Probably Not Too Many are in Danger of This
Apparently, too much sleep can make you tired.
Get Back in the Box
Chip and Dan Heath have a good article on how sometimes you don’t need to “think outside of the box.” Instead, you might just need a different box because constraints can free your team’s thinking.
Drawing Results
Thanks to everyone who entered the drawing! I’ve drawn the winners and will be emailing them today.
Thanks again, and thanks for reading!
The Essence of Time Management in One Paragraph
Stephen Covey pulls together the essence of time management into four sentences:
The essence of time management is to set priorities and then to organize and execute around them. Setting priorities requires us to think carefully and clearly about values, about ultimate concerns. These then have to be translated into long- and short- term goals and plans translated once more into schedules or time slots. Then, unless something more important — not something more urgent — comes along, we must discipline ourselves to do as we planned. (From Principle Centered Leadership, p 138.)
Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
Post 4 in the series: Managing in a Downturn.
We’ve seen that recessions are opportunities for those who refuse to obsess on the constraints of the external environment (post 2) and that one corollary of this is that you shouldn’t retreat (post 3).
Another corollary is that you shouldn’t overreact. Baveja, Ellis, and Rigby’s article continues:
Companies that fared poorly during the last recession exhibited a common response: they overreacted, then “stayed the course” even when rougher seas lay ahead.
The lesson? If your strategy isn’t showing results, reevaluate it. don’t expect it to start paying dividends just because the economy is recovering. Winning firms react to trouble early, scrapping ideas that aren’t working and turbocharging those that are. Firms that hunker down can miss opportunities and create even bigger problems down the road.
So don’t overreact, but if you do, make sure to course correct in a timely manner.
Perhaps the primary and most important example of over-reacting is excessive cost-cutting. That will be the subject of the next post.
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire
9 Productivity Practices in one Paragraph
This is an excellent, dense summary of some key productivity practices from Stephen Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership. I count 9 practices here:
Highly effective people carry their agenda with them. Their schedule is their servant, not their master. They organize weekly, adapt daily. However, they are not capricious in changing their plan. They exercise discipline and concentration and do not submit to moods and circumstances. They schedule blocks of prime time for important planning, projects, and creative work. They work on less important and less demanding activities when their fatigue level is higher. They avoid handling paper [and email!] more than once and avoid touching paperwork [and email!] unless they plan on taking action on it.
Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
Post 3 in the series: Managing in a Downturn
We saw in the previous post that recessions are actually intense crucibles of opportunity. But you will be unable to capitalize on this opportunity unless you retain the faith that you will prevail despite the brutal facts (the Stockdale Paradox) and take ownership of your situation instead of focusing on the systemic problems.
A critical corollary of these realities is: Don’t retreat.
It can be tempting to think that recessions should be treated like hurricanes. You don’t go outdoors. You go indoors and retreat. Or, if it’s bad enough, leave town altogether.
But if you do this in a recession — if you treat it like a hurricane and hunker down — your strategy will backfire.
The Harvard Business Review article that I quoted previously goes on to say:
Many managers tolerate subpar results during a recession, believing that their firms will accelerate past competitors once the economy recovers. This rarely happens [emphasis added]. More than two-thirds of the companies that made major gains in our study period did so during a recession, not before or after [emphasis added again].
The authors give Dell as an example of a company that took intelligent action in light of the recession:
In 2001, Dell Computer grew unit sales by 11% even as industry sales declined 12%. Realizing that price elasticity sometimes increase during a recession, Dell used sensible price cuts to gain more than six points in U.S. market share and, in the toughest period of all — the fourth quarter of 2001 — to capture more than 90% of the profits in its industry.
Such opportunities always exist for strong companies, but the impact of exercising them is much higher during a recession, when many competitors are either distracted or hibernating.
In other words, one of the reasons that recessions present such an opportunity is precisely because most of your competitors are hunkering down or losing focus. Don’t fall into that trap, and you can advance. (Even if you are a non-profit, where your competition is not always another non-profit, but perhaps something less tangible — apathy, for example? — or time and attention and dollars spent on other things generally.)
