I’ve put together a comprehensive collection of project management quotes.  I didn’t count them, but at a glance, it looks like more than 100 project management quotes covering key topics:  what is project management and what do project managers do, actions and tasks, change and change management, failure and learning, plans and planning, process, project cycles, risk management, schedule and time, scope, teams and leaders, and vision.

If you have a favorite project management quote, I’d love to hear it.

I’m a big believer that project management skills are some of the best skills for life (See Program Manager Skills for Work and Life).  One of the best skills we learn from project management is how to break work down into little steps we can execute.   We learn how to document a vision in a way that inspires others to see what’s possible.  We learn to anticipate, and better yet, deal with problems, risks, and issues.  Dreams are one thing.  Execution is another.  Project management is where dreams meet execution and it provides the framework and tools to create a new reality. 

It’s powerful stuff.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” -- Charles Darwin

That's one of my all-time favorite quotes because it's surprising.  It's not the smartest or the strongest, or even the fastest that survive ... it's the most flexible.

That says a lot about the value of agile and agility in today's world.  I think of agility as the ability to effectively respond to change.

Intelligence is valuable too, but not just raw smarts.  It's what you do with what you've got.  There are multiple flavors of intelligence, and they can help you survive and thrive in today's world.  Maybe you've heard of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, positive intelligence, or multiple intelligences?

I think how we look at our own intelligence can limit or enable us.  For example, if you don't think you're intelligent, then you might not try to do intelligent things.  For example, if you've defined intelligence in your own mind to mean something along the lines of "the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria", that singular view of intelligence might put a damper on how your view your own abilities (depending on how you scored on your IQ test.)

I wrote a post on What is Intelligence to elaborate and share what I've learned from Howard Gardner and his definition of intelligence.

I’d be curious on how your thoughts about intelligence have evolved and changed over the years, given how much of a premium people put on how smart you are.

This post will give you some Evernote tips and tricks for how to use Evernote as a Personal Information Manager or as a personal knowledge base.

I think of Evernote as an "Agile Knowledge-Base."  It's like a simple Wiki, with folders and pages.  The big deal is "access anywhere" and "friction-free" notes.   The beauty is the simplicity and the focus.  As a user of blogs and Wikis, I'm a fan of simple notes.  Plain-text is my preferred note format.

I've used Evernote for years (sidenote -- I drove a tool similar to Evernote, before Evernote, so I very much appreciated when Evernote showed up on the scene, and I empathized with some of the same technical challenges and user experience issues the Evernote team faced.)  I should also mention that I’ve created tens of wikis (if not hundreds) with many thousands of pages, tens of SharePoint sites with many thousands of documents, and tens of blogs with hundreds of posts.  In my early days of Microsoft, I‘ve created hundreds of Knowledge Base articles and managed thousands of Knowledge Base articles.  I’ve managed many thousands of pages for Microsoft patterns & practices (aside from co-authoring eight technical books.)  I’ve also created information architectures for very nasty and complex information problems to simplify them.  I regularly coach people and teams on how to keep their email at zero (I call it Zen of Zero Mail.)  

The bottom line is -- I slice and dice information overload down to size for breakfast, and I simplify complex information.

I've been using Evernote since 2008.  I must use it a lot since I have more than 7,000 notes.  Keep in mind, when I moved to Evernote, I started from scratch with a fresh start (or it would be many thousands of notes larger.)  I've used so many ways to store my personal knowledge base over the years, and I've learned a lot about keeping it simple, keeping it useful, and keeping it flexible and adaptable.  I’d like to share some tips and tricks with you, that might improve your Evernote experience. 

Here we go …

10 Ways to Use Evernote More Effectively

1. Keep it flat.  Keeping a flat set of folders (“Notebooks”) is a simpler experience.   A folder with notes in it keeps things simple.
2. Focus on fast browsing over creating dynamic views.  Sure you can tag things and get clever.  In my experience, focusing on naming folders better, and naming notes better, and having a place for things is way better than trying to create fancy views.   In the long run, simple folders and simple notes are easier to manage as batches if apples are with apples and oranges are with oranges.
3. Carve out “action” from “reference.”  You can broadly think of your information as either "actionable" or "reference."  Actionable information would be things like checklists, To-Do lists, step-by-step How Tos, etc.   Theses notes help you do stuff.  Reference information is anything else.  It's all the conceptual information or raw information that you might look up or refer to.   When you carve out action, you make it easier to actually use.
4. Keep your titles short. Keep your titles simple and sticky.  Sound them out.  When you say your title out loud, you can find a simpler name.  Name your notes what you would search for.  Whatever comes to mind is probably right, because they are your notes.  Ask yourself, "If I had to find this again, what would I look for?"
5. Name your notes with YYYY-MM-DD.   For date-based things, this is a great way to name your notes fast.  It also makes it easy to sort and sift through them.  I like to use this for my "To Do" lists.   For example, for a To-Do list for May 18, 2012, I would simply name it, “2012-05-18.”
6. Have a "Notes" folder.  I have one folder that is effectively my notes dumping ground.  It is my main place to stick anything and everything by default.  I don't have to think.  If it's a note, I stick it there.  I can always move it later, but it's my friction-free place to put information.
7. Use keywords in titles to cluster your notes.   Within my “Notes” folder, I have thousand of notes.  To cluster things together, I simply use a keyword in the title.  For example, I have a bunch of unique ideas that pop into my head.  To group them, each time I write a note, I prefix it with “JD – “ … for example, “JD – How to Create a 1,000 New Jobs”, “JD – How To Be an Infopreneur”, “JD – How To Change the Cloud Game”, etc.   So when I browse my big dump of notes, I can easily scan and browse this set.  It’s a proven practice.  I’ve used it for years.  I actually learned it from the Microsoft Knowledge Base for dealing with massive mounds of information and keeping it all findable over time.
8. Have a "Pics" folder.  I have a place to put pictures.  I always see things I want to remember, so I dump my visuals there.  Maybe I should have called it Visuals (it's easy to rename), but I like having a folder that when I browse it, it's all images.
9. Have a "Projects" folder.  I have a projects top-folder ("Notebook Stack"), with a notebook per project.  This is my fast place to put quick notes on the things I work on.  It's "one-place to look."
10. Periodically refactor your knowledge base.  Take the time to rework your knowledge base if it's not working for you.  Rename your folders.  Change your keywords or prefixes.  Do this periodically.  For example, once a month, see if your folder names are working for you.  Maybe you need to consolidate.  Maybe you need to take a whole batch of folders and shove them under a parent folder called Archive.  Get stuff out of your way, and surface the stuff you need.  Focus on speed and simplicity.

Example of My Evernote Notebooks
Below is a snapshot of my Evernote folders.  Use it to inspire your own customization of your Evernote.  That's another beauty of Evernote -- you can make it work for you.  If you're wondering what that top cluster of folder is under my "Action" folder, that's how I implement Getting Results the Agile Way.  (See How To Use Getting Results the Agile Way with Evernote.)

You Might Also Like

• 10 Ways to Make Information More Useful
• Agile Results with Evernote
• How To Use Getting Results the Agile Way with Evernote
• The Zen of Results with Evernote

“You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away and know when to run.” – Kenny Rogers

Dealing with setbacks is tough.  Sometimes we get knocked down so hard, we wonder if we’ll get up again.  Such is life.

But why do some people rise and triumph from their trials and tribulations, while others stay down for the count?  I believe a lot of it has to do with the way we program our minds.  It’s the sayings we say, it’s the thoughts we think and it’s words we use to express our condition.  In other words, it’s not what happens to us …  It’s how we respond.  It’s how we frame it.  It’s how we think about it.  It’s what we do about it.

Just like a picture is worth a 1,000 words, the right quote is worth a 1,000 books.

The best way I’ve found to bounce back, or to find a way forward, or to make the most of the unthinkable, is to fill our mental toolbox with a cornucopia of the world’s best wisdom at our finger tips.   Quotes are a powerful way to lift us, inspire us, and keep on keeping on.  

Here is a hand-crafted collection of some of the best quotes on moving on:

• Moving On Quotes

You can use them for work, when you need a reminder of how to stand strong when tested.  You can use them for life, when you need a firm foundation for rolling with the punches, and dealing with the setbacks that hold you back, or try to knock you down.  It is a serious and significant collection.  You will recognize many of the moving on quotes and hopefully find some new ones.

It’s a living collection so please feel free to share any of the best quotes on moving on that have served you well in work and life.  When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and tough minds get built from the sayings we say, and the beliefs we adopt.

Enjoy and please share with whoever needs a little lift in life.

If you want to read faster, I'll share a way that will radically change how fast you can read books, and, more importantly, comprehend the information.  You can read faster and absorb a lot more books with a rapid reading method -- the sticky note way.  You can do extreme reading with sticky notes. 

This approach is for printed books and magazines.  I'm a fan of the Kindle.  You can read my Kindle review.  My main scenario for Kindle is instant access, reading fiction, and having books at my finger tips.  That said, I can read and learn faster with physical books, using the "Sticky Note Method."

I read a lot of books each month.  I usually spend in the neighborhood of $300 a month.  Books are my fastest way to learn new ideas, new methods, new techniques that I can test at work to keep growing my capabilities.  Books are the short-cuts for personal development and rapid learning.

Why the Sticky Note Method
Here's a quick story that might help show how it works.  The other day I was looking for a key concept.  I knew which book it was in.  I started rapidly flipping through pages.  I couldn't find it.  I started to put yellow stickies in the book as I flipped through.  On each sticky, I wrote down one nugget of insight -- one key idea or action that was worth noting.  As I wrote down each insight, I put it into easy to understand terms.  I wrote it as a one-liner reminder.   Within 20 minutes, I had parsed my 300+ page book.   It was riddled with stickies, my one-liner reminders, and I now had a personal index, with key take aways.

It was the wrong book.

I took a break and realized I was intently looking the right way, but in the wrong book.  I grabbed the right book, and found the idea I had been looking for within seconds.  Meanwhile, what dawned on me was just how powerful this rapid reading method is.

The sticky note method is powerful because it forces you to internalize what you read, while turning insight into action.  It's simple too.  But don't let the simplicity fool you.

