From the Author

In this blog, and in my book, How to Organize Your Work and Your Life, I spend a lot of time discussing goals. I suggest you identify the goals you’re most interested in, I encourage you to work more consistently toward those goals, and I give advice on breaking down those goals into a series […]

The more successful you become and the more authority you acquire, the more likely it becomes that you’ll face situations requiring very quick thinking. These situations may include: Sudden events or problems that require immediate responses, Unexpected objections or demands from important people, or Surprise questions it’s your job to answer. At such moments, the

Incremental change is great. And in many situations, that’s the best you can manage. But there comes a time when, for many of us, incremental change is not nearly enough. At times like these, the best way forward involves a makeover. I suppose there are as many ways to do a makeover as there are

There’s a lot of advice online about setting goals. In fact, I’ve offered my own share of it. But while just setting some goals you care about naturally generates improvement in your level of productivity and success, goals work even better when you establish a balanced package of work and life targets reflecting a set

Lately I’ve been thinking about the failures in NASA’s 30-year-long Space Shuttle program (1981-2011). There were many, but of course the two biggest were the fatalities associated with Challenger and Columbia. In both cases, the problems that ultimately brought down the shuttle orbiters (a leak in one of Challenger’s solid rocket boosters and a chink

When you need something from another person and you don’ t have the power to just commandeer it, you’ll benefit from applying some basic negotiation techniques. Negotiation is particularly important when you expect to be coming back to this same person for more, maybe multiple times. By negotiating fairly, you leave open the door to

Productivity and success depend on many more factors than your solo smarts, drive, and persistence. One that’s often overlooked is the practical fit between you and the position in which you work: the better this fit, generally the better your results. To gauge this fit, we can look at four simple factors that describe your

As I’ve mentioned many times, your ability to work well with people is almost always vital to your productivity and success. And one of the most important of these “people skills” is interpersonal communication. Communicating well with other people allows you to develop and maintain a more collaborative, understanding, and supportive set of relationships. Ultimately,

How closely does your work situation match up with your dreams? For most of us, there’s a pretty significant gap between the reality we have at work and the reality we’d like to have. And that’s a problem, because when our working situation is not entirely satisfactory, we tend to lose motivation, turn in less

It’s been a long row to hoe, what with some personal issues and the Covid-19 epidemic complicating what would ordinarily have been a difficult and complex revision of my book: “How to Organize Your Work and Your Life.” For example, I was flabbergasted to see how many pages in the earlier editions had been devoted