QuietSpacing Store
QuietSpacing is a must for every busy professional and staff member! - Kelli Kohout, West Coast Region Manager, Dorsey Whitney
This is a short segment of a presentation I recently delivered on how to improve your e-mail productivity. The topics covered include:
I hope you find something useful – Watch on!
Whether you work in an office, at home or on the road, it’s often difficult to get what needs doing done. That’s because we are all bombarded by interruptions and distractions – self-imposed and from without – no matter where we try to work. Interruptions and distractions chip away at our focus and it’s focus that best facilitates productivity – accomplishment – success.
Most of the productivity saboteurs you endure each day can be reduced or eliminated. It’s just a matter of taking charge of your working environment and making the changes required to increase your “quiet.” Here’s a list of five that will get you started.
Most people set up their offices (or even temporary workspaces on the road) facing “out” into the fray of activity passing by them. Specifically, most office chairs are positioned such that they face the doorway. The same is true for mobile workers – they point themselves outward into the crowd at the airport or hotel lobby.
The human eye is disposed to catching motion. Thus, whenever someone (or something) passes by, we look up. That causes a slight hiccup in our focus and diverts our attention away from what we were thinking about. It may only be a second or two of distraction, but added up over the course of the day, minutes of productivity are lost. And minutes lost each day add up to hours of lost productivity each year. (This analysis doesn’t even consider the lost productivity that results when you catch someone’s eye as they pass by and they come into your workspace and start talking to you!)
The solution is to arrange your office so that you don’t directly face the door. Start by turning your desk 90 degrees – from the standard arrangement – and push it up against the wall. Now, one of your shoulders will face the door. (For best results, put the desk against the “far” wall such that the door is slightly off and behind the closest shoulder.) The result is you will no longer be interrupted by passersby and you will remain focused on the work at hand. Moreover, others will see you’re working and tend to respect that effort, reducing the number of drive-by interruptions you suffer.
With the desk properly oriented, let’s address the most important part of it – the part right in front of you - the desktop. Most people crowd their desktops with papers, personal effects, computer monitors, etc. The result is a cramped, interruption-littered workspace, all of which is self-imposed!
The most effective workspace is the quietest. Getting there in the physical world means clearing the roaring clutter that infringes on your focus while working. Creating a space in your office – preferably on your desktop – where only work is done is a terrific way to achieve the type of quiet you need to be highly productive.
To experience what I’m talking about, move everything off your entire desktop – the whole desktop. Put it behind you or on the floor in front of the desk. Now, sit back and look at it. Is it screaming at your psyche? Do you feel pulled in different directions? No, there’s nothing interfering with your attention – the attention you are currently training on your desktop.
Once you’re convinced this is a better way to maintain your desk, find a place to put all those things that used to reside there. My guess is many of them will leave your office or find a home on the periphery, where they belonged all along!
Modern technology has literally made the world smaller and closer. We can communicate with anyone, anywhere, in real-time right from the palm of our hands. Of course, with this ability has come attendant expectations. Many people now believe that because we can reach each other 24×7, that we should or should be able to do so. The result is cell phones ringing in movie theaters, e-mails pinging during meetings, and BlackBerrys vibrating across dinner tables. A cacophony of discordant sound populate our days.
The primary way to improve this situation is by taking command of your technological tools. Stated succinctly – TURN OFF THE BEEPS, BUZZES, PINGS, AND RINGS – at least periodically. We need to be alerted to people communicating with us, just not every minute of every day. The interruptions and distractions they cause is annihilating our productivity.
By taking command of when the alerts sound, you take command of how quiet your workspace is. Turn them off when you need to focus on a particular project. Turn them back on when you’re finished. It’s literally that easy.
Now that we’re facing the right way, cleared a place to work on, and turned off our electronic alerts, we’re ready to get to work. That’s where this next, and maybe most important, tip comes into play.
Whether you ascribe to results from scientific study or general common sense, the idea that we multi-task well has pretty well been debunked in the last 12 months. The only thing ”multi-tasking” seems to accomplish is increased stress, because attempts to work that way clearly reduce productivity. The solution is to single-task – do just one thing at a time.
Prepping your environment greatly enhances the ability to focus on one thing at a time. The best way to leverage the ”quieted” workspace is to grab a single file or project and place it in your designated work area. (If you’re working on the computer, this is accomplished by using full-sized screens.) Then work on it until you come to a natural stopping point. You’ll find that working this way greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to accomplish tasks. Not only will you get things done more quickly, you’ll feel doubly good about doing so!
We’ve all seen the workspace that was recently visited by a hurricane. Invariably, the resident claims to know where everything is and he/she probably does … within a few feet or so. Think of the lost productivity just searching!
But that’s not the only place where clutter reduces productivity. Anytime left over materials from tasks previously completed linger in your workplace, future productivity risks being adversely affected. The big piles and stacks are merely extreme examples of this loss. Remember, time is irrevocably lost every second it takes to dig around for something that’s “right here.” Searching for papers or e-mails or whatever is never time well-spent.
