Black Belt Productivity

The team at Black Belt Productivity want to take a moment to wish each of you and yours…Happy Holidays.

Enjoy taking time to share the joy of the holidays with friends and family.

- Jason & Michael

Lead up principle #5 in John C. Maxwell’s book The 360° Leader is to expand your circle of acquaintances. the word “expand” for many of us is naturally an uncomfortable word. When something expends, it stretches. Stretching something typically requires at least some discomfort. However, expanding our circle of acquaintances, though sometimes uncomfortable, can be very rewarding.

Doing this can have a couple of benefits. First, an expansion of our comfort zone can expose us to knowledge and experience that we would otherwise have not experienced. It opens out mind to new ideas and helps us think about things from another perspective.

As we continue in John C. Maxwell’s book The 360° Leader, we are talking about leading across. Lead-Across Principle #4 is to avoid politics in the office.

Anyone who works in an office with more than two levels of management, and more than 10 people knows about office politics. We have all been sickened by it. And in spite of that fact, some of us have participated in it..sometimes unknowingly.

As I posted earlier, I am beginning to work with a BlackBerry Pearl as a smartphone device. My inital impressions were muted. I wanted something low profile, but functional. The non-QWERTY keyboard concerned me, but not anymore. BlackBerry has developed “Suretype” technology that is surprisingly reliable. So typing with this keyboard is almost as quick as a true QWERTY. I rarely have to correct “Suretype”.

From a GTD standpoint, this device is doing a very good thing for me. It is forcing be to return to the basics of workflow managment. The David has often said that for GTD, a PDA really only needs to be a good list manager. I am now finding that to be true.

By definition, a tool is

is a piece of equipment that most commonly provides a mechanical advantage in accomplishing a physical task. [1]

As I was looking through my latest pr0n mag (or as it is better known, the Levenger Last Minute Shopping 2006 mag), I was drooling over a number of items contained within. On every page I was thinking of how could I incorporate item X into my current system; thinking that the Circa Starter Kit is so reasonably priced…how could I NOT get it!

In John C. Maxwell’s book The 360° Leader, lead-across principle #3 is Be a Friend.  This is an interesting principle.  Work can be a very competitive environment.  However, in recent weeks, we have discussed how teamwork and working together with other leaders is vital to an organizations health.

One of the key elements of leadership is relationship building.  For may of us, work is not necessarily the place that we spend a lot of time building relationships.   Most of us just want people to leave us alone and allow us to do what we are paid to do.  If you want to develop influence, you must be willing to build relationships.  People will not follow unless they can trust you and they know you have their best interest in mind.

As many of you know, I recently purchased a BlackBerry Pearl. In my post about my purchase, I solicited advice for setup and things of that sort. I received some really good responses…thanks to all of you who responded.

As I got familiar with the BlackBerry website, I signed up for the BlackBerry Connection newsletter.

So last week, I receive my online newsletter, and get this gem featuring “The David”.

- Jason