“Every word written is a victory against death.” — Michel Butor

Writing things down is a key to effectiveness.   It helps you free up your mind, think on paper, and better organize your thoughts.   If you don’t write things down, your mind spends more time “paper shuffling” and creates its own anxiety.

Writing things down is a powerful habit.  Even if you throw it away, you still get the benefits.

What kinds of things can you write down?   Bright ideas that pop into your head.  Three wins that you want for today.  Three wins that you want for the week.  One-liner reminders.   Your To-Do list.    Your one-liner insights and “ah-has.”  All the things buzzing around in your brain.  Anything keeping you up at night.  Your hopes, your dreams, your goals, and aspirations.  Your fears, anxieties, and concerns.  You get the idea.

10 Reasons to Write Things Down

Why write things down?   Here are some key insights and reminders:

1. Your mind lies.   Your mind easily distorts things.   That’s a blessing and a curse.   If you write things down, you change perspective.  Now you are looking at it on paper.  Does it still make the same sense as it did in your head?
2. Think on paper.  When it’s on paper, you can look your challenges in the eyes, and slice them down to size.   Your mind is a powerful thing when it can more objectively look at things instead of swirling them around in your head.
3. Organize your thoughts.     To write things down, you have to think a little bit to find the words or to figure out what it means.  Right off the bat, the act of trying to write something down shapes your thoughts.   Once it’s down on paper, you can now list things in a way that helps you think.   Whether it’s because you cross things off, or prioritize them, or shuffle them to make you feel good, you are in control.
4. It sinks in better.  Writing it down creates a little more of an experience, and that helps it stick.
5. Free up your mind.   When you write something down, you free up the task of having to remember it.   That might not sound like a big deal when it’s just a few things, but you might spend your mind on better things.   And, just imagine when it’s more than a few things, and it’s lots of things on your mind.
6. Calm your mind.  The Zeigarnik Effect says we tend to hang on to things in our mind, if we don’t finish what we start.   If you write things down, you free up your mind from worrying about what you forgot or what you need to remember.
7. Let things go.     You can let things naturally slough off by squeezing them out with better things to focus on.    You can also more deliberately let things go, or simply cut them, because now you have a bird’s-eye view.  Decide what matters and what doesn’t.  Let things go that don’t.
8. Avoid task saturation.   Write things down to avoid task saturation.   Three signs of task saturation are shutting down, compartmentalizing, and channelizing. Shutting down is when you simply stop performing.  Compartmentalizing and channelizing is when you act busy, but all your doing is organizing and reorganizing lists and doing things sequentially, but not actually producing effective results.
9. Rehydrate ideas.   You can rehydrate your ideas later on as you need them.
10. Shelve things.  You can put things on the shelf to worry about at a later time.

3 Habits that Help

Here are three habits that can help you:

1. Bring a pen and paper on the go.      Bring a little pad of yellow stickies around with you.  You can easily write your three wins for the day on it.  You can also jot down your ideas or things that are top of mind.  You can also use it as a scratch pad for your thoughts.
2. Keep a journal of one-liner insights and reminders.   Write down the one-liner “ah-has” you have throughout your day.   These little ah-has add up quickly.   Stick them in a place that you can easily flip back through each week.   This will sharpen your brain and brighten your day.
3. Do periodic “Brain Dumps.” Periodically dump your brain.   You know when it’s full, or when it’s getting to the brim.   Dump it down on paper and simply write it down as fast as you can.  Get it off your mind.   Don’t correct yourself as you go, simply dump down all the stuff that’s floating around.  I do a brain dump at the end of my day, in a plain text file and simply name it today’s date, such as “2012-04-11.”   When I’m in a really fast mode, I just dump things on my whiteboard.

You can always choose not to write things down, but now you can make a more thoughtful choice.

My Related Posts

• Writing Things Down Frees You Up
• Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind
• Tickler List of the Mind

This is my roundup of top blogs for insight and action.  The Web is a big place, but a lot of roads lead to the same town.

In the spirit of insight and action, I want to share some of the best blogs on the Web that help you get better, smarter, and faster in key areas of your life.  For this list, I looked to people, blogs, and sites that really make us think, surprise us with insight, and share news we can use (or make us laugh, cry, or feel alive..)  Many of the authors are people with a passion for more from life.

Collectively, this collection of top blogs helps equip you with “skills to pay the bills and lead a better life.”  You’ll find it’s a mash up.  The mix includes: business skills, continuous learning, entrepreneurism, fun, leadership, personal development, productivity, strategy, technology, thinking skills, and trends.

