Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

01 Sep 2008

What Do the Secrets of Greatness mean for Time Management and Productivity?

Pierogi by Anna Moderska

Following my last post, I’ve been thinking about what the secrets of greatness mean for time management and the impact this has on personal productivity?

I think that there is a scarily simple answer: just do it.

To explain: the core of the ‘secret’ of greatness was deliberate practice. Practice defined as being the focused attention at getting better at doing whatever it is that you’re doing.

Therefore, the only way you’ll get better at managing your time and productivity is ‘just do it’. Just take the time and do the task. Don’t prevaricate or procrastinate. Just start and do what you can in the time. Lowest unit of time? Assuming everything is to hand (i.e. brain/ pen/ paper) then five minutes? Try and do this as many times in a twenty four hour period as possible.

So this gives you the ‘practice’. When it comes to the deliberate improvement activity:

1. Try and get better at just starting and doing

2. Try and maintain mindfulness on the best way of squeezing the task in hand, and the quality required, into the time you are so ruthlessly managing

3. ….and repeat

There was a TV programme about a dumpling factory in China. The most productive dumpling maker was interviewed. When asked what she thought about all day when making dumplings, she replied ‘how to make them faster and better’

Dumplings or decisions: the deliberate practice is the same.

Posted in Action Orientation, Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Habits and Routines, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged Deliberate Practice, Focus, Productivity, Time Management

30 Aug 2008

1 Comment

Why Persistent Focused Practice is What it Takes to Be Great

Catching up on some articles and I came across a great one I’d pulled out of Fortune October 30 2006. Called ‘What it Takes to be Great’ by Geoffrey Colvin, it reviewed research to try and answer the question of what it takes: is it talent or hard work.

Great conclusions:

1. Nobody is great without work: there’s no evidence of high level performance without experience or practice

2. The Ten Year Rule: most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before coming world class: this is across most fields – music and literature it’s closer to twenty

3. The best people devote the most hours to ‘deliberate practice’: activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance

4. Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends

5. Great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude (the example is given of Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team)

6. Deliberate practice starts with going at any task with a new goal

7. The mental approach is vital and feedback is crucial

8. You have to do deliberate practice regularly and not sporadically

The really fascinating bit is the conclusion ‘we still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice’ or as University of Michigan business school professor puts it after 30 years of working with managers “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why”

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Mindfulness and tagged Conscious and Unconscious, Greatness, Learning, Practice, Skills

29 Aug 2008

1 Comment

How do Vision and Mission Improve Communications and Group Interaction?

Tug O' War by Kevin Luu

I was struck today by how powerful the outcomes of setting a good, clear vision and mission are: particularly in how they impact communications and group interaction.

They impact various types of communications, including personal, interpersonal and corporate (internal and external):

1. Communicating clearly to yourself to focus and prioritise the activity that will maximise your ability to achieve your mission and vision

2. Amongst a group sharing the same vision/ mission (i.e. a corporate, not-for-profit, social group etc.), there are a number of benefits:

– The creation of a common set of values: they naturally align to support delivery of a commonly held set of outcomes

– The creation of common underlying goals and activities: clear actions enabling all members to pull in the same direction

– The creation of common understanding: even if people are communicating at apparent cross-purposes (in non-mission/vision groups), in those with mission and vision, common understanding shines through whatever fuzzy interaction takes place

– The acceptance of difference is enhanced when all parties are known to share the same vision/ mission

– The allowance for divergent personality traits: less drive for normalising behaviour if it doesn’t matter in the short-term relative to long-term goal achievement

– The allowance for ‘journey’ differences: the route to a goal matters less if the achievement of that goal is shared

3. A group seems more aligned to external observers when the purpose is common

4. Shared vision and mission (more obviously) makes the outwards communication of shared purpose easier