A couple of years ago, I was wandering through my university library’s annual book sale when I came across a cache of books on leadership and administration all sitting together on a table as if they’d been donated as a group. Examples included:
I bought nearly all of them.
When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, "How well he spoke," but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, "Let us march." — Adlai Stevenson
Leadership is about many things, but in a nitty-gritty, brass-tacks sense, it’s largely about human behavior change.
We’re all leaders, and whether we lead employees, colleagues, our own kids, or an entire organization, we must have effective strategies at our disposal if we’re going to create positive change.
For better or worse, email is woven into the fabric of our professional lives. It’s the primary communication medium for most organizations and individual professionals, and it’s quick, low-friction, and universal.
It’s also a time vampire, as most of us spend much more time and energy on email than we should. We check our email compulsively, though email is mostly associated with low-importance, administrative work. Our best work—the work that only we can do, that creates value in the marketplace—takes place outside our inbox. Yet we can’t ignore email altogether. We need an email strategy, but few of us have one.
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.— Steven Pressfield
What does it take to have a successful career today?
For the modern knowledge worker (me, and probably you, too), a thriving career is often built on projects—specifically, a succession of increasingly complex long-term projects. Professors produce original research, attorneys draft intricate legal documents, programmers craft powerful software packages. Such long-term projects are marathons, not sprints, and they require us to chip away at our work over days, weeks, and months.
What gets measured gets managed. --- Peter Drucker
When it comes to managing precious resources—time, money, attention—you won’t find a more concise philosophy than Peter Drucker’s.
In my own quest to increase the amount of time I spend doing what author Cal Newport calls deep work (cognitively demanding work performed in a state of complete focus), I took a page from Newport’s book of the same name and started tracking my deep work time. A few minutes of Googling revealed a useful Medium post by NYU engineering professor Enrico Bertini from which I constructed an Excel template for tracking deep work. I’ve been tracking it successfully since 2017, and I’m routinely amazed at how the act of tracking itself keeps me on the straight and narrow.