I’ve been paying attention to the things that command attention, both of myself and others, and I’ve made a list of 21 techniques that work. This list is far from all of them I’m sure, but it should be enough to get you started …
1. Be wrong
The world is full of people trying to do the right things. It’s become so common that many of us are bored by it. We long for someone that’s willing to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, be the wrong thing. If you have the courage to be that person, you’ll find lots of people paying attention to you.
2. Be right
You can also gain attention by being right … but only if you’re more right than everyone else. Run a mile faster than anyone else, explain your topic more clearly than anyone else, be funnier than everyone else. Embody perfection, and people will take notice.
3. Communicate what others can’t
As writers, we take ideas from our heads and put them on the page. Sometimes we forget how difficult that is for some people and how valuable that makes us. Lots of people would give anything to be able to say what they mean. But they can’t. So, they turn to songs, books, and art that communicate for them. Be a producer of those things, and you’ll never lose their attention.
4. Do something
Everybody online is trying to say something important, but very few are trying to do something important. If you want attention, dare not to just give advice to others, but to live that advice yourself. Then publish it to the open web.
5. Surprise people
Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, say that one of the best ways to set yourself apart is to break people’s “guessing machines.” Take a surprising position, making outlandish analogy, or otherwise do the opposite of what you normally do. As long as it’s unexpected, people will stop and pay attention.
There is hope. Based on the insights from my interviews, there are productive ways to break the multitasking habit — even though that habit isn’t yours. Small strategic steps that bring to light how the multitasker is stalling progress can go a long way.
Call out the multitasker mid-task. Sometimes the pace of everyday life makes self-awareness challenging. As psychologists would argue, “emphasize the interpersonal and intraspsychic costs” (PDF) of the multitasker’s mistake. You can help by simply bringing attention to their multitasking habit and how damaging their behavior is becoming. The results could surprise you. One entrepreneur recounted, “After watching a VC constantly check his iPhone while I was pitching, I let him know that it was affecting the quality of our presentation. He put his phone away and respected me more as a result.”
Find a new time to meet. To beat a multitasker, take away their Plan B, C, and D. If they’re already engaged in something, reschedule time with them to have a proper interaction. One banker argued, “When my annual performance review meeting was sabotaged by my manager’s email habit, I stood up and suggested we reschedule time after hours, when he was ‘off the hook.'” An effective strategy for the workplace is to reschedule a slot at the beginning of the workday, before the day’s emails, alerts, and notifications start rolling in.
Physically disengage. When multitaskers get tough, the tough get walking. One mother said, “If my kids are too busy playing with their iPads to have a proper conversation with me, I walk out of the room. That usually does the trick.” Sending this powerful signal shows you’re willing to play hardball and will pique the attention of even the most-seasoned multitasker. Of course, walking out on your boss probably isn’t the best career option, so disengage in other ways. One junior consultant suggested that “moving to an empty chair on the opposite side of the room gave the senior partner space to wrap up her email and slide over to me when she was ready to talk.”
Handle a multitasker’s habit and pave the way for a more productive work environment. You’ll alleviate everyone’s irritation and frustration, and you might just rescue a failing project or a doomed relationship. By making them aware of their faux pas, you can stop the multitasking maniacs dead in their tracks — and sidestep potentially damaging impacts before they arise.
What does it mean to “manage up” in the workplace? It means to take initiative and build relationships. It’s pretty easy and fairly simple, but many of us struggle with it.Here’s how to help you manage up in your workplace:
1. Take initiative: Don’t wait for someone to tell you to do something—just do it. Look for ways to improve day-to-day operations, and suggest creative ideas. When you take the initiative, you increase your visibility within the company. Management will take notice.
2. Keep the boss informed: Communication is key. Make sure your boss knows everything there is to know about an assignment or project. This will help you build a solid relationship with her.
3. Leave personal opinions to yourself: Like mom always said, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Despite how you feel about your boss, you should always give your maximum effort. This is tough because you won’t always agree with her, but the solution is simple: Be professional at all times.
Here’s our first-ever list of the Top 75 Websites For Your Career (in alphabetical order):
Owned by The New York Times, About.com offers a wealth of free information for job seekers and those looking to advance their careers, including articles about everything from how to get along with your boss to questions not to ask an employer during an interview. About.com also links to other sites focused on specific careers like advertising or criminology, that have articles on topics like copywriting or the day in the life of a police officer. Users can also read up on the history of various fields, find a list of schools where they can study for a particular degree, or peruse an article on the most popular jobs in a given field. The site links to job listings powered by Indeed.com. Job search and employment expert Alison Doyle has been About.com’s job search guide since 1998.
This is the site for Betts Recruiting, which searches for talent for the business side of venture capital-backed startups in New York City and Silicon Valley. The focus is on sales, marketing and business development staff from the junior level through vice president.
Co-founded by career coach Pamela Skillings, who used to work in human resources at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and MasterCard International, Big Interview offers online interviewing tutorials where users pay $197 for a package of three installments. Users can prep for industry-specific interviews like pharmaceutical sales or advertising. The prep involves an on-screen interviewer asking questions like, “tell me about yourself,” and “why are you interested in this position?” The user then records her answer and watches it back onscreen. The site offers numerous tips for different stages of the interview process (sample answer, in part: “I love managing teams and solving customer problems.”)
Blogging4Jobs.com is an online workplace resource for managers, leaders, human resources, and recruiting professionals. They take their audience to “uncomfortable, yet necessary,” places exposing them to the realities of the workplace without the “corporate sugar coating.” The site was launched in 2007 with a goal of helping job seekers learn the unwritten rules of job searching. The site has since expanded to offer insights into the world of work from a corporate and operations no-nonsense point of view.
