The First 10 Minutes of Your Day
Ron Friedman on how to begin your day:
What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at your desk? For many of us, checking email or listening to voice mail is practically automatic. In many ways, these are among the worst ways to start a day. Both activities hijack our focus and put us in a reactive mode, where other people’s priorities take center stage. They are the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub.
A better approach is to begin your day with a brief planning session. An intellectual mise-en-place. Bourdain envisions the perfect execution before starting his dish. Here’s the corollary for the enterprising business professional. Ask yourself this question the moment you sit at your desk: The day is over and I am leaving the office with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?
I’ve noticed recently that I allow urgent tasks and projects to dominate far too much of my time, distracting me from those things that are truly important.
For me, this is most often the result of a failure slow down and plan well. I can easily convince myself that there just isn’t time to “waste” with a planning session—after all, I have things to do!
What usually follows is a day that looks much like a game of Whac–A–Mole, spent stamping out one urgent task after another while very little important work gets done.
Of course, the temptation to fall into this trap is the strongest when you are the busiest. As it turns out, the busier you are the more important it is to spend time planning your days and weeks.
So, tomorrow, begin your day by creating a plan, do some work that truly matters, and stop swinging that mallet at every urgent task that pops up.
Planting a church is like having a baby
An informal survey several years ago asked pastors what was the optimal size to plant a church. Across the board, whether the church was large or small, most pastors answered about 25 percent larger than their existing church.
Planting a church is like having a baby. There’s never really a good time. There is enough time, money, energy, and space to have one. Childbirth is messy and has a lot of yelling, but in the end, a beautiful life is born, the labor is forgotten, and we often want to have another.
We’ve got a lot of churches on some strong birth control. We need to have a lot more pregnancies. Intended ones. We need to see some beautiful church plants born and then we’ll want to have another one. And another one.
American Outlaws Tribute - #IBELIEVE
We’re just days away from the U.S. Men’s National Team’s first World Cup match. In anticipation, ESPN posted an American Outlaws[1] tribute video today.
It’s really good.
Crank up your computer volume[2], watch it, and get ready for Monday.
Update 2014–06–11:
I should have also mentioned the story that the Lincoln Journal Star ran about the American Outlaws on Sunday.
12 Principles for Pursuing Racial Integration
In video above, Pastor J.D. Greear unpacks twelve important principles for “how the Summit Church must pursue racial integration.”
Update:
You’ll find these twelve principles in written form over at Greear’s blog as well.
(HT: Zach Nielsen)
Project Naptha Chrome Extension
Here’s an impressive Chrome Extension:
Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image.
I could see this coming in handy in the future.
The Research Trap
Know when you start a project, research is often a trap. To avoid this pitfall, limit the amount of time spent so research does not become procrastination.
Setting a time limit for research is a great idea. The research trap—something I’m particularly susceptible to—can claim hours of your time if you aren’t careful.
Hours.
HOURS!
Maybe it’s time to stop doing research for your project and get started.