Category: Productivity

Overcoming 9 Common Lacks for Success

Lack of… 

1. Information

2. Skill

3. Belief

4. Motivation

5. Wellbeing

6. Time

7. Money

8. People

9. Fear

9 simple ways to mitigate these ‘Lacks’…

1. Information: Ask an expert.

2. Skills: Get a coach to train you.

3. Belief: Speak to customers and colleagues and get their testimonials.

4. Motivation: Define and Live your ‘Why’ every day. 

5. Wellbeing: Sleep, Sweat, Breathe, Laugh, Love, Eat Clean.

6. Time: Schedule everything and go to bed early to make time.

7. Money: Budget, make, spend, save (+raise).

8. People: Hire the best people through referrals.

9. Fear: Do a ‘Fear setting’ exercise and surround yourself with people that love and believe in you.

Master Your To-Do List with These 5 Categories

TLDR: Framework from book ‘Procrastinate on Purpose’ (combined with a bit of The General Patton Matrix).

Divide your To Do List into 5 categories:

1. Eliminate (tasks that are not urgent and not important) 

2. Automate (tasks that are repeated and can be eliminated/delegated by a rule) 

3. Delegate (tasks that are urgent but not important)- Note that it takes 15-minutes to delegate for every 1 minute of the task. 

4. Prioritise – Do first (urgent and important tasks) or Schedule (not urgent but important tasks)

5. Procrastinate – tasks you leave to ‘ripen’ (action) or ‘rot’ (eliminate)

Inbox Zero: Debunking Productivity Myths

Inbox zero and other productivity myths. 

A survey of 17,000 knowledge workers worldwide finds email lacking when it comes to effective workplace communication.

Three takeaways from this report below:

1. More email, more problems. Employees who receive the most email—more than 50 emails a day—are paying a steep price for their willingness to go head-to-head with their inbox. These “hyper-connectors” are more likely than moderate email users to say they struggle with essential workplace tasks, such as finding information needed to complete projects, meeting performance goals, and aligning with other teams. 

2. Managing messages vs. getting work done. Workers are stymied just trying to manage an avalanche of messages. Meanwhile, their actual to-do lists get longer and longer: 82% of hyper-connectors say they have three or more active projects each day and 58% attend three or more meetings each day. 

3. Same inbox, vastly different workplace. No one would argue that the workplace of today looks or feels the same as it did in 1971. Yet that’s the year an engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fired off the first email. So it pays to ask: Are we equipping ourselves with the right tools for modern work?