Stress-free productivity does exist

With projects of a certain size it is very important to consider the risks that could derail the project. A project may fail miserably by the mere fact of an unexpected event taking place, which can unbearably lengthen its execution, make it too expensive or destroy morale of the team working on it.

Are you sure that reading this article is the best thing you can be doing in the next two or three minutes? There comes a time in everyone’s life where they realize that time is their most valuable asset. However, sometimes this epiphany comes too late for some people, when there’s no much time left to enjoy.

Checklists are organizational elements with infinite possibilities. They allow you to specify repetitive tasks in such detail that you do not forget anything, they document tasks so you can delegate or automate them, they help you easily review projects, goals, etc.

Treating work as a special and different life, entirely separated from our personal and social life, seems to me a too widespread mistake, perhaps because it has some logic.

The term “lean” first appeared in the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World, by James Womack and Daniel Jones, from a thorough study by MIT on the automobile industry. That term was coined to define the manufacturing process in Toyota, which tried to create the largest possible value with minimal resources, as opposed to the management behavior of other major producers such as General Motors, in which wasting resources was pretty common.