SEPARATING THINKING FROM DOING, BOSS FROM WORKER

‘Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort.’
– Paul J. Meyer

Your goal in managing your attention is to create playful productive momentum and control, limiting stress, and being confident that you’re 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, best remembered by the acronym, CORD. We will look at this in more detail in chapter 5, but essentially this consists of:

• Capture and Collect: Collecting information wherever it lands, but also making a note of any useful ideas as they show up (in meetings or at your desk, for example).
• Organize: Taking all of this information and making sense of it. This is where you work out what’s do-able, what’s important and when you might want to do it. You organize it into some form of to-do list and then hopefully, as we develop the ideas in this chapter, into a more advanced and agile system for dealing with it well.
• Review: Looking through the to-do list or your entire system with all of your projects and commitments, you choose what it is you need to be working on and when.
• Do: Completion. Putting cherries on cakes.

So, when are you in boss-mode and when are you in worker-mode? And what level of attention do you need when capturing, organizing, reviewing and doing? While of course there are exceptions, it looks something like this:

Phase of work	Inactive attention	Active attention	Proactive attention
Capture and Collect (worker-mode)
Organize (boss-mode)
Review (boss-mode)
Do (worker-mode)

What this shows us is that the boss-mode of our work, the Organize and Review phases, requires the largest part of our active and proactive attention. Thinking about our work is in many ways the hard part. If you spend a week thinking about the solution to a potentially difficult problem, the solution is easy to arrange.

‘Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.’
– Henry Ford

The arranging part is just picking up the phone, writing emails, having conversations, doing research – bread and butter stuff to a knowledge worker. It’s the thinking that takes time and requires energy. Separating thinking from doing infinitely improves both.

As we have discovered, your proactive attention is a scarce and valuable commodity in your quest to be productive and to reduce information overload and stress. Four things are required to be at your best:

1. Schedule your work according to the attention level you’re operating on.
2. Protect as much of your attention as you can from the evils of distractions and interruptions.
3. Do whatever you can to increase your attention flows, ‘moving up’ to make periods of inactive attention active ones, and make periods of active attention proactive ones.
4. If at all possible, magic up some additional attention and time that you didn’t use to have available.

1. SCHEDULE YOUR WORK BASED ON YOUR ATTENTION LEVEL

Every job will have within it a range of tasks. These will often range from making huge decisions about what to do and when to do it, through to updating contact information, filing things away or changing the printer cartridge. Once you start to focus on your attention levels, you’ll start to realize that it’s a criminal waste to be changing the printer cartridge during a period of proactive attention. It’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, although in that moment it probably feels no different to when you change the printer cartridge at any other time. Yes, attention management is certainly a subtle game.

You can see below what I try to pigeonhole to specific attention levels if at all possible.

Proactive attention	Active attention	Inactive attention
Key decisions	Day-to-day decisions	Filing
Project planning and reviews	Scheduling the day’s work or keeping on top of action lists	Ordering stationery or other online purchases
Most phone calls (partly because I want to listen as intently as possible and partly that I generally don’t enjoy them!)	Internet research	Printing stuff out
Critical emails	Most email processing	Deleting emails or throwing away paperwork I no longer need
Chairing meetings	Attending meetings	Attending meetings that I don’t care about but can’t otherwise avoid
Creative thinking, writing new workshop materials, etc	Preparing handouts for workshops and making sure I’ve got everything I need	Making coffee!

It’s worth thinking about your natural strengths and weaknesses here. Save tasks that you find particularly difficult for when your attention level is proactive, leave the intense but easier stuff for those active attention times and try to save up the easy or dull stuff for when you’re capable of little else.

YOUR PROACTIVE ATTENTION IS IN SHORT SUPPLY: USE IT WISELY

While there will be patterns to your proactive attention, it changes from day to day and sometimes from minute to minute. Therefore, to be able to schedule or select your work appropriately to your attention level, you need to have all possible options available to you so that you’re always free to make informed choices from a position of confident, Zen-like calm. Since a lot of the boss-mode work of defining the best ways to achieve your tasks needs to be done when you have the proactive attention available to be able to make critical and strategic decisions, you need to ensure that you do your thinking when your attention is proactive. Finishing this thinking is what gives you the best possible range of options to choose from and the best possible information to support your decisions about what your worker-self should be doing.

Being caught in a period of inactive or active attention and not having a clue about all the possibilities of what’s out there to do next very quickly leads to a lack of clarity, stress, procrastination and bad decisions.

PROACTIVE ATTENTION & BOSS-MODE

We will talk in the upcoming chapters on managing your to-do list and actions in each of the four phases of our work: Capturing and Collecting, Organizing, Reviewing and Doing. It’s likely that a prolonged period of stress will have as its root cause the fact that you have not been able to devote enough proactive attention to your boss-mode work, particularly that of reviewing your commitments and priorities. Review is the phase of your work in which you see the timber from the trees; you look objectively at the range of commitments and projects on your plate and ensure that you are as up to date as you can be about the choices you have available. This leaves much of the doing phase feeling effortless. Having done the quality thinking you need to do in boss-mode, your worker-self is truly able to feel like your job is putting cherries on cakes: no conflicts, no confusion – just playful, productive momentum and control. For this reason, prioritizing your proactive attention towards the thinking parts of your work rather than the doing should be a key goal for any Productivity Ninja.

While it sounds easy, think about your own periods of proactive attention and then think about what’s going on around you during those times in the working day. I mentioned that 9–11am is good proactive time for me. That’s also exactly the time that my colleagues want a piece of my time, that the majority of the day’s emails and calls are flying in, exactly the time I’m having a million ideas that I want to investigate, have had appointments made for me, and so on. You need to be a pretty focused, firm and ruthless boss to make the most of this time! I regularly spend the mornings working away from the office for this very reason; I want to protect the proactive attention for my best work, and save my active and inactive attention for the parts of my job that don’t need the fullest of energy or engagement.

2. PROTECTING YOUR ATTENTION FROM INTERRUPTIONS AND DISTRACTIONS

Boss-mode requires the type of thinking that only concentrated proactive attention can offer.

Our best thinking – and the kind of thinking we need to keep us feeling calm and in control – comes from having two things in alignment. We need to be in periods of our most proactive attention and we need to apply concentration to see that thinking through to its natural end. If we get distracted by something else, all that’s happened is that we’ve done some thinking that we can’t feel confident is finished; therefore, there’s potential stress around the next corner because things aren’t clear.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of distractions: internal distractions and external distractions.

INTERNAL DISTRACTIONS: ONE OF THE BIGGEST DISTRACTIONS WE FACE IS OUR OWN MIND

We’re trying to sit down and write a report. Our worker-self is just kicking in and we’ve finished our boss-mode thinking as far as we can for now. So, on to the report. But, hang on – the boss is away! We’re just a lowly worker in worker-mode now. No bosses around. No one would mind if we had a quick look at Facebook. Or just nipped off to make another cup of tea and have a chat with a colleague.

We face our own personal battles against distractions all the time. Everything else in the world just seems more interesting than what we’re currently working on. Ever felt like you just needed to be strapped to the chair or chained to the desk in order to write, create, administrate, deal with or finish? It can sometimes feel like we’re full of unique and creative ways to distract ourselves – if only we could harness such wonderful and unique creativity in work itself!

A Productivity Ninja is self-aware here and can develop better habits to combat as much of this kind of distraction as possible. Here are some of the things that you can do to help (we’ll talk a lot more about this in later chapters, too):

GET NEW IDEAS OFF YOUR MIND AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE – SILENCE THE BOSS

As you’re working on something, particularly if it’s less interesting than other parts of your work, you’ll hear that boss voice in your head coming up with new ideas about other projects, thinking about all the things on your mind that need to be done and generally trying to force you out of worker-mode and into boss-mode. To overcome this, you need to capture all of these thoughts so that you can come back to them later (to organize, review and, if necessary, do the actions relating to them). Have a pen and paper handy. This only works if you trust that you’ll come back to these captured thoughts later on.

PROCESS EMAIL RATHER THAN CHECK EMAIL

Doing email in batches, returning your inbox to zero several times a day, severely reduces background noise and your keenness to go fiddling in your inbox looking for potential distractions. Yes, I did say zero. I will show you exactly how that’s possible in the next chapter!

INTERNET FAMINES

The internet is single-handedly the biggest productivity tool and the biggest procrastination tool, all wrapped into one. Can you see an immediate problem here? The point is to be clear with yourself: decide at which times of day you want access to a fantastic wealth of information – and decide the times in the day that you want to avoid the temptation to get caught in a ‘YouTube loop’ or waste valuable attention marvelling at Facebook statuses, celebrity gossip or BBC website articles. Learn that the internet is your best friend as well as your worst enemy, and at times it needs to be as far away from your impulsive grasp as possible.

‘SELECTIVE IGNORANCE’

We go to the same restaurant every evening and we have the same meal, month in, month out until we decide to change it. And that will be every evening until we change our minds again. We don’t like the idea of reading menus or thinking about food. It seems rather a waste of brain to us.’
– George Passmore, Gilbert & George

‘Selective ignorance’ is a term Tim Ferriss uses in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week. He describes the idea of avoiding ever buying newspapers or consuming unnecessary media. He talks about how he ‘shortcuts’ this by asking his friends’ trusted opinions on political issues so that he can make a good decision about who to vote for without the need for a lot of time wasted engaging in the issues, and how he deliberately avoids gadgets or internet sites that he knows can be distractions. There’s also an element of personal preference to some of these: I personally love political news coverage and find the ‘games’ that politicians engage in pretty fascinating stuff. I would therefore hate to be taking my voting preferences from friends – as good a judge as most of my friends are! – and miss all that entertainment on the way. Likewise, many of us love nothing more than relaxing with the Sunday papers and a cup of tea. This is all about compromise though – giving up small luxuries or small wins, knowing that from less comes more. An easy one for me was that I used to spend an hour or so every week trying to keep abreast of trade press, industry news and the like. After a while I realized that the important stories were generally forwarded to me anyway, so I cancelled my subscriptions and gave myself one less distraction each week. There will be many more examples that you can begin to explore here, too.

LOOK FOR THE WORLD’S INFORMATION DJS

A great trick in reducing distractions and coping with information overload is to look for DJs rather than records. DJs are the enthusiasts who curate, edit out the crap, give you the headlines or best bits and guide your thinking. John Peel was a legendary DJ. Gilles Peterson on BBC Radio is a fine current example: he travels the world, connects with interesting people at the heart of music scenes around the world and delivers a unique mix of music for three hours every week, most of which I would never find or understand without his help. As the world produces more content, there’s a good deal more worth paying attention to but infinitely more worth avoiding. TED acts as a DJ: it curates events and a website that identify a broad range of interesting ideas from diverse presenters.

I think we’re moving towards the age of the ‘Information DJ’. I hope Think Productive acts as a DJ too: we use our blog and LinkedIn group to find, comment on and share a whole range of perspectives on productivity. We add our own perspectives, we debate, we listen, we connect. We do this because we care. So look for the DJs, not the soulless presenters.

DON’T BE AN ‘EARLY ADOPTER’

It’s considered cool to be an early adopter. One glimpse at the line of people camped outside the Apple store when they introduce a new version of the iPad or iPhone is proof that people like to be the first to get their hands on new gadgets. However, it is certainly not smart to be an early adopter. Let the crowd figure stuff out, then spend time asking them for their informed opinions (which they’ll be delighted to give, seeing as their aim in being an early adopter is so they get to talk about it to anyone who’ll listen!) before deciding to buy. The same is true of online software. There are thousands of new sites out there purporting to be the next Facebook or LinkedIn that will revolutionize your life. Some of these things might turn out to do just that, but many of them will be consigned to history in a matter of months.

Patience is a virtue. You don’t need to look cool. And even if you really want to look cool, no one really cares if you do. On your deathbed, no one will ask you what you owned or what software you used, and they certainly won’t ask you whether you were among the first to have it.

BE SELF-AWARE

Your amazingly creative mind will come up with hundreds of ways to avoid stuff that’s either too boring, too challenging or just unfulfilling. Keep a constant lookout for what some of these avoidance tactics might be and start to battle against them. Yours will be different, but mine have included the following over the years:

• Tidying my house
• ‘Desk faffing’ – symptoms include over-labelling things, refilling staplers and stationery drawers and so on
• Eating – sometimes this is, of course, necessary, but often spending two minutes eating a Wispa bar is just easier than thinking about or doing your work
• Internet research or shopping
• Starting conversations in the office
• Twitter
• Listening to podcasts under the false impression that spending half of your attention on something inspirational will move you forward – save those for later
• Fiddling around with some new internet tool or iPad app that needs lots of ‘setting up’ (RSS readers are a good example of this) under the mistaken impression of later time savings and payoff
• Talking to people on internet message boards and Facebook groups about my extremely enlightened and important opinions about who Aston Villa should sign in the upcoming transfer window
• Doing easier or more interesting work than the stuff that really needs doing right now.

