Bernie J Mitchell

Productivity

  • Zoom Zoom Zoom We’re Going To The Moon…..

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    Bernie Mitchell

    And we’re back in the room

    It only seems ten minutes since I was last here armed with a keyboard and a stream of not very much to say, I have got the bug again for blogging like demon and it came from a combination of things.

    1. I have been posting my Instagram photos into my Day One Journal with an IFTTT recipe, so when I drift in there to write something I am met with a photo and off I go. The ‘I am sitting down to create’ thing has never, ever, ever, ever worked for me. What does work is standing on a train, hanging from a rafter in a barn, having my finger sewn back on and day dreaming while I wash-up.

    2. I noticed that my ‘ability’ to read and write has gone through the roof since I started sending my email newsletter every Sunday instead of ‘maybe’ every two weeks. You can imagine my surprise when doing something consistent started to get a response from people.

    So publishing more can only be a good thing, I am not trying to be a newspaper or media guru so as my mate Rich says, screw it, let’s do it.

    3. A few days ago my podcasting and trouble making mate Christina posted this blog declaring that she was kicking her own butt on her own blog and posting every day for 30 days. I sent her a message asking if can I join in too and we were two. I went to sleep for 48 hours and then we’d grown to five, Erin, Jessica and Nils had joined – this is starting to feel like the ice bucket challenge.

    4. Blogging and writing are so easy for me I am a knob for not doing them more often – I mean like every day often.

    5. Unfortunately for me pissing about before hitting publish, getting sucked into my vortex of self-doubt, procrastination, waiting for the planets to align and washing up one more time to have a better idea are even easier for me than writing and blogging is so there is my issue.

    6. I really despise ’30-Day blogging challenges’ – apart from Darren’s one of course. In the early days of twitter, I felt I was made to sit through too many lame arse “challenges” which were thinly veiled ‘traffic driving’ campaigns, often these shit blog posts were turned into a shit book “suddenly” at the end of the 30 days. I am all for repurposing content – please just do it elegantly.

    7. I am zooming around Krakow in Poland with #Babybernie and #Supercoolwife – I love travelling with these two! I have always secretly wanted to be a travel blogger, and now I am. All the ‘blog ideas’ that come from the heart seem to happen when I am travelling somewhere with #Babybernie.

    8. I am sure there was something else!

     

  • Keep Going: Building Daily Habits & Scrum

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    Bernie Mitchell

    Keep Going

    These days I am beyond the horror, drama, darkness of depression and I have dived fully into never getting there again.

    As a reader of this blog or my personal weekly email, you will have watched this unfold with both the joy and the crap.

    Habits and Comfort Zones

    My “deliberate practice” mega mission is to develop habits that will get me doing what matters.

    This made me identify the exit out of my real comfort zone. I thought my getting out my comfort zone was running fast, a cold shower or waking up early.

    I can do all those things and they are physical, I make them look hard (a waste of energy in itself) and some people go “aren’t you good Bernie!”

    Or “I don’t know how you do that, I couldn’t!”

    To which I go “oh it’s nothing” just to look sweet, but I am a fucker, it really is nothing to me.

    Snuggle Blankets and Energy Drinks

    Some nasty and upsetting shit happened to me but as I talk in therapy these days I can see how I hung onto it like a snuggle blanket.

    Getting out my comfort zone is making myself thrive on creating stuff, embracing responsibility and following through on my promises to family and coworkers.

    This is energising.

    Really energising.

    A super sugary energy drink is not energising it is a pacifier.

    I had been drinking too many energy drinks.

    Now I eat good protein, avocados and caffeine free bulletproof coffee.

    Building Habits & The Compound Effect

    This is so easy I am dumb for not doing it sooner. It is so easy you probably did this years ago and I am the only dickhead who did not get the memo.

    Just do the same thing every day until it becomes a habit.

    This works, how hard can it be?

    Most of us wake up, have a shit and eat every day without thinking about it – it is a habit.

    So it can’t be that hard to chuck write 750 words and don’t eat crap food into the mix?

    Turns out it is hard, I have come to think that it is so hard because it is so easy, maybe at some perverse level I resent that something so easy could be so effective and I think it is beneath me.

    I am too good for that.

    I have no more bandwidth for “I am too good for that” – I never woke up with the intention of thinking things are beneath me so this might be hard to shift.

    I’ll go into more mind-numbing detail in future posts, here are the headlines for now.

    Do the same things every day. I track and remind myself every day with Productive and an app called Momentum.

    These are both enabling me to fine tune my day. Emily and I talk about it in our daily scrum stand-up meeting to nudge each other along with organising our day.

    People are inclined to say, you can do that with a bit of paper, I don’t need a daily meeting or you can write in Google Docs for free, why do you pay for 750 words?

    In six months of stand-ups with Emily and nearly three years of spunking $5 a month on 750 words, I have made the most life changing progress I have made since I learnt to walk as a baby.

    Having everything out of my head and into Trello or my mind mapping app before writing about it is exhilarating.

    I wish I’d had this arsenal of software when I was a frustrated dyslexic teenager, but that’s another blog for tomorrow.

  • How to get your team to stop using endless email threads FOREVER

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    Emily

    We get it– you like the idea of less email. Conversations can be concentrated within certain apps (whichever it might be–of course we like Trello ;)), but your team isn’t complying. The email threads continue. And continue. Ad nauseum. How do you get them to ADAPT, already?

    Fortunately there something truly simple you can do to make them stop the email nonsense forever.

    In our lifetime, the social skill of setting and maintaining boundaries has been all but lost. This isn’t done by enforcing discipline with punitive measures, or by becoming a paranoid dickhead and watching over everyone’s shoulders. It’s actually quite amazingly easy.

    All you need to do it remind them of the app you use for communication every time they start a new email thread. Every. Single. Time. Trust me, you won’t have to do it for long. If someone resists for longer than a few weeks, you’ll know they aren’t being a good team member by hijacking communication, and can choose how to act.

    To make it even easier, have a copy-paste swipe file ready on your phone and desktop containing a phrase expressing the following sentiment:

    “STOP. This email thread stops now. Whoever started this thread must immediately go to (add link to your conversation app here) and restart this conversation there. All participants in this conversation must also repaste their comments in the app.

    “The purpose of using (the app) is to make your job easier in the future by making it easy to follow, find, and recreate what happened during the workday. Thank you for your compliance!”

    What do you do when no matter how many times you remind someone, they will not comply?

    Ask the team during your Review & Retrospective what to do about that person’s noncompliance. Make sure that person is present in that meeting. Allow them an opportunity to change their habit, perhaps a Sprint or two. Keep their noncompliance on the agenda for each Sprint and discuss it as if it were a new issue every time. If they still don’t comply after a few Sprints, add to the discussion agenda the possibility of removing that person from the team. The team decides what to do together.

    The only person you can control is yourself. You’ve set up a way for your team to streamline communication. Encourage them to use it. Ask them not to use other methods. This is how self-organizing teams learn how to adapt.

  • Retrospective: My Trello workshop at Hubud in Bali

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    Nils

    My family and I are currently travelling in Bali and Australia for a few months. It’s our last chance for a grand gesture before our son starts school back in London in September. For the last 5 weeks I’ve been stationed at the lovely Hubud co-working space in Ubud, Bali. If you’ve ever wanted to work in a hammock while monkeys are sitting in the trees above you, this is the place to go! Not to mention the amazing group of highly focussed international entrepreneurs, digital nomads and online experts who have made Bali their home and are collaborating their way to a better future!

    Hammock working in Hubud, Bali

    Last week, while my wife was busy doing yoga, I held one of our Trello Workshops at Hubud. What a great experience! There were around 15 to 20 of us squeezed into the air-conditioned meeting room, ready to discuss how to get organised with Trello for 1 hour. With German efficiency and a dash of the good old Pomodoro Technique we got through 11 topics,  touched on 4 others and even had a chance to discuss organising an entire workflow in Trello. Okay, so we did run over for 3o minutes or so but all in all it far exceeded my expectations.

    Trello Workshop Hubud Bali

    What really struck me above all was how engaged everybody is here. If I had to explain it I would say it’s a mixture of the Bali environment and the focus that people have while here. Hubud is one of the few workspaces in Bali and I think the only one in Ubud. That scarcity really focusses the attention and means that everybody is concentrated into a single community. It seems to lead to lots of collaboration and a strong, cohesive group spirit that I didn’t always experience to the same degree over in London.

    During the workshop there were tons of questions, even during the breaks and afterwards. Everybody seemed genuinely interested in hearing what I had to say and how they could then use it to improve their own working lives, businesses and team management. It was a real buzz presenting and a truly pleasurable experience, thank you all!

