Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Timeless leadership lessons

I've mentioned in the past that I'm a big fan of Audible, and I have been sprinkling audio books in with my 'normal' reading fare. As part of my 2-book-per-month credit as an Audible Premium Listener, I recently downloaded an audio book called "The 21 Most Powerful Minutes In A Leader's Day" by John Maxwell. It's available in audio via Audible, or in print form or on cassette from Powell's.

When I initially downloaded it, I thought it was going to be another take on the "start your day by planning what you want to do or you'll end up doing a bunch of random stuff." Boy, was I surprised, and pleasantly so.

If you have something against the Bible, this one may not be for you. Otherwise, read on.

This book is a series of short chapters that take stories from the Bible and relate them to leadership lessons that are very thought provoking, and quite poignant.  The "21 Minutes..." in the title refers to the suggestion that you listen to one chapter a day and reflect on it. That process should take about 21 minutes a day.

For the last week or so, I've been listening to one of these chapters each day during my morning commute (on my lovely iPod Shuffle, of course, which is connected to my car stereo). I really look forward to the chapter each morning now, and the thinking about the concepts have already helped me out at work. The first chapter, for example, is about courage and breaking through your current limitations as a leader, and uses the contrast between the leadership styles of David and Saul to illustrate its points.

If you don't mind getting a bit of business teaching from stories written thousands of years ago, I recommend this one. Even if the Bible isn't your thing, why not give it a try? After all, I'm not Hindu, but I have learned a lot from Ghandi.

One other thing I realized after the fact: this book is published by Michael Hyatt's company - if you haven't checked out his "Working Smart" blog, please do. He has some great productivity tips over there.

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[Updated] I'm a shuffler...

Update, April 10, 2005 - yet another reason to become a shuffler:

The other day, someone asked me how long the battery lasts on my Shuffle. I had to say, "I don't know." Which is, of course, the best answer I can hope for as a roving gadget freak!

OK, my latest gadget is really cool. I have the 1 Gig version of the iPod Shuffle and I really like it. It's very tiny (fits in a pocket with no trouble), and holds a ton of audiobooks from Audible (I have a Premium subscription, which gets me 2 books a month). You can also use it for music, of course - it works with iTunes, like the other iPods.

What do I like about this? It's very small, for one. I have a "normal" iPod, and I find I sometimes leave it home when my laptop bag gets too heavy.

Also, the battery life is very impressive, and it recharges directly from my USB port - no other cables to carry around.

Finally, it is dirt simple to use. The controls are so easy to learn.

Why don't you give it a try? The price is reasonable - $99 or so for the 512 meg version, and about $150 for the 1 Gig version.

The link above gets you to Amazon - you can also get them at Target, Circuit City, and a number of other places.

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Outsourcing my drudgery

Just reading a post on Open Loops where Bert talks about outsourcing your taxes to an accountant. I started doing that last year, and it was such a breeze this year to get my taxes in early. Having someone else prompt me for what to do and when was a lot easier than leaving it up to me to schedule time to sit down with TurboTax and do it myself.

Other areas I've outsourced that have added to my quality of life include:

  • I use "Dry Cleaning To Your Door" to handle my laundry and dry cleaning - they pick up my laundry every Monday morning, and deliver it back clean and pressed on Tuesday evening, and it costs the same as going to my local cleaners. When you travel as much as I do, it's easy to miss the pickup hours at the dry cleaners and end up with nothing to wear to a business meeting - that never happens to me any more.
  • I have a great yard guy that comes over every Thursday and cuts my grass, cleans our flower beds, trims trees, etc.
    • costs about $30 per week, and lets me spend my valuable home time with the family (as well as saving me a day of allergy hell every week)

What about you - any areas you are outsourcing to make life more liveable?

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Google puts me in orbit

I see a post tonight on Slacker Manager about a cool use for Google Maps. Well it just so happens that, this afternoon, I was using Google Maps to plot a course to take my family out for dinner at Gino's on Portland's east side (it was quite good, by the way).

While plotting the course, I discovered yet another badass Google feature - they will plot your course on an actual satellite photo, complete with highlighting, etc. I was so impressed I started bringing my kids and their friends upstairs to see it.

Check out this map that shows the course from the Portland International Airport to Powell's City of books, should you choose to visit our fair city and shop at the best bookstore in the world.

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GTD, dashboards, cockpits, and flight plans

Call me obsessive, but I've been tracking stats around my inbox, number of items in my various lists, etc. as part of my weekly review (although it's been more like an "every few weekly review" unfortunately). I put the counts in Excel and create a simple graph to look at is as a kind of dashboard.

The graph shows me my inbox is very cyclical (the big, dark blue line), and the peaks are when I slack on my weekly reviews. My dashboard has been useful for figuring out things like whether my "@waiting for" list is getting too long, which might indicate I'm falling behind on follow-up of delegated items.

The dashboard approach is helpful, but doesn't help me with one of the bigger recurring challenges I've had - how do I create better focus on the items contained in all these lists?

As a result, I'm experimenting with creating a "cockpit" (or maybe 'weekly flight plan' is a better analogy) to help me create a narrower subset of the lists to focus on each week. I ordered and just received my PlannerPad (www.plannerpads.com) and am going to give it a whirl for this project.

Why and what am I doing? I do so much stuff electronically now that it's easy to accumulate lots of things in my trusted system. It can, however, be overwhelming. What I'll do for this experiment is, as part of my weekly review, to decide what short list I want to work on during the coming week and write that stuff in my PlannerPad - that will serve as the flight plan for the week.

I'll let you know how it works. If you have any better ideas, come on with 'em.

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