FORTUNE: Secrets of greatness: How I work – Mar. 7, 2006

E-mail and voicemail; yoga and personal assistants; structure and grooving: A dozen accomplished people tell what works for them.

The Art of Work

“It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair….It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape….”

Preparing For Act II

How do you dodge a career crisis?

I don’t know that you need to dodge it. Rough it. What I mean is that there’s a time in your life when you’re rethinking the direction you’re heading. You absolutely need to do it. People drift into a career usually by accident; we get a job and it’s inertia that keeps us there. Maybe you need a pause to step back and ask yourself the reasons you got into this profession in the first place. Do they still hold? Are there things now that are more important to you than they were 15 to 20 years ago? I think periodically asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” is important. September 11 prompted people to ask a lot of these questions, but you don’t need a tragedy to ask yourself what you want your job to look like and what you want your life to look like.

Evaluating Project Success, Failure — and Everything in Between – Computerworld

Project managers must strive to become adept at negotiating the trade-offs between process (time, cost and product) and outcome (use, learning and business value). The project charter should include negotiated success metrics, the project dashboard should enable real-time metrics, and the project retrospective should document the actual results, concluding with overall stakeholder satisfaction.

There is a lot to be gained from looking into the rearview mirror from time to time. As philosopher George Santayana so pithily remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Creating Passionate Users: How to be an expert

“For the superior performer the goal isn’t just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That’s why they don’t find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.”

mezzoblue  Â§  Speaking? Tips.

Know your material. But plan to make mistakes anyway. If you talk through a bunch of slides, oh well. Make them available later, and it’s no big deal. If you have to back up and provide extra context that you missed earlier, go right ahead. You can even tell people that’s what you’re doing, although you probably don’t need to. Also, if you’re more of a bullet-point presenter, you can even use your slides as notes to keep you focused throughout. That’s hardly a bad system, though we all know why PowerPoint is evil…