347-878-3837

Life balance

Here are articles on Life balance

Happy or Successful? Which will you pursue?

, , ,

Click here to listen to this as a podcast.

Click here to download the Happy versus Successful graphic

On a recent birthday I was looking back at the strategies that my friends from high school and college and I employed to get where we are today. We assumed that success would bring happiness, and as far I can tell, we were wrong. It turns out that the two are separate, even though marketers would have us believe otherwise.The slogan for Cadillac is “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit.” Of course what your mind fills in is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. As if a $50,000.00 car will actually make you happier. And maybe it will. But keep in mind, if your life fundamentally sucks, it’s gonna keep on sucking the moment you step out of the car and onto the concrete. So, if the two are different—if happiness and success are not the same—what’s the best life strategy?

We are certainly taught to believe that being successful will make us happy. Society tells us, our parents tell us, our teachers tell us, students in high school as young as 12 and 13 are already being lectured about college. I take it to an extreme. I have a 5-year-old nephew, I am thinking about his college, I am thinking about his high school. It’s ridiculous; I am missing his entire childhood because I am so busy thinking about making him successful in the assumption that thus will he be happy.

I also find that in career coaching new MBAs, they have an almost religious belief that they can plan out a 20-year career path. They say things like, “I will make my money and then I will be happy. Then I will do the things that are meaningful.” Then, then, then. As if, among other things, you can even control whether “then” ever arrives.

So strategy number 1 is: pursue success and hope for happiness. The other strategy is to pursue happiness and meaning and find a way to make a living doing it. This is the strategy where happiness leads to success. Which one is better? Let’s see…

If you go for success and you become successful and you find a way to be happy doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. If you go for happiness and find a way to make money doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. So, in the case where you can achieve both, it doesn’t really matter which strategy you choose, you end up happy and successful.

But the point we rarely consider is what happens if everything doesn’t work out. If you define your life as pursuing success but you don’t actually find a way to be happy while doing it, or you get to that point where you have the money and now you don’t even know what makes you happy because you have spent the whole time pursuing success instead of happiness, well, great. You’re successful, but you’re not happy. You walk into an empty house surrounded by beautiful gorgeous things. You have a lot of friends and they like you. Why? Because you have a lot of nice things that they want to borrow. You buy a cat, the cat puts with you because you leave its automated feeding bowl in place while you go work at office. It actually hates you because you’re never around. You are too busy working, but at least it will pretend to purr every now and then.

On the other hand, if you go for happiness and aren’t successful, at least you will be happy and you will have a life full of meaning. They found one of the big things that helps people be happy, for example, it is having family and friends and community. So, if you are happy, but don’t quite make it to successful, you may wander into your one-bedroom tiny apartment and be surrounded by friends and family and people who love you and a cat that purrs because it recognizes you—it knows who you are and it appreciates the fact that you feed it. You may not have the money, but you will be happy.

So, in the case where the future works exactly the way we want it to, it doesn’t matter whether you pursue success and then find happiness or whether you pursue happiness and then find success. But in the case where you can’t guarantee the final outcome, it makes so much more sense to pursue happiness and hopefully you can find a way to be successful doing it.

I have spent my life up until very recently doing the opposite. I have spent my life pursuing success under the assumption that it would make me happy and it is not clear that it’s been worth it. Missing a weekend with friends so that I can work hard and earn enough money that I can take time off and … spend a weekend with friends. Hello? This doesn’t exactly make a whole lot of sense.

What I would like to invite you to do today is to examine your own life and your own motivations—How do you work? Are you pursuing success assuming that someday will bring happiness? Are you pursuing happiness looking for way to be successful while doing it? Are you getting both? And I would invite you to play around a little bit. Try doing something from the other camp and find out if that works for you.

If you’re a Type-A Personality Workaholic, skip a day of work, call in sick and do something that makes you happy, that’s meaningful, and that could be a taste of the life you could be living right now, maybe in exchange for money but maybe not. Because when you pursue happiness, you never know what kind of opportunities arise.

I am now one year into a three-year experiment of living my life to the extent that I can get my Type-A Personality to do so. I pursue the things that make me happy and have meaning. The bizarre part is my life is less predictable than ever before. The things I am getting involved with weren’t even on the radar screen a year-and-a-half ago, however, some of them are grander and more exciting than anything I could possibly have planned. Make a choice. Pursue success and find happiness or pursue happiness and find success. Either way you have a shot at both, but in one case you guarantee you will be happy.

