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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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? 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 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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This is a story about Hanlon’s Razor at work, and why it might be the most useful mental model you’ve never heard of. I was facilitating a team-building session last week. It was getting late in the day. People were getting tired. I asked participants to partner up with someone they hadn’t worked with earlier…
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You probably know this freezer. It lives in someone’s garage – your parents’, your grandparents’, your in-laws’. The light burned out sometime during a previous administration. It hasn’t been defrosted since the invention of electricity. And it’s packed floor to ceiling with food wrapped in foil. Every Thanksgiving, the leftovers go in there with the…
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Work feels far more complicated than it used to be. Navigating the incorporation of AI. Multiple generations in the workplace. Divisive politics. Upskilling, downskilling, reskilling. Whenever something starts to feel overly complex I go back to Rule #1: When things seem overly complicated, they probably are so simplify. So let’s go back to basics. What…
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Welcome to BetterAtWork! The place where I explore anything and everything having to do with how work gets done. Hi, I’m Garth Reed. I founded ExperienceBetter LLC with one thought in mind: a job should make your life better, not worse. That’s what we’ll be exploring each week. Not what we do or why we…
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