Category Archives: Productivity

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

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Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

Castle CragI need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Organisation Charts

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I love this cartoon from Bonkers World about different organisation structures:

I work in a large organisation that looks much more like a couple of these charts than others, and there are days when I’m not sure what it really looks like.

When people unfamiliar with the organisation ask how they get things done I regularly tell them that the informal organisation structure is much stronger than the formal one. So perhaps the diagram doesn’t matter too much anyway.

The connected world we now live in makes a whole set of new organisational shapes possible and great many of them will be successful.

At the end of the day it’s the people that matter though.

Hat tip to Seth Godin.

Telling Stories

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I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.

Work – Life Balance

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There are times in life when we can see our life clearly, at other times we need someone to remind us of the reality of a situation.

AbbeysteadNigel Marsh’s TED talk on the subject was for me a great reality check.

Some quotes that struck me:

Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being being meaningfully engaged on a day to day basis with a young family.

There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet desperation.

Governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us.

If you don’t design your life someone else will and you might not like their idea of balance.

We need to avoid the trap of “I’ll have a life when I retire”.

Nigel is passionate about his subject and rightly so – it’s a significant issue for our society.

Old Dogs and New Tricks

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One of the challenges I find as I get older is how I continue to be open to new ways of doing things.

Surveying the landThe world of work is consistently changing and in order to stay valuable we need to change with it. An example of this has recently become evident to me. I used to do a job that was very valuable within the business, I can now see a situation where the business no longer requires people with that role. It’s not just that the role is being diminished – it’s no longer needed at all.

If I’d stayed doing what I was doing I would now be feeling very sensitive about my position going forward.

Here are the things that I do to stay open to change:

  • Experiment – try new things out it’s a great way finding something out.
  • Read and watch widely – I try to get a broad view on as many things as I can.
  • Converse – other people’s points of view influence my point of view and it’s always better to converse with someone who has a different opinion to you.
  • Listen – conversing involves listening but it’s worth highlighting that it’s the listening part that is the most important.
  • Help – in helping others work through things I get to understand a different perspective
  • Be Open – I try to stay open to someone else having a better idea about something than I do
  • Lay down – I try to stop doing things that are no longer important. This is probably the thing I struggle with the most.
  • Respect – people are rarely the stereotype that they might look like so I try not to prejudge what someone might have to offer.

Living in a multi-track world

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One of the challenges of being a reasonably early adopter of things is that it take a while for people to catch-up.

Lake District SnowIt take some people even longer than others.

And then there is another group who are even further behind.

If I want to communicate with all of the groups I need to span all of the tracks.

Perhaps, one day, we’ll be able to turn some of the tracks off, but I don’t see much evidence of it.

And, I’m not just talking about my personal life, the same is true at my employer. Actually, as I think about it, it’s even worse amongst my colleagues.

Feedback is important

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We have all sorts of ways to communicate these days. One of the things I’ve noticed with the newer communication mechanisms is that they drive us to a level of informality.

Within the formal communication mechanisms we have built in ways of providing feedback, even if it was just a simple salutation at the start or the end of a letter.

With informal mechanisms we need to be careful to think about the feedback that we give. There are a number of times when I’ve read through twitter conversations where it would be easy to assume that the individuals are in violent and personal disagreement, when the reality was far different.

We need to think about the feedback that we give:

http://onefte.com/comics/2011-04-05-no-news-is-good-news-right.png