Doing any thing takes time – agreed?

We are limited to 24 hours each day – right?
So, the number of things we can do is limited by time – are you with me so far?

Most entrepreneurs respond to this truth by trying to do as much as they can every day. But what happens is they often mistake activity for accomplishment. Yes they are busy, maybe even efficient. But they aren’t as effective as they could be. I think they’re approaching this from the wrong end.

Choice is more important than activity.
If time (and the number of things you can do) is limited then what’s important is not how much you can cram into the day because by definition you can’t cram everything in. What’s important is what you choose to do and what you choose to leave undone. Choice is more important than activity. What if you could only accomplish one thing each day? Or even one thing each week? I bet it would be simple to decide what that one thing should be. But, I hear you saying, if I only did that one thing, then this wouldn’t get don’t and neither would this and this. Guess what? You’re right. But some things are not going to get done in any case (remember the 24 hours limit?). So shouldn’t the things that get done be the most important and the things that don’t get done be those of lesser importance?

Try it for a week. Pick one thing a day and accomplish, finish, complete, actually DO that one thing. At the expense of all else. A week later – revisit and see if it’s better or worse.

Bonus: This article gives some insight about the work routines of some pretty accomplished folks (from Beethoven to Churchill to Mandela to Al Gore). It’s surprising how little they DO to accomplish a lot.

Takeaway:

• Do less

[tags]time management, productivity, gtd, management [/tags]

I mentioned this before but I don’t think I gave it the focus it deserves. The focus it deserves is actually in this New Yorker article and a shorter one in Fast Company.

But consider this key quote

If someone found a new drug that could wipe out infections with anything remotely like the effectiveness of Pronovost’s [check lists], there would be television ads with Robert Jarvik extolling its virtues, detail men offering free lunches to get doctors to make it part of their practice, government programs to research it, and competitors jumping in to make a newer, better version.

The article focuses on checklists to improve outcomes in hospital intensive care units. But has examples of their use in other fields, with results just as impressive.

Why They are Unappealing

But just like the timer, a checklist is so mundane we feel funny using it. We think it will dehumanize our workers or our work. In my opinion it does the opposite. For two reasons.

1. When the checklist is created (and improved) it encapsulates the best of our creativity and judgement to determine how to best perform a job. In other words it takes the best practices out of the heads of a few individuals and spreads them around the entire organization.
2. When the checklist is used, it provides consistentcy and recall of best practices. Consistency and recall are two things people are not terribly good at. By relying on the checklist for those parts of their job, they can free their brains for other aspects that people are good at. Courage, wits, and improvisation are three of these that are mentioned in the New Yorker article.

Would your business benefit from consistency? Best Practices? Courage? Wits? Improvisation – what I’ll call creativity? If so then I’d propose that management’s primary job is to create check lists and make sure they are used properly.

Takeaways:

• Checklists encapsulate the best thinking in your organization and make it available to everyone
• Checklists replace the parts of our brain we aren’t good at, and free us up to use the parts we are.
• The primary job of Management is to come up with the right checklists and make sure they are used properly.

[tags] best practices, entreprneur, check list, productivity, small business, management. CEO [/tags]

I got this idea from a client – Thanks, Kendra.
In meetings when they have an topic on the agenda they allot a certain amount of time to it. Then they set a timer at the start. It keeps the meeting on schedule.

We also talked about the benefits of spending 15 minutes at the start of the day planning the calendar and developing a plan for the day. Many people have a hard time sticking to a routine like that because when they walk in, there are people wanting to talk to them, voice mails wanting to be listened to (it could be that big deal that you were waiting for and if you don’t get to it in 15 minutes it’s sure to disappear – really it could.) and emails screaming READ ME! READ ME! But usually those same people will keep appointments with another human, they just can’t keep the appointments with themselves to schedule their day. DAMHIKT – (that stands for Don’t Ask Me How I Know This meaing I learned it by personal experience).

Enter the assistant and the timer.
Make an appointment with your assistant every morning first thing when you arrive (or you could do it last thing before you leave to plan for the following day). By “your assistant“, I mean any other person in the office. If you don’t have an assistant, just pick someone and make this part of their job. When you first arrive, they are to drop what they’re doing, and come have a 10 second meeting with you. At the meeting they say: “I’m going to set the timer for 15 minutes. You’re going to do nothing but plan your day. I’ll call you when the timer goes off.” Then they go back to their regularly scheduled job and set a timer. In 15 minutes they call you. You spend that time planning your day. The end.

What’s weird about the timer.
What’s so funny is that all this use of the timer sounds so contrived and artificial. It’s true. It is. Don’t be afraid to say so and to laugh about it. But use one anyway. Do you work out? Don’t you measure your time on the tread mill? Your reps on the weights? Your miles on the bike? Would you eat in a restaurant where the cooks didn’t measure the ingredients? And of course you track the money in your company. Why are we so squeamish about measuring our most precious resource – time? I don’t know but we are. Acknowledge it and get over it.

