progress and determine if there is any need for assistance. This means that you will avoid discovering three days before the due date of a huge project that things just aren’t on schedule.

7. Stick to it! It may be hard at first, but it’s an important tool in your productivity arsenal. At first it may seem tempting to take the task back and do it yourself when your employee seems to be struggling, but really try to only do this in extreme cases. You want to make sure that the employee can learn and grow within his or her position.

8. Chase it down! If the work has not been completed by the deadline you set, make sure you chase it down immediately and request it. If not, they will think it’s not important.

9. Trust that your assistant is capable and trustworthy. Don’t hover over them while they work and give them the leeway, if appropriate, to experiment and find better ways to do the tasks. Ask them to explain what they learn from failures, and give them opportunities to expand their skill set and responsibilities if they prove themselves able to handle the challenge. This allows you to cultivate a team member over time, and that team member will be much more valuable to you than a robot that can only do what you’ve trained them to do.

Finding Things That Other People Want

In a world that’s increasingly becoming digitized, it may seem strange to discuss paper files. It makes a bit more sense, though, when you consider that there will likely always be paper in our lives. Contracts such as those signed when buying a home, for example, or the paperwork involved in our legal system, seem unlikely to become digitized any time soon. And there will always be those who think best with paper in front of them.

The first question to consider when approaching your files is how you have them set up now, and what aspects of that system are working. It’s not our intention to completely deconstruct what you have now unless it’s a total disaster. Our motto: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

As an Environmental, however, I’m guessing that there are some pretty big flaws to your system. We’re told that we need to organize our files either alphabetically or chronologically. This can work well, if you’re willing to spend the time to keep it maintained. Though, my guess is that you’re not someone who spends time with your filing system on a daily basis — or even a weekly basis. You probably let it build up until you can’t ignore it anymore, and then you do one huge push through everything and emerge stressed, exhausted, and generally in no state of mind to consider going back into that morass any time in the near future.

That’s OK. I formally give you permission to throw the rules out the window. We’re going to be working with one criteria here, and one only: can you find what you need within three minutes or less?

Sit down and think about what’s in your files. Medical records, kids’ report cards, appliance warranties, tax info... make out a list. Then look for four or five categories that you can condense everything into. Can you make one “Family” category and include everything related to your kids and your spouse? How about a “Home” category for all those warranties, handyman contacts and purchase contracts? Can one “Financial” category hold your tax returns and your investment info?

You’ll obviously need to adjust these to suit your own needs, but it is possible to do it. Once you’ve done so, assign each category a color and go in search of colored folders. If your local office supply store doesn’t have them, check out the site SeeJaneWork.com or Amazon. See Jane Work is also a great source for fun stickers—which is another way to categorize your files. The goal here is to make your system simple, colorful and fun!

The Inbox and the Later Box

Many Environmentals leave items on their desks or near their workspaces until they have time to deal with them, and then become overwhelmed because the pile is threatening to take over the room. The thing is, most of what’s in that pile doesn’t require action on your part. That’s why I love the idea of a Later Box.

Your Later Box doesn’t have to be fancy—it’s going under your desk. That said, feel free to make sure it fits with everything else in that space. If it stands out like a sore thumb, it will catch your eye every time you come near and serve as a distraction instead of a tool to boost your productivity.

When you’re going through your inbox, sort the items into the things that require action now, and the things that don’t. Things that require action now stay on your desk or go into a vertical filer (more on this in the next section). Things that don’t require action now go into your Later Box with the date written on the top. This can include anything from FYI notes from co-workers, files that you pulled out or someone else borrowed and need to be re- filed to little requests that aren’t that important. Once you’ve filled up your Later Box, go through it and either file or recycle everything inside it.

By moving the majority of your inbox into your Later Box, you’re left with the things that are truly important, and you can attend to them as needed.

Vertical Files

This suggestion isn’t appropriate for all Environmentals, but since many have a secondary Fantastical type, I’m including it for you to use if you find it useful.

Some Environmentals need to see things in front of them to remember that they exist. If that’s the case, vertical files can be especially effective.

A vertical file is just what it sounds like—something which holds papers and either stands upright or is mounted to a wall in a noticeable location. Many Environmentals with children use this to great effect to make sure that homework and field trip forms are completed and signed—they let their children help decorate each folder and make sure they know to put their forms and finished work there so their parents can check and sign as needed.

Other Environmentals place a vertical file on the wall near their computer and use it to store bills and other urgent items until they can be dealt with. In this case, the file serves as a supplement to the inbox and Later Box, thus ensuring that important items remain visible.

Purging Your Files

As an Environmental, you have a tendency to save things for longer than you normally have to. I’m not saying your files are a total disaster, but let’s be honest, you’ve probably got a lot of fluff in there, don’t you? And the thought of going through it all probably makes you want to do anything else, right?

Do this once every few years, and you’ll strike a balance between keeping what you need and tossing what you don’t, with minimal pain during the process. You can set yourself up with a marathon session of your favorite show, invite a group of friends over for cocktails and file purging, or even hire someone to help you clear out the fluff.

The most important thing to consider when creating an Environmental filing system is that it has to fit into your life. It needs to be attractive to look at and easy to maintain, otherwise you won’t use it. So let your personality shine through! If you want to use ballet and baseball stickers to denote folders relating to your kids, go for it! If you want your colors to be pink, orange, purple, blue and yellow, feel free! This is about creating something that works for you and lets you find what you need in three minutes or less, not about what anyone else might think.

Exercise

Assess the state of your files and decide whether you’ll be sticking with your current system in any form or throwing it out entirely.

Create your four or five big categories, and decide how you’ll be representing them.

Set up your Later Box, and consider whether vertical files would work for you.

Plan a Purge event—line up some friends and some food, and go crazy with those files!

Digital vs. Paper

Many Environmentals find themselves overwhelmed when trying to work out a digital system, but digital storage really offers a significant amount of freedom. In almost every case, your system can be anything that you can dream up. If you need a system optimized for sharing files between people, it can be done. If you want something that is as secure as the crown jewels, it’s not out of the question.

It’s really up to you whether you want to make your financial information digital, but there are easy ways to increase the security of your digital files. Trusteer Rapport is a program supported by most banks that runs in the background and provides an additional layer of security for your browser when you log into various accounts.

Another handy option is RoboForms, a software package that interfaces between you and your passwords, allowing you to enter in one master password rather than having to remember several dozen strings of numbers and letters. This is great for all types—there are enough things we have to remember without keeping track of the increasingly complex and regularly changing passwords for all our logins.

Outside of financial information, other items that you might want to keep in physical form are contracts, medical information, certificates and diplomas, warranty papers, user’s manuals, maintenance documents for cars and the home, and letters or other memorabilia. Lots of Environmentals also rely heavily on handwritten notes, and while there are ways to digitize these, we’re not going to recommend it. Very few people (of any type) actually refer back to their notes. Think about it—outside of a classroom situation, when did you last look back at notes you had taken? If you do find yourself in a situation where you want to keep track of your notes, there is a simple way to do it. Number all the pages in a blank notebook, and devote the first page to being a table of contents. When you write down something particularly important, jot down the page number in your table, and you’ll be able to find it again.

You might notice that I haven’t included pictures, business cards, receipts or articles in my list of things which should remain in paper form. With the ease of digital cameras and tools like the Brother Portable Scanner, it’s simple to create digital copies of all of those things that you used to save because you had to or you felt guilty throwing it out. Or you can pass on the task entirely by using a service like Shoeboxed to handle it for you. All you need to remember to do is toss it in the mail! Alternately, there are a dozen or more smartphone apps that allow you to snap photos of your receipts and business cards, read the contents, and organize them into reports for you.

The Freedom To Create

Digital storage offers you the ultimate freedom to create exactly the system you want. That said, for those of us who don’t want to mess with coding our database from scratch, there are some really good options for getting you most of the way there.

One of my favorites for Environmentals is Database Oasis. It’s simple to use and allows for complete customization of the structure and look of your database. You can create whatever structure works best for you! That said, if a program like Database Oasis isn’t in the budget, there’s also an amazingly effective system built right into your computer—the folders.

When opting for the folder method, it’s easiest to structure it to mimic your paper files. That way there will be minimal difficulty transitioning between paper and digital, especially if you have a copy of an item in both forms. One trick that works particularly well for Environmentals is to change the icons of the folders on the desktop—pick something attractive and distinctive, and you’ll not only enjoy looking at them, they’ll also tell you what’s in them. There are simple directions for doing this on a Mac and a PC.

Even though your digital files may take up less physical space, you still need to clean them out from time to time. Set yourself up with a purging schedule similar to the one you’ve created for your paper files. As you’ll see in the next section, you’ll be including your e-mail in that schedule as well. Accumulation of files is one of the biggest issues with digital filing systems over time, because the volume of files is so much more abstract. It’s difficult to visualize the space taken up by a gigabyte of text or images, whereas you can imagine a wall full of filing cabinets. When your digital system gets overloaded, it becomes more and more difficult to find what you need in a timely manner. Therefore, observe the same annual purge of your digital files that you do with your paper files. Invite some friends over with their laptops and cook up some soup on a cold winter day. Then see who can clear the most space in two or three hours.

Things That Involve Times

As you sit down to map out your day, remember that time isn’t your strongest point. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but the best way to come up with a schedule that works for you is to account for that aspect of your personality.

When at all possible, avoid being pinned down to specific times. Sometimes meetings and calls are unavoidable, but as best you can, try to keep yourself from being tied down to more than one or two times per day.

Schedule yourself in three blocks of two hours each. What goes into those blocks should depend on your energy cycles and your to-do list for the day. Try to leave one block open for e-mail and other correspondence, because these are a huge time sink for you. By limiting yourself to one block, you’ll have the time to respond to everyone without spending your entire day glued to your inbox.

But, you might be thinking, This only leaves me with six hours of work a day. What do I do with the last two?

Your last block of the day is for chaos. Chaos comes in several forms—the coworker who wants to chat about last night’s episode of House, the brother-in-law who calls to get your input on plans for your sister’s surprise birthday party, or the boss who needs your input on how to approach the higher-ups in the company for approval on a new project. It’s impossible to plan for each of these things individually, but by leaving an extra block of time at the end of the day for chaos, you can deal with them as they arise and be free from worry that you’re behind on your schedule. Simply deal with the chaos, and then return to whatever you were doing previously. Yes, there will be days when the chaos expands past your two hour block (and if that happens regularly, you should reconsider either the time you set aside or the source of all that chaos) but on average, you’ll be much better able to get done what you need to get done if there’s time for chaos planned in. If you have a rare day without chaos, then you can use that time to get ahead or clear out early and do something fun for yourself.

The next question I often hear from Environmentals is, “What do I do if I have something that takes more or less than two hours?” If that happens, you’ve got a choice. You can work on it for two hours and pick it up to finish tomorrow, or you can let it bleed over into the next two hour block and adjust your schedule accordingly.

For little tasks, group them under an umbrella and put that umbrella into the time block. Dealing with e-mail, calls and social media is a classic example—it all fits nicely into one block!

As you plan out your day, try to keep at least half of it to tasks that come naturally to you. How many of your projects would benefit from collaboration? It doesn’t have to be a large group, but even getting regular input from one other person will help keep your energy levels up and motivate you through the more isolating portions of the task.

Trying to keep your schedule loose and nonspecific eliminates stress for you and increases your ability to tackle your big rocks. It also makes you more likely to be on time for the things that require specific times, because inevitably something will. If you have one or two time sensitive events in any given day, it will be much easier for you to create the conditions where you’re more likely to be on time. Which leads us nicely into our next section, which is all about what those conditions are.

Reminders

You know how you’ve built up all these awesome, deep connections with the people around you? When things come along that are truly important, it’s time to let those people give back a bit of what you’ve given to them.

At the times when you really do need to be somewhere at a certain time, ask the people around you to help you get there, because it's such a small thing to ask them to tap you on the shoulder on the way out or to move you along if they see you in a conversation, when they know you need to be somewhere.

In addition, keeping alarms on your events in your calendar and your cell phone are helpful to really grab your attention if you have been talking with someone for a half hour or an hour.

For some folks this will be blindingly obvious and for others it will be enlightening, but you don’t have to accept every meeting invitation that comes your way.  Consider them in the context of your big rocks, but also consider whether the purpose of the meeting will be best served if you’re on your fourth meeting of the day and are not in a position to give your best to the project.

For situations like these, it’s really hard to come up with a refusal on the spot. I know, I’ve been there! So take some time now to write out what you might say in a scenario where your day is already at max meeting capacity. Something like, “I want to give you my full attention, and that can’t happen with my other commitments that day. Can we try another time?”

You can also create a script for when you really do need to extract yourself and get somewhere. "I'm really sorry—I have to run to this meeting. Let me call you back in an hour or two. I definitely want to keep continuing this conversation. Sounds good. All right. I'll be back in touch." It doesn't need to be rude; it doesn't need to be abrupt. You're just moving it to a time that hopefully works better for both of you. Use the space below to create your scripts.

Getting Shit Done

Let’s talk about some specific productivity techniques for Environmentals.

I already mentioned using your energy cycles and building contact into your schedule to charge up at the beginning of the day and throughout the course of the day. You can take this one step further by specifically sandwiching social time with tasks that you know will drain you, if you find yourself in a position where you have to do those sorts of tasks.

Another really good productivity technique, even though it's somewhat counterintuitive, is to create a “Do Not Disturb” sign when you are working on something important. The biggest issue for Environmentals that breaks productivity is being interrupted because they are so willing to put down whatever they are working on and help somebody else. When there are truly important things that you need to get done, just put up the sign and rehearse something to say in case somebody interrupts you. It doesn’t have to be rude – “I’m sorry, I really need to get this project out the door – can I come by to talk in a few hours?” Then once you’re done, make a point of removing the sign and rewarding yourself somehow—either by finding a friend for a quick conversation, having a piece of something tasty, or even seeking out the person who interrupted you and asking what you can help them with!

There is one amazing way to accomplish tasks:  to do whatever the task is with someone else or with a group of friends. My Environmental friend working on her dissertation uses this to great effect with a membership to a co-working location. You don’t necessarily need for the people around you to be working on the same thing that you are; it’s more important that you’re all working. Being in a space where everyone is focused on their own projects can fulfill your need to be around others, and it also challenges you to up your own game and focus on your own goals. Try meeting a few friends in a coffee shop for a co-working session: you start by quickly catching up with each other, and then sit down to an hour of work. At the end, you can compare notes on what you accomplished, relax for a bit, and head your separate ways or dive in to another hour of work.

That Damn Word: Should

To close out this chapter, I’d like to talk about one thing that can torpedo your goals even if you do everything else that I’ve described previously. This ties tightly to the internal influences chapter, but I’m bringing it back out because it comes up again and  again for the Environmentals I work with.

What is this thing? It’s the word “should.”

To elaborate, it’s more than just the five letters. It’s the emotion behind it, the feeling that somehow what you’ve done something wrong, or should have done something more.

I wish I knew where that guilt came from, so I could tell you and show you where to go to stop it from surfacing, but I suspect it’s different for each person. What I can tell you is that guilt is uniformly, unequivocally toxic to you, your goals, and the people around you.

When you act out of guilt, you’re reacting to something that happened in the past, rather than keeping your focus on acting in the present and positioning for the future. Guilt, and its root emotion, shame, keep you from showing your truest, most beautiful self to the world. That feeling of somehow being not enough, of being deficient, it will lead you to set aside your gorgeous visions and goals. It will set you on a path where you eternally reach for something that’s never quite within reach, and will never let you feel fulfilled and satisfied.

What do you feel you should do, or should be, or should think? Look back over the exercises you completed in this chapter, and think through the ways in which you can put your big rocks in the jar first and move that much closer to your goals. What are the "shoulds" that come up?

The antidote to should is a single question—why? Asking why is like shining a ray of sunlight into the closet where the monster hides at night. Whenever you find yourself thinking the word should, pause and ask why. Enlist your deepest connections to help you, and team up to chase the should into a corner where you can shine a light on it and watch it shrivel up and disappear. Should will keep you walking the same paths for the rest of your life if you let it, and it will do it so insidiously that most Environmentals never notice.

Don’t let the shoulds hold you back. Ask why.

This is our last customized stop, Environmentals. Time to pull it all together in CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together!

CHAPTER SEVEN: Structural

Somewhere, hanging on the wall of a doctor who I’ve never met, there’s a picture of my family. The picture represents something special to that doctor—it represents victory over a condition that used to kill hundreds of children, and the success of a drug that is now prescribed routinely all over the world.

When my father was seven, he developed kidney failure. There was a new drug in trials at the time—prednisone. It was expensive, experimental, and the long-term side effects were unknown, so anyone put on it required a rigorous regimen of administration and testing. At the time, my grandmother was teaching elementary school, working on her masters degree, and running a household that included my grandfather and my two aunts. Any other personality type would have been cowed in the face of that workload, but not my grandmother.

Systems and planning come naturally to my grandmother. She tells stories of setting her clothes out for school of her own accord as a child, and to this day she keeps an updated copy of her doctor’s numbers and emergency contacts in her car in the event of an accident. When Dad required precise daily dosing, weekly testing, and minimal exposure to allergens, she set up a detailed calendar to keep track of everything. And she stuck to it. Every Saturday, rain, snow or sunshine, she marshaled the kids to clean the house and opened the windows to air everything out. My dad jokes that he was scarred for life by years of Friday night tuna casseroles, but the strict routine allowed Grandma to save time and mental energy. She knew exactly where each item was on the shelf at the grocery store each week, and she could make the seven dinner dishes in her sleep. And when there was an emergency, well, she had planned for that too. Dad’s meds stayed in a little basket so they could be grabbed in a hurry, and she kept copies of his medical records in a folder for easy access.

In the seven years Dad was on prednisone, Grandma kept her family happy and healthy, plus she kept teaching full time and finished her degree. Her Structural abilities kept things running smoothly, and are at least part of the reason why my dad survived to become my dad.

So You Think You’re A Structural

Congratulations! You’re now the target of a surge of jealousy from everyone else who takes this quiz. Or rather, you would be, but we won’t tell them what you scored, all right?

So why would everyone else be jealous? You’re a natural organizer. For you, things like alphabetical filing and chronological routines come naturally. In fact, you enjoy them. Your routines are a source of comfort, and completing them each day gives you a deep feeling of satisfaction.

Nothing is more pleasing to you than looking down a bar in your closet and seeing all the shirts lined up with the hangers facing the same way and the colors grouped together. You probably enjoy the process of keeping files in order and making sure everything is labeled and put in its proper place.

At work, you’re the person everyone turns to when they need the details of  a particular event or a certain file. You’re trusted to know just where everything is, and while your co-workers may think your system is a tad elaborate, hey, it works!

When asked to name your greatest strength, people are quick to point to your ability to plan and organize. Your weakness may be a bit harder to identify, but it’s likely to be your difficulty in varying from your plans and systems once you’ve gotten them up and running. In your mind, the plan is made, the system is set, and you just want to let them work properly without all this fuss over new ideas and changes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

But what you don’t always realize is that sometimes it is broke.

The problem for you isn’t coming up with systems; it’s making sure that your systems fit the situation you’re using them in. When your work volume increases or your circumstances change, you can find it difficult to adjust your systems to the new reality. There is good news though—most of the time, it’s really easy to adjust your systems to take on the changes. I’ve never met a client where we had to throw out their entire system and start from scratch. Instead it’s a matter of little tweaks here and there, with maybe a new technique or two incorporated. You may think that the suggestions in this book are tiny and basic, but give them a try and you’ll be amazed at how well they can work. Often for a Structural, the answers are right in front of you—you —just need a fresh perspective to see them.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The Structural is a systems thinker. They are excellent at contingency planning and emergency planning, and charting out exactly how they are going to be able to get from A to B—not just once, but multiple times over. This is the personality type that is associated with 99% of the systems out there: organization, time management and productivity. You might wonder why that is, and it's really quite simple: when you think about seeing somebody struggle, your natural inclination is that you want to help, right? Seeing that so many of us seem to struggle with time management, organization and productivity, many Structurals have the natural reaction to document their successes and share information about their systems and routines so it can help others—leading to the domination of Structurals in the productivity arena.

Structurals excel as the ringmaster of anything with lots of moving parts. Event planning, emergency response, financial management—these fields tend to attract Structurals. You’re excellent at thinking through possibilities and planning responses. You put them into practice, get them running flawlessly and leave them to run while you focus your attention on something else.

And that’s where the Structural weakness comes in. Those systems are perfect when you first create them. But are they perfect a month, a year, or a decade from now? You may laugh—really, a decade?—but I’ve seen it happen. For you, when something is done, you’re not inclined to come back. If a new situation comes up, you’re more inclined to tweak the old system than you are to reexamine the pieces. That’s not a big issue at first, but over time it can become huge. Ever asked why someone does something a certain way and gotten, “We always do it this way,” in response? For you, an outsider, the inefficiencies are glaringly obvious. But the Structural in the midst of a system doesn’t see the overall picture. And chances are that you’ll discover your own inefficiencies when you pull back to forest level and take stock of your routines.

What Drives You: Efficiency

There is an inherent beauty in an efficient system. To take chaos and create order, or to tackle a mess and leave beauty in your wake—that is an amazing experience. When you can approach something that is completely dysfunctional and leave it functioning smoothly, you also leave with an immense sense of satisfaction.

Some Structurals create systems solely for that satisfaction. But for most, there is something else that you save time for—perhaps a hobby, a friend or partner, or a goal that you’re trying to achieve.

And there’s also an element of diminishing returns. Turning chaos to order gives you much more bang for your buck than reworking a system with five extra steps to save 10 minutes each day. Yes, those 10 minutes add up over time, but the immediate effort to return ratio isn’t all that great.

Rather than waste mental energy by checking the efficiency of a system every time you use it, it makes much more sense to do an annual systems analysis to identify potential areas of inefficiency and plan tests to get things running smoother.

The Best Thing You Can Do: Systems Analysis

You had to see this coming, right? There’s no time like the present!  Let’s get your systems analysis going!

We’ll touch on the traditional systems areas here—morning routines, filing, etc—but we’ll spend more time looking at some areas that typically don’t get attention from productivity folks. As you work through the following exercises, take the time to think about all the ways in which you implement a system or use a room in your day-to-day life. You may find large chunks of time savings—perhaps a new route to somewhere you go regularly can save you a half hour. You may also find lots of five and ten minute chunks that add up over the course of a day. It’s rare that I take someone through this exercise and they don’t find at least a few things that they could improve upon.

The Physical Environment

The physical environment is one of the most overlooked areas of personal productivity. Let’s be honest here for a moment. Can you be productive in a less than optimal environment? Of course! If you can muster enough self-discipline and motivation, you can accomplish some amazing things, regardless of your surroundings.

But can your surroundings support your efforts and boost your output? YES! And sometimes the changes can be so simple and inexpensive that you’ll wonder why it never occurred to you before. You don’t need to run out and implement every idea right now—especially if it’s a major change to your workflow or furniture. But by introducing the ideas, you can think on them for a few weeks, come up with the best solutions for you, and implement when the time is right.

We’re going to be going into two physical areas in this section—your home and your office. We’ll also take a look at what you can do to keep your productivity up when you find yourself outside of these arenas.

The Home

As a Structural, you likely keep your home clean at all times, and you know where everything is. You may think that you don’t need to do any work on your home systems (and you may be right), but it’s still worth taking the opportunity to see if there’s something that can be improved.

Let’s think through a quick scenario. Imagine there’s been some sort of natural disaster, and you have an hour to gather your most important possessions and evacuate. Could you make the deadline? Do you know what you would bring and where those items are located?

It’s worth making a master storage list with the locations of important items that you own, because then you’ll never be at a loss when you need to find something quickly. It will also help others, if they need to find something—they can just check the list. Set aside a few hours on a Saturday once or twice a year to go through the list and update it. You can also use these times to consider what you need to keep and what you can throw out or donate.

Keeping track of what and where things are is one thing, but deciding how you store it is another ballgame entirely. Depending on your space constraints, you may decide to designate certain areas (closet in the hall, left corner of the attic) with storage categories and organize by time or alphabet within those spaces.

Chances are that you already own a label maker. If not, it’s worth considering the purchase. Most Structurals find they do well when they are able to clearly organize and label the folders and boxes containing the  ir possessions. Labels also allow you to work with a larger variety of storage types, from cardboard boxes in the attic to shoeboxes in the closet to clear plastic tubs. This is where you differ from other, more visual types that need to rely on clear plastic to see what they’ve stored.

Labels or not, though, if you have enough stuff you’ll likely have difficulty remembering where you put it. Most Structurals turn to organizing in alphabetical or chronological order to make it easy to find the containers they’ve stored things in.

Now that we’ve hit the big areas, let’s focus a little on the smaller, less tangible aspects of your home.

If you have the money, dividers from The Container Store or IKEA can work wonders to bring order to your drawers and cupboards. If money is tight, don’t worry. You can get the exact same effect by cutting pieces of cardboard to the sizes you need. Pick up a roll of wrapping paper or tissue paper in a neutral color to cover up any writing that might be on the sides of the cardboard. This method has the advantage of giving you complete control over the size of your compartments—something that comes in handy for oddly shaped items. If you like the idea but want something a bit sturdier, run by your local hardware supply store and pick up some wooden dowels. These can be round, square or flat, and they’re easy to cut to the lengths you need with a small handsaw.

While you’re at the hardware store, let’s think about colors. I’m not saying you have to redecorate your house—not at all! But it does make sense to look at the colors in your home environment and consider whether they’re supporting your need to rest and recharge. Structurals I’ve worked with tend to decorate with earth tones and muted colors rather than bright primary colors. Your home looks well put together, with furniture pieces that match and decorations also serving functional purposes. It’s comfortable, but doesn’t stand out or elicit comments from your visitors. Does this match with your own experience? And if it doesn’t, would you like it to?

The Office

Wherever your office is—in your home or elsewhere—you’re going to be spending a significant amount of time there. In some ways, it’s much more central to your productivity than your home is because you actually do your work in your office. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your office supports your productivity needs.

You need the ability to close your door and turn off your phone and remove other distractions. Interruptions knock you off your schedule and following your schedule enables you to do your best work. Therefore, it follows that your office should minimize disruptions if it’s going to help you do your best work.

If you have to work out in the open, you still have a few options. Noise canceling headphones do wonders to block out the inconsiderate chatter of a nearby co- worker. You can also ward off interruptions with a “Do Not Disturb” sign. Most people will respect your request, assuming you give them other times to talk to you if they need to. For those who repeatedly blow past your sign, take a moment to explain why you have it there and ask that they respect your flow while working.

Keep your desk clear except for the items you use the most often. And keep your equipment maintained, because there’s nothing that’s a bigger productivity killer than going to print your document and spending the next half hour cursing at the printer. If you share office space, it’s worth the money to get your own supplies. Each time your office mate uses something and doesn’t put it back, it simply acts as an annoyance and a waste of time while you search it down.

