"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., American poet and philosopher. The above quote is one of my favorites. In this New Year, how can you extend it to your performance? Make a decision to stretch yourself beyond your ordinary productive limits! We Americans are famous for our productivity; we regularly exceed our previous peaks. This has become particularly true since the beginning of the electronics revolution, and continued even during the Great Recession of 2008. In part, this may be because we've learned to stretch our abilities to new dimensions—since for a while there, we had no choice. But just as even the finest Spring has its cool or wet spells, not everyone regularly increases his or her … [Read more...]

"Work smarter, not harder." – The advice of countless well-meaning managers over the decades. At some point—or perhaps many points!—you've probably received the advice to "Work smarter, not harder." Just about all of us have heard the phrase, to the point of it becoming a meaningless cliché and catch-all slogan. The problem here lies in the fact that most of the people who say this to you have no clue what it means. They're just repeating what other people have told them. Bluntly ask them, “How exactly do you ‘work smarter’?” and they'll most likely just look at you blankly. My entire career has involved helping people find ways to get more work done in less time. That's one definition of working smarter, and it's composed of multiple parts, including ruthless time management, … [Read more...]

"Once begun, half done." – Ancient Chinese proverb. Sometimes, it can be supremely hard to get up off your "buts" and get moving—as we've all discovered at some point in our careers. We all have our low points, where it's hard to believe we can ever regain old ground, much less rise to new peaks of productivity. I've been there myself—yes even as an author and noted authority in the productivity space—I’ve had days when my energy and mood have been at such a low ebb that it was hard not to crawl back into bed at 10:00 a.m. But my responsibilities drove me to get moving, and once I was moving, it was easy to keep going. Per the law of inertia, an object in motion tends to stay in motion—but you must invest a certain amount of energy to put it into motion in the first place. One of … [Read more...]

"Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live." — Jim Rohn, American motivational speaker. You've probably read and heard a lot about ergonomics during your career. But are you taking the topic seriously? When you Google the benefits of ergonomics, you'll find scores of articles about why companies should institute good ergonomic design, in everything from factories to the open-plan office. The upshot is, it always saves the business money, because it results in less wear and tear on the most important resource of all---the human one. However, one thing most articles seem to have in common is that they're aimed at upper management and those tasked with improving company-wide productivity. What about those of us doing the producing? Even if the company hasn't … [Read more...]