The Productivity Guru

I am just now coming across an article in Huffington Post called "Procrastination and Productivity: What Helps and What Hurts."  It was posted by Sarah Klein. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/31/procrastination-productivity_n_2584774.html earlier this year; but with my procrastination I am just now getting to it. One of the main sentences that struck me was "regular breaks throughout the day even just in increments of a few short minutes at a time, can improve focus, productivity and creativity, according to a 2011 study.    The study Klein refers to is one by Alejandro Lleras, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Lleras claims that "at any point of time you have multiple concerns or thoughts you could be having.  It's difficult to maintain one particular (focus) for a long period of time.  If you break that pattern and force yourself to think of something else very briefly, when y...

In my more than 36 years of working with executive teams, I used a tool that measured the correlation of how well the various executives at the most senior level, the C-suite, correlated with their CEO on the goals that the CEO had for the organization. In all those years, I was constantly fascinated by how wide the gap was between the executives and their CEO in the priority of those goals.  In many cases it was as much as 100% from the CEO with some of his or her executives.  To be clear if the CEO had as their highest goal to increase sales by 15%, as an example, and all of the other senior managers in the organization had that as the goal but at lower priorities, then the correlations would not be on target and could be as much as 100% away from the CEO.  I have even seen CEO's with goals like the one I mention and the VP of Sales for the same organization whose main goal was to improve the incentive system for the people in his department.  Now the p...