process

Signs that you are a micro-manager

By / September 12, 2014

This client’s issue was that she continually put in over 10 hours a day in a draining work environment. Although she had desires to do other hobbies and side businesses, she was too exhausted to do anything about those other dreams. She self-diagnosed herself as having no follow-through, although at the office – she had lots of follow-through.

After hearing her story, I suggested that she was actually micromanaging her people too much. This was taking her time away from the items she really wanted to accomplish as well as zapping all her energy. Her knee-jerk reaction was that she was not a micro-manager.

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You can’t get your money, unless you ask for it

By / August 2, 2013

4 weeks after I had completed his taxes for him, I asked this friend-first-removed if he had received his refund yet. He confessed that he has the forms signed, but he has not mailed them in yet.

“Well — you know you can’t get your money, until you mail the forms in….”

It’s the same in life and work. It’s more difficult to get what you really want if you don’t explicitly ask for it and then follow-through with your plan.

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Keeping an external job offer alive

By / August 2, 2013

It’s usually bad news when your job offer is put on hold. Sometimes the offer disappears. So what strategies can you employ to make sure you keep that offer alive even if the employer has to suspend plans for bringing you on board?

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How can a career vision help me with my career

By / June 11, 2013

Steve Wynkoop and I were talking a lot about designing and managing our professional careers on a weekly interview on SSWUG.org. This episode was about what steps to change your position in the your current company.

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Prototype your way to Real

By / January 3, 2011

When project managing for innovation and change, three important steps are getting great inspiration, having an effective idea generation session, and then moving your ideas forward with prototyping. Consider your personal and organizational prototyping practices: do you prototype across a wide range of levels, from rough to real? Do you prototype both your tangible and intangible concepts, as you might for service design and organizational change? Take a look at the following post to imagine your path this year on what and how to prototype – for yourself or across your company.

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Use a “Decision Tree” for Effective Daily E-mail Management

By / March 31, 2010

Randy Dean shares his “e-mail decision tree” for handling new e-mails received throughout the day, balancing time to complete embedded tasks inside of those e-mails, priority of the tasks in those e-mails, and your desire for organizational efficiency inside of your inbox.

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Are You Managing Your Projects, or Is Your E-mail Managing You?

By / March 29, 2010

This post features a recommended “daily start-up” routine that will keep you focused on your key projects and priorities rather than being driven by your e-mail and the “crisis du jour” on a daily basis, by Randy Dean, the author of the recent Amazon E-mail Bestseller, Taming the E-mail Beast.

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