One can have no smaller or
greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
* Leonardo da Vinci

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
* Cynthia Ozick

Don’t let life discourage you;
everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
* Gichard L. Evans

Genuinely feeling successful is possible when you detach yourself
from the things you desire and allow them to flow to you – and through you.
* Wayne Dyer

Close friends contribute to our personal growth.
They also contribute to our personal pleasure,
making the music sound sweeter, the food taste better,
and the humour richer, because they are there.
* Judith Viorst

Words are just words and without heart they have no meaning.
* Chinese Proverb

A man who works with his hands is a labourer;
a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman;
but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
* Louis Nizer

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if
you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you
are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet
many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.
* Annie Besant

The process of living is the process of reacting to stress.
* Stanley J Sarnoff

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Consider the following assertions from résumés that I reviewed recently:

• “Ambitious, career oriented, uniquely qualified, results-driven professional with outstanding academic preparation and exceptional industrial experience in applied research and design.”
• “Extremely strong, aggressive, self-sufficient writer with excellent technical skills and ability to learn new technologies quickly.”

The trouble with these statements is that they amount to unoriginal self-declarations. It is as though these candidates put on a crown and proclaimed themselves the kings and queens of the land of have-everything-an-employer-needs-skills. Most candidates do not realize such jargon can, in fact, be a turn-off.

Show than Tell

A résumé is, in essence, a documentation of your achievements and recognitions. Your résumé should not explicitly declare such characteristics as hard-working, entrepreneurial, self-starting, etc. Instead, your résumé should describe your accomplishments in such a way that a reader infers these skills in you.

Admittedly, describing your accomplishments to imply you are a “hard worker,” “self-starter,” or “team player” is difficult.

• To present yourself as “hard-working,” describe your part-time employment, serving as captain of the soccer team, leading a student club. Mention your high GPA and academic projects.
• To present yourself as “results-driven,” show how your projects contributed to your organization’s goals and bottom line: include phrases like, “saved 10% costs,” or “improved capacity by 18%,” etc.

Avoid proclamations, jargon and clichéd superlatives. Write your résumé to include more than a mere assemblage of personal particulars. Help the reader connect to you through your résumé and get a picture of your personality, unique skills and characteristics.

Recommended Reading

• Effective fonts and text sizes for résumés
• The one-page résumé rule
• Judging people: Talent is more than skin-deep

***See other articles related to resume tips, resumes, resume, job search, career, interviewing, curriculum vitae

A cheerful thought in you produces cheerful thoughts in others.
You are filled with joy and intense delight when you see a batch of
hilarious children playing mirthfully and dancing in joy.
* Swami Shivananda

Hard work performed in a disciplined manner will in most cases keep
the worker fit and also prolong his life.
* Mokshagundam Vishveshwariah

If you wish to avoid criticism,
do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
* Indira Gandhi

We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has
the blame, none has the praise.
* Swami Vivekananda

Be prepared to take some shit in life;
just do not take more than a mouthful at a time.
* Forrest Gump

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do
something you want done because he wants to do it.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
* Chinese Proverb

‘If something’s free, I’ll take two,’ a mentor of mine once said.
His point was that people don’t value things they don’t pay for.
* Edwin J. Feulner

A great mentor is one who aims for others’ abilities to surpass his own.
* Unknown

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

You can use the ‘Grammar Check’ feature in MS-Word to identify and eliminate passive voice. To activate the check for passive voice, follow these three steps.

Step 1: Select ‘Tools’ from the ‘Options’ menu

Step 2: In the ‘Spelling & Grammar’ tab of the Options dialog box, enable the ‘Check grammar as you type’ and ‘Check grammar with spelling’ options. Select ‘Grammar & Style’ from the ‘Writing style’ drop down and click on the ‘Settings’ button.

Step 3: In the ‘Grammar Settings’ dialog box, enable the ‘Passive sentences’ under the ‘Style’ category. ‘OK’ and close all the dialog boxes.

Once you configure the check for passive sentences, MS-Word will squiggly-underline (in green color) most instances of passive sentences as illustrated below, just like it does squiggly-underline (in red color) spelling mistakes.

Clarity and ease-of-comprehension are two of the most important requisites to effective communication. Active voice can facilitate effective communication.

Recommended Reading

• Active voice for persuasive communication
• The twelve most persuasive words in English
• What the deaf can teach us about listening

***See other articles related to persuasion, written communication, general communication, verbal communication, grammar

Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for
getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others
to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else,
sacrifice to get there.
* John Kotter

Before you can inspire with emotion,
you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself believe.
* Winston Churchill

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains,
but the thought which it suggests.
* Oliver Wendell Holmes

Meditation consists in conducting consciousness beyond the point
where it is the consciousness of a finite body or a finite mind,
transferring the focus from level to level without losing its continuity or form.
* Pir Vilayat Khan

Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
* Alexander Pope

To be yourself is an achievement in itself.
* Anonymous

Difficulties are meant to rouse not discourage.
The human spirit is grown strong from conflict.
* Willam Ellery Channing

The tragedy of life is not that man loses,
but that he almost wins.
* Heywood Broun

Concern over criticism clogs creativity.
* Duane Alan Hahn

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Classic Clutter-Busting Strategies

This ‘Unclutterer’ blog article lists essential strategies to get and stay organized. Below is an abridgment; see full article here.

1. A place for everything, and everything in its place. If an object doesn’t have an official home, then it will always be out of place. Once you’re finished using an object, immediately put it back in its place.
2. Establish routines. Set up a regular schedule for tasks that have to be completed daily and weekly: laundry, cleaning, cooking, organizing, filing, home and auto maintenance, etc. The more methodical you are, the simpler it is to maintain your home and office.
3. If you don’t use it, need it, love it, or feel inspired by it, get rid of it. Just because you might have space to store something, doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Your home and office should be filled with useful and inspiring things, not objects that cause you stress and anger. Plus, the less you own, the less you have to worry about, clean, organize, finance, and maintain.

Call for Action

One of the primary drivers of the feeling of not being on “top of things” is disorder and clutter. Given our busy lives, we tend to let things get out of hand. This can frequently lead to a chronic preoccupation over the lack of orderliness in our lives.

Set aside some time, perhaps just 30 minutes, and

• Eliminate. Toss out things you have not used in the last two years. If you are not using something on a regular basis, you probably do not need it. Consider donating to charity or let somebody else have things you do not need.
• Organize. After eliminating unneeded and unwanted things, store articles close to where you use them. Consider investing in filing cabinets, cupboards or storage boxes.
• Simplify. One of the biggest hindrances to “getting things done” is complexity and redundancy. In today’s consumer driven societies, we tend to buy things we don’t need or, worse, things we already have and cannot remember. Use common sense to prioritize what you will own and what you will do and fight complexity.

Control your ’stuff’ — do not let them control you.

Recommended Reading

• Prepare tomorrow’s to-do list as you wrap-up today

***See other articles related to reducing clutter, getting organized, productivity, simplicity

Men are like pillow-cases. The colour of one may be red,
that of another blue, and that of the third black;
but all contain the same cotton within. So it is with man;
one is beautiful, another is ugly, a third holy ,
and a fourth wicked; but the Divine Being dwells in them all.
* Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes
(that) can be made in a very narrow field.
* Niels Bohr

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
* Albert Einstein

Life is not holding a good hand;
Life is playing a poor hand well.
* Danish Proverb

Charity sees the need, not the cause.
* German proverb

The fraction of life can be increased in value
not so much by increasing your numerator as by
lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra
deceives me, unity itself divided by zero will give infinity.
* Thomas Carlyle

Hold yourself for a higher standard
than anyone else expects of you.
* Henry Ward Beecher

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through
personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
* Edith Wharton

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness
if greatness is expected of him.
* John Ernst Steinbeck

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

This article is the final article in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Here is a synopsis of the preceding three articles.

1. The first article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.
2. The second article outlined a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. See full article here.
3. Yesterday’s article described three steps to tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities. See full article here.

Today’s closing article details a simple process to list your life’s values and priorities and create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Define Your Values and Priorities

A great deal of anxiety and stress in your life is largely from doing things that are inconsistent with what you believe and what you know you should be doing. Your lack of control over your time stems from doing things that are incoherent with your core values and priorities in life and career.

