What are your note taking habits when you listen to a speech, sermon, presentation or similar? I find that most people fit into one of three camps. Which one describes you? You take a note or two, whether mental or written, but the content goes in one ear and out the other. You take some written notes, but rarely reference them later. You take written notes, identify how the content applies to you and consistently review your notes to evaluate action taken and catch any items you missed. The problem with habits #1 and #2 is that they have a similar outcome. Hours or days later, only broad themes are remembered. Weeks later, little to nothing is remembered let alone applied. In a relationship, sometimes you need to listen just to listen, but not when you sit in the crowd listening to a speaker. If you listen without purpose, without…

I’m a productivity junkie. I enjoy finding ways to be more efficient whatever the task. But why? To what end? Think about that question for a moment. Why do you want to be more productive? If you succeed, you’ll gain time, but where will the time go? This is a critical question, whether you lack motivation to be more productive or you’re a slave to productivity. If you just invest the time gained into doing more, you’re stuck in a vicious cycle because there will always be more to do. No wonder so many people could care less about being more productive. The reason I strive to be more productive is to capture time to invest in what’s most important to me, my relationship with Jesus and my family. If you had a similar goal in mind, focused on investing time gained into what’s most important to you, would you…

I run into a surprising number of people who explain away their lack of organization and discipline by emphasizing the importance of maintaining freedom and flexibility.  Sadly, what they desire eludes them because the truth is that the more organized and disciplined you are, the more freedom and flexibility you will have. Freedom and flexibility without organization and discipline is simply illusory.  If you do not know what you need to do and when you’re going to do it, life’s tasks become overwhelming and you’re forced to pursue moments of escape.  You avail yourself of your “freedom and flexibility”, but you cannot fully enjoy it because you are distracted by thoughts and concerns about what you may have forgotten or neglected at work or home. Contrast this with being more organized and disciplined.  With good organization, you’ll know what you need to do, when you need to do it and…

Feeling stressed, strained, worried or overwhelmed by all your tasks and responsibilities?  Read on… Anytime you do something more than once, pause to consider how a more efficient approach could save you time instead of just doing enough to complete the task now.  The key is to always calculate time savings on an annual basis and to take this approach with a lot of tasks.  Over the course of a single year, the efficiencies accumulate and have a significant impact.  This is what I call the accumulated efficiency effect. Let’s say you type a very similar two paragraph email twice a month.  It takes you four and a half minutes each time.  Whenever the occasion arises, four and half minutes never seem costly enough to put a better process in place. What if you took thirty seconds to save the text as a template?  Now you’re saving four minutes twice…