Busy or Productive – Increase Your Productivity with These 8 Tips

Busy or Productive – Increase Your Productivity with These 8 Tips

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
Time is the one true constraint for all of us in our lives. We all have 24 hours in a day. We all have 60 minutes in an hour. You can't change the pace of time. But what we can change is how we use that time. Most people I know are busy within their constrained time. A few people I know are productive in that time. Are you busy or productive? Here are 15 tips that can help you highlight where you fall, and how you can improve your productivity, be more successful and reduce your stress. Not every tip will work for everyone. Individual work styles differ, and some people can optimize more or less in each of these areas. The most important factor to success in productivity improvement is to be conscious in your efforts. Take time to understand how you work today and how that could be improved. Then execute against that plan. (more…)...
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Work Life “Blending”

Work Life “Blending”

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
At the Conference Board of Canada Innovation Summit this year one of the speakers during their lunch was Nitin Kawale, President of Cisco Canada.  He spoke about how Cisco was enabling a concept he called Work Life "Blending" and contrasted it with the age old challenge of work life balance by accepting that in a connected world "balance" is virtually impossible to attain. At the time I disagreed - maybe because I heard the voices of my parents and grandparents in my head as they "balanced" their work and life to enable the family experiences that I remember so fondly as I grew up.  But the more I have reflected on that brief talk the more I am realizing that Nitin is right - balance is unattainable today, but more importantly I'm not sure that balance was the right goal in the first place. (more…)...
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Snakes and Ladders

Snakes and Ladders

by Tim Empringham, MBA1 Comment
In "First Things First", Stephen Covey categorized work into a four box grid aligned to the "importance" of work and the "urgency" of that work. the clear motivation is to stop doing those things that are both not urgent and not important. Second we need to have the strength to stop doing the things that are urgent but not important. With the unimportant tasks eliminated we need to look at where we are spending our time to most effectively move our organizations (and lives) forward. The pace of competition and life in general seems to be increasing at an exponential rate over the past several years, and at the same time our organizations have been under severe productivity challenges. The result is that in many cases we are being asked to generate increasing returns with fewer staff to do the work. Given this landscape is it any surprise that more and more when I am talking with other leaders they are lamenting...
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