Purchase a Day Pass online and unlock instant access to our spaces in Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Sydney

×

Purchase a Day Pass online and unlock instant access to our spaces in Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Sydney

×
The Great Room by Industrious logo 1

Productivity

PRODUCTIVITY (current name is Briefing)
– all articles relating to work, coworking, hybrid working, landlords/developer content, meetings, collaboration, hot desking, access to virtual backgrounds, etc.

Untold Founder Stories: Shuhei Morofuji, Reapra

by

As one of the youngest and fastest entrepreneurs in Japan to reach an IPO for a startup, Shuhei Morofuji shares how a journey fuelled by curiosity led the way to success.

One’s twenties are often remembered as a time of uncertainty and struggle, but by the time Shuhei Morofuji was 25, he was laser-focused in leading his startup, SMS Co Ltd, to an IPO in just five years. Pleasantly surprised at how well SMS, a website operator focusing on elderly care, did, Morofuji realised his true passion was in trying to understand and manage complex things in an equally complex yet structured way.

After 11 years serving as SMS’ CEO, Morofuji indulged his curiosity by starting Reapra, a venture builder and investment group based in Singapore. Rather than become just another opportunistic, profit-chasing investing machine, Morofuji is in it for the long haul with the founders Reapra chooses to work with. We sit down with one of Japan’s brightest sparks — and one of The Great Room’s newest tenants — to pick his brains on the skills that got him this far.

When did your entrepreneurial flair first reveal itself?

I don’t believe that my talent emerged all of a sudden at any point in time. However, I do think that my innate sense of curiosity, present since childhood, played a crucial role. This means I have a tendency to not only view reality as complex, but to also fit it into a high complex environment, where it can only be unravelled by learning over time. Learning through experience in this environment cultivated my skills and talents as an entrepreneur.

So what was the impetus for founding SMS?

The economic bubble burst during my college days and seeing large companies go out of business shocked me. That was when I realised that landing a job at a big firm does not ensure job security, and considered starting my own. By my fourth year in university, I noticed how everyone was talking about the increasing aging population of Japan, and realised that the elder care industry was still small, but represented a high growth trajectory. After graduating, I found a job but left shortly after to start SMS in 2004.

Were there any life experiences that contributed to your success?

Somewhat paradoxically, I believe my lack of noteworthy life experiences in the past may have led to my success. I never excelled in my studies and I had a self-concept that I was nothing. Because of this foundation I wanted to see reality as complex, and I believed starting a business would achieve this.

What was the biggest mistake you learned from on your journey?

Not addressing human resource development in the early stages of SMS. As I was doing business in an industry of high growth, the size of the company was rapidly expanding. Regardless, I focused only on the product and not on the organisation that would support it. But this realisation helped the company grow even after I leave. As such, when Reapra was established, I aimed to create and environment where I could not only learn and grow by myself, but also where the people around me could grow together.

Grit and resourcefulness tend to be qualities those in business would like to nurture. What other characteristics do you find invaluable?

I refer to these necessary qualities as the “mastery of co-creating with society”. And it is present not just in entrepreneurs, but in anyone who is able to make an impact on society. It means that to be a market leader, you must first understand your own identity, and then improve on your proficiency through experiential learning.

So you believe that such qualities can be learned?

The question of what is inborn and what is acquired is contentious in academia but I personally believe that the desirable qualities of an entrepreneur can be largely acquired. I used to think of myself as a “nobody” but with the multitude of experiences that come with setting up a company, I learned to overcome my weaknesses and developed an entrepreneurial nature. Moreover, I don’t think there are many people who are born with the aforementioned “mastery” at a high level anyway. That’s why Reapra accompanies the transformation of the individual through hands-on support.

It’s important to unwind to avoid burnout. Do you have any daily rituals that help you stay sane?

I have two. Before I go to sleep and after I wake up, I reflect on the day and come up with whatever measures I need because I can organise my thoughts better during those times. My other routine is to simply walk because that too, helps my thinking process. Sometimes I walk two hours a day. I also have a personal rule not to work on holidays, as I like to spend them fishing and playing with my children.

