Blog – Simple List – George Ortiz

Stop Prioritizing and Start Automating

June 30, 2017 in People & Culture

Maximize your productivity through automation, not prioritization.

It’s amazing to me how enamored working professionals and communities at large are with to-do lists. There always seems to be a new app claiming to have solved society’s productivity dilemma with better ways to prioritize tasks. I think that as a society we’re generally more busy than any other community in history, and yet we still feel unproductive.

I think we’ve been approaching this whole productivity thing wrong. I don’t think it’s about prioritizing tasks to get done, but rather not having to do the tasks in the first place. That’s how you become the most productive – by eliminating the manual effort required to complete a task.

The 5 Minute Rule

June 21, 2017 in Management

How to respond well to difficult situations and prevent escalation in others.

We are met each day with pre-existing contexts, emotions, and desires. As we encounter the politics of business, our kid’s unyielding pursuit of independence during a tantrum, or the untimely blockade to our day’s goal, our response often includes these aforementioned elements. It’s these elements that add nuance and can cause our obstacles and trials to seem more difficult or challenging than they might otherwise be.

Knowing this, how do we effectively approach and respond well to challenging situations?

Run Daily Experiments

September 8, 2016 in People & Culture

Don’t settle for the status quo. Experiment with daily interactions and tasks.

Create a hypothesis on how to reach a more successful or efficient outcome, design an experiment around that, and learn.

Stop doing the same things and expecting different results. If you want to improve quality, gain efficiency, or simply have success in a given area then you have to work on it.

If you’re struggling to setup meetings, test different approaches. If you’re overwhelmed with tasks, try allotting blocks of time to specific categories of tasks to help you focus.

Experiment, learn, repeat.

Pick one area or task in your life to experiment with and let me know what you learn @grgortiz.