Business Insight Zone

A step-by-step approach:

1. Look over your To-Do List.
2. Think of the items there in terms of (a) return on time and effort, (b) potential strategic importance, (c) the joy they will bring you, (d) the trouble you’ll get in if you don’t do them, or (e) other metrics of your choice.
3. Take a moment to ponder the finitude of life, and the related fact that we’ll NEVER get to everything we’d ideally do.
4. Take the lowest-scoring item on your To-Do List and mark it off.
5. Never think of it again.
6. Move on to the most important item on your list.

Life is short, and so is the workweek — spend them doing the best things available.

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Image by Auntie K, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Feeling a little windswept these days?

I admit it — I’m a sucker for self-help reading. This is true anytime, but I’ve found that I’ve read even more of this stuff as the economy has soured. It’s not that I’m worried about work (we’re doing fine, thanks), but that I’m trying to figure out how I can be of more help to those around me in tougher times.

One way to be more helpful, I figure, is to take personal lessons and generalize them. This fits in with my overall idea that individual and organizational issues often echo one another; it also lets me take a moderately useful self-help post like this one . . .

10 Killer, Daily Habits to Boost Your Confidence

. . . and put it to immediate use in the workplace. Even if some of what these articles talk about is too touchy-feely for you, many of the lessons in them can be adapted on the fly to fit business needs:

• “Start Each Day Alert and Ready for Action” — Kickstart your days during hard times. Instead of fetching coffee and checking e-mail during your first half-hour at work, jump into something vital. In the time it would have taken you to warm up for the day, you can scratch something off your to-do list instead.
• “Operate from a Position of Generosity” — When times are tough, people seem to appreciate a kind word more than ever, and kindness costs very little.
• “Connect with Your Life Purpose” — Replace “life” with “business” (or, better yet, align them so they’re synonymous) and you’ll channel your energy better throughout the workweek.

Even better is when you come across a self-help item that’s explicitly aimed at work or career-building. Here are two that I’ve enjoyed lately:

• ZenHabits: 10 Steps to Take Action and Eliminate Bureaucracy - The great thing here is that every move YOU make along these lines encourages action and reduces bureaucracy for your co-workers, too. This improves your organization while potentially making you a folk hero.
• SocialMediaToday: 25 Ways to Fail and Come Out on Top - In this one, Valeria Maltoni gives a potpourri of advice that might be more than you can digest in one sitting. Better (in my book), she’s not trying to be overly creative or original, but rather trying to focus on the best advice that has helped her own career along. You could bookmark this one and come back to it daily for weeks, taking away new lessons for yourself and your team it each time.

I’ve also written my fair share of self-help and productivity pointers (and gathered some of the best ones here). You could start from those posts and figure out all kinds of ways to relieve your own stress and the stress of those around you by better focusing and executing on what’s most important.

But while we’re at it, you might take a minute to look at two more posts that don’t fit within the genre of self-help, but might show you why you need it:

• Stress kills.
• Stress kills, redux: the best short piece I’ve read about stress.

Stress is serious business, and it’s seriously costly — to your health and your bottom line — when you’re trying to DO business.

Use self-help reading, exercise, rock-climbing, play-time with your kids, or whatever-it-is that helps YOU to combat stress . . . but be SURE that you don’t leave yourself in the position of a palm tree in a hurricane, stuck in place and with nothing to do but hope that you’ll make it.

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Photo by Chrysaora, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

This one’s simple:

Not only should you do one THING at a time,
you should do one TYPE of thing at a time.

Dan Markovitz explains it in manufacturing terms when he compares human minds to “monument machines”:

Batching is not (necessarily) a dirty word.

The big advantage of batch processing: no neurological “context switching,” ergo less wasted time getting up to speed as you tackle each task. For more on this concept, check out two great posts that I’ve pointed to before:

• Kathy Sierra (2006) — Multitasking makes us stupid?
• Joel Spolsky (2001) — Human Task Switches Considered Harmful

For a first-person account of the practical benefits of batch processing, check out this post from Darren Rowse, whose prolific quality on ProBlogger and his other blogs proves he knows whereof he speaks when it comes to productivity:

How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive

Reading these posts made me feel even better about the advice I gave to my daughter a while back when she was confronted with the classic overwhelming project of kids everywhere, cleaning her room:

1. Group like with like.
2. Handle one thing at a time.

This advice is simple as can be, but how many of really do it amid the rapid fire of e-mails, phone calls, and the other interruptions of today’s workplace?

