Advanced Search

The source of wealth is knowledge. If we apply knowledge to tasks we already know how to do, we call it productivity. If we apply knowledge to tasks that are new and different, we call it innovation...the two beacons of productivity and innovation must be the guideposts of industrial management and leadership.

When you look at the productivity vs. activity scale, most of the things on your desk, in your files, and in your mail are activity, not productivity. As a blind person, I am fortunate enough to have people who take volumes of printed material and reduce them to the items that I have determined to be productive. If you can do this in your work life by using your own eyesight, you will have the best of both worlds.

When you look at your personal and professional life, the most important decisions you will make revolve around how you invest your effort, time, and energy. There are only two things you can do with your time. You can spend your time in activity or productivity. Activities are things that consume minutes and hours and get you no closer to your goals and objectives. Productivity consists of those tasks that directly impact getting you from where you are to where you want to be.

Many studies have been done that show that most people spend 80 percent of their time on activity and only 20 percent of their time on productivity. If you can ever reverse this ratio, or even affect it slightly, you will instantly notice a huge jump in your productivity.

There's a latent productivity in people; they're just waiting for someone to remind them of their capacity.

How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastination are those that seem like work, the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a park bench.

There are only a few reasons that people are unproductive. They either don't know what's expected of them, they need training, they're in the wrong job, or they need to go. Be careful not to confuse efficiency with unproductivity. Some people get things done so well they have time available to handle more. Whatever the reason, it's management's responsibility to address the situation immediately.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason that the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.

To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.

The problems of free access are fairly obvious: while workers may know how to use technology tools, they may not be skilled at searching for, using, or sharing the knowledge. One survey revealed that over a quarter of a typical knowledge worker’s time is spent searching for information. Another found that only 16 percent of the content within typical businesses is posted to locations where other workers can access it. Most knowledge workers haven’t been trained in search or knowledge management and have an incomplete understanding of how to use data sources and analytical tools.

You need a certain amount of discord in your meetings. If you just have discord, well, then you have a university, right? So what you want to do is you need a deadline. So discord plus deadline. Who enforces the deadline? Me. That’s my job. Or whoever is running the meeting. So if you have discord and deadline, then you’re likely to produce a consensus. And if you look at the academic literature, and all of the surveys and so forth, this is going to produce, on average, the best sort of business judgment kind of outcomes.

Instead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity. ...the new economics of personal productivity mean that the better organized we try to become, the more wasteful and inefficient we become. We'll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn't to organize ourselves better; it's to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It's not that we're becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it's that we haven't become dependent enough.