So much of what gets passed off as productivity involves trying to do more tasks. If the value of your tasks are all equal, then this might make sense, but not all tasks are equal. Imagine you have 10 tasks you could potentially work on today. Nine have a value of one, but the tenth one has a value of ten times that. Even if you are able to complete all nine of those low values tasks, you have failed if you don’t complete the high-value task. Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash The productivity benefits of doing more things are minuscule compared to the gains of doing the most valuable ..read more

John was the CEO of ACME Toothpaste and he was always looking for ways to make his factory more efficient. One of the areas he was looking into was the problems caused when an empty box somehow made its way to a store without containing a tube of toothpaste. When a large box packed with individual boxes of toothpaste arrived at a store, the store would check in the big box and then unpack the individual boxes onto the shelves. If one of the individual boxes was missing a tube of toothpaste, it caused a lot of inconvenience for the store and the company because of the amount of time it took to ..read more

Everyone “knows” that college graduates make more money than people without a college degree.  So, if you take everyone with a college degree and put them in bucket A, and put everyone without a college degree in bucket B, the average wage of bucket A will be higher than B. So, does that mean you should get a college degree in order to get higher income? Does getting a college degree actually help you earn more money? No. It doesn’t. Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash The real thing that will help you earn more is acquiring valuable skills.  Many people acquire skills in college, so it ..read more

In an effort to help you be more productive during the Christmas shopping season, here are two ideas for family Christmas gifts that are focused on sharing photos with family. I’ve  given both of these devices as gifts to family members in the past and they have been very well enjoyed for years. Google Chromecast The Chromecast might seem like an odd family gift, but it has a nice little feature that lets you set it up to play a slideshow from a Google Photos album.  If you hook this up to a TV at Grandma’s house and give all of her grandkids access to add photos to the album, s ..read more

Minimalism means very different things to different people. What someone living in downtown LA considers a minimalistic existence is probably very different from what someone who lives a nomadic life on the plains of Africa would consider minimalistic. What I want to talk about here is a type of minimal minimalism. The goal isn’t to get rid of all of your stuff or get down to only 100 possessions. Minimal minimalism is about recognizing that most things cost much more than simply their purchase price and very few things are actually “free” when all factors are considered. Photo by Ashim D’Silv ..read more

Some time ago, the New York Times had an article talking about how the United States Postal Service started scanning every piece of mail in response to the anthrax attacks back in 2001. This was part of a program called the Mail Isolation and Tracking system. That infrastructure can now be used by most people to get images of the pieces of mail that are going to be delivered to your mailbox each day. This service is called Informed Delivery and if it is available in your area, you can sign up for it here. Every day you’ll get an email showing you the mail that will be delivered. It d ..read more

If you want to be productive, you must complete work. Almost everything we do has multiple stages to completion and in many situations, you don’t actually create value until you finish the last stage. Farmers can’t sell their grain until it is harvested. Automakers can’t sell a bunch of cars that have made it 90% of the way through the assembly line. Most employers aren’t going to pay you for having a degree unless you finished the last class and graduated. Now all those things require starting, but if you have work in progress, the most valuable thing you can do is to pick something and fini ..read more

I’ve tried a number of Bluetooth earpieces and headphones and finally found one that I’d buy again after using it for two years. The earpiece is the Plantronics Voyager Legend. One of the big things I was looking for in an ear piece was the ability to mute it from the device itself. If I’m on a call, and there is some sort of background noise I don’t want to share, I don’t want to have to find the mute button on the phone or on my computer. This is especially important because I make a lot of calls while we are traveling and it is easy to get into a situation where I need to say something ..read more

If you are really focused on expanding your capabilities, your salary is probably a secondary motivation when it comes to employment. Your major motivation is going to be your learning and growth opportunities. The graph below shows how learning opportunities change over time. At the beginning of any job, you will have many opportunities to learn because everything is new.  This section is marked by the green zone. Every day will involve new experiences and learning new things. As time goes on, this tends to level out, as shown by the yellow zone. Sometimes the yellow zone is only tempo ..read more

If you want to reach your full potential you must constantly evaluate yourself.  There are always obstacles.  Sometimes, it might be a lack of skill, so you go back to school.  At other times, it might be interpersonal skills that you need to develop.  However, one of the biggest hurdles is something that doesn’t get much attention.  I’m going to call it a social glass ceiling. Whether we admit it or not, our ideas about what we can accomplish are very much related to the capabilities of the people we are around.  It is as if we have an internal bell curve that we ..read more