You only get four, six if you are lucky. If part of what you sell is creative or problem-solving in nature, you may have noticed that the flow state required is not something you can keep up all day. The reality is that human beings can only sustain this level of deep work for about [...]
A five-minute interruption is not five minutes. It is at least 10 minutes and can be as long as 30 minutes. Why? Because once you off task it takes a few minutes to remember what you were doing and refocus. People do favors for me all the time, for which I am grateful. I like to [...]
That the national unemployment rate has hit a 17 year low and that minorities have made big employment gains is laudable and important. But there is a bigger issue. We need to dramatically improve our labor participation rate. A good first step would be a simple and sincere request. The President should make a national plea: [...]
Miss Karen and I are taking a little well-deserved R and R to visit some friends who recently bought a second home in Florida. My goal: enjoy it. Enjoy the quiet, enjoy the company, enjoy the scenery. The joke in the appraisal profession is that there is either not enough work (so we are up nights [...]
This week I spent several hours making telephone calls and sending messages to get automatic subscription charges removed from my company debit card. At my hourly rate this made absolutely no sense. I should have just let Pandora charge me $4.00 per month ad infinitum. We are not rational creatures.
I have an affliction. It is incurable. It was first identified by The Buddha, who called it Kapicitta. Today we call it monkey mind. The incessant chattering of internal monologue. Monkey Mind sufferers are easy to spot. They can't sit still. They can't finish a task. They walk into rooms and forget why they went there [...]
In his April 2016 TED talk, Adam Grant made a point that I found fascinating. The best known and most re-recorded classical composers are the ones that generated the most content. Beethoven, Bach and Mozart wrote so much music that some of it turned out to be great. In other words, they were the ones [...]
Here are some software and web-based services that I find really helpful: ToDoIst This web-based To Do list software runs beautifully on all platforms: Windows, Apple, Android, even Google Chrome. You can set up an infinite number of To Do lists for your business and personal life, and your ToDoIst lists can be shared with [...]
We purchased a new washer and a new dryer several months ago. The washer has a setting called Fan Fresh. When the wash cycle finishes, the machine breathes in fresh air and occasionally tumbles the clothes to keep wrinkles at bay. The Fan Fresh cycle lasts up to 12 hours. When we wash a load [...]
As you know, The Ol' Prophet is keen on technology and productivity. Here are some recommendations that may help you get more connected and efficient: ToDoist This little gem of a Task Manager is worth its weight in gold. ToDoist works on all platforms: Apple iOS (there are iPhone and iPad apps), Android, Google Chrome, [...]
Most of the time we are busy, happily buzzing along, getting things done, doing our work, taking care of our families. But let's face it - we don't take enough time off. "Time off! Are you out of your head? The Johnson project is due next week. One kid has a recital and the other [...]
Gagliano & Company is a small business. A boutique firm, if you will. There are only three of us: Miss Sophia, Office Administrator, bookkeeper, preparer of paperwork and utility fielder; Miss Kim, Researcher extraordinaire, datakeeper, spreadsheeter and report ninja; and Yours Truly, the Wearer of the Turban. As a result, our capacity is limited. We [...]
Snow day! A cry of joy for children everywhere. Not so with the self employed. I sit at my home "office" (a thrice recycled desk and chair) stewing about my lot. I can't be stuck home again. I have too much to do. With all this time on my hands, I started thinking. What can [...]
I was fussing and fuming. Things weren't going my way. I was even having stress dreams. Frustrated, I was ready to declare myself a loser. With a capital L. But then I sat back and thought about it. I don't have control over this thing. There isn't a single concrete action I could take to [...]
Since the banking crisis reared its ugly head at the end of 2007, a raft of new legislation and regulation has been approved to prevent the darn thing from ever happening again. Among these efforts was, yet again, a crackdown on real estate appraisers. First an attempt was made to weed out the bad actors, [...]
There are times in every business when the ol' backlog gets a little, um, thin. Many business people at this juncture do one of two things: (a) panic or (b) slow down. Both responses are perfectly natural. Panic is simply our fight or flight response at work. Our ancestors would panic when they saw a [...]
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is a new book by Greg McKeown that tackles the Unimportance of Practically Everything. Or, put another way, if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. I originally bought Essentialism as an audiobook, but after I got a cold and was forced to stay home (and rest, and drink [...]
Mr. Smarty Pants had it all figured out. Two data backups. One onsite, one in the Cloud. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out that I was saving the data just fine, but I neglected to think through the recovery part. The Old Way - Onsite Our onsite backup was to an external hard [...]
Why is your fee so high? It’s just a little pizza parlor. On a corner. In the middle of a residential neighborhood. It is only assessed for $125,000. Because it is very difficult to appraise. Often the small and the cheap are the hard and expensive. So let’s compare the pizza parlor to a 100,000 square [...]
Working from home can be great. I roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and get to work. Two or three hours later I have the equivalent of a day’s worth of work done, and the rest of the day available to talk to clients and prospects. Years ago I discovered GoToMyPC and found that [...]
My ace Research Assistant, Miss Kim and I have struggled with tracking our projects and communicating our progress. For years we used the Task List in Microsoft Outlook, but we found it limited and sometimes the automatic updating was not so automatic. After reading Getting Things Done by David Allen and at the prompting of [...]
In an earlier post, I described my plans to get up earlier, add more to my morning routine and build some new habits. My goal was to focus on (1) waking earlier; (2) using that morning time to write or exercise. Another goal was to play more golf. This is more pragmatic than it sounds, [...]
Inbox Zero is a concept developed by Merlin Mann, the creator of 43folders.com. Mann took some of the ideas expressed in David Allen's famous book Getting Things Done and brought them into the digital age. I just finished reading Getting Things Done and it is a great book. The only problem is it was written in 2003 and [...]
Negotiation via e-mail is a waste of time and bandwidth. Getting everyone in one room takes time and resources, but in the end it is most efficient way to strike a deal.
I committed to reading two books every month in 2013, one fiction and one nonfiction. I cheated a this month (again) and read two nonfiction books, but both were really useful. Here is what I found: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. This book is a fascinating study [...]
Following up on my blog post last week in which I touted the virtues of the dictation software Dragon Naturally Speaking, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the tool that makes the whole thing work: the SAVI W710. The SAVI W710 by Pantronics is a wireless headset that allows the user to connect to the [...]