    Trello To Do Board Hubud

    A few people got in touch afterwards. Estela of Inspiral Studio wanted to pick my brain in a week or so once she has her Trello setup sorted out. Amber of climboutofthecubicle.com might appear on Bernie’s podcast and Jordan and I got into a longer conversation about how best to launch a new business idea. Amber, by the way, doesn’t use Trello and manages her life using a paper planner and Google calendar. Which of course is completely fine. I’m secretly a little jealous as I’m a closet fan of paper planners and notebooks but have never managed to use them consistently 🙂

    My own take-aways from the Hubud Trello workshop:

    • Workshops are a great way to meet people when you arrive at a new place. Next time I’ll schedule it much earlier, right at the beginning of my stay.
    • There is a keen interest in how to use Trello to organise an entire workflow. Answers to practical questions are important and we could have continued all day long but I’ll add a more structured Trello workflow segment next time.
    • Our Trello blog is a useful reference point to answer questions that I ran out of time on.
    • I need to take more and better pictures!
    • I need to find a better way to connect with people who attend, via Facebook, Twitter, etc. and to find out more about who they are, what they do and what their interests are. Sadly this part was a bit rushed as we only had 1 hour and I wasn’t at Hubud consistently enough to make stronger connections.

    Thanks for organising Vitto, thanks for coming everybody and see you all next time! Next stops: Sydney and Brisbane in Australia!

  • How to: Create Trello cards from Slack

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    Nils

    We recently wrote a blog post on How to integrate Trello and Slack. The stand-alone integration is fairly simple, and the question came up whether you could create a Trello card from inside a Slack channel conversation. It turns out the answer is YES, although it’s not exactly straightforward. Read on to find out how it works.

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  • How to: Integrate Trello with Slack

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    Nils

    We are often asked: “Can I integrate Trello with Slack”? The answer is a resounding YES and we’ll show you how to do it in a few easy steps.

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  • How to: Connect Trello to the Sunrise Calendar

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    Nils

    Trello is well known for its ease of use as an online project management tool. We recently wrote about how easy it is to set up the Trello calendar to manage your weekly and monthly work schedule. You can also integrate your Trello calendar with Google Calendar for a fairly basic read-only setup. The good news is that there is an online calendar that offers much better Trello support, including the ability to update Trello cards from within the calendar – and that is the Sunrise Calendar. Let me show you how you can connect Trello to the Sunrise Calendar in a few easy steps.

    As a quick aside: Sunrise has an amazing interface and is super easy to use – to the extent that if you use Google Calendar already, you should perhaps switch to Sunrise anyway!

    Step 1: Sign up for Sunrise

    Of course you can skip this step if you already have a Sunrise calendar account.

    1. Visit https://calendar.sunrise.am/, where you will see various options to sign up to the free Sunrise calendar service (currently with your Facebook or Google login or with an email address).

    Step 2: Integrate Trello with Sunrise

    1. In the top-left corner, click on the Settings icon:trello-sunrise-settings
    2. In the Sunrise Settings popup, switch to the Accounts section, scroll down until you find Trello and press ‘Connect’.
    3. You will be asked to connect Trello with Sunrise and might need to enter your Trello username and password. It’s a safe process, your login details are not actually sent to Sunrise, the authorisation page runs on the Trello website.
    4. Once completed, click ‘Done’ to close the Settings panel.

    trello-sunrise-connect

    And this is where the fun begins!

    Step 3: Get more productive!

    There isn’t really much need for a Step 3. Take a look at the Sunrise side bar – you will see your various Trello board calendars appear as if by magic. Turn them on and off as you require and see all your Trello due dates right here in your favourite calendar.

    Your entire calendar

    There is another special calendar that Sunrise automatically imports – it’s a calendar called ‘My Cards’. This calendar shows you all of the cards assigned to you that have a due date. There is almost no better way to plan what needs to be done!

    trello-sunrise-my-cards

    Two-way data synchronisation

    What was solely lacking from Trello’s Google Calendar integration is alive and well within Sunrise – two-way data synchronisation between Trello and the calendar itself. Move calendar events around in Sunrise – and Trello due dates will update. Edit the event description in Sunrise – and Trello card titles will update. It may take a couple of minutes for data to transfer and when it does you will have a full view of what needs to be done on both sides of the productivity coin.

    As a good friend of mine said once “This may well change your life forever!”

     

     

  • How to set up the Trello Calendar

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    Nils

    Perhaps you already know Trello as an easy-to-use project management tool and online to-do list. Did you know that you can also use Trello to schedule your time, set deadlines and manage your weekly and monthly work schedule? Let me show you how in 3 easy steps.

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