"No" is the New "Yes": Four Practices to Reprioritize Your Life

Good article this week from the HBR Blog:

I was sitting with the CEO and senior team of a well-respected organization. One at a time, they told me they spend their long days either in back-to-back meetings, responding to email, or putting out fires. They also readily acknowledged this way of working wasn’t serving them well — personally or professionally.

It’s a conundrum they couldn’t seem to solve. It’s also a theme on which I hear variations every day. Think of it as a madness loop — a vicious cycle. We react to what’s in front of us, whether it truly matters or not. More than ever, we’re prisoners of the urgent.

Prioritizing requires reflection, reflection takes time, and many of the executives I meet are so busy racing just to keep up they don’t believe they have time to stop and think about much of anything.

Click through for the entire article.

The Rise of the New Groupthink

New York Times - SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Click through to read the rest of the article.

How To Talk To Your Boss And Fix Your Job

It’s all too easy to spend long stretches simmering at your desk instead of having a straight-ahead talk with your boss. Click through for a few strategies to help you start the conversation.

From Fast Company Magazine.

The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals

For some reason I like diary-type articles discussing what different people so on a day-to-day basis. Inc. Magazine has done a series of these.

Click through the link to read the work-day diary article re Jason Fried, creator of 37Signals - a web development company that runs a cloud project management system I am fond of.

The 10 best gadgets and tech at CES 2012

At one end of the scale, CES is about big, high-end product announcements - the world’s biggest TV, the smallest pico projector, hi-fi speakers that cost more than your car.

At the other end it’s about companies you’ve never (or barely) heard of trying to catch the tired eye of a wandering blogger with head-mounted displays, portable scanners and USB penknives.

Filter out the noise with these picks of the best gadgets and tech of CES 2012.

Hat tip: @miunger