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Donald Trump

Love him or hate him, there’s no ignoring Donald Trump. Over the decades he’s made and lost major fortunes, known great success and abject failure, been hailed as a visionary and condemned as an ego-maniacal fool. His business empire, originally centering on Manhattan real estate, now includes hotels and buildings nationwide; international licensing of Trump properties;  the private Palm Beach club, Mar-A-Lago; the role of executive producer (and star) of the mega-hit NBC reality show, The Apprentice; ownership of the Miss Universe Organization; and a whole lot more. Trump’s personal life—filled with high-profile romantic complications and well-reported feuds—has been open to public scrutiny for decades.

Pugnacious and voluble, Trump has plenty to say about Trump—and about his work methods, tips for success, and general outlook. Here’s the first of two batches of Donald Trump quotes for your enjoyment and learning (I’ve given my very favorite quote the No. 1 position):

1. As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.
2. Everything in life is luck.
3. Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
4. I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s were the fun is.
5. If you’re interested in “balancing” work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.
6. Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.
7. Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
8. Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
9. What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
10. When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.
11. Without passion you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.
12. You can’t know it all. No matter how smart you are, no matter how comprehensive your education, no matter how wide-ranging your experience, there is simply no way to acquire all the wisdom you need to make your business thrive.
13. Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t know it all yourself…anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity.
14. People get caught up in wonderful, eye-catching pitches, but they don’t do enough to close the deal. It’s no good if you don’t make the sale. Even if your foot is in the door or you bring someone into a conference room, you don’t win the deal unless you actually get them to sign on the dotted line.
15. In business, I’ve discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That’s my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards.

A light bulb is turning on in boardrooms across America. The secret to running a productive company is to hire more women. Studies show that companies employing 30 percent female executives perform better than companies with only males at the helm.

The scarcity of women in boardrooms and executive suites has led to second-rate decision making, according to a study published by McKinsey & Co, an international consulting firm. The shattered economy has irrevocably altered the employment landscape. Many companies are dismantling their hierarchical structure. As the hierarchy goes away, so does the entrenched male echelon.

The segment of the U.S. workforce predicted to be independent contractors by 2019 will be 40 percent. Work hours will be more flexible, projects more collaborative, workers more freelance, and workplaces more virtual. Results will be the focus. Seniority matters less, and no one gets paid for showing up. The team member who contributes the most leads the team..until displaced by someone who contributes more.

One worker gets the job done in a four-hour work day, another works until midnight and sleeps in. Not only their modus operandi, but their goals are varied and highly personal. Employees may share jobs to keep working yet also take time off to head the save-the-Tasmanian-Devil campaign or write a novel at a sidewalk cafe in Paris.

In the work world of the future—where companies have fewer traditional employees and more short-term independent contractors and consultants—women will assume leading roles. They are consensus builders and collaborators. In the absence of a hierarchy, they focus on getting the job done. They have a transformational leadership style—heavily engaged, motivational. They may squelch competitiveness because it gets in the way. In short, their emotional-intelligence skills will be essential.

Companies that value these skills, and want to keep pace with the emerging workplace, are inviting more women on board.

Women are already running the show at Citigroup, Bank of America and the FDIC. Terri Dial heads consumer banking at Citigroup and is busy cleaning up the financial mess. Barbara Desoer at Bank of America is fixing up the bank’s risky acquisition of mortgage giant Countrywide Financial—and just may end up the bank’s next chief executive. Sheila Bair at FDIC is working to stabilize the economy. She initiated policies to keep cash-strapped borrowers in their homes by modifying mortgages. All three women are  balancing risk and reward.

No one epitomizes female management skills better than America’s newest icon. Michelle Obama says that she is doing what comes naturally. “But whether by accident or design, or a little of both, reports Nancy Gibbs in Time, June 1, 2009, “she has arrived at a place where her very power is magnified by her apparent lack of interest in it.”

In this flagging economy people with steady paychecks win our admiration faster than those with a fine wine cellar. Back when people were buying second homes and investing in hedge funds, the news drew an admiring crowd at cocktail parties. Those avenues to increasing net worth have vanished, replaced by the dirge: “Our portfolio is down 50% and our mortgage is more than what our house is worth.”

After years of being taken for granted, a job has become a person’s most valuable asset—just when bringing home a paycheck is harder to come by. Anyone with the goods on how to secure a steady paycheck is on a roll.

