How To Plan Your Work Day

I’ve committed myself to doing a better job of planning and executing my workdays…  I’ve even enlisted the help of a friend who is a sales manager for a major bank.  So let me share with you a few thoughts about planning and executing your workday with the help of my friend’s thoughts with a few tweaks of my own.  I can honestly say these ideas have been very helpful.

1.  The To-Do list.  Key – don’t get fancy.  The yellow pad is still the best tool around for managing to-dos.  But how you use it matters.  Here’s the trick that my friend taught me.  Write all of your thoughts down on a yellow piece of paper.  Capture all actions that are on your mind and call that your “General” list.  The key to making sure you are focused on the right stuff is to create a separate sheet for just “Today’s Priorities”.  I put no more than six items on this list.  If I get through all six, I can go to the general page and work on something else.  So your top page, or page 1 is “Today’s Priorities” and the second page is what you expect to do tomorrow and beyond.  Now, here is my additional tweak to this process.  I follow the David Allen GTD (Getting Things Done) method.  So I create additional sheets of paper that are lists by context.  I have one sheet for “Phone Calls” that are calls to be made from anywhere as long as I have my cell phone, and another sheet for “Out and About” which is a list of errands to run while I’m in the car.  There are lists for @Home, @Someday/Maybe – stuff I may do eventually, etc…  Then I put all of these lists in a pressboard folder that I carry with me pretty much wherever I go…  to meetings, shopping, etc…  (leave in the car when I’m out and about…)  Then I just scan the relevant lists whenever I come up for air and/or change locations.  If I’m going to leave the office, I check the lists first.  If I’m in the car and going from place to place, I take 60 seconds to check the lists while sitting in the car before I go to the next place…  someone I need to call?  someplace I need to stop?

Daily Quote

“What distinguishes winners from losers is that winners concentrate at all times on what they can do, not on what they can’t do.”

Bob Butera, President – New Jersey Devils.

From the book, “Failing Forward” by John Maxwell.

Daily Quote

“Five qualities that we need to bring to an activity in order to do it well are:  motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence, and authenticity.”

From Mojo by Marshall Goldsmith

Dealing With Fear

What is your toughest challenge?

Who is your largest customer?

What is your greatest opportunity?

Who is your strongest competitor?

What is the most encouraging/discouraging trend?

What do you do best/worst?

Who are your most important key executives/employees?

A business leader has much to think about.  The answers to these questions are some of the key ingredients to the recipe that will define your outcomes in the coming year.  There is one ingredient however, that you may not have listed as you thought about these important aspects of business…   yeast.

What do we mean by yeast?  (Also known as leaven)  Why does it matter?  And how does it fit into this list of key business concerns? 

Productivity Tips from NYTimes Columnist David Pogue

As you know, “DesertStream” is about many things.  Productivity and time management are certainly on the top 10 list…  Here is an interesting article I stumbled across on my Kindle…  Check out some interesting tools David uses to be productive.

Pogue’s Productivity Secrets Revealed “Dear David,” wrote a reader recently. “When will you share your productivity tips with us? Not everyone can write five books a year, file two columns a week, churn out a daily blog, speak 40 times a year and film a video every Thursday. What are your secrets?”

“Full of Paradise Without Knowing It” – Part 1

“I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.” – Thomas Merton.

There is a clue hidden in this wonderful quote from Thomas Merton.  It leads us to an answer to the question, “why can’t I stop my mind from racing, thinking and constantly processing my to-do list or my thoughts and feelings?  It’s easy to tell someone to “be still”, “calm down”, or “take some time for yourself and meditate”.  But why does this seem so hard to do?

Leaf in the Wind…?

Do you ever feel like you’re being tossed around like a leaf in the wind?  I’m talking about mentally/emotionally.  Take a moment to think about how much of your time throughout the day, you are thinking about things that you really didn’t decide to think about.  You just think about them.  But you didn’t say to yourself, “hey, I’m going to replay that conversation I had yesterday, over and over again until I craft the perfect comeback I wish I had said but didn’t because I couldn’t think fast enough at the time and I was nervous.”  Does anybody really ever decide to have and hold onto thoughts like that?  Or do they just kind of creep up on us and take hold of us.  Or here’s another way of saying it.  Do our thoughts take hold of us?  Or do we take hold of our thoughts?