Improve My Business

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

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

We all know that the hours in the day are numbered and that we need to make the most of them. So here are some tips that I have been using to increase my personal productivity.

1. Batch your E-mails. If your like me and most of the people in my office you have an almost constant stream of E-mails coming in. The temptation is to open them all as soon as they arrive. I realized that for me at least this meant stopping what I was doing and shifting my focus on average once every 15-20 minutes throughout the work day. This was very disruptive, particularly when there was something I wanted to read further in the E-mail and it wound up being a long distraction from the task I had been working on. The solution I have found is batching my E-mail reading into groups. Basically I keep my E-mail open, but don’t read any messages unless something urgent comes in that needs immediate attention. Instead I let things build up and then just before lunch and again just before I sign off for the evening I read through everything. I find this gives me longer blocks of un-interrupted time to focus on getting the important things I need to do done, without completely ignoring what is going on in my E-mail.
2. Pick one big thing every day and do it first. For me if I have a lot of things on my to do list I find that I often avoid the big ones and do all the little “quick wins” first. While this does shorten the list, it still leaves those big projects out there looming, and by the time I have done all the little things I often don’t have the mental energy to tackle a big project. To combat this I have started coming into the office each day, having picked out one large item from my to do list to tackle that day. I start my day off by first checking to make sure no urgent messages came in overnight, then getting right to work on my one big thing for the day. I don’t check E-mails, or make phone calls, or do anything else until I have knocked out my one big task. This has two benefits for me. First it gets those big tasks off the to do list in a timely manner, and second, I find myself having more energy throughout the day because I know that I have already accomplished something big and don’t have the stress of trying to find the energy late in the day to do a big project.
3. Have a defined plan. Beyond picking your one thing, I have also found it helpful to have a defined plan for the week. In other words I try to look at what I need to get done and slot it all into my week. This way I am not sitting here on Tuesday afternoon or worse on Thursday staring at my to do list and wondering how I am ever going to get it all done. I know how it is going to get done because I have already budgeted the time in my head. Of course my schedule gets shifted around a little bit as things come up, and it is important to remain flexible, but knowing what is on your list and what kind of time commitment it takes, then figuring out where you can make that time commitment can help overcome the feeling of overwhelm that comes with big to do lists.
4. Attitude is everything. Having a better attitude at work makes you more productive. If you feel like you have been productive you will continue to be more productive. This is what is really behind the other tips I have listed here, they all help me feel productive, which improves my attitude, and makes me more productive. Sometimes you even need to go so far as to force yourself to change your attitude, even if it seems superficial at first. If you tell yourself you have lots of energy and are ready to get something done, before you know it, it will be true. On the other hand if you sit around all day dreaming about a nap, you’re just going to make yourself more tired. So take a minute every now and then to check in on your attitude towards work and adjust it as needed.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, email, goals, improvement, managing your time, Planning, Time Management, working smarter

First off I would like to welcome everyone to the 2010 edition of the Improve My Business Now blog. I hope you all had a restful holidays and are ready to get to work making our businesses better. Now let’s get going on the good stuff.

If your business is like ours you probably spent the last several weeks wrapping things up from 2009, getting caught up on the things that inevitably fall through the cracks, and perhaps most important of all, thinking about what you were going to do in 2010. Well 2010 is here now, are you doing the things you thought about and planned for?

Whether you went through a formal strategic planning session in the latter part of the year or not, the holidays always provide a break from the frenetic pace of business and allow us to slow down and take a critical look at where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go next. Usually this comes in the form of setting goals for the New Year then coming up with plans to help us meet those goals. I am sure you are all already familiar with the importance of setting goals and planning how to meet them, but in case you need a reminder there is a good article about the importance of strategic planning here. If you didn’t get an opportunity to do some strategic planning in 2009 it’s never too late to put a plan in place.

However, this post isn’t about strategic planning, it’s about follow through. For most of us, we probably have our plan for 2010 at least in mind, if not actually written out somewhere, but what are you doing to put it into action? The truth of the matter is that strategic planning is only as good as the follow through. Your goal to grow sales by 40% over the next year is tremendous and your plan to accomplish it through increased marketing efforts, development of your sales funnel, and increasing return business sounds like a surefire way to make your goal a reality, but at the end of 2010, what is really going to matter is not the goal and the plan, but what you actually did.

Take a look at 2009 or any other year that has already come to a close. What were your goals for that year? Did you meet those goals? Why or why not? It is just as critical to review your old strategic plans and compare them to your actual results as it is to make new plans. Even if you don’t have a written plan, think about what you wanted to accomplish last year. Did you get it done? These reviews are a great way to judge follow through and goal setting. You can look at your previous goals and plans and determine whether you were able to effectively set reasonable goals, come up with actionable plans that meet those goals, and follow through on those plans. The point of these reviews is not to point fingers and establish blame if the strategic plan failed, they are about information. If you were able to put your plan into action and meet your goal that is great, if not, that is great too, by reviewing you can discover where the break down occurred and make sure you do better this year.

What I find most often when I look back at old strategic plans is that as soon as the pace of business and life picks back up in the beginning of the new year we make a couple attempts to start the ball rolling on our plan, then the plan gets forgotten in a cloud of dust and finds its way into a filing cabinet somewhere never to be touched again. Part of my plan in 2010 is to make sure that I stick to the plan, follow through on what I have said I am going to do, and make sure that, when I review my strategic plan at the end of this year, if I haven’t met my goals, it isn’t because of a lack of follow through. Until you have adequate follow through on your plan, you will never be able to tell if your goals are reasonable and if you plans are adequate to meet them. When looking forward, the plan is the key, but in review, it’s your follow through that really counts. If you didn’t follow through, nothing else matters.

Technorati Tags: Business, Follow Through, goals, Planning, Plans, Strategic Planning

My personal forte is in project management. I chose this line of work because I really like planning. I like to see how things are going to come together. This is often a problem at home since I always avoid spur of the moment activities, while my husband is definitely a jump in and go for it type of person. While sometimes frustrating, our opposite approaches tend to complement each other. If I was solely responsible for scheduling our activities, I would over-plan everything to the point of losing interest in the activity altogether. If it were left to my husband, he’d jump right in to everything without preparation. The problem with jumping right in is that you always will be forgetting something that will end up costing you more time and money then if you had prepared for it ahead. The problem with too much planning is you might lose some of the momentum and enthusiasm for the activity.

So, how does a planning-type personality enjoy the fun of a spontaneous activity? Here’s what I do:

You were expecting more maybe? I admit it’s a simple method, but even for a professional planner not everything has to be complicated. Don’t underestimate your gut instinct and don’t rule out compromise. In the end, no matter what you decide keep in mind this quote from Sidney J. Harris:

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

Technorati Tags: Planning