Matching your actions to the truly important aspects of your life will help you be more focused, more disciplined and more effective. With this objective, spend about 15 minutes to reflect on your life and career, clarify your short- and long-term goals and discover your overriding priorities.

Identify Your Priorities in Life

1. With the help of your spouse or significant other, catalog the core values that you hold dear — the guiding principles of your life. Include personal characteristics, traits and achievements you desire to realize in the short-term and the long-term. Your list many include family, career success, well-being and happiness, prestige, wealth, sense of community or anything else that you feel is important.
2. Rank your values and goals. Sort your list in order of their importance to you. Begin with most important value or goal and end with the least important. Judge between conflicting values to help you commit to ideas and activities that are truly important. Condense your list to 7 to 10 priorities.
3. Rewrite your priorities in terms of actions and achievements that would satisfy each priority or the associated value. Consider the following example.

Example 1: Top Three Priorities of Linda, a Housewife

The previous article on time analysis featured Linda, a housewife who works part-time. Consider this list of her top three priorities in life.

1. Husband and daughter. “Love and care for my husband. Support his career and goals. Nurture our daughter and give her the best upbringing.”
2. Family and friends. “Provide for my aging parents. Support my entrepreneur-brother. Spend more time with dear friends.”
3. Part-time work. “Learn and contribute in my profession as an accountant. Supplement family income.”

Identify Your Priorities at Work

Your desire to be productive at work should begin with understanding your most important tasks in terms of what your role demands of you.

1. Collect your job description, your boss’s and your employees’ job descriptions, your organization’s objectives, any metrics that you report on a regular basis, your recent performance reviews, and your documented career plan. Review these documents.
2. List and rank your priorities. What does your role require of you? What goals have your boss and your organization set for you? What are your key projects and initiatives? How your organizational objectives direct impact your own work? Do not list any more than three major priorities (priorities that require 25% of your time or more) and two minor, comparatively less-significant priorities.

Example 2: Top Priorities of Kumar, a Middle-Level Manager

The previous article on time analysis featured Kumar, a middle-level manager at an aerospace company. Kumar aspires to reorganize his time, adopt productive means to get his work completed by working no more than 45-48 hours per week. Consider the following list of his projects, in order.

1. Project A
2. Project B
3. Coaching and developing team members
4. Initiative M
5. Project C

Realize How Your Current Actions and Priorities are Incoherent

The root of the feeling of being under constant time pressure is the disparity between your actions and priorities. You tend to take advantage of almost every opportunity that comes your way, irrespective of the significance of these opportunities in relation to your core values.

Compare your time log and time analysis report with your list of priorities and decide objectively how much time each of your activities was worth to you in contrast to the time you actually spent on it. You may realize that, perhaps, 80% - 90% of your time is wasted in non-effective activities.

As you review your time analysis report, think about everything that you do that should not be done at all or should not be done by you and recognize all the non-productive, wasteful activities. You will realize that you have been spending time instead of investing time in what really matters.

Resolve to eliminate all activities and commitments that are not aligned to your priorities. For example, Linda — the housewife referred above — spent six hours each week volunteering on the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school “just to be involved.” She realized the lack of value in spending six hours every week on an activity she did not contribute much and decided to withdraw from the committee. Kumar, the middle-level manager, spent way too much time attending meetings. He decided to attend only the most important meetings where his presence was truly required, participated via telephone wherever possible and spared 10 hours on his weekly calendar.

Prepare a Time Budget to Schedule Your Priorities

A time budget helps you decide how your hours should be used given the priorities you have identified for yourself. This is the first step in exercising more control over your time and your life. Preparing a time budget could be as simple as deciding how many hours you would devote to each of your priorities, or could be as complex as setting up your weekly calendar to reflect your priorities.

1. Beginning with your top priority, setup appointments in your calendar and block-off as many hours of the week that are necessary for your priorities. If your most important priority in life is family (it should be,) first allot time for all the activities you desire to do or share your family — set aside time to coach your kids in basketball, set aside time to help your spouse with chores around the home, etc. At work, schedule time to work on your most important projects and initiatives.
2. Locate your most important tasks hours when you tend to be most efficient. For example, if you tend to work best in the mornings, schedule your most important projects for the mornings.
3. Schedule time for your minor projects and lower priorities around your major projects and higher priorities. Decide on the right time to do email, run errands, conduct regular staff meetings, etc.

