When We get busier, unless we give up, we work faster. We get more productive. But then life seems to speed up more. There is another way.
Categories
When Work Speeds Up
Category: Personal Margin
One of my biggest mistakes in recruiting somebody was early when I recruited a young man, straight out of school, as a COBOL programmer. The warning sign at his interview was his reply when I asked him where he saw his work taking him: I would like your job. I’d like to sit in an […]
Preface: As you read this, you may think this article is posted a week late. Please read on. Outside of the USA, most countries do not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday. And here in the UK, there is a particular suspicion over American holidays. (For example, we Brits have mixed feelings at best about the […]
When organisations try to manage scarcity, they can micro-control through imposing performance targets. This approach can have some mission-critical results.
Open-plan offices seem to be very popular. Part of the rationale for open-plan offices is that they aid teamwork and communications. It’s surprising, then, how many people who work in them, dislike them. Recently I was reviewing the work of an audit into a department where all its members work in a single open-plan office. […]
This article is updated from the version published earlier in 2018. Very likely, the following scene will be familiar to you. I was invited to facilitate a strategic workshop. I was told fairly early on, “We have 32 strategic objectives we need to meet.” “OK,” I replied. “Which one is the most important?” You can […]
Categories
Stop Pushing Me!!
At times we all feel somewhat overwhelmed by all the jobs piling up, whether in our email inbox, or in our own to-do lists. Many are overwhelmed all the time. It’s as if our lives are being driven by that pesky list of demands. It feels like they are pushing us, each vying for first […]
Categories
Interruptions at Work
One of the most common complaints I hear from clients is about their office environments, about how noisy or distracting they are. Where they can, I’m finding many people excuse themselves from their office to get serious, thought-intensive work done. In fact, some even argue that the age of the office as we know it […]
We need tools that can evolve with our work. As our work, our portfolio develops, we need tools that can grow with it.
I really appreciate Daniel Pink’s work, particularly Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, an awesome book. He delivers a periodic, high-energy, short video to his subscribers called Pinkcast. This week’s Pinkcast made me smile (as it usually does). It featured another notable author and speaker, David Allen, most well-known for his book Getting Things Done. On […]