Tag: productivity

What does your best work look like?

Posted on by philipdodson
‘Eruption’ by Philip Dodson

I attended a great workshop a few years back, facilitated by Judy Rees, and one of the exercises was if you had to visually illustrate what your best work looked like, what would you create? What would you draw?

what would you draw, paint, make or write to demonstrate you at your best?

Do we even stop to look at what factors combine to create our best work, when we are in complete flow, when we are ‘on fire’?

The more we work in a focused, deeper way, the less the shallow distractions occur and the better we can work.

The challenge for us all is that is personal. What creates the environment for deep work for me will be different to you.

However, we all have an environment and mindset that will come together to enable us to do deep focused and meaningful work.

Take a moment to work out where that is for you and then see how you can apply it.

Collective work

Posted on by philipdodson
‘Collective Work 2.0’ by Philip Dodson

Once a week as part of the Deep Work Project I am developing, we all sit down for The Write Club, where 10-15 of us sit around a big table and collectively work. Some are writing books, some articles, some blogs, proposals, emails and so on. What you are writing does not matter.

The only communication we have over the 2 1/2 hour session of ‘deep work’ is at the start where we publically share to the group what we plan to work on and at the end how we progressed. So it is a distraction free environment.

The magic doesn’t happen just from the silent work we are individually doing without interruption, it comes almost strangely from the collective power of all doing focused work together at the same time.

The positive influence of being surrounded by other focused people is what keeps the momentum going, it is one of those things that are hard to express in words. The focus is transmitted, you feel a togetherness in your mission to stay in tune with meaningful work.

It is the magic of collective work that enables us to create our best work. You just need to set the tone and agenda to being focused.