Many of you have seen my earlier posts - the Stanford research or the NY Times summary about how multitasking fails to increase our productivity ... the very enemy it's sworn to eliminate.In an HBR blog, Peter Bregman reports what he found when he did NOT multitask for a week…
Checklists? Those lists I prepare each day and don’t help me get everything done – don’t really need to know more about them … or do you mean those checklists that airline pilots use to keep me from getting killed? Now, those I like.
Some of you will remember an earlier post in the GTD context about the value of checklists. Now comes the book, The Checklist Manifesto, inspired by issues found in operating rooms but expanded to the many areas where simple checklists are invaluable.
Checklists couldn’t be simpler. (more…)
The Power of One concept is not new — it’s the bedrock of everything from motivational speeches to Army One.
There’s an entire industry devoted to the power we have over our destiny.
In the context of Building a Business, we can view the Power of One as a series of concentric circles that ripple outward from the center … from where we stand as business leaders.
[pullquote]“God grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Nieburh[/pullquote]
With a stagnant economy that has brought many businesses to their knees, we’ve been inundated with economic data, shards of doubt and glimmers of hope. While we can’t ignore these external forces, we can’t allow them to deter our commitment to reclaiming control of our agenda.
As a result, there’s no better topic with which to start than personal accountability, the singular touchstone of professional success over which we have the greatest control. (more…)
How about that for a double negative … meaning that “Not Not Important” is actually “pretty damn important”. Some of you took English, right?
What do I mean? Many of the followers of Sword Tips know that I’m a big fan of GTD, the “Getting Things Done” framework promoted by David Allen. He wrote recently in Wired magazine about one phenomenon that comes up all the time in my work with CEOs. If like most of us you’re always struggling with priorities, you need to read this. If you’ve got some ideas that have worked for you, share them.
By any other name, it’s the “it’s just not a priority” syndrome! God knows we’ve all got too much to do, and most of us have probably tried the 1-2-3 system of prioritization at one time … soon realizing that everything was becoming a “1” because it wouldn’t get attention any other way … and then we realized we made everything a “1” … and then we realized we ended up right back where we started.
There is no avoiding the pain that arrives like a SCUD when something that needs to get done doesn’t get any attention (more…)
Most of the time when we sit down to work, even in our favorite chair, we have a stack of papers or files, maybe a list of some kind, and proceed to “work” as we’ve always defined it … plow through the stack and “get ‘er done”.
But if you try it with a blank sheet of paper, as I did again this morning, and just sit back and noodle on the issues that are clogging your brain waves and keeping you up at night. … with no preconceived notions about them because your paper is blank so far … you’ll be amazed at how your mind starts to do it’s favorite thing … add some intellectual firepower to solving problems.
Our brain is not really that good at filing, sorting, recording and remembering what we need at the precise moment we need it. (more…)