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.

Good priority management is all about being cristal clear on our purpose, being committed to our goals, knowing what commitments are already in our trusted inventory of current commitments (much more than a to-do list), and having a process to manage this with ease on a day-to-day basis. In the same way that our Inbox, Calendar, Tasks and Contacts must be purposeful, so too must our desk and physical work environment be.

I have been working with some Location Independent Workers recently who have exchanged the corporate cubicle for a home office almost all of whom squirmed with some discomfort when I asked these 2 questions:

1. Is your desk top more akin to the purposeful flight deck of an aircraft carrier or a toxic waste dump?
2. How happy would you be if your home office desk was transported back to the office right now – exactly as it is in this moment - and you, your boss and a major client were sitting around it making an important business decision?

It seems that many home-based workers allow themselves a different standard to desk top purpose than they would back in the corporate office! Naturally we have some proven approaches to help people recreate that purposeful flight deck to operate from, meanwhile here’s a copy of a resource that many clients have found useful. What would you add to it?

Here’s some top tips from Katherine Gibson <http://www.katherinegibson.com/index.html> , a best selling author of – among other books – Unclutter your life. I originally published this article in 2004 and it has been an inspiration for many clients since.
Katherine writes….

 There was a time when my home office was chaos central. If I were in the midst of a major project, event plans and speeches littered the desk and tabletop and carpeted the floor. Reference books, half-a-dozen coffee cups, notepads, staplers, a radio, and stacks of compact disks lay jumbled among current and completed projects. New piles spawned with each new contract. I considered buying more shelf space, extra storage bins, and nifty organizers, but then I paused. I didn’t need more space. I needed less stuff.

 Studies show that people who work in disorganized spaces spend up to eight hours a week looking for things or being distracted by them.
Efficiency drops and stress levels rise. Earnings are often hidden among misplaced invoices, receipts gone astray, customer billings yet to be mailed, and lost telephone messages from clients who want to do business.

 The appearance of a workplace mirrors its priorities, affecting its professional image and levels of success. The ideal workplace should exude a positive, calm, and confident atmosphere that is congruent with who we are and what we want to achieve. While office clutter can affect the bottom line, it also affects our health. Working in a disorderly environment fractures our focus and creates stress, frustration, and anxiety. Headaches, stomach problems, and neck and shoulder strain seem more common to those who work in chaos. Subconsciously we resist working in a place that doesn’t feel comfortable.

 A clear, uncluttered working space helps sharpen our focus. It makes a clear statement about us and what we can accomplish. Without distractions pulling us off task, and with the tools at hand our productivity will rise as our anxiety levels decrease. Instead of confusion, we’ll find efficiency—and the notes from yesterday’s meeting.

Clutter Busters

1. Designate a time outside work hours to attack your office clutter. Follow up with shorter periods on a regular basis.
2. Eliminate duplicate documents, brochures, and sales catalogues.
3. Purge out-of-office-experiences such as postcards from faraway places, golf clubs, recipe books, and material for a dress you might sew one day. 
4. Reduce desk material. No one needs three staplers and dozens of pens.
5. Cancel all but essential memberships, subscriptions, and credit cards. 
6. Give each item a logical home in a drawer or on a shelf— not on the floor, under the desk, or stacked on chairs.
7. Attack files. Keep just those pertaining to recent and current projects. Others can be archived outside the office or shredded. I remove out-dated or duplicate papers each time I look at a file.
8. Postponing decisions creates clutter. Resolve to deal with all outstanding issues immediately. 
9. Stay clutter-free. Take ten minutes each day to tidy and toss.

 ©2004 Katherine Gibson. Excerpted from, Unclutter Your Life:
Transforming Your Physical, Mental, and Emotional Space, Beyond Words Pub. 2004, Now available at your bookstore and thoroughly recommended.

For proven, measurable, productivity training and support just ask here

As someone with a reputation in time and priority management you would expect me to have some idea of how many seconds there are in a day (86,400 since you asked). It is not a big stretch to have an idea of how long a million seconds is. A million seconds is actually 11.574 days or almost 11 days and 9 hours and 36 minutes. BUT…. How long is a Billion? 

I was blown away this morning when a Billion was put again into sharp perspective for me. A   billion seconds is 31.709792 YEARS, which is almost 31 years and 8 months and 12 days and 29 minutes. That’s a massive order of magnitude!  11.5 days against 31.7 years!! 

It is one thing to ‘know’ this intellectually; it is something else completely to ‘know’ this experientially.
11.5 days to repay £1million at a rate of £1 per second
31 years and 8 months and 12 days and 29 minutes to repay £1Billion at a rate of £1 per second
Tighten your belts, it’s going to be one hell of a ride!

If you want to make the most of every second you have, if you want a better way to weld your purpose to your priorities, you need to consider our support for yourself and your people now.

Till the next time…

I am a great fan of Tony Parinello, and specifically his book ‘Selling to VITO’  The very important top officer. He is compelling and I have used his simple, powerful processes for getting to top decision makers for many years. He cuts to the chase, as in this outstanding example…

This is based on some outstanding questions and I firmly believe that the quality of the question determines the quality of the outcome – always. Whilst supporting a salesperson client recently I came across this 86 second video gem by Tony Parinello on smart questions to ask key decision makers to maximise your time with them. Hit the link and build these questions into your approach – whatever sales process you are using right now and do let me know what you think.

If you want to create more time to sell, and want to maximise the effectiveness of your selling time within your demanding days call me on +44 (0) 1428 607763 or get in touch, I know that together we will produce results worth talking about.

Establishing a firm foundation for a project is critical to its success. If you don’t, then it’s a bit like building a house without bothering to lay proper footings. Things might look OK for a while (although if you look closely you can probably see the cracks already appearing). Inevitably though, the whole edifice will come tumbling down, bringing pain, distress and abject misery to all involved.

Our experience shows us that managers don’t lay adequate foundations for their project assignments. Instead they work on assumptions or what they intuitively feel to be the case. This is a very risky thing to do! Studies show that problems in establishing the assignment properly at the outset are a major cause of projects going off the rails.

So when you begin your next project make sure you have the answers to these ten questions. They will ensure that your project begins on a sound footing.

1. What’s wrong with the current situation? It’s important to define the problem, issue or opportunity that the assignment will address.

2. How will things be different when we’ve finished? What are the benefits that this assignment will bring to the organisation? There has to be a clear business case for the assignment.

3. What are the performance criteria? What does this “thing” that we will be creating have to do? How well will it need to perform? Here we are defining the business requirements for the deliverable, not the actual deliverable itself.

4. What’s the scope of the assignment? What is in and what is out? This will help to prevent the onset of the dreaded “scope creep” and provides the basis for change control.

5. What are the cost constraints? How much can the organisation commit to the assignment? Note that this is not the same thing as a detailed project budget!

6. What are the time constraints? Again, this is not the same thing as a detailed project schedule. Questions 5 & 6 refer to constraints, not estimates.

7 What project specific constraints exist?.  These could be people, equipment – whatever will constrain the project team’s ability to deliver the work.

8. Who is the project sponsor? It’s astounding how often this vital role is not clearly defined, resulting in confusion and delay due to slow (or no) decision making. Essentially the sponsor is the person who makes the decisions, on behalf of the organisation, about the assignment. They also hold the purse strings!

9. Who is the project manager? The person responsible for making it happen.

10. What authority is being delegated? Project managers need to know the limits of their authority, so that if one of those limits is reached it triggers a conversation with their sponsor. It’s important for project managers (especially for their sanity) that they have sufficient authority to make the day-by-day decisions necessary to deliver the work.

Of course, laying a firm foundation is only the first step to creating the project deliverable and many potential pitfalls remain for the unwary project manager. But without clear answers to these ten questions it is highly likely that the project will encounter significant problems later.

This article is written by my colleague Paul Stacey at Priority Management and published here with his permission. Paul is a lead facilitator for the Project Management Breakthroughs programme.

Call or mail me for further information

Let’s face it; ‘Information Overload’ has been a headline issue for ‘Knowledge Workers’ for at least 10 years. It’s no longer ‘News’ it is just a Fact. So! What to do with this fact of life? I’m going to highlight a few pointers on email management and task / workload management here and will highlight other ‘Social Media’ communication management aspects in a later blog.

I am very interested in your thoughts and experiences around this. What do you think? Drop me a comment below. As with all workload management issues there are the human elements and the technology elements to master. It’s a big area and clearly I believe that the best thing anybody could do is to book us to bring our proven support to them, their team and their company – and I’m always looking to do just that! So, whilst reading this, think about it and get in touch

The wonderful thing about the human side of managing focus, energy and priorities within a demanding workload is that one size fits nobody. We all approach this stuff with our own particular strengths, weaknesses, baggage and vision. That, by the way, is why we place such a high importance on the pre and post training support we provide people whom we train. It also probably explains why we help people get the results they do get from our support.

Human aspects of focus management and filter failure

There are obviously very many and I would just highlight 3 previous blogs that I think are important to look at through the prism of ‘Filter Failure’. These are:
1) The impact of Continuous Partial Attention and Multitasking. They are not the same!
2) The paradox of  choice: More is less - we need to be careful about this!
3) The business demands around speed of response / reaction to emailwhich can enslave people to their inboxes, contributing to stress at work . 

Technology aspects of focus management and filter failure

No technology is perfect, and certainly, no technology will do our focusing and filtering for us on its own! If you are using Microsoft Outlook then you might find these 2 earlier blogs useful  to look at through the prism of ‘Filter Failure’: 

1) How to create Outlook rules to control the email deluge.
2) How to turn off the Pavlovian Outlook alerts and alarms

There it is, over to you, let me have your thoughts below. I will blog on the social-media overload and filter failure shortly.

John Niland sent me these 2 great ideas from Angelika Poltz. I’m going to use both for those annoying inbound telemarketing calls I get at home!

1. Three Little Words That Work with Telemarketeers

The three little words are: ‘Hold On,  Please….’
Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more  time-consuming that boiler room sales would  grind to a halt.
Then when you eventually hear the phone company’s ‘beep-beep-beep’ tone, you know it’s time to go back and hang up your handset, which has  efficiently completed its task.
These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.

2. Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?

This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone.
This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a ‘real’ sales person to call back and get someone at home.
What  you can do after answering, if you notice there  is no one there, is to immediately start hitting  your #  button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as  possible This  confuses the machine that dialled the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Job done!

The Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Training Evaluation will be turning 50 in November this year! Quite a milestone and it is still the cornerstone for training effectiveness evaluation.

His legendary four words that comprise the foremost training evaluation model today are:
Reaction: Level 1 (measuring the degree of post training favourable reactions to an event)
Learning: Level 2 (measuring the degree of learning acquired)
Behaviour: Level 3 (measuring the degree of application of content back on the Job)
Results: Level 4 (measuring the degree of actual outcomes to targeted outcomes)

Jim Kirkpatrick and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick have produced a new paper incorporating new research on training effectiveness and great updated model graphics that I have found particularly useful.

If you are responsible for managing a return on your staff training and development investments you need to check out the free resources that the one and only Kirkpatrick are making available to you from the link below. It is well worth registering there to obtain it.

http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/Resources/tabid/56/Default.aspx

The sidebar metrics in their paper are all ratios we recognise which is why we are so passionate about pre and post workshop support. 

Go on! Test our results against the standards set down by the creators and current thought leaders in the field. All our proven training programmes incorporate:

Personal Pre-brief  because, in the real world, one size fits nobody
Practical Training  because ‘How to’ is far more valuable than ‘Should do’
Personal Coaching  because putting training into use back at work is never easy
Post support measurement because we need to justify the ROI in the field
Permanent Support  because learning that is supported is sustained

Please do get in touch if you wish to discuss any aspect of driving a Return on Expectations through your training investments. contact us  now. 

You can contact Wendy, Don and Jim Kirkpatrick at http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/ If you are on Linkedin you may wish to connect with Wendy here:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/wkkirkpatrick

What do you do in bed in the morning in that half dream consciousness between awakening and planting your feet on the floor to step again into the reality of your world?

It was 20th January 1993 in the Oberoi hotel Mumbai on a long forgotten business trip. The only business thing I recall is blocking out time to witness Bill Clinton’s inauguration on TV, I was especially keen to see a hero of mine, Maya Angelou, deliver her inauguration poem. Her 6 minute poem, ‘On The Pulse Of Morning’, has shaped my awakening since.

I have come to treasure that half awake, half asleep time, when the world is full of new potential again, and I use that time to do 3 things which I share with you today. I’m not claiming to be right here but if it resonates with you just give it a go and let me know.

First thing: The first thing I do is give thanks for the day. I believe that gratitude is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. Give thanks to your God, your Guide, your Higher-Self, The Universe – whatever you believe in, give thanks to it for another opportunity.

Secondly: Allow yourself in your conscious / half conscious state to revisit your higher purpose. You are not reviewing detailed plans or specific goals here, stay with any broad purposes that give meaning to you.

Finally, before you plant your feet on the floor, reconnect your top 2 or 3 priorities from your end of day review yesterday with your higher purpose for the month, the quarter, the year – your life. Weld them together mentally now because – as sure as the air you now breathe – those priorities will probably be challenged almost as soon as you start your day.

The best video of Maya Angelou’s Inaugural poem is here. It is powerful stuff; you might want to allow yourself a quiet 6 minutes to focus on it exclusively!
A text copy of the poem is here.

This is just my approach, I’d be interested to know what you do to weld your purpose to your priorities for the day.

Contact us for support in welding purpose to priorities.

I have just put the phone down on a guy working with a client firm who did one of my Goal Control programmes a year ago on the 2nd May – he is a real paradigm shifter! ‘Hey Richard,’ he said, ‘you gave me an extra 6 weeks work over the past year thanks a bunch!’

He is a high profile manager with an important client, so with a sharp intake of breath and a sudden increase in my heart rate I responded ‘That wasn’t the idea – you’re supposed to get better results with less work. What went wrong?’

‘Absolutely nothing’, came the reply, this time with that ‘gotcha!’ giggle that told me I had been suckered.  ‘I just wanted to tell you that by building an hour of purpose into every workday evening this is what I achieved….’ He then rattled out a number of massive personal and professional wins that he created for himself. It was awesome – and humbling.

I quickly did the maths – 47 working weeks = 235 days. 235 hours divided by 8 hours a day =  6 weeks!

Measuring productivity gains from our training is of course very important which is why we always get delegates of our workload management programmes to measure their behaviour changes a couple of months after their training with us. Often, though, it is the unmeasured gains that make the most impact.

As a postscript, he also used our process last year to help his son knuckle down for his final year of ‘A’ level study, which reminded me of the oft used phrase ‘To appreciate the value of one year, just ask the student who failed to meet their chosen university entrance criteria’.

To see how e can help you or your people achieve more just get in touch. I promise we will deliver results worth talking about.

If you feel that your role and widened, your responsibilities have increased and your results are more difficult to achieve than last year, you are not alone!

The latest Labour Market Outlook (Winter 2008/2009), compiled by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and KPMG, makes fascinating reading …. No honest it does.

One of the interesting areas for me is the section titled ‘Coping with the Credit Crunch’. Almost half  (48%) of employers have reported that individual staff workloads have increased as a result of the credit crunch. A similar number, 46% of employers, say that their employee stress levels have risen among those workers that have survived any redundancy culls.

I’m sure that if and when there is a poll of employees, as opposed to employers, these numbers may well be higher. The simple reality is that we all have to do more to achieve the results we are responsible for. So it is more important now than ever it was that we deliberately work smarter not just harder. This is where our support kicks in.

Measured productivity improvements from our training measured during last quarter show improvements way over our running average of 47 minutes per person per day.

If you or your team have not yet done the Working Smart programme NOW is the time to get on board – it is practical and profitable.

If you have already done the programme NOW is the time to re-evaluate your current behaviours and use of our processes and tools to make sure you can ride out the tough times with minimal stress and pain – just get in touch for any support you need.

You can check out the CIPD report here

Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.

Just recently the issue of managing our attention within what I call the ‘Stimulus Tsunami’ has been a hot topic within the training workshops, Key Note talks and team meeting engagements that I have been involved in since the start of the year. So I thought it important to include here something I wrote back in 2007 which struck a chord with many people and resulted in some very useful exchanges of ideas.

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them.

Of course, our training and support helps massively with managing where we choose to put our focus and energy moment to moment. My purpose here is to point you to other resources that may help contextualize this for you and provide the opportunity to reflect on and – if you feel motivated – to discuss here.

You know how it is; you are doing stuff and some other internal stuff keeps popping into your consciousness. This is made even more difficult by other external stuff clamouring for your attention. No wonder people sometimes feel a certain affinity to Dr. Pavlov’s dogs in his famous “conditioned reflex” experiments in the early 1900s. It almost seems like, since the start of the year, Twitter, Wikis, IM, Skype and other technologies are conspiring with ‘Establishment’ practices around email, BlackBerries, back-to-back meetings to divert and divide our attention.
 
CPA is one of those issues that have been bubbling under for a while now. I first came across it in 2005 when I came across Linda Stone, who worked for both Apple and Microsoft. Here’s 2 essential links for anyone who recognises the reality of this issue. Both are well worth grabbing a cup of coffee for!
 
To get an overview of CPA from Linda herself read this:
http://www.lindastone.net/

For near verbatim notes taken from her thought provoking ETech 2006 address where she further developed her thinking here read:
 http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech-linda-stone-1.html

Then, of course, decide how you are going to deal with this reality. A good starting point might be to Contact me to see how we might help deliver Results Worth Talking About.

Ever since being introduced to the excellent ‘Shift Happens’ aka ‘Now you Know’ presentation, I have been pointing countless people to it on the web (the ’Official’ source material) and using it within my Key-Note presentations and training workshops. Inexplicably, I haven’t posted it on my blog until now. In my opinion everyone who has personal responsibility for raising children or professional responsibility for hiring, leading, developing and managing talent (and that’s about all of us) should be aware of this information.

We are living in ‘Exponential Times’: The plates are shifting

The plates are shifting all around us. Change is no longer merely incremental and in this environment our own thinking can’t just be incremental. I urge you to check out these powerful presentations which remind us of what the future may hold for us all.

The primary source I point people to is the UK centric version created by Ray Flemming at Microsoft. This Shift Happens UK Version is available in 2 formats – a PowerPoint presentation and a Windows Media movie. Just click the links towards the bottom of the web page. These presentations were developed from the original USA version.

The original USA version was created by educator karl Fisch. He has now created an updated version available at YouTube. He also blogged about it, including his source data here .

For proven training and support around creating and controlling compelling goals and managing demanding workloads simply contact us and together we will produce ‘Results Worth Talking About’

My phone vibrated to another text, I picked it up and read ‘Hey dad, check out Sunday Times pg 7 – two of your favs – procrastination and Mark Twain’. So I dutifully read it. The article is not NEW news but the message has never been more important, especially as we face the uncertainty of 2009.

‘Procrastination is a prevalent and pernicious form of self-regulatory failure’ Piers Steel

Piers Steel at University of Calgary is, it seems, planning to publish a book based upon his research into procrastination, which I pointed people to back in 2007. It is good stuff. In 1978, only about 5% of a sampled population thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators. Now 26% do. Furthermore, Steel’s study found that in the past 25 years the average self-score for procrastination (using a 1-to-5 scale with 1 being no delaying) has increased by 39%. So, although procrastination has been recorded in writing for over 3000 years, it has never been easier to procrastinate than it is now. And it is getting worse!

There are many reasons for this. A main reason is that we have so many more easily accessible temptations, which make it harder to be self-disciplined now than ever before. Furthermore, many people are now in self managing or self directed working environments. Remote teamworking adds to the problem with a reduction of continuous visibility and accountability and allows – even encourages – last minute cramming to complete a task.

Steel has developed an E = MC² formula for Procrastination: U = E x V / Gamma x D.

This comes directly from his research work on Motivation, from which we now have the Temporal Motivational Theory (TMT), to add to all the other research available around Motivation. He may have to ‘consumerise’ it for the ‘Self Help Book Market’ but to quote directly from Steel’s Procrastination paper:

Utility (U) refers to how desirable a task or choice is for an individual to perform. By definition, people pursue whatever behavior has the highest utility. As the numerator of the equation indicates, activities that are high in expectancy (E) and value (V) should be more desirable. The denominator of the equation captures the element of time. Enjoyable activities that are immediately realizable (D), that have a short delay, should be more highly valued. As delay becomes large, utility necessarily shrinks. Gamma refers to how impulsive or sensitive to delay you are, and the larger Gamma becomes, the greater is the sensitivity.  

So What! What can you do to manage your procrastination?

1. Understand that this is an increasing problem for all of us, so we must build greater internal strength than in the past and hold ourselves more accountable, even when others can not see our activity level day to day. The Habit Helper article might help.
2. Don’t accept off-the-shelf personal solutions. After all, ‘In the real world one size fits nobody’. Use our proven programmes to provide practical personal help to you and your people
3. Ratchet up the E (Expectancy) and V (Value) elements of your equation on particular projects or deliverables through our Goal Control approaches.
4. Reduce the impact of distractions and temptations – toxic elements like living in the inbox, Web ‘Researching’ and completing lower value QFE (quick, fun and easy) tasks even though you have an important deliverable to work on.
5. Check out these Resources:

• Here’s A quick, easy, 22 slide presentation by Piers. A Laypersons guide to the whole thing
• Take Piers’ Procrastination questionnaire. It will take about 10 minutes. Hit the ‘here’ link towards the bottom of the homepage.
• Piers Steel’s paper: The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of
  Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure
• Piers’ paper on Temporal Motivational Theory (TMT)

Finally, good ol’ Mark Twain. This was the quote the Sunday Times used in its article: ‘Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off till the day-after-tomorrow just as well.’ Mark Twain

‘What can you do right now, knowing that tomorrow will be yesterday in 2 days time?’ Richard Maybury

Isn’t it amazing how much we can achieve  as the quarter-end bears down on us? What is it about quarter-end that turns us into super-achievers? How can we harness that power for the first 8 or 9 weeks of the quarter?

As quarter-end approaches, a whole pile of external drivers exert themselves upon us – the public goal or quota, the deadline, the urgency, the reward (positive or negative!), the reputation we carry. We then respond to these by applying increased focus, judgement, determination, skill and effort to the tasks in hand.

Most people I work with, when they are honest with themselves, admit that they feel they do not work as hard in the early part of the quarter as they do in the last weeks because they don’t feel as pressured. When asked, they also agree that, with improved workload management, they can smooth out the highs and the lows of their fluctuating activity levels. BUT and it is a big BUT – what about the buzz, the adrenalin-rush, the sense of power and achievement, the sheer exhilaration of winning the battle, the blood pumping through the proud heart and the fists triumphantly punching the air? What about that stuff? we are human, after all!!!

Super-achievers are Priority Managers from day 1 to day 90.

Yes, they are human, and human Super-achievers tap into their internal strengths and replace external drivers with internal ones more successfully than ordinary achievers.

They know that it is easier to manage their Activities than it is to manage Results.

They know WHY they are working towards their objectives, they have welded their personal wins more strongly to their achievements than any externally generated measure or recognition can match.

They create their own sense of internal urgency by breaking down annual goals to quarterly, to monthly to daily targets

They manage their daily activities against their daily plan, focusing on the tasks, projects and opportunities that will generate outstanding results, and say ‘no’ or ‘not now’ to everything else

They can, and do, get to the quarter end with more control, less stress and at an overall lower personal cost than many of their peers.

So can you! Manage your priorities from day 1 to day 90

 Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.

I was having a difficult conversation yesterday. The Manager I was speaking with has never been through a recession. He does not know what is about to hit him and his team. Yes, times are tough but one thing is certain – Some people and businesses will come out of this stronger than others. The question, then is, Who will you be looking to emulate – the creators or the casualties? A lesson from Michael Dell from not too long ago…

It was only February 2003, in the car-wreck of the dot com bust. Recent enough for even the youngest readers of this blog to draw inspiration. Many people were fearful. Many feared the worst – and spread their fear like a virus. Then there was Michael Dell, president and CEO of Dell Computer.

He was presenting Dell’s 4th quarter results and was bullish about the future. The naysayers, the market makers, the stock analysts, the journalists and almost everyone else scoffed. Was he living in the ‘Real world’?  When Michael was asked in a meeting of important opinion makers where his projected continued growth would come from, because of the slowdown in technology spending, he grew irritated.

“About 140 million PC’s will be sold this year and Dell still had only 15 to 16 percent of the worldwide market. We see wonderful opportunities to continue to expand our business.” he replied.

Michael Dell was going after the 85 percent he didn’t have. His reality was seen through a different prism. He was living the 80/20 rule. Others only saw the current car wreck of the dot-com bust – he saw the clear road ahead. 

In tough times you have a choice; do you go with the whingers or with the winners!

Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.

‘Our doubts are traitors and make us loose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt’ William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

What gets in the way of peoples’ performance? What, sometimes, makes performance so difficult? What, sometimes, stops performance dead in it’s tracks?  useful way to look for the answers to these questions is through the simple formula:

Performance = Potential minus Interference (P = P – I )

So if we reduce the Interference we can improve our Performance!
There are so many sources of interference, some external and some internal. We all know the obvious external ones – competing priorities from customers, boss and team, lack of clarity, information overload, firefighting by others.

It’s more important, however, to manage the internal sources of interruption:

More often than not our biggest interference is our limiting beliefs system. What is that little voice inside our head saying to us as we face yet another challenge in our busy days?

How do I choose to evaluate, plan and respond to the priorities of others?
How do I choose to manage my workload, commitments and communications?
Do I fear mistakes, looking different or simply asking why?
How are previous experiences and assumptions holding me back?
How confident am I with my current level of knowledge, skills, self-awareness, motivation and energy?

Some useful questions to help you manage yourself, your results and those around you are:
What are you assuming is getting in the way right now?
Is it really that – or is it your response to that?
What would help you?
Who can help you?

This is taken from Timothy Gallwey’s excellent book The Inner Game of Work . Do yourself a favour and buy it. Ever since his first bestseller, ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ Gallwey has been ahead of the field as far as the Inner Game is concerned – whether its the crunch point in a game, the closing of a deal or the critical point in a presentation or meeting, he has the answers that top professionals use. You can have the answers, too, for less than £10!
My own copy of ‘The  Inner Game of Tennis is a much annotated first edition hardback which I bought in 1975. It has served me well – no pun intended!

Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.

‘In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count … it’s the life in your years’                     Abraham Lincoln.

Once you get caught on the work and spend treadmill it’s hard to get off. The first victims are often your health, your family and your happiness. The only thing that goes up is your stress level. Many factors, some out of your control, will draw you away from balance and into stress, but it is vital to realize that balance will not come about on its own.

Here’s how to create work – life balance on purpose: :

Balance is driven by the pursuit of meaning – not the pursuit of money. So start by taking “The Tombstone Test”. What would you rather have inscribed? “She answered her emails every day” or “Loving friend and mother”.

1. Have a vision or picture of the life you want to lead and write it down.
2. Balance is an on-going goal – no one achieves it permanently, so add it to your Key Result Areas and check each month to ensure that balance is your number one goal.

The result – a better life today, tomorrow, and maybe forever.

A thought from Carl Jung:

‘Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens!’

Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.

‘‘Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin’. Mother Teresa (1910-1997) Missionary.

Taking right action right now can be difficult, there are many false trails; here’s some ideas to keep us on track …. after all, the heat is on. The role is demanding – but you knew that when you took it up. It’s a major project and everyone from the CEO to the guy down the hall is watching – some willing you on – others waiting for a fall. Your resources are stretched beyond belief and poor coordination from your suppliers and other departments ratchet up the pain. Against this, the workload seems never ending – it just keeps coming, dumping ever more issues that require your attention. Meanwhile, your customers are squeezing you from the other side; they are never satisfied, they demand more. They expect miracles.

Your critical results – whether closing that big deal before month end, getting the project signed off, delivering the numbers for the quarter or feeding the hungry in Calcutta, will be easier to achieve if you consciously connect these two elements:

• Know your purpose and develop a rich picture of what fulfilment looks and feels like. Build this powerful picture in your mind for each of your major goals and use this energy as your internal guidance system. Exactly how do you feel on closing the deal, what does it mean, how will you be different, how will you use the resultant reputation and rewards? Build very rich pictures. 

• Pitch your tactical decisions on what to do next and why, against your purpose, knowing that every decision either takes us closer to our objectives or moves us away from them. This requires further developing our self discipline, our self management, our motivation and our ability to drive these decisions. Procrastination, excessive inactive contemplation, avoiding the things we don’t like doing (even though we know they are important), resignation and allowing ourselves to be pulled of course, will, ultimately, only take us away from our purpose and our fulfilment. As Jacob Bronowski, the scientist and author of ‘The Assent of Man’ said ‘The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.’

That’s why our productivity programmes always incorporate both the strategic and the tactical issues of managing Results and Workload – including best practice use of technology and tools to drive our decisions.

The world will not always be on your side, that’s reality…..

We, on the other hand, are always on your side! Mother Teresa had a sign on the wall of Shishu Bhavan, the children’s home in Calcutta, that was taken from The Ten Paradoxical Commandments, originally published by Kent Keith in 1968 whilst still at school. Here is his full list.

The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr. Kent M. Keith

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centred.
   Love them anyway.
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
   Do good anyway. 
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
   Succeed anyway. 
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
   Do good anyway. 
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
   Be honest and frank anyway. 
6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
   Think big anyway. 
7. People favour underdogs but follow only top dogs.
   Fight for a few underdogs anyway. 
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
   Build anyway. 
9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
   Help people anyway. 
10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
    Give the world the best you have anyway.

Develop your magnificent obsession, get to work on it, create a great day.
Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.