December, 2011 | It's Worth Noting

Productivity

Importance of preserving big blocks of time to think and create

December 30, 2011

Take a look at your calendar. Is it full of scattered appointments, meetings and tasks? Thirty minutes here, sixty minutes there with varying breaks in between? You’re busy. So busy in fact that you’re probably missing one of the most important things you need to do, preserving a few big blocks of time to think and create. It’s nearly impossible to think or create in 15-30 minute spurts. It may be difficult for you to come up with more time, but one thing you can do is to rethink how you calendar to preserve big blocks of time. Here are a few ideas: Make Monday a day to race through all the small tasks for the week. Every task that needs to get done, but will not take more than 30 minutes each to complete, knock out on Monday. At the beginning of each week, move as much of your calendar…

Feeling overwhelmed with tasks? Here’s a 15 min solution.

December 9, 2011

Feeling overwhelmed, anxious or stressed about all your tasks at work or home? A simple and surprisingly therapeutic solution is to take a few moments and write everything down. I promise it’ll be worth the 15 minutes. Grab a blank sheet of paper or find an empty whiteboard. Write down all the words or phrases on your mind. Write until you exhaust what’s on your mind, until you feel a release of stress and anxiety After you get everything written down, you can focus on the underlying problem: lack of prioritization and awareness of deadlines. Now you can create a plan to handle all the tasks instead of being overwhelmed by them! Find three different color markers and start circling words or phrases based on whether they are of high, medium or low priority. When you finish prioritizing, put dates on items that have hard deadlines. When you’re done, go ahead and start working…

That’s why we mow the grass

December 23, 2011

I grew up on a large cattle ranch. We raised Registered Brangus. The best cattle were sold for 10’s of thousands of dollars to ranchers looking to improve the genetics of their herds. The ranch was a mix of iconic cattle wrangling and sophisticated lab work, which melded together to produce the best bulls and cows possible. I worked on the ranch during the summers. Two days a week all I did was mow. I mowed acres and acres of grass. I mowed miles and miles of road edges. I’d finish those two days covered in grass clippings with a lingering hum in my ears. One day I asked my dad why we spent so much time mowing grass: “When people come to the ranch, they see how attentive we are to the grass. They assume that if we take that good a care of the grass, we must take…

December 2011