There are three ways to change your behavior. You can have an epiphany. If you know the story of Byron Katie’s remarkable turn-around, you have an example of an epiphany. These are hard to engineer, so looking for one to show up can be a long and frustrating wait. You can change your context. When…
Category Archives: Goals
My One and Only Resolution for 2012
I spend my weeks helping other people make plans for their work and their lives – plans that are compelling, challenging, powerful, and juicy. And I believe that the best plans are as simple as possible. So here’s my resolution for me and my wish for you for 2012.
Four School Lessons to Unlearn Now
We’ve all been told that studying hard and doing well in school were necessary for our future success. But there are some things you learned in order to do well in school that you really need to unlearn in order to successfully start and run your own business. Here are four school rules that flunk…
What’s In It For You? How to Reward Yourself For Meeting Your Goals
How can I motivate and reward myself when I am both the boss and the employee? So, one of the skills I teach in my Plan to Thrive productivity program is how to use a four-month rolling plan to keep up your momentum. And one essential part of the rolling plan is a way to…
How Much Time Is There In An Eight-Hour Day?
Does this sound like a trick question? Let me ask it another way: have you ever planned to get a certain amount of work done only to find at the end of the day that you need another three or four hours to finish what you’d planned? Whether we work alone in a home office…
The Planning Fallacy: Why You Don’t Know How Much You Can Do This Year
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. – Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid As you make your plans for 2011, do you feel that you didn’t do much, or enough, last year? Do you feel that you really want this year…
How Much Time Should Planning Take?
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. – Seneca Once in a while a client avoids planning on the ground that it takes too much time. They’d much rather dive right in and spend that time getting some of their work done, instead of reviewing goals, choosing…
The Won't-Do List
Productivity is as much about what we choose not to do as it is about what we do. (Remember the Evil Overlord List? 100 tongue-in-cheek won’t-do entries that begins, “Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice.”) With this in mind, I’d like to supplement my list of committed tasks…
Why Tasks Hang On – Three Productivity Traps to Avoid
Take a look at your to-do list. Are there things that have been lurking there for weeks, maybe months? How do you feel when you think of those tenacious tasks? Tired? Discouraged? You can get rid of those “Velcro jobs” faster if you know how they got to be clinging to your days in the…
No Regrets
When I asked my father, then aged 85 and about to move out of the home he’d built with his own hands 25 years earlier, whether there was anything more he really wanted to do, his response was memorable: “You can always think of more things to do in a day than you can get…