A Book A Day - Weekly Digest 25

First Things First by Stephen R. Covey

💡Key takeaway💡

A simple and powerful recipe for prioritization.

💎 Key ideas💎

Living a meaningful life isn't about doing things quickly – it's about doing “first things” first. Quickly means focusing on commitments, objectives, journey. First means your compass: values, principles, conscience. First is long-lasting, positive impact on your happiness.

Urgent an important things in your life are not the same. We usually choose urgent tasks, because it is a status symbol, it gives us an adrenaline rush. We have less time for the important, like a family dinner, which brings long-term happiness.

Four basic human needs to increase quality of life: 1) Need to live: food, shelter, health. 2) Need to learn. 3) Need to love: trust, care. 4) Need to leave a legacy: sense of purpose. To fulfil and balance those needs, you focus on your principles, guiding your decisions.

Having a clear vision of your future makes it easier to make choices. It gets you through tough times. Write a personal mission statement for yourself, picture yourself at 80. What do you see? Who is there? What have you done during your life? Focus on steps now towards that future.

A goal that can be reached positively is consistent with your principles. Identify the right thing (what), for the right reason (why) and in the right way (how). Make sure it is within your influence (you can make it happen). It should be driven by importance, not urgency.

Plan in weekly terms when making decisions or plans. Have a weekly calendar to plan all that matters to you (work, family, leisure). Combine goals where you can. Remember your principles to prioritize (helping a friend last minute vs reading a book), that's integrity.

Focusing on independence and competition brings rushing and lack of attention, leading to poor health, and relationships. Our four basic human needs call for interdependence and cooperation. That brings win-win situations, even through difficult moments.

Trust, respect, honesty naturally lead to empowerment in others around you. Involve others in your decision making. Encourage subordinates to come up with their solutions. When leading, focus on trust and accountability, get regular feedback from those you lead. Whether it's family, work, friends.

All our roles and tasks in life are related (work, family, free time, etc.). You can use your social skills for work, and your professional skills for personal life. Connect what can work together, don't compartmentalize. (spend time with children + love playing tennis = play tennis with children)

Preventers of inner peace: discouragement, pride, unrealistic expectations. The biggest key to reaching inner peace if putting "first things first". Put the rocks in a jar first, then you can still put gravel, sand and even water. The rocks are the most important things, when you put them first, everything else falls into place.

#ABookADay #readingbooks #firstthingsfirst

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan

💡Key takeaway💡

Life is a game in which you are juggling five balls: work, family, health, friends, integrity. The work ball is made of rubber, if you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four are made of glass.

💎 Key ideas💎

All items on your to-do list are not equally important. This was discovered by Joseph Juran at General Motors, 80% of defects in cars came from 20% of production flaws. The Pareto Principle, (from Vilfredo Pareto), who wrote this model about wealth and income distribution. A few tasks contribute most to your success.

Ask the focusing question: What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary? Macro level: see the big picture, identify your overall goal (one thing to achieve in life), find the right direction. Micro level: one thing you can do right now, find the right action.

The secret to a disciplined life is sequential habit forming. It's about using discipline selectively to form good habits. Like Michael Phelps, diagnosed with ADD, focusing on one habit: swimming every day (from 14 to Beijing Olympics). Once one habit is formed, shift your discipline to another one.

Multitasking is horribly inefficient. There is a time penalty every time we switch tasks, the more complex, the bigger the tax. On average office workers are distracted every 11 minutes. Figure out what matters most in the moment and give it your undivided attention.

Our willpower drains at varying rates through the day. Focusing our attention, suppressing emotions, modifying our behavior for a goal. Then we don't resist snacking. Judges are more likely to give favorable parole judgments a the start of the day than at the end. It's better after snacks, breaks. Choose carefully when to use it your willpower.

In order to preserve your time and energy for your biggest goals, you need to say no to lower-priority requests. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he reduced the products from 350 to 10. Find systems that remove trivial asks coming to you.

Living with purpose and visualizing the steps to get to your goal will set you on the path to extraordinary results. It gives your life added meaning and purpose, bringing greater clarity, more conviction in your actions, faster decisions, inspiration and motivation under stress.

A balanced life is unobtainable and undesirable because if we try to do everything we short-change everything we do. Never sacrifice priorities in your personal life when there is pressure at work. Prioritize your work time ruthlessly to focus on professional goals.

To focus on your ONE thing, you need effective time-management strategies like scheduling blocks of time to work on it. Defend them like the most important thing in your life. Ensure your physical environment does not distract you. Accept some chaos in other areas that you are not focusing on.

#theonething

The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

💡Key takeaway💡

Part of the top ten mental models in life. Applicable to work, your business, your life. Keep your eye on the ball.

💎 Key ideas💎

Have you ever had a project were most of the work was accomplished in the few days before the deadline? Many businesses have 20% of their products accounting for 80% of their profits. Or 20% of motorists cause 80% of accidents. 80/20 principle: 80% of results/output produced by 20% of work/input.

We expect the world to be balanced, but imbalance is the norm. Less than 1% of the words in English language make up 80% of what we say. These imbalances happen because of feedback loops over time. A small advantage turns progressively in a bigger one. Some imbalances seem unfair: income distribution.

