Think productive, you litte Ninja

My blog would seem an odd place to review a book but since this was always about revelations on myself and others - it is an entirely appropriate place. I have an inordinate respect for Graham Allcott. He has an interesting history, keen social entrepreneur and founder of both social and charitable enterprise. I could witter on about his many successes but really, they are  precisely what you would expect from someone who clearly has natural insightful and who happens to have mastered that art of productivity.


Yep, he's done great but the real source of respect comes for Graham Allcott being the mind behind Think Productive - a company that made me cry.


Now it is well documented that those that make me cry, have generally had a deep impact on my life and no matter the pain of the moment, will always afford a positive gain.


I'm pretty certain that there was nothing in the Think Productive manual about making people cry but they didn't flinch. It seems that in order to be productive you have to stop trying so hard to be productive. Self placed expectation was leading to the constant guilt about not achieving enough. It was this that was  making me deeply unproductive. This revelation - apparently obvious to everyone else, was a bolt from the blue to me. So I cried, quite a lot.


So when Graham Allcotts new book 'How to be a productivity Ninja' was released this week, I was quite excited. The world is full of books that tell us how to make our lives easier but most are no more than another quick fix, often requiring us to master some overly complicated system that we don't have time for. Invariable a list of self help productivity manuals will accrue on the bookshelf, simply charting our own sense of failure.


Grahams book is simple. It's not about managing your world, it's about managing yourself. It doesn't teach you to be perfect, it teaches you to accept who you are. It will not teach you to get to the top by adding things to your to do list, it gives you the skills of working out what is important and reducing the chaos.  Most of all, it gets rid of guilt and once you do that, you achieve so much more.


And that's because Graham understands people, projecting a sense of calm insight into every word he writes. When you read this book it makes so much sense that you cannot quite believe it took someone else to tell you. To the rest of us with our scattered paintball approach to organisation, Graham Allcot is like a sniper.


And like all the good things - it all starts within.

 http://www.productivityninja.co.uk/.