Category: Productivity & Effectiveness

As a long-time executive assistant and project coordinator, I continually search for ways to eek the most out of my time. This is my collection of tips and tools to master your time.

Contemporary Communications

Carl Setzer

A current cultural value: speed. Faster, faster…get more done sooner!

So, with that, one of my recent personal observations: I need to slow down. In the grand flurry of work, I find it easy to wrap myself up in the frenetic nature of life and reactively communicate. My most common culprit: email, though other medium catch that, too.

Taking that moment to consider “what am I trying to say?” and “what do I want to happen?”, then evaluating my content against those proves itself valuable again and again.

Also valuable: thinking through medium. Is an email the best tool to get the results I need? Sometimes I end up shifting to a phone call after a few emails where we talk past each other.

Quite often slowing down, getting focused on quality ends up being by far faster. In my experience, I find that true more often than not.

Thoughts on Effectiveness and Hope 

Carl Setzer

I’ve long been a devote of Steven Covey. To this day, I try to keep his principles in mind. 

One of the central elements is the importance: urgency grid. 

The upper right grid is the key place: but urgent and important. Urgent and important grab priority, followed by urgent and not important. Not important and not urgent tend to grab our time, too. The realm of time wasting. 

Many people cycle between the urgents and time wasting. The not urgent important gets neglected. 

That’s the realm of Hope. This painful cycle minimizes hope; it doesn’t get fed. 

No wonder we swirl about in anger so much. Why we focus on win-lose, why we’re so afraid. 

We never feed hope. 

Paper vs Digital Notes and Vanishing Information

Carl Setzer

Today I was thinking today about the past. I worked on at project, in the mid-nineties, for Amazon. They were located in a single building in downtown Seattle, very close to Pike Place Market. Nothing to dramatic, just installed terminals in a new call center. I had fun. My main memory: a guy brought his Corgi to work every day. About once an hour, a ball would be thrown down the hall and the dog would tear after it. For me, that exemplified the kind of place I wanted to work.

Anyway, I was wondering what I could pull together from that. Who did I work with? For? Was I there for a week? A month?

All that info? Gone. Yeah, that was quite some time ago. But I’m a rather meticulous note-taker, so am a bit bothered by the information being simply gone.

Now, that was pre-digital anything, really. Ok, the world wide web was a thing (duh, Amazon), but I didn’t own a cellphone yet. There wasn’t a smartphone of any stripe (it would be several years before Handspring would launch the Treo). So, yeah…gone.

Much is made about the fragility of digital record keeping. But there’s fragility to paper, too. Sure, these notes may still exist in some box in my garage. But, most likely, they were tossed out, left somewhere, or… There’s no such thing as backing up paper “stuff”.

When I think about using tools like Evernote, Gmail and all the grand life in the Cloud, I’m struck by a key thing: syncing. My digital information is available cross-platform, cross-device, cross-everything. It’s easy to share (and, yeah, subpoena). Which, to me, sells digital over paper.

Now, I do have paper notes, and journals and notes and…I just need to remember to scan them in, just for a backup. Because, who knows, in twenty years, I might really be interested in where I was today.

Writing, Organization and Personal Effectiveness

Carl Setzer

I just read “Why Paper Is The Real Killer App“. Reinforces a number of things I’ve learned the past few years. From the folly of multi-tasking, to the neurological benefits of writing, pen to paper writing. The article even, briefly, talks about cursive (no idea if there’s any benefit to cursive over printing, but it sounds cool. My handwriting, though, might preclude such).

Now, I’ve read quite a bit about the benefits of writing in regards to information retention and processing. Enough so that I’ve considered moving back to my Franklin-Covey Planning system. However, I’ve found another option. As the article above mentions, I’ve moved to a bullet-journal system. Now, the act of writing does seem to activate different parts of the brain than keyboards do. And that’s great! I see another benefit, though. I’m required to slow down, take a minute or two and write out ideas. Though I can write fairly fast, I’m forced to focus more closely on what I am doing. Not having Twitter/Facebook/email/what-have-you constantly popping into your consciousness is very helpful, too.

Check out the video below for a good intro. But, to sum up, it’s a notetaking and organization system that really only needs a notebook and pen. You can buy specially designed ones (when they’re in stock…they’re highly sought for right now).

Today’s Meditation: Gratitude

Carl Setzer

​I need to reclaim my focus on gratitude and service. It’s so easy to lose sight of this, with our focus on the individual, on entitlement. I see so much energy on getting what’s deserved we lose sight of what we can do. Who can we serve? What can I do to make the world better? 

I’m grateful for my family, for that kind of love. It’s easy to get caught up in the challenges, though, and forget that all things fade. What’s here, right now, relentlessly shifts to memory. Keep the mind here; don’t miss this. 

Far too easily I mentally wander into entitlement. Resenting other’s gifts, successes, and foci. Sadly, looking back, I spend far too much time in this soul-robbing state. Wallowing within misery, losing touch with my gifts, my talents. So easy too sink into resentment, where mindfulness and focusing on contribution bring joy. Seeing what I can do, and fo well brings a far happier and effective mental state. 

Living gracefully

So easy to lose myself 

Gratitude focused 

The positive focus

Carl Setzer

I strive to keep the positive focus. That’s where I keep my compass pointed towards. Yet, it’s too easy to get wrapped up in petty squabbles. The amount of energy sucked up by this amazes me. And it damages relationships, creating frictions and distrust. Others see your biases and believe you’re seeing their view as lesser. Judging others tends to only damage relationships.

Somehow, we need to engage each other’s differences in ways that build and grow relationship, not further fracture our already divided society. Keeping our discussions centered upon respect and dignity is key. Also, avoiding rhetorical failures, these key logical fallacies will be crucial. Stay on point and avoid defensive responses. Remember that the goal isn’t to “win”, rather fund a way forward.