Links for 7-26-2007

Productivity Printable Templates at Organize IT.

Business Week chart: What people are doing on the Internet.

Keeping employees in the loop at Service Untitled.

Links for 7-19-07

A sentence from the book Words That Work - It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz made Linda Zdanowicz at Exceptional Dental Practice Management sit up and get excited. Here is the sentence: “Education must precede motivation, and even information.”

Idea Sandbox outlines the 7 Levels of Change based on the book by Rolf Smith. This outline is a terrific guide to productivity.

Productivity 501 is a offering The Habit List, a great tool for tracking repeating tasks or habits for RSS subscribers.

Stephen at HD Bizblog discusses the concept of GTD 2.0 which includes communication and relationships in New Ways of Looking at What We Know.

Life Optimizer has a nice Map of Personal Effectiveness.

A Menu of Options to Feel Happier by the End of the Day at The Happiness Project.

Productive laziness

Will Manley promotes “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” as the ultimate management book in the column “Tom Sawyer and the Art of Good Management” in the July issue of Booklist Magazine. (sadly the current issue is not online yet) He says, “I routinely give Tom Sawyer to my new managers and tell them to throw away their management textbooks.”

Tom re-frames the “work” of white-washing a large fence as “creative play” to convince others to do what needs to be done. It’s difficult for those who have been trained to have a strong work ethic to understand how productive his laziness is. The job of a manager is not to do the job, it is to dream up ways to motivate others. The less work a manger does, the more effective they are.  Motivation is “nothing more than an advanced form of con-artistry.”

Productivity adds up

Goal Setting…as Waveforms at Simple Productivity, original article by Graham English-Cool metaphor.

Motto Magazine’s purpose: Motto helps people make smart and informed decisions about how we are spending our lives. Most of us have been given roughly 30,000 days to live on Earth. How do you want to spend those days?

In Can Life Really Be Balanced? at Your Life. Organized., Monica Ricci does some math:

Total hours in a week: 168

Subtract hours for the following:
Sleep: (7 hours average per night) 49
Work: 40
Commuting: 10
Meals: 10
Home & life maintenance: 40 (this encompasses everything from laundry to getting dressed to running errands, to washing the car, to grocery shopping, and more)

That adds up to 149 hours of your week.

This chart is from the American Time Use Survey 2006:

Laura Stack, the Productivity Pro summarizes some of the results of the American Time Use Survey 2006.

Timeanddate.com provides a variety of interesting date calculators. You can use the Duration Calculator to enter your birthday as the start date and today’s date as the end date to determine how many days you’ve lived. Subtract that number from the approximate 30,000 days mentioned above for an estimate of days remaining. Using them well is what it’s all about.

Booknotes

“What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter.

Create a “To Stop” List from a list of 20 habits that hold you back. Most of these come from inappropriately sharing or withholding information or emotion. Ask “Is this appropriate? and how much should I convey?”

Obtain feedback from others on how you’re doing. The wisdom of the Johari Window: what is unknown to us may be well-known to others. Our perceptions may well be inaccurate.

Feedforward

• Choose one behavior you’d like to change
• Ask a person for two suggestions that might help
• Listen
• Say “Thank You”

A Simple process for change (not easy, but simple!)

• apologize-recognizing mistakes have been made
• advertise-announcing your intention to change
• listen-with attention
• thank-gratitude is good
• follow-up-act and check back regularly

Follow-up is vital

• Follow-up is an ongoing process
• It’s how we measure progress
• It reminds others of our efforts

Communication

• Send message
• Ask if it was received
• Ask if it was understood
• Ask if it was acted on

Just because we understand, doesn’t mean we will actually do.

We may learn information about the importance of changing something and yet fail to do so. Without follow-up, nothing happens.

Project Phases (can’t skip from 3 to 7):

1. assess the situation
2. isolate the problem
3. formulate solutions
4. woo up-upper management approve
5. woo laterally-peers agree
6. woo down-direct reports accept
7. imlementation

See Marshall Goldsmith’s Blog and Library with lots of free information.