Top 10 Tips on How to Delegate

Delegation is one of the secrets of good time management. But many people are reluctant to delegate because it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. When people you are depending on forget important tasks or miss deadlines it can be more than frustrating - it can be positively damaging. So here’s my Top 10 Tips on how to delegate effectively. And if you have a tip which you think should be in the Top 10, then tell us about it in the Comments.

1) Ask yourself which parts of your work can only be done by you. Then aim to delegate as much of the rest as possible so that you are free to make the most of your own work.

2) Never delegate even the simplest task without saying when you want it completed by.

3) Where possible, get the person to set the deadline themselves. Make it clear that you expect them to keep to it.

4) Always put a follow-up reminder in your schedule or Task Diary to check that the work has been done. Everytime you fail to do this, you have lost control of that part of your work.

5) Always chase work immediately if it hasn’t been done by the time you requested it. If you don’t, they will think it’s not important.

6) Break down large tasks into stages and set deadlines for each. Spell out what should have been achieved at each deadline. Don’t say “Let me know in a week’s time how you’re getting on”. Instead say “Send me the draft for the first section by lunchtime Friday.”

7) Remember you can delegate upwards and sideways as well as downwards, and the same rules apply when you do.

8) When someone overruns a deadline don’t say “Why haven’t you done it?”. Instead say: “I’m not interested in why you haven’t done it. What I want to know is when you will have done it.”

9) Remember no one is going to give the work they are doing for you more importance than you give it. So if they think you don’t care about it, why should they?

10) Remember that people whose time management is bad tend to react to what is making the most noise at the time. The way to get them to give your work priority is to make more noise than the other calls on their time.

If anyone consistently fails to do the work you are asking them to do in spite of your keeping to these rules, then you should cease to use their services. You are not doing them any favours by ignoring their poor performance.

Noguchi Filing System

A remark today by a reader in my Discussion Forum reminded me of something which had intrigued me in the past but which I had never followed up. This is the Noguchi Filing System. I was intrigued by it because it is in some ways similar to the filing system which I use myself and often recommend, though I developed this before I had heard of Noguchi.

In both systems the idea is that files are put on a shelf rather than in a filing cabinet, and the most recently used file is always replaced at the left end of the shelf so that files are in the order they were last used. This results in much faster retrieval of files because the most used files are always to be found towards the left of the shelf.

Where the systems differ is that I keep papers in fairly conventional subject files, while Noguchi suggests opening a folder (actually a cut-down large envelope) for every document.

I was very interested to know how this would work in practice. It is one of those counter-intuitive systems which can only be judged by trying it out.

So having armed myself with a large number of C4 envelopes, I started filing the Noguchi way this afternoon. And actually my first impression is that it works quite well, especially with the type of document one never quite knows what to do with. 

Looking at my shelf, from the left I now have the following documents each filed in its own envelope with a description written down the right hand edge, where I can see it easily:

• A leaflet giving changes to my bank’s standard tariff
• A pamphlet from my bank giving “important information” about my business account
• A pamphlet giving the Terms & Conditions for my business bank account
• My list of commonly used phone numbers
• A newspaper article about “Discretionary Portfolio Management”
• The latest copy of my Parish Magazine
• The latest weekly “pew sheet” from my church

Since I’ve only just filed these, they are not yet in “last-used” order, but I feel that I am now in control of them and can retrieve them easily. As you will have seen, none of these are the sort of thing which fits easily into a conventional file (which is the reason why they were lying around in the first place!) So far then, a definite improvement.

What can be done now?

I am often asked a question about how one choses what items you should put in the Task Diary for tomorrow. My answer is always that you should always be as up-to-date as possible with all current projects. Therefore any actions which can be taken now should be put in the task diary.

This adheres to the basic “Do It Tomorrow” principle that prioritising should not normally be done at the task level. It should be done at the project level.

What tends to happen is that when people get under pressure they tend to try to prioritise tasks. This is rarely very successful because all that happens is that tasks get put off to days in the future. But those future days are going to be just as full as today is.

Keeping on top of projects is the best way to ensure that you are forced to prioritise at the project level. If you can’t keep on top of all your projects, then you need to look at your current projects and decide which ones should be de-activated, either temporarily or permanently.

Before I wrote DIT, I used to recommend people to use the question “What needs to be done now?” with reference to projects. In full the question would be something like:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what needs to be done now?”

Nowadays the question I recommend is:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what can be done now?

The effect of the first question is to push action back until it needs to be done. This makes it very vulnerable to unexpected interruptions. Actually there’s no such thing as “unexpected interruptions”. Interruptions are a fact of life. Leaving action until it needs to be done tends to result in deadline pressure and over commitment.

The second question on the other hand has the effect of encouraging you to start action at the beginning of the time available for its completion. This gives you much more leeway if things go wrong (which they will). It is also a strong disincentive to over committing yourself.

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Dialoguing

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that. 

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

Stever Robbins interview with Mark Forster

There’s a great audio interview with me by Stever Robbins on his The Get-It-Done Guy blog. The subject is mainly about how to handle email.

Length of interview approximately 19 minutes.

Too Much Work?

In my recent article Auditing Your Time Management I said that I would write about each of the three parts of the audit procedure in turn. The three parts are:

1) Have you got too much work?

2) Are you working efficiently?

3) Have you left enough time to do the work?

So now let us look at the first of these. If you are carrying out an audit of your time management, then the question should be posed in the 1st person “Have I got too much work?”

As I have often remarked, being on top of your work leads to a hugh boost  in your energy. You can’t be on top of your work if you have too much of it. So the net result is that not only do you end up overburdened, but you also lose the energy to handle it all.

In spite of the benefits of focus and energy in keeping on top of your work, many people have a great deal of resistance to admitting that they have too much work. One of the causes may be that they see it as the equivalent of admitting that they are incompetent. But also I’m convinced that the amount of work that someone does is important to their self-image. Only if they realise that they will have a far healthier source of self-image by having the success (however they define success) that energy and focus will bring them, will they start to let go of some of the work.

The fact is that humans take on work and commitments like bushes grow in my back garden. Each now and then, I have to go and prune them back.

So how do we go about auditing our work?

The most important principle is that you don’t audit tasks, you audit the projects and commitments from which those task have come.

The easiest way to do this is to enter all the tasks you are behind with into an outliner or mindmapper. If you have failed to complete the tasks in your Task Diary for four or more days (which is the signal for carrying out an audit), then your are probably going to have quite a number. Now group them together under projects, so that you end up with a hierarchy of commitments.

The next stage is to look at the projects. Your aim is to cut the number of projects you have committed yourself to so that you have time to do all of them as well as they deserve. In order to do this you need to identify exactly what your real work is. If you are self-employed this will be the work that impacts the bottom line. If you are an employee it’s the reason why your employer thinks it worthwhile paying your salary.

Of course this audit can apply just as much to your private life as to your work life. What are the projects and commitments which are going to take forward your life goal and vision?

Also bear in mind that one and the same rule applies in life and business: it’s better to concentrate as far as possible on one thing at a time. You may have loads of ideas for your business, but it’s better to focus on one of them until it’s up and running successfully, rather than disperse your focus by trying to implement too many ideas at once.

Don’t be afraid to cut your commitments ruthlessly. The harder you prune a bush, the more vigorously it will grow.

And remember - there is no point at all in going through the audit procedure if you don’t do something about the results!

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Exceedingly busy people

Some extremely important points about how time management systems, specifically GTD and DIT, can cope with the demands of extremely busy people are raised by a university professor on my Discussion Forum.

Read his post and my replies at http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/364395

Dealing with Projects That Don't Have a Deadline

If we look at projects from the point of view of deadlines, we can identify three types:

1. Projects that have deadlines. These are the normal projects that we deal with day-by-day. We need to get them finished by a certain time, either because we have been given a deadline, or because the task needs to be completed to fit into a wider picture, or because there are certain expectations associated with the task, e.g. people expect us to reply to emails within 24-hours or so.
   
