The Acute Heptagram of Impact

Not as catchy a title as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but I hope you'll walk through this with me:

I can outline a strategy for you, but if you don't have the tactics in place or you're not skilled enough to execute, it won't matter if the strategy is a good one.

Your project's success is going to be influenced in large measure by the reputation of the people who join in and the organization that brings it forward. That's nothing you can completely change in a day, but it's something that will change (like it or not) every day.

None of this matters if you and your team don't persist, and your persistence will largely be driven by the desire you have to succeed, which of course is relentlessly undermined by the fear we all wrestle with every day.

These seven elements: Strategy, Tactics, Execution, Reputation, Persistence, Desire and Fear, make up the seven points of the acute heptagram of impact. If your project isn't working, it's almost certainly because one or more of these elements aren't right. And in my experience, it's all of them. We generally pick the easiest and safest one to work on (probably tactics) without taking a deep breath and understanding where the real problem is.

Feel free to share the AHI, but please don't have it tattooed on your hip or anything.

Via : Seth's Blog |

Free range

Ways to improve your performance:

• Compete for a prize
• Earn points
• Please a demanding boss
• Make someone else's imminent deadline
• Face sudden death elimination in the playoffs
• Wear a heart monitor and track performance publicly
• Go head-to-head against a determined foe

The thing is, all of these external stimuli are there to raise your game and push you ever harder. They are fences to be leaped, opponents to be defeated.

The alternative is to compete against nothing but yourself. To excel merely because the act of excelling without boundaries or incentives thrills you.

And the good news is that once you find that, you'll always have it.

Via : Seth's Blog |

Time Management Tips :7 ways to build time assets

Via : Donald Latumahina

In my previous post, I wrote that one good way to invest your time is to build time assets. Time assets are things that can save you time in the future. They require time investment to build, but once they are built, they can save you a lot of time. You will be more productive as a result.

Here I’d like to discuss several ways to build them. Of course, what I’m about to cover is not exhaustive; you are welcome to recommend more ways in the comments. But I hope these can give you a starting point.

From my experiences, here are seven ways to build time assets:

1. Create checklists

I have written about the benefits of using checklists before. In short, it helps you not to miss anything when performing a task. Plus, it frees up your mind for more creative things since you don’t have to remember steps and procedures.

Checklists are especially useful for complex tasks that you do frequently. For such tasks, you should invest time to create an accurate checklist so that you can do the task much faster later.

2. Build a knowledge base

Whenever you solve a difficult problem, be sure to document it. Write down the problem and the exact solution. You might think that once you solve a problem you will never forget the solution, but I often find that the reality is different. After several bad experiences, I made it a habit to document difficult problems I encounter and their solutions. I call the document my “knowledge base.”

3. Learn outsourcing skills

No matter how good you are at managing your time, your time is still limited. In addition, you can’t be good at every tasks. That’s why outsourcing is important: it allows you to tap into other people’s time and expertise and get a lot more done as a result.

These days there are a lot of outsourcing sites like oDesk, Elance, and Fiverr. Knowing how to outsource effectively though, requires practice. You should learn how to structure your tasks, how to find the right people, and how to handle communication problems. But the time you spend to learn these skills is worth it because they enable you to boost your productivity.

I must admit that I still have much to learn here. So far I use outsourcing mainly for graphic design, but the potential is almost endless.

4. Learn to use keyboard shortcuts

When I recently installed Windows 8, one of the first things I did was learning its keyboard shortcuts. I have become so accustomed to using keyboard shortcuts that not using them feels like a big productivity hurdle.

Whatever application it is that you usually use, you should spend time to learn its keyboard shortcuts. Some good candidates are the operating system (like Windows), browser (like Firefox), email app (like Gmail), and word processing app (like Microsoft Word).

5. Improve your typing skills

If you use computers a lot, it’s worth your time to learn to type faster. It seems that keyboard will still be the main input device for the foreseeable future, so being able to transfer your thoughts through it faster will save you a lot of time.

6. Highlight books

This one deals with the ability to quickly “reload” knowledge from a book. Unless you have a photographic memory (I know I don’t), you might find that you forget most of the ideas in a book within just a few weeks. After experiencing this again and again, I concluded that an important part of reading books is ensuring a faster way to “reinstall” the knowledge later on.

Highlighting the book you read is an easy way to do that. By highlighting the important ideas in a book, you can read just the those parts when you want to get the knowledge back.

7. Get organized

Have you ever lost something and spent a lot of time trying to find it? I certainly do. Obviously, that’s not a good way to use your time. Isn’t it much better if you can quickly find what you need when you need it? That’s why you should get your stuff organized.

It applies not just to your physical stuff, but also to your ideas, appointments, and others. Have a place to store each of them and organize them in such a way that you can easily find them later.

***

When it comes to time management, here is a good principle to live by: spend time on things that will save you time in the future. If you do that, you will be much more productive in the long term.

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

Cycle worse, cycle better

The downward spiral is all too familiar. A drinking problem leads to a job lost, which leads to more drinking. Poor customer service leads customers to choose other vendors, which of course leads to less investment in customer service, which continues the problem.

Your boss has a temper tantrum because he's stressed about his leadership abilities. The tantrum undermines his relationship with his peers, which of course makes him more stressed and he becomes more likely to have another tantrum. An employee is disheartened because of negative feedback from a boss, which leads to less effort, which of course leads to more negative feedback.

Most things that go wrong, go wrong slowly.

The answer isn't to look for the swift and certain solution to the long-term problem. The solution is to replace the down cycle with the up cycle.

The (too common, obvious, simple) plan is to live with the cycle that caused the problem instead ("When I get stressed, I freeze up, so I need to figure out how to avoid getting stressed"). The simple plan puts the onus on the outside world to stop contributing the input that always leads to the negative output. That's just not going to work very well.

The more difficult but more effective alternative is to become aware of the down cycle. Once you find it, understand what triggers it and then learn to use that trigger to initiate a different cycle.

"This is my down cycle. What will it cost me to replace it with a different one? Who can help me? What do I need to learn? How do I change my habits and my instincts?"

This works for organizations as well as individuals. The fish restaurant that as sales go down, borrows money to buy ever fresher fish instead of cutting corners that will lead nowhere good. Or the ad agency the follows a client loss not with layoffs, but with hiring of even better creative staff.

Slowing sales might lead to more investment with customer service, not less. Decreased grades might lead to more time spent on enthusiastic studying, not less.

This is incredibly difficult. But identifying the down cycle and investing in replacing it with the up cycle is the one and only best strategy. The alternative, which is to rationalize and defend the cycle as a law of nature or permanent habit, is tragic.

Via : Seth's Blog

SkinDisplay Shows Incoming Texts on Your Skin!

An innovative technological invention is able to imprint the text messages that come to your cell phone. This may seem a bit odd at first, but imagine a world where phones are not needed to communicate, but just a person’s own body.
The product works on the basis of piezoelectric technologies that connect different tissues and fabrics through electric waves. By just touching the back of the cell phone with your finger, you would be able to see what was written in it without having to make obvious movements and break the conversation you might be having at that time. It is also considered to be something that would help people read Braille.

Our Inner Ear is Harmed by Smoking and Eating!

Over stuffing yourself with food will harm your inner ear and so will smoking. Everything that lowers the abilities of the blood and slows down the bloodstream is damaging your inner ear. This means, that your hearing is obstructed and irritated and that, through constant stuffing or smoking, you will most definitely bring yourself quite a handful of issues with your ears. It is because bad blood circulation obstructs the natural ways and moves of the hair cells within the hearing apparatus and mostly the inner ear. Smoking, on top of everything, also increases the speed and number of the free radical molecules that also cause deafness.

The hearing capacity of each and every one of us can be damaged in many ways – from low and high pressure when swimming and diving to smoking to loud noises. All it takes for us to care of our bodies is to try and hope for the best, but overdoing everything will definitely bring harm to our own organism, even eating vitamins. What about the cigarette?

THE EASIEST WAY TO THRIVE AS AN OUTLIER

 

...is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers.
Surround yourself with people in at least as much of a hurry, at least as inquisitive, at least as focused as you are. Surround yourself by people who encourage and experience productive failure, and who are driven to make a difference.
What's contagious: standards, ethics, culture, expectations and most of all, the bar for achievement.
The crowd has more influence on us than we have on the crowd. It's not an accident that breakthroughs in music, architecture, software, athletics, fashion and cuisine come in bunches, often geographic. If you need to move, move. At least change how and where you exchange your electrons and your ideas.
We all need leaders who challenge the tribe. We benefit even more when our leaders have peers who push them to be even better.

Denying facts you don't like

Denying facts you don't like

Transformational leaders don't start by denying the world around them. Instead, they describe a future they'd like to create instead.
Denying the truth about relative market share, imperial power or the scientific method helps no one.
Gandhi didn't pretend the British weren't dominating his country, and Feynman didn't challenge Einstein's theory of relativity or the laws of thermodynamics.
It's okay to say, "this is going to be difficult." And it's productive to point out, "our product isn't as good as it should be yet."
The problem with Orwellian talking heads, agitprop, faux news and Ballmer-like posturing is that they take away a foundation for a genuine movement to occur, because once we start denying facts, it's difficult to know when to stop. Tell us where we are, tell us where we're going. But if you can't be clear about one, it's hard to buy into the other.