I knew my wallet was being stolen as it was happening, but was strangely powerless to stop it. While checking out one of the delightful displays of fresh fruit and veg in the market just off the Rambla in Barcelona, I felt something unusual happening with the bag...
It’s the 4th of February today. Set any new resolutions at the beginning of this month? I didn’t think so. Strange how we do that in January, but in February not so much. Still, I have to ask: how did you do? In January, I mean. Research shows that although millions...
There is still a lot to do this week, but many of those I’m meeting are already starting to move into end-of-year mode. With that often comes a review of the past year, sometimes done with columns for positive and negative things that happened along the way. That...
It’s a four-letter word. A bad ‘un. So awful is this word that its use has been de facto banished from organizational discourse. And yet the feeling this word describes is probably the biggest barrier there is to getting game-changing things done. It lurks in every...
One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines is, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Fabulous metaphor. Love it. The problem is that – as I’ve gotten a bit older, and the stage has gotten more crowded with each passing year – I can’t always...
(*Unless the Romans are morbidly obese, diabetic, mobility-scooter jockeys…in that case, do pretty much anything but what the Romans are doing) The summer holidays are a distant memory for me now, but a couple of things have stuck with me from my trip back to ‘the...
Like much of Europe, I’m off on my summer holiday. Unlike much of Europe, I’ve had a an e-mail arrive with a question about how to handle e-mail while on holiday. What to do? The sender did a seminar a year or so ago, and since then has been working at implementing as...
“You work too hard to be successful.“ Tom had been having a quick look at his e-mail under the table of the sidewalk café, but this last sentence from across the table jolted him back to reality. He considered himself a moderately successful individual, so he was a...
For the inveterate movie hound that I am, the streaming of movies over the internet seems a huge leap forward for our civilization. No more clicking through several hundred channels of an evening to find a speck of gold in a mountain of televisual dross; now I can tap...
When – in desperation – I first skimmed the book Getting Things Done back in 2004, I had a number of epiphanies. One of them was that there were people who were regularly able to empty out their e-mail inboxes. This information, in and of itself, re-defined the game I...
One of the clients I worked with recently had quickly understood GTD as a concept and wanted to do it, but was struggling with actually doing it consistently. He finally cracked the problem when he clarified why he wanted GTD, and what it would get him if he...
I recently got a message from a client who was all excited that a consultancy that works with her organization had announced that from 2013 the consultancy would no longer be using e-mail for internal communications. There was a hopeful implicit subtext that...
I’m no doctor, but here is something I’ve learned from experience: when a muscle goes into spasm and doesn’t recover properly, sometimes it gets to a point where it has been tight for so long that the brain simply stops registering the pain signals it is sending. It...
Winning business is challenging, and no business can thrive without sales. This is a problem in most organizations, because many people hate the idea of having to sell things, and spend their careers avoiding it. I was one of them. For years I avoided sales work...
‘I don’t like this exercise’. Given the expression on his face I didn’t actually have to get close enough to hear him to know that he was not enjoying the exercise, but – having learned to keep moving when things are looking good, and to step in when things are...
As my remaining hair slopes sneakily off towards the white end of the black-white spectrum, it seems my clients too are ageing, and – in many cases – taking on more and more responsibility. Unfortunately, often they are also working harder and harder, and I’m not sure...
Welcome back. With a bit of a tailwind and a bit of luck, many of you are re-starting after a two-week break thanks to the miracle of seasonal holidays falling very helpfully in the middle of the week. After a slow start early in the week, digital heads are being...
I’m a big fan of dogs. Love ’em. I’m not convinced that there is anything of unconditional love in the response of “Man’s Best Friend” (there is the small matter of MBF having identified a light touch for free food…),...
Lately I’ve been noticing that my ability to work productively is significantly impacted by the sounds in the environment that I’m working in. I can work very comfortably in a café with a ton of background noise, but I can be driven to distraction if there is a...
Back in the winter of 1976, a low-budget boxing movie came out of nowhere to take the world by storm and win the Academy Award for best picture. You’ll have guessed by now that it was ‘Rocky’, and for this 13 year-old boy it was huge. Epic. Transformational. I pretty...
When I was growing up, in our kitchen there was a chalkboard that had pride of place on the wall just beside the back door. My mum basically ran the family (with very little assistance from any of us) off of that chalkboard. With hindsight, it was basically a...
“People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.” – Albert Einstein Strange. I never knew him, but Albert seems to have known me; I’m not one for delayed gratification. As an old mentor of mine used to say with a smile, ‘if it ain’t...
This week, a dive into some of the detail with a round-up of answers to frequently asked questions we are seeing on the web: Question: Can you have more than one next action going at any one time for a project, or do you suggest focusing solely on doing one thing...
There are many things in life where being able to do something is not necessarily an indicator that it is a good idea. As with Lycra and an overweight cyclist, it seems to me that the ability offered by most digital systems to set reminders on anything that moves is...
