Entries from June 2008 ↓

Summary: Are you struggling to keep your desk clean because having a clean desk makes you happy or because you think you should have a clean desk? Is the simplicity of having a clean desk a need you have, or are you making someone else’s need your own? True wisdom is knowing what you need, and finding a way to solve that need - not fabricating a need to solve or finding a solution for a need you don’t have.

I hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to hear or see the future podcasts and screencasts, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email.

There has historically been a bias against money-makers among intellectuals. Being an academic, I inherited this bias without really thinking about it. It’s only recently that I began thinking about it again - and as normal I got there via a weird route.

I’ll spare a lot of the historical details, but I’m not saying that intellectuals historically weren’t wealthy. In fact, they were. But they rarely made their wealth by actually working - they had land, family, or positions in society that paid for their lifestyle.

I can trace this intellectual bias all the way back to Plato - who proposed that good men, and by analogy, good cities, would fall by concerning themselves with making money, and Aristotle’s disdain for the working class is well documented.

So what? Plato and Aristotle are but two philosophers that no one reads. Wrong - Plato and Aristotle’s ideas has infused the intellectual climate for the last two millenia. It’s no accident that democracy only became respectable after the Enlightenment placed such a high value on the quality of the “average” person. The idea that the “average” person was fit to have any say in ruling a nation before then was unheard of.

The underlying fear that the intellectuals had was that the desirous elements of humanity is uncontrollable by reason and that this element is only concerned with pulling value from the world to the individual. As long as people ruled by their desires had power, their greed would continue to pull and pull value from the community such that the community would collapse. Communities require relatively reciprocal flows of value.

So much for the historical background. Trust me, it has a point.

When bloggers try to make money…

The blogosphere is a weird community. We’ve become so accustomed to getting valuable stuff for free from people that when someone tries to monetize their content, there’s a load uproar (probably just from a small minority) about it.

Vered wrote about this when she discussed Leo from Zen Habits monetizing his content. Yes, there was an uproar (again, probably just from a loud minority), but it’s interesting to see that people come to expect and demand that bloggers continually provide free content.

Let’s be real here: blogging takes a lot of time. Creating really valuable content that enriches peoples’ lives or knowledge requires knowledge, experience, and actual production time. Writing that type of content multiple times a week requires a lot of work.

At a certain point, a blogger must ask herself whether the entertainment value she gets from writing for the blog is worth the time. If it is, she can continue with the hobby and consider it just a time-intensive hobby.

If not, the blogger only has a few options. She can quit blogging (most do), scale back, or continue ahead and start trying to monetize. None of the options above sit well with readers.

What I find really interesting is that there are a few critical shifts that happen when people move from sharing freely to trying to make money off of the stuff they’ve been giving.

The most fundamental shift is that the blogger moves from spreading and creating value as their own ends to spreading and creating value while trying to get something valuable (i.e. money) back from her endeavors.

It’s that expectant part that starts getting in the way of sharing. Prior to the attempt to monetize, good ideas flow without abandon. Afterwards, words like “strategy”", “timing”", and “opportunity” start to become the operating words. Rather than just writing and sharing, she starts plotting and scheming the placement of ideas so that there’s the biggest return on investment.

The follow-on shift is that she’s now trying to figure out how she’s going to monetize. Should she write ebooks? Set up affiliates? PPC? PayPerPost? What’s going to be the best option?

Looking into those options takes a lot of time - time that would otherwise be spent creating valuable content. So, not only has her purpose for creating valuable content changed, but now her time and focus is split between creating said content and figuring out how to monetize it.

Lastly, her measures of success change considerably in the process. Rather than just sharing and interacting with her friends and readers, she’s now looking at how much money she’s made. Rather than hoping readers would just show up and have a good time, she’s hoping that they show up, have a good time, and click on something that makes her money.

Due to these shifts, there is a tendency for the quality of the content to drop or be spread out differently than before the decision to sell the content.

Selling, Sharing, and the Flow of Value

It’s now fairly clear to me why intellectuals have a bias against money-makers. The ideal intellectual spreads and plays with ideas without trying to sell those ideas.

