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To-Do Lists – Helpful or Useless?

Published by in Business Advice, Management on January 25th, 2012

I like my whiteboard – when I have room to have one on my office wall. I usually dutifully list my tasks I need to do – and then promptly forget about it! It makes me feel good that I made my To-Do List, but it factors in only a portion of my organizational planning. Why? To-Do Lists Overwhelming? If I added all of my tasks on my To-Do List, I would simply get overwhelmed by all that needs to be done, and then I would get started on the easiest task first. I follow another method – its called

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Getting Information from (Out of) Engineers

Published by in Management, Technical Writing on July 30th, 2011

After 17 or so years in the Tech Writing business, I have a bit to say about getting information from Engineers. It is a key part of a technical writer’s job. I consider this part of the job as part diplomat, part comedian, part manager, and part psychologist. 1. Engineers need to provide the information Obviously, getting the respect of the Engineer is important. But it isn’t always necessary. Getting the engineer to realize they need to provide information to the Tech Writer so they can do their job is absolutely necessary. This realization can take many forms, first and

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ISO 9000 and Technical Writers

Published by in Management, Technical Writing on June 21st, 2011

Germany is ranked 6th in terms of number of certificates issued to companies that conform to the ISO 9001 Quality Management System, according to Wikipedia. To be certified, a company must institute a quality policy that is actually implemented throughout the organization. The company is then audited to determine if it is conformance to this policy . Deviations from this policy are handled effectively and quickly. The policy is not an end in itself. The goal is to reduce bad products by controlling and documenting the development and production process from start to finish and to resolve problems that lead

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Finding Time to Write Blog Posts

Published by in Management on April 12th, 2011

I remember Tom Johnson of Idratherbewriting giving me a sense of how much work is required to maintain a blog. If you look at Tom’s blog, he posts about once a day, weekends excluded. Sometimes he posts once every day, other times he is posting every other day or sometimes three times per week. Now, consider it takes approximately a half hour to one hour to compose, proofread and publish a post. This amounts to 5 hours per week to write the posts to a blog. The maintenance of the site, that is the nuts and bolts of the thing

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Five Leadership Myths

Published by in Management on March 23rd, 2011

I found the following very helpful. You may too. In the July 2010 issue of Business Week, Stephen Wiehe of SciQuest listed five Leadership Myths that need to be unlearned to become a genuine leader: Leadership is a process. Stephen writes that it is a behaviour not a process. True leaders lead by what they do, not by what they say. No PowerPoint presentation ever shows leadership. People observe leaders. Lack of action or wrong action cancels out all those carefully chosen talking points. Similarly, Jesus, who by all accounts was a successful leader, didn’t write a single word in

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