Leo Baubata from Productivity Habits Misses the Mark on Leadership
November 16, 2009
I’m generally a big fan of Leo Baubata’s Productivity Habits blog, but his recent post ”the little rules of action” misses the mark. Though Leo’s guidelines may make sense of individuals who are mostly managing themselves (e.g., writers, freelancers, etc.) I think they could be downright disastrous for leaders who need to manage other people.
9. Meetings aren’t action. This is a common mistake in management. They hold meetings to get things done. Meetings, unfortunately, almost always get in the way of actual doing. Stop holding those meetings!
Meetings are an easy target for criticism because so many of them are badly run. But that’s not a good reason to dismiss meetings entirely. If an organizational executive or business leader is trying to execute a complex strategy that touches several different divisions, meetings can be the most efficient way to drive things forward. The act of preparing for a big meeting helps clarify one’s thinking on a topic. Also, asking others to prepare for a meeting is a good method for understanding other division’s planning and strategizing. Finally, the meeting is a great way to ensure that stakeholders are aligned in a particular direction. Meetings are some of the most critical leadership “actions” that someone can do.
10. Talking (usually) isn’t action. Well, unless the action you need to take is a presentation or speech or something. Or you’re a television broadcaster. But usually, talking is just talking. Communication is necessary, but don’t mistake it for actual action.
I believe a leader’s most important role in an organization is articulating (ie talking about) a vision and aligning the stakeholders within the company, outside partners, current clients, and prospective clients around this vision. I am not sure of any method of achieving these leadership goals apart from doing a lot of talking. Talking is also a highly efficient way of brainstorming and problem solving. Again, if someone is just talking about sports, weather, or non-constructively whining about particular aspects of a company, then perhaps it is a waste of time. But just because a lot of people waste time talking does not make talking inherently non-action oriented.
11. Planning isn’t action. Sure, you need to plan. Do it, so you’re clear about what you’re doing. Just do it quickly, and get to the actual action as quickly as you can.
What!? If a business leader is responsible for directing and managing an organization where he or she is not directly responsible for the coding, product, delivery, or service, then planning is perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT thing that a manager can do. Also, if you are a programmer or engineer doing a complex project, then planning is the absolute most critical action that you can be doing. It’s hard for me to think of any circumstance where it makes sense for someone to “just do [the planning] quickly” outside of simple tasks like doing laundry (and even then you’d want to plan enough so you’re not washing two pairs of socks every day!).
2008 Year in Review in the Blogs
January 2, 2009
Here are a few of the best end of year blogs posts from my favorite bloggers.
Leo Babauta from Zen Habits, writes The Essential Zen Habits of 2008, and does a great job summarizing his best material over the last year.
Tim Ferriss, author of 4 hour work week, has a great post summarizing the lessons he learned in 2008.
John Halamka, possibly the best CIO on the planet, outlines his 2008 Goals on his blog.
Alexander Russo, the entertaining Scholastic Education blogger, lists some of the education policy winners and losers of 2008.
John Batelle, the foremost expert on Google and search, writes the results of some of his 2008 predictions.
Wishing you all a happy new year!
Life-maintaining Work vs Life-enhancing Work
December 14, 2008
My fiance and I were discussing ways to allocate our personal (non-professional) work time. We were referring to household work – taking out garbage, doing dishes, cleaning, etc. She believes that doing household work or “something you don’t want to do” is essential for developing character.
My approach was a bit different. I have no opinion on whether work is important for developing character, but I am willing to assume that this is true. On the other hand, because we have a limited number of hours per day, we should focus our energy and time on doing things that are improving ourselves as opposed to maintaining the status quo.
With both of these ideas in mind, we created the following two categories: maintaining work and life-enhancing work.
Maintaining work is defined as something that we must do to function in normal society.
Life enhancing work is defined as something we ought to do to improve our current state and surroundings.
Here are a few examples of activities we placed under maintaining work.
- Dishes
- Trash
- Laundry
- Grocery shopping
- Cooking
- Paying bills
- Shopping for cards, presents, and clothes
- Dropping off dry cleaning
- Packing lunches
We put the following activities under life enhancing work.
- Cleaning old files and cabinets
- Organizing DVDs and Books
- Decorating walls
- Creating a strategic philanthropy strategy
- Working out
- Creating a “disaster recovery” plan for losing wallet
- Reading blogs
We agreed that we should try automating or outsourcing as much maintaining work as possible and maximize the amount of time that we perform life enhancing work.
We will be experimenting with this concept over the next several months and see if this helps drive change in our personal (non-professional) work time allocation.
Do you have a paradigm that you use to organize your personal work life?
Free Productivity Coaching for Educators
May 15, 2008
As I have stated before, I am deeply interested in personal productivity. In fact, I have been invited by a Professor of Personal Leadership at Columbia Business School to lecture on the topic of personal productivity.
As someone who is always striving to learn more about educational leadership, I would be happy to learn some of the methods that educators have used to cope with the impossible workload of being an educational leader.
One of the things I like most about productivity solutions is that there’s always room for improvement — superintendents and educators in general have a lot on their plates and I would love to learn what strategies they have developed to stay on top of their work.
If you are an educational leader who would like to share your methods of personal productivity, please comment on this post, or write me an e-mail.
On the other hand, if you are an educational leader from Ohio and would like guidance on implementation of a productivity system, I would be happy to drop by and show you my system. I am accessible via e-mail or cell (216-374-6723).
I am especially interested in finding educators in the Ohio area who would be interested in discussing personal productivity to help them find more time!
Personal Productivity in the Education Sector
April 19, 2008
The topic of personal productivity is something that I am passionate about.
I have developed my own personal productivity style after extensively reading the following sources:
For those of you who are not aware, GTD (Getting Things Done) is the “bible” in productivity circles. The GTD tag on del.icio.us is a good place to start learning about the topic. I was also happy to catch this post on GTD in Education.
Believe it or not, personal productivity can be broken down into a core set of principles:
- Keep things simple
- Do one thing at a time
- Outsource everything possible
- Remove distractions from your life
- Work in terms of action steps
- Follow the Inbox Zero principle for your e-mail
- Have a weekly review to go over your projects, and clear your inbox, action steps, and follow ups