Productivity & Time Management Training, Speaking, Consulting

Take a look at what a fairly average to-do list looks like.

• expense report
• Joe – budget?
• bday card
• check to school

If this were your list, you would know what each of these things meant. But if you have ten minutes after the meeting and before the client call to get something done, you’d spend at least a couple of those minutes transitioning from whatever you just completed to reconnect with each of these, remember what they mean, decide which one to tackle, and pull enough brain cells together to mentally create the steps to get at least one of these items all the way done.

Remember that empowering your productivity involves knowing the best use of your time at any moment and being able to take immediate and appropriate action.

So, when you are adding items to your list, take a few extra seconds to add them in a way that will enable you to take immediate action, on any one of them.

Can you see how the “after” list is much more actionable?  You must eliminate any obstacles to completing the tasks that are on your Next Actions list if you want to increase the likelihood that you will get more things done.

While you’re at it, eliminate “vague” sounding words like “plan,” “implement,” “develop.”  Because if you only have a few minutes, seeing a word like “develop” on your list will act like a speed bump, and you’ll probably skip over it.  Save those “vague” words for your  Projects list, which is for those “big picture” items that aren’t immediately actionable by themselves. Take a look at the examples below of verbs that work fine for your Projects list, but not your Next Actions list, and verbs that are actionable to use on your Next Actions list.

An effective and actionable to-do list is often the weak link in most people’s efforts to keep their lives organized and on track.

Take the few extra seconds while you’re in planning mode and writing the list, to be as specific as you can be, so that when you’re taking on a task on the fly, you can just get it done and make those delightful check marks that make sleeping at night so much easier.

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The troublesome thing about To Do lists is that there is really no organic limit to them. In order to get your tasks out of your head so you can see them, you need to write them somewhere and a To Do list is the most obvious place. But then your To Do list can include everything from: Call client about deliverable format to…..

• Get oil changed
• Come up with pitch for client I really want
• Replace broken washing machine
• Get groceries for the week
• Start writing book
• Get house painted
• Start college fund for kindergartner

A To Do list can include things you need or want to do. But just plopping them all on a list becomes visually overwhelming. They need to be organized. For starters, I recommend breaking them into Next Actions and Future.

Of course, it’s easy to think that everything is a Next Action. You want to do it all. But just because something can be done now, doesn’t mean that it needs to be done now.  When you review all of the things that you are tempted to put on your Next Actions list, ask yourself, “given everything else that’s important, is it realistic that I can or need to get to this anytime soon?”  If you decide that it needs to be done, but realistically you would admit that it’s not pressing enough for you to be considering right now, then put it on your Future list.  If you fear forgetting that it’s there, then simply create a reminder.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say that you discover a great new sales technique in a book that you read, and you’d like to implement it.  But when you assess your priorities, you realize that you really don’t have the opportunity to give that the attention it deserves for at least a couple of months. Add that item to your list with a category of Future, and add a reminder date of about 2 months from now.  When the reminder pops up, reassess whether or not it will realistically fit into your workload in the next month or so. If it does, then change the category from Future to Next Actions. If it doesn’t, leave it with the Future category, change the reminder to another point in the future, and follow the same process when it pops up again.

This way, it’s neither stuck in your head nor constantly in your face. So you have more clarity and space to focus on what really needs to be done right now.

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People ask me all the time, “What’s your best tip for improving productivity?”  I give one of two answers, but they are really the same thing.  What I often say is “change your email so the messages don’t automatically download, and only check it a few times per day.” There are two major benefits of doing this:  first, it puts you in control over your technology and your communication, by allowing you to review your message when you decide to, instead of being interrupted constantly.  The second benefit you get from this is the other most frequent answer I give to the “best tip” question: single tasking.  When your email is open and messages are constantly downloading, it encourages you to be multitasking (or, more precisely, cognitive switching) all day, because you are constantly switching your attention to each new message as it arrives.  This has three major detrimental effects:

1. Activities take longer
2. The quality of your output is lower
3. It contributes to your feelings of distraction and stress.

Despite the volumes of scientific research that prove this, it’s still one of the hardest behaviors to change and we are our own worst enemy.  Once we’ve conditioned ourselves into always doing several things at once, we’ve destroyed our ability to focus because we’ve made it seem boring.  If you find yourself addicted to the fast-pace, multitasking, chaotic environment that you have created for yourself, it you’ll benefit from thinking about how you can begin to change the behaviors that contribute to this addiction.  One person who has taught me so much about changing behavior is Tony Schwartz, and you might start with his latest article on the HBR Blog Network, The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time.  He’s got great tips about how to change your behaviors by creating environments where it takes more energy to do the things you don’t want to do, and less energy to engage in healthier, more productive habits.

Also, if you’d like more information about how to control your attention,  improve your productivity, and live a life of choice rather than reaction, I hope you’ll check out my book.

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The thoughts ping you at random: “I need to talk to Brenda about pushing back this deliverable…” An hour later: “I have to ask Joe about the pricing for the client proposal….”  Twenty minutes after that: “I wonder if Luis has finished researching new project management tools….”

If you stop and act, every time it occurs to you that you need to talk to someone, you’re likely to generate a lot of frustration. First, you interrupt your work and your train of thought. Then, either you miss the other person and receive a call back at an in opportune time, or you interrupt her. And there’s a risk that she has something to ask you in return that you’re not at all prepared to process right now because your attention is focused in a different direction. Remember, it’s all about controlling your attention.

Because you need to control your attention, just “tucking that thought away” until you see the person next doesn’t work either. The thought invariably gets lost in your brain and doesn’t reappear until another inconvenient moment, and rarely when you see the person.

You need a Talk To list. A Talk To list works great for those who you work closely with and/or communicate with frequently. As you think of things you need to communicate to that person, create tasks that start with their name in the subject line, along with whatever you need to say to them.  For example, a Talk To task might look like the following:

“Joe: Ask his opinion on the pricing for the client proposal.” (the category that you assign to this task is “Talk To.”)

When you inevitably see that person throughout your day, you can refer to your Talk To list to ensure that you have covered all the items you thought of while they were not present. If they have a list for you as well, this process results in very efficient and effective communication.  This is especially helpful if you have people reporting to you, and to make efficient use of the time you get with your boss.

Not every conversation belongs on the Talk To list. If you think of something you need to communicate to someone you will NOT likely run into during your normal day-to-day activities, you may need to create a task to call or email that person. It belongs on your Talk To list if you think to yourself, “the next time I speak with Joe, I want to remember to say…”

If you keep your Talk To list on your person, such as synced your smart phone, you will have it when you run into Joe later in the day and you can resolve your questions without skipping a beat.

This also works great for people who bill you for their time, like a doctor, lawyer, or accountant.  Keep a running Talk To list for these people and pull it up at your next appointment.

This is just one of the 7 categories I recommend in the Empowered Productivity™ System. For the rest, check out my book.

Thanks for reading!

I haven’t had much balance in my life lately. It’s pretty much been “all writing all the time,” in order to get my book done and meet my publisher’s deadlines.  And when I wasn’t writing, I was doing my best to keep up with my clients and the rest of my business.  My personal life, and even other parts of my business, have definitely suffered.  But as a student of productivity, I have come to realize that “temporary imbalance” is ok. The definition of “productive” that guides my work is, “achieving a significant result.”  Can balance and productivity co-exist?  Sure, sometimes.  But there are other times when achieving that significant result is pretty consuming.  In order to assess whether your imbalance is temporary, ask yourself if you can define the point at which you’ll go back to “normal” – when you expect that your life will not be dominated by one area or project.  And when you get to that point when you expected things to go back to normal, stop and ask yourself if you really are making time for other parts of your life, or if that one all-consuming project has just been replaced by the next all-consuming project, and therefore you are still out of balance.

I’m excited that after this week, the hardest and most time-consuming parts of writing my book will be over.  It will be off to the publisher, and I’ll just have to approve the production version, where I’m really not supposed to change anything but the most glaring errors/omissions/problems.  I keep saying that after this week, “I’ll get my life back.”  I have many things I’ve been wanting to do in other parts of my life that I look forward to pursuing later this month.  Whether or not I get to those will determine whether my imbalance was really temporary.  I’ll keep you posted! =)

Ye olde time management techniques taught that a truly efficient person has every moment of his or her time filled with productive activity. Not only the time, but the chinks between the time. And it’s better if you have several things going at once.

So what happens if you have that kind of life, with back-to-back appointments and every minute planned out and a crisis occurs? Crisis, here, means any unforeseeable, unplanned situation that you have to respond to. It doesn’t have to mean an earthquake, it could be the flu that knocks you flat, or a car problem that leaves you stranded and makes getting to your meetings impossible.

Without flexibility in your schedule, your efficient system shatters. But if you build flexibility into your schedule, if you leave room for the unexpected, it’s a lot easier to cope with the unforeseen. And it creates opportunities to put final touches on projects or make last minute phone calls that otherwise wouldn’t have fit into your tightly-wound, intensely-planned schedule.

Building flexibility into your schedule can be approached as a simple math problem. Let’s say that you, like me, get up at 7 a.m. And at some point, maybe 8 p.m., you determine that you’re done for the day. It’s time to start unwinding. In a five-day week, that means you have 65 hours of “productive time.” If you plan up 90 percent of that—58.5 hours—and something goes awry, you will have to cancel appointments, miss deadlines and be generally stressed. But what if you only filled up around 60 percent? That’s still 39 hours a week, and there’s no law against being productive the other 19 hours. But you’ve given yourself room to make adjustments for a crisis, should it arise.

If the crises doesn’t happen, you can use the time to be proactive, knock items off your to-do list, catch up on reading, social media, bills, exercise, or whatever seems like the best use of your time.

Sixty percent may not work for you but it’s a good benchmark to start with. In any case, it will ease your stress level. Little issues like unexpected traffic or copiers out of ink don’t have to throw off your whole day.Try it out and see how productive you can be!

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Time management and “AttentionManagement” efforts are easily defeated when too many tasks confront us at once. I learned an anecdote suggesting that’s exactly why lion tamers use chairs, holding the seat of the chair or stool and pointing the legs at the lion. Do lions have some inordinate fear of chairs? Nope, lions are like us. They get overwhelmed with too much information. The lion tries to focus on all four legs at the same time. He can’t. So he becomes distracted, overwhelmed, passive, and less productive (“productive” in this case being interpreted as eating more trainers! .

Whether you’re an executive in a big corporation or a solopreneur, you probably have exactly the same problem. Most of us have piles of paper reflecting jobs that need tending to, pages of unread emails reproducing in our inboxes, phone calls yet to be made and blogs and other social media with embarrassingly old dates on them. This could be due to the fact that attention management is not being effectively practiced.

The pile of old work to be tackled produces a stressed out, overwhelmed, drowning feeling that has a paralyzing effect on your productivity. When you sit down at your desk and you think to yourself, “What do I need to do now?”, the sheer number of potential answers to that question is completely overwhelming. It probably causes you to retreat into some sort of busy work, something that is easy, familiar, and doesn’t require a lot of thought. For most people, this means email. It’s just so much easier to go look at new business coming down the pike than try to figure out what to do about the pile of old business.  Like the lion, we’re reacting, and our reaction is to retreat.As long as we don’t have a system in place to manage all the inputs, we’re faced daily with what I’ve learned to call Lion Syndrome: the passivity brought on by too much to think about. And the old tasks continue to pile up, or get done at the last minute, in a shower of stress. When we have an hour, or heck, 30 minutes to get something done,we need to easily and painlessly be able to answer the question: “What do I do need todo now?”

With a New Year starting, it’s a great time to resolve to overcome lion syndrome and take action that will put us back in control. This means systems of organization and action that really work. That’s what I’ll be talking about in 2012 in my productivity training classes. Keep reading, and step by step, we’ll overcome Lion Syndrome.  If you want some hands-on learning, about avoiding Lion Syndrome and other ways to lower your stress, get more done, and achieve your significant results, consider joining me in Austin for my next productivity training seminar. Read more and register here.

photo by Eric Kilby

One of the productivity training tools of my Empowered Productivity System is how to handle the “shoulds” on your list.  If you’re familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, you know that one quadrant reflects “low importance, low urgency” items that you feel need to be done, yet you know will have very little impact on your life andyour work if you actually complete them. However, knowing this does not free your mind from worrying about them. These are thetasks that I have learned to call the “shoulds”: things that you feel like you “should” do, that weigh on your mind, and perhaps languishon your to-do list, typically out of guilt. You might think of them as the “monkeys on your back,” sapping your productivity.  
Then there are the items that really need to be done in order for your life to run smoothly and according to plan, yet they aren’t nearly as important as other things on your list, and as a result, you just can’t seem to get them done. These include routine household chores like cleaning, laundry, and errands. They could also include business tasks like filing, event assistance, transcription, or data entry, and they often make you feel like your productivity
suffers if they don’t get done.
My advice for these “shoulds” and low-importance needs is to get help. If you are a busy professional and aren’t getting anyhelp in your life, whether it’s a cleaning person, some part-time admin or household help, or specialty services, then I think you are missing an opportunity to create the time and space to achieve your significant results.  Some people call this delegating. I like to think of it as empowering yourself or someone else (in my time management training classes, I teach clients how and when to eliminate some tasks from their to-do lists). Offloading these tasks can be empowering in several ways. It can empower you by freeing you up to be productive in the things that you are best at, the things that only you can do, the things that will have an impact on your life or work if they get done – your significant results. It can be empowering once you’ve found a source to get that item done for you. It can be empowering to someone else because it can give them an opportunity to learn something new (for example, a staff person or intern) or gain a new customer (if it’s outside help).
There are many resources to get “just a little help,” whenever you need it. Websites like Elance and Guru provide specialty business services. Many colleges and universities have resources for college students to make extra money. Here in Austin it’s Hire a Longhorn.  Other Austin resources are Avail Assistants and Let Kelly. There may be businesses like this in your town too. What might be my most favorite new service is Taskrabbit.

See if they are in your city and check them out. I think their business model is brilliant. The more “shoulds” and low priority items you clear from your list, the more you are free to do the things you’re best at; the things that offer you the highest payoff in your life; the things that you truly love to do – your significant results. For example, maybe you’ve been longing to start a part-time business doing something you enjoy.  If you didn’t have to mow the lawn, organize the garage, or fix the leaky faucet on the weekend, you could devote the time instead to generating extra income from your hobby. What have you been wanting to do “as soon as you find the time”? Could unloading some of your “shoulds” create the time you’ve been looking for?

If you know of another service like those I’ve mentioned above, please add them to the comments! Thanks for reading!

At some point in the past, likely around New Year’s, you may have sat down and written out your goals –  a plan for what you really want out of life in terms of business or career, finances, relationships, health. The question is, do you have any idea where you put it?

Our days are often filled with meeting deadlines, paying bills, and updating our social media, not to mention cleaning clothes and making sure there’s something besides jelly in the fridge. It can be really hard to turn away from those immediate demands and invest time and focus on distant future goals. After all, they’re not quick-hit tasks. Frequently long-term goals require multiple steps that don’t have immediate payoffs – tasks like building relationships, personal development or sticking to a schedule over a long period of time.

A long-term goal may require you to push yourself out of the house and away from all the fires you’re putting out to attend networking events where you may or may not meet your next dream client or boss. They may require going back to school, paying for a class and spending hours taking notes and doing homework that won’t help pay the bills any time soon. They may include getting to the gym every day and investing an hour or two in your health and fitness.

They’re not activities you can just check off a list so it’s easy to put them off until later, and later, and later, until they’re collecting dust.

But as inspirational leaders like Steven Covey and Tony Robbins agree, you wind up where you’re headed. You must keep your goals in front of you if you ever hope to achieve them. You must make a plan for your days that includes taking steps toward your goals. As Antoine St. Exupery wrote: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

So go dig that goal out of whatever file you stuck it in and start applying your attention to it. First, turn it into a project. For example, “Get fit” might be a goal but it’s not a project because you won’t know when it’s completed. So the project may be, “achieve a resting heartrate under 70,” or “run the Austin Marathon in 2012.” Now decide, what specific steps does the project require? How can you work one or more of them into your schedule every day? How can you motivate yourself to focus on that long-term goal, even when all the daily tasks are pulling at you? You need a process so that you are in control, and not always reacting, because in reaction mode, you’ll never have time for your own dreams.

You owe it to yourself to move toward the destination you’ve chosen for yourself.

Thanks for reading!