What is happening to traditional broadcasters? Who are the new broadcasters? How should we use broadcast media? What is broadcast media becoming? How do companies communicate in the emerging broadcast world order? These were just some of the topics from the Rebecca Caroe/Creative Agency Secrets ”Should Brands be Broadcasters?” event.

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

• Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
• Andrew Howells of Zype.
• Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik’s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

• Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
• The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
• Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …). 

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers – good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members – as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media – filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Authenticity

WOWNDADI is on top of the world. Well, Alltop specifically, sitting on the alltop lifehacks page, together with some familiar names.

Not everyone is feeling on top of the world though. Apparently the UK has a crisis of management, with a lack of people with the skills to motivate and manage staff. It probably isn’t a surprise that one of the most popular posts here is “How to deal with being overwhelmed at work.” – perhaps a little of Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start” might be an antidote: Guy Kawasaki – The Art of the Start

Alltop reminds me of a great technique for dealing with overwhelm: The at-a-glance tool. Alltop gives an at-a-glance view of the best sites on a particular topic. That overwhelmed feeling comes more from what you don’t know, than what you do. The feeling that not everything is on the the RADAR at once, that more is lurking on page 2, 3, 4, … An at-a-glance tool lets you know you’ve got it all in sight.

GTD is also an excellent at-a-glance tool. Yes, there are multiple to do lists (it is a good thing to have buckets), but it collects everything that needs doing into one place. That gives a single view of what needs doing and the confidence that it is a complete view.

If you haven’t got that view already, start by taking a blank sheet of paper and writing down everything that needs doing. Keep going until everything you can think of is down there. Don’t be afraid. It is the first step to getting back on track, and it is going to be manageable.

Second, check out Scott Young’s excellent post, “20 tips to survive when you’ve overloaded your schedule” – regular readers will spot familiar themes in this summary with my comments:

Stop the leaks:

• Work Your Calendar – block out time to cover your projects, to keep the excess out.
• Say No – don’t take more onto the to do list. Be firm.
• Use Your Network – get help and support, turn your network inside out.

‘Create’ more time:

• Get Up Earlier and Eliminate Time Sinks - Kill the TV, gaming and surfing. You snooze you loose.
• First Things First - always a winning strategy for productivity. Deal with the large rocks, watch out for the frogs.
• Exercise – If your workload is mental, make sure there is physical work to balance it.

Lighten the load:

• Lower Quality Thresholds – Think 80/20 or “good enough is good enough”. This isn’t the time to be a perfectionist. Next
• Explain the Situation – share the burden, although don’t fall into complaining.
• Triage and Defer – Don’t treat what will live without treatment and don’t treat the things that will die. If something isn’t going to make it, fast fail it, rather than wasting more time. If things can be deferred, defer them straight away.

Create a trusted system, like Getting Things Done, so that you can stay on top of things. Your attention is your scarcest resource, use it wisely so that you don’t go into attention bankruptcy. Control where you direct your attention, you control how you spend your time, and you will get the things done that need doing.

Related Posts

• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• iPod to Go – The iPod as a GTD capture device
• Dealing with the Do Its That Just Don’t Get Done
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes

Unusual productivity advice, but it will make sense. It all came home to me as I was editing some CSS code (CSS, or cascading style sheets, are what make web pages look pretty).

In the early days of web there was little control over how things ended up on a web page. HTML – hypertext mark up language – allowed some basic control, like adding titles and marking text bold, but basically things ended up all over the place. Hold on to that thought, because I’ll come back to it.

CSS contains wonderful things called containers (or DIVs). DIVs keep things together. You can also put these containers inside of other containers. Now, you can get into a real mess with this, or it can be a beautiful thing. That leads me neatly on to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

I better explain. One of the central concepts of GTD is the idea of contexts. For a GTD practitioner, every task has a context. I always interpreted this to be the place where that task could be done – @computer, @home, @phone, and so on. Sorted tasks this way makes a lot of sense. It is a very logical and productive way to file tasks, which means you know what to do when you are in a particular place. You can also see where you need to put in some time, because things need doing in that context (there is a long list), but there is more.

Contexts have another distinction, one which is less obvious for today’s knowledge worker, but one that is equally important. When GTD was written, those physical contexts related to roles that were being carried out: I am being a worker (@office), I am being a parent (@home), and so on. Implicit in the physical context was a specific role.

Today’s blended lifestyles blur those distinctions, especially for homeworkers. Location no longer defines our roles. This is compounded by increasingly ‘multi-role’ or ‘multi-skill’ jobs that many of us have. We are awash with context-blur.

The fact is we need contexts, and clear roles. The containers that are so important in CSS, to keep things in the right place, are important in life too. Contexts, roles, containers. Call them what you will. They create the focus that we need to be productive. Our perceptual systems need focus. In fact, attention is the thing that makes them workable.

Avoid switching contexts too frequently. Computer architects will tell you that context switching (switching rapidly between tasks) is bad for a computer – it slows the machine down and makes it in efficient. It does the same for your brain.

When you are working, stick your head in a bucket (notice how relieved you are to have made sense of that title). Put it yourself in one context and keep it there for a preset time. Be okay with it being there. Don’t feel guilty about the other contexts – you are doing what you are doing. You’ll get to the rest of it later, trust your system to get you there.

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
- Abraham Maslow

Above all else, act. And act now. Fretting is the most unproductive of all human endeavours.

“I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.”
- Florence Nightingale

Finally, David Allen makes another key point about contexts: There should be as many as you need, and no more. When you define your roles and contexts, pick the right number. Too few or too many can cause us to flounder.

Bear in mind the cognitive rule of thumb for things that we can hold in our working memory: 7 +/- 2. Less is fine, but if you have over 9, think about trimming.

Contexts serve to bracket what you can’t do now, and what you can do. If you are in the office, you can’t do @home things, and if you are at home, you can’t do @office things. The advantage of filing tasks into contexts is that you know what you need to do when you get there.

And when things go off track?

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
G. K. Chesterton

So do your best to stay on track, but enjoy the adventure if you go a little astray…

Related Posts

• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• iPod to Go – The iPod as a GTD capture device
• Dealing with the Do Its That Just Don’t Get Done
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done

Reading a recent post on David Tebbutt’s blog – You calling me a consultant? – took me to: What’s the real value of social software in enterprise from Adriana Lukas, which leads us to this post…

My longest experience with business social software has been with wikis. I first used a Wikis in a businesses about ten years ago, and have now seen a number of projects across different companies. Case studies are still hard to come by, partly because introducing wikis touches on some sensitive issues. It is not just about the technology, it is about a cultural shift. In many command-and-control cultures information is (seen as) power, but social software moves people towards sharing it. That is a big change.

Be Careful What You Measure

The major benefits of wiki technology are tangential ones. As such they present challenges for metrics, but I have seen multi-million dollar roll outs of ‘traditional’ applications hit their metrics, but be a productivity disaster. Metrics cut both ways, and there is the risk of MacNamara’s fallacy:

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

The quote is from Charles Handy, but it came via wikipedia and I’ve already said enough about wikipedia research. The Adam Curtis BBC program ‘The Trap’ explored this topic well, if you have the chance to watch it, it is well worth it.

Measuring human systems, like users with a wiki, is non-trivial. You change what you measure, simply by measuring it. This is not to say that things shouldn’t be measured, but they should be measured with caution. It might sound a little trite, but there is truth in saying that the most valuable things are invaluable (or immeasurable).

Wikis are most successful when they are introduced while the company is still small and growing. That way they become part of the culture. Not to say that big businesses can’t be successful with wikis, but it requires a good training program around them. The only wiki-failures I have found were in very large companies, where the technology was introduced with minimal training and no clear objectives, and predictable results.

What are the major benefits of a wiki to a business?

These apply just as well to any form of social workgroup, not just to businesses. They also apply for groups of two to hundreds, but the scaling of wikis is a topic for another day.

Knowledge Availability

Wikis remove much of the chance factor in finding knowledge in the business. Most intranets contain woefully out of date information, through no fault of the intranet owners. Users are left to chance upon the right person who is ‘in the know’. Wikis also reduce the dependence on key knowledge workers for answers to common questions.

Even if the answer isn’t on the wiki, at least users can glean an idea of who to ask (based on who has been adding what to the wiki). This speeds up the business and offloads the burden on senior staff. This is especially important when you are in a hiring phase. No new hire pack? Search the wiki.

Change Control

Basic, but missing from so many information systems in common use. The ability to rollback and track changes is inherent in most wiki software. This can be a life saver and is why wikis are the enterprise CMS of choice for me.

Knowledge Permanence

Wikis are the most constructive and least disruptive way of documenting projects that I have found to date. If someone leaves, at least some of their knowledge remains within the organisation, on the wiki. The same is true for extended absence due to illness, travel or long holidays.

Knowledge Creation

Sparks come from striking two things together. The same is true with knowledge. I have watched brilliant ideas emerge in real-time on a wiki page, right in front of my eyes. Something new on the wiki combined with something someone already knows leads to new knowledge in the business, across multiple people.

Geographic Freedom

Wikis work across geographic boundaries and across time zones. That supports remote offices and remote workers on a global basis. This is key to keeping a business competitive. Water cooler chat is good, but it doesn’t scale across national boundaries.

Cross Platform Portability

Because wikis are web based, the only client required is a browser. That means wikis work across different operating systems and even for mobile devices like Blackberries and smart phones.

So, hopefully now you can see why I am a wiki fan.

Related Posts

• Do Your Employees Dance?
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls
• Wikipedia – A Means not an End
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?

How are we doing with email? How did we do without it?

Or would we be better off without it.

A number of things have put e-mail at the top of the discussion list in recent weeks, from blogs to national TV. The BBC’s Money programme covered the topic last friday (March the 7th – if you can use iPlayer link here: The Money Programme), with the accompanying news article “E-mail is ruining my life.”

Information Overload via E-Mail

Information overload is a growing problem, and e-mail is right in the middle of it. People are overloaded by their personal email, from SPAM to Facebook notifications and seemingly endless forwarded emails. Even musicians suffer from information overload these days.

It is something when it makes it on to national TV – it doesn’t seem long ago that I had to explain what email was. Now I’m helping people deal with e-mail over use. It is clearly a problem of epidemic proportions. Lots of people have been researching the issue, like Nada Kakabadse at Northampton Business School (on the lift site here). She was recently quoted in a New Scientist article on technology addiction:

“Companies offer technologies like PDAs and Blackberies and just expect people to learn how to use them. They don’t consider the possible negative sides. New technology gives a feeling of having more control, but it may be only a feeling.

We don’t want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies and respond with appropriate education and policies.”

There is the backlash, lead by people like Tim Ferris, of the 4 hour work week fame, and others, who advocate minimising e-mail use. From e-mail free days to keeping your email client shut, checking email just once or twice a day, people are trying to tame the beast.

The technology elite are moving away from e-mail to new tools like twitter and pownce to get away from the torrent that floods the inbox. Some even proclaim that email is dead (or maybe not).

The Problem with E-Mail

The reality is that there are a number of problems with how e-mail is used today. Many people use it like an instant messaging tool – sending and expecting immediate responses. This has become more common because of tools like Blackberries, which provide this experience, most of the time at least.

The nature of our psychology, combined with a Blackberry, starts to distort our world view. I had mobile e-mail for a number of years, but I don’t currently. That is very much on purpose. My out, in, then out again perspective has made me realise the pros and cons of these tools:

• It is hard to have a meaningful conversation or meeting if someone is fiddling and distracted. We aren’t wired to have two conversations at once.
• Just because email is instant for you, doesn’t make it instant for others. Instant e-mail makes us unwittingly selfish. Don’t cancel a meeting when people may already travelling there and have no access to email. If you do, at least call. Don’t expect an answer at 2am.
• Email should never be used to avoid an awkward conversation or to hold an argument. There just isn’t enough salient indicators in email to convey emotion. We have no better communication medium today than having a face to face conversation.

One of the biggest challenge with e-mail is that it has no obvious priority level. Yes, emails can be marked high or low priority, but that is rarely used well. The other issue is more around time sensitivity. One email might be something for review or information that can be tackled any time in the next few weeks. The next email might be for a call starting in 2 minutes, or to do with an urgent customer problem. Thus we are drawn in, and our time disappears to the inbox.

