Take each estimate as the best guestimate made with all the current knowledge. There is always place for changes.

Bottom line an estimate is a the best guess based on all the current knowledge and skills of a person.
If the original estimate is not according with the current effort, then think what you got from it.
Keep your eyes open to possibilities.
There is always a place for quality as it is for quantity.
And team building.
Or feedback.

Related posts:

1. Monday Saying – 16th August
2. 4 reasons why managers should not make technical decisions
3. Monday Saying – 9th August

The design of trainings is made with total involvement of participants and created based on their questions.

What we did?
We asked participants to put their questions with one day before and we choose 6 of them to be addressed in the training.

And also during the training, participants could add their own life experiences for each of those questions.

How to pur your own ideas into practice

How to Communicate With You Team

You can find a more complete description of the these two trainings here: http://www.musat.com.ro/2010/08/05/participant-driven-learning-experience-english/

Many thanks to Mihail for all the cooperation and coaching offered during preparation and design of these trainings.
And many thanks to Iashington 2010 (AIESEC) team and participants for their cooperation and passion.

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A few months ago I’ve read the book “The Power of Less” of Leo Babauta.
An interesting book about simply organizing life about a simplified time management, allowing yourself to focus on the most important things.
Also I’ve started to came across with many articles about ToDo lists and Organizing projects and pros and cons about all of them.

And before that I was saying this thing for months: “Less is more”. So after reading the book, I’ve decided it is time to Walk the Talk and take some initiatives:

The first challenge: The do-list

My first step was to transform my re-organize my todo list into something that I’ve called the “do-list”. Meaning that it is the list of all things that I want to accomplish in a specific day.

I’ve made three folders: Work, Personal, Someday
And each day I’ve spent the first 10-15 minutes of the day by reading all emails and tasks and deciding which ones desirves my attention in that day. And I’ve put only those in my Work or Personal list in the order I was thinking is the most important for me.
I’ve took care to add to the do-list list everything that I considered to be very important for me, for my work, for my projects.

photo credit: Jakob E

In the beginning I leaned to put many things on the lists and as time passed I’ve learned to move the things remained from the other day to the Someday folder.

And as weeks passed by I’ve noticed an improvement on the things I like to do and accomplish each day. So my monthly accomplishments increased and the projects started to progress in a more meaningful way: the most important first. Those 20% that makes the 80% value of my all work.

Also I was able to estimate better the things I work on.

The second challenge

After 2 months, I’ve started another personal challenge: to make exercises each morning during the business week.
I’ve started this by making 15 minutes each day of push-ups. For this I’ve woke up with 15 minutes earlier than my normal wake up time.

I’ve done this for 2 weeks. Then I’ve increased the time to 30 minutes by 15 minutes of sit-ups and moving the wake up time with another 15 minutes earlier.

photo credit: Oliver.

And I’ve continue doing this program for another 5 weeks. In the last two weeks I’ve started to change every other day the push-ups with squats.

So after 5 weeks of 30 minutes morning exercises now I’m running twice a week and in those days I’m waking up with another 30 minutes earlier then the days with the exercises.
And it feels great.

What I’ve learned from this

1. It really works focusing on one thing at a time.
2. If you think the challenge is heavy, start by doing just a little effort of a couple of weeks, until the perception of heavy is starting to change.
3. Prepare the tools for success and keep them close. In order to quickly get up from the bed in the morning and start exercising, I’ve prepared my gym shorts and t-shirt and sport-wears near to my bed so that I can easily find them when I wake up
4. The “do-list” is much more motivating then the “todo” list. At least for me
5. Incremental improving steps are working much more quickly then a big 180 degrees turn-around
5. Have plenty of sleep. Even if It helps to fight with procrastination

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And we are very good at doing this. It comes from early development ages of human kind, when we need to generalize in order to be able to learn new things and move forward.

It is going to a new level, in our times with so much information available. The first option when there is such an abundance of information that a human cannot read/process in one single life-time, is to generalize.

And this is even worse when we used it for people.

We just categorize one of our co-workers as being not-opened or lazy or anything similar and whatever he/she will try to do, our only reaction could be to do our best to include it in the category we think it should be.

And on top of this, here comes “the need” to be right.

Put them together and it is like a cage:

- nothing come in if it is not according with your view

- nothing comes out if does not bind to the rules

And thus, removing anything that could be a leverage for getting him/her out of the box and see the wonder in him, it is our own limit, created by each of us and fed with our own judgments and assumptions.

photo credit: Orin Zebest

Keep the labels on the box. There is their places. And by this I mean on the objects. Do not put them on the human people.

As every human is a wonder and you will never know what he/she is able to accomplish and become.

Everyone will rise at least once in their lifetime above the expectation of others or himself/herself.

To the question of how to get rid of labeling people, here are some possible things to do:

1. Take the challenge to live at least one day without labeling people. And if you succeed  make it one week.  And then one month. And then one year. If you manage to make it one year tell me how you did it

2. Be aware. Notice when you start labeling people. Whatever it is a positive or negative label.

3. Ask yourself: Is it really this kind of person? (I’ve wrote about the power of the IS IT question here: http://ghinda.com/2010/03/is-it/ )

4. Clarify your label or assumption by directly asking the person about it

And most of all, ask:

What from myself is mirrored in this person in front on me? What is here for me to discover? What I know about myself deep inside that makes me put this label?

