Improve My Business

I recently delivered my updated Time Management class to a branch of the Federal (US) government.  During this time, I always review the course materials and see if there’s anything that needs to be refreshed or updated.  One of the things I talked about briefly, and probably will expand upon during the next go-round, is setting priorities.

Sure, we talked about it some; how everyone writes a “to-do” list instead of a “results needed” or “things to accomplish” list; and some attendees even said that they were going to switch from writing down tasks to writing down what needed to get done, and then how they would accomplish it.  That’s a great start.

What are the best ways to set priorities?  It turns out, it depends on who you ask:

Covey - Quadrant Method

Pareto - 80/20 rule

For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.”

Pairwise comparison

Determine what you need to do, and then ‘vote’ which you do given the list.  Let’s say our list states

1) get food for dinner

2) clean pool

3) work on proposal

You say which you’d prefer to do by voting:

1 vs 2 - 1

1 vs 3 - 3

2 vs 3 - 3

so your prioritized list is #3, then #1, then #2.

There are literally dozens of methods for setting priorities.  A quick scan into any search engine will show you these in detail.  Which one should you choose?  The one that works for you.  That’s why I present multiple tools in class - I ask students to find a tool that makes sense to them (logical for them, not onerous to use) - and then to start using it!

Technorati Tags: Time Management

Last night at dance class our instructor was talking about efficiency of movement and encouraging us to reduce the distance we move our center of gravity with each step. In general keeping steps smaller allows you to be quicker and is essential for dancing to faster tempo music. It got me thinking about efficiency in business expansions and wondering if similar principles apply.

To understand where I am coming from first think of your core business competencies as your business’ center of gravity. Now we can see that any expansion of our services or product offerings is a slight, or not so slight, shift of our center. Now similar to dance, the further away from our core competencies we get the more we are moving our center of gravity and the harder it is going to be to recover and change directions. In business this means that if we expand our offerings too far outside our core competencies it becomes increasingly harder to recover and we may wind up overextended. Sticking to expansions that are smaller steps away from our core competencies will allow for more speed and precision in our movements and also make it easier to recover should we decide that the expansion wasn’t a good idea.

With the pace of innovation and change we are seeing in the economy today it is becoming clear that going forward one of the key factors for business success is going to be agility. Those business that are able to most easily adapt to new changes in the marketplace are the ones that are going to survive. So think like a dancer when considering expansion and only move your core competencies as much as you have to. Don’t overdue it or you may get behind the beat and that’s never good in business or dancing.

Technorati Tags: Business, efficiency

Steven Covey, in his groundbreaking work The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, tells us to “begin with the end in mind”. The concept is to know what you want to accomplish, and to set up your tasks to assist you in reaching that goal. This is nothing more than knowing what you want to accomplish, and aligning your tasks and assignments with that goal.

Many folks get caught up in the social media craze – I admit that I did too for a while. The good news is that my personality gets ‘tired’ with things pretty easily – whether it’s posting 5-6 times per day on twitter, or connecting with acquaintances on Facebook, or answering questions in the Q&A on LinkedIn Answers. Why is that good news? Because I know that, once I ‘master’ this new application, it will lose its allure. So, I can focus on my new obsession in the knowledge that it’s only because I’m not expert at it yet; once I get there, my nature will allow me to naturally ratchet back on the time, effort, and brainpower I’ll put in on this.

Let me give you an example: when I first logged on to Twitter, I was one of the earlier adopters (I won’t say early adopters, but certainly am not a newbie to the app). I was focused on identifying posters who were interesting, humorous, leaders in their field, and leaders in my field. I grew my follower list thoughtfully (I don’t automatically follow those who follow me; and if someone follows me, I go to their profile, read 2-3 pages of the most recent posts, and decide to follow or not based on whether I want to hear what they have to say. If their entire post history are either retweets (RTs), responses (@twittername) or links to their own products (“come check out my 50% off sale!”) I don’t tend to follow them.)

My twitter followers to @marymcd has grown organically to around 1,000 – 1,100 followers – every week I gain some, and I lose some. I check out who I lose, and it’s invariably people who have followed me for 48 hours, seen that I don’t automatically follow them back, and they drop me (Twitter Quitters). Conversely, I’ve built online relationships with folks that I’ve never met IRL (In Real Life) and have a network of professionals I can tap at any given time to get their thoughts on something I’m struggling with. So, although I devoted a bunch of time to building this network, I don’t spend NEARLY that much maintaining it (and yes, I do post regularly on Twitter except when I’m travelling…)

What was my original goal? To understand this new tool, to figure out if I could build a revenue stream from it (yes, but indirectly only), and to connect with colleagues in far-flung locations. Did I accomplish this? You bet. Was it worth the effort? Yes, when I consider the friendships I’ve developed (you know who you are, @my-virtual-twitter-friends…) Am I a twitter guru? Not even close. I use the tool, and am happy with my use, but do not aspire to be a Twitter queen.

Re-examine how you are spending your time – are you doing things that support your ultimate goal? If not, why not? What can you do differently?

Technorati Tags: blogging, Business, communication, efficiency, goals, managing your time, Time Management, working smarter

We all know that a person’s work space says a lot about them, but did you also know that how you maintain your workspace can have a huge impact on your productivity. If you take a minute and think about it makes sense, if you have a well organized space with all the thing you need near by and very little clutter then whenever you are looking for something you can find it right away. On the other hand if you have a bunch of clutter in your workspace then its going to be a lot harder to find what you are looking for and therefore needing to find something is going to cause more of a brake in your concentration then it has to.

Beyond this very simple explanation of why having a well organized work space leads to higher productivity there are a lot of more subtle reasons that may not be so obvious. For example, maybe someone you know keeps a lot of stuff on their desk, some of it in process projects, some of it is mail that needs to be sorted, some of it is just stuff they meant to take care of but never got around to. Now this person needs to find something for an important project and they start sorting through their stuff, not only is it taking additional time to find what they need, but they also keep finding little things that need to take care of. If this person is prone to procrastination each one of these little unimportant tasks, like responding to a letter, or filing something, will serve as a great distraction from the real work they should be doing and they will spend time taking care of a dozen little less important things that they should be using to find what they need to finish the important project.

It is like I always said in high school; “if my room is clean it must mean I have a test or paper coming up that I don’t want to work on.” Just like a dirty room provides a great excuse to not study for a test, a dirty work area provides a great excuse not to work on a daunting project. By making sure that we always maintain a well organized workspace we can avoid these little distractions.

Some good tips for keeping your work area clean are:

1. Set aside time each day or every other day to handle the little things that come up like sorting mail, paying bills, etc. These are the types of things that can tend to linger in our inbox and provide great distractions from doing important things that we don’t want to do.
2. Keep well organized files. Good files can be a huge time saver when you need to reference older things and they also are a great way to keep from having to dig through things. If you need something and can just go straight to it in your files you won’t encounter all the little distractions that can through you off course.
3. Once every two weeks or once a month go through the stuff on your desk and get rid of everything that you haven’t used sense the last time you did it. We tend to keep things on our desk because we don’t know where else to put them, but if you can be judicious about only keeping the things you actually use on your desk you will find that you are much more productive in the long run.

I am sure that there are many more great tips and tricks you use to help keep your work area clean, but these are the ones that I have found help me. Let us know what you do to maintain your work area so we can continue to improve!

Technorati Tags: de-clutter, efficiency, managing your time, Time Management

There are several things in life that are almost universally true. One of these universal truths is that, if you work at a company that has more then two employees, you are going to have meetings. Meetings can be a huge time sink for your day, not to mention totally throw your time management plan out of whack if you were not told about the meeting in advance. I know plenty of people who feel like they spend half of the time they are at work in one meeting or another, so it’s understandable how meetings could seriously cripple your ability to be efficient at work. Here are some tips to help you time manage your meetings so you can spend more time doing your actual work.

1. Avoid meetings that don’t have a specific goal or problem to address. This is a very simple place to start, if someone asks you to be at a meeting, your first question should be what is the meeting about? If they can’t give you a firm answer to the purpose of the meeting, chances are you don’t really need to be there.

2. Ask for an agenda, or if none exists create one. Assuming that the person who requests your presence at the meeting does have a real issue that the meeting is addressing our next thought you be organization, and this is where the agenda comes in. Without and agenda the meeting will probably take at  least an extra thirty minutes because it will take time for everyone to get on the same page and make the transitions as you  move through the topics of the meeting. Also, having an agenda will set a definite end time for the meeting, this way you know how much time you are committing and if the meeting starts to run over you can simply excuse yourself by saying you made another commitment for after the meeting assuming it would end on time.

3. Do as much pre-meeting prep as you can for yourself and the other people at the meeting. An agenda is a great place to start but beyond that, if you can prepare discussion questions, or anything else that will help guide the meeting towards reaching a conclusion on the issue at hand your meetings will run more efficiently and smoothly.

4. Make sure everyone coming to the meeting is up to speed BEFORE they come to the meeting. Remember the agenda and questions you created for the meeting? By sending the questions and agenda out in advance to all the participants in the meeting and asking them to come with to the meeting with their responses ready you can minimize catch up time and get right down to business at the start of the meeting.

5. Identify time wasters and avoid going to meetings with them. Time wasters is a term I use to refer to those people in an office who either don’t have enough to do or don’t want to do the work they have, and instead invent creative ways to fill their time while appearing to be busy. Many of these people have realized that holding meetings and/or prolonging meetings they attend is a great way to avoid doing real work. If you can identify who these people are in your office and be especially careful to avoid getting sucked into their meetings you can hopefully avoid the dreaded two hour status update from last week when nothing happened.

These five tips will hopefully help you cut down on wasted time away from your desk and increase your productivity at work. One final thought on meetings, is that I have rarely encountered a meeting that needed to be longer then an hour. This is not to say that many meeting don’t run longer then an hour, but it is rare that they need to. Typically most any topic needing to be covered in a meeting, if well defined upfront, can be covered in an hour or less. If someone is trying to schedule you for a three hour meeting, it had better be a really important meeting and cover a whole lot of material.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, managing your time, Planning, preparation, Time Management, working smarter