E-Mail Isn’t Working

To be frank, E-mail isn’t work, it is communication. It is a means, not an end. Imagine if you spent the whole day chatting on the phone. Assuming you aren’t a call centre operative, you’d probably be viewed as well below the bar from a productivity perspective. We must reconstruct our work lives so that they are not so dependant on e-mail. We can’t do this on our own, it must be done in conjunction with the community that we interactive with. Don’t worry, you’ll be joining a growing bandwagon of reformers.

Declaring e-mail bancruptcy is not the answer, but refinancing is. I’ve already written about 7 common e-mail mistakes (there are more), but let’s come at it positively. Try this:

• Turn off automatic email checking in your email client (tell me which client you are using, and I’ll tell you how to do it).
  • This stops email interrupting you (even those little pop up messages play havoc with your attention and reduce productivity).
  • You will become concious of how often you check for email
• Try using Instant Messaging or the phone instead of email.
  • Get a corporate system or try MSN or Skype.
  • But avoid getting drawn into long conversations – more on Instant Messaging.

Send Less e-mail, and you’ll get less. Now, back to some real work…

Related Posts

• e-mailing your way to oblivion
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Social Media Week London
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis

Strategically Speaking

Serendipity is putting mission and strategy in the middle of my world. They are curiously emotive terms, dividing people into either cynics or firm believers in a single breath.

My passion for strategic planning has caused me to dig into these topics many times over the years. I firmly believe that you get the best results by being focussed, and by playing for the long term. Taking short cuts and only acting tactically results in burn outs and blow ups. This series of posts walks through a framework based on vision, mission and values, exploring how they are constructed and how they function.

Is Mission a Dirty Word?

The ‘mission’ word, like the ‘strategy’ word, is often abused these days. Recently I heard someone say “we have a strategy of handing out leaflets”. That isn’t a strategy. It is doing things. Doing things is valid, but don’t be fooled into thinking that doing things is the same as having a strategy. Herb Kelleher, of Southwest Airlines, once said “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things” – that probably says a lot about the airline industry. To be fair, Kelleher’s preceding words were “‘Strategy’ overrated, simply ‘doin’ stuff” underrated”, and I’d agree with the sentiment. All strategy and no doing is not going to get you far, but neither will doing with no strategy. The majority of people and small businesses don’t have a mission statement, and so end up all ‘doin’ and no strategy. Big businesses, in contrast, often end up all strategy and little doing. To be effective, you need a foot firmly in each camp.

Writing off the Mission

A strategy is the series of plans carried out to achieve the mission. Many people don’t like the idea of having a formalised, written ‘mission statement’ and see them as nasty, cheesy things. Good mission statements are actually exciting, motivating and empowering. Sorry to drag films into it, but if you aren’t convinced about the power of mission, think about great spy film heroes, think Mission Impossible II or James Bond. But this isn’t the stuff of fiction, studies have revealed strong links between clearly written mission statements and success. If you want to get to ‘mission accomplished’ you need one foot in the doing camp, and one foot in the strategy camp

Don’t Waste Any Time

Mission gives purpose to how time is spent. It guides actions and informs plans. If you haven’t got a mission, you can’t have a strategy, and if you haven’t got a strategy, then you are just ‘doing stuff’. There is much more to life and business than spontaneous actions, driven by life’s random events. Writing down things down flushes out differences of opinion. In the case of personal mission statements, it can surface internal conflicts. These hidden tensions hold up progress and waste valuable time.

When mission statements are implicit, people often believe that everyone is on the same page. That belief is misplaced. The process of writing thoughts down makes things explicit and concrete, enabling clarification and debate. Only then do the hidden conflicts surface – sometimes to the great consternation of those involved. People realise that there are different things in different people’s heads, at different times. Writing things down crystallises thinking and is the first step to resolving these conflicts and creating consistency.

One Step At a Time

Getting to a mission statement and building out a strategy is a process. All it requires is a few simple steps and the upfront investment of some time. Are you ready to accept your mission?

In part II, what is vision, and why do you need it?

Related Posts

• Where Are You Going? Vision, Mission and Values – Part II – Vision
• Mission Vision and Value – On Purpose
• More on the Death of Free – Marketing
• Three Reasons Free Will Eat Itself
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?

The technology used in businesses is changing rapidly. The technologies we use in the office today would have been the stuff of science fiction just a few decades ago. New technologies are arriving faster than most businesses can adapt and adopt. Within this change is the potential for both increasing, and decreasing, productivity. What is around the corner?

I’m am convinced that the business technology of the future is the consumer technology of today. In past decades technology flowed from business use to consumer use. Think of things like mobile phones and email, which started off as business tools, then became affordable and accessible at home. That flow is now reversing. The productivity tools of the future are in use by the youth of today, and they will bring them into businesses as they join the workforce. It will be the consumerization of IT.

Back in December, I was at Chinwag Live, Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls, an event that gathers some of the most intelligent figures from the world of digital marketing to have a shot at predicting where the industry will be in 5 years time. Now, if property prices are anything to go by, the newspapers are having trouble agreeing on what happened last month, so predicting technology five years out is a long shot! But this is an arena that is on the cutting edge of change and gets to see just that little bit further ahead.

The event confirmed many of my current thoughts, as well as being a great chance to have some meaningful debate. Here I am with the legendary Sam Michel, CEO of Chinwag, at the end of the session as we mulled over the discussions (there is a podcast here).

Social media is becoming more and more prominent. Jon Bains – Co-Founder of Lateral – raised the issue of Facebook versus LinkedIn. For me, the two are complimentary. I use Facebook for personal friends and LinkedIn for work associates, and some people I connect to on both – you’ll find a link to my LinkedIn profile in the about page. They represent two very different faces, excuse pun, of social networking applications. The teen-laden, wild partying Facebook, and the straight-laced executive LinkedIn. Now I hear of more and more people using even Facebook for business networking.

Today’s business leaders and tomorrow’s will be very different. The fact is that social networking tools, in one form or another, are here to stay. I predict they will be standard tools for many large businesses in years to come, although run on private, secure intranets.

Today most IT managers and business leaders are missing out on the potential productivity benefits of these tools. They provide an amazing ability to create and strengthen social bonds in businesses and enable people to find the resources they need to get their job done. In years gone by, the resources we needed to get the job done were ‘things’. Where is the plough? Where is the hammer?

Today, in a knowledge-led business world, they are the people with knowledge and skills. Where is someone who understands this? Where is the person who can interpret this data? Where is someone who has done this before? In a large company, with many staff telecommuting, you can’t get those answers by shouting across the desk anymore. Something else is needed.

Microsoft sponsored some recent research on skills businesses need, which is covered in an interesting BBC article here. The modern work place demands both people skills and IT skills. These two skill sets are becoming intertwined, as computers become the medium through which we communicate. Social Networking tools are powerful at expanding our social network, both in business and at home. Used badly, they can be a massive drain in terms of time and stress (see “web 2.0 as the new master” by Maz Hardy). Used wisely, they just might be one of the productivity tools of the future.

Related Posts

• FOAF – Building Networks With a Friend of a Friend
• The Rather Complex Issue of Identity
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• Who’s are you? The Question of stolen (bits of) identity
• Blocking FaceBook Manages What?

A Happy New Year to you! 2007 is yesterday, 2008 is today. I am thinking about what gave the best returns in ‘07, and plan to focus my efforts in those areas for ‘08 – an “RoE” model. If you’ve been dragged through the mill on large IT projects or vendors, you will be familiar with the concept of ROI – return on investment. RoE is the productivity equivalent: Return on Effort. What was the output, based on what you have to put in. It isn’t about being lazy and not putting the effort in. It is about being efficient, investing effort into the things that yield a return.

A new year gives the euphoria of a clean slate to work from. It is a bit of an artificial fresh start, but a new calendar year does bring a focus to putting out the old and bringing in the new. Enjoy making your New Year’s resolutions, but do start by focussing on one change, then you can build from there. The others will be there for you to come back and work on. It is better to fully succeed in making one change, rather than partially make five.

These were the top 10 posts during December, just in case you missed any of them:

1. Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour? (more than 20,000 views in the first week)
2. 5 Ways to Reduce the Stress of Choice
3. 10 Tips To Gain You a Better 08
4. The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination
5. A Presentation Lession From Al Gore
6. Watch out for the frogs!
7. The Rather Complex Issue of Identity
8. Too Much Choice – Too Little Happiness
9. You’re Having a Laugh Aren’t You?
10. A Little Bit of Philosophy Really Does Make You Smart

Her comes 08, make it great!

Related Posts

• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• E-mail 2.0

This is my 100th post and it is also the first anniversary of the WOWNDADI blog. It is only the 12th of December, but I’ve already been scooped on the first end of year review post for 2007, in my RSS feeds that honour goes to Chris Garrett for his great post on the 80/20 rule.

It seems like a good moment to look back and reflect, before the festivities start and the memories of last year fade away. I’m sharing my notes with the hope that they will provide you with food for thought. I could happily do a full post on any of them.

1. Set good goals.

Write them down and review them on a regular (weekly?) basis. If they evolve over the year, that is great, but if you forget them, that is bad. Very bad. When goals are written down and reflected on, they have a strange habit of being achieved. Nothing mystical about it, it’s just a productivity fact. Make yourself accountable to someone you trust, by sharing your goals with them. You’ll deepen a friendship, or at least get some feedback. At the very least be accountable to yourself, as a gentle but firm task master.

2. Quit stuff. Seriously, quit stuff.

Looking back through the year’s diary/iCal/Outlook and through the mental memory banks provides a good list of things to drop. Deciding what needs to not happen has value too – planned abandonment. Next year will have the same number of days as this. Dissipating less is the only way to make sure that there are more days to invest in achieving those goals (See 1).

3. Live purposefully and be productive.

Live purposefully, every minute. Efficiency is not the same as productivity. It is good to be efficient, but being productive actually starts with doing the right things, not doing the wrong things faster. Be clear on what you are doing and why you are doing it at each transition during the day. What is your intentional outcome?

Once you know the outcome, focus on ACTIONS that will get you there. Set time limits on activities: I’ll stop at 3:30pm and move on to the next thing. Stick to them. Be an outcome-orientated task executor. Focus on outputs and actions that produce things and create external change, rather than on inputs and re-arranging thoughts (see 2). It is great to think about things, but if you want to make a difference in the world, make stuff and make stuff happen. You’ll be happier and you won’t procrastinate.

4. Play lots.

Having fun is a sensible and agreeable outcome (see 3). Plan fun things to do, and make sure that they happen. Plan time out. Join a new community, get involved and do some random new things. Be social off-line as well as on-line. Yes, do work, but do play too.

5. Build up and support your network of friends.

In ways that you can, that they will appreciate, help your friends. Build your close personal network by investing in those people. You’ll most likely find that they support you in return, and that helping them does you a world of emotional good. We have so many ways to stay in touch, from Facebook to IM. Use the richest communications medium whenever you can, free air: meet face to face. Failing that, fire up a webcam or pick up the phone. Turn on some social ambiance, using a private blog, twitter, flickr, Facebook, SMS or whatever works for your network.

6. Commit to learning something new.

Pick a new skill or area of knowledge and learn it. Ideally, pick a topic outside of what earns you money today. What would you love to learn? Buy a good book. It will cost less than a CD and will increase your earning potential, change your outlook and broaden your horizons. Bonus: collect the books together on a bookshelf. People will see them and think you are smart. No, really, they will! Apparently that is a great dating tip. 1 in 4 people in the US didn’t read a book last year (AP Poll), so your bit to make sure your country doesn’t become illiterate. Because I am still a geek at heart, I’ll let reading on a Kindle count (even if Phillipe Starck entertainingly panned it at LeWeb 07). If you really don’t want to read a book, then enrol in a course. You’ll meet people and join a new community (See 4). What got you here won’t get you there, wherever there is. Keep asking questions.

