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When thinking about making our lives happier, more successful, and fulfilled, we seldom contemplate that the way to do it is through deliberately seeking difficulties. However, when Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi completed his initial studies into ‘Flow and the Psychology of Optimal Experience’, he was asked to condense the findings of a 2000 page document. After a brief moment he said,

Every day, the happy person does at least one difficult thing.

Lillian Galbraith, an early pioneer in the field of productivity and one of the most amazing women of the twentieth century, was asked what kept her alive and vital into her seventies. She responded,

‘ Every morning I ask God to give me a day filled with difficulties and challenges. Every evening I give thanks as he always answers my prayer. ‘

It may seem odd to conclude that by intentionally making your life harder you’ll be rewarded with more happiness, however, it does give a new perspective when your struggling to meet the deadline and the pressures piling. So next time you’re starting to feel stressed because the end is far from sight, take a deep breath and relax. Maybe it’s just one of those lessons that life itself keeps attempting to teach us.

Following up on my post of February 13, here are a few salient quotes about the productivity and inter-personal benefits of Listening with a capital L. The sources range from modern-day business gurus to a 1st century philosopher to an ancient Ethiopian proverb. Enjoy!

• “The best way to persuade people is with your ears—by listening to them.” (Dean Rusk, former U. S. Secretary of State)
• “If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention  to what they have to say, you can forget about the whole thing.” (Saul Alinsky, considered the founder of modern Community Organizing in America)
• “The fool speaks. The wise man listens.” (Ethiopian proverb)
• “Listen to everyone. Ideas come from everywhere.” (Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence)
• “The funny thing about human beings is that we tend to respect the intelligence of, and eventually to like, those who listen attentively to our ideas even if they continue to disagree with us.” (S. I. Hayakawa, Canadian-born American academic and political figure)
• “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” (Winston Churchill, British statesman and orator, former UK Prime Minister, Nobel Prize Winner)
• “In a truly customer-driven organization, everybody listens. But that’s not the way it usually is. In a typical organization, the higher up you go the less direct listening to customers there is.” (Feargall Quinn, King of Ireland’s Shopping Malls)
• “The essential information we need to get  from others depends on whether they trust us or not. Who do we trust  that doesn’t listen to us? No one. Want to build a trusting  relationship? Want to get essential information to make important decisions? Learn how to listen. Hire  people who listen to you.” (Peter deLiser, Executive Coach)
• “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They are either speaking or preparing to speak.” (Steve Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)
• “Listening is the single skill that makes the difference between a mediocre and a great company.” (Lee Iacocca, American businessman famed for his revival of Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s)
• “Hearing is a faculty; listening is an art. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” (Ernest Hemingway, Novelist and Nobel Prize Winner)
• “We have two ears and one mouth and should use them in that proportion.” (Epictetus, Greek Stoic Philosopher who lived 55-135 AD)

I’m a consultant who helps sole proprietors who are stuck on important projects or whose businesses are in trouble. Rather than come up with solutions, I tell my clients to look within for the answers. No matter how many experts you call in, or books you read, the fate of your business rests on your shoulders. Here’s a story about how one person shifted from a “Great Depression” mindset and got her business back in the black!

The travel industry is particularly vulnerable to swings in the economy. After spending the last 20 years barely making a living, my client woke up to the fact that her travel agency was a hair’s breadth from bankruptcy. I asked her to list what she wanted. She ended up with three sheets of viable actions and a smile on her face. “I never stopped to ask myself what I wanted,” she said, looking as if a weight had lifted. She had been so focused on paddling, she forgot to look up to see if the direction suited her current needs and desires.

This reflective questioning produced a miraculous shift. She decided not to bail out, but relocated her business to her home and advertised for outside agents. The office building also wrote off her unpaid rent, so her business began operating in the black in less time than she imagined.

The trick is to set aside concerns about how you are going to survive. Next, tune out the folks who say your financial goal is just a pipe dream. With the pressure off, get into a relaxed, creative state. Start to feel good. Write down answers to these questions, listening to your intuition, going with your hunches.

Why are you intent on having this business in the first place? What caused you to create it. Or, what caused you to come up with the project idea? Do you know it’s worth the time, creative effort, and resources you are giving it? Keep exploring as you question what you need to do and how you need to work with others to succeed in your business or project.

David Allen, in recent newsletter, (subscribe at www.davidco.com/productivity_principles.php) wrote that “Direction is more productive than discipline.” I take that to mean, it’s unproductive to keep paddling when the direction isn’t at all what you desire. Nor should you wait for the Aha! experience of your life purpose flashing before your eyes.

So don’t wait for President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package to kick in, start to take action now! A good question to ponder, now that congress has approved the stimulus package, is what to do to get our careers on track and participate in the economic recovery.

As my client discovered, deciding what we want and setting our own agendas gives us tremendous financial freedom.

Back when I was in college I took a class that changed my life—not because of the subject matter, but because of the superstar professor (who went on to head a major university). She was riveting: so brilliant, dramatic, and mesmerizing that I overcame my tendency to daydream in the classroom and listened carefully to every word. Before long I noticed that really listening had unintended but major benefits; not least, I was able to study less while testing extremely well.

Good listening offers countless advantages. It’s terrific on an inter-personal level, because. . .well, face it, we all like to be listened to. As American playwright Wilson Mizner once put it, “A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.”

Being a good listener also helps you work more effectively and productively, and it encourages those around you to do the same. Many people in top management fail to understand the profound benefits of effective Listening—but that’s hardly surprising. After all, Listening is rarely taught at home or in school. Even the best parents and teachers seem to equate Listening with breathing or swimming. That is, they think it’s something that everybody knows how to do.

But keep in mind that there’s a huge difference between listening and Listening. Most people practice the former, paying scant attention to what is being said by others while busily planning their own reply. The latter, however, is an art and a skill—and the effective wielding of it can and will improve your work life.

For instance, if you Listen carefully to what customers say—paying particularly attention to what they want—they’ll end up trusting and buying from you because they’ll feel that you understand and care about their needs.

This kind of Listening worked for Tim Boyle, CEO and President of Columbia Sportswear—one of the world’s largest outerwear brands. Back in 1970, Boyle was a college senior when his father, who had run the family-owned company since 1964, died suddenly of a heart attack. Tim immediately stepped into the breach to manage the company with his mother. At first the pair made one mistake after another, and nearly went bankrupt.

But then Boyle began to really Listen to what people were saying. When bankers—ready to foreclose—made specific suggestions for improving the business, he Listened and made the improvements. When customers told him what they wanted, he Listened and made product changes. The company’s fortunes began heading up, until, in March of 1998, it went public. Last year Columbia Sportswear reported overall sales of nearly $1.1 billion. “Listening,” says Boyle, “was the greatest part of the turnaround.”

Or, as was once said by Lee Iacocca, the renowned former chairman of Chrysler, “Listening is the single skill that makes the difference between a mediocre and a great company.”

Here’s another positive way in which Listening works in business: when you Listen to the people who work for you, their productivity and quality of work tends to improve. Why? Because in an open and accepting Listening environment, honest opinions and new ideas arise, are heard and discussed, and—when appropriate—acted upon. This, in turn, helps to decrease and even dissolve team conflicts.

Dave D’Antoni attributed his success as Senior Vice President of Fortune 500 company Ashland, Inc. to Listening to employees. “Not every team member is able to articulate concerns or solutions,” he once said. To encourage team participation in decision-making, D’Antoni regularly opened meetings by defining a problem and then turning the floor over to others. Meetings would continue while he Listened, took notes, asked an occasional question, and “Listened some more.” Such Listening, D’Antoni later revealed, allowed him to “discover pearls of wisdom.”

And then there was Sam Walton, billionaire founder of Wal-Mart. When asked the secret behind his achievement, he replied: “The key to success is to get out into the store and Listen to what the associates have to say. It’s terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stock boys.” No one can deny that his approached worked—and then some!

