Nano-Tip: Know Your Cycles…

Peo­ple don’t oper­ate at full throt­tle all the time, it’s just not how the human body and just about every­thing else in nature works.

Finan­cial mar­kets, the ebb and tide of the waves, the rev­o­lu­tion of the earth, the econ­omy and our minds all oper­ate at peaks, plateaus and troughs at dif­fer­ent times of the day, week, month and year.

At cer­tain points we can feel like we can achieve any­thing, the next moment we feel like we can barely make it out of bed and into the bath­room, there’s noth­ing unusual at all about it.

The secret is to har­ness this nat­ural cycle to be effec­tive in our under­tak­ings. It is essen­tial to under­stand your­self enough to know when is the right time to push ahead, to pull back, and to pre-occupy your­self with some­thing else entirely.

Learn how you tick, then ride then ride your cycles like a surfer rides the waves!

Nano-Tip: Headphones as a conversation deterrent…

Friends are great to have around, but some­times you just want to get things done. Con­ver­sa­tion and ban­ter, while enjoy­able can really cut into your effec­tive­ness at get­ting work or other oblig­a­tions taken care of.

Enter a low-tech, sim­ple deter­rent — the hum­ble pair of head­phones. I’ve found peo­ple to be far less will­ing to engage in ban­ter with me if I am stuck into a task AND with my head­phones stick­ing in my ears, god knows why, but hey it works. Most of the time I don’t even have any music play­ing, I just have them on and wham,it’s almost as effec­tive as wip­ing dog poop on my clothing.

Next time some­one wants to engage your time with point­less chit chat, try it out.

Nano-Tip: Sometimes, you just need a change of environment…

An obser­va­tion on my own per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life is that some­times I need to get a par­tic­u­lar task done and I just can’t find the flow to do it. As sim­ple as it sounds, get­ting out of the phys­i­cal space that you’re in, can help you out immensely with unblock­ing your chan­nels, get­ting those hands mov­ing and mind tick­ing over.

If you’re used to a cer­tain sur­round­ing for under­tak­ing a spe­cific task — for instance illus­trat­ing, you will most likely have set it up in a cer­tain way that is con­ducive to that type of work. That set up may be com­pletely at odds with get­ting other tasks done, such as read­ing or writing.

An exam­ple in my own work, is that I find that some­times when I am writ­ing these blog posts, I am far too dis­tracted by my sched­ules on the wall, the art books on the shelves and my project board that screams at me “What he hell are you doing!? Get down to busi­ness!” to really con­cen­trate on writ­ing effectively.

At times like these, I unplug my lap­top and go walk-about, to another room, to the beach, or to the park. Gen­er­ally, this change of phys­i­cal space allows me to get on with it. Nice, sim­ple and effec­tive. Stay cool!