I believe these are the sites that truly help you get the edge in work and life.  It’s a living list of top blogs, and I will update it from time to time.

Top 10 Blogs for Insight and Action

1. 800 CEO Read
2. All Top
3. How To Change the World, by Guy Kawsaki
4. Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
5. Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends, and Innovation
6. Psychology Today
7. Scobleizer, by Robert Scoble
8. Seth Godin
9. TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
10. The Blog of Tim Ferris

Top Blogs for Insight and Action A – Z

1. 43 Folders, by Merlin Man
2. 800 CEO Read
3. 1000 Ventures.com, by Vadim Kotelnikov
4. A Daring Adventure, Tim Brownson
5. Alissa Finerman – Author, Speaker, Life Coach
6. All Top
7. Big Think
8. Blue Zones Blog, by Dan Buettner
9. Brain Pickings
10. Business Balls, by Alan Chapman
11. Business Insider
12. Change This
13. Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, by Steven Aitchison
14. Charlie Rose
15. Chief Executive Magazine
16. CIO.com
17. CIO Insight
18. Cool Infographics, by Randy Krum
19. Danielle LaPorte – White Hot Truth
20. David Zinger – Employee Engagement
21. Dilbert
22. Disease Proof, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman
23. Dr. K’s Blog – How to Click with People, by Dr. Rick Kirshner
24. Entrepreneur’s Journey, by Yaro Starak
25. Entrepreneur Magazine
26. Expert Access, by Steve Kayser
27. Forbes
28. Gaping Void, by Hugh MacLeod
29. Gartner
30. Get Rich Slowly, by J.D. Roth
31. Grow with Stacey
32. HBR (Harvard Business Review)
33. How To Change the World, by Guy Kawsaki
34. Huffington Post
35. Ian’s Messy Desk, by Ian McKenzie
36. I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi
37. IGG – Tips, Tools, and Tantalizing Ideas, by Marquita Herald
38. Illuminated Mind, by Jonathan Mead
39. Inc – Small Business Ideas and Resources for Entrepreneurs
40. Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
41. Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends, and Innovation
42. John Maxwell on Leadership
43. Jurgen Appelo
44. Leading Answers – Leadership and Agile Project Management Ideas, Observations, and Links
45. Life Optimizer.org, by Donald Latumahina
46. Marc and Angel Hack Life
47. Marie Forleo
48. Mental Toughness Blog, by Steve Siebold
49. Michael Hyatt – Intentional Leadership
50. NPR
51. Personal Development with Fred Tracey
52. Personal Excellence Blog, by Celestine Chua
53. Personal Success Factors, by Stephen Borgman
54. Pick the Brain, by Erin Falconer
55. Possibilities – Master Brew for Creative Minds
56. Psychology Today
57. ReadWriteWeb
58. Richard Branson
59. Scientific American Mind
60. Scobleizer, by Robert Scoble
61. Seth Godin
62. Shake Off the Grind & Begin to Thrive, by Joe Wilner
63. Slate Magazine – Politics, Business, Technology, and the Arts
64. Smart Passive Income, by Pat Flynn
65. Stepcase Lifehack
66. Steve Pavlina
67. Strategy + Business
68. Success Begins Today, by John Richardson
69. Success Magazine Blog
70. Tammy Erickson (Harvard Business Review)
71. TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
72. The Blog of Tim Ferris
73. The Changing Minds Blog, by David Straker
74. The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
75. The Opinion Pages (The New York Times)
76. The Simple Dollar – Financial Talk for the Rest of Us, by Trent Hamm
77. The Wall Street Journal
78. Think Simple Now, by Tina Su
79. This Isn’t Happiness
80. Tim Sanders
81. Tony Robbins – Change Your Life Now
82. Top Tenz.Net
83. Victoria Vives – Strategies for Unleashing the Superhero in You

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” – Jerome K. Jerome

Why do we procrastinate and what can we do about it?   Procrastination is a subtle and insidious thing.  It can hold you back from who you were born to be.

Procrastination can lead to painful outcomes like not preparing adequately for exams and interviews, not paying bills on time, and not finishing project tasks on time.

The good news is, the more you understand about procrastination, the better armed you are to defeat it.  Knowledge and know-how are a powerful thing.   The answer to procrastination is surprisingly simple:  Work on things for “Just a few minutes.”

In the book, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, Richard Wiseman writes about the why we procrastinate and what we can do about it.

7 Reasons Why We Procrastinate

According to Wiseman, here are a few of the key reasons why we procrastinate:

1. A Tendency to see projects as a whole, rather than breaking them down into smaller parts.
2. Being prone to boredom.
3. Fear of failure.
4. Inability to estimate how long it takes to do things
5. Low levels of self-control.
6. Perfectionism.
7. The feeling that life is too short to worry about seemingly unimportant tasks

Work on Things for “Just a Few Minutes”

Is there a solution to the problem of procrastination?  The closest thing we may have to a silver bullet is to leverage the Zeigarnik Effect.    The Ziegarnik Effect says our brains hold on to unfinished tasks.  In other words, we like to finish what we start.  Here is what Wiseman has to say, about the research:

“Procrastinators frequently put off starting certain activities because they are overwhelmed by the size of the job in front of them.  However, if they can be persuaded, or can persuade themselves, to work on the activity for ‘just a few minutes,’ they often feel an urge to see it through to completion.  Research shows that the ‘just a few minutes’ rule is a highly effective way of beating procrastination and could help people finish the most arduous of tasks.  It is also a perfect application of Zeigarnik’s work – those few minutes of initial activity create an anxious brain that refuses to rest until the job is finished.”

What can you work on for “just a few minutes” that might change your life?

Best Books on Motivation and Procrastination

• 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, by Richard Wiseman
• 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever, by Steve Chandler
• Time Warrior: How to defeat procrastination, people-pleasing, self-doubt, over-commitment, broken promises and chaos, by Steve Chandler

You Might Also Like

• 101 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Others
• Motivational Quotes
• Multiply Your Productivity by 10,000 Times

Photo by inkshots.

In the article,“Making it in America”, in the Atlantic, Adam Davidson writes about how to create and keep a job in our globalizing, mechanizing, economy.  It’s a deep look at the impact of the shift to globalization and how “the rewards for being skilled grow, while the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.”

One of the passages really stood out for me:

“Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing.  Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve.   Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat.  Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to work in factories to make the products we use.  In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in society.   When one person can grow as much food or make as many car parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in that society more purchasing power; we all become a littler richer.  In the economic models, the benefits of productivity growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital.  As workers become more productive, they should be able to demand higher salaries.”

It reminded me that the way forward, is not to go backward.   It’s to embrace change and empower yourself with skill.   Personal productivity is a powerful tool for surviving and thriving in a world where better, faster, cheaper is the name of the game.

In my experience, the key to productivity is to apply it to meaningful problems and to flow value along the way.  To keep my own productivity in check, I use a guiding question:  “Am I working on the right things, at the right time, with the right energy, the right way?” While the question itself doesn’t hold all the answers, it does hold the keys that help finding them.

When it comes to “making it,”  I think productivity is one more lesson we learn from business that applies to life.   It’s an area we can invest in for the rest of our life, for the best of our life.  It never goes out of style.

Photo by Jane Rahman.

Trying to plan for a month can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have an approach.  I’m going to share with you a very simple way to plan your month.  It’s simple, but powerful.

You can use Agile Results as a way to simplify your monthly planning.  Agile Results is the system I talk about in my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

3 Steps to Plan Your Month

To plan the month using Agile Results, simply do three things:

1. Pick a theme for the month.
2. Identify three wins you want by the end of the month.
3. Write them down.

Monthly Theme

The monthly theme will give you focus.  You can use it as a mantra.  For example, let’s say the focus for this month, is simplicity.  (I happen to like that one because I used simplicity as a focus for one of my projects at work, with great success.)   For the entire month, you will have this one theme to keep going back to.  It will remind you of what’s important.  It’s like a mini-mission for the month.

Three Wins for the Month

The three wins you identify will help you set a target for the month, in a way that’s goal oriented.   As soon as you start to think about what you can achieve in a month, you will start to ask better questions.  You’ll start asking questions about what’s important.  You’ll start asking questions about what’s next.  You’ll also start asking questions about, what’s possible.

Meaningful Months

Meaningful months are made up of your weekly wins and your daily dos.   The Rule of Three is your friend and will help you focus, as well as zoom in and zoom out.  For example, you can use The Rule of Three to identify three wins for the day, three wins for the week, and three wins for the month.   This helps you avoid getting overwhelmed, and we tend to be pretty good at remembering three things.  Three is also a good way to focus your time and energy.

