Productive Simplicity = 

(Life + Goals) - Distraction

Every bit of advice on life and time management can be broken down to a single fundamental idea: know what is important to achieving your goals, focus accordingly, and ignore all else.  Do you have stuff in your home that you do not use?  Get rid of it.  Do you have features in your product that are not essential to your customer’s needs?  These features are only adding complexity to your product and confusing your customers in the process.  Mercilessly eradicate all the needless clutter, distraction and time sinks out of your life and suddenly everything else, the important stuff, becomes far more manageable.

The whole concept of doing less as a way of accomplishing more is actually quite simple.  The hard part is figuring out what you want to accomplish and then identifying the tasks that are truly important to get you there.  Many people also confuse urgency with importance.  Never drop a task of high importance for an seemingly urgent inconsequential one.  During most tasks only 20% of the activities surrounding it are truly important; the other 80% are just excess trivialities that can be ignored.  One of the most vital skills you can have in life is figuring out which one is which.

Productive Simplicity = (Life + Goals) - Distraction

http://www.marcandangel.com/2007/12/26/productive-simplicity-life-goals-distraction/

What is Your Leadership Style?

Leadership is less about your needs, and more about the needs of the people and the organization you are leading. Leadership styles are not something to be tried on like so many suits, to see which fits. Rather, they should be adapted to the particular demands of the situation, the particular requirements of the people involved and the particular challenges facing the organization.

In the book “Primal Leadership,” Daniel Goleman, who popularized the notion of “Emotional Intelligence,” describes six different styles of leadership. The most effective leaders can move among these styles, adopting the one that meets the needs of the moment. They can all become part of the leader’s repertoire.

Visionary. This style is most appropriate when an organization needs a new direction. Its goal is to move people towards a new set of shared dreams. “Visionary leaders articulate where a group is going, but not how it will get there – setting people free to innovate, experiment, take calculated risks,” write Mr. Goleman and his coauthors.

Coaching. This one-on-one style focuses on developing individuals, showing them how to improve their performance, and helping to connect their goals to the goals of the organization. Coaching works best, Mr. Goleman writes, “with employees who show initiative and want more professional development.” But it can backfire if it’s perceived as “micromanaging” an employee, and undermines his or her self-confidence.

Affiliative. This style emphasizes the importance of team work, and creates harmony in a group by connecting people to each other. Mr. Goleman argues this approach is particularly valuable “when trying to heighten team harmony, increase morale, improve communication or repair broken trust in an organization.” But he warns against using it alone, since its emphasis on group praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected. “Employees may perceive,” he writes, “that mediocrity is tolerated.”

Democratic. This style draws on people’s knowledge and skills, and creates a group commitment to the resulting goals. It works best when the direction the organization should take is unclear, and the leader needs to tap the collective wisdom of the group. Mr. Goleman warns that this consensus-building approach can be disastrous in times of crisis, when urgent events demand quick decisions.

Pacesetting. In this style, the leader sets high standards for performance. He or she is “obsessive about doing things better and faster, and asks the same of everyone.” But Mr. Goleman warns this style should be used sparingly, because it can undercut morale and make people feel as if they are failing. “Our data shows that, more often than not, pacesetting poisons the climate,” he writes.

Commanding. This is classic model of “military” style leadership – probably the most often used, but the least often effective. Because it rarely involves praise and frequently employs criticism, it undercuts morale and job satisfaction. Mr. Goleman argues it is only effective in a crisis, when an urgent turnaround is needed. Even the modern military has come to recognize its limited usefulness.

Now, check out this video of  Jeff Weiner the CEO of Linkden! Lead by Inspiration

Adapted from “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management” by Alan Murray, published by Harper Business.

N.E. Partners: 9 Black Belt Techniques for Fighting Laziness at Work

Laziness can ferociously creep up on us at work even when we’re consciously committed to getting things done.  It’s a byproduct those evil shiny objects passing through our periphery just begging for attention.  We try to fight them off, but sometimes it’s an arduous battle we can’t seem to win.  After all, being lazy is what our unconscious minds would rather being doing anyways.  

Not all is lost though.  With the help of a few black belt techniques, laziness can be conquered.  You just have to game your mind before your mind falls victim to the lazy game.  Here’s how…

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
- Anne Frank

1. Fully Understand the True Consequences of Being Lazy – If you are habitually lazy on the job there’s a good chance that you’re not fulfilling all of your responsibilities.  If you’re not fulfilling your responsibilities then you’re not doing your job, and thus, you’re not worth paying.  It’s only a matter on time before your superiors notice this and eliminate the dead weight.  There’s a pretty good article on About.com entitled “How To Get Fired.”  Take a quit look at this article and ask yourself, “How many of these points pertain to laziness?”  Similarly, if a self-employed person gets lazy, you can be fairly certain they will not be self-employed for long.
2. Never Lose Sight of the Whole Elephant – I’ve heard people use the phrase “take one bite of the elephant at a time” more times than I can count.  It is true, breaking up a large project into a series of smaller, bite-sized milestones is a smart way to hone your concentration and keep yourself motivated in the short-term.  However, it is never wise to completely lose sight of the whole elephant (the big picture).  After all, the whole elephant is the only reason you started working in the first place.  At some point you want to get promoted, land that full-size contract deal and have the opportunity to get ahead of the pack.  Those are big picture goals, goals that motivate long-term drive.  You must always remain cognizant of the fact that a bit of laziness now on a few small tasks may snowball into a lengthy stretch of missed opportunities in the future when the judge compares your performance to that of your peers.
3. Don’t Stop Doing… Start the Next Related Task – Once you stop, laziness kicks in and it’s hard to get going again.  The key is to complete a task and then immediately jump to the next related task.  I consider a related task to be any task with a similar type required mental thinking.  Your mind can transition seamlessly between related tasks because your efforts on the previously completed tasks have already geared your mind for the type of work required in all the subsequent tasks.  The sooner you forge ahead, the more confident you will feel going into it and the more productive you will be.
4. Do Work for You Too – Far too often I see competent, hardworking people only doing work for someone else, usually their employer.  When the workload is extremely light (or the day comes to and end), they get lazy and do less instead of transitioning their attention to accomplishing something for themselves.  If all you’re hard work is spent growing someone else’s business and all your free time is spent being lazy, you will never grow a business of your own.  Avoid laziness by spending your down time working for you.  The more you accomplish for yourself, the more motivated you will be in all walks of your work life.
5. Setup Physical Barriers Against Distractions – Distractions lead to laziness, and unfortunately, distractions are friggin’ everywhere!  If you’re like me, you love to check your favorite blogs and reddit.com 50 times a day.  How do I conquer the urge?  I setup a physical distraction barrier by unplugging my internet connection while I’m working.  If you’re like my wife, Angel, you are prone to spending too much of your “work at home” time watching Lifetime movies.  How do I conquer her urge for her?  I hide the dang remote!  ;-)  In all seriousness, sometimes you must setup physical barriers between yourself and the distractions that attempt to overpower your conscious will to work.
6. Actually Schedule In Late Afternoon Goof-Off Time – One of the most effective anti-laziness tricks I’ve implemented actually involves scheduling in goof-off time each afternoon at 4PM.  By doing so, I have slowly eliminated my spontaneous urges to check my favorite blogs and news sites because I now know I have a scheduled time to do so.  This may seem odd, or even somewhat counterproductive, but it has actually skyrocketed my early morning through mid-afternoon productivity levels.  So even though I’ve committed to being lazy in the late afternoon, the entire early part of my day (when my mind freshest) is spent in the zone without the physiological urge to slack off and succumb to laziness.
7. Coach Yourself Out Loud… Inch by Inch – This is another one that sounds strange (literally), but truly is an effective self-motivation method.  Break the task you’re currently working on into a few smaller, logical steps and then coach yourself through them out loud.  “You have to get this done!  This step is so easy!  Let’s do it right now!”  When you complete a step, congratulate yourself on a job well done.  “That was great work!  You’re on fire!  We’re going to be finished with this in no time!”  I find that coaching myself out loud through each step actually makes me more cognizant of my forward progress, thus motivating me to work even harder on the next small step.  Success is just a game of inches.  Every small inch of forward progress is a grand accomplishment, because at some point you will be able to add up all those inches.  When you do, you will find yourself in the end zone… Touchdown!
8. Take Mentally and Physically Active Reward Breaks – Taking a short, productive break in between every solid hour of work is something I strongly recommend, but only if you spend your short breaks doing something that actively stimulates your mind and body.  Inactive activities promote laziness and mid-day fatigue.  Take a quick stroll around the office, get up and talk to someone you enjoy speaking with, or crank-up your iPod and listen to a song that motivates you.  Whatever you do, stay active and alert.
9. Refuel Your Mind and Body with Premium Everyday – You are what you eat!  If you eat like crap, you will feel like crap.  If you feel like crap, you will produce crappy work.  Don’t sell yourself short of your full potential.  Refuel your mind and body with premium,healthy food and 8 hours of sleep each night.  Most unhealthy eaters who don’t receive enough sleep are unsurprisingly lethargic in every waking hour of their existence.

Article taken from: http://www.marcandangel.com/2008/06/23/9-black-belt-techniques-for-fighting-laziness-at-work/

www.nepartners.net 

N.E. Partners: Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Leader

The Wrath of a Great Leader

How Martin Luther King, Jr. wrestled with anger and what you can learn from his example.

Average leaders focus on results, and that's it.  Good leaders focus also on the behaviors that will get the results.  And great leaders focus, in addition, on the emotions that will drive these behaviors. 

One emotion that shapes our behavior is anger, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose 83rd birthday would have been today, knew of the power that came packed in this emotion. 

King had reason enough to be provoked, time and again.  He was physically threatened and attacked by bigoted people, repeatedly jailed by state authorities (sometimes on trivial traffic violations), harassed by the FBI and even vilified by fellow black leaders who preferred more aggressive forms of resistance.

