Procrastination!

From Kevin Dee here in town of Eagle Professional Resources. He wrote a while back about Procrastination. I had taken a note to re-visit that post, since for me in my day to day procrastination is a constant fight. For Kevin to get over it is about telling himself "FULL day of work, for every day AT work". For me his motto sums it up and this is what I aim to do everyday, but if I'm to stop there it won't work. Take cold calls for examples, we all have tasks we don't particularly enjoy doing, but we do them to get to our goals. For me when it's time to cold call during the day the handset any given day will weight from a few grams, to 50pounds.

What works best for me is the way we were taught to program back in University. I decompose the problem in smaller pieces, and after decomposing for a while I always come up with an action that I feel is not difficult to do, and I strictly focus on the task at end, then on the next one, but not before the previous one is finished. In the case of the cold call - it's start with pick up the darn head set, then dial, wait for pickup, then put a cheerful tone in your voice and off I go with the flow.

What would an A player do?

Too often I find myself puzzled by a situation. Asking questions is not always easy either.

Often I hear: "You don't know what an A player is until you've met one" Ok that's not useful right now for me. What is useful though is I can ask myself what would an A player do in the situation I'm in, I know this may sound corny, but I find it helps me.

The A player varies with the situation. The one constant is - "What would so and so do in this situation? What would be the next step according to him/her" and then I go and execute. Putting myself in someone else's shoes for a short period of time to analyze or action on something I have to do - helps me and reduce my overall procrastination ratio! I don't know why, but when I do this, I always have the feeling I gave it my best shot, and this feels good going home at night.

high end software development and haute cuisine!

I'm just finished reading Kitchen Confidential. What strikes me is how much similarities there is in the perception of what is cool in cooking and what is cool in software engineering, or how similar things have to be so that an organization becomes predictable.

The perception in software development is - one you write a lot of code, and two you get to exercise your creativity all the time. Well most of the software projects out there are software where you do add-ons, new features, rarely do you start from scratch. Regarding creativity, in order to be predictable and measurable, creativity must give way to some form of processes and discipline.

This is exactly what I found while reading Kitchen Confidential - if you think you want to be a chef so that you can cook crazy things, stay home, in your own kitchen. There is absolutely no improvisation on the cooking line, it's all mechanical and very precise movements, so that at the end of the line the dish that comes out is always the same no matter the day or the time of the day.

The creativity is not in production, the creativity is when you build the menu, just like us when we design for the users. The reality sets in when you get to talk about the cost of the products on the menu, the same for us when we start to factor in the business goals.

So for predictable and successful innovation there is a process and time for everything, just like when it's lunch time it's no time to try out new things. You have to depend on talent, people, and processes to funnel the energy and creativity in the most effective way, to read more about it see some material and here we have put together.

important non urgent category

This category is full of stuff for me, and I'm having a tough problem going through it. It takes a lot of discipline to be prepare in advance, but I think it's key to any kind of success. The best way I find to deal with the non-urgent important, is book yourself a meeting with yourself, and treat it as importantly as if it was with your most important customers. In a meeting with your most important customers, I'm sure none of us are checking their blackberry for emails or answering calls, well such is the rule for a meeting with ourselves as well. I like to think that fire alarm is ok, everything else is off. Then, since most of the time I'm not done with what I had set up myself to do, always too optimistic on the time it will take me to do something, so just before my meeting is over, just like with my most important customers ask what should be the next steps, and when should we meet again and then I put another appointment in my cal, and I keep moving the rock forward.

time management - WaitingFor folder

I attended a seminar back in November by a very good consultaint on Workplace performance, his name is Jason Womack. I took away many things but like everything else only a few end up sticking, or making their way into the workflow. The one that is proving very useful and very simple is the WaitingFor Folder in Outlook or any mail clients.

The concept is simple - when you send an email and you need to keep track of the content of the email for some reason or another, like you're asking a question, you need to know about something or whatever, you bcc yourself and you add a rule that when you're in the bcc field it gets routed to the WaitingFor Folder. This way when I send an email that I know there is chance I might need to follow up on - I bcc myself. So on a weekly basis I make sure I review what is in the folder, and I take actions  from there, create a task, or send a reminder. For me it works well because I used to create a task after sending the mail, or taking a note or worst of all making a mental note I needed to revisit this issue later. This way the regular review of the folder does this automatically for me, and it saves me stress and time. Give it a shot!

Time Management - Weekly Review

I'm stressed all the time, and one great way to get rid of a lot of stress at once, is to know that things are taken care of. I don't mean knowing what my team is doing in this particular case, I mean all the stuff I'm supposed to be doing, I need to know it's written somewhere so that I can forget about it, and reminded in due time.

So reviews are a great way to catch things, weekly reviews are recommended by all time management consultants to improve your organization level and decrease your stress.

For me they decrease stress because I get to look at my todo, my calendar, notebooks, you get the picture all the places where I enter information throughout the week to review what's in there. The review process is simple it's all about gathering the items into Outlook, so that then I know it's been processed, and will be "actionned" eventually when it needs to. The freedom I feel when I have done this right, not more than 60min, when I strickly stick to review/manage, and not do or think, is tremendous. I hit the weekend light as a feather.

So why if I think it's so important, and the results are so good on my stress level, do I only get to do my weekly review one week out of three? I keep on booking myself meetings or call during the time I have set aside for my weekly review. It's easy to book there because when I don't have access to my agenda, I know I don't have anything else booked during that time.

I need to get better at getting the review done weekly, it will help me spend better weekends with the family, and help me do my job better. This time I reserve for the review, has to become non negotiable.

Anyhow try it out, let me know. For references on Review, I'm a big fan of GTD as you know already!