How To Use the Sticky Note Method for Rapid Reading
The steps are simple:

1. Start with the right question.  Get curious about the book you are about to read by asking, "How can I use this?"
2. Flip through with intent to use it.  Flip through the book, scanning the information as you go, while asking, "What's the big idea?  What's the surprise inside?  What's the insight?  What's the action?"
3. Write down one-liner reminders.  As you hit interesting ideas, write down one key insight or action on a little yellow sticky, and place it in the book, close to where the source of the insight is.  These one-liner reminders turn the insight into action, and create little mantras for you to remember the big ideas.  For example, a one-liner reminder from the book, Little Book of Leadership, is Best is a Way of Life.  That one-liner reminder teaches us that excellence is a habit, and that the more we use it, the better it gets, and that it spills over into other parts of our life.

That's it.  I told you it was simple.  It’s simple, but effective.

You will get faster with practice.  When I asked one of my mentors what's the secret to running faster, he said run faster.  I thought he was joking but he was serious.  The same is true for reading faster.  To read faster ... read faster.  But now you have a method to make the most of what you read, as you go – The Sticky Note Method for Rapid Reading.  It works because it forces you to focus, it forces you to internalize information rather than regurgitate information, it forces you to create a personalized, meaningful index into your book, and it forces you to distill information into easier to little insights and actions (one-liner reminders) that turn insight into action.

I've been using this approach for years.  I've tried many ways to read faster, and they all add up, but if I could only share one approach with you, this is the one that will radically change your game and take your reading to the next level.

I find that action builds momentum.  The best kind of action is decisive action because then you are "all in."  Dipping a toe in the water doesn’t make the same splash as diving into the pool.

When I'm under the gun, "satisficing" to make decisions serves me well.  Gary Klein wrote a great book on how experts make rapid decisions under fire. (The book is Sources of Power.)

Some of the techniques I use include: criteria and weights, CARVER (Criticality, Accessibility, Return, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability), and Six Thinking Hats.  At Microsoft, I tend to use criteria and weight when I need to get agreement with others on what the priorities are.  I also tend to use Six Thinking Hats when I need to rapidly have folks change perspective, and take a more holistic view.  To make the most of Six Thinking Hats, I use questions at the whiteboard to focus the thinking and work our way through the hats.

At the end of the day, I've found that a lot of the decisions come down to who do you want to be and what experiences do you want to create.  Basically, the more you can connect your decisions to your "Why" or to your values, the stickier they are.

In fact, the secret of changing habits is to first decide who you want to be and our identify helps us pattern match the best fits.

I'm honored to have a guest post by Alan Shelton.  It's Leadership is Who You Are.  Alan is the author of Awakened Leadership, and his guest post is about how the key to effective leadership is to be more of who you already are.

It's a powerful idea.  Instead of changing who you are to be a more effective leader, you leverage who you are, and you bring out more of it, in an authentic way.

One of the most useful leadership trainings I had years ago, focused on bringing more of who you are to the table.  The idea was to use your unique experience and values as a strength.

In my example, one of my unique experiences was that I was a kickboxer.  Sports and personal growth are important to me.  What that means is that when I lead a project, I bring a personal growth perspective to it.  I find ways for people to spend more time in their strengths and I find ways for them to grow, while we take on new challenges.  I encourage people to push past their limits and expand their capabilities.  I encourage them to think of stories in their day to day, that reflect their private victories.  I use little wins as progress so that people flourish.

That's what it means to bring more of you to the table to play your best leadership game.  It's connecting to your values, and using your unique experience to create an authentic arena for growth and greatness.  It unleashes more of your power because you are going with your grain, instead of against it, and you are creating experiences that are congruent with your values.  In other words, you get what you project, and you get more of what you focus on.

The Rapid Research Method is a way to speed up your product research.  It’s also a way to speed up ramp up time when you are leaning a new domain.  The Rapid Research Method is also a key for rapid innovation and rapid product design and development.  Lastly, the Rapid Research Method is also a great way to map out a space and perform competitive assessments.

One of the challenges with product development is doing effective research for your product design to make sure you have the right map of the pains and needs, the top concerns, and the key desired outcomes.   Another challenge is actually making this information actionable and simple to share.  

I’ve had the benefit of driving several projects end-to-end, so I’ve been through the research and exploration stage multiple times.  I’ve learned a lot of tricks for speeding up research and making it more effective.   I’ve had to use these techniques to play catch up in various domains from application architecture to security and performance, to even the cloud.   They work.  

I’m going to share a few techniques in this post.  Collectively, I”ll refer to using them as the Rapid Research Method.  It’s the approach I’ve used for many, many projects over many years, and as a way to perform competitive assessments.

What’s important about the techniques is that they make it easy to rapidly organize and share vast amounts of information in an actionable way.   Looking back, one of the big surprises for me is how just about any domain can be broken down into questions and tasks.   If you know the questions that people ask and the tasks they need to perform, you’ve effectively mapped out the most important information within that domain.   This helps you prioritize all the rest of the information, such as concepts, principles, patterns, and practices.    Another way to look at it is that all the information is either going to be action or reference.   For example, a checklist would be actionable, while a whitepaper on a key topic, tends to be conceptual.

Software, like an information product, tends to suffer from information management problems.   It’s tough to share “castles in the mind.”  Then there is the people factor.  Not everybody can slice and dice information the same way, or with the same skill.  The real issue though is sharing “state.”   The problem with research is that it’s like climbing a mountain.  How quickly can you get others to make it up the mountain, after you?   What sort of trail or spikes can you leave along the way?   That’s where these research tools that I’m about to share come into play.   They help you not only get you and your teammates up the mountain faster, but they leave a trail that others can follow.

About the Approach

The approach is fairly easy.  It involves creating simple lists.  The power comes from how you create and share these lists.  It’s actually the information architecture of the research that unleashes the power of your research.  The single best thing you can do with your research is produce output that can easily be used by others, so that you can easily bring in more brains on the problem.  When everybody can see the lay of the land, it’s easier for people to find a faster way forward, get resourceful and solve problems.

Here is the approach in a nutshell:

1. Gather the Questions.   In this step, simply start gathering the user questions.  Questions are everywhere.  The trick is to capture them and put them down on paper.    My favorite questions are “Why" and “What is XYZ" and “How does XYZ work” or “When do I use XYZ.”
2. Gather the Tasks.   In this step, simply gather the user tasks.   You can interview users.  You can watch them in action.  You can survey.  You can play and explore the domain yourself.  You can analyze search queries.    What’s important is that you capture the user actions.   This compliments the user questions.  Questions are the “conceptual.”  Tasks are the “actionable.”  When gathering tasks, I find it helpful to write them down individually using the pattern “How To XYZ.”
3. Identify the Hot Spots.   As you organize your questions list and tasks list into more meaningful buckets, you’ll start to see common categories.   Consolidate the categories as best you can.  This will help you focus and refine your research and funnel what you learn.   These “Hot Spots” will make it a lot easier to slice and dice the domain into actionable nuggets.
4. Create a Frame.    Use your “Hot Spots” to create a “Frame” for your domain.   One way to do this is to create a simple table of your “Hot Spots” and a description of each “Hot Spot.”   This creates a quick lens for looking at the domain, and puts a focus on the most important categories of information.  When you need to share your research with others, you now have a fast way to show how you broke the information space down and made it more actionable.  Experts will quickly validate or correct your frame.   That’s the beauty of this approach.  You can’t lose.  You are always improving it based on what you learn.  It’s a true learning system.
5. Gather User Stories.   User stories are a great way to really take things to the next level.  They help to up-level the tasks, build empathy, and really put things in context.  I like to manage these as simple lists, and I use the language, “As a user, I want to …”, or “As a user, I need to …”

I’ve often said that any problem domain can quickly be broken down into questions and tasks and address 80% of what matters.   That little rule of thumb has served me well, time and again.   I never get stuck when I’m figuring out a new domain.  I always go back to the basics.  The real race is to find the fastest way to get the questions and tasks down on paper in a shared way that others can contribute, review, and prioritize.

You can browse the examples below to see what these question lists, task lists, hot spots/frame, and user stories look like.

Key Guidelines to Keep in Mind

• The value of your solution is the value of the problem solved.   So the better job you do of capturing the right problems, the better chance you have at a successful product or solution.
• Experience is the short cut.   Find the people with experience.   You can save yourself exponential time, money, and resources by finding the right people who have the experience who can quickly share the questions, tasks, and scenarios that matter within a given domain.
• Relevancy is king.   The best solutions don’t matter if they aren’t relevant.  You stay relevant by staying connected.  The trick is to stay connected to the key opinion leaders and influencers within a given domain.  You want to know the movers and the shakers as well as the folks that play in the domain on a daily basis.

Hot Spots and Frames

“Hot Spots” are simply the key categories or areas of focus.   They represent the categories that are key choice points.   They are actionable.   They are “Hot Spots” because they are 80% of where the action is.   They are the 20% of the domain that accounts for 80% of the activity.   I use “Hot Spots” as a way to slice a domain down to size and quickly get to what counts.  Each “Hot Spots” represents an area that is either a key opportunity or a key pain point.  The “Hot Spots” are a great way to organize actionable information such as principles, patterns, and practices.  

The Frame is simply a lens for looking at a problem.   It’s what’s in the picture and what’s out.  How you frame a problem domain can either simplify the problem space, or make it more complex.   When you frame the problem space well, it makes it easier to act on it.  It makes it easier to identify opportunities for innovation.  It makes it easier to research the problem space with better focus.  Focus is your friend.

The problem is that you usually don’t know the key areas up front.  Framing out the space is part of the challenge and it’s part of the by-product of your research.   What I’ve found is that when you start to collect questions and tasks, that “Hot Spots” start to emerge.  You will quickly start to see patterns and things will naturally start to cluster.   This collection of “Hot Spots” becomes the backbone for your frame.   Rather than be complete, it’s about being effective.  You can use the 80/20 rule to your advantage here, which is how you both gain speed, but also amplify your impact by focusing on the highest priorities.

Frame Example

This is a simple example of a frame using security Hot Spots.   By using this collection of Hot Spots, it was very easy to collect questions and tasks within the security domain.  It was also easy to walk different technologies and evaluate their security profile.  We also used the frame to quickly gather and organize threats, attacks, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures.   Organizing the information using this frame made it more actionable, and it made it a lot easier to deal with information overload.

