I was triaging  my Learning inbox subfolder just now. I go to it when I’m in a ‘learning mood’. In there I found a mail from Wow Accountants which got me thinking.

So I’ m sharing this with you right now

When managing conflicting priorities I have found over time that the quality of the question determines the quality of the outcome - always.

So I responded to their 5 Questions for success and thought I would ask you what question helps you make better decisions.

Here’s what I wrote on their blog. What question works for you?…….

Questions I ask myself when I need to get serious with myself:
1 ‘Why would I do that?’
2 ‘If not now – When?’
Both have helped me focus better than I otherwise would do. They are not easy ones to ask – especially if the object of the questions is immediately appealing but nonetheless distracting!

Over to you…… what questions work for you?

Readers who have heard me deliver a keynote or teamtalk presentation or perhaps attended one of my productivity and performance training programmes will have heard me say that ‘All we can truly manage in a demanding day is where we choose to put our focus and energy moment to moment’. In fact it has become, what my clients call, a ‘Mayburyism’.

Energy management seems to be a hot topic with people at the moment and in the past month many people in 4 different countries for different clients have asked me for specific support in this area within my training programmes.

Something is sapping our collective energy right now it seems.

Managing Purpose, Priorities, Focus and Energy leverages performance

Good personal purpose and priority management approaches to the key areas of our personal and professional lives obviously helps us maintain high motivation, performance and energy levels. But total Energy Management goes beyond that.

I see Energy Management as different to health and fitness management – both of which are, obviously, very important.

My GoToGuy for Energy Management is Bill Ford.

I bought his book ‘High Energy Habits – the busy person’s guide to more energy without diets and exercise’ in July 2002, one month after first publication and I have been recommending it ever since.

My battered, annotated, highlighted, Post-It tabbed copy is still close to hand in my office. It remains my No.1 reading recommendation on this topic.

I was having a chat with Bill recently and he kindly allowed me to post here a copy of one of his lists of ‘Top 10 ways to increase energy which you will see below. I have also added a non-affiliate link to the Amazon UK page for his book. Do yourself a favour and buy it!

Energy Management: Bill Ford top 10 ways to increase energy

Would you like to have more energy? Most business people would love to have more energy and feel that it would have an impact on productivity and profits. The main message is: notice what drains your energy and do less of it, and what boosts your energy and do more of it. As simple as that, here are some specifics:

1. Go for progress not perfection. The road sweeper when he wants to feel good looks behind him, not in front. Take a few moments at the end of each day to write down three things that you achieved that day.
2. Start meetings by going round the room and asking everyone to say one thing that is going well in their work. This modest exercise can be surprisingly challenging for some, but it will help to raise the energy for all present.
3. Clear clutter in 15 minute bursts – it matters more than you think. If it is neither useful nor beautiful, then sell it, give it away or dump it.
4. Fix the little things you’ve been meaning to get around to – the printer that doesn’t work properly, the loose light switch etc. Make a list and start taking action on them. Ignoring them drains energy, like a noisy fan in the background.
5. Start rating your energy out of 10. Before going into a meeting, prepare by deciding what level you would like to be during the meeting. Then act as if you were.
6. Make 3 minute phone calls to people who lift you. They can pick up your day and are particularly useful before you start making sales calls or more difficult phone calls.
7. Spend more time with people who lift you and less with those who drain you.
8. Avoid back to back meetings. Leave yourself a bit of space between them. And turn up for meetings a few minutes early so you are more composed and less flustered.
9. Allow an extra 15 minutes or so for journeys and put the departure time in your diary. Treat it as you would an appointment eg. If you said you would set off at 10.15, then do it. Resist the temptation to make an extra call or two. Do that at the other end, if you have time.
10. Your energy level impacts those around you. If you are managing others you have to look upbeat or you drag others down, affecting their productivity. Your apparent mood is a matter of scrutiny for those you manage. Ask yourself after every encounter did you just help them to achieve more or less by the way you came across?

Get Bill Ford’s full insights in his book ‘High Energy Habits’ through this non-affiliate Amazon link. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743428943/

So, what works for you? How do you manage your energy levels? Being around high energy people does it for me!
Until next time,
Richard

I had a great experience with UPS last week. It highlights practical business truths and is worth retelling here.

We had to get a high priority shipment of training manuals to an international office of one of our clients. We booked the shipment, created the waybills and booked the collection online through our UPS account.

Job done – or so we thought. We were wrong.

You probably appreciate that UPS, like many other just-in-time services, places a high priority on time management. It is fair to assume that speed, time utilisation and schedules are important performance metrics for ALL their people.

Our delivery guy duly arrived with a ready smile and a purposeful pace about him; he picked up the 2 parcels and took them to the van. Moments later he returned. We had made a mistake and needed to re-enter the order online, which would mean we would not get the shipment out that day.

He could see our concern and immediately offered a solution.

He had 3 other pick-ups locally and could pass by again. He gave us a paper Waybill and a couple of barcoded labels to complete manually because that would be quicker than reentering our online account, cancelling out the previous action and reentering the information again. We completed the forms just in time for his return.

His care and flexibility saved our reputation.

Naturally I wanted to recognise this Customer Service ‘Moment  Of Truth’ so immediately Tweeted my experience and got an immediate response:

I fired off a quick 2 –line email, got a 2-line reply back from a human being (not an autoresponder) saying that the driver’s manager would be informed and his service recognised.

Job done – or so I thought.

I saw the driver again yesterday. He was in his van. He saw me and stopped, wound down his window and thanked me for my feedback, saying that his boss gave him a big slap on the back which made him feel great. That made me feel great.

5 Moments of Truth Lessons

1. Feedback is the food of champions. If Moments of Truth matter to you, you must invest in feedback.
2. Most working  people do not get enough feedback in their busy days – and most of what they do get is issue, crisis, problem-escalation related not nurturing, developmental and encouraging. How much do you give?
3. A feedback and recognition system can be very simple. It’s more to do with human DNA than tools and process. It need not be complex – my example took a few minutes in total for all parties.
4. Speedy and specific recognition works much better than broad, bland statements long after the heat of battle has passed. This is one reason, among many, why I’m an advocate of collaboration platforms rather than internal email for work sharing.
5. What gets recognised gets repeated and everybody is a winner. No prizes for guessing how our UPS driver will approach our door for another delivery next time!

Have you had any recent Moment of Truth experiences? Is why not let us know.

Onwards and upwards
Richard

The economy may or may not recover this year.  The Drachma may or may not maintain parity with the Deutschmark. The USA may or may not say ‘Yes’ to Obama.

One thing is certain though:

Our personal, commercial and future prospects this year will be influenced more by what goes on in the 7 inches between our left and right ears than what goes on in the outside world.

Business will be done. Profits, bonuses, reputations and futures will be built. Ours is in our hands.

When it comes to what goes on between our left and right ears we must avoid the self delusional self talk of Gareth Cheeseman . We are not tigers, no matter how much we shout ‘Grrrrrr!!!!!’ into a mirror.

We must manage our Mind Traffic

Mind traffic is that constant dialogue that goes on between our conscious and subconscious mind.

Its roots are many and varied. Untamed, it can result in short attention spans, inability to focus, lack of clarity and control, stress, procrastination, urgency addiction, Continuous Partial Attention, which is NOT the same as multitasking.

We can manage this through deliberately working on our Self Talk (what we say when our mind talks to us and what we say when we talk to our mind).

Arguably we cannot claim authentic influence and leadership of people until we can claim authentic internal influence and leadership.

We must weld our purpose to our priorities

Peter Drucker famously said that the preferred management style is Firefighting and most managers are arsonists. We must overcome Urgency Addiction and the ruthless reality that ‘Just in Time’ is really just too late and unsustainable when working through people.

We need to create habits, rituals, processes that are simple, robust and flexible enough for us to clarify and control our competing priorities within our demanding days.

 In short we must manage our Mind Traffic and be Doers of Dreams.

These are the things we all need to be working on every day as we go about our day-job. These are the things we need to be deliberately learning and growing through. These are the things I get out of bed for and what I love working with my clients on.

Speaking about getting out of bed, here’s a simple ritual I run before I plant my feet on the floor first thing in the morning.

Over to you. You are a Doer of Dreams …. What habits, rituals or processes work for you? Drop a note in the comments section below.

If you or your team could use some practical support in managing Mind Traffic, purpose and Priorities just get in touch. I’m confident that, together, we will produce results worth talking about.

Hi all, this post has 2 purposes:

1. To give you a suggestion on how you can track your digital procrastination – what I call ‘Structured Procrastination’
2. To update you on an exciting development on the tool I use to monitor this myself.

So, let’s dive in or skim the surface, the choice is yours …

Get a grip on how your digital procrastination affects your priority workload management

Sometimes it is useful to be confronted with the reality and the consequences of our behaviours – preferably before it is too late!

Activity logs are a useful tool for this but paper time management logs are so last millennium. They take time to complete manually and, lets face it, when most of us are  not in meetings we are working digitally, so it makes sense to use a digital logging tool to assess our time management behaviours. That’s why I use Qlockwork (non-affiliate) straight out of the box and recommend it.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook as your primary email, calendar and high priority workload management tool, I suggest you take advantage of the free trial of this software and use it to see exactly how you are investing your digital time at work. It works with stand alone Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Outlook profiles. It lives on your PC, so all data stays securely with you. AND it tracks all your digital activity – not just Outlook based work. Scary sometimes!!!

You might also want to skim my posts on The frog, the octopus and the procrastinator and the Resistance / Procrastination matrix then, if you are thinking about downloading Qlockwork check out how I use it.

Update on Qlockwork

Currently this super software works as an Outlook add-in but Anne Currie, the brains behind it all, tells me that she is working on making it available in other ways, so that it will be available to non-Outlook based workers. Rest assured that I will post this news here as soon as Anne releases it.

Well, that’s it for now. I’d be delighted to hear from you on your thoughts around overcoming procrastination – use the comments area below. Onwards and upwards,

Richard

My thanks to my friend Ian Crocker for drawing my attention today to an interesting article on meetings written in the Daily Telegraph. You can find a link to the article below but here are 3 quick take-aways for you:

The article covers 3 principles which also happen to be in our making meetings work smarter training, which incorporates a number of key philosophies, principles and processes to get much better results from our meetings.

In brief the 3 principles covered in the article are:

1. Replace most of your management control type meetings, especially on project or goal progress, with greater ongoing visibility on the planning, execution and delivery of agreed activities, using the technology your business is already invested in. Such meetings should be the exception and not the weekly / monthly norm! We know many ways to achieve this.
2. This principle requires a paradigm shift on what our Outlook, Lotus Notes or other team calendar is for. Schedule your management of high priority workload first and meetings last each day.  It always amazes me that people still consider their calendar to be primarily for meetings and reminders when they have shed-loads of work to do each day!
3. If you have the authority and responsibility for a team, consider implementing a ‘No internal meetings’ day – or if that is not practical – a no internal meetings morning – to liberate your people to focus on doing uninterrupted, high value work. This, obviously, goes beyond a ban on formal meetings and extends into permission to say ‘Not now!’ and even, selectively, to put phones to voicemail within in these time slots.

Meetings can be a major productivity pirate for people juggling and managing high priority workloads. You might also want to read a few pointers on getting more from creative or problem solving meetings .

You can read the full Daily Telegraph article here:

Of course, you can always ask me about how our proven practical training and support makes a major, measurable difference in how teams manage shared results with fewer meetings here

Almost every person, and certainly every business I work with, tells me that meetings are a big productivity drain that sucks the life out of getting things done within their demanding days.

There are, of course, many ‘Meetings Heroes’ within these businesses. You know – they are the people who plan and run their meetings well and, in turn, deliver their commitments from meetings within the expectations agreed.

2 things always fascinate me about this:

1 Almost everyone can name the Meeting Heroes they work with

2 Almost no one deliberately models (the grown-up word for ‘copies’) what these Heroes do!

Just recently I have been working on the challenges people face within their meetings, based upon our Making Meetings Smarter training programme (Please permit me a quick plug for this training which even the most sceptical or hardened corporate meeting survivalist finds useful!)

The recent problems I have been helping with are in relation to those meetings where the objective is to explore a specific situation and come up with some conclusions and a plan of action – as opposed to the regular catch-up, report and pick-up new actions type management or team meeting that is the bane of most peoples’ lives.

There are a number of approaches to managing these types of meetings and I just want to point you to one of the most powerful I know – Edward DeBono’s 6 Thinking Hats.

Now, to be clear – I am not an accredited DeBono 6 Thinking Hats trainer but I have used it enough in the real world of business meetings to be able to overview it s ‘Parallel Thinking Process’ to other hard pressed meeting managers and attendees and help them make it work for them.

If you want to explore our smarter meetings training – with or without expert input on the ‘6 Thinking Hats Parallel Thinking Process’ then just let me know

Meanwhile, you might find this 18 minute video on the 6 thinking hats process by fellow #IoDSurrey member and regular IoD 859 Breakfast attendee Paul Sloane useful.

First off … one of my favourite one-liners on procrastination ….. wait for it ………
‘Do you know what happens when you give a procrastinator a good idea? ….. Nothing!’

Now a definition by Napoleon Hill:
‘Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.’

OK, let’s get to it – here are two fundamentals that underpin my thinking on procrastination and priority management:

1. My reading and observations lead me to the conclusion that procrastination is an emotional decision and not a logical one. We all know we should be working on the ‘Important stuff’, but doing it is different.
2. Very few people deliberately do things that they know will harm them in some way, unless they think that, through the ‘pain’ they will achieve a greater ‘pleasure’ as a result.

So, if you are a procrastinator, and – intellectually – you know it is not a resourceful behaviour, what emotional pleasures do you derive from your procrastination? Think about it … there will be some – otherwise you wouldn’t procrastinate. Is it the adrenalin? The buzz? Not wanting or needing time to think? The feeling of being needed? The thrill of the deadline? The hedonistic pleasure of ‘doing whatever I like’? Or is it the comfort you feel by avoidance? The temporary security you feel?  There is always a win that, in the moment, has a higher value than the perceived pain that results in doing the thing itself.

Some people can intellectualise this stuff. For a brief overview of ‘Structured Procrastination’ see John Perry’s website. He is a Stanford Philosophy Professor and it’s worth a peek: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html

The ‘Traditional’ Work/Value matrix suggests that all work is a function of urgency and importance and carves work up into 4 quadrants. We overlay our 4D approach on this matrix. Q1 is the stuff you have to DO; Q2 is the stuff you have to DATE ACTIVATE, Q3 is the stuff you DELEGATE and Q4 is what you DUMP! By working on Q2 and Q3 areas we minimise the overblown urgent and important Q1 load.

Below, you will see the same matrix BUT with a new twist for procrastinators, by Ken Blanchard in his book, The On Time On Target Manager. This is in his 1 minute manager series and is well worth investing in.

More often than not, people don’t do things because they are important – they do things because they like doing them – and they put things off, even important things, because they don’t like doing them.

Procrastinators and pleasure seekers do their work in the order Q1, Q3 and only then Q2 – often rushed at the last minute with obvious consequences in terms of quality, team impact and personal stress! The solution is to change the approach so that you do them in the order Quadrant 2, Quadrant 1 and forget about the other two quadrants.

Often, getting the ‘Have to do / Don’t want to do’ stuff out of the way releases tension, weight and dread; furthermore doing it is never as bad as the thought of doing it. Most people also report feeling energised once they have got that stuff out of the way. Try it – ON PURPOSE – and see how it goes.

Of course, you could always get me in to talk to or train your people. Clients do, after all, call me Mr Productivity’. Together we will produce results worth talking about, go on get in touch now.

Today a client, who I count as a professional friend and generous advocate for my work, got in touch. He works at Associate Director level in a £150Million revenue specialist consultancy. He knows a thing or two about profit delivery within a multi-disciplinary business working very closely with clients and therefore knows a lot about leadership in practical priority management and project management.

He knows how the dynamics of the different interests of the client and the consultant in a contractual relationship adds complexity to the daily priority management decisions that are taken by all parties working towards the shared goal.

He also knows that when it comes to managing competing priorities there is always a tension between the ‘Project World’ and the ‘Operational World’ of work.

The reason he got in touch is that he is currently working through the productivity issues within yet another complexity common to many businesses. The complexity of co-location with a client. 

Now, this is nothing new to him, his team or many of you reading this. What is laudable, and is probably a contributing factor in the trajectory of his career, is that he is stepping back from ‘Normal’ stepping back from ‘Business as usual’ to question how he can impact productivity improvement within that environment.

It’s a big ask. Mashing the culture, power play and commercial interests of the client with that of his firm. Mashing the competing priorities of the project and operational worlds, mashing the dynamics of conceptual work with the ‘Get it out the door today at any cost’ work.

Some would think it worthy of a process reengineering or change management project in itself.

Most would shrug their shoulders, consider it as ‘Normal’ and accept their fate.

Not him, though.

He also knows that demonstrating leadership and delivering high quality results within complex work environments and demanding workloads has more to do with the way he and his people choose, control and deliver their priorities on a day-to-day basis.

It has more to do with the small, simple, well thought out process improvements in the way we do work, more in line with kaizen than change management.

It has more to do with him and his people being, what he calls, a ‘Productivity Virus’ that will spread within the client team when they see the impact of his priority decisions, management and delivery.

I’d like to think that it may also have something to do with the training we provided him and many others in the business on managing competing priorities with Microsoft Outlook.

One of the resources he investigated as part of this initiative was the excellent TED talk by Jason Fried on ‘Why work doesn’t happen at work’ As my friend says, he now sees M&Ms in a new light!

Untill next time, cheers,

Richard

A very quick reflection on our management of our sales conversations, having just put the phone down on such an outbound call. I have learnt over the years that there is rarely a ‘Good time’ to talk about raising the priority of training (or anything else of value) with people.

I used to prioritise sales calls around certain days, times of the month or Quarter, or what I thought were ‘planning cycles’. 

I now believe that conversations should be starting all the time and we then allow (or plan for) them to progress, be deferred or fall away depending upon our evaluation of their priority within our overall pipeline and workload management process.

I’m a big fan of conversations that add value, whether incremental or instant and I always aim to give something of value, some collateral, IP, insight or even just an injection of energy – within every conversation I have. I’m not suggesting that this is good sales management practice; I do believe, though, that it is good relationship management practice. And that is what I believe my productivity training and speaking business is all about.

A key priority in my workload management approach is to protect time to have conversations with people who may have an interest in my productivity training. When I started this business a well respected consultant told me one of his secrets

‘Richard, tell your story to at least 4 new people every day’.

I don’t always manage to speak to 4 new people every day but I do hold it out as an ambition for every day to speak with ‘new people’.

Just a thought. What do you think? How do you plan, prioritise and protect your sales conversations?

Never choose fads over fundamentals.

I have been engaged in some heavy techie talk recently around productivity, priority and performance issues. I’m no Luddite but I am slightly concerned.

Sometimes fads, whether gadgets, gimmicks, apps or hacks - especially in the arena of productivity and performance can cloud simple truths.

Success in all its forms consists of simple fundamentals. That’s why my approach to all my training and speaking engagements is to honour the fundamentals and work out a way to help people like you, to put those fundamentals into daily practice as easily as possible.

Fundamentals are not fully appreciated by the vast majority of people.

Professionals respect them while amateurs dissrespect them. Professionals work with them while amateurs work around them. This is nothing new.

‘We are what we repeatedly do – excellence then is not an act but a habit’ – Aristotle (384-322BC)
‘We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.’ - John Dryden, Poet Laureate of England in 1668
‘Bad habits are like chains that are too light to feel until they are too heavy to carry’. – Warren Buffet

To build anything worthwhile and enduring it has to be built upon rock-solid foundations. The fundamentals are important because it is from their secure base that we can build our performance behaviours – whether around managing priorities, projects or goals or managing our influence within relationships.

Beware those who deride fundamentals as ‘Common Sense’ or worse. Most of them have not gone through the effort to embed them as Common Practice within their own lives.

In fact, in life, many people only widen their knowledge-practice gap by gaining new information. The idea of changing their behaviours significantly, especially when they feel at the top of their game is alien to them. Perhaps this is why many people plateau.

The problem with a plateau mentality is that that we can sometimes treat it as the summit, and we fail to future-proof ourselves.

I’ll leave you with one of  my favourite quotes; it is incorrectly attributed to a Frank Outlaw on the web. It is much older than him. It doesn’t matter who coined it first, it is well worth reflecting on:

Watch your thoughts; they become words
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Naturally, if you are interested in creating a rock-solid productivity platform to build your future upon I would be delighted to support you through our training and support programmes and build ‘Results Worth takling About’ please do get in touch

I have learnt that unless we make time for learning it never happens in a meaningful, capacity-building way. It is random, ad-hoc, unstructured, and therefore relatively unreliable. 

Our ability to learn, unlearn and relearn is a key ingredient in future-proofing ourselves in an increasingly competitive world,

Learning, therefor, warrants a much higher priority in the management of our demanding days. 

Here’s an approach to help build a little structured learning from email newsletters into each and every day:
I subscribe to a number of newsletters that I really want to read BUT I never read them in my inbox.

I read them when I am in a ‘Learning moment’ – and I always schedule at least a couple of short slots a week for this, in addition to my ‘Learning on the job’ type learning. The key here is to make learning from email and newsletters ’Deliberate Learning’.

Keeping my subscribed newsletters out of my inbox is easy, I have an Outlook Rule that puts all Learning type emails into a numbered subfolder in my Outlook Inbox.
I call it ‘7 Sharpen The Saw’ because I am a big fan of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits and the 7th Habit is Sharpen the Saw. Furthermore, assigning a number to the subfolder makes it easily visible in my inbox folder system.

I also have a ‘7 Sharpen the Saw’ Contact in Outlook to log my key learning points and action decisions thereon. 

I may write more fully on this whole aspect of ‘Learning on purpose within demanding days’ soon, meanwhile how do you make sure you can learn on purpose when there is always a thousand things to do?

Noted management expert, Peter Drucker, says

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing things right.”

Doing the right thing is effectiveness; doing things right is efficiency.

Every day we should focus first on effectiveness issues and tasks and make sure we have the capacity to get the most important done.

All the time, we should be looking at how we are delivering these outcomes … ‘Is there a better way?’  ’How can I change what I do to make it more efficient?’  ’How can we change what we do to make it more efficient?’ That’s the first step towards leveraged effectiveness, looking for continuous process improvement so that we create even more capacity to focus on the the Effective tasks.

Of course, people will say ‘I don’t have the capacity or the time to do that – my schedule is already too full’ The ruthless reality, however,  is that those same people will create the capacity to fix the process or deliver the result despite the constraints …. its just that they will create that capacity at the 11th hour, just before the final deadline, at a higher business and personal cost than would have been the case if they made the Effectiveness Decision earlier on.

Everything you and I do involves an overhead element. Creating and controlling the right overhead at the right time is much better than being subject to it when it is almost too late.

If you want a process to manage continuous process improvement when you are already working flat out just ask, its part of what we help our clients achieve.

I like Peter Drucker, he has always looked beyond the fads and fashion of leadership and management. He is more substance than style. His ideas resonate even though he died in 2005. I still talk about him in the present tense, and probably always will. His book: ‘The Daily Drucker’ is always close to hand – bite sized words of wisdom for busy people. Here’ one from the archive you might like … 8 Peter Drucker Questions for improved effectiveness.

Until next time……

‘The goal is not to work smarter – the goal is to work less and integrate work more successfully into the rest of our life’ Richard Maybury

A handful of questions to remind you of some critical elements of Best Practice workload planning and management. What elements are you using?

Every worthwhile job in the world entails prioritising a series of to-dos against the clock.

Yet, when it comes to workload planning and workload management very few people have a realistic, robust plan for each day.

Many ‘Plans’ that I see are long lists of tasks – without any priority criteria, nor any start or due dates allocated to them …… more of a ‘Wish List’ than a ‘Plan’.

Or they are a few high level ‘tasks’ which, in reality, are more like project milestones or project headers, each with a multitude of undefined, unallocated, unprioritised and unscheduled workloads lurking within!

Such To-Do lists, Task lists, ’Notes-to-self’ and reminders take many forms:-

• Pages in ‘Day or Meeting Books’ -the type that keeps Hamelin Paperbrands – owners of the ubiquitous  Black’n'Red notebooks in profit.
• Excel or Word files, or lists in the many thousands of ‘Apps-for-that’ that get downloaded by busy people every day
• Good, old-fashioned ‘Memory’ for those adrenalin junkies who think it is cool to be surfing on the edge of chaos every day and eventually drive home strung-out every evening.

Now, if you are a regular reader you will know that I believe that ’In the real world, one size fits nobody’ – so this is not a universal fix, and what follows may not be absolutely right for you. Use it as a basic check of workload management best practice processes.

1. How many ‘To-Do’ lists are you currently maintaining? Think notepad, daybook, loose paperto-do list, post-it notes, whiteboard, piles on the desk, overstuffed Inbox, electronic calendar, Smartphone tasks, ‘Apps-for-that’, Word and Excel lists, pocket paper diary,  and don’t forget your memory.
2. How rich is your To-Do list? How accurately does it reflect the ruthless reality of what is actually involved in delivering what is in front of you? 
3. How are you planning, prioritising and scheduling your start and due dates?
4. How well balanced are these prioritised, scheduled tasks against your other daily calendar commitments and inevitable interruptions and how easy is it to alter your plan against the onslaught of incoming fire during the day without loosing sight of what was initially important?
5. How well integrated are your email driven tasks and commitments with your To-Do list?

Best practice demands just one place to plan, review and execute our workload from (yes, that’s ONE – not a task list AND an inbox!) When our work is visible in one place it is easier to prioritise, manage and control.

Naturally, if you want any support in managing conflicting priorities for your organisation, team or yourself just call me on +44 (0)1428 607763 or use this enquiry form. Feel free to see what others say about our support before you get in touch. Finally feel free to add your thoughts here.

Clearly this is not about a menu dilemma.

It is, however, about dilemmas and difficulties, especially as we get more busy and pressure mounts.

It seems, from many conversations recently that a lot of people are looking to tame their procrastination behaviour for 2011 …. and are looking to me to get them through the pain barrier and out the other side.

Let’s get the octopus out of the way first.

If we keep postponing important work and keep ourselves busy with distraction activity we can resemble an octopus on roller skates – all movement and no direction. We also risk sapping our energy and our drive. We do – of course – eventually get around to the stuff we have procrastinated on but it is rarely completed at peak performance levels with a sense of purpose and pride. It is usually completed with a sense of anxiety and dread (usually about the looming deadline), after which we beat ourselves up about our procrastination behaviour!

What’s the frog got to do with it?

Well, many people are looking for tools, tricks and tips to help them break their procrastination habit. They look outside themselves for answers – but the answers almost always lie within.

Technology can compound the procrastination problem.

Yes, you can find an App for almost anything…  Yes, you can use training like ours to use your Outlook, BlackBerry, Lotus Notes, ACT! And Salesforce  tools to help you manage your competing priorities better within your heavy workload, BUT the real, enduring answers always lie within. (Which is why I place so high a priority on personal support for learning). I have written on the impact that technology can have on procrastination behaviour before.

I believe that the quality of the question determines the quality of the outcome – always

So, when you are looking at your prioritised Task list and you are tempted to procrastinate on the task that you know is the most important today just ask yourself 2 questions:

1. If I don’t do the task now will it go away?
2. Will doing the task become easier with time?

If the answer to either or both is NO, we better buckle down and do it.

The best time to do a procrastination candidate task is first thing in the morning

Gear yourself up – get started on it – do something with it – move it forward – complete it if you can – get to a natural break-point in it if you can’t – then reschedule and prioritise it for your next action. Then bask in the satisfaction that you did something difficult but worthwhile, feel the energy flow through your body and your brain and look around for the next piece of work to eat up.

But, what about Eat The Frog Richard?

Oh yea, the frog. Well, there is a quote (probably misattributed) to Mark Twain, that has been picked up by many people over time, including Brian Tracy, that goes something like this:

‘If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.’

So, eat the frog first thing and things can only get better! If you have the time watch this cool one and a half minute video on ‘Eat the Frog’ from Brian Tracy.

Till next time,

I’ve been working a lot with Managers and Leaders recently who struggle with the 4 competing demands of: 1 Leading and developing their direct reports, 2 Doing higher level work (often escalated or complex where their particular experience is required), 3 Forecasting/reporting/management admin, and – finally – 4 Working hard to otherwise keep their own boss happy and their own career moving forward.

A lot is written about leadership and I promise I won’t pontificate here. It is much more important in these ‘Productivity Pointers’ , I believe, to – well – point you towards actionable good practice based upon insights and hindsights gleaned from the real world. So, here’s 2 pointers around this constant competition for anyone with responsibility for people as well as their own numbers.

1 I was recently supporting a Call Centre Manager with a handful of Team Leader direct reports and a total team size of about 100 people. We had just run one of our training programmes on working smarter on competing priorities with Microsoft Outlook. Some of the things he is doing are exemplary.

Why not go beyond tips now and deep-dive into serious, sustainable and integrated workload, priority and time management approaches with our specialist productivity training and support. Just hit the iceberg graphic to access an enquiry form or call me on 0044 (0) 1428 607763 and let me know what you want

• He actively discourages his people from emailing him questions. He started this by saying ‘I’ve deleted your email, now, what do you want from me?’
• He believes in the potency of coaching and mentoring on the floor and has minimised the number of meetings at his desk or in a separate meeting room. Tactical meetings are conducted on the call centre floor. His Team Leader reports are picking up on the practice. This keeps them closer to the people, they in turn, must manage, lead, coach and develop.
• His people are learning that when he is at his desk he is working on mission critical work and they only approach him if their reason is critical.

Its not earth-shattering and it is not going to change the world but he already feels that he is changing his world for the better. And that – in my opinion – is Leadership Work.

2 There is real leadership leverage in giving and receiving feedback, coaching and building up the productive capacity of our people – and you have to be with them to do this. Equally, there is potency in creating and defending specific ‘Focus Time’ in our calendars for mission critical work. If we can protect our highest energy time in the day for our highest value work, so much the better. Turing the ‘Out of Office’ on and the phone off might also be a good idea!

Tony Schwartz, another of my few HBR blogging heroes recently included these 2 points in his Six Ways Leaders Can Fuel Excellence at Anything   It is well worth a read – as is his linked HBR post Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

Well, thats it for now. Feel free to join in the conversation and add your own insights or hindsights on this topic.

At this time of the year there is a tendency for the seeds of hope to sprout and grow more particularly than at other times. And hope competes more for attention in the cluttered landscape of our minds and our hearts. Hope for the promise of Christmas, hope for the potential of the New Year ahead. 

But what is hope and how is it different from many of the other drivers in our life? 

1 Hope requires time, focus and energy to fully unfold into a life. It differs from wishes, daydreams and fantasies which can be created and crushed in a heartbeat. 

2 Hope combines the desire for something with the expectation of receiving it. That expectation of receiving is rooted in the will, and the will drives the ambition to work towards the receiving. Hope is not passive. 

3 Hope inspires boldness, courage and daring; it blunts the edge of fear; it motivates massive action. Audacity and Hope have long been linked, most recently, of course, by Barack Obama. 

4 Hope sustains us through the ruthless realities of life that might otherwise overwhelm us. Hope helps us recalibrate our perspective; it gives us the blood to get up one more time, dust ourselves down and try again. 

Why not go beyond tips now and deep-dive into serious, sustainable and integrated workload, priority and time management approaches with our specialist productivity training and support. Just hit the iceberg graphic to access an enquiry form or call me on 0044 (0) 1428 607763 and let me know what you want

5 Hope has history. It is ancient. Hope can be relied upon, it does, however require and reward effort – effort of the body, the mind and the heart, which brings us back, in a virtuous circle to the first point above.

I think we can all benefit from building a little time into our busy pre-Christmas schedule to reflect on the potency of Hope and how it, along with appropriate action, might help propel us more purposefully towards our goals. I’d like to know what you think. Join in the conversation in the comments section below.

Today there are 30 days until Christmas day. A whole month to get ready then. A whole 720 hours! Obviously not. So just how long have you got to create an exceptional, memorable Christmas?

If you are lucky enough to leave home for work at 8AM and return home with all you work done at 6PM; that removes 300 hours, leaving you 420 hours. (Note to self: Better work on making this happen next month)

 Getting a healthy 8 hours sleep a night removes a further 240 hours, leaving you with 180 hours to create that perfect Christmas.

 Obviously, if you did not wash, brush, polish and preen yourself, all that time would be available to you but if you hold to a minimum level of hygiene, you would probably be left with 150 hours.

 Now, you won’t want to be fainting with the hunger would you? So, let’s allow some time for breakfast on the run, lunch at the desk and preparing, consuming and clearing a reasonably civilised dinner at home. Would an hour and a half a day do it? If so we are down to 105 hours to prepare for a fabulous Christmas.

 I don’t know about you but quality time with family at home (and perhaps a little time watching the television) is certainly part of my life, so if we gave 2 hours a day to the family that would leave us with 45 hours to create the perfect Christmas.

 But, hold on! We have got to have a social life as well, haven’t we? So, lets say 3 hours in the pub with friends for each of the next 4 Fridays and a 2-hour dinner with our partner once a week for the next 4 weeks, leaving us with 25 hours to create a memorable Christmas!

Wait a minute! The shops are closed on Christmas Day, so we only have one hour to create that perfect Christmas! Better get to work on it right now then!

My friend, strategist and the Thought Leader behind Genesis Management Consulting, Simon Gifford, pointed me to this HBR article the other day.  I like a lot of the material Ron Ashkenas writes. He’s pretty focused on the practicalities of delivering critical results within demanding workloads when he focuses on his ‘Time Management’, ‘Productivity’ and ‘Critical Result Management’ subjects. He is one of the handful of HBR correspondents that I follow and will make time to read.  

You might want to ask yourself this question from his article:

Imagine if the president of your company personally asked you to take on a special assignment — working directly for her. The project would take one day per week but you would have to continue your regular job in the remaining time. Would you take the assignment?  

You won’t be surprised that in a piece of research, 99% of the managers he and Robert Schaffer asked this question to said they would take the assignment, even though they said earlier that they did not have enough time already! You can read his article here .

I will leave you with 3 questions to ponder upon and 1 suggestion:

1. Would you take on the additional assignment today if you were asked the same question by your CEO?
2. What other critical result could you create time for within your busy schedule if you had a big enough reason to do so?
3. Why not start creating the capacity to work on that right now?

Why not go beyond tips now and deep-dive into serious, sustainable and integrated workload, priority and time management approaches with our specialist productivity training and support. Just hit the iceberg graphic to access an enquiry form or call me on 0044 (0) 1428 607763 and let me know what you want

I thoroughly recommend the HBR magazine and Online resources. They are essential reading as far as I am concerned.

Of course, if you are looking for practical training in planning and delivering critical results within a heavy workload crammed with competing priorities already, you can always get in touch. I will make sure we deliver results worth talking about.

National  Stress  Awareness Day is on the 3rd of November 2010. Stress management has never been more relevant than it is today.  Hectic lifestyles, demanding jobs and financial pressures, all contribute to a feeling of being ‘under stress’.

Whereas stress itself is not an illness, but a state of mind, a prolonged feeling of excessive stress can make you ill, literally. Stress has been linked with high levels of sickness absence, staff turnover and other indicators of organisational underperformance, including human error.

“As a manager you have a legal and moral duty to ensure that work does not adversely affect your team. Understanding how to spot the signs of stress and then knowing what to do to reduce stress is the way forward,” says Richard Maybury from Priority Management.

‘Based upon my training conversations with thousands of people, as well as looking at all the relevant research, I have concluded that the biggest cause of work related stress is that sense of feeling out of control. It is generally not the volume of work, unrealistic targets, nor the team being stretched thin per se. It is that sense of not being able to control the competing (and often conflicting) priorities within a demanding workday.’

Richard has 3 tips to help regain that sense of control and thereby reduce your stress:

1. Give yourself a good talking to: Given that you probably can’t work any harder on a sustainable basis, ask yourself how robust your current workload and priority management processes are. How are you currently building the personal productive capacity that will future-proof you.
2. Reconnect with your purpose and strategy, both professionally and personally. Aligning our purpose to our priorities within our workloads helps us make tougher decisions easier.
3. Create clarity: Use fewer management tools and integrate them better. Too many people use too many tools to manage their information flows, their commitments, To-Dos, ongoing projects and all the other inputs that make up their total workload. Treat reliance on Memory as a tool in this regard. Trying to manage competing priorities in your head whilst thinking on your feet  rewards reactivity, contributes to crisis and chaos management and is – in itself – a major stressor for oneself and those who deal with the fallout.

Some key statistics about work related stress

In  2008/09 an estimated 415,000 people in Britain believed that they were experiencing work-related stress at a level that was making them ill (according to the Labour Force Survey

The 2009 Psychosocial Working Conditions (PWC) survey showed that around 16.7% of all working individuals thought their job was very or extremely stressful.

Self reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounted for an estimated 11.4 million lost working days in Britain in 2008/09

Research amongst GPs showed that 30.9% of all work-related ill-health are cases of mental ill-health, with 26.8 working days the average length of sick leave

The International Stress Managament Association is holding the 12^th annual National Stress Awareness Day on 3 November 2010.  To find out how your organisation can get involved visit www.isma.org.uk/national-stress-awareness-day/index.html

My local IoD Branch in Surrey asks me to contribute a topical article in the members’ newsletter. I thought the recent one, marking the UK National Stress Awareness Day on November 3rd, might be interesting. You can see a copy here. Richard Maybury IoD article Start Living, Stop Stressing

Very few Business Networking meetings make it as a High Priority meeting in my Outlook Calendar. The excellent Shipley’s Godalming Breakfast Club does though – every month. The Partners and team at Shipleys provide an excellent resource for businesses like mine based around the Godalming and Guildford area of Surrey. It is brilliantly hosted by the Partners and expertly facilitated by Chris Ragg form the Centre for Organisational Analysis. I always come away with energy, insights and information which I can directly invest into my business. Today was no different and here’s why….

We were looking at aspects and impacts of ‘Optimism’ in business. Not something I would be thinking objectively about in normal circumstances but something which, with some thought, helps us get to the heart of productivity, effectiveness and purposefulness, both on a personal and team basis, and is worthy of a business conversation.

Chris then asked us to identify people with these traits:

• They are full of energy and enthusiasm. You can’t beat one who is really into something and going for it 100 per cent.
• They are natural risk-takers. They throw themselves into things in the boldest, bravest fashion.
• They are persistent. When told to stop doing something they will wait a couple of minutes and then do it again.
• They are inquisitive. They will not be fobbed off with a stock reply but go on asking “why?
• They are creative. Even their doodles betray the liveliest imagination.
• They have great interpersonal skills. They are good at thawing the hardest heart.
• They are assertive and jolly good at saying NO!
• They are not hamstrung by inhibitions
• They will go straight up to someone and say ‘Who are you?’
• They are good at making decisions.

Have you guessed who it is yet? You probably have …… its Toddlers!

This list of attributes is taken from Lucy Kellaway’s 12th September article for the FT on ‘Why CEOs cry all the way to the bank’where she writes about Bob Diamond’s appointment by Barclays Bank.

And there you have it, a great firm of accountants in Shipleys, bringing together a great group of business people orbiting Godalming and Guildford and creating a stimulating environment where ideas and inspiration are exchanged and relationships built. Thanks Shipleys, so much better than bog standard networking!

Now is probably a good time to future proof ourselves and investigate how we can work smarter and get our purpose and priority management in alignment. With the summer season upon us there might just be enough time to take our eye of fighting the alligators and take a little time to clear the swamp.  And it is becoming critical for many of us, whether we know it or not! Here’s why….

The latest UK Commission for Employment and Skills Report  suggests that 10 million people need to improve their skills if the UK is to achieve its ambition of being in the top eight countries in the world for skills, jobs and productivity by 2020.

If you are in UK, you are working in the 6th largest economy but only the 13th most competitive!

 The report states:

‘The UK remains the 6th largest economy in the world and the 4th largest in the OECD (behind the USA, Japan and Germany). It also remains regionally concentrated with London and the South East accounting for a third of GDP. The World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report ranks the UK as the 13th most competitive in the world (down one place from 2008/09, itself down three places from 2007/08).’

If you have not seen the excellent 6 minute video called ‘Shift Happens’ or ‘Now You Know’, I urge you to open yourself up to it. We are living in ‘Exponential Times’: The plates are shifting and change is no longer merely incremental. In this environment our own thinking can nop longer be just incremental.

Again, back to that report:

‘Despite our (UK Economy) progress in skills attainment, too few adults still possess the skills needed to succeed in tomorrow’s labour market or the motivation, confidence and opportunity to gain them.’

 You and I cannot directly impact the size and prosperity of the UK economy in these international league tables. We can, however, do something about our own place within our career and our own world.

So, here’s a few suggestions:

1. Take stock now. Don’t wait for someone to do it to you. Do your own skills / behaviour / belief audit with trusted friends and with trusted tools (ask me for some suggestions).
2. As London Transport is so fond of saying: ‘Mind the Gap!’ What gaps between your ideal future vision of yourself and your current reality do you need to work on? What are the priorities?
3. Our productivity is a key element when it comes to future proofing ourselves, answer these questions for yourself. How are you building your productive capacity? How robust are your current workload and priority management processes? How much productivity do you squeeze out of your  office and mobile tools compared to their productive capacity? Given that you probably can’t work harder what steps could you take to work smarter?  
4. How are you going to close the gap? There are many options open to you. This blog is in part subtitled  ‘Insights and hindsights on living purposefully. I carry the wounds of past wars into my work as much as I absorb, synthesise and implement new thinking and new technologies into the way I work with clients. I’m happy to share ideas if you get in touch. 
5. Take one good business book, a highlighter and a journal with you on holiday and develop a prioritised action plan to implement upon your return. Again, get in touch with an area you want to develop within and I will suggest a couple of the (far too many) books I read every year.

 I will leave the last word on the report to Chris Humphries CBE, Chief Executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, who said:

‘At the moment, our economy is still world-class – quite an achievement for such a small island.  But we’re living on past glories.  Economic success rests on three legs – skills, jobs and productivity – and we are well below average on the first of these. Unless swift and decisive action is taken, we can expect the UK’s economy to begin to slide down the international rankings.’

 Your own job, your career or your business success rests on 2 of those legs: Skills and Productivity. I can help you with both. It starts when you get in touch.

You can access the full report and a 2-page executive summary here: http://www.ukces.org.uk/

It doesn’t matter if you have got too much business to cope with at the moment or if you are working hard to bring more in; the ruthless reality for most people right now is that it takes an awful lot more work to achieve the results we were used to pre crunch. Most of us are under pressure.

Control is critical to success

Control requires clarity. Clarity of purpose. Clarity around expectations and delivery on deadlines. Clarity on priorities. Clarity under pressure. As one CEO client said to me the other week when he booked our support for his Board and his Senior management Team ‘I have a good business model and a good team, it’s just that they are all operating on a ‘Just In Time’ model – and when you work with people as opposed to a production line ……………

 ’Just in time is Just Too Late’.

It is my experience that most good people know what they need to achieve within a business, the difficulty lies in how they go about achieving it.

It is also my experience that many so called ‘Technological  Solutions’ to managing competing priorities only provide a partial, complex compromise on what you and I would know as working smarter not harder. Here I am thinking of all the high tech tools, either installed on our computers or accessed from the cloud that claim to be THE solution to individual and team productivity and effectiveness. Many, in my experience, only add another ‘To-Do List’ for us to interrogate.

So, technology itself is not the answer. The answer lies in welding time honoured principles and processes to the lightest use of technology so that people will use it well.

How many To-Do lists do you use?

It is not a trick question. It is serious. How many lists do you check physically or mentally in order to evaluate current priorities against incoming fire, whether in the guise of opportunities or threats?

Here’s a list. How many of these do you use?

1. Board Minutes
2. Management Team Action Points,
3. Business Plans, Project Tasks etc, usually written in other software programmes
4. Conference Call action points
5. Lists in other workflow management programmes and technologies you may use
6. Business Email Inbox and personal email account inbox(es)
7. Commitments from various internal and external meetings in a day-book.
8. Notes of promises and commitments from phone calls
9. Saved Voicemail messages that require action
10. Instant Messenger / Communicator / Social Media streams
11. Notes to self, written in a variety of places (even on the back of other available papers? – Surely not!)
12. MEMORY (Usually when you are trying to focus on some other work)
13. MEMORY (Usually on the way home).
14. MEMORY (Usually at 3 o’clock in the morning – accompanied by a cold sweat).

Here’s a second question:

How well do your To-Do lists integrate with each other?

How easy is it for you to see clearly the business impact of making one priority decision over another? To see, in front of your eyes – rather than in the back of your mind – the consequence of saying ‘Yes’ to one thing? To see how a delay in a scheduled activity will affect not only your delivery deadline but the time available for your colleague to do what they have to do before the work is finally delivered to the customer?

So, here’s 3 Productivity Pointers on To-Do Lists

1. Use fewer tools and integrate them better.
2. Think about your processes before you add another tool to your toolbox
3. As much as possible bring all your priorities into one place so you can evaluate and execute them with greater clarity and control.

This is why I think it is so much better to leverage the power of existing tools like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and the other programmes you are already invested in, rather than buy add-ons or new packages.

A final thought:

Working smarter is all about clarity of purpose and simplicity of process, lets not overcomplicate it with too many tools.

If you would like to know how we help people to improve their productivity and effectiveness, both personally and as a team, why not call me or complete this request form so I can get back to you with some ideas. As always, if you have any views on this or want to contribute to the debate I’d love to hear from you below….

It is so difficult to be proactive when most of the default settings in Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and other productivity tools reinforce and reward reactive behaviours. This is unfortunate because, as proactive people, we want to work smarter with Outlook, Notes or whatever tools we have in front of us. 

 This demands that we must move away from the Pavlovian stimuli   of alarms, alerts and flags as important elements in our decision making, no matter how appealing and ‘helpful’ they may appear on the surface.  This, then, means that we have to reinforce and reward our proactive behaviours of defining purpose, planning, focusing, discerning and doing what we decided to do – even when the inbox, the voicemail, the IM, the ‘social media’ channels are all pulling us in another direction.

It is almost as though, for many good, hard-working people, their own workload management skills are being assaulted and eroded by the Urgency Addiction amplified by technology. Not only that, but the time honoured principles and proven workload management processes, of which they are intellectually aware, appear to be an idealised Nirvana which slips further and further away from their reality as the next deadline approaches.

Add to this the fact that most hard working people are not clinically insane and do actually achieve results within this urgent, instant, reactive environment – and the fact that their behaviours (even though they know intellectually that they are not at best practice proactive level) have served them well when they were last under the cosh at work; it is little wonder that changing workload management habits can be difficult. 

This is why, in all our training and support programmes we incorporate as much best practice use of appropriate technology as possible – without the need to purchase or configure add-ins and bolt-ons; and why we ALWAYS provide post training support. 

In my experience this is the only way to get people to permanently change the habits of a working lifetime, habits that helped them in their last crisis, even though they were stress inducing!

“Before my training course with Richard, I thought it wouldn’t help me as much as it helped some of my colleagues. I was wrong. Following the course, I have started to make the small, easy changes to the way I work. I’m getting home earlier in the evenings and I can ‘switch off’ at night and at the weekends, which is great. I feel that I’m on top of my workload and, for the first time since I started my career, there is just about enough time in the day.” Stuart McCaul June 10, 2010

 If you are looking for a proven approach to more productive workload and results management for your team, your company or yourself, just ask us here and we will deliver results worth talking about.