2. Projects that go on for ever. These projects don’t need deadlines because we intend to continue carrying them out for a long period of time. I am thinking here of things like learning a language, learning a musical instrument, getting fit. Of course there may be intermediate exams at certain points but basically the effort is continuous.
   
3. Projects that don’t have any deadline. These are the projects about which we say things like: “I really must get the outside wall repainted sometime” or “I’ve been meaning to update the fire regulations but I haven’t had the time” or “I really need to run a publicity campaign, but I just haven’t been able to get round to it”. They are necessary, indeed possibly crucial, but because they don’t have a definite date by which they have to be done they tend to get pushed aside by more urgent things.

Most people have a problem with dealing with Type 3 Projects - the ones that don’t have a deadline. Sometimes they try to get them done by pretending that they are Type 1 Projects, in other words by giving them an artificial deadline. This can work - but often, because the mind knows that the deadline isn’t a “real” deadline, it gets ignored in favour of the projects which really do have to be done by a certain date.

Most of us have got a huge number of things which we want or need to get around to “sometime”. How can we deal with them?

Here’s my four stage process for getting these projects done:

Stage One: Draw Up a List

The first thing to do is to make a list of all the projects you ought to do, should do, would like to do, have been meaning to do or haven’t been able to get round to doing. Don’t hold back when you make this list. Don’t worry if some of the items are contradictory, or you’re not sure about them. Include everything. If you’ve done the exercise properly, the list should be quite an impressive size.

Stage Two: Edit the List

Ok, you’re really going to get these projects done now. So first you need to edit the list to make sure that you really do want to do them. Remove the ones you’re not sure about (you can always put them back later), the ones that would get in the way of other ones, and the ones which it’s not feasible to do now.

Stage Three: Order the List

Now take the items on the list and decide what order you are going to do them in. No, you’re not going to attempt to do them all at once. You’re going to do them one at a time (see below). So what order should you do them in? This is for you to decide, and there may be all sorts of things which you need to take into account. One important consideration is that projects which would make the other projects easier to complete should be done early on (for example sorting out your office procedures might make it quicker and easier to expand your customer base). Don’t get too hung-up on getting exactly the right order - you’re going to do the lot anyway!

Stage Four: Action the Items One by One

This is the secret to getting this type of project done - do them one at a time. This is far the quickest way of doing them, not just because it’s easier to focus on one at a time but for mathematical reasons as well.

To illustrate this, imagine that we have three projects to complete each of which will take a week and we have three weeks to complete them in. All other things being equal, is it quicker to do them all together, or to do them one at a time?

The answer is that it is quicker to do them one at a time. Why?

If you do them all at the same time, all three projects will be completed at the end of the third week.

If you do them one at a time, the first project will be completed at the end of the first week, the second at the end of the second week, and the third at the end of the third week. You will have gained two weeks on the first project, one week on the second project and the third project will finish at the same time as before. If these projects earn money as soon as they come on-line, you will have gained three project/weeks income by doing them one at a time.

If you want to refine this further, there are another two things you can do with the list before you start actioning it:

Stage 3B. Estimate how long each project will take

It’s a good idea to estimate in working days how long each item on your list will take. Don’t just leave it at that though - when you complete an item, write down how long it actually did take and compare it with your estimate. That way you will continue to get better at estimating - a very useful skill.

Stage 3C. Put an estimated completion date for each project

Since you’ve already worked out an estimate for how long each project will take, it’s easy to put a completion date for each item on the list. If you do that, you will arrive at a completion date for the whole list. That’s right - instead of having loads of projects hanging around with no idea how you are going to fit them in, you now have a date on which you expect to have them all done. That in itself will give you a real psychological lift. Try it!

Related articles:

From Pipe-Dream to Project

Space Invaders

Inspiration from the BBC

I have often said that it is structure that controls our actions - and that given different structures we will act in different ways.

So here are two different ways in which I act:

• When I get a rental DVD from amazon.co.uk it tends to lie around for a long time before I watch it. I seldom if ever get up to my monthly maximum.
• When I download a TV programme from BBC iPlayer it gets watched promptly.

Why the difference?

Amazon has no time limit and there is no penalty for not returning a DVD. As long as I continue to pay my monthly subscription they are perfectly happy!

The BBC iPlayer site has programmes available for 7 days after they are broadcast. If you download a programme you can keep it for 30 days before it is deleted automatically. But once you start watching it, it is deleted automatically after only 7 days.

So the result of the BBC’s system is that I never fail to watch the downloads.

My question is: could this 7-30-7 pattern be adapted into a time management system?

Any suggestions as to how that could work?

Auditing Your Time Management

One of the essential parts of the Do It Tomorrow system is the auditing procedure. You need to go through this whenever you get behind on your Will Do list for more than 3 or 4 days. Miss out on doing this and the entire system will collapse. Carry it out properly and your work will reach new heights of focus and effectiveness.

The DIT system has the great advantage that it preserves the link between the amount of work coming in and the amount of work going out. This means that it is easy to see what the problem is if you are having trouble keeping up with your work - much more so than with any other time management system I am aware of.

Remember that the aim of DIT is to get everything done. If you are going to get “everything” done, then it is essential to keep under close review what “everything” consists of. The most common failure in time management is to fail to keep “everything” focused enough with the result that you don’t have a hope in hell of getting it all done.

If you carry out the DIT auditing procedure properly, it will virtually automatically ensure that you keep focused. That’s not to say that it may not present you with some tough choices or some tough confrontations, but you will be quite clear what needs to be done.

Although the auditing procedure works best with DIT, it is also effective with other time management systems - or none at all!

This is what the procedure consists of:

1) Have you got too much work?

2) Are you working efficiently?

3) Have you left enough time to do the work?

Every problem with time management is caused by at least one of these. Often of course all three are involved. Of course, it’s not enough just to carry out the audit - you need to do something about the answers as well!

What I am going to do over the next few weeks is write about each of the three stages of the audit procedure. As I write each one I will link back to this article.

Related Discussion:

When the “Free” Time Gets Booked

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Friction

There’s a famous book on military strategy written by a Prussian general in the Napoleonic wars - “On War” by Carl von Clausewitz. It’s still studied in Military Academies all over the world. One of his concepts is that of “friction”, by which he means all the messy real-life things which get in the way of a commander’s beautifully conceived plans.

For example a commander issues orders for a battalion to advance to a certain line during the night in order to be ready to attack at dawn. But the rations are late coming up, the ammunition wagon loses a wheel, it starts to rain, the vehicles get bogged down, the streams flood, they come across an unexpected enemy patrol, the lead company gets lost, the maps are inaccurate, and someone calculated the time of dawn incorrectly. (Anyone who’s been in the Army will recognise all of these!)

Clausewitz stresses that any commander who doesn’t take the effects of friction into account when making his plans is asking for trouble. Friction is an ever present reality in war. It was in the days of Napoleon (and long before) and still is now.

In exactly the same way if we don’t take the effects of friction into account when we are planning our days, we are going to be in trouble. Often when I am talking to a meeting I ask the audience how many of them draw up a plan for each day of what they intend to do. Usually about 60 per cent put their hands up. Then I ask how many succeed in finishing their plan most days, and most people put their hands down again!

When I ask what the reason is for not getting to the end of the plan, the answer is always “Interruptions”.

Now interruptions are one type of friction, and anyone who doesn’t take interruptions into account when planning their day is asking for trouble, just like von Clausewitz’s commanders. There are many other types of friction in our work lives too. One example happened to me when my computer decided to stop working last Tuesday. Another is that I seem to have lost the charger for my laptop - just as I need to use it this weekend. Those are just two examples out of thousands.

Have a think about your day and see what types of friction are affecting your work. Once you’ve identified the concept in your life, then you can do something about it.

There are basically two things you can do about friction. One is to recognise that there is always going to be some friction however well organised you are, and not to schedule yourself so tightly that you are thrown out by it. The other is to make sure that your systems contain as little friction as possible. This is largely a question of thinking ahead to get systems right before they are needed, and taking the time to put systems errors right when you notice them.

Finally Clausewitz’s solution:

Perseverance in the chosen course is the essential counter-weight, provided that no compelling reasons intervene to the contrary. Moreover, there is hardly a worthwhile enterprise in war whose execution does not call for infinite effort, trouble, and privation; and as man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective. It is steadfastness that will earn the admiration of the world and of posterity.

Related article:

More About Systems

Related discussion:

Scheduling

Getting Going Again: First Week Update

After just one week of getting back on the Do It Tomorrow system, I can’t believe how my life has been transformed. I’m experiencing renewed energy and am moving forwards on all fronts. And as always seems to happen when one starts to move forward, opportunities have begun to open up in front of me.

Specifically I have got rid of all backlogs and so am completely up-to-date. I’ve rejuvenated my blog, got going again on my newsletter, started to develop ideas for new products and generally feel that I’m in the driving seat again.

And I’ve done all this without working later than 3.30 p.m. any day this week. With one exception - today!

Today my computer started playing up badly in the morning and I got the “blue wall of death” twice. However I couldn’t do much about it then because I had a meeting at 11.45 a.m. When I got back from this at 3.30 p.m. I was able to sort the problem out fairly comprehensively but it didn’t leave much time to finish my Will Do list for the day. Bear in mind that in Do It Tomorrow terminology a computer breakdown is an “Immediate” task, since it prevents one from doing any other work.

So I’ve finished the working day with a whole load of tasks to carry forward to tomorrow. That is absolutely nothing to worry about. It is bound to happen from time to time, and is only a cause for concern if one can’t catch up after 3 or 4 days.

Finally, here’s my “What’s Better?” list for my new Current Initiative - sorting out my office:

• Wrote blog entry on the subject
• Moved books back onto shelves
• Made a start on sorting out books
• Tidied area around shredder of bits of paper

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New Current Initiative

Having cleared my paper backlog yesterday (hurrah! hurrah!), I am starting a new Current Initiative today. This is to sort out my office. If I do it properly (as opposed to just a surface clean and tidy) it is a big job because it involves sorting out such things as the best locations for the furniture, computer, printer, phone, fax, etc, and also weeding and revising my filing system, and moving things to storage or dumping them altogether.

There are several ways I could tackle this:

• Empty everything out of the office and start again from scratch.
• Break the project up into a series of smaller areas and deal with each of them as a separate Current Initiative.
• Pay someone else to do it for me

But the way I am actually going to do it is using a “What’s Better?” list. This is a technique from my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True. All it involves is writing out a list of everything that is better about my office today. I ignore things that are worse or the same. The idea is that doing this focusses one’s mind on the growth points. And on the principle that what you pay attention to grows, those growth points will then grow further and faster.

In the book it is used as a way of measuring one’s progress during the day in general - and I know from experience that it is a very powerful way of moving forward. Will it work for a specific project like this? I’ve no idea. The reason I chose this method is precisely because I wanted to see what would happen.

Anyway I’ve got one thing that can go on my list already: I’ve written a blog entry about it. That must be something that’s better!

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Structure v. No Structure

I’m getting back into the swing of things now by using the Do It Tomorrow methods, but it’s brought back to me that there is a definite tension between having a methodical system for one’s work and being spontaneous and creative. It’s very easy to become a ‘prisoner of the system’. That is in fact the reason that I have spent the last year or more trying to find a more intuitive and spontaneous way of working. The fact that I failed shows how necessary it is to have structure in one’s life.

Nevertheless it is immensely important to preserve the creative aspects of working without preconceived structure. So the solution is to wear the structure lightly, but also to be able to avoid doing nothing more than drift when the structure has been relaxed. How can we do that?

In my article Feeling Good I wrote about how using a simple method to monitor one’s state of mind could have a major effect on one’s productivity and effectiveness. Basically it consisted of asking oneself at regular intervals “How good am I feeling right now?” and then marking oneself out of 10. I described in my article how I even succeeded in curing myself of a fear of flying by using this technique.

I’ve discovered an even more powerful question to use in this way. The question is “How much resistance am I feeling right now?” Just as with the “feeling good” question, you mark yourself out of 10. However in this case you are aiming for a low score rather than a high score!

