QuietSpacing

Rushing to meetings to appointments to teleconferences and back again.  Ah, the life of a busy professional.  Whenever I work with a client who is scheduled back-to-back I am often put in mind of the disheveled teacher charging down the school hallway, papers flying asunder, racing to her next class.

In fact, change that imagery only slightly and you’ll have a more apt description of what’s really going on during that charge down the hall.  Imagine that instead of papers floating to the floor, what’s getting lost are ideas and tasks. 

To state it even more directly, when we schedule ourselves back-to-back, we never get a chance to “finish” one meeting before “starting” the next.  We are still thinking about the last event as we enter the next one, resulting in lost information on both ends.  That’s because we begin to forget details about the prior meeting and we aren’t focused yet on the current meeting.  It’s ineffective and inefficient and, more importantly, it’s unnecessary.

Solution: Schedule at least five minutes between all appointments.

If you give yourself five minutes between events, you’ll have a moment to jot down or otherwise record all the pertinent information about the last event before entering the next one.  This will greatly increase your effectiveness and your information capture in terms of thoughts, ideas and tasks that originated during the last meeting.  Plus, you will enter the next appointment focused and fresh, ready to address the issues presented there.

Effecting this change is relatively easy once you make the decision it’s valuable.  My recommendation is to be like TBS (Turner Broadcasting System) – start your meetings on the 5’s – 00:05 and 00:35.  If you use Outlook, simply set your meetings for those times, which is especially effective if you use the Invite function in Outlook.  You can also direct anyone who schedules you to do the same.  Finally, you can regularly and repeatedly communicate your desire to do so to everyone with whom you meet, creating a bit of cultural shift in the process.

When you’re asked why the change, you explain that you want to give your full attention to every appointment.  By putting five minutes in between each, you are assured of capturing everything from the last event and of starting the next event fully focused.  Oh, and by the way, you might even have time to grab a cup of coffee or catch up on some other items (voice mails, e-mails, etc.) during that five minutes – assuming you’ve already completed your primary objective and still have some time left!

Try scheduling a few minutes between meetings to see if it increases your effectiveness and efficiency, while also reducing your stress.

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I had planned to post an article on another subject today, but was coaching a client this morning and we ended up focusing on QuietSpacing(tm)’s Designated Work Area recommendation.  It’s such a simple but vital component to regaining command of our working environments that I decided to forgo the original topic for today and focus on this one instead. 

The concept is very simple:  Pick one identifiable area that you can define as your Designated Work Area.  It must be physically definable, such as the four corners of your desk (versus a small space on your desk).  This area must be kept devoid of ALL things except the occasional picture of the family or other such items (read: one or two total) . If possible, remove your computer monitor and phone from this area and, if also possible, place them so they are not even peripherally visble from your Designated Work Area.

Once established, your Designated Work Area must remain sacrosanct.  By that I mean that only One Thing At A Time may be placed there.  Keeping it devoid of distractions – other files, the computer monitor, the flashing voice mail indicator, etc. - means you will focus more readily and for longer periods of time on the work at hand.  Increasing your focus will increase your productivity, which will increase both your effectiveness and your efficiency.

When you have accomplished what you can on that particular item, move it away from the Designated Work Area and place the next item there.  Repeat as much as you need to or can within any given time period.  Of course, you can shift your attention to the computer or your phone as necessary, but don’t ping pong back and forth.  Make each attention shift intentional.

Note: If your work is exclusively (or nearly exclusively) on the computer, you can create a Designated Work Area by using full screen windows of each application you use.  That way, you are only focusing on one screen/task at a time.

As a bang-for-your-buck item, the Designated Work Area pays both immediate and visceral dividends.  You will instantly notice an increase in focus because there is only one thing in your field of vision.  This will allow you to dive into the work more readily which increases your effectiveness and makes you feel more accomplished as a result. 

Try this simple trick for increasing your productivity.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

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One of the more common behaviors I run into when working with audiences or individual coaching clients is the “ureading” of e-mail.  Now here is a Top 10 contestant for insane things we do simply because we don’t know what else to do! 

Unreading e-mail involves selecting and reading an e-mail, then right clicking on it and marking it Unread.  The purpose is, of course, to make it appear bold again because it’s important and needs our attention.

Let’s review this behavior.  It is the functional equivalent of opening a piece of physical mail, reading it, then putting it back in the  envelope and returning it to the inbox!  For many, given the amount of time it will take to get back to that item, you might as well put a stamp on it and mail it to yourself (again and again and again…).  Net result:  Lots of Activity with no corresponding Productivity! 

We all know the definition of insanity, right?  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  Unreading e-mail fits squarely into that definition.  This behavior exacerbates the current sense of hamster-on-the-wheel syndrome we all experience.

The solution is to treat e-mail like the correspondence it is.  If it’s junk delete it.  If it’s archival or reference information, file it away either in your e-mail sub-folders or DMS system or, using File, Save As, as a document on your hard drive.  If it contains an action item, either adopt/develop a workflow management method (like QuietSpacing(tm)) or drag and drop it to a new Task.  Just don’t Unread it and come back to it again and again hoping that either (a) you will now have time to do it, lest you need to Unread it again, or (b) it has magically done itself or is no longer ripe for execution!

Approaching e-mail like regular old-school correspondence provides a number of ready solutions to the never-ending stream of information that comes our way through this valuable, but overwhelming, form of communication.  It really is up to each of us to find a way to command this particular method.

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In my travels across this fair land working with people on their time and workflow management issues, I routinely hear, “But I just don’t know what to do with it all!”  This, of course, is in response to the vast volume of e-mail, texts and tweets they receive.  Just last week, I was dining with a social networking maven who confessed to having 10 .pst files to keep her Outlook from crashing!

Clearly, e-mail and its progeny have gotten out of control and this problem will only get worse as social media continues to develop.  What are we mere mortals to do?  Wishing it away won’t work.  Ignoring it won’t work.  Hoping for a technology-based solution only appears to exacerbate the problem.  So, it’s back to the drawing board and a trip to the past to craft an effective solution.

The Solution:  E-mail, etc., is just correspondence; treat it as such.

It’s quite simple really, though implementing it is more about changing your perspective and behavior than it is about changing how e-mail works.  A few simple points demonstrate what I mean:

Your Inbox is only a collection point, not a depository.

I routinely work with individuals with Inboxes containing 15,000-25,000 e-mails!  This clearly demonstrates my point.  Back in the Dark Ages (i.e., pre-e-mail), it was literally impossible to even have a 100 things in your physical inbox.   My experience has demonstrated there are several pivot points that created this result.  First, people are afraid to delete things “in case they need them.”  This is a downward spiral once it starts because it gets easier and easier to just save everything instead of make decisions about the disposition of these items.  Consequently, the Inbox becomes a depository for all things that “might” be needed.  It’s the hall closet into which all things go.  The problem, of course, is that it was never designed for this use and there are only marginally efficient methods for making it work this way (sorting, searching, etc.)

Second, the technology itself is generally setup to promote this type of behavior.  Many people use Reading Pane to review e-mail without ever actually opening it and dealing with it.  Once read, it begins its life as compost at the bottom of the virtual stack of e-mails!   Moreover, most programs are set to return you to the Inbox after dispensing with an e-mail, so what’s the point of opening it in the first place?

Finally, most people haven’t developed a virtual filing architecture for easy location and retrieval.  This further promotes the Inbox as a place to store things.  Even those intrepid few who develop a folder system in the Inbox still suffer from a related problem of overloading their application’s ability to effectively and efficiently manage the application itself which ultimately causes the program (like Outlook) to slow down or corrupt and crash. 

Reboot:  E-mail as correspondence

Sit back for a moment and consider e-mail and all the other forms of communication that have developed over the last 25 years – voice mail, texting, tweeting, etc.  They are all forms of correspondence; each with their own advantages and disadvantages.  That simple shift in perspective gives the answer to what to do with it – process it.  In other words, get it the heck out of the Inbox!

As a side note, categorizing these items as correspondence also begins you down the path to salvation from overload because you will begin to ask yourself whether any particular e-mail, text or tweet is valuable as such – both on the send and receive side.  I believe that as people begin to re-orient their perspective about these forms of communication, the quantity will go down and the quality will go up.

But let’s get back to the point of this post – treating e-mail as simple correspondence.  To effectively process e-mail, you will need three things:

1. Proper setup of your Inbox.
2. A way to categorize each e-mail.
3. An action to associate with each categorized e-mail.

Inbox Setup

This is so easy it amazes me that people haven’t made this priority #1 for themselves.  In Outlook, turn off the Reading Pane (View, Reading Pane, Off). Then turn off Show-In-Groups (View, Arrange by, uncheck Show In Groups).  Finally, set your system to batch process e-mail by advancing to the next e-mail after acting on the open one in front of you (Tools, Options, E-mail Options, select Open Next Item in top drop down for “After moving or deleting an open item.”)  Now, your e-mail will appear in the Inbox as a list of things to process.  Open the first one and begin processing based on the categories in the next paragraph.

Categories of Correspondence

If e-mail is just correspondence, then it can be processed just like correspondence.  In my five years of working with this issue (both in terms of physical and electronic items), I have only discovered five categories for all “stuff” as David Allen puts it:

1. Trash - Items that need to be thrown away/deleted.
2. Archive - Items that need to be stored for possible future retrieval
3. Reference - Items we routinely refer to while accomplishing our tasks
4. Reading - Professional reading materials to stay abreast in our field.
5. Work - Things that need to get done.

Another thing to notice is that the first three are Closed – nothing further needs to be with them.  The latter two are Open – something needs to be done with them before they become Closed and, correspondingly, one of the first three categories!

That’s it.  Really.  The only thing you need to be willing to do is pause briefly on each item and decide what it is.  Once you’ve categorized it, then you will know what to do with it.  If not, keep reading!

Actions Associated with Categories

The final step in processing your e-mail (and other electronic and physical correspondence) is doing something with it so it leaves you Inbox.  Each category has an associated action, as follows:

1. Trash - Throw it away or delete it.
2. Archive - File it away in a long-term storage area.
3. Reference - Put it away in an easily-accessed storage area.
4. Reading - Pile it away so you can grab one or two at time to read.
5. Work - Develop or adopt a method of managing the work contained in your e-mail.

As you can see, processing your e-mail is fairly straight forward once you come at it from the perspective that it is correspondence.  Categorizing each item and applying the associated action effectively processes 80% of your e-mail, leaving you only the Open/Work correspondence with which to contend.  Those items can be processed just like you have always processed correspondence containing Work or you can adopt a more technologically-integrated method.  The cliff hanger here is which method do you choose?  QuietSpacing(tm) is one method, though there are quite a few others out there.  I’ll leave that decision up to you.

Also, as an additional note on processing Archive and Reference items, you can either build out a folder/sub-folder system in Outlook or save e-mails (and its attachments) as a file on your local or network storage area for other documents.  (File, Save as, select Save as type: Outlook message format (*.msg))

Once Processing, Always Processing

This post turned out be much longer than originally anticipated, but the underlying explanation seemed necessary once the basic precept was established.  If e-mail is to be treated as correspondence, then how do we do that mechanically?  The fact remains that until we re-align our thinking to view e-mail as correspondence, it will be difficult to effectively and efficiently manage it.  However, once we do adopt that  perspective, the processing of e-mail as such becomes much easier.

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