Author: admin

It’s good to fall in love isn’t it! You can’t predict when it will happen and it changes your life for the better. Well now I have, unexpectedly, fallen in love – with OneNote.

OneNote is a Microsoft programme, designed to hold your to-do lists and meeting notes, webpage clippings and scanned documents in one place. It’s free and can be downloaded to iPad, Android, Macs and PCs. It takes the ideas pioneered by Evernote and lifts them to a new level of usefulness. It also syncs seamlessly across Apple and PC, so my iPad and laptop are happily in touch with eachother all the time.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it makes for a superb note taker in meetings, with the added benefit that you can email your client with the notes before leaving the room. Quick, slick and useful.

And the reason for sharing my new love with you is that this year I have been looking to do old tasks in new ways, in order to increase productivity and make progress with those ghost tasks that are haunting my inbox. A ghost task is one you have to do and you ignore it…hoping it will go away! Instead of leaving you alone, it haunts you!

I have a TA case study to write and am enjoying the writing of it by combining OneNote with my iPad. It’s fun to use (so my inner kid is happy too) and allows me to keep all my notes with me all the time, instead of having to carry around a bulky lever arch file.

If you have a ghost task that is haunting you, then spend time this week thinking about how you can do an old thing in a new way. Maybe change the time of day when you work, or draft notes on a MindMap, or give yourself permission to write one sentence and then stop for tea. Or you can take a look at OneNote and have fun using it as a portable (and free) place to organise your thoughts and collect ideas. Old things in old ways never really work out, if we are stuck, so have fun doing old things in new ways!

Productivity can be fun and it feels good to have said boo to a ghost task!

Next week: Powerful Questions

This isn’t my rule, but as rules go it’s a good one, so worth sharing. What rules do you live your professional life by? What mottos do you carry with you to guide you, or to provide your organisation with a clear and purposeful culture?

Rules can inspire us and keep us safe and grounded.

…And when times change we can update them and can go and talk to people who can help us to construct new rules.

Now then, back to Rule Number 6. This comes from the book: The Art of Possibility (Zander & Zander, 2000). Rosamund Stone Zander is a family therapist and Benjamin Zander is an orchestra conductor and professor of music.

In the book he talks about how the conductor can be the person with the biggest ego in the room and yet come the night of the performance is the one person who makes no sound at all! He (or she) is totally dependant on the orchestra. It’s a good parable for any leader to think about and the secret of success boils down to Rule Number 6.

Many years ago a friend of mine had been promoted from junior manager to a more senior role and was moving to a new office and had the chance to build a team for himself. When he started this new role he was considered to be the poor cousin of the established senior leader. The new manager ran 10% of the business and the established one had 90%.

I gave my friend a copy of the book as a congratulations present and highlighted Rule Number 6 to him. We laughed together and he promised to remember it. A colleague of his recently told me that now his side of the business had grown to 60% and was rising fast, whilst the other business leader had failed to embrace new ways of working, new technology and still ran an autocratic team with ‘favourites’ and ‘golden boys’. The organisation was thinking about how to give my friend more freedom to create even more success for them. Although his success is down to many factors, he is a super leader and if you met him he would embody the spirit of Rule Number 6 to good effect.

The rule is much simpler than you might think. In the words of Benjamin Zander, telling a story about what made a fictional Prime Minister a success, Rule Number 6 is this:

‘Don’t take yourself so goddam seriously!’

After revealing his secret, the Prime Minister is asked:

‘Well Sir, that is a fine rule. And what are the other rules?’

‘There aren’t any,’ comes the reply.

This week have fun not taking yourself so seriously – other people have lives and pressures and talents and can think too!

Next week: Old Things in New Ways