Speaking of your desk, let’s look at the actual structure. Is it comfortable to use? Do you finish your day in pain, or do you occasionally feel dizzy when you get up from your computer? These are indications that you need to consider the ergonomics of your office layout. Remember that your office needs to support your work, and if you’re in pain then it has failed in that regard.

Often chiropractors, massage therapists or physical therapists will come out to do an ergonomic evaluation at your office, and since they’re the ones who end up fixing you up after you’ve injured yourself working in a poor ergonomic environment, they’re pretty knowledgeable about what situations lead to injury. Alternatively, there are ergonomic specialists that can come evaluate your workspace and offer suggestions. Sometimes the fixes are expensive—I can’t imagine why office chairs cost so much!—but often you can improve your workspace just by moving your monitor or adjusting the equipment you already have.

Exercise: Brainstorming and Planning

Go through your home and office and make a list of the ways in which it could be improved to support your energy and productivity. Then decide which of the improvements you’ll be implementing over the next few weeks and make plans to do so.

Additional Systems to Consider

These next several paragraphs will touch briefly on systems that, in all likelihood, are running smoothly already. So why am I including them? For two reasons: one, simply thinking through them may help you identify inefficiencies with very little effort, and two, there are a number of programs that I mention which may be worth checking out if are in a position where you’d like to rework some of your systems.

Files

While the trend in filing is definitely toward digitizing, I’m willing to bet that most Structurals still have a few paper files around. In general, you’re not one to start using something until it’s been well tested by others first. You’re also likely to convert your files in stages—perhaps you’ll go paperless with your tax return, but you still want a paper bill from the cell phone company so you can be 100% sure they’re not doing anything funny with your minutes. Whatever is in your files, they need to be in a state where you can access what you need easily.

Let me toss out an example—your birth certificate. Stop right now, check the time, and go find it.

Were you able to put your hands on it in under a minute? If yes, then you probably don’t need to worry about reworking your files. If no, then keep reading. What was it that kept you from finding the document? Did you think it was under B for birth certificate, when you’d really filed it under V for vital records? Was the certificate in a folder with your entire family’s vital records, meaning that you had to flip through each page to find yours?

Think through your files like a prosecutor—what are the weaknesses? Where do things fall apart, and what options do you have for altering that system?

Digital Storage

When you do move things over to digital storage, you’ll likely be able to keep a very similar system to what you had in the physical realm. However, if you feel the need to rework your digital storage systems, there is an amazing database program called DevonThink that is perfect for Structurals. It’s intended to be a repository for content-based files—think articles, images, scientific papers, etc—and it uses a hierarchical folder system that feels intuitive for Structurals. But the real genius comes as you begin to use it. DevonThink has a built in content analysis algorithm, and it builds its own understanding of how the files you store in it are connected. When you search for something within the database, you not only see the direct keyword results of your search, but also the files that the algorithm thinks are related. Many researchers and writers report that those suggestions spark ideas that become central to their work, and they question whether they would have made the connection without seeing the DevonThink results.

You may not feel you need that extra benefit, and perhaps you don’t. But if you make your living on your ideas, take a look at DevonThink.

Email

How many times a day do you check your email? Do you have a sound that alerts you when a new message comes in?

This isn’t purely a Structural issue—we’re all susceptible to treating our inbox like a task master, and it’s easy to get a nice dose of satisfaction by responding to an email and keeping our slate clean.

But consider this: your inbox is full of other people’s priorities. There’s nothing in your inbox that gets you toward your goals.

I’ve heard that Dan Kennedy, one of the best copywriters on the planet today, has his staff print out emails that require his attention. We might not have that luxury, but we can approximate a semi-competent assistant by setting up rules in our inboxes or investing in an inbox organizer such as Sanebox or Stacy.

The idea here is to make sure that the most important emails—the ones from clients, friends, or family—always show up at the top of the inbox. Things that don’t require input from you appear further down, or are funneled to their own folders, or in some cases don’t appear at all.

If you don’t already have Sanebox, Stacy, or your own series of rules to filter your email, getting something set up will be a huge time savings. If you do have one of these set up, take a moment to look at it. Are all the important emails showing up properly? Are your filters for unimportant messages picking up things they shouldn’t? A few tweaks can save you time and ensure that you stay on top of things without becoming a slave to your inbox.

Public Calendar/Scheduling

When someone wants to see you, what happens? Do you haggle back and forth via email until you come to a mutually agreeable time?

If this sounds familiar, you can save some significant time by moving to a self-book calendar. There are several of these online services, and they make it simple to schedule a meeting. If you’ve ever worked in an office that used Microsoft Outlook, the idea is similar.

Your calendar syncs to an online service that displays the blocks of time when you’re available or busy. Or you can program times when you’ll be available, and your calendar syncs over that. Regardless, people land on your personal URL and see your availability, and they can then suggest times to meet that work with their schedule. You get notification of the times they’ve suggested, as well as the subject, location and duration of the meeting. Pick the one that works best for you, confirm it, and the meeting is automatically put on your calendar and synced across platforms. Most services will even email reminders to your meeting attendees beforehand, so you don’t have to do it yourself.

For Structurals, the services I’ve found to work best are ScheduleOnce and TimeDriver. If you have a secondary Fantastical or Environmental type, you may also work well with Doodle.

Energy Tracking

Before you do anything else, print off the tracker table below or go to http://rethinkproductivity.com/structural-energy and download the Excel version. As you open it, you’ll notice that you’ll be tracking your energy, your task list and your food intake.

Your tasks and diet greatly influence your energy levels, and by tracking them all on the same sheet you’ll be able to see connections between the types of work you’re doing, the food you’re eating, and your energy. The spreadsheet has blank graphs already set into the page—when you input your records, the graphs will automatically populate and allow you to see your results immediately.

Keep the sheet in a location where you can access it easily. As you go through your day, pay attention to your energy levels. Are you feeling energized and ready to work, decent but not great, or absolutely lacking in energy? What hours were you sleeping? Enter the metrics in your spreadsheet.

{Note—there are any number of very nice apps that can be used to track these factors individually, but I haven’t run across any that include all three factors and can display them in an easily accessible way. If you know of anything, please drop me a line!}

As you record your energy, think about what you’re working on. Does the task work with your brain type or against it? Does it leave you feeling energized or drained? You don’t necessarily have to record exactly what you’re doing, but you can make a note of the general category of work and how it leaves you feeling. Decide on a method of measurement, and make the appropriate entries.

And finally, when you eat throughout the day, note down the general food groups. Are you eating carbohydrates or protein? Processed food or unprocessed? Sugars or grains? As you look back on a day, how often are you eating? What times? These are all factors that can influence your energy levels. As with everything in this book, I’m not going to tell you how to eat. If you’d like information on dietary changes that have improved my energy, there’s a section in the appendix with more information. But here, you’re just observing and looking for potential tests to improve your energy levels over time.

Some people can see clear patterns after just four days, but others need to go for a week or longer. Once you can see some patterns, though, it’s time to incorporate them into your daily schedule.

Everything you do during a high energy period is likely to flow well. Some people like to use this time for things they naturally excel at, to push their work into a higher level. Others like to use it for things that are difficult, to add an extra boost to their abilities. The choice is yours, but one thing is certain—using that time for things like checking e-mail, going to routine meetings or filing papers is a waste. Those tasks can easily be handled during your lower energy hours, leaving high energy times for high value tasks.

By recording the tasks you’re doing throughout the day, you’ll also be able to see another pattern emerging—how long it takes you to do typical tasks. This is another bit of information that you can start to incorporate into your day.

Having accurate estimates of how long it will take to complete your tasks helps ensure that you schedule enough time and remain on schedule throughout the day. The longer you record, the more you can begin to experiment—which tasks are more efficient when completed during high energy times? Low energy times?

Routines

For a Structural, the most important aspect of your day will be your routines. You gain strength and solace from your routines, and, as such, it’s vital that you start and end your day with a set routine.

Morning Routine. What those routines consist of is up to you. In the morning, some Structurals enjoy a workout followed by breakfast with the latest headlines. Others prefer a long, hot shower and conversation with their loved ones over breakfast. Still others have children and pets to see to, and their routine consists of making sure others are where they need to be. Whatever your routine is, going through it serves to ground you and prepare you for the day ahead.

The purpose of your morning routine isn’t to save time; it’s to get you centered and ready to start the day. As such, when I suggest looking at it to make it more efficient, I’m not suggesting that you cut anything out. If your routine is to meditate for 15 minutes before you leave for the day, then you’ve chosen to do that for a reason and I’m not about to tell you to stop. What I am suggesting is to look at your routine with an eye to streamlining it—are there places where you could eliminate stress or save a few moments for extending that meditation practice to 20 minutes?

Start with the time you need to be at work and move backwards through your routine. As you record it, look for places it can be altered or modified to make it more efficient.

Do you make multiple stops in your daughter’s bedroom before she’s finally up and ready to go? Instead of shaking her awake, what if you sat down next to her and gently cuddled her into consciousness?

Is the dog food stored up the stairs and down the hall from the kitchen where the food bowls are? What if you put it in the pantry or under a counter instead?

These examples may not apply, but you get the idea. Structurals often have difficulty changing their routines simply because they rarely take the time to look at them. Get in the habit of examining your routines with an eye to how they might be improved.

Planning For Chaos. There’s something that’s entirely unpredictable in your day, however, and that is the people around you. The co-worker who stops in to see if the Peterson project is ready, the boss who has a last minute request that you just can’t turn down or the spouse who calls  during an important meeting with the news that your child is sick and needs to be picked up from school.

Individually, you can’t plan for any of these events.

What you can do is plan for chaos.

It’s a pretty good bet that at least an hour of your day will be lost to these unforeseeable interruptions. So, stop scheduling anything in the last hour of your day. That way, when little stuff comes up you can deal with it without anxiety and know that you’ve got an extra hour to work with. If, on the off chance that you encounter a day with no chaos, you can use the time to get ahead or take off early and beat the traffic!

Evening Routines. Over the course of your day, about 50% of what you do should fit with your brain type. For you this means activities with clear structures, articulated steps to follow and outcomes that are easily defined. Your joy comes from completion rather than the process of exploration.

But spending 50% of your effort on work that is a fit for you means that you’re spending 50% of your time on work that drains you or stresses you out. So it’s a good idea to have a set of evening routines that allows you to return to your center and get a good night’s sleep.

If you’re wrapping up your workday, consider spending a few minutes reviewing what you accomplished today and what you’d like to accomplish tomorrow.

Therefore, just like it’s a good idea to start your day with a routine, it’s a good idea to end it in the same way. Spend your last half hour on filing, paperwork or even planning for tomorrow! It will put you in a relaxed and happy state of mind before you head home to unwind for the evening. Don’t discount the routines you create when you get home as well. A routine at the end of the workday helps you walk in the door with a clear head, but your evening routines continue to center you and ready you for the next day. Whether it’s cooking dinner with your partner, spending time in the garden, or spending a half hour reading before bed, constructing a supportive routine reduces your stress levels and helps keep you (and everyone around you!) happy.

Delegation

Part of productivity is learning where your value is and what types of activities are not worth your time. The idea is that you should invest more and more of your time in higher value activities. Over time, you will evolve to higher and higher productivity levels if you are always delegating the lower value tasks and using the freed up time to do the things you really love, the things that move you furthest toward your goals and the things you do very well.

Structurals are often introduced to delegation in scenarios where they take on management roles. Your ability to create systems and get tasks done efficiently may well catch the eye of your supervisor, who correctly sees your skill set as valuable to the organization. Whether or not you flourish in management roles depends entirely upon how you adjust to delegating the systems that you used to do yourself.

There are two types of delegation—passing tasks off to automated services, and assigning tasks to other people.

Start by Automating Everything You Can

We touched on this earlier, but there are many time consuming tasks that could be easily automated, either in full or in part.  Think sorting through email, handling calendars and scheduling, or synchronizing posts across various media platforms. I’m not going to repeat the sections on email and scheduling, so we’ll dive right into other sorts of online automation and then move into true delegation.

Online Automation

This category is going to vary by person, since the tasks you do are going to vary. But two services cover 95% of the online tasks that you could do in any given day: Zapier and IFTTT.

Both of these have the same basic formula—you’re creating if/than statements. If I mark an email as important, add it to my to-do list. If I pin a photo to Pinterest, upload it to Dropbox. If I receive an email with the word “Support” in the title, create a service request ZenDesk. Etc.

The brilliant thing about these is that they offer a drag and drop interface. Simply find the icon relating to the triggering event, authorize the service to access your account, specify what the event will be, and then do the same for the action.

I recommend you sign up for both services, because they cover different areas. IFTTT tends toward social media, capturing information and synchronization across platforms. Zapier is more business oriented, offering options relating to customer service, lead generation, analytics and financial management.

Offline Automation

There are a few instances where you can automate offline tasks. You may not have the home electronics system that can start the coffee pot and put bread in the toaster oven when your alarm goes off, but you can automate delivery of things like dry goods, pet food and prescriptions. In large cities, PeaPod can deliver groceries to your door. Amazon has a subscribe and save program for most consumable goods that you go through on a routine basis. And just about every health plan offers mail delivery for stable prescriptions. Keep your eyes and ears open for these sorts of opportunities, or shift over into our next section and ask someone to research available programs for you—this is the perfect small task to cut your teeth on while you learn to delegate.

How to Develop Your Delegation Skills

When you first start delegating, you’re going to screw it up. So start in an arena where you’re not putting excessive amounts of time or money on the line. Think about small tasks—research, tech issues, reservations, product comparisons. Things that won’t be the end of the world if they go wrong, but that would be useful if they weren’t on your list. You can even expand this to personal tasks—maybe you could hire someone to pick up your groceries, take the dog out to play or deal with coordinating your flight, rental car and hotel when you travel. There are services for many of these types of tasks (PeaPod, TaskRabbit, FancyHands, etc) that make a good starting place for developing your delegation skills.

