Printable "Triple Hat Trick" Checklist Helps You Knock Out a Great Week

Have a huge list of to-dos but don't feel like you accomplish enough in any given week? Productivity blog Manage This suggests simplifying your weekly goals by setting out and completing a hat trick of agendas, tasks, and delegations.

The inspiration for the Triple Hat Trick:

Sometimes it is tough to get focus with my big fancy fiddly collection of GTD lists. There are just too many items on the lists, and even when I filter on just the "next actions" the list is still pretty long. To gain focus, I plan to identify no more than three critical tasks that I want to accomplish in a given week. Sort of a hat trick if you will.

The author was kind enough to put together a printer-friendly version of his Triple Hat Trick template (pictured above), which you can grab here. Think the Triple Hat Trick might work well for you, or have some other method of laying out your goals for the week that works for you? Let's hear it in the comments.

The Triple Hat Trick [Manage This!]

This seems ambitious at first, but I guess my self-professed method of picking one task for each day actually arrives at seven tasks for a week.

Dear Diary:

A recent health problem led me to seek a cardiologist. On the recommendation of a friend, I called a Manhattan doctor to make an appointment.

In the process, I was introduced to his automated answering system — the name is slightly altered here — which left little doubt about the priorities typical in the health care industry today:

“Welcome to New York Cardiac Specialists. For the billing department, please press one. If this is a life-threatening emergency, please press two.”

From the Metropolitan Diary feature in The Times.

Vincent Pieribone is an Associate Professor at Yale University. He's also a passionate scientist working on new ways to help paraplegics move their arms and legs by bypassing the damage and having a computer do the work. While Pieribone is optimistic about the future of brain imaging advancements, he worries that we aren't moving quickly enough to understand every aspect of the brain. To him, more effort was put into creating the iPod than unlocking the secrets of the brain.

Why aren't more intelligent people going into science these days? Besides there being a problem with science education in the U.S., Pieribone thinks the public often misperceives the field entirely. "I got a lot of people who show up in the lab and they think every day is going to be like Mr. Spock running around the deck of the Enterprise making huge discoveries and stuff.  And it’s a little slow.  It’s a lot of pie petting and you know, things don’t work and like any job, it’s really like any job," he says. 

More money for iPods than brain research? This user says thank goodness Bioness is here now (but does wonder what else there could be).

I think every organization, conference, city, or profession should periodically sponsor their own version of an Olympics-style competition for the following reasons:

Jeffrey Cufaude challenges us all to find our own Olympics. Click through to see why he thinks it's a sensible idea, then spend some time thinking about how and where you could be an Olympian. Looking for personal responsibility in the Olympics reminds me of this favorite thought from Michael Gelb

The best communicators, motivators, and leaders take a different approach. They view competition in accordance with the original Olympic ideal--a javelin thrower throws his best to honor the gods, expressing the glory of humanity and inspiring his opponent to greater achievement. The opponent responds by mustering his best aiming to spur his competitor to further glory. Competition becomes a creative process, energizing the-ending quest for excellence.

Karen Armstrong presents a bold and inspiring overview of compassion and reverence for life as ideals that can save the planet. Here is an excerpt on compassion as an essential practice of the religions that developed during the Axial Age from 800 - 2000 BCE.

"What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.

Karen Armstrong has come to my attention in a big way recently. Click through for a thought-provoking excerpt.