The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

Pretty much anybody you ask will tell you they’re pressed for time. There just aren’t enough hours to get it all done, yadda yadda yadda.  So we prioritize, streamline, and simplify.  You can improve your efficiency until you’re blue in the face, not to mention very tightly wound, but you still aren’t addressing one of the biggest time and energy wasters in your day: incoming information.  As my 12-year-old daughter, Meagan, would text on her phone: “TMI” (translation: Too Much Information).

If the 21st century has brought us anything, it is WAY too much information. You can watch several channels full of cable news 24 hours a day. You can surf the internet on any topic until you can’t see straight. Most people could heat their home with the amount of junk mail they receive on a continuous basis.  Imagine the time and productivity lost just sorting though it all!

So why not join me in 2008 and put yourself on a low-information diet? Make this the year that you say “NO MORE!” to the endless onslaught of time-wasting, productivity-eating, stress-inducing STUFF coming at you.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Skip the news. I haven’t regularly watched the news or read a newspaper in fifteen years. Some people are shocked when they hear me say that.  But I’m shocked when people confess how much time they waste each day reading their latest blog postings.  Think about what you really gain by being a news junkie.  To be honest, most of the news out there just isn’t the kind of thing that really impacts my family, my business, or me. And quite frankly, a big chunk of what gets reported will do little more than make me feel angry or even depressed.  So if your job or your natural sense of curiosity don’t prohibit it, consider a very low-news diet. Believe me: my selective ignorance has never caused me a single problem and allows me to focus my energy and attention.

Never meet in person to give information. What’s the number one complaint most people have when it comes to office productivity? Meetings!  Why do we do it to ourselves?  Do we really leave with the decisions that made spending the time worthwhile?  Or are we just regurgitating information that’s already been provided elsewhere?  Does the speaker stand there and read the PowerPoint slides he just emailed to you?  Hello?  If you already have the slides—you could have just read them yourself.  Phone conferences are even worse: they take much longer than an in-person meeting, because participants are checking email and fiddling with their computers.  Create a pact with your team members or department mates to never again have an in-person meeting or phone conference where you are simply conveying information.  Put it on the intranet or compile it into a single email that goes out once a week.  Keep the high cost of the in-person meeting at ebay when the purpose is a simple transfer of low-value information.

Use the phone strategically.  What about meetings with people outside of your office—vendors and clients, for example?  How many times have you spent weeks trying to set up an appointment, only to have it rescheduled at the last minute? Once the meeting actually happens, it costs you a huge piece of your day. If you have a thirty minute meeting that requires an hour’s worth of driving, decide if the time would be better spent with a phone call. Are you really getting better information in person?  Nine times out of ten these meetings could be handled in a tiny fraction of the time, if only they were replaced with a quick phone call. Skip the commute, keep the gas money, and save yourself a ton of time. You may even find that your clients view your respect for THEIR time as refreshing and will appreciate it to no end.

The Mailman Knocks One Hundred Times. The U.S Postal Service does not come running to your home, ring your bell, and hand you one piece of mail at a time, multiple times a day.  It’s batched and delivered once.  If only we could follow the same principle with electronic mail.  I’m not recommending you only check your in-box once a day—I believe that’s unrealistic—but you should still try to cut down.  You can’t focus on a task requiring concentration with your in-box open.  I process my e-mail just a handful of times each day. It’s easy to be in the habit of checking the instant you hear that little ding, but think about what you’re doing to yourself.  What percentage of incoming email is important?  10 percent?  25 percent?  Two percent?  If the majority of incoming email is unimportant and represents information you don’t need (there are donuts in the cafeteria), why would you stop working on the most important task of the day to see if one makes the cut?  You’re letting everyone else dictate your day to you by immediately stopping your productive work and redirecting your attention to an e-mail that is probably not that important anyway.  Then you need to refocus your attention and try to get back on track with whatever you were doing.  After the 50-200 emails you receive each day, just think how many times per hour your productive activities must come to a grinding halt.  Maybe—just maybe—you’re doing it, on purpose, as an excuse to NOT to have to do the hard work you should be doing.

