Category: Productivity

Do work – Delight in work

I’ve always tried to be in a position where I love what I am doing at work. I’m not a mercenary who is just doing it for the money – I need to feel a value in what I do. The money could never make up for the feeling of achievement.

That need to feel value often means that I’ll go beyond the bare minimum so that I can get to the real meaning of what I am doing.

We have a standard methodology for some of what we do as an organisation but I regard it as a privilege to be in a position where I have a reasonable amount of autonomy over what I do. This freedom means I can go above and beyond when there is value in doing so and delight in doing it – a bit like this ice-cream seller:

I could spend my life delivering ice-cream, but I’d rather be delighting the customer and myself while I’m at it.

Hat tip to The Chief Happiness Officer for the video.

Things Don't Get Done in Meetings

I’ve been an observer of meetings for some time. It’s something that we do in business but I’m sure most people have no idea why.

This morning I’m struck by two thoughts.

The first comes from listening to a Daniel Pink podcast talking about “autonomy”.from his recent book – Drive.

The other comes from Leadership Freak and states wonderfully a set of 4 ways that Managers roadblock productivity one of which states:

Meetings – Too many meetings that include too many people that share too much detail. Here’s some motivation to abbreviate or cancel meetings. They are expensive. A one hour meeting with 8 people in attendance costs their combined salaries plus lost productivity. Remember, you don’t get anything done in a meeting. Things get done after meetings.

(Highlights mine)

Meetings are nearly always the opposite of autonomy.

They are there to serve the purposes of the person who organised the meeting, and no-one else.

Mutually beneficial meetings are the rarest of all things.

Meetings rarely produce any meaningful outcomes and all too often come to the wrong conclusion that is changed at a later date.

I could go on, but I’m determined to write shorter blog posts in 2011 – and I’ve got a meeting to go to.

Getting noticed

When my children were younger and we were driving between places we would point things out along the way.

Most of times we said "did you see that…?" the response, particularly when they were really young, would be "what…".

It just wouldn’t be on their radar. It didn’t matter whether we were pointing out a squirrel by the side of the road or Wembley stadium they would miss it.

When we talked to them later they would tell us about other things that they had seen. They weren’t looking at nothing but they weren’t looking at what we thought was important.

While I’m on parental stories. What is it about children that gives them selective hearing. Shout as loud as you like for some attention and you’ve got about as much chance as a hedgehog crossing the M6. Talk about them in a whisper and they are there in a shot.

We’re not too different in our working life.

Business attention is rarely focussed on the truly important things. Much of the time so much attention is looking at the business belly button fluff that it’s practically impossible to get the right people to contemplate the important issues.

It’s almost as if we need the opposite of stealth-mode for the activities that really need to be noticed. The problem, most of the time, is that the radar is so alight with things to be noticed that it’s difficult to see them as anything other than a big amorphous blob.

So how do you get noticed? Here are some thing that I try to do which I think make a difference:

  • Regular communication is better than great communication.
  • Keep it simple and direct – if you need people to understand something don’t leave them to work it out, they probably won’t.
  • Understand that they don’t care the way you do. There emotional and rational perspective will be different to yours.
  • Sometimes it’s the person communicating, not the message, so try getting a different person to say the same thing.
  • Pictures are your friend.
  • If you can make it a headline – do. But realise that there is a science to headlines.
  • Keep the message consistent.

Unfortunately, even after doing all of this, there are times when you still won’t be noticed.

Stress…

I little thought on stress for today:

image

From The Chief Happiness Officer.

Read more about the Top 5 myths about workplace stress.

Stop looking for the Silver Bullet – it doesn't exist

I don’t think that a week goes by without someone somewhere suggesting that their latest piece of technology is a silver bullet for a problem that someone is facing.

People then leap on the back of that technology, or concept, or idea and proclaim it as the new holy grail.

Lake District SnowI’ve been in IT a long time and have never seen one of these technology predictions come to pass in its all things to all men guise.

Don’t get me wrong, many of these technologies/concepts/ideas have made a significant difference to the way that we work, but they’ve never turned out to be the panacea that some professed them to be.

Experience says that IT silver bullets are as common as flying reindeer, or vegetarian great white sharks.

What puzzles me is that people are still looking for and still taken in by the rally cry of another IT silver bullet.

What is it that makes us participate in such madness?

If the car industry tried to tell us that they had invented a vehicle that required no fuel we’d never believe them.

If the food industry tried to tell us that they had invented a meal that would lead to eternal life for everyone we’d treat them with scorn.

If the Emperor tried to convince us that his new clothes were so wonderful and fine we  would surely shout out?

What makes the IT industry different?

Are we spending so much time listening to our own hype that we think it’s the reality?

Do we really want a silver bullet anyway? Sometimes it’s the journey that’s as important as the destination.

Why can’t we recognise the Emperor’s new clothes?

Or perhaps it isn’t just IT?

Scan Reading – Summary Reading

I have a confession to make, I rarely read all of a document.

Jimmy and Granddad visit Alnwick GardensThere, I’ve said it, it’s out in the open.

Why should I? It’s rare that the whole of a document, or to that matter, an email or a blog, has been written wholly with me in mind.

It’s been written to communicate something, so I need to be able to read enough of the document to understand what is being communicated, to the level that I need to understand it.

It’s not a productive use of my time to read all of a document when I’ve understood what needs to be understood by only reading part of it.

I’m sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but it is the reality of the world in which I live.

It’s a skill that has been born out of necessity. In the technical industry people don’t generally rank too highly on the spectrum of brevity. It’s much more likely that people will say too much than not enough.

Dilbert.com

One of the first lesson I learnt in summary reading was that you can’t get a summary of a document from the section title Introduction and certainly not from the section titled Executive Summary. I always thought it was a rather cruel trick to expect people who have not been executives to know what an executive might want to know about in a summary – assuming, of course, that a Technical Executive wants to read the same summary as a Project Executive or Finance Executive.

The need to understand a document at the summary level is one reason why I still print out quite a lot of documents. There have been all sorts of advances in screen technology and displays, but I still haven’t found one that allows me to flick through a document, forwards and backwards,

I wrote a bit more about this in an earlier post on scan reading.

Knowing that most of you haven’t even got this far I’ll finish there.

Feeding the Fire of Expectation

Every time you respond to an email, a text message, an instant message outside of your normal working day you are feeding the fire of expectation.

Don’t be surprised when that fire of expectation turns the exceptional into the norm.

Scan Reading – Pre Classify

If there was one skill I would teach people it would be the ability to scan read, but there is an important skill prior to that – pre-classification.

Chatworth with the FamilyThe people who will succeed in the knowledge age will be those people who can assimilate huge amounts of information, being able to understand what is important and what is not.

It isn’t possible even today to read all of the information that is made available to us, and we shouldn’t even be trying. I know of many people who, myself included, can’t even properly read all of the email that they are sent each day, and I for one don’t even bother trying.

But I do scan read every one of the hundreds of emails, the hundreds of blogs, twitter and facebook.

I don’t find these numbers overwhelming, or a burden. I have a routine, and a system that shows me what is important and allows me to fly through what is not important.

A significant part of that system is the pre-classification system.

Pre-classification is all about efficient use of your minds ability to process things. The minds is much more efficient at repeatedly processing similar things. It’s not so efficient at switching the processing between different types of information. If we had to work our way through a set of activities we would naturally split them down into groups of things and then tackle a group at a time – that’s what the pre-classification system does with information. There’s no way that we would switch between ironing and washing the pots – iron a shirt, wash a pot, iron some trousers, wash a port – and yet that’s exactly what we expect our brain to do with information.

Every email client I know has a rules engine of some description that allows you to pre-classify emails based on where they have come from or on their content. But I see so few people using them. This engine might just be your life saver.

In my scan-reading system all of the emails from expenses, from travel, from corporate communications, from marketers and newsletters get classified before I’ve even seen them. I’ll still scan read them, but that’s all they are going to get. Doing this allows me to handle them in bulk. There’s only one piece of information I care about in the emails from the expenses systems – and, as it happen, it’s the last line that says “status”. As long as this doesn’t say “rejected” I’m fine. Having a set of similar emails to review allows me to apply the same routine to each one, which is much more efficient than switching between email types.

Chatworth with the FamilyThe classification system works in my blog reader to (which happens to be FeedDemon). I fly through the updates of pictures that come through from flick because I’m really looking to see if there is anything particularly interesting. I know which these blogs are because they are in a folder called unsurprisingly “pictures”. The “colleagues” category, though, get much more attention, I want to give the people I work with more time than a high level scan.

Same with twitter and facebook pre-classify and then scan read.

For twitter, TweetDeck is invaluable for this, I care that the column from colleagues has been updated, I will rapidly skim through “all friends” list. They don’t necessarily say anything any more profound, it’s just that I care more about what they have to say than I do about Dave Gorman or Jason Manford, or even MC Hammer.

I’m slightly stretching the point on facebook though, because I don’t get many status updates as I’ve turned most of them off. This then means that I can scan through what’s there without having to work out whether I care or not.

Go on try it out – remember, this skill could be essential to your future job prospects.

I’ll talk about the actual process of scan reading another time.

Technology is making us rude

Another day, another conference call, another set of instant messages, some SMS messages and lots of rudeness.

When the Music StopsI would like to confess that today I have:

  • Joined a conference call without introducing myself.
  • Had an Instant Message conversation with someone I have never met and not even said “hello”.
  • Looked at my BlackBerry while talking to someone, to check an email.
  • Left a conference call to speak to someone else, while the call was still running, and not said anything. I just walked away.
  • Created a slide deck while on the same call – for a completely different project. I nearly had to confess to this rudeness and say “I’m sorry, can you say that again”.
  • Sent an SMS text message to someone without any pleasantries at all.
  • Ignored a phone call – because I knew who was phoning.
  • Stopped listening to someone sat next too me, because I was giving more attention to the PC screen in front of me.
  • Turned up late to a conference call and didn’t apologised for my lateness. These calls never start on time, do they?
  • Ignored a whole set of Instant Message conversations that people are wanting to have with me.

In short – very rude, but very normal.

You might argue that some of this is not really rudeness at all, but that would be putting a gloss onto something that is becoming an endemic issue.

Anyone else like to confess?

Meeting Efficiency: Oh how true

I hate to think how many meetings I have sat in that have basically been people catching up on email with the odd nod to the presenter.

We have a presentations style at work just for this occurrence – it’s the non-stop meeting style. We present at breakneck speed without any stops and without any time for questions. At the end we say “so is that agreed then?” and in many instances the answer from the non-listening participants is “yes”.

Top 5 tips: Getting more done when you are busy

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

1. Productivity not activity

Tuscany 2009When 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)