Security Frame with Hot Spots

Categories

• Auditing and Logging
• Authentication
• Configuration Management
• Cryptography
• Exception Management
• Input and Data Validation
• Sensitive Data
• Session Management

Question List Example

A “Question List” is simply a list of the key questions that people ask.   You can find the key questions through surveys, going through forums, looking through blogs, and through hands on experience.  Hands on experience helps you build empathy for what really matters, which will be essential when you are trying to rank, rate, and sort your list.   It also helps to organize your questions into “Hot Spot” areas or buckets.

Architectural Frame Questions List

Contents

• Authentication and Authorization
• Caching and State
• Communication
• Composition
• Concurrency and Transactions
• Configuration Management
• Coupling and Cohesion
• Data Access
• Exception Management
• Logging and Instrumentation
• User Experience
• Validation
• Workflow

Authentication and Authorization

• What are the approaches for identity store?
• What authentication mechanism will be used?
• What are relevant authentication and authorization patterns?
• How do I decide if I need to implement single sign-on?
• How do I design frontend single sign-on?
• How do I design for backend single sign-on?
• How to I flow identity to backend?
• What is impersonation and when should I use it?
• What is delegation and constrained delegation?

Caching and State

• How do you refresh your cache?
• How to design effective caching mechanism?
• What are common architectural pitfalls with caching?
• Which layers should implement caching?
• What data should be cached? (presentation, business and data access layers)
• How to choose a cache be store?
• How to cache data with different logical scopes?
• How to cache data on client side?
• How to cache user specific data?
• How to decide whether caching data will improve performance?
• How to manage expiration policy and scavenging mechanism?
• How do I protect cached data?

Communication

• How do I structure my application to optimize communication efficiency?
• How do I protect my communication channels?
• How do I choose appropriate communication protocol?
• How to flow identity across layers (tiers)?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with communication?
• How do I structure my application to optimize communication efficiency?
• How do I protect my communication channels?
• How do I choose appropriate communication protocol?
• How to flow identity across layers (tiers)?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with communication?
• What are effective techniques for communication between the tiers?
• What are effective techniques for exchanging data between the tiers?
• How to secure communication between the layers?
• When should I use synchronous communication?
• When should I use asynchronous communication?

Concurrency and Transactions

• What are effective transaction management strategies?
• How do I determine concurrency requirements?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with transactions?
• What’s the right level of granularity of transactions?
• How do I manage distributed transactions?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with concurrency?

Configuration Management

• How do I manage per app configuration?
• How do I manage per user configuration?
• How do I synchronize configuration across distributed environment (solutions)
• What are the effective configuration management patterns?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with configuration?

Coupling and Cohesion

• How to determine effective layering strategy?
• What are effective design patterns for coupling and cohesion?
• How to determine appropriate coupling between components and between layers?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with coupling and cohesion?

Data Access

• How do we pass data through the layers (tiers)?
• How to design effective data abstraction layer?
• How to model the data?
• How to page records?
• How to design for very large databases?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with data access?
• What is domain-driven architecture?
• What is a database-driven architecture?
• How do I choose between domain-driven and database-driven?
• Which technology should be used to access data store?
• How to manage database connections?
• What logic should be implemented in the data helper components?
• How to handle transactions?
• How to handle concurrency?
• How to design for a multi-tenant database?
• How to choose between in-line SQL and Stored Procedures?

Exception Management

• How to design effective exception management strategy?
• What are effective exception management patterns?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with exception management?
• How to design effective exception management strategy?
• What are effective exception management patterns?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with exception management?
• Whether to design custom exception handling logic?
• Which layers should implement exception management?
• How to deal with unhandled exceptions?
• How to display exception info to users?
• How to design logging of exception data?
• How to propagate exceptions through layers?

Layering

• How to design effective layering strategy?
• What are effective design patterns for layering?
• How to separate layers into areas of concerns?
• How should layers interact?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with layering?
• How to design effective layering strategy?
• What are effective design patterns for layering?
• How to separate layers into areas of concerns?
• How should layers interact?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with layering?
• How do I migrate my existing architecture to layered architecture, for example monolithic to layered architecture, from 2-tier to layered architecture or 3-tier to layered architecture?
• How should I structure my development teams i.e. group by layers or group by functional modules?
• How will my solution and project structure look like when using Layered Architecture?

Logging and Instrumentation

• How to design effective logging and instrumentation strategy?
• What are effective logging and instrumentation patterns?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with logging and instrumentation?
• How to design effective logging and instrumentation strategy?
• What are effective logging and instrumentation patterns?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with logging and instrumentation?
• Which layers should implement logging?
• When do I need a custom logging mechanism?
• How to make logging configurable?
• How to secure of logged data?

State Management

• How to design effective State Management?
• What are common architectural pitfalls with state management?
• Which components should be stateful?
• Which components should be stateless?
• Where should I store state?
• What information should be cached?
• How to manage state in a web farm?
• How to protect state data?

Structure

• What are the effective strategies and patterns for structuring the applications?
• How do I divide the application into sub-system?
• How do I factor the applications into layers, components and services?
• How do I factor the application into tiers?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with Structuring?
• What are the effective strategies and patterns for structuring the applications?
• How do I divide the application into sub-system?
• How do I factor the applications into layers, components and services?
• How do I factor the application into tiers?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with Structuring?

Validation

• Where do you perform validation?
• What do you validate?
• How to validate business rules?
• How to protect against malicious data?
• How to handle data validation exception?
• What are the common architectural pitfalls with validations?
• How to design client side validation?
• How to determine trust boundary for validation?

Workflow

• What are the different types of workflows? What are the differences between them?
• What are common workflow scenarios?
• What are effective workflow patterns?
• What are effective the tools for designing workflow?
• What is workflow modeling and how does it help in system design?
• What are the common pitfalls with using workflows?
• What is “workflow persistence”?
• How does workflow communicate with the system?
• How design for error recovery in a workflow?
• How do I manage workflow instances?
• How do I host workflows?

Task List Example

A “Task List” is simply a list of the tasks that users perform within a domain.   I find it helpful to use the language “How To.”   This forces people to think in terms of goals.  Sometimes it’s helpful to know the goal.  Sometimes it’s more helpful to know the specific tasks.   When you need to up-level it, simply ask “What are you trying to accomplish?”   When you need to drop down a notch, simply ask, “What are you trying to do?”   You can collect tasks from users through interviews, surveys, etc.   Again, I find that hands-on is one of the best ways to really build empathy for the pains and needs.   The real power comes from transforming from the problem side (the pains and needs), to the solution side (the specific goal or task that would address the pain or need.)

Architectural Frame Tasks List

Categories

• Authentication and Authorization
• Caching and State
• Communication
• Composition
• Concurrency and Transactions
• Configuration Management
• Coupling and Cohesion
• Data Access
• Exception Management
• Logging and Instrumentation
• User Experience
• Validation
• Workflow

Authentication and Authorization

• How to identify trust boundaries
• How to design single sign-on strategy
• How to design role-based authorization
• How to design resource-based authorization
• How to design claims-based authorization
• How to design a trusted sub-system
• How to flow identity across layers and tiers

Caching

• How to improve performance with caching
• How to decide what data to cache
• How to decide where to cache data
• How to cache data on client side
• How to cache user specific data
• How to manage expiration policy and scavenging mechanism
• How to protect cached data
• How to implement thread safety for the cached items using locking
• How to cache data proactively
• How to cache data reactively
• How to design caching for distributed environment
• How to design caching for web farm scenarios

Communication

• How to structure an application to optimize communication efficiency
• How to design for remote communication
• How to protect communication channels
• How to choose a communication protocol
• How to pass data across layers
• How to flow identity across layers (tiers)
• How to secure communication between the layers
• How to design for synchronous communication
• How to design for asynchronous communication
• How to design fire and forget (one way) communication

Concurrency and Transactions

• How to design for transactions
• How to manage distributed transactions
• How to design for atomic transactions
• How to design for long running transactions
• How to design for distributed transactions
• How to choose isolation level

Configuration Management

• How to design configuration
• How to choose for configuration store
• How to separate application data from configuration data
• How to synchronize configuration across distributed environment
• How to protective sensitive configuration information
• How to enable changing configuration information at run-time

Coupling and Cohesion

• How to design for loose coupling across layers
• How to design for high cohesion within layers
• How to design message based interfaces

Data Access

• How to design your data access layer
• How to design data abstraction
• How to pass data across layers and tiers
• How to model your data
• How to page records
• How to design for very large databases
• How to design a domain-driven architecture
• How to design a database-driven architecture
• How to manage database connections
• How to handle transactions
• How to handle concurrency
• How to design for a multi-tenant database

Exception Management

• How to design exception management
• How to design for unhandled exceptions
• How to design structured exception handling
• How to design for appropriate display of exception data
• How to plan and design for exception logging
• How to propagate exceptions in a distributed design
• How to design for notifications

Layering

• How to design layering
• How to choose communication options between layers
• How to design message based interfaces for remove layers
• How to separate layers into areas of concerns

Logging and Instrumentation

• How to design logging
• How to design for instrumentation
• How to design logging for distributed environment
• How to design logging for web farm scenario
• How to configure logging
• How to secure logged data

State Management

• How to choose the appropriate state model
• How to flow call context data across application layers
• How to design State Management
• How to store state
• How to manage state in a web farm
• How to protect state data
• How to design for passing data across tiers

Structure

• How to choose patterns for structuring your application
• How to factor security requirements when structuring your application
• How to factor performance and scalability requirements when structuring your application
• How to factor the applications into layers, components and services
• How to factor the application into tiers

Validation

• How to identify trust boundaries
• How to design a centralized validation solution
• How to validate input and data against business rules
• How to validate input and data for security
• How to validate the integrity of data
• How to handle data validation exceptions

Workflow

• How to design workflow
• How to choose a workflow technology
• How to choose authoring mode

Summarizing Task Lists

I’ve found it especially helpful to organize massive lists of tasks into simple two-column tables.   This creates a nice view that makes it very easy to prioritize, cut, or elaborate, in a fast and simple way.   You can color code your lists.  You can bubble key things to the top.  You can make whitespace where you need it.  You can group your tasks under sub-items within a row.   The choices are endless, but the two-column tables does make dealing with massive mounds of information a breeze.  The way it compacts and frames information makes scanning very easy, which is important when you are trying to get the “bird’s-eye view.”

User Stories at a Glance Example

One of the most powerful techniques I use to rapidly gather user requirements is user stories.  I find that capturing user stories with the language, “As a user, I need to” .. or “As a user, I want to …”  really helps add context and clarity, while keeping it amazingly simple.   I also find that organizing the user stories by Hot Spots helps go a long way, especially when you are dealing with a large amount of information.   Below is an example where I was collecting user stories to rapidly figure out the top concerns of business leaders and Enterprise Architects when it comes to cloud computing.

The beauty is that when you capture the user stories well, it is very easy to deal with both timeless stories and timely ones.   In this particular example, even though it’s a few years old, you can see that the top issues that it exposes are alive and well.  One additional point on this example is that I used another information pattern.  I call it the “View More” pattern.   I use it to bubble up the short-list and then push the rest of the list below the “View More …” heading.  It’s highly effective for organizing very large information sets, especially if you alphabetize the list.

User Stories for Cloud Enterprise Strategy

Categories

• Awareness / Education
• Architecture
• Availability
• Competition
• Cost
• Governance and Regulation
• Industry
• Integration
• Operations
• People
• Performance
• Planning
• Risk
• Security
• Service Levels / Quality of Service
• Solutions
• Sourcing
• Strategy
• Support

Cloud Enterprise Strategy Scenarios Map

If you are a project manager or a program manager, or aspiring to be, one of the best project management tools you can add to your toolbox is the Kanban. In fact, if somebody were to ask me, what’s the single best way to exponentially improve project execution, I would probably say, the answer is Kanban. (Well, I might first say, get my book, Getting Results the Agile Way, and adopt Agile Results

A Kanban is a simple project management tool. It enables you to visualize your workflow, limit your work in progress, and optimize your “cycle time” (the time it takes to complete one item.) For software development projects, this is a big deal. It helps you find bottlenecks and push quality upstream. Ultimately, you shape your process to flow more value as efficiently and effectively as possible, “just in time.” Another way to think of it is, your users “pull” value through your development chain, while you streamline your process.

I first got introduced to Kanbans, several years ago, by one of the best and brightest in software engineering, Corey Ladas (author of Scrumban.) My introduction was a “learn by doing” exercise.

Identify State Changes in Your Workflow

We went to the whiteboard and Corey has me identify the main states of my project workflow. While it was iterative, and a lot of work was done in parallel, the main stages were:

Analysis, Design, Development, Test, and Release. It looked something like this:

Identify Work Items

Next, Corey asked me to identify the “things” or “items” that I would show on my Kanban. I had a hard time breaking things down into useful units until I used a simple test. What’s the smallest, most useful thing I could demo to users? For simplicity, let’s just say I broke things down into features and user stories. In this case, a user story was simply a persona-based scenario with a goal. In my case, I also needed some “system” stories. The bottom line was that each of these was a “chunk” of value that I would ship to users. Corey had me name some of these items and write them down on stickies. He then had me place them wherever they were currently at on my Kanban. It looked something like this:

What surprised me was that he didn’t ask me to change our team’s process. The goal was simply to reflect whatever process we were already using. The most important thing was really to identify the most meaningful state changes in our workflow, and to identify the work items that flow through it. He said the power of the Kanban is that we would tune our process over time, with real data and real results. It’s a living thing. And it’s a visual thing.

Set Limits for Work in Progress

The next thing Corey had me do was to set a limit for how many items should be actively in development at any given time. I struggled here at first because I was used to having a lot of work in flight. He pointed out the problem with a lot of work in flight is that there’s thrashing, and more time spent context switching than actually finishing the work. Worse, if we’re not closing things down, then we aren’t flowing value. He said, to keep it simple, as an experiment, set the limit at 3. Find out what your team can do. For example, with focus, how quickly can we close down an item? Where does the bottleneck happen? Which resources are idle? Could idle developers pair up with testers and unblock test, for example? He got me thinking.

Push Quality Upstream

This is where the magic happened. Corey asked me to identify some of the most common issues found during Test. I rattled off a few common problems. He then asked me what I could check for before entering test. We then repeated this process a few times until we had a few simple checks before we leave Analysis, and before we leave Design, and before we leave Development.

It sounds so simple, and it is,   But the big deal was having it all at a glance, on the whiteboard.  We could now easily get the right people at the board, having the right conversations.

A Living Process

The beauty is that we ended up with a unique process for our team -- built by us, built for us, and optimized by us. As a team, we could now all visualize our process. We could easily see our bottlenecks. We could easily add quality checks. We could easily add more states to our Kanban if we needed more fine-grained visibility. We basically achieved a highly-flexible, highly relevant process that struck a balance between self-organization and workflow specialization.

Kanban for Execution Excellence

That was the start of my Kanban adventures, long ago. In the years since, I’ve experimented with Kanbans, personal kanbans, Kanban tools, and various approaches. The Kanban has proven itself time and again for me as one of my most effective project management tools. It really is “just enough process” combined with a focus on flowing value and improving quality. It’s one of the best tools I’ve used for driving execution excellence across people and teams in an empowering and self-directed way.

When the question is, “How do we improve our execution?” … even if Kanban is not the answer, it’s very often as good place to start. After all, if you can show somebody your Kanban with current activity, chances are you can find the bottlenecks and optimization opportunities. At the minimum, you’ll have a shared frame of reference, the visualization of your process, which is a great way to dive deeper to troubleshoot any execution issues.

You Might Also Like

• Agile Methodology in Microsoft patterns & practices
• Idea to Done: How I Use a Personal Kanban for Getting Results
• Methodologies at a Glance

One of the most useful patterns I’ve found to stay on top of a project budget is to think in terms of a monthly burn rate. As a program manager, one of my responsibilities is managing a budget. In the early days, I hated managing the budget because it always seemed like a lot of moving parts and more complex than it needed to be. That’s because it was.

What I found is that thinking in terms of a monthly burn rate, helps simplify the budget and chunk it up into manageable parts. I’ve managed projects over a million dollars and I’ve managed much smaller ones. This approach scales up and down. The monthly burn helps avoid surprises at the end, and it helps you keep a pulse on the spend without getting mired in details, until you need to.

Knowing the monthly burn rate makes it easy to calculate the overall spend. It also makes it easy to play out what if scenarios, such as when there are budget cuts. It also makes it easy to do draft ballpark figures, or to calculate your ask in terms of dollars if you need to extend your project.

What I like about the monthly burn rate is that it’s a big enough chunk of time that you can see patterns. A monthly burn rate also works well for managing a portfolio of programs and projects. For example, if you’re business has an overall budget you need to manage too, then you should know at your fingertips, how many big and small projects you can run in parallel.

Once you start trying to figure out the monthly burn rate, a lot of things fall into place quickly. For example, you can ask questions like, what’s the smallest monthly burn of your successful projects? What’s the average monthly burn rate across your projects? What’s the largest monthly burn rate?   This can lead to finding ways to do things better, faster, cheaper, and to cross-pollinate your project practices more effectively.

Your monthly burn can also help put things in perspective. For example, at the end of the month, are you flowing the right value or making the right impact for your money’s worth?

Once I switched to thinking in terms of the monthly burn, a lot of the previous budget management complexity went away. I think having a simpler mental model forced me to ask better questions. For example, when should the payment milestones be for any vendor resources? Could those be consolidated to the same day each month? When is the right time each month to review the work? Are there any anomalies in terms of vendor rates? Etc.  Instead of manage a composite of complexity, I was able to focus on managing well to the month.  If I took care of the days, the weeks too care of themselves, and if I took care of the weeks, the months took care of themselves, and so on.

In any case, thinking in terms of a monthly burn rate helps you quickly calculate potential project spend. Once you get a baseline, you can quickly play around with variables, such as, what would the ideal team of resources be and what would that cost each month? What would the minimum team of resources be and what would that cost each month?

This pattern has helped me make better choices around things like whether to start with a full team, or whether to add resources downstream, or whether to roll people off the project. Budget is a very real constraint, and it has significant impacts on how things get done. Using the monthly burn pattern is a powerful building block for building budgets. You can use it to help figure out affordable teams and project durations. Sometimes time is the main constraint. Sometimes budget is the main constraint. In any event, you can simplify your budget management by thinking in terms of a monthly burn rate.

As one of my wise mentors always said, “If it’s free, it’s for me.” (Tom, are you out there?)  Here is a quick list of free leadership tools you can use today, right now, to change your game.  These tools are battle-tested and have stood the test of time.  The beauty is you can take them wherever you go because they are leadership tools for your mind.

If you want the lion's share of impact, then you need tools for today's world.  It's an ever-changing landscape, and things can rapidly change under your feet.  It's the information age, so the right tools, accordingly are information tools.   They are tools for your mind, to help you organize, prioritize, and gain clarity and control over your actions and your thoughts.  They also help shape your feelings.  A great deal of your action is shaped by how you feel.  If you feel overwhelmed, that is not your power stance.  You achieve way more, with less effort and more impact, when you feel unstoppable.

That is the purpose of these tools – to bring out your best.

These tools help you unleash your capability and funnel your action and energy into more meaningful impact.  Through focus and clarity, you amplify your impact.  By using a system with pluggable parts, it's easy to swap tools in and out, to find the ones that work best for you.   Because it's a system, you can tune and prune it to get better results, and they keep getting better over time.

10 Free Leadership Tools for Making Things Happen
Here are free tools that you can add to your leadership toolbox:

1. Agile Results System.  This is the pluggable system.  Agile Results is a personal results system for work and life.  You can think of it as a simple system for producing meaningful results.  It's works for individuals and it works for teams.  It's also a highly effective time management system that puts an emphasis on flowing value to yourself and others.  It also helps you make time for what's important.  I've used it to lead more than 30 projects at Microsoft.  Around the world, people are using it for everything from business transformation to re-energizing their teams and leaders.  It's free.  You can get it today at http://GettingResults.com  (BTW – if you didn’t notice the acronym, it’s how to kick-ARS in work and life.)
2. The Rule of Three.  This is your leadership tool to avoid information overload.  You can use The Rule of Three to chop problems down to size.  It's also a way to help keep your mind organized among the chaos.  You can use it any situation where you feel overwhelmed or have fallen into the trap of analysis paralysis.  Simply identify three actions to take.  Or, simply identify three take aways from any meeting.  If you are trying to get your priorities in order, start with the top three.  Bubble things up.  The Rule of Three makes it easy to manage your mind, and manage your actions. 
3. Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection.  This is a free leadership tool for driving results each week.  It works by focusing on three wins each week and three wins each day.  Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection is simple to use.  On Mondays, you identify three wins that you want for the week.  Each day, you identify three wins for that day.  On Fridays, you identify three things going well and three things to improve.  The power comes from clarity in terms of priorities.  Another benefit is that you are taking both a fresh look each day, as well as zooming out to your week.  Additionally, you create a powerful learning loop through Friday Reflection so each week you are testing, learning, and adapting, while flowing value.
4. Weekly Outcomes.  This is a free leadership tool to take Monday Vision to the next level.  The idea is to first dump out all the things that are top of mind, and then identify your top three wins for the week.  This is a powerful leadership tool for driving clarity across the team, and for showcasing progress.  It's also a powerful way to troubleshoot execution issues.  On Monday's, simply write down the list of the work to be done, and put it in A-Z order.   This forces you to name things well.  It also helps you clear you mind, by dumping it down onto paper.  It also gives you a simple place to look for the week's work.   After you have your list, which is ultimately a "brain dump", you next identify the three wins that you want for this week.  You simply bubble those to the top.   You now have a very simple list of your three wins, and then your A-Z list of top of mind issues and work to be done.   This puts you in the driver's seat to create clear and compelling goals, as well as drive priorities with precision.   The beauty is, you can also easily share this list with your team.  In fact, it's a great way to co-create the week together.  What I do is this ... each Monday (or Sunday night), I start a new email with the subject line:  Weekly Outcomes: 05/07/2012 (or whatever Monday's date is.).  I then do a fast dump of all the work I'd like to achieve with the team.  I then bubble up three wins.  I then send it out to the team and ask them to identify anything I've missed, or to reshape or re-prioritize the wins, based on their vantage point.  The beauty of this approach is that it works with distributed teams.   Throughout the week, you also have a handy list to refer to, and it can help keep your grounded while everything around you might be moving about.  See Weekly Outcomes: The Simple Weekly Planner.
5. Monthly Theme.  This is a very simple, but very powerful free leadership tool.  The idea here is to identify a driving theme or priority for the month.  Having a theme makes it easy for everybody to contribute to the initiative.  For example, you might choose a theme of "simplicity" or a theme of "fun."  Whatever theme you choose, it should be relevant to a top concern that you want to address, and this helps get some extra elbow grease on the problem.  Having the theme gives the team an overall sense of purpose, and a way to connect what they do back to a bigger picture.  It makes the month more meaningful and the little extra efforts across the team on a daily basis, add up very quickly to exponential results.  If you don't have a theme for this month, simply identify one and start to socialize it.  You can quickly build a coalition in your favor if you pick a theme that people care about.  For example, a theme that I'm focused on now is "friction free delivery" where I want to streamline our consultants for world-class delivery in a way that's simple, effective, and repeatable, that gets the friction out.  Friction is anything from looking for assets or templates they need to figuring out what the anatomy of a great engagement looks like.  It also includes simplifying any tools or content to better support a "grab and go" approach over having to wallow and absorb how to put things together.
6. Ten at Ten.   This is one of my favorite tools for reducing email and administration overhead and getting everybody on the same page fast.  It's simply a stand-up meeting.  I tend to have them at 10:00, and I set a limit of 10 minutes.  This way people look forward to the meeting as a way to very quickly catch up with each other, and to stay on top of what's going on, and what's important.  The way it works is I go around the (virtual) room, and each person identifies what they got done yesterday, what they're getting done today, and any help they need.  It's a fast process, although it can take practice in the beginning.  When I first started, I had to get in the habit of hanging up on people if it went past 10 minutes.  People very quickly realized that the ten minute meeting was serious.  Also, as issues came up, if they weren't fast to solve on the fly and felt like a distraction, then we had to learn to take them offline.  Eventually, this helped build a case for a recurring team meeting where we could drill deeper into recurring issues or patterns, and focus on improving overall team effectiveness.
7. Show and Tells.   This is one of the best free leadership tools for helping enforce accountability.  The idea is this ... each week, have a recurring meeting where the point is to demo the work.  It gives people that have done great things, a great way to showcase their work.  For people that aren't delivering, it gives them a chance to feel some accountability to the team.  The most important problem it solves though, is that it helps people own demonstrating the value of their work.  It's one thing to do the work.  It's another to demo the work.  When you demo the work, it puts you in the mindset of the user, and you have to simplify your work so that it can be well-understood.  This process also helps the team air their dirty laundry among each other before going public.  That said, it's also a great way to showcase with customers, as long as the team has reached a level of maturity with their ideas, and is open to external feedback.  I made it a habit to include customers during our show and tells to really help spot problems early and make sure the pains and needs are being addressed.  The earlier the better, although there is such a thing as too early.  The is one of the most powerful leadership tools for really helping teams own improving their user experience.  It also is a powerful leadership tool in terms of helping people feel valued for the work they do.  The easier things are to demo, the easier it is to tell and sell the story.  It helps people practice their sticky messages and to feel a sense of progress.   It's also a way to build buzz and build momentum, while helping the team gain clarity across the team of what the different folks are bringing to the table.
8. 30 Day Improvement Sprints.   Simply pick a focus to work on and commit to improving it for a 30 day timebox.  Committing to 30 days of improvement in a focused area, is easier to swallow than changing for life.  However, improving an area for 30 days, is actually life changing.  With 30 days, persistence and time are on your side.  It's a big enough time box that you can try different techniques, while building proficiency.  Using 30 days makes working through hurdles easier too.  A lot of the hurdles you hit in you first week, are gone by week two.  Little improvements each day, add up quickly.  If you look back on how many things you tried for a week and stopped thinking you hadn't made progress, the reality might be that you didn’t get to week two to see your results.  This is a great approach for building muscle on the team when adopting new habits or practices.
9. Strong Week.  This is a powerful leadership tool for maximizing the impact of the overall team.   The idea is to have everybody spending more time in their strengths.  You can actually design a strong week by identifying the activities that make you strong, and reducing the activities that make you weak or drain you.  As you can imagine, this can dramatically amplify the results from each person on the team because you are deliberately having them spend more time in the things they do well and bring them to life.   This is one of the most effective tools I use to help anybody I mentor instantly start producing better, faster, more meaningful results.  For a step-by-step How To that walks through the process, see How To Have a Strong Week.
10. Guidelines for Focus.  When it comes to leadership tools, focus is your friend.   One of he best ways to rapidly improve your results is to narrow your focus.  When you narrow your focus, you gain clarity on outcomes, and you can both measure and feel your impact with more precision.  You can also build momentum more quickly and this will quickly turn into a snowball of success that rolls in your favor.  Here is a comprehensive set of focus guidelines that you can use to really hone your ability to focus.

Special Bonus
Although you can do anything I’ve explained here on paper, on a whiteboard, or electronically, I do have a set of template you can use that might help with some things.  You can find the templates here:

• Free Templates for Agile Results

You Might Also Like

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When life throws you a nasty curve ball, or when the best laid plans of mice and men go awry, it can be tough to look on the bright side.   But that’s what leaders do.  Whether you are a leader or developing your own self-leadership, positive quotes can serve you well.   They fortify the mind.   And where there’s a will, there is often a way.

Positive thinking helps breed positive action.   A positive mindset can help you see opportunities you might otherwise miss.   A positive mindset can also help you break out of limiting loop and self-defeating patterns.   They can lift yourself and those around you.  Positivity is contagious and it’s worth spreading.

I’m not a positive thinker of the Pollyanna kind, but I’ve learned through habit and practice to look for the sliver lining in the cloud, before dwelling on the rain.  I’ve also learned that crying over spilled milk just leaves a slippery floor, and that the fastest way to change the situation, is to change yourself.   The most important lesson I’ve learned is that opportunity comes to those who seek it.

Don’t let possibilities pass you by.   If you need a new lease on life, then fill your mind with some of the best positive quotes that the world has to offer.   Draw from the giants of the past and present and use their skillful words to reshape your own reality.  With the right pithy prose on your side, you are unstoppable.

Here is my collection of positive quotes to put some of the world’s best wisdom at your fingertips:

• Positive Quotes

Enjoy. 

Share freely with anyone who needs a lift in life.

Some people say, there is no such thing as work and life … there is just life.   Others say, the line between work and life has blended and we spend more time than ever on the job, so we have to make it meaningful.   And Confucius taught us, "Do something you love, and you will never work a day in your life."

One way to think about work is it’s the ultimate form of self-expression, and it’s an arena for your best results.  

How you show up, the thoughts you think, where you put your focus, and how you lean into challenges, can either grow your greatness, or spiral you down.  In Young Guns II, one of my favorite quotes is, “You’re either growing or dying … there’s no in between.”

One of the secrets to “The Good Life” is to spend more time in your values.  Given how much time we spend at work, it’s only natural that if we can connect what we do to our values, we improve the quality of our life.  Or, worst case, we get a whole lot of chances to practice every day

Once you start to use your values as a lens, you start to understand why you prefer some jobs over others, why you like to work with some people over others, and why you like some companies over others.  Yeah, values are that powerful.  People fight wars over values.   The trick is to get the power of values on your side, so that every day, you can use your values as a way to move mountains … or at least hop over some mole hills that get in the way.

To use your values, you first need to find your values.   Here is a list of values and approach for how to find your values.    Once you find your short set of values, you can then integrate them into your day to day.  Here is an article where I share how to live your values.

Values are the short-cut to living your best life and finding work-life balance.   The reality is that work-life balance doesn’t come from balancing competing forces .. it really comes from blending with skill.

At Microsoft, we get a lot of chances to present numbers.   Whether it’s making a project pitch, or writing our reviews and quantifying our impact, numbers are everywhere.   And when we aren’t the one presenting, we are often reviewing the numbers that other people are presenting.

It’s one thing to know the numbers.  It’s another to share the numbers in a meaningful way.

As a Program Manager for several years, I’ve had to manage, show, and report on budgets.  I’ve had to quantify impact.  I’ve had to report status on key metrics.    I’ve had to figure out velocity and burn down.   I’ve had to show schedules and variance.   I’ve had to present estimates and calculate risk.   It comes with the turf.   Part of making impact, is knowing how to show it.

The problem is, we don’t always get the best mentors or the best examples.   We don’t really learn how to present numbers in school, at least not with the same focus we get on learning how to read, write, and speak.   The more I see complicated charts and confusing figures that obfuscate key points, the more I appreciate the value of simplicity and elegance in presenting numbers.

I found the perfect compliment to Edward Tufte’s, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  It’s Painting with Numbers, by Randall Bolten.    It’s the best book I’ve seen on how to present numbers with skill.   Randall was a CFO for twenty years in Silicon Valley, so he’s got the benefit of seeing all the various ways, shapes, and sizes that people throw numbers around.  He’s exactly the right person to learn from when it comes to seeing through the numbers, knowing what they mean, and knowing how to present them more effectively to speak the truth, and to make better decisions … in work and in life.

I wrote a post to elaborate on the book and get specific on the problems it addresses.   You can read more at Quantation: How to Present Numbers with Skill.  

It’s a book I’m going to recommend to the people I mentor to help them advance their careers and take their game to the next level.

Information doesn’t have to suck, and it shouldn’t be a chore.  Beautiful information is when one sentence makes you want to read the next.  In the age of insight, the right information and “ah-has” is a powerful thing.  If you think of information as a continuum, flowing from data to information to knowledge to insight to wisdom … that’s a mighty wide playing field to practice the art of making your point.

Here are ten ways I’ve learned to help you simplify information and make it more useful:

1. Add a One-Liner Key Take Away.   This is my favorite trick for simplifying slides.   If a slide has too much stuff on it and the point is not clear, a quick fix is to add a one-liner to the bottom that makes the point.  Once you have the one-liner take away, it’s easier then to go back and overhaul the slide.   You can use one-liners in more than just slides.  For example, notice how I’m starting each of these list items with a simple one-liner take away up front.
2. Be specific.  Specific is better than the general.  It’s more insightful and more actionable.   One way to be specific is to use examples.  Examples make it concrete and they make it real.  For example, would you rather know that you could change some practices to improve your health, or would you like to know 9 ways to add 12 years to your life? 
3. Make it “glance and go” over “stop and stare.”  One of the tests we used on my team is, “Don’t make me work too hard.”  If somebody shows you something, and you have to work hard to parse the point, it’s not working.  As one of my mentors says, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
4. Make a visual.   As Confucius said, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."   If you want a point to pop, visual is the way to go.  The trick is to keep it simple and focused.   You can test your visual by asking, “What’s the point?”   If you don’t know what question the visual is answering, then it’s probably not working.   Don’t make it visual, just because you can.
5. Say it in a sticky way.   Writing things down makes it easy to over-complicated things.  Read it out loud.  The way to find sticky points is to say it out loud until you find a way that resonates.  By saying things out loud, you can find the right cadence and the right linguistic simplicity.  Powerful prose and inspiring words shouldn’t require crazy contortions or acrobatics of the mouth.  Dr. Sues and Yoda had a way with words.  A just in time rhyme will do it every time.  A test is, can other people tell your story for you.  You want your words to be contagious.  Related to this is the idea -- “Use a Metaphor.”  Metaphors are sticky and they are one of the best ways to communicate an idea (if you can find the right one.)
6. Separate the user view from the producer view.  It’s cliché to say, “Know your audience”, but it’s so true.  You really have to answer the question, “Who is this information for?”  That will take care of a lot of obvious problems when telling or selling your information.  But here is the non-obvious thing … make your perspective explicit.  If you are looking through the lens of a user or customer or producer or system, just say so.  So many arguments start out simply because people don’t state what perspective or position they are speaking from.  I’ve seen so many people swear up and down how right they are, and of course they are, from that particular perspective.  And more people would agree with them, if they simply stated which perspective they are speaking from.  If you’ve ever been to a requirements meeting you know exactly what I mean.  Is it a user requirement? … a technical requirement? … a system requirement? … etc.   A little context goes a long way, and perspective is everything. 
7. Share surprising insights.  If you can answer the question, "What's the surprise?" or “What did you learn that surprised you?” or “What did you learn that you didn’t expect?”, you’ve just found the key to finding insight.  The surprise is the prize.  If you want to be really good, and you want people to call you Cracker Jack, share more prizes.
8. Show the simple + complete.  Don’t let your best ideas or key points get lost among the sea of complexity or the bane of completeness.  Start brief, then elaborate.   Have a short list, then a long list.  Summarize your long doc with a summary at the top.  Have a short deck and a long deck.  Have a one-slider, and a full deck.  Have a one-page spec, and a full set of specs.
9. Turn insight into action. If you can answer the question, "What's the action?" or, "How can I use this?", you go a long way towards providing more useful information.    The translation layer between insight and action is often a tough one.  It’s a skill you can quickly get better at though, just by attempting to answer those questions.  It’s easy to describe stuff or say a bunch of things.  It’s tougher to distill, compact, and act on information.   That’s where the gold is.

Bonus Lesson
O.K., I just to throw one more in.  Don’t worry, it’s free …

• Put it where people keep looking for it.  Information shouldn’t be a game of hide and seek or find the cheese.  One of my big lessons learned here is that wherever you keep looking for something, that’s where it should be.   This helps refocus Web pages or slides or documents.   Put it where people keep looking for it, and pay attention to what people keep looking for.   This is a powerful way to quickly improve the value of information and all you have to do is pay attention.

The big lesson of course is – simplify it.   Say it in a simple way.  Trade up for simplicity.  Simple is sticky.  Simple wins every time.   Simple trumps complete or complex, and fun trumps simple.  That’s why conversational writing can kick non-conversational’s ***, or why emails can be more illuminating or insightful than a formal whitepaper.

The meta point (the point behind the points) is that if you know what’s valued, you can be an information sharp shooter every time.

The key to shipping value is making sure your users, value what you ship.  On the Microsoft patterns & practices team, we used a technique we called "Spend $100."  This was a highly effective way to prioritize our backlog and bubble up the most valuable things to do. 

It helped answer the question, "What's the next best thing to do?"

Implementation varied, but the main idea was this:  Give a customer $100 of make believe money.  Ask them to spend it on the things they value most in our backlog of opportunities.  When we did this across customers, we could then easily see which themes and things customers value more than others.

A variation off of this, but the same idea, is to have a customer spend 100 story points.  The way this works is you assign story points to specific user stories.  Customers can then spend their story points on the user stories they value most.  Here is an example that explains how this approach was used to help prioritize user stories for Microsoft Enterprise Library.

The beauty of this "Spend 100 dollars" approach is that it helps address several things:

• How to make sure you're shipping the next best thing
• How to ensure that your users value what you ship
• How to slice your backlog down into actionable size
• How to stay customer-connected while planning your product
• How to make it easy for your customers to have a voice in shaping the product
• How to use data-driven decisions to prioritize in a simple way
• How to quickly test  your ideas for potential value with real customer feedback
• How to fail fast and quickly change direction if the value isn't there
• How to identify demand and justify appropriate investment with real user data

While it sounds simple, and the idea is, there are things to think about.  For example, how do you survey the right users?  How do you make sure you don't just cater to the squeaky wheels?  How do you organize your user stories in a useful way to make it easy to vote effectively?

It's worth working through these issues.  If you can successfully drive customer value, your value as a Product Manager or Program Manager or Developer, etc. quickly goes up, as well as your personal brand and credibility.   You will become a high value, shipping machine. 

This is a proven practice that's served many people well.  You just have to give it a shot.

It's easy to build what's possible.  It's tough to build what's valued.

If there's one thing I've learned from shipping stuff, doing competitive assessments, working closely with customers, and doing a lot of in-depth feature analysis ... it's that value is the short-cut for building better products.  If you know what's valued, then you can target that.  And, the surprise is, less is often more.  (A little gold, beats a lot of junk, every time.)

I've also learned that value is in the eye of the beholder.

What's valued can surprise you.  For example, one customer might value integration, while another customer might value, and pay for, simplicity.  One customer might value security, while another might value usability.  Value is a slider scale and there are always key trade-offs that impact the design.  That's the art part.

It's easy to assume you know what's valued.  Here's the irony.  It's also easy to check your assumptions.  Customers are happy to tell you whether they prefer A over B.

Missing the boat on what's valued is one of the worst mistakes.  It's easy to build the wrong thing.  It's also to build something irrelevant.  It's also easy to build “bloat”-ware, where the product is too many things to too many people, and master of none.  Less is more, especially when you solve the problems that people actually care about, and when you enable users to have a great experience achieving their goals.

Here's the message:  "Do overs" are expensive (if you even get a second chance.)  You don't have to build things that people don't want.  You don't have to build things that people don't value.  You don't have to build things that people won't pay for. 

You can test the value, early and often.  And, that's what some successful shippers do that other shippers don't.

Life’s better with the right tools.  The trick of course is, how do we fill our mental toolbox with the right ones.

Work and life can throw plenty of challenges at us.  Whether it’s how to master your time, play well with others, lead more effectively manage your emotions. deal with stress, learn faster, or make things happen, there is never a shortage of things to work on, problems to solve, things to learn, or things to improve.

That’s why I started Sources of Insight.  There are actually more than 800 articles at Sources of Insight with principles, patterns, practices, and hacks for leadership, personal development, time management, and more.  Now you can easily brows the collection:

• Articles on personal development, time management, life hacks, and more.  

The Story of Sources of Insight
A few years back, I carved out Sources of Insight to focus on personal effectiveness.   The purpose of the site is to help you make the most of what you’ve got.    I believe everybody deserves a chance at a better life.   I find that skill is the difference that makes the difference.

It’s wisdom at your finger tips   On Sources of Insight, I used the tag line “Stand on the Shoulders of Giants”, because the idea is to lift you with the world’s best wisdom.  I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a place that put the world’s best wisdom of the ages and modern sages in the palm of your hand.   Rather than randomly learn about some of the best quotes, or some of the best books, or some amazing people, why not consolidate these, and start to seed a garden of greatness … where the greatness is a metaphor for your potential and capability.

During my day job, as a Principal Program Manager, I drive patterns and practices for the cloud story in the Enterprise.   As you can imagine, it involves a lot of thought and people leadership, as well as influence without authority.  Aside from strategy and project management skills, it also requires a lot of skills in terms of emotional intelligence, goals, leadership, motivation, productivity, time management, and thinking.   It’s a continuous learning lab of extreme personal development.

I mentor a lot of people, and periodically coach teams, and give talks on my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.   The demand for this seems to keep going up as more people find themselves asked to do more with less, or struggling with how to flow value, or simply want to get an edge at work or in life. 

To keep up with the pace, and to innovate where it counts, I have the bad habit of regularly spending $300 a month on books.    I’ve learned how to read faster, and turn insight into action at a faster pace.   The rubber meets the road when I apply what I learn at work or in life to get results.   If you’re wondering how I build my best books lists, such as my Business Books list or my Personal Development Books, or my Leadership Books list … now you know.

It’s a tough job, but it needs to be done.

800+ Articles on Leadership, Personal Development, and Time Management
I’ve finally found a solution to make it easier for you to find more than just the tip of the iceberg.  On the Articles page, you will find a simple list of categories, along with some of the key articles within each category.    You can quickly cherry pick the ones you want to read, or you can drill into the category and explore for more.

This may look easy, sound easy, and be perfectly obvious now, but it actually took me a lot of testing to find a simple pattern for showing a lot of articles in a simple way.   I tested many combinations including auto-generated lists and showing all the articles, as well as building separate page per topic.   I like the pattern I settled on because it puts the core articles at your finger tips, while making it easy to find the rest.  I also like that now I can send somebody to a particular section and get them started with the right articles fast.

Here is a sampling of the article collection.   When you browse the actual Articles page, you will be able to dive into the articles or the categories.   It’s a lot of insight and action, right at your finger tips.

Career

• 101 of the Greatest Insights and Actions for Work and Life
• 6 Personality and Work Environment Types
• Career Growth and Finding Your Way Forward
• Passion Does not Exist in the Job, It Exists in Us
• Proven Practices for Individual Contributors
• Rapid Growth Fields and Your Career Success
• The 20 Percent Spike
• Meaningful Work is Hard
• Think In Terms of an Hourly Rate
• Thinking About Career Paths

Effectiveness

• 101 Questions that Empower You
• Be Effective, then Efficient
• Can Effectiveness Be Learned?
• Finding Your Process
• If It’s Not Working, Change Your Approach
• Luck and Success
• Mentors are the Short Cuts
• Motivation, Skills, and Feedback
• The Hat of Effectiveness
• The Way of Success

Emotional-Intelligence

• Action Signals: Use Negative Emotions as a Call to Action
• Argue Your Way to Optimism
• Change Rumination or Pessimism to Defeat Depression
• Don’t Sip from the Stream of Polluted Thoughts
• How to Read Poetry to Expand Your Heart
• Life Leaves a Mark
• Positive Intelligence and PQ
• Positive Thinking vs. Positive Action
• Test Your Can’ts
• Those Moments When You are Most Alive/a>

Fitness

• 9 Ways to Add 12 Years to Your Life
• 10 Years Younger
• Blue Zones: The Healthiest Places on the Planet
• Breathe With Skill to Dramatically Improve Your Health
• Exercising Your Body Makes You Smarter
• Larks, Owls and Hummingbirds
• Lessons Learned from Bruce Lee
• Archive of Fitness

Happiness

• Enjoy the Struggle
• Happiness Quotes
• Keys for Skilled Happiness
• The Two Flavors of Happiness
• Low Frustration Tolerance
• Positive Intelligence and PQ
• Positive Thinking vs. Positive Action
• Synthetic Happiness
• When It’s Cold Shiver. When It’s Hot Sweat
• Those Moments When You are Most Alive
• Whiteboard Notes on Happiness

Interpersonal-Skills

• 12 Practices for Improving Likeability
• Apologize with Skill
• Concession is Rhetorical Judo
• Dialogue Debate and Discuss
• Five Conflict Management Styles at a Glance
• Know and Share Yourself Enough
• Poor Communication isn’t the Source of Most Conflicts
• The Iceberg of Conflict: A Lens for Conflict Management
• The Art of Mental Judo
• What’s Their Story
• Win the Heart the Mind Follows

Leadership

• 3 Stories Leaders Need to Tell
• 10 Ways to Hold People Accountable
• A Leaders is the Trustee of the Intangibles
• Author a Distinctive Story
• Balance Connection and Conviction
• Boldness Has Genius, Magic, and Power in It
• Leadership Checklist
• Leadership Styles and Development Levels
• Guide Your Path with Vision, Values, and Goals
• What Executives at Microsoft Taught Me

Lessons-Learned

• 10 Lessons Learned in Comedy by Craig Shoemaker
• Lessons Learned from Bill Gates
• Lessons Learned from Bruce Lee
• Lessons Learned from Dad
• Lessons Learned from Guy Kawasaki
• Lessons Learned from John Wooden
• Lessons Learned from Mom
• Lessons Learned from Seth Godin
• Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs
• Marie Forleo on Lessons in Life

Life

• How Will You Measure Your Life
• How To Figure Out What You Really Want
• Ikigai: The Reason for Which You Wake Up in the Morning
• Life Frame
• Life Leaves a Mark
• My Top 10 Lessons in Life
• Program Manager Skills for Life
• The Business of Life
• The Good Life
• Skills to Pay the Bills and Lead a Better Life
• What 16 Movies Teach Us About Life and Leadership

Motivation

• 13 Motivation Techniques
• 13 Negative Motivation Patterns
• 25 Inspirational Movies
• 101 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Others
• Four Sources of Strength
• Find Your Drive: The Keys to Motivation
• It’s Not Motivation
• McClelland’s Motivational Model
• Three D’s for Motivation – Direction, Decision, and Dedication
• Why Do We Procrastinate?

Personal-Development

• 3 Keys to Lasting Change
• 10 Keys to Changing a Habit
• 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great
• 10 Ways to Know Thyself
• Build a Personal Knowledge Base of Success Stories, Insight, and Action to Improve Your Success
• Emulate the Great
• Finding Your Values
• Improvement Frame
• Know Your Rules to Be Successful
• The Change Frame
• You’re the Average of the 10 People You Spend Time With

Productivity

• 30 Day Improvement Sprints
• Monthly Planning with Agile Results
• My Three Wins
• Productivity Personas
• Rituals for Results
• Tickler List of the Mind
• Use Three Stories to Drive Your Day
• What’s Worth Doing Today?
• Why Use Routines?
• Write Things Down

Strengths

• Choose Your Jobs Based on Strengths
• Feel Strong All Week Long
• Find Your Strengths Among Your Team
• How To Find Your Strengths
• Specialization is Nature’s Strategy for Winning
• Strengths and Talents
• Strength and Weakness
• The Language of Strengths
• What’s Your One-Liner Super Hero Power?
• Why Strengths?

Thinking Skills

• 3 Thinking Techniques to Improve Your Intellectual Horsepower
• 10 Distorted Thinking Patterns
• Five-Minute Thinks
• Five Thinking Styles
• Focus with Skill
• How To Have a Beautiful Mind
• How To Read Faster
• How To Use Six Thinking Hats to Improve Your Thinking
• Think of Yourself as a Thinker

Time-Management

• 30 Day Boot Camp for Time Management
• Agile Results for Time Management
• Carve Out Time for What’s Important
• Fix Time, Flex Scope
• How To Use Timeboxing for Getting Results
• The Secret of Time Management
• Time Changes What’s Important
• There is No Shortage of Time
• Time is the Limiting Factor
• Timeboxes, Rhythm, and Incremental Value

While reading the book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson, I came across their section on outsourcing.

I wish I had their frame for looking at outsourcing models long ago.   On the Microsoft patterns & practices team, we regularly partnered with vendors around the world to scale our business while focusing on our core competencies.   While I did manage to think through a lot of the issues and risks, I didn’t always have a great way of framing the conversations or recommendations.   When you have names for the three outsourcing models, key distinctions for each, and a map of the main outsourcing objectives, it gets a lot easier to both think through decisions, and frame conversations for more effective outsourcing decisions.

Three Outsourcing Models
According to Ross, Weill, and Robertson, there are three mutually exclusive outsourcing models:

Outsourcing Objectives
Ross, Weill, and Robertson, share examples of common outsourcing objectives:

The Three Outsourcing Models Explained
Ross, Weill, and Robertson, provide insight into the distinctions and uniqueness features of each mode:l:

Transaction

• The key metric is quality and/or cost per transaction.
• The client-vendor relationship is an “Arm’s length” model.
• Client expectations include world-class processes, variable capacity, and a management focus on core competencies.
• Vendor offerings include standard best practice process components, economies of scale, and distinctive platforms or assets.

Cosourcing

• The key metric is project success.
• The client-vendor relationship is joint-project management.
• Client-expectations include cost savings and access to expertise on demand.
• Vendor offerings include labor arbitrage, project management expertise, and expertise on specialized technologies.

Strategic Partnership

• The key metric is bottom-line impact.
• The client-vendor relationship is negotiated accountability.
• Client-expectations include cost savings, variable capacity, and management focus on core competencies.
• Vendor offerings include capability to deliver a broad range of services, integration expertise, disciplined practices, and economies of scale.

I’ve revamped my personal development How Tos page.  How Tos are simply step-by-step recipes for results.   They are powerful because they help you build a skill or learn a technique in a rapid way.   Rather than a lot of conceptual information, they are focused on action steps.   The beauty is they turn insight into action.  Rather than learn about personal development, you can “do” personal development.”