Your time budget should essentially serve as a guide for how you will spend your time. As with a financial budget, you may not necessarily comply with your time budget. Nevertheless, it is important to prepare a time budget to help you direct how you should spend your time.

Your time budget will help you decide how you can live your priorities. You will realize that by complying with your time budget, your use of your personal time improves dramatically; you are able to focus and reduce anxiety.

Example 1: Time Budget for Linda, the Housewife

Linda prepared the following time budget to help her comply with her stated priorities in life. She eliminated or reduced activities that did not directly contribute to her priorities or were not as productive. For example, she

• ‘found’ six hours by quitting from the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school
• saved four hours by seeking her husband’s help to clean her home and hiring a landscaping service to tend to her yard.
• reduced her time watching TV and on the internet.
• ‘discovered’ more time for her family and friends, exercise and well-being.

Example 2: Time Budget for Kumar, the Middle-Level Manager

Kumar, who previously could not “get it all done” in over 65 hours each week at work, reorganized his calendar around his most important projects and prepared the following budget for 45-48 hours of productive work per week.

Wrap-up: Managing Priorities (and Time) Effectively

This series of articles on the basics of time management described a simple and effective process of logging and analyzing how you use your time, and budgeting your time around your priorities. This process reveals time wastefulness and provides a structure to help you focus on your chosen priorities.

Your personal and professional values and priorities change often based on your progress in life and career. Plan to perform a detailed time analysis regularly — ideally once every six months, — monitor your time, review your priorities and adjust your time budget. Keep your focus on achieving the top priorities.

In sum, time management is, simply, an orderly discipline of controlling how you spend your most valuable resource. The singular purpose of this quest is to regulate the pace of life, reduce unwarranted stress, organize your actions and responsibilities according to the main values and priorities in your life, and realize a meaningful, purpose-driven life.

Recommended Reading

• Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’
• Overcoming procrastination: the “10-minute dash” technique to get a task going
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

This article is the third in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you.

1. The first article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.
2. Yesterday’s article outlined a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. See full article here. Here is what your log should look like.

This article describes three simple steps to tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.

Step 1: Tally up Time-Use by Purpose or Project

Following an entire week of logging your time in 10- or 15-minute intervals, spend an hour at the end of the week to compile your logs.

The third column in your time log chart had identified the purpose and project of each 10- or 15-minute interval. Consolidate these projects and purposes into meaningful categories, ideally 10-15 categories. Review each day’s time log chart and add the time spent in each category, calculate percent of total time, and tabulate the results as illustrated in the following two examples.

Example 1: Time Analysis for Linda, a Housewife & Part-time Worker

Below is the time analysis for an entire week (168 hours) for Linda, a housewife who works part-time as an accountant at a law firm. Linda feels that she does not spend enough time with her friends and family.

Example 2: Time Analysis for Kumar, a Middle-Level Manager

Kumar, a middle-level manager at an aerospace company, feels he spends too much time at work and yet cannot “get it all done.” Below is the time analysis of his work week (67 hours.) Kumar aspires to reorganize his time, adopt productive means to get his work completed by working no more than 45-48 hours per week.

Step 2: Examine Wastefulness

As you tally your time by categories, ascertain the time you spent unproductively. Understand all your non-productive, wasteful activities. Identify,

1. Time spent doing things that do not directly contribute to your short- and long-term goals and, hence, should not be done at all.
2. Time spent on activities that need a lot of work, but have very little return in comparison to other necessities. These are activities that may not make any difference if you eliminate them.
3. Time spent doing others’ work — time spent doing things that could have been and should be done by someone else. For instance, the 1.5 hours that Kumar spent on booking tickets and accommodation for an upcoming trip could have been done by an administrative assistant.
4. Time wasted in transitions — for instance, time wasted when waiting for an appointment with your dentist, time wasted for a meeting to start, time lost due to a computer crash.
5. Time spent doing things that you could more productively by using the right tools, learning a new skill, changing a process (developing a standard system,) seeking somebody’s help, or using a new software program.
6. Time wasted from being disorganized. Time wasted in figuring out what to work on, or time wasted by not collecting all the resources when they could have been collected earlier, for instance.
7. Time spent handling interruptions and distractions, such as when colleagues stop-by your desk to discuss their weekends.
8. Time spent fighting fires caused by your earlier inaction or careless work. And, time spent doing things that could have been avoided had you taken the appropriate actions earlier.
9. Time spent doing things that were probably better suited for other parts of the day. For example, checking email first thing in the mornings when you, like the majority of people, tend to be most efficient.

