This arrived today. It was so easy to make. I'm really getting into this Thrive Life stuff. #ThriveLifeDads

New guest blog post

Head on over to this site for my thoughts about daily reading of God's word. Ever feel guilty for not reading enough? My thoughts on how to avoid such feelings.

-wc

Gratitude blog guest post

This past week I contributed a short post to this blog that is coordinated by my work colleague Lynn Olsen.

http://progressiveforage.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/guest-post-grateful-for-last-year-hoping-for-this-year/

I wondered if anyone would even find it interesting. Surprisingly, my sister found it through a Facebook post.

Behold the power of social media!

Not so great

Today I tried M&Ms new seasonal flavor, Carrot Cake. We had some in a treat bowl at the office. Ugh, yuck! I can handle pretzels inside of an M&M, but this seemed to have a small, dried bit of carrot inside of it. Not sure it does or not. I didn't actually break one open besides the one I quickly swallowed.

The taste was right on.

But I don't think cake was meant to be consumed in a chocolate-coated shell. 

Today I read this question that Michael Lewis asked to the president. (The 9-page article he wrote from the whole interview can be found here.) I thought the question, not necessarily the article, was a good one. That question is one I'll recycle. It's a good one to ask not only to a politician but to the CEO of a company, the executive director of an organization or any other pubic figure.

"Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president [or leader]. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president [or be the leader]."

#Weblinks for Nov. 4

This 4-minute video made me emotional the first time I saw it. I love the lesson that it teaches about kindness and thinking of helping, rather than harming, others.

"America is a place for winners, not whiners." This is a quote I found on this website. Are you part of the 53 percent?

If you're like other readers of my blog, or any blog for that matter, you're skimming this text. Nearly 80 percent of web readers scan text; while less than 20 percent read word-by-word. And if you got to the end of this paragraph, congratulations you're probably one of those 20 percenters. Read more about your web reading habits and those of the scanners here.

What is Contact Pressure?

Earlier this year I started tracking a personal metric that I call "Contact Pressure." This metric measures in a real way when I am feeling most stressed at work. It's like a blood pressure reading for stress.


The blue line represents Quadrant 1 emails that need a response soon. This is in reference to Stephen Covey's suggestion to categorize work into one of four quadrants of urgency. I keep my general email inbox clean at the end of each day, moving emails that still need a response (usually requiring more than a few minutes of thought) into a folder called Quadrant 1. At the end of each day, I track the number of emails in this folder.

The red line is the callbacks or to-do items that are on my calendar or in my contact database management program. The unattended-to alerts I note at the end of each day as well.

As you can tell I'm currently not at a healthily contact pressure level. I would consider healthy more like 100 Q1s (or less) over 10 callbacks (or less).

How do I get myself out of this mess? This usually requires some extra time at the office with strict attention paid to doing the follow-ups that have built up over time. Unfortunately, this graph also sometimes discourages me from taking vacation or regret taking productive work trips, as I know they both set me behind.

I used Skitch, a screen capturing software program that partners with Evernote, to capture this image from Excel and add the notations you see. Skitch also makes it super easy to drag these saved images into Evernote for permanent storage.

I welcome any suggestions or tips readers may have to decrease my Contact Pressure or to change my workflow altogether.