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Consensus Decision Making in a Room of 19
I liked a recent experience on the City of Worcester’s Task Force for Sustaining Housing First Solutions. In the current climate of incivility, especially on social media, consensus-oriented approaches to hard problems are especially appealing. Here’s how this one worked. Smart editors, including Barbara Poppe, prepared a set of 26 recommendations. The goal was to […]
Task and Management Update
I haven’t written a blog article in about seven months. It has been about a year since I optimistically wrote “The Great Untasking“. Here’s an update of that graph. Big-picture, little has changed: The “total queue” seems to be on average 280 items. “Days overdue” seems to be on average a month. Both series are […]
Bootstrapped Startup Update: Leveraged Management vs Individual Contributions
Starting 18 months ago, I began more detailed timetracking for MassLandlords, which is a bootstrapped startup. I started noting the difference between what Andrew Grove called “high leverage” activities and what Pratt and Whitney called “individual contributor” activities. This is the first time I’ve made a graph of the results. It’s a prime example of “what you don’t […]
Prioritization Grid
I drew this on a screenshare today while talking to a MassLandlords manager. I don’t remember where I learned it*. The basic gist is that lots of people will suggest lots of things for you to do. Some things are going to be hard and have a low impact on your goals. Write them down, […]
My Favorite Part of the Work Week is Saturday at 7:30am
Saturdays at 7:30 am (5:00 or 6:00 pm India time depending on daylight saving) I call the MassLandlords bookkeepers in India. I love it. I actually get up at 6:30 to prepare for the call and to review our “treasury dashboard.” I love getting up early on a weekend. It feels so productive. Plus, this phone call represents […]
The Worst GTD Backlog Since Tracking Began
This afternoon I’m at the worst backlog of “things to do” since GTD tracking began in late 2014. I have 333 items in my inbox, on my desk, and in my task list that all demand attention yesterday. What’s astonishing is that “days overdue” is only 8, which means none of these things really originated before the last week. […]
One thing I carry every workday
It has been over nine months since the last update. I have been busy. I may write an update soon. In the meantime, it occurs to me to share this strange fact: every workday, everywhere I go, I carry the final pages of Andrew Grove’s High Output Management. Lame but true. High Output Management is a soft skills […]
Busier than a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest
Yes, I guess I am, but I don’t feel that way. Below are some fun statistics from my personal task list, and one big surprise at the end. (For those of you that don’t know, I follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done to stay in control and Making it All Work to keep perspective. The gist […]
Sam Walton on How to Treat Employees
I’d like to share a surprising quote from the book Made in America, a sort of conversational biography of the founder and manager of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton, who said: The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes — like the discounter’s principle of the less you charge, […]
