Monday, July 27, 2009

todo

Just added two feed at my netvibes and now I'm full of todo lists and thrilled to find an answer how to stop worrying and start implementing all my plans.

One more article from John Baldoni To Lead More Effectively, Increase Your Self-Confidence.

From time to time I need to ask myself a couple of questions to boost my self-confidence. Here they are from the mentioned article.

What do you do well?
What have you done to earn the trust of others?

I omit the second question from the article (Why should people follow you?) cause I'm rarely thinking for the whole team, concentrating on personal issues. May be the ability to create the followership defines a leader? Anyway, I decided to concentrate on processes I'm managing. Well, human resources are the part of the process, so are the clients, that makes followership being vital for me.

#100 post

...is full of quotes from articles mentioned in previous post.

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning.

It's hard to do because maybe, just maybe, that next piece of information will be the key to our success. But our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We'll exhaust ourselves.


The world is changing fast and if we don't stay focused on the road ahead, resisting the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting, then we increase the chances of a crash.


Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. Make two lists:

List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What's important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can't work 25/8.

List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn't make you happy? What's not important to you? What gets in the way?


An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
Ritual is a secret power to manage one's life.
Managing our time needs to become a ritual too. Not simply a list or a vague sense of our priorities. That's not consistent or deliberate. It needs to be an ongoing process we follow no matter what to keep us focused on our priorities throughout the day.


STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful.
Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus. Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour. When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don't let the hours manage you.

STEP 3 (5 minutes) Review. Shut off your computer and review your day. What worked? Where did you focus? Where did you get distracted? What did you learn that will help you be more productive tomorrow?


Make Your Place Proud of You.

"Do not let what you cannot do, interfere with what you can do." The words are those of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach. When attempting to do anything new, voices inside us will whisper "No, don't do it." Those who give up listen to such voices; those who persevere pay them no heed. When it comes to making big and bold changes, either in our lives or our careers, there will always be those around us telling us no; it is up to us to heed our own inner yes.


"I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives," said Abraham Lincoln. "I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him."

love it

I've discovered a wonderful source of knowledge recently. It has started with Managerial tip of a day from HBR and now I'm in blogs, reading all the stuff I need to read in order to calm myself.

Here are the links to articles I've just gone through and I'm about to enjoy by reading thourougly:
- Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning.
- An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
- Make Your Place Proud of You.

These are topics I've been thinking for a while recently. Hoping to find some hints.

PS. Good sign that I've started thinking in English again.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

HBR's

I love the way Harvard Business Review promotes its products - The management tip of the day with all the lnks to related topic's products.

I've got this thru twitter's @ManagementTip which is an extremely simple way to get info.