Takeaways:

• Use a timer.
• It will feel strange. Don’t ignore this. Talk about how you’re using the timer and how strange it feels. That will make the power of the strangeness disappear.

[Update - I didn't fall off the face of the earth since the last post, we had a death in the family. But I'm back now]

[tags] entrepreneur, small business, business owner, time management, productivity [/tags]

There are examples to show incentives are good: they improve some behaviors and are a way to give people what they want in exchange for effort you want. There are also examples of why incentives are bad: they promote individuality at the expense of teamwork, they morph motivation to extrinsic rewards when motivation could (should?) be intrinsic, people always find ways to game the system.

Context is the Key
It’s like saying is fat bad? Too much is, so is too little. And it depends what kind, what else you eat etc.

Incentives are good for some things, bad for others. On top of that some people respond to them differently from others. Management is part science and part art. The smaller your group of people (less than a dozen) the more exceptions there are to the “science” and the more important is the art of knowing each person and what works for them and how to give people what they want/need without making others feel things are unfair.

Takeaway:

• Sorry there are no easy, one-size-fits-all answers when it comes to managing people. That’s why management is a skill set in it’s own right.

If you’re in the USA – have a happy Thanksgiving Day this Thursday. If you’re not in the USA be thankful. (Double entendre intended.)
[tags] management, CEO skills, small business, entrepreneur [/tags]

We all know about working smarter not harder. But Seth Godin has an interesting insight that we often confuse working longer with working harder (or smarter).

Here are a couple of choice quotes (but you should really read the whole thing – especially on Labor Day).

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.

Entrepreneurs, especially need to hear that working long is attractive because it helps you avoid the hard stuff while feeling like you’re doing what you should. And the hard stuff that really pays off doesn’t have to take long.

Takeaways:

• Sometimes longer is easier because it helps you avoid facing the really hard decisions.
• If you always feel like there are not enough hours in the day, you’re probably doing it wrong.

UPDATE: I have a client who loves to work 17 hour days (except for weekends when she only works eight). She also wants to grow her company and sell it for 20 million dollars. She doesn’t realize why her long hours will make it harder for her company to be worth that much. Here’s why.

Anyone in a position to pay $20MM for her company, won’t be in a position to step into her job and work those hours. If they have to figure out how many people it will take to replace her, how those people will fit into the organization and how it will affect the bottom line, then the company will be a lot less valuable to them than if she’s already A) figured it out and B) implemented it for enough time to work out the kinks.

Let’s say her company is worth $5 Million today. She can wait till it’s worth 15 before she does those things, OR she can do them now. The sooner she does them, the more pervasive the systems and culture of scalability will be within the company when it is time to sell. That will make it worth more sooner.

The most value she can add is to replace herself so completely that when she does sell, neither the customers, the staff, or the suppliers notice any hiccup at all.
[tags] entrepreneur, hard work, productivity, small business, CEO Skills [/tags]

1. Does it fit into the big picture?
This is the 80/20 rule. Should eliminate 80% of stuff. Of course you have to know what the big picture is. I think many people are afraid to eliminate stuff because it MIGHT turn into something useful.
2. Is it important or just urgent?
Some stuff is both! But in general, the more you do important stuff – the less stuff there is that is urgent but not important.
3. Am I the only person who can do this?
If the answer is YES in your business then you’re not doing well in building a company – just a job.
4. Do I have to be there in person?
I’m ambivalent about this one. Technology is good for transmittal of information without you being there in person. But lousy for the nuance of non-information, emotions, possibility, serendipity etc. Since you don’t know what you don’t know it’s hard to tell in advance.

[Digression about the phrase "You don't know what you don't know"

• There are things you know you know. This means you know the question and you know the answer.
• There are things you know you don't know. This means you know the question but you don't know the answer.
• Then there are things you don't know you don't know. This means you don't even know what the question is. Or that you have a world view that frames the question in a way that's not useful. Face to face meetings can teach you a lot about whether you and the other person share the same world view but only if you assume you might not.

- end of digression]
5. Will it cost me if I don’t go?
And what will it cost me (in opportunity cost) if I DO go? As the original article (see below) says the COST might be “who will I piss off if I don’t go?”

Questions from http://cashbulge.com/2007/08/14/a-few-tips-on-how-to-shrink-and-prioritze-your-to-do-list/
[The Comments are mine]

One of the services that makes this blog worth every dollar you pay for it, is the time I take to scour the web and find the gems for you. Two posts in blogs I love come together today under the heading :Why didn’t I think of that?

Seth Godin says make sure your system works before you make it bigger. DUH! My refinements are: Make sure you can sell before you spend more on marketing and advertising. And make sure you can sell at a profit (including the cost of sales) before you do more of it. No sense paying people to take your stuff.

Guy Kawasaki posts an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer author of “What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.” 16 questions and answers – You could spend 6 months on each one and your company would see vast improvement. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.

Question: What is the proper role for a CEO?
Answer: To develop others and their talents and to create an environment in which people can do their best and want to. It is not to make all the decisions or, like some kind of “sun king,” absorb all the light and the attention.

In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.

Takeaways:

• Take time to think so you can see the obvious.
• You can’t work smarter if you’re working all the time.

[tags]small business, management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur [/tags]

200,000 deliveries a day. 5,000 employees (many barely literate) and an enviable error rate without depending on electronic technology. And such dedication that when Royalty visits, Prince Charles (yes, THAT Prince Charles) adjusts his schedule to fit theirs, because they won’t deviate.
What’s your error rate?

Your dedication level?

Read about the Dabbawala and see if you can think of reasons for their success.

My Reasons:

1. The job description is very clear. The difference between success and failure is obvious, and indisputable.
2. The job description doesn’t change.
3. Everyone is treated as an equal and is paid the same.
4. Just three levels of management. (I think this is possible because of #2 and #3)
5. Each worker has to contribute some of their own capital. Different from an ESOP where capital is usually given to the employees, these workers provide their own, (And I suspect they keep ownership of it.)
6. UPDATE – I agree with Seth Godin that it works because they know their customers which engenders trust and hence responsibility. But I don’t think that’s the only reason it works.

Post your reasons in the comments.

Takeaway:

• When would such a low error rate be a bad thing?

[tags] small business, entrepreneur, error rate, management, productivity, Dabbawala [/tags]

“When you’re up to your eyeballs in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp.”

Many clients come to me in that situation. And they feel paralyzed with so many emergencies they don’t see how to get ahead. I’ll make this short for those of you who have to get back to your latest brush fire.

A useful distinction: Urgent vs Important.

All of the things that demand your time are urgent. Only some are also important. But some important things are not urgent. (doing your will, training your managers to manage better, hiring that new assistant). So those always get put off when there are too many “urgentcies”. The irony is that most of the important things will actually prevent or reduce the urgent interruptions if you’d only have time to do them.

Takeaway:

• At the start of the day, ask yourself this: What one thing could I do today that is most critical to achieving my desire? Write it on a 3×5 card and carry it around. Just one. Make sure you do at least that one thing.

If you do that each day, you’ll get 5 things done a week. Many of them will be the important things that are not urgent, and they’ll reduce emergencies in the future.

Bonus Takeaway:

• When something demands your attention, ask yourself if it’s important or merely urgent. Try saying no to a few of the non-important ones.

An effective schedule is composed solely of Routine, Rocks and Reserves. You should be able to look at your calendar and see them.

Routine.
This is missing from most entrepreneur’s schedule. It’s the routine meetings and regular times you review reports. Of course you don’t have time for this. There’s too much happening in your day. And all those damn interruptions. What you don’t realize is that if you have the right routine it minimizes the interruptions and the surprises. But you may have to give up the adrenaline addiction, so it won’t feel the same.

What is the right routine? More than I can go into here but check out Mastering The Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. It involves doing certain things daily, others weekly, monthly and quarterly. You can do them by phone when traveling so there’s no excuse. And they don’t take a lot of time but they must be done consistently.

Rocks.
These are the important things that are never urgent. The name comes from a story told in First Things First by Stephen Covey. (Buy it used at Amazon for a penny.)

The gist is that if you want to fill a bucket with some rocks, some gravel, some sand and some water, you need to put the rocks in first and let the other stuff flow around them. Your rocks are the projects you want to get done but can’t find time for. Pick one. Two at the most. You need to put rock time on your calendar just like you would any important meeting. Work on them till they’re finished then move to the next rocks. In a year, you’ll get much more done than if you try to work on thirty at once a little at a time.

For some people, rocks are the production time they need – this is true for lawyers, graphic artists, phone sales people and the like. The key to these rocks is to schedule time that’s uninterrupted and keep it that way. Don’t check email, don’t answer the phone, make sure the others in your office know not to knock unless there’s blood or fire.

Reserves
Once your schedule has the routines and rocks in it, there should be space. That means you have to be selective about scheduling your rocks. Don’t fill up the schedule. Leave that space alone. The holes in your calendar are your reserve. They will fill up. Some problems and emergencies will arise (fewer than when you didn’t have routine, but some will.) More importantly, some opportunities will show up and you’ll now have time to take advantage of them. That’s what reserves are for.

Takeaways:

• It’s a bit of a skill to get the right balance of the 3 R’s but when you get it down, you and your company will be more productive and less harried.
• You know you’ve got the skill down when you plan which rocks you’ll deal with at the start of the week, and by the end, you’ve handled all the rocks you planned to as well as dealt with all the stuff that came up.
• By picking fewer rocks and scheduling time to actually complete them you may find you’ll accomplish more by doing less.
• You have to be a slave to the routine – but it sets you free.