Improve My Business

Both last month and this month we have talked a lot about what I consider personal practices to increase performance. Whether it is better time management, or cleaning out our to do list on a regular basis, all of these things will reduce the stress we feel at work and help us be more productive with our time. However, these practices can only help us if we turn them into habits. If we have to consciously force ourselves to do them then when we get stressed/tired/busy we will inevitably stop these practices and their benefits will go away. So for this week I want to point everyone to an article on www.lifehack.org about making habits stick. The habits the author talks about in the article aren’t necessarily the same habits we are trying to cultivate, but the advice holds true for anything you want to make a habit. Give it a read here and let me know what you think. Do you think this can help you turn the new practices we have been working on into habits?

Full link: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/6-proven-ways-to-make-new-habits-stick.html

Technorati Tags: improvement, Time Management

Last week we talked about the importance of cleaning out your mental closet, getting rid of old ideas that had been sitting around collecting dust and taking up space for too long. Today I want to talk about cleaning another aspect of work life that can seriously stress us out and detract from our productivity at work, the in-box. To me an in-box is where you keep all of the projects that you need to work on and usually its full of little things that never seem to get done. Letting things pile up in your in-box will eventually stress you out and can lead to panic and overwhelm at work, and we all know how productive we become once that sets in.

To avoid in-box overload it is important to clean it out every so often, this seems obvious I know, but can be harder then it sounds. Most peoples in-boxes are full of what I call, “when I get around to it,” tasks, meaning they aren’t important enough to make you stop what your doing, and are just important enough to not be shuffled to the trash can. They sit there until that magical day in the future when you have boundless time and nothing to do with it, I’m sorry to say, that day isn’t coming anytime soon. So we have to come up with some other strategy to deal with our in-box and I have two different approaches that I have found to be effective.

The first approach I call the one a day method. Basically you take one item from the bottom of the in-box every day, and do it. Now  it is important to note that you pull from the bottom of the in-box. Doing the new things that come in that are  more urgent doesn’t count towards your one a day goal, it has to be something that has been in your in-box for a while and doesn’t necessarily have to get done right away. By doing this you will start to whittle away at the growing mountain and keep it under control.

Typically the one a day method wont take more then 10 or 15 minutes from your day. The tasks at the bottom of the in-box are usually little things that just sort of sift down to the bottom, they don’t get done because they are minor annoyances that don’t demand attention, not because they are major projects that take a lot of time. These minor annoyances however, if allowed to build up, can turn into a serious mountain that will add serious stress to our work day. So make the commitment to do one of them a day, it wont take long, and help manage the mountain.

The other method I use is a planned cycle of batch an process. This typically happens when I have a big project on a relatively tight time schedule. I can’t really spare the 10 or 15 minutes here and there to take care of a little task, so my mountain starts to grow. However, I avoid the feeling of overwhelm that is created by the ever growing stack of stuff, by scheduling when I will deal with it, typically after the project is done.

Usually I will spend several hours going through the little stuff in my in-box and getting caught up the day after a big project or deadline. I have found this to have two great benefits. First off, by having it scheduled I know I can just ignore the stuff in my in-box while I am focusing on the project. Second, it provides a nice break from the heavy mental lifting of a major project. Remember that these tasks are typically of the minor annoyance varietal and are stuff you can just chew through without too much thought, which can be a great way to be productive while recovering from some serious mental labor.

So start working on those in-boxes today. The magical day of plenty of time and no work will never come, so there is nothing for it but to just get to it.

Technorati Tags: de-clutter, efficiency, managing your time, organization, organizing, Planning, Time Management, working smarter

Spring is in full swing, at least it is here in the southern part of the country, the trees are green, the sun is out and the flower are blooming. This has me thinking more and more about spring cleaning, and today specifically about spring cleaning for your ideas. Most people have a bunch of ideas that just come to them throughout the year, and if your involved in the running of a business a lot of those ideas probably relate to your business. Many of the business people I know record their ideas either in journals, or e-mail to help them remember the ideas later when they have time to act on them. Ideas always seem to have a way of always coming to you when you don’t have time to work on them.  So today, I want to talk about doing some spring cleaning of our ideas.

First thing to do is to consolidate your ideas into a single list. This may mean pulling together multiple entries into your journal, or searching through your E-mail for notes to yourself, or maybe you just have them all rolling around in your head and just need to right them down. One way or the other it is important to get all of the ideas you have been storing up in one place so you can look at them all together. Once we have our completed list we can being sorting through our ideas using the following steps.

1. Combine. I like to start by taking ideas that are related or similar and combining them, that way I won’t accidentally through out one part of a two or three part idea.

2. Review. This will inevitably happen when you go through to combine, but you want to review your ideas with a critical eye. Things to be looking for are ideas that are no longer relevant, meaning that either your business or the business environment has changed significantly sense you had the idea and therefore it no longer seems like a good one. Other types of ideas you might want to identify are ideas that are just too out there, unless your at a place where pursuing a pretty out there idea is what you are looking for, and ideas that are too grandiose, while we all like to dream big, putting these kinds of ideas on your to do list will only stress you out.

3. Discard. Any ideas that you identified during your review you should discard from the list, the goal after all is to reduce the number of ideas we have in our idea bank, thus making room for more ideas, not to mention giving us some space to actually work on the ideas not just have them. Other items to discard from the list might include ideas that never seem to get done, if you have had the same idea for two or three years and aren’t any closer to realizing the idea then you were then, it might be time to let it go. Alternatively these types of ideas can be great candidates for our next step.

4. Organize. In this step you want to organize your ideas in order of importance. The goal is to come away with a clear picture of what the next idea you want to work on is going to be, and the one after that, and so on. Often times with so many ideas floating around it is hard to pick just one to work on, so organizing your list is a way of focusing your energy on realizing the most important ideas first. Items to look at for moving to the top of the list are probably either, recent and time sensitive ideas, or those old ideas we discussed in number 3, if they still seem like great ideas and you just can’t let them go then try to get them off your list by making them happen.

5. Get to work. Now comes the easy part right? Just start working on realizing the idea at the top of your list. I know its typically not that simple, but at least by cleaning your ideas you can get more targeted and focused and clear up some mental space to really delve into your ideas.

Another thing that some people have found helpful but that I didn’t include in the list, is making two separate lists in the organize stage, sorting ideas into big ideas and smaller ideas. Typically this is done based on the amount of time it would take to accomplish the idea. This way you can always be working on one quicker easy idea and one more long term idea. The goal in either scenario is always the same though, get your ideas in order, get rid of the ones you don’t need, and make space for working on the ones that are most important.

Technorati Tags: Business, de-clutter, goals, improvement, organizing, working smarter

I recently wrote a little article for our upcoming newsletter (sign up through our homepage at www.mcdcg.com) about the internal auditor refresher classes we offer and the benefits they provide. It got me to thinking about the idea of looking at problems from a new angle or a new way of thinking. You see part of what we do in auditor refresher classes is work with the auditors to give them new tools that allow them to approach audits from a different perspective. For experienced auditors it is easy to fall into a rut where you no longer look critically at the area you are auditing so much as go through the motions of your audit, it has become too familiar. While this blog isn’t about auditing or how to be a better internal auditor, I think that auditing isn’t the only place where we can tend to have rut syndrome.

Rut syndrome is what I am calling our tendency in life and in business to get stuck in the same groove. After a while we wear this groove so deep it’s more like a trench and it can be quite a struggle to climb out of, but if you think about it, if you are so deep in your groove that you can’t climb out of it, you probably don’t have a very good view of the world around you. This is not to say that there can’t be progress made by working in your rut, you can move forward and go deeper, but the progress at some point becomes undirected. Unless we step outside our rut to check our bearings every once in a while we may wind up grooving our way right to where we don’t want to be.

So I encourage you think about what kind of ruts you are digging right now. When was the last time you stopped and poked your head up for a look around? You may find that the landscape has changed dramatically sense the last time you stopped to examine it, and that in fact what you thought was your productive rut is actually holding you back from an even greater opportunity. Just like auditors get too comfortable with the audit process we can get too comfortable with our work, our life, our business and stop exploring and examining. At this point our rut is limiting our opportunities for growth and success.

I would also like to point out that sometimes it can be hard to get out of your rut, ruts are after all comfortable and routine. Just like it takes training and new techniques for auditors to gain a new perspective and get out of their auditing rut, there may be some techniques we can use to help us get out of our ruts and survey our surroundings. One of them that I know works for me is as simple as taking a vacation, and no I don’t mean going to a hotel where you will plug into the wi-fi and turn on your cell phone, I mean taking a true vacation from your work. Vacations from work allow you to escape the day to day run around and take a good look around, survey the surroundings, and examine the value of your rut. I am sure there are other techniques that you use to help you get out of a rut. What are they? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Business, living your life, working smarter

I know that time management month ended two days ago, but I stumbled across this cartoon and thought it was too timely not to post.  Also on this funny Friday I want to let you all know that we will no longer be posting to this blog on Friday except for the first Friday of the month which continue to be funny Friday. From here on posts will only be on Tuesday. If you want to read more from us I recommend you check out one of our other two blogs either the Efficiency Dr. or the Integration Dr.