Honestly, the biggest hang up that Structurals face when delegating is letting go of the need to control the process. It’s natural to worry that the job won’t get done, or that it won’t get done well. You wouldn’t be outsourcing it if you didn’t want it done at all. But there are three critical things you need to realize when your brain objects that no one else could possibly do it as well as you could.

1) If your goal is bigger than yourself, on any level, you will *never* make it if you do everything yourself. It’s not physically possible. At some point, you will have to pass some tasks on to others and trust that you’ve given them sufficient training and inspiration to do the job well.

2) Not everything has to be done as well as you would do it. Things need to be done to certain minimum standards, yes, but those standards vary depending on the situation. If you’re cleaning surgical equipment, yes, it needs to be sterile, no exceptions. If you’re running a business with a restroom, the standard is different. Maybe you would prefer it to be sterilized between each use, but hiring someone to wipe it down a few times a day is good enough.

3) Sometimes people can come up with ways to do it *better* than you would have done it. If you do a good enough job of explaining the end result and how it fits into the overall vision, they may well make suggestions that improve the process. Bringing additional minds together to work toward a goal can catapult it forward in ways that you never could have expected.

So spend a few months sharpening your delegation skills with one-off requests using the services mentioned above.

You will learn how to be specific and clear in your requests. This is a very important step in your productivity evolution, and even though you think it might be trivial, try it! I guarantee you will learn something. When I did it, I learned exactly how I needed to phrase my questions so that the task was done in the way I needed it to be done. This is crucial! I was assuming that the person completing the task just knew what I wanted, when they had no clue what I was talking about sometimes. So, this is a very important step in the delegation process.

When to Hire a Part or Full Time Team Member

If you’ve been successfully delegating smaller, one-time tasks for a few months, it’s time to consider bringing on an assistant. This can be virtual or in person, for a few hours a week on up to full time. Though I’d strongly recommend you start out with a part time person and scale them up to full rather than starting off with full time people right away.

Consider the tasks you do on a daily or weekly basis which are reasonably straightforward. These are excellent candidates for outsourcing. For example, consider customer service, tracking analytics, managing shipping or production runs, screening potential leads, ongoing market research, editing and content management, syndication—all are potentially outsourceable.

Think through each task and write down the steps you take to complete it. When the steps depend on the situation, consider making decision trees to illustrate the thought processes you go through. This process allows you to create training materials for the person you hire, but also allows you to see potential areas for improvement.

Rethink Productivity offers a VA Matchmaker service for Structurals who are ready to begin routine outsourcing. The package includes a consultation to identify the tasks you want to outsource, assistance clarifying the end goals and instructions, and ongoing oversight of your relationship with your virtual assistant. We match you with one of our screened VAs who has the ability and personality to work well with you, and we actively mediate the first month to make sure everything is going smoothly. After that we step back, but we’re always available to work out any misunderstandings that may arise in the future, and we handle all the finances so that you don’t have to worry about it.

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

1. Make sure the person knows and understands exactly what you want them to do. Have them summarize the task in their own words, and make sure you can be available in the beginning as the person learns and has questions.

2. Communicate well and often—good communication is probably the most important thing when it comes to effective delegation. This can mean face-to-face meetings, Skype calls, or webinars—but whatever you do, make sure you do it consistently. One thing that has worked well for me is to have my VA send an email at the end of each day with what they have accomplished, what they’ll be doing tomorrow, and any questions they have.

3. Identify the outcome or measurements you will use to determine that the project was successfully completed.

4. Determine in advance how you will thank or reward the person for the completion of the task.

5. Establish a time limit. If you want the delegated work completed within a certain time period, make that very clear. If you say “when you have the time, work on this” the project may never get finished.

6. Establish a follow-up schedule. Use meetings to monitor progress and determine if there is any need for assistance. This means that you will avoid discovering three days before the due date of a huge project that things just aren’t on schedule.

7. Stick to it! It may be hard at first, but it’s an important tool in your productivity arsenal. At first it may seem tempting to take the task back and do it yourself when your employee seems to be struggling, but really try to only do this in extreme cases. You want to make sure that the employee can learn and grow within his or her position.

8. Chase it down! If the work has not been completed by the deadline you set, make sure you chase it down immediately and request it. If not, they will think it’s not important.

9. Trust that your assistant is capable and trustworthy. Don’t hover over them while they work and give them the leeway, if appropriate, to experiment and find better ways to do the tasks. Ask them to explain what they learn from failures, and give them opportunities to expand their skill set and responsibilities if they prove themselves able to handle the challenge. This allows you to cultivate a team member over time, and that team member will be much more valuable to you than a robot that can only do what you’ve trained them to do.

Interacting With Others

As a Structural, your primary frustration with other types likely relates to their inability to be on time with anything. You’re the person that leaves an extra five to ten minutes for traffic when you leave for anything, and here other people are showing up 15 and 20 minutes late. You plan your projects to your portion ahead of deadline, and your team members offer excuses as to why their part isn’t done yet. It’s enough to make you want to scream—and sometimes you do!

What you need to understand, though, is that as much value as you place on schedules, other types place just as much value on conversations or ideas or goals. So while you’re annoyed that they didn’t show enough respect for the schedule to show up on time; they’re showing respect to a friend by waiting for an appropriate time to break off a conversation, or showing respect to a goal by finishing the work necessary to finish today.

There’s no use in being annoyed about it—you’ll just raise your blood pressure and make your throat sore. But what you can do is accept that others move on a slightly different time than you, and take steps to make sure that the time zones coincide. If you have a friend who’s always 15 minutes late for your dinners, start telling her that they’re starting a quarter hour earlier than they actually are, and she’ll have a better chance of showing up on time. Similarly, you could take it upon yourself to drop said friend a quick call or e-mail reminder as the time for him to leave draws near, thereby reminding him of the event and increasing the chances that he’ll show up. I’ve found that I have a much lower absentee rate on my consulting calls if I send a personal e-mail reminder the day before.

Likewise, you can build delays and reminders into project timelines to increase the chances that others will finish in time. If you have a task that you know someone will likely have difficulty completing, consider whether there’s another role they could play. By matching your tasks to those who have complementing strengths, you can make the outcome better and save aggravation along the way.

But the best thing you can do for yourself is to accept the differences. There’s a line from “The Geography of Bliss” by Eric Weiner that I like to repeat to myself in situations where others are annoying me: “I may not believe what they do, but my life is richer because they believe.”

You may not be wired like they are, but your life is richer because they are wired that way. And a richer life is worth the occasional late event, right?

Agreed. Unless they’re consistently late because they’re a self-absorbed douche, in which case it’s time to rethink that relationship! Anyway, Structurals, this is our last customized stop. Onward to the conclusion in CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together!!

CHAPTER EIGHT: Analytical

Wake County, North Carolina has been growing at an astounding rate for the past couple of decades. The school system is now the 18th largest in the United States, but unlike other systems that have undergone such dramatic growth, Wake County has maintained excellent scores on standardized tests and other measurements of student achievement. This has, in large part, been credited to the county’s economic diversity policy, which states that no school shall have more than 30% of their students qualifying for free and reduced lunch.

The county accomplishes this by tweaking district lines each year to even out the quotas. Like most bureaucratic processes, previous school boards have been ham-handed about doing so, and it’s not difficult to find students who have been reassigned multiple times or who ride a bus for an hour or more to get to school.

I’m telling you this because in 2007 the school board flipped from a 5-4 Democratic majority to a 5-4 Tea Party majority, and the first thing the new board did was abolish the diversity policy in favor of a return to “neighborhood schools”. And the man who took it upon himself to save the school system is a perfect example of the Analytical type.

Tim works as the Vice President of Communications for an education non-profit that serves to liaison between the schools and the business community. He spent 25 years as a journalist covering education before seeing the writing on the wall and jumping to what appeared to be a relatively quiet position matching business donors with school programs and keeping the non-profit relevant to both communities. He also happens to be my father.

Dad saw the new board’s actions as a disaster, but also as an opportunity to create something better, something that could solve the problems of the old system and positively impact the community, schools, and children’s achievement.

And thus began three years of behind the scenes negotiations, analysis and idea generation. Dad pulled out his source list from 25 years as a reporter and his experiences covering the schools in Wake County, and he used them to build a coalition calling for a more sensible reassignment policy.

He convinced the business community to hire an outside consultant to create a plan that would preserve diversity, give parents choices about their children’s schools, and eliminate excessive bus rides and reassignments. In the face of opposition from the board (not to mention some truly ridiculous behavior), he built a reputation for the non-profit as a consistent source of unbiased information and analysis. Using his ability to understand situations and personal motivations, he moved between warring factions and slowly built consensus. Eventually, the school system asked him for help creating a new plan, and he was able to put forward the new plan as a school system creation. The board voted on the plan, and it passed!

As you can imagine, my family didn’t see much of Dad during those years. I’d moved out of state, and I remember having to text him to arrange a time when we could talk on the phone. He often left the house at 7:30 and didn’t return for 11, 12, sometimes even 14 hours. When he did try to take time off, his attempts were often interrupted by a board member’s shenanigan, a panicked member of the business community, or another stakeholder looking for his input.

He was always thinking about his job, trying to figure out how the pieces fit together and he often took things on that he didn't necessarily need to take on, simply because he didn't have the funding or the inclination to hire somebody else. If it was worth doing, he felt he should do it himself.

That is an incredibly typical attitude for an Analytical, and one that is essential for you to break if you’re going to achieve your giant goals without sacrificing your health, sanity and relationships.

So You Think You’re An Analytical

You’re headed for great things. You’re ambitious, logical, and great at understanding the big picture. You deal with facts, not feelings, and you want your information fast, fresh and in figures. When you’re in a position of power, don’t forget about the people at Personalized Productivity who helped you create a productivity system that jet propelled you on the way to success.

There are some pitfalls lining your path, though. Ever found yourself at work at 10pm on a Friday night? You can get tunnel vision from time to time. There’s more to life than your goals—like your significant other or your family. Or even just spending some time for yourself every so often. You’ll come back from a day off refreshed and ready to tackle your tasks with twice as much focus. I promise.

You can also have trouble interacting with others at times. It all goes back to your tendency to view the world logically. While that may be a great trait for the goals you’ve set, most of the world makes decisions based on emotions. If you’re having trouble with a supervisor, co-worker or employee (or anyone else in your life) take a step back and ask yourself how they’re approaching the situation. Chances are, you think they’re being foolish. Perhaps they are, but more likely they’re making emotional decisions, and you’ll be much more successful in interacting with them if you remember that and make allowances for it. They can’t help their tendencies any more than you can help yours.

Let’s talk about your goals for a moment. They’re an essential part of your life. Chances are you’ve got them written down somewhere secure, or you carry them in your head and review them from time to time to make sure that you’re still on track to meet them. Those goals are what drives you, and once they’re set the world had better watch out, because you’re coming!

Your systems have to support your goals. Otherwise there’s just no point. So our time working with you will be spent on streamlining your systems, identifying ways to incorporate others, and structuring your environment to support your efforts to achieve your visions. Sometimes this involves large changes, like hiring an assistant to manage your files, calendar and e-mail. Other times it could be as simple as moving your supply cabinet two feet to the left so that you can reach it easily from your desk when you need a fresh sheet of paper.

Whatever the changes, at the end of this process you’ll have a system that supports anything you might choose to do, and you’ll be free to go and take on the important work involved in doing anything you chose to do.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The Analytical is someone who is incredibly big-picture, incredibly goal-oriented. This is someone who wants to leave their mark on the world, and wants to be in a position to make a difference. You see Analyticals in position of leadership; I hesitate to say positions of power, but that’s not uncommon. Many people in higher office, many leaders within large corporations are Analytical. And, the Analytical’s strength is an amazing ability to look at the big picture and look at the current pieces and understand how they relate to the end goal, and then what actions need to be taken to reach that end goal. They're excellent at prioritizing and they have an almost uncanny ability to remove emotions from complex decisions. This is someone who can compare several different items and ideas or options and actually come out with a reasonable comparison of an apple and an orange. If they are not in a political or business arena, they can be very mechanically minded, or possibly logistically minded. In general, the Analytical prizes critical thinking and they're incredibly good at it. If you ever get to see two Analyticals truly debate each other—and I'm not referring to any sort of televised debate, but the impromptu debate and exchange of ideas and pushing for holes in an idea—that is truly something to behold, because you get to see these two minds on display at their best abilities.

The Analytical does have weaknesses, and as is true of all of the types, those weaknesses are rooted in the extremities of their strengths. So, for the Analytical, interactions with other types can be a real Achilles heel. They find it difficult sometimes to understand where people come from when they are making decisions that include emotion. I vividly remember a decision that I made shortly after I graduated, to get a dog and I was just starting a job. I didn't have much money. But this was a dog that had really captured my heart, and he had chosen me as his human – literally, by climbing into my lap when I first met him.

In the process of trying to make this decision, I asked my dad for his opinion. It was, of course, the very logical "wait until later. You need to be settled before you get a dog"—certainly a very valid point. But ultimately, I decided that I wanted to have a dog, and not only did I want to have a dog, but I wanted to have this dog. And, I vividly remember a conversation that we had after I made this decision, where he essentially asked "if you asked for my advice, why didn't you follow it?"

And, that illustrates the Analytical conundrum when it comes to interacting with other personality types perfectly. He didn't understand that there were other emotional pieces that I had taken into account in making my decision, but he didn't understand why I had given those pieces preference and prevalence over the logic that indicated that I shouldn't be getting a dog.

