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This episode is about the productivity paradox. The Productivity paradox has been around for a while, and it’s the economist’s way of saying “we don’t see the productivity value from our investment in IT”. So the question is, companies and people have invested a ton of cash in, I’ll say, desktop IT. Over the 40 […]

I think we get confused about efficiency, and I think this leads us away from actually becoming efficient. There are two concepts that can confuse us. They disguise the challenge that we really actually face around efficiency. And I’ll talk about what all those things are, but if we’ve got the wrong mindset, it leads

This is the ‘set up’ meeting in a typical AC coaching engagement – the first of eight weekly meetings. As a coach, I’m still motivating the work that my client will have to do. I’m also explaining mindset kinds of things. There should be a lot of knowledge you can take away.   Chris’s approach

We all try to help our organization be flexible. We hear about the benefits of flexibility, responsiveness, and flat organizational structure. In addition, we all hear about the power and benefits of teams. We feel that fast communication is good (fast information exchange). So, we avoid structure in the belief that this benefits our organization

In this episode, I’m going to refine our definition of productivity in knowledge work. If you think you know the definition, there’s a good chance you’ll be surprised. I have my customers tell me their definition of productivity; I believe that the typical definition is broken. I’ve seen it lead people to over-think, hesitate, or even

This will be a review of Cal Newport’s book, Slow Productivity. By the way of introduction, if you’ve listened to much of my podcast, you know that I pay a fair amount of attention to Cal and what he’s doing, because I think he’s really bright, really focused on the idea of productivity. If you

When I talk about task and attention management, I usually talk about wastes of attention. And there are three primary wastes of attention that I’ve been able to identify with my clients. They are, in order of easiest to deal with to hardest to deal with: The first is interruption – external things in the

Let’s talk about email, and communication metaphors. You’re not going to be shocked when I tell you that we don’t handle email well. It’s not that we don’t know how to use the app that produces email; that’s pretty straightforward. And I’m not arguing that we don’t know how to deal with emails as items

I try to help you think about how you’re using your attention and, thus, how to manage yourself. What you need to manage is your attention. So, when I see systemic waste of attention or weak self management practices, I try to call them out for you so you can begin to think “do I

In the podcast, we study knowledge work and how to get better at it. This touches on a lot of different disciplines, notably management. Typically, I discuss management as how we should manage ourselves. So, when I talk about managing knowledge work, I usually mean how do we manage ourselves as knowledge workers. I believe