Test Your Productivity Skills with GTD-Q in 2 Minutes

Self management is all about perspective (focus on the right things) and control (the ability to effectively manage all the things coming at you).

The David Allen Company in conjunction with one of the world's leading professional assessment firms developed a test to determine ability to GTD.

GTD® is the shorthand brand for "Getting Things Done®," the groundbreaking work-life management system by David Allen that provides concrete solutions for transforming overwhelm and uncertainty into an integrated system of stress-free productivity. GTD is a powerful method to manage commitments, information, and communication.

GTD-Q is a measurement for evaluating two elements of self-management - control and perspective. In less than two minutes, you will get a visual representation of where you fit in terms of personal productivity.

My Results:

Your "perspective" score was 4 and your "control" score was 2. This means you have scored in the "Visionary / Crazy-Maker" quadrant.

On the positive side, you are a Visionary—you have no shortage of ideas and inspiration. You're probably pretty good at setting goals, being creative, and focused on "the most important thing."

On the developmental side, you are a Crazy Maker. The challenge is that your ideas, projects, and commitments may be outstripping your ability to keep up with them. Along with the inspiration of what you're envisioning, there may be things falling through the cracks, details being missed, and a general sense of being overwhelmed.


Test your ability to get things done here.

Lean Quote: Encouraging Those to Succeed

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not." — Neil deGrasse Tyson

Congratulating employees is a simple, effective way to acknowledge them and boost their morale, as well as their colleagues. Leaders know that in order to be successful, they must influence employees to deliver positive performance. They succeed in this area because they do things to inspire higher levels of commitment and cooperation from employees. They don't just assume that because they are leading, employees will follow.

Here are some ways to encourage your employees to get moving in the right direction:

Show genuine interest. I believe this is by far the most effective way of encouraging others. Let them know you care. Express genuine interest by asking questions. Get them talking. With some hope and luck, this can lead to positive action. But don’t be fake about it and don’t go overboard.

Acknowledge what’s important to them. When you acknowledge what’s important to others, you provide a form of affirmation and validation about who they are and what they’re doing. Whether they can admit it or not, each of them deep down craves this acknowledgement. The affirmation and validation fuels their confidence and self-esteem.

Offer to lend a hand. Waiting for someone to ask you for advice is passive. You can be proactive by offering to lend a hand. If that person sees that you are willing to commit your own time and energy in their interests, they will be more committed to seeing it through and less likely to give up themselves.

Say “Well done”. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. If it’s easy, then it’s not worth doing. Worthwhile things always takes time and effort. One good way of providing encouragement is simply by saying “Well done” or “Congratulations”. These magical words of encouragement at the right time can make all the difference between “keep going” and “give up”.

Giving encouragement can boost that person’s motivation, which in turn lead to actions and finally results. Managers need to keep in mind that feelings are contagious. By positively encouraging, a leader makes others want to be part of the change. Only satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers.

Meet-up: My Flexible Pencil's David Kasprzak

Today, I would like to introduce David Kasprzak of My Flexible Pencil. David and I have been friends ever since we started blogging a few years ago. We have carried on a dialogue online over the years that has been thought provoking. He has contributed to this site many times which you can find here.


The goal of Meet-up is provide you an opportunity to meet some other influential voices in the Lean community. I will ask these authors a series of questions:

Who are you and what do you do?
My background is, primarily, in large-scale, multi-year, hardware development program planning and analysis. This includes both engineering R&D and transition into manufacturing. Most of my background is in support of DoD programs, but also includes commercial aviation and IT programs as well.

How and when did you learn Lean?
My employer launched a Lean initiative and put a core group of us through GBMP's 8-week Lean program.

How and why did you start blogging or writing about Lean?
The Lean training really lit my fire in terms of being able to understand the, frankly, broken way in which most organizations operate - particularly as it relates to the humanistic aspects of work (or lack thereof). That fire burned hot enough for me to go back to school and earn an MBA. I started blogging 1/2 way through that program as a way to broadcast my ideas and network with others who share my belief in changing the underlying mindset by which organizations operate.

