Hi Reader,

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Welcome to this week’s Rev Up for the Week, where each Sunday I deliver you an idea to help supercharge your work week.

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I moved house recently. It was my first house move in nearly a decade. I’d forgotten how much there is do, and how it disrupts little habits that you didn’t even know you had. For example, in the new house, I no longer eat bagels, I sit down and just relax more, I've stopped playing chess or looking at my iPad, I’ve taken some pleasure and even joy in tidying up (which definitely didn’t exist before!) and in my new (slightly smaller) office, I’ve been waaaay more ruthless with chucking stuff away I don’t need, and keeping the clutter around me to a minimum. None of those were conscious decisions, they’re just the result of my new relationships to the new spaces I’m in. And it’s brought me back to something I talked about in How to be a Productivity Ninja: the idea of ‘changing the view’.

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There’s a lot we don’t know about our brains so I can't tell you precisely why this works, but one thing that’s worked consistently for me over many years is when I need inspiration, or a boost in momentum, or to get something unstuck, is to change what I’m looking at in some way. When you change the view, or move yourself physically, you move something psychologically too. Here are a few examples:

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• When you’re trying to get your inbox to zero, move from sorting by date to sorting by subject line or person – infinite opportunities to cull usually present themselves pretty instantly.
• When you need a route through a knotty problem, don’t sit there dwelling, just go for a run and forget about it. Either the solution will pop into your head on the run, or looking at it slightly differently when you return will help (I figure out almost all the chapter structuring for my books in this way).
• When you want to remember the different talks or workshops at a conference or away day, just make sure you don’t sit in the same seat all day. You'll remember each section of the day much more distinctly. And if you’re organising something like that, encourage (or force!) people to move around. They'll thank you for it later.
• When you’re out of the habit of something (for example, doing a Weekly Review), then change the location. Find a nice coffee shop you never usually go to, or just a different room. For me, locations that constantly change have often been the best places: trains and planes offer perspective because they put you in a liminal state.
• If your team is stuck or you want to shake things up, assign different roles to different folks (chair of the meeting, minute-taker, social secretary, new-project-lead, etc). When something feels slightly different and isn't the 'status quo', our brains get off auto pilot and start to take notice again.
• If you’re running any kind of workshop or event, shifts in the activity should occur quicker than the average attention span (it’s why when I do keynotes that are an hour long, I make sure there’s some kind of break in the middle, or group discussions every 20-30 mins, or surprising visual slides, or a piece of video, or some audience participation). The same is true for how we design Think Productive's workshops.​

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It’s a simple idea, but a very powerful one. When we feel stuck or rooted, it feels like we’re a million miles away, but when we have momentum, it feels like we’re halfway there. Often all we need to change is the view.

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Where can you change the view this week?

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Graham

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PS - One of Think Productive's Productivity Ninjas, Hayley Watts is offering a package for people who are freelance/solopreneurs/self-employed. Working solo can be tricky, and her 'Focus' programme is a 6 month package to help you grow and develop your business without feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It's for solo workers who want to bid farewell to distractions, get some accountability and learn from others. ‘Focus’ empowers you to channel your focus where it matters most – on the tasks that drive your business forward.

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Sign up to Hayley's mailing list to get a free 'Procrastination Buster Toolkit'. If you're interested in finding out more about the 6 month programme starting on 9th May head here and book a call with Hayley to see if it might be right for you. Let her know that you came via my mailing list and if you sign up to focus in April you will get a 5% discount. At the time of writing, there were 8 spaces left, so... go!

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