Category: “Personal Productivity”

Stress is generated due to certain restrictions and demands that act upon us. Restrictions prevent us to do what we desire and demands request strongly our effort and focus into something. In particular, stress occurs when we deal with a restriction or demand of which outcome we perceive to be both important and uncertain.

Until a couple of years, I never gave due emphasis to personal productivity. It’s true that I’ve always tried to be as productive as possible in my professional life, but I didn’t care about being a disaster in my personal life. I guess it was because I found an economic profit in the first case and no benefit at all in the latter.

Virtually, all the projects you want to perform in your life will require the utilization of time and money. Both resources are often limited and usually shared by all your projects, so it’s necessary to manage them with good judgement to make the most of them.

In 1953 a group of students from Yale University was surveyed about many questions, included the following: Have you set goals? Have you written them down? Do you have a plan to accomplish them? 84% of the students had no defined goal, 13% had set goals but had not written them down, and 3% had written their goals down and also had a plan of action.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor known worldwide as a researcher on positive psychology, defined the concept of flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.