Somewhere along the line, Tim Boyle, Lee Iacocca, Dave D’Antoni, and Sam Walton not only learned the difference between listening and Listening—they also understood that Listening is vital to productivity and running a successful business.

The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), based in the US and with members in eight other countries, offers some straightforward tips on being organized in the office:

Manage Your Time

• Use a planner to track appointments and tasks. It can be a paper-based notebook, a computer software program, or an electronic handheld device.
• Create at least one hour of uninterrupted time per day to tackle projects and action items.
• Allocate twice as much time for a task as you think it will take. This accommodates for interruptions and stopping to get more information.
• Break large projects down into small, sequential steps. Schedule these steps into your day with your planner.

Tame Your Desk

• Keep only supplies you need on a daily basis on your desktop.
• Create a paper flow system for your incoming documents.
• Use your in box only for items that haven’t yet been reviewed.
• Avoid looking at documents and placing them back on the desk. Follow through with the decision you have made about the document.

Supercharge Your Communication

• Write an agenda before making a phone call so you don’t forget the important points.
• Keep a record or schedule follow-up calls of what you’ve delegated so it doesn’t fall through the cracks.
• Be clear about the response you need when sending messages to colleagues. They can then provide a full response, even if they don’t reach you directly.

Conquer Your Filing

• Create a filing system for your electronic documents that mirrors the one you have for paper. Sort, file, and purge electronic information regularly.
• Keep a file index (a master list of file names). Check the index before creating a new file to avoid making duplicates. Also use it when deciding where to put new documents.
• Refer to your company’s records retention plan for guidance on how long to keep documents.
• Keep the most recent papers in the front of the file. Whenever you open it, the current information will be on top.

Want to get a quick, free, no-strings assessment from David Allen on your own personal productivity? Of course you do!

The author of Getting Things Done has recently worked with a leading professional assessment firm to develop an online self-assessment quiz. By taking it you’ll learn how you fit into Allen’s matrix of self-management, based on the traits of perspective and control.

You don’t need to have read any of Allen’s books to take the quiz. However, checking off which of those books you’ve read is used to indicate your background before you tackle the first question.

There are four outcomes: Visionary (Crazy Maker), Responder (Victim), Implementer (Micro Manager), and Captain/Commander ((Autocrat). A generous amount of free add-on material is available to help you figure out what your category means: numerous PDFs, an episode of Allen’s “2 Minutes” series, and an audio discussion between Allen and his mentor, Dean Acheson (U. S. Secretary of State in the administration of President Harry Truman).

Visit www.gtdiq.com to take the quiz.

After reading all the books and blogs on productivity, efficiency and time management, chances are you gathered the best bits, forgot the more complex ones and carried on as usual. This sounds like a fairly reasonable way of approaching the issue of organizing your work schedule and at least you are approaching it.

However there’s one tiny flaw that still remains… these great, inspiring methods for getting more done and achieving order are still being implemented by a not so organized individual…namely you.

Now, I pretty much believe that everyone has the ability, recognized or not, to excel in some area, but it is impossible to be fantastic at everything.

As an example, lets take the Dalai Lama. Many people have heard the words of the Dalai Lama, and as a result have been inspired to live a better life. But we wouldn’t ask him to fix the exhaust on the car, or baby-sit the kids for the afternoon, would we?

Why? The real reason is, car repairs and childcare are not where his level of expertise lies. So although he is a great inspiration to thousands of people and someone we can all learn from, no one can be expected to be a master of all trades.

Likewise, if you apply the same logic to the office environment, John may be good at programming, or have fabulous personnel skill. However it doesn’t automatically follow that he can organise his daily tasks and schedule as effectively as something or someone that’s designed to do the job.

So, when making the decision to become more organized and proactive at work, instead of shuffling papers around the desk, creating a more attractive yet still disorganized pile in the other corner, why not use something that’s designed for, and better equipped to deal with the problem: a task management tool.

Using the right tool for the job will help you to get more done in less time and will leave you happy and content in the knowledge that while it’s busy doing what it does best, so can you.