The career industry is going gangbusters. Before you jump in, read the 2009 edition of What Color is your parachute?. The job-hunting and career-changing tome, first published in 1970, is back on the best-seller list.

Then take your job search online. iRelaunch, the Clifton, New Jersey-based job coaching firm, helps women who have opted out of the rat race but who are now scrambling to get back. This top-notch educational resource covers job-search strategies in $19.99 webinars. For $350 women can join a Relaunch Circle, often run by former recruiters, and receive six hours of coaching.

YourOnRamp is another website where you can pick up tips for how to make social media part of your job search. You can use the information to position yourself to be discovered by companies seeking applicants. Companies and recruiters are using social media to find job candidates.

Check online job listings. There is less new demand but there’s still job opportunities generated by replacement demand. The Ladders lists job opportunities for those aiming for a job in the $100,000-a-year-salary range. More people want to work in New York than anywhere else in the country but the least competitive job market is Washington, D.C. with only six job seekers for each executive-level job opening.

Flexible employment is the slant to the job listings posted at Mom Corps, a staffing firm based in Atlanta. Skilled professionals, who may have run their own business from home designing web sites, come here because they need a reliable source of income. Thousands of people pounce on job openings posted online. In March, Mom Corps had 34,000 job hunters and 54 jobs. “It’s certainly an employer’s market,” says CEO Allison O’Kelly. “Employers want to get exactly what they are looking for.”

If you don’t want to go the DIY route, and you have the money, you can opt for personal, customized coaching sessions. Job-coaching firms step you through the process, not only repairing ineffective resumes but zeroing in on the value can you extract from your education and training.

A typical client at Career Insiders, a San Francisco-based career consulting firm, is someone who:

• has sent out a resume a dozen times with no response.
• was laid off last year and is becoming disheartened.
• wants to change careers.
• wants to tap into online social networks to connect to potential employers.
• becomes tongue-tied at interviews.
• hasn’t had to look for a job in twenty years and is unaware of his or her true earning power.

In this post-financial-meltdown-of-Wall Street world, a flurry of options exists for people refocusing on their number one asset. Career Insiders CEO Mauri Schwartz says a job is the real source of financial stability.

If you sometimes feel like a slave to the ever-increasing demands of email, this story’s for you:

About this time last summer, Joan, a woman in a small Midwestern US city, lost her file clerk’s job. Widowed and with an infant child, she quickly ran through her savings while looking for work. Prospects were bleak. Wherever Joan showed up for one of the few jobs available…well, so did hundreds of other desperate applicants.

Finally, down to her last $10, Joan applied for a night-shift cleaning job at the Acme Office Building downtown. The Human Resources assistant agreed to hire her, but changed his mind after learning that Joan had no phone or email address. Joan explained that not having a phone was temporary; as soon as she could afford the monthly fee she would have one again. As for the computer, she’d been forced to sell it for the money and couldn’t afford Internet cafés more than twice a month to check her email. But the young assistant—who’d had his own email address since age 6—was suspicious of someone without one. To him, the lack of an email address was akin to not having fingerprints.

Joan left the interview in despair. She took that last $10 out of her wallet and stared at it for a long, long time. Should she hoard it? Or should she throw caution to the wind and try an idea she’d been nursing for a while?
The next morning—at dawn—Joan walked 3 miles to the city’s produce distribution center and plunked down that last $10 for 10 pounds of beautiful, ripe tomatoes from regional farms. Then she walked 3 miles in a different direction to one of the city’s most upscale neighbhorhoods. Walking door to door, she sold the tomatoes in about an hour—at three times what she’d paid for them. She did the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next after that. By the end of the week she had pulled together half the next month’s rent and was able to have her phone turned back on
The next week, Joan hired an out-of-work friend to help her. They walked together to the produce market, and between them carried away 25 pounds of tomatoes each day, as well as a few pounds of peaches. The week after that she had two people working for her, selling 40 pounds of produce daily. When she bought three inexpensive hand-pull wagons to haul their produce in different neighborhoods, sales doubled, and then tripled. Before long she could buy a battered but well-maintained pickup truck, and she began dealing in hundreds of pounds of produce, brought directly to people’s homes.

The city  newspaper wrote an article about Joan entitled “From the Brink of Poverty,” and she developed more customers. A few people with disabilities asked her to deliver groceries along with produce, and soon Joan had a small-but-thriving side business. She started selling from a temporary stand at the farmer’s market, and a few months later agreed to share one of the permanent stands with a woman who sold honey.

And so it went…

Last winter, six months into her surprising success, Joan paused to take a breath and consider her future options. One thing she needed, she felt, was life insurance—enough to care for her child just in case something should happen to Joan. She called an insurance adviser, who recommended various plans to suit her new circumstances. He asked for her email address to forward appropriate documents.

Joan laughed. “I don’t have one,” she said. “I keep meaning to buy a computer and get back into all of that, but really—this has been a whirlwind. I just haven’t had time.”

The insurance adviser was stunned. “I can’t believe you’ve managed to do everything you’ve done without a computer!” he exclaimed. “Without using the Internet? Without having an email address? If you’d had access to all of that, just imagine where you might be now!”

“Oh, I can imagine,” Joan said. She laughed again. “If I’d had access to all of that I know exactly where I’d be—on my hands and knees as a cleaning lady at the Acme Office Building!”

The Moral of Joan’s Story: Just because you’re on the pathway to success doesn’t mean your life needs to be ruled by the Internet or email. Keep technology in perspective.

It sounds simple. But is it? Are you doing the right steps? There is a way to manage email using Microsoft Outlook Mail Folders, but it is not always obvious how to do it effectively.

Steps

1. Identify individuals or groups of people you regularly get email from.
2. Identify individuals or groups of people you regularly send email to.
3. From Outlook Mail, Actions, Rules and Alerts, create new rules for each individual group or person you regularly receive email from and direct these emails to be moved to a specific folder under the Inbox folder.
4. Determine whether you want to A) be alerted when you receive a special message from this individual or group and/or B) mark it as read immediately. Review the other action options to see whether they can further assist you.
5. Create new rules for each individual group or person you regularly send email to and direct these emails to be moved as a copy of the email you are sending to a specific folder under the Sent folder.
6. Based on priority, decide when and in what order you want to stop processing a rule. This is particularly important when working with rules that deal with emails you send — otherwise you will be saving multiple copies of the same email.
7. Have one sent rule at the bottom of all of the sent rules with Stop processing. This rule will catch all emails that did not get placed into individual subfolders.
8. On an ongoing basis, evaluate the Sent emails that go to the Sent folder that do not get moved to another subfolder. The number of messages in the Sent folder can indicate when it is time to create new subcategories of sent email.
9. On an ongoing basis, evaluate the Inbox emails that go to the Inbox and are not moved into another subcategory. The number of messages in the main Inbox folder can determine when it is time to create new subcategories of received email.

Tips

• The key to managing email using Microsoft Outlook is learning how to create email categories and prioritize your emails — think of it as pruning and weeding your email garden — so you can benefit from the flourish of information you have available.
• Once the Sent and Received emails are categorized, it is easier to see where “email growth” is coming from and decide where to prune and create new branches.
• For example, advertising emails may be worth reviewing when they first arrive, but they soon go stale and can be removed. Bank notices and receipts you may want to hold on to longer.
• For the folders you create for Sent mail, you will want to adjust the view (right click on the display/sort bar of the folder, Customize Current View, Fields…) to remove the From and Received and add the To and Sent field.
• You may also want to add other useful fields to your folder’s view. Size allows you to see and sort by the size of the message. You may decide to unburden your email folders of larger emails and manage them outside of email (i.e., save important attachments or save an entire email to location outside of Outlook).
• Consider changing the properties of folders to show the Total Number of Items rather than the Total Number of Unread Items, particularly, if you are already getting alerts for important new messages being received.

Warnings

• When the number of messages in a folder approaches a certain number (50? 100? 200?), it is time to evaluate weeding, pruning, subcategorizing your emails in that folder.
• You should make your home version of Outlook your test case for creating Outlook email rules before you make changes to your work version of Outlook (or vice versa, depending on which you care about more).

