An organization is nothing more than a living embodiment of a strategy. That means its “organizational hardware” (i.e., structures, processes, technologies, and governance) and its “organizational software” (i.e., values, norms, culture, leadership, and employee skills and aspirations) must be designed exclusively in the service of a specific strategy.Research suggests that only 10% of organizations are successful at aligning their strategy with their organization design.

The Importance Of Strategy

When it comes to executing strategy, alignment means configuring all of the organization’s assets in the service of your stated strategy and making sure there is no confusion about what each part of the organization does to bring it to life. If you’re embarking on executing your company’s strategy, here are six ways to make sure your organization is designed to do it successfully.

Designing Your Organization To Match Your Strategy

Know what your current organization is and isn’t capable of and what capabilities you need to achieve the newly articulated strategy. Unlike competencies, which belong to individuals, capabilities are organizational.Every strategy will demand unique competitive capabilities that clearly enable your success. This work that forms these capabilities is work you must be better at than competitors.

Translate Differentiation Into Capabilities

Not all work is equal. True competitive work will get you $5 for every $1 you invest in it. However, “everyday work” — tasks that can be done on par with anyone else or in compliance with regulatory requirements, or even work that adds no value to the final product — must be resourced according to its strategic importance.Problems occur when your competitive and necessary work gets too close or intermixed. In other words, the immediacy of everyday tasks takes away from the focus on competitive work.

Separate Competitive Capabilities from  Everyday Work

In the organizations we work with, <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/02/how-systems-support-or-undermine-good-decision-making">governance design</a> — which defines who gets to make decisions and allocate resources — is often too complicated or unclear to be effective. For a strategy to be successful, those closest to the most relevant information, budgets, and problems are the best equipped to make decisions. When leaders have proximity to an issue but no authority, authority without the needed resources, or control of the budget but not the people, the decisions tend to follow hierarchical lines

Distribute Resources and Decision Rights to The Right Leaders

The new governance is often no match for the legacy behaviours and processes that remain. Like layers of wallpaper in an old house, sometimes you need to strip down to the sheetrock to make way for new décor. Leaders must not only design new governance, they must also <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/02/how-to-fix-the-most-soul-crushing-meetings">strip away previous processes and governance</a> that are no longer contributing to the strategy’s success.

Shut Down Irrelevant Processes and Governance

Understand the way your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours motivate other leaders to think, feel, and behave in similar ways. And whether you realize it or not, existing values may be rooted in a previous strategy. Consider an organization whose strategy is moving toward increased innovation and has a corporate value of precision. A value like precision could lead to overanalyzing and a low tolerance for risk — the very things needed to encourage a more innovative culture.

Understand Where the Current Culture Will Get in The Way

Too frequently, leaders assume that a few nips and tucks to the <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/02/most-reorgs-arent-ambitious-enough">org chart</a> are the equivalent of good design. But those are the Frankenstein “designs” that make people in different parts of the organization feel like they work in different companies. They quickly grow stagnant and are more fit for the PowerPoint slides on which they’re loosely drawn than for a dynamic business.For your structure to enable your strategy, it must be agile enough to face the shifts, challenges, and opportunities from its marketplace, stakeholders, and employees.

Build Nimble Structures that Allow You to Pivot

Stashed ideas

Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy

The dangers of waiting too long are that someone else will do it first, and better

Organizations are sitting on torrents of data; they just need right acumen to extract insights and be data-driven.Most business leaders still rely on their experiences and gut feeling when making business decisions , a report by forester surveys shows that 48% of decisions today are completely based on quantitative information and analysis. A lack of data literacy skills obstructs the transformation into an insight driven organization.

Getting Insights From Data

The organization who understands their customer well can serve them better and who understands the process can improve them. Data and analytics can help but only when well understood across the entire organization and used effectively.Data literacy is the ability to read, write and communicate with data which includes deep understanding of data sources, analytical methods and techniques applied to turn raw data into meaning insights which can help in validating the decision with data and hence add value to an organization’s existing capabilities.

Data Literacy

The ability of understanding and communicating with data language is a core skill required today. The art of successfully driving value from data and analytics is a core competency for making an organization stand out and leaving the competitors behind.Data literacy is an underlying component of digital dexterity, which is defined as an employee’s ability to use existing technology to drive better business outcomes.

Making Sense Of Data

Poor data literacy is ranked as the second-biggest internal roadblock to the success of the office of the chief data officer. By 2020, 80% of organizations will commence development in the field of data literacy to overcome extreme deficiencies, 50% of organizations will lack sufficient AI, data science and data literacy skills to achieve business value.As organizations become more data-driven , poor data literacy will become a deterrent to growth.

Importance Of Data Literacy

● How many people aligned with your business do you think can interpret straightforward statistical estimations such as correlations or averages?● How many managers can construct an optimal business case based on available data and relevant numbers?● How many managers can access the output of their systems or processes?● How many data scientists can explain the output of their machine learning algorithms?

What Organizations Can Ask Themselves

Start by identifying the data speakers within the organization’s i.e., Business analyst, data scientist or architecture who can speak with data as they serve as a good mediator in incorporating data driven culture within the organization. Organizations can also identify the gaps where data isn’t utilized to its full potential and can conduct data literacy workshops, training, assessments for smooth induction of data literacy.

Strategizing Data Literacy

For most of the enterprises, the data literacy program starts with a discussion drive between the data officer, competency managers, and the people leaders. The discussion should cover three critical aspects i.e., the participants, duration & budget, and the time needed to complete the program.

Incorporating Data Literacy Program Step 1: Planning and Vision 

Data Literacy is a workplace transformation program, not a technical training. Therefore, keep a note to communicate and communicate more.i. Communicate the program objectivesii. Communicate the benefit on personal & professional growth and productivityiii. Communicate the trends by drawing industry parallels, case studies, and testimonialsiv. Communicate the examples set by the leadershipv. Communicate and broadcast the internal stories

Step 2: Communication

A simple assessment will reflect the level of understanding of the workforce.<ul><li>Data Learner — He has heard about data and is willing to grow in the field, but lacks subject knowledge</li><li>Data Apprentice — Comes with a basic level of expertise in data handling and analysis. </li><li>Data Journeyman — Works on routine data activities like data collection, processing, and basic analysis</li><li>Data Star — Expert in handling all stages of data lifecycle management — data collection, processing, and analysis.</li><li>Data Rockstar — Has the ability to build stories with data and communicate to business stakeholders.</li></ul>

Step 3: Workforce Assessment

Learning is a habit and habits build culture. Organizations who have successfully implemented data literacy programs have a culture of learning and growth. Data literacy is not meant for the workforce to perform better in their projects, but it is to build habit of critically analyze data to make better decisions. Now here comes the tough part — why should we learn? Resistance, push back, and interrogation eats a lot of time and patience.

Step 4: Culture Discovery

The prescriptive learning is designed based on the different levels of data literacy; this roadmap helps in ensuring that no learner feels lost trying to absorb the concept or is bored by wasting time. The success of the program largely depends on devoted learning time in daily schedules incorporated with consistent assessments and feedback for improvement.

Step 5: Prescriptive Learning

The data literacy program should have a preset success criteria that can be visited in due course of time to get a glimpse of the program on the ground and if needed, calibrate the program strategy. The metrics can be sign up, active users, program completion, and very importantly rewards & recognition.

Step 6: Impact measurement

The growth of organizations solely depends on how the leaders responsible for incorporating data literacy in organization think about the data literacy program, data literacy is not equivalent to data training and it’s all about how effectively they plan the programs within organizations.The plan for making a common data literacy program for everyone regardless of their previous experience, knowledge, skill set or role in the organization. For example, a data leader might have a different learning needs, while business stake holder might have a different ask.

