Productivity Pointer for March 2, 2009
What a folly, to dread the thought of throwing away time at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal. ~ John Howe ~
Do you make and keep the most important kind of appointments – those with yourself? Make appointments with yourself when you need time to concentrate on an important project, time to catch up on accumulated mail and email, or following a vacation or business trip.
This is especially important if you use a network technology calendar (Outlook, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, etc.) where others may look to commandeer some of your time.
Reserving time on your calendar for your own priorities and you’ll find that you are more focused, more efficient and more effective.
Productivity Pointer for February 23, 2009
If you don’t run your own life, somebody else will. ~ John Atkinson ~
Is your life overly complicated? You CAN get it back in control, and here are 5 suggestions to help you.
1. Keep in mind that you have choices; no one is forcing you to complicate your life.
2. Keep your “wants” and “needs” in their proper perspective. Don’t confuse things that you merely want with those that you really need.
3. Learn how to say “no”. When you are asked to help, volunteer for or join a group or cause, make certain you understand the consequences of saying yes.
4. Understand how much of what you do benefits you directly, and how much you do for others that they really ought to learn to do for themselves.
And be sure to set aside quality time each day. One hour during which you’ll do only what you want to do, rather than what the world tells you to do.
Productivity Pointer for February 16, 2009
It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. – Sally Kempton
Using your mind to remember when to do things is not only a waste of your most valuable asset, but also creates undue stress and anxiety. The human mind is great at many things but using it to remember tasks and appointments is not one of them.
The second you decide something is worth doing, but not now, capture into in a system that your mind trusts. If you use an electronic tool like Microsoft Outlook, create a task. If you have a manual system, write it down as a future activity.
If you are frequently away from your system, create a process for capturing these thoughts while on the go. Do this by using a small pad of paper or digital recorder. Once you return to your system, process each thought as you would any other input (e-mail, snail mail, phone message, etc. Turn it into a project, task or appointment by entering it into your system.
The habit of capturing everything (and I mean everything) into a place that you trust will free your mind for more profitable uses like problem solving and creativity. It will also result in a sense of release and a burst of creative energy. Try it.
Productivity Pointer for February 9, 2009
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. Elbert Hubbard
Not every problem or request has to be resolved immediately. People who habitually do this find there just aren’t enough hours in the day. To break this habit, consider these three strategies:
1. Set aside time early in the day for your most important tasks, since this is the most productive time for most people.
2. Restrict meetings and phone calls during this time to the most pressing issues.
3. To insure that your important tasks take precedence over those that can be delayed or delegated, sequence them in order of importance.
And remember stick with the most important task until it can be crossed off the list.
Productivity Pointer For October 27, 2008
Every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine-as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got. – -Ayn Rand
These words spoken by Francisco, a character in Ayn Rand’s great novel Atlas Shrugged, ring true today more than ever. Time is the most precious and perishable commodity we have. Saving more of it for the truly important things adds richness to life.
What can you do to free more time for you? Start with little things. How much time do you spend reading (and re-reading) e-mail? How many minutes do you lose each day just long for things on your desk or In-box? How much time do you spend watching television?
Take a critical look at where your time is really going. Tighten up your daily self management and you will free more time for the rest of your life. Do it today.
The Root Cause of Clutter
This is a picture of my in basket a few days ago. It’s a collection of random small things was my nemesis for a few weeks. It doesn’t look like much but it really bugged me.
What are they? They’re the result of a recent wallet cleaning and attempt to corral loose pieces of floatsum laying around my workspace. The kind of things that are there so long you stop noticing them.
Like a good processor I gathered these things up and put them in my Inbox to be processed. But something happened. I put new mail etc. on top, processed the mail and continued to leave them in the bottom of the basket. “I’ll get to them later” I thought.
Here you have it, a public confession that I broke one of my own cardinal rules. DON’T USE YOUR INBOX AS A STORAGE FACILITY.
But these items were so insignificant to my daily work they hardly seemed worth my time, attention and decision making prowess. So they just sat.
Why did they sit? In analyzing the situation I realized that first I had no place to put them and didn’t feel like using limited space and my even more valuable time deciding what to do with them. I realized that the process of making two decisions about each piece was just too painful (brain hurting as a colleague always says), so I put it off. I was avoiding the pain of making (a very simple) decision. The result was clutter.
This is a very simple example why we accumulate clutter in the first place. Whether its’ just a few stray pieces of paper in our wallets or piles of paper and folders throughout our entire office. Clutter (any clutter) represents un-made or deferred decisions. In fact each time you look at a piece of clutter you actually do make a decision, which is to do nothing. The problem with this is that you are making multiple decisions about something that could have been resolved with only one. It’s a huge waste of mental energy.
The solution is to set aside time to process (and only process) incoming information (mail, e-mail, meeting notes, a pile of loose notes, etc.). Make a decision about each piece before moving to the next. Use the temptation to put it aside as a trigger to first think about why you are deferring your decision, then force yourself to make it. Maybe, like me, you put off the decision because you don’t have a place to put it. If so time for an action item to create some files (or electronic folders) and move on.
If I was sitting with you at your desk this is exactly what we would do with each item in your Inbox. It can create quite a bit of anxiety. If it does, use that feeling as a red flag and dig into your underlying reason for not deciding.
You may be wondering what happed to my little pile of stuff. About half is in the trash. Some things have been added to my Outlook contacts and the rest are in a folder for little used but sometimes needed frequent shopper cards. I feel better now.
Productivity Pointer for October 13, 2008
People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.
– Lewis Cass
Respect your own schedule. While it’s good to be available to others at work and at home, too many interruptions can be very costly. Whether you’re in the middle of that important report, or working on a home project, let others know that you are busy and working towards a deadline (even though it may be of your own making), and when you expect you will be available to them.
If you don’t respect your schedule how can you expect other to?
A Simple Way to Overcome Procrastinaton
Have you ever received a dope slap? Have you ever given yourself one? Some people call that a “flat head moment”. That’s how I felt yesterday.
Not long ago I promised to write a post about overcoming procrastination. I started to work on it a couple times but didn’t come up with anything new beyond the standard list of six or seven things you can do to take action sooner. We’ve seen it all before so I didn’t feel justified regurgitating it one more time.
Yesterday I stumbled on a post by blogger Debi Zylbermann about actions she’s taking to overcome one of her personal constraints. It’s so simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it (isn’t that true with so many things). Click here to read her post in its entirety.
Debi talks about a technique used by a former boss where he required his managers to write a daily report that consisted of a simple statement about they did that day to move their department forward.
So why not do this yourself? At the end of each day write one sentence in your planner, journal, e-mail to yourself (or significant other) about how you moved (insert whatever is important to you) forward that day. And do it every day. This will be especially helpful to the self employed and home office types who don’t have someone looking over their shoulder.
When you know at the outset of the day that you will be writing the report at the end of the day you will be more cognizant of how you are using your time to make progress. To be effective you have to be brutally honest yourself.
I did it today (Tuesday) and it was a real eye opener. I plan to do it again for the rest of the month and see how I do. Try it yourself.
Thanks Debi.
Productivity Pointer for October 6, 2008
A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.
— H. Mathews
Are You In The Top 10%?
The resource that people will tell you they lack most is time. However, if you watch them at work you’ll observe constant activity: people rushing to meetings, receiving and sending hundreds of e-mails, answering their cells and either creating or putting out fires.
A 10 year study conducted by the Harvard Business Review of the behavior of busy managers revealed that 90% squandered most of their time in ineffective activities. Only 10% were truly effective and used their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner.
The two traits that the study found made for true effectiveness were:
- Focus – the ability to establish and zero in on a goal and see it through to completion.
- Energy – the vigor that comes from owning the goal, tackling a heavy workload and meeting deadlines.
If you are prone to treating every activity in the day as a vital goal you will undoubtedly end up very ‘busy’, but not necessarily very effective. My advice is to ‘focus’ on one key goal for your work and one for your personal life. Commit to it and I will guarantee that the ‘energy’ will flow.
How to Achieve Your Goals
It’s the weekend and time to take a few minutes to catch your breath and decide how you’re going to attack next week.
This Cessna Citation is owned by a friend of mine. He wasn’t born rich. He’s from a working class family in a Midwestern suburb just like most of middle America. But he’s one of the most focused people I know. This jet and his ability to fly it are a testament to his ability to set clear goals and remaining focused on them.
You achieve your goals by first having some. If you don’t, read no further. Go to a quite place, set some (more on this in a later post), write them down then come back here.
I’m going to show you a simple weekly planning and review process that will help you reach your goals. It looks almost too easy. But I guarantee you that my friend with the jet and successful other people do this or something similar as a matter of routine.
The reason for this process is that we tend to get lost in the weeds during the turmoil of the work day. So it’s vital to to step back into your personal manager role to remind yourself of your goals, capture any loose ends from the previous week and plan how you’re going to use the following week to get you closer to where you want to be.
Do this every week. Print it out or paste it into a recurring Outlook Task scheduled for late every Friday afternoon:
- Review Your Goals and related projects one at a time to evaluate status and outcomes. Generate at least one action item for each. Keep your goals in mind as you capture and schedule tasks for the following week. Tasks that drive your goals should be higher priority than those that don’t.
- Collect Everything (Loose Papers, notes, scraps, bar napkins, sticky notes…everything that needs to be someplace else) and put them into your in basket. Process those items using the 4-Ds (just like incoming e-mail).
- Process your notes. Review all meeting and miscellaneous notes. Schedule all open action items, things due from others, calendar items, and, project tasks. File any reference material.
- Review Previous Calendar Data, Daily Task Pads or To-Do Lists for missing action items and create tasks for them in Outlook or your planner. Make sure nothing from previous week is un-captured.
- Review Upcoming Calendar to capture action items and prepare for upcoming events.
- Schedule your Priorities! – Block out time to work on high priority activities (do the important things first). Outlook users, use the 5 Work Week Calendar View to facilitate this process.
- Think. Take some time in a quite place without a phone or computer to kick back and think. Capture any ideas, thoughts or action items.
- Go enjoy yourself, it’s the weekend after all. You’ll feel better because you’ve dealt with any open issues (they won’t nag you all weekend now) and planned your next week. You’ll be flying your own Citation in no time.
This is the cliff note version, but you get the idea. Make a commitment to doing this every Friday without fail for the next three months. Let me know how it works.
