Personal productivity

On average, we get interrupted 50 to 60 times per day at work.

A wandering mind can pay off.

The primitive, emotional parts of our brains have a powerful influence on the choices we make. Now, neuroscientists are mapping the risk and reward systems in the brain that drive our best—and worst—decision making.

In the frantic buzz of most managerial lives, I see people running from meeting to meeting, consulting their BlackBerrys as though in prayer, desperately working into the night to cope with a deluge of emails and otherwise being busy, busy, busy. The dilemma of all this activity, however, is that it is for the most […]

Jim Collins is all about discipline. The man who described Level 5 Leadership not only understands the inner fortitude of the best-performing companies and leaders; he’s famously disciplined and enormously productive, as you can tell from his website (jimcollins.com). A runner and mountain-climber, he is the picture of fitness. How does he manage his time? […]

Six strategies.

It depends on the task at hand.

The burdens of subordinates always seem to end up on the manager’s back. Here’s how to get rid of them.

Research-backed ways to increase employees' enjoyment of work by reducing time spent on unpleasant tasks.

When productivity is a problem in manufacturing, managers turn to the R&D department or operations for help. In services, however, especially ones where there is a lot of contact with the customer, such in-house groups cannot by themselves improve productivity. Because services involve the customer in production, are labor intensive, and are time-bound, consumer behavior […]

Your entire day revolves around willpower.

That hack you read on the internet is wrong.

The Denver office of Clarion Co., a $30 million, full-service marketing firm, has always been a politics-free zone. Nonwork conversations revolve around...

Research shows how to make messaging more efficient.

Increases in productivity far outweigh the costs.

If the CEO sits in the hot seat, the CFO’s chair is positively smoking. According to analysis conducted by the CFO Executive Board, annual CFO turnover at the largest 162 global companies between 1995 and 2003 was 17%—even higher than for CEOs—and three out of four current Fortune 500 finance officers have been in their […]

A study of scientific papers shows that women hype their findings less than men do.

It won’t solve every problem.

And don't feel guilty about it.

I have a colleague in publishing who works many miles from me and has a different but overlapping area of editorial expertise. Recently, instead of doing a bit of freelance work for her independently and having her interpret it later, I suggested that, as an experiment, I do it live with her on the phone […]