Make the decision NOW.  Many decisions are put off because people are waiting for more information.  How much do you need?  Sometimes enough is good enough.  You will never be able to analyze all the in’s and out’s of every decision, and there will always be more information out there you didn’t consider.  Gather enough information and make the best decision you can with the information you have.  Things can always change.  My father always told me to take initiative and ask forgiveness, not permission.  In the early days of my career, I just handled things for my managers without asking.  If they were gone, I answered for them.  Sometimes it was the wrong answer to be sure, but I’ve always been praised for trying to save my boss some time and force some movement, rather than being berated for the wrong action.  I wish more people would just get some brass and DECIDE.  Stop getting approvals from a million people to cover your backside.  You’re making everyone around you crazy.  Sometimes it is much more efficient to go with the information you have, make the WRONG decision, and make adjustments if necessary, than to waste time being indecisive.

Empower your people. Eric Hoffer, the late American social philosopher, once said, “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.” My husband and COO, John, has asked me several times if I’d like to learn to use the postage machine in our office.  I’ve always staunchly declined.  I have absolutely no desire to learn how to use it.  I enjoy being purposefully ignorant about that machine, since I have no business running it.  When my assistant, Lisa (who sits near me by design), casually asks me a question on the postal machine, I can honestly say, “I have no idea.  You’ll have to get with someone else.”  My staff needs to learn to be problem solving people and handle challenges they experience in the areas they’ve been charged to run, just as I do.  They can’t handle my areas of responsibility, and I refuse to handle theirs—and I unabashedly hold them accountable for their own results.  I’m happy to get them training or pay for assistance, but you should never do those things personally that can be done by someone else at a lower pay level.  You’ll kill yourself.  Give your people the authority they need to make decisions and get things done. If you don’t, you’ll find they consistently create more work for you, not less.

Cut, cut, cut.  Don’t lose your focus as the year goes on.  Cut, streamline, and reduce.  Cancel magazine subscriptions.  Get rid of the junk you haven’t used in a year.  Let all calls you don’t recognize go to voicemail.  Unsubscribe from all newsletters you haven’t specifically requested.  Go out and find things you determine you need to buy, rather than having salespeople feed you information about more things you’ll buy but won’t use.  If your clients keep asking you for the same information over and over again, put it on your website and let new clients know in advance where to find it.  These are just a few examples about how you can deal with less information.  Hope you lose lots of weight on your low-information diet and make 2008…GREAT!

Make it a productive day! ™

Interruptions abound—a co-worker drops by to chat, the phone rings, and your boss sends you an email to handle something, pronto—all at the same time.  With a flurry of activity, you respond to these various demands.  All prove to be low priority, and an hour later, you return to your initial task, your energy waning.  You decide you’ll work on the project in the afternoon, when your energy picks up again.  Of course, after lunch, there’s some crisis, and after fielding a volley of phone calls and unscheduled visits from co-workers, the day ends, and the project is yet again unfinished. 

You’ve lost your momentum.  Much like your car has to work harder to accelerate from a complete stop, so does your brain.  Although interruptions are a normal (and sometimes desirable) part of our work experience, there are times when it’s helpful to defend against them.

So try to eliminate distractions when you need to concentrate on a difficult task.  It’s hard to get much done when someone or something is bugging you. It’s a major problem in most offices, particularly in those with open-plan architecture. If people aren’t talking or walking around, they’re coming directly to you to chit-chat. If they don’t come personally, they call you or send you email. This is fine for occasional socializing or if you’re working with someone on something, but at times it might be necessary to set limits on the chatting. This isn’t much of a problem when you have your own office; you can shut the door, and even lock it if necessary. If you’re stuck in a cubicle, however, there’s not much you can do to stop people from coming by, or even from parking themselves outside your cubicle and holding a long discussion with someone else. Try slipping on some noise canceling headphones to drown out the antics of passersby or your neighbor. People are less likely to interrupt you when you’re wearing a headset.  I’m not sure why this is but it’s true.  Just don’t get any eye contact. This can create a little privacy without seeming too unfriendly. Similarly, you can send your calls to voicemail and close your email program to give yourself some time to focus without getting distracted.

I have a friend who jokes there are always three people in her bed: herself, her husband, and her Blackberry.  I was in California last week on vacation with my family and witnessed people typing away on their Blackberries while at Disneyland, with their children tugging at their pants legs, asking to go see Cinderella.  I was presenting a seminar yesterday, and one participant kept looking up to say, "Would you repeat that"? not because I wasn’t clear, but because she wasn’t paying attention to me—you got it—checking her email during class.  Examples abound but the bottom line is Americans are addicted to email.  Slaves to the Send/Receive button, countless workers sit at their desks, waiting for the next Desktop Alert, beep, cursor change, envelope in the system tray, whatever trigger prompts their Pavlovian response to interrupt whatever they are doing and check it.  And unopened email!  A present—for me!  Someone loves me.  Many workers allow themselves to get sucked in the email vortex for an entire day and not actually complete any work.  And then we blame the sheer mass for sucking all of our time, rather than acknowledging the reality: you are controlled by your email. 

