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

What do you do when there’s TOO MUCH TO DO?

You mark your calendar and come to THE PRODUCTIVITY ACADEMY with Laura Stack!

Due to popular demand, we are once again presenting The Productivity Academy on March 15 at the Marriott Denver South at Park Meadows in the Denver area. 

Past participants have said:

You just have NO idea. Really.
New planner. New plan. New tools. New knowledge. New mindset. New energy. New enthusiasm. New HOPE!!

and

I have benefited hugely from the tasking tools in Microsoft Outlook, particularly saving emails to tasks – as well as your 3-minute rule. My inbox is emptied every time I check my email! I am also using standing tickler files at work and home, which has helped me corral all that incoming paperwork! Finally, I am aware of what times of the day I should be working on more difficult tasks, but I have not gotten to where I’ve committed to doing it yet – work in progress!

You’ll learn Laura’s innovative PRODUCTIVITY WORKFLOW FORMULA (PWF). Are you tired of hearing “do more with less”? Many people are already working as long and as hard as they can, and “productivity improvement” classes can be hard to swallow. Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro, turns time management on its head and shows overwhelmed professionals how to actually DO LESS and ACHIEVE MORE. They’ll produce greater results and create significant impact on organizational goals. Laura teaches her latest thinking using this innovative workflow formula to reduce to-do lists, reduce commitments, reduce distractions, reduce the glut of information, reduce inefficiencies, and reduce energy expenditure. Past clients using these systems and methods report savings of 90 minutes a day and higher productivity than ever before!

Visit The Productivity Academy to find out more and register. We’ve got a special for early registrations! Individual registrants can save $100 by using coupon code EARLY by February 6, and if you bring 3 or more people from the same company, you save $100 per person! 3 or more people ordering with the EARLY coupon code can save an additional $100 off their order.

“My to-do list is so long that it doesn’t have an end; it has an event horizon.” — Craig Bruce, Canadian Software Engineer.

“According to USA Today, an astonishing 95 percent of companies don’t share their strategies with employees.” — Joel Garfinkle, American inspirational speaker.

Efficient time management requires the establishment of a dependable routine. The modern office worker can tap a variety of tools when constructing such a productivity framework, with the simple to-do list arguably the most important tool in the chest. But this begs a question: What rules do you apply to determine what goes onto your daily to-do list in the first place? In other words, how do you decide what you should be working on each day?

This question goes to the very heart of personal productivity. So let’s look at a few factors that can help you determine what to focus your attention on, so you don’t waste time and endanger your career with missteps.

Your Job Requirements
Start by asking yourself, “Why am I here?” What, precisely, did the company hire you to do? Acquire a thorough familiarity with all the requirements of your job—not just the ones published in the job description, but the informal ones as well. The latter do exist in most jobs, and it may take you a while to discover them all. If your job has published performance objectives, learn them by heart—and don’t assume they’ll remain static from year to year or even month to month. They may well evolve as time passes. If you stick to the same set-in-concrete routine, you may end up damaging your workplace productivity.

If you aren’t entirely sure about everything the job requires of you, don’t hesitate to ask your superiors. Try to ask probing questions, to get beyond the “official” requirements and into the nitty-gritty details that HR may not have informed you about when you interviewed for the position.

Another good source of guidance will come during your annual performance reviews, when your boss rates how well you do your job. As necessary, ask him or her to provide pointers to help you refine your personal productivity. Take notes, and make a sincere effort to implement what you’ve learned.

Know Your Company Strategy
Do you have a clear idea of your company’s grand strategy? Studies show that very few rank-and-file workers do; and this is one situation where what you don’t know can definitely hurt you. If your company’s mission is largely a mystery to you, then I suggest you make a deliberate effort to learn it. At the very least, study annual reports and presentations to shareholders and investors. For a more personal touch, make an appointment with your department head, and ask them to make a presentation on the subject to your team.

Once you understand the general corporate strategy, tighten the focus to your department and team in order to clarify the more immediate aspects of the company’s goals. You may discover your boss has specific policies he or she focuses on, while other teams handle different aspects of the overall strategy. In any case, start incorporating what you’ve found into your daily schedule wherever possible.

The Master List
Most of your daily to-do list will consist of tasks funneled to you on a regular basis during meetings, emails, phone calls, and direct verbal communications with your superiors. These are the urgent tasks you need to tend to ASAP to keep your productivity at work moving along smoothly. But while they may rank as important in the short term, you can’t allow them to overwhelm the long-term projects and issues that, while not especially urgent, you must accomplish in order to achieve true workplace success.

This is where the concept of the master to-do list comes in. Think of it as a “brain dump” file containing all the things you want to do eventually, but that you need not take care of right away. Many of the strategic goals of your company, department, and team will end up here, along with “someday” ideas like revamping old workflow systems and inventing new ones, or your intention to learn a new programming language. Your master list keeps your daily list from overflowing into uselessness, and it may consist of dozens or hundreds of entries as a result. Whenever something important comes in that lacks urgency or has no set deadline, add it to the master list.

A master list should be a living, evolving document that guides your long-term workflow; you can’t let it turn into a dead-file for forgotten tasks. To keep it at the top of your mind, review it at least weekly. You can use the Category feature in Outlook or your email program to group like items or projects. Leave time in your schedule for strategic, long-term projects. For example, you might schedule one timeslot a day for working on a project requiring thinking or concentration, or you might find spaces for three a week. Whatever works for you is fine, as long as you keep your master list firmly in mind. When the block of time arrives, turn everything off and resist the urge to check email or open a browser.

The Bottom Line
The average daily to-do list contains a mix of items with different priorities, originating from a variety of sources. By necessity, it will be weighted toward urgent but relatively unimportant items, with a leavening of non-urgent but essential tasks—i.e., the things that count most in the long run. An effective to-do list takes both into account, folds in crisis situations as they occur, and deletes the trivial.

Make absolutely sure that the crises and daily minutiae don’t overwhelm the long-term tasks. Purely reactive busyness will get you nowhere if it’s not underlain and supported by the solid bedrock of job requirements, strategic goals, process maintenance, and other important but non-urgent items. Handling all these proactively, in combination with daily routine, results in honest-to-goodness personal productivity.

We’re excited to be included among the terrific blogs on Evan Carmichael’s “The Entrepreneur Blog” list of top productivity blogs to watch in 2010! The list includes great blogs in the areas of business, personal, technology lifestyle and more. Check it out!

Top Ten Tips for a More Organized 2011!
By Laura Stack, MBA, CSP

There will always be more things to do than time to do it. Working longer isn’t going to save you. (I’d bet you’ve never gone to sleep at the end of a long day with everything on your to-do list completed.) To counter this never-ending battle, you’ll need to learn to be more efficient and get your work done in less time. If you can figure out how to be more productive during the day and achieve greater results in less time, you can leave the office earlier and get a life.

Learn how to use your software. One of the many ways professionals waste time during the day is with Microsoft Outlook (or whatever email software you use). I estimate people waste 30 minutes to 2 hours a day with incorrect or inefficient information management systems. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of not understanding what Outlook is capable of doing (Journaling, Notes, Customized Contact Forms, Task Tracking, etc.). As a Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (MCAS) in Outlook, I estimate most people only understand and use 10-20% of Outlook’s capabilities.

The Inbox is not a to-do list. Pull the action from the email and move it to the correct location. Do NOT simply flag the email, which simply leaves it in the inbox.

1. Right-click on the email.

2. Select “Move to Folder” from the short cut menu.

3. Select Tasks from the list if it’s a “to-do” item or Calendar if it has a specific time.

4. Click OK.

5. This will activate a task properties window.

6. Update all of the information accordingly. Use the “Start Date” to indicate when you want the task to appear on your To-Do Bar.

7. Click the “Save and Close” button.

8. Make sure your TaskPad (2003) or To-Do Bar (2007/2010) sorts by Start Date, not Due Date.

File email in your existing folder system. You already have a folder system on your hard drive or a shared drive. Rather than keeping a different list of personal folders in your Outlook, save emails in your existing folders to keep reference items together. Just as you would save a Word document or PowerPoint show, you can save email as a file. While viewing the email:

1. Under the File menu, select Save As.

2. Navigate to the correct folder on your hard or shared drive.

3. Change the file name, if desired.

4. In the Save as Type dropdown menu, select Outlook Message Format (*.msg).

5. Click Save.

6. When you double-click the Outlook icon, the email will open within your Outlook software, just as if it were in the inbox.

