Business Insight Zone

Monday morning hits a lot of us harder than we’d like. It seems to take hours to get into the swing of things. You face all the same challenges that you did on Friday, but with none of the momentum.

Here, then, are half a dozen ten-minute tasks that you can do in an easy hour over the weekend, or even during your first hour in the office on Monday morning.

I’ve used all of these tricks, and I find that even the simplest ones help get the ball rolling for a more productive week.

1. Reduce your inbox load by 10%.

Do this by deleting messages, filing them, or a combination. If your inbox is small enough, you could handle messages one by one. My favorite trick is to set Outlook to queue up the next message automatically when I delete or file; the program will keep feeding you messages one after the other until you’ve hit your target.

If you have a big inbox, there’s no shame in it, but you will be able to navigate it better if you remove some of the cruft. If you have 6,000 messages lying around, you won’t be able to make individeal decisions about 600 of them in ten minutes. But you can make some big-bucket files — “2006 projects,” “Sales forecasts,” “Mom,” etc. — and handle your 10% quota that way.

It’s a good habit to get into, and maybe the experience will persuade you to take other 10-minute chunks of the week to do more inbox housecleaning. (When you’re ready to really take control of your e-mail, be sure to read Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” series.)

2. Remove yourself from three distribution lists.

Now that your inbox is cleaner, why not make a move to keep it that way? This step could be applied to internal lists that don’t mean anything to you, or else newsletters from outside that you don’t usually read.

For most external newsletters, it’s as simple as clicking an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the message. For internal lists, a very short e-mail to the distributor might suffice. (”Nancy, I appreciate your work on these reports, but since I don’t have a role in XYZ anymore, I really can’t put them to use. If you would remove me from the distribution list, I would appreciate it.”)

If you’re afraid you’ll ruffle feathers by requesting to leave an internal distribution list, take two minutes instead to set up a filter that will catch the messages and route them to a special folder (or the trash) before they ever hit your inbox.

3. Ping three old friends you haven’t talked to in a while.

Now that you’ve got some breathing room in your inbox, why not use your e-mail for something rewarding? Spend a couple of minutes looking through your e-mail archive or your social networks and find three people you like but whom you haven’t spoken to in a while.

Keep each message simple enough that you can write it in two minutes. Most folks love to get a note from an old friend, even if it’s just five sentences and starts with “I have to apologize — I can’t believe I’ve let so much time go by without being in touch.” You can talk at more length once they write you back.

Sometimes networking can seem like a daunting task, but this sort of small, contained step can be surprisingly effective for keeping in touch with people who are important to you.

4. Block out time for your #1 project.

Switch to your calendar and look over the coming week. Find at least a couple of two-hour blocks that you can book, then book them — just like you would any other appointment — to work on a longer-term project that tends to get shoved aside by the day-to-day press of business.

Take a minute to figure out how you can be sure not to be disturbed during this time. I suggest working from home, booking a conference room, or finding a quiet table in a cafe. Shoot off a quick note to your boss, if need be, to explain why you’ll be out of pocket during these times.

If it’s not clear what your most important long-range project is, use the time you’ve set aside to work on any high-yield project, or else to figure out what projects you should be working on.

5. Remove one bad meeting from your schedule.

So long as you’re adding something important to your calendar, why not remove something unimportant? Many people are amazed to find that they can get out of their most dreaded meetings — and that many meetings can be done away with altogether.

If there’s a meeting you “own” that fills you with dread, think for a minute about how you might shorten or eliminate it. One-on-one conferences? Cut it down by half an hour? Compile and distribute a one-page report in its stead? Sometimes the change is as simple as sending a note to the other participants that says “I can only meet for 60 minutes, not 90, this week” — and then silently making that the new standard going forward. And even if you can’t deliver big changes this week, you can certainly bring them up when the meeting convenes.

If it’s a meeting that someone else owns and you normally just suffer through it, figure out a way to get out of it, even for only one week. Send a short note to the organizer saying that you’re heavily booked — which is truer than ever, since you just blocked off five hours for Project #1. For that matter, see if you can schedule your Project #1 time so that it conflicts with the bad meeting. Then see if you can make missing the meeting a regular thing.

Too often, we get trapped in routinely bad meetings simply out of habit, not because we really and truly need to be in them. If you must be there, fair enough. But if not? Claw your way free. If you’ve never tried it, you may be surprised at how effective ten minutes of schedule-pruning can be.

6. Answer the hardest e-mail in your inbox.

Okay, 50 minutes have elapsed and you should be feeling a sense of accomplishment. That’s your big spoonful of sugar — but now it’s time for a small dose of medicine. If you’re like me and most of the folks I talk to, you’ve probably got an emotional or logistical landmine lurking in your inbox somewhere. It could be a project that you flubbed. It could be an awkward request. It could be the opener for a whole new can of worms.

Whatever it is, you’ll know you have the right one if you get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. If you’re going to feel those feelings regardless, would you rather feel them once — intensely, right now — as you’re doing something to make the situation better? Or would you rather feel them over and over as you see that problem e-mail every day? Things like that are like a sore tooth: you can’t help but probe them over and over. And you’ll feel even worse for letting it linger.

Better, then, to make a clean breast of things. Start with an apology, if one’s called for. Accept responsibility for whatever you should. Offer to talk it out in person. Be as circumspect as you need to be, but by all means be candid.

Don’t worry about writing a multi-paragraph essay; after all, the point of the exercise is to take no more than ten minutes. It’s amazing what you can say in a small space if you’ll let yourself be honest and direct.

~ ~ ~

There’s your 60 minutes. You’ve improved your day-to-day communications, your networking, and your scheduling. You’ve cleared some of your backlog and blocked out time for strategically important projects. If you’ve had enough, shut down the computer and enjoy the rest of the weekend, knowing that you’ll glide into the workweek a little sleeker than usual. But if you’re still feeling productive . . .

BONUS: Write one proactive e-mail about a Big Idea.

Maybe you want to enlist a friend for your Project #1. Maybe you want to rally support for killing the weekly TPS report meeting. Maybe you want to ask the boss about telecommuting more, or changing the mix of your work. Whatever it is, try to stay on your rhythm — take just ten minutes to set something in motion.

Now let me turn the floor over to you:

What are your favorite quick-and-effective ways
to jumpstart your work for the week?

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(Clock photo by givepeasachance; friends picture from freeparking; calendar photo by Yandle; warning-sign photo by kyle simourd.)