Quotes About Management

Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don't know the balance or the limit - it's a lot easier to be irresponsible.

The ability to leverage that thinking with good collection devices that are always at hand is key to increased productivity.

have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven't had a lot of success with getting organized is simply that they have tried to do all five steps at one time.

you don't manage priorities—you have them.

Distinguishing actionable from nonactionable things is the first key success factor in this arena. Second is determining what your potential use of the information is, and therefore where and how it should be stored. Once these are addressed, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want.

how they might be articulated into productive shape.

of professionals down in the trenches, I can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, of our projects and our lives.

You can't organize what's incoming—you can only capture it and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you'll need to take based on the decisions you've made about what needs to be done.

Ask yourself, "When do I need to see what, in what form, to get it off my mind?" You build a system for function, not just to have a system.

To manage actionable things, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you're waiting for.

We need to transform all the "stuff" we've attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information. Almost all of the to-do lists I have seen over the years (when people had them at all!)

Horizontal control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.

The traditional approaches to time management and personal organization were useful in their time. They provided helpful reference points for a workforce that was just emerging from an industrial assembly-line modality into a new kind of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do it.

Vertical control, in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

There are no interruptions—there are only mismanaged inputs.

Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. —David Kekich

It's OK to decide not to decide—as long as you have a decide-not-to-decide system.

A "Projects" list • Project support material • Calendared actions and information • "Next Actions" lists • A "Waiting For" list • Reference material • A "Someday/Maybe" list

The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain, so all the links must be integrated and supported with consistent standards.

Having an organizational tool that allows you to easily make lists such as these, ad hoc, is quite worthwhile.

Amira In training and coaching thousands of professionals, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they themselves may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.

Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. —David Kekich The methods I present here are all based on two key objectives: (1) capturing all the things that need to get done—now

capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you—

How much available data could be relevant to doing those projects "better"? The answer is: an infinite amount, easily accessible, or at least potentially so, through the Internet. On