Automate manual actions. Use Outlook’s Rules; they help you manage your e-mail messages by performing actions on messages that match a specific set of conditions. After you create a rule, Outlook applies it when a message arrives in your Inbox or when you send a message. Spend some time playing with the Rules Wizard to explore all the cool things you can do, such as forwarding to a list, automatically deleting mail from certain people, printing, moving messages where you’re cc’d into a specified folder, or moving messages with certain words in the subject field to a folder.

1. On the Tools menu, click Rules and Alerts.

2. Click New Rule.

3. Make sure the “Start creating a rule from a template” button is selected.

4. Follow the Wizard.

Keep your notes on your Contacts up to date. Keep notes for every client contact in a contact management system of some sort: ACT, Salesforce.com, Outlook, etc. If you have Outlook, this feature is called the Journal, which is a little-known, powerful feature rarely used by immensely helpful for salespeople to document client history: conversations, phone calls, and meetings. Create a New Journal Entry, tag it to the Contact, type out the contents of the meeting. You can now view a Contact’s Journal entries from years ago. If you share your Journal and Contacts, anyone on your time can see your notes and client activity if you’re out.

Create a travel plan. When you do have to fly for business, you’ll usually have a pretty good idea of how much downtime you’ll have during your trip, so set some goals for your travel time before you leave. How long is the flight each way? How long will you be alone in your hotel room in the evening? Know what you want to accomplish during various parts of your trip. It isn’t set in stone—it’s just a guide. When you sit down in your airplane seat, you should know exactly what to do next. Maybe there’s a report you want to read or a proposal you want to write. Be ready to dive right in. Until I can turn on my computer, I generally do light reading as I catch my breath and get settled. I might even do a Sudoku puzzle. Then I get right to it. I never turn on the television in my hotel, since a quiet hotel room is a great place to bang out work.

Embrace the Smartphone. You don’t need to become a full-fledged Crackberry addict to enjoy the benefits of a smartphone. It shouldn’t hijack your life, but it can be a useful tool while you’re riding in a taxi or sitting at the gate. Use your downtime to keep up with email; it’s comforting to know it isn’t piling up while you’re away. A smart phone can also help you stay on top of things back at the office without playing phone tag and leaving voicemails all over the place.

Simplify with a docking station. Do you find yourself transferring files between a desktop computer and your laptop when you need to travel or bring work home? This was one of my biggest frustrations and time-wasters for many years. Unless your work requires some serious computer resources, you can probably stop using the desktop machine altogether. A docking station will allow you to keep your nice big monitor and full-size keyboard, but still be able to pop your computer out of the dock, slip it into your laptop bag, and have all your files in one place. It’s the best of both worlds.

Be determined to complete a task in less time. Sometimes we’re so busy looking for an extra thirty minutes to complete a task we don’t realize it could be done in ten. Make sure you aren’t over-researching, over-analyzing, or just plain over-thinking what you’re trying to do. Some fish will grow to fit the size of their tank, and tasks will do the same thing. If Step One of writing a report is always an hour of banging your head against the blank computer screen, it becomes the norm. Don’t fall into this trap. Evaluate your tasks and challenge yourself to get them done more quickly. If you had to have the report written by the end of the day instead of the end of the week, you would find a way to get it done. Tight deadlines don’t leave much time for banging your head on the computer. When a crisis pops up, rise to the challenge. Apply the same “never say die” attitude to your more routine tasks, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish. Focus, focus, focus. Give yourself ten minutes to concentrate on the task at hand. Once you commit your full energy to getting it done, you’ll be amazed at how things start zipping along.

Hold an efficiency meeting. We all know we can be more productive. When I ask salespeople, “What would you need to change about yourself in order to be more productive and increase sales?” everyone knows the answer. When I ask, “What would need to change in the office in order for you to be more productive?” everyone knows the answer. However, most salespeople and their teams rarely take the time to discuss these issues and formulate solutions. If you haven’t had an “efficiency meeting” in a while, get it on your schedule. Vent your frustrations. Try different methods. Blow up a process. Get help when you need it. All of this effort will pay off handsomely in the way of increased client acquisition.

Wishing you a Happy, Prosperous, and Productive 2011!

** To purchase online video tutorials on the above Outlook functions, please visit http://www.theproductivitypro.com/s_outlook-virtual-training-products.htm.

