Archive | Workflow Processing RSS feed for this section

No Snow Day For Me! The Benefits of Being Virtual

Thursday, January 27, 2011

This is a guest post authored by Jessica Levin, professional speaker and principal in Seven Degrees Communication.

It snowed today. Again. Schools are closed. Offices are closed. Many, many people are losing productivity and many businesses are losing money. I, however, am toasty warm working from my office. Sure, I had a meeting canceled today, but I am still am able to get all of my other work done. Why? Because I work 100% virtually.

I didn’t set out to be virtual. It started when I worked in NYC and would occasionally work from home. It then turned into Fridays. When our office was closing and we needed to move buildings, it didn’t make sense for me to get another office. When I think back to that commute and how unproductive it was, working virtually was one of the best decisions I could have made.

A lot of companies don’t want employees working from home for various reasons. I think trust has a lot to do with it. I also understand that this structure doesn’t work for all job types and not everyone has the discipline to “go to work” while they are in their home.

Here is a little glimpse of how I operate. I hope it helps you to understand how easy it can be.

Read More…

QuickTip: Activity v. Productivity = Thirsty v. Hungry

Monday, January 24, 2011

My inbound marketing coach, Mike Redbord, at HubSpot recently observed that I was an “average” blogger. The trouble is that he’s right!  I post a new blog article about every seven to ten days and most of them are somewhat long…ish, averaging in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1,200 words each.  Who’s got that much time anymore?

Mike’s okay with my blogging since we’re going to focus our work more on the static content pages of my web site – with the view of increasing the number of people contacting me to learn more about my non-blogging services.  That is, the ones I get paid for!  But his words haunted me all weekend and it slowly dawned on me that his message to me and my message to my clients are very similar – small, incremental change aggregates into large benefit. 

With that in mind, here’s a short snippet of thought to consider.

Read More…

Three Reasons Why Executive Time Management is Like Losing Weight

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Instead of doing the normal “set your goals” first-of-the-year post that you’d expect from a productivity guy, I wanted to do something different. The purpose of New Year’s resolutions is to take stock of our lives and, hopefully, find things we can improve. However, making a list of resolutions that invariably fail is not only pointless and unproductive, it’s failure – plain and simple. Why do we want to start the year off with a failure?

And then it hit me! The rate of failure of New Year’s resolutions is so high that their failure must have a pattern, a discernible weakness. That got me to thinking. Why do these resolutions (and similar commitments) fail so often? More importantly, how could that dynamic be changed to make keeping resolutions a successful experience?

Much thought and many discussions ensued to uncover the dynamics of resolution failure. The theory proposed below was developed based on these informal research sessions and the actual experiences of success I encountered. I’m sure there are thousands (millions?) of PhDs who could give us all a lesson on the hows and whys we have difficulty maintaining commitments. But, candidly, if they were so smart, they’d be able to do more than explain why we can’t fulfill certain types of commitments, they’d offer us an answer that can be translated into action resulting in success.

Read More…

Taming The Beast – Making E-mail Work For You – Part 3 of 3

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The first installment of this series focused on the Pavlovian response we’ve developed with e-mail – the constant need to check it – and recommended that we turn off the new message alerts and regularly batch process our e-mail in the same fashion that we process our postal mail.  The second installment drilled down into how to better craft our e-mails.  Specifically, we found that placing only one subject in each e-mail we send greatly reduces the risk of miscommunication (and it’s cousin – wasted time) and increases the ability to find and file individual e-mails.  We also concluded that writing strong, clear and communicative subjects in the Subject field of each e-mail sped up processing time and facilitated filing and retrieval.

This third and final installment will address another pesky behavior we’ve developed with e-mail and we’ll learn a nifty feature in Microsoft Outlook which many of my clients say is the best trick they’ve every learned about Outlook.

Read More…