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I’ll Pat Your Back

Posted on 01/21/2013 by ·

When you’re part of a team, each person impacts your productivity and contributes to how quickly or slowly things get done. When others are late in getting answers to you, you’re late in producing the final product. When you’re relying on your coworkers to review a document before proceeding, a month can go by before you have everyone’s input. It’s in your best interest to help your team members speed up and get things done more quickly, so you can produce better results, in less time, with less frustration. I learned this streamlining lesson from a flight attendant, who taught me a lesson in steamrolling obstacles. As a professional speaker, travel is a job hazard; I fly over 100,000 miles each year on United. I travel so much that sometimes I have to wait until the USA Today gets … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: , ,

Managing Your Availability

Posted on 01/18/2013 by ·

One key to leadership success is limiting your availability. To be a strategic enabler of business, you must find the time to be strategic. Therefore, you must guard what little you have, so you can complete your high-value tasks.  Managing your availability requires close attention to the truly important. Once you reach higher levels in leadership, you can't allow the mundane to distract you; you shouldn't be running around putting out brushfires, especially when others can do so less expensively. Additionally, that style of management comes perilously close to micromanaging.  Always keep this in mind as you climb the corporate ladder: in almost every case, what you do as a leader will affect the organization more than anything you did while you occupied lower rungs. You forget this at … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leadership & Teamwork · Tagged: ,

Do We Really Need 32 People at This Meeting?

Posted on 01/16/2013 by ·

"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything." -- Thomas Sowell, American economist and social theorist. "Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings." ― George Will, American journalist. Meetings may just be the bane of our workplace existence. I don't mean events like professional conferences; those generally represent valuable educational experiences. No, I refer to those self-proliferating time-wasters that bring co-workers together to discuss ways to maximize team productivity, but instead accomplish the exact opposite. They seem to expand as time goes by; and when everyone has to have their say, they can drag on for hours, killing productive momentum. Yet meetings remain absolutely necessary if … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: , ,

Closing Communication Loops

Posted on 01/14/2013 by ·

One of the traits that sets humans apart from the rest of Creation is our ability to communicate in great detail, with a minimum of confusion and unproductive "noise." Still, we fail to communicate unusually often. The annals of history contain endless episodes of poor communication (or a complete lack thereof), leading to widespread misery and pain. On a lesser scale, individuals and businesses deal with miscommunication issues every single day; in the workplace, these breakdowns can have an impact not just on individual productivity, but also on the bottom line.  Even minor miscommunications can prove costly. For example: I once worked with a corporate president who called an analyst in finance to get a figure to put into a speech he was planning. The president expected the finance guy … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leadership & Teamwork · Tagged: ,

Prioritization: Reordering Your World

Posted on 01/11/2013 by ·

Prioritization sits near the top of any list of successful leadership skills. This holds true whether the leader involved runs an army or the night crew at the local donut shop. It holds true everywhere on Earth and has for all of human history. In general, prioritization represents the order in which you organize and ultimately accomplish the goals most important to you: your faith, your family, your friends, your career, your self-care, and your daily work. You have to look closely at each and decide which items should come first and how everything else should follow. While all these categories are important, they aren't equally important at all times. As we limit this discussion to the work arena, prioritization may involve several levels of responsibility, starting with the personal … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Management · Tagged: , , ,

Scoring Synergy With Outside Sources

Posted on 01/10/2013 by ·

"It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed." -- Napoleon Hill, American motivational guru and author of Think and Grow Rich. "Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success." -- Stephen Covey, author, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People In chemistry, a "synergistic reaction" occurs when two substances interact to generate a greater effect than either would alone. This can have dangerous consequences, as when bleach and ammonia mix to produce chlorine gas. On the other hand, adding specific impurities to a silicon semiconductor can greatly boost its performance. In a situation like this, the whole proves greater than the sum of the parts. This principle can apply to human … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: ,

What Comes Next? Criteria for Choosing Your Next Task

Posted on 01/07/2013 by ·

"The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them." -- Carlos Ghosn, Brazilian businessman (Chairman and CEO of Renault, Nissan, and the Renault-Nissan Alliance). "In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States Just about every productivity expert prescribes a to-do list as part of your time management process, and I'm certainly no exception. In fact, I advocate keeping at least two. First up: the daily High Impact Task or "HIT" list, a short list of everything you must do today. Second, use a Master Task List to track upcoming tasks and items you want to accomplish … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Management · Tagged: ,

Start the New Year off Productively with Laura Stack

Posted on 01/04/2013 by ·

Did you know that one of the most popular New Year's Resolutions is to get organized?  Maybe it was one of yours.  How will you  accomplish that goal? We've got just the plan for YOU to take your personal productivity to the next level! We have just a few more spots open for the brand new 2013 STACK ATTACK! This is your perfect opportunity to get all of your "ducks in a row" with a productivity makeover. Spend the day in Laura's home office getting YOUR systems up and running. Learn more about the STACK ATTACK, and sign up today! And in recent news... Laura was featured yesterday on Entrepreneur.com in this article by Stephanie Vozza: Forget Your To-Do List: The 3 Lists Every Entrepreneur Needs … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: , , ,

How Your Standards Can Slow You Down

Posted on 01/02/2013 by ·

"If you look for perfection, you will never be content." -- Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist (Anna Karenina). "I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business." ― Michael J. Fox It’s true that as your experience and skills evolve, you should occasionally push the envelope of your personal constraints. But to paraphrase Clint Eastwood in the film Magnum Force, you've got to know your limitations. And you do have limitations—which also means you can't always do everything just right. It’s important to have high standards for your work; in fact, you need them if you expect to achieve consistent productivity. But be aware of the difference between high standards and impossibly high standards. When your standards for yourself and … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: ,

What The Most Successful People Do On The Weekend

Posted on 01/01/2013 by ·

No matter who you are, no matter what your station in life, we all get the same 1,440 minutes per day in the same seven days per week. It all works out to 168 hours weekly for the young and old, great and small, rich and poor alike. So how can it be that some of us accomplish great things with that seemingly meager amount of time, while others struggle through the week, with barely enough wiggle room to take a deep breath? Well, as it turns out, the super-productive aren't superhuman—just very careful with our most precious natural resource. It all boils down to effective time management; as I often point out, time management is really self-management. Despite our fondest fantasies, we'll never be able to actually manage time itself, or move a snippet from last week to this week, or … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: ,