Paul Burton

Nine Ways Leaders Can Better Manage Their Time

Leadership time is your organization's most valuable asset. Where leaders focus their time and effort affects everyone below them and the organization as a whole. So how can leaders make the best use of their time?There are a number of small, increment... Read >

Where Stress And Disorganization Collide

As a professional speaker, I travel constantly. That means that I go through airport security all the time and, as a consequence, am witness to myriad methods of successfully and not-so-successfully navigating the process. This microcosm of activity is a ... Read >

Top Ten Time Management Tips

Below are the time management suggestions I most often give to my speaking and training audiences. Whenever I deliver these, I implore people to Adopt, Adapt, Reject any or all of them. What I mean is: Adopt.Givethe suggestion a try; see if it works fo... Read >

Which Books To Keep? - Making Really Hard Choices

When I downsized to a small cottage about six years ago, I had to pare down the number of books I owned. This was a huge issue for me. I'm a book fanatic. All hope is lost when I walk into a bookstore. We're talking hundreds of dollars a visit. In fact, i... Read >

Spend Now, Receive Later - The Ongoing Value Of Documented Processes

I own two businesses - my consultancy and an e-tailer of kayaking gear. The latter, Outdoorplay, migrated to a cloud-based software package called NetSuite in early 2010. From the very beginning we required everyone to document the various business proces... Read >

Three Uber-Effective Tips For Home Offices

We just moved into our next "forever" home. Seems like the only "forever" is the moving part. But that's not the point of this missive. The point here is to describe THE three characteristics every home office should possess to be highly effective. The... Read >

Three Small Steps To Greater Control Of Your Day

Change is easy; deciding to is hard. That's because we all know that we need to make changes to improve our lives. However, the inertia of the status quo is a very powerful force to overcome when the moment to effect those changes arrives. My personal and... Read >

Three Simple Ways To Direct Conversations In Multiple-Recipient E-mails

One of the greatest benefits to using e-mail is the ability to converse with a group of people asynchronously over a large geographic area. Just add any number of e-mail addresses into the To:, CC: and BCC: fields, write your e-mail and hit Send. Off goes... Read >

Activity V. Productivity = Thirsty V. Hungry

My inbound marketing coach, Mike Redbord, at HubSpot recently observed that I was an "average" blogger. The trouble is that he's right! I post a new blog article about every seven to ten days and most of them are somewhat long...ish,averaging in the neigh... Read >

Productivity Saboteurs - Identifying & Managing Them

Today's working environments are riddled with interruptions and distractions. Just when we get focused on one task, a new e-mail arrives, the phone rings, or someone stops by and off we go on a new tangent. Later, when we return to the original task, we n... Read >

Three Reasons Why Executive Time Management Is Like Losing Weight

Instead>Throughout this period of reflection and conversation, I was on my own mission to lose a few extra pounds that I'd picked up over the last ... 20 years. This was an effort I undertook in early November, so it doesn't count as a New Year's resoluti... Read >

The New Frontier - 2010 In Review

With our holiday travel over, I find myself working on 2011 projects - finalizing my second book, revising my first book into its third edition, and working on my 2011 business plan. Today, though, I'm not feeling the rush to get tothe future. Rather, I'm... Read >

Taming The Beast - Making E-mail Work For You - Part 3 Of 3

The first installment of this series focused on the Pavlovian response we've developed with e-mail - the constant need to check it - and recommended that we turn off the new message alerts and regularly batch process our e-mail in the same fashion that we... Read >

The Year In Gratitude - A New Perspective On The Retrospective

2010>Outdoorplay- was taking shots to the head because the retail customer was cutting back on non-essential purchases. My consulting business - QuietSpacing - was dramatically affected by the elimination of training and retreat funding from most 2010budg... Read >

Taming The Beast - Making E-mail Work For You - Part 2 Of 3

Getting Up To Speed Part> in this series looked at how our love-hate relationship with e-mail developed. It proposedchangingour perspectiveto better align our expectations with what e-mail actually is and does - a modernway of doing something we've lon... Read >