Boomer Job Tops offers ideas, hints, tips and how-to’s for the growing baby boomer population to help them find a job, win an interview or move their career forward. The site has hundreds of articles from experts in the career area on résumés, interviews, strategy and tactics with a “boomer focus.”
Here are the Top Ways You Stink At LinkedIn:
1. Warm Spam – Just because I accept you as a contact, does not mean I want you to pitch me your product/service. Although I wrote a post about it, take a gander at what happened today. Some financial planner thought it was wise to pitch me his services right after accepting him as a contact. When I enlightened him in my reply on why spam is a bad thing, this was his reply:
“”I’m sorry that you felt so negative about that email. I try to send that correspondence out to a select group of people that I think have the financial sense and means to be interested in this strategy Scott. Obviously I was wrong in your case and apologize for brothering you with this suggestion. Linkedin is a way to network and connect with other business people Scott so if I can help enhance a high income earners retirement, that’s what I try to do as a Financial Advisor. Most high income earners are always looking for a way not to pay taxes Scott and this is a strategy to do so and this is why the rich get richer.”
I assume the book he read about selling said:
1. Every no is a yes in disguise!
2. Use the person’s first name multiple times. It makes them trust you!
3. Social media is really social selling!Outside of his lack of a comma anywhere, spelling and the perception that my name was just auto-filled into a form email, what he doesn’t realize is that in his industry above most, I have to know and trust you to an incredible level before we’d even start this discussion.
Social is just that, getting to know each other. Not social spamming.
2. Blank Requests – “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”. Do you feel that? That’s the feeling of a relationship! Nothing says “I know you!” like a generic request for a connection! Let the good times roll! If you want someone to be your connection, put 5 seconds of effort into it and let that person know how you know them or why you want to connect. I know some of the apps don’t allow for it and fire off this request anyways, but spend a little time and care and those requests will get accepted much quicker.
3. Twitter + LinkedIn = Litter – Go login now to LI and tell me what you see from people and their “status”. 98% of what I see are automated feeds from Twitter. Broken @ names, and “via Twitter” all over the place. Is that the message you want to send to your business contacts? That you’re not there but you’re giving them the honor of reading your tweets? Social media isn’t about being everywhere, it’s about being great at where you are. Stop the social synching.
It’s long been thought that the best way to get ahead is to hitch your wagon to a senior star, but a University of Chicago business school professor’s book, Neighbor Networks, has debunked this myth. A summary of Prof. Ronald S. Burt’s book suggests “There is no advantage at all to having well-connected friends.” Instead, it is the managers who do the connecting that tend to earn demonstrably higher salaries. This is not because they become linchpins or hubs or gateways to power and information, per se, but rather because managers who maintain contacts in a diverse range of departments are getting a very healthy and intellectually stimulating “exposure to diverse ideas and behaviors.” According to Burt, “the way networks have their effect is not by getting information from people, but rather by finding people who are interesting and who think differently from you,” adding that it isn’t being in the know, “but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.”
Recently, I was waiting for a meeting to begin at a 500-person professional services firm. An item on the bulletin board caught my eye. It was a memo from the CFO. If everyone in the firm could spend an hour less per day managing email, he said, it would make a difference of $2 million a year to the company.
I don’t know how he arrived at that number (and I believe it’s quite conservative), but I have to give him credit – not many companies would publish a number like that. In fact, I haven’t seen many companies that have even tried to figure it out.
This may seem like a problem for HR or IT – but I believe it falls squarely in communications territory. It’s our responsibility to help our employers and clients understand how clogged communications channels are costing very real dollars – just like rush hour on the Long Island Expressway wastes untold gallons of increasingly precious gasoline.
Let’s take a look at four aspects of infoglut that reduce the “MPG” of our communications:
Lost productivity – What does an hour of employee time cost? In U.S. knowledge organizations, it can easily average $50 including benefits – more if you add in everything it takes to support an employee.
In a 1,000-person organization, if you can eliminate five minutes of wasted time, you’ve saved $4,167. Do that every weekday for a year, and you’ve freed up more than $1 million worth of productivity. Make it 10 minutes a day, and you’ve saved $2 million plus. (That’s why I think the CFO’s estimate above is on the low side.)
What gobbles up all that time with no benefit to the company? The mechanics of email, for starters. Sorting through the hundreds of messages in your in-box. Deleting messages you never should have received (cc’s and distribution lists are big culprits here). Filing messages you might need someday. Frantically nuking emails – or dragging them into folders – so the “send” button will work once again.
The problem isn’t just time spent on low-value activities. Interrupting employees is costly. Research shows that every time an employee must refocus his or her attention, it takes time and energy to mentally switch from Topic A to Topic B and back again.
In 2000, Pitney Bowes teamed up with the Institute for the Future to measure the number of messages employees receive daily. In Fortune 1000 companies that number was 168 – via phone, email, voicemail, postal mail, interoffice mail, fax and cell phone. That was five years ago; today you’d need to significantly up the email count, and add in instant messaging, SMS, RSS and other new ways to contact employees.
Time spent finding information – Beyond the time spent processing the high volume of messages lies another problem. Employees spend a huge amount of their time looking for information they can’t find – or recreating information that already exists.
IDC wrote about this for KM World magazine last year. The numbers they cite are mind-boggling:
“Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists.”
Using a hypothetical company that employed 1,000 knowledge workers who earn an average salary plus benefits of $80,000 a year, IDC calculated that:
“The time spent looking for and not finding information costs our mythical organization a total of $6 million a year. That doesn’t include opportunity costs or the costs of reworking information that exists but can’t be located.
“The cost of reworking information because it hasn’t been found costs that organization a further $12 million a year (15% of time spent in duplicating existing information).
“Not locating and retrieving information has an opportunity cost of more than $15 million annually. Accelerating the introduction of a blockbuster drug or delaying its demotion to generic status by just one day through use of information access software could mean $8.5 million or more each day.”
Diminished quality of thought – IDC points out that there are other factors that are just as real – but impossible to measure. For instance, how much would an organization gain if its employees could spend more time thinking about the business and less time searching for information? How much better would their decisions be if they really understood their company’s direction – and the marketplace forces that shape it?
There’s also new evidence linking info-bombardment with decreased ability to think. Hewlett Packard recently teamed up with the University of London to study the impact of constant information barrage on intelligence. Here’s how HP describes the results:
“In a series of tests carried out by Dr. Glenn Wilson, Reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, an average worker’s functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming emails. This drop in IQ is more than double the four point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana.”
The Guardian summarizes the study more colorfully:
“Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached ‘startling’ levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.
“Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night’s sleep.
“’This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,’ said Glenn Wilson, a psychologist from King’s College, London University, who carried out 80 clinical trials for TNS research, commissioned by the IT firm Hewlett Packard. The average IQ loss was measured at 10 points, more than double the four point mean fall found in studies of cannabis users.
“The most damage was done, according to the survey, by the almost complete lack of discipline in handling emails. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues found a compulsion to reply to each new message, leading to constant changes of direction which inevitably tired and slowed down the brain.”
HP is discouraging “always-on” communications in its own company, and has created a downloadable “Guide to Avoiding Info-Mania” to help others.
The human costs – I recently flew from the Midwest to Seattle. My seatmate was a recruiter for a high-tech corporation. And she was under such stress that she was about ready to resign.
“I spend my life dealing with email,” she said. “I shouldn’t even take the time to talk with you.”
But talk she did. The flow of email was relentless, she said. On a “quiet afternoon,” more than 200 messages dropped into her in-box, all clamoring for her attention. She spent much of the flight trying to cope with the latest deluge – knowing that more awaited her when she landed.
“I’m usually a positive person,” she said. “I don’t like what this job has done to me. It’s a job I wanted, but I may need to leave it so I can get back to who I am.”
Stressed-out employees like my seatmate are not likely to contribute the creativity, innovation, imagination and energy their organizations need to compete. Stress costs industry over $300 billion a year in the United States, over $16 billion a year in Canada, and as much as £7.3 billion in the United Kingdom, says Ravi Tangri, founder of Chrysalis Performance Technologies.
In his book Stress Costs, Stress-Cures, Tangri says stress is responsible for 19 percent of absenteeism, 40 percent of turnover, 55 percent of employee-assistance program costs – and much more.
To what extent does information overload directly fuel stress? In the short term, probably not as much as, say, widespread layoffs. But, longer term, the unrelenting feeling that you can’t keep up with the demands for your attention and mindpower can take a heavy toll – and doubtless contributes to the high cost of stress.
So how do we reduce stress, curtail interruptions, make information more accessible and free up productivity? There’s much more we can do – from helping people better manage incoming messages to changing the behavior of senders to applying alternative technologies.
Communicators need to give this their urgent attention. But until we prove to executives that information overload is a problem that is costing them hard dollars (or pounds, euros, rupees or yen), it’s unlikely we’ll get the resources to tackle it in any meaningful way.
Admit it: A number of us complain about the meetings we have to attend. However, there must be a memory, distant though it might be, of a meeting you participated in that had the key people in the room, went by quickly and actually produced a result.
Here are some questions to ask to have the right kind of meeting:
Question #1: Is a meeting the “right” thing to do?
One of the ways to figure out the answer to that question is to make sure you understand the purpose of pulling people together. A meeting can often achieve better communication around a topic, which in turn can lead to better decision-making. A meeting, especially those at which most of the people are physically present, allows greater transparency, since all the key communication components are present: words, tone and body language. Even though we often rue the time spent in meetings, a well-run meeting with the right players present can actually be less time-consuming than following, and then interpreting, the multiple threaded emails discussing the same topic. Which leads me to Question #2.
Question #2: Are the right people here?
You want people in the room who have either or both of two attributes, specifically: the knowledge to inform and move the discussion forward, or the ability — that is, the authority — to make a decision. If the person can’t be either a key contributor or a decision-maker, he or she does not belong in the meeting. A key contributor might be someone from another area of the business who will bring a different perspective to the conversation and therefore enhance the overall thought process — and ultimately the decision-making.
Question #3: Is it the right time for a meeting?
This is not about people’s individual circadian clock, although, in today’s global economy, being aware of who might be dialed in when they ideally would be sleeping is a consideration. What I’m referring to is whether, at this particular time in a project or in a process, a meeting is the right action or intervention. Updates are often better done in a succinctly written document. Trouble-shooting an obstacle can usually be accomplished in a one-on-one conversation with two or multiple players.
There is a hierarchy of work that must ebb and flow throughout your days and weeks that acts as the filter for your focus. This hierarchy has to inform what you allow yourself to do and not do throughout your week.
You can only focus on so many things and if you are to move your business forward in a way that doesn’t feel like treading water you’ve got to focus on the right things.
BAI – At the top of the pyramid is what I call you one big audacious idea. This is the one thing that is far out there, but that possesses a gravitational pull that keeps you going. It’s the big thing you know you want your business to become, even if you’re not really sure today how you’ll get there.
I believe you must always take stock of this idea and make sure it’s alive and, in some cases, actually big enough to alter your behavior. Without this pull, the other stages can turn into busy work.
Priorities – Each year you should define your top 3-4 priorities. Keep this list small or your focus will become diluted. Most business can’t accomplish more than this number and trying to do so means nothing really get accomplished. This is also a great way to identify the highest payoff work when it comes down to utilizing scarce resources like the owner’s time.
When you pare your list to only the top priorities, you have a filter for making determinations about what projects or great new ideas should actually receive consideration going forward. If they don’t support one of you annual priorities, they go on the back burner for later consideration. It’s a great way to keep everyone moving in the same direction, including the self-sabotaging owner!
Goals – Everyone is familiar with the idea of using goals, but few businesses establish goals as a key way to track and measure progress, particularly as it relates to the stated major priorities for the year.
After you agree upon the 3-4 priority objectives, you must establish goals that allow you to track your progress in ways that help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
Read full article via blogs.hbr.org
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- Be genuine. The only connections that work will be the ones that you truly care about; the world will see through anything short of that. If you don’t have a genuine interest in the person with whom you’re trying to connect, then stop trying.
- Provide massive help. Even the biggest and most powerful people in the world have something they’d like help with. Too many people never reach out to those above them due to the fear that they wouldn’t be able to offer anything in return. But you have more to offer than you realize: write an article or blog post about them, share their project with your community, offer to spread their message through a video interview with them. Give real thought to who you could connect them with to benefit their goals. If it turns out you can’t be that helpful, the gesture alone will stand out.
- Pay ridiculous attention. It’s nearly impossible to genuinely offer help if you don’t pay attention — I mean real attention, not just to what business they started or what sport they like! Do your research by reading blog posts, books and articles about the connection beforehand. Learn about their backgrounds and passions. Invest genuine time in learning what really matters to them and how you can help.
- Connect with people close to them. Most job openings are filled through networking and referrals, and making connections is no different. You automatically arrive with credibility when referred to someone you want to meet by a mutual friend. For example, I recently wanted to meet a best-selling author, and it turned out we had the same personal trainer. In reality, that fact means nothing, but in the world of social dynamics, it’s gold! Spend more time connecting with your current network of friends and colleagues and see where it leads.
There are a few things you should take note of before starting with the list:
- You can sort the blogs numerically and alphabetically by clicking on the relevant header.
- Each blog has been categorized by a consideration of its main focus, and the entire list can be sorted by category by clicking on the relevant header. If you feel that a blog has been incorrectly categorized, please let me know.
- If you feel that a worthy blog has been missed off the list, please let me know! It may not have made the cut, or I may have missed it. Either way, I would like to know.
With that said, let’s get to it!
The Leaving Work Behind 100 [2nd Edition]
# Name Category 1 SEOmoz Blog SEO 2 ProBlogger Blogging 3 Copyblogger Marketing 4 Social Media Examiner Social Media 5 Daily Blog Tips Blogging 6 Seth Godin Marketing 7 Four Hour Work Week Blog Leaving Work Behind 8 Zen Habits Personal Development 9 Freelance Switch Freelancing 10 Smart Passive Income Internet Marketing 11 Quicksprout Internet Marketing 12 Get Rich Slowly Personal Finance 13 Entrepreneur’s Journey Internet Marketing 14 Shoe Money Internet Marketing 15 Chris Brogan Social Media 16 Occam’s Razor SEO 17 Mixergy Entrepreneurship 18 Famous Bloggers Blogging 19 Viperchill Internet Marketing 20 Income Diary Internet Marketing
Part II: Eight ways to combat e-mail overload for yourself and your organization: A do-it-yourself kit.
By Bill Boyd, ABC
Communications Integrator + Principal, Outsource Marketing
5. Templates save writing and reading time
There are two types of templates to consider (the two could also be combined):
Employee e-mail templates. These are predetermined e-mail formats intended to ensure that information gets to appropriate audiences quickly and efficiently. The template could include “Intended audience,” “What this message covers,” “Action expected,” the message itself, and “For more information.” The idea is to compel managers to provide some logical structure to the e-mails they write – and to think through the intended outcome before they hit “send.”
Bill Jensen suggests that anything worth reading must fit in the top 3” x 5”. It’s the most common size people use for their message window, he says. It also creates a balance between a space designed for fast scanning and the most message before needing to scroll. Jensen says e-mail messages should use the CLEAR model. Readers are looking for:
Connected – to their current projects and workload
List next steps – What you want them to do after reading your e-mail
Expectations – What success looks like
Ability – How they’ll get things done (tools and support)
Return – Their WIIFM
Quick Templates. The other type of template is created by Outlook add-ins. The idea here is to enable you to store paragraphs, sentences or phrases that you can instantly “plug in” to an e-mail you want to send. The templates enable you to reuse the copy you’ve written for any previous e-mail—or create “boilerplate” that you can call up at any time. One of the better add-ins is “Quick Templates” from MapiLab: http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/quick_templates/
Take advantage of alternative technologies
6. Collaboration space can replace some e-mails
The amount of e-mail devoted to collaboration varies by company, but in many organizations—ones that have no other technological solution—the percentage is huge. Questions are asked and answered, volunteers sought, project updates provided, meetings scheduled, agendas and minutes shared, and countless other exchanges initiated. Many of which could be accomplished just as efficiently—and without clogging anyone’s in box —by using SharePoint, eRoom, a wiki, or another collaboration mechanism.
The problem is, IT departments often don’t provide those solutions. At the same time, companies don’t want groups of engineers (for instance) setting up communities on Yahoo! Where company policy allows, secure hosted off-site wikis—such as SocialText.com and JotSpot.com—work well for project teams that need to keep information private.
In the absence of company-approved mechanisms, what often happens is that someone with a few resources and a little know-how sets up SharePoint on a desktop computer or a borrowed server—giving his or her work group at least a primitive way to collaborate inside the firewall.
7. Blogs and RSS can eliminate more e-mails
For routine one-way communication—say, an HR department that needs to communicate job postings—blogs and RSS can be an ideal way to move substantial amounts of traffic out of e-mail. Using blogging software to post operational data has two big advantages:
- It creates a permanent record of the topics being communicated. It’s been said, “e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.” That’s certainly true if the information isn’t posted somewhere permanent.
- It’s easy to use (which is why blogging has become so popular on the Internet in general).
- It can be syndicated via RSS, which enables a “news reader” on the desktop to display the latest communications around a given topic. (The topics can be organized by “channel,” and people can subscribe to a given channel or not.)
Employees need to understand that operational blogs are not for posting the sort of opinions they might share after hours via Blogspot or Typepad. This kind of blog is all business—and consists primarily of messages that previously would have been shared via e-mail.
8. Make employees subscribe to e-mail communications
Listservs been around for years. They were popular even before the Web. How many companies, however, use them to manage their internal distribution lists? Instead, lists are often created and maintained by admins, who do their best to add and delete names as people come and go in the organization.
Why not publish a catalog of the available distribution lists and let people subscribe—or not—as they find value in the information? (Or at least give them the “unsubscribe” option.) Two horrible things might happen:
- Employees might subscribe to lists involving groups they don’t “belong” to. If the information is really sensitive, then don’t allow this. If it’s not, rejoice that some employees care enough to monitor what’s going on in areas where they might make an unexpected contribution.
- They might not subscribe to information they should be reading. Well, don’t let them opt out of e-mails from the CEO or the must-shove-it-out-there stuff from HR and Legal. Apart from that, though, why force anything on employees? If they’re just going to nuke it anyway, why suck up the IT resources and employee time necessary to send it to people who will just delete it (and then have to delete it again to free up server space)?
If employees aren’t reading information the company needs them to know, the answer isn’t to dump it wholesale into their in-box. It’s to deal with the issue at performance review time—or sooner. Smart employees will soon learn which distribution lists they need to be on, and which they don’t.
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management (JECM) magazine, published by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. (http://www.ragan.com). It is shared with members of the Communitelligence portal with the kind permission of JECM’s editor, David R. Murray.
– Part II of Taming the e-mail elephant
Serious reductions in e-mail overload will require three things: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies. Here are eight ways to combat e-mail overload for yourself and your organization: A do-it-yourself kit.
By Bill Boyd, ABC
Communications Integrator + Principal, Outsource Marketing
You’ve no doubt seen them tromping through the halls of your company, or at least hiding in the corner of the room. Elephants. These elephants have two characteristics: They’re something big that your organization knows is there and finds impossible to ignore. They’re also something no one talks about—because nobody knows what to do about them.
Some companies have lots of elephants; others have fairly few. But there’s one elephant that resides in nearly every organization (and that communicators should be helping to hunt down)—e-mail overload.
Why is e-mail overload an elephant? For one thing, the costs are huge. A couple of years ago, the CFO of a professional services firm shared a startling factoid with his organization. If everyone spent an hour a day less managing e-mail, it would add $2 million a year to the bottom line. And that’s for just 500 people!
That amount strikes me as quite conservative: By my calculations, if you work in a 500-person organization where employees average $50 an hour, you can free up $2 million in productivity in a year by eliminating just 20 minutes of wasted time per day. Consider the amount of time employees spend simply handling (or mishandling) the mechanics of e-mail, and 20 minutes a day seems like an easy target.
Too much e-mail can bury vital information. According to IDC, knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out new information. Why can’t they locate the existing stuff? My theory: A lot of it was shared via e-mail. Then it got deleted to make room for more messages, or buried in folders with subject lines that didn’t do the job. IDC says chasing existing info can cost untold millions in a single knowledge company.
How about your IQ? What’s that worth to your company? Research by Hewlett Packard and the University of London shows that the IQ of an average employee falls 10 points when interrupted repeatedly by incoming e-mail – more than twice the four-point drop experienced by marijuana smokers. HP is striving to reduce “always on” communications among its own employees, and has created a “Guide to Info Mania” to help others.
Most organizations, however, aren’t sure what to do about the e-mail elephant. There’s no shortage of software, books, courses and other tools to help tackle the problem. The challenge—as countless communicators have discovered—is that no one offers an off-the-shelf solution that will address e-mail overload comprehensively.
So we have assembled a toolbox for you that will enable to you combat information overload on three fronts within your organization: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies.
Try any or all of them and see what they do for your organization. Just as important, please let us know which ideas worked well for you—and which didn’t.
Use tools for in-box management
1. A good system—including self-discipline
There are many places you can turn for advice on how to deal with the 2,785 e-mails awaiting your attention. Which system you choose is not nearly as important as having a system of some kind.
Productivity consultant and executive coach Sally McGhee teaches courses on the Microsoft campus on how to get the most from Outlook. You may want to consider something similar for your organization.
Like many e-mail gurus, McGhee prefers an empty inbox. She recommends that you start at the top, tackling e-mails one at a time, and do one of four things with each:
- Delete it—you can do this with about half your e-mail
- Do it—if you can accomplish that in two minutes or less
- Delegate it—this should take no more than two minutes
- Defer it—this should be about 10 percent of your e-mail
McGhee says power e-mail processors can go through about 100 messages an hour. She also recommends you build a simple e-mail reference system. Read McGhee’s article at http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/manageinfo/e-mail.mspx
Consultant Bill Jensen, author of several books on simplifying communications, advises you to delete 75 percent of your e-mails. “They bring the noisy, unfiltered, unfocused, and undesired world to you!” he says. “You need to get disciplined about closing your virtual door.”
In The Simplicity Survival Handbook, Jensen says the first step in eliminating most of the noise coming at us is admitting that we own part of the problem. Advises Jensen: “If BOTH the Subject and the Sender fail to create this reaction – I have to read or at least scan this today – DO NOT open or scan the message. Hit Delete immediately.”
Then, he says, scan the remaining e-mails for two bits of information: Action you must take, and date or deadline for that action. “If the messages do not contain an action and a short-term date, delete them.”
Other e-mail experts advise you to touch every message only once. The success of any system will depend on balance – the balance between dealing with e-mail regularly enough to keep it under control, but not so often that you “live” in your inbox.
2. Teach employees to use more descriptive subject lines
When it comes to being able to handle e-mail, better subject lines are one of the most promising “quick hits” available. Sally McGhee advises her clients to include three elements: An objective or project name (which lets you know what the e-mail relates to), a requested action, and a due date. “Taking the time to create clear subject lines makes e-mail communication more effective and increases the chance that your e-mail will be responded to,” says McGhee.
Another little-considered subject line is the one attached to meeting requests. Instead of “SETI Project meeting,” how about “SETI Project: Responding to e-mail from aliens”?
You might also include one other category of useful info – who’s supposed to attend. Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook’s calendar entries include where a meeting will take place, but not who’s invited. Add Your name, Invitee 1, and Invitee 2 to the subject line – and you’ve undoubtedly saved time for all three people. (No, this won’t work with 10 people – but how many of your meetings include 10 people?)
3. Create a priortization code for subject lines
There’s yet another element to subject lines that—if widely used—could help everyone filter their messages more effectively. One of the problems with e-mails is that they seldom clearly indicate what you’re supposed to do with them.
“Imagine,” says McGhee, “if you could sort your Subject lines by action – Action Requested (AR), Response Requested (RR), and Read Only (RO) – or if you could sort them by objectives or due dates.”
I believe this system would work even better with unique four-letter indicators (I call them “O-Marks,” for Outlook):
URGT: Urgent – respond or act ASAP
ACTN: Action required
RSPN: Response requested
UN2K: You need to know
FYIN: Read at your convenience
Other categories could include:
MTNG: Pre- or post-meeting communication
BUSN: Strategic business information
EMPY: Information for employees – benefits, job postings, HR
TRNG: Training-related communications
And, for your team or department, make up your own. Create O-Marks for projects, team updates, whatever your particular group is working on. Adding O-Marks at the front of your subject line can make e-mails – at least from your teammates – easier to process quickly. Just sort your in-box alphabetically to group like categories – or send each type of e-mail to its own folder.
Change sender behavior
4. Write some corporate e-mail rules
Most companies have rules—ranging from a few guidelines to thick manuals – on how to use the Web. Almost no one has rules surrounding e-mail (apart from the usual boilerplate about how We The Company can read every word of it – and if you violate one of the 50 rules, you’re history).
Why shouldn’t the rules include how to use e-mail effectively? E-mail is a business tool, and companies have the right to decide how it will be used to conduct business. That could mean, for instance, limitations on use of the “cc” line. Companies are very quick to identify the cost of producing communications – but they too seldom calculate the cost of consuming them. A low-value e-mail sent to 20 top managers can be very expensive, indeed.
The rules might evolve into a comprehensive guide to how to use all the company’s electronic channels. Technology consultant Shel Holtz says too often, the launch of technology is left to IT:
“Most IT departments do a great job at what they’re supposed to do: get the technology working. It’s not—and shouldn’t be—IT’s job to establish policies for the use of technologies, to market the tool, or to drive a cultural change around how the tool should be used in a business context. Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. ‘Here you go everybody. We’ve installed e-mail for you. Godspeed.’
“As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative.” Holtz envisions a joint effort between HR and Employee Communications – which he calls “Message Mission Control” – to set and communicate policies on the use of all messaging channels, from interoffice mail to SMS.
Holtz says this effort must include promoting behavior change through rewards and recognition. “Part of the culture change,” he says, “is knowing when NOT to use e-mail, but rather the phone, fax, IM, face-to-face or other channels.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management (JECM) magazine, published by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. (http://www.ragan.com). It is shared with members of the Communitelligence portal with the kind permission of JECM’s editor, David R. Murray.
For years, I scoffed at the idea of “information overload.” I kept up with MY emails, read several books a year, and felt perfectly able to stay on top of my calendar. I wrote articles for publications, spoke at conferences, entered awards competitions, and stayed in touch with colleagues around the world.
Sure, there was a “guilt pile” on my bed table, my filing cabinet needed attention, and the family photo albums hadn’t been updated since 1990 (still haven’t) – but information overload? No way.
Today? Way. The guilt pile has expanded to my hard drive, which now contains untold megabytes of stuff I’ll never read. (But would like to. Really.) Emails go unanswered for days if not weeks. I missed my most recent tax deadline. And it took me a year – yes, a year – to get this site started.
Some of that comes from building a business, some from doing lots of client work. But I’m no longer raising children (a huge consumer of time when done right), and I’m no busier than lots of people I know.
So what’s sucking up our time?
Recently, I spoke with the VP for internal communications of a nationwide health-care provider. I asked how concerned she was about “information overload.” She said what her people were experiencing was less information overload, and more “everything overload.”
I agree. Where once friendly (or not) employees answered business phones, now we have to navigate through layers of voice menus. Where not so long ago you could actually get help via hotline, now you have to read the FAQs online. And search for the hidden email link when they don’t answer your question. Where once our choices at the grocery store involved Rice, Wheat or Corn Chex, now there are more than a dozen varieties of Oreos. (Aren’t those by definition chocolate cookies with white icing between? Not anymore.)
