I’ve recently had the privilege of speaking at the national conference of TravelManagers Australia, a subsidiary of New Zealand’s House of Travel. Kim Mason, one of their top agents, is a young mum in Sydney and yet she runs her travel business in about 20 hours a week. Given that travel is usually a very [...]
Continue reading about Overloaded? Educate the people around you how to treat you. »
Does it ever feel like your organisation pays a mere lipservice to work/life balance? On a trip to Sydney to speak at a conference, I got into conversation with the chap in the next seat – John is a senior account manager for a very large multi-national firm and sells very high value products. We’d already done [...]
Continue reading about Who’s Responsible For Work/Life Balance? »
Want to beat procrastination? Here’s some easy tips you can apply right now! Have deadlines for your goals. Beware, however, of being unrealistic. Working towards impossible deadlines is very de- motivating and won’t help you break the procrastination habit. Break a task down to smaller, bite-sized pieces with realistic achievable time-lines. This can often help [...]
Continue reading about The Procrastination Tightrope And How To Keep Your Balance »
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Mr Common Sense. Mr Sense had been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such value lessons as knowing [...]
How many times do we hear people say ‘I haven’t got time to .. ‘? Many times that is true, but if you notice yourself repeatedly using this phrase, step back a bit and analyse what it is you’re referring to. What are you really saying? You haven’t got time to teach someone else? You haven’t [...]
Continue reading about In Order To Go Faster, First You Must Go Slower »
Do you find that interruptions are the constant companion of an open plan office? If you’ve been one of my ‘family’ of readers for a while, you’ll possibly already know my thoughts on unmoderated open plan environments, but in case you’re new, or missed my previous comments, here’s the snippet from‘Getting a Grip on the Paper [...]
Continue reading about Battery People: The Dark Side Of Open Plan Offices »
A key question for the problem of space and information storage and management is ‘do I really need it?’ And following that, ‘what can I prevent coming into my space?’ Faxes: Get off fax lists of unwanted information. First port of call is to contact the offending company and politely request removal. If they choose [...]
Who opens the mail? Who does the filing? Do you find yourself constantly getting bogged down with tasks somebody else could do? Over lunch some time David Eddy, Project Director of a great First Time Principals programme via Auckland University, shared the following tip. It was given to him by a colleague early in [...]
In my farming childhood the principle of fallowing a paddock was common (leaving ground uncultivated for a season, in order to rest the land, restore its fertility, and prepare it for a new crop.). These days, however, it’s not a word you often see or hear, except in cropping country. It was therefore with [...]
Continue reading about You Don’t Have To Work This Hard! – Positive Slow-Time »
One day I took most of the day off – went beachcombing with four of my grandchildren, aged 3 – 8. Three things combined to create a weekday that felt like a delicious holiday, despite the pile of work waiting: It was school holidays in New Zealand It was wedding anniversary time-out for their hard-working parents [...]
Continue reading about A Lesson In Stress Management From The Kids’ »