Lifehacker has a workspace Flickr group where you can post a picture of your workspace and look at what other people have done. It’s a great place to see what other people do.
If you post your own photo, they also add: “Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.”
Peter Drucker:
The first step toward effectiveness is to decide what are the right things to do. Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. Decide your priorities, where to concentrate.
Work within your strengths. The road to effectiveness is not to mimic the behavior of the successful boss you so admire, or to follow the program of a book (even mine). You can only be effective by working with your own set of strengths, a set of strengths that are as distinctive as your fingerprints. Your job is to make effective what you have — not what you don’t have. (From Managing the Nonprofit Organization, 198.)
Zach Nielsen has a good post on how to handle the challenges of managing your life when you have a young family. I went to college with Zach, and would recommend his blog in general.
Trustworthiness is a function of two things — character and competence. Stephen Cover makes this point well in Principle Centered Leadership:
Most people equate trustworthiness with character alone. Character is vital, but it is also insufficient. For example, would you trust a surgeon to perform a critical operation who is honest in his billing practices, but who has not kept up on advances in his field and is professionally obsolete?
On the other side, some people equate trustworthiness with competence alone. That, too, is insufficient. Would you hire a doctor who was up on the advances in his field but not honest in his billing practices?
And we need to go beyond simply the minimum character requirements. We should seek to be people of character who pursue the good of others. And, we should seek to be incredibly competent in this, because there are few things worse than well-intentioned incompetence.
Pursue both character and competence.
Apparently, too much sleep can make you tired.
Stephen Covey pulls together the essence of time management into four sentences:
The essence of time management is to set priorities and then to organize and execute around them. Setting priorities requires us to think carefully and clearly about values, about ultimate concerns. These then have to be translated into long- and short- term goals and plans translated once more into schedules or time slots. Then, unless something more important — not something more urgent — comes along, we must discipline ourselves to do as we planned. (From Principle Centered Leadership, p 138.)
This is an excellent, dense summary of some key productivity practices from Stephen Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership. I count 9 practices here:
Highly effective people carry their agenda with them. Their schedule is their servant, not their master. They organize weekly, adapt daily. However, they are not capricious in changing their plan. They exercise discipline and concentration and do not submit to moods and circumstances. They schedule blocks of prime time for important planning, projects, and creative work. They work on less important and less demanding activities when their fatigue level is higher. They avoid handling paper [and email!] more than once and avoid touching paperwork [and email!] unless they plan on taking action on it.
Post 8 in the series: How to Set Up Your Desk
Having discussed how to set up your desk, now it is time to close this series by looking at the rest of the room.
(FYI: Originally this was the third post in the series because I thought it would be helpful to see the whole context of the room in general before discussing the desk in particular. But that seemed to interrupt the flow of the posts. So this post is now at the end to close out the series.)
The Components of An Office/Workspace
There are six components of your broader work area:
In other words, you need to have a place to actually do your work (the desk), a place to keep reference materials, a place to keep extra supplies and equipment, a place to meet with visitors and, perhaps, a place to take a break.
Post 7 in the series: How to Set Up Your Desk
For your desk drawers, I recommend having two of the three-drawer units. These three-drawer units have two normal drawers on top and then a larger file drawer on bottom. Here’s an example:
You can get by with just one if you need to, but I recommend two. One goes on your right and the other goes on your left.
Here’s how to set them up.
Now this is really interesting. I haven’t put things together in this way before, but I think it’s right:
“Your feelings of being overwhelmed don’t spring from having too much on your plate, but from having too little [emphasis added], too little of what strengthens you. The specific activities that strengthen you have been drowned out by everything else.
Wow. The problem is not too much to do — there is too much to do, but that’s not the problem. The problem is doing too little that aligns with your strengths — that is, not devoting the majority of your attention to the things that make you feel strong. We let the “too much” crowd out the things where we can really make a contribution, with the result that we do too little of what we are best at.
So, what is the solution?
Prioritize your to-dos based on what makes you feel strong. Which ones do you love? Which ones are you actually looking forward to? Make a plan to do those first, and to find a small way to celebrate them when you’ve done them. Cradling these activities will give you strength and resilience to get through everything else.
This is from Marcus Buckingham’s new book Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.
(As an aside here: Yes, you read that sub-title correctly: it’s for women. I love Buckingham’s stuff, but almost skipped this one for that reason. I ended up buying it for my wife and have now been reading it tonight instead of her, while she reads one of my other Marcus Buckingham books.
(Marcus Buckingham is “the strengths guy” who worked for the Gallup organization and wrote the paradigm-shaping books First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently [on management] and Now, Discover Your Strengths [on developing your strengths]. I find everything that he writes to be incredibly insightful.
(His latest book here was a surprise to me [and I’m not a fan of the pink cover — but it’s not for me, anyway], but it’s an extension of his teaching on strengths to the problems women face. So I decided that it would be a great gift to serve my wife. And, it looks like there are a lot of good things in it that men can learn from, too.)