Training non-standard actions: how to make work more productive

The fact that non-standard actions help self-development, I think, is far from news to the community and especially to readers of the GTD blog. In the topic, the topic is revealed somewhat more fully, plus there are examples of what is worth doing in order to feel good and easy to work with a fresh mind and keen attention.



In order to work well, it is important to be a victory geek (which is regularly mentioned in various Success Stories and motivation books). Each victory is a proof of one's own strength, fixation for further success, improvement of mood and condition. And yet - building new neural connections and a lot of development.



Roughly speaking, it works like this: when you win, the brain starts the stimulation processes, fixing the tendency to success at a low level.

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There is also the so-called “frontier factor”: businessmen who have ever experienced a serious risk and won, usually achieve more than those who always choose complete security (research and methodology are described in the book “Good to Great”).



Fresh emotions from unusual actions and overcoming oneself and circumstances are the emotions of victory. Training non-standard actions is a thing that helps to feel the risk, to do unusual things and get a bonus in the form of sharply increasing productivity.



Non-standard actions are divided into three main categories:

- Just unusual, which build new neural connections in the brain.

- Associated with the rejection of something, giving a feeling of lightness.

- Physically safe, but risky, which give the feeling of victory.



The most interesting, of course, are the third, but first we analyze the first two types.

So, just unusual actions

Example : Try a half hour to work the mouse with your left hand if you are right handed. Pretty soon, “halt EXP” in the form of a charge of vivacity. When in a couple of days you are ready to control the mouse in this way, the effect of cheerfulness will disappear: the act will become habitual and you will get a new standard skill



Method : choose standard actions and make them different. Tie shoelaces with your left hand, rearrange the icons on the desktop, carry the phone in another pocket. The task is to disable the template reactions, which run on all the usual actions, as far as possible. In Eastern Zen practice, for example, there is an exercise, when a student asks a teacher permission for each of his actions, even for a simple desire to scratch. The goal is to catch any patterns and come to the awareness of each action.



Profit : a sense of cheerfulness, positive consolidation in the development of complex things, the potential development of neural connections, reduced downtime (including one that leads to salty coffee, because the code, and the salt shaker was closer to the sugar bowl).

Change tempo

One of the most interesting classes of this type of behavior is a change in the rate of perception. Try to eat your favorite dish for exactly an hour (you won’t believe how much taste you will open), answer IM twice less, walk as slowly as possible. Eastern nations, by the way, still have lessons of contemplation in school, when students simply look at a subject for hours, it’s something like that. Just try, it is incredibly exciting and unexpectedly difficult: as practice has shown, not everyone on Habré maintains 2 minutes of inactivity .

Failure actions

This is when we remove something very familiar and routine from our lives. Examples are clearing the desktop (remember what a relief it gives), transition to a new job (more precisely, the gap between the old and the new), the completion of a large project when nothing else “presses”. The principle here is also simple: a lot of things are taken up by the “background” by some of the brain resources. Removing the load leads to the fact that we stop worrying.



Remember what happens if you accidentally kill a screw and screw up a backup. First, the shock of loss ... and then the unreal relief that you no longer need to disassemble the folders "Disassemble", "Any" and "New Folder", no need to store a 40-gig archive of photos, and so on. I think the situation is familiar to many. The more there was, the more anxiety.

Physically safe, but risky actions

And this is a classic of many psychological training. A staff psychologist once forced us to do the most insane things as part of training non-standard actions. We had to greet everyone we met, took photographs of all pedestrians (politely asking and getting permission), went to different companies with security at the door (like bloody spammers traveling salesmen), proudly wearing a brick with a red bow on outstretched arms through the city center, picnics on asphalt and in general do a lot of things that a normal notorious person will not do. It must be said that the skills acquired were very useful in life, in particular, to me personally - at the negotiations.



Modern salespeople, by the way, train selling ordinary matches to passers-by for 300-500 rubles, distributing free flyers in the metro for rubles per piece and other foci.



Everything that challenges our complexes, ideas about the prevailing reality and a standard way of life - all this served as a wild source of buzz from a victory over oneself and circumstances at such trainings.

Back to reality

In ordinary life, not in the framework of insane training or any course of study, non-standard actions are quite a rarity (maximum, break and go somewhere). The mind is a rather lazy thing, it wants stability and a minimum of inclusions, for which it forms standard patterns for many, many actions. Crazy actions make very unusual adjustments to the vividness of the sensation of reality.

Let's play in the training of non-standard actions?

Here are examples of moderately insane tasks: remove all RSS-subscriptions, try to read books all day upside down, go to the zoo, write someone a letter on paper (damn attractively), suddenly give a favorite bouquet (“And when you gave flowers - two a month ago? ”), make a permutation in the room and, oh yeah, change the standard passwords and finally learn new ones.

Let's play?

How about inventing a moderately insane act (which you can still do in reality without any particular physical consequences) and unsubscribe it in the comments? I think in this case it will be possible to simply go over the comments and choose the “act of the day” to increase the productivity.



PS Transferred to the corporate to show the game , where we collected 30 non-standard actions (good in the comments, the topic of romance is actively mentioned).