(not up for rubbing cheese on your feet? You could always buy a copy of End Malaria instead…)

On the one hand, it makes all kinds of sense to get focused and efficient and what you do.

On the other, it can become an end in itself (“woo hoo, zero inbox!”) as opposed to serving a great purpose: finding more time to do Great Work.

Here’s my video review three books that aren’t David Allen’s Getting Things Done that I think find a useful and, let me say it, productive line on productivity.

I’m talking about

• Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist
• Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
• Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen

(And apologies for the echo chamber effect. Clearly, the experiment of filming in that space didn’t quite work…)

That said, there have been some lovely side benefits. Working with a bunch of people I’ve long admired, both creating the books with Seth and The Domino Project team and the 62 brilliant contributors. Hitting #2 on Amazon.com was also quite the thrill.

And now it’s the winner of the 2012 Culture prize, one of the Eric Hoffer award categories. Hurrah! (Here’s Seth’s post about the glorious moment.)

Being strategic is one of those buzzwords in corporate life. So many companies seek to become more strategic without really knowing what it means or if all the stakeholders are defining it in the same way. Can people really learn it? Is it one of those things that you either have or you don’t?

For answers, enter Julia Sloan, author of Learning to Think Strategically. She is an expert in teaching executives and global leaders how to do just that.

In this interview I talk with Julia about:

• How strategic thinking is like positioning a lighthouse
• The difference between complicated and complex
• How a state of disequilibrium can produce innovative thought

You can find out more about Julia on her website.

Listen to my interview with Julia Sloan

Let me introduce my awesome mastermind group – The Brain Trust.

Left to right: that’s me (long arms, so I get to hold the camera), Michele Lisenbury Christensen of Loving with Power (with baby Mira), Eric Klein of Wisdom Heart, Jen Louden of JenniferLouden.com, Mark Silver of Heart of Business and Molly Gordon of Shaboom Inc.

We’ve supported each other (strategy and tactics, hugs and arse-kicking) for 6 years now, and we met once a year to hang out and go deep on our businesses.

A couple of weeks ago we were all on Bainbridge Island, and I happened to have a advanced copy of Chris Guillebeau’s new book with me, The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, a book that happens to be released today.

At a lunch break we took half an hour and shared our own insights and secrets based on Chris’s book, including:

• What we think of shameless self-promotion
• How to find the bridge from our passion to serving the people we serve
• The key thing we’ve each started and stopped that’s helped our businesses grow

It was a great conversation, and if you run your own business you’re going to find this useful to listen to. You can download it here for your easy listening pleasure. If you’d prefer to read, then the transcript is here.

And if you’re toying with/starting up/running your own small business, then check out Chris’s book.  It’s full of insights, worksheets and tactics from his and many others’ micro-businesses that you can grab and use.

If I was to point a finger at one critical element in that success, it would my Brain Trust, my most excellent mastermind group of Jen, Eric, Molly, Michele and Mark.

For more than five years we’ve checked in with each other three to five times a week, talked on the phone biweekly, and done an annual retreat.

These people have become my supporters, my provocateurs and my friends. And you have to understand, I’m one of those people that hates joining groups. So I’m totally nonplussed that this has happened.

If you wish you had something like that – and this isn’t just for entrepreneurs, its for anyone who’s living a life – then Jen has put together a program to help you create your own mastermind group.

She’s sharing what we’ve done that’s worked (and not worked), how we’ve reinvented ourselves 3 or 4 times, and what you need to do to get something rolling of your own.

If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

I still only travel by foot and by foot, it’s a slow climb,
But I’m good at being uncomfortable,
so I can’t stop changing all the time

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine

Who’s good at being uncomfortable?

Not me.

It’s an effort, always, to step up to the thing that’s out there on the boundaries, a little odd, a little challenging, a little unknown.

But if changing means evolving, growing, becoming a better version of me, then I can see that getting uncomfortable  is part of that process.

Where’s the wisdom in this for you, I wonder?

And where’s the next place you’re willing to be uncomfortable?

This is the week for getting charged up on how to do it.

This is the blog to show you how.

Would you like an A with that?

There’s an unspoken assumption that everything you’re doing, you’re going to do well.

Really well.

In fact, being the driven-and-somewhat-ambitious person you are, you’re likely to want to push for excellence in all you do. You want that ‘A’.

Of course, you secretly know that that standard is being compromised all the time, what with the overwhelming amount of work you’ve got coming at you. But equally secretly you suspect that if you could just get it all together you’d deliver at a Generally Awesome Standard All The Time.

Pah!

Abandon Excellence

I think this drive for excellence is impossible and it creates misery.

I’m not saying abandon excellence. (OK, I know I did in the sub-heading there, but bear with me.)

I’m saying abandon your general standard of excellence.

Here’s what I want for you.

Do your Good Work – your every day, got to get through it work – at an adequate standard.

Do your Great Work – your this matters, this is what I care about work – at a jaw-droppingly amazingly standard.

Adequate?

Yes, adequate.

I know “adequate” sounds remarkably like “inadequate”, but in fact they’re quite different.

Adequate means “good enough”. It means “sufficient”.

And every time you upgrade the time and effort and energy you spend on your Good Work from Adequate to Excellence, you’re wasting time and effort and energy you might otherwise be directing to your Great Work.

Don’t hack yourself

If you’re like me, you might learn this over-fussing with your Good Work is a cunning way you get to avoid doing the Great Work. Because Great Work is a step into the unknown, a step outside and up to the edges of your own competence, ambition and hope.

And in many ways, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to stay Busy Busy with the Good Work and never quite get round to the Great Work that will challenge you and push you.

Here’s the question

“What’s ‘good enough’ for this?”

Try it out. See where you’re overworking.

Is this just crazy talk, or is there something to it? Let me know in the comments.

By the way – if you’ve enjoyed this post, you’ll love the Great Work Provocations, a nifty Monday – Friday email series.

This is the week for getting charged up on how to do it.

This is the blog to show you how.

Whatever the question, here are some answers

This advice is guaranteed to work absolutely every time, except when it doesn’t.

If one piece of advice doesn’t quite work for you, pick another.

1. Less not more. Cut the bottom 10%

Stuff you’re working on, meetings you’re attending, people you’re spending time with, future possibilities, things you’re worrying about.

If they’re the bottom 10%, it’s likely that they’re costing you not nourishing you.

2. Enjoy things. Stop taking it all quite so seriously

Yes it matters, of course it does. But it’s unlikely to matter at all in one year, ten years, hundred years.

So tackle it now with a lighter heart.

3. Make the decision. Stop prevaricating

Don’t get trapped in the timid middle of “maybe…”, or “I’ll have a bit of this and a bit of that”.

Make the choice and stride down that road.

4. Stop knowing it all. Get curious

We all love the certainly, clarity and comfort of expertise.

A good question can make everything a little wobbly, challenging and a whole lot more interesting. You can do worse than starting with these two.

5. Get off your backside. Move more.

Shift perspectives. Get away from the box. Meet up with people.

Your body isn’t just a way of moving your brain about.

Get going on the stuff that matters.

What are the timeless hacks that get you unstuck and focused? (If you want another eight options, or maybe 5.75 ways, take a look here.)

By the way – if you’ve enjoyed this post, you’ll love the Great Work Provocations, a nifty Monday – Friday email series.

This is the week for getting charged up on how to do it.

This is the blog to show you how.

Do you see any white space in your calendar?

Of course not. It’s booked from 8am to 6pm with meetings, back to back.

That’s why you have to do all your email under the table during the meetings.

So get your How I Manage Meetings philosophy in shape. Get clear about which meetings you’ll attend. And make your meetings a beacon of worth-showing-up-to-on-time-ness, rather than the dark abyss of wasted life that so many of them are. Here are 7 ways to get started.

Go/No Go

1. Only hold a meeting if you’ve got a decision to make or a celebration to have. These days, a gathering to trade information is a failure to understand the basic technology at your disposal.

2. Only attend the meetings if you know (and care) what the decision is that’s needed or the celebration is that’s being had. See point #1.

3. Don’t show up to the meeting but ask for a list of the actions. See if anyone really (I mean, really really) misses you. See if there is actually a list of actions. (It’s quite a shift when your default answer to a meeting request is “prove why I have to be there” rather than “yes”.)

Running

4. Halve the time. Meetings expand to fill the time alloted, so cut things down and watch everything crisp up nicely.

5. Then take off another 10 minutes. Finish ten minutes before the hour or half hour, so people have time to take a breath, figure out what the heck the next meeting is about (and whether they really need to attend), and get there in time.

6. Embrace shrinkage. Dis-invite people who aren’t involved in making the decision or celebrating the celebration. Let your people go free. Send the people who are nervous about missing the meeting the list of actions. Oh yes – that means…

7. Write down the actions. Scott Belsky makes a pretty compelling case to be totally action oriented. Become the VP Of Action Point Nagging. Ask questions like, “so what’s the action from this discussion? And who’ll do it? And by when?”

I know you know other ways of making meetings better. (Maybe you’ve also done what it says on the title and Read This Before Our Next Meeting What would you add to the list of seven?

By the way – if you’ve enjoyed this post, you’ll love the Great Work Provocations, a nifty Monday – Friday email series.