Path to Critical Thinking

4 Phases to Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is an essential skill for all of us.  These 4 phases will help to build critical thinking skills within yourself and your team.

1. Execute:  ensure that you can complete tasks in their entirety, meet deadlines, and complete satisfactory work.
2. Synthesize: the ability to identify important insights and leave out the unimportant ones, arrange insights in order of importance, and then communicate findings clearly and concisely.
3. Recommend: the ability to make recommendations about how to solve issues with little or no preparation.  This phase includes taking initiative, understanding counterarguments, accepting constructive criticism, and backing decisions with facts and logic.
4. Generate: the ability to create something out of nothing.  This phase includes proposing high level work that's separate from existing assignments, turning ideas into actionable plans, and generating answers to questions that you previously didn't know.

Bloom's Taxonomy includes six types of skills and abilities essential to critical thinking:

1. recollection
2. understanding
3. application
4. analyzing
5. evaluation
6. creativity

Keys to Productivity

My Keys to Productivity

• consistency
• have a plan
• figure out priorities
• family, work, & health
• Ivy Lee method:  
• at the end of each day write down the 6 most important things to accomplish the next day
• arrange the tasks in order of priority
• work down the list
• at the end of the day do the same thing
• Say NO to anything that's not a priority (easier said than done, but a good rule of thumb)