Eliminating Multitasking

Flipping the switch on innovation

While Kotter’s “Leading Change” is still a favorite and one of the most comprehensive works on change, I give authors Chip and Dan Heath high marks for this contribution to the field with ”Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard.” Organizational and personal change is a complex subject, but the Heath brothers offer [...]

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More innovation lessons from the classroom

Just read an interesting study from Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational, that adds an extra layer of value to the argument for pipelining your new product development projects – as if faster cycle time and earlier cash flow weren’t enough. If you aren’t familiar with the idea of pipelining, working on projects sequentially rather than [...]

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What are you feeding R&D?

As you kick-off your growth efforts for this year, have you given any consideration to what you should be feeding the teams in your new product development process? Just as we all need to start the day off with a healthy breakfast and limit our intake of junk food, your new product development efforts will [...]

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Tomatoes, single-tasking & innovation?

Okay, so a tomato can’t make your new product innovation move any faster, but a little concept called the Pomodoro Technique might help eliminate some of the bad multi-tasking that wastes time and can slow any new product project down. I’ve written a lot lately about eliminating multi-tasking for personal and corporate productivity, but only [...]

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Starbucks to eliminate multitasking

That’s right – even a coffee chain knows that trying to do multiple things at the same time is a bad idea. This WSJ article details the ubiquitous coffee house’s efforts to improve quality and customer experience by limiting the number of drinks and the number of espresso machine’s run at the same time. Here [...]

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What are late new product launches costing you?

What are late new product launches costing you? I recently saw that missing the launch date for their 3D Gameboy is costing Nintendo $1Billion in lost profits by missing the Christmas buying season. When Nintendo issued the profit warning cutting it’s fiscal 2011 profit forecast that news wiped out 10% of the stocks value in [...]

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Managing your constraint – Part III – Personal Kanban and your calendar program

In previous posts, I shared the Personal Kanban approach for getting the most out of your constraint – the 86,400 seconds you are limited to each day – and also some free web based approaches for automating your Kanban board.  This post share’s my approach to integrating  Kanban into my planning, calendar, and follow-up systems. [...]

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Managing your constraint – Part II – Automation

In Part I, you saw how Personal Kanban can be applied to managing your personal constraint – the 10,080 minutes you have available each and every week. This second installment will share some free web based tools so you can automate your Kanban and take it with you. I’ve tried the free web-based versions of [...]

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Managing your constraint – Part I – Kanban

Each of has the same 1,440 minutes every day, 7 days a week, but what we accomplish with them varies dramatically. For most of us, time is our constraint, and how we choose to exploit the time available will drive the results we see. My last post on singletasking gave some tips for managing your [...]

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The case for singletasking

A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking “Is multitasking getting us anywhere?“  It created quite a bit of activity in my LinkedIn groups and one kind reader reminded me about the  The 4 hour work week. I had read Ferris’ book a few years ago and while his internet entrepreneur shtick is  definitely [...]

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