The Zen of Results - Tips for Micro-Management

from here

“Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own.”
– Bruce Lee

Sources Of Insight has a great article titled as The Zen of Results, which talks about daily personal management tips.

The basic practices it proposed are simply as:

Monday Vision
– Each Monday, identify the most important outcomes for the week.
– Take the time to see the forest from the trees.

Daily Outcomes
– Each day, make a short To Do list (toward Outcomes)
– Title it by date (e.g. 01-29-08).
– Start by listing your MUST items. Next, list your SHOULD or COULD.
– Use this list throughout your day, as you fish your various streams for action (Your streams include meetings, email, conversations, or bursts of brilliance throughout the day.)

Friday Reflection
– Evaluate what you got done, or didn't, and why.
– Identify 3 things that are working well.
– Identify 3 things that are not working well.
– Carry your lessons forward to your Monday Vision.

It also summarized its key concepts as:

– Carve out time for what’s important!
– Outcomes guide your action.
– Keep your outcomes scannable at a glance.
– Organize outcomes by work projects, personal projects, and life frame.
– Balance is your friend.
– Pioritize incoming action items against your outcomes.
– Triage incoming action items to either do, queue, schedule or delegate it.
– Use daily tickler lists for action items.
– Schedule items that will take time.
– Think in terms of value delivered (to yourself or others).
– Windows of opportunity matter!
– If you fall off the horse, you can get back on.
– It’s question-driven.
– Principles, patterns and practices over tool-driven.

It has detailed suggestions how to apply these practices in daily life, a free ebook is available here.

I use some of these practices in my daily life and it works well. Hope it works for you as well.