SPECIAL THINKING DAYS

Friday afternoon you feel different since Saturday is a special day. Many groups have special days and they look forward to have them. The concept here is the same, to create special days that increase productivity and enrich your life.

1. SMALL PROJECTS DAYS

Many of us have tasks and projects that they mean to start but don’t for various reasons. Often something unattractive mandate or meetings get in the way. However, on this day we break through by committing ourselves to spend a short specified amount of time 2 hours per pair on doing interesting stuff. On that day we say “No” to meetings – email or any other things to get things done.

2. LEARNING DAYS

Whatever your potential is - you become better through learning, study and practice. It would be a great day to design new tools like inventing a new game for learning the business. On this day you can learn a new skill, new programming language, crafting a new screen you always wanted for administrating your shared files, etc.

3. GETTING THINGS DONE DAYS

On these days your mood is clearing clutters. No email review when you start your machine and allocate time for reading emails same way C programmers do for allocating arrays [1024]. Read email at 10, 2 and 4. Reinforce the habit of making a small to do list of 4 things on a sticky or index card. Set short deadline for each activity and do one thing at a time (multitasking is evil).

4. POSITVE ACTION DAYS

On these days you invest time and energy to help others. Positive actions create a permanent effect of team work and long lasting friendship.

5. CLEAN UP DAYS

Increasingly we seem to spend our lives rushing around with stressful meetings, phony deadlines and many other things passes easily through our firewall. One consequence is failure to extract the full value that every moment offers and emotional bankruptcy. On these days you make “no” the default answer for new tasks, meetings, and other demands. Those things should wait and earn their way into the attention field. On these days you don’t review your email when your day or machine starts. Morning is yours, afternoons you can spend time with your teammate to refactor that piece of a code that make you feel unclean. You delete emails, trash documents and turn off your phones.

6. TRY SOMETHING NEW DAYS

It is very easy to become entrenched in the same habits and get used to your daily habits. There is always stuff in the horizon with the potential to enrich our lives – we just have to be willing to seek them out. On Try Something New Days start trying different kind of food (spray coffee powder on your pasta – it is great), talk with different kind of people, go visiting somewhere you’ve never been. Write a utility you always wanted in new language. (I am not qualified on many of these items, as I am too lazy to go to new places or do some of the aforementioned items; however I believe in trying new things. I have tried the grounded coffee on pasta and can’t eat pasta without it ever since).

7. WORK FROM HOME DAYS

On working from home days we get into the creativity zone and purposely engage our brain into thinking of “possibilities”. Your mode will change and you can perform better at work when you have these days (pauses).