“This thing all things devours:/ Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;/ Gnaws iron, bites steel; /Grinds hard stones to meal; /Slays king, ruins town, /And beats high mountain down.” – Gollum's riddle for Bilbo in The Hobbit, by British professor and writer J.R.R. Tolkien. If you haven't already figured it out, the answer to Gollum's riddle is Time, and no matter what we do, it seems there's never enough of it. We all get the same 168 hours per week. So why is it some people get very little done, while others are paragons of productivity? Simple: productive workers treat time as the finite resource it is, making effective use of every minute. They're not necessarily smarter than you or work longer hours. They've learned the lessons of efficiency: they work harder and smarter. Rather than … [Read more...]

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.” – English-language proverb dating back to the Middle Ages. While it's true that two heads are often better than one, too many heads is a recipe for poor productivity. Indeed, it is possible to over collaborate. But where's the sweet spot of just right? For some things, the number may be one. For other tasks, it may be ten. Decades of business research, however, puts the number somewhere between two and seven, with an average of 4.6. If your team lacks enough to do, it's most likely too big. What are some other indicators that your team is too large? Keep these factors in mind: What are you trying to accomplish? For some tasks, many hands make light work. If you're painting a building or harvesting a field, the more hands, the faster you … [Read more...]

“More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.” – Rudyard Kipling, British author The Japanese have a word for working too much: karoshi. It's applied to people who literally work themselves to death... or suicide because they can't keep up. Japan's intense work culture encourages overwork, to the point where families of victims can sue the government and the victim's company for compensation. In Western languages, there's no equivalent for karoshi, nor do we officially recognize it as a cause of death—but it happens. Instead, we say those workers died from exhaustion, failed to care of themselves, used too many stimulants, or suffered sudden strokes or heart attacks. But those are just results; they don't address the root cause of people working too … [Read more...]

“The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.” – Maureen Dowd, American journalist. Call them dinosaur-brains or Neanderthals, there are people in every business who live to make us miserable. They aren't necessarily actively toxic, but some are so rude, bureaucratic, and/or annoying, your automatic response may be to disengage from them and your work. As well all know, disengagement kills productivity. Hopefully, you're not the Neanderthal in question. But hey, if you want to send personal and team productivity tumbling, here are four great ways to do it: Micromanage... or ignore. Helicopter managers who hover at your shoulder and control every aspect of your work are foolish, not just because they frustrate others and encourage … [Read more...]

“First things first, second things never.” – Shirley Conlan, British journalist and novelist. We all know the expression “first things first.” But what’s a high priority to one person might have low value to another, so it takes time to get everyone on a team on the same page with projects and deadlines. Effective prioritization requires teamwork, training, and trust for it to become automatic. Your team may not have arrived there yet, as it requires what the military calls "time in grade." Military tactics, lingo, philosophy, and process have filtered into modern business culture for good reason: business is almost a kind of warfare in these days of constant change, even though you may never find yourself on the front line. Organizing masses of people for dead-serious competition is … [Read more...]

“Men: if you ever want to know what a woman's mind feels like, imagine a browser with 2,587 tabs open. All. The. Time.” – Anonymous If you've ever seen an article about multitasking, it probably included an image of someone with multiple arms typing, using a calculator, talking on the phone, and drinking coffee, all at once, like something out of Hindu mythology or Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics. While women seem to multitask better than men—if we couldn't, the race would probably have died out long ago—I'm still not a big fan of what’s often mistakenly called “multitasking.” In my opinion, both tend to waste more time than they save, while putting undue strain on those practicing them. For 97.5% of workers, we know for a fact multitasking doesn't work as well as … [Read more...]

“No one is more cherished in this world than someone who lightens the burden of another.” – Joseph Addison, 18th century British writer and politician. You probably work too hard. Most people in my audiences do and have for many years. We know that working long hours every day is unhealthy and unproductive. We know we should delegate more but don’t. We know other people are perfectly capable of lightening some of our load, but we don’t let them. We have more money than time, but we’re not willing to part with some of it to buy some time. YES, money does buy time! If have more money to spare than time, why not hire a personal assistant? You don't need that person to deliver the perfect latte to you twice a day or help you on with your coat. Real personal assistants complete necessary … [Read more...]

“If I ate a live frog first thing in the morning, I am pretty sure the worst thing that would happen to me that day is I would vomit up a frog.” – Valerie Alexander, American Business writer, in the Huffington Post, 2013. We've all heard or read that it's best to jump on your toughest tasks early in your work shift, using as a guide this famous aphorism: "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." Mark Twain typically gets the credit for this line, though French writer Nicholas Chamfort said something similar about toads in the 1700s. In 2006, my colleague Brian Tracy popularized the concept in his bestselling book, Eat That Frog! Many accepted it as near-gospel, though some who haven't actually read the book, or didn't … [Read more...]

“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the point where the quo has lost its status.” – Laurence J. Peter, business writer and inventor of The Peter Principle. Has the United States become an ADHD culture? Some people think so, since everything changes so rapidly and most of us bounce right along with it. We do so partly because our technology changes so fast we have no choice but to change along with it. For example: Even though just about everyone who wants a smartphone has one, Apple or Samsung can usually entice you to spend $1,000 every other year for a new i-Phone or Galaxy. You don't really have a choice; decent electronics quickly become obsolete. Not that our new toys aren't worth it. A single smartphone is millions of times faster than all the computers used for … [Read more...]

“Multitasking is a lie... You can do two things at once, but you can't focus effectively on two things at once.” – Gary Keller, real estate mogul and bestselling author. If you honestly, truly believe you're great at multitasking, I have disappointing news: you're honestly, truly not. Numerous studies have confirmed one of the findings of a 2009 pilot study of heavy multitaskers by Stanford University psychologists: that those who are convinced they've mastered multitasking invariably prove bad at it. Rather, they excel at task-switching—rapidly flipping to the mode of thought required by a secondary task. Think of it as one of those two-sided whiteboards. When you task-switch, you flip from one board full of information to the other. If you happen to have a three-sided board, you can … [Read more...]