To ensure that deliverables are assigned, if you’re running the meeting you can formally set the final meeting agenda item to be something like “assign deliverables”. If you’re not running the meeting, you can suggest having this final agenda item to the meeting organizer at the meeting’s outset or even as the meeting begins to wrap up. By assigning deliverables in this way, we not only make the best use of everyone’s time going forward, but we also maximize the probability that all of the essential action items are actually delivered upon.
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Filtering by Tag: habits
Daily Habit #10: Limit Social Media Use
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits and we’ve been returning to this daily-habit theme periodically since.
The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine. In the spring, these habit episodes have focused on productivity, and I’ve got another such productivity habit for you today.
To provide some context on the impetus behind this week’s habit, I’ve got a quote for you from the author Robert Greene, specifically from his book, Mastery: "The human that depended on focused attention for its survival now becomes the distracted scanning animal, unable to think in depth, yet unable to depend on instincts."
This suboptimal state of affairs — where our minds are endlessly flitting between stimuli — is exemplified by countless digital distractions we encounter every day, but none is quite as pernicious as the distraction brought to us by social media platforms. When using free social media platforms, you are typically the product — a product being sold to in-platform advertisers. Thus, to maximize ad revenue, these platforms are engineered to keep you seeking cheap, typically unsatisfying dopamine hits within them for as long as they can.
Read MoreDaily Habit #6: Write Morning Pages
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today. Indeed, having covered most of my morning habits already, namely:
Starting the day with a glass of water
Making my bed
Carrying out alternate-nostril breathing
Meditating
We’ve now reached my final morning habit, which is to compose something called morning pages.
I learned about the concept of morning pages from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It may seem hard to believe now that I’m releasing two podcast episodes and a YouTube tutorial every single week, but five years ago I had staggeringly little creative capacity. I excelled at evaluating other peoples’ ideas and I could execute on ideas very well once they were passed to me, but I self-diagnosed that if I was going to flourish as a data scientist and entrepreneur, I’d need to hone my creativity.
Read MoreDaily Habit #5: Meditate
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today with my daily habit of meditation.
If you’ve been listening to SuperDataScience episodes for more than a year, you’ll be familiar with my meditation practice already, as I detailed it back in Episodes #434 and 436 — episodes on what I called “attention-sharpening tools”. You can refer back to those episodes to hear all the specifics, but the main idea is that every single day — for thousands of consecutive days now — I go through a guided meditation session using the popular Headspace application.
Read MoreDaily Habit #4: Alternate-Nostril Breathing
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
Back in Episode #538, I kicked off the new year of Five-Minute Fridays by introducing the practice of habit-tracking, including providing you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. I followed that up in Episodes #540 and 544 by detailing for you my habits of starting the day with a glass of water and making my bed, respectively.
Continuing on with my morning habits, today’s episode is about alternate-nostril breathing (ANB).
ANB is often associated with yoga classes so if you do a lot of yoga, you may have encountered this technique before. However, there’s no reason why you can’t duck into a quick ANB session for a couple of minutes at any time. I like having it as one of my morning rituals because it makes me feel centered, focused, and present; as a result, I find myself both enjoying being alive and ready to tackle whatever’s going to come at me through the day. That said, if I’m feeling particularly stressed out or out of touch with the present moment, I might quickly squeeze in a few rounds of ANB at any time of day.
Read MoreDaily Habit #3: Make Your Bed
Back in Episode #538, I kicked off the new year of Five-Minute Fridays by introducing the practice of habit-tracking, including providing you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. I followed that up in Episode #540 by detailing for you my habit of starting the day with a glass of water.
So Daily Habit #1 was the meta-habit of tracking your habits. Daily Habit #2 is the morning water glass. That brings us today to my Daily Habit #3, which is another morning habit: making your bed.
Read MoreDaily Habit #2: Start the Day with a Glass of Water
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
On Five-Minute Friday last week, I introduced the life-transforming concept of daily habit tracking and, if you‘re keen to try it for yourself, I provided an example spreadsheet to get you up and running quickly on your own daily habit tracking journey. If you check out the YouTube version of last week’s episode, you’ll also see that I screenshared the final part of the episode in order to provide a hands-on demonstration of how to configure my habit-tracking template for whatever habits you’d like to track.
Starting with today’s episode, I’ll be recurringly using Five-Minute Fridays to cover the daily habits I track that are most influential in my life. Perhaps they’ll provide food for thought for you or maybe you’ll even try adopting some of them into your own life.
Read MoreDaily Habit #1: Track Your Habits
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
In September 2016, Konrad Kopczynski — who happened to be the guest on episode #465 of the SuperDataScience podcast — introduced me to the idea of daily habit tracking.
I appreciate that it’s easy to throw around an expression like “life-changing”, but tracking my habits every day really has been a dramatically life-changing experience. When you wake up every morning and report honestly to yourself on whether you did or didn’t perform a particular good or bad habit yesterday, you open up your eyes to who you really are in a way that our minds otherwise trick us into ignoring or exaggerating.
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