Category Archives: Productivity

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Psychology Tells Us How to Improve Our Planning

We all struggle with our schedules. We don’t get done what we want to. Many things take longer than we expect. And urgent tasks regularly bump out more strategy things. The good news is, psychologists have found two predictable ways that we mess up our planning – and what to do about them.

Psychologists understand our difficulties in planning. They know why we are late to appointments. They know why we make commitments that we later regret.

Here’s what to do about it and how to plan more effectively.

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Technology Has Completely Changed Our Communication, and What You Need To Do

Before mobile phones, telephones were wired to a place – a home, a office, a store. If you wanted to speak with someone you called the place where you expected them to be. Now that most people have cell phones we call the person.

Moving from place to person is a paradigm shift.

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Why You Must Set Performance Measures To Achieve Results

We know what gets measured gets done. So, who decides what gets measured? It might surprise you, but most leaders set objectives but not performance measurements. This can be a costly mistake.

If you don’t determine what performance gets measured, people will make up their own. And those things may not lead to your objectives.

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4 Reasons People Don’t Want What You’re Offering

We offer people things everyday. It’s not just about selling, it’s also about inviting people to your church, publishing newsletters, or even spending time with your teenagers. Even before they hear our pitch for why what we’re offering is great, they turned us down. Here are 4 reasons why – and what to do about them. 

1. “You don’t talk to me.”

People are social. The more personal connection you have with them the better.

I missed this for years in offering my coaching training. I relied too heavily on emails, newsletters, websites, and social media to connect with new people. This was a mistake.

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From Napkin Drawing to Color Graphic in 38 Minutes and $19

The original article used a now defunct service called Swifty. 99designs absorbed them. I now contact a designer at 99designs for the small things mentioned in this article. It takes a couple of days, but still priced about the same. – Keith

Sitting at Top Pot Donuts, my office for the day, I wrote a blog post on how mentoring and coaching are similar, yet distinct. I drew an illustration on a napkin to accompany the article. Thirty-eight minutes and $19 later I downloaded a beautiful, color custom graphic. Here’s how I did it.

Graphic design is not in my skill set. I don’t know what all those Adobe Illustrator settings do, and I don’t want to learn. I just want good-looking graphics.

I’ve worked with some excellent designers. In the old days (1 year ago) you had to find a graphic designer, send a description of what you want, wait days or weeks for the design, and hope what came back was what you had in mind.

The Internet has brought a thousand designers to your doorstep (or Internet browser) and enabled quick and inexpensive graphic design.

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What If You Could Multiply Your Ministry Impact?

If you minister to others, and you want to know what it takes to make a greater impact… if you want to see people transformed… if you want to multiply your efforts… It’s possible! Here’s what I discovered.

Personally, I know how challenging it can be to minister. Whether you are launching a new church or working in a foreign country or supervising people in 4 countries, I’ve been there.

And the pace is speeding up. People are more spread out. It is hard to keep up. I thought if I could just work smarter, more efficiently, I could see the ministry impact I hoped for. There were just too many needs and too much to do.

“Recruit others to join you,” was the advice I received. I did. The administrative load multiplied with each new teammate! Soon I was busy filling out forms instead of building into the lives of others.

Developing myself and others to be effective in ministry turned out to be my biggest challenge of all.

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4 Ways to Practice Pacing for More Energy and Better Results

Walking all day with a 15-pound backpack, 15 miles finished. According to the directions, only a mile to go. I was exhausted. It began to rain. I had a decision to make, do I push through the last mile, maybe 30 minutes more walking and finish for the day, or do I stop and get out of the rain and continue later?

I decided to push through. This was a mistake.

Lesson learned: practicing pacing the following day.

It was the first day of 5 days of walking the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St James, in northern Spain. I wanted to get to the stop for the night and shower and rest – most of all, to stop walking.

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50 Powerful Coaching Questions

“I want to be able to ask better questions.” I hear this a lot from the leaders I train to coach others. 50 Powerful Coaching Questions - Keith Webb

Everyone is looking for magic questions that will create insight, foster innovation, and help people get things done.

There are no magic questions. But there are powerful questions!

Powerful questions are the tools to help people discover new roads and to find answers. Many people are not naturally reflective. We all have a limited perspective. Questions are powerful when they provoke reflection in other people, causing them to think more deeply and creatively than they could on their own.

I decided to list up 50 of my favorite powerful questions in a resource guide. It’s called 50 Powerful Coaching Questions. Each question approaches a problem or goal from a different perspective. Here are a few examples: