This blog explains the productivity principles that the Grid is built upon. Gain a real understanding of the science behind the system and find some great articles for further reading if you want to delve deeper.
Getting Organised at the Macro and Micro Level
Sometimes it really is hard to see the wood for the trees and this can be very overwhelming.
The Grid helps organise all activities into one space: your personal Grid. It further clusters activities to aid focus and helps you keep track of completed work with highlighting. This makes it easy to see what is left to do.
Focusing on Creativity Over Reactivity
Reacting to things catches us off guard which means we are not able to respond from a truly resourceful space. And, irrespective of job or life station, everyone is a CEO of their life as an adult. Inspiration correlates strongly with ownership over one’s vision and one’s ability to execute it.
For this reason, the Grid does not recognise deadlines as something to guide work or decision-making.
Instead, the Grid aims to restore the creative gift in everyone by conditioning the habits of
- clarity,
- focus,
- effective energy management, and
- motivation.
Finding Peak Productivity from Energy Flow, Not Deadlines
Grid recognises the power of flow, whereby we feel more energetically able to tackle one activity over another. Instead of working to deadlines, where we achieve results under stress, the Grid utilises energy surfing.
Energy surfing allows you to take ownership and recognise that everything on the Grid belongs to you. From this point on, you are guided more by inspiration than having to force action to meet a deadline.
This also means that over time, the Grid helps reveal what naturally energises and what drains, helping the user make better choices in all quadrants. This is where we start to find a beautiful balance between productivity, achievement, and wellbeing.
Chunking Big Audacious Goals into Achievable True Tasks
Grid recognises that many of the things we wish to achieve will take time and require sustained levels of motivation. But human beings tire and lose interest especially when the endpoint recedes into the distance.
For this reason Grid emphasises the value of each work unit being a true task: something that can be done in one sitting.
Celebrating Action and Completions
Along with chunking all activities into tasks, Grid puts a strong emphasis on completion through
the use of colourful highlighting and by linking work across timescales.
Your Grid could include big picture, long-term goals that may take a year or more. Or you might choose to Grid to monthly or even daily cycle. Either way, being able to mark tasks as completed fuels motivation and contributes to increased flow.
Finding Balance between Achievement and Wellbeing
By being able to accommodate everything you will do in all of the four quadrants, the Grid is helping
you advance your agenda across all domains for optimal balance. The use of highlighting helps visualise when balance is lost.
Self-Development through Personal Responsibility and Continuous Growth
Grid aids your self-development and helps you achieve your career and creativity goals. It coaches you by evidencing what actually happens over what you think or wish to do.
A Constant Visual Reference
The Grid uses the power of the nervous system and regular visual referencing to ensure immediate biofeedback to the user.
Grid user knows what to do by having a direct visual overview of all the work to be done, completed, and existing commitments. In this landscape he or she can take responsibility by advancing results based on the energy available and celebrate completion with colour by highlighting and evidencing progress in real time.
Grid Productivity Principles are grounded in Practical Neuroscience
The wellbeing and productivity principles mentioned here are all grounded in researched neuroscientific principles1,2, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)3, positive psychology4, motivational theory and habits function5. Find the full referenced links at the foot of this article.
More Articles about the Science Behind the Grid
In this blog, you will learn some of the key neuroscience concepts that help explain what makes the Grid so effective.
Grid is a tool to help you live a better life. In this blog, we will look at the psychological concepts that make the Grid so effective.
References and Further Reading
- Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M. (2012). Principles of neural science. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Nancy Kanwisher, (2010) Functional specificity in the human brain: A window into the functional architecture of the mind, PNAS, 107 (25) 11163-11170.
- Dilts, R., DeLozier, J.A., and Bacon-Dilts, D.S. (2018) NLP ii: Enriching the structure of subjective experience. Scotts Valley. Dilts Strategy Group.
- Shane, L. and Snyder, C.R. (2011) The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York: Oxford
University Press. - Duhigg, C. (2012) The power of habit. Why we do what we do in life and business. New York: Random House.