Okay, I admit it. I’m an inbox junkie. And, If I have to look in more than one electronic inbox, it drives me crazy. Historically, nothing drove me crazier than voice mail… it just refused to behave. So the journey began: first it was eliminating all but one voice mail box; then I began forwarding everything — business, mobile, and home — to that one (voicemail) inbox. But even that wasn’t enough — I still couldn’t manage to remember to dial in for the messages. I tried asking people to e-mail me instead of leaving a voice mail, but that was short-lived. Then I hit on the magic dust: a voice mail transcription service.

Pondering both Rob and Rolf’s comments on my suggestion that time management is more important than project management for most non-profit organizations, I was left thinking about the larger issue that each of our perspectives points too… Once distilled down to its essence, my hypothesis is that many people don’t have an accurate picture of their available time.

Rob believes that what I call “traditional” project management is what he would call bad project management, meaning that:

This will most certainly be the first in a long line of posts documenting my observations of life inside many non-profit organizations I’ve connected with. And a discussion around some of the commonly held views of what they struggle with, and what the best approaches are to helping voluntary organizations be more effective are.

One of the commonly held assumptions that I struggle with most is the notion that non-profits are inherently inefficient or poorly managed. My personal experiences lead me to believe that this rarely the case – or certainly no more the case in non-profits than in any other form of organization. And, quite often, I’ve seen innovation coming from community-based organizations being adopted and applied elsewhere.