“Make use of time, let not advantage slip.” ~ William Shakespeare What Does It Take to be a Great Leader? As we've all learned, most of life's lessons don't travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we've made…
Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to help you get more done. Each Productivity Tip is a remarkably simple tool or concept that can be quickly implemented to make a real difference in your personal productivity. When you apply many of them together, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.
You may want to check out some of the posts in this Productivity series, including the the value of checklists; the importance of getting rid of the crappy stuff; the nightmare of the cluttered mind; and that feeling of being buried all the time. You can also leverage your resources and apply the lessons of the ARCI chart and the S.M.A.R.T. goals to boost the accountability of your entire organization.
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Most of us follow an informal rule about doing something now if it takes just a few minutes. Most GTD aficionados are familiar with a more specific 2 Minute Rule. The short version? If you can get it done in 2 minutes, don’t add it to your task list. Do it now and be done with it.
That’s about as direct and in-your-face as GTD gets. For me, though, the real power of this rule is to make sure you do the opposite of the rule.
So, what’s the opposite of the 2 Minute Rule? Don’t do it if it takes more than 2 Minutes? Wouldn’t that be nice … but unfortunately, far more things take 2 minutes than not.
Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to make a real difference in your personal productivity success. When you apply these techniques, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.
You may want to check out some of the posts in this Productivity series, including the the value of checklists; the importance of getting rid of the crappy stuff; the nightmare of the cluttered mind; and that feeling of being buried all the time. You can also leverage your resources and apply the lessons of the ARCI chart and the S.M.A.R.T. goals to boost the accountability of your entire organization. Start by Turbocharging the Sunrise! Last week, we talked about the distractions that are destroying our brains, and next week I’ll outline one approach to getting more control over these relentless intruders.
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If you’re like me, you realize that there are a lot of “little things” that we need to do every day that often escape us in the maelstrom that surrounds our normal routine. It’s usually those things we’ve promised someone we would do that day FOR SURE … a small thing, easily done … but then, in the firestorm at the office, we completely forget about until we hit home and are gently reminded about our oversight … again.
This may sound absurd … maybe it is a sign of the times … but I’ve recently created a “Routines List”, an innovation that serves as a handy checklist of routines that I may or may not need on any given day but I want a quick reminder of what they are. As you know, I’ve written before about the power of such checklists. (You can also check out David Allen of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, who has also written extensively on the value of checklists.)
We all have routines, don’t we? (more…)
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So, why not jump into the deep end right now by reading Business Finance is about much more than finance
I’ve said before that leaders don’t have the luxury of confining their interests to just a few things
You need Leadership Skills to ascend to the C-SuiteA young friend of mine called me recently and said he was being considered for the CEO position of his young but growing company
He was elated, so excited, so thrilled to be considered until the “be careful what you wish for” axiom popped into his head and he realized he was pretty inexperienced in leading an organization of any size
We went on to talk about his concerns and as he began to think about his candidacy, it dawned on him that he had a very limited finance background … he didn’t think much about communication … and could be a better team player. (more…)
What do you think we’d get if we asked everyone who writes about Leadership to offer up a definition?
Probably need a new wing in the Library of Congress, don’t you think?
For some, it’s everything and anything that has to do with influencing others. It’s communication. It’s achieving accountability. For others, it’s a body of work built around values and character and timeless qualities of integrity, passion, respect, et. al. Do you have a definition that works for you?
As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris … naivete … and ignorance … or simply from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
This series is not about reiterating or re-examining the principles of leadership that so many seasoned professionals have so eloquently described. Leadership observers have extracted lessons from Julius Caesar to Patton, Jesus to Mohamed and (more…)
It’s not the clutter of the desktop or inbox … but the clutter of the mind that scuttles our personal productivity plans and leads us into unproductive habits and wasted time.
Yes, I know, our inbox is spawning new life forms, ending the paper flood has been about as successful as ending world hunger and our mobility means that we have to juggle all of this like we’re riding a unicycle.
Sometimes we’re infected with the attention span of a mosquito.
We’re moving fast … but we aren’t getting anywhere.
A lot of it starts with The Great Multitasking Hoax: It’s killing us.
Most of our conversations about personal productivity seem to revolve around related fields like organization or time management … but it’s probably more about mind management.
The consequence of a cluttered mind is our inability to focus on one thing at at time, fueled by our obsession with multi-tasking.
In many ways, technology has driven us to overestimate our multi-tasking abilities … and science has repeatedly confirmed that we are misguided about this.
Consider the debate in Is Technology making us Smarter or Stupider, or the results of one man’s decision to stop multi-tasking for a week.
Late last year, the New York Times summarized the most recent data on failed multitasking.
Don’t overlook the Atlantic’s detailed analysis, either, in Is Google Making us Stupid, which looks more closely at what the Internet is doing to our brains as we become increasingly focused on short mind-bites of information.
One thing really works for me … and the more I talk to others, the more this seems to work for them, too.
It’s stupidly simple and it doesn’t seem like it should work at all. In fact, I’m not exactly sure why it works … but it seems like it’s connected to our ability to focus.
What is it? (more…)
What are we going to be covering in this 6th and final podcast in our Action Planning Course? In this final episode of our Strategy podcast series, we extend our conversation to examine a 4th criterion that should be used to evaluate all of the opportunities available to build your…
~ Thomas Carlyle
A lady walked into a neighborhood market one day and spoke loudly over the counter to the head butcher.
“Your prices these days are atrocious, Sal. Joe’s Deli across the street is selling your $10 chuck roast for only $5!”
“I know, Mrs. Haggle. I saw the sign. The thing is . . . Joe doesn’t have any chuck roast.”
So, the law of supply and demand rears its head again, some days a beautiful vision, other days an ugly hag. We’re surrounded by her mystique everywhere we go. Traffic is tied up because there are more cars than highway space. Starbuck’s is backed up because people want coffee faster than it can be made. There are no paper clips in the supply room but there’s plenty of fruitcake left in the kitchen.
Supply and demand drove markets long before economists appeared … and its jarring prevalence is unavoidable. One of my favorite examples is (more…)