Lights, Action: How Lighting Affects your Productivity

by

There is more than meets the eye in the lighting design applied in The Great Room venues

Your hair is perfectly coiffured, your outfit making just the right statement, and the perfect background of your favourite The Great Room venue is set up. You are ready for that big presentation from home, yet somehow, you find yourself not looking quite as sharp on screen as you usually do. What you are missing: the finely calibrated lighting at The Great Room, purpose-designed by internationally acclaimed lighting designers DJCoalition.

Yet good lighting does a lot more than, well, make one look good. “There is a well-researched science behind light and its effect on productivity. In simple terms: light has to enable our visual tasks, encourage connectivity to the environment around us and reinforce our physiology. When it does this, we are more productive,” explains David Skelley, the Chairman of DJCoalition.

“The Great Room has the opportunity to be at the forefront of good office lighting design – which needs to be focused on people and offer personalised solutions,” opines David. “Conventional office space lighting design needs to catch up to co-working spaces where lighting solutions are more flexible and variable to suit the task and the user.”

Drawing Room – The Great Room One Taikoo Place, Hong Kong

Different lights for different tasks

“If you are relationship-building with a member of the co-working community over a drink or two, you want to get everybody relaxed – the lighting needs to be warm and inviting and at a low scale. This means using floor lamps, desk lights, wall lights, sconce lights… not just light beaming down from the seating,” details David.

The meeting rooms, on the other hand, feature three different light settings: brighter wall and ceiling up-lighting to create a more for formal atmosphere; dim ambient lighting with the light focused on the speaker for presentations; and even, neutral lighting throughout the room for video conferences to avoid stark contrasts between faces and the background. Colour correctness is also critical.

At The Great Room, David uses high quality LED lighting that mixes a wide spectrum of lights to recreate a “white” light: “Our physiology needs the whole spectrum of light in natural daylight to function at the right level. It is what allows us to see red as red, rather than a dirty brownish hue; and it gives everybody a healthier skintone for that video call,” shares David.

Stateroom – The Great Room Ngee Ann City, Singapore

In the work hall where members are popping in for a couple of hours to bang out something within short deadlines in between appointments, or someone who needs to turn-off all distractions down and hunker down for some deep work, white light – also known as daylight in the lighting industry – will help one to be more alert and focused. “Optimum light performance at work stations has many variables, such as surface colours, material reflections, type of task, length of time doing the task, time in the day, age and culture of the worker. Thus the best lighting solution is one that is flexible.

One general rule that does help concentration is to have the working surface brighter than the overall ambient light levels, this helps our brains to focus on the task.” He also recommends even lighting in the room so as to prevent the eyes from having to adjust to contrasting levels of brightness constantly, which can cause fatigue.

David cautions against prolonged exposure to white light, though: “Daylight helps you concentrate, but it is not good for long tasks because it creates serotonin and suppresses melatonin. If you sit under a 5000 Kelvin white downlight all day, your body will not get the chance to relax, and wind down at the end of the day, and you will end up feeling tired.”

Be well to work well

Indeed, David’s top consideration when it comes to lighting design is wellness. Wellness in lighting terms has three aspects: good colour quality – where colours are can be perceived accurately, flexibility in brightness settings, and overall room ambience. “People don’t realise how lighting affects our well-being, yet it is so obvious. We are sensitive to lighting – not just how it affects visibility, but also our mood and how we interact with people.”

The Circle – The Great Room Centennial Tower, Singapore

Natural daylight is the optimum light for working, as its natural rhythm of change in intensity and colour during the day fits to our in-built biorhythms, shares David. “Natural daylight also fills a room rendering its surfaces with light to give a comfortable ambience. This background room ambience is as critical as lighting a work surface.” While David feels that there is no such thing as too much natural daylight, he also works alongside interior designers to minimise the chance of glare caused by natural light source.

And while not everybody has the luxury of working in a room with lots of daylight, David prescribes this: get yourself a task lamp over your work desk. “Find something that is adjustable in terms of both brightness levels and angles, and preferably one with a solid metal shade that bounces the light down towards the work surface. Find a design that you love, and plug it in. It is a really simply thing to do for yourself.”

COVID-19 Covered: How to Ramp Up your Brand Positioning in a Pandemic

by

There is no better time than now to build and strengthen your brand positioning and messaging through digital platforms

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the world into a new normal: a life conducted online. How can companies leverage on this to build and strengthen their brand position and messaging during this extraordinary time? Experts from The Great Room community weigh in.

Now. Now. Now.

Kevin Wang, Principal Consultant of digital growth consultancy Webprofits, which operate out of our coworking space in Singapore, points out why digital marketing is ever more important in this current climate: people are more active online now than ever, with Facebook/WhatsApp reporting 40% increase in usage due to the pandemic.

And with companies tightening budgets, resources should be strategically deployed to deliver the greatest impact. “CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) are cheaper on digital platforms. We are seeing CPMs dropping across industries, and within our network of digital partners we have seen between 15% – 70% decreases in CPMs,” shares Kevin.

And while it might seem counter-intuitive to be spending on marketing during an economic downturn, Kevin also highlights that brands that maintained ad spend during a time of crisis have, historically, came out much stronger than those who reduced their ad spend. It is just as the old marketing dictum goes: “When times are good you should advertise, when times are bad you must advertise”.

“The spread of COVID-19 and its resulting isolation measures have been an accelerator for digital-first marketing and advertising,” opines and Angie Akaraskul, the Client Services Director at social video company Brave Bison. According to App Annie, social media use has increased by 20% with consumers now spending more time online than ever before due to ‘stay at home’ and ‘work from home’.

Business as Unusual

Unusual times call for unusual strategies, for the same messaging that could be well received normally could now come across as offensive and tone-deaf. Kevin and Angie both stress that the key to getting your message heard the right way, you have to first listen: not just to anything, but your customer’s pain points.

“The best and the most long standing brands are the ones that place their consumers at the heart of everything they do, from product development to purchase,” says Angie. And consumers are now likely be feeling:

  1. Worried and fearful. Consumers are likely to feel shaken and worried about the financial security of their future, so they’re more likely to think twice before making a purchase – especially on higher-value goods.
  2. Bored and anxious. Consumers are more likely to buy into escapism and are looking to recreate their normal routine from the comfort and safety of their homes.
  3. Missing family and friends. Consumers want to feel connected more than ever before and are eager to learn more about new ways to connect with loved ones.

Angie highlights that while some Fortune 500 brands have taken high-level CSR initiatives and reacted well to the current consumer climate and sentiment, it is also possible to successfully pivot in a simpler and equally innovative way: “A number of fitness brands are now hosting virtual workouts (F45, Nike, Yoga Movement), bespoke travel experiences have transformed into bespoke stay at home services (Random Dots) and Shanghai Fashion Week has partnered with Alibaba for a see now and buy online shopping experience. The point is to create meaning to your brand by fulfilling your consumer’s needs; show them you care!”

Build your platform(s)

For brands with a different positioning, Angie identifies three emerging platforms to leverage on: video-sharing social networking service TikTok; social networking service Houseparty, which has surpassed 9m downloads in March alone; and Yubo, the leading social discovery platform for Gen Z, which has seen an increase of three million users, to 28 million users, since the lockdown. Citing the example of TikTok, she says to brands who want to reach out to Gen Z and Millenials, but are cautious about using a less established platform: “As a disrupter platform, there’s less competition for share of voice on TikTok which means there’s more opportunity for brands to reach their audience.”

And though extremely established, YouTube continues to be an important platform. “A recent study found that during the Coronavirus crisis, 64% of consumers expected their YouTube consumption to go up. This shows the massive global relevance the platform still holds in the industry and should still be considered as a pillar in any strong marketing plan,” says Angie. “Brave Bison has used YouTube to great success in the past, from telling brand stories to reach a wealth of new audiences, to gaining brands global recognition catapulting them into the next stages of growth.

The platform offers great versatility and its huge audience can be tapped with the right content.” Similarly, while new platforms present exciting opportunities and new ways of interaction, Kevin feels that Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn remain key platforms in these times. “If you are not mastering your messaging on these three platforms, there is no point expanding your presence on other platforms,” says Kevin, who feels that the biggest opportunities for the majority of brands still lies in optimising engagement on these ‘traditional platforms’. 

Moving pictures

Brave Bison – which produces, distributes and monetises videos for digital platforms – also prescribes video as the content format of the times. The World Economic Forum reports that over 50% of Gen-Z’s report an increased consumption of online videos more than any other mediums since the lockdown, presenting a huge opportunity for brands to acquire a new fan base and deepen their relationship with existing ones.

“Brave Bison can confirm these findings as we have started to see its effect on our O&O channels. As of March 22, there has been a 13.2% increase in minutes viewed on Facebook compared to the previous two weeks and our influencer partners have also seen a 30% uptake on content,” reveals Angie.

