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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

More advice to ignore

 

Forbes has an article called “14 Things You Should Do at the Start of Every Work Day”.  Really? 14 things before you start to work?  Procrastination is enough of a problem (“Maybe I do need a second cup of coffee.”) without having not 1, 2, or 3 things but 14 before starting to work.

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Number 1 is “arrive on time”. OK.

But number 3 is “take five”.  That’s good advice for maybe 10:30 or so, but to start out?

Number 8, maybe (they aren’t numbered, just one to a slide) is don’t check your email.  But the very next one is to check your voicemail.  Curious.

The next item on the list is “Place important calls and send urgent e-mails.”  I’m fine with sending urgent emails, but if you get to the office at 7:40 (as I did before retirement) making a bunch of calls at that time accomplishes very little, unless you are calling people one or two time zones farther east.

After this we have “Plan a mid-morning break.”  Really? One of the14 things you should do at the start of every work day is to plan your mid-morning break? Do I really want to have employees who make planning their mid-morning break a high priority?

It’s not all crap advice, of course. Making a “to-do” list is a good place to start, although frankly I always had one left over from yesterday to serve as a start, and those urgent emails were a good source of information for editing the “to-do” list. 

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