7. Review.

Review your week and your work, regularly. What is getting results and what isn’t? Figure out a way to kill activity that isn’t productive, in order to make room for the things that are. This will create time to learn and build your skills (see 6). Avid followers of David Alan’s Getting Things Done site the weekly review as one of the best aspects of the system. What do you need to get better at? (see 5)

8. Be focussed!

How focussed are you? Trying to do too much means that nothing gets done. The combination of focus and planned abandonment inherently creates efficiency. I know that points 1,2 and 3 already covered this, but I figure on the forth mention it might penetrate my thick skull. With all of the possibilities that are offered up today, you can’t them all. This is really hard, because we know we could do it all, if only we had enough time. We haven’t. Get over it. Some things work better than others (see 7). Attention will likely be the scarcest commodity in the next decade. Start hoarding now.

9. Be committed!

Be committed to the things that are important. Do not waver or slow. Capture and understand your commitments, then execute on them. It you commit to something, write/type it down. Keep these together in one place where you can see them all quickly, and then tuck them away. Be careful not to take on things that you shouldn’t or can’t. Renegotiate your commitments if you need to (see 9).

10. Be thinking and understanding.

In a knowledge economy this will be the key skill and time will be the key resource. Even if you can’t spell them yet, I couldn’t, epistemology and ontology will be your friends in the future. More on them in the new year.

Live the year like it is both your first and your last, but also appreciate the past and plan for your future! What did you learn this year, and what will you carry forward to next? Share your ideas…

Related Posts

• iPod to Go – The iPod as a GTD capture device
• Caught by CauseWired
• WordCamp UK 2008 – A Qik Look Back…
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2

As I was saying, too much choice can lead to too little happiness, but the psychology can be turned around. Thank you Melanie for the recent great comment, your “so this is progress” post nails so many of today’s technology overload issues on the head. Technology should make us more productive and efficient, not less.

Here are some tips to help reduce the stress and anxiety caused by the daily choices technology gives all of us. There is a real-world and a virtual-world application for each, so something for the office and something for the PC.

1. Make decisions once and move on them

How many times do you need to re-evaluate each decision? The research shows that permanently leaving our options open causes more stress and less success. If you don’t consciously make the decision, you will carry on trying to make it subconsciously, flattening your batteries in the process. Make the decision, then make that decision concrete. Take an action that moves it on, so that next time you think of it you are having a new set of thoughts, rather than unproductively revisiting old ones – Don’t wear grooves into your mental pathways.

Remember that there is always one more piece of critical information that will really, really help with the decision you are trying to make. Remember too, that it is unlikely to actually affect the outcome of your decision! Don’t wait every last piece of detail. Make a decision, then commit to moving on. As it becomes a habit, watch your stress reduce.

2. Declutter to move faster

Clear out your office and clear off your desktop. All of that clutter hanging around, both real and virtual, slows you down. It is a constant reminder of decisions still to be made, tasks undone and things unprocessed. Deal with it, even if it means putting it all in a folder for later. Put it out of sight. It will free your brain up for the task that you are doing right now, free from the distraction of the ones that you aren’t. Reducing clutter limits your brains options in a wonderful good way.

3. Have less to get more

Do you really need everything that you have? Fifty pens, four text editors, three mp3 players? This is your life, not the twelve days of Christmas. By using less tools, you can focus on becoming expert at using the ones you have, without worrying if you’ve fired up the right application or picked up the right gadget. Less gadgets and less things means less stress.

4. Create Routines To Get Peace

Routines and habitual behaviour are effective ways to reduce the number of choices required each day. Think of them like presets on a radio, that save you scanning around. They are automated choices with a repeated play back mechansism. If you do exactly the same thing when you wake up each day, you don’t have to think about what to do when you wake up everyday! If you build good habits that deal with the things that regularly need doing, then you have just de-stressed a whole area of your life. In the virtual-world, see what you can script. How many of the things you do on your PC are repeatable tasks? Have the computer take care of them, that’s what it is for. Most operating systems have good scripting tools. Scripts are good for the computer and they can be good for you as well.

5. Commit to one thing at once

When you have picked one thing to work on, work on that one thing like it was the only thing in the world. Build the habit of closing everything else out. When you are doing the one thing, it isn’t the time to think about the ten things are you aren’t doing. You are doing the one thing. The power of focus is incredible, build the habit of getting into a flow state and having that ‘matrix moment’ where you look up and it is as if the rest of the world has been moving in slow motion whilst you have darted around everything. You’ve achieved lots, but the clock has hardly moved. If you are struggling to get started, check out The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination and Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour?.
Be productive, be happy, and share what works for you!

Related Posts

• Too Much Choice – Too Little Happiness
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• Power up your business with a Wiki

These Things Come in Threes

Three things in two days. First, I loose contact with my phone. Second, my MacBook Pro dies. Then, in a third and final twist, traffic on the blog increased by 2000% (yes, two thousand) and I get locked out of WordPress. Coincidence? Of course. I got a free lesson in personal productivity in the process; How do you survive when your options are shut down?

Day One

On day one, I headed into London, having agreed to phone everyone I was meeting when I located a suitable coffee shop to gather in. I arrived and reached for my phone. No phone in my pocket. No phone in my bag. Generally, no phone anywhere. How did we survive before we had a phones in our pockets? Perhaps we were more organized, perhaps we just wondered around lost. We only had certain opportunities to communicate, so we planned a little more and were a little less spontaneous. We certainly weren’t sending a text when someone was trying to talk to us! When we got opportunities to communicate, we made the most of them.

There I was with one pound in my pocket. Now, the way the dollar is going, one pound may be worth about $5 at the moment, but it still only gets you one phone call from a UK phone box. As I stood in the pouring rain in central London, staring at the phone box, I didn’t know who to call to sort out the mess. Miraculously, it all worked out fine. I was still glad when I got my phone back later in the day.

Day Two

On day two, I flipped open the lid of my trusty MacBook Pro to do my semi-regular backup and… Nothing. Bright light on front, but black screen. 18 months old and it was dead. Cue raised blood pressure and a trip to the Apple store. Despite mouth-to-mouth from the man at the genius bar (note to self: they really don’t like it when you call it the geek bar), there was no getting any sense out of the thing. The result? A very productive day of phone calls and ticking off items on the to do list that had been left undone because I’d been caught up in email, slide creation and the wonders of the Internet. The MacBook story is to be continued… For now, my trusty G4 is helping me through, sans Microsoft Windows.

