Have you ever had days or weeks when your calendar was filled seemingly to the brim with meetings? As an experienced software developer in a senior technical role, I find that I am being requested to attend more and more meetings, especially to provide advice or guidance to various teams and to participate in status […]
As part of my series on personal learning, I’ve previously written about learning via online reading and reading books. Reading websites and books is a good strategy for gaining knowledge, but works poorly for gaining skill at doing something. Your ability to retain the information you read is also greatly increased when you actively use […]
Do you find yourself constantly busy with urgent tasks, left with no time to work on less urgent yet more important activities? In my experience this is a wide-spread problem, both at the workplace and at home. How many people do you know acknowledge the importance of exercise, but claim they don’t have the time? […]
I recently read the book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. The book is the outcome of a simple question: how can a good or even mediocre company achieve enduring greatness? A research team worked for five years to answer this question, and Good to Great provides […]
Thanks to a comment submitted by Brian for my article Working Smarter, Not Harder, I have recently worked through the book Getting Things Done : The Art Of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. I already considered myself well-organized, yet I found the book extremely helpful. The author takes a bottom-up approach, focusing on presenting an […]
I have always been fond of the phrase ‘work smarter, not harder’, so I enjoyed my recent read of the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco. The main premise of the book is that being 100% busy (totally efficient) provides no capacity for dealing with change. […]
