Here’s a picture of my desk. It’s got ZERO papers on it. If I’m working on something I’ll put that ONE thing on the desk. Then put it away when I’m done, or when I’m interrupted. This concept is new to me (as anyone who’s seen my desk can attest). We’ll have to see how long it lasts, but I’m liking the way that it feels. I’m more focused and feel I have more choice in what I should be working on. And those nagging projects that I needed to do but didn’t want to get started on? It’s harder to ignore them.
Look below for a view of what it used to look like:
And that blank stare you see? The clutter made it hard to focus. But when there’s nothing on my desk I have to decide what’s the most important thing to work on now. I can’t fool myself into thinking I’m doing something important when I’m working on what’s merely urgent (or worse!). When there’s only one thing on my desk I know what I have to work on. When there’s two things on the desk (or more) I’m distracted.
You may also be able to see I’ve got ZERO emails in my inbox (the monitor on the left). I realized I was using it as a holding tank and doing so was cluttering up my mind. I’m using gmail so I just selected them all and archived them. That way I can find them with search if I need to, but if I don’t ever need them then I don’t need them. As mail comes in I’ll check periodically and empty the box every time. I’ve never been a huge fan of labels (folders) for email but I’m starting to find them useful. I now have one called “later” for stuff I want out of my inbox but don’t want to take the time for now.
A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Clutter
You do realize that multi-tasking is a myth don’t you? You can’t really do two things at once, you just flip from one to the other in very small bits. Like talking to someone on the phone while you’re having a different conversation with someone in the room. You don’t really hear them both at the same time. You just ignore parts of each conversation that (hopefully) you can infer when you switch back.
I’m trying to be more conscious about what I work on – meaning I’m deciding based on what’s important not what’s urgent (or distracting) unless I decide distraction is important for the time. It’s similar to the GTD process of emptying your inbox on a regular basis.
Applying this to a TODO list
I’ve started using Asana for my TODO / Project list. I like it because I can assign tasks to projects and see them that way. But in another view I can see all my tasks in a single list (called your inbox) This needs to be emptied regularly as well. The way Asana prioritizes tasks, you go to your inbox, and decide when you’re going to work on each task. You can assign it to TODAY, Upcoming or Later. I realized that the reason I kept so many things in my in box is I didn’t want to forget about them. The “Later” category is great for that. I can keep my Today list clean and not loose those wonderful ideas that I love (which often turn out to be not so great but that’s a post for another day).
It’s kind of like the concept of a WILL-DO list rather than a TODO list.
It’s devolved into a productivity discussion – which isn’t bad – but that’s not the bigger thought that inspired me to write. The bigger thought is
The difference between zero and one is huge!
Much bigger than the difference between one and two or even one and one hundred. You see this in lots of arenas. When a startup goes from zero sales to one – it becomes a company instead of just a prototype factory. That’s why so many small shops stick the first dollar on the wall. They don’t do that with the 2nd or the tenth or even the millionth dollar.
Zero mistakes is a great place to be. So is zero late shipments. Factories post how many days they’ve gone with zero injuries – not how many days since they’ve had one.
And the difference makes the one important as well. The only one is much more important than the best of two.
Takeaway:
I’m not sure what’s the best takeaway for this post. But it’s a new year. A year I hope will be marked by a one followed by lots of zeros in my bank account. Maybe starting with zero things on my desk and in my inbox will help.
By “most CEO’s” I don’t mean most of the people who have CEO on their business card; not those in charge of very large, public companies. Most of us run companies with less than 100 people. In fact, 50% of the American work force works for companies under 50 employees. That’s a lot of CEOs.
And by “Nothing All Day”, I don’t mean you’re lazy or hanging out at the beach playing angry birds. What I mean is that the stuff you do all day is not, for the most part “CEO work”. It’s usually what is done in a large company by sales people, or production folks or HR or accounting.
There are 2 reasons for this.
This is a trap. The more time you spend on important work, the less often emergencies pop up. If you don’t force yourself to block out time for the non-urgent then you’ll always be chasing your tail.
This is true for all but the very largest companies. Think of CEO as a function not a job. Like cleaning your house. It’s a function that needs to be done, but you don’t need a full time janitorial staff. So there’s nothing wrong with you doing sales, solving production problems, or any of that others stuff. In fact there’s a lot that’s right with it.
What you shouldn’t do is neglect the CEO functions your company needs because they are not urgent.
Think of that metaphor. The conductor makes none of the music. A small band (4 or 5 people) doesn’t need a conductor. Everyone plays an instrument – but someone chooses what song to do next, and when to schedule rehearsal. You’re probably mid-way between the two. You are the conductor but you also play an instrument (or several).
Jason Fried says that the office is a lousy place to get work done because of 2 things: Managers & Meetings.