The best part is that each month is a chance to turn the page and start fresh.  You are the author of your life and you are always writing your story forward.  Use each month as a way to add great chapters to your life.  When things don’t go as planned, carry the lessons forward, and use each day, each week, and each month, as  a fresh start on your path of meaningful results.

Getting Results the Agile Way is a simple time management system for achievers.   Whether you are an underdog trying to make the most of what you’ve got, or you are simply somebody with a passion for more from life, you are an achiever in my book.  (After all, we are all an underdog at some point in our lives.)  This is a system to help you be YOUR best.

As a time management system, Getting Results the Agile Ways is focused on answering two very fundamental questions about time management:

1. What to do?
2. How to do it?

By figuring out what to do, you set the stage for meaningful results.  This is all about slowing down to speed up.  This also reiterates the idea that less is more.  Rather than spread yourself thin, the idea is to focus on what really matters to you, and create meaningful experiences.

Download the Free eBook

The Getting Started with Getting Results the Agile Way Guide is a short guide (14 pages) to help you get up and running fast.

• Download Getting Started with Getting Results the Agile Way Free eBook

Take it for a test-drive and get the system on your side.  Share it with friends, family, and whoever you want to help get more out of life and put the system on their side, too.

“Movement isn’t progress.” — Thomas Leonard

You can dramatically shape a positive inner work life if you know what the key catalysts are.  Catalysts are powerful ways to influence a positive inner work life.   When people have a positive inner work life, they are more creative and productive.  People are also more committed to their work and more likely to work well with their colleagues.

Progress is actually one of the best ways to motivate people, and catalysts influence your progress loop in an interesting way.  First, a catalyst can positively influence your inner work life, before it actually impacts the work itself.  For example, if you knew you were getting a faster computer, you would think positively of your employer before you actually got the computer.  Next, when the catalyst does actually positively impact your work, it then boosts your inner work life again.

In the book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work , Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer share the most crucial catalysts that shape your inner work life.  Their findings are based on studying more than 12,000 “even of the day” narratives by employees across multiple organizations.

The Seven Major Catalysts
Here are the seven major catalysts that affect both the positive perception of progress and the actual positive impact on progress:

1. Setting clear goals.
2. Allowing autonomy.
3. Providing resources.
4. Giving enough time — but not too much.
5. Help with the work.
6. Learning from problems and successes.
7. Allowing ideas to flow.

The opposite of each of these is an inhibitor of progress.  Inhibitors hinder progress or cause setbacks and have a negative impact on inner work life.

Photo by Anil Bhatt.

"With each sunrise, we start anew." — Anonymous

This is my roundup of top productivity blogs.  You can think of it as a “productivity hub”, where each spoke is a blog focused on productivity.

Like many things, productivity is a skill you can learn.  If you want to be more productive, you can learn proven practices for improving your focus, improving your energy, improving your motivation, setting goals, and managing your time.

Why focus on productivity?  It’s a way to amplify your impact.  It’s a way to get better, faster, simpler results.   Whatever you save in time and energy, you can apply to other areas of your life.  By improving your productivity, you can unleash your creativity, flow more value, and make the most of what you’ve got.  Success is also a numbers game so if you’re a productive artist, you can stack the deck in your favor.

Please enjoy my roundup of top productivity blogs …

Top 10 Productivity Blogs

1. 43 Folders, by Merlin Mann
2. Dumb Little Man
3. GTD Times
4. Life Optimizer, by Donald Latumahina
5. Lite Mind
6. Marc and Angel Hack Life
7. Productive Flourishing, by Charlie Gilkey
8. Stepcase Lifehack
9. The Blog of Tim Ferriss
10. Zen Habits, by Leo Babauta

Top Productivity Blogs A – Z

1. 43 Folders, by Merlin Mann
2. Academic Productivity
3. Business Hacks, by Rick Broida
4. Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, by Steven Aitchison
5. Chasing Productivity, by Chase Smith
6. Craig Harper
7. Cranking Widgets
8. David Seah
9. Did I Get Things Done, by Andrew Mason
10. Double Your Gains, by Caleb Lee
11. Dragos Roua
12. Dumb Little Man
13. Effective Time Management
14. Escape from Cubicle Nation, by Pam Slim
15. Genuine Curiosity
16. Get Everything Done, by Mark Forster
17. Get Organized Wizard, by Michele Connolly
18. Getting Things Gone, by Dwayne Melancon
19. Goals Success.com, by Josh Hinds
20. GTD Times
21. Hack College
22. Hack the Day, by Alex Brie
23. How to Change the World, by Guy Kawasaki
24. Ian’s Messy Desk, by Ian McKenzie
25. Illuminated Mind, by Jonathan Mead
26. Jonathan Fields
27. Knowledge Jolt with Jack, by Jack Vinson
28. Laura Stack – The Productivity Pro
29. Learn This, by Mike King
30. Life Hacker
31. LifeDev, by Glen Stansberry
32. Lifehack.org
33. Life Optimizer, by Donald Latumahina
34. Life Reboot, by Shaun Boyd
35. Life Sutra: The 4-Hour Workweek Journal, by Andrew Brick
36. Lite Mind
37. Marc and Angel Hack Life
38. Managing with Aloha, by Rosa Say
39. Matthew Cornell
40. My Bad Habits, by Clark Guelph
41. Neat and Simple Living, by Airane Benefit
42. Open Loop, by Bert Webb
43. Parent Hacks
44. patrickrhone.com
45. Pick the Brain
46. PluginID
47. Productive! Firm
48. Productive Flourishing, by Charlie Gilkey
49. Productivity 501, by Mark Shead
50. Productivity Cafe, by Susan Sabo
51. Productivity Goal
52. Ririan Project
53. Scott Berkun
54. Scott Young
55. Seth Godin
56. Simple Productivity Blog, by LJ Earnest
57. Stepcase Lifehack
58. Steve Pavlina
59. Steve-Olson.com
60. Study Hacks
61. Success Begins Today, by John Richardson
62. Synechism, by Doug Belshaw
63. Technotheory.com, by Jared Goralnick
64. The Daily Saint
65. The Bamboo Project, by Michele Martin
66. The Blog of Tim Ferriss
67. The In Context Blog, by Stephen Smith
68. The Life Uncommon
69. The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman
70. The Positivity Blog, by Henrik Edberg
71. Think Simple Now
72. Upgrade Reality
73. Wise Bread
74. Your Life Organized, by Monica Ricci
75. Zen Habits, by Leo Babauta

The Quality of Being Productive

My dictionary defines productivity as "the quality or state of being productive” and it defines productive as "having the quality or power of producing especially in abundance."  For me, I’m not into mass production.  I care more about meaningful results.  So for me, I think of productivity as a tool for unleashing efficient and effective results based on what I want to accomplish.

I share a lot of tips and techniques on this blog for improving your productivity.  I also have a playbook you can read for free, Getting Results the Agile Way, that distills the best practices I’ve learned for improving productivity and time management.  That said, I’m a fan of learning from a wide variety of sources and standing on the shoulders of giants.  This list is my way of helping you find some of the best shoulders to stand on when it comes to learning effective productivity skills and taking your game to a whole new level …

My Related Posts

• Productivity Quotes
• Productivity Personas
• Be Effective, Then Efficient
• 10,000 Times the Productivity

Photo by pranav.

“The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.” — Mike Murdock

Normally, I try to avoid posting on the weekends (it’s part of my “take weekends off” strategy), but I came across such a timely and beautiful blurb that I just had to share it.

I know that for many people, the idea of a routine seems like the death of innovation and creativity.  It’s actually quite the opposite.  Having routines means you can stop wasting your precious time and energy on the basics.  Instead, you can use routines to move up the stack and unleash your best.  More precisely, it puts your thinking where it counts.

While reading the book, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution , by Peter Weill, I came across a few pieces of perfect prose that make the points way better than I have in the past.

From Deliberate Task to Second Nature
The more we can turn common tasks into routines, the less we have to think about them.  The less we have to think about the basics, the more we can spend on the more advanced things.

Weill writes:
“Every human being performs a variety of critical, fairly complex tasks without actually thinking about them.  These tasks include breathing, hearing, swallowing, and seeing.  With experience, humans can take on more-deliberate tasks like walking, riding a bike, driving a car, and making coffee.  At first, these more-deliberate tasks require some concentration and adaption, but they quickly become second nature.”

Easy for the Expert, Tough for the Novice
The expert can perform the basics without thinking.  The novice needs to spend a lot of time thinking through the basics, to understand the nature of the tasks and how to sequence their actions.  Additionally, the expert builds distinguishing capabilities by specializing in more advanced skills.  The difference between a novice and expert can be exponential.

Weill writes:
“Over time, different humans develop distinguishing capabilities.  A talented musician learns how to play piano; a great athlete plays basketball; a famous chef prepares extraordinary meals.  Each of these distinctive capabilities has repeatable, routine activities that would be hard for a novice but that the expert can perform without thinking.”

Concentrate on Achieving Greatness
By turning the basics into routines or habits, you can focus on developing your greatness.

Weill writes:
“Because experts need not focus on the routine activities in their field, they can concentrate on achieving greatness.”

Now, while routines are a good thing in concept and in practice, there is another important rule of thumb.  Don’t let your routines stifle or limit you.  The last thing you want is a routine that becomes a burden or works against you.   A simple way to prevent this, or fix this, is to innovate in your routines.  Periodically sweep your routines.  Throw out the ones that aren’t working, tune and prune the ones that do, and keep testing what works.

Model from the best, and tailor to work for you.

Photo by eviltomthai.

“Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.” –  Calvin Coolidge

I hope your New Year’s Resolutions or goals are going well.  For a lot of people I know, they aren’t getting the results they want.  Let’s fix that.

One of the best ways to get results is to use a system.  Why is that?

Because if you use a system, you can keep tuning it.

But it’s more than that.  If you use a system, you don’t have to keep figuring out the basics.  You can move up the stack and focus on higher-level issues.  Another benefit is that you can chip away at a problem.  Few problems withstand sustained effort over time.

The System in a Nutshell
Here is a very simple system, that I use, along with many other, for getting results:

• Monday – Each Monday, write down three results you want for the week.  Yes, just three.  And write down the “results” you want, not the ‘tasks” of how you’ll get it done.
• Daily – Each day, write down three results you want for that day.  Again, identify the ‘results”, not the tasks.  If you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll figure out the tasks.
• Friday – Each Friday, ask yourself, “What are three things going well?” and “What are three things to improve?” and write them down.

That’s the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection pattern from my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

The writing down part is important, even if you lose it.  It’s the process.  This is a simple, but systematic way to get results.  In fact, it might seem too simple, but that’s why it works.

Why the System Works
I’m torn between wanting to tell you a story or give you an example to light this up, but I’m actually going to reveal the magic for now.  If you know why the system works, you can better leverage it to unleash your best results.  Here are some of the finer points on why this system works:

1. It’s pinned to a week.  Each week is another chance to test the system.
2. It uses The Rule of Three.  By sticking with three things, it helps you chunk up your results and make them easier to remember.
3. It works with pen and paper.  I use an electronic approach.  But I’m primarily paper-based.  I use sticky notes to write my three things down.
4. It’s “outcome” focused.  Because you are focusing on three results, you avoid being a “task master.”  All of your “tasks” should roll up to your three results or outcomes.  These three results are your tests for success for the day, and the beauty is, you decide what those three key things are.
5. Meaningful results.  This makes you the author of your life.  You write your story forward.  You define those three results each day, and each week.
6. You automatically improve focus, priorities, and time management.  Simply by making mindful choices about your results, you’re exercising your focus, priorities and time management.  By focusing on the day or the week, you are tuning your time management skills by figuring out what you can bite off that makes sense with the time you’ve got.
7. Avoid overload and overwhelm.  Rather than get buried under your tasks, you uplevel it.  You decide the meaningful results to carve out for the day or the week.
8. You can see the forest from the trees.  You can zoom into the day, by focusing on your three key results, or your can take a look from the balcony, and focus on your three key results for the week.
9. It’s a positive spin.  You’re basically empowering yourself and taking ownership of your results.  In addition, part of Friday Reflection is shining the light on your personal victories.  These quickly add up.  Every week.
10. Roll with the punches.  Things go wrong.  This system is all about getting back on your horse, in the simplest way possible.  Did you fall off today?  Fine … it’s a clean slate.  Simply ask yourself, what are three results you want for today, with the time, energy, and resources you’ve got?
11. Fresh starts.  It’s a fresh start, each day, each week, etc.
12. It’s a learning loop.  Just by practicing the system

It’s a system I’ve used with many people over many years.  It’s worked wonders.  The surprise is how effective it is for such a simple system, but the proof is in the results.  Take it for a test drive and see whether it helps you whip your day into more meaningful results, improves your energy, and helps you actually achieve more of the things that matter to you.

Keep the test simple and just write down three results you want for today down on paper.  That’s it.  You’re doing Agile Results.

Here are some additional resources to explore for more information:

• Getting Results the Agile Way (Landing Page)
• 30 Free Training Modules for Getting Results
• Video – Eduardo Jezierski on Getting Results the Agile Way