These are all delay tactics. Some of them might be vaguely useful to you, others less so. Importantly though, they can also all be done with the most minimal attention so if you’re full of proactive attention now, these things can wait.

EXTERNAL DISTRACTIONS: DEALING WITH INTERRUPTIONS

No amount of self-awareness alone will protect our attention, for one very good reason: the world is filled with other people, all with a propensity to interrupt us and steer us down a different path. As a result, we have to guard our precious attention ruthlessly against these numerous enemies. Whereas dealing with our own distractions is more like a science (observe behaviour, diagnose what’s going on in our own heads, develop new behaviour, test out effectiveness, repeat), dealing with the interruptions and agendas of other people is an art form. Your deftness, skill and oft-underhanded ruthlessness is what comes to the fore here.

There are several really obvious forms of interruption that we can deal with straight away and many more subtle forms of interruption that we’ll move on to later.

AVOID MOST MEETINGS YOU’RE INVITED TO

Meetings are a wonderful way to spend time indulging in other people’s priorities rather than your own. Avoiding meetings that are not directly concerned with your major projects or areas of responsibility, or for which it would be possible to have an involvement in a much easier way, is critical. We all know that at times this takes some creativity and even sometimes some deception, but spending all morning in a meeting being a luxury ‘extra brain’ in someone else’s project is a ridiculous and churlish waste of your valuable proactive attention. I’ll discuss this in more detail later, but where possible, just say ‘No’.

DON’T ANSWER YOUR PHONE

Phone calls are among the worst interruptions. They cost you time and energy, both in dealing with them and in ‘recovering’ from them (those, ‘Oh, where was I again?’ conversations that you have to have with yourself once you’re off the call). Try this: for the periods of time that you have decided you will use to tackle proactive attention work, turn off your mobile phone and if you have a phone on your desk, set it to automatic answer machine. Over time, let the decision to leave your phone turned on be a conscious one, so that it feels like you now choose to receive calls for a period of time rather than choosing not to.

There’s another great reason for doing this. Voicemail is seriously underrated as a communication medium. It’s one-way communication instead of two-way. As such, the caller leaving the message gets to the root of the issue in seconds rather than in minutes and by the time you call them back, you’re both halfway through the conversation that needs to happen.

CLOSE DOWN YOUR EMAIL AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE

Amazing things happen outside of your inbox. In fact, most of the work that you produce happens outside of your inbox. We are social creatures, and the ‘ping’ of a new email arriving is enough to give us sufficient curiosity to drop our most important piece of work and ‘check’ who is reaching out to us to say hi. As we do so, we lose our place, interrupting the most important work of the day, and for what? Usually a circular ‘all staff’ email telling us that Julie from accounts has brought back some sweets from her holiday to Greece, or a reminder about next week’s all staff meeting that you already had in your calendar anyway. Yet most people turn on their email as soon as they arrive in the morning, and turning it off is the last thing they do each evening before heading home. This means that you’re constantly prone to interruptions that are easily avoided. Turning off your emails, even for just a couple of hours a day or half an hour in each hour, will give you a clearer head, reduce the noise threatening to distract you, and will help you pay attention more easily to the things that really matter.

WEAR HEADPHONES OR HAVE A VISUAL SYMBOL TO KEEP COLLEAGUES’ QUESTIONS AT BAY

Elena is one of the stars of the Think Productive office, and is on many projects our main linchpin between our client, our Productivity Ninja delivering the workshop and our administrative support. As such, she gets a lot of questions from the rest of us in the office, all of which interrupt her flow. If she’s in need of some proactive attention time she has a small china kitten that she places on the desk. Everyone else in the office, including me as her boss, knows that when we see the kitten it’s a sign that she needs proactive attention time. We save up our questions or ideas for later and she stays focused. I’ve seen variations on this: homemade plastic signs, whiteboards, hats, police-style tape on the back of a chair – ‘Stay back, there’s nothing here to see’ – etc. Perhaps the simplest and most effective is a big pair of headphones. As well as having the extra practical function that you can drown out the office hubbub with music (which some people love to work to, while others find difficult to concentrate with), it’s also a real barrier to you hearing the bits of the conversation or questions aimed at you. If you are interrupted while wearing headphones, it’s kind of obvious to the person interrupting you that they’re breaking your flow.