Try it for yourself — especially by handing your Internet browsing in batches — and tell me what you think.

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Photo by marvinxsteadfast.

It’s nice when the answers are elegant. I’m a fan of balletic grace, chess-master-like foresight, machinelike precision.

And then there are days like today. Not a bad day, by any means — plenty of laughs and smiles along the way — but one of those days that required some serious pushing and shoving against systems that didn’t want to budge.

Even the best organizations and the most delightful projects will create these conditions for you some of the time. When you face challenges like these, sometimes the answer can’t be found by pulling back and thinking it over, or brainstorming with the team, or learning a nifty new skill, or figuring out a way around the barrier.

Sometimes you just have to get down in the mud and push.

~

Photo by So Salem, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

The skepticism aimed at social-media use within companies would be more aptly directed toward e-mail use, a source of far more wasted time for workers, and one that has become as invisible as oxygen for most of us.

This BBC article — “Bosses ’should embrace Facebook’” – quotes a sensible study that argues for open-minded views toward the use of social media in the workplace:

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional command-and-control techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity.

“Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability.”

As I’ve argued before, command-and-control is dying a well-deserved death in the enlightened workplace, and certainly in the realm of social media.

But given my thoughts — and especially Dan Markovitz’s thoughts — on how e-mail so pervasively corrupts the typical office environment, it’s worthwhile to shine the same kind of spotlight on e-mail as well.

Consider this series of quotations from the BBC article, applying each to e-mail instead of social media:

Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm, it added. . . . Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, the research found.

When e-mail came into broad use in the early 1990s, smart companies quickly found out the same thing.

“Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships.”

Using technology to build closer links with ex-employees and potential customers could also boost productivity, innovation and create a more democratic working environment, Mr Bradwell added.

It took a while for this insight to penetrate some corners of the working world, and indeed there are still older executives (Henry Paulson, Donald Trump, and Richard Branson come to mind) who never use e-mail. But for the most part, its merits for collaboration and productivity are clear.

But he argued the use of networking sites “must be tied to a business goal”.

And here we come to the crux: many businesses have rushed to block access to Facebook, LinkedIn, et al., without stopping to think that their people are already wasting much more time on e-mail.

The report’s authors said that clear guidelines needed to be set out about appropriate use of social networking.

And there should be no hesitation in telling employees who spent “unreasonable” amounts of time using technology for non-work related activity that their behaviour must change, they added.

Here’s the kicker: it’s obvious enough that someone is wasting the company’s time if they’re playing Scrabble with their friends via Facebook. But the lost productivity of fruitless e-mail — especially e-mail that’s ostensibly meant to propel work projects — goes totally unnoticed in many organizations.

Worse, in many organizations people face penalties if they use e-mail the smart way — that is, if they turn it off for long stretches of the day so that they can get their work done.

“But it is also good for companies to be aware of the tensions and look at deploying practical guidelines which will protect the positive impact of networks, not hamper it.”

Well said, and smart companies are already figuring out sensible guidelines for spending time on Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and so during work hours. But they need to remember that the most pervasive social medium in the workplace is e-mail.

Get e-mail right, and you can probably afford to let your folks play a game of Scrabble when they want.

~

Related posts:

• Social media breaches barriers.
• Information overload: the best of the best take pains to avoid it.
• 7 Good Reads to Boost Your Productivity

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(Hat tip: Jeremiah Owyang.)

When I wrote about hustle-meters yesterday, I forgot to cite one of my inspirations: my pal Austin Kleon’s book-writing calendar:

HarperCollins will publish a book of Austin’s fabulous Newspaper Blackout Poems next year, and he’s using a simple hustle-meter of his own — a calendar hand-written into a Moleskine notebook — to keep himself on track for his manuscript deadline.

Where do YOU draw your inspiration to hustle?

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Image used by permission.

