Kingdom productivity

It has been a while since you heard about me. I am amazed about the tools there are online to help you with productivity and sharing information. Since I collaborate with people who are not always around it is just great to be able to work on projects together in a virtual space.

The week before Christmas I had to visit London again to meet up with some people from Apple. For those of you in London know what flying to London meant that week. Fog all over the place but little did I know when I left for the airport.

We were scheduled to fly at 13:50 hr from Amsterdam. When I arrived at Schiphol around noon I was told that my flight was cancelled but the kind lady suggested to book us on the 10:50 flight cause it was delayed and scheduled to depart around 15:00 hr at that time. But that changed quickly so without time to finish coffee we rushed to the gate. So we went on that plane together with around 200 upset people, they had waited for 4 hours. From our perspecive: we won 20 minutes cause the plane took off around 13:30 hr.

For about 2 years now I work from home every Wednesday. This has proven a very effective way of staying productive. This may sound weird but it is actually true. Every Tuesday I gather the stuff I want to do from home. And Thursday I return fresh and up to speed with all the input that has been thrown at me.

Since last summer I have added an extra new habit, every quarter I am going totally offsite for one day. This means no email, no phone. You won't find me at home, I am just going somewhere. Just to do higher level thinking about God, work and life.

Sometimes you don't see things that have been there all along. I remember one of our boys screaming because he couldn't find a toy that was right in front of him.

I was wondering why Word didn't have a simple way of opening the three,  four files you are currently working on. Well, on OSX in Word 2004 there is a Work menu item that does just this. Never saw it before, now I use it everyday!

I am enjoying a week off. The kids are free from school. During my weekreview last Friday I saw that my project and next actions lists are too long. But since I know everything that needs to be done is on my lists I can safely disconnect this week.

In my busy life with balancing time between family and a handful of big projects at work I try to read and study different aspects of productivity too.

One of my favourite subject these days is flow. How is it possible that sometimes time flies when you are working and sometimes it just doesn't seem to work out. I am reading articles and books on this subject for instance from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has written quite a deal about this subject. If I find new insights I will post them in short here. Comments on you experience with flow are welcomed!

I will share some of my news clippings on productivity I find on the Internet by sharing them from within Googlereader. To see it for yourself look here...

Googlereader

I wrote my last post almost two months ago. On the way back from another short trip to London last week I pondered on this.

Does the lack of blog items mean that I am no longer productive anymore? Or will writing more posts display my lack of productivity?

And even more, what is productivity? As you can imagine I got stuck so I wanted to ask you this: what's your description of productivity?