We always hear about renewable energy sources, but do you ever stand still and consider that the word renewable refers to more than just energy?

Let’s start thinking about renewable items as it seems to me that we can do a lot more about those in our daily lives than we can when making a choice of our energy suppliers.

Relying on your own intuition and knowledge can be a good starting point, but sometimes it’s not enough to stew in your own juices and outside input is required to move past a roadblock.

Of course, bringing in other people to brainstorm is common practice in work environments (often overused, think of all those pointless meetings you’ve been to), it’s also not the best use of getting feedback. If open-ended questions are rarely the best approach to moving forward, then what is?

“Learn from your mistakes” is one of those sayings that crop up all the time and in many different situations, and I agree with the sentiment. For the most part…

Of course we should always learn from our mistakes: doing something the same way and expecting different outcomes is pretty dumb to start with. However, the saying has more to do with improvement than with radical change.

You may think that “process” sounds very limited to business and the work arena, but you probably just use different terminology in your private life. Cooking a meal involves some planning: what’s in your pantry, what to buy and when, how much time you need for the food to be ready at dinner time, etc… well: that’s a process, we just call it ‘planning’ in private life. Nothing scary about it at all, and it only differs from ‘business strategy’ in its content, length of time and scale.

Let's look at processes in everyday life and how to improve them...

When you think of recycling, what comes to mind? Collecting paper, metal, plastic, etc. and then ditching it into the right bin? Or do you sometimes wander around your home and collect random “superfluous” items to give to a charity shop?

The kind of items you are recycling tend to be things that have overstayed their welcome or are simply no longer “good enough”, right? But if you really think about it, it’s simply a way of avoiding putting stuff in the bin, and maybe making sure landfills don’t fill up quite as fast.

Are you having trouble staying focused on the tasks ahead of you? You may have tried a series of practical tools like planners, task managers, lists, Kanban boards, Asana, Evernote and many more.

And yet you still find yourself pulled off track by distractions like your phone or email demanding attention all the time, obligations to family and friends, and even standard household tasks that seem to build up beyond belief?

If you are surrounded by distractions, or have a lot on your mind, you may find it hard to focus on anything. That could be a noisy office, your family not giving you enough time and space to concentrate, or a level of sensory overload you cannot deal with.

All those situations – and many others – can benefit from your own kind of positive distraction: i.e., not distract you from the tasks at hand, but from the things that pull your focus away from these tasks.

Sometimes we start working and soon find ourselves in the zone. Nothing can reach us, we are in our bubble and chip away at a task without engaging at all with the outside world. And before we realise it, a productive day has gone by in a flash and we find ourselves fresh, yet hungry, as we had forgotten to eat during the day.

I know: it's the perfect circumstance to get things done, but it doesn’t always happen, especially if the task is not exactly our most favourite thing to do. So let’s look at ways to get into the borderlands of the zone and focus on the task at hand.

Being productive with any task depends on our ability to focus and how easily we allow ourselves to be distracted.

There is one typical example of distraction that I regularly encounter during decluttering sessions: my client comes across a photo album and immediately they sit down and start looking at photos. I get it, they have not seen those in a while and it’s tempting to open the album, but in the meantime they completely forget about the task at hand.

Have you ever found yourself saying “yes” to do something and you immediately knew you really didn’t want to do it but felt obliged to accept anyway? We are all primed to say “yes” from a young age: “be polite”, “don’t be rude” and “help those less able” are phrases that have been hammered into children’s heads from a young age.

As adults, we often find ourselves in situations where that choice between “yes” and “no” can become difficult to navigate.