WORK FROM HOME, OR FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

Of course, the best way to be sure that you won’t be interrupted and distracted by all the noises and annoyances of the office is to be somewhere other than the office. Working from home can be a good solution to this. It can also provide its own new set of distractions: ‘I’ll start my report just as soon as I’ve done last night’s washing up and hoovered the lounge’. Working from home isn’t for everyone. I find, though, that I do some of my best thinking work on trains and in coffee shops. These are places where the atmosphere and scenery is calming, but where there are few distractions: desk, pad, laptop and me. There’s nothing to do but drink coffee and do my best work and as a result, that’s often exactly what I do.

SAY ‘NO’

Realize that you shouldn’t feel guilty saying ‘No’ if someone is interrupting you at an important point in a key task, when you’re on a roll during a period of productive, proactive attention. Try to schedule their query or involvement when you know your attention will be on the wane, thereby protecting your most precious attention and momentum. Don’t drop everything straight away for another person’s badly timed query.

REMEMBER THAT MOST INFORMATION IS CLOSE TO WORTHLESS

Be very choosy about what you drop everything to read, investigate or do anything with. In the age of information, opportunity often knocks pretty loudly, through the recommendations of friends, social media sharing and so on. It’s no longer that important to scan the horizons. Letting the more important things come to you is much easier.

3. INCREASING YOUR ATTENTION: MAKING INACTIVE ATTENTION ACTIVE, MAKING ACTIVE ATTENTION PROACTIVE

In truth, if you’re feeling like your mind is in a real period of inactive attention it’s impossible to do that much about it. You’re already tired, lacking in focus, perhaps lacking in motivation. There is, however, a lot that you can do to develop better habits that will leave your mind healthier, happier and more likely to produce prolonged periods of proactive and active attention. Before I get onto that, here are a couple of short-term fixes – the sticking plasters of attention management:

CHANGE THE VIEW

It’s possible to temporarily ‘trick’ your brain into a short additional period of active attention if you’re feeling sluggish and inactive. To do this, you need to jolt your brain into needing to feel its way around again. If I’m asked to facilitate a long meeting, I will ask people to move chairs in the afternoon and face a different direction. Just this small movement that changes the view is enough to awaken your consciousness and jolt it into increased attention. If you’re working on a long report, move to a new part of the room every half an hour or so. If you’re working on an Excel spreadsheet, change all the fonts to red and green just for half an hour and then change it all back. These tweaks in perspective can really help to keep you going that bit longer than you really have the energy for.

CHANGE THE GAME

If you’re really battling to stay focused, change the game every 30–60 minutes. Don’t dwell on that report, staring into space; instead do half an hour of email, half an hour of the report, half an hour of something completely different, half an hour of the report, and so on. Keep your attention on its toes and keep moving.

AIR

Get outside and go for a quick walk. The fresh air in your lungs, the movement, the changes in sights, sounds, smells and thought patterns will awaken you again for the next little while. If you can’t get outside, simply open a window and take some deep breaths of fresh air, with five minutes just to admire the view and notice your surroundings. Such time to ‘just be’ is precious and again, it’ll awaken the senses and switch your attention back into gear.

STRATEGIC CAFFEINE (BUT SEE BELOW!)

A short caffeine fix at the right time can be a handy Ninja move. If you’re tired, you’ll ‘crash’ afterwards and end up in the worst kind of inactive attention you can experience. But for now, load up the cafetière, strap in and let’s go!

BRAIN MAINTENANCE

‘In times of life crisis, whether wild fires or smouldering stress, the first thing I do is go back to basics … am I eating right, am I getting enough sleep, am I getting some physical and mental exercise everyday.’
– Edward Albert

The above are just the short-term fixes that over the course of a year will offer you precious little impact. You may find a couple of days go better as a result, but what you see below are the holy trinity of increasing your attention levels regularly: nutrition, physical fitness and meditation. Your brain 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. Too many of the blogs and books on productivity focus just on shortcuts, tips and ways of using the tool of your mind, without paying any attention to how you might improve the tool, increase capacity and boost your personal potential to create impact. What follows is a quick tour of several things that can work wonders in increasing your attention, focus, alertness and all-round brain performance. You may find a few of these suggestions common sense, and you may also find some of them downright weird. You don’t have to try them all, but bear with me.

