Keep It Interesting
Boredom kills concentration, productivity, and pleasure. It's hard to motivate yourself to pay attention when you're bored out of your mind. If you find yourself bored in a meeting or on a project, you need a remedy. Here are three things you can do. One idea is to...
Reset Your Counter
Here's an excellent piece of advice I got from small-business coach Mark LeBlanc: Whatever you are tracking — time spent during the day, exercise periods during the week, or sales during the month, make sure you reset your counter mentally at the end of the tracking...
Recommendation: The Marketing Minute
Often I recommend books in this newsletter. Today I'd like to recommend a person: Marcia Yudkin, a business and marketing consultant who I have learned a tremendous amount from over the years. One of my favorite resources from Marcia is her weekly "Marketing Minute"...
Three Questions for Reflection
As those of you who have taken my freebie "Jump Start Your Thinking" class know, I like to collect questions. Questions are the spur to thinking. The right question at the right time can trigger important learning. Here is a set of questions I collected from Glenna...
Tip: Three Reasons to Learn a Formula
At a humor workshop I attended recently, Judy Carter taught us a formula for creating a joke around something mean that someone said to us. The steps were: Remember exactly what words were used, plus the tone and body language, so you can act it out. Backtrack: what...
Tackle Tough Long-Term Issues with Three Pages a Day
In Thinking Tactics, I teach a set of thinking procedures that each take under 10 minutes. They can be used to clarify most confusion, resolve most conflicts, and figure out the next step on most projects. But not everything. Sometimes you face a bigger issue — one...
Begin Where You Are
I filled out a time-management questionnaire recently (see references below), and one question was, "Where should I begin, if I want to keep my appointments better?" The only general-purpose answer to such a question is: begin where you are. You always must begin...
Book Recommendation: Leave the Office Earlier
I've recommended three top books on time management in the past. (Getting Things Done, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, and The Pomodoro Technique). Each of those explains a system or philosophy of time management. If you are looking for an integrated...
Book Recommendation: The Pomodoro Technique
by Francesco Cirillo
When people complain about not getting things done, they almost always wish they had bigger blocks of time to do the work. A surprising solution to this problem is to plan your unstructured time using standard time blocks of 25 minutes. The method, called the Pomodoro...
Getting Started Using a Bit of Pretend
A bit of imagination can be surprisingly helpful with difficult thinking. I learned this by applying advice from Alan Lakein on how to get started on a difficult task: "Imagine this: You've been relieved of all responsibility for getting a difficult A-1 [important...