Five Things You Should Make Time For This Year. Reading... Honestly this one is easy by getting an audible account and use the downtime in your commute to read with your ears. I find I can get far more books in by using adible than trying to shoehorn in an hour here and there for eyeball reading time. Your passion project: Fancy word for "hobby" Problem is most people have 5-8 hobbies instead of focusing on 1-3 of them. I used to rebuild classic rare motorcycles, build Hotrods, Dabble in Engineering electronics, game programming ,etc.... My passion is cars and bikes, not a specific car or bike. My wife still does not like the every other Saturday when I refuse to answer any calls and Metallica blares from the garage for 8 hours.
What Motivates Us To Do Great Work? What motivates us to do great work? It’s an age-old question. But the age-old answers – rewards, recognition, money, stability – no longer seem to suffice. As we’ve shifted to a knowledge-based economy, it turns out that what drives us has shifted, too. Recent research reveals that when creative thinking is part and parcel of your job description, external motivation just doesn’t work.
What really gets creatives fired up is, well, ourselves. In a recent post, science writer Jonah Lehrer cites an interesting study about “self-talk” – the running commentary we always have going on in our heads. “The first group was told to prepare for an anagram-solving task by thinking, for one minute, about whether they would work on anagrams. Contrary to what you might expect, the “Will I?” “Subsequent experiments by the scientists suggested that the power of the ‘Will I?’ A recent Harvard study further reinforces the power of intrinsic motivation. Top 10 Characteristics of GREAT Project Managers.
Good project managers are hard enough to find, and great project managers are rarer still. Thanks to Andy Crowe, though, we now have a peek inside the top 2 percent of project managers, based on a study of 860 of them as rated by their peers/clients. Not surprisingly, great project management requires a lot more than the ability to move a milestone. Here are the top 10 traits of project managers who are really making ideas happen: 1. Command authority naturally. In other words, they don’t need borrowed power to enlist the help of others – they just know how to do it. They are optimistic leaders who are viewed in a favorable light and are valued by the organization. 2. The latter is more important since there’s almost always too much data, and rarely too little. 3.
They focus and prioritize by handling fewer emails, attending fewer meetings, and generally limiting their data input. 4. Great project managers don’t just go through the motions. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 30 Minutes a Day ? Jack Cheng. If you’re like me, there are times when you get so excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two on it non-stop, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. When mastery is the goal, spending an exorbitant number of hours in one sitting will likely lead to burnout. We don’t go to the gym expecting to put on 20 pounds of muscle in a single, day-long workout.
Instead, we do several short workouts a week, spread out over months. Our bodies need time to heal; our muscles time to grow. And the same goes for that muscle inside your skull. Say you’re trying to memorize a list of new words. An interesting third approach is one developed by a man named Paul Pimsleur. Of course, these schedules depend on different factors like the difficulty of the word and the background of the speaker, but even a rough timetable would be invaluable for teachers as it’d let them know when they needed to review old material — to get maximum retention with minimum repetition. 10 Laws of Productivity. You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5, and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would have little in common.
In fact, the tenets that guide how they – and exceptionally productive creatives across the board – make ideas happen are incredibly similar. Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors: 1. Break the seal of hesitation. A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. While preparing properly as you start a new project is certainly valuable, it’s also easy to lose yourself in planning (and dreaming) indefinitely. 2. When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. 3. Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life. To avoid ‘blue sky paralysis,’ pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Why Leaders Should Take A Break From Talking. Last month, a long stint of nonstop traveling combined with numerous speaking engagements and a nasty cold finally caught up with me. Every time I spoke for more than a few minutes, I would start coughing and lose my voice. After a few visits to the doctor, I learned that I had damaged my vocal cords. My treatment was a series of vocal building lessons and, for a period of time, a directive to speak less. I was encouraged to adopt an entire week of silence, which honestly proved a bit too much for me to manage. However, I had no choice but to reduce my words significantly. I promised myself that, for a week, I would speak 75% less.”Hah!” My friends and colleagues joked. I promised myself that, for a week, I would speak 75% less. I accepted my predicament not only as a treatment but also as an experiment. Here are a few insights worth sharing: 1. When you are trying to understand those around you, just listening to someone’s words is not enough. 2. 3. 4.
What’s Your Experience?