A new study released July 26 by AOL in partnership with Opinion Research Corporation reveals that more Americans are using portable devices to email around the clock from virtually anywhere—even in the bathroom and at church.  Even more dangerously, 53% of respondents admit to tapping away *while driving.*  Some other interesting statistics:

* 83% of email users are checking while on vacation;

* 59% of those with portable devices are using them to check email every time a new message arrives.

* 43% of users keep the device nearby when they are sleeping to listen for incoming email.

*  15% describe themselves as "addicted to email" (really? only 15%?)

These statistics are just sad.  AOL was extolling this like a virtue, of course, that you can stay connected anywhere, anytime.  I think it’s a dangerous message.  We’re teaching people that in order to be productive and be a valuable worker, you have to be "always on," give up your private time, and check email at all hours of the night.  Portable devices are very convenient when you’re traveling for business, sitting on an airplane, in a taxi, driving as a passenger in a car with nothing better to do, at a business conference to stay in touch with the office, waiting to pick you kid up from soccer, etc.  There are certainly and definitely valuable uses for handhelds and they can be quite handy.  But be very careful about throwing yourself upon the altar of email addiction and sacrificing the quality of your life balance and time with your loved ones. 

The big differentiating factor is control.  If you shut your Outlook down completely for an hour, would you be able to resist checking?  Can you turn off your device for two hours while having a nice dinner with a spouse without thinking about it constantly?  Would you get hives if your Blackberry wasn’t charged?  Do you feel like the world is going to end?  I’m not here to judge you and neither should anyone else—only you know—intuitively—whether you have a problem.  Time to control yourself rather than letting technology control you.  If you think it’s bad now, just wait to see what happens in a couple years.

Feeling overwhelmed?  Try this little experiment—turn off your computer volume. Your psyche is constantly bombarded with all the little clicks and dings your computer makes when it performs the smallest operation—simply decide you don’t need it!  You only need the volume turned up if you’re watching a file with sound, such as a video.  You will be completely amazed at how much more calmness you exude and how much peace of mind you feel if you try this!  Encourage your co-workers to turn off their computer volume as well, to minimize the overall background noise in your office.  This is especially helpful if you work in an open-space office with several cubicles.  To further reduce noise in your life, trying driving with your radio off.  You don’t have to be the receptor for all the bad news in the world.  That doesn’t mean you should be an uncaring person, but there’s nothing you can do about a murder that took place yesterday in a different state.  It’s important to keep abreast of news—but you’d be surprised at how little news you need to keep abreast.  Keep the radio on for only 10 minutes of your drive, or listen to it every other day.  Better yet, put in your favorite CD.  Or drive in silence and spend some time thinking some positive thoughts—like a recent vacation.  Remember the saying, “silence is golden.”

I enjoyed this post about how to be more productive with your Crackberry, I mean Blackberry.

Especially true is Nakagawa’s comment, "…the people who are the most productive don’t seem to have them." 

I’m sure you have your beefs about Blackberry usage in your organization (or by your spouse, for that matter).  If you were king or queen of the world, what "rules" would you create about Blackberry usage?  In addition to the 10 the author lists, I’ll add the following from personal experience:

1.  Do not pretend you are listening to someone by brainlessly mumbling "uh-huh" while you are answering an email on your Crackberry.

2.  Pay attention to the presenter during training sessions rather than using the time as your personal Crackberry play time.

3.  Use codes in the subject line when emailing, so Crackberry recipients can get your message without having to open it: "Do you know what the June budget figure is for professional services? END"  (AR = Action Required, END = End of message, LONG = read later etc.)

4.  Set your Crackberry to delete your email off the server when you delete it from your handheld (so you don’t have to do it twice).

5.  Turn your Crackberry off when you are standing in line for the Matterhorn at Disney World with your poor children tugging at your arm.

What are your rules?

I am rid of spam!  YES, it’s true!  Just in the last few months, as many of you have experienced, the volume of spam I was receiving was increasing drastically.  I was getting 200+ spam email messages a day, and it was killing my productivity and frustrating me to no end.  Just scanning the subject lines and deleting was costing me precious time, and some spam messages were causing my Treo handheld to reset upon email retrieval.  I’ve tried several end-user anti-spam filters, and nothing was doing the trick.  Add to that multiple domains, email addresses, and aliases, and the problem was compounding daily. 

