Improve My Business

I recently gave a presentation at a well-known conference in my industry - something that I enjoy doing.  I get to share new ideas (or ideas combined in a different way), interact with folks, and get a conversation going.  Most gratifying to me was to hear a colleague whose opinion I admire and respect say, “Mary gave me such food for thought - I had never thought to combine these two techniques before, and she not only showed us how she did it, but gave us some ideas of how we can do it ‘back at the ranch’ “…

The presentation went well according to feedback (did it have anything to do with the fact that the presentation included lunch?), and I’ve been able to hear some interesting talks on diverse topics, as well as meet some great new business contacts.

What are YOU doing to improve your skills/business? Please comment on how you ensure that you’re staying on top of your particular market… is it

- reading trade journals?

- attending seminars? conferences?

- in-house training?

- online webinars? teleseminars?

- etc.

Do tell - I’d love to hear how you’re staying on top of your game!

And, if you’re not doing anything right now - take a minute to search online for some form of professional development; type some keywords into a search engine and read some relevant articles; find and bookmark / RSS some key websites or blogs and set aside 30 mins every week to read (may I suggest improveyourbusinessnow.com, blog.efficiencydr.com, or blog.sustainabilitydr.com ?)

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Business, communication, mcdonald consulting group, preparation, training

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

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