It’s official. Summer’s over, kids. Yeah, school’s been back in session for a week or two, but it’s a long haul from here to Thanksgiving. Lots of work ahead of us all. Maybe we could use some tips for being more productive. Here are a few I’ve culled from the RSS feeds.
- When you absolutely, positively should not use email: a civilized list. Following this advice would let me cut back on a lot of email.
- In a similar vein is The low-information diet: how to eliminate email overload and triple productivity in 24 hours. Adopting some of these suggestions may be tough for those who deal with media emergencies. Or maybe we just think it will be too tough, and so we don’t even try.
- 10 guidelines for effective brainstorming. No. 5 on the list — “defer judgment” — seems to be a hangup for me.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo. …
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.
So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.
Andy writes! 