Fascinating New York Times blog post on exercising. Turns out perfectionism is a barrier to many people’s getting in shape.

Specifically:   

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous.” That’s textbook perfectionism: setting unachievable goals.

“I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don’t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit.” That’s three perfectionist symptoms right there: short term thinking, over-focus on product over process, and over-focus on external rewards.

The interviewee, Gretchen Reynolds, has just published a book “The First 20 Minutes,” the title referencing scientific data that shows that, if someone is out of shape, just 20 minutes of exercise can yield huge health benefits. Perfectionists may well be suspicious of this advice, however, because they tend to be suspicious of success when it comes too easily. They expect everything to be a hard struggle, and are caught off guard when something isn’t.

I’m not surprised that perfectionism is a barrier to fitness because if you’ve got perfectionist tendencies they’re probably going to crop up in many of your important endeavors.

The article reaches a nice compassionate conclusion:

“The human body is a really excellent coach. If you listen to it, it will tell you if you’re going hard enough, if you’re going too hard. If it starts to hurt, then you back off. It should just feel good, because we really are built to move, and not moving is so unnatural. Just move, because it really can be so easy, and it really can change your life.”

Listening to, and trusting, yourself – that’s the opposite of perfectionism.

This is a crucial topic because without rewards you’ll probably get miserable, run down, deprived, and then burn out… Read More.

Excerpts:

“The human brain handles negative and positive input differently, psychologists say, which is why memories of unpleasant experiences seem indelible…”

“If managers or bosses know this, then they should be acutely aware of the impact they have when they fail to recognize the importance to workers of making progress on meaningful work, criticize, take credit for their employees’ work, pass on negative information from on top without filtering and don’t listen when employees try to express grievances.”

Of course, many bosses/teachers/mentors/etc. who deliver harsh criticism are are all too likely to blame the recipients of their harshness for the consequent underproductivity.

Link

1. Specialize More

Invest as much of your time as possible in your “high value activities”: those that (1) are within your mission, (2) leverage your strengths, and (3) create impact or change. Doing so not only greatly increases your effectiveness, but reduces your busyness and stress. It also avoids overgiving, the Achilles heel of many talented, nice people.

In the professional realm this often means dropping out of projects and groups where your contribution is not vital, or where you’re not seeing much yield. In the personal realm it means not doing housework or running errands when you can find (or pay) others to do those things. Most successful people focus on a handful of key priorities–and if you’re worried that you’ll become an overspecialized nerd, don’t. Most people are way underspecialized, and so this will only be a corrective. (But check with your mentors to be sure.)

2. When Being Purposeful About Your Time, Also be Resilient in the Face of Criticism

When you pull out of projects, or stop running errands, you’re probably going to make someone, or multiple someones, unhappy. That’s great! I always tell people that they know they’re doing their time management right when people start complaining! This is true especially if you’ve got a history of overgiving.

“How come you can’t do this project any more?” and “You’re not as helpful as you used to be!” are signs you’re doing it right, as are, “Why don’t we have more home cooked meals?” “Why is the house such a mess?” and “You’re no fun any more!” To be clear, all of these could be legitimate concerns; however, the answer is not to perpetually subordinate your mission to others’, but to cooperatively problem-solve, a process by which you explain the problem (in this case, your time crunch) and how it’s affecting you, brainstorm with everyone majorly affected, and jointly craft the most acceptable solution. (No blame, shame, or guilt trips!) However, in some cases, you really do want to make a unilateral decision, and in those cases you’ll simply have to say you’re not available.

If anyone accuses you of being “selfish” for managing your time, remember that you’re not– you’re being purposeful. Hopefully, however, you’re hanging around a crowd that supports your efforts to succeed.

3. Send Fewer and Terser Emails

“Email overload” is one of the most common problems raised in my workshops and classes. It’s another overgiving problem with two extra wrinkles: (1) most of us get a ton of emails, and (2) because email combines the quickness and informality of spoken communication with the permanence and formality of written communication many of us are tempted to “overwork” our emails. If you get just twenty nonessential emails a day and spend just three minutes answering each, that’s an hour *every day* on this low-value activity. (Or: 365 hours a year, or more than nine 40-hour workweeks! Holy cow!) No good time manager would stand for that.

