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Do you ever wish that your meetings were actually, you know, productive?

Use this template to create standard work for project planning.

Use this template to start creating standard work for meetings.

By embracing the discipline of your calendar, you'll liberate yourself from having to make choices all the time. And in a world where attention and focus are the most valuable commodities, that's a priceless kind of freedom.

Your cellphone, Blackberry, and general willingness to work late and on weekends are part of the problem, not the solution.  You need to reduce the inventory of time, not increase it.

Cogitus Interruptus is the disease of the modern workplace. Its symptoms are familiar to any executive: the inability to complete a thought or a task without losing focus under the onslaught of relentless interruptions. It results in a lack of efficiency, a loss of time to solve problems, to think strategically, to plan, to dream – to get your organization from here to there.

When you’re dealing with knowledge workers in an office, critical process inefficiencies aren’t as visible as they are in a factory. Value stream mapping is only part of the answer. You also need to see and eliminate the waste inherent in how people work. Here’s a guide to some of the questions you should be asking.

“Innovate or die.”  That’s the mandate of the global economy these days.  And though you’ve been trying to create a culture of innovation at your firm, you’ve had little success.  Why do some companies seem to be breeding grounds of innovation, while yours is, at best, a breeding ground for mosquitoes?

Imagine running a production line without knowing each day what to make and in what quantities. The lack of that critical information guarantees uneven production, overburdened workers, and waste -- a disaster in the world of Lean. Yet this is precisely the situation for most knowledge workers, even those in lean organizations.

An organization that only creates a lean business process without creating lean work habits is like a sprinter with a track spike on one foot and an army boot on the other -- and that's a sure way to lose the race to satisfy the customer.

Ever been in a 60 minute meeting that ended up lasting longer than a Robert Byrd fillibuster? Don't despair; there's hope for keeping meetings short enough to get out in time for lunch.

If you're a neat freak like me, you want to toss all your old papers.  Immediately.  If you're a pack rat, you've got so much stuff piled up in your office that you're now using tax returns from last decade as a coffee table.  So how long should you keep that stuff?

If the first thing you do upon sitting down at your desk is read email, don't!  You'll be a whole lot more productive if you do the most unpleasant task of the day first.  Get yourself a cup of coffee and read on....

Put down your Blackberries and pay attention -- really pay attention -- when you read this: multi-tasking doesn't work.

This article deals with paper management. And if your office isn't snowed under by a blizzard of paper, that's okay, too. You can apply the same rules to your electronic files.

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