Plato wanted his philosopher-kings detached from money so that they could pursue and spread the Good without trying to figure out how they could sell it. We want our religious leaders detached from money for similar reasons - when we have to question whether the holy water is worth the money we spent for it, something has gone wrong.

The Good and holy water should be free for those that want it.

The problem, of course, is that everyone wants as much free stuff as they can get while wanting to get as much as they can from what they’ve got. In other words, we want the maximum value to come from the world with little to no cost from us.

A few souls are lucky and hard-working enough such that they can do what they love and add value to the world and people will support them financially while they do it. The rest of us, however, have to sell our value - I’m pretty sure that the bank won’t accept my ideas as payment for the mortgage.

I’m not saying that bloggers who are trying to monetize on what they’re doing are all bad people, and I’m not saying that because monetization plays a part in what I do here at PF. What I’m saying is that sharing and selling have opposite flows of value.

This is also a call to those parts of the blogosphere that think and behave as if everything should be free. Before you get too righteous in your demands, justify why you expect value to exclusively flow your way. Your goodwill and enjoyment does not pay the rent, and as long as people have needs and bills to pay, they are going to have to find a way to get money to take care of those needs and bills.

Don’t like that your favorite blog has new ads? Send the author a dollar or sign up for some of the services they recommend. Maybe click on the ads in the sidebar more so that they continue to put stuff there and not in the content.

Rather than complain about not getting free stuff anymore, do something for the blogger that sends value her way.

And bloggers - understand that once you start attempting to monetize, you are no longer just playing with ideas. Understand that you will be expecting more from your readers and your readers will have different expectations from you.

Don’t build up a mountain of great content and let it slide into mediocrity because you’re now trying to make money from what you’re doing. Don’t leverage the goodwill you’ve created just for a quick buck.

If we all are upfront and share value, selling doesn’t have to trump sharing. The rule is as simple as keeping the beer stocked in the fridge: if you take it (value) out, put another (thing of value) back in.

Following this one simple rule will make sure that the blogosphere doesn’t collapse under our greed.

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That’s right, folks - the Internet is making us stupid. It’s actually changing the way we think, and not for the better.

Sure, anecdotal evidence is somewhat sketchy, but I’m sure many of you have felt the feeling that the many hours you’ve spent online has subjected you to more content but has made you all the dumber for reading it.

You can wait until science proves what you already know to be true, or you can accept the fact that there’s an inverse ratio between hours spent reading online and intellectual capabilities - er, that reading content online changes the way you think and not for the better - and start fighting for your mind now.

Here’s how:

1. Read Great Literature

Remember when you could actually read Shakespeare without getting frustrated. I can, too. I was reading Macbeth a few weeks ago and found myself getting irritated, not with myself, but with ole’ Willy. “Why can’t you just come out and say what you mean, man?!”

Before Flash, list items, and hyperlinks, authors wrote to work your brain. Embedded between the lines and pages where clues to different levels of stories and insight, so that each successive reading became deeper and deeper. You weren’t supposed to get it in five minutes.

Today, online writers must contend with the ever-looming threat of a click to another site. Rather than writing under the premise that they have have your attention, they must write with the understanding that you must be quickly entertained or informed, and if not, you’ll find another source of infotainment - if they make you work in the slightest, you’re gone.

The result is that online writing and reading has become an over-technologized form of bread and circus, and even smart people become too lazy to take the time to actually digest what they’re reading.

The great literature that we have has passed the test of time and provides insights into the eternal human condition. There have always been hack writers, but the cost and effort required to print made it such that most of them found their way back to the fields and factories.

Today, the ease and relative inexpensiveness of putting content online makes it such that any monkey with a computer and internet access can unleash his mental flatulence upon untold millions before he gets bored and goes back to watching television.

Rather than read another Flash-animated, listed post about cat poo, visit your local library (best option) or sign up for DailyLit (better than nothing). Read the great works from people who weren’t born last century and learn to understand the human condition before HTML. Your brain will thank you (eventually).

2. Create Something Daily

Rather than being a mere consumer of ideas, start being a producer. Creative processes ignite different parts of the brain than those required to chew gum and click on the StumbleUpon button.

Everyone can create something. Buy Legos and build a car. Draw a picture. Make a cabinet. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you flip the switch and start altering reality rather than consuming the alterations of others.

It doesn’t even matter if the idea that you’re manifesting makes any sense to anyone else. The real reason you’re creating something has nothing to do with what you’ve created, but rather has everything to do with exercising your brain by performing creative processes. Speaking of exercising your mind…

3. Train Your Brain

There’s a lot of scientific research that points to the fact that people who exercise their brains on a daily basis live longer, are happier, and have a tendency to be wealthier than those who don’t. Those are all nice things, but it’s also nice to know that people who train their brain delay the gradual descent into stupidity.

There are a slew of pen and paper games and exercises available - I’ve tried a lot of them. There’s even one on the Xbox360 Arcade called Brain Challenge (I own it, too). By far the most entertaining and effective brain exercises I’ve tried have come from the good folks over at Lumosity. Give Lumosity a free try for TWO weeks and you’ll be sharpening your mind and having fun in no time.

4. Exercise Your Body, Too

It has also been shown that physical exercise improves cognition and memory. So, while running may make you generally hate life, your brain loves it.

5. Play Music

Creating music does more for you than giving you a reason to be emo or becoming popular on YouTube.

Creating music taps into processes that are rarely jointly used by other types of creative processes due to how much the senses are involved. Combine sight and feel with the standard visual and cognitive centers and you get a very powerful workout for your brain.

Music soothes the savage beast, but it also makes her smarter.

6. Talk to Offliners

Believe it or not, there are intelligent, insightful people who don’t have part of their psyches encoded into zeroes and ones and saved on servers in Connecticut. Stop trying to convince them into plugging in and instead unplug and interact with them on their terms - i.e. outside of a chat room, email, or IRC channel.

Doing this will make your brain turn as you try to uphold a conversation that doesn’t have 140-character limits and you try to talk about things that you haven’t in a while. It also causes a lot of exercise as you blindly try to draw pictures in the air and use your hands to express ideas through gestures rather than by typing.

Different linguistic centers will activate, different visual parts of your brain will go off as you try to understand people’s facial expressions, and you might actually enjoy it more than poking friends on Facebook if you give it a chance.

7. Go Outside

Going outside excites the mind due to the novelty of the experience. Ever notice how when you’re going someplace new, it seems to take a lot longer going there than coming back? This is because you’re keenly aware of the novelty of the situation and it’s far more taxing on your brain.

Walk down a different street. Go down a different bike trail. Drive through a new part of town. Hell, go into a different liquor store.

Your brain will go into overdrive trying to sort together the new bits of information and you’ll be all the smarter for it, not accounting for how much alcohol you get.

As more and more of our lives go online, we will become more and more stupid if we don’t make active efforts to keep our wits. The Internet is a tool, but if we don’t watch it, it’ll make tools of us all.

If you’d like to learn more ways to lead a mentally-awake life, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

Photo Credit: ahajokes

I finally got unblocked and finished up the redesign of the Weekly Productivity Planner and the Daily Productivity Planner. Pick them up here:

[Instead of updating this post every month, I'm sending you to the place where I keep all the planners up to date. The link will send you to the "Free Planners" page where you can pick up the most current versions as well as any planners that I design. Click here to grab your planners.]

There’s an interesting story about why they took so long, but I’ll save that discussion for another day.

A Brief Intro

The Weekly Productivity Planner serves as your task manager for the week. It doesn’t get into a lot of detail and doesn’t focus on time - rather it gives you the global view for the week and let’s you focus on the structure of the week.

The Daily Productivity Planner, on the other hand, does have times and details. It’s the “in the trench” planner and only gives the hard structure of the day.

The planners were redesigned in tandem, so they both compliment each other much better than previous designs. You can start with just the day, or you can start from the week - either way, they’ll end up scaffolding your productive work nicely. I recommend starting with the weekly view, even if it’s late in the week - but start somewhere today.
Continue reading →

In our last installment of this series, we discussed setting the vision for your organization and developing SOPs. At least, that’s what the series list says.

When I started writing this series, it was more like unconnected braingoo than a series of linear thinking. I did some scaffold-assisted planning and saw that some structure would make the series make more sense. That said, I discussed setting the vision last time because all of the suggestions below require that your team knows what you want them to do.

Okay, you’ve set your vision. Great! Here are some suggestions on how to help them execute your vision:

• Use the 4/5s Rule

No one likes getting handed the project that someone’s been sitting on until the last minute. The 4/5s rule states you should give your team 4/5 of the time allotted for the project to complete it.

For example, if you have ten working days to complete a project, you should have the rough details of the project in their hands within two working days. You can’t always do this - urgency strikes and things have to happen now - but it’s a good rule to work by. But the only way you can actually use this one is to…

• Give Them Enough Guidance to Get the Job Done and No More

If you try to plan everything down to the minute detail, you are mis-allocating your time and taking execution time away from your team. You are their leader - they need guidance on what you want done, not on how to do it. You’ve already set your vision and approved SOPs, so all they need is the critical requirements to get the job done.

An easy way to ask yourself whether you’re giving them too much information is to ask yourself if you’re telling them what to do or if you’re telling them how to do it. If you’re telling them how they should do the job, either they aren’t trained for the job or you’re wasting everyone’s time.

If they don’t know how to do it, get them trained. If they already know how to do it, get out of the way and let them do it. The goal is to get your operators better at doing their jobs in the company than you are - you make decisions, they execute those decisions.

In my experience, you make better, more adaptable teammates by giving them as much latitude as possible and they often do a better job than you could have estimated if you leave them alone and let them do what you pay and train them to do. This is hard to do because you have to learn that…

• How They’ll Do It Is Different Than How You’d Do It, but That’s (Usually) Okay

You probably think you know exactly how to get something done. Stop right now and get over yourself. You can’t do everything, and it’s not your job - learn to accept that people are going to do things different than you would and to look at the end result objectively.

As long as they’re doing the job within legal, ethical, and procedural parameters, they’ve gotten the job done. If they go outside of those parameters, it’s your job to push them back in them.

The key thing here is for you to take note of the process. Their way may be significantly slower than your way, in which case you’ll probably want to step in and show them a more efficient way. Their way may be significantly faster than your way, in which case you’ll need to learn from them, praise them for their efforts, and make that part of your organization’s standard operating procedures.

• Use Their Time Wisely

People hate to have their time wasted, and as their leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that people have enough to do to justify their being away from their families and free time.

As a general rule, give them more than you think they can do - people complain more fervently about not having anything to do than about having more to do than they can do. You can always triage tasks for them if they need it, but it’s pretty apparent when you’re just trying to find something for them to do to fill time.

If you’ve set the vision for the organization and you encourage initiative, your junior leaders will start to make things happen. Think about how Google does business: 20% of their employees’ time can be spent on side projects that interest them. I don’t think the G-team will ever have to worry about their employees watching the clock and being unproductive. But they’ve set a vision for innovation…

You’ve no doubt noticed that I continually use the words “guide” and “lead” rather than stronger words like “direct”. This is intentional: people don’t like someone looking over their shoulder while they work while constantly telling them how to do what they’re doing. It’s unproductive and generally demoralizing - they are trained adults that show up to do what they know how to do.

The next installation in this series is about spreading teamthink throughout your organization. If you’d like to learn more about the Art of Leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

Want to know how to become an SEO Ninja? Want to know how to do that without searching and reading for two months or buying a book that requires you to buy four other books to understand the first one?

Look no further: Naomi from Ittybiz has written the ebook you’re looking for. It’s fifty pages of no bull-shit content that will get you from not knowing what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to being able to put content up on your blog or website without shooting yourself in the foot in the search engines.

I was originally going to give a cursory review, reading through for useful snippets and such. What actually happened is that I couldn’t stop reading once I started. And I had a good productivity brainstorm going, too…

For those of you who don’t know about Naomi or Ittybiz, I’ll give you the 30 second primer. She’s a marketing coach for businesses with less the five employees. She’s funny. She’s potty-mouthed. She knows her stuff and has a rockin’ blog where she entertains and teaches at the same time.

All of that is evident in the book. It’s entertaining. It’s funny. But it gets you from zero to 60 in SEO.

It’s at this point that I must give a disclaimer. I’ve been heckling harassing helping Naomi with getting this ebook completed. I had nothing to do with the content and likely would have made it worse had I done so. I’m proud to have been a part of the process of getting such a great product to the floor, and man, have I wanted to tell you guys about it.

To tell the truth, I was surprised at how much I learned from the book. Not because I doubted Naomi’s ability, but because I’ve done a lot of research on SEO stuff before and I thought I knew enough to get along pretty well. Turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.

Here’s what I learned from SEO School:

• I understood what “long tail” keywords were. I didn’t quite understand how to use that information. SEO School showed me how to do it.
• Even when you offer free content, you still have “competitor” sites that are offering their information for free. SEO School gave me a few easy tools and ideas on how to analyze my “competition” so that I can rank better.
• Naomi made it clear to me just how bad I am at writing good text for links. I’ve been working on it, but man, I have a long way to go.
• I’m horrible at picture tags, as well. She gave some really helpful tips on that one, too.

Keep in mind that I’ve done a lot research into SEO, so there’ll be a lot more there for people who haven’t.

Summary: SEO School is a one-stop shop for people who want to learn SEO without picking up an associates’ in Computer Science. The ebook is accessible but doesn’t make you feel stupid, informative but not boring, and funny but not slapstick. Purchasing the ebook will be the best $39 you can spend on improving your knowledge of SEO and your ability to create online content that ranks well in the search engines.

SPECIAL DEAL: Purchase the ebook before July 1st and save $9! Type “MovingDay” to claim your discount when you order SEO School. Click here to find out more about SEO School. Get it now while it’s cheap!

If you don’t like the book, Naomi will refund the entire cost of your purchase, no questions asked. You have nothing to lose, but a whole lot to gain.

This post is a continuation of The Elements of Leadership series. Knowing your team is critical if you are to lead them, but knowing what you want them to do is just as paramount.

Your job as the leader of your team is to effectively communicate your vision for the organization and to initiate and finalize standard operating procedures. With these two pieces in place, your team will know the direction you want the organization to go and they’ll know how to react without you being there.

Communicate Your Vision

Where is your organization going? Who does what jobs? What does success and failure look like?

These are hard questions that only you can determine. If you want your organization to make $100,000 dollars this quarter, make that goal public. Talk about it with your team. Explain why it’s important to the organization that you do so. No one should be left in the dark about it, and everyone should know how their job helps advance that goal.

Perhaps you’re not in the business of making money, but rather you’re in the business of educating people. Define the standards you consider relevant to education and some threshold for people to aspire to. Talk to your teachers to see how they think they can help achieve that goal. Every employee who shows up to work should know how their job relates to that goal.

If you can’t immediately articulate in one sentence at least three short-term goals for your organization, stop the train now and figure them out. Rate them by importance in case your organization comes into the situation that not all goals can be achieved at the same time. If you, as their leader, can’t do it, your organization won’t be able to do it.

I’ve worked in places where I had no idea what the goals of the organization actually were. It’s not that they didn’t have any, but that the goals where so convoluted and inconsistent that when it came time to make decisions, I didn’t know what I should do. The only resolve was to ask someone, who asked someone else, who asked someone else, until someone finally decide what to do.

Don’t do this to your team. People naturally want to succeed - your job is to let them know what success looks like.

Develop Standard Operating Procedures

Every organization should have standard operating procedures. These procedures document the standard actions to be taken in certain situations.

I was in a sports store yesterday and their credit card server had crashed. Despite the fact that it took forever to process my order, I was impressed with the store’s response. They doubled up cashiers at registers and one cashier prepared the order to be handwritten and the other did the writing. It was clear that they done this before and had developed an efficient system.

I’ve been in other stores where this has happened and they closed down their registers. The store managers and employees had no idea what to do, and rather than continue to get sales, they turned customers away or asked them to shop for an additional twenty or thirty minutes (yeah right!).

The difference in the two stores was the leadership of the managers. The managers of the first store anticipated this problem and developed a system in case that problem happened. The employees of the store didn’t have to try to figure it out on their own - they grabbed their credit card slips and kept going.

The real value of standard operating procedures comes in the training and integration of new people. Rather than having to learn everything the hard way, new team members can pick up the document and see basically how the organization runs.

It’s important to keep in mind that you personally don’t have to write the standard operating procedures. In fact, you shouldn’t. Harness the intelligence and experience of those people who have actually been doing the job and let/make them do it. Review the standard operating procedures and other get them corrected or approve them.

Clearly communicating your vision and developing standard operating procedures allows your organization to run without you getting in the way of normal operations. Your team knows what you want them to do (since you’ve shared your vision), and they know how to do them (since you’ve developed the organizations standard operating procedures). This frees you up to lead, guide, mentor, and decide - which is what you should be doing.

The next installment in this series is on guiding your organization and using your team’s time wisely. If you’d like to learn more about the Art of Leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

I’ve read two great posts this week that I’m going to tie together with some other thoughts I’ve been having. Thus, I’m violating the “one post, one topic” blogging wisdom - but bear with me as the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve mentioned before that I started writing about productivity because my own productivity system was broken. At the time, I was having such a hard time getting my life to fit inside one of the different systems that I was frustrated - I went from getting fully invested in the system, to falling off the horse , to getting back on the system…in roughly five to six week cycles, no less.

Looking back, I now realize the folly. The point of productivity systems is not to get my life into the system, but to help me live my life through a system.

Generating Motion and Scaffolding

While reading Dave Seah’s post Reevaluating the Year’s Goals, a weird tangent occurred to me. Dave said:

The GHDR System is designed to maintain momentum via natural levels of desire, whereas other systems seem to be designed to use either pressure (nagging) or structure (idealize process) to create the necessary motion. I happen to know that what works for me is just focusing on moving, and I will build structure as necessary, so it’s no surprise that GHDR has evolved the way it has.

The insight here is brilliant - I’d like to build on it a bit more. Part of what has always bothered me about GTD is purely skill-based. I’ve found that I don’t need to list every action to complete the project in most cases - using GTD, I was overplanning.

On the other hand, a lot of my creative projects needed to be left tagged “to do” but relatively unstructured during the planning phase. What I needed most is a system that helped me generate motion.

The problem was that a lot of my projects were ones that I didn’t want to do. No productivity system was going to make me enjoy things I didn’t enjoy doing - so inevitably, generating motion wasn’t enough as I’d soon become disinterested and start doing things that generally weren’t advancing that current goal.

So the second lesson: it needed to generate motion and make short bursts of work worthwhile. The main project that I need the most help with is completing the chapters of my dissertation. All the GTD’ing and productivity systems weren’t helping me.

Okay, tying this back in with what Dave was talking about, I’ve recently started teaching myself Ruby on Rails. For those of you not in the know, Ruby on Rails is a great platform for quickly building and deploying web-based applications - all of the 37Signal’s products (Backpack, Basecamp, and Highrise) are built using it, as well as a slew of other web2.0 services. It’s great stuff, but I’ll not get too much into it here.

There’s a process in building with Ruby on Rails called scaffolding. The basic idea, as I currently understand it, is to very quickly get the structure of the design you want now and quickly remove it when you deploy the application. As such, you aren’t bogged down by complicated problems - you’re actively moving towards the completed project.

This is exactly what I want my productivity system to do - it should fluidly structure the movement towards a goal rather than direct the movement towards the goal. As I complete a part of a project, I should be able to scaffold to the next and kick away the stuff I don’t need from the old system.

The reason I find this paradigm shift empowering is because it is structured around the way our lives actually work. I need to fix the airplane while I’m flying it - and though a well-structured plane would have prevented me from having to fix it midair, I’m here already and can’t land.

My Notebook-based Productivity System

It’s at this point that I’ll reveal a somewhat embarrassing secret - the scaffolds of my actual productivity system is a set of notebooks. Yes, I said set (as in multiple) and notebook (as in paper). This is anathema for most productivity gurus - the conventional advice is if you absolutely must have a notebook, everything needs to go in one.

For me, nothing beats the fluidness and simplicity of paper for charting, planning, and capturing. Everyday, I write down what I need to do and draw (DRAW!) a daily planner (or use my own if I have one printed). That planner becomes my dashboard for the day and this takes me about ten minutes to do.

(Yes, my drawings differ a bit each day - but each day is a bit different. Yes, the planner I draw is different than the one I’ve presented, but all of my planners are going through a redesign to make them more useful and intuitive. Sorry that it’s taking me so long to get these out.)

But why do I have a set of notebooks? Because I’ve got discrete components of my life that I want to keep separate, and I’ve found that having everything in one notebook makes it such that it takes me a long time to find what I’m looking for. Also, having one notebook means I go through it faster, making it the case that I spend more time trying to capture the information than if I just left them in a dedicated notebook for longer. Here are the notebooks I have:

• Charlie

For general notes I take - has blogging notes, ToDo Lists, notes from conversations, notes from research, etc.

• Joint

When Angela and I talk about some of our joint projects, it goes in here.

• Home

Notes having to do with home projects, groceries, chore lists, etc.

• Military

Everything having to do with Guard projects.

• Music

Notes I take from playing music - chord structures, lyrics, song lists, etc.

• Work-Out Log

Notes I take about my workouts and other exercise related information.

Each notebook is marked with what it’s about, and the Military notebook is visually different from the others mainly because I get them free from the Guard. They are all 6″ x 9″ Gregg Ruled, Top Bound and cost something like $4 for a three pack - this is a good size, because they fit in cargo pockets, and I can write, jot, and draw to my heart’s content because they’re relatively cheap, unlike Moleskines which cost $12-16 a pop.

I keep each notebook in the place it’s most likely to be used - i.e. the Joint and Home notebooks are on the kitchen desk counter, the Music notebook is back with my music stuff, and the Work-Out Log is down with the exercise equipment. The Military notebook is part of my uniform set and is pulled out when I do military correspondence - everything relevant to my Guard life is captured there. The Charlie notebook goes everywhere with me and is always retrievable within 10-15 seconds.

Now, this byzantine system may drive others crazy, but it works really well for me because I know where I wrote something based on what type of information it is. I don’t have to worry about listing contexts, projects, or what have you - I can just grab the notebook, put a date and time at the top of a clean sheet, and start writing. If I ever need that information again, I know where to find it.

Sometimes it happens that I write the wrong stuff in the wrong notebook - but usually I remember that I wrote it in a different notebook and remember what notebook it was, so it’s not that big of a deal.

Back to scaffolding - the notebooks help me because they generate rapid scaffolds that don’t pull from the process that I’m trying to do. Because each notebook is dedicated to a particular type of information, I can focus on what I’m currently doing without getting derailed on the notes from other projects.

When I’m done with the project, I turn the page - I generally don’t throw the page away until I get to the end of the notebook, as the ideas from one project sometimes help with another. The information from the notebook that needs to be captured permanently goes into a text file (because it’s searchable) and the rest gets recycled.

Paper-Based Task Management is Still Simpler, More Effective, and More Useful

It was Andre’s post On Paper-Based Task Management that motivated me to write about my notebook- scaffolded life. His discussion of the benefits of switching to a paper-based system is dead-on from my experience and I won’t repeat much of it. I think the most insightful piece is when he says:

Perhaps the most important advantage of using a separate organizer is perspective. Keeping my task management system outside of my production tools — my laptop and cell phone — provides an Archimedean vantage point that allows me to think about my workflow instead of within it.

Laptops, cellphones, PDAs, and the other tools we use have a tendency to diffuse our focus. Paper-based task management systems work so well because you’re not trying to work from them - the reason you refer to such a system is not to do you work, but to figure out what you need to be doing. To carry on with the scaffolding metaphor, paper-based task management systems are more prone to help you see the structure you’re building from the outside rather than from the inside.

Our projects take lives of their own sometimes (most of the time) - and computer-based task management systems cause most people to spend more time restructuring the plan and fidgeting with software than working on the product. A paper-based system lets you develop a system that scaffolds the motion you’ve generated quickly and let’s you maintain that motion without pulling you away from the work.

If you’d like to learn more about developing your own system that keeps you working without being something else you’ve got to work on, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

This post is a continuation of The Elements of Leadership. To effectively lead people, you have to know who they are.

I’m not talking about learning their names and positions. Where do they live? What’s their spouses’ and kids’ names? Who are their favorite musicians and sports teams? These are the types of questions that begin to give an indication of what they value and who they really are.

