Joe’s Leadership Blog

Chris Brogan talks about Scaling Yourself.  He speaks of being in a situation that I find myself in now. 

“It’s been difficult, and along the way, I let down a few people, friends who wanted my best effort, and who got a really pale rendition of what I can do and offer instead. That was hard to swallow, as no one ever likes to overpromise and underdeliver.”

 

He offers pointers on cutting relentlessly; saying no with kindness; learning triage and loop closing, decisiveness and shortcutting.  He also notes that the hardest time to enforce this is in person.  That is where I struggle as well.  I find the line outside my office hard to break down.  I need and want to be responsive to our staff and the community.  I find that when I can decide what I’m doing, I’m usually pretty effective, but my struggle is with controlling how other people need my time. 

 

Self Organization always seems to come back to the Eisenhower matrix, popularized in Stephen Covey’s

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I find myself always in Quadrant One (important and urgent) and Quadrant Three (urgent and unimportant), also known as the Stress and Deception Quadrants.  I need to get to Quadrant Two (important, but not urgent) or the Value Quadrant.  I’m pretty good about avoiding The Quadrant of Regret (unimportant and not urgent) unless I’m taking a mental break.   I feel like I continue to do a better job of cutting relentlessly and while I still struggle with saying no with kindness, I do it more often than ever before. 

 

A large part of the my issue is what Covey would call Sharpening the Saw.  I feel like we’ve been on a continuum of major projects at work.  I find it harder and harder to reach back for the fastball.  The motivation and energy is just not there.  I have some goals around diet and exercise. I just put in for all my vacation time for this year, which I have never come close to using. I just took my first vacation day today and I’m already mentally in a better place. 

 

All that being said, I have to figure out how to control my world at work better.  I still love my job, but feel like I don’t work on what really matters as often as I should.  I wish I could do a better job at following the Einstein Principle on Study Hacks:

 

“We are most productive when we focus on a very small number of projects on which we can devote a large amount of attention.”

On the subject of getting things done.  Here are a few good links:

Lifehack has 50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better and More Easily

 

LiveDev has the GTD Cheatsheet.

 

Tim Ferriss tells us How to Stop Checking E-mail on Weekends. 

Categories: gtd
Tags: energy, featured, features, gtd, self organization, stress, Time Managment