Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Efficiency

How to … Kickstart Your Day with Focus & Set a Daily Highlight to Stay on Track

By Leave a Comment

How to ... Kickstart Your Day with Focus & Set a Daily Highlight to Stay on Track Take a few minutes, whether it’s 10 or 30, after rolling out of bed to start your day intentionally. Ground yourself in what you want to achieve. In those moments, practice a little mindfulness—tuning in to your body and mind without rushing to fix anything.

Even a brief check-in with yourself can help you notice what’s going on internally, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Maybe your mind feels foggy or sharp, your body tense or relaxed. Just observe it all without judgment. When you do this, you’re practicing discipline by acknowledging your inner states without reacting. Are you tense? Excited? Your mind is like a clear, still pond, reflecting everything that passes without clinging to it.

This creates a space between you and your thoughts or emotions, allowing you to see them as fleeting sensations rather than who you are. This kind of awareness keeps you focused, without getting derailed by every little feeling that pops up.

Next, choose a “daily highlight”—a single priority for your day. As John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp say in Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (2018,) picking one focus gives you clarity, helping you stay true to your intention. It can be urgent, important, or simply something that brings joy.

Idea for Impact: Start your day with a calm, clear mindset, understanding that it’s your choices—not your impulses—that shape your experience. As the day unfolds, take intentional moments to check in with yourself and adjust where needed. This practice of mindful discipline keeps you centered, enabling you to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively to the challenges and distractions of modern life.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  2. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First
  3. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  4. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

A Tagline for Most Meetings: Much Said, Little Decided

By Leave a Comment

A one-hour meeting with eight people is an 8-hour meeting.

It’s ludicrous that a $5KK expense budget requires a tiresome justification and sign-off by senior executives, but gathering a bunch of well-paid professionals to dawdle away for a few hours and burn the same money in low-value interactions is totally unchecked. Besides, no one seems satisfied with the quality of the output of these ‘decision meetings,’ let alone committed to following through.

Idea for Impact: Want a better decision? Plan a better meeting! Treat time spent in meetings consciously by emphasizing decision-making over information-sharing.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed
  2. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  3. How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time
  4. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  5. The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones

The Midday Check

By Leave a Comment

Do a midday review daily to determine how you’re progressing on the day’s goals.

Consider whether you’ve been scurrying from one project to another, constantly hustling to meet deadlines, or feeling like you haven’t accomplished much up to that point. Filter out low-value tasks and ruthlessly make time for what’s still important in the day. Set time limits for tasks—there’s no driving force better than a challenging deadline.

If you’re often derailed by side issues or significant changes that set your days askew, use this midday check to find extra time in your day merely by reprioritizing and reorganizing how you’ll approach the tasks that fall within your responsibility.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  2. Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks
  3. Overwhelmed with Things To Do? Accelerate, Maintain, or Terminate.
  4. How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List
  5. A Guaranteed Formula for Success: Identify Your #1 Priority and Finish It First

First Things First

By Leave a Comment

Most people have the disposition to work on easy, accessible, or pleasant tasks while putting off tasks that seem tedious or difficult.

Using minor tasks to put the big tasks on the back burner is a particularly deceptive form of procrastination. You pat yourself on the back for checking items off your to-do list, but all you’ve done is deferred the more critical, time-consuming work until the end.

Sure, you need to exercise, check your Facebook wall, run errands, tidy your desk, catch up with a buddy, and plan your next vacation. But don’t use these activities as excuses for not preparing the progress report whose due date is creeping up on you.

'7 Habits of Highly Effective People' by Stephen R. Covey (ISBN 0671708635) One of the self-help guru Stephen Covey’s familiar 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) is the discipline of classifying essential things that need to be prioritized. Habit 3, “put first things first.”

Idea for Impact: Delaying a critical task hardly makes it easier. When tempted to procrastinate, first catch yourself making an excuse. Don’t let the little necessary tasks trivialize the more substantive work.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  2. How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List
  3. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  4. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  5. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First

How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed

By Leave a Comment

Refuse meetings that swallow up your time with little benefit. Unproductive talk and time tend to fill the space at protracted meetings.

