David Hollingworth

A recent article from Mark Forster came up with a useful idea for those of us who tend to get distracted away from the items on our to-do list by other less productive pursuits.

Mark suggested that rather than use a time log, to record everything we’ve done; use an “event log” to record everything we’re about to do.

What advantages does this have over a time log? Basically if you have to stop for a second and write down what you’re about to do before you do it then you have to make an active choice as to what it is you’re going to do. So when I complete this posting I might write down:

21:57 - surf on over to gamestar

and I must just stop and think, “Hang on, I still need to sort out the laundry. Gamestar will have to wait”.

You get the idea? I’ve made an active choice as to what I’m going to do rather than just let the fancy take me where it will.

In the next day or so I’m going to give this a try and I’ll report back how I got on.

I was listening to the radio this evening, with it being Saturday the football results from the UK were on and I heard one of the commentators refer to the “gigantic step” one of the clubs had taken today.

That got me thinking. You know we all expect instantaneous results these days. Look at the Internet, instant information, instant purchasing power. We want to buy something, we don’t have to save for years we can get instant credit. Heck, even my porridge is instant these days!

We live in a world were we want it and we can get it now. Or do we? If we have a goal then our underlying belief maybe that this too should be instantly attainable and when it’s not we may loose heart, loose focus, loose direction. However we have to remember that it’s the little steps that take us steadily forwards and that will eventually lead us to our goal. Those little steps that we take every day are the ones that will eventually lead us to success.

That gigantic step the club took was a gigantic step out of the relegation zone. Perhaps if they’d been taking little steps all season they’d not have been in the relegation zone today.

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”.

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!