The Psychology of Happiness

So, a little bit of Psychology, to fuzz up your day, specifically the psychology of choice and of happiness. Two gentlemen, Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert, have made these topics more accessible via their TED talks last year. To summarize and synthesize the two: The more choice we have, the less happy we are. When we do get choices, we don’t use them well, and when we make mistakes, we rationalize them to ourselves, but still we worry that we didn’t do the right thing.

And Finally

We are at our most happy when we aren’t given too many choices, because choices cause stress. Despite that, we always want the ability to have lots of choice, we call it freedom. We want the freedom to keep our options open. Together that creates some interesting insight into why all of this technology causes us to procrastinate. Technology creates so many different possibilities, and with it a whole range of new decisions for us to worry about.

See also: 5 Ways to reduce stress, by reducing choices.

Related Posts

• Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour?
• 5 Ways to Reduce the Stress of Choice
• The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination
• Watch out for the frogs!
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

Here’s a productivity tip for you, especially if you are suffering from procrastination. It involves a little attitude shift and a mind trick, but it can be very effective.

How often do you have a task that seems insurmountable or indigestible? Do you find that you just can’t get started on it? There is a phrase we use around our here, “have you eaten your frog yet?” Frogs are the things that you need to do, but don’t want to do, for whatever reason (for a bit of background see Watch out for the frogs and Frogs, Gnats, Butterflies and Gems).

These things get put off, because they are seen as impossibly hard to swallow. At the start of each day, pick the ugliest one and get working on it, so it doesn’t hang around.

Planning can be a form of procrastination

I used to approach things by carving out half hour slots in my diary, and scheduling various tasks across the day or week. The problem with that approach is that it creates a lot of pressure to perform, and it increases the likelihood of procrastination. Every little distraction and interuption becomes an excuse to put off doing the scheduled thing until later. By mid-afternoon, that hour’s commitment is starting to feel like a mountain to climb. We are aware when we get off-task like this, but it doesn’t help with getting back on track. So what is to be done?

Take a bite of the elephant

I hope that no-one would actually eat an elephant, but it is a common phrase and a strong image (see Chasing Mice and Eating Elephants for one discussion). The way to deal with a monster task is to take it one little piece at a time. Pick the task or project and say “Let me see what I can get done on this in the next hour.” Commit to starting on the task, and working only that task for the next hour. No more, and no less. You might even plan a reward for yourself at the end of the hour. It might be a drink, a walk or a bit of random procrastination of your choice, like a quick bit of web surfing.

Pick the task, and shut out any other distractions. Create focus for yourself. Look at the clock, note the time and set to work. Remember, you aren’t committing to an outcome or an achievement, you are just investing an hour into a task to move things forward.

At the end of the hour, let yourself loose, but first look back at what you have achieved. I guarantee that you will be amazed at the results. Celebrate the achievement. That success creates forward momentum and boosts your productivity, you’ll want to get going on more things.

Amaze yourself and let the pressure off

Note that it isn’t “I must work on this for an hour”. You are not beating yourself up or trying to put yourself under pressure. You are choosing to be creative – “let me see what I can do” – playing a game, having a little race. Say I will do what I can do, and all that will be enough. Set yourself up for success. Anything that you get done is bonus. Rather than “I must do x” which sets you up for failure and is going to trigger fear and stress responses.

Once the frog is gone, it is gone

The one hour approach makes those frogs easier to swallow. If you know the frog eating is only going to last an hour, and you are only going to eat what you can, it is that much less pressured.

The feeling of having that tasks out of the way is a wonderful boost to productivity for the rest of the day. If an hour seems like too much, try the beginners version and go for a very focussed 20 minutes. This technique has worked wonders for me, let me know how it works for you.

Related Articles: Too Much Choice – Too Little Happiness (how choice causes procrastination), Watch out for the frogs! (understanding different types of task) and The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination (overview of Neil Fiore’s excellent book).

Related Posts

• Too Much Choice – Too Little Happiness
• The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination
• Watch out for the frogs!
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Broadband Maslow and the Hierarchy of Human Needs

Habits are curious things, studying them has been insightful and enjoyable. We are all creatures of habit, apparently. There is a lot of focus on breaking habits, but not much on making habits. Habits can be a problem, but they can also be a positive tool. Good reviewing habits are a key part of Getting Things Done. Good communication habits are key to effective presentation and to communication. Generally, it is a good habit to review your habits. They are formed for a reason, but can persist long after that reason has become irrelevant.Habit change is about introducing or removing choice. Habits free up the thinking part of the brain. As an example, in the early days of driving, everything is a conscious effort, which can be very exhausting. For the experienced driver, most of the driving is done ‘out of habit’, there is little conscious thought required. So an experienced driver finds it easy to have a conversation while driving. I am gradually building more habits to ‘automate’ day to day work and free up my brain for more creative thinking.

Habits are behaviours that slip past our conscious decision making processes. This can make them dangerous, but it is also a key to breaking them. To break a habit, force a conscious choice and make it a manageable one. Identify situations that support the habit you are trying to break and avoid them where possible or create a new competing habit. A competing habit is one that makes the old habit impossible, or at least forces a conscious choice to do it. For example, to break a snoozing habit, hitting the snooze button on the alarm and falling back to sleep, move the alarm far enough away that you have to get out of bed to hit it. If you loose the evening to TV watching, but would rather spend it studying, take the TV power cord to work and leave it there. You get the idea. Make the habit difficult, if not impossible. I’ve been having hours of fun with this one.

Creating a habit involves repetition and positive feedback. Starting means removing or limiting choice, until the habit is formed. Tell a friend about the new habit you are planning and tell them them to ask you how it is going, surrender some choices. There don’t seem to be any real shortcuts to creating new habits, it is just hardwork and discipline. Don’t try to add too many habits at once. Better to develop one and succeed, than go for four and fail.

My main focus in recent times has been on creating good habits. A change of work routine has created an ideal opportunity to change my habits. Good habits can be more important than good goals. Goals are an end, good habits can be the means.

Related posts you may enjoy: A WINning strategy for productivity, Do something different, for a change! and Chasing Mice and Eating Elephants.

Related Posts

• Change From Within
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• Power up your business with a Wiki

My personal mission to increase productivity, by decreasing the number of gadgets I use, took a sideways step recently. Since I started listening to podcasts, lectures and audio books, my iPod nano has become a fairly central part of my life. Now my new companion has even started listening to me, resulting in an even deeper relationship. We are spending lots of time together. I don’t think my family has noticed this new interloper yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time.

The MicroMemo for iPod is a tiny device that plugs into the iPod Nano, providing a microphone, an audio input, and an extra button. Despite the fact that the nano has more processing power and memory than the first supercomputer I used, it definitely lacks a decent ‘input’ capability. The MicroMemo fixes that by turning the iPod into a universal audio capture device. Plug it in, and the iPod jumps to a recording screen. From then on, the iPod is ready to capture every spoken thought at the click of a button.

Getting Things Done and a number of other productivity philosophies promote the idea of recording and collecting all of ones ideas in single place. This is a great hack for improving organisation and creativity. Having a capture device creates a means to seize fleeting thoughts and ideas, before they are lost to the next random incoming call, email or conversation. Never loose another valuable thought or miss a ‘I must do that’ again. May be you will, but now there will be one less excuse for doing so.

Capturing thoughts and ideas rewards and encourages creative thinking. Rather than losing thoughts, you can capture them. Now your mind is free to move on to the next thought, knowing that you can act on the last one later. This is a positive cycle that rewards creative behaviour, because those creative thoughts get turned into action, rather than lost. Of course, you now need a ‘processing’ step to deal with all these new memos. The MicroMemo makes this easy, by syncing to iTunes. The next time I plug in to top up on pod-casts and music, the memos appear in their very own playlist, ready to be played back and acted on.

The MicroMemo isn’t just for short memos. You can record hours of dictation too. This blog post started off as a voice memo on the iPod. If you do use it for dictation, there is the small matter of transcription to deal with. Unless you are an accomplished touch typist, dictation can be a time consuming chore. However, help is at hand, thanks to the outsource your life principle of the 4 hour work week, and a handy blog post by the ever developing Matt. There are some very affordable on-line transcription services (Matt’s post covers some these services and his experiences with them). Isn’t life good?

I’ve used a pen and pad as my main capture device in the past. It works well, and I am sure that I will continue to do so, but voice memos do have a number of unique strengths. Voice memos put the ‘stuff’ that is captured ‘out of sight’. That means less clutter and distractions, reducing the noise from ideas coming back at you off of the page or piles of post it notes. Capturing verbally is also faster that writing and can be done on the move. You speak at around 200 words per minute but write at about 30, and that’s if you aren’t trying to use a pen and paper one-handed as you are running for a train. It is also useful to have an audio capture tool to hand during interesting talks – do ask permission before you record. You can also record your own speeches and presentations – a great way to reflect and improve your communication skills.

See Also: iPhone hits the UK and Information at Your Finger Tips

Related Posts

• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• 10 Tips To Gain You a Better 08
• Communicating With Yourself – More on the iPod and iPhone as a Universal GTD Capture Device
• Dealing with the Do Its That Just Don’t Get Done

I can’t remember where I heard it, it was a long time ago, but someone talked to me about WINning – WIN – What’s Important right Now. Picking the most important thing to do right now, and focusing on it, 100%.

It is a little like Covey’s First Things First habit. The challenge, of course, is working out what is important right now! Prioritisation can be a tricky thing. Getting Things Done doesn’t really major on prioritisation, to me it is more focussed on getting everything that needs to be done, done. I probably need to look at that aspect of GTD again though, unless someone out there has a view! Covey has the four quadrants:

• Urgent, Important
• Urgent, Not Important
• Not Urgent, Important
• Not Urgent, Not Important

Some people use the ABC123 system to prioritize tasks, popularized by Alan Lakein. Which got me thinking: Perhaps there is a hierarchy of tasks, just like Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? Are there tasks that trump any others? As it turns out, there seems to be some balance between a simple ‘do the most important thing right now’ and a ‘boxing’ or category-based approach.

Take business as an example. There are different needs that have to be met, think about concepts like revenue, costs, investment and efficiency. If one is tackled and the others are neglected, the business will fail. Take these same ideas and then apply them to general life:

• does this activity free up time? (efficiency)
• does this increase my earning potential? (investment – skills development/resource creation)
• does this activity generate income? (‘revenue’)
• does this reduce my outgoings? (‘costs’)

All of these needs should be served in a truly productive life. How about writing four lists this weekend, then picking the highest impact, winning item, off of each list and getting it done this week?

You might find some extra inspiration in the Zen Habit’s automate your income post and the Habitual Habits post.

Related Posts

• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• E-mail 2.0

The big problem with getting good at building to do lists, is that you end up with long lists of things to be done! The list just seems to keep on growing and growing. There are lots of reasons that can happen and lots of ways to deal with it. Recently I had noticed a few things were lingering on my list and causing it to bulk up. I decided to try a new tactic and learnt some interesting things on the way, in studying those lingering tasks and why they end up there.

I’ve been moving to using ThinkingRock, from Outlook, and was trying to complete my outlook to do list. Yes, two to do lists in two different applications. Not big. Not Clever. Definitely not Getting Things Done. Regardless, one of the things that Outlook does let you do is to sort tasks by last modified time. I set outlook to sort the list that way and started paying attention to the oldest things on the list. If I rewrote a task, the last modified time changed and it bounced off of the bottom. FIFO – first in, first out – task management. I started to notice some specific things with those ‘hard to shift’ tasks which had been lingering and built some strategies to deal with them.

1. The Un-actionable Thin Mist – A Task So Vague…

Some items that were just too fluffy to actually be done: “make office look nice”, “look at competitors”. Badly written to dos.

Tactic: Rewrite to focus them and make them specific, e.g. “file piles of paper to office cabinet”, “write a SWAT on the top 4 competitors” and so on. In outlook, I pasted the original to do into the notes section for reference. In ThinkingRock, I just broke the item down into projects or sub-projects.

