What David perhaps doesn’t realize is that being isn’t the same as inactivity (or not-doing). Rather it is the connection with a fundamental, and formless aspect, of reality. That connection can happen during relative inactivity or during the most intense activity. The sages of all of the world’s wisdom tradition have recognized this. In the Taoist tradition we see references to the phrase “effortless effort”, in the Christian tradition we see a deep concern with the integration of contemplation and action, and in the Buddhist tradition we see the activity of the Bodhisattva, who does not forsake the world for some sort of pure being, but rather commits to helping all beings realize that same being. In short, there is absolutely no contradiction between being and doing, and many people throughout the millennia have recognized this.

But let’s not be too hard on David Allen. Being isn’t his main focus, and for what he has done in the world of doing, he has helped a tremendous number of people. Some of those people (like me) have even used his system to deepen their connection with and recognition of being. Thanks David!

That being said, if David, or any other productivity nuts are reading this, I want you to know that just as there are some great methodologies to help us do, like his GTD system, there are also many great methodologies for being. Indeed, just as David suggestions systematic instructions for how to become more organized, effective, and attentive to our life’s activity, there are many systematic instructions for helping one come to find deep levels of being, of stillness, and peace, in the very midst of doing!

Meditation techniques like Vipassana, Zen, Centering Prayer, Raja Yoga (not just the physical poses but the whole system of yoga), Vedanta, Sufi meditation, etc. are all methodologies for revealing the deepest truths about who we are. This truth is not opposed to the world (as many spiritual seekers often believe) but is rather something that deeply transcends the world, while also being intimately connected with it. It is both immanent and transcendent.

When one begins to awaken to their true being, their engagement with the world can emerge from a place of much greater stillness, peace, and clarity. Certain confusions can drop away, and we are free to engage our lives with a greater sense of freedom. This can be a tremendous compliment for mastering productivity, and as far as I can tell, one without the other can actually be a great disservice to our highest potential as human beings.

One of my favorite books on personal productivity is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The subtitle is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” and lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “stress-free” part.

Much of the productivity material on the web focuses on hacks, tips, and tricks to increase productivity at work–learning keyboard shortcuts, installing new organizing software, keeping a time log, reducing distractions, etc. This is all fine information, but if we implement these techniques of becoming more productive and are just as stressed, we have failed at the most important thing: becoming stress-free, happy people.

Productivity’s Diminishing Returns

If we make more money but still worry constantly about money, we have not attained financial freedom. Similarly, if we become much more efficient, organized, and productive but are equally if not more stressed, we have not achieved productive freedom. While it might be helpful to be more productive or make more money, the #1 priority must be to cultivate a stress-free state in the midst of “doing.”

The evidence from happiness studies concludes that making more money up to a modest point contributes to happiness. Once they can study it, I believe we will similarly find a kind of diminishing returns on increased productivity relative to happiness. Being more organized and productive doesn’t necessarily make your work stress-free, as a boss can give you more to do, or you can take on more personal projects. But most importantly however, increased productivity doesn’t necessarily change your relationship to your mind, and to doing itself, and therefore doesn’t necessarily make you happier.

Befriending Your Mind is The Key to Stress-Free

It has occurred to me that the reason GTD gives a sense of peace and ease (stress-free productivity) when it does is because by completely “getting everything out of your head” you are completely acknowledging and appreciating that part of yourself that reminds you to do things. Also, by creating trust in your system, you are cultivating self-leadership, a kind of trust in yourself that you will acknowledge and take in information from all the parts of yourself, and then manage that information and act upon it skillfully.

It’s common knowledge amongst GTD practitioners that getting most things out of your head doesn’t give you that profound feeling of relief. Neither does mostly trusting your system, or mostly reviewing everything, or clearing nearly all of your emails from your inbox. Only 100% gives that stress-free feeling.

Why 100%? Is it because David Allen wants us all to be perfectionists? No–it’s because only by completely accepting something 100% do we get an “unconditional” feeling, like love, flow, peace, OKness, etc. Do you really think you can feel inner peace if you only accept most of reality as it is? Have you ever experienced being in the zone when you were only mostly focusing on the task at hand? I don’t think so.

Alternative Ways to Befriend the Mind

There are also many other ways of befriending your mind that lead to less stress. Mindfulness meditation is one way as in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or Vipassana meditation. Both are ways of training the mind, kind of like training a puppy to sit and not poop on the rug. If you beat the pooch, you will get bit. If however you are patient and persistent and loving, you will have a new furry best friend.

You could appreciate this part directly by assuming it has a positive purpose for you, and then seeking to find out what it is. Maybe it just wants you to remember the milk and be successful in work, but just doesn’t know the best way to make that happen for you. There is a technique that emerged from NLP called Core Transformation that I’ve been studying and working with lately that has you directly appreciate a part, and seek it’s positive purpose in a very powerful way.

You could also appreciate the part by seeing and hearing it differently, what is called in NLP changing the submodalities. If you imagine what this part is like, perhaps it looks and sounds like a nagging parent. What if instead it were a sexy secretary telling you what to do? Or simply a neutral computer algorithm?

Or you could appreciate the part by asking yourself “what if you didn’t have this part?” What if you had a brain disorder that made it so that you didn’t have a voice inside reminding you of things to do? How would you know what to do at all? You would be completely absent-minded and wouldn’t be able to remember any details. You wouldn’t even remember to check your lists! You’d also lack creative thoughts about what you want to do and creative solutions for problems.

The key no matter what the technique seems to be a real appreciation for the field of information that your mind is giving you.

Self-Leadership is Protection Against Perfectionism in GTD

People new to GTD often take David Allen’s advice and do a complete “core dump” or “mindsweep” and really get everything out of their head, or really clear their email inbox to 0. They feel a profound sense of relief and even inner peace with their work, perhaps for the first time ever. This inner peace can be seen as a result of fully acknowledging and accepting the part of the mind that reminds you of what you are committed to or might want to do. It’s in some ways a state of unconditional love!

Where people go wrong next though is letting this part dominate their lives. They become productivity robots, productivity perfectionists (and believe me, I’ve been there!), and overachievers–constantly looking for more things to do and faster ways to do them. In many ways our entire modern economy is being lead by these parts of ourselves.

But unconditional acceptance of a part does not mean that this part runs your life! Look–if you unconditionally love your children, it doesn’t mean they get to make decisions about whether or not they get to play with matches, or eat nothing but candy. You love your kids, you listen to their requests, but you also set reasonable limits and make intelligent decisions that keep everyone safe.

Be the Master of Your Own Mind

The part of you that reminds you of your commitments and things you might want to do is a better servant than master. You can gain the benefits of 100% acknowledging and appreciating the job this part of your mind plays without letting it take the reigns of your life. You do that by capturing everything, but then make a decision about what you are going to do and not do based on all the input from your whole mind, including from other intuitive feelings, hunches, or even conflicting interests.

When you let perfectionist productivity rule, it’s as if you’re letting the legal department make decisions for the entire company. Instead, let the legal department do what it does best (making sure you don’t get screwed) but have the CEO make the decisions about what you are and aren’t going to do with full input from all relevant parties.

The key is to stress-free productivity is to completely accept this part of yourself and take in the information it provides you without letting it run your life. It is a poor leader of your internal family system, and is not even very good at deciding or prioritizing or letting you know at the right times or the right contexts, as David Allen so insightfully points out.

I recently read one of those books that changes your life. Unfortunately I think it’s out of print, but it’s called The Energy Break: Recharge Your Life with Autokinetics by Bradford Keeney. I found a used copy at a bookstore, and there appear to be copies on Amazon as well.

I’ve been Twittering a lot about autokinetics lately and I figured it was time to write a post about it, as I think it fills in a HUGE missing piece of personal productivity for me. Autokinetics is the first technique I’ve ever seen to explicitly help you access an energized, creative flow state in 10 minutes or less. It’s also a perfect counterpoint to systems like GTD because it involves no “work” whatsoever, and actually cultivates an effortless, purposeless state of mind and body where creativity flows like a fountain, and doing and being merge into easeful activity. In Clay Collins‘ language, it is the ultimate “anti-hack.”

Since it’s a fairly new topic for me (and the blogosphere), in this article I’ll be covering the background, and in a subsequent article I’ll cover exactly how to practice it.

Who is Bradford Keeney?

Keeney was a prominent family therapist who at the peak of his career realized that for all of his cleverness (and he is an incredibly clever psychotherapist) and knowledge of family systems, he could not fix the problems in his own family. So he had a spiritual crisis and found himself looking for something deeper. For him that meant studying the indigenous spiritual traditions around the world by participating in their ceremonies and practices. And what he found was that in many cultures throughout the world, not only are there traditions of relaxing and concentrating in meditative absorption, there are also traditions of energizing and arousing in ecstatic movement and expression.

