Time Management = Self-Management

by | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals

Pausch

 

I found more evidence of just how much we lost when Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch died. Today, while revising my executive coaching materials on goal setting and time management, a colleague mentioned that Randy Pausch was most proud of his talk on time management.

 

Randy Pausch on time management at UVA
We are in the midst of a famine,
a prolonged, widespread deficit of a resource
essential to life: productive time.

 

Pausch’s talk is a thorough and entertaining presentation of the essentials and I highly recommend it for my executive coaching clients (though I can not agree with every suggestion). You may have heard much of it before, but Professor Pausch’s celebrity, good humor, and excellent example give it tremendous impact. You will do something different and better as a result of watching.

Highlights

• Record and priority rank your tasks to reduce stress

• Batch your tasks, questions, and communications by person

• Schedule blocks of time adequate for the task

• Avoid interruptions and distractions

 

The video and the PowerPoint slides, along with lots of other Pausch material, are available here.

Watching this talk may leave you with a big question, especially if the advice is familiar. “Why am I not doing these things despite the knowing that they work?” That gap, the mystery between what we know and what we practice, is my domain: executive coaching.

 

 

Warren Bennis on Leadership

by | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development

 

The Economist newspaper has an excellent summary of Warren Bennis’s work on leadership, adapted from their book: Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus. Bennis makes a strong case for leadership as something to be nurtured and learned.

Four things an effective leader must embody, communicate, and encourage are:

Mr. Bennis and I share, along with many other management consultants and executive coaches, a debt to the pioneering work of Werner Erhard‘s EST and Landmark Education.