Fuller version of Blog Post of February 21, 2009

The Personal Productivity Improvement process that is going to work must have the beauty of laying out a low-demand approach that can produce major change over time. The guarantee of success is that you either earn the outcome you set out to achieve, or you prove to yourself and perhaps to others that you are a person of growth, meaning and promise.

None of this happens by accident, or by force of nature. You make it happen by the kinds of decisions, both broad and small, you make about who you are and what you do.

I had an invigorating discussion on the Project Management applications of this concept Thursday night with the participants in a program of the Maine chapter of the Project Management Institute. I asked the 30 or so people present to choose (with Lego blocks as ballots) the most important factors among 10 that pertain to management of a typical project.

The election outcome, largely tracking with my experience in this exercise over the years, put Communication, Planning/Task Definition, Teamwork and Goal Coordination among Stakeholders at the top of the list.

And those are pretty much what people have no time for in real-world Projects. They just have to get going. The sense of urgency creates a pressure for action without forethought. And this bad habit persists, however many times Projects stumble and fall because of poor decisions about priorities.

The Project Management application may not have obvious lessons for “life management,” or workstyle tune-up, but that is not to say the lessons aren't there. Real life is much the same. We roll along in unthinking acceptance of the idea that there's no other way to live.

On the contrary, a couple of relatively simply decision, faithfully executed, can have a marvelous effect in helping you find out what you've REALLY decided to do with yourself. At the very least, it will be one seven-day period that won't slide anonymously into your accumulating personal history. It will have a marker flag on it.

I've done this, and it's hard to describe the feelings you start to develop about yourself. By defining your future and taking the first steps along the new road, you will have firmly grasped the controls. Now THAT'S decision-making!

  Tune in tomorrow. There's a practical payoff in it for you.