There’s a good sort of just in time. We plan something, know what needs to happen and how, know what we need to do it well, when, where and with whom. This kind of just in time feels great, with the right amount of tension for whatever it is we’re doing. Good training events feel tight like the skin of…
Tag: organisation
…before you leave the house is not the time to start moving faster. Strange things happen to time in the last ten, and the minutes go twice as fast. Thrash early. Start acting with last minute urgency with twenty minutes** to go and you’ll glide out of the door gracefully, and right on time.*** *See also: Thrash Now– and this…
is caused by things in your working day that you live with or work around but that sap your time, energy or attention and make it harder for you to do good work. It’s caused by the work equivalents of leaving unwashed plates piled up in the sink at home. You save a bit of time and energy heaping them…
You can fill a bucket pretty quickly under a tap. But try and fill a lot of buckets at once – a drip here, a squirt there – and it can take a long time before you have enough to work with in any of your buckets. And you’re probably wasting time, energy and water moving constantly between them.
Richard Stallman famously wrote the GNU GPL, which is a license based on copy-left, not copyright. His position is the freedom to work with computers and work with software and work with software is hindered by copyright. That in fact these are useful tools, and there are people who want to make useful tools and remix the useful tools of…
If you’re in a book group, social pressure is going to get you to read that book. The act of joining the book group is the hard part. Once you’re in the book group, the books are going to get read, because now you’re playing a game. It’s a game you’re enrolled in, it’s one you want to move forward.…
I’ve just been listening to Richard Hackman on teams and team performance. His first lens for evaluating team performance is straight forward: Delivering the goods Did you get the job done? How well did you do it? Who is the legitimate receiver, user, reviewer of this performance and what to they think of it? Did you serve the client first? At…
If you’re leading an organisation or a team, a big part of your job is to help others to do their jobs. The reference escapes me, but I’m pretty sure Peter Drucker used the phrase “to make the work meaningful and the worker effective.” Making work meaningful is about vision. It means making sure people understand why what they do is important.…
Here’s a good way to build capacity: every time you do something new, open a googledoc (or your searchable, annotate-able editor of choice) and do the following: Give it a name that you’ll be able to find in future, like – Howto Make a Transfer from OurBank Use headings and subheadings to give titles to key sections Use an ordered…
You might know what you want to achieve – a service or product or program that you’d love to see happen. Maybe you’ve already started doing it. Today’s question is, what is the minimum ‘wrapper’ – all the additional activities, people, organisational structures, resources – that you’ll need to make your thing impactful and sustainable? This is partly a business…