ENTER Mail Foundry.  My webmaster, Lance Gibb, installed the appliance on his server, routed my mail (all addresses, domains, aliases) through it, and TA-DA!  No more spam.  No kidding!  99% is gone.  At the end of each day, I receive a quarantine digest of all messages MailFoundry grabbed, and I have the option of releasing them back to my in-box and tagging them as not spam.  I have only had one or two messages with false positives.  I can also report messages I receive in error that are actually spam and should be grabbed next time. 

You could even do it yourself, if you own your own domain, have total control of your domain, and know all the technical details of how to route your mail.  But it’s just as easy to contact your webmaster and recommend MailFoundry. The best part yet?  It’s FREE!  I highly recommend it.

Merry Christmas!  No spam is my best business present to myself!

I’ve always used RSS Reader 2.0 as my news aggregator/feed reader, until it started acting buggy, and I explored other options.  After reading other blogs and postings on the subject, I decided to try NewsGator Inbox for Outlook…and I love it!  What a time saver!  It integrates right into my Outlook email client and acts just like an email.  It has its own folder, and I can delete, forward, store, and search blog postings just like email.  It adds a nifty "Subscribe in NewsGator" item to the Internet Explorer menu.  I also like the wizard that lets you search feeds by keyword.

It has some disadvantages: you can only use it with Outlook, although NewsGator has different software versions as well.  The only thing I don’t like is you can’t group RSS feeds.

There’s a free 30-day trial at the NewsGator InBox website; the software version is only $29.95, which is well worth the convenience of seeing everything in one place (if you’re an Outlook user).

Bottom line: If the average "Joe" had this tool when blogging first started, it wouldn’t have been near as confusing and more people would have taken the time to learn how to subscribe to RSS feeds.

I love this amazing little plug-in for Outlook.  Your $30 will be well-spent.  You highlight information from the text of an email, hit a hotkey, and the software instantly determines whether you’re highlighting contact, appointment, task, or note information and opens the appropriate dialog box in Outlook with the information *already populated* for your review.  You can try it free for 45 days.

Visit http://getanagram.com/anagramoutlook/ to see a flash video and read about the neat features.

According to a report from Basex, the average "knowledge worker" — someone who is part of the growing information economy — loses 2.1 hours a day to interruptions. If those workers make an average of $21 an hour, that adds up to $588 billion a year — more than the gross domestic product of

Argentina

Then another article http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=1549972 goes on to say, “Other companies, such as Ambient Devices, say keep it simple. You shouldn’t have to open your e-mail whenever an icon pops up on your screen. A glance should tell if the new message is important to you, much the way you glance at a clock.”

Actually, that’s a *really* bad idea.  Even glancing at an email starts your mind a-wandering, and there aren’t too many people who are disciplined enough not to open it if the subject line and sender looks even remotely more interesting than what they’re working on.  If you have the luxury of having two screens (which boosts productivity by 30%), keep one dedicated to your communications functions, and mute the sound and blank the screen when you’re trying to concentrate on a project.  Bring a kitchen timer from home, set it for an hour, and dare yourself not to check email until the timer goes off.  If you can’t, you officially have email OCD.  If you only have one monitor, either close your email program completely, or if you have to have it open to check your calendar, don’t keep your in-box up. 

Better yet, go under Tools, Options, Email Options, Advanced Email Options and turn off all the global alerts, noises, envelopes, and pop-ups when you get an email, so you won’t be tempted to check it.  Then go into your Rules and set a specific sound to play when you do get a message from a particular person such as your boss.  That way, your ears will hear the cue, but your eyes won’t go to the pop-up and distract your thoughts.  You can complete the sentence you’re working on before checking the message.

Spam can be annoying and time consuming. In a test, Northeast Netforce investigators “seeded” 175 different locations and monitored the fake addresses over the next six weeks for spam; 100 percent of email addresses used in chat rooms received spam; 86 percent of posts in newsgroups received spam. So what can you do to help reduce it? Bottom line: Don’t use your work address or personal address for open, public forums, where spammers are harvesting your email address. Create a screen name that isn’t associated with your email address or a “dummy” email address. Your ISP can automatically forward the “dummy” address to your “real” address. When spam builds up, delete the decoy. For $9.95 a year, you can get a block of 500 disposable email addresses to use from www.Spamex.com. You can also purchase spam-filtering software for your computer, which “grabs” junk email and files it in a special folder, separate from your real email in the in-box (my favorite is McAfee Spamkiller, www.McAfee.com).