Archive for 2009

Welcome to the third instalment of the Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off. This week, the very definition of “working smarter, not harder” where you can learn how to double your productivity. Mini-Plans Can Double Your Micro-Task Productivity You can make the next hour the most productive of your day, if you know precisely what you will be…

What’s a SenseCam? Think of a SenseCam as a black box flight recorder for human beings. Almost everything you or I see, hear or encounter can be recorded in some fashion on a tiny digital device. You can later use the recorded data as a memory aid, to reconstruct an event, to prove who won…

Phone designs, like fashion, move fast. And they mostly move in herds. Incremental changes to design are quickly emulated. Technological tweaks are rapidly assimilated in the next generation of a competitor’s handset. If your product is aiming to be fashionable, aim to move fast so that you don’t become irrelevant quite literally over night. Move…

Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off, the second instalment in an ongoing series. This week I am continuing the email theme. Why Short Emails Give Everything You Say A Big Impact In business and personal life, email is a great tool. But, like all tools, it needs to be properly handled and you need…

When I first decided to begin writing for this blog I thought I had it all figured out of how I wanted it to work. I thought ”Hey, you know, I can write out a synopsis of what I want to say, perhaps a few hundred words, then hand that off to a cheap writer…

Things you can say to an entrepreneur but not to someone contemplating suicide “There’s no better time than to take that leap.” “Your problem is you don’t follow through on anything you say you will do.” “Oh well then just do it and stop talking about it already.” “Just pull the trigger already!” “I don’t…

A few years back, I was attending my usual weekly Toastmasters meeting and had the opportunity, as part of the prescribed curriculum of practice, to give a speech about the value of opinions. I have been writing a lot about this subject lately for future blog articles so thought I would share a copy of…

Welcome to the first Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, this week, the distraction of just one aspect of email. Disable Your Email Alerts A huge time sink. We all love email. Some days it just seems I live in the Inbox of Microsoft Outlook where I have to respond to a few dozen business emails and be…

We repeatedly revisit past failures no matter how small. “I missed winning the contest by that much.” “Our team could have won if I had just gotten a few more yards.” “I would have sealed that business deal if I had just walked to the plane a little faster.” But we rarely revisit our past…

Continuing on from the super productivity boosters I wrote about yesterday, here are another dozen techniques you can use to push through your personal productivity dip. 13. Closed Task Lists We all have a never-ending task list that seems to have tasks added to the end faster than we remove tasks from the front. I…

Super productivity boosters multiply your daily output by applying simple techniques and easily learnable skills you most likely already have. The right productivity booster correctly applied can double or triple your effective work output for a day. Techniques that are super productivity boosters need to be incredibly simple and beautifully elegant. A complex ritual requiring…

Stop spending irreplaceable hours researching cheap items on websites and just spend easily replaceable dollars purchasing different brands and models until you locate one you are satisfied with. What is the point of spending hundreds of hours a year of your valuable time researching on various websites which $50 products to buy? Just go ahead…

Being born is “good exposure.” Everything else is just someone trying to get you to do free work for them.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. What is perfect anyway? It is in your interest to avoid perfection whenever possible, a good enough solution that works, is immeasurably better than a perfect solution yet to be implemented. In your company and your life, good enough solutions should be prevalent. Good enough should be the dominant…

I was wondering about a small productivity booster whilst being distracted by all of the bells and whistles in Microsoft Word 2007. I must admit that the ribbon and the icons in the new edition of Word are very pretty but they are a huge distraction when I am trying to concentrate on creating an…

I am off to a very slow start with my Cook Something Original And Fantastic 30-Day Goal, the first week I was focusing on minor side dishes or so busy with life that preparing anything more than a basic meal was not within the time available to me. The past few days however have been…

This is the second part of my article on self-discipline that continues where the article from yesterday left off. Today I am writing about techniques you can use to build up part of your internal self-discipline. Awareness Discipline is deciding, consciously, that you need to act in a certain way, or perform a certain task,…

Today I am writing specifically about self-discipline and I want to make sure that there is no confusion between what I mean by self-discipline and what others mean by self-control. Self-discipline and self-control are closely related subjects and it is quite easy to confuse the two. "Discipline is freedom" touts one pundit. This smacks of…