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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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There is an excellent thread on Time Management over at Work.Life.Creativity about managing time (and managing up) in an office environment that is filled with distractions, including the boss!

Here is part of the the initial post:

I work with a team in a very small business (I’m one of six FTEs, and we’ve got two PTEs). Sadly, my boss is an entirely distraction-driven person, and many of the folks in the office (I’m not there most of the time - I telecommute) abuse this and make it worse, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think that they mean to do it, but it’s the way that the business seems to have been set up (to a certain degree, I’m the nOOb to the staff).

As a result of the distraction-driven nature of the business, he constantly misses deadlines and puts projects on the backburner…and then complains about the fact that nothing seems to get done.

Go read the whole thing, and leave a comment, what would you suggest?

This is a great forum, and I am glad to be involved with it again.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5xqzh7. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

This might be a fun team-building excercise:
Innovation Personality Poker

Personality Poker is a fast-paced, highly interactive game that helps employees (and individuals) understand how they contribute to - and detract from - the innovation process. This is a personality test specifically designed for innovation and gives you yet another valuable tool to enhance both your professional and personal lives.

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

Good morning all, I have a guest post up at Slacker Manager today. It is the third installment of the Leadership series for the  month of May.

It’s a little different from what I normally write about, so please check it out, and leave a comment. I would love to hear what you think.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6p5brx. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

If you haven’t caught up with Leadership Journal in a while, their recent edition focuses on teams and how they lead. I was especially fascinated by an article about how one church went from a one pastor model to a team approach of four men who lead together.

Can you imagine if every church was led by four instead of one? Blows your mind doesn‘t it?

The featured church, Next Level Church in Denver, explained how their model allows for deeper service, more humility, greater accountability and a healthy buffer in case one leader falls. It also allows for a community to get things done. Maybe, just maybe, it decreases the amount of ‘leadership complaining’.

All of us complain about our leaders. I just wish they would do more of this… Why can’t he be more like… It drives me crazy when… When you practice GTD, you are putting next-action thinking into play. You stop looking around and wondering why it isn‘t moving fast enough and

you
start
making it happen.

This of course builds you up as someone who actually produces results. You are then able to do the work of four instead of one.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5a8e23. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen