At Stiernholm Consulting, we strongly believe that good structure strengthens productivity. This applies to us as individuals as well as for our organizations. Here, David Stiernholm, Struktör, shares his concrete tips on how to visualize, simplify and get more time for what is important.
You’ve tried it all. You have structured and systematized your workday so that you are aware of all things you need to do, you know where you have your material and you have all your various ongoing projects under control.
You know what your ...
Do you get easily distracted by all the papers on your desk when you really need to focus on a particularly difficult, complicated or urgent task?
Do these papers and piles concern ...
When I wrote about the fact that a massive clean up once in a while isn’t enough to keep our workspaces cleared from distracting clutter, in the Swedish edition of our weekly newsletter Done! before Christmas, Gun-Britt Karlsson got in touch with me.
With regards to keeping the desk clean, she wrote ...
Now I’ve chosen my words for 2011.
It took a few days for the words to fall into place this year (and perhaps they still haven’t settled in just yet).
But, here they are at long last. Stiernholm Consulting will under the year of 2011 be characterized by ...
Today, this year ends and tomorrow begins a new.
When my tempo is high in work periods during the year, I like to clarify and define my projects and next steps in detail. When I am on holiday (like right now), I prefer to relax also from that. These days, ...
We are approaching one of the times during the year when most of us take a longer continuous break. It might as well be the summer vacation, but right now it’s the Christmas holiday.?? During these breaks, a ...
Does your agenda have a tendency to quickly fill up with meetings?
Do you tend to schedule too many meetings during the day and perhaps even have colleagues who “help you out” by calling you to meetings when they know you are not due somewhere else?
Does this result in that ...
This tip is a continuation of last week’s post. In it, just as I will in this, I promote the great structural tool that the “mind-map” is, especially digital versions, that is, those made in one of the mind-map-software available for purchase or downloading free (also referred to as “open source”-software).
A mind-map is especially practical when ...
This week I spent for the most part in Kramfors, a sawmill town on the Swedish High Coast in Västernorrland, which ...
When you have a lot of information you wish to structure in such a way that you get an overview and when you need to clarify and sort out something complex – make a ...
Unfortunately most of us don’t just have e-mails, phone-calls and good ideas which need to be dealt with in our daily lives, but also a continuous inflow of physical papers and material to process.
We receive mail, notes from colleagues, we have ...
I am sure it happens to you, just as it does to everyone, that problems show up in your work as well?
It might be: ...
Presumably, there are days when your to-do-list just keeps growing, when most of the tasks are bigger and more time consuming, so you have difficulties applying the two-minute rule.?? If you would have had a lot of short and simple tasks on the list, it would have been easier, because then you would have been able to take fifteen minutes to quickly handle a handful of two-minute tasks.
Now it feels like ...
Last week, Göteborgs-Posten (west Sweden’s major daily newspaper) made an interview with me about how to combine having your own business and being a parent. Since my kids came along to the interview, ...
Whenever something shows up in your everyday life, ask yourself if it takes less than two minutes to do or complete.??It can be an e-mail, a colleague who asks you to do something, or something you come to think of yourself. If something can be done in less than two minutes, do it right away.??
When something takes that ...
Have you too experienced arriving at work Monday morning, skimmed through what you’ve got to do this week and felt so overwhelmed that you’ve felt completely blocked out? ??You can’t get started and you get nothing done, and this in itself doesn’t exactly improve things.??If this is the case, you’re not alone.
It’s in moments like these ..
Let’s say you’ve got something you want to talk about with a certain person next time you meet him. It’s not that urgent that you need to call instantly, but can wait till you meet next time. Perhaps this is someone who is difficult to reach, even by telephone.
Let’s call him Bob.
It’s easy to remember that ...
To be effective on your own as if you were isolated in your own bubble is one thing, but what about when we work together with other people, in a project or in any form of team?
As soon as we are more than one person, it is easy ...
In times like these, it is more important than ever to work efficiently in the sense that we spend our time doing the right things. ??Now is the perfect time to better refine and elucidate our tasks and assignments so that we really have time for the most important ones, meaning, those which ...
We who do our best to be structured, do it because we want to move forward; we want a progressive movement in our life, in our careers or in our business.
What this “forward” looks like, is different for all of us, but what we have in common is that we decide to achieve something and then work as smoothly as possible in order to succeed. ??That’s why we need to see if we are actually moving forward, as well as define things we can do actively so that we’re truly taking steps in the right direction.
This means that ...