Cut the meetings you have in half. Cut the time of the meetings that remain in half. Then cut the number of attendees in half.

Show up only if you’re required—not just to be seen, and be prepared with your contribution.

Anecdote: When Andy Grove was CEO at Intel, every new employee, from a production worker to an executive, was required to take the company’s course on effective meetings, often taught by the acclaimed CEO himself. Grove believed good meetings were of such consequence to Intel that it was worth his time to train all employees.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Tagline for Most Meetings: Much Said, Little Decided
  2. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  3. How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time
  4. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  5. The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones

At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It

By Leave a Comment

After steering a consensus at the end of every meeting, allow two minutes to grade it.

Have the meeting’s chairperson go around the table and ask every attendee to give the session a letter grade. If someone doesn’t characterize it as an A, ask them to pinpoint what would have made it an A.

Through this initiative, your team can recognize the factors that influence the success of your meetings. The attendees are responsible for making future meetings an A and cutting barriers to achieving your organization’s objectives.

Few managers do this, but it’s a game changer. Close every meeting on a tone of achievement.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  2. A Tagline for Most Meetings: Much Said, Little Decided
  3. How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed
  4. A Great Email Time-Saver
  5. How to Decline a Meeting Invitation

How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

By Leave a Comment

Long before management consultants made the humble 2×2 matrix their stock-in-trade, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format to create one of the most powerful productivity tools of the 20th century: take your itemized to-do list, and dichotomize all the items on their importance and urgency. Then, classify these on a 2×2 with urgency on the x-axis and importance on the y-axis. The items in each bucket warrant a different kind of response.

  • The urgent-and-important tasks in the ‘Do’ quadrant need doing now (e.g., call the fire brigade if your house is burning down.)
  • The urgent-but-not-important tasks in the ‘Delegate or Automate’ quadrant are best delegated where possible (think booking a hotel or clearing low-priority emails.)
  • The important-but-not-urgent tasks (strategic planning, training) in the ‘Schedule’ quadrant should take up most of your time. Eisenhower noted that truly vital yet immediate tasks are few and far between: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That means committing to doing the tasks you schedule. Being effective can’t happen if you keep kicking the can down the road.
  • The neither-important nor-urgent tasks in the ‘Eliminate’ quadrant are usually time-wasting activities and must be eliminated forthwith. They don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

The Eisenhower Priority Matrix isn’t entirely ground-breaking. Still, it can help you recognize you can deliver yourself by knowing it’s okay not to complete them all, so long as you get the most vital ones done. The challenge lies in being able to determine what’s essential and what isn’t, as expounded tediously in Steven Covey’s First Things First (1994):

Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention now. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidadable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.

Important matters, on the other hand, are those that contribute to long-term goals and life values. These items require planning and thoughtful action. When you focus on important matters you manage your time, energy, and attention rather than mindlessly expending these resources. What is important is subjective and depends on your own values and personal goals. No one else can define what is important for you.

The key to productivity is to be very selective in what you pick and execute your most important priorities. Be ready to delegate and be quick and not-to-perfection on as many things as possible. You really don’t need to give 110% on everything.

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

The Eisenhower method can be an indispensable weapon in your efficiency arsenal. Your life will never be the same when you internalize clarity of habits. Once you’ve been using the matrix for a while, you can realize a pattern of your own behavior. With some discipline, you can change your behaviors to ensure you’re spending more time on the ‘Schedule’ and ‘Do’ quadrants, improving your ability to plan your work.

Try taking a few minutes each day and analyze your task list. Are there things on there that you can delegate or eliminate? Are you genuinely focusing on the right tasks? It’s incredible how much more productive you can be with a bit of planning and forethought.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  2. First Things First
  3. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  4. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First
  5. Hofstadter’s Law: Why Everything Takes Longer Than Anticipated

Begin With the Least Urgent Task

By Leave a Comment

Don’t wait until something becomes urgent to do it. Most of your urgent tasks—the ones that have the menacing power to distract you now—were non-urgent once.

Becoming more alert to time and staying aware of what genuinely deserves your attention at the moment is the key to time-effectiveness.

Idea for Impact: Complete your tasks before they become urgent. You’re thus putting yourself, not the incoming flow of attention demands, in the driving seat.

This discipline of getting things done early won’t help you eliminate real emergencies. Still, on the whole, your self-inflicted crises might drop significantly, and the stress that comes with them. Your efficiency will increase, and so will your predictability and reliability.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  2. How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun
  3. The Midday Check
  4. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  5. Don’t Keep Running Hard If You’re Not Making Progress

How to Minute a Meeting

By Leave a Comment

If you’re the unlucky minute-taker tasked with recording a discussion for the benefit of posterity, remember that minutes are expected to contain essentially a reliable record of what transpired at the meeting, key decisions taken, and action items.

In principle, meetings exist for people to inform and decide, but, in reality, lots of what people say in meetings will be trivial, pointless, and unhelpful. Unless specifically required by the forum, you don’t have to scribble down each and every pearl of wisdom that ensues. Per Wikipedia, the term “minutes” derives from the Latin minuta scriptura (“small writing,”) meaning “rough notes.”

The BBC political satire Yes, Prime Minister (1986–88; prequel Yes Minister, 1980–84,) that masterly class on politics, manipulation, and being manipulated, has particularly handy advice on meeting minutes. From the ‘Man Overboard’ (clip) and ‘Official Secrets’ (clip) episodes,

  • A minute is a note for the records and a statement of action, if any, that was agreed upon.
  • It is characteristic of all discussions and decisions that every meeting member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials … if a decision had been officially reached, it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials.
  • The purpose of minutes is not to record events, it is to protect people.
  • People frequently change their minds during a meeting. Therefore, what is said at a meeting merely constitutes the choice of ingredients for the minutes. The minute-taker’s task is to choose, from a jumble of ill-digested ideas, a version that represents the [powerful person’s] views as he would, on reflection, have liked them to emerge.
  • Minutes do not record everything that was said at a meeting. Minutes are constructive—they are to improve what is said, to be tactful, to put in better order.
  • Minutes, by virtue of the selection process, can never be a true and complete record. Minutes don’t constitute a true record.

You’ll have to maintain a Zen-like focus on why everybody disagrees with somebody and how nobody agrees to do what anybody could have done. But you don’t have to work hard to keep yourself awake either.

As soon as you’ve circulated those minutes and got them approved, you can file them away. Nobody may ever actually read them in the future.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  2. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  3. How to Be a Great Conversationalist: Ask for Stories
  4. Ditch Sarcasm—Don’t Hide Hostility Behind Humor
  5. Stop asking, “What do you do for a living?”

Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting

By Leave a Comment

Latecomers not only demoralize and disrespect those who turn up on time and have to wait around but also hurt the meeting’s productivity—especially if you have a tight and structured schedule.

  • Always start and end your meeting at the appointed time. Are your attendees tardy because they know that you don’t start the meeting promptly? Do you tend to wander off-topic?
  • Confirm that there’re enough chairs in the meeting room. A latecomer can disrupt a discussion by dragging chairs over from other meeting rooms.
  • Don’t reprimand or embarrass a latecomer during the meeting. Speak to her later. Does she understand that she has a clearly defined role in this meeting? (People are often late to events because they’re not entirely convinced about whether they really want—or need—to be there.)
  • Don’t go over an agenda item to help a latecomer catch up. Recapitulate the key points only if the latecomer’s inputs are necessary to what’s left on the agenda.
  • If you have a chronic latecomer, check if he has a schedule-conflict. Confirm that his participation is still relevant. If he doesn’t want to—or need not—attend the entire meeting, pull him to the top of the agenda. Let him contribute and leave.
  • Try to corral the chronic latecomers by stopping by their desks en route to the meeting.
  • Could you make the meeting more beneficial for all your attendees? Invite suggestions for mutual gain so that everyone feels more productive.

Also, be alert to power trippers who get a small thrill in keeping others waiting, and then requiring you to start over or recapitulate when they arrive.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  2. A Great Email Time-Saver
  3. The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego!
  4. The Midday Check
  5. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus