There’s something about this time of year.

I don’t know if it’s the dark mornings, the grey days or the cold evenings but I just want to stay in bed and hibernate until spring!

This time last year I completely lost my work ‘mojo’. Getting out of bed each day was a struggle. Working alone at home, the days blurred. Nothing interested me and nothing motivated me. This year I joined Club Workspace in Clerkenwell to get out of the house now and again to see this would help. And it has to an extent, but those creeping feelings are still there. I think I’m just not a winter person.

When I have low energy and motivation, my carefully planned days can disintegrate into a blur of emails, reading blogs and faffing around the house. As Buddhist nun Pema Chodron rightly points out, “the mundane details of our life eat us up”.

Michael Nobbs from Sustainably Creative suffers from low energy and he has made a living helping others get their important work done especially if they suffer from low energy. He wrote that in the early days of his ME, some days he could only do 20 minutes of work before stopping for the day and that having only one thing on his to-do list is OK.

Like Michael, on these kind of days, I try to be compassionate with myself and ask, “what is the most important thing?” and focus on that. Even if I only get one important thing done that day, that’s still a good day.

If I am having a wonderfully productive day, I still stop now and again and ask myself, “what is the most important thing?”. What is the action that is going to lead me closer to my vision and my goals? Am I being productive or just active? Is what I am working on important, and if not, why am I doing it?

This is something that I teach in week 3 of my Mindful Productivity eClass (new class starts on 24 February). Our time, attention and energy are finite but the amount of things we could do are infinite, Therefore we have to make some hard choices.

Eric Klein in his free ebook 50 Ways to Leave Your Karma has some great advice on how to decide what to do. He quotes the poet Mary Oliver who says:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

To which, he adds —“And what is a simple, direct choice that will move you in that direction?”

Now, go do that.

This blog post is part of The Business Yogi – inspiration and thoughts for business based on the philosophy, principles and practices of yoga. The book, co-authored by Bridget Stacey-Luff from An Urban Om is due to be published this spring.

His advice was simple: choose the work which is going to maximise your results (the 80/20 rule) and do it in the shortest time possible by setting yourself impossible deadlines (Parkinson’s Law).

I was hooked.

Since then my journey towards being a productivity ninja has seen me try to implement David Allen’s GTD system, experimenting with kitchen timers in the Pomodoro Technique, and spend a lot of time in Paperchase buying new pens, planners and folders. Productivity blogs Zen Habits, Productive Flourishing and The 99 Percent were my constant travelling companions with their no nonsense advice and handy tips.

As I delved more into the psychology of why we work the way we do, books such as Your Brain at Work, Making Ideas Happen and Do More Great Work were dissected and poured over.

As my yoga, meditation and mindfulness practices deepened over the past two years books from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Dr. Srikumar S. Rao and Pema Chodron made an appearance on my bed-stand and many of these ideas have influenced the thinking behind my new book The Business Yogi (to be published in March).

And so after three years of reading, research and practice, I have come to the conclusion that getting stuff done at work is a simple formula:

RW/PP x EA - (B+D) = MP

Let me break that down for you:

Identify what work you need to be working on to make an impact (Right Work). Devise a trusted system that suits you (not one imposed by someone else) to Plan and Prioritise your work. Learn how your brain and body function so you can work with your Energy and Attention rather then against them. And reduce Busywork and Distractions to a minimum.

That’s Mindful Productivity. Simple right?

RW/PP x EA - (B+D) = MP

If you want to make 2012 your most productive year yet and make real impact with your work, then sign up for my Mindful Productivity live eClass starting on Friday 24 February.

Over six weeks, we will be breaking down the Mindful Productivity formula and putting in place simple actions and habits so you can get your Right Work done and regain balance in your working life.

If you would like to be one of the first to hear about the programme when it opens on 1 February, then do sign up for my mailing list.

January is a time of review and planning, of looking forward and making goals and resolutions for the coming year.

But sometimes as well as defining what we are going to do in our business and life, it’s essential to identify those things we are going to stop. I was inspired to put together my own To Stop List after I read an article in the Harvard Business Review where the author shared 5 things to stop doing in 2012. Soon after Michael Nobbs from Sustainably Creative asked in his member’s forum what were people’s resolutions and plans for the New Year. I shared my idea of a To Stop List and it generated a really interesting debate.

I wanted to share my To Stop List with you today and invite to create your own.

1. Using Twitter as a work/people avoidance tactic.

Safe to say I have been a bit of a Twitter addict in the past. I find it a great way to keep up to date with what’s happening in my areas of interest and find it a good way to keep in contact with people as well. But Twitter can be very addictive. It shares some characteristics with email in that it has what is called uneven rewards – we never know if there is something exciting waiting for us.

With the Retweet button it has become so easy to share information but this is adding to all the noise on the social web. I have always been mindful of thinking before I hit Tweet but this year I have been practicing waiting that second more and considering whether this piece of information is really valuable to my followers.

Blogger Alexandra Samuel calls Twitter ‘a tiny gym for the brain’ so I will be exercising my Twitter muscles this year! Read her Social Sanity Manifesto for 2012 if want to get your social media habit under control.

2. Agreeing to ‘coffees’ with people with no clear agenda or business objective.

One of the great things about working and living in Lisbon for five weeks recently was that the requests for meeting for coffee just stop or have to be declined. Meeting for a coffee with a work acquaintance may seem like an innocuous and fun thing to do but a coffee can take a good three hours out of my day with travel time. My goal for the year is only to agree to meet for a coffee if there is a clear business objective i.e. potential client or collaborator.

Another tactic I am trying is saying yes more slowly i.e. ignore the request first time around, then postpone it, then ignore it again. Usually I find that if I don’t want to say yes straight away to a request then two weeks later it becomes easier to say no.

3. Subscribing to/reading email newsletters.

Ah, my nemesis. Like Twitter I find email newsletters a good way of keeping up to date but at times I feel myself being overwhelmed by the amount of email I get. Since the beginning of the New Year I have been actively taking the time (instead of just deleting) newsletters that I feel are no longer providing value for me. I have unsubscribed from some bloggers updates that I have been following for years but their voice no longer resonates with where I am. Most email newsletters have a one click unsubscribe button but if they don’t I have been setting up delete filters in my Gmail to remove them from my Inbox forever.

Does this sound familiar? Have a look through your Inbox today and see what you can get rid of.

4. Doing work for free.

Being a digital coach I get asked a LOT of digital questions. Mainly it’s requests by email but sometimes it’s a request to ‘pick my brain’ in person. I do believe in giving back and in helping others as much as you can – I wrote about this recently for The Business Yogi book (out in March) in the content of Karma Yoga – service without expecting any thing in return.

But when does free become a problem? I was fascinated to read Alexandra Samuel’s article on her blog about respecting the billable hour. She poses the question – would you ask someone for $500? OK, so I don’t bill out at $500/hour but the principle is sound. This year I will be thinking carefully about the requests for free advice while still helping those who need support through 8fold Social.

What’s on your To Stop List for 2012? Do share in the comments.

Chris Guillebeau has been blogging about his annual review process for the past four years. For one week in December he spends time looking back at what worked well and not so well during the year and puts in place tangible goals for the year ahead. You can read more about how he does this in his original blog post and also read the posts from this years annual review here.

For me this annual review is like the yogic idea of recalibration, getting our bodies and minds back into alignment and this is what I have been considering during my annual review. This is a great time of year to go back and examine what your core mission and values are and what you want to achieve with your business. As blogger Derek Sivers puts it, starting a business is an opportunity to create your own utopia for you and your customers.

So what’s the utopia that I am trying to create for myself and my customers?

I think it can be summed up like this: helping people work better.

Working better means mindful productivity, working smarter not longer; making smart digital choices that work for you.

Working better is creating flexible businesses allowing you to fulfil your work and life objectives and to design your business to suit your lifestyle.

Working better is recognising that all business can and should be social businesses, good for profit, good for people and good for planet.

These three themes are going to be at the forefront of my work this year. Here is a preview of what’s in store:

-Launching an online Mindful Productivity weekly class starting in February based around my year-long research and practice into integrating productivity, yoga and digital to find new ways of getting the important stuff done and getting our working lives back into balance.

-Hosting Mindful Productivity weekend retreats in the Spring and Autumn combining yoga, meditation and productivity training (and great food and company!)

-Continuing to offer my Digital Wellbeing 101 coaching packages to help individual clients make the most out of their digital life.

-Offering bespoke in-house training packages to organisations and companies on topics around productivity and the social web.

-Speaking at as many events as I can fit in!

-Running a new cohort of the Digital Assistant Academy, this time focussing on getting teenage mums back into work and experimenting with delivering some of the programme online.

-Using my three years of building online business models to develop a brand new programme to help my audience translate their ideas into successful lifestyle businesses. Watch this space for more details.

-The launch of my next book The Business Yogi: How the Science of Yoga can Help You Be More Happy, Healthy and Productive in the Spring.

How are you recalibrating for the New Year? What goals have you set yourself? Do share in the comments.

PS. All of this is a work in progress and I’d love to get your feedback on my new offerings. Do drop me a line and say hello.

“When the time is on you, start and the pressure will be off.”

Yogi Bhajan’s Sutras for the Aquarian Age

When I first sat down to write The Business Yogi book in August 2011, the words just would not come.

Knowing that August is normally a quiet month of work, I had designated the month to writing. I had visions of spending long mornings with endless cups of coffee writing instinctive prose, uninterrupted by the day to day minutiae of running a business. Afternoons would be spent in the park thinking in the sun.

Sometimes the Universe has other plans.

When I tried to write other things seemed infinitely more interesting. I found chores to do, emails to answer and unsolicited work to take. Anything except starting the book seemed to be of higher priority. Oh, and the weather was terrible!

It’s the same with our yoga practice. Sometimes we do anything not to get on the mat.

But a funny thing happens when we eventually drag ourselves onto the mat. With the pressure off, the practice flows.

It’s starting, and worse, thinking about starting, that’s the problem.

This time writing the book in Lisbon, I don’t have any preconceptions of how or when I am going to write, I just pick one or two ideas a day and just start each morning whether I feel like it or not. As Eric Klein explains in his free ebook 50 Ways to Leave Your Karma: Freedom, Fear and the Art of Getting Unstuck we can’t afford to wait until we feel like it. Because we may never feel like it.

With the new year upon us, it’s a good time to start thinking about those big projects that we never get around to. Do you have a project that you have been putting off for ages? Overthinking can lead to inaction. Stop thinking and start doing, something.

Here are some ideas to help get your teeth into a big project this month:

1. ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’

This is how to approach a big project. Break it down into smaller action steps. The idea of sitting down to ‘write a book’ is scary but writing 750 words on an idea each morning is doable. As Eric advises – don’t throw yourself off the cliff. Just take the next step, however tiny, to move you towards your goal.

2. Take the 20 minutes a day challenge.

This is an idea I borrowed from blogger and illustrator Michael Nobbs who suffers from low energy. This is the approach I took for writing my free ebook From Apps to Zen: 26+ Ideas for Building a Business with Balance. Publically commit to a big project (this step is important), work on your project without distraction for 20 minutes each morning, and then stop and reward yourself with a cuppa. Before you know it, you will have made significant progress.

3. Listen to your resistance.

If you are feeling an inner resistance to starting the project, then sit with that and ask yourself why. Sometimes we can resist starting something because an inner voice is telling us that it is the wrong project to be working on or that it is the wrong time. But do start and see what comes up. If it’s the right project, starting will take the pressure off.

4. Eat the frog first and the rest of the day will be easy.

Author Brian Tracy has written a whole book on how getting a task you are avoiding out of the way first thing, can make the rest of the day feel productive and easy by comparison. While I think this is a little simplistic, why not try to ‘eat that frog’? Maybe once you start the frog will taste good!

What big projects are your thinking of tackling this year? How are you going to move this project forward? Do share them with me in the comments.

This blog post is part of The Business Yogi series – inspiration and thoughts for business based on the philosophy, principles and practices of yoga. The book of the same name is due to be published this spring.

After a fruitful and enjoyable month long stay at The Hub in Amsterdam last winter, I decided to try and make it a practice to get out of London and go live and work in a new city each December/January. I left a freezing cold London two days ago to travel to Lisbon for a five week sojourn at Coworking Lisboa.

I came to Lisbon a few years ago for a long weekend when I lived in Spain and fell in love with the light, the people and the custard tarts (there is one on my desk as I write). I have wanted to come back ever since and as work is quiet during December and the beginning of January, it seemed like the perfect time to visit again.

Getting out of London and living and working in different countries is a core part of my vision for my work and life and I would heartily recommend that everyone gives it a go. All you need is a laptop, internet connection and a place to work.

Here are some thoughts on the benefits of taking your computer and going working abroad:

1. It gives you the physical and head space to work on a big project.

My project that I tackled in Amsterdam was researching material around mindfulness at work. This year I am writing my new book The Business Yogi: How the Science of Yoga Can Help You Be More Productive, Happy and Healthy at Work, which takes ideas around the practice and philosophy of yoga and applies them to modern business and the workplace. I actually had allocated time in August this year (another quiet period) to write the book but for whatever reason, I couldn’t summon the creative juices then. I sat down yesterday to write and the words just flowed. Getting your of your normal routine can do wonders for your creativity!

2. You are working but not really available.

When you are away you can’t have meetings, the request for random coffees stop, and your email inbox slows to a trickle. Without all these interruptions and calls on your time, you can get an enormous amount of work done.

3. You can work more according to your energy patterns and feelings instead of pre-planning your time.

Being a bit of a productivity geek, in London I tend to plan and prioritise my time quite strictly. When I am away I tend to kill the to-do list and instead work on what I feel like working on that hour or day.

4. You can foster new collaborations and opportunities.

Being in a coworking space means that I have access to a whole new set of people and businesses and already opportunities for collaborations are emerging here in Lisbon.

5. It’s good personal development stuff.

Seth Godin says “seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia”. Going to live and work in a new country, even if only for a short time, is scary stuff. You leave the comfort of your family, your friends and your language for somewhere new. Yes, it’s scary and you have to really put yourself out there and try to make friends. Sunday afternoons are always the worst as everyone seems to be with others except for you. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and a little bit of loneliness now and again makes you grateful for what you have back home. You also find yourself really looking forward to going to work on Monday morning!

6. You can see how other cultures work and play.

I find this a fascinating part of working in another country. In the Netherlands, people tend to start work early at 8 or 9am but down tools bang on 5pm as they head home. Here in Lisbon we start later around 10 or 11am but work through until 6 or 7pm. Lunch at The Hub was taken communally round the kitchen table. Lunch here in Lisbon is an hour and a half affair at a local cafe or restaurant. I have already been taken to task for eating lunch at my desk – very unusual here! The Dutch spend time with family and friends with an early dinner and early bed. Lisbon workers head home to get changed and then might have dinner around 10 or 11pm before hitting the bars until 2am. And that’s on a school night!

Fancy giving this working abroad thing a go? Here are some top tips for making it an easier and enjoyable experience:

• Book yourself a desk at a coworking space. I know first hand how lonely it can be working from home so find a space where you can go to work everyday and meet new people. Pedro Santos, one of the members here at Coworking Lisboa, has developed a new platform called All Desk where you can search for a spare desk in cities around the world.
• Get involved in the space. If there are lunches or social occasions, go along. Offer to run a workshop or talk for the space members. If there is a space mailing list, introduce yourself and say what kind of people you would like to meet.
• Use AirBnB.com to find a room for your stay. Don’t stay in a soulless hotel, stay with a local so you get a real feel for how the locals live. I am staying in this gorgeous place in the Barrio Alto, one of the coolest places in Lisbon. Use AirBnB to also rent out your home while you are gone to cover your costs.
• Don’t make it all about work. Make the most of your stay in a new place. Spend evenings trying out local cuisine and entertainment and use the weekends to go exploring. Bunk off the odd afternoon to go for a trip out of town. Build some non-work time in as well (we are off to the Algarve for five days between Christmas and New Year).
• If you can, invite your partner along for part of your trip. I am lucky that Alex also works for himself and he was able to join me in Amsterdam and now Lisbon for part of my trip.
• Make the most of Skype. Unlike in London, here I am logged in to Skype all the time. When I see a friend online, I jump on for a chat. Keeping in contact with others back home can stop you getting lonely.

This is my last post until the New Year, and so from Lisbon, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

[image with thanks to ChrisYunker via CC]