Displaying All Posts tagged with time management

The Rock Solid Reflection Plan

One of the best ways – some would say the only way – to keep tabs on where you’re at and where you’re headed in terms of being productive is by looking back on where you’ve been. It’s challenging to do this regularly. Really challenging. What’s more is that many people don’t do it at all. Doing this (or, rather, not doing this) is a recipe of mediocrity…or even organizational disaster.

All that aside, you can do this. You can review, reflect, revisit…whatever you’d like to call it…and you can do it regularly. I’m not going to outline what this consists of – there’s many different ways to do it and not one particular method works for everyone unilaterally. What I can do is present to you a plan on how to make sure you get to the act of doing it. Click Here to Read Article …

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What Can You Do In Two Minutes?

Andre Kibbe 19th May Productivity Leave a Comment

Two minutes might not seem like much, but appearances can be deceiving. There’s actually quite a lot you can accomplish in a two-minute window if you develop the habit if asking yourself if something takes two minutes or less. This habit was codified by consultant Dean Acheson (not the deceased U.S. senator), and later David Allen, as the Two Minute Rule. Click Here to Read Article …

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Don’t Increase Your Willpower — Reduce Your Options

Andre Kibbe 29th April Productivity Leave a Comment

A little over a year ago, I started going on a low information diet. Rather than just reduce the number of feeds in my RSS reader, I dumped them all in one shot. I knew myself well enough to realize that I would open up the reader the moment I felt the need to postpone taking action on something important. So I still found myself opening the reader, but there was nothing in it that would serve as a tool for procrastination. Rather than just limiting my email consumption to one or two scheduled sessions per day, I added Gmail.com to Leechblock, a Firefox extension that blocks your access to designated sites for designated time periods.

The principle is simple: it’s easier to increase our concentration by controlling our environment than controlling our attention. By setting the conditions in which we operate on the front end, we spare ourselves the order of having to make moment-to-moment decisions for staying on task. I kept trying to open GReader and Gmail, despite my conscious commitment to the low information diet. The problem isn’t changing a behavior, it’s changing a habit, and a habit is much more deep-seated and has more momentum than a single action.

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How to Turn Your Goals Into Actions

Andre Kibbe 14th April Productivity Leave a Comment

Most people understand the need to set goals and higher standards, but how does that translate into practice? What does it mean to have a goal to “Lose 10 pounds,” or “Get promoted”? Drilling down to an actionable level of detail makes the difference between aspiration and achievement. One of the keys to actualizing goals is understanding the difference between goals and projects.

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Should I Use a Paper or Electronic Organizer?

Andre Kibbe 13th April Productivity Leave a Comment

Ah, the evergreen question of all self-proclaimed productivity geeks. Should you keep your appointments and action lists on paper or in an electronic organizer? The answer: pick one. Making a decision work is more important than making the right decision.

It really doesn’t matter. No, really, it doesn’t. I’ve spent most of my organized years using an electronic setup with a smartphone synced with a desktop PIM — initially the Palm Desktop. Then I briefly defected to a paper organizer, which I swore by for a few weeks until the novelty and its placebo effect wore off, then I returned to an electronic system. Due to the reduced administrative overhead of my current work situation (less email, less customer interaction), I’ve recent been flirting with the idea of just dumping everything on a legal pad, keeping all of my lists on a single sheet.

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Calendar or To Do List? Two Task Management Tools Compared

Andre Kibbe 24th February Productivity Leave a Comment

How do you plan and track your daily activities, with a calendar or a to do list? Some productivity gurus claim that putting everything on your calendar ensures that it never gets done, or that you’ll cross off what you don’t get done and just reschedule it for the next day — which defeats the purpose of scheduling. Other gurus claim that putting everything on a list, where items aren’t tied to a time and date, ensures that they never get done, since they lack specific queues to get started or deadlines to finish.

If the choice is mutually exclusive, I think they’re both wrong. Calendars and lists are related, but serve different purposes, not unlike clocks and timers. You can use a clock as a timer, but it’s not the best tool for the job.

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Four Strategies for Increasing Email Productivity

Andre Kibbe 16th February Productivity Leave a Comment

If you want to know what people value most, look at which email subject lines get the fastest replies from them. You’ll find that issues you consider priorities aren’t valued equally by others, and vice versa, which makes one-size-fits-all policies like “check email twice a day” or “turn off email notifications” awkward to implement company-wide.

Regardless of the medium, one person’s communication is another person’s distraction. So how do you get anything done in a culture where expectations for email turnaround are frustratingly vague? How do you deal with your own email overload? Click Here to Read Article …

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Meetings 101: Always Bring Something to the Table

Mike Vardy 10th February Management Leave a Comment

During family dinners in my household, we’d all bring an item from the kitchen to the table. None was exempt from this ritual. No matter who cooked dinner that night, everyone ended up contributing to the meal because of what they brought to the table. What they brought was incidental–the fact they brought something was what was important.

The same applies in a work environment–especially in meetings. We all have different things we bring to the table. What we bring often depends on the role we have in the organization or the area of expertise we apply every day to our work. None of these are really any different than setting a dinner table – every part of the meal is important.

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