Category: Time and Priorities

  • Finding the Balance Between Modern Convenience, Self-Reliance, and Community

    Surviving and thriving at work requires some balance between your work life and the rest of your life beyond the job. But even your life beyond work may need some balancing of modern convenience, self-reliance, and community. I’ve been reading several good novels set in rural America of the early 20th century and I am […]

  • Prepare for Perpetual Technology Upgrade Mode: Lifetime Learning With an Attitude

    Do you find yourself spending more and more time trying to keep up with the constant stream of technology upgrades and the fallout they create? I do. Here’s a small sampling from last week. I finally upgraded my Mac operating system because it is supposed to be “more secure.” In the process, the OS upgrade “broke” […]

  • The Art of Yak Shaving Revisited

    A while ago, my son Teague introduced me to the concept of “yak shaving.” If you do a web search you get a few definitions which are variations on a theme. They boil down to something like “activities you find yourself doing which appear unrelated to the objective you started out with but which, in fact, are […]

  • How Much Work is Enough? Are You Working Smart, Hard, or Long?

    On this topic, I have many more questions than answers. There are new kinds of vacation policies popping up, especially at new companies trying to establish a different kind of company culture. They have been experimenting with policies with no set formula for determining how much vacation you can take. It is up to the […]

  • Three Secrets to Managing Interruptions With Less Stress for Everyone

    1.  Define your “interrupt hierarchy” and discuss it with your colleagues. If you are meeting with a colleague and your smartphone buzzes, your desk phone rings, and someone knocks at the door, what do you do? Do you answer the call on your smartphone while letting your desk phone go to voicemail, then answer the questions […]

  • Four Steps to Make Your Team Meeting Worth Everyone’s Time

    Four Steps to Make Your Team Meeting Worth Everyone’s Time

    We have all participated in team meetings where very smart people deliver their competing brilliant insights about the “real problem” and what would solve it. “We just need to change the website to put the products front and center.” “We just need to segment our market.” “We just need to offer discounts.” “We just need […]

  • Make Your “not going to do it anymore” List

    There is some combination of sun angle, crisp blue sky, football games on TV, and other signals of fall that triggers in me an epigenetic response that it is time to start learning again. School is now in session. No matter how long it has been since you sat in the classroom, there is that […]