Now I want to make it clear–you don’t have to believe in any weird stuff or study with any tribal shaman to make use of autokinetics any more than you have to become a Hindu and fly to India to learn to relax and concentrate. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is a completely secular technique that works no matter what your religion or lack thereof. The same is true of what Keeney calls “autokinetics”–it is a completely secular and rational technique that can be experienced directly by anyone, regardless of belief or lack of belief.

What is “Autokinetics”?

Autokinetics is short for automatic kinetics, which is “the practice of making automatic or spontaneous body movements that bring forth life energy.” It’s practiced in one or two 10-minute sessions, sitting on a chair or bench (or standing if you prefer), and has 3 phases that move progressively more into a kind of energized flow state. But the best part is because the movements are to be made in a way that feels automatic, the technique involves no “work” per say, unlike meditation which can become to feel like a chore and still requires disciplined attention.

It sounds simple, even dumb, but so does running (put one foot in front of the other for multiple miles) or meditation (sit and do nothing but notice your breath). The key is to have the movements feel automatic, even though you are making them. Try it right now! While you are reading this, allow your body to move how it wants without conscious effort. The goals is to have it feel like the movements are moving you, rather than you are moving your body.

With this simple practice you are cultivating “effortless effort.” Could that perhaps be useful in your work life? To feel like work just pours out of you naturally and easily? Hmmm….

Friday Night Dance Therapy

Club pic from fabbio.

How do I know autokinetics works? Well, I’ve actually been practicing it for years without knowing it. Growing up I had intense, debilitating social anxiety. I never dated until age 18 (not even one date!). I felt awkward and shy nearly always. I was afraid of everything–banana peel strings, dogs, other people’s bathrooms, you name it. I was a total perfectionist, procrastinator, and generally high-strung dude.

I wanted desperately to be comfortable in social situations. The situation that scared me the most was dancing, so I counter-phobically went out dancing 3 or 4 nights a week, alone, in order to challenge myself…for about 5 years!

At first I found it excruciatingly difficult to make any movements that felt coordinated and spontaneous for many, many evenings. Every movement of my body felt awkward, planned, and just plain stupid. A voice inside berated me for my awkwardness and idiocy–why was I out doing this to myself? Eventually I broke through again and again to a spontaneous experience of flow and joy, which chipped away at my social anxiety, silenced my inner critic, and gave me an experience of social ease–even charisma–that I never imagined possible.

Today I enjoy dancing more than just about anything. I am now regularly complimented for being a great dancer and I have experienced wonderful and profound flow states from dance. I am just now learning how to apply this principle of flow and ease to my work life. But I always thought I’d discovered something new and strange that no one else would understand, so I usually keep this profound experience of growth to myself. Little did I know I had been practicing autokinetics, the practice of making automatic or spontaneous body movements that bring forth life energy.

What is “Life Energy” and How Do We Get More of It?

Reiki Cat from anomalous4.

Now what exactly is life energy? Am I getting all woo-woo on you? Put away the crystals and incense. Life energy is simply what it sounds like–feeling energized and alive, beaming with happiness and joy…naturally, i.e. without the Starbucks. It’s what you feel when watching a great movie, when you’re in love, when watching a sunset or crossing the finish line of a marathon. Life energy is inspiration, creativity, and joy. It’s what I felt when dancing after getting over the years of shyness and just moving and shaking and having fun.

If you have kids, you know that they can’t stop jiggling, shaking, talking, and generally bouncing off the walls with energy–and this torrent of energy only stops when they are sleeping. But somewhere in junior high or high school we have this constant agitation suppressed by well-meaning teachers and what happens? We fall asleep.

When we get out of school and get a job, we similarly have trouble staying awake and alert sitting at desks 8-12 hours a day. So we reach for the coffee–an artificial stimulant of life energy–in order to have the energy to do that which just doesn’t seem to naturally energize us. We are drowsy and stressed most of the day. But on the weekend when we engage in a creative project, play sports, watch a powerful movie, or make love, we feel that surge of energy throughout our bodies and feel alive again for the moment.

Keeney’s claim is that a major reason why we are tired most of the time is not because we aren’t resting enough (how draining to the body is it really to sit all day?) but because we aren’t regularly accessing this life energy, this passion, this intuitive flow of creativity that inspires us and literally moves us.

Our bodies are not machines needing to be refueled. We are fine instruments needing to be regularly re-tuned. By practicing automatic or spontaneous body movements we cultivate an energized flow state. We can re-tune ourselves to this ease and flow, and it can begin to permeate our life and our work.

By getting more things done, we believe we will make more money, have more time, and therefore have more happiness. But what are you going to do with that money and time?

We all know intuitively that more money won’t make us happy. Those who consult others on money have clients with money problems making $30,000 a year and $800,000 a year. Happiness studies have shown no correlation between increased life satisfaction and making more than about $36,000 a year.

We also know intuitively that more time won’t make us happy, either. I remember being so excited when school got out, only to be totally bored the next day, and for the rest of the summer. Many people find that they can’t relax–or even stop checking work email–when they are on vacation. And try relaxing on vacation when you have kids!

Don’t get me wrong–excess time and money are great. But what exactly are you going to do with that time and money?

Many people when they fantasize about what they’d rather be doing instead of their crappy job think of hanging out on some tropical island. I’ve met several wealthy people who’ve sold a business and then done this. It’s great for about a week, maybe 4, but then what? After a while you get restless, and want to do something–maybe not toil away at an office, but certainly contribute to the world, or create something unique, or help others in some way.

I say, why wait?

Do what you are most wanting to do, now. Do what you are here to do.

Don’t put your life’s purpose on your someday/maybe list.

Productivity is the measure of outputs per unit of input, i.e. efficiency. The value hidden in “productivity” is frugality, and frugality does not mean being a tightwad but “sucking the marrow out of life.” Personal productivity is about living fully–not someday/maybe, but RIGHT NOW.

A lot has also been written about simplicity. As David Allen talks about on an upcoming episode of Precision Change, simplicity is about being deeply present in the moment, getting into the zone, so that the only thing that matters is this very moment.

And this very moment is all that we ever have, right?

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing and talking more about productivity, simplicity, and some specific methods for cultivating this flow state, this presence, this zone right in the midst of your work…so you won’t have to work ever harder to achieve something you can have right now.

I just read a short book called The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett, M.D. It’s appropriately very short–you can read it in 30 minutes, after which you feel you accomplished something…something very small.

While nearly everyone has the potential to improve their lives, often times our idealistic standards keep us from doing anything, or even make us more unhappy than not having them. Because the neighbor is a raw foods evangelist claiming “cooked food is poison,” we don’t even bother eating a serving of vegetables at dinner, reasoning “it’s too much work to be healthy.” Yet we feel like crap–not because of the food we’re eating, but because of the thought that we should be eating better! If we’d simply lower our standards to the bare minimum to meet our real needs, we’d find it’s incredibly easy to improve our lives in substantial ways.

Here are 3 ways to lower your standards for greater happiness and real achievement (I’d write more, but that’s enough for now):

• Exercise 20 minutes a day, max. Go for a walk, do some pushups and bodyweight squats, and stretch comfortably. Don’t let yourself do more! Do you really need to be more fit than this? Get fit over a year or more’s time, not in a 12-week blitz.
• Get Rich Slowly.
• Find work you love by working less. Do something you enjoy in the extra time you’d be putting in at the office. Find at least 10-30 minutes a day to have fun or do something creative. By developing your passions, you’re less likely to burn out, and more likely to learn something fun that you could also get paid for.
• Less courage, more consistency. I often recommend to clients that they do something each day that is at a level 2-3 of courage out of 10, and avoid doing things that require an 8-10 of courage whenever possible. Reserve your adrenal glands for life and death emergencies!

Ha, I gave you 4 points. That’s a tip called underpromise, overdeliver. It’s easier to go the extra mile when you only promised you’d run one mile than if you promised a marathon. This is something I’m really working on personally.

The things that I’ve made the most significant progress on in my life have often been areas in which I set minimum standards and worked on them over long periods of time. For instance, when I had social anxiety, I would attempt to make eye contact and smile with a couple people a day until that felt comfortable. Sometimes I got too wound up and tried to make huge leaps in progress, but I inevitably crashed.

What can you achieve less at today?

p.s. I thought about putting a photo in this post, but it doesn’t really need one. Plus, I put a lot of work into the Precision Change podcast, which is where more of my strengths and interests lie anyway.