Looking for Problems

I was listening to an interesting interview the other day between 2 authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Joseph Finder. The former is the author of the Tipping Point, while the latter is the author of three or four novels, including “Killer Instinct” which I happen to be reading.

They made the following points:

• Email is driving people crazy. Email is beginning to swallow people’s lives and they don’t quite know what to do about it. Malcolm Gladwell
• If you are not awake at 2:00 a.m. in the morning when a discussion is going on among your colleagues, you lose. Joseph Finder on the use of Blackberry’s

I make an outrageous claim in this blog - that every issue of Time Management can be resolved by improving the practice of one or more of the 11 fundamentals.

Of course I could be very wrong, but I am willing to be proven wrong, and perhaps in the process discover a new fundamental!

Anyone have any problems that are just plain intractable? I’d love to test out my theory in this regard.

Replying to Every Email

I can’t quite recall where I read this suggestion, but I have been trying it out and it seems to work.

It’s very simple - for every important piece of email, send a reply, even a short one, to say one of the following messages:

1. Thanks
2. It’s received and will be acted on and here’s the promised due date
3. To ask a question

I think that this is a great suggestion, and the idea is to delete the email once a reply has been sent. I’m experimenting with this approach to see what comes of it, once again with the goal of achieving a Zero Inbox.

Recession Proofing Your Career

I think that becoming more productive only increases in importance when a recession comes.  I made that point in the following article taken from the Jamaica Daily Gleaner:

http://go-jamaica.com/jobsmart/view_article_details.php?id=233

A Mention on the Genuine Curiosity blog

This blog received a mention on the Genuine Curiosity blog:

http://www.genuinecuriosity.com/genuinecuriosity/2007/
10/productivity-an.html

Microsoft Outlook Team Blog

I mentioned in a prior post that I have been looking for someplace on the internet where I could find a serious discussion about the philosphy behind Microsoft Outlook. I hoped that it would include those who developed the software.

Well, I found a website that might be serious.

Check out this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/default.aspx

I also found the following mesage board, again for serious discussions on Outlook:

http://www.office-outlook.com/outlook-forum/

Top 100 List of Productivity and Life Hack Blogs

I think the following list of top internet resources might be somewhere that I should be aspiring to appear with this blog.

In any case, it’s a good list made up of the absolute best thinking to be found anywhere on the planet.

The Top 100 Productivity and Life Hack blogs:

http://www.collegedegree.com/library/college-life/top-100-
productivity-and-lifehack-blogs

Outlook and other Tools

I’m not a big fan of lots of tips and fancy tools for professionals that don’t use the fundamentals, but sometimes they can be a lot of fun to play around with!

So, I present this interesting list of tools with a caveat - employ them in your habits cautiously, with an understanding of how they impact the fundamentals.

Having said that, have fun!

Here is the link - http://urlcut.com/tips4-2time

Time Out of Mind

I think that this New York Times article is an interesting one. It makes the case that there is no such thing as “clock time” and that there is only time that is experienced in the mind of human beings. We treat time as if it were money - something that can be saved, stored, invested and wasted, but our language is quite mis-leading.

Here is an excerpt:

Time Out of Mind

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin composed a satire, “Essay on Daylight Saving,” proposing a law that would oblige Parisians to get up an hour earlier in summer. By putting the daylight to better use, he reasoned, they’d save a good deal of money — 96 million livres tournois — that might otherwise go to buying candles. Now this switch to daylight saving time (which occurs early Sunday in the United States) is an annual ritual in Western countries.

Even more influential has been something else Franklin said about time in the same year: time is money. He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to “sit idle” for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” it.

Local Productivity — Jamaica

It is well established that the productivity levels we experience here in the Caribbean are lower than those of North America.

In a way, that’ s a good thing. After all, who wants to take a trip to a foreign country for the purposes of relaxing only to discover that the environment you are visiting is more stressful than the one you are leaving behind? If productivity is correlated with stress, then certainly one would want neither when visiting a Caribbean destination in order to take a break from the rat-race.

On the other hand, doing business in the region can be a problem.

From my experience, there are simply many more professionals at all positions who exhibit many of the behaviors of people who are swamped. Their email in-boxes are full. They forget appointments. Their cell phones can accept no new messages. They miss deadlines. Phone calls go unreturned. In short, they cannot deal with the volume of time demands that life throws at them.

Open Door Policy?

The idea of an open door policy has become something like a religious belief. It has gone from a good suggestion to a badge of honor, and is now an established management dogma.

The fact is that the most productive managers DO NOT have an open door policy, and this with good reason. When taken to its extreme, managers think that they should be available to interruptions as long as there is no-one in their office. The impact of this unconscious decision is that a manager never creates a space in which they can be deeply productive, unless they come in early, stay late or come in on weekends.

I say to managers that they need to schedule their times to have an Open Door, and allow themselves to be interrupted only when there are emergencies. This takes careful scheduling, plus an effort to notify others about the exact nature of this “modified” open door policy.

The result, however, is more quality time for both the employee and the manager. The manager is able to give 100% of his attention to the times when he has to do uninterrupted deep thinking, and the times when he has the employee in front of him in need of his attention, without his mind straying to other activities. The employee gains by being able to gain the full attention of the manager.

A modified open door policy is a win-win for everyone.