The point of this post is NOT to recommend a 100% complete “capture tool” for your tasks, like David Allen would. (David’s right, mind you, but it’s not my point at the moment.) The point is to get you thinking harder about how you spend those tiny slices of your career that get doled out to you moment by moment every day.

You probably need this exercise only occasionally, in bursts. Here’s how it works:

For every single thing you do at work, write down a descriptive to-do for it, before or after the fact.

Simple, right? The power of this comes not from any complexity, but from what it tells you about yourself and your working conditions. It basically works as a time diary, but I find it heightens the absurdity to write things as imperatives: not “Processed e-mail for two hours” but “Spend two solid hours processing e-mail, with no discernible results.”

You can leave out calls of nature. You can leave out walking back to your car because you got to the door and realized that you left your ID tag in the glove box. (Not that that ever happens to me.) But everything else, no matter how banal, goes on the list.

Some things will be outright productive:

• Update the team via e-mail about the bid process — 4 minutes.
• Answer 4 e-mail queries re affiliate program — 15 minutes.
• Schedule quarterly review meeting with the boss for next week — 2 minutes.
• Compile budget estimates for 2009 and circulate for review — 95 minutes.

Slap yourself on the back for these, and don’t worry too much about the run-of-the-mill detritus that crops up along the way:

• Fetch coffee from break room — 6 minutes.
• Attend department meeting — 50 minutes.
• Stand in hallway gossiping after meeting — 12 minutes.

Some items, when you have to write them down, will strike you as obvious wastes of time:

• Watch a video of a dog bouncing on a trampoline — 2 minutes.
• Graze Internet aimlessly — 45 minutes.
• IM with friends — 25 seconds x 41 exchanges.

Silly though they are, these are at least things you understand well, just like you know that eating three scoops of Rocky Road won’t help you get back into the outfit you wore to your senior prom. (Hey, I don’t judge — I love Rocky Road.)

But here’s where I want you to get serious: be merciless when you write down the hidden land-mines in your day. In other words, don’t write this:

• Meet one-on-one with Mitch about project specs — 40 minutes.
• Take online training module — 60 minutes.

Write what you really mean instead:

• Argue in circles with Mitch about project specs — 40 minutes.
• Suffer pointlessly through ill-conceived online training module — 80 minutes.

Sure, it’s just a trick of language, but language is a powerful thing. Words have real meaning, even when we write them only for ourselves.

Maybe by writing things down this way you’ll come to admit that you and Mitch have been talking in circles, and it’s been going on for weeks. Maybe this will lead you to figure out whether the problem lies with you, Mitch, departmental politics, bureaucracy, or whatever. Heck, maybe this will get things rolling so you and Mitch can team up and take on the bureaucracy like Jet Li and Jackie Chan took on the Jade Warlord in The Forbidden Kingdom. (Totally underrated movie, by the way.) The point is, it might get your thinking unstuck.

Which would be worth it, right?

We can all use some thinking-unsticking sometimes. Give it a try. Tell me what you think.

~

(Photo by luc legay.)

Years ago I was in a long and mostly-pointless meeting that had gone past its allotted time. The crowd was getting antsy as the speaker droned on. Then the senior executive in the room raised her hand and said, “How many more MINUTES will this meeting go on?”

Emphasis very much in the original. The exec understood that time is money — plus productivity and, in that case, widely distributed frustration — and she wasn’t afraid to call the speaker to task for the literal number of minutes being wasted for all the many people sitting in the meeting.

You’ll see above a snapshot I just took of the stopwatch on my computer desktop. I’ve gotten in the habit of starting it up first thing in the morning to see how long it takes me to get down to my most important work, which is writing this blog (and related goodies) for Hoover’s. Usually, I do better than this.

Mind you, during that hour and 43 minutes, I did other good things — cleaned up the blog comments queue, edited a press release, talked with a couple of colleagues — but I think it’s important that we all get a clear understanding of how we work, and especially of how long it takes us to do the various parts of our jobs.

When we don’t pay attention to the literal numbers, it’s easy to come to the end of the day, say “Where did the time go?,” and promise ourselves (often vainly) that we’ll “have to get to the Big Stuff tomorrow.”

