Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. Six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

Corporate Strategy: The Evolution

Competitive advantages do not last as long as they used to, as reflected in the acceleration of the <a href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/fighting-the-gravity-of-average-performance/">competitive fade rate</a>, which measures how quickly market and operational returns regress to the mean, has accelerated markedly in recently years.In practical terms, the result is that the churn rate of companies on lists like the Fortune 500 has increased remarkably.

Dynamism In The Market

<ul><li>Active management of the business portfolio is again important: companies need to ensure that their business portfolios are continually rebalanced in order to maintain growth expectations. </li><li>New businesses need to be seeded at a higher rate, requiring large companies to behave more like entrepreneurs in part of their business, and to build the requisite skills and structures to ensure this. </li><li>Turnaround or transformation has become a prevalent and strategic capability for fixing or renewing businesses which have experienced competitive disruption, reached maturity, or fallen into decline.</li></ul>

The Three Consequences Of Dynami

As a product of the technology revolution and other factors, business plans have become less predictable. This is expected to continue with further waves of technological disruption like AI washing through the corporate economy. The consequence for corporate strategy is an entirely new logic for scale advantage.  These capabilities combine to create a new dynamic type of advantage: resilience, which delivers <a href="https://bcghendersoninstitute.com/becoming-an-all-weather-company-35d819aa99fe">long-term performance through uncertain periods</a>.

Uncertainty

Depending on the uncertainty, malleability or harshness of each, corporations have to adopt very different approaches to strategy-making, each with its distinct processes and tools. These approaches include: classical strategy (in which firms compete on scale and position), adaptive strategy (they compete on their ability to learn), vision-driven strategy (they compete on imagination, creativity, and innovation), shaping strategy (they compete on their ability to collaborate with partners), or turnaround (they compete on their ability to renew a business).

Contingency

On average the business environment has become more dynamic and uncertain.Corporate strategy must cultivate capabilities to apply and balance these diverse frameworks/strategies, picking the right approach to strategy to each business and creating a common platform for operationalizing them.

The Right Approach

The list of the world’s largest companies today is dominated by <a href="https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2022/what-is-your-business-ecosystem-strategy">digital ecosystem orchestrators</a> like Amazon, which create an offering in collaboration with hundreds or thousands of other enterprises. This profoundly changes the role of corporate strategy since the diversity of offerings and capabilities that contribute to a firm’s value creation can now reside beyond the boundaries of the firm. The goal of corporate strategy becomes to create an advantaged position within an advantaged ecosystem, blurring the boundary between corporate and business strategy

Connectedness

Corporations now need to demonstrate purpose, social contribution, trustworthiness, and ecological responsibility. This involves not only matters of intent, measurement, compliance and communication, but also increasingly issues of competitive advantage. A corporate strategy must now create credibility, social contribution, and generate advantage by dealing creatively with new social and ecological constraints, as well as deliver on the traditional variables.

Contextuality

Until recently business strategy was largely about human analysis and decision making. But machine learning has now reached a level of sophistication that rivals or exceeds human expert capabilities for an increasing scope of tasks. This has profound implications for corporate strategy. To begin with, the cognitive advantage of corporations becomes a potential axis of competition. This is determined not only by its ability to deploy AI in each business effectively, but also to shift the focus of human minds to more uniquely advantaged areas like ethics, empathy, and creativity.

Cognition

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances.

The Bottom Line

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. This article discusses six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

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Corporate Culture

strategy

Strategy

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Business

6 Factors Driving Changes to Today’s Corporate Strategies

There are several reasons why people work better in the afternoon. <ul><li>Based on circadian rhythms, some people just naturally focus better in the late afternoons or evening.</li><li>Working from home has also played a role in uncovering natural energy patterns.</li><li>Parkinson's law is at work here too. It is the idea that work expands to fill the time allotted. In the morning, we feel we have all the time in the world to focus on our to-do list. But when 2pm rolls around, we kick into high gear and accomplish all our tasks with the limited time left.</li></ul>

Why some people are more productive in the afternoons

Get the most out of those three hours of work. Reserve that 2 to 5 pm time slot for tackling your big projects. When you do your most important work during your peak energy, you can work quicker and more accurately. Use your mornings for tasks that you can easily accomplish, such as attending meetings, answering emails, and tidying up your computer files.

