Achieving what’s Important

We all care about different goals.  Some want to run a marathon; others dream of getting a first for their art history degree.  Some care passionately about delivering an important project at work, and going on to yet greater responsibility and job satisfaction.  Others are frustrated with lack of success in completely different areas.  Whilst all our goals are very different, they are tied together with more commonality than differences.

What’s very clear is that achieving what’s important to us matters a lot.  It matters for our happiness, our financial security, and our ability to make choices in how we live our lives

There are just four steps to achieving your highest priorities:

1.      Be specific about what you want to achieve. 

2.      Plan what you will do to be successful.

3.      Make time to do the big, important things, as well as fitting in everything else.

4.      Stay in control of your days.

It’s short, specific and anyone can do it.  But not everyone does, even though there is a mountain of research to demonstrate that it works.  The reason for this anomaly, despite everyone’s protestations about how important their goals are, is equally short and specific.  It’s self-discipline.

It’s not that we don’t know what to do; it’s more that it’s a lot of effort to do it. 

A recent Horizon programme called “The Truth About Exercise” promised a way out of hours in the gym, at least for some people.  One minute of high intensity training, three times a week, can keep you fit.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Almost as good as a silver-bullet list for achieving your goals.  The difficulty is that one minute of truly high intensity training is not pleasant; I know because I’ve tried it.  I’d go as far as to say it’s unpleasant.  It’s certainly not an easy option, but it does get you fitter.

There’s the rub.  If you want to compete at the Olympics you have to get up early and train hard, so hard that you start to dream of opening a sweet shop in Devon.  If you want to achieve your goals you have to work at it - not on an exercise bike until you feel queasy, but at your desk until your brain hurts.  And then some.

The good news is that whilst you may not be a natural athlete, you can achieve important goals where you do have the necessary ability and motivation, providing you are disciplined enough to do what needs to be done.  Discipline isn’t a fashionable word, or a particularly agreeable notion in a world of instant-gratification.  On the plus side, if you want something badly enough, you don’t have to wait to win the lottery.  You can go out there and get it.

Are you are making progress?

“I’m like a little boat adrift in the ocean - I don’t know whether I’m 200 yards from land or 200 miles.”

When we are working under difficult conditions, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics.   The old saying “when you are up to your neck in alligators, don’t forget you came to drain the swap” is never more true when something is hard going.  We set out bright eyed and bushy tailed only to find everything a lot more difficult than we realised.  As time marches on our enthusiasm dwindles, and we start to wonder whether we will ever be successful.

I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about his business and he said he felt like a little boat adrift in the ocean.  He had no idea whether he was 200 yards from land, or 200 miles.  It’s not a nice feeling, and it’s all too easy to give up when you feel like that.  He was taking a step back to figure out what to do with this feeling.

What’s needed is to work out what’s important in your business, and to measure it.  In his business it was getting face to face meetings with people who have a need for his service.  As it turns out meetings with prospects is a lag indicator, rather than a lead indicator.  That is to say that the number of meetings with prospects is a result of work already done.  That work might be meeting new people at networking events, or having people request a white paper from your web site, or making a certain number of cold calls each week.  You know what the activities are that you need to do to create the circumstances where meetings with prospects start to get into your diary.  So the lead indicators are number of new people in your contacts database, the number of marketing communications sent out, etc.  The lag indicator is the number of meetings with prospects.  To say it another way, you reap what you sow. 

Coming back to this feeling of being a boat adrift in the ocean, it’s important to measure this activity.  Unless you know on average how many people you need to contact to generate a meeting you will never know where you are in the ocean.  If you don’t know where you are, your motivation takes a hit.  Without motivation you don’t do those upfront activities that are actually the life blood of your business.  So measurement isn’t a nice to have, it’s actually the map that guides our little boats through calm or chopping waters. 

I wrote about lead and lag indicators a while ago, if you want to have another look.

Clarity of Purpose

Anna Wintour: “People respond well to people who are sure of what they want.”

We somehow think that a clear purpose will come to us from above, as the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, or as Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi  tree.  Some people are lucky enough to know early on their where their talents and interests lie.  Anna Wintour reckoned she was just 15 when her career in fashion was fixed[1].    For the rest of us, being clear about our purpose is hard work. 

There is no escaping the fact that a clear vision is essential to the success of any organisation, and essential to the success of those within the organisation.  

If being clear about your purpose was easy, though, everyone would be highly focused on their specific goals.  Sadly, that’s not the case for one very simple reason: being clear about your purpose means making a choice.  By choosing one path you close off others.  For many people that is very difficult; the grass always looks greener someplace else, particularly when things don’t turn out as you planned.  So our attention wanders to something we think might be more profitable, more interesting, or just plain different from the problems we are facing.  However, that is exactly why clarity of purpose is so powerful; choosing forces you to focus your time, resources, and energy on one thing.  And doing one thing vastly improve your chances of success.  The old saying that the hunter who cases two rabbits catches neither one is as true in business as it is in the woods.  

When we are sure we are doing the right thing, we can sink ourselves fully into the activity.  Free from distractions, we become absorbed in our work.  Disturbances that would normally cause annoyance are ignored as we focus on the job.   Concentration and effectiveness are at their highest when we have absolute clarity about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

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[1] When Anna Wintour was just 21 years old she told her co-workers that she wanted to be Editor of Vogue.  She achieved her ambition in 1988 and 24 years later she is still Editor-in-Chief of American Vogue.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wintour.

Be Sure of What you Want

Driven, ambitious and competitive; this is hardly the description you would expect of someone born into a wealthy family.  But it might be more understandable when you know the person’s father.  Charles Wintour was editor of the London Evening Standard following a decorated military career.  His daughter Anna obviously inherited his coolness under fire.

Anna Wintour is, of course, the legendary editor-in-chief of American Vogue who was savagely depicted in The Devil Wears Prada.  Ms Wintour is characteristically unruffled by such things.  She has been editor of Vogue since 1988 and has a loyal following from friends and staff.    She is unrepentant about her management style, saying[1] “people respond well to people who are sure of what they want”.  Her skill of course is both knowing what she wants, and being mostly right.   Her track record is impressive and Vogue continues to be an icon for all that is desirable in fashion and lifestyle.  It has made and broken many promising careers.

Being sure of what you want sounds simple enough, but reaching the point of clarity and being able to communicate it clearly isn’t always easy.  Without that clarity, however, decision making becomes laboured and people confused.  Your decisions may or may not be popular, as is the case with Ms Wintour, but at least people know where they stand.

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[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-5013905.html?pageNum=3&tag=contentMain;contentBody

What Steve Jobs Taught Me

Let me say at the outset that I didn’t know Steve Jobs, or ever work with him.  In fact I haven’t even read the book that EVERYONE seems to be reading at the moment – his biography by Walter Isaacson.  And I don’t intend to anytime soon.  Which I guess makes me supremely unqualified to write about any lessons he taught anyone. 

But Steve Jobs did, apparently, teach me one thing. 

It doesn’t involve any form of computing, is completely unconnected to tablets or smart phones, and is so ordinary that it doesn’t even begin to give away its power. 

What is it?  It is planning in analog. 

Unusually for me, I didn’t even need to read a book to get the idea; it came in a freely downloadable pdf.  Plan in analog.  So simple, so obvious, but so, so powerful.

I happened to be working on a presentation and tried the idea out.  I replaced my much loved but very broken fountain pen with a sleek, inexpensive silver number and invested in a nice notebook (without a power pack).  And I started to write.  And draw bubbles.  And more bubbles.  Turned the page and did it again.  For hours on end. 

It is notable how the brain is free to think creatively when it doesn’t get caught up worrying about point sizes, or whether boxes are lined up.  I thought about my BIG IDEAS.  I criticized them, turned the page and started again.  I have pages and pages of mind maps, notes, crossings out and ideas that run off the edge of the page.  Pen and paper isn’t nearly as flexible or forgiving of mistakes as my Office software, but it is superb at freeing the mind.

I hope I produced a better presentation with my inspiration from Steve Jobs.  I know I created it more quickly than if I hadn’t done my pen and paper planning.  I guess I won’t know until it closes a sale or makes an entire audience stand up to applaud. 

The process has taught me an important lesson – pre-planning on paper should be given plenty of time.  It produces better structure, better ideas, and hopefully a better end result.  It certainly saves time. 

I shall credit Steve Jobs with the lesson.  It’s not as earth-shattering as the iPhone or iPad, but looking at his presentations I can well believe he devoted considerable time to worrying about big ideas before worrying about how it might look on the screen.

Watch “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” by Camine Gallo here:  http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs-2609477.  His book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience” is also well worth a read.  OK – I’ll admit to having read that one!

Weekly Meetings

Meetings get a lot of bad press: too many, badly run, no preparation and of negligible value.  Yet meetings can be tremendously valuable.  A weekly meeting is an opportunity to plan and review, and to set the tone for the upcoming week’s work. 

Steve Jobs had a meeting each Monday with his executives to review all the products in development.  “Eighty per cent is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week,” Jobs said in an interview with Fortune in 2008.  “We don't have a lot of process at Apple, but that's one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page."

I know if I were an executive at Apple I’d make sure I was up to speed by the end of Friday on what progress had been made, and what the plan was for next week because if I didn’t know, I’d be getting a roasting on Monday morning.  So not only did Jobs create accountability and visibility with these meetings, but he also made sure that all his executives had reviewed the past week and planned the upcoming week.  Sure, this was something they should have been doing anyway, but that Monday morning meeting made sure of it.  Not bad for 60 minutes of everyone’s time. 

Steve Jobs: An Unconventional Leader, The Sunday Morning Herald, Australia: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/management/steve-jobs-an-unconventional-leader-20111007-1lcmo.html#ixzz1l2AZC5il 

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

Most people have dreams, ideas and ambitions that they hope they will achieve one day.  I’m no exception and I doubt you are either.

The only trouble with dreams is that it’s a little tricky turning them in reality.  Our ambitious dreams often get trodden on by the little sceptic at the back of our minds who tells us we can't do whatever it is.  And too often we listen to the sceptic in us, instead of the dreamer.

Randy Pausch, who was  Professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, USA until he died in 2008, once wrote “Get tenure” on his to do list.  He laughed about it and said it was probably naive to write such a big thing on a To Do list.  He said should have broken it down into smaller chunks.  Maybe he was right, but he did become a Professor at Carnegie Mellon and did turn his dream into a reality.  His book “The Last Lecture” talks a lot about achieving dreams and is well worth a read.

There is a nugget of an idea here, though.  If we were to put our dreams onto our To Do lists, we might start doing more to achieve them.  We might start breaking them down into smaller tasks, and get on and do something about them.  Because unless we start doing something, we will definitely NOT achieve our dreams - that much is certain.

Just about every time management course I’ve ever been on, and I’ve attended a few, has always asked the same question.  What did you do today to achieve your most important goals?  What have you done this week, or this month?  Sadly, many people admit they haven’t done anything in a long time.  Many people admit they forget, for long periods of time, about their dreams and ambitions.

It’s worth more than a passing thought as we jot down what we intend to do today.

Being Productive when Tired

There are different types of tiredness at work.  Like:

• No sleep last night because of noisy neighbours/  baby crying/ didn’t get in till 3am (delete as appropriate) tiredness
• Been in the office since 7am, now it’s 5pm and I’m running out of steam tiredness
• Had a super productive day, got loads done, and now tailing off fast
• Just got back from a business trip and I’m jet-lagged or just plain tired from several days intensive work
• Got a cold/ headache/ hangover/other type of unwellness
• Not got a good reason, just firing on much less than three cylinders and don’t seem to care …. tiredness
• You probably know other types of tiredness at work.  It’s a universal problem. 

No matter how many books get bought on Time Management, it’s a simple fact of life that we get tired and work gets a lot more difficult.  So how can we be productive when dog-tired?

As Philip Pullman once said – “A bad day’s work is a lot better than no day’s work at all”.

So here are my ten tired, tried and tested ideas:

