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Mar31
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What is productivity? 
Basically, it’s getting important stuff done well enough in a reasonable amount of time. Key words: important, well enough, reasonable. If your output is high, but it’s crap, you’re not being productive. If you’re being a perfectionist (i.e., aiming for an impossible goal), you’re not being productive. If your work is taking oodles of time to produce because you’re procrastinating or not taking initiative or being a perfectionist, you’re not being productive.
How do you know if you’re productive? It’s really a judgment call. You have to know the value of the task relative to everything else you have to do, or whoever else you are working with. Tip: To keep the first two elements in balance, focus on time. It's finite and everyone has the same amount. Deadlines work.
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Mar30
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One of the tenets she spells out at the very beginning of the book is that real, productive artists don’t rely on visits from the muse to create their work. What they do is get down to work.
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What Can 20 Minutes a Day Do for You??
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Mar29
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Even without the freedom to do what you want, when you want to and the way you want to, I recommend finding the intersection between your job description and your own personal goals.
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A goal needs to be something you really want, not just something that makes sense or seems like a good idea.
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Mar28
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Especially these days when so many jobs require more personal initiative and responsibility than before, you need to be aware of the less obvious, more psychological aspects to your own productivity, and how leverage them for best performance.
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Mar27
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One would think that having a larger number of options to choose between makes life easier, but it generally makes decision making harder.
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Mar24
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To generate that list, it can be helpful to divide your to-do’s, tasks and projects into “important to me” and “important to someone else,” then see how many from the latter list you can dump.
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Mar23
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Just for fun, here are some other corollaries to Parkinson’s law
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Mar22
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Still on this week’s topic of Parkinson's law, we have to accept that we will never be able to accomplish all that's expected of us, or all that we expect of ourselves, for that matter.
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Mar21
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You will reduce your susceptibility to perfectionism and focus more on your desire to have something be done and out of your hair.
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Mar20
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If you believe that your work can expand endlessly, just as those Saturday morning projects actually take the entire weekend and then some, you must also believe that the same project can be limited by time.
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Mar17
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When people procrastinate, they usually have a whole series of thoughts and feelings about the task in question; worrying about failing at it, anxiety about how long it will take or just not being in the mood to do it.
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Mar16
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Look, forming new habits takes effort and attention to take you beyond the fascination of a new idea to the regular activity of implementing it. To create habits that stick, you also must create an environment to support them.
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Mar15
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All those undecided upon emails are obstacles blocking your laser focus on what's truly important.
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Mar14
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So here's an idea: next report, get to the point and leave out the biz jargon and fluff pie charts. Not only will it speed up understanding for your audience and waste less of their time...
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Mar13
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It’s tough to be productive when you aren’t even at your desk to get the work done. When you’re at meetings, that is. Here are some tips for coping with too-many-meetings syndrome:
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Mar10
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Think about how good a gatekeeper you are in your own office. The lure of more, newer information is very strong, but consuming it, digesting it, ordering it, analyzing it, etc. takes oodles of your time.
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Mar 9
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It’s about having a clarity of vision and a focus on getting there. Whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed or pulled in too many directions, stop, breathe and think. Where is your focus?
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Mar 8
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In this blog, I'll suggest different ways of approaching productivity at work, give you ideas that have worked for my clients, and recommend products and services that I think are really useful.
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