2. The Monster Task – A Task So Huge…

To do’s that are half a lifetime of work. When you see something like “read war and peace” on a to do list, you know it isn’t going to get done in the next 30 minutes. So many things get trapped on a to do list because they are simply too big to digest in one go, they are projects.

Tactic: Break them down. Rewrite as a few smaller tasks, or in ThinkingRock press the button to promote it to a project and create new tasks under it. Read the book a chapter at a time. Boom. It is off the bottom of the list, and more likely to have progress made on it.

3. The Hidden Dependency – The Task Isn’t The Next Action…

Task are sometimes stuck because of a hidden dependency. It requires a resource to enable it to happen, or a new skill. Perhaps it needs a specific person, or requires being at a physical location, or requires a piece of information or knowledge.

Tactic: Replace the to do with an action that gets that resource, and/or put the to do into your diary on the date that you will have the resource. GTD’s contexts are a great system for tracking location based dependencies, by having separate lists for tasks that are location dependent.

4. The Frog – A Task So Ugly You Don’t Want To Kiss It…

Sometimes I look at the task and think, “I really don’t want to do that.” I’m sure you don’t ever do that, but just in case it ever happens to you… Eat that frog!

Tactic: Make the frog tasty and easier to eat, combine the undesirable with something nice “sweep the path while listening to favourite new album on iPod”, or whatever works for you.

5. Its information! Not A Task At All!

This sounds silly, but I still find a few of these get onto the list, you know, “George is a dog”. Am I going to do something about it? If not, then file it somewhere with all the other information and get it off of the to do list.

Tactic: File it somewhere, or work out what the actual action is.

6. It is not Worth it.

Give it up. Sometimes it is a question of saying “Will this make a lasting difference?” and realising it won’t.
Tactic: Practice Planned Abandonment.

Sometimes I found combinations of all of these tactics most effective. “Process and pay the 20 bills in the in tray” is changed to 4 lots of “process and pay 5 bills while listening to new favourite album”.

There are probably a few others, let me know in the comments. Sometimes I just making sure I prod the oldest item on my to do list and get it done or using some of these tactics has drastically reduced the size of my to do list.

Related Posts

• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• iPod to Go – The iPod as a GTD capture device
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done

I have to confess, I am not great at saying ‘no’ and I don’t like giving up on things. I have always thought of ‘no’ as an ugly word, but the more I read, the more I am changing my mind. When it comes to doing things, ‘no’ and ‘yes’ go together.

If you say ‘yes’ to one thing, you are saying ‘no’ to another. This is also true for beginnings and endings. Sometimes you have to stop one thing in order to start another. you have to consciously give up. Having spent a bit of time on procrastination, it seems a good idea to look at what to do when you want to stop doing something!

I am currently reading the Laurie Beth Jones book “Jesus Life Coach“, I’ve not got to the end, so the jury is still out. However, in one of the chapters she writes about planned abandonment, pointing out that this is not the same as false abandonment, that is ‘just quitting’. To some extent the second habit in Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People hints at the idea of endings with “Begin with the end in mind”, as do many other productivity books. The idea of planning to, and including, the end, or of outcome-based planning and doing is something I want to come back in a future post. For now let’s take it that there must be a planned end.

“If we are to remain mission focused, as we must if we are to be relevant in an uncertain age, then abandoning those things that do not further the mission is a leadership imperative.” Frances Hesselbein

Frances Hesselbein worked for the Drucker foundation and was the former CEO of the Girl Scouts, discusses the principle in her book Hesselbein on Leadership. Peter Drucker recommended it as best practice for businesses. It seems it would be a good thing for people too.

Planned abandonment is about learning when and how to say ‘enough’, and planning for it. The idea is used in town planning and in the lifecycle management of products. When entering into a commitment, determine how long that commitment will be for. Create some bounds on it, “I will help you with this for the next three months, then let’s work out what happens afterward that”. One of the most major dimensions of a commitment or a task is its duration. If we are able to understand and control that, we have made a great leap forward in creating enough time to get the right things done.

Why is planned abandonment such a good idea? Quite simply because sometimes things we have done for years are just habits, rather than real priorities. They might have been a priority at one point in our lives, but that has changed and we haven’t stopped to reevaluate them. We need to set our priorities above our habits, or looking at it another way, we need to make a habit of our priorities.

By adopting the idea of planned abandonment, we create a review mechanism. There is a point in time at which we say “I can stop this now, without disappointment or guilt.” It might be that we get to that point and decide that we actually want to carry on, and that it fine. To be clear, there are lifelong commitments, such as our mission, our values and aims that we don’t abandon. I don’t want to abandon being a father or husband. However, there are also finite commitments, where we review our aims. It is sensible to understand how long a task or project is going to take before taking it on. Likewise, before starting something, make sure there is enough time to finish it. One achieved goal is much better than a dozen that are 98% complete.

The great thing about planning an ending, is that it makes room for new beginnings. As one thing ends, another one begins. It keeps focus on ‘the main thing’, sometimes it can even help us discover that main thing, our mission, by stripping away all else. Look at what not to do, as well as what to do.

Related Posts

• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• E-mail 2.0

Is it just me, or are e-mail and productivity at work just two things that don’t belong in the same sentence together? I find it amazing that companies invest so much money in deploying e-mail systems and yet spend nothing on training people to communicate effectively with them. Perhaps you work in a company that is uniquely different? If so, I would love to hear about it!

E-mail lacks so many of the visual and auditory cues that we need to communicate effectively, yet people write less clearly and deliberately than they would in a letter.

The opportunity for mis-communication and emotional trauma is almost endless. Recently I have been comparing the organizational effectiveness of e-mail, phone calls, conference calls and face to face communication. I am sure you won’t be surprised to hear that e-mail comes out bottom in terms of results achieved against time invested.

My conclusions?

• If you can pick up the phone and get hold of the person, pick up the phone. In the long run it is actually quicker and cheaper.
• A conference call will achieve more than an email storm almost any day.
• If something has emotional element (e.g. might cause a strong emotional reaction), then the communication does not belong on email.

Related Posts

• E-mail 2.0
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Social Media Week London
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis