Let's Fight (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!
All in Productivity
OKRs, Objectives and Key Results is a framework widely used by technology companies to set strategic goals and align the organization behind them. Now, you might be not exactly Google, but OKRs might still have the potential to help you to achieve your goals. At least that’s what my recent podcast guest Simon Klaiber and I think!
Five years around this time of the year, I worked on the first articles to publish on Life-Sparring.com. Time to look back on half a decade as an ambitious blogger and share my most valuable advice: “write shitty first drafts!”
One of my LinkedIn contacts recently tagged one of his posts with “Daydreaming, after all, is just a form of planning.” When I saw this line, I knew it was the missing piece for this article that I have been pondering over for quite a while. As it turns out, I have without knowing prior to writing this article, practiced what NYU Professor of Psychology Gabriele Oettingen calls “Mental Contrasting for Goal-Fulfillment.”, a framework to tap into daydreams for motivation and more productivity.
Do you live the life of an “human oxygen molecule”, reacting to everything life throws at you? Or are you fully in control of your life?
Despite knowing that you actually could change your life on any given day, I am a committed practitioner of New Year’s resolutions. The change of the year has this magical aura that calls for big changes, even if we then often fall back to our old ways.
The Quantified Self Hong Kong meet-up discussed in December about “How to Quantify Your 2018 Goals”. One of my contributions to the debate was the idea of a little 3-step framework to put self-tracking into a larger context of self-improvement.
While the framework is actually quite simple, I thought it might be worth to write the idea out in full, give it a funky name and open it for a broader discussion. So, without further ado, let me introduce the GoMoTo-Framework.
Food for Thoughts is the traditional book review article, summarizing the highlights of my reading over the past year. Who claims the throne for the Life-Sparring book of 2017?
It has been a while since I published a full-length Life-Sparring round. My excuse? Stress! The perfect opportunity to take a closer look at my strange relationship with one of the strangest side-effects of our modern lifestyle.
About four years ago I started to show severe signs of getting addicted to a popular mobile phone game. After reaching a point where playing the game began to disrupt parts of my life, I made a rather radical decision: I deleted all games from my phone and decided to get my fix from something much more productive, a flashcard game to learn Chinese. Interested to hear how that worked out?
Today’s Life-Sparring round is all about Bagel. No, I don’t mean the dry stepbrother of the doughnut, but another ambitious Kickstarter project I backed last year. The Korean team of Bagel Labs promised nothing less than "The World's Smartest Tape Measure". Does the sleek looking Bagel device live up to that promise?
After chasing big and lofty goals in 2016, the focus in 2017 is on habit setting. Using a strategy called "Mini Habits", I try to set small but very regular tasks to establish healthy habits that bring me closer to my ambitious goals, with much less stress. To make sure that I am not forgetting my daily goals, I was experimenting finding the perfect mobile up to nudge me at the right time. Which of the contenders Irunurun, Nozbe or Strides proofs to be best suited to keep me on track over the year?
