The following article was written by my esteemed colleague, Bea Fields, but being the Productivity Professor, I’m so in alignment with everything she wrote, I had to share it here:

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I am not a productivity expert, but I am well known for getting things done and getting them done well, so I want to share with you a few strategies which have worked for me so that you can also be more productive.

The first thing to know is that we are in unique times. Because of laptops and the internet, our work and personal lives are intersecting unlike they ever have in the history of work. We lie in the bed checking e-mail. We are up at the crack of dawn to write our blog entries (like this one today.) We can have a report faxed or e-mailed to our homes 24/7. The question I hear from leaders each day is “How do I deal with all of this so that I stay as productive as possible?”

My response is always to come back to the leaders I work with and ask them to answer the following questions:

1) What is the biggest project that is on your mind?

If you have something on your mind, and it’s not getting done, it may never happen. The best way to address this is to sit down with a piece of paper and get the project on paper with a list of things to get done, completion dates and the names of people you will delegate out the project to.

2) What is the weakest link in your time management system?

One of the tools I use quite often with my clients is the Time Mastery Profile. With this profile, you will be able to quickly see the area which is your weakest link in your time management system. The weak link might be a lack of planning, procrastination, interruptions or poor communication. Once you have identified the weakest link, sit down and craft a plan to turn that weakness into a strength. Once your plan is crafted, you must be willing to dedicate your time and energy to changing that behavior around for at least one year (hey…it took you 20, 30 or 40 years to get where you are, so it’s going to take time to turn the behavior around.)

3) What commitments are you not fulfilling?

I work with leaders each day who are just simply over-committed. They are not only running a large organization. They are sitting on multiple non profit boards, attending conferences and attending meetings with strategic partners and political decision makers. Many leaders will tell you that they often can’t meet about 50% of their obligations. Look closely at your commitments, rank them in order of priority, and politely decline from any commitments you know you cannot meet (or delegate them out to someone who can meet them.)

4) What small tasks are you worrying about?

What are you thinking about? “I need to make a doctor’s appointment” or “Send that thank-you note” or “The dog needs a bath.” Does this sound familiar?

Last night, as I was going to sleep, I realized I had a radio interview this morning at 7:45. I had been worried that I might miss the interview, so I got up, wrote myself a big reminder and placed it beside the phone. I was then able to go to sleep. Each day, we have small “worries” that run in the background of our minds. They keep playing and playing like a broken record. The best thing you can do to relieve this mental stress is to complete a brain dump. Sit down, and write out a list of everything that’s on your mind (including that squeaky door that keeps irritating you every time you open it.) Then, set out to knock out every “to do” on your list. You will find that your productivity is so much greater once you get everything out of your brain and on paper.

5) What is your magical time of day?

Each person has a time of day that is what I call “magical.” It’ s that time of day when you are the least distracted and the most productive. It’s that time of day when you can focus on one project and get in the zone on that project. Consider carefully what your magical time of day is, and dedicate this time to your most important projects.

6) What do you always find time to do?

There are tasks on your task list which always seem to get done. Look closely at this list. From there, you will want to ask yourself why these things are easy for you to do. Do you enjoy them? Do they help you fulfill a core value? Do they allow you to feel a sense of accomplishment? Do they spark your creativity? There are always “to do’s” in your life which are working, and these accomplishments can boost your confidence. Once you discover “why” they are working, use these reasons as a way to look at why other tasks are difficult to accomplish. As an example, if you value time with family in the evening, and you are committed to an evening meeting that you never seem to be able to attend, it is probably because this meeting is bumping up against time with your family.

7) What projects are the most important to your overall life and career success?

It is so easy to put off bigger projects which may have a huge positive impact in our lives, because they seem so daunting. I know…I wrote two books in two years, and there were times when I wondered if they would ever get done. The thing to know here is that you cannot “implement” or “act on” a project. You can only “act on” each task which is a part of the bigger project. The best way to approach a big project is to sit down and write out each and every step you will need to implement to complete the project and then implement one task each day (or two tasks each day if possible) until the bigger project is complete.

8)What seems to interrupt you?