Probably tomorrow (well, Monday in this case) will be a lot like today. Maybe we’ll encounter one of those magical uninterrupted spells that sometimes arise . . . but that’s not the way to bet. Probably we’ll face just as many chances for interruptions and distractions, just as many opportunities to “turn aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”

And on Monday — or Tuesday, or a Tuesday next March — we’ll still be saying “Too much to do, too little time.” Which, as we just discussed yesterday, is a mug’s game.

Set a timer. (The one I use is TimeLeft.) Figure out where your time goes. Take steps to ensure that more of your time goes where you want it to.

How many more minutes will it be before you take charge of your working day?

Surely we’ve all said — or just felt in our bones — the old saw, “So much to do, so little time.” It can even be a good thing to have such a full plate.

But what happens when our work morphs into “TOO much to do, TOO little time”?

This situation might seem worse today than ever, but the condition is an old one. In fact, dealing with this sort of “overburden” (muri in Japanese) is one of the main pillars of the Toyota Production System, which has slowly but surely taken Toyota to the top of the global automotive industry.

Consider this assessment of overburden, from a site dedicated to enterprise software development:

As long as people work crazy hours, and as long as projects and teams are overwhelmed by the amount of work, the removal of waste alone is ineffective. Waste is likely to creep back in unless we limit the amount of work to the capacity and capabilities of the organization. Let’s assume you try to eliminate defects but the project still suffers from overburden. Chances are that quality problems reappear since the project members still feel pressured and are overworked. In fact, overburden is a major source of waste such as work-in-process, waiting and delays, task-switching and defects.

In crunch times, people can often pull an extra shift, work through weekends, or what-have-you. And I won’t deny that there are good reasons why, for instance, people in software startups tend to work all the time.

But what about most of the time, for most of us? It shouldn’t be this way. We’re not wired for such strain.

I’ll share my two-part hypothesis with you:

• Individuals who suffer from chronic overburden aren’t managing themselves well. (I know — I’ve done this.)
• Companies that suffer from chronic overburden aren’t managing themselves well. (I’ve seen this one from the inside, too.)

Don’t get me wrong: good things come to those who hustle, especially in hard times. Please go ahead and work hard, and demand the same from others in your organization.

But don’t treat yourself like a beast of burden — and don’t give in to OVERburden.

~

Related posts:

• How to succeed in business: the simple version.
• You don’t need better technology.
• Company of the Day: Toyota.

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(Photo by krayker; thanks to Dan Markovitz for pointing me to the link on overburden.)

You, too, can be a happy busy-beaver with these tips!

I started this week with a productivity tip that helps you use your “Sent Items” e-mail box to keep up with your projects. Here, I’ve collected ten more of the best productivity-oriented posts I’ve written this year.

• 60 weekend minutes that will make your week go better. — In 60 minutes between now and Monday morning, you can carry out these half-dozen tasks to reduce clutter, refresh your personal network, and guarantee a more productive week to come.
• The Magic Hour — If you’re up for it, shift gears and use a second hour this weekend to dive deep into your most important work. You may be surprised at the results.
• Self-management tip: change verb tenses. — Use this simple trick of language to reinforce a personal bias for action, the trait that has marked leaders from U.S. Grant to Winston Churchill to Bill Gates.
• ONE thing DONE. — Multitasking is poisonous to your career. This is the antidote.
• Self-management tip: explode the stack. — Use a simple paper-management technique to wrangle your projects into line.
• Give yourself the gift of calm. — Finding ways to relax in your job doesn’t just help you feel better, it helps you work better.
• Down the rabbit-hole. — How to avoid the conversation (well-intended or otherwise) that could derail half your day.
• What is it time to let go of? — This could be either a simple uncluttering trick or a deeper philosophical investigation. Your choice.
• Make fewer decisions to have better self-control. — Every day, we confront ourselves with more choices than we can handle. Pare down your brain’s workload, and your ability to fuction will improve.
• You don’t need better technology. — Pencil and paper are high-enough technology . . . when you use them for deeper thinking.

I hope that you find these helpful — and that you’ll share tips of your own (or links to your favorites) in the comments.

~

(Picture by sherseydc, used under CC-Share Alike license.)