A clutter-free desk can help you have a clutter-free mind. Follow these steps to see for yourself:

1. Go through everything sitting atop your desk, disposing of anything you don’t need. If  your desk is cluttered with many pens, notepads, etc., whittle them down to a reasonable number. Are paper piles dotting your desk? You can fix that easily enough: refer to my earlier post, “Drowning in Paper.”  Are there too many knick-knacks taking up valuable space and lending a sense of chaos? You know what to do…
2. Now go through your desk’s drawers, disposing of anything you don’t need. If you’re like most people, you haven’t done this in ages—you’ll be surprised at how much you get rid of.
3. Next, examine what remains from atop your desk and the desk’s drawers. Divide these items into two categories: things you use frequently, and things you don’t. Find a place away from your desk for the latter category (for instance, you could store company letterhead, the telephone book, or the Policy manual on a nearby shelf). Find a logical home in or on your desk for everything else. Devote one pull-out drawer to supplies: pens, a ruler, a stapler, sticky notes, paper clips, etc. (you might consider buying a drawer organizer so that each of these items has its own “home”).
4. Do you use a paper calendar? If so, take it off your desk. Tack it to the wall or a bulletin board, where you can see it instantly and it won’t get buried under paperwork during a busy day.
5. Give some thought to your inbox. Way too often inboxes become a place to stick paper we don’t know what to do with. “I’ll look at this tomorrow,” we might say, but then we forget about it. But if carefully used, an inbox can be a useful mechanism to keep you organized. A multi-level inbox is okay, but don’t have more than three levels. Think about the incoming material you get each day, and divide it into no more than three categories—let’s say: (A) Important: Needs to be taken care of today; (B) Ongoing: Info related to current projects you’re working on; and (C) To Be Filed: Material you don’t need at the moment but which may be important in the future. Or maybe you’ll just have one inbox and make a vow to completely empty it daily before you go home.
6. At the end of each day, straighten your desk, putting everything back in place.

First in a series of interviews with productive people succeeding in the recession.

We’ve read the World Bank statistics that the global economy is contracting for the first time since World War II. Magazines are chock-full of cost-cutting strategies, which the public has taken to heart a little too eagerly.

Despite the trend toward frugality, the best way to ride out a recession may be the attitude: “What recession?”  Recoveries begin where they always have—with creative individuals.

Michael Mina, CEO of the Mina Group recently opened an upscale restaurant and wine bar in San Francisco. Even in boom times, the restaurant business is risky. The risk is greater now that the average American is spending 56 percent less on dining out, according to a Time magazine poll. In this climate of scrimping, it’s more common to hear of restaurant closings rather than openings. But Mina has bucked the trend.

RN74 is hot. The dining room is booked 7 days a week. On a Tuesday evening, diners were ensconced in leather banquettes, tasting their way through the regional cuisine of France’s wine-growing regions. I recently caught up with Mina to find out his business recipe for ‘hotness.’

Control costs by controlling the space. Less square feet means less expense and less risk. The Mina Group controlled costs by having a 74-seat dining room. “One advantage in creating a great wine bar area and having a smaller dining room is that it takes way alot of the risk,” says Mina, noting that the bar business has not struggled as much as restaurants in San Francisco. The Mina Group also secured a good lease on the space a few years ago when the owners of the Millennium Tower residential high-rise came courting.

Have a great concept. RN74’s interior conveys a train station theme with louver windows, red and orange ‘flares’ for lighting, a barrel ceiling, distressed leather banquettes and a ‘curtain’ of bronze conductors’ lamps. Signs on train boards flip to reveal new wines on the list. “We didn’t scale this back,” says Mina. “We elevated the vision.”

Get the word out. Longevity and good press are important in a tough market like San Francisco, he says. Mina hit it big in the restaurant business in 1991 when he opened Aqua. His restaurant at the Westin St. Francis, Michael Mina, received the Michelin two-star award. Several people involved in RN74 have loyal followings.  Wilf Jaeger, one of America’s prominent and most respected collectors, has his personal collection on the wine list. Rajat Parr is recognized as a top U.S. Sommelier and chef Jason Berthold worked at French Laundry.

Outshine your competition in any way you can. “We have to compete at the price point of other mid-level priced restaurants that are busy,” Mina says. In terms of food quality and service, “you have to be ahead of everyone as much as possible.“ The Mina Group has good buying power on food and wine. Despite costing $50 a pound, morels are on the menu as well as foie gras and $600 bottles of Burgundy from Wilf Jaeger’s prized collection. The wine list highlights many of the small producers along the Route Nationale 74 which runs through Burgundy.  “Wilf Jaeger and Raj [Rajat Parr] are able to buy a lot of these wines for much less than they are worth today.” says Mina.

Exude confidence built on experience. “I’ve done it alot, so I have this gut instinct,” says Mina, referring to the restaurants he has opened in California, Las Vegas, Arizona, Michigan, New Jersey,  Washington D.C. and Florida. He continues, “It comes down to your confidence level.”

Mina may have the best strategy yet to reverse the global recession. Don’t dwell on what you can do nothing about and do what you do well.

Two employees are laid off. They hold the exact same job title, functions, and salary. One struggles to find a new position, sending out dozens of resumes, making countless phone calls, and chasing umpteen leads. He attends mixers and job fairs, obtains career-counseling and resume consultations, and puts the word out to everyone he knows, both in his personal and professional life. Five months later, there’s no interest.

The second employee finds his phone ringing off the hook the moment the announcement is made. He fields several offers, takes his time considering his options, and eventually negotiates a higher rate of pay than his last job. He slides seamlessly into his new position the day his second one ends without a gap in income, benefits, or productivity.

What’s the Difference?

You may assume the second employee has more experience, a better record, or advanced degrees. Perhaps he has more contacts “in the business” or is related to someone prominent.

False. The biggest difference between the two employees is attitude.

Attitude Is Everything.

Employee One came to work and did his job just like everyone else. He worked hard, and was frazzled and short with people to make a point. If something wasn’t working as planned, he was quick to give up and move on to the next task. If someone wasn’t high on his priority list, he would let phone calls go unreturned for days.

Employee Two came to work each day ready to succeed. His philosophy was to say “yes” first and hammer out the details later. Employees and clients alike enjoyed working with him because each encounter was a positive experience. He worked hard to make everyone happy, including himself. He was seldom stressed or frantic. He treated each person with respect, from the mailman to the CEO.

It’s Easy to Make Excuses for Other People’s Success

Though their sales records are identical, Employee Two is easier to work with, and had an attitude toward success. Company morale is higher because he is around, and clients look forward to referring others to his services.

His reputation precedes him. Companies want to snatch him up because they’ve heard (or experienced) such great things from him. In the long run, he’s a much better investment for employers, because he is not quick to give up or throw temper tantrums. He intends to succeed, and doesn’t let anything stand in his way. However, that does not mean he steps on people. He helps others succeed along the way.

Meanwhile, Employee One has a track record of being difficult to work with. Even though he eventually gets the job done, the process is so excruciating for everyone involved that it often doesn’t seem worth the effort. His brusque approach is a turn-off to clients. His attitude says me, me, me.

Though the two may be at the same place in their career at the time of the lay-off, it would not have stayed that way for long. Employee One would have found himself his own worst enemy, constantly struggling against his bad attitude. Employee Two has already found his attitude pays off.

The Best Way to Get Ahead Is to Have a Good Attitude

Focus on your job and maintain a positive approach to everything you do. It may not seem to make an immediate difference, but over time it will be noticed and rewarded.

Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

For nearly 40 years, Stanford University’s Computer Systems Colloquium (CSC) has excited high-level academic/corporate tech circles in the United States by presenting speakers who embrace the future’s edge. Among their ranks have been at least two MacArthur Fellows, major corporate CEOs, inventors of devices and systems that have changed society, venture capitalist superstars, world-famous electronic musicians, and a generous sprinkling of oddball theorists and developers.

The Colloquium, sponsored by Stanford’s Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and open to the public, was begun in 1969 (before the microcomputer had been invented). “In retrospect,” says Dennis Allison, who has run the Wednesday-afternoon class since  1986, “the class provides a panoramic snapshot of the computer industry’s growth. But our speakers transcend mere technology; they have always addressed ideas, trends, and devices that were two years—or more—in the future.”

For instance, in 1998 a guy named Craig Newmark came to speak about an online community he was creating to help buyers and sellers of goods and services find each other (CraigsList was soon a household name in the U.S.). In 2002, Wikipedia co-founder Lee Sanger talked about why an online encyclopedia was important, thus marking the beginning of the end for the world’s major paper encyclopedias. In 1999 I was present when a four-person panel debated whether electronic books could ever succeed; today, the ebook market is growing at a lightning-fast pace.

Just a few of the illustrious many who have addressed the class over the years:

• Brian Eno, acknowledged as the “father” of ambient music
• Al Alcorn, inventor of Pong, the first video game
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google (at the time they were still Stanford students; many speakers went on to found successful and even wildly-successful companies based on the technology they discussed at the Colloquium)
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
• John Doerr  of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the world’s leading venture capitalists
• John Hennessy, Stanford President and founder of MIPS Computer Systems
• Lisa Palac, editor of Future Sex magazine
• Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse
• Persi Diaconis, two-time winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, known for solving mathematical problems involving randomization (i.e., shuffling cards, coin flipping)
• Stephen Schneider, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, celebrated for his work on modeling of the atmosphere and climate change

I spoke with the Colloquium’s organizer, Dennis Allison, this week. Among other things, I asked him two questions that might interest readers of this column.

They know how to define their Master Goal…

First, I asked him to speculate on what qualities the CSC speakers share that result in such spectacular accomplishments. “Intense curiosity,” he replied without hesitation. “Curiosity about absolutely everything going on around them. They wonder about everything. They have a willingness to learn about new things. They’re always looking for better understanding of the world around them and what it constitutes. They’re curious about ‘why.’ They’re always asking that question: ‘Why?’ They’re not always very social, but they’re very curious.”

He also cited the commonality of a strong shared social sense about the way the world should work. “They want things to be the way they ‘ought’ to be,” Allison says. “Quite often their thinking along these lines runs contrary to the way most others think, but they’re not afraid to take positions against the mainstream. They have a vision of the way the world should be and they try to move it forward.”

Third and last was the fact that, quite often, such people are not primarily motivated by financial gain. “They tend to be more part of a gift culture than a money culture,” Allison told me. “They want to give to other people what they know and understand, and don’t necessarily think about profiting from it.”

Naturally, my thoughts turned to how such gifted people organized themselves to be productive. So I asked.

“All these people are list makers,” Allison responded. “They write down and articulate their goals and express how to get from Point A to Point B.  They know how to define their Master goal, break into points, and then into sub-points, and then into sub-points again—until they can manage it. You see that all the time.” *

Allison emphasized the common need his guest speakers have to put a list into writing. “They’re extremely busy mentally,” he explained.  “They’re taken up with big ideas and thinking, and they just don’t have the memory bandwidth to keep in mind all the details of what needs to be done. They run the risk of forgetting if it’s not written down. A list becomes a solid mechanism to keep them focused on the goal.”

In summary, Allison noted that “people who are intensely creative tend to be just ordinary people who have learned how to channel their energy and focus on what’s important to them. The difference between someone who runs a billion dollar company and someone who doesn’t may or may  not be anything but luck. I think the skill set to do that may exist in almost anyone—but execution requires not only a certain amount of luck but the ability to harness intellectual and physical capabilities. Most of the speakers I’ve seen in the Colloquium are able to harness both those capabilities exceedingly well.”

* Note: When Dennis Allison made that remark about breaking a goal into points, I assumed he was an adherent of GTD. I was surprised to learn that he’d never heard of it. “Well,” he said, shrugging, “it just makes sense to break a goal into parts you can work with.” Perhaps this approach comes with scientific or technical training.

If you pack your day with things to get done, you may psych yourself out before you start. Before you tackle the long To-Do List, you’ve given up and started watching Major League Baseball instead.

I regularly have a task list longer than a 10-year-old’s Christmas wish list. It haunts me from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed. Some mornings I don’t even bother trying to get anything done—there is so much, it just feels impossible.

The other day I uncharacteristically had no specific plans for the day—but a mondo To-Do List. After dropping off my kids at afternoon daycare, I decided to tackle the most important thing: buy toilet paper. (Imperative, no?) Once my trip to the store was completed, I allowed the minor sense of accomplishment to catapult me into my second project. Then a third. Then a fourth. Before I knew it, I’d spent five hours completing over half of my list—something that certainly wouldn’t have gotten done had I sat down and planned it that way. If I’d known I had that many things facing me that afternoon, I would have talked myself out of it before I even began.

Try being more flexible. Have a list of things that need to be done—eventually. When you begin your day, tackle the most time-sensitive items first. But give yourself permission to take it easy. Take breaks when you need them, while still staying task-driven. If you get one thing done, don’t feel like you have to move immediately on to the next thing. You might find yourself surprised at your willingness to move on.

When the pressure is off, it’s easy to move straight to the next thing. Next time, don’t give yourself a list of tasks that you MUST complete by the day’s end. Have a flexible list, and work from there. It’s much easier to remain productive when there is no pressure to perform.

by Melissa Dylan