After reading the book by the title above, I find myself noticing a number of items that, yesterday, would have gone unnoticed and perhaps untouched. I figured if I was not going to complete the task at hand in one sitting, I would wait until I could find the time to do so. This has proven over time to be a wasteful decision.

The Kaizen philosophy goes against the popular teaching that you must finish what you start… at one sitting. Kaizen implies that you will eventually complete the task, but not as quickly as you first imagined. Read the rest of this entry »

It was 7:05 am on a Thursday morning when I stumbled across a recent blog post by Seth Godin. It was titled Date Certain. Not being sure what that meant, I clicked on the link and was immediately nodding my head in agreement.

The gist of Seth’s advice that day was to “pick a date”—any date. Flip your calendar, circle a day and month in the not-to-distant future. For lack of a better term, let’s refer to this as your target date. Using this date as your deadline, what are you planning to accomplish? What will you do? Who will you meet? Who will you be? How will you be different? How will you be better? By that date. Read the rest of this entry »