What does the question mean? You may be saying to yourself “resistance to what?” The answer is resistance to whatever your mind is subconsciously telling you would be the best thing for you to be doing at this precise moment. You are either doing it, or resisting doing it.

So for instance this morning instead of getting on with the next item on my list I started following up a thought I had just had by googling it. Instantly my resistance went up from 0 to 7! And it took a while to fall back to 0 even after I had stopped surfing. By contrast when it was time for lunch I felt the resistance grow because I was working instead of relaxing.

Like the Feeling Good method, it is important you don’t try to force this. The idea is simply to monitor your level of resistance and let it adjust itself. The process of monitoring itself will cause the resistance to fall overall. You will soon begin to discover what sort of things make it rise and make it fall. You will also discover that they will be different things according to the time of day or the circumstances.

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Getting Going Again: Day 2 Report

I finished my Will Do list today at about 12.30 p.m., just in time for lunch. Everything has been pretty effortless so far, which is encouraging.

The most important thing I did today was the item “Think about the future of my business”. That actually only took me about ten minutes, but generated a whole stream of other “Think abouts”, including:

Think about:

how to blog regularly
new subjects for seminars
collecting subjects for future articles
subjects for another book
increasing sales of existing books
using audio/video/teleclass formats
touring
publicity
joint projects
increasing website circulation
monetarising my website

I’ve scheduled these forward over the next two weeks in my Task Diary, and added at the end the all-important “Think about the future of my business again”.

The great thing about the Do It Tomorrow system is that it enables one to keep the momentum going.

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Project Management

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this site in the Comments and the Discussion Forum about the best ways to manage projects using the Do It Tomorrow techniques. The word “project” covers everything from writing an article about fly-fishing to building a bridge from the English mainland to the Isle of Wight. Do It Tomorrow is not intended to be a project planning manual, and so much of what is involved in a major project is far beyond its scope. What it is intended to address is how you manage yourself within a project - or multiple projects.

The key to managing yourself within projects is your Task Diary. You can use it for all sorts of project related activity, especially for keeping track of when actions fall due (which is not the same as the deadline for completing the action).

One very important aspect of using the Task Diary is that you need to put plenty of “project management” type tasks in it. It’s a great mistake to use it only for concrete actions such as “Call Pete”, “Place monthly order for supplies”, “Draw up budget”.

The sort of tasks I am talking about here begin with these sorts of verbs:

Think about…

Investigate…

Discuss… with …

Plan…

Review…

List…

You can probably think of more for yourself.

When I blogged yesterday about getting my business going again, the very first action I put in my Task Diary concerning it was “Think about the future of my business”.

Remember: Thinking is the most important action a manager does, and using your Task Diary allows you easily to translate that thinking into action.

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Tiinker: Tailormade News Stories

Today I’ve been playing with a website Tiinker which has been in Beta by invitation for some time but has just been released to the public. It aims to provide you with news articles which are tailored to your tastes. It doesn’t do this by asking you for the type of story you want, but by getting you to give its stories a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This way it learns what you like and what you don’t.

The interface is simple and easy and I found after very little use that it was already getting to know me quite well. The quality of the stories seems quite high too. So I recommend it for anyone who wants to keep up with the world in general or any subjects in particular.

A word of warning: set yourself a time limit for using this site - it can be quite addictive. (Just as well I didn’t have anything very important to do today!)

"How to Make Your Dreams Come True" Review

There’s a complimentary review of How to Make Your Dreams Come True on Jennifer George’s Lifemuncher blog.

Forster combines a comforting, down to earth, practical Englishness with a very American understanding of the value of self-interest and creativity

I’d not seen this blog before, but it’s full of useful tips and tricks for everyday productivity, written with some humour and a great deal of zest for living. Thank you, Jennifer!

To read the whole review, click here.

How to have a great 2008!

John McConnel, a stress management trainer and coach, has sent me a useful checklist for having a great 2008. You can read it and/or download it by clicking here.

He is happy for you to make what use you like of it as long as you attribute it to him.