Almost a year ago (wow, times really fly !) I’ve shared with you an email management system I was starting to use. During this year, I’ve shared this system with as many people as possible as I think it is really excellent. I don’t see myself today not using it as it did help me being 10 times more efficient when dealing with the pile of email I receive everyday. Some close colleague were as excited as I was and made a few improvement. In this quick post, I wanted …

“Management Time: Who’s got the Monkey” is probably one of the most popular management article published by the Harvard Business Review (PDF can be found here). It’s been written by William Oncken and Donald Wass in 1974. It’s been reprinted several time since then and the message is still very true. This is a must read for everyone who has trouble delegating and ends up doing their subordinates or peers work.
If you can relate to the following situation, you should definitely read the article:
Let us imagine that a manager is …

I’ve just ran across this short article on the Personal MBA blog which summarizes really well how I approach both my professional life and personal life. Project yourself into a situation where you’d do something (useful) and which would bring you excitement. It doesn’t matter how far you are from that situation as long as you understand clearly your goal. Then you can drill down and lay down intermediate stages which will help you reach the ultimate goal. These intermediate levels should really get you closer to where you want …

As a QA director, I focus particularly on the quality of our products of course but it is also true on how I try to manage both my professional and personal life. I’m not particularly interested to do a lot at an average level but rather do maybe less but at an exceptional level. Optimally I’d like to do a lot at an exceptional level but if you want to reach an optimal  work-life balance, you will need to compromise.
I ran across this article on lifehacker and got interested by …

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had trouble managing properly the huge amount of email I receive everyday. I’ve tried creating dedicated folders with email to be processed, tried the flag functionality of outlook, colors, priority settings etc. I’ve always managed to be reasonably organized but there was always a part of me which was afraid to miss important email to process. Then I’ve ran across an article from Ian Palangio’s who runs a blog on productivity. He describes his own system to manage email called PIFEM which …