To get a test, here are a few examples to take for a test drive:

1. How To Read Faster
2. How To Use Timeboxing for Getting Results
3. How To Solve Problems with Skill

Here is the current catalog of personal development How Tos:

Popular How Tos

• How To Change a Habit and Make It Stick
• How To Solve Problems with Skill
• How To Step Into Your Future to Visualize Success
• How To Read Faster
• How To Use the PMI Technique to Improve Your Thinking

Change, Influence, and Negotiation

• How To Change a Habit and Make It Stick
• How To Negotiate More Effectively

Decision Making

• How To Decide with Criteria and Weight
• How To Use the PMI Technique to Improve Your Thinking

Emotional Intelligence and Feeling Good

• How To Boost Self-Esteem
• How To Use a Daily Activity Schedule to Defeat Procrastination
• How To Use a Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts to Overcome Procrastination
• How To Use a Pleasure-Predicting Sheet to Find Your Passion
• How To Use an Anti-procrastination Sheet to Defeat Procrastination
• How To Use the But-Rebuttal Method
• How To Use the Triple Column Technique to Defeat Negative Self-Talk
• How To Use the TIC-TOC Technique to Improve Your Motivation and Defeat Procrastination

Interpersonal Skills

• How To Deal with Hard Bargainers
• How To Improve Your Crucial Conversations
• How To Overcome Mistrust
• How To Repair a Broken Work Relationship

Leadership

• How To Be a leader In Your Field
• How To Consistently Build a Winning Team

NLP

• How To Elicit a Strategy in NLP
• How To Reduce Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion to Improve How You Think, Feel, and Act
• How To Step Into Your Future to Visualize Success
• How To Use PRIEST to Create Well-Formed Outcomes

Personal Development

• How To Develop Your Intuition
• How To Overcome Resistance
• How To Solve Problems with Skill
• How To Use a Coach Effectively

Purpose

• How To Design a Fulfilling Life
• How To Figure Out What You Really Want
• How To Find Your Why
• How To Pave a Path Forward

Strengths

• How To Find Your Strengths
• How To Put Your Strengths to Work

Thinking Skills

• How To Think Like Bill Gates
• How To Use the PMI Technique to Improve Your Thinking
• How To Use the Six Thinking Hats to Improve Your Thinking

Time Management and Productivity

• How To Avoid Task Saturation
• How To Do Tasks More Efficiently
• How To Use Timeboxing for Getting Results

Visualization

• How To Paint a Future Picture to Share Your Vision
• How To Step Into Your Future to Visualize Success
• How To Visualize Success
  

The single most important thing I do at the start of each week is create my list of "Weekly Outcomes."  It's my approach for a simple weekly planner.  It helps me focus on the most important outcomes, and take the balcony view for my week.  It works through thick and thin.  It's a practice I've used for years, leading distributed teams around the world.

To use it, it’s simple.   Just follow three rules:

1. Create the list on Mondays.
2. Write the list down.
3. List three wins at the top, and then your A-Z list of goals or tasks.

It’s a simple format.  That’s why it works.  In the worst case scenario, I’ve taken at least five minutes to map out the wins for the upcoming week.   This helps me set a target for success.  Writing it down is important.  This frees my mind to focus on where my attention is needed most.  Whenever I need a fast reminder of what my week is about, I can look back to my list.

It’s a great leadership tool as well, especially if you have a distributed team.  It’s easy to send out the email that maps out what a great week looks like.    In the thick of things, it might take me 15 minutes to do the exercise, but those 15 minutes can save me 15 hours of wasted work or off path.  It helps create clarity and common goals across the team.   It also gives the team a chance to plug in things that are on the radar so everybody gets a good look at what’s on our plates.

You can do it on a whiteboard, or on a piece of paper, or in any tool of your choice.   I prefer anything that I can type in that lets me very quickly move things around and adjust the list without worrying about formatting.   To split up the list, I simply use whitespace.  I like whitespace and breathing room, especially when my lists are outrageous.

The key, as always, is to focus on outcomes, not tasks.   By having a list of your outcomes, you make it easier to drive results versus getting lost in the weeds.  It really is a simple weekly planner.

You can find more time management tips at http://GettingResults.com

This is a serious roundup of top blogs for insight and action:

• Top Blogs for Insight and Action

Colleagues asked me where do I go to find the best of the Web for insight and action.   This is that list.  It’s a list of the top blogs and sites that I find really go the extra mile.   It’s a mash up of top blogs on the following areas of focus: business skills, continuous learning, entrepreneurism, fun, leadership, personal development, productivity, strategy, technology, thinking skills, and trends.

Here is a sampling of top blogs from the list:

1. If you like infographics or visualizing information, you’ll really appreciate the artful presentation and insights of Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless.
2. If you are curious about the best patterns and practices in the world for living to be 100, you’ll enjoy Blue Zones Blog, by Dan Buettner.
3. If you want the Web at your finger tips in a scannable way, you’ll enjoy All Top.
4. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, anticipate the future, and be in the know on which trends will make a difference, check out Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends, and Innovation.
5. If you want leadership insights you can use, with a dash of productivity sprinkled in, you’ll enjoy Michael Hyatt – Intentional Leadership.
6. If you want deep insights into the art of change leadership, you’ll want to explore The Changing Minds Blog, by David Straker.
7. If you want ground breaking information on peak personal performance and experiments in life style design, you’ll enjoy The Blog of Tim Ferris.

It’s a living list of top blogs.  I’ll periodically update it.  

Enjoy and explore the top blogs for insight and action.

I’ve updated my top blogs lists.   They are roundups of top blogs that I find to be useful.  I organize the lists by category to make it easy to dive in by topic.  I have the following lists so far:

• Top Happiness Blogs
• Top Leadership Blogs
• Top Personal Development Blogs
• Top Productivity Blogs

For each list, I included the Top Ten Blogs, and then a longer list, organized A-Z.   This makes it easy for me to keep a short-list, and a more complete list for that particular domain.

I will continue to expand the list of top blogs to add other domains, such as top emotional intelligence blogs, top management blogs, etc.    The common theme across everything will be insight and action with a  focus on proven practices for personal effectiveness.

“Speak when you are angry - and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.” -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter

A crucial conversation is any conversation where the stakes are high, emotions run strong and opinions vary.  If you can master crucial conversations, you can kick-start your career, strengthen your relationships, and improve your health.  In the game of life, skill is often a better hand to play, than fear or luck.  Don’t fear crucial conversations.  Master them.

One of the best books on the topic, is Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

Here's the process in a nutshell ...

1. Step 1. Start with Heart.
2. Step 2. Learn to Look.
3. Step 3. Make it Safe.
4. Step 4. Master My Stories.
5. Step 5. STATE My Path.
6. Step 6. Explore Other’s Paths.
7. Step 7. Move to Action.

The beauty of the approach is that the patterns are sticky.  If you can remember things like "Master My Stories" or "Make it Safe,", then you can easily break out of limiting patterns.  The patterns are cleverly named, and once you read the book, they make perfect sense in terms of how you use them to shape or reshape conversations.   They break limiting patterns, and enable empowering ones.

Early on, we adopted and practiced these skills on the Microsoft patterns & practices team.  It was extremely helpful for bringing issues to the table, creating an open and respectful environment, and ultimately trust.  Not to mention, when you can talk about the tough stuff at work, it makes work life better.

I mentor a lot of people inside and outside of Microsoft.  This is one of the tools I highly recommend everybody adds to their toolbox.  Even if you are already good at crucial conversations, this helps you be succseeful by design rather than luck or stumble into success.

It's one thing to hear about a technique.  It's another to hear the story.  If you want to read the story of how one Softie, changed their life through crucial conversations, check out Lessons Learned from Crucial Conversations, by Eric Brun.

I put together a collection of several of my greatest “ah-has” that have served me in work and life:

• 101 of the Greatest Insights and Actions for Work and Life

It’s no ordinary collection of insight.   I attempted to capture things you can use everyday, and apply for the rest of your life.  For example, have you ever wondered if there’s a way to really defeat procrastination?   Is will power something you are just born with or can you develop it?   When you are motivating yourself, should you focus on what you’ve already done, or should you focus on what’s left to do?

This collection covers various topics including communication skills, personal development, mind skills, motivation skills, and more.   I paid special attention to things that can trip us up on a daily basis.   For example, one of traps of the mind is the “I knew it all along” phenomenon”, which is also known as “hindsight bias” (and I like to call it 20/20 hindsight.)   

To make the collection easy to use, I tried to do two things: 1) Provide the name of the insight or technique, and 2)  Share a sticky little way to remember it in your mind.   For example, I paired “Black Swan Theory” with “expect the unexpected.”  I kept the insights compact and to the point.  If you scan the list, you’ll have a wealth of wisdom at your finger tips.

I also focused heavily on surfacing many of the banes and burdens of our existence.  For example, one of the worst traps to fall into is “learned helplessness.”   It’s when you basically feel like you can’t win, so you give up, or stop trying.  That sucks.   There is answer to this, and it all comes down to our self-talk.   If we develop a healthy “explanatory style”, we help stay out of the trap.  Maybe you don’t fall into the trap, but maybe someone you know does, or maybe you are helping your kids learn how to thrive in the world … they need to learn this early on.

I also paid special attention to areas that address personal development and self-awareness.   If you can build a great “owner’s manual” and “driver’s guide”, then you can truly make the most of what you’ve got.   For example, have you heard of “The Golden Circle”?   It’s the secret of many great leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs.  It’s all about how you think, act, and communicate from the inside out.  In fact, many Microsoft leaders have this tool in their tool-belt, and it helps them make meaning, in their day to day activities, and in the bigger picture, we call life.

The post not only reflects a lifetime of learnings, but the post itself was hand-crafted with care.   This is actually the post that has taken me the most time to write … ever.   It’s not the length.   It was the challenge of finding a compact way to distill so many lessons, and create an effective “hub/spoke”model, where each “spoke” or insight can point to more.   It was also the challenge of how to sequence the insights.   I played with several variations and ran them by folks to try to find what works best.  I finally settled on a pattern where it’s in alphabetical order by the name of the insights, and coupled that to an actionable insight to make each one memorable.

Here is a key tip on how to make the most of the list.   As you read the 101 Insights and Actions for Work and Life, find three take aways that you can immediately apply.  

Enjoy.