What does Lean mean to you?
Lean is a philosophy of human behavior. It offers an explanation of why people do what they do, describes the path to develop an ideal mindset, from which ideal activities take place. Seeing Lean as a philosophy explains why it is so hard to understand fully, and yet so easy to apply to many different situations and activities.

What is the biggest myth or misconception of Lean?
That it is only about reducing cost. Reducing cost is just an outcome of Lean practices and, especially if you believe in the Shingo model. (easier, better, faster, cheaper) All too often, those cost reductions are enforced in a way that makes the work harder - which is unsustainable since no one will, or even can, do that which is more difficult for an indefinite period of time.

What is your current Lean passion, project, or initiative?
I am always looking for ways to make home life more efficient, effective, organized, simpler....so there is an on-going personal initiative to apply Lean concepts to daily, personal life. On the blog, I keep looking for way to introduce typically non-Lean audiences to Lean concepts. Usually, this focuses on white-collar, knowledge management environments and the project management activities I'm most familiar with. The more I dig into it, the more I find similarities in the approaches different schools of thought advocate. When it comes to organizing large groups of people, the tactics are often very similar even if the terminology or application is different.

Resistance to Change is Futile, You Will Be Assimilated

Change is inevitable. Adaptation to change is a necessary and critical component to survival. But mostly, change is a constant in business. And business seems to be where the adaptation to change -- or lack thereof -- seems to have some of the most significant impact.

Former US president John F. Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”.

In business, we must continually change, evolution is not an option. If we stand still in our businesses we go backwards. The day that we think we have our business model perfected is not the day to stop changing. The issue comes about when we try to make changes. With the evidence in existence related to the necessity of change in business, you would think every business would constantly be revising their model. But that is not the case.

Before you can overcome the resistance it is wise to be aware of why the resistance exists. Usually it is a result of one of the following causes…

• People not agreeing with or understanding the value / benefits of the innovation.
• Fear of the unknown.
• People have had no opportunity to provide input in the planning or implementation of the change.
• Little or no reward / benefits to the people impacted by the idea.
• Increased effort from people required as a result of implementing the idea.
• Fear that the change will result in job cuts.
• Personality clashes between the people affected by the idea and the ideas inventor.
• No trust of the people who have been mandated to implement the change
• Belief that the change is unnecessary or will make the situation worse
• A belief that the idea is inferior to another idea.
• A feeling that the change will result in a loss of security, status, money or friends.
• Bad experiences from similar changes that had been or been attempted to be implemented in the past.

Being aware of the causes mentioned above and being able to specifically identify which ones may be relevant to our particular business greatly increases your chances of overcoming the resistance to change.

Being a leader today we must to be more adaptable to change than ever before. Technology alone will challenge us to learn new things and adapt almost on a daily basis! Change is absolutely unavoidable and successful people recognize this fact and learn how to play the “Change Game”.

Let go of the feelings you have associated with the “old way” of doing things. While some strategies are tried and true… change WILL find a way… and when it does, bringing emotional attachment into the fray can spell disaster. Comfort does not equal rationality.

Change is most often a difficult thing. The sooner we learn to embrace it and work within it, the easier it will be to begin the next challenge that comes along. We naturally gravitate toward the things that make us feel fulfilled, safe and happy. Therefore as we embrace change more often and see the good in it… the more we will gravitate toward it with enthusiasm!

If we accept change is inevitable, you will need a means to continually drive change throughout your business. You should have a change management process that involves every single employee in an organization. Change should be ongoing and employees should be a critical part of that process so there is not fear of change but a willingness to embrace it because it’s a part of the everyday process in the organization.

Change is necessary, resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

Moving Quality Beyond The Product

In June’s post on ASQ’s A View from the Q Blog Paul Borawski asks how you are moving quality beyond product.

… the Quality Council report provides great insights on how the quality community is responding and what it can do better. And therein lies the seed for my question of the day. The opening paragraph of the Quality Council’s perspective is, “For some organizations, ‘quality’ remains a set of tools and techniques associated almost exclusively with quality control. For others, quality has evolved into a critical partner, closely linked with business model development and the enterprise-wide execution of long-term strategy to achieve results.”

Building a quality culture is not an easy task. A quality culture starts with managers who understand and believe the implications of the systems view and know the necessity of serving customers in order to succeed. The result of that understanding is a culture where a positive internal environment and the creation of delighted customers go together. It is a culture that naturally emphasizes continuous improvement of processes, one that results in a healthy workplace, satisfied customers, and a growing, profitable company.

Every year companies ratify and formally commit to their quality policies but are they more than words on paper. It should be part of the culture of the company. Employing quality methods and practices in everything you do provides a firm foundation for your business and can be a determining factor in your success.

To create a culture of quality, an organization must align its organizational processes with quality planning and desired outcomes. Quality leadership starts with the leaders who plant the seeds, create the environment for success, empower others and deploy quality throughout the organization.

After safety, quality must be the organization’s highest priority. In lean manufacturing one of the principles we teach is to build in quality. Many think it is only about eliminating waste but that is too minimalistic. Quality issues result in all sorts of waste. As a result, lean principles specifically seek to address this point.

Quality must go beyond our product or service. We cannot add it at the end of the line or inspect it into the product. At best that is only a false sense of security. If we want a quality product it must be made with quality processes by quality minded people. A focus on quality must be intrinsic to the company culture and practices for the customer to take notice.

In my opinion successful businesses are those that not only sell quality to their employees but make it part of the culture or what they do daily. The organization must make quality a top priority for everyone in the company, from top managers to the workers building product. The final product and goal of the organization is creating value for consumers.

A quality organization understands that the realization of quality must be continually energized and regenerated. Successful implementation of a quality focused organization requires commitment and patience, but the rewards are substantial. Beyond the obvious practical benefits, organizations become empowered to solve persistent process and performance challenges while raising the expectations they set for themselves.

It is said that the quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up. The key to success lies in how well each employee is motivated and inspired to deliver quality work.


I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.

Lean Quote: Reduce Fire Fighting By Not Participating

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"I spent so much time putting out fires until I realized I was the oxygen." — John Toussaint, MD

Unfortunately, a far too common management style in many companies is the reactionary style commonly referred to as fire fighting. But fire fighting consumes an organization's resources and damages productivity. Fire fighting derives from what seems like a reasonable set of rules--investigate all problems, for example, or assign the most difficult problems to your best troubleshooter. Ultimately, however, fire-fighting organizations fail to solve problems adequately. Fire fighting prevents us from getting to the root cause. And if we don’t get to the root of problem we will be right back to fire fighting soon.

The idea of fire fighting is to let a problem fester until it becomes a crisis, and then swoop in and fix it. Fire fighting is popular because it is exciting. Furthermore, it is a win-win situation for the fire fighter. If the fix works out, the fire fighter is a hero. If it doesn’t, the fire fighter can’t be blamed, because the situation was virtually hopeless to begin with. Notice that it is to the fire fighter’s advantage to actually let the problem become worse, because then there will be less blame if they fail or more praise if they succeed.

But the real problem is the people in charge. Fighting fires instead of developing a plan to stop fire fighting and making sure it will not happen again is the job of management. Most of us deplore the firefighting style, yet many managers and organizations perpetuate it by rewarding firefighters for the miraculous things they do. In fact, it may be the absence of a vision and plan that cause your organization to be so reactive, and spend a lot of time fire-fighting rather than proactively meeting the needs of your customers. This is all easier said than done, of course, but if you get things right the first time, there's usually not much fire-fighting later.

Meet-up: Lean Leadership's Christian Paulsen

Today, we’ll meet-up with Christian Paulsen, who blogs at Lean Leadership. Christian has contributed several guest posts here. He started blogging shortly after me so we have grown through the process together. It has been nice to have someone to trade insights with and learn with.



The goal of Meet-up is provide you an opportunity to meet some other influential voices in the Lean community. I will ask these authors a series of questions:

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Christian Paulsen and I have been working in food manufacturing since getting out of the Navy in 1989. I have held several manufacturing leadership roles with Unilever, Frito-Lay, and Nestle and a couple smaller manufacturers. I am currently using this experience to help food companies optimize their manufacturing processes using Lean - TPM as an outside consultant.

How and when did you learn Lean?
My first experience with Lean was when I was a supervisor at Frito-Lay. We were not calling it Lean yet and it was really Dr. Deming’s Total Quality approach for those that remember TQM. I was not directly involved but started to see the benefit to Pareto charts and started to glean some knowledge. Within a couple years I was a Production Manager at Lipton (Unilever). We were serious about Continuous Improvement and TQM. The supply chain was going JIT and we had teams addressing one loss issue after another. Start up losses were being driven out by the start up team and SMED principles were used to cut change-over times in half several times. I was hooked when I saw how we could work with the team to drive out losses and make it a better place to work. It was classic Theory X vs. Theory Y management to me and I’d rather work with the team than have to fight them to make improvements. I have attended several seminars and courses like Total Quality, Root Cause Analysis & DMAIC, TPM, and Lean Six Sigma. These have helped strengthen my knowledge of Lean theory and to support the hands on experience along the way.

How and why did you start blogging or writing about Lean?
I started blogging while in transition from my traditional manufacturing roles into consulting. It was a good time to establish a stronger presence on the social media scene and served as a great way to refine my thinking on a variety of topics. Tim McMahon (author of this blog) was a lot of help to me while getting started. He was kind enough to field my questions even though we didn't know each other at the time. Jamie Flinchbaugh was helpful while starting as well. Guest blogging for other Lean thinkers has been a great way to challenge my level of thinking on a topic. Several bloggers have been kind enough to have me guest blog. Tim at A Lean Journey, Beyond Lean (Matt Wrye), Gemba Tales (Mark Hamel), Gotta Go Lean (Jeff Hajek) and My Flexible Pencil (David Kasprzak). The Lean community is helpful and open with information. My blog is Lean Leadership. The name of the blog reveals the focus of that blog. I am also one of a dozen contributing bloggers at Consumer Good Club but I am the only one with a Lean focus there.

What does Lean mean to you?
Lean is all about a pursuit of excellence. While many of us focus on reducing cost by eliminating waste, it should be about being great at what we do. Pursuing excellence will maximize profits while eliminating waste and reducing cost. There is a big difference between just cutting costs and making sustainable improvements. Lean thinkers attack waste and optimize value added activities rather than slashing budgets and letting others deal with the consequences. Lean principles give the structure to make it sustainable rather than the flavor-of-the-month.

What is the biggest myth or misconception of Lean?
You hear a lot of discussion in Lean circles about Lean being a way of thinking and not a set of tools. There is certainly a lot of misconception about that. I think that there is also a lot of misconception about the difference Continuous Improvement camps. I hear some people talk about Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, and even TQM as if they are mutually exclusive. There are books and courses about Lean-Six Sigma, Lean-TPM, and such that seem to imply that the different camps can somehow co-exist (There are some great manufacturing minds and Lean thinkers behind this material, so these comments are not intended to be critical of them). I'd suggest that there is more similarity between the methods and less differences than many people think. I grew up on Deming & TQM principles then got deep into TPM. I started to hear more and more about Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. I decided to start reading up on Lean and was very surprised to see that it was a lot of what we had been doing under the TQM umbrella. Then I decided I better read up on Six Sigma. Again, I was surprised to find more similarities than differences. Don't think though that I didn't learn anything in this process. I'm still learning with each new venture. To me, there is a lot of overlap and similarities. They are far from being mutually exclusive.

What is your current Lean passion, project, or initiative?
I have been doing a lot of TPM work, mostly Autonomous Maintenance with a couple well known food companies which has been a lot of fun. It's great to see a teams come together and improve Safety & Quality while reducing downtime by 50%.

I am also working on a Kaizen initiative with another food manufacturer. This one is focused on eliminating the waste is a manual process. It's also fun to see the light bulbs go off as we teach the operators about the lean concepts.