Knowing When To Quit

By Keith

I’ve been really productive lately. As such I’ve had little time to devote to many of my pet projects. I’m finding out that it’s much better for my overall stress level to drop some things. In essence–to quit. Even if I wasn’t devoting time and energy to them, they were there, weighing on me in the back of my mind, nagging at me for attention.

It’s hard for me to give up on good ideas, but I feel that in order to do something great not only do you need a good idea to start with, you need to be able to focus on that idea and execute. It’s hard to focus when you have so many things going on. Sometimes you’ve got to let things go.

Choosing The Task to Fit The Time

By Patrick Rhone

Not too long ago, I was asked by a client of mine how long it would take to complete a certain large project. After thinking about it for a while, I gave what I thought was a fair estimate given all of the parameters, possible hurdles and building in time for contingencies. The client then asked me if I could do it faster than that. They asked if I could do it in about a third of what I had estimated.

10 Steps To Better Meetings

Throughout my professional life I think meetings have been one of the biggest sources of frustration. I’m one of those people who really likes to work at work and while I do find some meetings very useful, and the occasional meeting totally necessary, I think the majority of meetings I’ve attended over the years could be done away with.

Or at least done better.

I wanted to take a stab at offering up some tips to get more out of meetings in general. These come from years of being frustrated by useless meetings and a true desire to help people get the most out of their work day. If you’ve got more tips, please add them in the comments.

Productivity Tips For Avid Blog Readers

Information overload is one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to deal with on the road to being more productive. There is so much out there and it’s so damn easy to spend hours sorting through your favorite blogs and Web sites. I’ve always been pretty good in keeping my reading time under control, that is until I started really using NetNewsWire to subscribe to feeds. I went through a phase where I really felt overwhelmed by the amount of news coming in and amazingly huge number of unread items I’d have.

I decided shortly thereafter to put into place some kind of rules, and a process, to keep control of all the information. I needed to do this so that I could stay sane and keep focused on my work.

I imagine many of you feel the same way. I’ve been asked by readers about this and I think it’s something anyone who reads blogs could benefit from taking some time to look at and reevaluate.

If you’re interested, I’ve got a few tips that have helped me keep control of the information, stay focused and actually get more out of the blogs I do read. After all, how much can you really take in if you are flying through hundreds of posts a day?