BRAIN FUEL

There are hundreds of books out there that focus wholly on nutrition. I’d recommend it as an area you spend some time thinking about, researching and planning. Not only is it good for your productivity, but good nutrition can make you happier and help you lead a healthier, longer life too. Bonus! So while nutrition is an area to definitely spend some time on beyond this book, here are ten quick rules of the road:

• Drink water – even when you’re not thirsty
  Dehydration is one of the major causes of lost concentration. If you’re feeling thirsty, it’s too late. The body will only let you know the signs of thirst when you’re already pretty dehydrated. Keep a large glass or water bottle on your desk at all times and figure out how to incorporate drinking water into your daily routine if you’re not doing it habitually.
• Five or six small meals are better than three big ones
  For your body, it takes energy to make energy. If you can spend the day regularly eating small meals rather than having points in the day where you’re either starved or stuffed, you’ll create a more balanced release of energy, keeping your brain more focused. Have a small breakfast at home and another when you reach the office. Eat half of your lunch a bit earlier and half a bit later. Buddhists practise eating until 80% full, not 100% – this simple but counter-intuitive habit can prevent sluggishness and makes digestion easier. When you eat, don’t do anything else – one of the main reasons we get too full is because we don’t notice soon enough!
• Eat breakfast
  Yes, that old chestnut. It’s a cliché because it’s true. Fire up your metabolism early in the day and get the brain fuelled and ready for action.
• Eat vitamin-heavy food and cut out the crap
  It’s also not rocket science to say that natural, raw, organic ingredients are going to do your body a lot more good than another McDonald’s. Think about the overall balance of your diet. That doesn’t need to mean being a martyr and certainly we shouldn’t always associate good eating with diets or weight loss – and a little of what you fancy can do you good! But you should ensure you eat a good range of colours of vegetables and varied, low fat sources of protein such as lean meat, fish and beans.
• Use caffeine wisely or cut it out
  As a sparsely used weapon, coffee or tea can be great; as a crutch it’s so unproductive. Aim for one coffee a day and if you need to boost your energy at other times, try snacking on apples as an alternative (it works surprisingly well!).
• Think about your Glycemic Index (GI)
  As well as thinking about the quality of the food that you put into your body, think about how slowly or quickly the energy gets released. Foods that have a low GI rating mean they release their energy more slowly and therefore more consistently. High GI foods can leave you constantly reaching highs and lows, rather than experiencing a steady flow of energy throughout the day. Low GI foods include beans, green vegetables, oranges, sunflower seeds, eggs, peanuts, apples, tuna, pears and peaches. Medium GI foods include bananas, granola, crisps, rice, sugar, granola, cereal, croissants and kiwi fruit. High GIs are things like potatoes, sweets, fizzy drinks, biscuits, some breads, chips and perhaps more surprisingly, things like carrots, watermelon, raisins and dried dates. Keep your focus on low GI foods for a more sustained and consistent energy release. For the same reason, a large, carb-heavy lunch will leave you sluggish straight after lunch, followed by a high, followed by a dip! For a good directory of low-GI recipes, try the BBC good food website: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/low-gi
• Avoid sugary drinks and energy drinks
  Like caffeine, sugar is a great temporary solution to increasing your energy and therefore your short-term attention. It’s an equally unsustainable long-term option. Drink water or fruit juices instead of lots of fizzy drinks, although be aware that fruit juices can be equally high in (natural) sugars! The proliferation of energy drinks in offices really is worrying. I have seen people twitching from withdrawal and actually becoming a distraction to the rest of the office as they’re either unaware of the huge highs and lows that these drinks create, or simply unable to manage it. Avoid.
• Use ‘brain fuel’ supplements
  There are a range of supplements on the market that are recommended to improve cognitive performance, the nervous system and physical suppleness. There are also detractors who will say you should only get such vitamins and minerals from real food, not from supplements. While I am sure getting everything you need from the perfect diet is the best option, it’s simply not always feasible in today’s fast-paced age. You can research particular supplements if you have specific requirements, but personally I think a fish oil tablet for the brain, zinc for immunity and a good multivitamin for overall health and well-being are all you really need.
• Sleep
  Losing sleep is sometimes inevitable, but nevertheless do all you can to improve both the quality and quantity of your sleep. Want to know one of my guilty secrets? If I have a whole day working from home, I will often have a little ‘power nap’ just after lunch or mid-afternoon. Even twenty minutes of quiet darkness is enough to recharge and revive. I also know a couple of people who work in corporate law firms who swear by this – and luckily there they provide ‘pods’ for the people who sleep there overnight, so they can nap whenever they need to! I’ll also admit I’ve napped under my desk in a busy office before now (using stealth and camouflage so that no one noticed!), under the table in a meeting room and even in a small storage cupboard.