Yet this doesn’t mean pushing out any moving picture – you need to push pictures that move, says Angie: “The rapid rise of successful YouTubers and TikTokers is proof that all that’s needed to create an effective piece of content is an authentic story, a credible voice and a smartphone.”

The Power of Pause

by

When life is good we enjoy it fully and when life throws us a curveball, remember that better days are on the way… 

The human race has never before united by a singular enemy, democratic and global. And we are responding, in record time and record numbers.  As scientists race towards new diagnostics, antivirals, vaccines and therapeutics at exponential speeds, we are also figuring out new things for ourselves.  We still need to believe, even when it is difficult to do.  We need to straighten our shoulders and develop a little resolve to ride out the uncertainty. 

As we approach this collective interlude, we won’t be standing still. We will use this time to continue to make room for deep work and play (digitally and within our households, of course), to organise our thoughts and recharge with loved ones, make space for new ideas, and plan our next social—whilst harnessing the power of pause.

In the meantime, the team has been busy at their respective hives putting together a list of Wonderful Things to serve our community’s new online culture. I am using the pause to create new habits and cultivate traditions at home. Dare I imagine looking leaner and more mindful when we return to The Great Room.

Finally, as we adjust to our new normal, use this intermission for an extra hug after composing that important email, and hop on your video call in athleisure wear after an online Ashtanga session. Because “there is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither”. 

I look forward to welcoming you back with the mother of all Monday Breakfast Clubs and a cheeky night cap (or 3). 

Go Deep: How Focused Work can Set You up for Success

by

Forget multi-tasking. Deep work is the key to boosting productivity and performance. Here’s how to do it.

Last year, a McKinsey Global Institute survey, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies”, found that most professionals spent an average of 28% of their work-week reading and answering emails. Your inbox is probably just one of the many distractions you now face throughout the working day, and it’s likely keeping you in a superficial state where you don’t really accomplish anything of significance. The antidote? Deep work.

What is Deep Work?

Deep work – a term coined by author Cal Newport, who wrote Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – refers to the process of undertaking cognitively demanding professional activities that require you to block out anything that could distract you; whether that’s the tap on the shoulder from a colleague, the overflowing inbox, your admin tasks or your friends’ social media posts. Instead, deep work is about setting aside a decent nugget of time in which to focus on one task, and one task only.

Some of the world’s most successful people make time for deep work, from Carl Jung and Bill Gates to authors J.K. Rowling and Neal Stephenson. At The Great Room, which provides hospitality-led premium co-working spaces in Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok, Cofounder and CEO Jaelle Ang carves out space each week for deep work.

“Deep work requires large chunks of time without external conversations or split periods,” she says. “Usually, I’m able to do deep work after the kids go to bed – from 8.30 – 10.30 pm; I call it my second shift, or larger, four-hour chunks on Sunday afternoons when I need to review designs, review feasibilities, write strategy, op-eds… In the typical weekday at work, there aren’t many opportunities for deep work chunks, as my time is filled with meetings, emails and calls.”

Here are some quick tips on how to get into that focused work headspace in order to maximise productivity and performance, so you can block out distractions and finally achieve that big dream.

The Four Rules of Deep Work

Newport breaks it down into four essential rules:

1. Work deeply.

Put “smart routines and rituals” in place that will help minimise procrastination and distraction. While he says there’s no one formula fits all, he suggests ritualising your work location – pick somewhere quiet where you won’t be disturbed; at HK shared office space The Great Room, the dedicated offices and Workhall for its hot desk members were designed with concentrated, serious work sessions in mind.

In addition, ritualise how long you’ll work for and how you’ll work – get structures in place, like cutting email and internet access, predetermining a number of pages read or words written – and what you’ll do to support that work. That could be working with your coffee or tea of choice at hand, playing music designed to get your brain accessing gamma and beta frequencies… etc.


For co-working space provider The Great Room’s CEO, Ang, music works best when she’s doing right-brain work. “Like writing or designing,” she says. “I need stillness when I do left-brain work, like structuring and reviewing spreadsheets.”

