Don’t Win the Fight but Lose the Customer
A good post from Seth Godin on the true meaning of “the customer is always right” and how not to fire your customers:
Does it really matter if you’re right?
Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose?
You can be right or you can have empathy.
You can’t do both.
It’s not the nature of capitalism to need to teach people a lesson, it’s the nature of being a human, we just blame it on capitalism. In fact, smart marketers understand that the word ‘right’ in “The customer is always right” doesn’t mean that they’d win in court or a debate. It means, “If you want the customer to remain a customer, you need to permit him to believe he’s right.”
If someone thinks they’re unhappy, then you know what? They are.
Trying say this to yourself: I have no problem acknowledging that you’re unhappy, upset or even angry. Next time, I’d prefer to organize our interaction so you don’t end up feeling that way, and I probably could have done it this time, too. You have my attention and my empathy and I value you. Thanks for being here.
If you can’t be happy with that, then sure, go ahead and fire the customer, cause they’re going to leave anyway.
What Needs to Be Done?
From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:
The first practice [of an effective executive] is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.
Why Talking About the Weather is Smart
While we’re on the subject of small talk, it’s worthwhile to say a few words about the biggest small talk cliche around — talking about the weather.
Oscar Wilde said that “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
It turns out that Oscare Wilde was wrong. Talking about the weather is not lame. It’s actually a really good idea.
Here’s why:
- The weather affects everybody.
- Talking about the weather leads into a whole lot of other subjects. But if you never get started with a “basic” topic like the weather, you might not get a conversation going at all — and thus you’ll never get to other more substantial topics at all.
I first came across this realization in a chapter from The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable, edited by Seth Godin. The book is a collection of insights from 33 different minds. I’m not sure who wrote the chapter “Talking About the Weather,” but they said it well:
Until I was thirty-five years old I thought talking about the weather was for losers. A waste of time, insulting even. No one can do anything about the weather anyway. I believed that any comment that doesn’t offer new insight or otherwise advance the cause of humanity is just so much hot air….
Then something happened. Alone for the first time in a long time, living in challenging circumstances, experiencing a cold winter in New England, I noticed the weather. It affected me deeply and directly, every single day. Slowly it dawned on me that the weather affected everyone else, too. Maybe talking about it wasn’t totally vacuous after all.
I started with the cashier at a gas station….Years of cynicism made me almost laugh as I said, “Sure got a lot of snow this year so far.” “Yep,” was her reply. Then she said, “I could barely get my car out of the lot, be careful driving!”
Talking about the weather was easy, even effortless. An entree to at least one person on the planet who apparently cared about me, at least enough to share her small challenge and want me safe on the road. Wow.
Next I tried it at work. It turned out to be even more effective with people I already knew. Talking about the weather acted as a little bridge, sometimes to further conversation and sometimes just to the mutual acknowledgment of shared experience.
Whether it was rainy or snowy or sunny or damp for everyone, each had their own relationship with the weather. They might be achy, delighted, burdened, grumpy, relieved, or simply cold or hot. Like anything of personal importance, most were grateful for the opportunity to talk about it.
Then something else happened. As talking about the weather became more natural, I found myself talking about a whole lot more. Cashiers and clients and suppliers and colleagues all over opened up about all kinds of things. I found out about people’s families, their frustrations at work, their plans and aspirations.
Plus, I found out that the weather is not the same for everyone! And it’s only one of many factors dependent on location that you’ll never know about without engaging in casual conversations.
For a businessperson, there may be no better way to make a connection, continue a thread, or open a deeper dialogue. Honoring the simply reality of another person’s experience is an instant link to the bigger world outside one’s self. It’s the seed of empathy, and it’s free…. Talking about the weather is a baby step on your way to making change.
Breaking the First Rule of Small Talk
Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, has a good post on making small talk more effective (and authentic) that makes the simple point: be yourself. But to do this, you have to ignore conventional wisdom’s first rule of small talk:
Small talk experts claim that when you first meet a person, you should avoid unpleasant, overly personal, and highly controversial issues.
Wrong! Don’t listen to these people! Nothing has contributed more to the development of boring chitchatters everywhere. The notion that everyone can be everything to everybody at all times is completely off the mark. Personally, I’d rather be interested in what someone was saying, even if I disagreed, than be catatonic any day.
There’s one guaranteed way to stand out in the professional world: Be yourself. I believe that vulnerability—yes, vulnerability—is one of the most underappreciated assets in business today. Too many people confuse secrecy with importance. Business schools teach us to keep everything close to our vest. But the world has changed. Power, today, comes from sharing information, not withholding it. More than ever, the lines demarcating the personal and the professional have blurred. We’re an open-source society, and that calls for open-source behavior. And as a rule, not many secrets are worth the energy required to keep them secret.
How Do You Assess Performance that Defies Measurement?
Yesterday we saw that a great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time.
But how do you measure “superior performance” and “impact”? — especially in the social sectors, where they are hard to quantify and thus largely defy measurement?
Jim Collins answers in Good to Great and the Social Sectors:
For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance. For a social sector organization, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns. In the social sectors, the critical question is not “How much money do we make per dollar of invested capital?” but “How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?”
Now, you may be thinking, “OK, but collegiate sports programs and police departments have one giant advantage: you can measure win records and crime rates. What if your outputs are inherently not measurable?
The basic idea is still the same: separate inputs from outputs, and hold yourself accountable for progress in outputs, even if those outputs defy measurement.
Here’s the key point:
It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence – quantitative or qualitative — to track your progress.
If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing the data.
To throw our hands up and say, “But we cannot measure performance in the social sectors the way you can in a business” is simply lack of discipline.
All indicators are flawed, whether qualitative or quantitative. Test scores are flawed, mammograms are flawed, crime data are flawed, customer service data are flawed, patient-outcome data are flawed.
What matters is not finding the perfect indicator, but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor.
So when there are aspects of your performance that seem to defy measurement, you aren’t stuck. You just need to think in terms of assembling evidence.
Much of that evidence may be qualitative. But that’s fine — in that case you are just thinking like a trial lawyer rather than a laboratory scientist. Therefore, lack of easily quantifiable performance outputs does not need to preclude your ability to give intelligent thought to identifying a consistent method for assessing results, and tracking them with rigor.
First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet Computer
Very interesting. Very, very interesting.
This is how I’d like to see a tablet work. It should not just be a bigger iPhone. It needs to be more like a notebook. Which is what this one is.
There’s a great video there (I wasn’t able to embed it here) which will show you what I mean.
Intel’s Multitasking Concept Brings You Three More Screens
From Fast Company:
Sitting in the coffee shop with forty Firefox tabs open on your laptop, wishing you had one more monitor? Or three? Today at IDF, Intel introduced a multi-tasking concept PC that allows users to work on their main screen while providing three small auxiliary screens above the keyboard for organizing and accessing smaller, snackable chunks of info from their PCs.
The concept PC was developed with an eye toward future-gen laptops–on which you can organize more information while still reducing the size of your notebook. Without affecting the information or activity on the main screen, you can access information–say, a phone number in your address book or a reminder you’ve placed in your sticky notes–while keeping the desktop as clutter-free as possible.
I’d like to see this — or something like it — catch on. It is very needed, and a solution like “Spaces” for Mac doesn’t do the trick for me because you still have to switch screens.
Avoid the Gray Twilight
From Theodore Roosevelt (quoted in Built to Last):
Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, not defeat.
What is a Great Organization?
Jim Collins gives a very helpful, succinct, and profound definition of a great organization in Good to Great and the Social Sectors:
A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time.
So there are three characteristics of a great organization. They are:
- Superior performance
- Distinctive impact
- Lasting endurance
I think we ought to aim to build great organizations, and so it is helpful to have a good outline of what that means. It’s not enough to just say “we should seek to make our organizations great.” We need to know what that means. This is a good start.
Having this before us, though, also leads to more questions — such as “Why should you try to build something great?” and “How do you assess how your organization is doing on these qualities, especially when they are hard to measure?” I’ll address these questions in upcoming posts.
Top 100 Twitter Users
In terms of number of followers, here’s the list.
More Than Profit
In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins points out that the most successful companies do not exist first and foremost to maximize profits. He writes:
Contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “profit maximization” has not been the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of the visionary companies.
Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one — and not necessarily the primary one.
Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology — core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money.
Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the more purely profit-driven companies.
The Purpose of Budgeting
From Good to Great on the purpose of budgeting in an organization — with implications for your personal budgeting as well:
What is the purpose of budgeting? Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good-to-great perspective, both of these answers are wrong.
In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.
In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.
The point is: we shouldn’t have a mentality of doing “some of everything.” This will distract from doing what is most important. You need to do the right things, and the corollary of that is to stop doing the wrong things. Budgeting is a discipline for making those determinations.
Don’t skimp on what is most important because you need to make room for all sorts of other things, spreading yourself thin. Don’t think that there is virtue in only partially funding things, as though it makes you look more frugal. Instead, fully fund the right things, and in order to make room for that don’t fund at all the wrong things.
And this requires the disciplined thought to identify what the right things are, and what the wrong things are.
On Eliminating Artificial Motivation
I’m jumping into the middle of a story here from Good to Great (p. 206), but I think you’ll get the point. This has far-reaching implications for many things (including — and perhaps especially — churches):
Of equal importance is what they don’t waste energy on. For example, when the head coach took over the [cross country] program, she found herself burdened with expectations to do “fun programs” and “rah-rah stuff” to motivate the kids and keep them interested — parties, and special trips, and shopping adventures to Nike outlets, and inspirational speeches.
She quickly put an end to nearly all that distracting (and time consuming) activity.
“Look,” she said,”this program will be built on the idea that running is fun, racing is fun, improving is fun, and winning is fun. If you’re not passionate about what we do here, then go find something else to do.”
The result: The number of kids in the program nearly tripled in five years, from thirty to eighty-two.
What’s Not Best: Charging a Fee to Get a Discount
AT&T has a plan where you can save something like $5 per month on your cell bill if enough people in your company have AT&T for their wireless and enroll in the savings program. Something like that.
So I went on to sign up for the savings the other day, and AT&T charged me $36. They charged me $36 to enroll in a program designed to save money. They charged me a fee in order to get the discount.
???
A discount program should, at the very least, produce good-will in the customer. This program does the opposite. Now, AT&T is very close to earning a place on my list of things that should not exist.
The Economic Stimulus Didn’t Work
A good article from the Wall Street Journal. It begins:
Is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 working? At the time of the act’s passage last February, this question was hotly debated. Administration economists cited Keynesian models that predicted that the $787 billion stimulus package would increase GDP by enough to create 3.6 million jobs. Our own research showed that more modern macroeconomic models predicted only one-sixth of that GDP impact. Estimates by economist Robert Barro of Harvard predicted the impact would not be significantly different from zero.
Now, six months after the act’s passage, we no longer have to rely solely on the predictions of models. We can look and see what actually happened.
And it concludes:
Incoming data will reveal more in coming months, but the data available so far tell us that the government transfers and rebates have not stimulated consumption at all, and that the resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic–not the fiscal stimulus program–deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement from the first to the second quarter. As the economic recovery takes hold, it is important to continue assessing the role played by the stimulus package and other factors. These assessments can be a valuable guide to future policy makers in designing effective policy responses to economic downturns.
(HT: Glenn Brooke)
Avoiding the Bureaucratic Death Spiral
In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins has a great section on how a bureaucratic death spiral turns exciting, high-potential start-ups into mediocre companies:
Few successful start-ups become great companies, in large part because they respond to growth and success in the wrong way.
Entrepreneurial success is fueled by creativity, imagination, bold moves into uncharted waters, and visionary zeal. [Then] as a company grows and becomes more complex, it begins to trip over its own success — too many new people, too many new customers, too many new orders, too many new products.
What was once great fun becomes an unwieldy ball of disorganized stuff. Lack of planning, lack of accounting, lack of systems, and lack of hiring creates constant friction. Problems surface — with customers, with cash flow, with schedules.
The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit [emphasis added].
Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms and follow these stupid rules. Worst of all, I have to spend a horrendous amount of time in useless meetings.”
The creative magic begins to wane as some of the most innovative people leave, disgusted by the burgeoning bureaucracy and hierarchy. The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest.
How do you avoid the bureaucratic death spiral? You create a culture of discipline instead of a bureaucracy. Collins continues:
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place [emphasis added].
Most people build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.
… An alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together — a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship — you get the magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.
The rest of the chapter is about how to create this culture of discipline. In fact, the whole book is really about that: disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and then take disciplined action. That’s how you avoid a bureaucracy and create a great company.
Facebook is Finally Making Money
According to Ad Age:
Scratch Facebook from the list of web 2.0 startups that don’t make money: The world’s largest social network said today it has become profitable.
Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook had crossed the 300 million registered-user milestone and that it had become “cash-flow positive” in the second quarter, ahead of schedule. Previously, Facebook had said it was targeting profitability “sometime in 2010.”
Why Mint.com + Intuit is a Big Idea
Aaron Patzer, the founder and CEO of Mint.com, gives his thoughts on why he is excited about Mint.com’s acquisition by Intuit (the makers of Quicken).
Mint.com needs to offer two more features to be most useful, in my opinion: (1) the ability to delete the default categories (currently you can create new categories, but can’t delete the ones you don’t want) and (2) the ability to split transactions.
Without those two features, we can’t use it to keep track of our budget. For example, if Heidi goes to Target and buys groceries, toys for the kids, and a DVD, it all gets classified into a single category. You can’t split that transaction into the respective categories that reflect your actual purchase. That makes it impossible to track the grocery budget accurately.
Mint.com is great on so many other fronts. But without those two abilities, it is is simply not functional for us. Hopefully with this acquisition, those functions will be added to it.
By the way: I use the Windows desktop version of Quicken, which does offer the ability to split transactions and delete the default categories that you don’t want. But it has the drawback of only being accessible on a single computer.
So, for example, Heidi has to come to my computer to see our budget status or update any information, since we have Quicken on my computer (I run Windows on my Mac so that I can use Quicken). If we put it on her computer, on the other hand, I wouldn’t be able to see our data or update any information without going to her computer.
So the ability to keep this data online is very important. The unfortunate thing is that no online programs (not Mint.com, Quicken Online, iBank, nor anything else) offer both of the two critical functions mentioned above. On the other hand, the desktop version of Quicken does, but since it is not online the data is not easily accessible within a family.
Intuit can solve this problem by simply taking Mint.com and giving it the two critical features that made the desktop version of Quicken so effective: the ability to create and delete categories at will (including the bad default categories that come baked in) and the ability to split transactions.
Update
My readers have pointed out below that Mint does in fact have the ability to split transactions. So I (gladly) stand corrected. Thank you!
I don’t know if this feature did not exist the last time I gave Mint a detailed look, or if I simply failed to notice the way they’ve implemented it. Either way, this is great news and has me giving serious consideration to Mint now.
A Couple Thoughts on What the Apple Tablet Should Do
I miss the days of my paper planner. The reason: It was simple.
On a single page I could see my calendar for the day and critical action items for the day. On the other side of the page was a place for notes. In the tabs at the back were my longer-term lists — projects, next actions (that weren’t due on a certain day), and so forth.
Those are the four critical components of any planning system, and they were all right in view. Now that I am electronic, those four components are split across multiple programs. I have no way to get a single, integrated, and simple sight of my calendar, critical actions for the day, and a place to jot notes. Especially when I’m on the go and have to deal with the much smaller screen of the iPhone.
So although I could never go back from the speed of keeping everything electronic, I am continually frustrated — and slowed down — by the cumbersome interface(s) that we have to deal with.
Enter the (rumored) Apple Tablet. My first question for the iTablet (or whatever they call it) is how it will relate to my laptop. And I have an answer, which stems from the above problem.
Among all the various things it will be able to do, there is one main thing I want the iTable to do: I want it to be the electronic version of the physical planner that I used to have.
To do this, first of all it will have to be an extension of my laptop rather than a truly separate device. This means that it will have to easily (and wirelessly, fully, and instantly) sync with my laptop so I don’t have to keep track of which data is where.
Then, without that concern, I want to use it in conjunction with my laptop (at least when I am at my desk) as a second screen that I can use to show an integrated view of my calendar, daily tasks, and daily note capture.
My desire is to look to the iTablet to identify “what’s best” to do next (reviewing calendar and actions), and then to my laptop (plus the attached external monitor, for screen #3) to actually do the work.
That’s the heart of the matter: You need one screen where you do the work, and a different screen where you keep track of the work you are doing / will be doing next.
On top of this, I want to be able to input into the iTablet by writing on it. Just like I could with my old physical planner.
When I leave my desk, I’ll then take just my tablet with me. In those instances, then I’ll use it both as my planner and also for any other tasks I need to do on the go. But it will need to be simple to get back to the “planner view” so I can easily determine what needs to be done next. Gone will be the days of having to both keep track of my work and do my work in the same view.
And that’s the critical principle, so I’ll say it again: there needs to be a separation between the screen where you keep track of your work and the screens where you do your work. That, in a nutshell, is what the iTablet needs to offer.
How to Make Your Data Matter
Chip and Dan Heath discuss how to make your data stand out by building people’s intuition about your numbers. The key is to drag your numbers into the everyday:
A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That’s your job — to do the dragging. In our world of billions and trillions, that can be a lot of manual labor. But it’s worth it: A number people can grasp is a number that can make a difference.
Here’s one example from the article of how to put a number in a day-to-day context. This is also a good example of the importance of looking beyond stage one in order to avoid being “penny wise and pound foolish”:
Years ago, Cisco Systems was contemplating whether to install a wireless network for its employees (a “duh” decision today but not at the time). The company had calculated that it would cost roughly $500 per year, per employee to maintain the network. Was that worth it? Hard to say since we don’t have much intuition about $500 yearly expenses.
One employee brought the number into daily life, computing that given what Cisco paid its average employee, if the wireless network could save that worker one to two minutes per day, it would be a good investment. Suddenly, our intuition is activated. Can we imagine a situation where the network might save someone two minutes? Almost certainly yes. (Whereas if the network had required 52 minutes of daily savings to pay off, that would have been a hard sell.)
4 Ways Airlines Could Make In-Flight Wi-Fi Free
Some good ideas on this by Gregory Ferenstein at Fast Company.
Raising Socially Literate Children
Keith Ferrazi gives 6 tips for kick-starting thinking on raising kids that are great at online media but bad at in-person interaction. Here’s the first part:
Are we raising a nation of teenagers who r omg totally gr8 texters, but total dopes when it comes to managing face to face communication?
Your teenage child sends and receives 2,272 texts a month and spends 9 hours a week absorbed in social networking sites. According to this Wall Street Journal Online op-ed by an English professor at Emory, there’s major collateral damage: a rising generation who’s deaf and dumb when it comes to real-time interaction and the subtle language of nonverbal cues – tonality, facial expressions, posture, and the like. He’s concerned: His book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
The professor’s both wrong and dead right.
Read the whole thing.
Recommended File Cabinets and Bookshelves
Post 13 in the series: Recommended Productivity Tools
File Cabinets
When it comes to file cabinets, there are two rules:
- Get ones that don’t screech when you open them.
- Get ones where the drawer comes all the way out.
This rules out the Office Depot el cheapo $30 excuses for file cabinets.
But, also at Office Depot, are the Hon 2-drawer and 4-drawer file cabinets. Hon is a decent brand, and their cabinets meet the above criteria. They are more expensive than the $30 excuses, but are the cheapest file cabinets I’ve found that don’t waste your time.
Get 2-drawer or 4-drawer, depending on your needs. Don’t get the lateral ones that go in sideways. Get the ones that go in normally. Here’s the specific one I recommend, in both 2-drawer and 4-drawer options:
Now, I also recommend having some ordinary drawers at your desk, as I went over in the second post in this series. If your desk doesn’t have those built into it, there are some good drawer units that have two ordinary drawers on top, and then one file drawer below.
If that single file drawer gives you enough room for your files, then you don’t need to get an additional 2-drawer unit. Get the 2-drawer unit (or 4-drawer) if you need additional space.
Bookshelves
IKEA has fantastic bookshelves that look nice at a great price. I love IKEA in general for their motto “we’ll never stop making good design affordable” and for generally living up to it.
They’ve captured it well: keeping things affordable doesn’t mean getting ugly stuff. Good design can be obtained at a good price.
Here are the bookshelves that I use from IKEA:
You can also get the shorter 2-shelf unit, or some nice-looking cubed ones:
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of our series on recommended (physical) productivity tools. I will close the way I began: Having good tools matters.
First, because if you have good tools, you will often find yourself wanting to use them. And “one of the best tricks for enhancing your personal productivity is having tools you want to use.” Second, because bad tools get in the way. And third, because good tools in general make your workspace as a whole a place where you want to be.
Don’t be selectively strategic. Make your workspace work well for you in all respects — give it both an efficient setup and effective tools.
Posts in This Series
- Recommended Productivity Tools: An Introduction
- The Tools You Need to Have (And Where to Keep Them)
- Recommended In Boxes
- Recommended Capture Journals
- Recommended Pens
- Recommended Pencils and Paper Pads
- Recommended Staplers, Staple Removers, and Tape
- Recommended Scissors, Letter Openers, and Post-Its
- Recommended Paper Clips and Super Glue
- Not Recommended: Desktop Organizer Things
- Recommended Chairs and Waste Baskets
- Recommended Labelers and File Folders
- Recommended File Cabinets and Bookshelves
The Secret of those Who Do So Many Things
From The Effective Executive:
This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.
That last sentence is critical: “as a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.”
Recommended Labelers and File Folders
Post 12 in the series: Recommended Productivity Tools
On Physical Filing
My series on filing is coming up (sorry for the delay). In it I’m going to cover both electronic and physical filing. As a general rule, obviously it makes sense to keep as much as possible electronically and minimize the amount of physical filing that you have to do.
But if you still receive some things made of actual paper that are worth keeping, there is still a need to keep physical files. And so you need to have a decent labeler and some file folders.
Labelers
David Allen has a great paragraph on why having a decent labeler matters. His words here actually illustrate very well the much broader point I’ve made regarding productivity tools in general — namely, that if you have tools that you enjoy using, you will use them more effectively.
Here’s what he says about labelers (on pages 93 and 100 of Getting Things Done):
The labeler is a surprisingly critical tool in our work. Thousands of executives and professionals and homemakers I have worked with now have their own automatic labelers, and my archives are full of their comments, like, “Incredible–I wouldn’t have believed what a difference it makes!” The labeler will be used to label your file folders, binder spines, and numerous other things.
….
Typeset labels change the nature of your files and your relationship to them. Labeled files feel comfortable on a boardroom table; everyone can identify them; you can easily see what they are from a distance in your briefcase; and when you open your file drawers, you get to see what looks almost like a printed index of your files in alphabetical order. It makes it fun to open the drawer to find or insert things.
Perhaps later in this new millennium the brain scientists will give us some esoteric and complex neurological explanation for why labeled files work so effectively. Until then, trust me. Get a labeler. And get your own. To make the whole system work without a hitch, you’ll need to have it at hand all the time, so you can file something whenever you want. And don’t share! If you have something to file and your labeler’s not there, you’ll just stack the material instead of filing it.
I recommend the Brother PT-1750. The reason is: It’s easy to figure out and it works well. Here it is:
There’s just one problem: it appears to have been replaced by a more up to date model, so you can only get it used. The problem with the more up to date model is that it is harder to use. They added some features, and failed to integrate them in a usable way into the interface.
I think its replacement is the Brother PT-1880:
I have this newer version at work because I had to replace my labeler there, and the better earlier model had been discontinued by then.
Label Tape
Along with the labeler, you also need label tape. Get the half inch, black on white tape:
When it comes to label tape or any other supply, remember this principle: Get two. Keep one in use, and the second in with your extra supplies. When the one you are using runs out, grab the one in with the extras and replace it.
In other words: Always keep one extra, and replace it as soon as you use it. That way, you never run out — you’re always one ahead. This same principle works with everything — rock salt (if you have a water softener), furnace filters, everything.
File Folders
Get the third-cut file folders. Third-cut means the tab at the top will be in one of three slots. There is also five-cut, which I don’t recommend because it makes the tabs so small.
The file folders at Office Depot work just fine. Here is an example.
You can get plain ones or colored ones. If you get colored ones, just make sure to have a rhyme and reason to things and keep it simple. I’ll talk more about that in my posts on filing.
Posts in This Series
- Recommended Productivity Tools: An Introduction
- The Tools You Need to Have (And Where to Keep Them)
- Recommended In Boxes
- Recommended Capture Journals
- Recommended Pens
- Recommended Pencils and Paper Pads
- Recommended Staplers, Staple Removers, and Tape
- Recommended Scissors, Letter Openers, and Post-Its
- Recommended Paper Clips and Super Glue
- Not Recommended: Desktop Organizer Things
- Recommended Chairs and Waste Baskets
- Recommended Labelers and File Folders
- Recommended File Cabinets and Bookshelves
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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