Tag: self leadership

There is an absurd­ly wide gap between the human capac­i­ty to make many grand plans and the life­time avail­able to real­ize them. This brevi­ty of life makes rig­or­ous pri­or­i­ti­za­tion cen­tral to all time man­age­ment and, at the same time, makes every choice painful­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in our des­per­a­tion, we tend to squeeze so much into our day until we are final­ly suf­fi­cient­ly over­loaded to say no with a clear conscience.

Time is our scarcest resource. It runs out irre­triev­ably. Already the ancient Romans gave the advice: Carpe diem! In the age of knowl­edge work with a thou­sand pos­si­bil­i­ties and just as many dis­trac­tions, how­ev­er, this is eas­i­er said than done. In about twen­ty years of knowl­edge work, I have tried out a few things and learned a lot about how to orga­nize myself well.

Do fish have to climb trees? Of course not! So why are employ­ees reg­u­lar­ly asked to work on their weak­ness­es? It would make more sense for every­one to accept weak­ness­es, make them irrel­e­vant through appro­pri­ate orga­ni­za­tion and thus delib­er­ate­ly make strengths productive.

Only those who can lead them­selves can lead oth­ers. This is how Father Anselm Grün sums up the essen­tial chal­lenge of self-lead­­er­­ship. Those who want to serve life…