Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: StephenPSmith.com

Clay at The Growing Life is on to some very thought-provoking ideas.

This is number 3 on his list:

Here’s one of way measuring productivity:

P = W/t

Productivity (P) is work accomplished (W) divided by time (t). We’ve traditionally tried to increase productivity by amping up work output (e.g. Getting Things Done by David Allen). But there’s another means to skyrocketing productivity: leaving work right where it is and decreasing “t” or time (see here). This focus on increasing productivity by decreasing time is, I believe, what differentiates Productivity 2.0 from it predecessor. And, ironically, mechanisms used to decrease time — like automation and personal outsourcing — often increase work while simultaneously decreasing time.

Go read what he has to say, and leave a comment. This is a very interesting set of ideas!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5hy7ko. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

“Without freedom from the past,
there is no freedom at all, because
the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.”

~ Krishnamurti

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6l5njx. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Attention!

This is a call for participation.

I am working on collecting Personal Mission Statements from readers and writers, near and far. Benjamin from WOWNDADI and I are collaborating on this project, and it looks to be a lot of fun.

We will be publishing a Carnival of Mission Statements featuring your own submissions and links to other personal development bloggers around the world. Get involved!

Please add your own Personal Mission Statement in the Comments, or e-mail them to stephen [at] hdbizblog [dot] com.

See this post for more info. I’d also like to give a shout-out to Kate at Blog to Discovery for getting this started!

Here are some of the other bloggers that are participating:

gtdfrk at Getting Things Done

Lodewijk at How to Be an Original

Lisa from The 360 Alliance sent this:

This is really me in a nutshell.

My vision: peace.

My mission:

• The peaceful activism of empowered women and men

• The contagious strength of families in aligned relationship

• The breathtaking momentum of inspired young people

• The transformative fire of artists working on purpose

• The globally healing leadership of conscious corporations

Benjamin sent us a pic of how he keeps his personal mission statement handy:

Reading online is one of my passions. It was a great day when I found Google Reader and was able to navigate my way around RSS and Atom feeds! I love reading just about anything on which I can lay my hands.

Being an avid reader, I often throttle myself about the lack of time that I have to read published works: but if you would count the amount of reading I do online, it would amount to about a 500 page book per week!

I am constantly on a journey of self-exploration and growth. All that I read on my daily RSS feeds as well as anywhere else helps me to grow. My latest “spurt” is incorporating both GTD and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, with the guidance of Stephen at Productivity in Context. From his blog, I have leapt also to read Christine O’Kelly, who is indeed a very powerful and down-to-earth person.

Creating my own blog at blog.wordswithin.info, I gather things that are of interest to me and I would hope to others as well. I have an eclectic mix of material in which most anyone should be able to find something that they like. I am also happy to accept critiques and suggestions: without them we never learn!

Thanks, I am looking forward to sharing more of these with you. For more information on writing your own Personal Mission Statement, see this post[link]. And you can download a worksheet here [right-click and “Save As”].

UPDATE: A reader has submitted a new mission statement:

“God preserves His order despite our chaos.”
It reminds me that there is order in spite of failure to create, much less
clean out, my in box! ~C

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6hqfjn. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Today’s post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

This past week, Leo from Zen Habits interviewed Stephen Covey, legendary author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen of Productivity in Context also made reference to this interview. The conversation between Leo and Covey is striking. Some observations:

• Covey wrote his opus in 1988
• Leo asks for specifics several times but it seems that Covey dodges the question or only provides general answers
• When asked what Covey thought about Getting Things Done, he described it as “overly simplistic” (ouch!)

My personal sense was that Leo and Covey were on an entirely different wavelength.

What to make of this?

My first thought was disappointment in Covey’s responses but then I stepped back and reminded myself that Covey’s prime was somewhere about 10 years ago, roughly 10 years after the launch of 7 Habits.As we approach the 6 year mark of Getting Things Done, it’s safe to say that David Allen is happily in his prime and has plenty of gas left in the tank. But what’s the “next big thing”? Who comes after Allen when GTD fizzles into what we perceive to be old material?

It certainly makes you wonder. You can join in a discussion of the future of productivity and knowledge management in the forum [link]. Registration is free, and keeps out the V|@gr@ spammers.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5hx8a2. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen