Archives for posts with tag: Productivity
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Meeting with New People

December 16, 2016 //
2

Did anyone notable ever say something along the lines of ‘a wise man speaks less, a foolish man does not’?

If they didn’t, they should have, so I’m filling the gap now.

When you’re in a meeting with new people, I think it’s a sensible course of action to keep your own counsel first. This is deferential, which is polite and considerate, but also gives you a chance to gauge the situation, see what they’re like, assess what they know, and generally rate them as individuals, based on your early impressions.

Then, when you’ve given them a chance and you’re surer of the situation, you can start contributing from a more knowledgeable basis.

This approach certainly works well in sales and marketing, when you’re looking to get the customer to do the talking so you can learn more and propose a better solution that builds on your increased understanding of their requirements.

When you understand the situation and the new person you’re talking to better than they do you, you’re in a position to help them better, make a better first impression, and have a better chance of controlling the dialogue and the output.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

One Hour

December 9, 2016 //
0

I’ll keep this post uncharacteristically short. I’m going to put it out there. It applies for work and play.

No meeting, session, presentation and so on should be longer than an hour. Anything more is too much, unfair to the audience, not a good use of anyone’s time. It’s a productivity and attention thing.

Do we really need longer than an hour? If we do, we should split it up into sessions, with breaks. Look at the educational system, which should be focused on learning, absorbing, retaining and using information. Classes are less than an hour, and double classes should have a complete break.

The exception to this is if you, the customer, the audience member, have paid for the privilege. A film, a show, or an evening with someone. Other than that, it should be an hour, max. It’s all you should need.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Never Leave a Room Empty-Handed

October 26, 2016 //
0

My good lady’s father has a saying: never leave a room empty-handed. There’s always something you could be putting back, tidying up, or passing to someone.

It makes sense. It feeds directly into our personal productivity; doing a little often, chipping away at something rather than allowing a huge wedge of a thankless job to weigh us down, becoming bigger by the day, hanging over our heads and making us stressed.

I must confess I’m not good at this. These little pregnant pauses are great moments for doing a few leg exercises to loosen a troublesome calf muscle, or filing a few bills away at a time. Too often I let procrastination of the distasteful become the thief of my time as I kid myself that it’s better if I do one big job.

It’s the same in the electronic world as well of course. Even though we feel we’ve never been busier, with our time seemingly accounted for from the moment we wake til the moment we sleep, there are still little tiny pockets of time that we could be using better. We could be getting rid of emails, deleting old texts or unwanted photos languishing in our phones.

In work and life, idleness is a disease. It’s not the same as relaxation. There’s always something we could be doing.

Tags
Categories Communication, General

Slender Footprint

October 12, 2016 //
0

A recurrent theme in this blog is personal productivity. Sometimes it also takes in with it environmental productivity, by which I mean a judicious use of the finite resources at our disposal to get around our place in the world.

This is something we can all do pretty well in the city, where the infrastructure is there to help us. It’s much harder to pull it off in those more sparsely populated areas.

A friend of mine that I work with from time to time has what I would call a slender footprint – in the sense of his carbon footprint rather than the mark his shoe leaves.

He lives in a city, in the nicest part in his city. Most of what he needs on the weekends is within a few minutes’ walk. When he’s working in the office, he has a 5-minute walk to the bus, a 20-minute bus ride into the centre, and a 5-minute walk to the office. A door-to-door commute of 30 minutes, where he can work for 20 of them, is just about perfect.

When he has to travel internationally for work, he can take the train or else a very affordable taxi to the airport. He has a car, but reckons he does no more than 1,000 miles a year in it, taken up by the occasional trip to the golf course or a trip to see the folks.

That’s what I call a slender footprint. Personal and environmental productivity at its finest.

Tags , , ,
Categories General

When the time begins with a 4

October 7, 2016 //
0

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m all about productivity. Sometimes our productivity can be stretched over a long working day, and sometimes a shorter one.

If I’ve got a ton of work on or I have to travel a long distance to get to a meeting, I’m fine with getting up early, sometimes really early, and cranking out a very long day. I can’t do it every day, but I can when I need to.

Except when the time begins with a 4, as in 4-something am. 5am onwards is not a problem. There’s something barbaric about setting the alarm and having to get up when the time begins with a 4. It has a crushing effect on my productivity and staying power.

This doesn’t seem to apply when I’m heading off on holidays. Getting up at 2 or 3am for a a 6am flight to the sun, sea or slopes doesn’t seem so bad.

But when the getting up time begins wth a 4, and the effort is for work, then the mental tiredness and productivity plummet – rather than the physical tiredness necessarily – kicks in way earlier than leaving it until after 5.

Tags , ,
Categories General

Prime Now, Prime Not

July 1, 2016 //
0

I did a stupid thing the other day.

I packed for a trip to the UK from Ireland, and forgot the power pack for my MacBook Air. Realising the error of my ways, and with an hour’s juice left, I went online to see if I could get one delivered to me the same day. I had heard that with Amazon Prime Now you can get stuff delivered in big cities like London within the hour, which was perfect.

I couldn’t see any Prime Now offers for the charger I needed. Then someone told me that Prime Now was a mobile thing, so I needed to download the app. I couldn’t find the app, which was when that same someone told me I probably couldn’t see the app because I lived in Ireland where Prime Now was not available. No problem, I’ll change my country to the UK in my Amazon settings. Except that it’s not straightforward and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do it.

No problem said that same someone, I’ll order it for you with my Prime Now app and get it delivered here to the office. Great, except that the app wouldn’t allow him to change the delivery address from his home to the office. Not a good first impression…

We gave up. I walked 3 minutes to a local electrical store, they had the power pack I needed, which I bought, and I was back in the office in 15 minutes.

You see, when your ecommerce technology fails your customers, they leave you and go back to good old bricks and mortar.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Sales, Technology

A Sense of Urgency

June 15, 2016 //
0

A sense of urgency is the secret weapon of the self-starter. A self-starter adopts a sense of urgency because he or she understands that time is the most precious commodity, and wasted time can never be won back.

I try to instil this in my kids, with almost unwaveringly poor results. Whenever they’re asked to do anything around the house, or to get ready for school, they seem to head into a neutral gear, returning the aside I made to them once: ‘yes Dad, I’m on a sponsored go slow…’ They don’t buy into the concept of the sooner you start something and the quicker you do it, the quicker you can get onto something else. Either that, or they fly through jobs in a slap-dash fashion that necessitates a rework and the accompanying retort: ‘if only you’d done it right the first time, you’d be done by now…’

It’s all about balance. A sense of urgency – in work or play – combined with the right level of quality gets things done in the most effective way. Emptying a dishwasher, putting everything in the right place with no breakages and a sense of urgency gets the job done correctly in the least amount of time. This sense of urgency, using the dishwasher example, pushes us to group items for the same cupboard or shelf into one trip, so that we minimise aggregate journey time.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we fly around our daily work and house tasks like people possessed all day. Everyone needs downtime. Don’t get me wrong, I love to relax, and taking time out from work and play is key. But you can still relax well, relax effectively :-).

Tags ,
Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Lemming Time

May 29, 2015 //
0

There is a certain time that kills your productivity in work and life. I call it the Lemming Time, after the animals that are supposed to jump off cliffs in droves to their deaths.

You know the Lemming Time when you see it. It doesn’t happen every time and it’s hard to predict. You might be driving your car in town and it seems like every few metres a car is trying to turn into your path, a pedestrian is attempting an ill-advised crossing or people’s rushed behaviour turns erratic and mildly dangerous. It’s the time of day when everyone has decided they simply have to get something urgent done, yourself included.

It happens in work as well. A deadline is looming, you’re getting close, and suddenly the replies come in, the phone calls, emails, requests for a quick chat. Everyone else getting to the finish line of their own thing needs a quick interaction or two with someone else before they can put their thing to bed. All of a sudden you’re in a funk, that 3-syllable word that starts in cluster and ends in an anglo-saxon word for sexual coition. Bad for your productivity and peace of mind.

Avoid the Lemming Time. Plan better.

 

Tags ,
Categories Customers, General

The Two Types of Busy

December 12, 2014 //
0

There are two types of busy.

In our yin and yang working lives, the first type of busy is the productive type, where you are focused, you have the end goal in mind, and you are getting through stuff. You’re giving people what they need to progress their own projects and they’re giving you what you need for success. You’re like a machine, energised, nothing can stop you. This is good busy.

The other type of busy is bad busy. You’re bogged down, maybe in admin, you’re doing tasks of low value, you’re switching between tasks and not getting them done. You can’t reach the people you need and the stuff that people need from you is long or difficult to complete. You’re frustrated and annoyed. You’re not productive.

It goes without saying that you need to maximise good busy, and minimise bad busy. How do you achieve this? By planning, being honest with yourself and others, setting the right expectations and executing. In other words, working smarter. Working smarter is always good busy.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Small Beauty of Efficiency Gains

October 22, 2014 //
0

When you’re looking to improve what you do, the temptation is to go for far-reaching change, massive innovation, that kind of thing.

It’s far better in the long run to look for the small efficiencies, and to look for them all the time.

When you visit the R&D facilities of a Formula 1 racing team, you see people striving to shave thousands of seconds off racing times with the most miniscule adjustment to things like aerodynamics. A few thousandths of a second is a few metres at top speed. A bunch of a few thousandths of a second is a commanding advantage.

Compare the touch-typing keyboardist with the one who has learned their own way, maybe using half their available digits and crossing hands across the workspace as they type. Imagine over a working life the enormous time savings formed from the collection of a vast number of infinitesimally smaller micro-movements by typing properly. Could you retire a year earlier if you were more productive over a 3-decade career in front of a computer, in a business where your productivity correlated to your profitability? Probably.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look to change the game, out-think the competition, or disrupt the business model. Not at all. But you need to do it against a background of continuous improvement. The little things add up to much more than constantly battling the big things.

Tags ,
Categories General, Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »