Posts tagged as "productivity" - Chris Hardie

The new calendar year is a great time to think about how you manage your personal and work/organizational email accounts.  I know that I benefit from the opportunity to purge or rotate out some old folders, delete large attachments just sitting around taking up space, and think about how well my setup is working for me in my daily workflow. There are a lot of different strategies out there and each person has to find what works best for them.  Here are a few queries that might help you think...

In every organizational conversation, there's some process for setting the agenda of what the conversation will be about, and how it will be conducted.  Usually there's a subset of the organization's members who set that agenda - sometimes just a single person - shaping the issues and decisions that the organization takes on. In a non-profit organization board meeting, it might be the Executive Committee or the board chair. In a small business, it might be the business's owners or managers. In...

Recently I've heard some people make the all-too-common assertion that they don't have enough time in the day to get done all of the things they want or need to get done.  I was reminded of an exercise I went through about a year ago, during a period when I was making similar statements, sometimes out loud, sometimes just to myself.  I wanted to do the math to see how the hours really did add up - did I have enough time in the day to do what I wanted to do, or was I actually overbooked and trying...

Are you trying to sabotage your organization by reducing productivity? Are you trying to frustrate and dis-empower your co-workers? Do you have a laser-like focus on poor communication? If so, then you'll appreciate these six tips for how to run a meeting poorly: Really RUN the meeting. Make it known that you're in charge and that this is your meeting - nothing will be discussed or decided unless you are the one initiating and guiding it. If someone else tries to show leadership in the conversation,...

One of my recurring summer jobs, in addition to filling and unfilling the tubes of the Internets, is to adjust the height of the small vertically-oriented plant life that densely covers the land surrounding my house. Many people refer to this act as "cutting the grass." Over the last few years I've tried quite a wide variety of approaches to and implements for "cutting the grass," and I'd like to share them with you now, because imparting unsolicited and only moderately useful information to a halfway-interested...

One of the downsides of working in a field where so much is beholden to the almighty billable hour is that my brain has started to re-wire itself to engage the day in terms of one-hour chunks.  This model is reinforced by other phenomena in life - calendaring software like iCal and Google Calendar make it easy to parcel out the day in discrete bits of time, beeps, alarms and bells go off on the hour mark in many workplace and educational settings, and then there's the cultural convention that "all...

Writing good subject lines in your email messages is important. As email continues to serve as a primary communication tool for many people, and as our inboxes are filled up with ridiculous amounts of stuff that we may or may not need to actually act on, we will all benefit from writing good subject lines that save time and improve productivity. My suggested tips for success: Don't leave the subject line blank. When you send someone an email with a blank subject line, they are lost. They...

I have tried and dismissed a number of personal organizational systems over time, but none of them has lasted as long or served me as well as my current system: my life and all of its to-do lists are managed on the back of used envelopes. Before I tell you more about how it works, let me first assure you that I've tried the alternatives:Past Solutions I have carried a Franklin Covey Day Planner around, and it wasn't too bad. Plenty of space to keep track of events and to look into the future....

I'm looking for one of those lamp/appliance timers I could plug my computer into that will do the following during times when I really need to focus: Block incoming e-mail that isn't related to the specific projects I need to make progress on, but allow others through Block outgoing web requests that are more than one degree removed from the original topic matter I was working on, but allow others through Only allow streaming of net radio stations without lyrics or other spoken words Deliver...