A MAD Productivity Day

Happy new 2012.

If you’re like me you have started the new year feeling hopeful, excited, refreshed and ready to grow, I mean both you and your business.  Though we might supposedly not enjoy change, we all love a  clean start, a fresh page, a new leaf to turn over again.

So I’ve raced into action already in week 1 and worked hard each day while mindful that the house is in need of some TLC, my website is crying out for attention and as for my marketing, hmm, don’t go there.  Seems that no matter how hard I work, though, come Friday evening I still have 101 tasks I’d really like to tackle.

Great news then to receive an email from Jurgen Wolff earlier in the week about the Productivity Day he is running today for a whopping 15 hours, to encompass the time zones of his participants all over the world from Bangladesh to New York.  Jurgen must be sitting somewhere in London right now since we started at 9am UK.  Suits me fine.

So What’s a Productivity Day?

But some of you will be asking what a productivity day actually is and how it differs from any other full-on day.  The idea is that every hour on the hour we all have a chance to set a goal for the next 60 minutes and share it in a chat window on Jurgen’s website.  The goal is up to us.  Work, home, writing scripts, decluttering, editing a book, plotting a novel, making banana cake, ok, made that one up but really, anything goes just as long as you are setting forth with gusto to achieve as much as you can within the time frame.

There is something about knowing you have some accountability to others for getting the job done, and it’s good to know there are others all over the world setting themselves similar challenges.  Knowing that I’ve an hour to complete the task helps me stay focused, stay sharp and keep the energy high.

Some people have come with just one task for the day – like completing an ebook, and each hour they can set themselves a mini-goal within that topic.  Others, like me, have got a whole list of things to do, a mixture of personal and work, and I’ve decided to alternate an hour of practical stuff with an hour of more cerebral activity, thus keeping myself on the ball physically and mentally and hoping to see some progress in a variety of areas, from setting up some new spreadsheets, clearing out under the stairs, writing, creating my marketing plan and so forth.

I also contemplated tackling just one bigger project today, completing my new freebie for list subscribers but felt that if I got stuck on a section, I’d end up feeling frustrated at how little I’d achieved.

At the top of each hour, Jurgen is coming through to us on video to give us tips, tell us a little story and keep encouraging us with what we’re up to.  His first tip this morning at 9am was to put our inner critic to bed for the day.  By the sound of my last comment, imagining the frustration of failure, my inner critic has crept down the stairs and is sitting on my knee.

Key Components of a Productivity Day

So in summary, the key components of a productivity day are:

• A time frame.  Jurgen’s is a long 15 hours but you could equally well do this for just a morning.

• Other people.  This sort of day is much more fun to do with other people but it could equally be two of you rather than a big international group like Jurgen’s.

A structure.  Doesn’t necessarily need to include Jurgen’s tips and stories but commit to stopping at the top of each hour to re-group, celebrate achievements and commit to the next hour’s activity.

Have you been involved in a productivity day or run one yourself? How useful did you find it? You don’t have to be a lazy procrastinator to be involved (though it helps, ha ha). No, for some of us it’s simply an opportunity to get through a task that has been hanging around just a bit longer than we intended. Or to put a satisfying number of ticks against that mega-long action list.

Jurgen runs his productivity days every second month and calls them Massive Action Days, click the image below to find out more.

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