<ul><li>The solution to multitasking is to do one thing-for as long as you want or until it is finished. This is called monotasking.</li><li>You'll find that this new pace is far more sustainable.</li><li>Don't try to do everything at once, work at a steady pace, keep your plate full, and keep chipping away.</li><li>Put all your tasks in one big list.</li><li>You simply have to get the tasks that are overwhelming you out of your head, and into a list.</li><li>Add everything, even if it feels wrong to write "Swiffer the floors" next to "rough draft of essay".</li><li>Once it's written out, you can organize it how you like.</li></ul>

Monotasking

<ul><li>Begin with the easiest possible item on your list. Get it done quickly and knock out a bunch of easy tasks in a row to start building up momentum.</li><li>If you want to commit to the idea, arrange your tasks in order from hardest to easiest.</li><li>Take as long as you want on each task.</li><li>The radical thing we do by monotasking is take two important tasks, and choose only one of them.</li><li>The world won't end if you leave task #2 for a few hours.</li></ul>

Start With An Easy One

Stashed ideas

Monotask to chip away at your to-do list - RescueTime Blog

Rarely does a company sustain its global industry leadership for more than a few decades, and most that do so are very well-known global brands.Organizational longevity relates to how well a firm succeeds across different markets over time, irrespective of its original objectives and founders.

Being A Leading Company For Decades Isn't Easy

YKK stands for the Japanese zipper manufacturer Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, which roughly translates to Yoshida Company Limited. YKK, founded in 1934, manufactures and produces approximately 10 billion zippers a year.It has impressively, and quietly, remained the market leader for zipper sales for many decades, begging the question: What contributes to its success and longevity?

The YKK Mystery

Zippers are a specialty item that is not marketed directly to consumers yet make up an integral part of the piece of clothing, bags, luggage, or similar items.While the zipper industry is relatively obscure, it is also large, with annual sales in between $7 and 13 billion (U.S.), with a CAGR between 5.4% and 7.6%.

Making An Obscure Speciality Item

<ul><li>Do not fear failure; experience builds success/creates opportunities for employees.</li><li>Insist of quality in everything.</li><li>Build trust, transparency, and respect.</li><li>Failure is a good thing, and YKK believes that if the goals are set high, failure is inevitable.</li></ul>

Company Values

YKK goes to great lengths to connect with stakeholders on a local, community, and global level.A key part of stakeholder engagement is giving back to the community and operating in a sustainable fashion.By virtue of its corporate values, YKK is further ahead than most in integrating sustainability into all aspects of its business.

Commitment to Stakeholders

<ul><li class="ql-indent-1">YKK's financial statements reveal slow but steady growth through the years.</li><li class="ql-indent-1">Dating back 20 years, the operating profits of the fastening business fluctuated between 11% and 16%.</li><li class="ql-indent-1">All of its employees participate in the ownership of the company as stockholders and receive dividends.</li></ul>

Private Ownership

<ul><li>One of YKK's core values is "insist on quality in everything," and, according to the company's own website, all of its business activities revolve around the assurance of quality.</li><li>Each YKK production site conducts various quality tests and regularly reports these to the headquarters in Japan.</li></ul>

Focus On Quality

Adopting new cultural customs, norms, and traditions means acquiring new cultural knowledge and experiences, and learning and using new languages.Focusing on local even manifests itself in different operations within one country. YKK successfully integrated its traditional Japanese values with those of the local southern U.S. culture at its plant in Macon, Georgia.

Being Global And Local

<ul><li>The YKK case illustrates that diversification may be a good business move but it can come with downsides and other risks.</li><li>Building a highly visible brand is conducive to staying on top or is it better to keep a low profile? The YKK story shows us that being visible to the public and garnering unwanted attention can be a risky thing. It also forces companies to take active political stances.</li></ul>

Diverse And Low Profile

How the Japanese manufacturer YKK has stayed at the top of its industry.

Lessons in Longevity from an 88-Year-Old Zipper Company

<ul>
<li>Having a culture that can absorb change is essential in leadership.</li>
<li>People need to trust who is leading the change to help understand the reason for it and trust that they will be successful.</li>
<li>For change to be successful, top-down communication and bottom-up feedback are also essential.</li>
</ul>

Leading With Change

<ul><li>Culture is an evolving creature, and the aspects of culture to look for are:</li><li>No change saturation (there isn’t too much already occurring)</li><li>People feel empowered. That is, people can either adopt the change when they want, they are involved from the onset, and/or they can voice their concerns freely.</li><li>You are in luck if you have an <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/creativity">innovation</a> culture, a fast-paced culture, or a culture that is excited by change.</li></ul> If you don’t have these, consider what alternatives or postponements you can do to allow for a better environment for your change.

