ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

Latest Episodes:

ProdPod: Episode 92--Rewarding Yourself for Productive Habit Development and Reaching Goals Nov 03, 2015

Show notes

One of the most unproductive outcomes of the last century’s shift from the Industrial Age to knowledge work in the Digital Age has been the loss of seeing the fruits of our labor firsthand. In the Industrial Age, Americans made things and saw them come to life. There’s an inherent satisfaction in creating products that come off an assembly line. Contrast that to our daily lives in the Knowledge Worker Age, and you may start to notice this missing element in your life. And, I think an example of a cultural response to this lack of tangible outcomes is the Maker Movement. People need extrinsic as well as intrinsic motivations. And, while not a perfect solution, I have found that establishing a tiered reward system for completing mundane tasks, habit development and reaching big goals in a Digital Age society increases productive output by pairing difficult-to-achieve outcomes with physical rewards. Read the full blog and listen to the podcast here.

ProdPod: Episode 91 -- What Do You Own? Aug 06, 2015

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Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all your worldly possessions in one day? I have. It’s a life-changing event, even for someone not too attached to material things, to find out it’s all been burned away, water-damaged or otherwise destroyed in a catastrophic event. Other than the insurance covering my personal property providing little emotional relief for lost baby pictures and irreplaceable artwork, I had one piece of solace--my home inventory. Before or if calamity strikes, you too should have a home inventory. Read full post and listen.

ProdPod: Episode 90 -- Biology, Self-Actualization and Your Productivity Mar 31, 2015

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When the idea of self-actualization developed in the mid-20th century, far before the field of positive psychology was fostered by Dr. Martin Seligman, there was a desire to study and cure illness, mental and physical. Dr. Abraham Maslow tried something different; he studied the role model, the talented and the ingenious. By doing so, he hoped to unlock how we all could do more, better. He developed the hierarchy of needs (which most know by the pyramid with our biological needs at its base and self-actualization at its zenith), and expounded the theory of motivation starting in 1938 and in his 1954 publishing of Motivation and Personality. I’ve always found criticism of Maslow’s pyramid’s order as constructively lacking, but I thought it would be good in this episode I’d like to discuss my thoughts on how you might look at the pyramid through a different lens for greater productivity. Read more.

ProdPod: Episode 89 -- Multi-Sensory Productivity Mar 24, 2015

Show notes

Humans have five common senses. (We actually have several more senses not commonly discussed.) Your sense of touch is mostly dedicated to your largest organ, your skin, comprising 22 square feet (or, 2 square meters), which holds millions of touch receptors of various sensitivity to map your physical surroundings. Your five fingers on each hand alone contain 3,000 touch receptors of the highest sensitivity on each finger tip. Then, there’s your sense of sight, which is the reigning champion of information collection for the brain, provided for by your eyes’s millions of light-sensitive cells. Next up, we have our hearing from our ears and second-most valuable information-gatherer. Finally we have smell and sound caught by our noses’ six million receptors and our tongues’ 10,000 taste buds. Altogether we have a sensory experience unrivaled by any other animal on the planet because of our remarkably curious neurocognitive abilities. Thanks to this, I think we should pay more attention to how we can be more productive in multisensory ways. I’d like to provide the benefits and some examples in this episode. Read more.

ProdPod: Episode 88 -- Defining Happiness Jan 08, 2015

Show notes

As I’ve written about before, “happiness” is a terrible word to me. It’s my version of a four-letter word in regard to positive psychology and personal productivity. And yet, we continue to keep using it; I’m guilty of it as well from time to time. While it seems like a universal term, it’s actually a rather confusing word. If the purpose of communication is to convey information clearly to another, why circumvent the process with vagaries? Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who I’ve written about before, agrees with me in his famous TED talk, “Riddle of Remembering and Experiencing Self.” What does it mean when you say you’re happy? And, to what degree? Difficult to interpret, right?
Read full post here.

ProdPod: Episode 87 -- Two-Minute Book Summary: The First 20 Hours Oct 26, 2014

Show notes

Learning, in the way that humans can, is one of the fundamental ways that set us apart from all other species on Earth. Skills acquisition is one of those kinds of learning that we do really well, and many of us want to do more of, better and faster. I’m one of those people, and when I picked up The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast by Josh Kaufman, I was skeptical. However, he outlines successfully a 10-step process for rapid skill acquisition and I think he’s onto something potent. Here are the principles of the book.

ProdPod: Episode 86 -- The Kaizen Way: What Are the Elements of Kaizen? with Sally Reinholdt (Part 2 of 2) Oct 01, 2014

Show notes

Welcome to Episode 86 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt here for Part 2 of our discussion of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by psychologist [ http://amzn.to/1lKpijP ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. We’ll be covering the elements of Kaizen. Sally, take it away.
Read full transcript.

ProdPod: Episode 85 — The Kaizen Way: What is the Kaizen Way? with Sally Reinholdt (Part 1 of 2) Oct 01, 2014

Show notes

Welcome to Episode 85 of ProdPod, the podcast of productivity lessons in two minutes or less. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I have Professional Organizer Sally Reinholdt back on ProdPod to tell us about One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by psychologist [ http://amzn.to/1lKpijP ], by Dr. Robert Maurer. So, Sally, what is The Kaizen Way?
Read full transcript.

ProdPod: Episode 84 -- Two-Minute Book Summary: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor Aug 31, 2014

Show notes

I first became aware of Shawn Achor as the funny, charismatic presenter of the popular TEDxBloomington Talk, "The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance.” And, subsequently, I came to know his eponymous book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. His book’s premise is, I quote,

Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra.

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