In his autobiography, King wrote about this incident that occurred in 1943: "When I was 14, I traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley (to) participate in an oratorical contest.  We were on a bus returning to Atlanta. Along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us. I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. We stood up in the aisle for 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."  

Great leaders often have a strong capacity to experience anger.  It wakes them up and makes them pay attention to what is wrong in their environment, or in themselves.  Without anger, they would not have the awareness or the drive to fix what is wrong. 

But they also know the downside of anger, and wage a firm battle to tame it within themselves.  One such moment for King came when, in December 1955, he led talks with the authorities in Montgomery, Alabama on negotiating the end of the bus boycott that was hurting both whites and African Americans. He realized that the whites were not ready to give up their segregation privileges, the talks were heading for a stalemate, and, what was more, the other party was trying to portray King as the sole stumbling block to an agreement.

"That Monday I went home with a heavy heart," he wrote in his autobiography. "I was weighed down by a terrible sense of guilt, remembering that on two or three occasions I had allowed myself to become angry and indignant. I had spoken hastily and resentfully. Yet I knew that this was no way to solve a problem. 'You must not harbor anger,' I admonished myself. 'You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.'"

Only by taming his own anger did King earn the right to become a messenger of peaceful struggle to the people of the nation.  An acid test came his way on a night in 1956 when his home in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by white extremists. In his autobiography, he wrote: "While I lay in that quiet front bedroom, I began to think of the viciousness of people who would bomb my home. I could feel the anger rising when I realized that my wife and baby could have been killed. I was once more on the verge of corroding hatred. And once more I caught myself and said: 'You must not allow yourself to become bitter'."

That night, he didn't just quell his own stirring for vengeance, but also that of the restless and roused masses who were outside his house, angered and ready to strike a blow at the establishment until they were soothed and moved by his words: "We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know that you love them."

But don't get me wrong.  In these moments, he wasn't trying to crush his anger, or that of his people.  He was trying to channel it into a higher purpose.   

In September 1962, as King sat on the stage during an Southern Christian Leadership Convention, a white member of the Nazi party jumped up to the podium and punched him several times in the face.  As the security guards rushed to his help and pulled away the hate-filled youth, King responded, calmly, that he would not press charges. In response, he said in Martin Luther King on Leadership: "The system that we live under creates people such as this youth. I am not interested in pressing charges. I'm interested in changing the kind of system that produces this kind of man."   

Great leaders do not ignore their anger, nor do they allow themselves to get consumed by it. Instead, they channel the emotion into energy, commitment, sacrifice, and purpose. They use it to step up their game.  And they infuse people around them with this form of constructive anger so they, too, can be infused with energy commitment, sacrifice and purpose. In the words of King in Freedomways magazine in 1968, "The supreme task [of a leader] is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force." 

So now, what is your relationship with anger? 

• Are there situations that you're ignoring or minimizing that instead should rouse you up?  For instance, when your organization is not delivering products on time, customers aren't being given the experience they should, top management isn't taking action on a festering issue, or you're not changing a habit that is derailing you?  In such cases, how might you benefit from getting in touch with your feelings of anger, frustration, or disappointment and channeling them into a higher purpose?

• Or is anger in fact a frequent visitor in your inner home?  In such situations, does anger control you, or do you control it?

• Do you sense when others around you are angry, or when anger in fact needs to be ignited within them so they get all fired up for the right reasons?  Do you help them channel it into positive action? 

In my personal leadership class at Columbia Business School, we discuss specific techniques all of us can use to master anger.  Some of these involve behaviors such as deep breathing or hitting the pause button in a heated argument, while others involve reframing the situation and challenging your own thoughts. King was a master at challenging and re-sculpting his thoughts, and he was doing exactly that on that dark day in 1956 when his house was bombed, "And once more I caught myself and said: 'You must not allow yourself to become bitter'."   

I'll end this column with the words of another great leader, the one who taught Martin Luther King, Jr. his signature technique of peaceful struggle, Mahatma Gandhi. "I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world." (Young India journal, September 1920.)

May the force of constructive anger be with you.

N.E. Partners: 14 Ways to Get Insanely Motivated

It's the beginning of the year, so with the holidays out of sight, its appropriate to go over 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated in the new year:

1. Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.

2. Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action.  Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.

3. Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.

5. Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.

6. Act with a higher purpose.  Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is wasted effort--and should be avoided.

7. Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

8. Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

9. Don't wait for perfection; do it now! Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life.  Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.

10. Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don't achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.

11. Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow's failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.

12. Avoid weak goals.  Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with "I'll try ..."  Always start with "I will" or "I must."

13. Treat inaction as the only real failure.  If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can't even learn from the experience.

14. Think before you speak.  Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.

N.E Partners: 7 Tips for Productivity

Happy New Years! 2012 a new year, and a new chance to achieve goals we want to hit. With these goals comes staying productive to accomplish them. Here are 7 tips highly productive people do.

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women). 
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead. 
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day. 
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

Article taken from http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/7-things-highly-productive-people-do.html?nav=pop