Tag: Productivity
Don’t Increase Your Willpower — Reduce Your Options
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 IRead More
Reading Blogs Like Books
In my last post, I talked about how I gave up reading blogs for a while by dumping all of my feeds from Google Reader. Initially I still found myself opening GReader, but since it was devoid of content, the habit died much more quickly than if I would haveRead More
How to Turn Your Goals Into Actions
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 ofRead More
Should I Use a Paper or Electronic Organizer?
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 spentRead More
Calendar or To Do List? Two Task Management Tools Compared
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 nextRead More
Four Strategies for Increasing Email Productivity
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 emailRead More
Meetings 101: Always Bring Something to the Table
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–theRead More
The 80/20 Rule Revisited
The 80/20 Rule can save massive amounts of time and energy when properly understood and applied. As with many observations described as rules, failing to understanding the operating principles underlying the 80/20 Rule leads can lead to some pretty academic debates about its veracity, which ultimately leads inaction. Repopularized inRead More