Analyticals can also have issues with bounds between their different life components, so if they have family, significant other, it can be difficult for those people to see much of an Analytical when they're truly immersed in a goal. At the moment, my boyfriend is neck deep in the finals for his first semester as a PhD student, and I have not seen him in 3 weeks. He lives all of a mile away. So, that balance can really be an issue. On the short term, it's certainly do-able but when it extends for a long period of time, it can really become a problem.

(Side Note: In the six months between first draft and edit, we broke up. Not entirely due to his Analytical-ness, but only seeing him every few weeks was certainly a factor.)

Analyticals also have a fair amount of difficulty working in teams, partially due to interactions when there are other types on the team, but also due to a feeling of not exactly trusting others, particularly if they've made mistakes in the past. The same issue keeps them often from delegating to others, which is an essential piece of their ability to truly reach their goals, because typically Analytical goals are larger than one person is capable of. If they are not able to work on teams and incorporate others, they're never going to be able to reach those goals.

What Drives You

After reading the first few sections, I’m sure you’ll probably be able to guess the answer to what drives you—your goals. For an Analytical, their goals are the be all and end all; for some, it’s not an exaggeration to say that their goals are their sole purpose for living. Most don’t take it to that extreme, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that most of their decisions are made with their ultimate goal in mind. Other Analyticals have goals that complement each other and serve to balance their trademark drive across different areas of life.

But an Analytical isn’t happy unless they’re actively working toward something—a degree, an income level, a fitness achievement or a fulfilling relationship. Most Analyticals will have two to three goals on a professional, personal and/or fitness front.

Since this book is all about using your strengths to achieve almost anything, I’d like to start the practical aspects of this chapter with the most useful thing to you at this very moment. There’s something you can do that will put you on a fast track to your goals, something that is unique to your type.

The Best Thing You Can Do: Delegate

Part of productivity is learning where your value is and what types of activities are not worth your time. The idea is that you should invest more and more of your time in higher value activities. Over time, you will evolve to higher and higher productivity levels if you are always delegating the lower value tasks and using the freed up time to do the things you really love, the things that move you furthest toward your goals and the things you do very well.

The other very important thing to remember is the omnipresent 80/20 rule (that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your actions). This also applies to delegation. When you put something on your list to delegate, first ask yourself: Does this task even need to be done at all? If you can completely eliminate it, then great! If not, then here are some ways you can delegate the items:

Start by Automating Everything You Can

There are a lot of time consuming tasks that could be easily automated, either in full or in part. In the vast majority of these cases (unless you have a super cool advanced home electronics system that can turn on the coffee pot and start making toast when your alarm goes off), these tasks are digital. Think sorting through email, handling calendars and scheduling, or synchronizing posts across various media platforms.

Now, I’ll tell you how to set up automation for your tasks. But, to be honest, as an Analytical this is something that you should outsource to someone else to set up. Your time is better spent elsewhere. We offer an Automation Package at Rethink Productivity that consists of a short consult to identify the most logical automation services for your needs, and then we’ll install and set up everything for you. Please check out the services page for more info.

Automating Email

There are several ways you can approach this. The free option is to take advantage of the rules and filters in your inbox. Every email provider offers you the option to set up rules for your incoming email, from flagging messages from certain senders as urgent to sorting others into the folders or categories you specify. I’d suggest you sit down and make a list of emails that you definitely don’t want to miss, and create rules to apply to those. Run the rules as you create them, so that you can see how they affect what’s already in your inbox.

Once you’ve got the important messages covered, consider sending all subscriptions, newsletters, sale announcements and coupons straight to their own folder. You can flip through this folder as often as you want, but the idea is to keep these non-urgent messages from taking up space in your main inbox. If you’re specifically looking for something from these nonessential items—say you’re in the market for a new mattress and don’t want to miss any sales—you can set up a temporary rule to scan for key words and override the previous rule to send the relevant messages straight to your main inbox.

After taking care of the far ends of your email spectrum—the important and unimportant—you can turn your attention to the middle. These messages are typically important, but don’t require action on your part. For me, these are things like receipts and shipping notices for things I’ve bought online, the occasional high value newsletter that I want to make sure I read, and financial notices of various sorts. For these messages, consider setting up rules that trigger on arrival or after the message has been read. For example, I always want to read Christopher Penn’s newsletter, so I have it set to always show up in my priority inbox (I use Gmail, but you can do this with any email client). I also have all of my financial messages set to be tagged and archived as soon as I mark them as read, and they always show up in my priority inbox. The sorts of messages in the middle of your email spectrum will be different than mine, but you get the idea.

If you’d rather not set up email rules, there are any number of third party inbox managers out there. I personally like Sanebox because you can customize your subscription to get the extra features you need. Everything from getting digests of newsletters to hiding messages until you need to see them. I also combine Sanebox with Boomerang. There’s a bit of an overlap, but Boomerang offers one awesome feature that I use on a regular basis—drafting a message and setting it to send at a specific time. I can time my messages to send when I know someone will be at their computer and going through their inbox—even if I’m nowhere near my computer at that time. Sanebox and Boomerang are both available for free or for monthly fees of less than $10.

Another alternative is Stacy, a “silent inbox assistant” that interfaces with your calendar, to-do list, and inbox; it can make messages disappear and reappear as you need to see them, and sort out important messages from unimportant ones.

Automating Calendars and Scheduling

There are lots of options in this arena, but for Analyticals one stands out: TimeTrade. Why? Because TimeTrade offers all of the basic functionality required for managing calendars and allowing clients to self-schedule meetings, but it also offers the most capacity to customize and expand over time. It allows for additional employees, customizes for your area of focus (retail, marketing, education, financial, etc), and it’s packaged in a sleek interface that can be branded with your own logos. Since most Analyticals are pursuing goals that will involve teams at some point, it only makes sense to start with a service that can be expanded as needed later on.

If TimeTrade doesn’t work out for you, another good option for Analyticals is ScheduleOnce. It offers similar features, but with less ability to customize and expand over time.

Automating Other Online Stuff

This category is going to vary by person, since the tasks you do are going to vary. But two services cover 95% of the online tasks that you could do in any given day: Zapier and IFTTT.

Both of these have the same basic formula—you’re creating if/than statements. If I mark an email as important, add it to my to-do list. If I pin a photo to Pinterest, upload it to Dropbox. If I receive an email with the word “Support” in the title, create a service request ZenDesk. Etc.

The brilliant thing about these is that they offer a drag and drop interface. Simply find the icon relating to the triggering event, authorize the service to access your account, specify what the event will be, and then do the same for the action.

I recommend you sign up for both services, because they cover different areas. IFTTT tends toward social media, capturing information and synchronization across platforms. Zapier is more business oriented, offering options relating to customer service, lead generation, analytics and financial management.

Offline Automation

There are a few instances where you can automate offline tasks. You may not have the home electronics system that can start the coffee pot and put bread in the toaster oven when your alarm goes off, but you can automate delivery of things like dry goods, pet food and prescriptions. In large cities, PeaPod can deliver groceries to your door. Amazon has a subscribe and save program for most consumable goods that you go through on a routine basis. And just about every health plan offers mail delivery for stable prescriptions. Keep your eyes and ears open for these sorts of opportunities, or shift over into our next section and ask someone to research available programs for you—this is the perfect small task to cut your teeth on while you learn to delegate.

How to Start (For Cheap) & Develop Your Delegation Skills

When you first start delegating, you’re going to screw it up. So start in an arena where you’re not putting excessive amounts of time or money on the line. Think about small tasks—research, tech issues, reservations, product comparisons. Things that won’t be the end of the world if they go wrong, but that would be useful if they weren’t on your list. You can even expand this to personal tasks—maybe you could hire someone to pick up your groceries, take the dog out to play or deal with coordinating your flight, rental car and hotel when you travel. There are services for many of these types of tasks (PeaPod, TaskRabbit, etc) that make a good starting place for developing your delegation skills.

Starting with small tasks also lets you begin get around a classic Analytical hang up—the assumption that if I want it done well, I need to do it myself. Yes, it’s true that no one is going to care about the end product quite as much as you do. If you do a good job of describing your end goals, you can get someone close to caring as much as you do, but the goal and vision is ultimately yours. However, there are three critical things you need to realize when your brain objects that no one else could possibly do it as well as you could.

1. If your goal is bigger than yourself, on any level, you will *never* make it if you do everything yourself. It’s not physically possible. At some point, you will have to pass some tasks on to others and trust that you’ve given them sufficient training and inspiration to do the job well.

2. Not everything has to be done as well as you would do it. Things need to be done to certain minimum standards, yes, but those standards vary depending on the situation. If you’re cleaning surgical equipment, yes, it needs to be sterile, no exceptions. If you’re running a business with a restroom, the standard is different. Maybe you would prefer it to be sterilized between each use, but hiring someone to wipe it down a few times a day is good enough.

3. Sometimes people can come up with ways to do it *better* than you would have done it. If you do a good enough job of explaining the end result and how it fits into the overall vision, they may well make suggestions that improve the process. Bringing additional minds together to work toward a goal can catapult it forward in ways that you never could have expected.

So spend a few months sharpening your delegation skills with one-off requests using the services mentioned above.

You will learn how to be specific and clear in your requests. This is a very important step in your productivity evolution, and even though you think it might be trivial, try it! I guarantee you will learn something. When I did it, I learned exactly how I needed to phrase my questions so that the task was done in the way I needed it to be done. This is crucial! I was assuming that the person completing the task just knew what I wanted, when they had no clue what I was talking about sometimes. So, this is a very important step in the delegation process.

When to Hire a Part or Full Time Team Member

If you’ve been successfully delegating smaller, one time tasks for a few months, it’s time to consider bringing on an assistant. This can be virtual or in person, for a few hours a week on up to full time. Though I’d strongly recommend you start out with a part time person and scale them up to full rather than starting off with full time people right away.

Consider the tasks you do on a daily or weekly basis which are reasonably straightforward. These are excellent candidates for outsourcing. For example, consider customer service, tracking analytics, managing shipping or production runs, screening potential leads, ongoing market research, editing and content management, syndication—all are potentially outsourceable.

Rethink Productivity offers a VA Matchmaker service for Analyticals who are ready to begin routine outsourcing. The package includes a consultation to identify the tasks you want to outsource, assistance clarifying the end goals and instructions, and ongoing oversight of your relationship with your virtual assistant. We match you with one of our screened VAs who has the ability and personality to work well with you, and we actively mediate the first month to make sure everything is going smoothly. After that we step back, but we’re always available to work out any misunderstandings that may arise in the future, and we handle all the finances so that you don’t have to worry about it.

Tips to Keep in Mind When Delegating

1. Make sure the person knows and understands exactly what you want them to do. Have them summarize the task in their own words, and make sure you can be available in the beginning as the person learns and has questions.

2. Communicate well and often—good communication is probably the most important thing when it comes to effective delegation. This can mean face-to-face meetings, Skype calls, or webinars—but whatever you do, make sure you do it consistently. One thing that has worked well for me is to have my VA send an email at the end of each day with what they have accomplished, what they’ll be doing tomorrow, and any questions they have.

3. Identify the outcome or measurements you will use to determine that the project was successfully completed.

4. Determine in advance how you will thank or reward the person for the completion of the task.

5. Establish a time limit. If you want the delegated work completed within a certain time period, make that very clear. If you say “when you have the time, work on this” the project may never get finished.

6. Establish a follow-up schedule. Use meetings to monitor progress and determine if there is any need for assistance. This means that you will avoid discovering three days before the due date of a huge project that things just aren’t on schedule.

7. Stick to it! It may be hard at first, but it’s an important tool in your productivity arsenal. At first it may seem tempting to take the task back and do it yourself when your employee seems to be struggling, but really try to only do this in extreme cases. You want to make sure that the employee can learn and grow within his or her position.

8. Chase it down! If the work has not been completed by the deadline you set, make sure you chase it down immediately and request it. If not, they will think it’s not important.

9. Trust that your assistant is capable and trustworthy. Don’t hover over them while they work and give them the leeway, if appropriate, to experiment and find better ways to do the tasks. Ask them to explain what they learn from failures, and give them opportunities to expand their skill set and responsibilities if they prove themselves able to handle the challenge. This allows you to cultivate a team member over time, and that team member will be much more valuable to you than a robot that can only do what you’ve trained them to do.

Cleaning Up Your Environment

After delegation, the next most common source of turbo charge for Analyticals comes in assessing and altering the environments you work in.

The physical environment is one of the most overlooked areas of personal productivity. Let’s be honest here for a moment. Can you be productive in a less than optimal environment? Of course! If you can muster enough self-discipline and motivation, you can accomplish some amazing things, regardless of your surroundings.

But can your surroundings support your efforts and boost your output? YES! And sometimes the changes can be so simple and inexpensive that you’ll wonder why it never occurred to you before. You don’t need to run out and implement every idea right now—especially if it’s a major change to your workflow or furniture. But by introducing the ideas, you can think on them for a few weeks, come up with the best solutions for you, and implement when the time is right.

We’re going to be going into two physical areas in this section—your home and your office. We’ll also take a look at what you can do to keep your productivity up when you find yourself outside of these arenas.

Home

The home is a crucial domain for all types—it’s where you spend most of your time, and it can either support you or drag you down. For an Analytical, especially, your home is your kingdom. It’s the place where you can let down your guard fully and relax from the stress of your day. You’re probably not someone who entertains much—you prefer to attend other people’s parties, where the mess of cleanup is not your responsibility. And, if we’re honest, you’re not so keen on cleaning up your own messes either. You’ll do it, but it tends to be something you leave to your partner or a housekeeper, if you have one. Or if you do clean up, it’s because you’ve made the conscious decision that doing so is better than the alternative of losing your partner or roommate!

Your style is sleek and functional. Analyticals tend to think that everything should have a function, and that things should look nice. You tend to go for leather, stainless steel, black granite countertops, perhaps a monochrome palette with a few splashes of primary color. Your choices are high end, if you have the money, but you’re always in the market for function and looks.

Clutter doesn’t tend to be an issue for Analyticals. You can be ruthless in your ability to purge things you don’t need to have around, especially things that don’t fulfill some need for you. That said, there are a few things you could do to keep transient items in check.

While the Environmental and Fantastical use catchment areas to contain the chaos, you can use them to provide a convenient place for the things you would otherwise carry around. An Analytical doesn’t tend to like the look of hooks, but a small leather basket near the door can be the perfect place to toss keys and loose change.

And while you likely wouldn’t be caught dead with a recycling bin anywhere visible in your house, one in the floor of the coat closet can allow you to discard the junk mail within seconds of stepping in the door. What about the rest of the mail? Consider a wide ceramic bowl or plate that can serve as a decoration piece when it’s not holding the mail.

Everyone has things they need to store throughout the year, and Analyticals are no exception. If there’s any chance of those storage items being seen, then they need to be sleek and attractive, same as the rest of the house. While plastic bins may be acceptable for items tucked away in closets or the attic, consider containers that double as footrests or low tables for your visible storage needs. Another attractive option is antique steamer trunks.

The final consideration for the Analytical house is the traffic patterns. Take a moment to consider how people move throughout the house and whether or not any of the furniture pieces could be moved to open up more efficient pathways. This isn’t essential for all Analyticals, but for the strong ones it can be the difference between feeling comfortable in their home and trying to figure out why they’re so restless.

Office

Whether your office is in your home or somewhere else, it is, after your home, a place where you spend a significant chunk of your time. In some ways, it’s much more central to your productivity than your home is because you actually do your work in your office. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your office supports your productivity needs.

In an Analytical office, the emphasis is on speed. Information needs to be at your fingertips within seconds of your wanting it. Like your home, the furniture gracing your office is functional and high end; if it doesn’t work well and look good you’re going to get rid of it.

This means that you probably have a powerful computer with a large screen, a light yet powerful laptop (no netbooks for you) and smartphone. You’re going to tend toward digital documents over paper, simply because it increases the ease with which you can search and find the information you need.

If you keep paper files, glance over the filing cabinets you have and decide whether you’ll need to expand that space. We’ll go into filing more in the next section, but it’s something to keep in the back of your mind for now.

Most Analyticals don’t manage their files or their books, but you should still be involved in the systems used to keep them in order. Does your current system allow you to get to what you need within a moment of needing it? If the answer is no, schedule some time with your assistant to go over the system and find a way to speed it up. We’ll provide some suggestions for this in the next section. If the answer is yes, it’s still a good idea to schedule some time with your assistant and familiarize yourself with the system, if you haven’t already.

The final thing to consider for Analyticals is the placement of furniture, particularly items that you need often. Is your printer next to your desk, or across the room?

Do you have a small shelf near your desk for books and items that you refer to regularly? Is your desk situated in such a way that you can walk in and get started, or do you have to skirt around the edge to get to your chair?

These are all small considerations that can make a big difference in your productivity and save you time throughout the course of the day.

Exercise

Go through your home and office and make a list of the ways in which it could be improved to support your energy and productivity. Meet with your assistant, if you have one, to discuss the changes you’ll be implementing based on your list. Arrange to have them done or schedule time to do it yourself over the next few weeks.

Non-Traditional Work Space

Perhaps you don’t have a traditional office. Maybe you’re stuck in a cube, or perhaps you spend time occasionally in a coworking facility, a coffee shop, or even an airport waiting lounge. What steps can you take to make these places as supportive as possible?

For an Analytical, these spaces can be especially challenging. I strongly recommend investing in a pair of noise cancelling headphones (BOSE is generally considered the industry leader) and using them regularly when you need the space to concentrate. Without the distraction of side conversations and co-workers who need help, you’re much more likely to get into your flow state where you can actually get your work done.

If you’re still having issues, there’s an excellent visualization exercise that you can do to move your attention from your surroundings to your work. It’s not practical for daily use, but for public situations it can work beautifully. Pull out whatever you’re working on and place it in front of you. Now, imagine you’re carrying a razor sharp paring knife and focus on your laptop (or whatever tool you’re working on). When you stare at your work space, what distracts you? Is it the seeing-eye dog assisting its owner to a chair in the airline lounge? Take your knife and mentally cut it from your concentration. Now is there a woman talking loudly on her cell at the table next to you? Turn on the noise cancellation on your headphones and excise her from your consciousness. Act as if the distraction simply doesn’t exist after you’ve cut it out—it’s gone, you’ve thrown it to the corner, and it’s not going to bother you anymore. Do this until you have tunnel vision on your work space, and then start cranking out your genius.

Cubicles are more difficult to work with, as are shared office spaces. If you have a solo cube, try rigging up an impromptu door of some sort to present the illusion of privacy. A rope across the entrance with a simple piece of fabric hung from it can go a long way toward signaling your desire to maintain your space. Likewise, the noise cancelling headphones can help both to keep your concentration focused and alert colleagues not to bother you. And don’t underestimate the effectiveness of a “Do Not Disturb” sign—most folks will see that as a signal to try again later.

In shared spaces, take the time to evaluate the space each of you occupies and where your equipment resides. If you can see ways to increase the efficiency of the space for your productivity and it doesn’t unduly inconvenience the other person, ask them if you can make the change. Most people will be happy to accommodate your request if you phrase it politely, and you may even spark a discussion that benefits both your working styles.

Time Management

After reading this far, you can probably guess that our approach to time management is not going to be anything like the standard fare. There are plenty of places for you to catch up on the latest ideas for batching email, reducing time spent in meetings and knocking out your work more efficiently. I’ll include a few ideas at the end of this section, but if you’re looking for an encyclopedia-scale source for techniques, Time Management Ninja does an excellent job of presenting those ideas in an Analytical style.

At Rethink Productivity, I want to get the underpinnings of your day rock solid.  Your day is determined by your energy levels, and if you understand your energy levels you can make tweaks to your routine that will give you a huge boost toward your goals. This is the Pareto Principle at work—80% of your results will come from understanding your energy levels, and the additional 20% comes from the techniques you leverage on top of that energy foundation. So, let’s jump into getting your energy levels recorded and get started with accomplishing 80% of your results!

Energy Tracking

Before you do anything else, go to http://rethinkproductivity.com/analytical-energy  and download the Excel spreadsheet with the Analytical energy tracker. As you open it, you’ll notice that you’ll be tracking your energy, your task list and your food intake.

Your tasks and diet greatly influence your energy levels, and by tracking them all on the same sheet you’ll be able to see connections between the types of work you’re doing, the food you’re eating, and your energy. The spreadsheet has blank graphs already set into the page—when you input your records, the graphs will automatically populate and allow you to see your results immediately.

Keep the sheet in a location where you can access it easily. As you go through your day, pay attention to your energy levels. Are you feeling energized and ready to work, decent but not great, or absolutely lacking in energy? What hours were you sleeping? Enter the metrics in your spreadsheet.

As you record your energy, think about what you’re working on. Does the task work with your brain type or against it? Does it leave you feeling energized or drained? You don’t necessarily have to record exactly what you’re doing, but you can make a note of the general category of work and how it leaves you feeling. Decide on a method of measurement, and make the appropriate entries.

And finally, when you eat throughout the day, note down the general food groups. Are you eating carbohydrates or protein? Processed food or unprocessed? Sugars or grains? As you look back on a day, how often are you eating? What times? These are all factors that can influence your energy levels. As with everything in this book, I’m not going to tell you how to eat. If you’d like information on dietary changes that have improved my energy, there’s a section in the appendix with more information. But here, you’re just observing and looking for potential tests to improve your energy levels over time.

Some people can see clear patterns after just four days, but others need to go for a week or longer. Once you can see some patterns, though, it’s time to incorporate them into your daily schedule.

Everything you do during a high energy period is likely to flow well. Some people like to use this time for things they naturally excel at, to push their work into a higher level. Others like to use it for things that are difficult, to add an extra boost to their abilities. The choice is yours, but one thing is certain—using that time for things like checking e-mail, going to routine meetings or filing papers is a waste. Those tasks can easily be handled during your lower energy hours, leaving high energy times for high value tasks.

By recording the tasks you’re doing throughout the day, you’ll also be able to see another pattern emerging—how long it takes you to do typical tasks. This is another bit of information that you can start to incorporate into your day.

Having accurate estimates of how long it will take to complete your tasks helps ensure that you schedule enough time and remain on schedule throughout the day. The longer you record, the more you can begin to experiment—which tasks are more efficient when completed during high energy times? Low energy times?

Build Routines That Support Your Goals

Once you have an understanding of your energy levels, you can begin to look at the routines you follow throughout the day and whether they support or detract from your efforts to reach your goals. All Analyticals have some sort of morning routine that they follow, something that likely has evolved over time. Most people also have some sort of lunchtime and evening routines as well. Read through the sections below and think about your routines. Can you tweak them in ways that support your goals?

Morning

The best way to start your day is by spending some time working in harmony with your personality type. That time can start from the moment you get out of bed or the moment you walk into the office. By starting your day with something that comes naturally, you’ll charge yourself up for whatever your day has in store.

Analyticals excel at analysis and goal setting, so many people with your brain type find it energizing to spend a half hour in the morning flipping through the latest headlines and connecting the dots with regards to world events. Or you might prefer to spend 15 minutes reviewing your short and long term goals and making sure that your activities for the day line up appropriately. Whatever you choose to do, keep that time sacred because it prepares you for the day ahead.

Lunchtime

Are you known to grab a sandwich and eat lunch at your desk? Chances are that you’ll benefit from some time away to collect your thoughts and do a bit of brainstorming. Test out a week where you leave your desk for an afternoon walk, run to the gym for a workout or take the time to meditate.

Evening

Most Analyticals enjoy wrapping up the day with a review of what they’ve accomplished and what the days to come might hold. If you’re in the habit of taking work home with you, try a week where you leave it at the office. Give yourself a clean break each evening, and spend the time doing something you enjoy or with someone whose company you cherish.

Getting More Done

As I said earlier, this isn’t a book stuffed with tips that will get you over the last 20% of the course. There are plenty of places where you can find that information, and a section in the appendix listing some of the best ones. That said, here are some general principles that you can start with when looking for specific techniques or brainstorming ways to improve your output.

What do you need to be doing? Tasks that move you toward your goals, why delegation is such an awesome thing. As you move higher up the ladder, you’ll likely find yourself overwhelmed by tasks which are not necessarily important to your goals, but which you’re still expected to complete. Before you add something to your to-do list, ask yourself who else could potentially do it and what the consequences would be if it were left undone. Often, the answer to these questions is “someone else” and “not much,” in which case your time is better spent elsewhere. The classic question of time management, “What is the most effective use of my time right now?” was written for your personality type. You are the only one with the natural foresight to understand how your current tasks fit into your visions and overall goals. If you take nothing else from this section, learn to ask this question—and act accordingly—on a regular basis.

If you can’t delegate it, what would happen if you didn’t do it? If it’s been on your list for more than a week, kill it.

Batch your schedule—calls, meetings, email, etc. Plan in one hour blocks. Enforce it—if you’re working on something important, turn off email and phone.

Put high value work in your high energy periods. You can check your email and deal with paperwork later—your value is in what you produce, not what you check off.

Compounding Time: Analyticals are especially good at compounding time, a technique in which several less important tasks can be completed simultaneously. This doesn’t work for important tasks, but often e-mail can be responded to during a boring conference call, or quality time with your spouse can occur while you both go on an evening jog.

Text Expander—if you find yourself writing emails with the same phrases over and over, this little app is a lifesaver. It automatically swaps pre-programmed keystrokes for the full sentences or paragraphs that would take you a minute or more to type out.

Take breaks. Go for a walk. Unplug for one day a week. Go have sex with your partner or get yourself off.  Bounce ideas off another person when you’re stuck on something.

Interacting With Others

As an Analytical, you view the vast majority of the world through an extremely logical lens. Goals, business decisions, even relationships are carefully considered with pros and cons and you move forward with the most logical decision.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world operates a bit differently. If you’re having trouble with a supervisor, co-worker, or employee (or anyone else in your life) take a step back and ask yourself how they’re approaching the situation. 99% of the time, they’re making an emotional decision. Emotion has its own logic, but it can take some thought before you decipher it. So tread carefully during conflict, and consider where the other side is coming from, and you’ll be in much better shape than if you dismiss so-called foolish decisions off hand.

One area in which Analyticals typically trip is in the balance between work and home life. If you have a spouse or significant other, 9 times out of 10 they’ll say that they don’t see enough of you and that you spend too much time working. Finding ways to detach more often will not only help your relationship, but also your mental and physical health. I’m not saying that you should give up your progress toward your goals—on the contrary, many Analyticals find that they return from these regularly scheduled breaks refreshed and dive back into their work with increased enthusiasm and productivity.

Next stop is the goals chapter, Analyticals. Flip to CHAPTER TWO: External Influences.

CHAPTER NINE: Pulling it All Together

All right. Let’s take a step back and a deep breath. We’ve taken a detailed tour of your productivity ecosystem in a really short amount of time, and your head is probably spinning.

To recap, we’ve:

- Taken a deep dive into your goals, from the lifetime, big purpose level to the micro, what to do in the next 90 days

- Looked long and hard at the relationships, roles and people in our lives and how they’re serving our goals and desires

- Peered into the dark recesses of our own mental scripts and followed them out into the actions we take and the habits we form, and

- Explored the intricacies of our personality types and how they influence our strengths, weaknesses, and approach to the tasks we take on

At this point, you are probably thinking, "What the hell do I do with all this stuff? How does it connect? And how do I use this information to improve my productivity?"

The first thing we need to do is get it into a place where you can look at the whole mess at once. The key to reaching your goals is in the data that you've collected and the decisions that you have made as you have read through this book.

Flip back through the book and grab the key point summaries you created at the end of each chapter. We’re going to pull it all into a format that allows you to take it all in at once and use that perspective to make decisions.

Now that we’ve covered the personality types, I’m going to give type-specific information for this process, when it’s appropriate. Feel free to skim all the sections and grab ideas that appeal to you—they may well relate to your secondary type. The trick in this process, as you can see from the image below, is to go from all of the abstract observations to concrete steps toward your goals that fit with your ecosystem.

Visualization Techniques for Each Type

Fantastical Visualization

Since the Fantastical is so visual, getting a handle on all of this information is going to require some interesting displays. Here are a few methods for getting all your data into a format you can comprehend.

Your first option is a variation on the Branch Calendar—get yourself a few pieces of poster board and label them “Goals”, “External Influences”, and “Internal Influences.” Divide each into three vertical columns. Write your key point summaries in the far right column, spacing them out enough that you can fill the entire board.

For the Influence boards, use the middle column to consider whether this influence is supporting you or detracting from your goals. Are there ways you could improve this influence? Write down the opposite of each influence you think could be better, and then jot down a few variations of your opposite. Then in the final column, take a guess at the effect that changing this influence might have on your goals. You can note down anything from improved mental state to number of hours saved. These aren’t intended to be 100% accurate—in some cases, you have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty. We’re just trying to get a visual representation of what each potential change might do for you.

Switching over to the goal board now, use the middle column to assess the effect that this goal might have on your life. Is it one that is going to take every resource you have, or one that you can pursue in a few hours a week? Then, use the final column to write down three concrete steps that you will need to take soon if you want to pursue your goal.

Stand back and take a look at your boards. Can you start to see the connections?

Another option for the Fantastical is to create images of your goals and influences. Let your gut pick the media and colors when you depict your current reality and the changes you could make. Don’t censor yourself, for two reasons. One, those color choices and tone help significantly to inform your decisions, because this is your intuition giving you recommendations. And two, this method can become a cover for procrastination. We’ll dig into procrastination and motivation in a little bit, but if you find yourself spending more than an hour or two on your boards, start examining why it’s taking so long.

A third option for visualization is a hybrid of the first two—consider creating a couple of mind maps. The first map of your goals can fit on a page in a notebook and needs to include goals themselves, their effects on your life and your best guess on the amount of time it will take to achieve them. The second map, of all your influences, is going to be much larger and will have lots of lobes and connections. Instead of a single item in the middle, you’ll have shapes representing interior and exterior influences, and all of the influences you identified will have their own lobe. Start to chart out how these influences affect your life and how changing those influences will affect your goals. When you find connections between influences, draw a connecting line between the lobes and add in any cascading effects that you can think of. For example, if you have external influences coming from your boss, your partner and yourself with regards to your job, moving to another position within the same company would influence all of those expectations. The number of potential paths is almost limitless, so don’t censor yourself as you go. You’re going to want to create this one on something huge—think a 4x6 whiteboard, several pieces of poster board or giant post-it notes taped together, or a large section of packing paper.

If you’re having a hard time visualizing these mind maps, look for an example at the end of the Environmental section. If you have a secondary Environmental personality you may find the color suggestions for Environmentals attractive; feel free to use them if so!

Environmental Visualization

For the Environmental, visualizing the connections is also important, but how you go about doing so is going to be slightly different. Before you begin, find yourself a box of colored markers and set up a scheme. You’re going to need separate colors for the following: big, medium and little goals, internal influences, external influences, connections between influences, time guesses and potential changes.

If you’re an Environmental with an artistic bent, feel free to start creating images to represent your current reality, your goals and your influences. You can work in a sketchbook or on a large space—rolls of packing paper work brilliantly for things like this. Give yourself a few hours and let your gut lead your hand. Don’t stop to analyze and think through what you’re creating; the whole is more important than the parts here, and ideally I’d like you to step back at the end and see connections that you didn’t even know you were creating. When you step back at the end, you may well find additional connections; feel free to step back in and create them, but under no circumstances should you cut anything out.

Another option for Environmentals is a variation of the mind maps described in the Fantastical section—a smaller one for your goals with you in the center and a larger one with a double center for your internal and external influences. Here’s where the colors you chose will come in more explicitly. As you create your mind maps, use the appropriate colors to write descriptions of goals and influences and draw connections between pieces. In the goals map, use the colors to distinguish between big, medium and little goals. In the influences map, use the colors to mark the source of each influence, the connections between influences, any potential changes and guesses about how various changes in influences might change your life.

In the space at the end of this section I’ve included an example of a goal and influence map. There is no wrong way to create your own maps, but if you’re confused about the idea you might find it useful to consider these.

One final option for Environmentals to pull together all the information they’ve gathered is to use each key takeaway you created from the chapters as a prompt for a journal entry. Pull all of the takeaways together onto one page so you can see them all, then pick one to start writing with. If it’s a goal, explore the end point and how your life will change when you reach it; take the time to linger on how you’ll get there and what you’ll have to do along the way. If it’s an influence, let your pen wander through the nooks and crannies. Follow the connections to other influences, and let yourself imagine what your life would look like without that influence. Approach these as free write exercises; don’t stop to censor yourself or let your mind contradict what’s coming out on the page. Write until you have nothing left to say, then move to the next takeaway and repeat the process. At some point you’ll start to feel that you have nothing new to say, and at that point you should take a step back and read through what you’ve written and the remaining takeaway prompts that you haven’t tackled yet. Does anything new come up that needs to be recorded? If so, write it down. If not, take another 10 minutes or so to solidify your conclusions from the time you’ve just spent.

There’s an aspect of this exercise that comes up for every single Environmental that I’ve ever worked with, and it’s a huge internal script that’s almost impossible to see by yourself. When you’re considering external and internal influences, your personality is going to work against you. As someone who excels at interpersonal interaction and thrives on helping and working with others, you can often see the expectations of others as internal expectations of yourself. Your psyche is going to fight really hard against the thought of changing these influences because they’re part of your comfort zone.

What you need to remember is that you’re NOT changing all of your influences. You may not even change any of them. You’re simply examining the pieces of your life that affect your ability to reach your goals and grow as a person. If you choose to make any changes to your influences, you’ll be doing it to further your goals and your personal growth. So, politely listen to that little voice that says, “You can’t possibly stop taking meals to old Mrs. Pickleby, even if she does complain about your cooking each week!” Thank it for its input and tell it that you need to consider all sides of the issue. Then continue with what you were doing and ignore the voice if it comes up again.

Structural Visualization

Most Structurals are going to instinctively turn to some sort of outline or chart to pull all of the information they’ve collected into something they can easily understand. (Unless you happen to have a strong secondary Fantastical type, which isn’t as unlikely as it sounds!)

In general, I’ve found that outlines work particularly well for Structurals because the ability to record and label main points and sub points allows for easy cross reference. If your main entries become Goals, Internal Influences and External Influences and you use an alphabetical or Roman numeral numbering scheme, the details from your key takeaways line up neatly. Connections between influences or potential changes then become sub points under their origin and reference the other side. For example:

I. External Influences

a. Boss expects reports every Friday

i. Time: 4 hours

ii. Process is soothing and helps me keep on top of my output

iii. Potential Change: Negotiate biweekly reports

1. May not decrease time needs, but would allow date night to start at 6pm twice a month

iv. Potential Change: Automate reporting

1. Increased time upfront to set up automation, but serious time savings later. (See Ibii)

2. Would need to be approved by management

v. Potential Change: Apply for different position in office

1. Enjoy my current position, but there are other opportunities available

2. Would allow shift from reporting requirements (See Ia and Ib)

b. Coworkers usually need help with calculations and wait until last minute

i. Time: 2 hours

ii. Usually causes stress and makes me late for date night

c. Date night is Friday night

i. Time: Ideally 6pm onward

ii. Time with partner is mental reset, allows relaxation and support

…and so on. While creating your outline, try to strike a balance between censorship and recording your ideas. You may find some of your ideas to be ridiculous on their face, but fill in the details before you discard them. If you want, you can begin to use text colors to keep track of ideas that have potential and those you’ve discarded. Unlike the Fantastical and Environmental personality, you’re going to be inclined to bring the pieces of your ecosystem together in a digital format rather than creating something in the physical world.

Analytical Visualization

For an Analytical personality, pulling together the pieces of their productivity ecosystem needs to happen as succinctly as possible. In almost all cases, this is going to result in some combination of tables, graphs, or spreadsheets. Let’s dig into a few of the options.

Many Analyticals find that their goals can easily be summarized in a table. Handwritten pages are rarely a good option for you—they’re too difficult to update and hard to scan for key pieces of information. So create a digital version of the Norway Calendar idea suggested for the Fantasticals. Set up a table with three columns and fill them in with your goals, the estimated time commitment, and the next three steps for each one. If you like, you can use the location of each goal in the table as a general indication of its importance or the amount of time you expect it to take. Your table can be easily updated as you make progress toward your goals or your priorities change, and you can always easily see where you stand in the grand scheme of things.

When considering influences, most Analyticals find graphs easiest to work with. You can see at a glance what the positive and negative influences are in your life, and you can utilize colors, mouse-over labels and background equations to keep track of the various potential changes and their linked impacts.

If you opt to go with a graph, there will be a fair amount of background work in the connecting spreadsheet to get your displays working properly. In almost any other situation, this is the sort of project that I’d recommend an Analytical to hand off to an assistant or freelancer. It can be time consuming, and the end result is the piece that you really care about, not the process of putting it together. Your time is almost universally better spent elsewhere.

But—and this is a big but—Analyticals are almost universally private people. It’s one thing to have an assistant working on a report or keeping your schedule or filtering your business inbox. It’s another entirely to have them creating the representation of your influences. If you have someone you trust 100%, go ahead and ask them to create the graphs for you. Alternately, you could strip your identifying information from the base documents and put up a one time job on oDesk to fill in the remaining columns and create the graphs. For a one off job, though, you may well spend more time explaining what you want than you would trying to do it yourself.

Whether you choose to do the behind the scenes work or not, the end result you’re looking for is a spreadsheet with embedded graphs that allow you to see your influences at a glance and make changes to the appropriate columns to see how those changes might affect your ability to reach your goals.

The Five Factors of Motivation

Now that we have a good handle on all the pieces in our productivity ecosystem, it’s time to address the huge elephant in the room: motivation.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced some variation of this one.

You have a whole day to be productive. You have a list of stuff that needs to be done. You sit down, all jazzed up and ready to jump in... and you proceed to spend the rest of the day bouncing between social media sites.

Or how about this one:

You have a task on your list that keeps getting pushed further and further down. You can go weeks or even months without doing it. It’s not until someone nags asks you about it that it finally gets done.

Or maybe this one:

You need to get a post written for your blog by the end of the day. You sit down, intending to write, and end up editing the video that your client wants by the end of the week.

Any of that sound familiar? Everyone’s wrestled with situations like these before, and the problem almost always comes down to the same reason—motivation.

To put it simply, if you don’t *want* to do the work, then you’re not going to enjoy the process of doing it. And if you don’t enjoy the process, you’ll never be interested in doing the work.

If you’re having difficulty motivating yourself, then it’s worth examining what about the work is leaving you cold. There are five factors that play into your motivation, and a lack in any area can leave you trying to sweet-talk yourself into tackling your tasks.

Intrinsic

Is the work itself attractive to you? Is this specific task kryptonite?

Often we’ll get attracted to the vision of a project, all the sparkles in the best possible scenario outcome untarnished by the work it will take to get there.

“I hate writing, but I love having written.” ~ Dorothy Parker

Anything worth doing is going to have difficult pieces. That’s true whether your goal is to write a world-changing book or to raise a baby into a healthy, socially conscious adult. But there should also be pieces that are easy, days where you bask in the glow of doing something you love and doing it well, and where you can see the fruits of your labors returning to you.

If your goals don’t allow you to have those days, then you should consider whether you’re the best person to achieve those goals. I personally think emergency planning is essential and I totally want every individual, town, state, nation and region to have the knowledge and resources to remain safe in an emergency. But as a primary Fantastical, taking on that work would be soul-draining for me. There are others in a much better position to do it than I am, and they’ll do it much better than I ever could.

Extrinsic

What are the external rewards for doing the work? Will you be paid well for it? Will your efforts be recognized? All of us have a price point at which we’re willing to do something we don’t enjoy. We may not do it as well as something we did enjoy, but we’ll likely bite the bullet and take the check. The same isn’t always true for accolades and recognition, but if you’re doing the labor and someone else gets the credit, it’s understandable that you won’t be eager to take on the task again.

Often, our intrinsic factors interact with our extrinsic ones in ways we don’t expect as time passes and we get additional information and a better understanding of a situation. Perhaps your price point for doing something you don’t enjoy gets higher once you’ve started and you’re in the thick of just how tedious and unpleasant the task really is. Or perhaps you realize that the shiny end point you’d hoped for is getting less and less likely, and the work that is required to get through to the somewhat tarnished endpoint that could be accomplished isn’t worth the pain of getting there.

