Posts Tagged ‘Productivity’
Motivational Harness #4 – You Don’t Have To Stink!
At a recent iNform Corporate function, I had the privilege of presenting to the cream of Adelaide’s small and medium-sized business directors, and here’s what I noticed:
They all dressed REALLY nicely!
I know…insightful!
The reason I noted this, above anything else is, I was there to talk about the benefits of exercising before AND during work to enhance productivity. I was duly informed this is not practical for well-dressed, nice smelling people who wished to remain that way through the course of their workday.
So I want to throw a spin on the perception that meaningful exercise must ALWAYS make you stinky!
Motivational Harness #3 – Flow From Within
In my recent football article, here’s what I eluded to:
Is your workday structured around your physiology, or is your physiology dictated to by your workday?
On a very complex level, asleep or awake, our bodies operate in cycles. It is physiologically impossible to be firing on all cylinders for the entire day, and so the busy structure of our external world can deplete our reserve of internal endurance.
You can’t force productivity.
However you can nurture it. The coming installments will tactically address the requirements of your physiology to create an internal environment that thrives in external conditions.
It was recently presented to me that the greatest barrier to productive workdays were M&M’s! It took me a while to work out that this wasn’t a reference to tasty little treats, but rather the concept of Management and Meetings.
I once worked under a manager who, I’m sure, had a KPI to interrupt work as often as he could! He would constantly pop by for a chat, to see what I was up to, and to add new tasks to my hectic schedule. He called meetings for everything, and scheduled these – without fail – in the most inconvenient times for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Motivational Harness #2 – Internal World Vs. External World
Each waking day there is a b
I’m going to indulge my AFL bias, and suggest that if our work day were a football game, the match report might go something like this:
Heading into opposition territory, bottom placed Internal Physiology were always going to have a tough day up against ladder leader External Conditions. With the roof closed on External Environment Arena, the home side took early ascendancy with Caffeine and Email goaling in the opening minutes. Ringing Mobile was busy around the packs and provided further scoreboard pressure while Caffeine asserted dominance up forward slamming through a second goal before quarter time. Read the rest of this entry »
Motivational Harness #1 – Finding The Elusive Character
I used to enjoy cooking.
Before I became a parent, the journey of cooking a meal included any or all of the following:
- a nice beverage
- experimentation with flavours
- frolicking in the herb garden
- good company
- my choice of music
After I became a parent, the process of making a meal now includes:
- a selection of steamed vegetables
- some form of boiled or grilled meat
- a tired, hungry little person who communicates her lack of appreciation for my cooking by decorating the walls and floors with it
- Justine Clarke’s album ‘I Like To Sing’, generally for the fifth time on any given day
The end goal is the same – to ensure that everyone is fed – but the path to getting there is very different! Suffice to say that my levels of ‘motivation’ for the latter are somewhat lower than they were for the former.
How does this relate to exercise?
TV Can Kill You, Hey?
I heard a recent statistic that watching two hours of television per day increased risk of death before the age of 65 by 13%, with associated risks of heart disease and diabetes going up by 15% and 20% respectively. Given the average Australian watches the box for around four hours per day, this should be an alarming stat to some of us!
Obviously we’re all smart enough to know there’s more to it than this otherwise, I’d anticipate, we would have seen a massive government legislation against the idiot box!
Surely it’s more about the behaviour that TV watching represents, and the impact that this has on our bodies when carried out over extended periods of time. Read the rest of this entry »
To Be Fit or Not, That is the Question…
Yeah yeah, I hear the droning! Of course we need to be fit…
Actually, I’d like to take this opportunity to put fitness into context.
The current ‘buzz’ around training is Boot Camps or similar fitness programs – an all or nothing approach to training – where every session is designed to be harder than the last. The mere thought of it is exhausting to me and as such – from my experience – poses a challenge to maintaining motivation!
The physiological basis of programming for fitness is to improve physical performance through the progressive increase in intensity. Mental performance and productivity, however, needs to be approached a little differently.
Outworking Stress : Survival of the Fittest
I begin by referring back to a post by Max, to expand on a single point regarding our western setting.
As stated in his article, stress should be acute – we perceive threat, we deal with it, and we move on. However, the nature of many stressful situations are diluted, and so we see an internal build up. Our society is laden with fighters who have nobody to fight!
We need to chase a tiger every once in a while!
Think about the recent times where you’ve had more hours of work than working hours in the day. That’s your internal queue to ramp up a response that could – and should – challenge a raging bull. The difference being that with the bull, you dodge it or end up wearing a horn; either way, the outcome is determined within a short matter of time. Read the rest of this entry »
