From the Author

As I’ve written many times, increasing your level of productivity and success entails working well with others. That’s not always easy, though, and it’s particularly difficult when working with a group of people who have different opinions, agendas, working styles, and so forth. But there are some ways to forge a viable way forward in […]

All of us develop and regularly exhibit a portfolio of strengths and weaknesses. What’s more, most of us seek to improve on them as much as we can. But we don’t all do this the same way. One common approach is to focus primarily on your weaknesses and strive to lessen their impact on your

It’s less showy, less newsworthy, much less praised than creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. But conscientiousness is a critical element in building productivity and success in your work and your life. As Hillary Clinton has said: “Showing up is not all of life – but it counts for a lot.” Of course, just making an appearance

A key aspect of increasing your level of productivity and success is your ability to work well with other people. Central to that is your skill at recognizing and honoring their emotions. We call this ability “empathy.” As I wrote recently, the right kind of empathy is a major accelerant of productivity: It gets you

As you know, I’m intensely interested in productivity and success, and in finding ways to boost them both. So I was intrigued to come across an interesting perspective that can help that quest. It involves dividing up activities, efforts, and plans into four categories: What you’re good at. What you may soon become good at.

“You didn’t do that very well, did you?” “You made the wrong choice.” “That was stupid.” We’ve all heard critical comments like these directed at us; they’re part of living. But there’s a major difference between hearing those kinds of comments coming from others, and hearing them coming from inside ourselves: from our Inner Critic.

As I’ve written many times before, pretty much the only constant these days is change. And when change happens, nearly always the appropriate response is to update something in order to make it mesh well with the new situation and better handle the new requirements and opportunities. The previous sentence has been an awkward way

As I’ve written recently, I spent many years tracking the time on spent on each of my daily, weekly, and monthly projects. That served me well, as it gave me the data I needed to eliminate time-wasters so I could focus in depth and at length on my most important tasks, projects, and goals. But

I’ve written often about the need for and benefit of working well with others. This time around, I’d like to revisit this topic from a different perspective: empathy. It’s defined as the ability to understand or identify with another person’s situation or feelings. You can empathize just by talking with the other person, and it’s