As I drove to the office this morning, I was preparing to turn right into a side street from a main road. An oncoming car slowed and stopped to let me turn, even though they clearly had right of way, and had no reason to stop other than to be nice to me. ‘Ahh’, I hear you say. ‘How polite they are in the inner west of Sydney’. Even though they were just trying to be nice, the truth is this actually irritated me, and I suspect lots of other drivers too!

You see, we have rules of the road to create order, and to reduce the risk of accidents, crashes and death. And as nice and polite as those drivers were, they were breaking the agreed rules of the road, and causing confusion. I knew I did not have right of way, so was confused as to whether it was safe to turn. The cars travelling behind them did not understand what was happening, and probably did not expect the car in front to stop. Confusion reigned. I turned, but spent the next few minutes mumbling to myself about how people can’t seem to follow the agreed rules! Maybe it’s time for a holiday.

In our work, we should also have rules to avoid confusion and unproductive situations. These are often called protocols, but I prefer to call them agreements. I believe that to operate effectively as a team it is wise to create some agreements about how we work together. These agreements will be most useful when it comes to the areas that you tend to intersect most with others. Meetings, projects, delegations, conversations, emails and instant messaging are some common intersections.

A good example of how an agreement could help everyone work in a more productive way would be the classic ‘Thank You’ email. We all try to be polite and communicate our thanks when we receive certain emails, but often those emails may just cause more noise for the recipient. Often the recipient gets irritated by your polite kindness. But what if you don’t say thank you and they get offended? What to do?

Maybe have a conversation at your next team meeting and set some agreements about when a thank you is and is not needed. Could we agree that in normal circumstances we don’t need to say thanks, and then list some exceptions to that rule? Maybe a thank you would be warranted when receiving a critical document and you need to let them know it has arrived safely. Or when someone has gone above and beyond with a piece of work, and a thank you would communicate real appreciation. Sometimes teams use ‘codes’ in the subject line like ‘NRR’, which stands for ‘No response required’.  Establishing agreements like these form the ‘rules of the road’ for your team, and reduce frustration. People then know how to behave and what is expected. You become predictable, and that helps us all to work better together.

Give me predictability over politeness any day. Especially when I am driving to work!

A phrase I hear fairly regularly is the sheepishly delivered, “Sorry, I’ve been meaning to do that”. It is a very Irish thing to say I reckon. What it really means is that there was an intention that had not yet turned into an action.

Do you “mean to” too?  Do you find yourself repeatedly thinking about something you need to do, making mental note after mental note, and usually remembering it when you’re not in a position to do it?  When asked by your boss/colleague/partner/friend if it’s done, do you meekly say, “No.  I have been meaning to, but haven’t done it yet”?

I reckon leaving things in your head is one of the main reasons why the “I’ve been meaning to” phenomenon occurs.  Your brain is amazing, and can store many millions of things, but it is terrible at remembering stuff at the right time.  So how do we stop using our head and move from Intention to Action? I reckon there are four stages, each building on the last and increasing the chances of you doing something before it becomes urgent, or an issue.

1. Make it visible – Step 1 is not rocket science. Get it out of your head and write it down, either on paper, or electronically. This makes the action visible and will increase the chances of it getting done. But just writing it down may not be enough. If it ends up buried in a list, or a notebook, or on a sticky note, you may still forget. Just writing it down relies on you remembering to actively look at the task to do it.

2. Make a time – By writing the task down, and making a time to do it, we are starting to manage the action in a more systemised way. All actions need your time to get done, so allocating some of that time increases the chances of traction. You might schedule time in your calendar, or schedule a task into a dated list so that the action appears on the appropriate day for you to do. This sort of ‘trigger’ reminder really brings your action management to a new level.

3. Make it a priority – Taking the additional step of prioritising the task will increase your desire to get it done. We all have a lot to do every day, and it is easy to procrastinate about some of this work. When we prioritise our lists, we start to commit to what is really important. A great way to make your big priorities really stand out is to copy them from your task list into your calendar and schedule a specific time when you will do that work. Don’t do this with every task in your task list, just with the key priorities.

4. Make it happen – The final step is to do it. If it was worth capturing, scheduling and prioritising, it is worth fighting for. My friend and mentor Pete Cook talks about fighting for three priorities every day in his book The New Rules of Management. Identify three high-impact priorities every day, and fight for them. Sometimes the fight is with others (negotiation), and sometimes it is with yourself (procrastination).

Turning intention into action is essential if we want to have an impact in our role, and our lives. We feel more fulfilled, and we achieve greater things when we work in this way. I hope you have found this newsletter useful. I have been meaning to write it for a while (Boom, boom).

In a recent coaching call with a client, I came across one of the most common issues at senior management level. A case of too many meetings, and no time left over for important priorities. I see this time and time again with my clients. Every patch of empty calendar seen as available real estate to build another meeting on.

I like to recommend a 70:30 split for someone who has a very meeting-driven role. Make 70% of your core working hours available for meetings, but protect at least 30% of your time for important priorities that you need to work on alone. This includes preparation for some of those meetings, thinking time, writing time and of course time to keep on top of emails and calls.

My coaching client heard what I was saying, and was keen, but looking forward over the coming month, just had no space left to protect. When I suggested cancelling or declining some of those meetings, she felt she could lose a few, but with most she felt compelled to attend. I felt she was not being ruthless enough. So, I tried something a bit different.

I asked her to review all the meetings that she attended over the last month. With her hindsight about the quality and the outcomes achieved in these meetings, I asked her to identify any meetings which:

1. Should not have gone ahead because they did not achieve a worthwhile outcome or could have been dealt with in another way, or

1. She should not have attended because they were not a good use of her time or she was the wrong person, or

1. Could have been shortened as they were poorly organised and unfocused.

She printed her calendar for the previous month off, and lo and behold, identified many hours that she could have freed up over the month. Unfortunately, that boat had sailed, but when she looked forward at the coming month again, I could see a more ruthless glint in her eye. I left her to make some decisions about which meetings she should cancel, decline, delegate or shorten. If she could not do any of those things, hopefully she at least took measures to ensure the meetings she attended were well organised and focused.

Time is our most precious resource. Be ruthless with it otherwise other people will inadvertently squander it.   

People depend on you for many things every day.  There are work deadlines, deliverables and milestones, and it can be overwhelming when things start to stack up.

My experience managing projects has taught me that it is vital you are crystal clear about your stakeholders’ most important requirements to successfully juggle multiple, often competing priorities.  A project management framework I use focuses on four flexible constraints in a project: cost, time, scope and quality. The idea is that if one of these constraints changes in a project, one or more of the others will need to adjust to compensate. For example, if the time available to complete the project decreases, then the cost may go up, the scope may need to reduce, or the quality of the finished product may need to be compromised.

A useful application of this framework is to understand what the non-negotiables are for your key stakeholders. Asking them at the start of a project whether delivering to budget, delivering on time, delivering within scope or achieving a certain minimum quality is most important to them will help you align your work effort to their expectations.

While this is a great framework to use when working on complex projects, it can also be simplified and used with day-to-day operational work. The two constraints generally associated with our everyday work are probably time and quality. When a piece of work has been delegated to you, at some point you may need to have a conversation about which is more important to the delegator. Obviously, we all want the work to be on time and to the highest quality. But if that cannot be achieved, would it be better to be on time but not quite as good, or a bit late with no compromise on quality?

This might not be a conversation you have when the work is first delegated. But it should be a conversation you have when you spot a deadline that is at risk of being missed. Don’t bury your head in the sand. Put your hand up, be accountable and have the conversation. Your boss and colleagues will appreciate it, because in the end you are thinking of their best interests.

Because so much of our work is driven by emails and other ‘instant’ communication tools, we now operate in a business environment where urgency and reactivity have become the default. This can keep many of my clients from getting to their most impactful work, so a lot of my time is spent helping people work more proactively – helping them to resist the urge to react every time a new piece of potential work shows up.  That’s why I recommend people turn off their email alerts and get into the habit of checking their emails proactively instead.

But turning off your alerts is not enough.  I believe it’s all about having a RESPONSIVE mindset, as opposed to a REACTIVE mindset.  I believe that a responsive mindset is much more productive.  So what’s the difference?  I reckon having a responsive mindset signifies a more balanced, timely and thoughtful approach to incoming work.  It’s about being importance-driven vs urgency-driven.  It’s measured vs knee-jerk.

Not everything should be classified as urgent.  Emergencies are urgent.  Catastrophes are urgent.  But what we determine is urgent should be the exception in today’s workplace, not the norm.  Way too often I see clients putting off their important work because of whatever drama has just shown up in their inbox.

The urge to react is in our DNA, from the days when we were cave men and woman. Fight or flight is what we were designed to do.  But now that we have taken off the loin clothes and put on the business suits, we need a more measured approach to work.  Our worlds are much more complex, and contain way too many inputs to allow reactivity to rule.  If reactivity rules we end up stressed, unfocused and ultimately unproductive.

Adopting a responsive mindset puts your priorities centre-stage, rather than getting caught up in less meaningful work.  Here are a few strategies you can implement to avoid unnecessary urgency:

• Resist the temptation to jump every time something ‘urgent’ shows up.  Don’t accept urgency as the norm. Always question it. Is it actually urgent for you?
• Measure the new input against what you are currently doing, or had planned to do. Remember, every time you say YES to something, you are saying NO to something else.
• Consider this: Do you want every single working moment of your life to be driven by whatever email has just turned up in your inbox?  For most people, this is NOT the pathway to productivity.
• Think of your Inbox as an organising system for everyone else’s priorities. Counterbalance this by using your daily plan as the organising system for your priorities. Balance your time across both.
• Fight for your priorities and learn to negotiate with others.  Being assertive doesn’t mean you’re not a team player.  It simply shows that you are clear about your priorities and are willing to stand up for them.

Do you aspire to get in control of your inbox, but just can’t seem to make the time to get it sorted once and for all?  Maybe you have not really committed to the idea of working from an empty inbox.  Perhaps this is because you are telling yourself stories that are holding you back.

I was in a coaching session with a client this week when this situation arose.  He had completed my training with his team, but several weeks on was still drowning in emails.  He had not made it to zero as he had committed, and was ready to give up and go back to his old, comfortable but unproductive ways.

When we talked about what was stopping him from getting on top of his inbox, he came up with several surface level excuses.  He was busy in meetings most of the day.  He was getting too many emails.  He was not disciplined enough.

Then the real reason came out.  He felt that if he had to turn every email into a scheduled task, it would involve more work than it was worth.  It would be quicker just to deal with the emails as he went, rather than scheduling in tasks for later.  But the truth of the matter was that he was not dealing with them.  He was procrastinating over many, and letting them pile up in his inbox.

You see, his logic makes sense only for the simple emails. That is why I use a ‘2-minute rule’ and deal with the simple emails as I go.  But many of my client’s emails needed ten or fifteen minutes to deal with.  Some even longer.  Some emails he didn’t know what was needed until he had read through them.  But one thing was for sure, they were too dense to deal with in the moment.

The story he was telling himself about the perceived inefficiency of scheduling his emails as tasks was convenient but flawed.  It might apply to the easiest emails he dealt with, but it was not applicable to many of the other priorities that were showing up in his inbox.  Good inbox management is not necessarily about working on every email as you go.  Certainly, for the easier emails, deal with them immediately.  They should not be tasked.  But for the emails that need more time the aim should be to make a decision about what needs to be done, and when, and have them show up in your action management system.  It is about lifting the important actions out of the inbox ‘pile’ and getting them into a focused plan.

While it may feel like it takes a bit more time to process your emails in this way, the truth is that it saves you time in the long run.  How much time do we waste touching and retouching the same emails, leaving things until they are urgent, or simply forgetting about critical emails altogether?  Stressful and ineffective!

So, if you’re struggling to get to inbox zero on a regular basis, what stories might be holding you back?

Being clear about your priorities gives you the conviction to say no to work that is not a good use of your time, and the confidence to spend time on the things that really matter.

This was a thought I had a few days ago in a moment of relaxed clarity. Bam! There it was. It seemed like a big thought. You might not agree, but for someone who thinks and talks about prioritisation most days of the week, it seemed to carry weight. So here I am sharing it with you.

This thought came from an experience I had in a coaching session with a client last week. He was a busy manager in a large corporate. He was both successful and a good leader. But like many, was caught up most days in the constant churn of meetings, emails and interruptions.

We spent some time talking about the benefits of devoting time every Friday to plan the week and weeks ahead. Not just a cursory scan of his meetings for next week, but a full 360-degree scan of everything he was doing and should be doing.

He committed to making time the following Friday for what I call a weekly ROAR (Review, Organise, Anticipate and Realign). The Monday after I received an email from my client. He’d spent an hour and a half running through the weekly planning process I recommended.  As a result, he reclaimed valuable time to work on an important project that had been sidelined by more ‘pressing’ work.

To make time for this important work, he had cancelled or delegated several meetings that he decided were not the best use of his time. By taking the time to plan and get clear about his priorities, he had the conviction to say no to less important work. And he was confident about what he should be working on. If questioned on how he was spending his time, he would have been able to justify his decisions with ease.  He was so excited and thankful about his new found clarity.

So, do you have time scheduled this Friday to do your weekly ROAR? If not, block out at least 30 minutes right now.  Better still, make it a weekly recurring meeting with yourself – do it EVERY Friday.

Conviction and confidence comes from clarity. And in today’s busy workplace, we only get clarity when we take time out to plan, to think and to prioritise.

A friend of mine who was a chef by trade once shared with me how he was designing his new kitchen at home. He had a small but trendy apartment and did not have a lot of space to play with, so he had to think long and hard about every detail.

One thing that really stood out for me was his thinking around the cupboards closest to his cooker. He designed these so that he could put the pots, pans and utensils that he used most frequently within hands reach. These essential tools had to be accessible without moving away from the cooktop, so that he never let anything burn because he was looking for something on the other side of the kitchen.

I reckon that the same applies to your document filing folders on your PC. How often are you clicking into level after level of folders looking for a document that you use frequently? How much of your time is wasted every time you send an email, or review a report, or look for a spreadsheet? If you are like most people, too much time!

I recently reconfigured my document filing system with this idea in mind. I was frustrated  that I can comfortably file all my emails into one filing folder and find them quickly using the search tools in MS Outlook, but hadn’t achieved the same ease with my document filing. While I can also search for documents in Windows, the search capabilities are not as powerful as Outlook, and I still feel the need to create some structure with my document files.

I started by deleting as many folders as I possibly could. Folders that were no longer of value, or maybe never were. I then got to thinking about my chef friend. The folders that were left were still organised in multiple levels of folders and sub-folders. I realised that just like essential cooking utensils, there were certain folders that I accessed every day, and other folders that I accessed every now and again. Yet in my system all folders were given the same priority, and were stored on the level that made contextual sense, rather than the level that allowed quickest access.

Of course! What I needed to do was make the folders that I accessed most frequently highly accessible, while allowing the folders that I used less frequently to sit at a lower level. My solution to achieve this was to simply create a structure like the one below:

Business Systems

Financial Management

Program Development

                Archive

                Productive Leadership

                Images

                Smart Teams

                Whitepapers

Sales & Marketing

                Archive

                Newsletter

The key to this system is the Archive folder that I created under each of the five main folders in my structure. This is where I put the bulk of folders that I had under Program Development in this example. But I realised that Productive Leadership, Images, Smart Teams and Whitepapers were the four folders that I accessed most frequently, so they sit at the top level under Program Development, while everything else is hidden away, but accessible if I do need them every now and again.

This is a good example of the Pareto principle in action. I am making the 20% of folders I use 80% of the time more accessible and easier to see at a glance. While I still need to click one level down to access them, that is better than the six levels I had to travel with the old system. I used the same Archive folder solution in each of the five main folders I use, and now accessing documents is much faster.

Could you save some time by restructuring your folder system? Put everything in hands reach and you won’t get burnt again!

A very common question in our training that comes up when we cover task management is ‘Should I set a reminder for a task?’ My answer is generally no. Reminders work well for calendar appointments, but are unnecessary for tasks and priorities if you manage your task list well.

This is a hard concept for people to get their head around, as they fear that without a reminder, they will forget to do the task. Tools like MS Outlook and our smartphones have made us heavily reliant on reminders to cut through the noise in our busy days.

The challenge is that we now have reminders on too many things, and often on activities that don’t need a reminder. This creates its own level of noise. We are either faced with countless pop up alerts interrupting our day at the wrong time, or a reminders pane that we ignore because it holds 37 overdue reminders that just make us feel guilty. The useful reminders then get lost in amongst the useless ones.

Reminders only work when they provide a cut-through message that we need to take notice of at the exact moment. So, a reminder fifteen minutes before a meeting in your calendar gets noticed. A reminder on a flagged email that is not time-critical just creates noise.

If you want to ensure that reminders serve you well, use them sparingly for the right things. Otherwise they become the boy who cried wolf, and will get ignored. Here are some creative ideas on how you could get reminders to serve you better.

• Set reminders on meetings in your calendar. 15 minutes is usually the default and is an appropriate reminder time. If needed, snooze to 5 minutes before rather than dismissing the reminder to ensure you don’t get caught up in something else and miss the start of the meeting.

• Only set reminders on tasks that must happen at a specific time. This is not usually the case with task workload, so most of the time will be unnecessary. As an alternative, consider putting a time-specific task into your calendar as an appointment.
• Schedule All Day Events in your calendar for major deadlines and events like Birthdays. Then set a 2-week reminder so that you anticipate the looming deadline or event with plenty of time to spare.
• Resist setting reminder flags for other people when sending emails. While it is a common strategy to ensure that other people don’t forget your request, it is better to fix the root problem and work with them on improving their workload management rather than just putting a band-aid on the problem with a reminder.
• Set fewer reminders but take notice of them when they appear. Allow reminders to do their job!

In a recent coaching session with a senior client, we had an interesting conversation about hygiene. You see, he admitted to me that he had fallen off the weekly planning routine he’d built up with his EA. Before Christmas they had regularly put time aside each week to plan the week ahead. But over the Christmas break and into the New Year they had let it drop, even though they had found it an extremely beneficial routine. I questioned why this had happened.

My client’s response was that they usually put time aside on Fridays, but the last few had been pretty busy. I asked him if he had showered on those Friday mornings. He looked at me funny, but admitted that of course he had. ‘So’, I said. ‘You didn’t compromise on having a shower on those busy days, but you did compromise on your weekly planning routine. Why was that do you think?’.

His immediate response was that if he didn’t have a shower he would stink, and that wouldn’t be acceptable in front of peers, his team and clients. After more thought, he added,

‘So, do you think my effectiveness might also begin to stink if I don’t make time for planning?’

Absolutely. Weekly planning is about work ‘hygiene’. It’s about keeping your schedule clean, your priorities clean, your inputs clean and your thinking clean. If you don’t stop and take time to plan, the quality of your work begins to stink.  You work more reactively. You miss deadlines. Things slip through the cracks. You get stressed.

So, if you identify with this dilemma, make weekly planning a non-negotiable. You wouldn’t go to work without a shower, so don’t start your week without taking time to plan.