David Hollingworth

After all this talk about loosing weight last weekend I contracted a virus that had some unpleasant gastric side effects. This is the reason the blog has been so quiet this week.

I’ve not weighed myself yet; but I’ll be darned disappointed if I get on the scale tomorrow and I haven’t lost anything at all. Mrs. H commented this afternoon that if I lost any more weight of my face I’d look dead! Nice!

Now I’m not really suggesting that my desire to loose weight triggered the earlier unpleasantness; but there is still something to be said for being careful how we envision our desires and goals. For one thing the sub-conscious doesn’t understand the word “not”. So if you say, “I will not smoke”, all that gets through is the, “will smoke”. Not the desired effect at all. It’s far better to say something like, “My life is free from the need for cigarettes”.

Here’s something I learned today;

That if something goes wrong it’s not a failure - it’s feedback!

When I read that I thought, WOW! That’s a revolutionary way of looking at what’s happening in my life. If I’m not progressing in the way that I want to then it’s not a failure it’s feedback.

What do we do with feedback?

Feedback is called feedback because it feeds back into the system and modifies it so that the situation that produced the feedback doesn’t happen again (in the case of negative feedback) or does happen again in the case of positive feedback.

This morning I got on the scales again, it being Saturday which is weigh day in our house. Well I was disappointed at first to find that my weight was exactly the same as last week and the week before.

Then I thought, “Hand on! This is feedback, not failure! The feedback is that I haven’t modified my behavior enough to start loosing the weight. I must make more effort to start the weight loss process”. Which is a much more positive slant on the situation.

Recently I wrote about the importance of making goals SMART and that the R meant Relevant. For example my walking goal is relevant to my goal to loose weight whereas a goal to buy a new car isn’t (currently) relevant to any of my other goals. Hence it’s not on my goals list at all (currently).

But what about those “life” goals, the top level goals like; “own a house by the sea”, or even, “loose 23lbs weight by Christmas”. What must these goals be relevant too in order that we buy into them?

The answer is that our top level goals must be relevant to our mission and our values. In fact these two items provide the context for all our goal setting so it’s important that we understand what our mission is and what our values are.

Our mission and values are the things that drive us, the reason why we get out of bed in the morning, the things we are passionate about. They define us as a person and state what we stand up for and, by writing them down, we can look at them and say, “Yes! This is me, this is what I care about”.

Stating them in writing also gives us a clearer picture of the framework in which we’re setting our goals. Our mission and values set the boundaries for our goals and gives us an opportunity to see the big picture. How are our goals contributing to our mission? Do our goals fit with our values?

Finally here’s my personal mission statement as an example:

To be a creative and compassionate person. To achieve self-fulfillment through the pursuit of understanding, the love of my family and the respect of all. To have control of my own destiny through acknowledging that the causes I make today shape my future. To maintain a healthy and emotionally balanced lifestyle between self, family and work. I will maintain my family and my self through my efforts to help others to expand their lives and reach their goals.

It’s the age old adage; the less, the more. But how do you do less to do more?

One habit that I have adopted recently, both at work and at home, has helped me to do just that - I’m doing more by doing less.

What am I talking about? Email! If you let it email will simply gobble up tonnes and tonnes of your time as it used to do for me.

Ask yourself this question, “Do you use email to hold a conversation”? In other words do you respond to an email as soon as it arrives and when you get a reply to that you reply again, just like a verbal conversation? If you do then you’re probably wasting lots of time in your use of email.

If you’re doing the email conversation thing back and forth then your productivity will go way down. Have you ever timed how long it takes to type something rather than say it to some one? No? Let’s try a little experiment. Here’s a typical sentence I might include in an email conversation at work:

“The platform you are trying to install on is not supported at that release. You will have to manually hack the configuration file and re run the install”

That took me 47 seconds to type and correct a misspelled word. Now let me say it…

8.7 seconds later I’ve given over exactly the same piece of information. That’s just over five times faster than writing the same thing in an email!

So here’s my tips for improving your email productivity.

• Switch off the email notification. This only serves to distract you from what you’re doing productively and makes you the slave of your email client when it should be the other way around.
• Process email in a batch three times a day; first thing in the morning, just after lunch and again about an hour before you finish up. Often I find people come up with the solution themselves before I have time to reply to their email, which is empowering for them and saves me the time looking it up and responding.
• Don’t process email just as you’re finishing - if there’s any unpleasant surprises in your email you’ll worry about them all night when you can’t do anything about it until the following morning.
• Work down the emails from the most recent towards the oldest. If there’s been much activity in an email thread then the most recent email will have all the information you need and you can delete the rest.
• Don’t use email as a conversation tool, it’s a very inefficient way of speaking. Use your email to request information and to send information; but use the telephone to hold a conversation.

So do less emailing, do more real stuff.

PS. Instant Messaging is even worse. Avoid it like the plague!