Work with your natural energy instead of against it

Once you're feeling creative, you want to maximise that time. Silence your phone and other devices that compete for your attention. Close additional browser tabs that may be distracting you.

Ensure you are ready when you enter your peak hours

The shift from morning to afternoon productivity may be due to working from home and the resultant blurring of our work and personal lives. Our daily morning commute was pretty important. You used to have a routine that got you from home to your place of work. If you no longer commute, you don't have that ritual to signal to your brain that it's work time now. To overcome those blurred lines, you can make your morning time feel more "official" by going on a "false commute", even if it is a walk around the block to switch your mindset to think about what you want to achieve at work.

Create a “false commute”

If you've identified co-workers who share your work and energy patterns, consider asking them to be your "accountability partner." Brainstorming and bouncing ideas around with your accountability partner will help to motivate you. Then, when they're in a similar rut, you can be there for them, too.

Partner with other people who find morning productivity challenging

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Productivity

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Personal Development

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Time Management

Help! I Only Feel Productive In The Afternoon

Effective project governance is about making good decisions and being accountable for them.  Project governance involves:<ul><li>ensuring the project's direction is in line with the rest of the organisation</li><li>making strategic decisions</li><li>managing oversight</li></ul>

Effective project governance

<ul><li>Aligning the project's strategic direction with the organisation. Every product should move toward the organisations' goals and visions.</li><li>Finding the sweet spot of project governance case-by-case. Every project will need some governance. A quick project with a narrow scope and low risk may need less governance, while a complex and important project will need more governance.</li><li>As the timeline unfolds, it will help to make strategic decisions and manage project oversight.</li></ul>

The main purposes for project governance

<ul><li>Project initiation. Strategic decisions at the start of the project include a governance framework, establishing roles and responsibilities, and deciding on project stakeholder engagement and communication.</li><li>Planning: Assessing risk, establishing clear protocols and "rules for engagement" for problems, such as missed milestones.</li><li>Execution: First, ensure to communicate all strategic plans and decisions. As the project progresses, give regular updates and monitor for oversight.</li><li>Completion: Assess what worked, what didn't and adjust for future projects.</li></ul>

How project governance shifts through a project's lifecycle

Various people are responsible for strategic decisions, assessing the risk, reporting on progress and managing the project. <ul><li>The project owner is responsible for the direction, alignment, and overall success of the project. They are often a senior executive and accountable for the entire project lifecycle.</li><li>Project stakeholders are invested in the project outcome, such as the directors or investors.</li><li>The steering committee is responsible for oversight, risk management, quality control, and project goals.</li><li>The project manager oversees the day-to-day management of the project.</li></ul>

Establishing roles and responsibilities

A strong foundation with the right structure, people, and information-sharing can ensure that projects align with your organization and result in good decisions.

Dive into the key reasons why organizations need project governance and then uncover how to apply it effectively within your company.  

product

Product & Design

A Project Management Team’s Guide To Successful Project Governance

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. 
They never have learned that insights become effective only through hard systematic work.
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Brilliance Vs Hard Work

If one cannot increase the supply of a resource, one must increase its yield. And effectiveness is the one tool to make the resources of ability and knowledge yield more and better results.Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

Effectiveness: Better Results

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away simply“operating.” He may be excellent but is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved.What the executive needs are criteria that enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.

The Flow Of Events

What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.Therefore, we have to staff our organizations with people who at best excel in one of these abilities. And then they are more than likely to lack any but the most modest endowment in the others.

The Universal Incompetent

<ol><li>Effective executives are time-oriented.</li><li>Effective executives focus on outward contribution and results rather than effort.</li><li>Effective executives build on strengths— their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation.</li><li>Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.</li><li>Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system— of the right steps in the right sequence.</li></ol>

Five Habits Of The Effective Executive

<ul><li>Effective executives do not start with their tasks. </li><li>They start with their time. </li><li>They do not start out with planning. </li><li>They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. </li><li>Finally, they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.</li></ul>Time is the most valuable resource, as one can hire great people but cannot rent, hire, buy or obtain more time.

Managing Time

<ul><li>The first step toward executive effectiveness is therefore to record actual time-use.</li><li>Systematic time management is therefore the next step.</li><li>One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can.</li><li>This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.</li></ul>Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.

The First Step

To ask, “What can I contribute?” is to look for the unused potential in the job. And what is considered excellent performance in a many positions is often but a pale shadow of the job’s full potential of contribution.
Every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.

The Team Contribution

"He always, at the end of his meetings, goes back to the opening statement and relates the final conclusions to the original intent."

<ul><li>The one secret of effectiveness is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.</li><li>This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.</li><li>Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily.</li></ul>

Secrets Of Effectiveness

One can be an effective executive by:<ul><li>Recording where the time goes.</li><li>Focusing your vision on contribution.</li><li>Making your strengths productive and focus on using them.</li><li>Prioritizing the most important things first, not necessarily the most urgent.</li><li>Taking rational action.</li></ul>

Learning Effectiveness

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to 'get the right things done'. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive. He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

books

Books

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to 'get the right things done'. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive. He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

Peter Drucker

The Effective Executive

The planning fallacy is the likelihood to underestimate the time it will take to finish a future task despite knowing that similar projects have taken longer in the past. For example, writers underestimate how long it will take to complete a novel; product managers miscalculate how long a new feature will take to build.
Studies show that we underestimate how long it will take even when we know we're likely to underestimate timelines.

The planning fallacy

<ul><li>Break projects down into smaller pieces and estimate how long each part will take.</li><li>Add 20% to your estimated completion time. It is better to plan for the unexpected than to be surprised by it.</li><li>Use historical data to make better predictions. Don't think you'll be able to finish faster next time.</li><li>Limit the scope of work. Instead of extending the timeline, reduce the scope of work.</li><li>Communicate early and often if you're going to miss a deadline.</li></ul>

Overcoming the planning fallacy

Our tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task despite knowing that similar tasks have taken longer in the past.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

The Planning Fallacy

Being productive is not about doing more. It is about doing things efficiently.
You have the same number of hours in the day as successful authors, musicians, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Investing time in some simple strategies and making small changes can help you get more out of your day.

Being productive means being efficient

Research found we get 22% less work done when we have a meeting coming up in the next hour or two.
Consider creating rules around your schedule. Batching emails, calls, meetings, or virtual events can leave a longer timespan for you to focus on work without distractions.

Batch your meetings

A study found that most people lose about two seconds per minute of work using their mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts. That amounts to eight days a year.
Learning keyboard shortcuts can increase your productivity. Most software shares the same shortcuts - learning a few shortcuts will make you faster.

Keyboard shortcuts for productivity

Small behavioural hacks can assist in better working habits and lead to huge payoffs.
Consider what habits you want to change, then modify your environment to support those behaviours. For example, if you want to read more, keep books or your kindle next to your bed and put your phone further away. If you want to check social media less often, delete those apps from your phone.

Setting better work habits

We are all writers. Our success at work or school is partly determined by our ability to communicate through email, reports, projects, and maybe articles or books.
Reading your work out loud makes it easier to test if it sounds right. It helps to make your writing clearer, exact, and more impactful.

Read your work out loud

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Remote Work

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Teamwork

What Super Productive People Do Differently

A process of performing “professional activities…in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” - Cal NewportHistorically, psychologists used to refer to deep work as “being in the flow."

What Deep Work Is

The non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted, tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Shallow work

...is the first element of deep work.That means you won’t have the mental discipline to stay concentrated on a single task unless you prepare your mind and environment to it.

Recognizing our limited willpower

"The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration."

<ol><li>Develop a deep work schedule and routine: A systematic way of getting in that deep work mindset is to develop a routine in which you always perform the task in the same place and time, for a given time frame.</li><li>Work on what matters: At the end of the day, you should be acting like an executive, working towards your goals in a professional, consistent manner.</li><li>Accept laziness: While the results should lead to higher productivity levels, your ultimate goal is to have more time for yourself. Enjoy your “lazy” time".</li></ol>

Organize Your Deep Work

<ol><li>Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours</li><li>Find your lag (the goal you’re trying to achieve) and lead metrics (the behaviors you’ll do to reach the goal)</li><li>Develop a scoreboard where you track your time spend in a state of deep work</li><li>Analyze the results and be accountable for the results, always working to hit the metrics you had previously identified</li></ol>

To work on what matters...

... is all about taking your existing time spent working and concentrating it to make the most out of it. But it’s not that you have to do more things in less time. Instead, it’s about getting more out of the tasks you normally do by reducing distractions. Deep Work is about working smarter, not harder.

Deep Work

<ol><li>Take breaks: instead of trying to get rid of distractions, you should concentrate the energy you put into them during set breaks.</li><li>Schedule tight deadlines: pick your most important tasks, the ones that require deep work, and then you schedule them in a shorter time span than you normally would.</li><li>Meditate: set a scheduled break which you dedicate to physical activity, like walking or driving, focusing your attention on a specific problem as you carry out the former.</li></ol>

Concentrate Your Energy

But instead of denying their use completely, use the  “Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection.” This means that you copy the way craftsman pick tools: they use the ones with positive impacts that outweigh the negative impacts if you are a Facebook Ads marketer,  use Facebook. If you have found the use of LinkedIn helps you attract traffic and leads to your site, the same idea applies.But if you can’t find a positive outcome from the use of a social media channel, quit it.

Quit Social Media

<ol><li>Schedule all your activities: schedule your day before you start it and organize your work — both deep and shallow.</li><li>Finish your workday early: cutting off your working time early will put your mind in “scarcity mode,” pushing you to finish it in less time than usual.</li></ol>

Eliminate Shallow Time

If you want to find time for your deep work, close all your distractions—email, Slack, phone, internet connection—and work until you’re done. Then reconnect to the world.The strategy is effective for the simple reason that you’re forcing yourself to do your work — you give yourself no choice but to work.

Become Hard to Reach

Emails. Messages. Phone calls. That new season that just dropped on Netflix. How can you be expected to concentrate in a world full of such delicious distractions? It's as if the universe is conspiring against you. In a lot of ways, it is. That means it's your job to outsmart it.

How to Use Deep Work to Ignite Your Productivity and Get More Done in Less Time

People suffering from the fear of missing out have a real need to be in the know of everything. They want to see all the news and events, any office activity they want to be a part of and are always busy commenting on Facebook posts or tweeting on Twitter.
But FOMO can negatively affect productivity in the workplace.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) in the workplace

The following issues can affect some people and should be taken seriously.
<ul>
<li>The fear of not being asked to attend an important meeting.</li>
<li>The fear of not being able to participate in a meeting.</li>
<li>The fear of not being invited to a company retreat or office party.</li>
<li>The fear of not being able to take part in a lunch break group chat.</li>
</ul>

Reasons for FOMO in the workplace

FOMO is not only decreasing productivity, but it can also cause information overload. For example, when something exciting happens early in the day, it can consume so much information that a person can reach his limit. 
His productivity will decrease and affect overall workload progress. Worse is that the information was not even valuable or beneficial to perform his task at the office.

The relationship between FOMO and information overload

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Computer Science

How FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Keeps Killing Productivity? - nTask

Work is never finished, and we are unable to disconnect from it, causing us to experience productivity shame, impacting our happiness and creativity.
The modern working profiles (like knowledge work and remote work) do not have strict guidelines on a day’s productivity or any clear deliverables. It relies on a constant flow of communication, collaboration and multiple switching of context.

Productivity Shame

<ul>
<li>Personal productivity is not about all-round efficiency, and it is wrong to think about your input as that of a machine in a factory unit.</li>
<li>This is further complicated by our mistaken assumption that being in demand means that we are doing a splendid job.</li>
<li>We blur our all boundaries between our work and personal life and every minute of the day is to be kept busy as we rush to attend every meeting, cross out every task from the to-do list or to answer every email that we get.</li>
</ul>

The Busyness Paradox: Addicted To Being Busy

Our brain starts to favour small tasks that give a false impression of productivity (woohoo! I just sent out fifty emails!) while we neglect the large, complex but meaningful tasks.
This is known as the completion bias.

Completion Bias

We are not a factory pumping out products. Our constant switching of context, and checking our smartphone notifications/email has a huge impact on our productivity, focus and our ability to get things done. We are rarely productive in the real sense but feel productive doing pseudo-work all the time.
Productivity is not getting more stuff done every day, but getting important stuff done in a consistent manner.

Changing How We Understand Productivity

If we don’t see enough progress by the end of the day, it feels (to us or our superiors) like we haven’t done enough.
Apart from the completion bias, where our brain seems hardwired to wanting to finish the given tasks, we are also having another cognitive bias called the planning fallacy, in which the brain is unable to estimate how long any task would take.
The answer is The Progress Principle, the art of reducing big, audacious goals into small chunks of doable and easily trackable tasks that provide us with a sense of accomplishment.

The Progress Principle

Our self-motivation and excitement have a relatively short life span, and while we want to be motivated before we start something, it is only possible once we have begun. This paradox is called the Motivation Trap and basically implies that action precedes motivation and not the other way round.
The trick is to to create systems and tools that get things done and sets us up for future success.

The Motivation Trap

Getting Things Done is a productivity system that helps us capture our work in one place and manage where our attention is going to be. The five steps of GTD are:
<ol>
<li>Capturing one’s ideas in a tool which is an app of your choice.</li>
<li>Clarifying each task to its next most easy step that reduces any friction.</li>
<li>Organizing each task by priority level and due date.</li>
<li>Review and reflect on your to-do list.</li>
<li>Engage yourself and get in action mode, implementing the list.</li>
</ol>

Getting Things Done (GTD)

There are four elements that need to be done as a ritual to disconnect from work:
<ol>
<li>Create a shutdown ritual each evening.</li>
<li>Physically separate from your laptop and/or smartphone if possible.</li>
<li>Take some time to relax and reflect on the day, just with yourself.</li>
<li>Take up a hobby or something that interests you outside of work.</li>
</ol>

Learning To Disconnect From Work

Take a good look at your life, and the goals you have set, and find out that sweet spot, the threshold of success that you think is ‘enough’ for you to feel productive and successful.
Example: At Google, projects have multiple objectives but instead of an all-or-nothing situation, they have Objective and Key Results (OKRs) which let them set a success threshold (usually 60 to 70 per cent) so that they feel challenged and motivated and at the same time do not feel like a failure.

A Threshold Of Success

End the guilt-ridden cycle of productivity shame, and learn to feel satisfied with how you spend your time – in work and life.

Productivity Shame: How To Stop Feeling Like You Haven't Done 'Enough'

The antidote to chronic overwhelm is accepting that you cannot do it all.
Prioritizing means embracing the limits of your time and your energy, and taking back control of your to-do list. Embrace tactical strategies to ensure your priorities rise to the top amid the busyness of life.

