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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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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: StephenPSmith.com

At long last the e-book is ready! I have compiled all of the posts and worksheets from one of my most popular series into one download.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People E-book

If you are looking to get more information on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system you are in the right place. Over the course of the next few pages you will encounter lessons in personal change that can transform your life.

Because this is not exactly a simple concept to implement, I have created a set of 7 lessons that will guide you through the stages of implementation over the next 7 weeks. This should give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before implementing the next one. Some of the lessons are supplemented by a follow-up worksheet that I have created to help you start implementing the new habit.

Many of you have been requesting this, and I am pleased to provide the totally free information here: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/7wgj24. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

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

As the new year approaches, many folks begin to think about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the coming year. Sometimes these goals involve your job, your health habits, or other personal development topics.

Jeremiah Owyang published a list of Six Career Tips for people in the corporate world. One of the most interesting was this one:

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Another tip that resonated with me was his perspective on education. Quite a few of the people that I have managed and trained in the past have been young people, just going off to college, and they have asked me about the value of education and what they should study in order to get a “good” job.

My advice often conflicts with what they have heard from parents and guidance counselors. In my own experience those guidance counselors were dead wrong and the whole profession should be outlawed. An education is important, depending on what field you are looking to go into. Most of the time I recommend that you go to college and study something that you are passionate about, or at least very interested in. I’ll let Jeremiah cover the rest:

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

The future of work is changing, schools are not preparing children for it.It is increasingly up to you to help and educate yourself.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6z3co8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

My friend Michael Sliwinski, founder of the Nozbe GTD application and editor of Productive Magazine, has just released the first issue of Productive magazine. It is a fantastic resource! The magazine includes 17 very useful articles in this first issue - with the headliner being an Interview with Getting Things Done author David Allen by Oliver Starr.

Your favorite feature of this magazine (besides the article by yours truly, of course!) is that it’s absolutely free to download.

The magazine is in PDF format and it is obvious that Michael and his team have put in a lot of time and effort producing this.

The list of contributors is a Who’s Who of the Productivity Blogosphere:

• Alex Shalman Blog
• Black Belt Productivity
• Change your thoughts
• Cranking Widgets
• David Allen Company
• GTD Times
• LifeClever
• Marc and Angel Hack a Life
• Michael Sliwinski on Productivity
• Organize IT
• Positive Sharing
• Productivity 501
• Productivity in Context
• Put Things off
• Simply Get Things Done with Nozbe
• The Happiness Project
• Unclutterer
• Zen Habits

Download your copy at  Productive Magazine today!

UPDATE: For a pic of my desk and workspace, see http://flickr.com/photos/hdbizblog/2956402748/

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/654q3f. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen