Productivity Keynote Speaker Leadership, Sales, & Team Productivity Expert
Maximum Results. Minimum Time.®
303-471-7401

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: ,

Goal-Setting Basics

Posted on 12/31/2012 by ·

I fly 125,000+ miles a year traveling to speaking engagements. When meeting my seat mates on planes, they usually ask what I do. When they hear I speak and write on personal productivity, many of them will quip, “Work smarter, not harder.” I will cringe a bit inside, smile, and tell them, “Most professionals are working very hard these days. I’ve long since discarded that philosophy and prefer to live by my own mantra: ‘Motion Beats Meditation.’” Too many people spend time getting ready to be ready, setting up their systems, organizing their work, and figuring out what they need to do—but then they don’t DO the work—to-do lists just keep rolling forward and important projects fall through the cracks. Only results matter. And the first and most critical step in getting results, as I define … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged:

The word guilt starts with a G – Productivity Minute Video

Posted on 12/28/2012 by ·

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro, talks about guilt and how important it is to take care of ourselves. (C) 2012 Laura Stack. All Rights Reserved. https://theproductivitypro.com   … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Life Balance · Tagged: ,

Look Back on 2012 and Look Forward to 2013

Posted on 12/26/2012 by ·

"Life is divided into three terms---that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future." -- William Wordsworth, British poet. If you're anything like me, you recently looked up and wondered (or said aloud to a friend), "Hey, what the heck happened to 2012?" As we all know from experience, time really does fly when you're having fun. When it also flies at work, that’s a good thing, because you know work fascinates you nearly as much as play. Wonderful news, right? Be careful here: just because you've kept busy and enjoy what you do doesn't mean you've actually accomplished anything lately. To get ahead, we have to leverage our past experiences to gain an advantage in the future. So as you … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: ,

Acknowledgement in All Directions

Posted on 12/21/2012 by ·

My father is a retired USAF Colonel, and I spent many of my childhood years living on the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Growing up in the military environment, I soon learned that a soldier or sailor (or child) who receives a verbal order from an officer must repeat it immediately, often word for word, to acknowledge that he or she received it accurately. This especially holds true for the Navy, as you may have noticed in war movies like Battleship and Crimson Tide. While this practice may make for some dramatic moments on the silver screen, that's hardly its purpose. The military developed this particular Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a simple and sobering reason: If a poorly relayed message results in the wrong action taken, the results can literally prove … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: ,

Get Started Already!

Posted on 12/19/2012 by ·

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started." -- Agatha Christie, British mystery novelist. "The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." -- Walt Disney, American animator. No matter how grandiose your plans or how carefully laid your schemes, they're worthless if you never shift gears from meditation into motion. You may have heard the old platitude, “Dreams are just goals without deadlines.” Yes, it’s true we all need to keep ourselves motivated as we work our way through life, but eventually, you've got to get off your duff and get moving. I'm not telling you to leap immediately into action without considering the consequences. I like to say, “Thoughtless action will benefit you no more than action-less thought.” But once you've gathered your resources, considered … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: ,

Pulling Action Out of Information

Posted on 12/17/2012 by ·

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer and philosopher. "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage." -- Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. Do we already have a cure for cancer lurking somewhere in the huge mass of uncorrelated medical data accumulated in books, journals, and computers worldwide? How about a solution for global hunger? Or a way to knit broken bones in days? These may all sound like fantasies to you, but some scientists suspect such solutions might already exist...if we could just fit the data together correctly. But our ability to accumulate data has long since outstripped our ability to digest and correlate it. Worse, no single person … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Management · Tagged: , , ,

How Can Partnerships Create Leverage?

Posted on 12/12/2012 by ·

"In this new wave of technology, you can't do it all yourself. You have to form alliances." -- Carlos Slim Helú, Mexican business magnate (and wealthiest person on Earth as of 2012) While individual effort serves as the foundation of all human activities, true accomplishment requires partnership. The trick here lies in figuring out how to cooperate in such a way that 1 + 1 = 3 or more. We call such leverage points synergy, wherein the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. So before you take on a prospective business partner, ask yourself these questions first: 1. How well do our strategic priorities align? Aligning strategy within one organization is hard enough, much less between two. The better your missions match up, the more likely you'll be able to leverage off each other. But don't … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: , ,

Good Enough Is Never Enough! Encouraging Improvement Through Change

Posted on 12/10/2012 by ·

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher. Just about everyone has experienced the "new broom sweeps clean" effect. We've watched, and often suffered, as a fresh leader came onto the scene and changed everything just because they could—regardless of how well the existing system functioned. Whenever this happens, chaos reigns and productivity plummets for a while. Sometimes it never recovers, whereupon another broom soon appears to start its own ambitious cleaning project. However, many changes are inevitable and desirable. Otherwise, old inefficiencies may pile up until workflow grinds to a halt...or worse, something explodes and flies apart in a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: ,