Values

This category relates to your individual values—do you feel that doing this work is the right thing to do, or that you should finish what you start? Or on the flip side, do you find the work repulsive? A conscious objector will not take a position in the military under any circumstances, because his or her personal values forbid it. Likewise, many a family member has undertaken the task of caring for an elderly relative because their values won’t allow otherwise. If you’re having difficulty motivating yourself, the problem may be a conflict in values.

Interpersonal

These influences are easy to identify—if the first thing you think of when you think about a project you're not motivated for is another person, I'll guarantee are there are some interpersonal issues to explore.

Take, for example, the contract I'm working on now. If you were to ask me about it, I'd tell you first that I was looking for something else and list my skills, but if you pried a bit it wouldn't take long for me to start ticking off the poor decisions and bureaucratic red tape that led a government agency to hire 3 people with masters degrees to enter data in by hand. Are interpersonal issues influencing my motivation to do a good job here? Absolutely.

If you're having trouble getting motivated for a task that others are involved in, it's worth some time to consider what interpersonal issues you might be facing. What does society expect you to be doing? What about the people around you? Often the expectations of others can be a positive or negative motivation, depending on your personality and the respect you hold for the people around you. Perhaps you’re having trouble following through on a plan because you know your family disapproves, or you might be willing to stay late because your boss expects the report to be on his desk at 9am the next morning.

Environmental

It doesn’t matter how perfectly the other factors fall into play if you’re not working in a decent environment. I don’t care if you’re working on a thorny problem that was given to you by your best friend and has the potential to change the world—you’re not going to do your best work if you’re stuffed into a windowless 5x5 cube. While I’m not saying that you should wait to work until you’re in your dream office, I am saying that it’s worth looking around and noting what factors in your environment might be keeping you from working. Maybe your next door neighbor is blasting heavy metal for hours on end. Maybe it’s pollen season and your eyes are swollen and itching. Certain things in your environment can torpedo your motivation, and it’s worth identifying those and taking steps to avoid or alter them.

Your schedule is also part of your environment, in this instance—does your schedule even allow you the time to dig into your work and get a meaningful amount done? If not, you could be subconsciously avoiding the frustration that would come from being forced to stop right as you start in on something rewarding.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

If you’re having trouble motivating yourself to get work done, then it’s worth running through the five factors to see whether anything is off kilter. If it is, then it’s going to be difficult to get through your tasks, no matter how big a stick or carrot you set up for yourself. You’ll need to correct the problem before you can make much in the way of meaningful progress.

Sometimes that involves speaking with the people around you to clarify expectations, request behavioral changes or negotiate higher compensation.

Sometimes that involves handing responsibility of some tasks to someone else, so that you can focus on the pieces that play to your strengths.

Sometimes that involves walking away from a project entirely and finding something better suited.

But what if your motivations are in place and you’re still having trouble?

If that’s the case, then you probably have some sort of fear or limiting belief that’s holding you back. We touched on fears and mental scripts in the chapter about habits, but I’m going to give you one more exercise and then leave the subject behind.

I’ve found it’s much more effective to identify mental clutter when you’re talking with someone who’s able to pick up on and point out those scripts. That can be in a formal coaching setting, or in a conversation with a friend who’s particularly observant and honest. It’s very difficult to identify assumptions that you may have held for your entire life. They emerged out of a specific situation and were useful at the time, but aren’t helping you now. Your mind instinctively takes pains to keep you out of danger, and it considers those assumptions essential to keeping you safe.

Even if you can grab onto a piece of mental clutter, it’s often difficult to see the entire thing. Again, your mind conspires against you for what it considers to be your own good. A coach or a friend can see what’s buried there and prompt you to continue digging. Now, that’s not to say that it’s easy to eliminate all these blocks in a single session with a coach and then go on your merry way. It can take weeks, months, or even years to fully eradicate some of your limiting beliefs and fears. But the alternative is usually years, decades or lifetimes of solitary thought.

Working with a coach is often scary, and it’s very similar to seeing a counselor—if you don’t have a good relationship, not much is going to get accomplished. I’m able to work with mental clutter as it comes up in sessions with my productivity clients, but I also know many excellent coaches who specialize in eliminating limiting beliefs. I don’t have that specialty, which is also part of why I’m not going into it in more detail here.

If you’d like to work with me or get a referral to a coach who works specifically with limiting beliefs, please get in touch with me via my website. I’ll be more than happy to get you hooked up with the best person for you.

Exercise

Make a list of tasks or projects you’re having motivational difficulties with, and examine them in light of each motivational factor. If you find problems, decide on an appropriate change, and take steps to implement it. If you don’t find problems, than take 5 minutes to write down anything that comes to mind when you contemplate this task or project. This is a free write, so do not censor yourself or let your pencil leave the page.

Once you’ve written for five minutes, take some time to examine your words for evidence of fears, limiting beliefs or mental scripts. Probe the ones you find—can you identify where they originated and how they might have served you then? What effect are they having on you now? Can you mentally thank them for their help and let them know that they’re no longer needed?

Pay attention to your body and your emotions as you go through this process. Allow yourself to experience anything that comes up, whether it’s a knot in the stomach, an unexpected flood of tears, or a giddy peal of laughter. Once you’ve reached a place of peace when you contemplate the scripts you’ve identified, write down a new script to fit the situation you’re working in now. Again, pay attention to your body and emotions, and take the time to experience whatever may come up.

Once you’ve written yourself a new script, keep it with you for several days. Pay attention to what happens when you use it, both in your own body and in the people around you. Conscious use and observation will help you tweak your new script if needed, and seal it into place for future subconscious use.

Into the Future!

So… what’s next? You’re looking at this map of your productivity ecosystem, and you’ve taken a quick dive into your motivations. From where you sit right now, this all probably looks like a giant elephant that you’re somehow expected to eat.

You know what they say about how to eat an elephant—you do it one bite at a time.

In the case of this elephant, it’s always going to be changing. As long as you care about your goals and reaching them, eating this elephant will be a part of your life. Why? Because you are not a static object. Your life is constantly changing as you learn and grow. The Productivity Ecosystem is a way of life, not a one-time exercise that you can set in place and run on autopilot until the day you die.

You won’t have to constantly work through the exercises in this book, but you will need to cultivate a mentality of constant experimentation and testing. In order to tweak your Ecosystem, you need to pick something to change and observe what happens. Based on your observations, you’ll either decide on a new test that refines the change you’ve made or pick another test that is completely unrelated to the first. If you’ve been testing changes in one area for a while, you may decide that you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns and move on to testing another influence.

So, let’s stop talking about theory and pick something to take action on. Pull out your goals sheet and pick out a next action step. Pick one that has an influence that could impede it.

Now, go to that influence and look at your potential changes. Pick a change that either has the greatest chance of success or which offers a high rate of return. That change is your test. If the change you make allows you to complete your next action step, then your test can be considered successful. If not, you’ll need to take a step back, consider why not, and decide on a new test to conduct.

I know this sounds clunky. In reality, the time needed to make these decisions is a fraction of the time it’s taken you to read through the process. Maybe not the first few times, but it won’t take long for you to set the new habit into your neural pathways and start initiating multiple tests per day. You’ll begin testing changes to influences, incorporating your personality strengths into your work, taking your energy cycles into account, working with different people and programs, even using your test results to move beyond what’s been covered in this book. You’ll start tests that take weeks, months, even years to produce results.

One of the awesome things about constantly testing is the subtle change in how you view failure. When you turn off autopilot and become fully engaged in your life’s ecosystem, something that would have been considered a failure before becomes a test result that you can analyze, learn from, and build upon. Life becomes bigger than the report due on Friday or the number of times you succeed in a week or month. You start playing a much bigger game.

Working with Others

It’s true that the way to eat an elephant is always one bite at a time, but it’s also true that an elephant is a lot easier to eat when you have others biting into it alongside you. Other people play a role in your Productivity Ecosystem through their expectations and influences; make your engagement with them deliberate and positive. Your friends and your partner should support your efforts and cheer you on towards your goals. You can build relationships with accountability partners, mentors, and peers who can offer feedback on your tests, your work, and your ideas in general. Many people find that their early tests involve subtle shifts to the relationships that they already have so that those relationships add increased value to their Productivity Ecosystem. Once their existing network is optimized, it makes sense to move toward expanding that network.

For Environmentals, this talk of optimizing networks can feel manipulative. If we were trying to trick the people around us into supporting us at the expense of their own goals, it most certainly would be manipulative. But in the vast majority of cases, the people in our networks don’t mind reaching out to support us when they know that we’re willing to do the same for them. You get back what you put out into the world, and part of optimizing your Productivity Ecosystem is understanding how to accept that positive energy back into your life.

Your network will likely be able to provide much of what you need to move toward your goals, but there will always be aspects of your testing and optimization where it would be useful to have access to additional resources. I’d encourage you to check out the Rethink Productivity website at http://rethinkproductivity.com/book. You’ll find up to date reviews of various services and products, as well as articles addressing common questions from readers and suggested resources for specific challenges.

I also offer a free 30 minute consultation for anyone who’s never worked with me before, so you can bring a quick question to a Skype session or phone call and get an answer customized to your personality type and situation. For more in depth support, I offer an extended personality profile, individual coaching packages and a mastermind group that launches you into your Productivity Ecosystem explorations. The enrollment for that group is only open once a year, but all other options are available to you year round. Visit http://rethinkproductivity.com/book for more information. And remember, all of my offerings are backed by my 100% money back guarantee—I am here to get you to your goals, and if you don’t reach them, I don’t deserve your money. If you’re not satisfied, I’ll make it right, or I’ll refund your payment and do everything in my power to match you with someone who can help you with what you want to do.

We’re reaching the end of this book, and I would like to take these last lines to thank you for taking the time and the initiative to read this and take action to change your life. I am incredibly honored by the opportunity to support you in the work that you’re doing in the world. I’m excited that you’ve made it this far, because it means that you’re committed to doing what it takes to bring your goals into reality. Not many people have that drive, and the very fact that you’re reading these words indicates that you do. Working with people like you is incredibly rewarding; I can’t wait to see what you will accomplish and be part of the change that you’re going to create in the world. That’s really fucking exciting and amazing and humbling.

So thank you. Thank you for reading, for taking the time, and for giving me the chance to help you. Thank you for doing the work you’re doing out in the world. If there’s ever anything I can do to help you, please come to the website or drop me an email at kirsten@rethinkproductivity.com. I would love to hear from you.

Now, go out and kick ass!

Resources

Paleo Diet – Mark’s Daily Apple (http://www.marksdailyapple.com/welcome-to-marks-daily-apple/ ), Chris Kresser (http://chriskresser.com/beyondpaleo), Robb Wolf (http://robbwolf.com/what-is-the-paleo-diet/ )

Flow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs, http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-Invention/dp/0060928204, http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0061339202/

Intermittent Fasting – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/01/25/intermittent-fasting/

Dragon Dictate for Phones - http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/voice-to-text/index.htm

Sanebox - http://www.sanebox.com/

Boomerang - http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Doodle - http://doodle.com/

Donna - http://don.na

Time Trade - http://www.timetrade.com/

Schedule Once - http://www.scheduleonce.com/

Zapier - https://zapier.com/

IFTTT - https://ifttt.com/

VA Matchmaker - http://rethinkproductivity.com/consulting/ (scroll to bottom)

TaskRabbit - https://www.taskrabbit.com/

Trusteer Rapport - http://www.trusteer.com/Products/pc-and-mac-security

RoboForms - http://www.roboform.com/

Livescribe - http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/

Brother Portable Scanner- http://www.brother-usa.com/Scanners/ModelDetail/24/DS610/Overview#.UdEcfuuPt4w

Apps - http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/expense-reports-iphone-apps/, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231406/10_smartphone_apps_that_can_help_track_your_expenses?pageNumber=1, http://www.zdnet.com/8-mobile-apps-for-managing-business-cards-7000016496/

Shoeboxed - https://www.shoeboxed.com/

Personal Brain - http://www.thebrain.com/

Link to change folder icons on pc and mac - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2493, http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20125635-285/how-to-customize-folder-icons-in-windows-7/

UnPlanner - http://www.amazon.com/The-Non-Planner-Datebook-Keri-Smith/dp/1934378194/

Moleskin Daily Planner - http://www.amazon.com/Moleskine-Month-Professional-Planner-Diaries/dp/8866131148/

Skyvi, Iris, or Speaktoit Assistant - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-free-siri-alternatives-for-android-which-is-the-best/

JotIt - https://jot-it.herokuapp.com/landing_pages/astrid

Google Calendar – calendar.google.com

Database Oasis - http://www.databaseoasis.com/

SeeJaneWork.com

Noise Cancelling Headphones – BOSE.com

The Container Store - http://www.containerstore.com/welcome.htm

IKEA – ikea.com

DevonThink - http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overview.html

Stacy - http://stacyplease.com/

TimeDriver – http://timetrade.com

PeaPod - http://www.peapod.com/

Amazon Subscribe and Save - http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/

Fancy Hands - http://www.fancyhands.com/

Text Expander - http://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html, http://www.16software.com/breevy/

Kirsten Simmons is a polymath with an insatiable curiosity and a tendency to go to extremes.  She’s not exactly a model of organization and productivity, but that’s exactly the point – she may run late on occasion, and yes, there are tumbleweeds of dog hair on the floor more often than she wants to admit.  But she gets some epic shit done.  At last check, she was running a community garden, coaching clients through everything from business growth to book publication, working full time analyzing and modeling big data for public health purposes and occasionally floating down the Chattahoochee River in an inflatable pirate kiddie pool.  She lives in a tree house in Atlanta, GA with two dogs, several fish, several dozen plants and five chicks that will hopefully have moved off her balcony by the time you read this.