2. Embrace boredom.

Deep work is like training for a sporting event: it requires effort and practice to get to peak performance. Part of that effort involves accepting that you’ll naturally get bored while you’re trying to work on your project of choice; instead of giving in to distraction and checking email or hunting down a snack, lean into the boredom. You can get past it (the only way is through!).

3. Quit social media.

It’s the opposite of deep work, offering very little ROI.

4. Drain the shallows.

Minimise the amount of time you spend on low-value tasks like email, phone calls and meetings.

Other Insights

Here are some quick, final tips to get you in the deep work zone:

  • Say yes to a project/subject that evokes a “terrifying longing” in you, rather than saying no to other distractions. You’re more likely to engage with your task if you’re excited or inspired by it. Say yes to it, and watch as it drowns out all the noise.
  • Be prepared for attention residue. If you need to get into deep mode for more than one project, be aware that part of your focus will lag behind as you switch between your tasks. The trick? It goes back to Rule #1 of deep work: work deeply. The longer you spend on each task, the more you optimise your productivity.
  • Consider investing in a website and application blocker like Focus or Freedom to help you combat distractions.
  • Systematise idleness. Make guilt-free downtime a part of every day: this will help your brain recharge and gear up for the next deep work session, and it will also help you unravel problems, too. Newport recommends ritualising shut-down, bringing downtime in at a set time at the end of every workday.

5 Tips for Leading Through Adversity

by

It’s during anxious times that strong, unshakeable leadership is ever more necessary to keep both businesses and morale from plummeting, so we’ve roped in a professional for advice. Helping corporate captains steer their ships through troubled waters happens to be what Paul Harvey has built his career on. From The Great Room at Centennial Tower, Harvey applies his extensive experience with executive coaching and leadership development programmes to his role as partner at organisational design consultancy Synthesis. Here are his leadership strategies for guiding a team through crisis.

1. Connect with others

The best thing you can do at this stage is to talk about your experience and your feelings. It isn’t always easy in the Asian context but reaching out to trusted family members, friends or colleagues will help to alleviate those feelings of being lost or alone. Right now the whole world is struggling with the same Covid-19 challenges, so the opportunity to empathise with and comfort one another is available if we take the risk of opening up.

2. Talk about underlying feelings

Discussing the new work-from-home procedures and the logistics of sharing tasks is important but you need to create some time to talk about everyone’s underlying anxiety, about how to support each other, and even of hopes and dreams for the future. This will also reduce the need to rush around trying to complete tasks that aren’t even that useful. Doing things distracts us from these anxieties but the best way to alleviate such feelings is to build a set of support resources to help everyone through the change.

3. Take care of yourself

Leaders don’t just have to manage their own anxieties, they also have to contain the anxieties of their teams. So you have to take time each day to recharge. Whether it’s running, writing in a journal, taking a walk in nature or playing with your kids, find something that will rejuvenate you. Leaders who are drained, overworked and overstressed are less able to think clearly, be empathetic and act as a support to others — all things that they will need to do more of during a crisis.

4. Exercise a more directive style

In times of crisis, followers are seeking clarity and certainty from their leaders. Teams in a heightened state of anxiety are less able to process complex or nuanced information, so keep your communications short, clear and to the point. Leaders would also be well advised to create forums where employees can talk about their experiences and feelings. All you have to do is acknowledge what is shared; you don’t have to fix them. Because if these feelings aren’t acknowledged, they will show up in employees’ actions — teams will be less collaborative, less innovative and more protective. If you’re noticing these signs, it means more communication and dialogue is needed.

5. Let people go at their own pace

Transitions aren’t linear, so it’s possible to feel hopeful one day and confused and lost again the next. Some team members may even transition faster than others, but forcing everyone to transition faster than they are ready to will only lead to resistance. By creating psychological safety for people to share honestly without fear of retribution, the leader is creating a culture that enables people to adapt better to change. For teams that are less comfortable talking about their emotions in a group setting, Synthesis’ organisational psychologists can help leaders create that environment. We use a variety of techniques, including practices like calligraphy and poetry, to create a space where people can open up without feeling like they’re in the spotlight or unduly separated from the crowd.

Personal Kanban: How This Organising System can Boost your Productivity

by

While many productivity tools focus on achieving more and ticking the boxes, this handy, adaptable system emphasises working and living better. Here’s how it works, and how you can make it work for you.