Take the time to get to know the people you work with - nothing lets people know you care about them as people, rather than as workers, than if you talk to them about things they care about.

I suggest you…

• Start with who you primarily work with and build your way out

I’ve got 156 people in my company, and I’ll never actually have a chance to talk on a personal level with most of them. However, I see my middle and senior supervisors often - so rather than being overwhelmed with 156 people, I started with the 15-20 people that I work with. I know them well enough now, so I’m starting to move to out from there.

• Talk to people who aren’t in cliques

Every organization has people who aren’t in the “in” crowd. Make sure you take the time to talk to them so that they know they’re part of the team. Not only are you helping them, you’re helping your organization because these people can become fiercely loyal and will work when everyone else is looking at the clock. They will ride with you through the gates of hell - all because you took the time to ask them how their third-grader was doing.

• Use notecards to help you learn who they are

When I deployed, I made notecards that had the Soldier’s name on one side and relevant information on the back. I wanted to know their age, birth date, their hometown, their civilian occupation, and their family information (spouse’s name and occupation and kids’ names and ages). That’s a lot of information, but when I had downtime on missions or back in garrison, I’d start flipping through the notecards- it took me about a month to do it. It definitely helped with camaraderie, and, if nothing else, they knew I cared enough to try.

Obviously, you may not need to know their civilian occupation if they work with you, but the rest is a pretty good start.

The next installment in this series is about defining your vision for your organization. If you’d like to learn more about the art of leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

The art of leadership takes years to learn, mainly because knowing how to lead requires knowledge of yourself, knowledge of those you lead, and knowing how to get things done. Despite these variables, there are elements of leadership that will apply in any context.

I’ve been in a leadership role in one shape or another for about 16 years, and I started thinking about these elements the other day while driving to military training. It started as tips I was going to share with my new lieutenant during our first counseling session - but I figured I’d share it with everyone.

Many people think military leadership is different than civilian leadership. What’s different in the military setting is that the scope of leadership is greater - the elements are the same. The elements that keep your team working under fire when they’ve been up for too many hours are the same ones that keep your team together after a strong push at work.

There’s a lot to the art of leadership, so I’ll split this into a series. I’ll try to keep the post size manageable, and they’re not in any particular order. And we’re off…

Teach Your Team about the Three Types of Decisions

There are three main types of decisions that your team will have to make.

1. The decisions they can make on their own without letting you know

These are the routine decisions that they make to get their job done on a daily basis. They have no obvious long-term repercussions for your organization, and you just frankly don’t need to be included in the process.

2. The decisions they can make on their own but they have to let you know they made them

Your team has to make some decisions on the fly, but sometimes you need to know they made the decision. As a general rule, if there are obvious positive or negative long-term fiscal, legal, or public relations repercussions, you probably want to know so you’re not blindsided by the information.

3. The decisions they can’t make and must defer to you
   

There are just some decisions that no one but you, as their leader, can make. They need to know what these are so they a) don’t make them and b) learn to anticipate when a process is going to lead to this type of decision.

It takes a while for people to learn these types of decisions. On the one hand, you don’t want to have it where they can’t make any decisions without deferring to you, and on the other, you don’t want them to make decisions they shouldn’t be making. It is your responsibility as their leader to help them through this lengthy learning process.

When someone comes to you with a decision of the first type, kindly thank them for letting you know and let them know that they don’t have to tell you about it in the future. If it’s a good decision, praise her to encourage her budding initiative.

When you get blindsided by information that you should have been told, find the project manager and kindly let them know that you applaud them for making the decision but that it’s something you needed to know.  If it’s a bad decision, clearly and calmly explain why it was a bad decision - your goal is to teach them to make good decisions without you.

If someone makes a decision that fell within your domain as a leader, kindly let them know that they overstepped their boundaries and that in the future all decisions of that type need to be deferred to you. If it’s a great decision, praise the hell out of the her and consider including her on important decision-making committees.

Above all, present a clear vision of the organization’s goals and encourage people to take as much initiative as they can to advance those goals. The more they advance your vision on their own without stepping outside of legal, fiscal, or procedural parameters, the more time you have to make strategic decisions and plan for the future success of your organization.

The next installment in this series is about getting to know your team. If you’d like to learn more about the art of leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.