I reckon we all tell a few white lies from time to time. I personally hold honesty as a key value, but I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to the little lies that just make things easier. And sometimes we tell ourselves and our colleague’s stories that bend the truth just a little to make ourselves feel better or less guilty.

A story I heard recently from someone I was collaborating with was “I did not get time to do that thing I promised”. I took this in good spirit and graciously allowed them more time on the task. But I know that they were telling themselves a story. The truth was, they did not make the task a priority. They had time – they just choose to use it on other things. And that is fine, because life is busy and complicated, and we are all human.

But I believe that when we tell the story that we did not have time, it externalises the blame. It makes it feel like we had no control and that circumstances were the cause. This is not about whose fault it was, but about people owning their work and their decisions. It is about taking ownership of our work and our commitments. It is about accountability.

In our current work situation (which for many is remote working, or a hybrid of home and office) it is essential that our teams have a culture of accountability. This starts with owning our work and our decisions. It may be uncomfortable to admit to someone that we prioritised other work over theirs, but sometimes this is just the way it must be. And by telling a more truthful story, we are creating an accountability mindset for ourselves as well as an accountability brand that others experience.

So, next time you start to tell someone a story about how busy you are, or how you did not have time, or how you have been meaning to get to something, pause and consider if there is a different story that might serve you better.

As we start to draw the curtains on what has been one of the most challenging years in memory, I would like to say a big thank you and share some learnings. I am a glass half-full type of guy, so I’ve been reflecting on what I have learned over the past eight months. COVID-19 has stretched me in many ways, but one of my mentors always says that “a mind stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”.

Here are three key things I have learnt over this time:

1. The delivery of online productivity training is not only possible, but also effective and enjoyable. I was always sceptical about the ability to deliver Smart Work or Smart Teams online in a way that still created real behavioural change. I now know online delivery can deliver tremendous value and believe this option will remain a core component of our delivery mix, even after COVID-19 is just a memory.
2. Most people want to do great work and can be trusted to deliver on their outcomes as well, if not better, working from home. I see some workplaces going back to a fully onsite workforce when things settle down, but I believe most will move to a hybrid working solution. How to do this effectively will be one of our key challenges to solve in the coming years. Bring it on, I am up for that challenge!
3. Like it or not, technology is becoming more and more necessary to our productivity. Not just our laptops and phones. Not just MS Outlook or OneNote. I also passionately believe that the suite of collaboration tools we have at our fingertips will be the key to collaborating productively, whether online or onsite. So, if you have access to tools like Office 365, MS Teams and MS Planner, you need to not only get up to speed on how to use them, but also become best practice in how to leverage them for group productivity.

2021 is going to be an interesting year for all of us. Thank you for your support in 2020, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you in the year ahead.

Happy holidays!

I recently had a conversation with a senior client about her struggle to get her team to approach their weekly 1:1 meetings in a consistent way. She had started to use MS OneNote to share discussion lists with a couple of her team and was so pleased with the result she wanted to extend this strategy this to all her direct reports. But some of them resisted, preferring to stick with their current manual systems and notebooks to manage the agenda.

This perplexed my client, as moving to OneNote instead of a paper notepad had many benefits and should have been an obvious win/win for both parties. It was intuitive to use, could be accessed easily on any device, was searchable, and allowed you to link documents and emails for discussion with the click of a button. And most importantly, the OneNote notebook could be shared by both parties which created much higher levels of control and visibility.

However, the reality is many of us are set in our ways, and comfortable with doing things the way we have always done them. We like using the tools that we have always used. That is absolutely fine in situations where you are working independently. In these cases, it should be up to me how I manage my work, and up to you how you manage your work. But when we come together to work, like in a 1:1 meeting, it is no longer just about you and how you like to work. It must be about us, and the tools and strategies that are going to maximise our joint productivity.

When we insist on sticking with outdated tools and strategies that feel comfortable to us, we are being selfish (harsh but true). When we agree on a set of tools and strategies that are fit for purpose and will enhance the productivity of both parties, we are serving.

It is not all about you and what you want, or all about me and what I want. It is about us and what serves our combined productivity.

One of my colleagues in the training industry is Chris Meredith. Chris helps people to create, capture and communicate great ideas. When I was writing Urgent!, he shared a story with me about communicating urgency that I thought was worth sharing with you.

I was once teaching a friend to skipper a yacht. We were in shallow water on a falling tide and there was a risk of us running aground as we sailed towards an anchorage.

The trainee skipper asked a crew-member to help out by reading out the soundings from the depth gauge so that he could concentrate on steering. It looked like a great piece of delegation, but it had an unintended consequence. 

Because the depths were being read out aloud, all of the other crew members were able to hear it as well.  Bit by bit, they each stopped what they were doing and crowded round the depth gauge – obsessed with the changing numbers. 

It meant that the skipper had put the yacht at risk because the crew were needed elsewhere, ready to react if we did indeed hit ground. 

I told the skipper to stop having the information read aloud and instead monitor the depth himself. Meanwhile, the other crew members were sent back to their posts. 

Soon, the boat was back to normal and the crew were working efficiently again. (And you’ll be glad to hear, we didn’t run aground). 

This is a great example of a leader absorbing urgency for the good of the team, not just transferring it to them in a way that disturbs or distracts. As leaders, we have a responsibility to use urgency with purpose, and sometimes it does not serve to communicate the urgency. Of course, sometimes it does. You need to read the situation and make a call about the best course of action.

Don’t let your team run aground because you allowed urgency to distract them from their job.

One of the key strategies we teach in our Smart Work program is the idea of managing the Start Date of a task, not the Due Date. The premise here is that if your task list is sorted by Due Dates, there is a greater risk that you may fall into the trap of leaving things until they get close to the deadline and have become urgent before you do them. So, we recommend sorting your task list by Start Date so that your tasks appear in your schedule when you need to start working on them, rather than when they are due.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep a keen eye on the Due Date. In fact, I think you should make your key deadlines highly visible so that they really stand out and don’t catch you by surprise. One of my clients told me a great story about a team member who was caught by surprise with a deadline.

The executive involved was getting pressure from the business on a critical deadline. He called the team member who was working on the task to check where he was at with the report, which was due by COB that day. The team member said to him ‘We have plenty of time, it is not due until the 1st of October’.

The executive’s response was ‘This is the 1st of October!’

The team member was obviously extremely busy with other priorities, and time had slipped by without him realising that the deadline was upon them. Thank goodness the executive checked, and they were able to get it over the line. But can you imagine how both their days, and possibly the team’s day was thrown into reactive chaos?

To avoid this situation, we recommend organising your task list by Start Date, but also highlighting key deadlines in one of two ways. You could put the due date into the subject line of your task like below:

Finalise documents for BAS return – D1/10 (D=due)

Alternatively, you could schedule an All-Day Event into your calendar on the Due Date. This will put a visible bar at the top of your calendar for that day. Being an All-Day Event, this does not block out your time for that day, but it does make the deadline visible in your schedule when you are forward planning. Sometimes I will put a reminder on the event one-week before the deadline so that I am sure it will be on my radar screen before the due date.

If you want to help your team reduce the unproductive urgency they have to deal with, work proactively and make your deadlines visible!

I read a great blog (The lie of working better under pressure) recently that got me thinking about working under pressure, especially under the pressure of a deadline. The blog was aimed at students, but I think it holds a lesson for all of us, as many of our unproductive habits around deadlines come from our student days.

The author of the blog suggests that students often procrastinate when working on assignments and studying for exams, and they tell themselves the story that they do their best work under pressure. They have clear memories of leaving work until the last minute in the past, and then nailing the assignment or test anyway. But research suggests that for many this is just memory bias at work, where we only recall the positive outcomes we experienced, while conveniently forgetting the other times that we performed badly.

Leaving work until the last minute is a common workstyle for many in the corporate workplace. We are under pressure with many competing priorities and feel that the best way to manage our work is to focus on what is most urgent. In fact, some people wear their reactive workstyle like a badge of honour and will boast about how well they perform under pressure. But this way of working can only be tolerated for so long, as there is a big difference between working this way at school and working this way in a collaborative workplace.

If you left something until the last minute at school, the only person it impacted was you and your grades. But if this is your workstyle when working in a team environment, your lack of planning becomes an urgent distraction for your colleagues. Requesting information or delegating work at the last minute is one of the most selfish things you can do to your colleagues if the urgency could have been avoided by working more proactively.

Do you tell yourself stories about how you do your best work under pressure?

I, like many people, rely heavily on my smart phone to manage my work when I am out and about. I personally use an iPhone and love the fact that I can see my calendar, deal with emails on the fly, and even schedule tasks into my task list seamlessly using my phone.

I have found that most types of incoming communications that need a response or an action have been fairly easy to deal with on my iPhone. When dealing with emails, I can quickly delete or file things that I don’t need to action or have already actioned. My process is that anything I leave in my Inbox still requires some action when I am back at my desk.

My Achilles heel when using the phone has always been voicemails. If I listened to a voicemail, and did not return the call immediately, there was always a risk that I would get distracted, forget to make a note to return the call, and therefore forget it. This always bothered me, and the voicemail system itself always felt outdated and cumbersome to me. Well, not anymore!

Last week my iPhone was updated to the latest iOS (14.0.1 I believe). And to my delight, the way voicemails are managed has been completely revolutionised! Now, instead of having to dial a number to listen to your voicemails, new voicemails get listed as sound files in your phone app that you can listen to anytime.

The beauty of this is that you can easily forward the voicemail as an email to yourself if you need to remember to action it at a later stage. The sound file can then be listened to again via your PC, and of course the email can be converted into a task or a calendar appointment, so you don’t forget to deal with it at the appropriate time. Simple and effective.

I feel so much more comfortable now knowing that whether you email me, text me or call me I have a way of managing the action so that I never let you down. Thank you, Apple*.

*I have never used an Android device or any other phone other than an iPhone, so do not know if these other devices already do something similar. If they do, good stuff. If they don’t, it is a real pity.

A member of my team was having a conversation with a client recently about our Smart Teams program. They were keen to look at ways to create a more productive email culture but were hesitant because they had tried to embed a set of email protocols in the past, but nothing had changed. Their concern was that nothing would change this time either.

Changing cultures is hard, especially around something like email usage, as most people have a set of email habits that are very much baked on and hard to shift. I have seen many teams that have tried to shift their email culture create a short-term change, and then slip back to old patterns and behaviours.

Most of these change initiatives revolve around a set of working protocols. This could be called a charter, a rule book or a working contract. We call them team agreements in our Smart Teams program. Having a set of agreed behaviours around how we will work makes a lot of sense, as it helps us all to understand the expectations of the team and helps us to hold ourselves and each other accountable. The challenge is getting the team to buy in to these agreements, and to sustain the change in behaviour. 

Some of the mistakes I have seen teams make in this regard are:

• Leadership rubber-stamp the initiative but fail to make the time to lead and inspire the wider team to make the required changes
• Management creates a set of rules and then simply emails these to staff, expecting a cultural change to follow
• The team tries to implement too many agreements at once
• Different teams create different sets of agreements, creating confusion
• There is a belief that the culture will change overnight

My experience with creating and sustaining more productive cultures is that it takes time, effort, commitment, and passionate leadership. But if the will is there, and enough people see the benefits of changing, then it is very possible to create a far more productive culture based upon a simple but powerful set of team agreements.  

When I have seen teams successfully change their productivity culture, they have generally committed to at least a 3-month project to shift the behaviours of everyone involved. They often appoint a team of internal champions to create the agreements and to help embed them and coach behaviours. Leadership is involved with the project, and attend training along with everyone else to ensure they have the right skills and strategies in place to bring the agreements to life. 

So, if your team is struggling with a noisy email culture, an ineffective meeting culture, a disjointed collaboration culture or a reactive urgency culture, have a think about whether it would be worth creating a set of team agreements to create a more productive culture. But if you are going to do this, ‘go all in and commit fully’ as my friend Pete Cook always says.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Do What You Say You Are Going To Do, I cover delivering on your promises and commitments, and not forcing others to chase you up.

A client in a recent Smart Work online training program asked a question I thought was worth sharing. We were discussing the use of the task management system in Outlook, which I believe to be the best tool for managing your tasks and priorities. The Smart Work program promotes opening the Outlook Task Bar in your calendar and managing your meetings and tasks side-by-side in one view.

‘I just schedule things I do directly into my calendar’, she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

My answer?

Absolutely nothing. I believe that as long as we are capturing what we need to do in some way, and we are managing our time around those activities, all is good.

But while there is nothing wrong with scheduling both meetings and priorities directly into your calendar, there are benefits to managing your tasks in a time-based task list rather than your calendar. You see, it is about using the tool that is the best fit for purpose.

I could write this newsletter in a PowerPoint slide, but MS Word is a tool that is better fit for purpose. Conversely, I could present the ideas in my webinars using text and images in a Word document, but PowerPoint is better fit for purpose. Sometimes, because we are comfortable with certain tools we use them for too many different things. And that can be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

While you could use your calendar to manage your tasks, a well-constructed task list is better fit for purpose in the following ways:

• Tasks are usually more flexible by nature, and don’t have to be done at a specific time
• Tasks can be marked complete, giving you a sense of progress
• Task lists can be prioritised, giving you a sense of focus
• Incomplete tasks will move forward with you and don’t get left behind
• The task list allows you to manage many priorities without becoming too complex or confusing

So, your calendar is a great tool for managing your meetings, and some of the bigger chunks of work you need to protect time for. But the task list, used alongside your calendar, might be the tool more fit for purpose for managing your priorities.