Since 1992, Laura Stack has presented keynotes and seminars that help leaders, teams, and individuals achieve Maximum Result in Minimum Time®. As the President of The Productivity Pro®, Inc., she has implemented productivity-improvement programs at companies such as Wal-Mart, Cisco Systems, and Bank of America, as well as government agencies and national associations. She is the bestselling author of four books and has been a spokesperson for Microsoft, 3M, Xerox, and Office Depot. Laura is the 2011-2012 president of the National Speakers Association and the creator of The Productivity Pro® planner by Day-Timer. To have Laura speak at your next event, visit www.TheProductivityPro.com.

We all want to do our part to help the environment. But if you can give the Earth a break and increase your productivity at the same time, that’s a real no-brainer!  Luckily, a lot of the things you can do to help sustain the planet can help sustain your productivity as well.  Read on for tips on how to green-size your life and get more done at the same time.

Use less paper.  About 80 percent of papers that are filed are never referenced again.  What a waste! A good solution? File less.  An even better solution?  Produce less paper to begin with.  That doesn’t mean you have to constantly inconvenience yourself or feel guilty about ever sheet that comes off the printer.  It just means you should think twice before you hit “print.” Do you really need a paper copy of that e-mail message or status report?

Why you’ll get more done: The less paper you allow into your day, the less time you’ll spend managing it.  I’m talking about filing things, shuffling them around, and tearing through the heaps to find what you need. Keeping less paper means you’ll have an easier time finding the things that really matter and also eliminate some of the stress that inevitably comes from stacks of paper clutter.     

Give your PC (and yourself) a rest.  When was the last time you gave your PC a break?  Letting it sit with the screensaver on doesn’t count.  I mean actually shutting it down, all the way.  The next time you finish working for the day, turn your computer off (black screen, no blinking lights).  You’ll save energy and let the machine cool down for the night.   

Why you’ll get more done:  Shutting down your PC at the end of the day not only saves electricity, but it can also work wonders for your personal energy level.  It’s easy enough to leave a computer untouched at the office, but I’ll bet your home computer is buzzing away whenever someone is nearby.  This leads to technological burnout.  You’re constantly checking e-mail.  Mindlessly surfing the web.  Compulsively scanning social networking sites.  The next thing you know it’s deep into the night and you never really took time to unwind.  Shutting the computer down means you’ll be less likely to plop down in front of it for “just a minute” and more likely to accomplish things around the house, spend time relaxing with family, or go get some exercise. 

Drive smart.  Does it ever feel like you’re losing time every day running errands or zipping around from appointment to appointment?  If you think ahead, you might be able to consolidate all those quick trips into one or two longer outings, especially if you can batch them together based on where in town you need to go.  Also consider making your regular commute outside of rush hour.  You’ll travel the same distance in a shorter time and pollute less along the way.

Why you’ll get more done:  Driving smarter isn’t just going to save gas, money, and harmful emissions, but it’s also going to save you time.  Planning ahead and spending less time running around or stuck in traffic will do nothing but add precious productive minutes (or hours!) to your day. 

Recycle and declutter.  Don’t you always feel better after getting rid of stuff?  It doesn’t matter if you’re at home or the office, getting rid of clutter is always a liberating experience.  Tackle problem areas one at a time by identifying clutter and dividing it into “storage,” “trash,” and “recycling” piles.  Recycling can mean sending junk to a traditional recycling facility or simply passing items along to those who can make better use of them than you can.  Sites like www.freecycle.org can help you find a good home for your unused stuff and local schools and libraries often have a need for any extra office supplies you may have lying around.

Why you’ll get more done: Getting rid of clutter is just plain good for your state of mind, which is good for overall productivity.   On top of that, getting rid of clutter will have the same effect as getting rid of paper – less junk to sort through, fewer storage hassles, and more space to live and work. 

Travel less.  Lots of companies learned this lesson from the recession, but there’s an environmental impact as well.  Is all of your business travel necessary?  Think about the trips you take, whether they’re across town or across the county.  Would it be possible to get the work done remotely?  Technology allows us to accomplish an awful lot from afar, from conference calls to complete virtual presentations.  If you can manage to stay in town in a few instances where you’d usually pack up the car or hop on an airplane, you’ll be doing Mother Nature and yourself a favor.

Why you’ll get more done: Business trips can eat a lot of time.  Sometimes you’ll literally need to spend days on the road for the sake of engaging in a few hours of productive activity once you’re there.  Sure you can get work done on the go, but it isn’t the same as being close to home base.  Skipping an out-of-town trip or two can free you up to make a serious dent in your workload. 

When you get down to it, greensizing is just a matter of paying a little more attention to the habits that you wouldn’t usually give a second thought. Often, productivity is the same way.  I hope you’ll join me in thinking twice and finding simple ways to conserve not only precious resources but valuable time as well.  The planet will thank you and you’ll get more done.  That’s what I call a win-win.

Make it a productive day! ™

(C) Copyright 2009 Laura Stack.  All rights reserved.  www.TheProductivityPro.com

http://www.theproductivitypro.com/newsletters/num115Dec2008.htm visit for full newsletter

Importance of Productivity during Down Times

In the summer of 1900…

• The average life expectancy in the United States was 47.
• A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11, which was an incredible sum because the average American made .22 cents an hour, or about $400 per year.
• Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
• Only 6% of all Americans had graduated from high school.
• Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores.
• There were about 230 reported murders in the US annually.

Amazing what a century will change. Amazing what a few months will change. Growth ends, recession sets in, the stock market stops booming, and companies go bust. The recession is impacting our clients in various ways: we’re hearing of layoffs, hiring freezes, reduced budgets, not rehiring for positions as people leave, go on maternity, etc.

Tough economic times are packing a one-two punch in the workplace.

First, everyone is forced to do more with less (POW!).

Second, you have to do it all while dealing with the nagging anxieties that come with an uncertain economy—threats of downsizing, bankruptcies, cost containment, you name it (POW, again!).

So how do we cope—as leaders and as productive employees?

To succeed and keep their doors open, companies must make more money but spend less money and create greater results with fewer resources. You could attempt to cut salaries, benefits, staff, costs, or the quality of your products—all poor options. A better choice? Increase employee productivity. If you have 10 people, and you can get them to improve their productivity by 10%, you just effectively added another staff person without increasing salary expense—a much more attractive response. To do this, your employees need your help.

First of all, get a grip on your personal negative feelings that result from your lack of control. You DO have control over your friends, your love relationships, and your career. You decide for yourself what’s right and what’s wrong, whether you should stay in this weekend or go out, whether to vote Democrat or Republican. You decide who to see, what to wear, what to eat.

However, you have VERY LITTLE control over the government, economic policy, the rise and fall of the stock market, Mother Nature, international events, and even your company direction. Changes can often disrupt your life and force you to change your plans. Often there is little you can do and yet you are overwhelmingly affected by it. Accepting what is means realizing you can’t control certain things and to stop trying. You can sit around and wonder, “Oh, my gosh, how is this going to affect me? What if I’m next to go? How will I pay the bills? I’m going to be a bag lady!” You stew and worry and literally make yourself sick.

These things will happen. They just will. You will get no warning, and nobody will prepare you. And that’s frustrating. Because people will tell you to “reach for the stars—you can achieve whatever you want!” But they don’t mention you might get hit by a comet in the process.

It’s time to accept the things that you cannot change and focus on the things you can. What can you do?

Give yourself a break. Try to stay positive, despite the doom and gloom. Overdosing on pessimistic, overly dramatic news coverage is just going to weigh you down with bad thoughts—not good for those looking to clear their heads and get things done! It’s important to be informed about what is happening in the world, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it.

For months now, we’ve been bombarded with bad economic news every time we turn on the television or pick up a newspaper. No wonder everybody seems to be in a rut. Follow the daily news as much as you need to so that you feel in the loop and understand the issues that affect your industry. Other than that, it might be time to shut off the TV and catch up on some fun reading or spend some more time with family.

Know your job. Seems like this one should be a no-brainer, but you’d be amazed at how often our responsibilities can change and evolve without our even knowing it. Small incremental changes in how employees or departments do business can add up over time, leaving groups of people that work hard, but aren’t contributing to business objectives as effectively as they once did.

For example, in an effort to provide an exceptional level of service, you might find yourself doing work that is below your pay grade. Maybe you end up doing a large portion of the administrative work associated with a project that needs your input. Consider the value of your time!

Make sure that the things that occupy your time are worthy of your talent and expertise and hold your staff to the same standard. With any project, you should be able to look at the time spent, multiply by the pay rate of the ones doing the work, and still feel that your resources were well spent.

If you’ve got a $40,000/year employee stuffing a bunch of envelopes (even just that one time) or a six-figure manager assembling an important presentation page-by-page, then that work becomes awfully expensive!

These examples might seem outrageous to you, but believe me, it happens all the time. Never make the mistake of treating your time like it’s free. Time and other resources are limited, and we need to treat them that way.

As your company and your department are undoubtedly being asked to do more with less, now is the time to step back and take stock of the type of work you’re doing. Many times roles and responsibilities change, but job descriptions do not. As a result, we end up drifting away from core priorities and towards dong work that, while challenging, doesn’t really meet the organization’s immediate needs.

Now might be a good time to step back and ask that all important question: “Why am I (or we) doing this?” If you can’t answer that, or the answer doesn’t make sense, it’s time to purposefully make a change.

Break habits, build systems. Every office that has been around for any length of time has certain unwritten policies and procedures that exist simply because “we’ve always done it that way.” Now is a great opportunity to analyze your existing business practices and find opportunities to break the bad habits that may be bogging your operation down. Take you entire department for example. Do you and your people have a clear idea of your area’s specific responsibilities? Do you have the confidence and determination to say “no” when someone is asking you to do work that is outside your scope of responsibility?

Perhaps over the years your group took on the responsibility of coordinating quarterly meetings with senior managers. It might have made sense for you to be doing the legwork then, but now that the work has become routine, is it really the best use of your talent and resources?

That’s just one specific example, but there are many more out there. Usually, these are the kinds of tasks and responsibilities that make employees want to ask the all-important “Why am I doing this?” question. Rather than spend another day mindlessly plowing though projects that may or may not be a good use of your time, force yourself to take a hard look at what you are doing and why you are doing it.

If you had to pick three tasks or responsibilities that should be the top priorities for your department, what would they be? Once you know, evaluate how much time and energy is dedicated to those things. You might be surprised at how much time we can spend doing things that aren’t even close to the top of that priorities list.

It isn’t always easy to say “no,” but fortunately, that’s where your systems can come in. As you work to create smooth, efficient systems to do work within your department, you can give yourself some ammunition to fend off others in the company that might be inclined to slide work onto your plate where it doesn’t belong. If you don’t have firm policies and procedures in place to identify who should be doing what, it is much more difficult to make the case for “no.”

Analyze your relationships with other departments. Have trouble turning down work coming from other areas of the company? Now is a perfect time to start fresh and rebuild your department’s boundaries. In a frank and honest way, simply explain to others that in light of the current economic situation, your group has taken a critical look at its daily operations and needs to decline certain types of requests in order to build efficiency.

Perhaps you need to apply a little systems thinking and rethink the flow of information. Is there a procedure in place for other business units to request your assistance or input? If there’s not, you’re probably being hit from all angles with requests that may or may not be the best use of your time. Diagram how work moves through your department. Where does it come in from and go out to other departments? Interview your internal customers and find out how you can provide value through reduced services. Can you provide a report monthly instead of quarterly? Can you cancel the weekly project meeting and get everyone to email updates instead? Question travel requests if you feel a conference call will do. One of the best ways to take stock of the situation is to survey your group, ask them what gets in the way of productivity, and to genuinely ask how they would redesign things if they could.

Find the bottom line. Right now, businesses everywhere are taking stock of their must-haves versus their nice-to-haves. From an organizational perspective, which are you?

Economic necessity can force budget cuts and cost containment that might otherwise be unnecessary. One way to prepare yourself for this reality is to make sure you have a good understanding of how you and your people contribute to the company’s bottom line.

Sometimes, it’s easy. If you work in sales, for example, the correlation between what you do every day and the company’s financial success might be very straightforward—my group sells our most profitable product, which makes the company money.

Sometimes that correlation is not so obvious. If you operate in a support role, like Human Resources, you may want to start looking at your various responsibilities and deciding which among them have the greatest influence on the company’s bottom line—either by somehow driving revenue or by controlling expenses. Perhaps you help contribute to developing talent within the company, which clearly has an impact on the overall success of the organization. Employee development always seems to be one of the first things to go during down economic times, but this is not the time to reduce training if you’d like to get more work from fewer people. Or maybe you’re managing clerical or administrative functions that would be expensive to secure elsewhere.
If you can’t draw a line from what you do each day to the financial well-being of the company, then it might be time to do some hard thinking. Your other contributions might be valuable, but in difficult economic times, corporate leadership often becomes must more focused on dollars and cents, for better or for worse.

Where am I going with this? If it isn’t obvious how your contributions benefit the company, be prepared to explain how they do. If you CAN’T explain why certain aspects of what you do are valuable, then it’s time to stop doing them.

At the end of the day, productivity is about more than getting things done. It’s about getting the RIGHT things done and getting them done efficiently.

Make it a productive day! (TM)

(C) Copyright 2008 Laura Stack. All rights reserved.  www.TheProductivityPro.com

Working long hours and feeling like you aren’t accomplishing enough? Are you ready to learn to be more productive?  Laura Stack is presenting her flagship productivity class at a rare public seminar in Denver on Tuesday, December 9, 2008!

Here is your opportunity to learn from The Productivity Pro® herself.  Get the tools you need to become more productive at work so that you can achieve Maximum Results in Minimum Time® and Leave the Office Earlier®!

Times are uncertain. The news programs and websites are all gloom and doom, full of distractions with the financial “crisis” and the upcoming elections. How do we stay productive when Chicken Little is screaming “the sky is falling”? Turn it all off, at least for a while.  Stay off the news websites during the work day. Schedule yourself for some time to read up on the candidates, ballot issues and news that is important to you, but outside of that, turn it off. Keeping the TV on and constantly being on news websites is information overload that creates undue stress. What’s going to happen is going to happen and you watching it unfold on CNN is not going to change anything. What we CAN do to help is to stay productive so that our businesses and households are as healthy as they can be. “But, there are things in the news I want to read/see,” you say? Then create a Google alert at www.google.com to search for for news, articles and blogs on the topics you choose sent straight to your inbox. That way you avoid the clutter on the front page of MSNBC or CNN which can distract you from the tasks at hand. I’m not saying it is not important to remain informed about what’s happening in the country and the world. We just need to control the time we spend on news and television. Our productivity boosts when we are healthy and not over-stressed about things we cannot control. So, skip the news tonight and go for a walk with a loved one.

(C) 2008 Laura Stack. www.TheProductivityPro.com

I found this article at BNET.com very interesting.  Separating hours on the job from results has been a boost to productivity in many situations.  Outside of the service based or retail environments, should our productivity be based on hours spend on the job, or on what is accomplished?  Some companies, like Best Buy, have implemented the Results-Only Work Environment or “ROWE,” and finding success.  When I chat with audience members after giving a keynote speech, they tell me about coworkers who spend 10-12 hours a day in the office and get nothing done.  That’s because being physically in the office has little to do with productivity.  Some people can be there ten hours a day and get virtually nothing done, while others can accomplish great amounts of work in just a few hours.   Part of the trick to getting a ROWE culture to work is figuring out how to measure results.  Some business results are easier to measure than others, such as number of orders processed, or increase in revenue.  In a 2006 article in Business Week, Best Buy reported a 13%-18% increase in orders processed by people who worked out of the office most often.  Businesses moving towards the ROWE culture are not only reporting increased productivity, but are also reporting lower employee turnover.  As companies work to adjust to the “Gen Why” workers and their styles, it will be interesting to see how many companies move towards this.  (C) 2008 Laura Stack. www.TheProductivityPro.com

It happens all the time.  You just want to get some brief information to someone but when you call you get sucked into a long conversation.  Sometimes you don’t WANT the person to answer their phone – you just want to leave a voicemail.  It’s nice to catch up, but what if you just need to pass on some information and get to the next task?   Well friends, someone has come up with a solution for this problem!  Check out www.slydial.com. It lets you just leave a message – simple as that.  It is a free service, and they do offer some premium services for a fee.  It is well worth checking out. 

While on the subject of voice mail – here’s a quick tip.  Before making a call, jot down the bullet points you want to cover.  This way you have an outline for the call, or if you do get voice mail you have a simple list of what you need to cover.  It will save time and help avoid rambling messages. 

Make it a productive day!

(C) 2008 Laura Stack.  All rights reserved.  www.TheProductivityPro.com