There’s a good list of project management podcasts over at PMcrunch which is interesting to check out. I would have listed the same here.

I’d recommend: The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner I especially enjoy, you can find Cornelius on Twitter for a good PM quote too.

Audio programs on motivation and business like the ones you can buy at Nightingale Conant are also often very inspirational and easy to lay down and pick up again, very practical in the car.

I’d recommend: The New Psycho Cybernetics audio program, it’s a very good listen. The weird title put me off at first, but it’s genuine stuff. I guarantee you you’ll get some good ideas out of it. I got interested after reading this post at Freestylemind.com.

Some very cool audiobooks I enjoyed are:

• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, goes good with the book
  , has great insights on networking.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People: Unabridged, even if you read the book, it’s worth it.
• First Things First which is the audio version of the book I got as a reading assignment on my PM training at Xios, also very good.

I moved to the other side of the country, my commute got a bit longer. About 2 hours a day longer to be precise. It’s been like this for several months now and I’ve found listening to podcasts and audiobooks to be a very rich experience, certainly with the many traffic yams around Brussels.

Hope you like the list, if you have any other audio programs or cool podcasts you’d like to recommend, I’d love to hear from you.

Edit (10/06/2010): I found some inspiration on Bil Gates’ blog, he recommends lectures from the Teaching Company. I’m listening to The Art of Critical Decision Making at the moment, it’s great!

Have a look at my sketch drawing in the picture …

1. important things that are urgent
2. important things that are less urgent, but not less important
3. not so very important things that are urgent
4. unimportant things that aren’t urgent

You can put everything you have to do in one of those 4 groups. Groups 1 and 4 are the obvious ones, do stuff in 1 now, never do anything that gets into 4, easy. But the things in groups 2 and 3 could trick you in wasting your time if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t rocket science, you already know this but I think it’s a good way to visualize the choices you have to make.

It takes discipline and courage at times to focus on the tasks you put in group 2, but often they are the ones that help you grow out of hard situations. Stuff that goes into group 2 for a PM for instance could be making a detailed planning or a strong risk log, or something strategical like writing out a new process and presenting it to your own project office or to your executives.

Have a good look at what your project teams are doing, it’s the job of a PM to indicate the urgency and the importance of different things for them but also to help them make the correct assessment and maybe the drawing can help you with that when things get fuzzy (like they do).

I got a lot of things like this explained to me in far greater detail by Inge De Bruyn from De Groeipraktijk and use the advice quite a lot, they do training workshops and seminars on all kind of soft skills. This post isn’t endorse by them but I’d recommend them to you if you’d ask me.