Category: Other

          This month is the scariest one so far.  Not the scariest month in my year of experiments (trust me, I know what’s to come in May and a couple of the later months!) but the scariest one so far.  More scary for me than only checking my emails on a…

February has been a strange month.  With the dice man experiment, I’ve made decisions big and small by the throw of the dice.  Am I glad it’s over?  Maybe.  Would I do it again?  Maybe.  Will I miss the dice?  Definitely. Such is the nature of the dice, it’s difficult to be feel fondness or…

Question.  What do team meeting agendas, pistachio ice cream, business marketing partnerships, exotic cocktails and going to the gym have in common? Answer.  I have chosen all of them by dice in the last two weeks.  And in doing so, I’ve made my life an elaborate game. Choosing by dice is a contradiction of free…

Grace Marshall is our Productivity Ninja for the Midlands She blogs at https://grace-marshall.com/ and can be found on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin Writers, ever find yourself procrastinating at that ‘just about to get started’ phase? You know once you get started and into the flow, you can be totally focused, inspired and creative, but before that holy…

There’s a game we play in my improvised comedy class (check out The May Days here).  It’s called “New choice!”.  Two people start an improvised dialogue (“Hi Dave, I like your new haircut”) and someone shouts “New choice!”.  At that moment you repeat the previous line of dialogue you’d said, but with a new choice……

In a previous post, we gave you a list of alternatives to (long) meetings to cut down on the time spent in the boardroom. But what happens when the meeting is not yours to call? When someone else invites you to a meeting, it can often seem like you can’t say no, and such situations…

If you’re interested in becoming a Productivity Ninja, start by thinking about your brain! It is a muscle and like any muscle, it is linked to your overall physical health and fitness. A healthy body truly is a healthy mind. What follows are 10 quick fire things you can do to increase your attention, focus,…

When talking about meetings, it’s important to shift our focus from the individual to the group. We arrive at meetings as individuals and we leave as individuals, but the work of the meeting is done in a group. At both the individual and group level, there exists an important tension. It’s the tension between listening…

  Start every day by doing the worst task on your list. It could be the biggest of your ‘big rocks’  (or “frogs”)  or the thing you’re least looking forward to. The sense of relief in having polished that one off before 10am is palpable. And everything else that day is of course, easier. It…

Ever get those days where you feel groggy, unmotivated, low on energy and fuzzy in your thinking? Well, even the most productive of Productivity Ninjas have these days.  Unlike most authors, I don’t feel the need to pretend that such things don’t happen to me!  Because the real issue, as I see it, is how…

Your goal in managing your attention is to create playful productive momentum and control, limiting stress, and being confident that you’re making the best decisions you can and doing the best work you can possibly do. It’s worth noting that in the course of our work, information inputs flow through four different phases of work,…

            In January, I played around with the idea of gaining more attention for creative work by limiting my email activity ONLY to Fridays.  It worked pretty well.  There were some consequences but I think the good outweighed the bad. There was an element of jeopardy in last month’s experiment,…