If that’s true, then you’re not doing it right. And, of course a lot of people aren’t doing it right – that’s what keeps my blog in business. I’ll tackle the meetings bit here and leave the manager problem for another post.
Most people don’t do their work in a vacuum. They need collaboration and communication (C&C) with others. Let’s say you have 5 people on a team who need to organize their work together. Let’s add a sixth person – the manager – who needs to know how the team is doing, if there’s anything she can do to help any of them (that’s her job after all) AND she needs to provide direction and connection with other teams in the organization.
That’s a lot of C&C. If all those people reach out to one another willy-nilly whenever the impulse strikes that’s a lot of interruptions. No wonder Jason wants to get away from the office.
But there is another solution. Figure out which parts of all that C&C can be scheduled and organized. It won’t make the problem go away, but it will diminish it. Hopefully to the point where the down side of the interruption is out weighed by the benefits of C&C. So if you’ve got a scheduled and organized way to collaborate and communicate, what do you have but a meeting?!?!?
I agree that most meetings are a waste of time. But that’s because they aren’t done right. Appropriate meetings not only save time, but encourage all kinds of good things like synergy, morale, camaraderie, sharing of ideas – in short, team work. But the idea of abolishing meetings because of this problem is like abolishing food because people are obese. You just have to do it right.
[Ricardo Semler goes so far as to make all meetings optional. His point is if you're planning the meeting it's your job to make it enticing enough that people want to come (and want to pay attention instead of playing with their iphones). This is pretty extreme and only works when all other aspects of the company culture are aligned with it. But it's an interesting approach. ]
If doing meetings this way sounds like a lot of work – well yeah. That’s why no bumper sticker says “I’d rather be running a meeting.” But (as Jason points out in the video) meetings are expensive. A one hour meeting with 10 people is really a ten hour meeting. And if you add up the salaries of all those people and account for the interruptions the meeting causes before they get back into the flow of their work – you’ll jump out of your skin. If you’re going to spend that much money / time / etc isn’t it worth it to do it right? That’s why you get paid the big bucks.
UPDATE: Seth Godin and I are aligned in starting the new year with better meetings.
If the answer is NEVER then you’re doing it wrong.
Seriously. Check this out:
Time Management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defence, and 6+ peer-reviews papers. And finishes by 5:30pm.
You see you can’t really manage time. You can’t save it, spend it or do anything with it or to it. You have the same 24 hours a day that Bill Gates, and your cat have.
What you can manage is yourself and what you do or don’t do WITHIN the time you have. It’s a great article. Click and read it if you haven’t already.
flickr.com/photos/meddygarnet/3459415984
Hey, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you don’t have happy employees this will change everything. I mean EVERYTHING. The good news is it works. And the better news is it’s less expensive that you think (and probably less than you’re spending now). But it does take some effort. If that sounds like a good deal to you, read on.
UPDATE: BMW asked their employees what they needed and gave it to them [albeit this was focused on what they needed to be comfortable at work and nothing else] but the results were pretty spectacular.
Do we really need to review this people?
Dreams. People have dreams. And remember, your employees are people not “resources”. Have you ever asked your employees what their dreams are? What they want to accomplish in life? What is some place they’ve never been they’d like to visit? Something they’ve never done before? It may be as broad reaching as to buy their own home and build a better life for their kids. Or it may be as simple a chance to see a pro sports game live. Or maybe pay off some student loans. Ask. See what you can do to help them accomplish their dreams.
A Good Boss. I’m talking about their immediate supervisor. More people quit a good company with a bad boss than a bad company if they have a good boss. And this is a two-fer. The better bosses your people are, you get the benefit of retention, and you also get good supervisors.
Security. This one frustrates a lot of entrepreneurs. We know things are constantly changing and we can’t promise how it’s going to be in the future. And we don’t have any job security and we love it that way. But consider the good news. If all your employees thought like you do, they wouldn’t be working for you. They’d be working for themselves.
You can’t promise lifetime employment. What you can do is be open and honest about the state of things (the economy, your company, and their performance) and give them a way to continually improve their abilities. That includes training, the proper tools, and most importantly the proper feedback, mentoring and coaching. If you do have to lay people off, do it all at once, be honest about it, pull the remaining team back together and move on.
Money. Obviously. I don’t think anyone at your place is working just for all the fun and good coffee you provide. Even though entrepreneurs tend not to believe it – it’s true that if the money is decent it ceases to be a motivator and can even be a de-motivator. See Dan Pink’s book DRIVE for details. This is why a good retention program can be cheaper than what you’re spending now cycling through employees.
Recognition. Notice when people do a good job even if it’s their job to do a good job. Tell them. Mention it in front of others. In detail.
Check out what Rebekah Monson wants. She’s twenty-something. And she works for somebody. What would you do differently if you were her boss and she told this to you?
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:
[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.
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:
[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:
[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:
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:
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"
- 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?â€
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:
[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:
Post your reasons in the comments.
Takeaway:
[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:
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:
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:
Last week I wrote about not buying people’s time. If you’re not buying time, you have to know what you are buying. This is harder than buying time, so we buy time as a cop out. It’s hard for two reasons.
One is we often don’t know how to explain what we want but “we know it when we see it”. Assuming for a minute that our knowing it when we see it is consistent (and it often isn’t) it still helps to explain what we want, so the other person knows.
The other reason is we don’t know how much is enough or when the job is done. Most knowledge work is like that. If I’m painting a room it’s obvious to me or anyone watching if I’m done, and before that, how much I have left to go. If I’m doing a marketing report, or researching competitors on the web, how do you know when you’ve done enough? It could go on forever. Generally what happens is you do it till something else becomes more urgent. Sort of like on Thanksgiving when you eat till the game is on. Then you doze in front of the game till you’re hungry. Then you eat till it’s time to take a nap etc.
So try this. Imagine your employees worked the night shift. And you came in every morning and never saw them.
How would you know what they’d done?
How would you know who did a good job?
How would you know how much work was left to do?
Try that for each person’s job. Write down your thoughts. Discuss with them.
You won’t get all your answers doing this exercise, but it will help.
Takeaways. Describing expected results and managing that way does the following:
Many moons ago a buddy and I got a sub-contracting gig putting roofing shingles on a building. It was our first and last roofing job – we were terrible. And not because we only had old fashioned hammers instead of the (then) new-fangled air guns. No, it was because we didn’t know what we were doing - didn’t line things up right, didn’t use the right kind of nails etc. An air gun would have only helped us makes mistakes quicker.
Technology is like that. Besides knowing how to use it, you have to know what to use it for. For most businesses that means you’re going to have to change the way you work in order to get the benefit of new technology. And you’re going to have to change your mind set. Buying the newest technology won’t do that for you. Ten years ago, many small companies didn’t adopt new technology for that reason. Today that would be a death sentence.
Put Data in Only Once -Use it Often
Here’s a small example in the field of IT – information technology. One of the principles of ideal IT design is that you only have to capture data one time in one place, then you can use it everywhere. This means its much cheaper and easier to use the information you have than it would be if it were only captured on paper.
For example, I know a guy who owns several title companies that do real estate closings. Each time they get a new file, they capture a lot of info including the name of the person who sent the file. In the real olden days, those files were paper. so even though each file had a source, there was no easy way to aggregate that information and learn who had been sending over the most files every month. Or who was sending over the most profitable files, or if there was a pattern of whose files tended to have more problems.
That was the olden days. Putting that information on a computer helped a bit. But unless you changed how people put that information in, you still couldn’t get it out right. Some would put it in a spreadsheet, some in a word processing document. different people might get business from the same source but spell the name differently or one would use a first name and last name and one would use the last name and the company name.
But when the operating procedures (ie the ways people work) are adapted to use the tools, then data goes in the system correctly. Once that data is in the system it’s relatively easy to get it out for all kinds of new uses. This makes it cheap and easy to do things like:
However, the owner of the companies that I was telling you about is from the old school. He wasn’t raised on technology, and while he does use it, he’s never been shown how to get the best use out of it. So he didn’t think of all the things he should be able to do with it.
But if you want to survive you’d better get with the program – your competition is, and your customers demand it. Back when I did my one and only roofing job, many knowledgeable roofers still used a hammer, not an air gun. None do today.
Takeaways:
Just thought I’d share a nice piece of software I’ve been using called The Journal ($40 with a 45 day trial and as always I’ve got no financial stake in the company.) It’s designed to pop up a new page every day where you jot down your thoughts. Sort of like a journal. DUH!
I’m using it in a feeble attempt to stay on top of all my projects using David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. The Journal lets me set up categories (the tabs you see in the picture) and they can have entries and sub-entries. Did you know it’s not uncommon to have 60 projects a person is dealing with? Makes me feel better.
In the default useage, you have a new entry for each date of your ramblings. But I use that as a kind of scratch pad / TODO list. Then I have a tab for each project. In the project notes, you can do a lot of formatting (outlines, tables etc – in some cases easier than WORD) and you can assign topics to any text or picture you put in the journal. Then you can search by word or by topic. That’s the power.
So scattered about among many projects you have many tasks. Some are assigned to your assistant. You can put them all in a topic and then search by that topic. All the tasks assigned to him from every project show up in the search. All without making a separate list. Followers of the Getting Things Done method (GTD as the cult members call it) will realize you can make a topic for calls, at home, at computer, waiting on, shopping and all the other ways you’d want to catagorize tasks. COOL
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