Is Counting the Root of all Evil?

, , ,

Click here to listen to this article as a podcast.

The love of money isn’t the root of all evil; arithmetic is the root of all evil. More specifically, counting.

Don’t get me wrong; counting was a wonderful invention. It has its uses. We can keep track of kids: “Are all 5 kids here? Let’s see, 1… 2… 3… 4… where’s Billy?” We can keep track of time. “He’s working overtime in the salt mines, honey. Instead of 12 hours, he’s working 14 hours today. He’ll be home at … 9, 10. Yes, 10 p.m.” And we can keep track of money: “He gets paid $1.49/hour working overtime, so our bank balance will be $11.37 … $12.37 … $13.37 … $13.86 after Billy gives us his share.” In fact, they remind us over and over in MBA school that “What gets measured, gets managed.”

So where’s the problem? This is evil? This gave us the industrial-friggin’-revolution. This sounds great!!

We measure the wrong stuff

Well, the problem starts when we choose what to measure. We often measure what doesn’t lead to our goal, and expect the measuring to magically create the managing.

Want profit? Let’s count expenses. Tell all managers to submit weekly reports of their team’s expenses. Let’s call it a TPS Report, and count how many TPS reports people send, to make sure they’re doing their job (which has silently morphed from “running a profitable business” to “submitting TPS reports”). Well, whoopie. We’ve added a whole layer of useless counting, and then another layer to count who is and isn’t counting. Since we don’t actually know what to do with the silly TPS report, we slide further from profitability. We’re counting the wrong thing.

Or how about sick days? There’s a hoot. “You only get six sick days.” Nice. Like that’s controllable. If you’re sick for seven days, come on in and give it to everyone else in your department, so everyone has to take six days off. You can measure sick days, but the measure is useless.

Seemingly meaningful measurements … aren’t

Then we make up measurements that mean nothing and try to manage those. “Let’s rank our employees. Then we can fire the bottom 10%.” Sounds easy; isn’t easy. (Sadly, however, it is a much-publicized Jack Welch policy.) How much time will managers spend on this ranking exercise? Do they apply consistent standards that are directly related to the company’s goals? Do we fire the 10% of managers whose ranking skill is in the bottom 10%? Who decides that?

Ranking is hard. Really hard. In fact, in 1963, psychologist George Miller’s famous paper “The Magic Number 7 +/- 2” presented results showing people can make ranking distinctions between 5 to 9 items, and then we pretty much lose track. If you think you can accurately rank a 250-person department, you’re deluded and thus in the bottom 10%; it’s time to pack your bags.

Even if you can rank, can you use the rankings for action? We want to punt the bottom 10% of the company. We can’t really compare an accountant against a design engineer, so our fresh new Harriford MBA, Darren, suggests we eliminate 10% of each department. That will add up to 10% of the company.

But what if our 30 design engineers rock, while our 30 accountants all suck eggs? As a company, we want to fire six accountants (10% of 60 employees) and no design engineers. But firing 10% of each department means we leave three mediocre accountants standing, and three rockin’ design engineers out of work. That’s clearly wrong. But we get one benefit: we know Darren didn’t understand the logic of firing, so we know he’s in the bottom 10% and should be fired. Success! We have at least one confirmed cost savings from this exercise.

Measurement turns us evil

I know you’re asking: what in heaven’s name does this have to do with spirituality, morality, and/or the rest of our lives? (If you weren’t asking that, don’t worry, just go with the flow.)

Here’s where the evil comes in. We only measure so we can make decisions about those measurements and change our behavior. But we do this by judging the measurements as “good” or “bad.” When we’re measuring a “bad” trend, we panic. We’re afraid. We’re angry. We get frustrated, anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty.

How do people act when they feel anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty? Fortunately, we live in a Highly Evolved Society, so we meditate for five minutes, do some yoga, and we’re fine. NOT! Most people want to get rid of the bad feelings. Some fudge the numbers and play financial games. Think Enron. Some people hit something. Some people treat everyone around like crap. And some people blame.

Yes, they blame. They blame colleagues. “Sales are down! Sally distracted me so I lost the big prospect.” They blame loved ones. “I went over my sick day quota since I had to take Billy to treatment for his Black Lung disease.” They blame the government.”If it weren’t for the (Republicans/Democrats), (the economy/the occupation/global warming/life/love/happiness) would be better.” And they blame themselves. “I’m just a failure.”

All because they counted, then got emotionally wedded to the counting.

What counts and what doesn’t?

I’ve been talking so far about business, only not really. We count the wrong things in business, we count the wrong things in life. We go to pieces when our business counts go off-track, we go to pieces when our real-life counts go off-track. And remember, real life counts more. Where do you get caught in the counting?

Some of us count who’s done more housework, us or our spouse. Some of us count the dollars in our savings account. Some of us count what someone does to prove they love us. Some of us count how pious our neighbors are. It all turns into judgment, and from there, into emotion. When the counting is going the way we want, we think life is good. When the counting goes the other way, we get upset.

The upset is extra, though! It’s our reaction to the counting. The counting doesn’t cause the problem; it’s our stories about the counting that cause the problem.

Let’s fix this. Let counting be counting. Let emotion be emotion. All this score-keeping, counting, and measuring is made up. It’s all fantasy. It’s a convenient tool for making decisions. But it’s not real. And it’s certainly not worth turning yourself into an ogre, feeling horrible, and abusing yourself and your loved ones.

What if you count and discover your bank account isn’t high enough to send your kids to college? Don’t get upset. Use it as information and change your savings plan. But don’t beat yourself up. You can’t do anything for your kids that way, except set a bad example. Use the information to stay centered and work with the people you love to fix the situation.

What if you count and discover your spouse overcharged on the credit card? You can fly into a rage, or you can sit down with your spouse, love each other tremendously, and decide from that place how you’ll deal with the situation. I used the “fly-into-a-rage” method several times. It didn’t pay the bill, nor did it make me an attractive snuggle partner, even to our stuffed animals. The counting-as-information plus love-then-problem-solving works way better.

What if you count pounds, and discover you have more than you want? You can get depressed and eat a chocolate cake to help yourself feel better (Stever’s diet advice: learn to distinguish “sugar rush” from “feel better”). Or realize the number’s just information you can use to change your diet. If you’re going to diet, doing it from a place of fun makes it … well … more fun. And if you’re not going to diet, then at least enjoy the chocolate cake. But don’t let counting trick you into not-dieting, and also not enjoying the cake. That’s plain foolishness!

And what if you count and discover you’re not as rich as Darren, despite your superior skills? Or you’re not as rich as the goal you set at age 23? You can call yourself a failure and jump out of a plane without a parachute. That’s one solution. But maybe you can notice that a number is just a number, while you’re an entire human being who has much more to offer than a number.

Counting is optional. If you stop counting and look around, you just might find you’re warm, dry, full, and reading the web. And that’s not such a bad place to be. So count only when it’s useful, don’t take it too seriously, and feel good either way. Move your attention from counting to living. Put your attention on the things that make you feel happy, joyous, and grateful. If you must count, count those, and every day, count a little higher. It’s your life, and only you can make your counting count.

Conquering the Stress of Uncertainty: Keeping Yourself Sane in an Uncertain World

,

A reader writes: I could use some helpful tips in overcoming stress from not seeing success right away.

For many of us, the economic slowdown has meant less business. We can no longer count on steady growth and reliable money. It’s easy to become stressed when we aren’t seeing the results we expect.

In Western culture, we are rarely taught coping skills for uncertainty. It can be especially hard having patience and a clear mind when things aren’t going the way we want them to (witness our country’s difficulty with two weeks of uncertainty around our Y2K Presidential election!).

If you haven’t been seeing success right away, start by asking yourself “what constitutes success?” If you’re attached to an outcome—say, doing $10 million of sales in your first year—you’ll find that success is all-or-nothing; you’ve either reached the outcome or you haven’t. It may help you feel process to subdivide your goal into smaller pieces. Shoot for at least one milestone a week, so your progress is continuous. Your first week’s goal could be to get a face-to-face appointment with three prospects and land one sale. Each goal you meet will help you feel progress.

The key is that you’re not choosing your milestones just to manage the projects. This is about managing your emotions; choose milestones that will cause you to feel progress in your gut, even if the outside results aren’t there, yet.

You can also succeed with process goals. Process goals measure what you’re doing, not where you are. You’re shooting for three prospect appointments? You might set a process goal of calling 10 Widget Retailers from the phonebook daily. That’s a process goal. If you find you’re missing your process goals, asking yourself why can lead to you choosing a better way to reach your outcome. For example, if you miss your ten daily calls because there are only three Widget Retailers in the phone book, it’s a signal that you’ll need another way to find prospects. Process goals give you the chance for daily "wins" on your way to your bigger goals.

If you find yourself stressed even when you reach smaller progress goals, you might want to tackle the stress directly. Meditate for a half hour a day, get some exercise, and set aside time for yourself to relax and unwind. Choose a time for the day to be over and when it is, go home and do something completely unrelated to work. It can be a challenge, but separating work and home life can save your sanity. At least three times a week, leave your office by 6 p.m. and go play. Clear your mind. Get a massage. Indulge yourself in a bubble bath. Treat yourself well! (My personal touchstone is yoga.)

Of course, it’s possible your business might not be truly sustainable. The market may not be there, the distribution can’t be worked out, or competition makes it impossible to build a business that makes money. Set boundaries for yourself to keep yourself healthy. Decide now how much time/money/effort you are willing to put into the business, so you don’t someday wake up having overspent yourself. Also, think hard on how you’ll know if the business really won’t work. Just setting those limits can help. If you decide three months of consecutive losses is the signal that your specialty Pokeman Roller Skate Shop has outlived its usefulness, then you’ll know when it’s time to quit. And knowing there’s a defined exit point can really be calming.

But meanwhile, give it your all! With well-thought-out process and outcome goals, you may never have to worry about your exit conditions. You’ll know early on if what you’re doing isn’t working, and you can take action to insure your success. With hard work, skill, and a little luck, you main worries will be plotting your multibillion dollar expansion …as you relax in your mansion’s new whirlpool bubble bath.

So take a deep breath. Calm your mind. And Go For It!

Living Your Life with Quality

,

A story by Mark Albion of Making a Life, Making a Living.

An elderly carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer-contractor of his plans to leave the house-building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He would miss the paycheck, but he needed to retire. They could get by.

The contractor was sorry to see his good worker go and asked if he could build just one more house as a personal favor. The carpenter said "yes", but in time it was easy to see that his heart was not in his work. He resorted to shoddy workmanship and used inferior materials. It was an unfortunate way to end his career.

When the carpenter finished his work and the builder came to inspect the house, the contractor handed the front-door key to the carpenter. "This is your house," he said, "my gift to you." What a shock! What a shame! If he had only known he was building his own house, he would have done it all so differently. Now he had to live in the home he had built none too well.

So it is with us. We build our lives in a distracted way, reacting rather than acting, willing to put up less than the best. At important points we do not give the job our best effort. Then with a shock, we look at the situation we have created and find that we are now living in the house we have built. If we had realized, we would have done it differently.

Think of yourself as the carpenter. Think about your house. Each day you hammer a nail, place a board, or erect a wall. Build wisely. It is the only life you will ever build. Even if you live it for only one day more, that day deserves to be lived graciously and with dignity.

The plaque on the wall says, "Life is a do-it-yourself project,"

Who would say it more clearly? Your life today is the result of your attitudes and choices in the past. Your life tomorrow will be the result of your attitudes and the choices you make today.

Dealing with Overwhelm

The overwhelm can be worse than the backlog!

From my March 2001 newsletter

A client of mine discovered that the feelings of overwhelm can be more harmful than the fact of overwhelm itself. The feelings lead to stress, which makes one less productive. The less productive, the more work piles up. Bigger piles lead to more feelings of overwhelm, and the cycle repeats.

But what if the work really is manageable? How can one address the feeling of overcommitment and go ahead to get things done?

Getting a lot done is really a matter of doing one thing at a time, whether or not you stress. When the stress is from volume of work, locally reducing the volume can help the stress…

This article is continued in “It Takes a Lot More than Attitude … to Lead a Stellar Organization!" Click here to purchase.

Take Time to Recharge (Pushing Yourself, You'll Get Less Done Than You Think)

Taken from February 2001 newsletter and private correspondence

One of my clients was feeling under the weather last. Motivation was down, stress was up. Instead of an attitude of optimism and cheerfulness, the world was melancholy gloom. Overall, a bad scene, and not one to set a good tone within the business–a CEO‘s mood can infect the entire company. The problem? He wasn’t getting enough sleep, was working through his normal exercise time, and was making up the energy deficit with coffee during the day.

This is an all-too-common spiral…

This article is continued in “It Takes a Lot More than Attitude … to Lead a Stellar Organization!" Click here to purchase.

Get a Life While You Still Have the Chance (it's easier than you think)

,

From my newsletter of December 2000

I’ve spent the last four days bedridden, recovering from oral surgery, unable to eat, and barely able to think. It’s been wonderful. It really underscores the value of time away from work. And life balance is possible without major surgery. You just have to know how…

Most importantly, you must decide that having a life is a priority. Many claim they value balance—they just have to work late this once… Make the decision and commit to it. Don’t wait for a brush with death to decide. My friend John needed a mid-30s heart attack to slow him down. For me, it was caring for a dying parent. Be good to yourself. Decide on your own to have a life!

Time is precious; no amount of money can buy back time. Set firm boundaries on the time you spend at work and home. Within those boundaries, only take on as much as you can do in that time. If you decide you will work eight hours each day, turn down work that will require a ten hours a day.

Use the 80/20 rule: you get 80% of your results from 20% of your time. Track how you spend your time, identify the tasks that produce the most results, and orient your work around those high-leverage activities. Use the extra productivity to pay someone else to do the low leverage activities.

Respect your boundaries. When you’re playing, really play. When you’re at work, really work. Your unconscious mind will know if you’re cheating—if you truly honor your commitment to yourself, you’ll be surprised how much more you’ll get done in both places.

If you find yourself having business thoughts during free time, buy an 89-cent notepad & pen and carry it with you. Jot down those thoughts when they happen, and go back to playing. When you get to work, start by reviewing your notepad for critical ideas.

Read a (fun!) book, go on a trip with your family, or see a movie for pleasure at least once a month.

Assignment: identify one high-leverage activity you do that produces lots of results. Identify one low-leverage activity that takes time but doesn’t do much for you. Arrange to have the low-leverage activity taken care of some other way, and use the time you save to do more of the high leverage activity.

Making Space for Success: Controlling Clutter

,

Clutter kills our dreams. It fogs our vision. Cleverly disguised as temporary convenience ("I’ll just put this here … for now"), clutter undermines more progress than TV, soft-money campaign contributions, and badly designed web sites put together. Who can be a visionary leader, when vision is obscured by a stack of magazines waiting to be read, twenty signature pages to forgotten contracts, a file folder of "time-critical stuff" dated 4-17-1998, and an e-mail inbox the size of Texas?

For many of us, getting a handle on clutter is remarkably freeing…

This article is continued in “It Takes a Lot More than Attitude … to Lead a Stellar Organization!" Click here to purchase.

Operating at Your Peak; Sleep and Good Food are Underrated

Sleep and good food are underrated

One of my clients was feeling under the weather last week. Motivation was down, stress was up. Instead of an attitude of optimism and cheerfulness, the world was melancholy gloom. Overall, a bad scene, and not one to set a good tone within the business–a CEO’s mood can infect the entire company. The problem? He wasn’t getting enough sleep, was working through his normal exercise time, and was making up the energy deficit with coffee during the day.

This is an all-too-common spiral. Too much work means too little sleep. Too little sleep means a drag on energy, less productivity, less creativity, and a sudden fondness for Starbucks. All that caffeine-induced energy makes it easy to work on into the night… and the whole thing starts over.

Unfortunately, chemically induced energy isn’t enough. Our bodies and our minds need time to recharge. Sleep rests your body, and it also gives your mind time to explore and file everything that’s happened during the day. The eighth hour of REM sleep, in fact, is where much of the most intense dreaming and creativity happens. Chemicals can keep your body awake, but your mind won’t produce your best work unless you’ve had time to recharge.

It’s all too easy to let the occasional late night slide into a habit of not taking care of yourself. Breaking the downward spiral can be mentally difficult, but it’s quite simple in practice: leave the office by 6:30 pm every night, even if stuff doesn’t get done (the world won’t end). Get a full night’s sleep. Throw away your coffee maker. And start the day with a glass of water or juice. By the next week, you’ll start feeling a lot better.

One reader asks:

I totally agree with it in theory, but I don’t see it being feasible for my startup any time in the near future. I was just wondering if you had insight into how other companies follow this?