1. Work on your To Do List – and prioritise it.  Make sure everything you need to do is written down and then decide what needs to be done next.  The act of sorting out what needs to be done, and in what order, is motivating in itself, and more often than not prompts thought and action on the task.
2. Set your stop watch to 15 minutes and work on your Most Important Task.  Just 15 minutes, even if you work slowly.  Getting started on a task, even a little bit, moves things forward and will make the next 15 minutes easier to do.
3. If you can, take a nap.  Even a short nap can make a huge difference in your productivity and might make the difference between a decent day’s work, or a totally wasted day. 
4. Work on routine admin stuff, like expenses, filing, accounts or something that doesn’t take too much brain power.  I often that I can get quite engrossed in little tasks, and get quite a lot done despite initial tiredness.
5. Track your time.  You are most likely to waste time by web surfing, reading the paper or generally wasting time when you are tired.  And most likely to lose track of time when you are tired.  We do it without thinking, or realising how much time has gone.  If you track your time then at least you get reminded where the time is going, and can use another technique to try and get back on track. 
6. Learn something new.  Reading is productive, and a good way to learn about important but not urgent things.  So if you’ve been meaning to learn a new software package, or get up to date on industry trends, tired time might be perfect timing. 
7. Give yourself a deadline.  Not having a deadline for tasks can be a huge problem – when everything is urgent, but nothing absolutely has to be done today.  Work ahead and figure out deadlines for mini-tasks and work in hour long chunks, tracking your productive time in each hour.
8. Work with someone else.  Hold a meeting, a telecom or something that requires interaction with someone else.  It’s amazing how you perk up when reacting to someone else’s ideas and views.  Just be careful not to waste someone else’s time in the process of trying to rescue your own day.  I like holding meetings at the end of the day because it helps everyone keep going a bit longer, and the ideas are just as relevant.
9. Work on something you love.  It’s always easier to work on something that naturally inspires you.  It may be better to get something done in an area that flows easily during tired time, and work on more difficult things when you are fresh.
10. Remind yourself of your ultimate goals.  Not giving in to tiredness is difficult, and often the only way to do it is remind yourself why you do what you do, and why you love it.  It’s easier to motivate a tired brain when you know why it’s worthwhile. 

What are your top tips for working when tired?  I’d love to hear them.  And I promise not to disappear for such a long time again!

Meetings, bloody meetings

I noticed the heading of blog post a few days ago: "10 Ways to Get out of Meetings". I didn’t read it, but suspect it was popular. Too many meetings are less productive than they should be.

Instead of trying to avoid meetings, though, how about figuring out how to make meetings more useful, and more effective? After all, two or three or four heads are always better than one. It’s just that it takes a little effort to get a meeting to work well. When creativity and problem solving start to work in a co-operative way, meetings are worth their weight in gold.

So, with reference to John Cleese’s excellent film “Meetings Bloody Meetings” here are 10 ways to get more out of meetings:

1. Prepare in advance (Is the meeting necessary? Who should attend? What is already known? Are sensitive issues being discussed that merit face to face discussion, etc, etc)
2. Set clear meeting objectives
3. Have an agreed agenda
4. Make sure everyone is invited who needs to be there, and that they have the opportunity to give their input during the meeting
5. Give people time to prepare in advance (with sight of relevant information)
6. Ensure everyone is working from the same documentation (up to date agenda, budgets, documents, etc)
7. Keep to time (start, finish, take individual items off-line if they are taking too much time)
8. Record decisions and key points in the minutes
9. Follow-up after the meeting
10. Use a collaboration tool to keep everything together rather than relying on email (it provides structure and reduces the risk of missing things): Dates, times, attendees, objectives, the agenda, additional documents, minutes

It isn’t rocket science, but it is almost always more work than we first reckon. If that means having fewer, but better, meetings that would likely suit everyone. Including whoever is trying to get things done.

My very old copy of John Cleese’s book “How to Run a Meeting” always brings a smile to my face. Cleese’s eyes are raised skywards in sympathy in frustration at yet another unnecessary, unproductive and unbelievably long meeting.

Collaboration and knowledge-sharing is much more of a framework than it was in the 1970’s where the emphasis was on controlling meetings. Yet the dangers of rambling, unfocused discussion is as great today as it was then. So Cleese’s 1976 book stays on my bookshelf, alongside my 2010 collaboration software.

Ten reasons time is so precious

1. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time.
2. You can store money to be used later, but time stops for no man (a bit like the tide).
3. You can borrow money to achieve an important goal, but you can’t beg, steal or borrow more time.
4. We all work with the same 24 hours, no ifs or buts and no way to inherit a tidy pile more.
5. Most resources can be bought, borrowed, sold or lent. Time cannot be traded, and so is the scarcest of all resources.
6. You can’t swap time for all the tea in China. Unless you have a plan. In which case time can be used to earn a lot of the tea in China, a bigger house or a faster car.
7. Writing a cheque won’t allow you to spend a sunny afternoon in the park with those you love, but using some of your precious time will.
8. No one ever laid on their death bed wishing they had spent more time in the office. But I suspect a few wished they had spent their time more wisely, doing the things that were important to them.
9. Time flies like the wind, and fruit flies like bananas.
10. Once a day is done, you cannot get it back again, whether it was well spent or frittered away unthinkingly. But tomorrow, said Scarlet, is another day.

What's your Planning Horizon?

March 31st. It’s the end of a quarter, or the end of a financial year depending. A time for looking back on objectives achieved and work that still needs to be done. Whether you plan on a monthly, quarterly or annual horizon, it’s a milestone.

The length of your planning horizon is important. To some people a quarter is a lifetime; for them a month is better. Of course it depends on your business and your ambitions. Google sets “impossible bodacious goals” and then achieves them, according to one employee. They set goals for the quarter, not for the year: for Google a year is forever. They want results faster. They pay those who deliver, they get results faster, and the world stands back in awe wondering how they do it.

If you are attempting complex engineering-type changes, then a month’s planning horizon is too short. But as Google are perhaps demonstrating, a year may be too long.

Your planning/review horizon is important – whatever the time period - as is the seriousness with which you review it. Your progress vis a vis your competitors may depend on it.

Edit your way to success

Editing is the most important activity for a writer. Writers need ideas, structure, and to make their prose sing, but all that hard work is wasted without editing. How do I know? Because too often I’m a lousy editor! Editing always improves my writing and my thinking.

It’s just as true in business. What we exclude is more important than what we include. Here’s why:

1. It's difficult to serve a defined customer niche exceptionally well. But it’s much more difficult to serve many markets. The Virgin Group try to make their brand elastic, but the failures of Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cosmetics and Virgin Vodka demonstrate that it ain’t so easy. Define which markets to exclude, so as to improve the message to your chosen market(s).
2. Too many priorities means nothing gets done well, important stuff gets missed, and half-finished jobs tug at your attention. To Do lists should be edited ruthlessly: Delete, Automate, or Delegate. Doing is a last resort but it means that important stuff gets done well.
3. Cluttered filing systems (paper and electronic), full in-boxes, unread books and magazines are a constant distraction if left unattended. Keeping things “just in case” seems to be in my genes, but when I force myself to shed the junk my mind is clearer and more focused.
4. Exclude “nice to have” objectives from your business plan so as to free resources and thinking time for essentials. It’s more motivating at the end of the year to see that all objectives were achieved, rather than a long list that gets quietly forgotten.

Editing, excluding and choosing are easier to write about than to do, but are hugely effective as a business tool. So if in doubt: edit, edit, edit!

Unplan Your Business – Not!

Are business plans dead? Are events moving so fast that planning has become a bureaucratic luxury? I think not, and research indicates that business plans are as relevant today as they always have been.

An inadequate or non-existent business plan is still a cause of failure amongst small businesses. No business plan = insufficient thought and seat-of-the-pants management. All boats might float on a rising tide, but when things are less buoyant, too many sink never to be seen again. The list of why small businesses fail is long and depressing, but pretty much all of them include Poor Planning.

So why do people suggest such dangerous nonsense? Is it to be different? To shake things up a bit and get known as a popular thought leader? After all business planning isn’t exactly the most popular activity for managers.

Or is it because they genuinely have a crystal clear vision of their business that they don’t need a plan? And so think that other businesses shouldn’t have one either? I guess that’s the kindest explanation I can come up with, and I take my hat off to anyone who can hold the complexities of leading and managing a business without a business plan.

Like the billionaire day-traders (not too many of them around …) I’d love to meet those successful people who steer their thriving businesses without a so much as a back-of-an-envelope plan. How do they do it?

Finding flow for high performance

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is
stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I was deeply impressed by Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas about flow when I first came across them. Flow is completely focused motivation and we all know it when it’s there. You might experience flow mode when trying to beat an opponent at tennis, or preparing a big presentation.

For me, flow mode, and doing the best I possibly can, always needs a deadline, a clear target and some way of knowing what progress I am making.

Csikszentmihalyi identified a number of factors that were important to flow mode:

1. A challenging activity that requires skill
2. The merging of action and awareness
3. Clear goals and feedback
4. Concentration on the task in hand
5. The paradox of control (not being overly worried about failing)
6. The loss of self-consciousness
7. The transformation of time (losing sense of time)

Computer games immediately come to mind as an activity where you can easily lose yourself in concentration for hours on end, but writing, studying for an exam or playing a competitive sport are equally likely to be absorbing.

Performance management, and measurement, is all about finding the right environment for people to do their best work. Csikszentmihalyi’s point about clear goals and feedback is most obviously pertinent to how we work – good leaders work hard at making goals and feedback clear and unambiguous. Yet providing an environment that encourages concentration, rewards good work and learns from mistakes would also inspire better performance. So it seems that in a work situation it takes at least two to flow and achieve greatness:

Leaders

1. Ensure tasks are stretching but achievable
2. Make goals crystal clear
3. Make feedback immediate, visual and for improving rather than controlling
4. Create a culture where it is OK to push, even if it sometimes means failing

Workers

1. Be willing to fully concentrate on the task
2. Desire excellence, don’t settle for “good enough”
3. Give a task body and soul attention to get it done on time

Paradoxically, research shows that tasks where all of these things come together are some of the most satisfying. So creating an environment for high performance is well worth the effort – for both the organisation and individuals.

Want to be successful? Have a plan!

Oddly enough the most difficult thing about being a success is figuring out what you want to be a success at. It’s strange, isn’t it, that we are as a species so undecided. I know a few people whose talents were so obvious at a young age that they have just followed their dream. But it’s certainly not the case for everyone. But working hard at figuring out what you want to excel at is so worthwhile. Because once you have a goal you have a chance of being successful.

Of course the difficulty is the choice. There are so many things we can do, could do, or perhaps would do if we had the time/money/figure for it. But there are relatively few things we can really excel at, and it’s figuring out what we love doing, and can be really good at that enables us to enjoy real success.

Assuming you know what you want, a big assumption I know but let’s assume for the second, the next stage is to plan. Plan in detail what’s needed to be successful. Plan what could go wrong. Look at other people doing what you want to do. Consider the risks. Figure out how long things might take. How much they might cost. What assumptions you have made that might be incorrect. Go through the whole shooting match of thinking through what will be required. It takes time, quite a lot of time, but will pay you back a thousand fold.

Gandhi said “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes”. Planning is a formalised and proven way of thinking through and refining thoughts into something actionable.

Pooh Bear said “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

As a bear of little brain I know exactly what Pooh Bear meant. I’ve spent a few days this week on business planning and its tough going, but oh so worthwhile.

I’ve bought Richard Stutely’s book “The Definitive Business Plan” and highly recommend it. He’s seen businesses come and go, worked on plans and budgets for UK plc (he worked at the Treasury) so comes at the subject with some authority.

So if being successful at something matters to you, have a plan!

6 more reasons why being tidy and organised encourages high performance

I was sent a quote recently:

Disorganization wins! (Love the mess!) - Tom Peters

Now I’m all for free speech (even opinionated free speech), but I have to say my opinion differs here. Whilst there may be some brilliant folk who work in a disorganized mess, I suspect they are few and far between. For the rest of us who want to excel in our chosen field, there are compelling reasons to be tidy and organised:

1. You can find things. So basic, but so important! Whether it is in your filing system (or lack of it), hard disk, or the bottom of your briefcase, inability to find things is uncomfortable, annoying, inconvenient and can sometimes royally mess things up. Having a place for everything, and putting most things in their place, spreads calm and organisation. And sooner or later you will think of looking for it in your filing system.
2. Work on current priorities. Mess and disorganisation hides out of date priorities we are unwilling to let go. My paper filing cabinet is small; holding only 15 or so files. If it doesn’t fit, I have to go through and figure out what can be thrown out. It’s a great way of ensuring I don’t have too many projects on the go at the same time, and that out of date stuff gets thrown away. If only my hard disk were that limited!
3. Make better decisions. The late Randy Pausch was adamant that his students’ email inbox was not their To Do list. Organising, reorganising, prioritising and planning may sound like more work but it produces better results because you work on what’s important and not just what’s in front of you at this moment.
4. Improved focus. It’s easier to focus if you have everything you need all together, without stuff pulling at your attention. I have a VERY small desk which is designed to be super ergonomic for computer users, but a BIG benefit is that I can’t have much on my desk at a time.
5. Where there is mastery, there is no mystery. This came from the tag on my spicy tea bag, and it made me smile because it’s true. To master something you have to understand it, and you can’t understand it if it is scattered all around your office. Or am I missing something Mr Peters?
6. It gives a sense of control. Whether it is a real or imagined sense of control, I suggest doesn’t really matter. What matters is the frame of mind in which we do our work. Clutter and disorganisation are not great reminders of the importance of turning out high quality work.

There are probably many other benefits besides the ones I have listed, and I’d love to hear of others – either for or against.

7 Good Ways to Better Planning

The importance of good goals and good planning comes up over and over again in Performance Management. You simply cannot perform well if you don’t know what you should be doing, or why you should be doing it. It sounds so obvious, but somehow day to day stuff often gets in the way.

Here are seven good ways to ensure planning gets done, and gets done to a high standard:

1. Work in a distraction free zone. This is important for any kind of work, but particularly for planning. Some people find classical music helps to really concentrate; personally I like quiet. Planning necessitates ignoring the minutiae and concentrating on what’s really important; what will really make the difference. In order to find those important ideas, you have to give your mind space and time.
2. Work in multiple time horizons. Ensure you have the long term goals and ambitions right, but also ensure you have planned out what you need to do this week, this month, and this quarter to achieve your goals.
3. Work through the pain. Planning is difficult and there is always a temptation to do something easier, or something that will give an immediate payback. Stay with it, feel the uncomfortable feelings of not knowing, and work it through until the plan makes sense.
4. Include numbers. Numbers being dates, estimates, quantities and financials. Unless you can quantify how long something will take, or how much money it will cost or generate, or when it must be done by, it isn’t a plan. It’s an un-thought-through wish list.
5. Collaborate. Plans that have been done with other people are better plans than those done alone. All plans require other people to make them happen, so include them in the planning process. Ensure that those doing the work are able to contribute. Ambitious plans that require everyone to work together need to have everyone’s input right at the start.
6. Finish it. Planning is a valuable tool to refine and improve thinking, but it also makes sure you have a roadmap moving forward. Planning that takes so long that it never gets finished, and never gets used, might as well never have been done. Set a time limit, work hard and well, and get a decent plan together that can be used. You can always refine it later.
7. Enjoy the process. Rather than seeing planning as a drag, enjoy the mind-expanding experience. Planning is a time to see the world as a better place through our actions and our work. What could be more enjoyable than that?

Planning and goal setting is such a fundamental part of achieving anything that it is worth thinking about how to get the environment right to do it better.

What are your top tips to better planning?

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10 Good Ways to Get Things Done

Everyone has their own techniques to get things done - and this is mine. A way to get done what needs to be done efficiently, and well. And then have time to Smell The Roses, which is a Good Thing to do at this time of year.

1. Do Important things first. Consider the most important thing that was left undone from yesterday.


2. Do difficult things first. This is a cornerstone in our work in software development, but also helps with other work. Getting difficult things completed stabilises a project.


3. Do big things first. If you don’t have anything important or difficult (lucky you), do bigger things first. Smaller things are easier to fit around bigger things. (These first three point also work like Russian dolls, ie for any given task you can prioritise what needs to be done by Importance, Difficulty, Size.)


4. Focus 100% on the task in hand. Although this has the biggest impact on productivity, it’s only possible when are convinced that whatever you are working on deserves your full attention. Turn off all distractions like e-mail, Twitter, MSN, etc. to help focus.


5. Work for longer on the task that you think you need to. In other words – really finish it. Finish everything about it. Think about what you have done and whether it’s good enough/finished enough/needs input from anyone else. Finish the admin associated with it. Put things away neatly afterwards. Then it doesn’t reappear on your To DO list in a different guise.


6. Plan before you do it – ideally at least a day before. This enables your mind to work on the problem/task beforehand so you are more productive while you are doing it.


7. Work undisturbed in pre-determined blocks of time. The Pomodoro technique suggests 25 minutes. I like half days. This brings all the advantages of 5, plus it ensures you plan your time properly to get the thing finished before you have to stop.


8. Make things a habit. For tasks that crop up regularly it is worth putting the extra effort in to engrain them into your psyche. You don’t have to think about habits, you just do them, so habits always get done.


9. Plan your day. Spend time at the beginning of the day planning what needs to be done. Spend longer on this than you feel is necessary and really work through as much detail as possible. 30 minutes seems like a long time when working at the day level, but it pays off handsomely.


10. Review your day. Identify what needs to be done tomorrow, what you could have done more efficiently, what could/should be made a habit. What can you do better tomorrow?

Then go smell those roses ….

From Material Girl to Eco Warrior

I am a child of the ‘60’s who still looks back on the ‘80’s as her glory days. I worked in London and for the advertising agency that worked on the BMW account (amongst other things). I used to joke, although it doesn’t sound so funny now, that I changed my car when it needed washing. We got a new one every six months. It seems impossible now, when I happily drive a car for 10 years, but back then it was part of a heady lifestyle that I took to like a duck to sparkling water.

I guess I’m a pretty unlikely eco-warrior.

But I have to admit I have become increasingly focused on environmental issues. To some degree it’s inescapable: the newspapers are full of it. Yet to many it’s still “someone else’s problem”. And perhaps to me too, after all it’s a big shift in thinking – moving away from the “I-can-use-up-and-wear-out-what-I-like-so-long-as-I-can-just-about-afford-it” mentality.

To be honest, my thinking is changing kind of slowly. My car is still too useful not to drive whenever I want. I am more aware of the price of petrol, and how many miles I can drive on a tankful, but as long as I can afford the petrol it is still pretty much an academic exercise. It’s only when I stop making semi-necessary journeys that I can really say that I am on the first rung of being a trainee eco-warrior.

I’m also slowly becoming more aware of the real cost of the stuff I buy. Changing my thinking away from just its price tag, to considering the raw materials that go into it, producing the thing, me using it and then disposing of it. Cars, computers, even my beloved books, all have energy costs to them that I wasn’t really aware of before.

The government publishes their strategy for moving us towards a low carbon economy today. Their introductory paragraph is heartening – they suggest that low carbon living might actually create a better kind of society, and a stronger, more sustainable economy. When compared to the throw-away lifestyles we have become used to, that has to make sense.

So Material Girl turns Eco Warrior ….

Floods and power cuts – just another day on the London Underground

I have been in London twice this week and I have been delayed on the underground twice. First it was flooding that closed a bunch of stations (including one I needed to use), and today it was power cuts that closed the Circle line for I don’t know how long. Readers outside the UK won’t recognise the details, but will certainly recognise the frustration this adds to the already arduous task of moving around a capital city.

Thankfully, in the London of 2009, this is a relatively rare occurrence. However, London of 2019 or 2059 might tell a different story. Scientists tell us that we need to prepare for climate change and that climate change is going to mean more extreme weather conditions occurring more frequently. Temperatures will get uncomfortably hot more often - perhaps 70 days in the year instead of the handful we experience at the moment. We will have less rainfall in the summer, and more in the winter.

This is the pioneering work being presented by UKCIP, leading the world in trying to predict what the effect of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have on our climate. UK Climate Projections 2009 is a brand, spanking new report that uses the best scientific and statistical techniques available to predict what the UK climate will feel like in 10, 20 or 100 years’ time. What I find particularly impressive, however, is that all of the data is being made available, including the assumptions of, for example, how much CO2 we continue to pump skywards.

They have included, for the first time, the full range of confidence levels that can be extracted from the data. This is good news for all those journalists who write for The Sun – plenty of headline grabbing scare mongering to be had for those who go in for such things. But also a wealth of valuable data for professionals who want to make the best of available data to look 50 – 100 years into the future. Which is, coincidentally the life of a building or a railway track for example.

Unless our tube and railway infrastructures are upgraded The Sun’s headline writers will have had it about right – we will be in for summers of misery and winters of cancelled train services.

All this was hosted at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers – perhaps the very people we should be blaming for getting us into this CO2 pickle in the first place. It was engineers who taught us how to use carbon-based fuels with such efficiency. But let’s not quibble – they are making up for it now with some intelligent and thought provoking debates about how to move forward. And we have to face facts – there are not too many of us prepared to give up our washing machines or cars for the sake of the planet.

With a bit of luck, however, and some critical analysis of the data, policy makers will have a better view of what’s in store going forward. Which means I will be much less forgiving when they close underground stations for either “unexpected” floods or power cuts due to a certain type of leaf on the line.

In the meantime I’m resting my tired feet after having trekked half way across London to get home. All that, and it was a hotter day than the weather forecasters had predicted. Ironic, non?

UKCP09 is published by UKCIP and is available to download from

www.ukcip.org.uk.