This year, the Palm Beach County Library System worked with a consultant, John Huber, to understand and deploy the Lean Library Management Methodology to our publicity flow chain. During his time with us, one concept that John reiterated time and time again was, “If you don’t measure it, it must not be important.” What does this mean?
In order to make meaningful progress in any endeavor there must be a way to track success. This is easy to understand for Olympic athletes, who measure themselves against the clock, or distance traveled, or their ranking against other competitors. If want to loss weight, calorie counting and minutes of exercise per day are great items to track. So if you want to improve your personal productivity, it is important to identify measurable quantities that can be tracked over time.
For example, if inbox zero is your goal then keep track of the number of messages in your inbox at the end of the day when you leave work. If you want to be faster at the computer, track and record the number of words you can type per minute. To keep your commitments under control, maintain an accurate project list, count the projects on it, and discover the maximum number of projects that your stress management can handle at one time. In short, if you have meaningful productivity goals ask yourself how to measure progress because, “If you don’t measure it, it must not be important.”
To learn more about John Huber’s work visit his web site, look at his book, Lean Library Management, or visit Lean.org.
very system has one bottleneck tighter than all the others, in the same way a chain has only one weakest link.
“I was taking a cycling class one time and the instructor made a comment that intrigued me. Between intense bursts of climbing hills she said, ‘recovery builds confidence and strength.’ Whereas part of me wanted to keep a fast pace and just keep going, I took her advice, slowed my speed down to rest my legs and heart. I was stronger on the next hill I climbed. OK–so you knew there’d be something GTD in this: the Weekly Review is recovery. It’s my time to relax my mind and body from the frantic pace of the daily grind. It builds confidence in my system letting my mind know it’s OK to relax and be creative. It gives me mental strength to make better choices because I’m seeing a clear picture of everything instead of chasing after latest and loudest.”
Having everything that is actionable in one place creates a simple menu of items that can be worked on whenever time allows. It creates efficiency because there is no longer a need to search around your work space for actionable items. The clarity of mind that comes from knowing where all your actions are stored is priceless.
For most people, the default way to take notes and plan events is very linear. On a clean page in the top left corner they start to write things down in sentences one line after the other. The drawback to this linear approach is that it is challenging to connect thoughts and ideas quickly, especially when they are separated on the page. A great alternative approach for note taking and planning is a mind map.
reveals insights into the link between creativity and procrastination in Chapter 4, Fools Rush In. While procrastination is mostly associated with laziness, it can also be defined as “waiting for the right time.” Adam writes that “Procrastination turns out to be a common habit of creative thinkers and great problem solvers.” The trick to meaningful procrastination is that one must start working on the project or problem in question first before setting it aside. Studies seem to show that leaving open loops active can spur original thinking as the mind slowly churns away on the project or problem in the background. This process may open up creative options that might not have been found if the situation was rushed. So the next time you feel procrastination setting in, it may be a sign that you are waiting for creative options to appear, in which case, procrastinate on!
Think of the light on a telephone answering machine which turns on when a new message arrives. Failure to clear the message leaves the light on which means one will never know if another message has arrived after that one. The light ceases to have a function and becomes background illumination.
In fact, I highly recommend listing to one podcast in particular: 
To be clear, this curse has nothing to do with magic or ancient mystical tombs. The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals are unable to ignore the knowledge they have which others do not, or when they are unable to disregard information already processed. This is the reason why an expert musician can make a lousy teacher of novices, because the expert forgets what it is like to know so little.
Efficient Librarian 