Do yourself a favor. Do your employees, coworkers and associates a favor. Do your clients a favor. Take a break. Take a walk, play with the dog, practice your clarinet, read a book. Take the afternoon, the weekend or a cruise. Sure you are behind. Gotta catch up. Just gut it out, get it done, man. Go! [...]
There is an old joke in business: Good/Fast/Cheap. Pick any two. What if you took one off the table? What is everything you offer has to be good? Then it can be fast, but not cheap. Or it can be cheap, but not fast. So you get paid well for working under pressure (which feels good), [...]
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 [...]
I have decided that I am not taking telephone calls or answering emails on Friday afternoons. If there is a piece of bad news guaranteed to cause me stress, it almost always received on a Friday afternoon. The worst part about it is that I can't do anything but stew about it until Monday morning. [...]
I am pathologically prompt. Five minutes before meeting time is what I consider on time. I think it is a sign of respect. But it is probably just insecurity.
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Online retailer Bonobos, not to be confused with the eponymous simian, wants to be the Amazon of Pants. Men's pants, specifically. [I perused the Bonobos website. They indeed have a wide variety of men's pants. If you live in the West Village. Of if you are built like Adam Scott. The actor or the golfer, take your [...]
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 [...]
In a effort to make my drive time more productive I started listening to podcasts. It has worked well, my head stays full of positive thoughts and I have learned a lot. I have had to create ways to safely take notes in the car (more on that sometime soon) but I have a treasure trove [...]
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 [...]
By far one of my favorite time-saving tools is the speech recognition program Dragon Naturally Speaking. I have been using Dragon for years and really love it. I pay for upgrades periodically, but through the updates Dragon retains my User Profile, so recognition has gotten better and better over time. And frankly, so has my dictating - I have [...]
Back in the 70's, the late, great Gilda Radner played a little old lady character on Saturday Night Live name Emily Litella. Emily Litella would appear on the news with an editorial reply, angry and confused about a news item that she invariably misunderstood. "What's all this I hear about Presidential Erections? I say it is best [...]
Of all the apps and software around, one of my all-time favorites is Roboform. Roboform is a secure website login and form-filling software that offers the greatest feature of all - one password to remember. Each time you register or create a login on a website, Roboform asks if you want to save the settings. Roboform can also generate [...]
