Drills and Productivity

Olympic athletes do them. Professional athletes do them. When my son wrestled, he did them. Even my son who plays chess does them. "They" are drills, simple actions that force us to practice some part of a skill set to improve them. In football, it may entail practicing a set of plays that will be used at the two-minute warning. In chess, it may be practicing a set of moves to win with only a bishop and a rook. In baseball, it might be simply batting practice, where the pitcher throws nothing but curve balls so the batter can better deal with them. Athletes know that drills are one key to success and they don't mind practicing them.

Coaches, to create drills, break down complex actions, situations, and behavior combinations into their separate components. then design exercises where one component is developed. In martial arts, for instance, the act of fighting, is broken down into its individual parts: punches, blocks, and kicks. Then, the instructor has students practice kicks for a period of time. Even kicks will be broken down into different types of kicks (e.g., front, back, roundhouse, side) and then practiced individually.

Drills can benefit our personal and professional lives as well. One example is from the previous post on using a timer to develop focus, where one concentrates on simply maintaining momentum for a specific duration of time. Over the next couple of days, I'll show a few more drills that I, along with many others, use to hone our performance in our work and improve our productivity.

Until then, what drills do you use in your life and profession?

Comments

[Harmony]

I use Benjamin-Franklin-style personality drills each evening by rating my day's behavior against a checklist of things I am trying to improve about myself, eg - http://www.flamebright.com/PTPages/Benjamin.asp - it seems to work very well because I am constantly reminding myself (and thus thinking about) those specific things rather than forgetting them.

I also use drawing drills before starting any kind of art (basically just drawing a series of shapes and shading for a few minutes), and at least 10 minutes of scales before any kind of music practice. Additionally I try and involve myself in mini competitions for things I want to improve in, eg: for music there's an ongoing 3 week competition I partipate in which means I'm actively writing music a lot more often than I would do if I didn't have this motivation.

I look forward to reading about your productivity drills! I really enjoy Open Loops too by the way, I don't comment much but I do think it's an excellent blog and I always find your posts helpful, so thank you :)

[Diane Ensey]

Writing drills of all kinds. My favorite is randomly selecting a word and writing for ten minutes about that word.