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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.

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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.

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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.

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QuickTip: Schedule Snippets of Time Between Appointments

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Today, people run from appointment to appointment to appointment with nary a moment’s rest.  Not only is this overwhelming, it’s ineffective.  Imagine sheets of paper fluttering to the flow behind you as you charge from one meeting to the next conference call.  These are the thoughts and tasks you’re forgetting in your rush. 

Schedule 5-15 minutes between every appointment to collect your thoughts, check in with team members, prepare for the next appointment, and even relax for a moment!  You will be more effective, more efficient, more responsive, and less stressed out.