business

There is a natural reaction for people when faced with a problem to offer solutions. This can be especially true for managers.

This excellent article looks at the different types of deadlines and the impact they have. The key point for me, and not something I had seen previously defined, is the distinction between real and artificial deadlines:

This one is just for future reference for me that I may find useful one day - a website full of resources that may be useful for naming things.

I have used the "5 whys" approach multiple times to get to the root of some question. This article advocates adding a time dimension to the decision. Not only should we consider why we are doing something, we should also consider why we are doing something at a specific point in time. It also twists this around and suggests we should consider "What is the danger of not doing this right now?" - what would we lose or miss?

This is an old post (March 2009) that someone retweeted but still holds true on how to work out if an expert is really an expert. It also is a guide how not to fall into common traps that so-called experts fall into.