Natalie Hailey is one of those people who does it all... mum, wife and entrepreneur. She's also fun, sane and one of the nicest people I've met online.

So, at risk of making her sound like some kind of saint, in this episode I chat to her about:

setting priorities

setting targets

using apps

using paper notebooks

staying sane.

It's an absolutely fabulous episode, packed with wisdom from someone who's starting to make her mark on the online world, but not getting up before she went to bed yesterday. :)

It's hard work to do stuff for The Man, sure. But at least you know what to do. When you hire yourself because you're self employed things get messier. Not only do you have to do the work, you have to figure out which work to do.

Self employed publisher Tim Lewis helps get it unpacked for us in part one of a two-parter.

No matter how big your plan for changing the universe and no matter how much you love what you do, there are days when you just feel 'meh'. Your mojo has just upped and left. 

So what do you do when that happens? You can't be productive without your mojo.

I asked a range of people, from friends to experts (and a couple of people who are both! ;) ) what they did to refind their mojo. I got a lot of different answers, and used a lot of different recording devices (quality alert! :) ) but overall I got a fascinating glimpse of how some ultra-productive people

stay

ultra-productive.

In order of the podcast, I talk to:

Mark Orr - gritmon.com (pocketvideoschool.com)

Eight folk, eight mojo-productivity answers and one unusually long episode: I'm not far short of half an hour on this one (which is why it's a bonus episode!)

Enjoy!

We all know that willpower (alone) is rubbish for improving our productivity and keeping us doing what we're supposed to be doing. That's everything from going to the gym to working harder to being nice to that irritating neighbour and taking lunch breaks.

What we need is to have the 'good thing' so ingrained it becomes a habit that doesn't need a habit. But building habits can be hard.

Enter lifehacks.

Lifehacks are a mechanical trick or device to get something from the back our our heads to the front, so we can make a conscious decision, instead of relying on 'just remembering' to do what we told ourselves we should...

I'm not making any claims, but no one has seen me and Batman in the same room, at the same, time, right? ;)

In this episode I explore a couple of sayings we use around here to help us get things done and to help us figure out what we need to get done. Productivity is often about

planning

just doing!

But sometimes we don't know what to do when, or don't feel up to doing it. Let me introduce you to FutureSimon, who knows what you should have done today, to make his job easier - and Batman, who you might have met before.

Batman doesn't have off days. Batman doesn't go "meh, I don't feel up to it today".

Maybe productivity is about being more Batman! ;)

Wouldn't you love to work just three days a week? The other two days are time to spend with your new daughter (as well as the weekends!) or chill out, relax - or do some personal development...

... in this episode I chat to Dave Algeo, who runs a training company and who does exactly that.

Dave's utterly honest and open about how he managers - and when he might not!

There's something for anyone here, if you're interested in knowing how to get enough done and still have time to play.

We're all good at something. And it's fair to say we're all less good at other things. If we're going to be honest, there are some things we're absolutely sucky at!

But all is not lost. Sometimes we can look at things that we're rubbish at (or better yet, things that

other people

are rubbish at) to see how to be more efficient and effective.

For example, I know I drive more economically when my car's computer tells me there's only enough juice in the tank to get where I'm going with not tooooo much spare!

Only to episode four and I can't wait to get to my office to record something! ;)

Here, I rant a little - just a little - from one of my favourite cafes, as I do some Reflective Practice and debrief myself after a productivity training course I ran.

The course was great, the clients were great, the outcomes were mixed? Why? Not because people didn't know what to do by the end of the day, but because...

The HBR is a term we used in theatres a long, long time ago, when I was working as a touring theatre tech.  Directors would as for the moon on a stick to make their show just one percent better... but the effort involved would have killed us.

No one doubted it was worth the effort though - because that's theatre!

Do the same rules apply when it's the real world?

Let's talk about meetings and who to invite. We've all be there - there productivity level of a meeting is in directly inverse proportion to how much we want to be there and how much we want to live by the end of it...

... or how much we want our co-workers to live, even!

In this episode I talk about how to figure out who should be invited to a meeting and who should be just told about it.

And although I describe a process based on meetings, the idea applies to lots of other stuff at work too!