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It has some good questions that you need to put to yourself when you start doing a task like “Is this task related to my goals? Does doing this make any difference to me?“. Pay attention to what tasks you are doing and what values they are bringing to your life.

The author of article split the current time management approaches into fourth systems:

First Generation – Reminders. The first generation of system is about “reminders” of our tasks through notes and to-do lists. While these are generally helpful, there are two downsides. Firstly, commitments may not be kept, because people do tasks as they appear as on the list or according to whatever may seem important at the time. Secondly, there is a lack of long-term vision. Using lists do not enable us to look ahead or get to the truly important tasks.

…

The fourth generation system addresses this gap – It focuses us on developing deeper value tasks and accomplishing results. This is done via using Covey’s framework to first classify our daily activities, then dealing with them in a certain way based on which quadrant they fall in.

Read full article here at Time Management Matrix

Related posts:

1. Do first things, first
2. What tools I use to keep track of my projects

This is why I like to have reports as small as possible, focused only on the content, without any thing added to it.

And looking around I’ve tried to use the twitter idea: express something in no more than 140 chars.

Also for clear understanding I like to split reports in two main components: Things we’ve done and thing we want to do.

And there is a third component that it is not contained in the raport, but a manager should be very interested in it: Thing that might stop me achieving the results.
I’ve got this from the way SCRUM works. In SCRUM they meet daily and talk about three topics: What I’ve done so far, What I want to do next, What problems might appear.

So a report should answer to the following public questions:
- What I’ve done?
- What I want to do?
And one private question:
- What could possible stop me?

In each category, just follow the rule not to have actions/items described in more than 140 chars.
If you can make a summary of 140 chars in the beginning of each category, then you’ve got the new level in making really readable reports: Tweeter like reports.

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I used them one or two days, or a week, then I dropped them, cause they only added more confusing or more stress on my to-do lists.

I tried to use sticky notes put on my monitor with the important things to do in one day.

And then I forgot to look at them or I’ve got used with them and didn’t noticed.

Now I’ve realized that I have a great tool to organize the important things I need to do in one day.

This great tool is my mind.

No matter of what I need to do, I trust my mind to remind me which tasks are the most important to do.

I’m not talking here to try to memorize a bunch of phone numbers, names, texts or anything like this. For this you can find many software to help you.

I’m talking about remembering what to do in your daily life, remember your goal during a week, a month, an year.

Also I learned that if I just continue not to remember a thing, that means two things:

- it is not such important

- it is something that became a routine

It is so simple: just make an metal note about a thing that I need to follow-up and then when time comes, my mind will bring it to life

No related posts.

This is not related to any email client or particularly email service. It can be used anywhere, anytime.

I’m talking about making comments like  “see below”:

Here it is:
1. Write your name and format the way you desire, just after the first paragraph where you want to comment something. Do not start to write the comment it-self yet. Just your identification and formatting of the reply.
2. Copy/Paste this text along with formatting below every paragraph where you want to comment something.
3. Go to each paragraph and add your comment in the placeholder you just added on step 2.

This is it! Very simple and powerful!

No related posts.

There are of course, multiple arguments that managers say to support this behavior:

- I have much more experience

- I’m a technical person too

- I know enough about the system or about the client to be able to say this

- I feel the direction we are going it is not right

and many more …

Because the Law of Consequence, our mind is trying to deliver as many as possible arguments to support the behavior we are taking.

Don’t let yourself fooled by this. Open your mind.

Ask yourself: Am I, truly the right person to make this decision?

Am I knowing all the facts, expertise, reports, tests to make this decision?

Here are some reasons why probably you, like me, are not the right person to take such technical decisions. Rather your role, like mine, should to be help your team discover on their own the good path they should go.

1. You ARE NOT GOD and because of this, you DON’T HAVE ALL THE KNOWLEDGE your entire team have, you don’t know all the facts, you don’t see all the details, you don’t have their cumulative experience.

So let them analyze all data, cause multiple minds are always better then one single mind.

2. Your role should be to support and help the decision making process, not to take decisions in place of your team.

If you make every decision on their behalf, then you obtain what you want: for each decision, they will come to you and ask for your help. For every and each decision, small or big. Do you really want this? Do you really have this time available? If so, then maybe you should leave your current position and become a technical person, cause it is obvious that you don’t and don’t want to be a manager.

3. You take all the responsibility for a technical decision, rather than your team.

Do you know what this means? This means that your team it will not feel responsible for that decision.  If it will fail, they will say: It was your decision, not mine. But more dangerous: they might feel this every day. And if you continue to do their work, they will stop carrying about their work. They will feel like they don’t have control of what they do. And the first sign to recognize this it is simple: open your eyes and ears and notice if your team is arguing with you on one of your decision. If they start to accept every technical decision you make, if they are not showing to you the risks of that decision, they started not to care. Be aware!

4. You communicate lake of trust in your team.

Each member of your team has a place, has something that he/she knows to do better than the others. Make a technical decision in place of that people, and the message your are transmitting is that the person don’t have a skill you trust. You are lowering the self-esteem of team members. This is demotivating cause every human being wants to have something different than the others.

You you are doing what I’ve described here, then ask yourself: What is the reason you are behaving this way? Find out the answer!

Is most of the cases the reason is the lack of trust in your team. In this case, please do not continue lowering their self-esteem. They will not do anything to gain your trust back.

Take action now! Stop doing this, stop taking decisions that your team should take!

Related posts:

1. What tools I use to keep track of my projects
2. Really listening to others