Weekly Round-Up #20 – Sleeping well, compressed books and increasing your productivity
Another week over, and another weekend to look forward to! In this Weekly Round Up we look at better sleeping habits, how to be more productive and a new condensed form of book in video form so you have no excuse for not “reading it”.
Happy Friday! Hasn’t time flown and Yes, it’s already 32 weeks to Christmas half way through May. With time moving so quickly it’s amazing we can fit it all in but somehow we do. Anyway on to this week’s Weekly round-up. My apologies for the lack of a post on Wednesday but I followed my own “4th P To Personal Happiness” and gave myself the night off as I’ve been busy doing a “proper job” (as my Dad calls it) and on top of that moving around a load of charity websites I help run which has been rather time consuming. But enough with the excuses, this hasn’t stopped me peering into the productivity stuff on the Internet for you and coming up with some interesting posts I hope you’ll enjoy reading whilst you (hopefully) relax over the weekend.
The Book Distillery – 30 Seconds Mail
The guys from 30 Seconds Mail approached me a couple of days ago and asked me to take a look at their new YouTube channel. Called the “Book Distillery” they aim to pick a management or productivity book and distill it down into a maximum of 5 minutes so that you can easily understand the concept. The first video is “Zero to One – by Peter Thiel” and is well worth a watch. I’ve subscribed, you should too!
Digital recipe organizing solutions to love – Unclutterer
I’ve just started making a lot of homemade stuff recently (you can see some of my efforts on Instagram mine are all the good looking items unhealthy things – if you want to you can follow me on Instagram to see random food and animal photos too!)… anyway I’ve massively digressed there! I use Pinterest to flag ideas that I like the look of and Evernote for recipes I want to make (their tagging is what make its stand out from Pinterest). Recipes I actually make get put into my nice Moleskine Journal but if you’re all digital then this post may interest you.
20 Awesome Productivity Tricks Anyone Can Use – INC
Some of these may be obvious but some may make you stop and think such as making temptation hard to reach (hiding the T.V remote upstairs? Borderline genius/sadist)
The Joy of Less: A Systematic Approach to Minimalist Living – Lifehacker
This book review of Francine Jay’s new book “The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide” (affiliate link) gives an overview of how you can clear out some of your junk and make your living place a happier and more productive one. I’ve had a bit of a “de-clutter” head on at the moment and this book is certainly one I’ve added to my “to read” list.
How to Hack Your Calendar and Create More Time in Your Day – INC
I’m not sure if I agree with this post, the author seems to only have a few minutes spare in their day with everything else regimentally put in their calendar. Maybe I read it wrong but I think we need a certain amount of flexibility in our days to enable us to be spontaneous.
The Science Of Good Sleep: There’s A Reason You’re Always So Tired – Elite Daily
This is a really interesting article. I’ve written in the past about Whether you can get up in the morning easier but I didn’t realise how much of it was tied into the amount of sleep we need rather than the amount of sleep we have and type of alarm we set. I’ve gone recently from getting a solid 12 hours of sleep a day to a dodgy 5 hours of sleep a day (still feeling okay), with extra on the weekends so perhaps that sneaky extra lie in on a Saturday is helping after all, although some sleep proponents recommend keeping the same schedule all week long. What do you think? Should we stick to the same sleep patterns or just go with what feels natural? Let me know in the comments.
How To: Sleep better at night – A Pair & A Spare
There are a few good hints here, especially about making your space conducive to sleep and wearing the right clothes (if you wear them that is!) One thing that I’ve found that’s helped me greatly is an eye mask. Even though I have a light-cancelling blind, when the window is open light creeps in and can disrupt my sleeping pattern. An eye mask ensures I stay awake until my alarm goes off or one of my cats comes in and punches me in the face for attention!
11 Tricks to Increase Your Productivity – PCMag
There are some useful hints here and, surprisingly for a Computer Website they’re not all tech based but their idea of time tracking is a good one. I use TimeStats Chrome Extension which gives a nice breakdown of websites I spend my time on – I only spent 5.6% of my time on Facebook yesterday, Go Me!
Have A Great Weekend
I hope you find it refreshing and relaxing and I’ll see you on Monday with some interesting (I hope!) website updates!
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