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Productivity

How to be More Productive: Creating Routines

As I open my laptop to type this morning, I had a quick realization that I have been thrown off in some way. I could say it’s because I got back from Las Vegas 7 hours ago (and that would be accurate) and that I’m sleep deprived, but that’s not it. My routine has been thrown off and I’m struggling to get back into it.

I talked briefly about habits and the opposite of routines last week. The premise of that theory was to shock your system so you see things in a new light. But it in order to change things up, you have to have something set in place. Today we’re going to dive into one of my theories on how to be more productive: Creating Routines.

Personal Application

I am usually an early riser. I work on my blog before the world wakes up so I can give myself an entire workday instead of taking up time writing when I could be working.

I start early, I read for a few minutes and then I fire up the laptop. This usually all happens before 6:00 or 6:30. Today I woke up at 7:45 since I didn’t get in till well after midnight returning from Las Vegas… habit loop crushed.

As I’ve said before, when we get into a habit loop (think a regular routine you have) and we just kind of mindlessly “do it” the time almost flies by. Guys, how vivid was your most recent memory of shaving your face?

Our brains recognize that activity and to save energy, they relax so we can go through the motions. Those activities become easier for us and we breeze right through them. Let’s just say I’m not exactly flying through this blog post today.

Business Application

As we dive into this more, I think about how it could be applied in my work life and how I could help others incorporate it into their own work lives. I wish I would have had information like this in my furniture days when I needed to juggle 489 things a day.

So how can you create good routines for yourself and your team?

How to be More Productive

I always thought that when I’m in the position of managing other people again, I would do a few things differently.

First off, I would create routines for checking emails at scheduled times so that the people I manage don’t waste time. Next, I would have more scheduled contact with the people with whom I work remote, even if it was only for 5 minutes in around lunch. I always had contact, but it was sporadic at best.

And finally (this is the most important one) I would require people to have quite time in which they work on projects without distractions. I would show them how I do it and I would make it a habit for them to work on projects with complete concentration.

Think about how much growth you could have if everyone in your organization (or at least managers) took 1 hour of quite time each day to work on a project that would move the company forward.

Productive vs. Creative

So Mike last week you said we need to change things up, and this week you’re saying we need to repeat a bunch of activities… huh???

What I’m saying is we need to attempt to balance out our work lives. When we are able to create routines, we become very good at those particular activities. But in order to keep a fresh outlook, we need to continue to gain new experiences and throw off that routine every once in a while.

For example: If you  take my daily email checking and quite time routines above, you would add a “fresh experience” every so often. Maybe in the afternoons so they can keep those times sacred. Or only on a Friday when work is light and people don’t need to have as much quite time. Or still, you could switch the day up and have people get their quite time in the afternoon if they normally get it in the AM hours.

Whatever your daily work is like, there are always opportunities to streamline them with routines to make you more productive. But there are also times when should break out of a rigid schedule to keep yourself from being bored into ineffectiveness.

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What are some of your routines? How do they help you become more productive with your work? Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter.

Have a great week!

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What I Learned From Being Spread Too Thin

Fresh Start

When I left Atlantic Bedding back in July, I did not have a clue about what I was going to do. I didn’t need to get a job immediately because I had been smart with my money and I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck. Nothing was set up for me on the outside world, I just knew it was time to leave.

As soon as I left, I was approached by six people that wanted me to either work for them or start a business with them. I had lots of options, and as soon as I heard them I wanted to start them all. I wanted to dive in and get to work building the next great thing. Each sounded exciting, fun, lucrative, and they all sounded like I would do well in them.

Being Effective

spread too thinI like to be effective and I was used to having a lot on my plate so I knew my limitations and how much I wanted to dedicate myself to something. I looked at what I could do freely, what each would need for investment, and who I would be working with on each. Epic Day Outdoors (Adventures at the time) it was, working alongside my buddy Travis that I’ve always wanted to work with.

I knew this was a new challenge, I knew who I was going to work with, and I knew what sort of resources I was prepared to dedicate to this project and this person. Had I chosen more than one of the other businesses, I would have had to ration out my time amongst multiple partners and businesses. I’m glad I didn’t do that *pats self on the back*

Furniture Daze

In my Atlantic Bedding days, I was almost always spread too thin to really dig in and enjoy what I was doing. Since the company had grown so large of the years, the positions weren’t really built around the strengths of the people and roles weren’t that defined. When a company starts small and grows fast it has to build positions around people. This isn’t a bad thing but since there’s almost always less staff than is needed, people get stuck with jobs they don’t like or can’t do well.

When I had too much on my plate I was never able to focus in on one project and give it my all. There was always a trip to be made or a proverbial fire that needed to be put out, it was a reactionary situation. One thing I liked about the prospect of Epic Day was the idea of planning and looking forward instead of looking back.

Going With My Gut

When I picked Epic Day I was going in the opposite direction of my previous position, I didn’t want to be spread too thin. I picked what I thought I would be the best at and who I would show up every day for because I knew he’d do the same for me. I wasn’t interested in wasting my time, and I haven’t. Epic Day has been quite an adventure (pun intended) and I’ve learned a lot from the experience so far.

When we spread ourselves too thin we don’t put forth our best work. If I had started 3 businesses at once I would never had given any one of them a fair shot, I would have been spread too thin. I wouldn’t have the appropriate time to dedicate to each one of them. And if even one of those was a great idea, it would have folded because I didn’t get it the necessary time to grow and mature.

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Where are you spread too thin? What about your business? What can you do to get focused back in? 

Leave a comment below or chat with me on Twitter!

Have a great day!pickadirection.com

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How Minimalism can Grow our Businesses

As I begin packing for an extended stay in Florida for Christmas, I am reminded of how minimalist my life has become. I am not an avid practitioner of minimalism and I have not gone off the deep end, I just don’t have as much stuff in my life as I used to. But there are some important lessons we can use while making plans in our businesses.

I have an advantage

I’m a guy. We don’t need 4 pairs of shoes for a weekend trip. I can re-wear the same pair of jeans from Friday to Monday and nobody would be able to tell. This usually makes packing very easy for me when I leave, whether it’s for a weekend or week. I learned this from years of traveling for work, I used to constantly over-pack. However, this holiday trip is different.

I have a wedding to go to, church to attend, golf to be played, running to be done (yes, I’m finally fully recovered), and ducks to be hunted. Needless to say, I have a busy stretch ahead of me, and I am in the process of packing for all this. My single roller suitcase is going to turn into a car-full of shoes, suits, golf clubs, and 1/2 of the clothes I own!

Minimalism defined

minimalismWhen we get used to not having a lot of “fluff” in our lives, we don’t need it. I do my best to live with only the essentials. I try not to buy more clothes than I would wear, I don’t have a brand new car “just because I want it,” and the items I have in my home are functional so I have a little junk as possible. But when I recently moved I realized that I had accumulated more junk than I realized, I had to simplify. I donated 10 bags of cloths & stuff to Goodwill and threw out enough trash to fill an entire garbage truck. I was a stress-relieving process that helped me strip life down to the essentials. 

Minimalism is difficult to define since it’s more of a concept than a concrete thing. Basically, it’s living with only the essentials. Part of the definition I found on Wiki was “not completely without ornamentation, but that all parts, details and joinery (referring to architecture) are considered as reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design.” Although this is an architecture definition, it perfectly captures the idea I am attempting to express.

Application

In art, architecture, our lives , and most importantly for this example, our businesses it helps us to strip away all that is unnecessary and only focus on what we need. I enjoy learning and practicing productivity tips because they are similar in philosophy to a minimalist: nothing is unnecessary.

I get it, you kind of have to be a radical to be a minimalist. Again, I am not one. If I were, this post would be 3 sentences long and this blog would be much less intricate. However, the 2 part application of a minimalist theory to our businesses would help many of us.

1.) Strip away all that is unnecessary –

  • Meeting that don’t have a real objective
  • Reports that don’t bring any action or have any purpose
  • Busy-work (I loathe that term)
  • Processes that slow down decision making

2.) Focus on what is most important in the business –

  • Is it product design?
  • Is it a lean manufacturing process?
  • Is it customer service?
  • Is it the people we hire?

When we take away the things that aren’t absolutely necessary to us doing business, we can focus on our core competencies and improve them. What can you improve in your business today?

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Have you recently stripped your business down to the core? Share what the process was like and what you learned.

Leave me a comment or connect with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts on stripping down a business.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. 5 Days till Christmas!

Why Counterbalancing Improves our Effectiveness

Some of us go, go, go and we never stop. Never taking a break for coworkers, family, or even ourselves. These are the ones that burnout. These are the ones that can’t really enjoy life because we’re so focused on our work. We need to be counterbalancing our focused work with family time, with study time, and with ‘me’ time as well.

A Parable

There’s a parable I love about two lumberjack brothers that decide test their skills against one another. They have an all day wood chopping competition that would make my friend Reed blush. The rules are simple, whoever has the biggest pile at the end of the day is the better lumberjack.

counterbalancing

#reedbrownchopswood

They begin in the early morning furiously chopping wood at the same rate, building equally impressive heaps. After a couple hours, the older brother takes a break and walks away. The younger sees the opportunity and begins to chop even faster, forgoing rest. The older brother returns and begins to chop away for another couple hours, then takes another break.

The younger brother again forgoes rest and continues to plow through logs as fast as he can while his brother is away. He noticed that his pile had initially been larger than his brothers in the morning, but as the day went on his brother’s pile seemed to overshadow his own. So he put his head down and chop away as hard as his body would let him. This happens again and again until the day is over. The older brother would take a break every couple of hours and the younger would push through.

At the end of the day the older brother had a pile more than twice the size of his brother’s! The younger brother was furious. “How did you beat me? I never stopped chopping all day and you were taking breaks every couple hours!”

The older brother responded, “I was sharpening my ax every time I took a break.”

The younger brother hadn’t stopped once to sharpen his ax all day. By noon he was working twice as hard as his older brother with less than half the results.

The Lesson

When we attack something with all of our might, we need to counterbalance that ‘push’ by giving time to sharpen our ax. This can come in many forms, but ultimately it helps us keep us from getting burned out in one area or another.

For some this might be spending quality time with family after a hard push at work that requires extra hours at the office. For others it might be some alone time after friends come in town for the weekend and we host. And still for some it can be diving into a project wholeheartedly after never really committing themselves to anything prior.

To be the most effective versions of our selves, we should to take counterbalancing measures our lives to stay sharp. We can work as hard as we want, but if we’re using a dull ax we won’t be able to give our best.

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How do you sharpen your ax? 

Connect with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your successes (& failures) on the subject. 

P.S. 12 Days till Christmas!

Learn to be in 2 Places at Once & Save Time Doing It (4/4)

As the world of social media continues to become more and more crowded we find it harder and harder to keep up with the pace. How do these huge brands have people that use all of these different platforms? How do they stay relevant? They must sit in front of their computers and type posts every 10 minutes, do they even have another job? As small businesses, we don’t have the resources for someone sit and ‘play’ on social media all day long. The good news is we don’t have to.

The bad news is that if you agreed with the word ‘play’ above you haven’t seen the relevance of social media and you need to open your eyes. It’s not going away anytime soon so embrace it. Those businesses that embrace social media marketing now will be light-years ahead of those that pick it up in 6 months or 2 years. Think of it like investing, the earlier you get in the more value you can bring to yourself even if it’s a small amount.

So far in Social Stratgery we have gone through the process of listing ourselves everywhere in Part 1. We have picked our top platforms to use based on our business’ demographics in Part 2. And we have discussed how to effectively communicate on those hand-picked platforms in Part 3. Today we’ll talk about the rest of the parties and how to get our message across on each of the other forms of social media that we discussed in Part 1. Here are some time saving social media tips and strategies.

The Plan

Most businesses have a website. If you’re reading this, you probably have a website, if not we’ve got a whole other set of problems to tackle… And most of our websites do not just sit dormant, we use them to create content for our customers and communicate to them what we do.

As we add content to our website we need to share it with the world. The online world. The social media world. If our content just sits on our site and nobody sees it, it doesn’t do us a bit of good.

Let’s use an example:

  • Joseph sells product X for a living
  • Joseph puts new uses up for product X on his website each week
  • Joseph begins to share his product and uses for it on as many forms of social media as he can find
  • Joseph gets one of his pins on Pinterest (not his main platform) re-pinned 482 times by chance
  • Joseph drives 5 new sales onto his site from his decision to post everywhere automatically

By sharing his products on every form of social media he can find, Joseph is increasing his chances of being found. In our example, let’s say Facebook is Joseph’s main platform. But he finds a way to distribute to every other platform effectively when he makes new posts about how to use his products, e.g. Pinterest.

The Hack(s)

We all know I am a big fan of using technology to increase our productivity. So here’s some technology that has helped Joseph and millions of others distribute their information to their ancillary forms of social media. These plugins are for WordPress (not sure about Twitterfeed), they are all free, and they require some setup in the beginning, they don’t all just automatically link to our profiles. Take some time to set them up properly and each time we create new content we can publish it to multiple social platforms at once. 

  • Jetpack – Jetpack is a plugin that connects WordPress blog features to WordPress.com users. Amongst them is the feature to “Publicize” content to a few forms of social media simply by pressing “Publish” on a post or a page of your site. Here are the sites Jetpack allows us to post to automatically:
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn – What I use
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr – What I use
    • Path
  • SNAP – The Social Network Auto Poster plugin allows you to post to a plethora of different social networks all at once, just like Jetpack. Here is a list of the platforms it services.
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr
    • Path
    • Blogger
    • StumbleUpon – What I use
    • Delicious
    • Twitter – What I use
    • Diigo
    • Blog.com
    • Livejournal
    • Plurk
    • A handful of others that I am not familiar with
    • Google+ & Pinterest – These can be purchased for $49.95 each
  • Twitterfeed – I do not use Twitterfeed but it was high on the list of services when researching this topic. It only posts to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from what I can tell but seems to be very simple and tracks results for you.

Imagine Pinning, Tweeting, Tumbling, and LinkedIn-ing (huh?) all with the push of one button. That’s what we will enable our websites to do with these plugins. We will be able to be in multiple places at once and save time doing it. We increase our outreach with minimally additional effort. If you are not the person that manages your website, ask them to download one or a combination of these (like I have) to get your content out there ASAP. Each plugin shows your contently slightly different across each platform so take some time to analyze how your content looks once it is posted so it appears the way you want it to. 

But wait, if we’re just posting on all these sites and we’re not engaging with users, isn’t that what you called ‘shouting’ in Part 3???

ChurchillContradictions

Yes ,I said we don’t need to spend time on each social media platform. Yes, if we try to be everywhere without using these tools we’ll go crazy. And YES, this will create the ‘shouting’ effect that we talked about in Part 3. I know what I said, and yes, I’m sticking by it.

BUT, when we can set these programs up ahead of time and it’s a simple as a button, why not post to those sites? Why not put our names out there? Why not increase our online footprint? This is about saving time and increasing our effectiveness, not limiting who we reach. If our customers aren’t on Pinterest (like Joseph’s) than they won’t follow us and they don’t care that we’re ‘shouting’ on that platform.

If we’re communicating effectively on our hand-picked platform, we don’t need to worry about ‘shouting’ on other platforms. A majority of our customers aren’t there and if we get additional traffic that’s icing on the cake.

Scheduling

So now we know how to communicate on our hand-picked platforms as well as our ancillary platforms. But what if we still want to conserve time? What if this is STILL overwhelming for us? Don’t fret, there are more tools that we can incorporate to help us save time and increase our visibility.

Below are the two most popular social scheduling sites, they allow us to insert pre-determined messages, include a link, include a picture/video, and schedule a time for the posts to go out. These sites shrink our website URL’s that we’re posting (that’s where the ow.ly and buff.ly links come from) to enable us to use as many characters as possible for our messages. Each site allows us to connect various social media accounts so we can post to each of them simultaneously. When we set aside time, once a day/week/fortnight, we can plan out what we want to say to our followers on a variety of social media platforms all at once.

If we take time to schedule messages, we can fill in the hours that we know we won’t be able to check our social media accounts. For example, I do a majority of our work on social media in the morning, but I work on other projects in the afternoon. So while I’m away from social media in the afternoon and evenings, I use Hootsuite to schedule messages so the accounts stay active. My live messages are the engaging ones and the scheduled messages are the ‘asks.’

  • HootSuite – This has a wider variety of platforms to choose from and allows users to seem more interactions with followers such as @mentions or Twitter. We have the paid version for Epic Day Outdoors and we are able to schedule over 300 messages per sitting using a CSV file (similar to Excel). Duplicate messages are NOT allowed on this platform.
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Google+
    • Linkedin
    • Foursquare
    • WordPress
    • Mixi
  • Buffer – This essentially does the same thing as Hootsuite, but it has better statistical analysis and is more effective for Linkedin posting. I am not sure of the capabilities of Buffer since we don’t use it, but I’m sure there is a bulk uploader just like we use for Hootsuite.
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Google+
    • Linkedin
    • app.net

Yes, this does take spontaneity out of our messages, but not everything we talk about has to be spontaneous. If we have things like interesting articles or funny pictures that our followers will enjoy, we can schedule those to be posted when we know we won’t be spending time on social media. This allows us to fill in the gaps so we can always be relevant.

Checking In

One trick that I use to attempt to keep my ancillary profiles up to date is checking them each once per month. For example, I’ll go to Google+ and connect with some new people, make sure my profile is up to date, and like/comment on a few things while I’m on the platform. If someone has commented on a post, I’ll comment back. If someone has followed me, I’ll follow them back. Google+ is not one of my main platforms, but it helps to not have a barren, dormant account if I’m posting my daily blog posts there.

If someone comes across our profile and they see old personal information combined with no activity, we can’t expect them to follow us. However, if we maintain these profiles and check up on them once per month (or so) we will have a much better chance of growing our followers, even if that’s not our hand-picked platform we spend a majority of our time on. 

The Future

This has been a long and technical series of posts, but I know that many small businesses are missing out because they don’t know these processes. Social Media is not a fad, it is not going away anytime soon. Every day more platforms are developed, more users sign up, and we are weaving it deeper and deeper into our social fabric. When we learn to embrace the change we will have an advantage over most of our competitors. When we embrace it we can set ourselves apart from the crowd and begin get ahead of the curve.

Please share this with anyone you think might enjoy reading this or get something out of it, that’s why I wrote it. I hope you have enjoyed my mini-series on social media known as Social Strategery, but more than that I hope it will help you improve your social media marketing!

Part 1 – How to be Everywhere on Social Media Without Losing Focus

Part 2 – How Small Businesses Should Choose Social Media Platforms

Part 3 – Why talk if nobody cares? (no shouting, please)

Part 4 – Learn to be in Two Places at Once and Save Time Doing It

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How do you engage with your followers? 

Connect with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your successes (& failures) on the subject. 

P.S. 13 Days till Christmas!

Learn to be more Effective AND Efficient: Monotasking vs Multitasking

Recently I have had my eyes and ears open to more and more business books, blogs, and podcasts to hear what the experts are doing to be effective and efficient at their work. At the same time I experiment with my own daily tasks and objectives to find out what works for me, so I can get the most out of my days.

Monotasking (the opposite of multitasking that requires us to focus solely on one task at a time without interruptions) has become a very popular trend. But, I’m not 100% convinced it’s the only way to get work done effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, multitasking forces us to split our efforts in order to get more done in a shorter period of time.

This is an audio version of this exact blog post:

Multitasking

When I entered the business world I continually heard about multitasking from superiors, from professors, and even some business books. I put this ‘art’ as some might call it, into practice.

I talked on the phone while I was typing emails, I texted colleagues while I was in meetings, and I had conference calls on speaker phone while I would continue to work on other projects. I divided my attention amongst multiple tasks in hopes of saving time to get more done in a day, like a well oiled machine… or so I thought.

Reflecting back on those days, I see that I was more efficient than I was effective. This was because those multitasking practices forced me to give 1/2 of my attention to each task.  Giving them both a sub-par effort, but getting a lot checked off my to-do list at the end of the day.

Each of us wants to be effective at our work, but we also have long to-do lists, so we need to be efficient to get it all done. What I’ve found is that we need a healthy mixture of effective focused work mixed with efficient tasks to maximize our productivity. It’s not an either or question for multi or mono tasking, it’s a when and where question to maximize our effectiveness AND efficiency.

Monotasking

As I’ve talked about, I start my day no later than 6 AM to read and write, getting the most important task for the day knocked off my list. My day starts out monotasking, there is no music or podcasts in the background and my phone is on silent until 8 AM.

When I write, I have to practice discipline to not check email or Facebook before my daily post is published. It’s difficult to stay focused but it’s helped me stay disciplined in other areas. I eliminate all other windows and I’ve set my bottom task bar to disappear in order to give me as few distractions as possible on my screen. The only things on my desk (aka kitchen table) are my laptop (no power cord), my mouse, and my coffee. I don’t get up from my seat until my post is published, however long that takes.

This is monotasking, not allowing distractions to creep in. We have to do it in quiet space and time with as few distractions as possible or we won’t be as effective. Some people will go into extreme monotask mode and put on a timer, close their office door, and knock out their tasks. I would recommend putting on a timer for 20-30 minutes, putting the phone on airplane mode, closing the office door, and selecting one task to accomplish.

We amaze ourselves at how much gets done when we put all our effort into 1 thing and 1 thing only.

Monotasking vs MultitaskingAs I mentioned I used to juggle multiple tasks all day to get as much done in my quest for efficiency. That’s the way my mind works, “If I can do this while I’m doing that, I’ll be done in half the time!”

WRONG!

I have only learned the value of true quality work in the past few years. Too many times when we attempt multitasking we end up doing a piss-poor job of our work and we need to go back and fix it.

In the days I was multitasking my face off I would regularly (almost daily) forget to attach things to emails because I didn’t focus on the task at hand. I would have to go back and resend it with an attachment and a sheepish note saying I forgot it after someone replied all to ask about said attachment.

Monotasking AND Multitasking

I have definitely changed my ways since  then, but I still believe there are a few times we can effectively and efficiently multitask to get more done in a day.

Today I listen to podcasts or audio books while running and working out, cleaning the house, or driving. I’ll check my Twitter feed (yes, this actually is work-related) on my elevator ride in my apartment or while waiting in line for coffee. And of course, I’ll talk on the phone while walking, driving, or riding/crashing my bike.

Notice I didn’t say emails, I batch all of those into certain times of the day, you can read more about that and seven other productivity tips here.

The bottom line is everyone works differently. I’ve found that the more I attempt to do, the less effective I will be at it. So if you’re in need of great work, eliminate distractions and get focused. If you have a mundane task like listening to a conference call, than listen. But take a walk or clean your office so you’re not just sitting and staring. Its OK to be efficient AND effective sometimes.

What Monotasking vs Multitasking examples do you have?

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Leave me a comment or chat with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you. Have a great weekend!

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How Going Down Rabbit Holes Helped Me Stay Sane

When we allow ourselves to get lost in our thoughts and explore every inch of a subject we are able to find details that we didn’t know existed. Allowing ourselves this time lets our minds wander and learn, which is crucial to problem solving and critical thinking. To keep our heads down all day and not let our minds explore new topics will ultimately limit our creativity.

The term “going down a rabbit hole” is a term used to describe an individual or a group that blocks out all other subject matter and hones in on one topic with zero distractions. We explore that singular idea forwards, backwards, upside down, inside out, and from all angles. We find out new things such as how it works or how it might work, and what we would have to do to implement it. In the business world when going down a rabbit hole, we keep our heads down and neglect to see how our ideas/plans/topics fit in line with the rest of our strategy.

This term stems from Alice in Wonderland’s experience of following the rabbit down it’s hole for an unforeseen adventure. We can often do the same, not knowing what we are getting ourselves into. This can lead to major breakthroughs or it can lead to major wastes of time.Rabbit Holes

I go down rabbit holes quite often, and if you’re reading this you go on those journeys with me. Today for example, I wanted to explore this term since Travis and I use it frequently when discussing our work with Epic Day. When I allow myself to get lost and write on a  particular subject I block as many distractions as possible, I reach back to my experiences on the given subject, and I explore as many angles of the topic I’m writing about. There is often research that is involved used to either reassure my thoughts or further explain them and this additional research adds to my knowledge on each given subject.

A rabbit hole usually has a negative connotation aligned with it because these obnoxiously focused bouts are not always planned and can be on unrelated topics to our work. However when we focus on the right things at the right times and block out unnecessary distractions, we are free to fall as far down the rabbit hole as time permits.

The key here being time.

It’s a disciplined stray, it’s allowing ourselves to go on these mental explorations but only when the time is right. I do my best to allot time in the early morning to fall down rabbit holes while keeping the rest of my day structured so I can focus and get things done. In my research for this post I came across another blog that explained how we need time to put our nose to the grindstone and we need time to have our head in the clouds to maximize our potential. I couldn’t agree more.

To stay focused on my work during the day I do my best to write out the most important task(s) for the day and get that done first, then prioritizing my tasks. Nowhere in my day-time work do I have scheduled “rabbit hole” time. However if I find myself on a subject I want to know more about I’ll clip it or write it down in Evernote and come back to it when I can allot the proper time – usually in the early morning or on the weekend.

Allowing myself this freedom of exploration has enabled me to stay focused during the day and still get into new and interesting subject matter in the mornings. If I didn’t have this time I would not be able to get work done and keep multiple projects afloat, I would go insane.

 

What is the most interesting rabbit hole you’ve let yourself go down? Was it applicable to the business?

Informational Bottlenecks

Any piece of general information we could ever imagine needing is readily available with the click of a button. It’s easy and fast for us to get the answer to anything we want, just by pressing “search” on a screen. So it stands to reason when we’re in a position of managing others that we have the inclination to want any and sometimes every piece of information at a moment’s notice. Since technology is so advanced we have become accustomed to this urge, but it is a quick path to slowing down the processes of a business.

When we demand to know every detail of a person’s job that reports to us at a moment’s notice, we slow down the flow of work. In manufacturing a bottleneck is the the slowest performing area in a series of operations that affects throughput. Throughput is how many widgets can be completed in a given time period from start to finish. In turn, a “bottleneck” sets the pace for a manufacturing process since it is the slowest process. The fastest that a manufacturing process can move is the slowest operation. If we are the informational bottlenecks in our organization, we are inhibiting the daily throughput of the company.

For example, if a principal wants to know each and every lesson plan of every teacher prior to instructing their kids, the teachers cannot begin to prepare until they have their lesson plans approved. And if they have to wait in line to be approved by the principal one by one, the principal is holding up throughput and the teachers aren’t able to do their jobs effectively, lacking the proper time to prepare.

This type of behavior is often seen in micro-managers. Often times they don’t necessarily do anything with the information, they just want to feel important and exercise their power. Sometimes the check-ups are needed, but the very act still slows down productivity. Fortunately there are ways to combat this if we’re the ones doing the micro-managing AND if we’re the ones being micro-managed.

First off, pinpoint the areas that are the most often identified as the most coveted information (in the teacher analogy it would be the lesson plans) and make this information readily available on some form of multi-user platform such as Google Drive or Evernote. These platforms, and a number of others like them, allow multiple users to view the same document(s) simultaneously and leave notes to each other without having to email or transfer them back and forth. Begin working on one of these types of platforms and “share” the work with the people that are always asking for the information. When this is done, the person in need of the information (whether it’s us or someone managing us) can easily and immediately access the work to “check up on things” without being a bottleneck to the process. The manager gets the information they’re seeking and the workers can work with fewer interruptions, everyone gets what they want.

Utilizing the technology available to us is key in today’s work world. We live in a fast-paced society and speed the speed of our organizations can be a competitive advantage. Micro-managing can and will always happen, but this is one way to slow it down and keep our throughput at a premium.

How do you prevent bottlenecks in your organization?