Читать книгу Smart Work - Crowley Dermot - Страница 6

In July 2001 I excitedly (and nervously) started my own business, Adapt Training Solutions. I had a vision and was confident that I could make it come alive. Fourteen years later and I am still bringing that vision to life.

My vision was to help corporate executives to harness the power of their technology and to work more productively in a rapidly changing workplace. A workplace that was becoming busier, increasingly pressured and more and more urgently driven. The email workplace.

My business name, Adapt, had been suggested by a friend. It was short and snappy and seemed a perfect fit. I did not think too much about any deeper meaning. Adapt it was. Over the years I have thought hard about what I do, about the true value of what I bring to my clients. During that time I have come to realise that I could not have picked a more apt business name. Most people would place my brand of training, coaching and speaking in the categories of productivity, time management and email management, as I did for many years. I have now come to realise that my passion sits at a level above these labels. I believe that my calling is to help people to adapt. And we need to adapt now more than ever.

We are now at one of those critical turning points in the evolution of the workplace. We are working in what some have labelled the Third Industrial Revolution. The first was launched by the mechanisation of the textile industry in Britain. The second saw manufacturing techniques vastly accelerate due to the brilliance of the likes of Henry Ford. The third (also known as the Digital Revolution) saw computers change the face of the modern workplace.

Computers have made it so much easier to do many of our daily tasks, allowing us to communicate faster with more people and to expand our workplaces from local to global. But these changes have meant more pressure, tighter deadlines and more work for most of us. Recognising this, I decided that I needed to go beyond teaching the basic time management principles that were relevant in the workplace of old. I needed to help my clients to adapt to the new workplace, and that meant learning to harness the power of the technologies that were changing our world. It also meant working smarter in this challenging new workplace.

In Smart Work I explore how we can adapt to a new way of working and organising in the digital age. My aim is to provide a simple, practical guide to working productively in today's workplace. Smart Work delivers a practical approach to productivity and clearly addresses the issues that modern executives and workers face every day.

It does not set out to explain the psychology of productivity or base its recommendations on scientifically researched studies. It simply suggests a range of practical solutions that work, and attempts to link the theory of productivity to the technology that we are already using every day.

Read this book from cover to cover if you are interested in a comprehensive approach to personal productivity using technology. Or dip in and grab an idea or strategy that you can implement straight away. But know this: if you do not adapt, you will be left behind, drowning in unprocessed emails, overwhelmed by your workload and feeling like you are getting nowhere in this brave new world.

It is time for smart work.