Events, tasks, deadlines, people to please, kids’ activities to juggle, presentations to prepare for. Like many of us who live multi-hyphenate lives, Jaelle Ang, CEO and co-founder of hospitality-led, premium coworking space operator The Great Room, knows how this goes. “As a multi-hyphenate, entrepreneur and mother, I still have an unreasonable belief having it all. I believe that one can have it all, just not all at the same time,” she says.

“I no longer believe in seeking balance in life, I feel it’s like a trap to do that. It is important to seek the deepest clarity of what are the glass balls and rubber balls in your life now,” she says. “There are five balls in my life: health, spouse and kids, family, career and social. I always remind myself that my health is the glass ball – if I drop it, it could break irreversibly. My career is a rubber ball; it is likely that I will hit the ground (because it doesn’t ever, I am probably not doing enough or doing anything worthwhile) at some point in time, but I can and will bounce back.”

A useful – some might even call it game-changing – tool for managing all those glass and rubber balls is Personal Kanban (PK). It came into being because Jim Benson realised work life, personal life and social life cannot be treated as separate entities. “Work / life balance is not sustainable,” he says in the book he co-authored with Torianne DeMaria, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life. “When we compartmentalize our lives, these elements [professional, personal and social] become pathological, pushing us from one task to the next in order to satisfy their own jealous needs.”

Benson describes PK as “A visual launchpad to personal effectiveness, spontaneous collaboration and an integrated life.”

While there is no productivity panacea that can turn you into a hyper-achieving speed demon, no matter where you work – whether that’s as a digital nomad out of a shared office in Hong Kong, from home or in a corporate office – PK can deliver something many other organisation tools don’t: fulfillment. It does this by helping you visually map everything that matters to you, within and beyond the walls of your workplace, so that you can prioritise and focus.

For the corporate team, PK is handy because you can share boards and follow team progress, and for the multi-hyphenate working remotely in a coworking space, it’s useful because it helps you stay disciplined and on track with your tasks – in work and in life.

How Personal Kanban came into being

PK has its roots in a scheduling system first created for the automotive industry, by an industrial engineer, Taiichi Ohno at Toyota. Developed with just-in-time manufacturing in mind, kanban used cards to track production in factories, in this way preventing the build-up of excess inventory at any stage of the production process.

Benson used variations of this technique in his work in software development, then he further developed the method into Personal Kanban with his colleagues at Modus Cooperandi. It helped them understand their workload, work flow, and also limit the amount of work in progress – and it’s this last part that’s key.

The rules

Recognising that we can only do so much – and realistically, we only have capacity for one task at a time (multi-tasking is so passé) – PK has adopted two rules, one of which is: limit what you’re working on at any one time. It’s rule number two, so let’s backtrack a bit and start with rule number one: visualise your work.

“Visualising work gives us power over it,” says Benson, who later honed the method with his co-author, DeMaria. “We now have a physical record of all those demands on our time. This larger view of our work and our context allows us to make better decisions.”

You can use a whiteboard, you can use sticky notes, or you can use a digital tool like Trello, Zenkit, Jira or Taskworld, to help you visualise your tasks. Benson and DeMaria encourage the use of a whiteboard and physical sticky notes, at least to start with, because “hands-on experience reinforces what we learn.” But many PK advocates use digital tools instead of physical ones, and these seem to be highly effective – especially if you want to have your PK board with you on your smartphone when you’re travelling.

Back to the second rule: limit your work in progress to just three tasks at a time. “You can only do as much work as you can handle. You can’t overload yourself. Once you do, your ability to finish and your ability to focus breaks down,” says Benson.

How to apply Personal Kanban

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell:

  1. Write down all the expectations you have on different sticky notes.
  2. Create an Options column, and put all your tasks in it. It’s much easier for your brain to take in your tasks this way, as it’s more visually pleasing than a jumble of tasks.
  3. Create a Doing column. Limit what you put in this column to three items, and no more.
  4. Create a Done column, and move tasks you’ve finished into this column.

Finish one task before you move something else onto your ‘doing’ list. “You finish, you focus [on something else]. You’re giving yourself the luxury of being able to complete something with quality, which means that you like your work when it’s done,” says Benson.

Insider tips

The beauty of PK is that you can make it your own. You don’t have to stick to three columns: you can have far more, and you can name them whatever you want, as long as you stick to Rule 1 and Rule 2 (maximum three tasks in the Doing column at any one time).

