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The Two-Minute Rule — If It’s Quick, Just Do It
Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. We’ve ranked, blocked, and boxed our way through this series so far. This week’s tool is the shortest one yet, both to explain and to use. Most people credit this one to David Allen and GTD, and it does show up…
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Time Blocking — Put the Work on the Calendar or Someone Else Will
Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. We know what’s important now, we ranked our six things, we timed our focus in tomato-sized chunks. This week’s tool answers the question none of those actually solve: when does the work happen? Benjamin Franklin kept a daily schedule in his…
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The Ivy Lee Method — Six Things, In Order, No Exceptions
Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. We’ve covered the timer, the box, and the brain dump. This week’s tool asks you to do almost nothing — just pick six things and do them in order. In 1918, a productivity consultant named Ivy Lee walked into a meeting…
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Torschlusspanik — FOMO, German-Style
Torschlusspanik! The German word for that fear that time is running out and doors are closing. Also a possible swear word when you feel like there is no way you can possibly get everything done today. We’re taking a short interlude from the productivity tools series this week to explore why so many of us…
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The GTD® Method – Shifting Your Brain from Task Tracker to Idea Generator
Your brain is a terrible to-do list. No search function. No reminders. No backups. And it completely freezes at the worst possible times, usually when someone asks you a direct question about a project you were definitely thinking about two minutes ago. This is the problem David Allen set out to solve when he developed…
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The Eisenhower Matrix — Your Priorities In a Box
Why does it sometimes feel like no matter how hard we try the “important” things never get done? Instead, everything feels urgent, the day fills up with other people’s fires, and the work that actually matters slides to tomorrow…again. When work gets busy and stressful it can be easy to default to a complex system…
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The Pomodoro Technique – The Weirdest Name in Productivity
Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. Over the next several weeks I’m going to dig into some of the most talked-about productivity techniques out there — what they are, how they work, and where I’ve landed after trying them myself. We start with one that has the…
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How Do You Define “Work”?
How do you define work? I was at the Washington Workplace Summit last week when the lunchtime keynote speaker, Jeff Utecht, ended with a line that really stuck with me and sent me down a mental rabbit hole. “Leadership is not choosing one generation’s definition of work over another. It is creating a definition of…
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Is Your To-Do List Stressing You Out?
Is your to-do list stressing you out? Maybe it’s not even a full list yet. Maybe it’s just the thought of making one, sitting down and actually accounting for every project, every task, everything you said you’d do. Just the idea of it is exhausting. The problem likely has nothing to do with the tool…
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Your Workday Needs a Palate Cleanser
Your workday needs a palate cleanser between tasks. I had finished responding to emails. Closed all my apps and browser windows. Opened a doc. Time to write. And then I just sat there. Slumped back in my chair. It wasn’t writer’s block. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I had my coffee. I…
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