Accepting that you can't do everything

There are some general areas that all of us should prioritize in order to function well and generally make life worthwhile. These areas are:
<ul>
<li>Health and fitness. Bad health and fitness habits add up over time and have a knock-on effect in other areas of our lives.</li>
<li>Sleep and rest. Inadequate sleep leads to unstable emotions, impaired learning, imbalanced hormones and a compromised cardiovascular system.</li>
<li>Friends, family, and relationships. It's hard to mend relationships once they've been frayed. Be proactive about being the connector and decide beforehand what you won't miss out on.</li>
<li>Productive work. Instead of working harder, we should work smarter (more strategically.)</li>
</ul>

Things worth prioritizing in life

Intentionally take your focus away from distracting areas in your life.
<ul>
<li>Social media and entertainment. While they can add fun to our days, it's worth reducing how much time we spend on apps.</li>
<li>Busy work. These are tasks we do regularly but that fail to move us forward. These tasks should be delegated, automated, limited, or deleted.</li>
<li>Negativity. When we focus on the negative, we are prevented from seeing reality clearly. It is then important to be aware of your inner thoughts. Maintain a running record of positive things people say about you.</li>
</ul>

Things to deprioritize

<ul>
<li>Make a habit of gathering all your to-dos in one place - from email, personal tasks like cooking meals, to new ideas for projects. Capture your tasks in a productivity system and add a date when you need to do it.</li>
<li>Stay focused by eliminating distractions. Use an app blocker to reduce social media and entertainment when you need to get things done.</li>
<li>Don't fall for shiny object syndrome. When boredom creeps into our routine, it's easy to get distracted with something new.</li>
</ul>

Capturing tasks and preventing distraction

The Eisenhower Matrix system forces us to prioritize important tasks over urgent tasks.
Put your tasks in one of four separate categories:
<ul>
<li>Urgent and Important tasks/projects to be completed immediately.</li>
<li>Not Urgent & Important tasks/projects to be scheduled on your calendar.</li>
<li>Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be delegated to someone else.</li>
<li>Not Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be deleted.</li>
</ul>

Understanding importance over urgency

Instead of watching the clock, energy management can be used instead of time management. Our positive mood is high in the morning, dips in the afternoon, and rises again in the evening. We can use this information to our advantage and plan for our high-priority work when our mood is high and do low-priority work during our low mood hours.
Not everyone is the same, so it's worth figuring out when you're most productive and schedule your tasks accordingly.

Manage your energy, not your time

The Commitment Inventory productivity method makes us take stock of all our commitments and forces us to take a look at them.
<ul>
<li>Create an exhaustive list of everything you spend time on.</li>
<li>Consolidate into categories and assign a percentage to each.</li>
<li>Trim your list of commitments, ensuring each category has enough time to do it well.</li>
<li>Organize your to-do list around your categories.</li>
<li>Break big tasks down into checklists.</li>
<li>Work in timed "bursts" aligned with your categories.</li>
</ul>
Ensure your priorities are reflected in your categories.

The Commitment Inventory

<ul>
<li>Identify your hardest, most important task for the day.</li>
<li>Do your most important task first thing in the morning. Don't put it off for later.</li>
</ul>
This productivity system is known as Eat the Frog. Using this method will enable you to prioritize the important every day and build momentum for the hours ahead.

Put your most important task first

The Time Blocking productivity method compels you to plan your day hour by hour, and prevent multitasking by batching similar tasks together.
<ul>
<li>Make a to-do list for the day.</li>
<li>Categorize hour tasks together in similar blocks.</li>
<li>Estimate how long each block of tasks will take.</li>
<li>Add each block to your schedule sequentially with a time attached.</li>
<li>Complete each block of tasks from morning to evening in order.</li>
<li>Modify or postpone blocks of time when needed.</li>
</ul>
Ensure that at least one of your blocks of time is related to your most important tasks/projects.

Account for your hours: The Time Blocking method

Warren Buffett's "2 List" Strategy focuses on getting rid of the tasks holding you back from your real priorities.
<ul>
<li>Write down 25 things you want to accomplish.</li>
<li>Select your top 5 priorities from this list.</li>
<li>Cross out the remaining 20 items and actively avoid thinking about them.</li>
<li>Focus only on your top 5 priorities.</li>
</ul>

Eliminate non-priority tasks

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