Looking at your work, probably 80% of your efforts are inefficient. What would happen is you can redeploy the 80% of efforts on the 20% of truly efficient work you do? Examine, analyze your work to find inefficiencies. You might be over-thinking at the start of a project. Learn to stop this or avoid.

For your business, identify the products generating the most profits, it's probably 20% of them or any imbalanced ratio. Leverage and amplify the potential of the 20%. Prioritize them, focus your resources on them.

Internal complexity in a business has huge hidden costs (logistics, training, administration). Narrow down your focus and product range, people will be able to devote their attention and depth of understanding of the products. Less administrative work, economies of scale. The least complex mid-size companies are most successful.

In negotiations, the points to discuss are known, but there are too many of them. Only a few points actually matter to you or the other party. Target your marketing efforts on the 20% of customers, give them great customer service.

Apply 80/20 thinking to your life, like relationships, some friends give you more value (joy, camaraderie) than others. Here you can estimate, who are the most important people in your life? How much quality time do I spend with them every week? Go for quality (depth), not quantity.

Time management aims at fitting more tasks into a period of time. Time revolution (80/20), first identifies the 20% of tasks producing 80% of the achievement, then focus on them.

Most people define quality of life by their level of happiness. But few change their lives to be happier. Try to identify the distribution of happiness and unhappiness in your life, trace their causes, act for change. For the 80% not contributing, reduce the time spent. Then you have more time for the 20%.

#8020rule

Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, James Wood

💡Key takeaway💡

Everyone ends up managing a project at some point, whether for life or at work. Aside from a good PM tool, the principles explained here are golden. As an ex-PM, I fully endorse them.

💎 Key ideas💎

The most important part of PM is to be a leader radiating informal authority. Like Nelson Mandela, MLK, not having a formal authority but inspiring millions.

Four fundamental behaviors for a leader:

1) Demonstrate respect, particularly under stress.

2) Listen first, talk second. When you listen, you speed things up as productivity increases (respect).

3) Clarify expectations. Show colleagues hoe their work fits in the big picture.

4) Practice accountability. Treat others as you want to be treated. Set the standard.

Initiate. First, find your stakeholders, everyone involved or impacted by your project. Interview them to explain your project and get their opinions, expectations. This creates awareness on all sides.

Plan. The first step here is to identify the risks your project involves, together with your team. Then find mitigations for them. 2nd step is to figure out your project deliverables (goals). Identify all activities required to complete them. 3rd step is to schedule the activities, identifying the sequence in which they should be ordered. See what are the activities which are critical to your project delivery. Put extra resources there.

Execute. Accountability is key here, it is a driving force to building trust with team members. Stick to your commitments, to reinforce your informal authority. Use team accountability sessions, 30-minute meeting every week to share where people are with their deliverables, get suggestions on how to solve roadblocks, support others if they are ahead.

Monitor and Control. The key part to control is scope creep, the project starting to grow outside of its boundaries, and burying it. Change is necessary during execution, but you need to select what you accept. Spend the time to analyse the impact of the change on time and cost, with facts.

Close. Whether successful or not, the project should end with a stakeholder meeting, like it started. You discuss whether the goals were met, and if you are satisfied with the end results. You get feedback on how to do better next time so you can apply it in future projects. Do the same with your project team, treat them with respect (no finger pointing). Don't forget to celebrate, do it in a personalized way (like written notes).

#projectmanagement

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, Robert H. Waterman Jr.

💡Key takeaway💡

When I read older books, it makes me realize how much we tend to re-hash what has been said before. This book dates back to 1982, most of its lessons on management excellence are still spot on.

💎 Key ideas💎

The authors selected a list of the US top 15 companies, from 43 contenders. The criteria for selection were: 1) The company's reputation among businessmen, consultants, business academics. 2) Basic measures of growth, long-term wealth creation (ROC, ROS) over 20 years.

All 15 companies had an action bias (get things done). They have organizational fluidity, an ability to resolve issues requiring multiple departments. They have vast informal networks for communication. They also had small, spontaneous groups working on solving specific problems.

They have a service obsession. The needs of the customer intrude in every facet of the business. Pushing for 24 hours resolution of complaints like IBM. It also enables innovation, like P&G putting atoll free number on its products, leading to many suggestions for improvement.

Small businesses produce 24x more innovation per dollar than large firms. The best US firms do better, they use internal competition between teams and products. They embrace failure by encouraging experimentation and entrepreneurship. Like 3M reusing failed experiments for different purpose.

They have a deeply ingrained respect for individual employees. Creating people-oriented working environments, investing time and money into people's development, holding them to reasonable expectations. They are at forefront of new practices centered on people respect.

Excellent companies set out qualitative values to inspire employees at every level of the company. Companies that fared the worst were the ones with financially oriented values. One shared core value for the best was innovation at every level. With a belief that everyone is capable of innovating in a company, not just R&D.

When excellent companies diversify their products, they tick to their knitting. They keep the new products consistent with their central skills and strengths. 3M has 50,000 products, add 100 new ones each year, but each one relies on the company's signature coating and bonding technology.

Best large companies embrace simple organization form and lean staff. Minimal administrative, managerial, executive layers and an unchanging organization structure.

Encourage your employees to freely use company resources in their free time. Playing with the tools of the trade can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

#excellence