personal+effectiveness category archives
Ask yourself some good questions, rather than worry about getting buried in information. This is the essential advice of Frank and Magnone's new book.
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Interesting set of executive "habits" associated with failures from Sydney Finkelstein - originally published eight years ago. I like the "lack of respect" early warning sign.
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A local paper has a great quote that is takes four times longer to complete two tasks effectively than to do each one individually.
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There are always more things to do. Rather than continually bemoan the fact that the backlog exists, find some mechanism to "gain comfort and control" over what you are doing today and what you are NOT doing today.
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I came across something in my personal life that connects back to my business life. Use experience to get better.
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Another take on defining problems the right way, motivated by a David Allen newsletter article.
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Pierre Khawand has a simple, short video that looks at interruptions from a slightly different angle. Not multitasking but the results of the effort.
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It is my responsibility to post useful information into the world. And it is also my responsibility to decide how, when and where to consume the information that comes to me. And we should work out together how we want to do that.
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Do you go for perfect or good enough when producing your work? Do you go for perfect or interesting when selecting job candidates or companies with whom to do business?
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Mark White has published an eBook as your very own "Get Out of Jail Free" card - information jail. It's an interesting three-week program to help someone change their relationship to their own overload.
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Knowledge workers have lots of gold in their personal archives. But how can others learn about it if they don't know you have it? If you are a knowledge worker, don't hide your gold. Share it with others and it will grow and change in ways that you might not expect.
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I'm in the midst of shifting from Windows XP into the Mac operating system. I am trying to find a keyboard launcher to replace ActiveWords and have been testing out Quicksilver to some frustration.
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An interesting speech from William Deresiewicz on leadership and the need for being alone with your thoughts also includes a comment about multitasking.
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There are a number of changes afoot in my personal toolset. One of the big ones is that I am dropping MS Outlook for Google for my email, contacts, calendar, and tasks. Here are some thoughts about that transition. And it all works with my iPhone too!
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Based on a recommendation, I decided to pick up Daryl Conner's Managing at the Speed of Change. The book's focus is more on the underpinnings of why changes work (or fail), based on his research and experiences. I enjoyed the model he developed in the book.
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The final chapter of SPIN Selling stood out for its emphasis on turning theory (the book) into a regular practice.
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Dawn Foster at GigaOm has a nice discussion of "How to Write Better Emails." I've talked about many of these things as well, but it's nice to see this on a widely-read website.
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I received a complimentary upgrade of PersonalBrain, and these are my comment in thanks for the upgrade. It has also given me a chance to review how I use PersonalBrain and if any of the new features are going to make sense for me.
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The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." This idea shows up again and again in life and business. For some reason, I pick up on it right away when I am reading something new or hearing new ideas about how to organize or plan or get something done. It's usually in the form of "to succeed at _____, you must be prepared."
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Last week I attended the Traction User Group (TUG) conference last week. While it was your usual software user-group meeting with customer presentations and some software updates, they also designed in a larger discussion around the concept of Observable Work with keynotes from Jim McGee and Jon Udell as well as several of the customer presentations tying into the idea.
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I've talked about the idea of What Good Looks Like a number of times here. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Stever Robbins, The Get-It-Done Guy, talking about the same thing with different words on his recent podcast
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Add "attends meetings well" to the list of things that don't belong on resumes or job postings. Along with "good at multitasking." Thanks for that belong to Mike Monteiro and his post on "The Chokehold of Calendars."
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The Boston Globe today had an interesting tidbit in their Uncommon Knowledge column, under "When not to interrupt." The short version is that the research suggests that the actual work quality on a second task is impacted by when the first task is interrupted.
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Luis Suarez talked about the importance of focus and the issues associated with multitasking. And he provided pointers to many useful discussions and solutions. Namley: do one thing at a time for a defined period of time.
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Knowledge workers have to have tolerance for ambiguity in the information they have, and enough courage to move forward under that uncertainty.
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I had a pair of podcasts piped into my ears that were on very similar topics: how do people manage with their own time and attention AND manage that of other people. It is about respect!
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A couple friends on Twitter linked to Dennis McCafferty's CIO Insight slideshow with "10 Clues That You're a Workaholic" which came from consultation with doctor of psychiatry David Krueger. The piece also provides four suggestions on ways to get out.
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Harold Jarche has a nice discussion of why he blogs. He calls it Active sense-making. And this is right in line with my previous post, linking to Thomas Vander Wal's comments about how ideas flow from the individual outward.
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A few years ago (when I was a teenager), I recall a friend's mother telling me something along the lines of "Ignoring someone is the height of ignorance." The implication being that it is offensive to the person you aren't paying attending to.
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So, there is no such thing as a bad day (or any other period). Thing happen, and how we interpret them is dependent on all sorts of factors. If you want a "good" day, find ways to use the "bad" things for positive benefit. Don't let all the "stuff" pile up into that ball of blackness. Start the day over.
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What do you think of when you hear about constraints? Do you want to eliminate them? Do you want to change them? Or do you know that they are a fact of life? It all depends on your perspective and what you think those constraints do.
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There is more discussion bouncing around the idea of knoweldedge work and visibility. The group has decided this is called "observable work." I've used "explicit" in my title simply to reference the long-running discussion of explicit-implicit-tacit in the knowledge management world.
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How does discipline affect personal knowledge management? I came across this interesting question recently through a student in Northwestern's MS-LOC program.
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There is a bigger issue with email than simply "inbox zero:" e-mail not a solo sport. People send and receive emails from many others, and it is their behavior that affect individuals just as much as her own actions.
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Everyone knows the old saw that goes, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." For many people, email is the hammer to anything that can be written down.
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Twitter pointed me to a great article on How to work with "stupid" people by Jason Crawford. He's answering the belief that "people are stupid" with a wise redirection: maybe we don't understand them.
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Ricky Cheong has posted a slideshare presentation of his research progress on Personal Knowledge Management.
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" applies to email just as it applied to letters in the 17th Century.
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As many of you know, I am always looking for better ways to do my own work - personal knowledge management or just plain old being smart about how I work. But why is that? Why do I think it is so important that my own work moves so smoothly?
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Here is a suggestion: Instead of sending email, step back for ten seconds and reflect on: Does this need to be sent? Can I contact the person directly instead?
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I hold that the best way to deal with this is to encourage fewer people to send you email. Of course, before that happens you still need some solutions for triaging when there is too much.
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Just think. If you write in public, it is both easier to find you AND when they do, the conversation can be at a higher level. Luis Suarez makes me think.
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There are a lot of interesting conversations happening recently about knowledge management and the value of knowledge sharing or knowledge collecting and what it all means. KM is about taking action.
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My thoughts about David Allen's 2009 book, Making It All Work, an extension to Getting Things Done. I also make a connection to some of my other work, beyond the obvious organizing and prioritizing that come from the book.
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Sure there is a lot of "information" rolling by out there. But we have always filtered it. Here's another way to think abuot it from John Reaves.
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How Smart Leaders Talk About Time is a "Conversation Starter" from HarvardBusiness.org in October. It talks about the the struggle so many businesses have of having too many things to do and prioritizing amongst them. What is a leader to do?
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It's hard to be actively involved in the online world and thinking about how it affects your life and those around you and not know about Seth Godin. Here is an interview with him that makes some connection to how people should operate their lives in today's world.
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Is juggling several tennis balls while telling a joke multitasking? Not according to an interesting discussion from Stowe Boyd.
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Patti Anklam covers about five years worth of research and writing in her extensive summary.
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