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Productivity

Do you have any canaries to warn you of trouble?

February 20, 2014

You’ve probably heard about how miners used to bring caged canaries with them deep into mine shafts. If any harmful gases emerged, the canaries would die, giving the miners sign of trouble while they still had time to get out. Having easily observable indicators of coming trouble is really helpful, not just in mines, but in all areas of life. As we go about our days, weeks and months it’s easy to get lost in the details and fail to see trouble brewing until it hits us hard and has significant consequences. If you can identify a few leading indicators or “canaries” that you can easily keep an eye on though, you can get an early warning of coming challenges in time to make adjustments and avoid more dire consequences. As an example, I have three key canaries I watch to make sure my schedule is in healthy balance: Do…

Leadership Productivity

The power of 10x problem solving

July 28, 2013

Life in business and at home presents an endless array of problems to solve. Probably due to this relentless volume, it’s easy to get stuck in a routine of implementing solutions that will simply solve the immediate problem. It’s uncommon to routinely take the time and energy to identify good long-term solutions that will be scalable and flexible enough to handle growth and other changes. Unfortunately, the effect of routine short-term problem solving is that problems reoccur and accumulate. As the volume of reoccurring problems increases, it gets harder to have the time and energy to work on long-term solutions. It is a vicious cycle and it’s easy to get stuck. One easy way to either avoid getting into this mess or to claw your way out of it you’re already there is to start solving problems using what I call a 10X test. The next time you have a…

Leadership Productivity

The importance of operating below your capacity

April 27, 2012

How often do you hear, “I’m giving one hundred and ten percent!” It’s said with pride. It communicates dedication, focus and drive. We say it about work, school, relationships and more. But there’s a problem. In many instances we’re committing more time, energy and other resources than we truly have to give. We consistently fall short of unreasonable expectations. Moments out from under the heavy weight of overcommitments are rare and too brief. The problem isn’t just the extra ten percent. The problem is the extra twenty percent. To show others that we’re more dedicated, more productive or can juggle a dizzying amount of obligations, we give up something really important: whitespace or capacity. What if you reoriented your life to only commit ninety percent of your capacity, whether measured in time, resources, energy, etc. What if you intentionally held back ten percent to create space to think, reflect or…

Productivity

The importance of a stop doing list

August 21, 2012

I’m a fan of to-do lists. Whether on paper or digital, I find great peace of mind knowing that what I need to do is written down. Marking off the tasks is a satisfying visual indicator of apparent progress. While extensive to-do lists are not for everyone, there’s a complimentary list I keep that I believe is for everyone, though few seem to have: a stop doing list. We’re rarely honest with ourselves, or those around us, about our limited capacity. We behave as though we have an unlimited ability to expand our time and energy for work, relationships, volunteering, social engagements, etc. The trouble is that if you do not regularly decide what you need to stop doing, from the mundane to the material, you’ll find yourself perpetually overextended because as more comes in, nothing goes out. What if this evening at home, or tomorrow with your colleagues, you…

Productivity

A simple “Is it worth my time to improve?” calculator

June 10, 2014

I’m an optimizer by nature. I notice opportunities for small improvements to save time or money that are only motivating when you think about the time or money saved over the course of a year. I call this the “Accumulated Efficiency Effect”. I’ve also written a related post about the “Power of 10x Problem Solving”. But how do you know whether a small inefficiency is actually worth the time and effort to improve with a better tool or automation? Well, I’ve got a calculator for that. This little gem will help you figure out whether saving a minute or two a few times a week is actually worth the effort. If you run a business, you can click on the advanced options to calculate the impact on your entire team and the return on investment for implementing a solution. If you’d prefer a chart, I’ve included that below, which you can download to keep…

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…

Productivity Reviews Technology

Taming email to an hour or less a day

March 8, 2013

Have you heard of people declaring email bankruptcy, wiping out their mailbox and emailing everyone in their address book that they are starting over? Or what about the people who have boldly declared they are no longer using email? It is tempting. Both of these rather severe reactions seem somewhat reasonable given how much we have come to disdain managing the ever increasing flood and time demands of email. There are three tools I want to share with you that I use to manage all of my personal and business email in less than an hour a day. For those who have been following my blog for long, you know I am not interested in this to be a productivity or technology junkie. I try to be more productive and leverage the best technology so I have more time for the things ever increasing demands on our time crowd out: white…

Leadership Productivity

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…

Leadership Productivity

Buying into lies about running late

January 4, 2012

First off, let me be upfront that I’m often guilty of running late, so what I share here comes from self evaluation. I have committed to solving the problem because as you’ll see below, nothing good comes of running late. I hope my observations about lies I bought into over the years will help you, or someone you share this post with, resolve to be prompt instead of making others suffer the consequences of running late. Perception is reality in this arena. If you have a reputation for running late, it’s because it’s well deserved. Self-denial will not help you get better. Failure to be prompt is disrespectful and communicates that your time is more valuable than someone else’s. Your time is not more valuable that someone else’s whom you’ve made a commitment to. Failure to plan for traffic, know how to get where you’re going, plan on time to…

Productivity

Are you too responsive to unsolicited calls or emails?

November 10, 2011

How often do you take calls from numbers you do not recognize? How often do you feel obligated to reply to an email simply because someone sent it to you? Most people have the phone numbers of people they regularly talk to or want to talk to in their phone or address book. So, when that calls come in without caller ID or without matching one of hundreds of phone numbers you already have, why take the call? Unless you’re in a role or profession that requires fielding these calls, why not let the call go to voicemail and phone back when convenient for you? If you take an unsolicited call when you do not need to, you’re simply letting the caller dictate your schedule. What about the unsolicited email you get? I’m not talking about email from people you want or need to correspond with or spam, but all…