The blog

This week I spent for the most part in Kram­fors, a sawmill town on the Swedish High Coast in Väster­nor­rland, which accord­ing to a clas­sic skit is both ​“bright and beau­ti­ful” (while Dals Långed is ​“pure hell” (which is unfair)).

I had the plea­sure to hold three sem­i­nars on per­son­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty dur­ing three days, for 60 man­agers from the local munic­i­pal admin­is­tra­tion. The third day some­thing hap­pened that hap­pens every once in a while and that makes me enthu­si­as­tic every time — a par­tic­i­pant says some­thing that gives me a whole new insight. Some­times it’s about a new trick, and some­times we find a pre­vi­ous­ly hid­den aspect of the struc­ture top­ic together.

On Wednes­day, we talked about con­texts, i.e. in what sit­u­a­tion we need to be to do what we have to do. Ani­ta said:

“If I feel that we need to be in the office, at the com­put­er, by the phone and togeth­er with a spe­cif­ic col­league to work with a cer­tain task, then I have prob­a­bly defined the to-do task too large. I should break it up into small­er steps.”

That is so true. And, I had not thought of that par­tic­u­lar indi­ca­tion that a task is too large before. Thank you, Anita!

More­over, while in Kram­fors I expe­ri­enced how dif­fi­cult it is to main­tain your bal­ance when you are run­ning fast on a tread­mill and the gym is sud­den­ly pitch dark because the lights were set on timers, at Hotel Höga Kusten I ate the most deli­cious meat­loaf I have ever eat­en and I got to feel what it was like to run with spikes on my shoes in 16 degrees Cel­sius below zero (it hurt and I enjoyed it a lot).