You can’t prevent team conflict at work by hiring nicer people. Harvard Business School recently redesigned its flagship MBA team-immersion program to test what actually works, and the number of teams needing a faculty intervention for serious breakdowns fell from 45 to one.1 Not fewer people. Not softer feedback. A shared vocabulary for how teammates process…
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Difficult conversations at work rarely feel optional, yet most people find a way to avoid them anyway. One in three employees believe the crucial conversation they were too polite to have cost their organization at least $25,000; nineteen percent put the number above $50,000.1 Ask most of them why they stayed quiet, and the answer isn’t…
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TBSP (Too Busy, Summary Please) Accountability is one of those hot button words at work. It gets tossed around in leadership circles or used as a scapegoat term when things aren’t going well. In this post we’ll explore some of the common issues with workplace accountability and why the way we think about the term…
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Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. Over the last several weeks, this series has walked through Pomodoro, the Eisenhower Matrix, GTD, the Ivy Lee Method, Time Blocking, the Two-Minute Rule, Personal Kanban, and Parkinson’s Law. Eight tools, eight different ways of wrestling the same basic problem: how…
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Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. This week we are exploring Parkinson’s Law. Although not strictly a tool, it’s a principle you’ve already experienced firsthand more times than you’ve probably noticed. In 1955, a British naval historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a short, sarcastic essay for…
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Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. Every tool in this series so far has lived on a page: a list, a calendar, a ranked six. This week’s tool is the first one you actually look at instead of read. In 1956, a Toyota engineer named Taiichi Ohno…
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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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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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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! 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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