Some good techniques are to set your email program to automatically filter and sort, use email signatures, and unsubscribe from superfluous mailing lists. But as with most time management techniques, you’ve got to take things to the limit and go past your comfort zone to see the real benefit. Good time managers don’t reply to emails when replying is low-value or optional, and when they do reply, they often reply tersely–i.e., not, “Great, I’d love to get together on Saturday; how about 8, and how about if I bring dessert? What do you think of pie?” but “Sure, see you at 8 – pie OK?” The savings may seem trivial, but it quickly adds up. When you start sending fewer and terser emails, you might get pushback from people who say you’re being abrupt or even rude. In that case, refer back to Tip #2, above.

4. Be More Grateful

Gratitude, a.k.a., appreciation, is a topic I’m just beginning to explore, although many people have already gone deep into it. (It’s prominent in both religious thinking and addiction-recovery practices, for instance.) Most of us are taught that it’s the “nice” thing to do–which it is–but it’s also a practice of unique power and effectiveness.

First, feel gratitude for all the good things in your life and especially the people and animals in your life. (Heck, and the whole planet, too.) You’ll not only feel better, but more alive and attuned and connected. Also, be sure to feel gratitude for yourself, and all the things you are, and have done, and are capable of doing. If that feels weird, remember that dwelling on your perceived “negatives” and “failures” is not being objective, and it’s also not a corrective or motivator. It’s nothing but perfectionism and it will stall your progress. You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by seeing the glory in yourself and everything around you.

Next, express your gratitude, because gratitude isn’t fully real until expressed. Beyond the moral and psychological benefits of doing so, gratitude is also one of the strongest motivators around. When you thank someone for a favor or job well done–really thank them–you powerfully incent them to continue to assist you. (That’s why gratitude is a productivity technique!) In contrast, if you don’t express gratitude, that’s a powerful DEmotivator.

I’m constantly amazed at how many people don’t express thanks for meaningful favors or work done, or who do so only cursorily. (A quick verbal “thanks” is NOT sufficient; you need to follow up with a note. And it doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it does have to be specific to the occasion.) Gratitude is one of the highest return-on-investment (ROI) productivity techniques out there, so use it lavishly.

Most people, though, take too long to quit–and many take way too long.
One question to ask yourself: while you ponder or ruminate about the quit, are you inventing reasons for staying put, or reasons for leaving. If you’re expending a lot of energy trying to convince yourself to stay, that’s probably a sign you should go.

Excerpted from Gulati’s article:

You’ve been conditioned. Scientists know that the best way to train someone to perform a behavior is to reward them for doing so at random intervals….If you look closely enough, you’ll find that the corporate world is littered with hundreds of these variable reinforcement schedules.

Your losses are more visible than ever. Ubiquitous connectivity plus social media equals high virality. In other words, news now travels fast. So when your early-stage venture fails, your friends are going to know about it.

You suffer from premature optimization….This strong human bias toward accumulating small wins is what we call progress, but paradoxically, it seems to be inhibiting many individuals from reaching their true potential.

Personally I don’t think I’m prey to the first two, much–but then I read the third and I thought oy vey. Something to think about.

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Artist Corii Rowell, whom I met at Boskone, did this ubercute robot version of Barry Deutsch’s cartoon for my book cover!

I’m hearing from readers in the U.S., Canada, England, Poland, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere!

Read sample chapters here and buy from my shop here. $24.95 + s&h for paperback and ecopy bundle; $3.95 just for ecopy. Ecopy purchasers get a Zip file with 3 formats: MOBI (Kindle), ePUB (Nook, Reader), and PDF.

Regardless of where you bought your copy, if you would leave a review on the book’s Amazon page that would be great!

There are two main categories of disempowering forces: obstacles and triggers.

An obstacle is something that competes with your project for time or other resources, or that inhibits your ability to do your work. Distractions, conflicts, lack of resources, and lack of training or information are all obstacles.

Triggers are feelings that undermine your ability to do your work – fear and shame being the big two. In fact, these are most people’s major barriers to productivity, since, besides paralyzing you, they also obstruct problem solving. Once you help people overcome their fear and shame, they often speedily deal with their obstacles and get back to work.

The above analysis makes it clear why the two most common tactics for dealing with under-productivity – punishment and nagging – are inadequate.

Punishment includes actual or threatened punitive acts, and emotional punishment such as harshness or shaming. In any form, it increases one’s fear around one’s work, and therefore one’s disempowerment. It also increases one’s need to escape from one’s fears via procrastination. Other problems with punishment include: (1) we become habituated to it, so it eventually loses its power; (2) it at best achieves short-term compliance, and not the growth and capacity building that enables us to do our best; and (3) it’s fundamentally inhumane.