Have a Culture That Can Absorb the Change

People need to trust who is leading the change to help understand the reason for change and trust that they will be successful. The following people are needed:<ul><li>Senior leaders who support change</li><li>An actual change team with training in change management</li><li>Someone managing the project</li><li>Someone managing the communications</li><li>Specialists who know the changing process (IT/finance) or people (HR)</li><li>Early adopters or advocates from the operations/business</li></ul>An effective change leader does not need to be the top leader in the hierarchy. It needs to be someone who can influence, and people listen to.

Key People in Key Roles

For change to be successful, it needs to be tailored to the individual by building out a “what’s in it for me” approach:<ul><li>Identify different types of stakeholders based on how the change impacts them.</li><li>Determine unique resistance for each stakeholder group and an appropriate mitigation plan for each resistance point.</li><li>Develop a communications plan per stakeholder group (medium, frequency, messenger).</li><li>Create a training plan per each stakeholder group (content, medium, instructor).</li></ul>The change team themselves may be a group, as are senior leaders, people leaders, and HR.

Customized Approach

It is essential that communication happens in two ways. That is, there is top-down communication but also bottom-up feedback. To make this happen:<ul><li>Default communication to live discussion (e.g. face-to-face)</li><li>Communicate frequently and consistently</li><li>Ensure you talk to the quiet people</li><li>Utilize existing structures/meetings to reduce adding additional work/change</li><li>Be positive but realistic</li><li>Place messages in the larger context, but tailor them to the individual</li><li>Stay aligned with other leaders/departments/functions</li></ul>

Over-Communicate

Leaders should consider these four things when implementing a change.

Leading with a Change Checklist

Before deciding on how to create a hybrid work schedule for when you'll work from home and at the office you must consider the tasks that you'd prefer doing in the office, such as project meetings that are best done in person. Moreover, don't limit yourself to one schedule only and insted flex your preferences over time.&nbsp;

Straightening preferences

In order to maximize team productivity you must identify what interactions are effective in person and virtually. By knowing your teammates' preferences, you'll be able to better comprehend and respond appropriately for planning in-office days that align with them and what you could need them for.&nbsp;

Maximizing team productivity

In order to manage your productivity, you must first understand how to manage your energy. Don't overbook yourself with meetings so much that you feel like you're drowning in work. Remote work can affect our motivation levels but with the rise of hybrid working times, having in-office time will pump up the times that we feel unmotivated.

Maximizing your own productivity

If you have the flexibility to decide when to come into the office, these four questions can help you figure out your routine.

How to Set a Hybrid Work Schedule That Works for You

<ul>
<li>It has been internalized in us since childhood that we should never give up, and that quitting is bad.</li>
<li>Many of us are stuck in the wrong jobs and due to this idea of not quitting, we waste a lot of productive years.</li>
<li>We don’t quit because of a cognitive bias known as the sunk cost fallacy, which basically means we continue to do something that is not helping us, but because we have already invested our time, energy and resources.</li>
</ul>
Example: We don’t quit reading a half-finished book even if the content is not helping us in any way.

The Problem With Quitting

When running a company, many entrepreneurs fail to quit, change direction or pivot their business model, unable to admit that what they were doing isn’t working, or that they were plain wrong in their decisions.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy is the primary reason for this gross error in judgement, as entrepreneurs believe that if they quit now, all the time and money investment would go down the drain.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy In Business

As a well-known cliché goes: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.
Be it an activity, a job or a relationship, we need to quit if things aren’t working out. We are too afraid to quit, and in today’s uncertain, complicated world, we are better off moving on.

Move On And Learn From It

Career

Quitting is good, actually

A critical skill in your pursuit of career success is impression management, where you have an awareness of who you are, what you are capable of, and the real nature of your strengths and weaknesses.
A positive impression can increase opportunities and help you gain some degree of control over the pace and extent of your career advancement.

Impression management is a critical skill

When you are self-aware, you recognize the impressions others are forming about you.
If a manager is tasking someone with a leadership role, you need to be sure your skills and ability are on display effectively, but also ensure that you don't come across as too abrasive. The key to impression management is to be emotionally aware of yourself and your image.

Impression management and self-awareness

Effective impressions management not only requires you to be self-aware but also to change how you communicate.
For example, compensation and promotion decisions generally involve subjective judgments. This means you want to use your communication techniques in a way that emphasize the traits needed to reach your objective. If decisiveness is called for, you want to present your decisive characteristics.

Impression management and your communication style

Impression management involves two key elements: the ability to get your point across and self-awareness.


Why managing impressions is critical (and doesn’t make you inauthentic)

<ol><li>Align to your vision. When you're clear about what you want, you're able to describe it in vivid detail and hypothesize how to get it. </li><li>Ask questions. Ask yourself what are your vision, goals and resources. </li><li>Give it some thought. Find a quiet place and reflect. Write in detail your answers from the previous step. Set up a meeting with people from different backgrounds and discuss matters of strategy. </li><li>Plan. Identify your action items to achieve your short-term and long-term goals. </li><li>Diagram. Diagramming, mindmapping, brainstorming, drawing pictures, mocking up graphs and charts… All of these techniques stimulate your creativity and can break you out of the box. </li></ol>

5 Steps To Strategic Thinking

I've been having an ongoing conversation with two or three executives lately that struck me as somewhat surprising. As an executive coach, I am also tasked with helping executives be more strategic. But finally this week someone asked me straight up: "What is strategic thinking?"

The 5 Steps to Strategic Thinking That Really Matter

As we climb up the corporate ladder, there are fewer options available, and a mid-life crisis of the corporate world comes. The reason is that the same skills that got a person hired as a young graduate are not sufficient for a senior job, in spite of the years of experience gained during the course of time.
The way out of this crisis is to be forever employable, a concept that involves continuous learning, sharing and re-purposing of one’s experience, expertise and skillsets to create a brand.

Forever Employable: Brand Yourself

There are five core concepts to keep in mind as you think about the second half of your career:
<ul>
<li>The entrepreneurial mindset : Your life is not to be sold to a person who can give you a monthly paycheck (however large it is) but has to be moulded and perfected so that it becomes your business.</li>
<li>Self-confidence: It may seem like everything related to management, digital transformation, marketing and sales has been told already, and sharing your own experience would not be something new. What is to be understood is that your own experience has a unique value, which no one has or can steal from you.</li>
<li>Continuous learning: Staying curious and well informed will help you to shape your brand.</li>
<li>Continuous improvement: Being enthusiastically skeptical is a great strategy for a constant endeavour to improve oneself, and finding a better way to do one’s task. </li>
<li>Reinvention: Being forever employable means that you have to reinvent the core aspects of yourself.</li>
</ul>

Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career

How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career

Peter J. Lawrence, whose 1969 bestseller “The Peter Principle” satirically provided many insights on the hows and the whys of incompetents working among us, is now being taken more seriously.
People are promoted to a job they are incapable of doing, based on their previous performance. This makes most employees rise to their level of incompetence.

The Peter Principle and Occupational Incompetence

The skills that made a great performer excel, the aggression and the drive, did not translate well when the same performer was in charge of a team, where other skills like people management come into play.
The best teacher of the school cannot be simply promoted as a school principal.

Different Competencies

A manager wouldn’t be able to handle a team of specialists (like Doctors or Scientists) efficiently, without any direct experience. This makes excelling at the current role a huge requirement for anyone being hired as a manager.
A fine balance between the two aspects is required while hiring, with one option being to change the hierarchy of the company itself. The person can be promoted without a typical career ladder, and continue to do his current role, which he is doing well.

Hiring The Right Person

Apart from a regular performance review, some companies have started a different form of appraisal called the management potential review, which essentially gauges the leadership specific skills of an employee who may or may not score well in the performance review.
Better management training for upcoming leaders also plays a great role in grooming management talent.

Management Potential

Why are so many people so bad at what they do? The ‘Peter Principle’ may explain.

The reasons why people become incompetent at work

Louis Pasteur is known as the father of microbiology. He is renowned for developing the germ theory of disease, creating the process of pasteurization, and for changing the way scientists develop vaccines.

Louis Pasteur

<ul>
<li>He was born on December 27, 1827, to a poor Catholic family in Jura, France.</li>
<li>In 1842, he graduated with a degree in science from the Royal College of Besançon. A year later, he started studying at École Normale Supérieure, and in 1848, Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg.</li>
<li>In 1856, Pasteur started to study fermentation to help a local wine manufacturer overcome the problem of alcohol souring.</li>
</ul>

The life of Louis Pasteur

Before Pasteur, people believed the doctrine of "spontaneous generation" - that life spontaneously appeared from non-living matter. 
This theory was used to explain why food spoiled and how infection developed. Pasteur disproved this theory.

The "spontaneous generation" theory

<ul>
<li>Pasteur found that heating beverages to a temperature between 140F to 212F (60°C-100°C) killed bacteria in those liquids - a process known as pasteurization.</li>
<li>He also turned his attention to the development of vaccines. He used artificially weakened viruses as vaccines and went on to develop a vaccine for anthrax and rabies.</li>
</ul>
Pasteur provided the proof for the existence of the germ theory of disease and revolutionized the way we think about human health.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Aubree F.
@aubree_qff

Monotask to chip away at your to-do list - RescueTime Blog

Lessons in Longevity from an 88-Year-Old Zipper Company

Leading with a Change Checklist

How to Set a Hybrid Work Schedule That Works for You

Quitting is good, actually

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Aubree F.@aubree_qff

Monotask to chip away at your to-do list - RescueTime Blog

Lessons in Longevity from an 88-Year-Old Zipper Company

Leading with a Change Checklist

How to Set a Hybrid Work Schedule That Works for You

Quitting is good, actually

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Aubree F.
@aubree_qff