Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD

Blog Archives

Beat Procrastination Habits With A Three-step Intervention

Do you want to give your productivity a boost? This three-step intervention can help you diagnose and beat some of your most persistent procrastination habits.

Beat Procrastination Habits: Three Step Intervention

Step 1 – Assessment: Diagnose the Problems

Each person is different. What triggers your procrastination?

Procrastination is at its worst when we’re not aware of it. The first step in this intervention is therefore to increase your awareness of what’s tripping you up. You’ll want to get as much insight into yourself as possible, recognizing any problematic habits, or any patterns in your thoughts and behaviors that are getting in your way.

With that goal, keep a productivity journal to collect some data about yourself. You can download a template here and print it out.

Here is how it works: the night before your workday, write a to-do list and a schedule for the following day.

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Common procrastination triggers and fixes

What are some of the most common procrastination triggers? Finding out why you procrastinate will help you tackle each problem one by one.

Summer Reading List 2018

New Summer Readings: Books on Decision Making and Goal Achievement Another hopefully long and beautiful summer is coming up, and my intention is to spend a lot of it productively: reading. Preferably in a hammock. If you feel the same, here comes my new list of book recommendations about decision-making and goal achievement.

Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler (2017). Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. I’ve always enjoyed Dan Ariely’s self-deprecating sense of humor, and in this collaboration he found a great match in Jeff Kreisler. Even though I was familiar with most of the concepts they discuss, this book not only kept me entertained, but also highlighted very clearly (and sometimes painfully) the irrationalities around money that I still allow into my life. Read a sample here.

Chris Guillebeau (2017). Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.

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Employee Coaching ROI: Is It Worth It?

What is the return on investment (ROI) of employee coaching for an organization?

Offering coaching for employees – especially at the executive level – has become a widespread management tool. Companies often hire coaches with the goal to improve performance and develop talents, but also to keep high-performing people within an organization.

However, coaching is an expensive intervention: aside from the fees of the coach, there’s also the opportunity cost of the employee’s time spent with the coach during working hours. Therefore, companies who are paying for coaching for their employees will want to know whether it is a good investment. Does it improve the company’s bottom line enough to be worth the cost?

A look at the evidence

What effects does coaching have? I put together a selection of research articles investigating this question, including all the meta-analyses I could find that have been conducted in the past two decades.

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Workshop: Job Stress Management

Wednesday August 16, 11am-1pm (Portland, OR).

Is your job causing you a lot of unhealthy stress? In my last post, I wrote about the “Sort and Tackle” Technique, and how and why it can improve your stress levels at work. You can now give this technique a try in a guided setting and start sorting out and tackling some of your own biggest challenges at work. In this interactive workshop, I’ll help you prioritize which stressors to tackle first, and design a plan with specific next steps. Find more information and register here.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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How to Manage Stress at Work

If your job is causing you a lot of stress, you’re not alone. In a 2014 survey in the US, almost a third (31%) of the workers reported that they typically feel tense or stressed out during the work day. This number is even higher among millenials (18-34 year old workers) than among any of the older generations.

What are the most common causes for stress at work?

So many issues can cause stress at work. The survey lists the following, with the most commonly experienced stressors on top:

Low salaries
Lack of opportunity for growth and development
Uncertain or undefined job expectations
Job insecurity
Long hours
Too heavy of a workload
Unrealistic job expectations
Work interfering during personal or family time
Lack of participation in decision making
Inflexible hours
Problems with my supervisor
Commuting
Physical illnesses and ailments
Problems with my co-workers
Unpleasant or dangerous physical conditions
Personal life interfering during work hours

Does any of this sound familiar when you think or your own job?

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Summer Reading List 2017

My latest picks: (mostly) recent books about decision making and goal achievement.

The promise of a long summer ahead makes me very happy, and so does the knowledge that no matter how much I read, there will always be books out there that I haven’t read yet, as well as books I want to re-read. So, while the truth is that I spend a lot of time reading all year round, not just during the summer, I love the idea of a special “summer reading” list – maybe just because I love seeing two of my favorite words so close together.
So here’s my latest list of book recommendations. Most of these came out within the last year, and all except the last are non-fiction. That last one is very much fiction indeed – a special treat. It’s on my treasured list of books that I’ve read many times,

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Binge Working and Procrastination

Thanks to all of you who shared your experiences and thoughts about binge working and procrastination! Your insights have given me food for thought and an opportunity to make an addition to my hamster-wheel image. It now includes an additional stage: what one of my readers called the “tidal wave of joy and relief when you finish the thing and it is a success!”

Binge Working and Procrastination - Revised

It is clear though that there are many individual differences as to how people experience binge working. The figure only shows one type of a particularly stable loop of reinforcement.

For some people, for example, bouts of binge working are very positive and productive experiences, without any of the ill effects shown in the image. For them, intense phases of working around the clock are simply a temporary effort for special projects. Rather than leading to exhaustion and burnout,

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Binge Working and Procrastination: Your Experience

Last-minute stress and binge working will improve your future procrastination as much as a hangover will improve your drinking habits.

At least that’s my hypotheses.

Guilt, Binge Working and Procrastination

Or what do you think? I’d love to hear about your experience. Do you sometimes work in somewhat excessive “binges”, for example through the night or throughout a weekend? If so, is this productive for you in the long run, or does it lead to the vicious circle in the image?

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Am I a Procrastinator?

Am I a procrastinator? “I know that I am a procrastinator, but taking this survey made me realize just how bad it is!”
– One of my students.

Clarry Lay, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto created the “General Procrastination Scale” as a research tool. While it is not intended for diagnosis, you can still get a general sense of your tendency to procrastinate across a pretty wide a range of situations.

In the interactive form below, you can simply move the sliders around and see your total score at the bottom. The total will be updated as you go along. A lower total score mean less procrastination, from 1, which would mean you don’t procrastinate at all in any of those situations, to 10, which would mean you procrastinate at every opportunity. Only the overall score at the bottom matters,

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New Productivity Coaching Group

Time is our most precious resource – are you getting the most out of yours? Or are you ready for a change?

My next productivity coaching group will come in a new format, starting with one-on-one sessions and an in-depth assessment before the group meetings.

It is a 3-month package that includes:

Two individual coaching sessions of 50 min each and an initial in-depth assessment of your goals, your individual style, your situation, and your personality along the Five Factor Model (FFM). A part of the assessment will happen during our sessions together, and a part of it will be homework for you in between our meetings.
A copy of the workbook: “Increasing Personal Productivity in Healthy and Sustainable Ways” by Ursina Teuscher.

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Productivity Wallpaper

Organize Your Desktop Strategically with this Productivity Wallpaper

Loosely inspired by Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle, I designed a Productivity Wallpaper that you can download here as a template. It is a customized desktop background that helps you stay focused by organizing your tasks in a spatial layout.

The idea is that it gives you room to arrange your documents, folders or apps according to when you want to use them:

In the upper left quadrant of the screen, you would place stuff you need for your most important tasks. By important, I mean tasks that you truly care about, that have long-term significance, and that make your life more meaningful. Typically, those are bigger projects, often without a deadline (because they matter to YOU, more than to other people). They are therefore most in danger of being infringed upon by other people’s more urgent demands.

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Featured Video: Raise Your Children As Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial skills are not a part of traditional education, even though they are important if we want to empower more people to make an independent living in a world where not everyone can find a good job.

In this TED talk, Cameron Herald argues that we should encourage and foster those skills in children. He makes a case that entrepreneurial traits occur quite naturally in children and can be encouraged and reinforced in playful ways. He gives many practical suggestions how parents can help their children develop those skills. For example, rather than giving children allowances and thereby getting them used to expecting a regular paycheck, children could be paid for specific projects.

Many important traits could be developed in that way, including such big ones as creativity, social skills, a proactive attitude towards working, and an understanding of what it means to create value for others.

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Do Reading and Writing Make you More Creative?

A study by Amber Y. Wang gives us reason to think so: students who spent more time reading and writing performed better on creativity tests.

The study only investigated the correlations however, so it can’t tell us what’s cause and what’s effect. Reading and writing might indeed lead to more creativity, but it’s also possible that creative people naturally feel more drawn to reading and writing, or that other factors influence all of it together: reading, writing and creativity.

What we can say in any case is that both reading and writing are related to creativity.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

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Book Recommendation: How To Write A Lot

Paul J. Silvia (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing.

Paul Silvia makes a strong case for scheduling in his book “How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing“.
It has been one of the most influential books for my own writing practice, and I often find myself mentioning gems of practical wisdom from this book in my own workshops and coaching sessions.

The book focuses on academic writing, but a lot of its advice applies to anybody who has a hard time working towards goals that are important in the long run, but not urgent on any particular day. Writing is just a really good example of such a goal.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling,

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Book Recommendations: How To Organize Both Space and Time

If you’re up for some serious spring cleaning of not only your home or work space, but also your schedule, Julie Morgenstern has written two books that can help:

1. Organizing from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System For Organizing Your Home, Your Office and Your Life.

2. Time Management from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System for Taking Control of Your Schedule — and Your Life.

She applies the following three basic steps to organizing both space and time:

Analyze
Strategize
Attack

There are of course fundamental parallels between the two domains of space and time. The most important for practical purposes is maybe that the two skill sets — maintaining a well-organized space on one hand,

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Book Recommendation: Willpower

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This book is a collaboration of the psychologist and researcher Roy Baumeister with New York Times science writer John Tierney. Together, they created the kind of book I really love. It offers very practical advice, based on a lot of research. It provides very helpful insight into how we can increase our self-control, focus our strength, and better resist temptation. It is easy to read, but not dumbed down, nor diluted with unnecessary stories.

For those who are in money-saving mode after the holidays, you’ll most likely find this one in your local library. Ours (Multnomah County) even has the e-book for mobile devices, so you can borrow it from wherever you are. What I love most about those library e-books is that they return themselves –

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Featured Video: Baumeister on Self-Control

Here’s a great talk by Roy Baumeister about all the cool research he and others have done on self-control:

Self-control seems to be one of only two human traits that can predict success through a broad range of situations. The other one is IQ. But the good news about self-control is that we can train it, even as grown-ups, while IQ is much harder to increase. (Only recently have attempts to increase people’s fluid intelligence shown some success, but the effects are small, not very robust, and very hard-earned.)

One of the intriguing findings that Baumeister mentions in his talk: effective self-controllers actually show LESS frequent resistance towards desires, less guilt, and lower life stress. Instead, it looks like they have more proactive coping mechanisms, which set in before the desires even show up. In other words, they have learned to avert crises in advance and therefore have to cope with them less.

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Infographic: Increase Your Productivity Without Burning Out

Here is a two-sided infographic. Together, the two pages give you a visual summary of my workbook: “Increasing Productivity in Healthy and Sustainable Ways”.

The first page provides an overview of important neurological and psychological findings. Based on those, I suggest best practices grouped along five broad principles.

The second page presents a framework for assessing your own work-habits, trouble-shooting your problems, and developing new habits.

Find more information about the workbook here, or on Amazon, where you can look inside, read a sample, and see reviews. You can also order the workbook directly from the publisher on Createspace.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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tDCS: Brain-Zapping for Creativity and Focus

Fun Stuff Brought To Us By Mad Scientists

A recent study found that participants were performing better than usual in a creative task when they received electric stimulation of the brain.
The method is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and this particular treatment was set up to increase activity in the right hemisphere, while diminishing activity
in a part of the left hemisphere involved with sensory input, memory, and language.

If you’re intrigued – or alarmed – by the idea of sending electric current through your brain, I recommend this Radiolab episode:

It does a great job explaining how tDCS works, including interviews with participants, researchers, and other neuroscientists who might have a more skeptical view of this method.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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