PHYSICAL FITNESS

To reiterate: a healthy body really does mean a healthy mind. As well as nutrition, it’s important to take care of your body with regular exercise. You’ve probably heard the doctor mention this, that woman on TV has mentioned this, and probably the annoyingly fit and active cousin in your family has, too. Again, it’s a cliché because it’s such valuable advice.

It doesn’t need to be strenuous. A few short periods of, say, half an hour exercising each week is enough. If you live two or three miles from your office, you could probably get everything you need by simply walking to and from work more often than not.

Establishing a regular gym routine can also be a great way to keep fit as well as improve your strength and physical resilience. I tend to aim for three gym sessions each week (usually two mornings before I start work and then one session at the weekend). The important thing is to find something that you can fall into an easy routine with and that works for you. Celebrate it when momentum is good, but please don’t beat yourself up if there’s a week when it doesn’t quite happen. It won’t make a huge difference in the short-term. Ninjas are human beings, after all.

MEDITATION & SWITCHING OFF

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt presents a compelling thesis that one of the only things proven to make you happier is regular practice of meditation. Meditation comes in many forms and is also often wrapped up with mysticism, religions and cults, which many of us can find unsettling or unpalatable. It’s the practice of being present, focused only on yourself and your connection to the world around you. The Happiness Hypothesis also presents a brilliant analogy that allowed me to understand meditation in a much deeper way.

THE ELEPHANT AND THE MONKEY

Your mind is like a monkey riding an elephant. The monkey represents your conscious mind. It chatters away, has a million ideas a second and is constantly in a state of agitation. The elephant, meanwhile, represents your subconscious mind. It carries all the things going on beneath the surface. The monkey is of course too small to control the direction of the elephant, whereas the elephant isn’t often able communicate the journey it wants to take. During meditation, you’re trying to silence the monkey or at least ignore it and let its chatter pass you by. You’re trying to find out what that elephant is saying and then have the elephant and monkey work in harmony.

MEDITATION DOESN’T NEED TO BE HARD

In our constantly wired world, we can sometimes forget to listen to ourselves. The monkey in our head is fed by work, stress, news, content, Facebook posts, tweets, blogs, newspapers, TV, radio chit chat and the relentless pace of 21st century life. Taking time to listen to our emotional responses, calming ourselves down, making space to be grateful for the world around us … all of these things are shunned and excluded from our culture of constant connection. I spent about four years being interested in meditation, dabbling in it and yet never really finding the time for it (or to put it another way, the energy to prioritize it). Then, in conversation with a meditation teacher one day, where I was doing my usual monkey brained thing of asking for the ‘best book recommendation’ or ‘best podcast’, this meditation teacher looked me in the eye and said, ‘Dude, just sit’. And really that was all I needed to hear. There are a million versions of the perfect way to meditate, a million people trying to attach their own meaning or pseudo-religious explanation for it, but at its heart, to meditate is just to sit and do nothing. Listen to the silence. It’s unnerving at first but you’ll learn to enjoy it.

NOT HAVING TIME TO MEDITATE IS NEVER THE REASON WE DON’T MEDITATE

Meditation can be hard. It requires practice. But get into the swing of it and you can meditate pretty much anywhere: from crowded tubes to driving along the motorway, from walking home to queuing in the supermarket. And if you’re new to it – or you just want to make it as easy as possible for yourself – a great tip would be to get an app for your phone or some kind of guided audio meditation series. My favourites are a couple of simple and rather delightful iPhone and Android apps called ‘buddhify’ and ‘Headspace’. Both of these bring a modern, practical and very 21st-century feel to meditation. For just a couple of pounds you have a wealth of short, guided meditations at your fingertips, each designed to help you experience clarity, connection, stability and embodiment. The audios even come purpose-built to suit wherever you happen to be, with options for travelling, walking, the gym and home. Just search ‘buddhify’ or ‘Headspace’ in the iPhone or Android app stores. (Oh, and just so you’re clear, they don’t pay me to mention them; I just enjoy using the apps and I think you will too. The same goes for all the other things I mention later in the book!)

