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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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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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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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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