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

Hello all, I trust that you are having a productive week. The lovely bride and I are doing a lot of traveling lately, and I have not had too much time for keeping up with the posting. We are having a wonderful time - Monday in Chicago, Tuesday in St Louis, Wednesday in Nashville. Whew!

Tomorrow we will be on the road all day, so I wanted to share some cool links with you, nominally related to Productivity and personal development, and I will be back on Monday with more applications and productivity lessons learned on this amazing adventure!

NOTE: There will be no Productivity Mastermind call this week, since I will be driving (or navigating) the family truckster toward Hilton Head.

Enjoy the following links, and please leave a comment about your own most pressing needs for workflow and goal-setting as the new year approaches.

Psychology Today: Confessions of a Late Bloomer

Could I be a Ph.D.? Not a chance. How about a college graduate? Nope. Semiskilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally found my range. “Lucky to graduate high school,” it said. I threw the book down on the table with an audible “**** that!” as several librarians rushed over to quiet and, possibly, tackle me.

David Allen explains how to be “master and commander” of your own vision.

The patron saint of personal productivity is back — and this time he’s offering more than just a system for handling overflowing email inboxes and misplaced files. In his third book, “Making It All Work,” David Allen takes his popular Getting Things Done model to the next level and promises a full-fledged road map for processing life and work in tandem.

Patching vs Repairing

So…sorry about that, in advance. But that’s what this post is gonna be about. About fixing things—really fixing things, where you get at the root of them, vs. fake-fixing things, where you just slap on a little metaphoric Shoe Goo and keep on keeping on.

That’s what the landlords who own my apartment building has been doing since they bought it: Shoe Gooing the place. Leaky pipes, funky wiring, rotten caulking—you name it, they’ve Shoe Gooed it. My bathroom is a vertible museum of land-based jury-rigging techniques. Mildewed ceiling? Paint over ‘it! The only real repairs they’ve done in the time I’ve lived here are the ones mandated by the State of California and City of Los Angeles. And those have generally been done on an overtime schedule, lest they get slapped with costly fines on top of costly repairs.

Al at 7P Productions explains his take on the recession
“working hard is not nearly as valuable as working smart.”

During the last recession in the early 2000’s, I was one of those statistics. It was my first job after being done with school. Ever since grade school, I was told to get good grades so I worked hard at it. In college, I was told that engineers would always be in demand so I worked hard in that major. When I worked for an internet company, I was told to work hard and I would get rewarded in stock options. The company went bankrupt, my stock options were worthless and I was out of a job. I remember telling myself, “It wasn’t supposed to end this way. I did what I was told. I was faithful and worked hard but I have nothing to show for it.” I was angry and unemployed.

Thanks for coming by folks, I’d like to hear what you have to say about this list of links.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/65dsp2. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen