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.
One of my main sources of inspiration is to read blogs. From my blogroll in Google Reader, I get ideas for new tips on structure, new ways to package my services physically, for innovative ways to market my business.
One of the most well-written and well-run blogs I follow are ...
You can easily be led to believe that the piles on the desk primarily are an aesthetic problem; that it gives a negative impression to someone who comes to pay a visit.
Or, that it’s only a problem with order; that the piles make it difficult to find the documents you are looking for when you need them.
But, unfortunately the problem is more serious than ...
About a week ago, I had the pleasure of giving a talk on structure and personal productivity for West Swedish Sports Confederation here in Gothenburg. We were at Ullevi Conference and the participants came from the sports confederation and from the municipalities of the City of Göteborg.
In conversations after my talk, it became clear to me that ...
This whole business of good structure – isn’t it sometimes the case that we really feel that we would need to work more effectively in our everyday life, but we just don’t know where to start? It’s just too much right now and we can barely keep our heads above the water.
We’ve got so little time that we don’t have the time to change the way we work, even if it’s in order to get more time to work with. It’ll have to be some other time, when we’ve got time.
But, if we continue like this, will the day when we have enough time to start working more
efficiently ever come? Do we really have to wait?
Not the way I see it. Right now is the second best time to start. The best time was yesterday.
So, let us now take only one simple step in the right direction. What would that be?
This week, US website “Small Business Trends Radio” listed the 100 best small business podcasts of 2010.
In the category “Business news and the big picture”, they picked my ...
To be a ”struktör” is very much about visualizing; to clarify what at first sight might be experienced as messy. By structuring and visualizing you make it all apprehensible and tangible. Then it will be easy to see what is big and what is small (it can be problems, opportunities or something else), what’s important and what is not so important, what the next natural step will be et c.
This type of work is a lot easier if you have well adapted tools, tools which you are comfortable with and enjoy working with. The struktör’s eight tools are:
Good morning.
Today is one of my recurring days dedicated to writing.
Right now I am writing about different methods for prioritization. That is, to do the right thing at the right time.
I have written about ...
Are structure and creativity each other’s incompatible opposites? Does clarity and orderliness inhibit creativity? Is chaos a prerequisite for high quality creative expression?
Some people I meet express a fear that if they could improve their structure on the job, they would not be as creative as they are now. They seem to believe that order in itself stops the flow of ideas.
That’s not my experience at all. I would not say that ...
Do you find it hard to compile tasks that were completed in a project or an assignment with the purpose of writing a report or create an invoice from the hours you spend on the project?
Is the result of this that you work until late at night trying to finish the report in time or that you send the invoice much later than you would like to?
Could these difficulties be due to that it’s hard to remember what you did and for how long when trying to remember it long after it was completed?
Here are five simple tips on how to make this process easy as pie.
Yesterday’s “the 100th edition of Swedish ‘Done!”’-party was a success. Well, of course it was, since I have so many charming subscribers who wanted to celebrate with coffee and cake at my office yesterday.
As for all great partys, ...
Have you ever experienced losing the receipts you got during a business trip that you had to account for, that the notes you took during the conference just disappeared, or perhaps the business cards you received at the mingle party apparently were nowhere to be found?
They have probably disappeared because ...
Next Monday, February 22nd, the one hundredth edition of the Swedish version of the weekly newsletter “Done! - Tips on structure from Stiernholm Consulting” is published.
When I started writing these structure tips for almost three years ago, I did not think I would keep up for so long. However,
Most of us spend much of our days in meetings. At the risk of generalizing, I dare say that we all have experienced meetings that we wish we had not attended and that turned out not quite what we had expected. There may be meetings where do not come to any decision, meetings that get prolonged, meetings that start late, meetings that are completely chaotic, etc.
When you want to refine the way you do something, it is a good idea to ask the pros, those that apparently manage to develop their businesses from success to success, mostly by having meetings. A while ago, BusinessWeek published an interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of search products, where she ...
Choose a word, any word, and say it out loud to yourself over and over again. After a while it becomes more like a sound than a word and it looses its meaning.
I’ve experienced a similar effect at a few management team meetings. It may have been the tenth management team meeting for the year and just after lunch when we’ve come to the chart concerning how the eighth key figure is evolving, ...
In early January, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published a feature about the Malmö based company TAT - The Astonishing Tribe.
Among the pictures ...
In a normal week at work, I have got a lot of different meetings with different people. It can be project-meetings, sales-meetings, lunch meetings or other kinds of meetings.
It is important for me that all of my meetings result in some form of progression, that they are tangible, and that all parties know the purpose of the meeting. It is not necessary that we make decisions in every meeting for things to progress; some meetings’ primary purpose is to get to know each other and our respective businesses, but ...
One of the most valuable components of a structured, effective, personal way of working is the weekly update.
If you in your everyday life complete and add tasks to your to-do-list, creating a continuous in and out flow of tasks, it is in itself a good thing. But it often tends to result in a situation where only the tasks of immediate importance are completed, for example the most recently added tasks or those someone recently reminded you to do.
There may be tasks here and there in the to-do-list that you added a couple of months ago, which are of vital importance for your business, but which you couldn’t do anything about at the time. Now might be the right time to complete such a task and if you do not at regular intervals go through your to-do-list, it can easily get lost in the crowd.
This is where the…
To keep and store reference material such as meeting notes, project documents, sketches, correspondence, printouts and other things so that they are easy to find when you need them, is a key factor in a good structure at work.
If we furthermore want the storage method to be aesthetically pleasing even as the material is readily available, it is a real challenge (but an enjoyable such).
A man that ...
An effective way to easily get the right thing done at the right time is to use a to-do-list where you write down everything you have to do and check them off the list once you have completed them.
As I see it, the greatest benefit with this is that you no longer have to keep everything in your head and instead you can relax, knowing that everything awaiting completion is on the list.
But, aren’t we quite a few who have decided to start making to-do-lists, got it going and after a while noticed that all the things we don’t have time to do are what’s on the list since we are only doing the things we are trying to remember? Where and in what format you choose to keep your list is crucial as to how well it will help you.
Here are ten, no, eleven tips to how to be successful with a to-do-list that works in the long run.
I have got an idea and I need your help.
In one of my current assignments, we need to…
