About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Excellent points.
Dan -- Good stuff here. Besides being a longtime fan of John Wooden and his methods, I liked the Wm. James quote so much that I posted a slightly longer version of it on my own blog back in March:
http://tewalkerjr.com/blog/?p=498
Reading your post makes me think of two other things:
1. Mark Hurst's new book Bit Literacy, which is intended to help information-saturated folks develop better habits for handling the bits in their lives so that they're freed up from having to worry about them. See his book site: http://www.bitliteracy.com/
2. The great novelist Thomas Mann was famed for his unusually strict daily regimen: he wrote for four hours every morning, and was so intent on having a quiet environment for his work that he made his children wear crepe-soled shoes so that he wouldn't hear their footsteps through the walls of his house. Someone once wrote something about Mann have "boring days, but a fascinating life". In other words, he controlled his habits in the William James mold so that he was free to exercise immense creativity on the page, which the rest of get to enjoy when we read The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and so on.
(Oh, and I can't resist offering one tiny correction: Adolph Rupp of the University of Kentucky won four NCAA basketball titles.)