More Progress – Same Hours

How do you put more progress in your week without adding additional hours?  Future pace your time.

True or False:  If you start the day with no objectives, no goals, and no hot priorities tied directly to your objectives, your day will still fill up with tasks and busy work.

True.

There is an alternate path.  Future pace your week by imagining exactly which steps toward achieving your major objectives you will accomplish by week’s end.  Reinforce the picture by imagining how great it will feel to leave at the end of the day Friday knowing that you have made real progress on your deliverables.

Open your calendar right now and insert 1 next action step for every major goal.

Added bonus:  Reserving time to work on what’s most important will give you the conviction you need to say no to some of the requests for your time that are coming your way.

You might also enjoy:

Big Rocks – Creating Time for Success

Too Much Work and Not Enough Day?

Finding Time for Strategy

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Teamwork Slays the Goodenuff Monster

The Goodenuff Monster

They say a problem named is a problem half solved.  I’ve not only named this one, I’ve given it a face.  Meet the Goodenuff Monster.

Regular readers may recognize portions of this post – It is updated material from something I wrote in 2010.

Who Or What Is The Goodenuff Monster?

The Goodenuff Monster is a faulty thought process that justifies second-rate performance.  Often, he presents himself when we’re trying do things ourselves that would benefit from teamwork.

Although easy to spot he makes himself appear harmless by appealing to our sense of humanity — “Come on, don’t be so hard on yourself.  It’s goodenuff.”

How To Slay The Goodenuff Monster

Unless you are a neurosurgeon it’s not reasonable or feasible to try to do everything perfectly.  This is where the beauty of teams comes to the rescue.  In a high functioning team each person or group owns a specific piece of the puzzle.  This allows members or divisions to focus entirely on their core competencies and responsibilities.

To be effective is to hold ourselves accountable to each other and to speak up when we see an element that is out of sync.  So if a colleague or team member points out something in need of improvement, accept it gratefully and know you’re doing your part to slay the Goodenuff Monster.

No-Talk Thursdays

Jason Fried says one of the worst things managers do is interrupt their people.  He proposes an interesting idea in this short video called: Why People Can’t Seem To Get Work Done At Work.

Recruiter Workload

Setting appropriate goals for recruiters is a tough task.  Generalist recruiters handle a wide variety of positions which creates productivity peaks and valleys.  Specialists may enjoy a steadier, more predictable workflow in terms of number of hires expected; their challenges come from the differing preferences of the hiring managers they support.  In the agency world, client mix produces measurement complexity due to variations in administrative requirements from client to client.  And then there are the unrecoverable lost hours from cancelled requisitions…  You see the challenge.

A balanced scorecard is critical to measuring true productivity and contribution.  Marcus Buckingham, author of “The One Thing You Need To Know”, advocates finding the one metric that is important above all others.  This is a great principle to follow at the organization level, but one that causes recruiters great angst and increases staff turnover.  Staffing.org presents just such a case by telling Jennifer’s story.  It’s worth a read if you have recruiters in your company.

Get Out of Email Jail

We have been conditioned to read and react to email messages like Pavlov’s dogs responding to a dinner bell.  Unless you are a customer service rep paid to answer client requests immediately, this behaviour is not helping you achieve your most important objectives.

Take control of your day.  Get out of Email Jail.

1.  Turn off audible email notifications and the blinking red email-waiting light on your Blackberry.  If you can bring yourself to do this, it will greatly reduce the number of distractions that pull you away from your daily work.

2.  Select blocks of time to work on strategic matters and set your email system to notify senders that you are unable to respond until next day.  You can build in a message to include your mobile number for urgent matters.  Very few people will actually phone you after having received an out of office notification.

3.  Publicize your new approach.  Tell people you are not less available — they can phone you anytime –  you simply are trying to reduce time spent reading email messages so that you can focus on what needs to get done.  Offer to support them should they undertake a similar approach.

4.  Promote better email practices by setting a good example.  Don’t create distribution lists with wild abandon and then hope others will eliminate you from theirs.  Reduce the number of emails you send others by keeping a running list of topics to discuss during your next meeting or phone call.

Break with tradition.  Give yourself a pass out of Email Jail.