Personal Productivity

Kick the Clutter to Reverse a Bad Day

October 3, 2011

Bad day? Frustrated? I’ve found a few times that I can get through one of those days by finding those chores that I put off. You know the ones I mean … paying bills, calling about the insurance, scanning documents, keeping the books, organizing emails … these are all things I know I have to [...]

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I’m Loving the New Version of Business Plan Pro

August 4, 2011

If you’re a regular reader you know I don’t normally do sales pitches here on this blog, but this is special. Last week Palo Alto Software introduced a brand new version of Business Plan Pro incorporating (finally) my Plan-as-You-Go Business Planning ideas into the mainstream of the software. With this new version, when you start [...]

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Magic of Metrics. Tyranny of Metrics. Management of Metrics

July 22, 2011

The tyranny of metrics is that I keep looking at my page views on this blog, my subscriber count, my Klout score, my blog rating, and I can’t stop. I have to keep blogging, tweeting, and conversing, or else it goes down. There is no taking a pause, no relaxation, or my rating goes down. There’s [...]

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The Brain Scientist’s Insight From Inside Out

July 15, 2011

She’s a brain scientist who studied the brain “from inside out” when she had a stroke. We should listen to what she discovered. And what we have to choose from. If you don’t see the video embedded here, you can click this link to go to the original on TED.com.

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Folk Wisdom Reversal: Necessity Isn't the Mother of Invention

June 10, 2011

This will be hard for anybody under 50 to believe, but there was a time when word processing and spreadsheets were a real productivity advantage. Are you old enough to remember Visicalc, or maybe SuperCalc? In the very early 1980s, most business people still did budgets with paper and calculator. The spreadsheet power user was [...]

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5 Survival Tips for Work Overload

February 18, 2011

I like Nate Riggs’ 5 Survival Tips for Work Overload over at Nate Riggs & Social Business Strategies. These are pretty good tips, and we all need reminders. This is just a summary, Nate has a lot more on the original post. Forget about emptying your email inbox. Set a reasonable task list by day. [...]

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Productivity is as Productivity Does

February 3, 2011

Work differs. The other day somebody told me about the problem of getting into some kinds of work. It went something like this (paraphrasing): With computer programming it takes more time to get in and out of it. You can’t just stop to talk, or answer an instant message, and then continue. Interruptions make a [...]

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Wishing You'd Had The Perfect Response?

December 7, 2010

… you can often go back later and change what you said. Do you know what I refer to? Some exchange in the workplace, it all happens very quickly, and later you find yourself wishing you’d said something else, or something different? You don’t like your answer, but the moment has passed. If you don’t [...]

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Charting the Lesson of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal

November 30, 2010

Yesterday I posted here David McCandless’ fascinating 18-minute talk on data visualization, in which he puts up charts and graphs as a window into patterns and relationships in numbers. Watching that talk led me to discover his Information is Beautiful blog, which is a great source of ideas and insights. For example, the chart shown [...]

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The Beauty Of Data Visualization

November 29, 2010

I really like business charts. I think I always have. I’ve been in the business of communicating about numbers for a long time. And here is a master of it. David McCandless, a British journalist, also calls himself “a data detective,” and we see why in his Ted talk shown here, The Beauty Of Data [...]

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