Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “gettingthingsdone”
We’re almost done with first week in January: the week where more New Year’s resolutions are broken than any other.
According a study conducted in 2002, 25% of New Year’s resolutions are broken in the first week alone. Within 6 months, over half of us will have given up.
Why? Why is it that so many resolutions are doomed from the start?
Here’s one major reason I’ve found with clients: you need to learn how to balance these new resolutions with your prior commitments.
“A good plan implemented today is better than a perfect plan implemented tomorrow.”
– George Patton
You may be familiar with this old Abraham Lincoln quote: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”
And for many people, that kind of perspective can be a tremendous life changer.
If you’ve been going through your whole life without regard for any preparation, a little preparation will dramatically improve your productivity.
However, there is a flip side to this.
Get too consumed with planning and preparing, and you risk drowning in metawork: tasks that may make you feel productive, but in the end produce no real results without action to back it up.
“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
– John of Salisbury
Today, anyone can buy an MP3 player, download some podcasts and transform their headphones into a mobile classroom. We can access discussions, explanations – and my favorite, solutions from the best minds of today and yesterday.
Rather than going through the process of trial and error ourselves, we can benefit from other people who have already made the mistakes and distilled those lessons into concise explanations.
That’s right, 12,853 Articles, Forum Topics & Blog Posts. At least approximately – that’s what I processed last week. And I do it all in less than 1 hour a day (mostly =) ). Rather than just blindly reading everything I come across though, I follow a process to make my time reading online as efficient as possible.
Read on as I discuss the issue and the process I have come up with to make my reading quick, and make the time spent efficient.