I had a call with a member of the Thinking Lab the other day. He was concerned that he was reverting to some old behavior. He had changed jobs, and as a result he was very busy ramping up his knowledge and activity in the new position. He said it had occurred to him...
You have probably heard the saying, "no plan survives contact with reality." There's a lot of truth in this — so what's the value of planning? Planning pays off before you take action, while you are taking action, and after you have taken action. The most obvious...
In another article, I mentioned that whenever you give a reason for your conclusion, you should pause to make sure it passes the Laugh Test. Yes, the "Laugh Test." Sometimes your reason will turn out to be a patent rationalization, and you won't be able to repeat it...
The other day I got a call at 9:00 a.m. about an event I'm planning for my Toastmasters club. I felt I needed to take it. Soon afterwards I noticed an email from a fellow volunteer in another organization. It concerned a problematic situation, and I was lured into a...
Much of the advice for curing yourself of procrastination comes down to "just get started" or "just take a little step." Once you start on a task that you've been avoiding, you often find that the work develops its own momentum. If you can just get started, you can...
Last week I gave a terrific class on how to troubleshoot "Rationally Connected Conversations." I mentioned three mistakes to watch out for. Then yesterday in a conversation I made all three mistakes. Actually, I did catch mistake #1 at a certain point and remedy it....
In the last blog post, I pointed out that when you struggle there is a fact that needs to be accepted. In a post a month ago I explained that the way you accept facts is that you factor that fact into your thinking, your expectations, and your planning. This leaves...
Perhaps the most important lesson I've learned in life is to treat struggle as an alarm that warrants your immediate, full attention. By "struggle," I mean "to proceed with great difficulty and effort." [Merriam-Webster] You struggle because the task is difficult...
Realists point out that if you want to live in the world that exists, you need to accept facts. Idealists point out that you can change the world that exists — if you take the appropriate action. These two perspectives needn’t conflict.
In recent years, I've incorporated ideas from The Twelve Week Year (by Brian Moran) into my routines, and found them very helpful. My top takeaway from this book is the idea of setting quarterly goals rather than annual or monthly goals. When you set goals you intend...
Mark Murphy has a great short article titled "Don't Make Constructive Criticism so Soft That People Miss Your Message." In it, he criticizes the feedback sandwich, which I learned long ago in Toastmasters. It's simple: when you are giving feedback, first tell...
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve been introduced to “thinking on paper.” If not, you can read about it and get instruction on it with my Thinking Directions Starter Kit. With that as the context, a client sent me this note about "thinking on paper"...
In a recent newsletter I talked about transitioning to “neutral” when I was feeling resistance to doing chores. You can’t get yourself excited to do the chores, but if you can get to neutral, you’ll probably be willing to do it. Then I read a blog post by my friend...
Here’s another blog post from Peter Bregman: Quash Your Bad Habits by Knowing What Triggers Them. He's a terrific thinker on productivity and execution issues. What I like particularly about this article is that he documents the physical warning signs that Jeff was...
An important part of execution is managing transitions. That’s where the time gets wasted and the distractions rule. If you're not "in the mood” to transition to the top priority item on your list, you can waste a lot of time getting down to work. To get out of the...
There is misinformation in your mental databanks. I guarantee it. Sometime in your personal history, you've overgeneralized or dropped context or missed something. Yet you rely on information from your mental databanks in all your thinking! How can you be sure you're...
There's much we don't know yet about the subconscious. Here's an example of a strange phenomenon that is sure to lead to interesting future discoveries--eventually: If you find you are obsessing on a thought, you can stop it with a simple rapid eye-movement technique....
Did something go badly? A "discussion" with a spouse or coworker that ended in acrimony? A proposal that flopped? When something goes badly, you may be tempted to forget about it and just try to do better next time. But the secret to doing better lies in thinking...
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