You can create a Backlog column for every single task you need to do, big or small. Don’t leave anything out: be honest with yourself Oh and this doesn’t simply have to relate to work – your PK board can include tasks you have to do outside of work – like booking your kids into swim class, paying for those concert tickets, date night, whatever!

Then put those you’re ready to do now in a Ready column – work that’s waiting to be done. These can be funneled into the Doing column when you’re good to go on them.

Long-time PK user Sven Wiegand suggests dividing your board into tasks to be done today (create a Today column for this), this week, this year, and he also has a Waiting column for those tasks that require someone else’s input in order to be completed. You can find out more about his approach here.

As well as being a useful organisation tool for individuals, PK is ideal for teams – especially if part of your team is working remotely out of a coworking space, or if they’re working in agile workspaces. You can put team tasks on a PK board using a digital tool like Kanban Zone to help you track workflow, giving everyone on your team access. You can even create different PK boards for different projects.

For further insights into Personal Kanban and how to use it, check out Benson and DeMaria’s site here.

Live in the Moment and Be Great at What You Do

by

Zi En, Co-founder of HASIKO, is a former banker turned serial entrepreneur and a qualified Pilates instructor. HASIKO was founded to empower people to lead their best lives by forging strong connections with their mind, body and self.

She shares how being present can make you happier, reduce stress and perform better at work.

Most of us are not fully engaged in what’s happening in our daily life. We are constantly in our heads anticipating how something will turn out, or thinking about how things didn’t happen the exact way we wanted it to.

The result is that we live with high levels of stress, tension, frustration and anxiety everyday. Not only does it take away joy in our everyday life, living in this distracted manner decreases our productivity and performance.

The Mind Hack: Be Present

In his TEDx talk, Matt Killingsworth, a Harvard psychologist who ran a study that gathered 650,000 data points from 15,000 people across 80 countries discovered this:

“We are substantially happier when we are are fully engaged (being present) in what we are doing.”

We are less happy when our mind is distracted regardless of what we are doing. For example, commuting to work is something that most of us do not enjoy. Yet, Matt’s research showed that people who focused on their commute instead of letting their mind wander off were substantially happier. This pattern held true for every single activity that was measured.

In addition to higher happiness levels, you enter a state of flow when you are fully engaged and present in an activity. This is a state of being where you are able to tap into your highest abilities, where you are at the optimum level of clarity and focus, and where your performance level is at its peak. Research by the Flow Genome Project found that being in “flow” can boost human productivity, learning, and skill mastery by 490%. It’s the state that elite athletes are in when achieving superhuman feats, and it’s not exclusive to them.

However, we are a distracted breed. Matt’s research shows that we are only present 35 – 50% of the time in our daily life.

So How Do We Be More Present?

This is not about ignoring the past or the future. Our capacity to learn from the past and plan for the future is immensely useful. Just that when you are doing them, do them with your full attention. That’s being present and in flow.
There is no magic formula or a single method that works. Just like learning anything new, start with small steps and keep practicing. Here are some simple ways you can start with.

1) Start Your Day With Some Quiet Time

After scrambling to get the kids off to school and driving through rush hour traffic, most of us come into work already stressed and on the edge. In this frazzled state of mind, you are more likely to be stressed out by things at work.
Start your day with 5 minutes of quiet time, have a cup of tea, a nice shower, or focus on your breath. You may find that the stresses of the day roll off your back easier.

2) Focus On One Task

How often do you switch from your inbox, to a conversation with your colleague? Or from reading an article to checking messages on WhatsApp. Our attention is being demanded by so many things that we are constantly pumped up on cortisol. Our distracted mind feels overwhelmed because it’s constantly shifting from one thing to another.

Try this instead. Switch off all distractions and set a timer for 20 minutes. Pick a task on your to do list and fully engage in it. Besides lower stress levels, you’ll get more done than when you were multitasking.

3) Practice While You Wait

Embrace the daily pockets of waiting time as opportunities to practice being present. When waiting for the lift or in line for your coffee, instead of looking at your phone, practice being fully present. Observe what is happening in that moment without any judgment or commentary about how the line is slower today because the lady at the counter doesn’t know what she wants. Just notice what you see, hear, or smell.

4) Be Intentional

Our intentions drive our focus. An effective way to build a habit of presence is to intentionally practice for a month.