From the category archives:

Office life

10 Question to Ask When You Get Asked to do Something

July 22, 2010

How much of what you do during an average day is purely volentery? I mean how much of it is the decision 100% with you over whether you do it or not, with no adverse concequences to swing your decision? My guess – less that 1%. Either your boss, your wife, your son, your neighbour, [...]

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How to be an Expert

July 15, 2010

We live in a world of ‘experts’. The sheer amount of freely available information out there, especially on the ‘interwebs’, mean we are all ‘experts’. In any field we want. All we need to do is read the Wikipedia article and a couple of forum posts and we know all we need to know. There [...]

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When Do You Have Capacity to Work?

July 12, 2010

As human beings we have a finite capacity to get things done. This is limited by time, attention span, motivation, priorities, and a whole heap of less nagging, but equally as disruptive things. Our limited capacity varies through the day – the graph below is utterly fictitious from a numerical point of view, but the [...]

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What to do When the World is Against You

June 10, 2010

Life is tough sometimes isn’t it? You get home from work, collapse on the couch with a warm can of soda, and as it sprays it’s contents over your face and up your wall, you conclude that things are pretty much lined against you. And it is not just that things have gone wrong for [...]

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The 3 Truths of Office Politics

June 8, 2010

In my very humble opinion, the biggest loss of overall production in most people’s lives is in office politics. And I don’t make that sweeping generalisation lightly. Or not that lightly at least. It might not be politics that you see as the immediate cause to any inefficiency, but in 8 out of 10 cases, [...]

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Improving Your Gravitas

May 25, 2010

Had an interesting conversation the other day with an old friend of mine. Like me, he works for a large organisation, and has been slowly working his way up the food chain over a number of years. He likes his job, and is good at his job. But he feels he has hit a ceiling. [...]

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Bibliosnap – James Mallinson

May 22, 2010

Welcome to the second in my ‘Bibliosnap’ series – snapshots of my current bibliography – what I am enjoying reading and what I am inspired by. This time it is James Mallinson. James is a blogger who I have enjoyed following for a number of years, having built up an excellent Productivity Blog, Organize IT. [...]

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Bibliosnap – Hauke Borow

May 15, 2010

I read a lot. I read a lot about a lot. I’m one of those people who can lose days to Wikipedia – you read one article then click on a link that takes you off on a tangent, then from that article another link takes you on another tangent, and so on. This is [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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