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

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

Time management is one of those things that we all know we should be doing yet for some reason, we aren’t, kind of like eating healthy. At the end of the day it boils down to this, time is what it is and there is nothing we can do to change it, what we can change though, is how we interact with the time we have, in other words, how we use it. This is the heart of time management, controlling how we use our time in pursuit of increased efficiency. We learned some of the basics of time management earlier this month, this week I want to explore some interesting ideas and topics in time management.

To me, one of the interesting things about time management is that, at one point in time or another, we have all done it. Everyone goes through periods where they are so busy they have to budget their time down to the minute to make sure that everything gets done, and this is time management. However, we often lose this sense of urgency when the task list dwindles and we aren’t so overwhelmed. We no longer feel the need to schedule everything and our time management practices get left behind.

Have you ever found yourself wondering what happened to the time? If so you are probably a victim of failed time management maintenance. When we have a lot to do we don’t wonder what happened to the time, we know what happened to it, it was used accomplishing one of the many things we needed to get done. However, when we don’t have a lot to do, we open ourselves up to procrastinating. When we open our task list in the morning and add up the hours only to realize that we don’t have to spend every minute of the day going 100% in order to get everything done, the tendency is to relax a little bit. When we feel like we can relax we don’t feel this need to schedule our time in order to get everything done, so our time management falls to the side. We simply think that we don’t have that much to do so it will certainly get done.

The risk here is obvious and we have probably all experienced. We start doing something not task related and all of a sudden it’s the middle of the afternoon and we haven’t gotten anything done. Where did the time go? This is why maintaining our time management habits is so important. If we manage our time outside of crunch time like we do when we are busy we won’t leave ourselves open to these afternoon panic attacks, instead we would have everything done before the middle of the afternoon and have time to relax.

The biggest complaint about using time management techniques when we don’t have to is that people want to feel like they can relax and not have to stress about their work all the time. When things are slow we like to rest and recoup a little bit so that we are ready to go next time things pick up. This is incredibly valuable and we all need this down time so we don’t burn out, this is certainly true. However, you can use time management techniques and stay relaxed during the downtimes, in fact, time management can make your slow times even more relaxing.

Think about it this way. What would be more relaxing, taking some time for yourself in the morning only to realize that you let too much time slide by and now have to scramble to get the few things done that you had to do today, or managing your time, so that you get everything on your list done by two in the afternoon and can spend the last part of the afternoon relaxing and taking care of personal items. It is easy to see, that, while it may seem like managing our time forces us to stress about our work, it really can allow us more freedom to truly relax and enjoy those rare times when things are running smoothly and we don’t have to spend our whole day putting out fires and keeping the ball rolling.

So I encourage you to think about maintaining those great time management habits we use to get through crunch times. Keep them going and not only will you be rewarded with better personal time, but next time you get busy it won’t be such a struggle to schedule your time because you will already be in the habit.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, managing your time, 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