One of the easiest ways to permanently eliminate this inefficiency is to organize and remove task/project materials for your workspace when the task/project is done. Yes, it’s administrative (versus productive), but it results in multiples of increased productivity downstream. Moreover, you’ve spent some time and energy getting your workspace as productive as possible through implementing these points. Why let avoiding a little administrative effort minimize the value of that effort?
The best way to improve your productivity is by making small changes that require little effort. To that end, give one of the above suggestions a try. If it works for you, great! If not, but you like the idea behind it, try adapting it to the way you like to work. And if you can’t adopt or adapt that suggestion, throw it out and try one of the other ones. Every step you take in reducing the interruptions and distractions that bombard you each day is a step towards increasing your productivity and sense of command and control over your workload.
Good luck!
Microsoft Outlook is the modern-day DayTimer. Almost everyone in the business world today uses it either in a standalone setting or as part of Microsoft Exchange. Whether it’s managing e-mail, scheduling, tasks or all of the above, Outlook has become a ubiquitous part of our daily life.
One of the downsides to the explosion of electronic communications facilitated by software like Outlook, is that the underlying files within these programs become bloated with stored information. Whether data is contained in an e-mail in your Inbox (or other sub-folder), an event scheduled on your calendar, or stored as part of a task, it is all encapsulated in Outlook – within the very program itself. If that’s a bit confusing, imagine saving every document you craft in Word within Word itself, versus somewhere else on your hard drive or network drive. Eventually, Word would start to “fill up” with all those letters and memos that you’ve written.
This is exactly what happens with Microsoft Outlook. Whenever you store an e-mail in any Outlook folder, schedule an event or create a task, all of that information, as well as any related attachments, are all stored in Outlook itself.. The end result of this behavior is that Outlook begins to buckle under its own size, which we usually experience as a slowing down of the program. (Oh, and if you use Outlook via Exchange in a corporate network, multiply this effect by the number of people doing the same thing on your network!) Moreover, as the Outlook .pst file becomes increasing large, you increase the chances of corrupting the data in the file. Now you probably (hopefully!) have a backup somewhere that’s reasonably current, but who wants to go through the hassle?
E-mail hygiene is a huge issue today. This post will focus on one specific, but significant, component of getting e-mail better managed – saving the important information somewhere other than in the .pst file.
Open an e-mail and click on the File command in the menu bar. You’ll notice the option to “Save As.” This allows you to save an e-mail in a number of formats and in a location other than the .pst file. If we view e-mail as a form of correspondence - as I promoted in an earlier post (http://www.quietspacing.com/2009/08/03/what-to-do-with-it-all-treating-e-mail-as-correspondence/ - then we should just be saving e-mails in the same fashion we save other documents (like letters, spreadsheets, etc.). Assuming that filing methodology is already established for your other documents, either through your own doing or that of your employer, you can use “Save As” to file these communiques in the same manner. Makes sense right? Why not just store all related items together in the same way!
Now we’ll look at the technical part to make sure we achieve our intended result. When you click File and select Save As, you will see the same familiar window that opens whenever you save other items. Navigate to the location you would save any other item related to this matter using the buttons on the left side of the pop-up window.
Now, look down at the bottom of the window. You will notice that the Subject line for the e-mail/event/task is automatically placed in the “File name” area. You are free to change the name in accordance with your own or your company’s file naming convention.
Below the “File name” area, you will see an area titled “Save as type” with a drop down arrow to the right. The default setting is “Text Only.” That is NOT the one you want. The best selection is “Outlook Message Format – Unicode.” This will save the contents of the e-mail, including ALL attachments, in the location you have selected, in a format that that will visually tell you it’s an e-mail.
When you’re done naming the e-mail and selecting the Outlook Message Format – Unicode “Save as type,” click Save and a copy of the e-mail and everything attached to it will reside in the location you selected. You can now delete the original e-mail, freeing up that space in your .pst file.
To confirm that this will work for you, go to the location you saved the e-mail using Windows Explorer. You’ll see an e-mail message envelope with the file name you chose. Double click on it and it’ll open up the e-mail with any attachments still attached.
You can also save just the attachments from an e-mail, instead of the body of the e-mail itself, by selecting File | Save Attachments. In the Save Attachment window that pops up, navigate to the location you want the attachments saved to and confirm the “File name” and “Save as type” before hitting Save. The result is that copies of the attachments are saved as separate documents from the e-mail (which is not saved in that location).
This works well, for example, with documents that are going through a drafting process and transmitted back and forth via e-mail. The transmittal e-mail is of little importance and can be deleted, along with its attachments, once the attachments have been copied elsewhere.
Using the Save As and Save Attachments function is a terrific way to deal with the issue of reducing the bulk of your .pst file. It won’t solve all the issues presented with the enormous amount of e-mail we deal with from day to day. However, you’ll find that storing e-mails and attachments in the same location as other related documents will make finding things easier and more efficient, in addition to speeding up the response times you experience when working in Outlook.
Good luck!
Last week a Stanford University study concluded what we’ve anecdotally known for a long time – we mere mortals don’t multi-task well. (See the Stanford article here http://ow.ly/oOTB). Not to lambast Stanford for their efforts, but consider the last time you were in someone’s office trying to have a conversation while the person on the other side of desk was checking their e-mail. If that’s not convincing enough, consider sitting in the passenger seat of a car while the driver negotiates traffic and texts back and forth with a colleague. That’ll get your blood pressure elevated for sure!
All in all, it’s great to have an esteemed learning institution validate the notion that multi-tasking produces less than optimal results. In today’s 24/7 global working environments, so many people (with and without authority) consider “on it” the only way to accomplish what needs to get done, preferring the idea that multiple “on its” mean multipliers in productivity. This is simply not the case.
With multi-tasking functionally debunked as an effective means of producing results, what other options do we have for achieving that goal?
Henry Ford figured out an effective way to get things produced over 100 years ago – batch processing. That is, group like tasks together because repeating the same task over and over in one “batch” increases productivity. Of course, he applied the concept to the manufacturing line, but the underlying premise holds true for any group of tasks that share similar actions for their completion.
Batch processing is fundamentally a workflow behavior - a way (or “process”) for getting things done. To batch process means to gather together like or similar tasks and act upon them at the same time. In effect, it’s working through a stack of items in a repetitive way until you have completed the batch.
Take processing you physical mail as an example. Physical mail is delivered in a batch by the post office each day. Most people grab the stack of mail (a series of similar items), open each one, toss the junk out, and sort the meaningful items in some logical manner. That’s batch processing. The alternative would be to grab one piece of mail from the stack, open it and then make three un-related phone calls and attend a meeting or two before grabbing the next piece of mail. What if something in the mail related to one of those phone calls or meetings!?
Besides that, it just “seems” inefficient to process one piece of mail at a time. Yet, when you’re multi-tasking, that’s exactly what you’re doing from a workflow processing point of view. It’s just more efficient and effective to batch process things whenever possible.
To get you started on batch processing the stuff that pours into your workday, I’ve pulled together a list of things off the top of my head that can be batch processed. Give one or more of these a try to see if you find it a more efficient way to plow through your work.
Many of the tasks we must accomplish each day can be grouped into batches for more efficient processing. I encourage you to identify additional activities that can be grouped and accomplished in batches together. My experience is that it’s more productive and efficient, which are key components to feeling in command of your work environment.
The “science” of increasing individual productivity is really the blending of three interrelated disciplines: time management, organizational skills, and workflow processing. Possessing a basic understanding of each will greatly assist you in determining how to improve your own productivity. Here’s a short breakdown and a few related QuickTips for each category:
I often joke with clients that there’s no such thing as time management because time ticks inexorably forward – second by second. Though you can’t really manage time itself, you can manage how you use time. The distinction is essentially between managing something external to you (time) or something internal to you (behaviors).
Changing long-held behaviors can be very difficult. That’s why I advise clients to look for one or two small changes to make so they can experience the positive feedback of success immediately. Once a number of small changes are paying productivity dividends, larger changes can be tackled. Here are a couple of small time management changes you can try:
Mtg: John Doe (phone number) – Re: Johnson Marketing Campaign – Mr. Doe’s Office
Now you can look directly at the event item on your computer (and PDA) and see exactly what will be happening and where. This is true of e-mail subject lines as well. Instead of:
Update
try something like this:
Johnson Marketing Campaign – Update Following Meeting with John Doe
It’s not only easier for you to search for and find later, the recipient of your e-mail will immediately know what the content of the email is!
Small advances in these time management behaviors demonstrate my point that it only takes a little bit each day to aggregate into a significant improvement over the longer term. Remember also, that I’m talking about both your productivity and your sense of accomplishment.
We’ve all seen the desk that looks like a hurricane recently passed over it. The oft-heard retort is “But I know where everything is.” And that may be true to a certain degree. However, when pressed, it usually takes about 30-45 seconds to actually find a specific item. Add those seconds add up over a year and hours are lost just searching.
I’m not advocating that you have to live a highly structured life or keep your working environment super organized. However, small changes to your organizational behaviors pay big dividends both in terms of efficiency and greater peace of mind. Try a couple these suggestions on for size to see how they work for you:
Consider organizational skills the oil in the machine. When things are where you expect them to be and you can readily find and/or identify things, everything runs more smoothly. Again, the result is increased productivity and a greater sense of well-being.
In today’s world the phrase “workflow processing” brings to mind countless consultants descending upon an environment to make it all better. Though to some extent true, more simply viewed, workflow processing is just identifying the steps to getting something done. The struggle we all face today is the endless stream of interruptions and distractions that bombard us while we’re trying to get things done! Here are a couple of ideas that will help you navigate through that minefield more productively.
You may or may not be successful with all these proposed changes. However, each small change generates increased control over your productivity and, generally, produces measureable results. The real win comes from continuing to ask yourself “How can I do ‘this’ a little better?” There’s always something you can improve upon and each time you do, you receive the reward of achievement!
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