After taking into account time wasted, the remainder of time on your time logs should be time actually spent doing something useful or meaningful at the right time — as defined by your priorities in life or your role in your organization. Contemplate habits you can develop to avoid wasting time. (Future blog articles will discuss such habits in detail.)

Step 3: Investigate Time Demands to Seek Better Habits

“Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.”
-Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

For each task in your time log, ask the following three themes of questions to assess the nature of everything you spend time on.

• Theme 1: Questions to examine the necessity. Ask, “Should I do this at all? Does this relate to my priorities? Does this help me achieve my goals or my organization’s objectives?”
• Theme 2: Questions to examine the ownership. Ask, “Is this required of me? Am I the right person to do this? Do I have the right tools to do this? Can I delegate? Can I seek help?”
• Theme 3: Questions to examine the prioritization. Ask, “Can I spend less time on this? Should I do this during the part of the day when I can focus/concentrate better? Can I do this during some other part of the day or week?”

Concluding Thoughts

Asking the above questions helps you identify the nature of your activities and prepares you to discover to spend a significant portion of your time more effectively.

Tomorrow’s article will help you reflect on your life and career and catalog the principal values that you hold dear. These values define your priorities — what is really important to you in the context of your professional and personal life. You can then prepare a ‘Time Budget’ which prescribes how you should spend your time on things that are congruent with your priorities in life or at work.

Recommended Reading

• Make your weekends feel longer
• Managing time by managing priorities
• Logging where time actually goes

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

This article is the second in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Yesterday’s article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.

Log How You Spend Your Time

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
-Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.

Below is a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. If you follow a specific routine everyday, you may be able to approximate your time analysis by doing this exercise for a couple of weekdays and a Saturday or a Sunday. Alternatively, you may choose to do this only during your time at work. Again, more data leads to a more comprehensive analysis; hence, try to log an entire week.

1. Create a simple chart that consists of four columns as in the above illustration. Column 1 contains labels for time intervals, in 10- or 15-minute increments. Column 2 records your activity. Column 3 identifies the project or purpose that activity served. Column 4 rates the effectiveness of time spent. Itemizing all these details is the key to identifying time wasted and time effectively used.
2. Make as many photocopies of this chart as required for a whole week.
3. Carry your time log charts around with you wherever you go. Record every activity — significant or insignificant, large or small — during the entire week. Include time spent at your morning ablutions, travel time, time spent chitchatting around the water cooler, time spent helping your daughter with homework, telephone time, time spent on the internet — your sleeping time too.

Time Log Forms

Here are two PDF forms you could download and use:

• A time log form for a full day (24 hours) in 10-minute intervals
• A time log form for a work day (11 hours) in 15-minute intervals

You need not necessarily stop every 10th or 15th minute to record your activity. You can fill up the relevant rows once every hour or so. If you spend two hours on an airplane, you can mark 12 rows (of 10 minutes each) with a single comment. You need not be very precise: if you spend 7 minutes on the phone with a customer, you can record spending an entire 10 minutes.

Here is what your log should look like.

Benefits of Time Logging

The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time. It compels you into the right mindset to consider habits you need to develop, avoid or change and start using your hours and minutes more effectively.

The more significant advantage is that your time logs will serve as a foundation for structuring your time according to your priorities and thus enable effective time management.

Tomorrow’s article will focus on time-analysis to help you review results from your time logs and prepare you for budgeting time according to your priorities.

Recommended Reading

• The basis for managing your time
• Prepare tomorrow’s to-do list as you wrap-up today
• Everyday reflections for effective time management

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance