Scott Bel­sky:

We lose respect for a leader when he or she fails to acknowl­edge a mis­take. What we want to see in our lead­ers is a sense of self-awareness and hon­esty. Per­son­ally, I gain con­fi­dence when one of my col­leagues says, “Gosh, I don’t know what I was think­ing, sorry about [fill in the blank].” It makes me feel like the mis­take or false assump­tion is now fully under­stood and owned. It makes me feel safe.

Make no mis­take about it, part of being a pro­duc­tive mem­ber of soci­ety is own­ing up to your mistakes.

via The 99 Per­cent.

Ouno Design:

In 2007 Joan Meyers-Levy, a pro­fes­sor of mar­ket­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota, reported that the height of a room’s ceil­ing affects how peo­ple think. She ran­domly assigned 100 peo­ple to a room with either an eight– or 10-foot ceil­ing and asked par­tic­i­pants to group sports from a 10-item list into cat­e­gories of their own choice. The peo­ple who com­pleted the task in the room with taller ceil­ings came up with more abstract cat­e­gories, such as “chal­leng­ing” sports or sports they would like to play, than did those in rooms with shorter ceil­ings, who offered more con­crete group­ings, such as the num­ber of par­tic­i­pants on a team.

via ouno.

Alik Levin:

If you’ve ever felt that the more hur­ried you go, the more behind you get, maybe you just need to prac­tice switch­ing gears and add some slow to your life.

via Sources of Insight.

Scott Berkun talk­ing about Nicole Steinbok’s 22 minute meet­ing theory:

Who decided meet­ings should be 30 or 60 min­utes?  What data is this based on? None. 30 and 60 minute meet­ings leave no time to get between meet­ings, and assumes, on aver­age, peo­ple need an hour to sort things out. Cer­tainly not all meet­ings can be run in 22 min­utes, but many can, so we’d all be bet­ter off if the default time were small, not large.

Need­less to say this is exactly what I have been talk­ing about. I could not agree more with the points on this list. If you have meet­ings every, you need to read this.

via Scott Berkun.

Alex Black­well:

The first task in goal set­ting is to clearly visu­al­ize what you want to achieve. Spend time con­sid­er­ing what you want and then burn this goal into your mind. Once there, the chances of suc­cess increase significantly.

via Dumb Lit­tle Man.

Inbox Zero is a con­cept by Mer­lin Mann that I embrace fully (he is writ­ing a book on it due to be out soon), and most email hogs have a love hate rela­tion­ship with Inbox Zero. The thing is, most peo­ple have Inbox Zero wrong. Not being the inven­tor of the con­cept, I should say that most peo­ple approach keep­ing noth­ing in their inbox the wrong way.

Keep­ing your inbox empty is not about react­ing to email quickly and effi­ciently – keep­ing your inbox empty is about proac­tively stop­ping email. That is, many of us try to keep our email under con­trol, file it, respond to it, del­e­gate it, fil­ters, key­board tricks – we all use them to try and tame the wild beast that is our inbox. Lately though, I have found that this piece by Mer­lin Mann is the most for­ward think­ing way to reduce your inbox to zero:

Of course, the lion’s share of your action­able email will con­tinue to come from work projects and friends, so you may feel like you have rel­a­tively lit­tle lee­way here. Can­didly, the eas­i­est trick here may just be to respond less. I’m not say­ing you should ignore peo­ple or blow off clients, but con­sider the cues that instant, fre­quent, detailed responses relay to peo­ple; one of the best ways to sug­gest that you want to receive less email is to send less as well.

Since the start of this year I have been mak­ing a con­certed effort to not send any email unless I thought it to be the best way to com­mu­ni­cate with some­one. When­ever I send or receive email I try my best to keep it short, I try to never respond with just a ‘thanks’.

I have been oper­at­ing under the gen­eral rule that if some­thing is not needed for com­pre­hen­sion, then I don’t need it in my emails. The speed at which I reply to emails has also slowed. It used to be that I would respond instantly, now I try to wait at least an hour, find­ing that most peo­ple can solve the prob­lem them­selves in that time period. The net result is that my inbox was started to feel neglected, abused even.

I went from mas­sive email quan­ti­ties every few min­utes to a steady, small num­ber hourly. Bet­ter yet, peo­ple see that I mean busi­ness when I am email­ing – tend­ing now to leave out all the fluff and just get to the brass tax of the matter.

Give it a try, and enjoy an empty inbox this weekend.

Leo Babauta:

If you choose to give your atten­tion to your friends, fam­ily and other loved ones — really give your atten­tion to them instead of only half-heartedly while also check­ing text mes­sages and emails and other updates — your life will be rich in many ways.

via Zen Habits.

Here is a list of 63 ways to help you with your spring cleaning.

1.

One Room at a Time: Pick a room in your house/office and start there, don’t move rooms until you com­plete that room. Com­part­men­tal­iz­ing a larger build­ing by rooms makes orga­niz­ing seem far less daunt­ing. I rec­om­mend start­ing with the room that is most orga­nized, it will take the least amount of time and give you a visual goal for the rest of the home.

2.

Have You Used It in the Last Year?: This is the met­ric that I use to gauge whether I should keep some­thing and get rid of it. If I have not used it in the last year, and I am not sen­ti­men­tally attached to it, then it is time to get rid of it. Often I find myself say­ing that I will need it in two weeks, so I wait two weeks and if it is still unused then I dump it. Most peo­ple have a lot of trou­ble wrap­ping their heads around this com­ment, if there is space for keep­ing some­thing, then why trash it? Sim­ple: space is space and you should not clut­ter your life with things you don’t use – some­one else will put it to good use.

3.

Break Each Room Into Sec­tions and Do Them One at a Time: Same logic that applies for #1 applies here. When it comes to clean­ing a garage most peo­ple will pro­cras­ti­nate – it is sim­ply to over­whelm­ing of a task for most peo­ple to wrap their minds around. The best approach is to break the room into mul­ti­ple sec­tions (e.g. In the garage break it into the work­bench, the back, the left side, the right side, and so forth). Break­ing a larger room into sec­tions gives you a clear approach for orga­niz­ing it, and mul­ti­ple goals that you can reachas you start com­plet­ing the sections.

click to read on…

Everett Bogue:

Many peo­ple sim­ply do things because some­one told them to. Don’t accept the status-quo; if you can elim­i­nate or auto­mate a task you must make the deci­sion to do so.

Time­jack­ing and just about every­thing he talks about in this post is excellent.

via The Art of Being Min­i­mal­ist.

Leo Babauta:

This is the beta, online ver­sion of my sec­ond book, ten­ta­tively titled: focus – a sim­plic­ity man­i­festo in the age of dis­trac­tion.

I have posted this before, but he just updated to a new ver­sion so I thought it was worth post­ing again.

Link: focus.