I actually do believe companies would survive. The "savings" from pushing people hard are usually short-term. You may need all-nighters in an emergency, but over time, too little sleep impairs thinking ability. In a knowledge-intensive business, poor thinking can be deadly.

Though startups often get away with a year or two of very intense work, you’re risking burnout if it goes much longer. And burnout’s unpredictable and hard to manage. You can easily ask a healthy workforce for occasional bursts of intense work. But when someone flips into burnout, they literally can’t get started again. They stop caring, and often check out completely. At best, burnout is unmanageable, and it worst, it can be a complete disaster.

A young workforce can take longer to burn out, but it still happens. Twenty-year olds can be hard on their bodies without feeling the effects as severely as we older folks. Several of my MBA classmates have been going full-tilt for a decade, and at least one had his first heart attack from stress and overwork (so said his doctor). These are folks in their mid-30s. That’s pretty young, career-wise.

One way to promote health is lowering the workload. It means saying "No" to work that would hurting people’s health. It means building systems to save work, separating out the "must do" from the "we’d really like to do," and setting realistic client expectations if you’re a service business.

But even if you don’t lower the workload, sacrificing quality of life for short-term progress may be a fantasy. The basic math suggests that damaged immune systems still don’t get the desired results. If someone loses three days to sickness that could have been avoided, that is equivalent to them having worked one hour less per day for an entire month (assuming ten-hour day, five-day workweeks)! It may be better to cut the extra hour off in the first place, and keep people in good health.

Scenario 1 Scenario 2
10 hour days 8.8 hour days
3 days sick no days off
risk of spreading sickness n/a
low quality of life high quality of life

The scenarios are equally productive, but scenario 2 is probably a lot more fun for the individual and the company.

Most startups are run as pressure cookers. I suspect it’s a misguided romantic notion that confuses movement with progress. A company I worked with closely took pride in their overwork, though any experienced project manager could instantly see the overwork came from poor scheduling, poor resource allocation, and a lack of attention to infrastructure that would have sped up later projects. The haste to get early contracts out the door sacrificed the opportunity to build systems for later productivity and later quality of life.

Because people think startups require sacrifice, they ask themselves, "How can we keep running the company the way we currently do, but avoid burnout?" The answer: you can’t. At best, you start giving out sabbaticals, which in one fell swoop lose the gains of several years’ worth of overtime. That’s the wrong question, and the wrong question will always lead to the wrong answer. The question to be asking is, "How can we run the company in a healthful way?" The answer will depend on your company, your people, and your culture.

It’s possible. My formerly caffeine-addicted CEO runs two companies staffed by people in their late-30s to fifties, and they don’t need 100 hour weeks. But it takes care, planning, and constant attention to workload, infrastructure, and the like.

So in short, I’m sure that there are limited times–especially in startups–when deadlines and circumstances demand Herculean effort. But part of building a sustainable business is learning how to channel part of that effort into systems and structures that reduce the need for such effort in the future. And even in startups, the gains from super-effort crunches are only gains in the short term. Most of them are more than made up for by decreased productivity, decreased creativity [which necessitates later rework], and time lost to sickness and required vacation.

This month, take steps to restore your life to an upward spiral:

  • Commit to getting enough sleep every night for the next two weeks. Find out how that changes your outlook.
  • Each day, substitute a glass of water or juice when you would normally drink coffee or soda. Learn to distinguish between caffeine energy and energy from health.
  • Help your long-term balance by scheduling four weeks of vacation next year. Do it now. Yes, I know that "there’s no convenient time" or "emergencies happen." There’s never a convenient time, and there will always be emergencies. Schedule your vacations and stick to them, realizing that the world around you will do its best to keep you from taking them.

Organize Your Life With 2 "To Do" Lists

, ,

It’s been a pretty busy month, and I’ve been swamped with so many TO DO items that post-it notes, scraps of paper, napkins, and dozens of other scribbled “urgent” tasks have been covering my desk. My Palm Pilot TO DO list terrifies me. Every night I prayed, “Grant me freedom! Let my Palm’s recharger mysteriously run out of power.” My prayers were answered in the book The Organized Executive by Stephanie Winston.

Stephanie suggest a method that’s working great for me:…

This article is continued in “It Takes a Lot More than Attitude … to Lead a Stellar Organization!" Click here to purchase.