SWITCHING OFF PRODUCES RENEWAL

Much like turning off our computers in the evening, switching off our brains and allowing silence, space and rest to permeate them is so important not only to our mental health but to our ability to produce proactive attention and stay on top form. Give yourself permission to switch off at night and at weekends – don’t give in to the pressure to constantly work late and burn yourself out. Remember that you’re switching off to boost your productivity.

SMARTPHONES ARE TOO SMART TO BE IGNORED

The makers of Blackberry and other similar mobile email devices know exactly how to make them ‘sticky’, easy to use and addictive. It’s rare that I meet anyone who feels able to have the Blackberry turned on during the evening and yet resist the temptation to check or react to that little red light, flashing away on the table. To truly switch off, designate a time in the evening when your smartphone goes off and stays off. Proper renewal comes from rest and silence: silence half-interrupted is just more low-level noise.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH

Regularly take a deep breath. Remember as you do so that what you are doing is enough. Take a moment to feel grateful for everything around you. Taking stock is important and helps prepare a Ninja for tomorrow’s battles.

4. THE MAGIC OF CREATING ADDITIONAL POCKETS OF ATTENTION

Finally, what if you could find additional pockets of attention where there were previously none? I’m not talking about extending your working hours here, but perhaps using some of the points in your day that you might currently not have considered. Opportunity is everywhere – as long as we’re prepared.

CALLS & WALKING

Every day I have at least two periods where I’m walking somewhere for five or ten minutes. This is where I make most of my phone calls. Why make calls when I’m at my desk and have so many other things available to me, when I can do this when I’d otherwise be, well, just walking? I can’t do these calls unless I’m prepared, though. I need a regular discipline of adding phone numbers to my Blackberry and a regularly updated list of what calls I can make on the move.

READING & WAITING

Similarly, I keep both a physical and a digital file of reading materials, primarily as a way of avoiding having to read things at my desk when again, there are other things I could be doing there that require more resources to be available. My physical ‘Reading’ file is simply an A4 document wallet. It lives in my bag and is constantly being filled up and emptied. My digital file is one I keep on the iPad using the app, Instapaper. Instapaper allows me to save interesting pages from the web, documents, and emails, and then access them wherever I am (and without the need for a 3G connection either). I read on trains, on the tube (my particular favourite, as I get a geeky little thrill from leaving interesting articles behind for other passengers to discover!), in the dentist’s waiting room, in receptions if I arrive early for a meeting and so on. It’s also sometimes nice to catch up your reading at home for an hour, while relaxing with a cup of tea.

THINKING & TRAVELLING

One of my Think Productive colleagues lives just outside London and travels into the city on a motorbike. By keeping a list of all the big decisions and thinking he has coming up, he can refer to this just before he turns the key and starts the engine running; it sets him up to use that time really productively. For several years I lived in London and rode a motorbike (by far the best way of getting around the city) but all I could think about when I rode my bike was, ‘Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die’, so I’m in awe of the confidence needed to also use this time for useful thinking! There are many, many other examples of times a ‘Thinking List’ comes in handy: at airports, in queues, when driving, while attending functions you don’t really care about, or watching films your partner wanted to see but you hate (do it subtly though!), and many more. A great tip is to keep this list synchronized to your phone. Since you always have your phone with you, the list is always there when you find an opportunity arises. Again, you need to be prepared for this to work!

COFFEE & CONVERSATIONS

We’re about to move on and look at the dreaded medium of email, so think about all those internal emails that fly around the office from people who sit just a few desks away. While the kettle is being boiled or the coffee made, use this time to have quick conversations in reply to some of those emails. Before you get up to make a drink, do a quick scan of your email inbox, picking out two or three potential targets. Then, your goal is to hunt them down between now and when you sit back down with your hot beverage. Make it a game! Particularly focus on the conversations that are so much more easily done in person than on email, which will save you a bucketful of time later on. Sometimes a useful way to decide this is to think about which emails might lead you to reply with a series of questions – usually in a two-way conversation, the number of questions you need to answer is seriously reduced.