Graham Chastney

How do you get more done when you are busy? Here are my top 5 tips for overcoming busyness:

1. Productivity not activity

When busyness strikes people will often leap to the nearest activity in a hope that this will help them to get through the pile. This creates activity, but destroys productivity, and it’s really productivity that you need.

This might sound obvious but it’s just as important to prioritise when you are busy as it is when you aren’t. Having prioritised you can then get through the items productively.

2. Lists are your friend

One of the key lessons of the GTD methodology is that we can waste lots of effort managing the information in our head. Making lists help you to focus your brain on getting things done rather than on managing the information.

3. Learn to skim read

You can’t read all of the information available to you – after all if you printed-out the internet it would take you 57,000 years to read it all.

There is lots of stuff that you don’t need to read all of, you just need to understand what it is saying and that is what skim reading is all about.

It’s a skill that takes a little while to become confident in, but it’s well worth developing.

4. Take “Out” times

The productivity of your work times is defined, to a greater extent, by your “out” times. If you don’t take the “out” times your productivity in the “in” times will steadily diminish until all of the extra time that you are putting in is worthless.

Exercise in your “out” times is also very important because exercise is just as important for your brain as it is for your body.

5. Say “No”

The danger when you are busy is that you are venerable to being put upon. Not everything that everybody asks you to do is important. When you are busy it can feel easier to just accept things rather than go through the hassle of challenging them. This, of course, just adds to the problem.

I do this a lot and the result is that I just dig a deeper and deeper hole for myself.

(This idea for a blog came via twitter following my What would you like me to write about? post. Please fell free to add other ideas)

I’m not sure whether this counts as a real fully fledged concept, or just an idea, or actually even whether there is a difference.

The idea comes from Jonah Lehrer over on The Frontal Cortext blog where he reflects on the diversity of music that we enjoy (his pretext is the events at the MTV awards with Kanye West and Taylor Swift).

It got me thinking, in what other ways are we culturally plastic:

• Food: The range of food available in the UK is incredible. Foods from every country in the world and even fusions of different food types. We skip between them without really thinking about it, something that my grandparents would never have done.
• Video/Television/Films: I know a few people who will only go to the movies to see a certain type of film, but there aren’t many of them. And the range of film genre is increasing all of the time.
• Reading: Looking at the book shelf beside me there is a huge variety of material. There’s no Mills and Boon, but apart from that there is practically every other type of writing.

So what impact does this plasticity have on the world of work?

Teams that accept diversity work better and produce stronger results. As people become more tolerant of, and learn to enjoy cultural differences hopefully this will be reflected in teams. This will be especially true for international teams which will become more prevalent as technology enables it.

I suspect, to, that people we start to choose the places where they work on the basis of the diversity of the culture. Places with a monolithic culture we be regarded  as stale and dull. Skilful business managers will be able to create diverse cultures that are highly productive.

Some of you who read this blog know my quite well, others of you who only read about me here are starting to know me.

So I thought I’d ask the question.

What would you like me to write about?

Not sure why I’ve never though to ask before.

I’m writing this post sitting on a full train using a Blackberry while reading an article that states "within the next few years as many as 20 million people will be choosing to work one or more days a week in third-place facilities – that is, public or private spaces built specifically for the temporary or semi-temporary business purposes of companies and individuals".

And I’ve spent most of today in a meeting in a hotel lobby…it’s a changing world of work.

By far the most popular post on this blog over the last few weeks has been my recent one on team development and forming-storming-norming-performing.

I’ve been involved in hundreds of teams and, in my opinion, the most important factor in the effectiveness of these teams has been the formation phase.

If a child isn’t given the right food in its early years its growth will be stunted and it will never reach its full potential. This is the same for teams that aren’t given the right start in life.

What is the right start though?

I mainly work on technical teams and there are, from personal experience, a number of things that, if done right, put the team on a firm foundation:

Early Face-to-Face Meeting

There  might not be any tangible benefits to an initial meeting, but there are a lot of intangible benefits. These intangible benefits are very important for good ongoing development.

At a good face-to-face meeting the team will start to build a rapport that will be vital in the storming phase.

We don’t have any technology, yet, that replaces the power of face-to-face meetings.

An Openness to Communicate

Secrets are a huge problem for team development. Hidden agendas are very destructive. In order to overcome these issue people need to communicate.

A Lack of Pre-conceived Ideas and an Abundance of Open Minds.

I have been in many a team where someone (sometimes me) believed that they had all of the answers and all that anyone needed to do was to get on with what they said. This might produce a quick result, but isn’t likely to produce the best result.

Where members of a team have had a previous bad experience of working together this can add to the problem.

Focussing on the Solution

Some people will always look on the bright side of life, and others will look on the opposite, negative side. Where members of a team focus, quickly, on the possible solutions the team formation is a good one.

Working Beyond the Boundaries

People are normally part of a team because they have a role, or a skill, or a position. If they only do the job that they are their to do, the team is likely to remain as a set of parts and not become a unit.

Valuing Diversity

Different members of the team will have different skills and insights. An openness to recognising and valuing these differences will let the team form more quickly.

I’m sure that there are all sorts of things that I’ve forgotten but these will do for now. Do you have some that you think are vital?

Having written about the things that I could waste my time doing I really liked this visualisation of Digital Distraction.