Life is filled with interruptions. The first step in the direction of reducing interruptions is to keep an interruption log for one week. The log should include:

-The interruption

-The time of day

-The person who interrupted you

-The length of the interruption

At the end of one week, look closely at your data to spot trends in your answers. You may find that a certain person interrupts you or that interruptions are more frequent at certain times of day and so forth. Once you have discovered the repeating patterns of your interruptions, it’s time to start making some changes. Speak to the people who are interrupting you, establish office hours, close the door and turn off the phone during your peak productivity hours.

9) How many hours each day do you spend multi-tasking?

The multi-taskers of the world think they are getting a lot done (I am admitting that I am a multi-tasker. Right now, as I write this article, I am not multi-tasking. I am sitting in my dining room away from my other toys and people). The Journal of Experimental Psychology has discovered that it takes the brain four times longer to process each task you are working on during multi-tasking. So, if you are multi-tasking for one hour, you are actually working for about four hours. The best approach with any task is to carve out the time of day and a quiet location so that you can stay focused on that one project only. Your completion time will literally be cut in half.

10) How often are you checking e-mail each day?

Many people think that checking and responding to e-mail is making them more efficient, yet the reality is that checking e-mail multiple times a day creates distraction and causes us to veer off in a direction away from our most critical tasks. It causes a loss in concentration and causes eye strain and fatigue. The best approach with both e-mail and phone calls is to schedule two times each day to check e-mail and to return phone calls. Use the time in between to work on those tasks which are going to help you achieve your most important projects and goals.

If you are someone who is interested in improving your leadership by improving your productivity, contact me today at beafields@beafields.com to schedule time for a consultation.

In the process improvement world of Six Sigma, the word Kano is associated with customer service—exceptional customer service—if you’re in the right quadrant!

The use of quadrants and matrices in business to gauge where you are is not uncommon. I immediately think of Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant and Stephen Pierce’s Cycle of Success I heard about at the Dallas World Internet Summit a couple of weeks ago (as of this writing) to name a couple. And in both cases, there is a most desired quadrant of the four to be in.

Noritki Kano’s model is based on customer expectations, which are always changing right along with technology. There are levels of quality in a product or service that people expect implicitly (i.e., working windows & tires on a car) and explicitly (i.e., good mileage if it’s a compact car).

And then there are the bells and whistles associated with unexpected or “exciting” quality. In this day and age an example might be an SUV that gets 100 MPG! The following graph shows how to capture what I just described graphically. This is also known as the Kano Model:

That was a tangible product example. Let’s look at a recent real life service example:

The Unscientific Informal Grocery Store Focus Group…

My husband went out to a local grocery store this weekend to grab a few last minute items he forgot to buy earlier for a barbeque we hosted yesterday. When you go to a grocery store you expect a certain level of service, right? This may include speedy checkout in the 10-items-or-less express lane, for example.

He was in a hurry, and the lines were long everywhere and not moving. He guessed that everyone was doing their Saturday shopping at once, but the reality was that the computer servers were down and no one had made an announcement to the customers who were waiting. He eventually had to ask, and then he ultimately ended up leaving to get his items at another grocery store.

This is an example of being in the lower left quadrant of the Kano Model. You don’t want to be there!

So today, while hanging out with friends and Vietnamese food, we all sat around with our cuisine after a swim and talked about what we all believed fell under those various levels of quality in a grocery store. Here are a few of the thoughts we came up with:

Basic Quality Category-What we take for granted (implicit): a climate controlled building, working cash registers, shelves for groceries…

Expected Quality Category-Explicit expectations: Quick checkout in the express lane, fresh food, courteous staff…

Exciting Quality Category-Above and beyond: Free groceries, four-for-one specials, random cash awards of $X for the Xth customer who walks through the door…

You get the idea.

But keep in mind that there is always going to be competitive pressure to stay on top of innovation. To quote Tom Pyzdek, “Today’s exciting quality is tomorrow’s basic quality.”

So what are you doing to excite and delight your customers?

–Carol Dickson-Carr

“I don’t want to,” my eight year old daughter said sadly when I asked her to clean her room. I asked her why that was her typical response. Her reply, “Because no one ever seems to want to help me.” I’d asked her that same question three years ago and her reply was, “It’s [the task] too big!”

In each instance, my thought immediately went to her being overwhelmed. Even though the payoff would be an allowance, she often wanted to forgo the money to get out of doing it! That is, until I reminded her of strategies to getting it done without the task feeling as daunting, with the biggest tip being: take baby steps and prioritize by working on one area of the room or category at a time (i.e., school papers, then shoes, then stuffed animals, etc.). But truth be told, she has no real passion for cleaning her room.

When we coach our adult clients, or sometimes when we are being coached or mentored ourselves, there is also often a similar trend of resistance in some cases. This can be true whether we’re dealing with grunt work that doesn’t light us up (One word to that: Outsource!) or if we have been presented with quite a few cool tools that can help our businesses in the long run.

Let’s stay with the Web 2.0 theme: Introducing blogging, podcasting, video creation, talk radio, and social networks to people who are totally new to it in a six week period have sometimes invoked these types of interjections:

“I feel like I’ve been sprayed with a fire hose of information!”

“How can I incorporate it all?”

“I don’t have enough time.”

“I am not a techie!”

“AAAAAAHHHH!”

The baby steps and prioritizing come in handy again. And so does breathing. If rotating between using all the tools while learning them doesn’t float your boat after getting introduced to them, try this: Figure out which tool interests you the most and carve out a specified time daily or every other day to become one with it until you master it, and then move on to the next favorite and repeat the process.

And remember, you don’t have to take this journey alone. Take advantage of all the resources out there. The ones I listed in the previous blog post are just a starting point.

So tell me, if you have a favorite Web 2.0 tool, what is it and why?

If you haven’t tried out any of the tools, I’d also like to know why?

My inquiring mind wants to know!

–Carol Dickson-Carr

The video clip below shares the remaining seven of ten tips to maintaining balance while learning about or currently employing any or all of the Web 2.0 technology to your business model.

Once you dive into the tools (Bea & I can help you with that too!), here are a few more resources worth checking out in the Web 2.0 community–these are people I’ve built relationships with in a social networking framework:

Facebook Goddess: Mari Smith

For Business Blogging Experts: Denise Wakeman & Patsi Krakoff of The Blog Squad

Twitter Experts: Deb Micek and Warren Whitlock

Video (and integrating all the tools): Sherman Hu

Wordpress Expert: Kim Beasley

Folks who know me know I am the hugest advocate of storytelling. Check out Carla Young’s program for more on that!

And for more on time mastery, check out Ann Rusnak (The Time Diva!).

And the list goes on!

This clip will share three of ten tips to maintaining balance while learning about or currently employing any or all of the Web 2.0 technology to your business model.

Check out our comprehensive multimedia Business Pulse library!

I know I’m dating myself, but I loved A Different World, the NBC spin-off of the Cosby show as a youth in the 90s. Hearing Whitley say, “Relax, Relate, Release!” was something I just adopted even when it was hard for me to relax, relate or release!

Lately, I was starting to think the moon or some cosmic force was having an effect on so many people in my sphere: In my academic world, I had some students freaking out about their grades as the semester nears an end, fellow professors stressed about publication and tenure and general overwhelm… In the coaching world, a more-than-usual amount of clients have been experiencing a sustained sense of overwhelm.

And today! Today, I can’t remember how many times I had to tell someone to BREATHE, whether it was my daughter, one of her teammates, one of the parents of the teammates, or yours truly (uh-huh!) when all was said and done.

So after I got back from dropping off my daughter at one of her friends’ houses for a sleepover this evening, I immediately turned on my recording software and started to speak a meditation around overwhelm and stress. Rather than the usual gregarious tone some of you may have heard in my podcasts (particularly the storytelling one for Six Sigma), my voice is quite even and calm in this audio.

There was some irony in my process because of various interruptions and false starts while I was recording. I was so glad when I finally finished my vocals and could move on to mixing the ocean waves and my relaxing music in!

So if you, or someone you know is starting to feel the pinch, or if you just want to do some preventative maintenance, I invite you to get in a quiet place and treat yourself for 14 minutes by downloading the MP3 below and listening:

 

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