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Self Management
Self-Managed Work and the Self-Managing Worker
Work that involves carrying out prefigured routines closely overseen by managers to ensure compliance, no longer dominates organisational efforts. These days, "work" for most senior staff and for very many other workers, means "knowledge work" whose nature requires, primarily, self-management. Modern organisations could not exist without self-managing workers. However, this fundamental shift in the nature of work hasn't been matched by a corresponding shift in the systems used in an attempt to manage and develop performance. This article discusses the shift to knowledge work and introduces some of what is required to develop and sustain it.
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Our Interpersonal Inheritance
Conversations are the barometers of a healthy organisation but answers to important questions about our own conversational competence usually lie outside of our understanding, because examining interpersonal practices is like to asking a fish to describe water. For most people they're an ever-present, unnoticed environment in which our lives happen. We inherited many of them from our families and may not realise how they are based on very old and unnecessary patterns.
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Got a Minute . . ?
Answering this question with a knee-jerk "Yes", is one of the ways we conventionally mismanage priorities and eventually need to improve our "time management". This brief article introduces more constructive responses to the question.
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In Adversity and Uncertainty
John Kirwan, former All Black and coach of the Japanese Rugby team, is a capable advocate for people who experience depression. Drawing on his personal experience with the condition, he advises "Have a plan": know what to do when you don't know what to do. When things go belly-up with our lives and intentions we can then behave as we've prepared for and rehearsed. Commonsense, but not common practice. Recent catastrophic events reinforced four important lessons about this advice.
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Hecticity
If your working week is characterised by continual haste or frantic activity and a sense of things barely under control without time to rest or relax, this brief article is for you. Four definitions provide a useful perspective on becoming less hectic.
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Managing Depression and Despondency
The process of modifying our tendencies to despondency can resemble a joke about changing light-bulbs: the light-bulb has to want the change. Really want to. Deeply and earnestly. Having some skilled support can be useful but you can probably make very significant change on your own. The key seems to be sharpening-up our self-awareness to become experts on ourselves and our own thinking and emotional processes. There's nothing mysterious about them.
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Problem-Solving Development Plan (Template & Illustration)
Well-planned plans to resolve well-defined and well-clarified problems provide the best return on investment of effort for dealing with challenges, short of miraculous guesswork or extraordinary luck. They are a combination of practices every manager should possess and help others learn, as an alternative to "throwing solutions" at problems. This (MS Word) template helps organise development planning for problem resolution, and to answer the question "Where should I start?"
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Six keys to being excellent at anything
Does the phrase "six keys to being excellent" provide a clue to the inevitable worthlessness of this information? Another book title offering a short-cut to instant success? A bandwagon fad that deserves to binned along with last year's and all the previous how-to-sort-it-all-out pop social science best-sellers? Maybe, but I don't think so. There's real-world, workplace-tested merit in this one; much good sense that would be common-sense if it were common-practice. Hoping to Make Some Changes? Here's help.
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Gentle Shock Therapies to Aid Self-Reflection
The effectiveness of periodic action-reflection can be enhanced by the introduction of fresh ideas. Here are nine techniques I sometimes use with clients, to help introduce fresh thinking into your reflection on recent experiences in order to learn from them, in this case by being a little crazy about the processes you apply.
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Facing Reality
It’s surprising how often we revisit, as though for the first time and like a bolt from the blue, the realisation that life is often painful. Our repeated awakenings from the fantasy that it should be otherwise, generate a good deal of difficulty. Ultimately, happiness is a matter of choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our unhealthy habits of mind and the discomfort of being ruled by them. Understanding these processes and how to make healthy choices are matters worth exploring if we're concerned with enhancing our self-management practices. To the extent that we believe and remain unaware or barely aware of them, we self-generate increasing stress and suffering.
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Manage Priorities, Not Time
It's not responsibilities and problem-solving that cause burnout, it's being confronted repeatedly by the same urgent problems - often in different guises. Too many urgent activities have the appearance of importance but contribute little to progress. Priority management addresses the basic problem by distinguishing between urgency and importance to raise the odds of accomplishing our intentions. Even a modest increase in priority management competence significantly reduces the stress usually associated with "time-management" problems.
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Understand and Manage Your Attitudes
How much does it matter what we think from moment to moment? Or how we think? The answer to both questions, according to an increasingly persuasive body of research is more than you might have thought. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever your perspective of the day's events and whatever you want or will do next - are matters determined by the nature and quality of your thinking and thought systems. We constantly cultivate our thinking and harvest the resulting attitudes.
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How are you doing (since you last got off the treadmill) . . ?
Got some time to reflect on where you’re up to, take stock of your progress so far this year, check your alignment with ideals or targets you set yourself earlier? Use this simple, one-page graphic to clarify your personal reference-points, check your direction and make good sense of your recent experiences.
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All material on this site is © 2007 Tom Watkins.
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