From the category archives:

Office life

How to Survive Your Annual Review

February 25, 2010

It feels like you’ve just been sentenced to life in prison when you get that reminder from personnel that it is time for the annual review process. A futile month long exercise in pointless formed, and meaningless comments.
Yes, I am being overly cynical about this, but they are usually nothing more than a personal PR [...]

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Choose Your Impact

February 11, 2010

Everyone has a ‘tic’. Yes, there is a medical interpretation of this but I am not referring too that here (at least not directly). But every one has something by which people remember them by – you know what I mean – the thing you whisper to your colleague in the lift after a meeting.
Let [...]

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10 Reasons Why You Should Get Angry

February 9, 2010

We all like to think we are that icy cool operator. The Roger Moore of the office. But most of us are aren’t. Some of us certainly aren’t. And a few of us are so far away from this that the concept has no meaning.
But this isn’t a bad thing [...]

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How Much of You to Develop at Once

January 20, 2010

How many ‘goals’ or ‘development points’ do you focus on at any one point in time? Do you choose one thing you are working on or towards, and leave that as you sole purpose? Or do you monitor all your targets, and apply each one as and when it is most appropriate?
I ask this as [...]

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168 Hour Work Week

November 16, 2009

Are you ever properly ‘off duty‘? You may be in the office fron 9am until 5pm, but do you take your laptop home to ‘catch-up’ in the evening? Do you send the odd e-mail on your Blackberry when you go to bed?
It is easy to spot ‘work creep‘ – and I don’t mean the guy [...]

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8 Ways to Cope with a Tight Deadline

November 2, 2009

There is nothing better at ruining a perfectly good weekend than an impending deadline. It nags at you when wash the dishes, it plagues you when you mow the lawn, and it pesters you when you go to bed.
How do you ease this burden, when you have a deadline coming up fast?
1. Ask for an [...]

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How Do You Measure How Productive You Are?

October 28, 2009

Good morning/afternoon/evening! How are you all today? Good good. So how productive were you today/yesterday? Was that more or less than the day before? Really, that is very interesting. But tell me, how are you measuring how productive you are?
It is an important question. If you don’t have an adequate way of measuring how well [...]

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When to be Nasty and When to be Nice

October 22, 2009

The last few weeks I have been listening to Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people” – a book first I read and enjoyed many years ago. As is always the case in life, since I put the book down last, my experience, myself, and the World in general has changed in one [...]

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Have You Got a Career or a Job?

October 8, 2009

You turn up for work every day. You bang away into your under-powered Dell for 8 hours, then go home and try and refresh yourself sufficiently to start all over again tomorrow. But why are you doing this day-in-day-out? Are you doing this just to pay your mortgage, 401k/pension contribution, and beer money? Or it [...]

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Making Other People Productive

October 5, 2009

In my last post, I noted how we need to identify the bottlenecks in our system to enable us to be more productive. Often the biggest, and most frustrating, impediment to getting things done, is other people. It may be that you can’t tick something off your list until you get the draft back from [...]

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