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After becoming extremely efficient in my time management, I realized that I had just spent a year being really good at what I was already doing. However, I was still basically in the same place as I was a year before. I hadn’t moved to my dream home, the
In other words, unsuccessful people hope to be lucky. Hard work beats luck. Friends have told me that chess is a game of luck: the more they practice, the luckier they get. Success is the same way.
Begin with the end in mind by asking the big questions: What do I want my IT organization to be like two years from now? What do I want to have accomplished in my career five years from now? Where do I want to be socially and financially 10 years from now? What do I want my life to be like when I retire?
What do I want to achieve? When do I want to have achieved it? Everyone forgets the when. It’s easy to never begin if you don’t set a deadline. In the chapter opening, I was careful to include a specific deadline for each goal.
In preparation for writing down your goals, take a moment to think about your values . What do you see as your personal mission? Do you believe in helping others or letting others help themselves? Do you want to be rich or happy (or can both be achieved)? Do you value independence or cooperation? Do you value community or self-interest?
Setting Goals How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (Signet) is a classic book on time management. The book brings out the
To achieve your long-term goals, you need to know what they are and work toward them. If you don’t write down your goals, you end up spinning your wheels or depending on luck.
Goals should be measurable: they need a tangible result or numeric measurement that, for example, someone else could check.
Goals should have deadlines: knowing when a goal should be achieved helps set the pace. Begin by listing your one-month, one-year, and five-year goals for work and your life. Prioritize them. List steps required to achieve these goals. Sprinkle the next step of each goal into future to do lists. Once a month, review the goals and steps, reprioritize if needed, and sprinkle more “next steps” into your to do lists. Work the next steps as part of your regular to do list management. Gradually, each g...
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Prioritizing Based on Customer Expectations Here’s a little secret I picked up from Ralph Loura when he was my boss at Bell Labs. If you have a list of tasks, doing them in any order takes (approximately) the same amount of time. However, if you do them in an order that is based on customers’ expectations, your customers will perceive you as working faster. Same amount of work for you, better perception from your customers. Pretty cool, huh?
walked into Les Lloyd’s office and said, “Les, I may be a freshman now, but someday I want to be one of the student managers here at the computer center.” He
It sounded greedy at first, but then I realized, who am I to judge? So I redirected my priorities to make sure that those criteria were met.
Well, if you’re smart enough to know more about what’s right for your company than your boss’s boss, it shouldn’t be very difficult to find a way to meet both goals at the same time.
When you visibly contribute to making your boss a success, it opens many doors. He will spend extra effort helping
Action expresses priorities. — Mahatma Gandhi Summary
make sure your boss knows your career goals, use upward delegation only when it leverages his authority, and understand his goals and be part of accomplishing them.
Sadly, he couldn’t always stop what he was doing to listen to someone, so he had a teddy bear in his office. When he was busy, he would tell people to “talk to the bear.” It worked very well. Soon he found people stopping by his office and going straight to the bear.
word we would use that would mean, “You’re too stressed to see how stressed you are.” It was a code word so that it could be said in front of others without embarrassment. He did it for me and I did it for him. It was very helpful.
I want a hotel that, for a small charge, promises that I will be completely prevented from getting anywhere near any kind of Internet access.
Taking a long vacation is one way to test that theory without suffering bodily harm. Here’s my advice about taking
anything as root or Administrator. You don’t want to make any changes that can’t be fixed. If the temptation is great, distract yourself: spend the day writing documentation.
It would be nice if every five minutes our brains would think, “Gosh, what’s the benefit of what I’m doing right now?”
Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper bringing-up, a sound set of values — and witnesses.
Gosh, isn’t it an amazing coincidence that those things are already well-documented and ready for someone else to take over?
Document the steps, then automate them. If you can’t write down the steps, you’ll never figure out how to automate them.
keeping all of the steps in your head, you can show the document to other people to have them verify the process.
To err is human; to really screw up, be careless with root.
Fighting injustice is like dropping acorns wherever you go. Sometimes, you return to a place and find something wonderful growing; other times, there is nothing. Most of the time, however, you’ll never know how much you’ve changed the world or how many people’s lives you’ve touched. You just have to trust that it was worth it. Peace.