Challenges With Data literacy training programs:

MOOC (massive open online courses) platforms offer numerous knowledge tracks and there is nothing wrong in adopting them. However, data literacy is best learned when you have data, an exploration tool, and a simple problem statement to chase. Instead of just reading the scripts, you will see the problem through data lens.Remember data literacy is about learning skills which will help you more than anyone else.

Data Literacy Training Is Made Up Of MOOCs

Another common mistake which organizations make is to equate training with data literacy, it is not an easy skill to learn if it doesn’t include use cases and it is likely to be forgotten after some weekends. Mentoring employees while they apply their learning on use cases will help them build effective skills for the longer term, and for achieving the best data literacy outcome employees should immediately apply what they learn in their current workflow.

Training Does Not Include Use Cases

Data literacy is a requirement for making effective insight driven decisions, with short term investment in the program, data tools the organization can democratize data. Successful data literacy programs can play a significant role in creating long term business growth when coupled with right executive support, strategic goals, and established metrics.

The Conclusion

Organizations are sitting on torrents of data; they just need right acumen to extract insights and be data-driven. Most business leaders still rely on their experiences and gut feeling when making…

6 steps to build Data Literacy program

The first chaper of an ancient Daoist masterpiece (attributed to Zhuang Zhou, c369-286 BCE) concludes with a discourse about a huge twisted and knotted tree that made its wood unusable. Huizi considers the tree useless, and so everyone spurns it. But his friend Zhuangzi responds, "relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it." Zhuangzi suggests further that we should not always aim for usefulness nor strive to produce or do things that benefit ourselves or others. He thought we could reclaim our lives and be happier if we became more useless.

Reclaiming our lives

In modern times, we often hear how we should avoid useless things such as pursuing the arts or humanities education. Or we are told to only allow for these things if they benefit the economy or human welfare. But Zhuangzi offers an antidote to this way of thinking and demonstrates that you can improve your life if you let go of the idea of wanting to serve a purpose. He argues that usefulness in itself should not be the purpose.

Becoming useless

"Axes will never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there's no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?" A gnarled and bumpy tree cannot be reduced to its usefulness. By extension, neither can a human being. If one stops to focus on its usefulness, one can come to enjoy them. Zhuangzi similarly describes disabled people. They should be celebrated for who they are and not try to be fixed or changed.

Celebrate gnarly trees

Trying to be useful can end up harming you. For example, the gnarly tree can remain standing because it is deemed useless, but a neat and straight tree is cut down for timber. We should refrain from casting ourselves and our doings in terms of how much we contribute to the economy, the greater good, or even our future selves. Instead, we should be drifting, wandering, not concerned about praise or condemnation.

Being useful isn't always good for us

Throughout his book, Zhuangzi puts the ideas of freedom and play opposite usefulness. He thinks we need to reject the concept of usefulness because it does not make us happier or more in harmony with nature. Zhuangzi does not recommend that we shut ourselves away from society or give up a lucrative position to become a hermit in a mountain cabin. Instead, Zhuangzi responds to a mindset - that usefulness should be last when we evaluate our life choices.

A useless life is free

Welfarism is the idea that the value of something or someone is limited by if we or others benefit from it. A handful of philosophers in the West have argued against it. For example, Susan Wolf argues that 'we should think more creatively and imaginatively about the value of things we love in ways that are not confined to identifying some way in which we or others benefit from them.' Zhuangzi reasons that it is enough to simply be. Zhuangzi's vision might be likened to 'finding your groove'. Those who enjoy computers become programmers. Others become tennis players, surgeons, gardeners.

Become your true self

Follow the Daoist way – reclaim your life and happiness by letting go of the need to produce, strive or serve a purpose

How to be useless | Psyche Guides

Good customer service is super important for any company striving for customer support greatness, but it shouldn’t be all there is to it.Sometimes, the best solution allows your customers to help themselves by giving them access to immediate knowledge without requiring personal assistance.

Solving Customer Queries

A <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/knowledge-base">knowledge base</a>(KB) consists of an online library filled with guides, tutorials, and answers to common customer questions about a business’s products or services. It’s a self-service portal that can be easily accessed by customers and internal employees alike. An effective knowledge base allows you to stay two steps ahead of your customers’ issues. Waiting for customers to come to you is a dangerous strategy.

Knowledge Base

An overwhelming <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/customer-service-statistics#statistics7">91%</a> of customers said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs. Beyond that, <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/customer-service-statistics#statistics7">55%</a> of consumers fall in love with a brand when that brand offers “easy access to information and support.” Reduce customer effort and you’ll improve customer loyalty.

The Stats Are In Favour

How many steps does the customer have to take to contact you and get answers to their questions? Something that could have taken 10 seconds has now turned into 10 minutes of their time and yours. Why would you not make that process easier?Your customers will be empowered to find their own solutions, feel accomplished, and appreciate your effort to make things as easy as possible.

Reduce The Steps

A good knowledge base will also give a boost to your customer support agents by:<ul><li>Helping them be more productive: Shifting basic support queries over to the knowledge base frees up your support staff for the really important issues.</li><li>Making them happier: Employees are happier when they’re able to spend more time on meaningful interactions. (For example, preempting a problem rather than resolving it after it has already negatively affected the customer.)</li></ul>

Benefits Of A Knowledge Base(KB)

Your knowledge base tool must do more than just exist. It has to be good. The first thing to note is that a knowledge base is, at its core, documentation.Documentation is the media—text, images, and video—that explain a product or service, the material that provides official information.

The Building Block Of Knowledge Base: Documentation

<ul><li>Be easily accessible</li><li>Be organized and easy to navigate</li><li>Solve common problems</li><li>Save a customer time</li><li>Be up to date</li></ul>

Traits Of A Good Knowledge Base

<ul><li>Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base</li><li>Choose your knowledge base content</li><li>Agree on the structure of your knowledge base articles </li><li>Write your knowledge base articles</li><li>Add visuals to your content</li><li>Publish your knowledge base</li><li>Analyze and improve your articles </li></ul>

Basic Process Of Building A Knowledge Base

<ol><li>Having a FAQ section: If a customer has a basic question about your product or service, the first place they generally look is the FAQ section.</li><li>Ensuring that the contact support option is always available.</li><li>Search function: Just like Google’s search bar, you’ll usually see this before the full list of knowledge base articles.</li></ol>

Three Core Elements of a Knowledge Base

Being with these two topics, no time-consuming customer or behaviour research is needed.<ul><li>Basics: Every single question a complete stranger would have about your company or service.</li><li>Getting started: The basic onboarding and setup process a customer goes through when starting to use your service/product, broken down into steps.</li></ul>

Choosing Your Content

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to knowledge bases specifically.First, focus on scaling the structure of your help content. Create a simple knowledge base template to use for every article.Second, prioritize the customer’s workflow and use cases. Most of your knowledge base articles probably include a set process the user needs to follow. Make it as smooth as possible.

KB Structure

<ul><li>Problem or topic: Describe the task on hand or the customer issue.</li><li>Step by step process: Describe the process of completing the task or solving the issue in detailed, but simple, steps.</li><li>Result: What should happen after the steps have been completed by the customer?</li><li>Related resources: Similar articles, questions, or topics</li></ul>

Article Structure

<ul><li>Put the most important information first. If there’s something the user absolutely needs to know before they get into the process of taking action.</li><li>Chronological order. Make sure the order of each step makes sense and doesn’t interfere chronologically with any other steps.</li><li>If there’s no chronological order or dependencies between tasks, make the easiest ones the first ones. </li><li>Avoid distractions. Structure the instructions in a way that keeps them focused on the tasks on hand and won’t interrupt their workflow.</li></ul>

Structure Tips

<ul><li>When writing the actual text for your articles, mind your language first and foremost to make your knowledge base as effective as possible. Assume the reader is a complete beginner.</li><li>Don’t use any advanced terminologies or industry-related jargon, even if it makes sense to you. This might be the first time the reader has seen any of this information. Make it simple.</li><li>When it comes to actually formatting your text, simplicity is key. Focus on making your communication as scannable as possible.</li></ul>

Writing The Actual Content

The less text, the better: Customer support isn’t the place to practice your novel writing skills. Short paragraphs: Nobody has the time or attention span to pick out important information from a wall of text.Bullet points and lists: You’ll make everyone’s life easier by structuring information in a way that’s easy to read and follow.Bold and italics: Use them to give more dimension to your text. Do not underline words unless they contain a link.Adding links: Point out resources that go more in-depth so you don’t have to explain everything in one article.

Important Points To Consider While Doing KB Content Writing

Visual materials enrich your support content and keep users engaged.The most obvious type of visuals to use in your knowledge base are screenshots of new products to show how things work. But you can also play around with instructional videos, GIFs, or whatever else you feel would add a little something extra to your content.

Add Visuals

Make your knowledge base easy to find both on your own website and through popular search engines. Feel free to link to your knowledge base from other forms of support, too. Don’t be afraid to rub the fact that you have a knowledge base into people’s faces. How else are your customers going to find it? The more places you feature your knowledge base link, the better.

Publish Your Knowledge Base

The success of your knowledge base (or lack of success) should be constantly measured to see where to improve.When looking at your knowledge base performance, focus on impact. Examples of what to track include:<ul><li>Increase in customer satisfaction </li><li>Decreased volume of tickets</li></ul>Examine how your customers are using your company’s knowledge base. What parts are customers engaging with most? What are they searching for?

Analyse and Improve Your KB Content

A good knowledge base is never complete. Don’t be that company with an outdated, useless portal. Audit the entire base on a recurring basis, aim for monthly or quarterly check-ins. Add new products, updates or other changes to your knowledge base articles, and delete old, irrelevant posts about features that don’t exist anymore.

Review Your KB

<ul><li>A good knowledge base will save you tons of time, and make both your customers and support agents happier. It takes time up front, but it’s worth it.</li><li>Gather your customer support team and start simple. Figure out the basics, then get writing.</li><li>Once you have a functioning and effective knowledge base, you can build and improve on it anytime.</li></ul>

Save Time, Money and Resources

Here's the basic process of building a knowledge base: Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base. Select which topics to include. Agree on the structure of the content. Write the knowledge base articles. Add visuals. Analyze and improve.

How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

To delegate effectively, it’s essential to embrace the fundamental truth that your teams can often do it better. They are on the ground and much more attuned to what works and what doesn’t. They understand nuances in a way a leader simply can’t.

Learning how to delegate

<ul>
<li>Realize your limits. Trying to do too much on your own will result in burnout.</li>
<li>Delegation takes patience, practice, and persistence. It’s a skill you learn to master.</li>
<li>You probably have a particular way of doing things, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way. </li>
<li>Your ability to delegate depends on your team having the tools they need to succeed.</li>
<li>Acknowledge your progress. You’ll begin to enjoy delegating when you recognize you are succeeding. </li>
<li> The more you delegate the more your team will get to engage in exciting opportunities they have never had.</li>
</ul>

Delegate effectively

Executive coach Frank Faeth says that to delegate effectively, it’s essential to embrace the fundamental truth that your teams can often do it better.


Delegating shouldn’t be scary. Here’s how to do it right and become a better leader

The dynamics of one's workplace is determines how the company values their people's well-being and how they forge strong relationships. Where a workplace is influence by these two, represents them to a degree of their interplay.Though the company puts emphasis on qualities such as excellence, innovation, or industry leadership, it wouldn't be there if it weren't for the people who showed results from having good relationships and a healthy well-being.

The Dynamics of Workplace Culture

This is the kind of work dynamic that values relationships more than their well-being.
<ul>
<li>Business results matter the most for them</li>
<li>Relationships are transactional. They only value relationships based on their utility: for acquiring money, success, or prestige.</li>
<li>Many of them work unmanageable hours but are expected to accept it and not complain</li>
<li>" Winners win and anyone who falters is lunch"</li>
</ul>
This kind of workplace may get your the business results you need but the cost is their ever so often burnout and where people aren't loyal.

The Characteristics of The School of Sharks

The relationship dynamic of the Doom Loop is where neither relationships nor well-being matter.<ul><li>Taking chances on whether they're high-performers or not at all</li><li>Most business results score below average</li><li>Those a part of this team are often cynical and low performers</li></ul>

The Characteristics of The Doom Loop

The Lone Leopard culture is where they value individual well-being yet human relationships are not so important.
<ul>
<li>They often have a rugged sense of individualism</li>
<li>Low organizationaly resiliency </li>
<li>Low understanding of contrasting work styles</li>
<li>Struggle to create win-win solutinos</li>
</ul>
Although there might be individuals who like to work alone, businesses won't thrive in that culture. Innovation and risk taking is a team's work. Plus, being able to get that feeling of nurtured teamwork and goodwill for others is an experience they will likely miss.

The Characteristics of The Lone Leopards

The ideal workplace culture is where there are strong relationships and nurtered individual well-being. This is the kind of workplace dynamic where individuals can benefit because they're looking our for themselves but each other asl well.
<ul>
<li>Diverse types work together without forcing conformity</li>
<li>People give respect and receive respect at all levels</li>
<li>High chances for organizational resilience growth</li>
<li>Material, emotional, intellectual, and social needs are in balance</li>
</ul>

The Characteristics of The Trusted Teams

Here are some questions to ask yourself to figure out which team are you a part of:
<ul>
<li>Who do you want to be and who are the people surrounding you?</li>
<li>Do the people you work with share the same values as you?</li>
</ul>
Decide which best scenario best describes your team and write down the reasons for your decision. It's important to think about these things because in order for an organization to grow and produce fruitful results, people have to have strong relationships with each other that doesn't make them want to jump ship.

Figuring Out Your Team's Culture

Picture the dynamics of your workplace according to how much it values well-being and strong relationships.

4 Types of Workplace Culture: Which One is Most Like Your Team? - Mindful

<ul>
<li>Getting good at starting a difficult task is a powerful skill to acquire, and if we can just start the task, half the battle is won already.</li>
<li>Fear, stress, uncertainty and a feeling of inadequacy make it hard to start a big task.</li>
</ul>
We need to shift our thinking and take the task as an opportunity, an adventure, a playground to do something useful and fun.

Starting A Difficult Task

<ol>
<li>Pick a big task that is important and meaningful to you.</li>
<li>Find a way to make the task enjoyable and meaningful at the same time.</li>
<li>Break the task into smaller subtasks that are easier to start.</li>
<li>Remove all distractions like your smartphone notifications, browser windows and other things vying for your attention.</li>
<li>Take it as a dance and pour yourself in!</li>
</ol>

Start The Shift And Accomplish The Difficult Task

<ol>
<li>Challenge yourself to accomplish a big task once a day, for five days a week, and take it to four weeks.</li>
<li>Keep a journal to record what works and what does not.</li>
<li>Do a review and learn from your journal or from other people who follow your progress.</li>
<li>Make it a shared goal with someone else.</li>
<li>Enjoy the practice, making it playful and delicious!</li>
</ol>

The Art Of The Start

Time Management

Getting Good at Just Starting a Difficult Task - zen habits

We mostly use our smartphone’s alarm to wake up in the morning and rising up to a startling ‘beep beep’ sound can actually hinder our work performance and alertness.
Harsh alarms can disrupt our brain activity when awake, while the melodic alarm sounds like old pop songs can help the brain transition softly and effectively to a waking state.

Your Morning Alarm

A new study suggests that certain types of morning alarm tones may be better than others when it comes to improving alertness in the morning.

How your morning alarm may set the tone of your day

Most goals are out of our control. We have limited control to reach them. In a system, your focus is on all the parts that you do control. And system is a fancy word for “repeatable process”.
For example: running a marathon is a goal, running 4 days a week for 30 minutes is a repeatable process.

Focus on Systems Instead of Goals

When you focus on developing systems and work every day, your work compounds over time, developing exponential growth.
The more advantages you create, the more your next advantages pay off. A 1% gain every day compounds to almost 38x increase over a year.

Leverage the Compound Effect

Systems are the best way to progress since they reward effort and we control all the variables. However, we need to have a sense of direction in those efforts, to know what we are trying to accomplish.
Writing daily with no objective is just practice. If you want to achieve something, you need to commit to a certain output, like publishing a post on your blog weekly. At the end of the day, a system is a way to control how to achieve an output.

Measure Output, Not Input

... to constantly question yourself if your focus, time or money is on the things that generate the majority of the results.
The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle states: 80% of the output or results will come from 20% of the input or action. The little things are the ones that account for the majority of the results.

Use the 80/20 Rule

Our working memory, alertness, and concentration gradually improve a couple of hours after waking up, peaking at about mid-morning - our brain’s natural peak productivity period.
Take advantage of this state, by scheduling your most important work for this period. Focus on performing Deep Work, meaning you get to work free of distraction for a long period of time.

Reserve Mornings for Deep Work

<ul>
<li>Physical: they range from the clutter on your desk or having too many clothes, making it harder to choose an outfit in the morning.</li>
<li>Intangible: notifications from your phone, random web browsing sessions without an end in mind, convoluted apps and systems that take more time to manage than to do the actual work.</li>
<li>People: the annoying coworker who keeps interrupting you or that friend that you always give more than you receive.</li>
</ul>

3 Types of Distractions

More automation means more time to focus on creative and productive work.
Start by listing down all the tasks that you have to do recurrently every week. Then find ways to automate them, either by using apps or building your own system. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll always have recurring tasks.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

You should always make data-driven decisions. If you don’t, you are choosing to go with your opinion with no facts to back it up.
It starts by questioning everything: do I think this way because it’s my opinion/other people say so/it’s how the world works or because I’ve tested it?
Growth comes from hard work and a little luck. Hyper-growth comes from testing.

Be Data-Driven

No one is the best at everything. By focusing on what you do best and delegating the rest, you optimize your productivity.
Unless you have to develop a new skill, it’s always better to find someone already skilled at something to complete that task.

Delegate the Non-Essential

Some days are great, some days are good, some days are bad. Embrace the struggle: this is the space where breakthroughs come from.
And when you finally find something that works, it’s a magical time. But no one is going to clap. So you must do it for yourself. Learn to enjoy the small victories.

The Struggle Is the Process

Throughout the years, I've learned a lot of lessons about productivity and working smarter. These are my 10 commandments on how to be productive and work smarter, instead of harder. They serve as a constant reminder when I am feeling unproductive or things are just not working out the way they should.

10 Ways to Actually Work Smarter

Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
Being constantly interrupted by many different tasks isn't going to make you successful, only distracted. So clear away the distractions and put most of your energy on the essentials and create something worthwhile.

Focusing On The Essentials In Life

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80-20 Principle and it mainly revolves around the idea that we should focus on the few things that give you the most benefit.
For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So choose three Most Important Tasks for each day, and focus completely on getting them done within a specific time. By restricting yourself to a small number of things, you force yourself to focus only on the essential.

Focus On The Few Things Give Most Benefits

A success list is a short, well-kept list that aims to lead us in a specific direction in an organized manner. If a list isn't built around success, then success is not where it takes you.
To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. And if your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.

The To-Do List Vs The Success List

Many of us work in an endless stream of tasks, emails, notifications, and meetings — never pausing and never-ending. When you don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus your energy and…

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Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy

6 steps to build Data Literacy program

How to be useless | Psyche Guides

How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

Delegating shouldn’t be scary. Here’s how to do it right and become a better leader

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Miles @miles_n

Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy

6 steps to build Data Literacy program

How to be useless | Psyche Guides

How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

Delegating shouldn’t be scary. Here’s how to do it right and become a better leader

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Miles
@miles_n