Business has shifted a tremendous amount of work onto consumers and employees. We pump our own gas, pour our own soft drinks, and check out our own groceries. At work, we go online for HR transactions, order our own business cards, and manage our retirement plans (heaven help us). And whether we’re buying something, investing, or solving problems, we want to make good choices. And that takes time.
Combine all that with shifting corporate strategy, constant organizational change, 100 or more emails a day, web sites to check, iTunes, eBay, TiVo, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, instant messaging, cell phone text messages – aaaaaaaaagghh! Make it stop!
No wonder 80 percent of the complaints treated by doctors are stress-related.
This community invites you to join the discussion on communications overload:
– How can we reduce the feeling among employees that they’re being bombarded (often with irrelevant information)?
– How can we cut (and cut through) the clutter?
– How can we help our employers and clients communicate the right amount in the right way at the right time? (And not forget that communications travel in many directions?)
I don’t know what we’re about to unleash here, but I’m certain the discussion will be passionate. I expect the input will range from the 30,000-foot view to the immensely practical. From heartfelt questions to best practices to links to articles published elsewhere. We welcome it all.
Hang on to your hats.
If you know your time management skills aren’t quite up to scratch, try these simple steps to improve: #1: Use an Organizer
It doesn’t matter what kind of organizer you use – some people like a paper diary, others use Google Calendar, and others have a favorite software program. What’s important is that you have an organizer and that you use it.
Your organizer should let you keep track of your appointments. If you’ve ever forgotten a meeting, or double-booked yourself, you’ll know why this matters!
You’ll also want to keep a note of key reminders (“Buy anniversary card for spouse”). It’s also useful if there’s space for a daily to-do list or similar…
#2: Write a To-Do List Every Day
How do you begin your working day? Many people start off by checking their emails, and then begin tackling whatever happens to have come in. It’s easy to end up spending the whole day on minor tasks, rather than tackling the work that really needs to be done.
At the start of each day, take five or ten minutes to write down a list of what you want to accomplish. You’ll probably have a few mission-critical items (“Finish client’s report”) and a few things that are essentially just reminders of small tasks (“Phone Joe”).
Writing down the big items helps you focus on them right from the beginning of the day; writing down the small ones means you don’t have to use up valuable mental energy trying to remember them.
#3: Prioritize by Importance
How do you decide which tasks to tackle first? If you go for the ones that seem most urgent – with the closest deadline, or the pushiest client – then you might end up shoving aside more important things. Sometimes, prioritizing by urgency makes sense, but as a general rule, you should be tackling the important tasks first.
One way to do that is by dividing your day into two halves: work on important, longer-term tasks in the morning, and on urgent tasks in the afternoon.
If those urgent things truly need to get done by 5pm, you’ll probably manage them just fine — without spending the whole day caught up in them.
#4: Understand Your Peak Times of Day
Are you a morning lark or a night owl? Do you find it easier to focus at 8am or 8pm? We all have peaks and troughs of energy throughout the day – and it’s useful to get to know when your best (and worst) times are.
For me, mornings are the best time: I use them for my most creative and energy-demanding work, which is writing. Afternoons are when I deal with editing, admin, emails, and other smaller tasks.
I have a slump around 4pm – 5pm, when I’m grouchy and unable to focus. I can easily accomplish twice as much between 9am – 10am as between 4pm – 5pm. Your ups and downs may be very different from mine – but by figuring out when they are, you can plan your work and manage your time more effectively.
Read full article via dumblittleman.com
Remember how your mother always told you to stand up straight, lest you wind up a dateless wallflower? As it turns out, slouching will cost you more than just an invitation to prom. It may cost you your job.
At least, so say the ergonomic specialists at Fellowes, who note that slouching at work indicates that workers don’t care or aren’t interested. Projecting a lack of interest can mean being passed over for a promotion or even booted out the door. Slouching on the edge of your seat? You’re clearly ready to bolt the moment a better job comes along. Sprawled out in your chair? You don’t take your work seriously. Sitting with your chin in your hand? Too much partying, not enough punching the clock.
With the average office worker spending most of the day behind the desk, Fellowes warns, the physical toll of regular slouching is also high: chronic pain, repetitive stress injuries, etc. Those who don’t heed Mom’s call to “stand up straight!” are surely doomed to a life of chronic pain and lingering death. Or they’ll be fired. Whichever scares you more.
Slouching probably isn’t healthy, but as workplace offenses go, it seems a minor one. Still, it’s tempting to chalk being fired up to bad posture. It’s a bad habit, but it’s one you can control. It’s harder to face the idea that a firing was based on the company’s desire to get the same job done elsewhere for pennies – especially when the new employees are probably allowed to slouch while doing it.
Forbes interviewed 20 entrepreneurs about their work habits and found they worked an average of 60 to more than 100 hours per week. Most noted that weekdays were not much different from weekends, and that personal time off did not exist at all. One responded, “the concept of ‘work’ disappears–it is just what we do.”
As anyone who has crammed for an exam can tell you, usually the number of hours we work without interruption is inversely proportionate to how much we accomplish. So how do these entrepreneurs manage to work so many hours without suffering from brain fatigue?
Well, first of all, it is because they truly love being an entrepreneur and are passionate about their enterprise. But, I believe, part of the answer is that they wear so many hats. They never get stuck doing the same kind of work for too long.
Here are some more brain-based tips that can work wonders and could be what helps propel entrepreneurs forward:
1. Buy a good office chair, or get a standing desk.
Focal Upright Furniture has a brand-new chair-and-desk combination on the market. Invented by Martin Keen, of Keen shoes fame, it uses a position between sitting and standing, and allows lots of movement as you work. It also helps those who use it remain attentive.
2. Do not multitask.
John Medina, author of Brain Rules, tells us the brain cannot multitask, period. What it does do is switch back and forth between tasks very quickly. Someone whose attention is interrupted not only takes 50% longer to accomplish a task but also makes up to 50% more errors. A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that people who talk on the cell phone while driving are four times more likely to have an accident, because it isn’t possible to devote your full attention to both driving and talking at the same time. Hands-free calling offered no advantage. What’s the lesson to take away? Focus on one task at a time, and you’ll accomplish each better and faster–without killing anybody.
3. Use all your senses.
Work is more entertaining for your brain–and therefore makes you more alert–when you engage as many of your senses as possible. Use colored paper and pens. Experiment with peppermint, lemon, or cinnamon aromatherapy. Try playing background music.
4. Don’t make too many decisions in one day.
It sounds farfetched, but if you go shopping in the morning, then negotiate yourself out of eating a cookie at lunch, and finally try to decide between two job offers that afternoon, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat the cookie, according to Scientific American. Making choices depletes your reserves of executive function, or “the mental system involved in abstract thinking, planning, and focusing on one thing instead of another.” This can adversely affect decisions you make later.
5. Take a quick break every 20 minutes.
A study in the journal Cognition reveals that people can maintain their focus or “vigilance” much longer when their brains are given something else to think about every 20 minutes. That’s the time when thinking becomes less efficient. This trick is called momentary deactivation. If your mind isn’t as sharp after a long period of work, it may not be completely fatigued. It just needs to focus on something else to refresh the specific neural network you’ve been using.
Here are three strategies for avoiding burnout by staying connected to work, both as an employee and as a person.
1. Connect the dots between the Home You and the Office You.
One cliché that still holds very true: Finding what you love is central to being your best at work. Within your industry and organization, be sure that your talents and abilities in “real life” (the things that are important to you in your day-to-day life at home) are in line with your tasks at work. In the best scenario, the talents that make you who you are in your family life, your social life, your hobbies, etc. are also put to use in your job (think meticulous attention to detail, compassionate understanding in social situations, drive to creatively problem solve, etc.).
Not there yet? Even some small changes–like taking on pieces of projects that you feel connected to–can help give you a more personal relationship to your work and company.
Some of the best decisions I’ve made for Blu have involved helping employees find where they are best suited and where their passions within the business truly lie. Productivity goes up, of course, but so do morale, fresh ideas, and a host of other invaluable and highly contagious effects.
2. Keep the big picture easily within reach–literally.
Getting caught up in the minutiae is so easy, especially when your job is high stress, involves managing others, or demands intense attention to detail.
There’s much research to support the idea that visual reminders can be powerful motivators. So find one and keep it in plain sight. Hokey? Maybe.
But I remember one day when I stopped by my local pizza place for a slice, I was struck by, of all things, the box: The ambitious little pizza company had designed its box to incorporate the words that evoke its mission and message. It depicted visually the ideals at the core of the business. That stuck with me. I cut out the box top and still have it to this day at my desk.
Reconnecting to the reasons you were inspired in the first place is crucial to keeping your own work exciting–and, if you are the boss, provides the fuel for continuing to inspire others.
Read full article via Inc
Do…
· Be approachable. At your desk. In the lunchroom. In the bathroom. In the parking lot. You’ll get a reputation as a go-to guy who listens. A low-level supervisor remembers a colleague approached him at his desk the day after an office party and said, “My wife loved talking to you. She thought you were so interesting.” The supervisor remembered talking with her, and he remembered that he had barely said a word. He just listened to her.
· Build relationships before you need them. Crushing office politics means networking before you need to network. People who know each other can handle disagreements better than people who do not.
· Practice self-awareness. Are you the source of tension? Many people can recognize shortcomings in others, but fail to recognize their own faults. Be a positive influence for everyone else.
· Think win-win. We grow up thinking that if someone has to win, then someone else has to lose. It doesn’t have to be that way in the workplace. Be the one in your office or department who is always saying, “How can we all win here?” Promote mutually acceptable solutions. Win-win situations help to engage employees, promote unity, and drown out politics.
Happiness–in your business life and your personal life–is often a matter of subtraction, not addition.
Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things:
1. Blaming.
People make mistakes. Employees don’t meet your expectations. Vendors don’t deliver on time.
So you blame them for your problems.
But you’re also to blame. Maybe you didn’t provide enough training. Maybe you didn’t build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.
Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn’t masochistic, it’s empowering–because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.
And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.
2. Impressing.
No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all “things.” People may like your things–but that doesn’t mean they like you.
Sure, superficially they might seem to, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship that is not based on substance is not a real relationship.
Genuine relationships make you happier, and you’ll only form genuine relationships when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.
3. Clinging.
When you’re afraid or insecure, you hold on tightly to what you know, even if what you know isn’t particularly good for you.
An absence of fear or insecurity isn’t happiness: It’s just an absence of fear or insecurity.
Holding on to what you think you need won’t make you happier; letting go so you can reach for and try to earn what you want will.
Even if you don’t succeed in earning what you want, the act of trying alone will make you feel better about yourself.
4. Interrupting.
Interrupting isn’t just rude. When you interrupt someone, what you’re really saying is, “I’m not listening to you so I can understand what you’re saying; I’m listening to you so I can decide what I want to say.”
Want people to like you? Listen to what they say. Focus on what they say. Ask questions to make sure you understand what they say.
They’ll love you for it–and you’ll love how that makes you feel.
5. Whining.
Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better.
If something is wrong, don’t waste time complaining. Put that effort into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you’ll have to do that. So why waste time? Fix it now.
Don’t talk about what’s wrong. Talk about how you’ll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.
And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don’t just be the shoulder they cry on.
Friends don’t let friends whine–friends help friends make their lives better.