focus

It’s time to be outcome driven - Felipe Castro - OKR Trainer, Speaker, Author As Benedict Evans points out, humans have a clear tendency when they get new tools: There’s an old saying that when we get a new tool, we begin by making it fit the old way of working, and then we change the way we work to fit the new tool. ...

Illustation of how distributing work on 4 streams in parallel will delay the end date of all of them, even though it seems like you are making progress in all fronts. Contrast with the benefits of fully focusing on a single stream at a time, and the impact in has on the end date of 3 of the 4 streams, with the 4th one staying the same. Opportunity cost calculation - Google Drawings ...

Excessive complexity is nature’s punishment for organizations that are unable to make decisions. — Gregor Hohpe in The Architect Elevator You can trace its origin to my original blog post on IT complexity from 2018.

Seth’s Blog: More trouble than it’s worth In five words, that’s one secret to delight. When you do the work that others can’t possibly imagine doing, you set yourself apart. Seeking out the things that are more trouble than most people think they’re worth is a powerful place to be. The hard part, of course, is actually doing something that appears to be far more trouble than it’s worth.

The philosophy of great customer service | Derek Sivers (Actually, I prefer the term “client care”, since “client” implies a relationship, instead of “customer”, which is transactional. But I’ll use the normal term instead of confusing things by using mine.) You can afford to be generous The customer is more important than the company Customer service is a profit center Every interaction is your moment to shine Lose every fight Rebelliously right the wrongs of the world

Treat people at the end of the relationship like it’s the beginning, and there won’t be an end. Tony Robbins

Inspiration is perishable… Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (via REWORK: The new business book from 37signals. ) If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore. ...

How to Create a Business that Prints Money | Forever Jobless Step 1: How can you create something of value in a market better than what’s out there? Step 2: When you do that, how can you reach your potential audience? If you can answer “yes” to both, do you have something you think you’ll enjoy, and can make an amount of money that may be interesting to you? Cool. Jump in. ...

The default state of any new idea is failure. It’s the execution–the fight against inertia–that matters. Dustin Curtis (via The Fight ) It’s so easy to get stuck in the waiting place, putting things off until later, even when those things are vitally important to making your dreams come true. But the truth is that, in order to make progress, you need to physically and mentally fight against the momentum of ordinary events . ...

Don’t hate, create. Ben Horowitz (in Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture | Re/code )

The instinct to produce great work doesn’t require a fancy notebook. Seth Godin (via Seth’s Blog: A productivity gap )

A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption. When interrupted during an edit of a method, only 10% of times did a programmer resume work in less than a minute. A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day (via Programmer Interrupted )

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Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. Voltaire (via Wikiquote ) (en) *The best is the enemy of the good.\ (pt) O óptimo é inimigo do bom.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Donald Knuth (via When optimal matters ) ...

90% of the decisions you make don’t matter; real success comes in being able to identify the 10% that do and focus on those. via Charlie Kindel | cek.log

The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor | cek.log The 5 Ps : PURPOSE, PRINCIPLES, PRIORITIES, PLAN, AND PEOPLE (…) a tool that helps projects be focused: the “5Ps”: Purpose : Why do we exist? Why are we in business? Where do we want to be in the future? What will we deliver? Principles : What are the non-negotiable rules and key strategies? How will we act? Priorities : What’s the framework for tradeoffs? Plan : How are we going to stage and tackle solving the problems? What are the known dates & forcing functions on the calendar? People : Who’s accountable for every key part of the plan? There are tons of frameworks/tools for helping people understand roles & responsibilities. (…) They can all be made to work, as long as you don’t over-do it (just like you should not over-do the 5 Ps). To illustrate (…) I’ll use RACI : ...

Chuck Blakeman / Why Our Favorite Questions Keep Us On The Treadmill If you only ask the first four questions, you are likely to only make enough money to pay your mortgage. If you ask the last two, “when” and “why”, every time you ask the others, you are likely to build a business a real that makes money when you’re not around. Get off the treadmill. Ask when and why all the time. ...

If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will | LinkedIn Step 1: Review the year, month by month. Step 2: Ask, “What is the news?” Look over your list and reflect on what is really going on. Step 3: Ask “What would I do in my career if I could do anything?” Step 4: Go back and spend a bit more time on Step 3. Step 5: Write down six objectives for next year and place them in priority order. ...

The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can “own” in another person’s mind. People can’t think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us but people can only think of us as one thing first. At any one time there is only one phrase that can follow our name. ...