Nagging is what well-meaning bosses and colleagues often do instead of punishment. However, constantly asking someone, “How’s the work going?” is not only not helpful, it’s likely to backfire by adding to your colleague’s sense of fear around his or her project.

Here are some better techniques:

1) Ask if you can help. Better yet, suggest how you can help. Because underproductive people are often mired in shame and denial they will often brush off a non-focused request of assistance. But if you say, “How about if I handle the billing paperwork so you can focus on your blog post,” or, “How about if I handle the graphics while you focus on the text,” they might accept. At home, this strategy looks like, “Honey, why don’t you let me do the dishes and put the kids to bed so you can work on your project?”

2) Assist the person with problem solving, i.e., “Let’s make a list of what needs to get done,” or, “Let’s see whom else we can get to help with this project.”

3) Help them optimize their process. Many people who get struck on their writing or other projects lack an effective process. Ineffective writers, for instance, often think they’re supposed to start at the beginning of the piece and proceed linearly to the end, which is a recipe for a stall-out. Far better to do what nearly all professional writers do and work on whatever part of the piece (or whichever piece) seems most friendly, interesting and accessible at the moment. Then, when you feel the urge, simply switch over to another part. In this way you’ll cover the entire piece as quickly and easily as possible – in part because while you’re busy switching from easy part to easy part, you’re actually shedding light on, and “marinading,” the challenging parts so that they, too, eventually become easy.

Here’s the ultra-prolific Isaac Asimov – author or editor of more than 500 books and a voluminous correspondence – explaining how it works:

‘What if you get a writer’s block?’ That’s a favorite question. I say, ‘I don’t ever get one precisely because I switch from one task to another at will. If I’m tired of one project, I just switch to something else which, at the moment, interests me more’ (from his memoir In Joy Still Felt).

This and other optimized writing techniques will make your process not just way more productive, but way more fun.

4) Encourage them to look at their barriers. If someone can’t do their writing or other work, suggest they write about, or discuss, *why* they can’t. In other words, have them list their obstacles and triggers (most people come up with a list of two or three dozen). Remind them that people’s reasons for procrastinating are always valid. Always. Procrastination is simply a suboptimal response to those reasons.

Fortunately, many obstacles and triggers will be easily dealt with once they’re out in the open – and sometimes simply naming one is enough to defuse it. The rest can be split into the “moderately easy to deal with” and “hard to deal with” camps. Even with the latter, however, at least you’ll know what you’re up against and what you need to do, moving forward.

Everything I said above applies to your staff and colleagues, but obviously it also applies to yourself! High performers learn to manage their internal dialogues and their moment-by-moment relationship with their work so they can catch any punitive or nagging thoughts as – or even before – they occur. This takes a bit of time and practice, but the yield, not just in terms of increased productivity but increased joy in your work, is sublime.

Why indie publish? Well, let’s look at the alternative, what is now called legacy publishing. Here’s the process, in a nutshell:

Send dozens of letters to agents or editors, begging them to read your manuscript. Wait—for weeks, or months, or (no joke) sometimes years, hoping one or two respond with interest. If they do, send a book proposal and/or “partial” manuscript (3 chapters plus detailed outline), and wait some more. If you’re not rejected in this second round, then send your full manuscript in, and (you got it) wait some more. Maybe it will be accepted, or maybe they’ll ask you for some edits, in which case you do them and…wait some more.

And for many authors, “acceptance” is where the headaches really begin. Stories of books that were essentially sabotaged by publishers’ bad marketing and sales decisions are legion.

And all of the above for, in most cases, either no advance payment or a $5,000 – $10,000 advance—which sounds like a lot only until you consider it takes a year or more to write a book. And, after publication, most authors receive royalty payments amounting to a mere $1 or $2 per book sold.

Oh, and did I mention that you’ll wind up doing all, or nearly all, of the marketing and sales, including paying for your Website and perhaps your own book tour?

The above scenario is why, for many authors, the decision to indie publish is a no-brainer. Sure, it’s work, but it’s interesting work, and you have a shot at fair compensation for your efforts. However, there’s an arguably more important reason to indie publish. In my new (indie published!) book, The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: the Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer’s Block (Infinite Art, 2011), I discuss how procrastination, perfectionism, and blocks are NOT due to laziness, lack of willpower, lack of discipline, or other character flaws. They’re due to disempowerment, a condition in which you are separated from your strengths, skills, energy, etc. Remove the forces that disempower you—and “exploitative career paths” is a big one–and you can “automagically” reclaim your energy, willpower, discipline, etc.

So, indie publish to retain not just your profit, but your personal power and productivity.

The trick to successfully indie publishing is to treat it like the business it is. That makes it a great fit for entrepreneurial e-Junkie users! In the next article, I’ll give you some very specific and concrete tips that will help ensure that your indie-published book is a success, so stay tuned…

Here are some guidelines for doing it right:

Clarify your goals

If you want to indie publish for a hobby, or to create a memento for loved ones, then you can just cut loose and publish however you want and give or sell the copies to whomever you want. (Try lulu.com or iuniverse.com for paperbacks; Smashwords.com for ebooks.) But if you want to make serious coin from your writing then you need to produce a saleable product, and market and sell the heck out of it. All that requires investment. I’m a professional writer, but still spent around $1,500 on a professional editor (who also did layout) and copy editor. I also spent $1,200 on a professional illustrator (who did an amazing job and really added appeal and meaning to the book), and around $5,000 on a designer who did my book cover (super important to sales!), Website, and other marketing.

And I currently invest at least 20 hours a week marketing and selling.

You can consider that the “bad news,” if you want. But most business people understand that you have to spend money (and time) to make money. All of the above expenses were an investment in myself and my future.

2) Plan Your Profit

Serious entrepreneurs also plan. I planned my project by doing a profit and loss (P&L) spreadsheet in which I outlined my projected expenses and revenues month-by-month for twelve months. In that P&L I committed to selling 30 paper copies and 60 ecopies of The 7 Secrets of the Prolific each month. (Three months post-publication, I’m not there yet, but well on my way, with sales increasing each month.) But I didn’t just list the numbers; I had to tell exactly how I would achieve them—a marketing plan, in other words.

I also calculated the Breakeven Point (BEQ): the number of books I needed to sell to cover expenses. It was 344 paper books, and, in the three months since publication, I’ve already sold around 120. (For simplicity’s sake I didn’t include ebooks in the calculation.) Many were sold as “preorders” via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. (FYI, here’s my Indiegogo pitch page: http://www.indiegogo.com/Preorder-Hillary-Rettigs-The-Seven-Secrets-of-the-Prolific-and-save.)

Those preorders helped me defray costs AND build my market.

Profit may be harder to come by for fiction writers, but those who do serious marketing and sales can make good money. Bestselling thriller writer Joe Konrath is the reigning guru of this: read his Newbie’s Guide to Publishing and (co-authored with Barry Eisler) Be the Monkey for some insights.

3) Research Your Platforms

You can make glorious money through your site with the help of E-junkie. But, let’s face it, most of the two billion or so people currently on the Internet* will make it to Amazon and iTunes and popular blogs and affiliate sites a lot sooner than they will make it to your site. So you’ll want to get your book listed on as many of those high-traffic sites as possible. (But keep the prices on your site lowest so more people are motivated to buy from you directly!)

Smashwords is a great e-publishing choice for many writers: you feed it; a properly formatted Word file and it spits out files for all the major readers, including Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader, AND lists your book on iTunes, BN.com, and other major retailers. However, you can also work individually with each of those readers and platforms, and might keep a bigger chunk of the revenues by doing so.

If you are producing a paperback, you can go with the aforementioned iUniverse or LuLu for printing and distribution, and also sell it on Amazon’s Advantage and Alibris, among other places.

Research your choices carefully, and especially study their revenue/royalty structures and their publishing or affiliate agreements. Remember that the agreements are legally binding, and could have a major effect on both your income and your overall publishing experience (and sanity!). Don’t go with anyone who wants to take all the rights to your work, or whose right to publish your work extends past the point you decide to terminate the relationship.


4) Work on your Procrastination and Time Management Issues

Hey, I know a great book that will help you!

Seriously, though, life’s too short, and there’s too much opportunity around. Procrastination and even serious blocks are solvable problems, so just start solving them. Sample chapters and plenty of other free info on my Website.

Sometimes, I look at my career and am amazed. Through my Website I can sell my ideas to a global audience, many of whom write me back to tell me how my work has helped them. And through wonderful e-Junkie I can have a $10/month shopping cart that, even a decade ago, would have probably cost me thousands, and a decade before that would have simply been out of the reach of anyone except big corporations.

It’s a golden age for writers and entrepreneurs and all other seekers and dreamers. Get out there and live it – the indie way.