Articles
Knowledge is an important element of productivity. If follows that the acquisition of knowledge is equally important to your long-term success. But how do you learn? And how do you find time?
A 2014 research paper titled “Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning” offers some keen insights.
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Productivity is hard. Most people overthink it, or worse, try to copy what someone else does. It’s tempting to think what works for others will work for us. Oh, if that were only true. Productivity is a beast that everyone must tame in their own way.
This is part I of a five-part series.
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To be successful you must be visible, and that means people in your orbits know what you’re working on. In particular, what does your boss think you’re working on? Control the message. Status reports are the way to do it.
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Discipline is choosing between what you want now … and what you want most.
We are on cruise control most of the time in our lives, unconsciously choosing what we want in the moment, not even realizing we could make a deeper choice. This article uses the mythical Sirens to help us get clear on what we want most in life. Strap yourself to the mast of your ship if you must, but develop the discipline to choose in every moment what you want most over the endless stream of temptations that you think you want now.
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Happy New Year!
As the holidays wrap up this week, it’s time to start thinking about the year ahead.
A cycle of annual and quarterly planning sets the strategy that you execute with a weekly and daily rhythm. You think ‘big picture’ and chart your course broadly at the beginning of the year. Then, on a quarterly basis, you make more specific plans that help you reach those ‘big picture’ goals.
Next, every week you lay out specific activities that you are going to work on, and finally, every day you identify tasks that must be done.
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I love to hike. There is something deeply satisfying in loading a few provisions into a backpack and heading off into the hills. I have had the good fortune of hiking in the Colorado Rockies as well as the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Hiking is both an exhausting and exhilarating activity. The pack is heavy and rarely comfortable. The trail is often steep, the terrain rocky. There are times when each step is a slog. You make progress by keeping your head down and putting one foot in front of the other again and again. You find your stride.
Eventually, it’s time for a break. You reach a vista where you loosen your pack and refresh yourself with water. And then you look up. The view is amazing. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how far you’ve traveled. Looking ahead, you see the path clearly in front of you. You catch your breath, revel in your progress, affirm your course, and don the pack for another march.
The rhythm of productivity follows a similar path.
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Do you struggle to be productive? At the end of the day does it feel like there are more items on your ToDo list than there were at the beginning of the day?
There is no end to the articles and blogs and tools and apps that aim to help you be more productive. Many of them are even good. But in some ways, they’re all a bit of distraction for the task at hand: getting stuff done.
Being productive is hard. If it was easy — if an app could solve your problem — we wouldn’t see the proliferation of articles and blogs and tools and apps.
Personal productivity is a Holy Grail: Many pursue it. Few seem to find it.
Read MoreAbout Heather
Heather Hollick has been helping others become better leaders and craft more meaningful careers for more than 25 years. Her experience spans both business and technology, operations and organizational development. Oh, and she was born in Canada, so she can't help but be helpful. 😉