Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentines Day


Thinking Josh will get all the girls this valentines day.

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I have had feedback on my See Do Time Management System which I agree with. It works well at home but poorly in the office.

I think this is partly because home stuff tends to be similar in priority. I think it is partly because the time spend Seeing and Doing might have actually not been used productively at all.

As with all time management techniques, they are meant to be filtered. Use them when appropriate and use them where they work for you.

I find it highly effective at home if I set a time limit (otherwise I can spend all night and never get any downtime which is not the goal). 45-60 minutes of see do around the house can get a lot done and reduce my stress a lot.

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HBR had a great article on "the 24 hour rule". The gist of excellence can be created by simply responding to all communication within 24 hours. The article was talking about internal communication but I thought it also applied to external communication. This speaks to having excellent systems for dealing with email volume. (although suggesting that might just be adding to Internet Compulsion Disorder (thought it was an interesting comment that most people use Google to figure out how to get rid of internet addiction))

The article was talking about Ford. An excerpt:

We spend a lot of time hunting for problems. During launch, people are driving cars, they're running tests, and they're doing things that can lead to the discovery of a new complication that could delay a launch. Say I'm an engineer who suddenly finds such a problem. I probably want to solve it on my own if I can--that's human nature. But it's not the right impulse. If I sit on a problem for too long, working on it in isolation, the whole team—and the launch timeline—may suffer.

So we put a rule in place. It says: 'You have 24 hours to take a new and emerging issue, try to understand it and see if you can resolve it yourself. After that, you have to go public with it.' It's an escalation process. Because with a lot of these issues, we can solve them pretty quickly by applying the intellect we have in this company.


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