What should be rewarded

A comment from Ibrahim Husain led me to explore his site at http://www.zencollegelife.com.

There’s lots of productivity info here with a focus on college life. There was also a link to Steve Olson’s gathering of Free Personal Development Material, to be explored with all the extra time you will gain!

I was especially drawn to his review of The Greatest Management Principle in the World” by Michael LeBoeuf BECAUSE of the list of things that should be rewarded. I immediately thought of David Seah’s Printable CEO Series and how this could fit in to motivate ourselves. (or employees)

The next thing to consider is how to discover what is most rewarding for each individual, and find a way to work that into the system.

Productivity Flourishing

Productivity Flourishing offers three free planners with a view to using highly productive time blocks for tasks that require high levels of productive capacity.

Have you mastered productivity?

The 2Time Mgt Blog compares Tae Kwon Do Belt Colors to productivity mastery on eleven levels. Much knowledge can be gained from reading the individual posts. I was intrigued by the idea of seeing how to gradually improve skills on these different levels, and was motivated to create a pdf that compiles them. See the post on Putting it All Together for a sample personal development plan.

Productivity Levels

I’ve got to add this:  “Ready to Test for Your Belt?” from MarkTaw.com

Blog to Discovery

There’s an interesting series called “My Organizer” at Blog to Discovery. I especially like the form shown in “How I successfully plan my day” and the ideas in “Dealing with repeating tasks in a paperbased system.”

You might be a digital packrat if…

you bookmarked this article at Zen Habits. (I did)

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.

Discoveries of the day

WOWNDADI (Work Out What Needs Doing and Do It! Living a Productive Life) has written another excellent article about Frogs, Gnats, Butterflies and Gems, and how they masterfully disguise themselves so we won’t recognize their true identity.

That article mentioned a blog I don’t know how I’ve missed until now: Simple Productivity has a wonderful series about simplifying inboxes. It’s amazing how many there can be!