Redesigned Productivity Planners Available (For Free!)

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 [...]

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4 Ways to Effectively Guide Your Team

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 [...]

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To Lead Them, Know Them

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 [...]

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The Elements of Leadership and Decision-Making

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 [...]

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Balancing Freebies and Time Creep When Planning

When planning, should we look at how much time is allotted for the day and try to fill it, or do we look at how many tasks we have planned and cap it at that? This question was really brought home to me while I was working on the redesign of the Weekly Productivity Planner. [...]

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Mastering the ToDo List

The chief problem many of us face when we make our ToDo lists is that we try to list everything that we’re thinking about doing. The result is that we end up with lists that are far too long to actually complete – and, despite how much we actually get done, we focus on what [...]

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Is Backpack Worth the Time and Money?

The short answer: For most users, Backpack is worth the time and money. Backpack is an online service offered by 37Signals that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with [...]

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21 Ways to Quickly Short-Circuit a Funk

The situation: you find yourself in a funk. I’m not talking about the Pepe’ Le Pew kind of funk – that just requires the generous application of soap and water. The kind of funk I’m talking about is where you’re almost inexplicably sad, slightly depressed, or down about something. This happens to almost everyone every [...]

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A Special Theory of Productivity

I mentioned after I completed the Daily Productivity Planner that I figured out how to write this post. Life intervened and I lost the muse. I’m currently in the process of reconstructing the train of thought, but it’s going to be rather rough. The hardest part I’m having in articulating the ideas in this post [...]

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