Another reason you don’t want to hibernate in a recession is that “gains or losses made during a recession tend to endure.” As the article points out:
Of the firms that made major gains in revenue or profitability during the last recession, more than 70% sustained those gains through the next boom cycle. The corollary was also true: fewer than 30% of those that lost ground were able to regain their positions.
So if you advance during a recession, you are likely to hold that ground. But if you lose ground, you are unlikely to recover it.
In sum: Don’t retreat.
And here’s a post I wrote last January that says a bit more on thus: Recessions are Not for Hunkering Down.
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire
Beyond the Kindle
Fast company has a quick update on how color and video e-paper devices are just around the corner.
The Type of Culture that Encourages Entrepreneurial Activities
Tom Peters gives a good example from 3M of what a culture that encourages entrepreneurial activity looks like:
A good staring point as any is [3M's] value system, in particular its “eleventh commandment.” It is: “Thou shalt not kill a new product idea.”
The company may slow it down. Or it may not commit a venture team. But it doesn’t shoot its pioneers.
As one 3M observer notes, the eleventh commandment is at odds with most activities in large corporations. Moreover, he adds, “If you want to stop a project aimed at developing a new product, the burden of proof is on the one who wants to stop the project, not the one who proposes the project. When you switch the burden from proving that the idea is good to the burden of proving that the idea is not good, you do an awful lot for changing the environment within the company with respect to the sponsorship of entrepreneurial people (In Search of Excellence, pp 227-228).
Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
Post 2 in the series: Managing in a Downturn
Here’s the good news about recessions:
Recessions are famous for breaking companies. But what few people realize is that recessions are in fact more likely to make a company’s reputation.
A recent study by Bain & Company found that twice as many companies made the leap from laggards to leaders during the last recession as during surrounding periods of economic calm.[1]
So recessions are an opportunity. This doesn’t make them any easier, of course. And part of the opportunity lies precisely in the fact that they “shuffle the deck more than boom times do.” Thus, the study also indicated that more than a fifth of all leadership companies–those in the top 25% of their industry–fell to the bottom 25%.
So there is a big risk of falling in a recession. But it is through this that they provide the opportunity to advance and improve. The article continues:
These findings show that recessions are not so much “slowdowns” as they are intense crucibles of opportunity. Why is this so? Good times can cushion the hard truths of company performance, whereas tough times reveal true strengths and weaknesses.
Then, too, the number of strategic opportunities to make deals or to take advantage of weaker players increases during a recession. Many companies either hunker down or stray outside their core business in a desperate bid for growth, creating openings for companies willing to pursue thoughtful and balanced recession strategies. Judging from the experiences of the best performers of the last recession, the key is to stay focused.
So good times can cushion things, but hard times can reveal true strengths and weaknesses.
This means that a challenging economic environment is not ultimately about the factors beyond your control, but is actually about what is in your control — the nature of your company.
Thus, whatever has happened in your organization, the only way to advance through a recession (or turn things around if you’ve gone backwards) and seize the opportunity is to resist the temptation to blame external factors.
That can be hard to do, because conditions in a recession (and this one especially) are very tough.
But I am reminded of the point that Jim Collins makes at the end of Good to Great and the Social Sectors. He mentions that many people in the social sectors can “obsess on systemic constraints.” But, he points out in response, “every institution has a unique set of irrational and difficult constraints, yet some make the leap while others facing the same environmental challenges do not.”
In the for-profit world, for example, the company that generated the greatest return to investors on a dollar-for-dollar basis of all publicly traded companies from 1972 to 2002 was in the airline industry. It was Southwest Airlines.
“You cannot imagine a worse industry than airlines over this 30-year period,” notes Collins. The industry endured “fuel shocks, deregulation, brutal competition, labor strife, 9/11, huge fixed costs, bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy.” Yet Southwest Airlines came out number one of all companies in all industries.
The point is: you cannot blame circumstances, as hard as they are. Great companies are able to succeed despite a challenging environment. One reason is that they live out “the Stockdale Paradox.” The Stockdale Paradox means that “you must retain the faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.”
This applies at all times and it applies in this current recession. Do not blame circumstances, as hard as they are. Own the difficulties and take responsibility to do what you can to “create a pocket of greatness, despite the brutal facts of your environment.”
For, as Collins points out at the end of the monograph, the most important point in all of his research for Good to Great was this:
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.
Notes
1. “Taking Advantage in a Downturn,” by Sarabjit Singh Bevaja, Steve Ellis, and Darrell Rigby in Executing Strategy for Business Results, published by Harvard Business School Press.
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire
Subscribers, Enter to Win Two Free Books
I’ve never done something like this before, and am actually kind of hesitant. But some people that I respect do this on their blogs once in a while and I think it might be kind of fun, so I’m going to give it a try.
Here are the rules:
- Subscribe to the blog before the end of tomorrow (Wed, Oct 28).
- Contact me and tell me that you subscribed.
- If you are already a subscriber, mention this blog to some friends, contact me, and I’ll enter you into the drawing as well. (If you are a new subscriber, you can do this as well, and I’ll enter you twice.)
- I’ll draw 2 winners, email them back to ask them their address, and send them each 2 free books.
The two books will be:
1. The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees) by Patrick Lencioni.
I picked this book because everyone can relate to a miserable job and Lencioni provides great points here on how to make your job (and, if you are a manager, those of your employees) more rewarding and fulfilling.
The first part of the book is a fictional story, and the second part lays out the concepts. This was the first Lencioni book that I read, and I found it very refreshing.
2. Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance by Marcus Buckingham.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found Marcus Buckingham to be one of the most helpful and insightful business thinkers around. His focus is how to discover your strengths and base your role on them rather than on “fixing your weaknesses.” It is a revolutionary insight and has tons of implications outside of work as well.
Here’s the first part of the blurb for this book:
Beginning with the million-copy bestsellers First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham jump-started the strengths movement that is now sweeping the work world, from business to government to education. Now that the movement is in full swing, Buckingham’s new book answers the ultimate question: How can you actually apply your strngths for maximum success at work?
Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
Post 1 in the series: Managing in a Downturn
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire
This week we are going to do a series on managing in a downturn.
This leads us to two questions right away. First, why now? Isn’t the recession just about over? And second, if I’m not a manager, how does this relate to me?
Why Now?
Why do this series now, when it looks like the recession may be nearing its end?
First, the recession might not be over. Second, even if the economic contraction is over, it may be the case (especially if government policy doesn’t change) that an actual recovery could be a decent way off. So even if the downturn ends soon, there may be much managing in a down economy left to do.
Third, looking at how to manage in a downturn provides good lessons about management in general. The lessons you learn in a downturn are still relevant in ordinary times. Fourth, these lessons will be useful for future recessions, although after this one I don’t relish the thought that there are more to come down the road.
Why This is Relevant to Everyone
This series is relevant to everyone, even if you are not in senior leadership, because productivity isn’t just about how to be more personally productive, but also about how to be more productive as a society. Society as a whole is better off when everyone, not just senior executives, understands the things that make organizations effective.
It is also relevant in many other specific ways to people at all levels in an organization.
If you are a manager, it is relevant because you can apply these things as much as possible in your specific area. And it can hopefully give you a grid for understanding what the overall leadership of your organization is doing or is not doing. This, in turn, can help you contribute ideas and prepare for the next level of leadership.
If you are an individual contributor, it is relevant because you can fulfill your role more effectively when you understand the big picture in more detail. Further, the decisions made by the leadership in your organization affect you, so it will only be to your advantage to develop and refine your point of view on the matter more fully.
Last of all, this series is relevant even for those who are not employed by organizations, such as stay-at-home-moms, because all of society is better off when everyone, not just the specific people at the helm of an organization, understand the principles of management.
The more people throughout society who understand organizational management, the better.
What Science Can’t Account For
This is a fantastic riff by William Lane Craig from a 1998 debate. It gets really good 1 minute and 20 seconds in.
The point: Science is critically important. But it is a fallacy to think that the only beliefs that are rational are those that can be demonstrated scientifically. For many beliefs that we all accept as rational are not demonstrable on scientific grounds. Therefore science cannot be the sole criteria for determining truth.
(HT: Between Two Worlds)
Incentives: Irresistible, Effective, and Likely to Backfire
A good article by Chip and Dan Heath on incentives. Here’s the first paragraph:
Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and 1990s. Early in his career, he threw a lot of interceptions, so one clever team lawyer wrote a clause into O’Brien’s contract penalizing him for each one he threw. The incentive worked as intended: His interceptions plummeted. But that’s because he stopped throwing the ball.
(And for a bonus, you’ll also learn why the really cold upper-Midwestern winters don’t make the people here less happy overall.)
Thinking Outside the Office
Joe Duffy has a great article at Fast Company on the importance of thinking beyond the notions of a 9-5, in-the-office mentality for keeping fresh, staying engaged, and generating new ideas.
The Longevity of the Temporary
Here’s an important point for decision-making from Drucker’s The Effective Executive (129):
One of the most obvious facts of social and political life is the longevity of the temporary. British licensing hours for taverns, for instance, French rent controls, or Washington “temporary” government buildings, all three hastily developed in World War I to last “a few months of temporary emergency” are still with us fifty years later.
The effective decision-maker knows this. He too improvises, of course. But he asks himself every time, “If I had to live with this for a long time, would I be willing to?” And if the answer is “no,” he keeps on working to find a more general, a more conceptual, a more comprehensive solution–one which establishes the right principle.
3 Questions to Ask in any Job Interview
In this down economy, a lot of people are looking for jobs. Part of the interviewing process is asking good questions of the interviewer.
Marcus Buckingham lists three questions you should always ask, and I think he’s right:
- What are the three top priorities for the person in this position during the next ninety days?
- What are the key strengths you’re looking for in the person you select for this position? How do these strengths relate to what this position is responsible for?
- How would you describe the company culture? Would you give me some examples of the culture in action?
First, you ask about top priorities so you can know what’s expected, especially at the start, and so you can identify if the employer has sufficiently thought through the position. If they don’t know what to expect, you won’t know what to expect. (And one of the three priorities they list will hopefully be: learn the position well.)
Second, you ask about strengths because the purpose of any organization is to make strength productive and because you will be at your best when you are in a role that calls upon your strengths. If the organization does not have this mindset, it’s a yellow flag and it may not serve you to work there. So you want to know if they think in terms of maximizing strengths. Also, you want to know if the position matches your strengths and thus if you truly are a good fit.
Third, you ask about the culture because this is fundamental to knowing your “fit” and because you want to work for organizations with a healthy culture. One of the best answers a potential employer could give to this question is: “Trust.”
And one last thing: Present your true self. First, this is right. Second, the interview will go better. Third, it won’t serve you or the company if you get the job on the basis of an inaccurate understanding of your fit for the position.
Get Out There and Try Something!
A good word from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies:
Just as you don’t learn anything in science without experimenting, you don’t learn anything in business without trying, failing, and trying again. The trick, and it’s a tough one, is a common cultural understanding of what kind of failure is okay and what kind leads to disaster. But don’t kid yourself. No amount of analysis, especially market research, will lead to true innovation.
Or, as Jim Collins puts it, “try a lot of stuff and keep what works.” That is, branch and prune:
The idea is simple: If you add enough branches to a tree (variation) and intelligently prune the deadwood (selection), then you’ll likely evolve into a collection of healthy branches well positioned to prosper in an ever-changing environment. (Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 146).
And this doesn’t just apply to your business or organization. It applies to the rest of your life as well. Try stuff. Make things happen. Build on what works.
Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7
Windows 7 launches today, and Lifehacker has produced a guide that will tell you everything you need to know. They write:
This guide will take you straight through from system requirements and upgrading your PC to highlighting Windows 7′s best new features to help you hit the ground running with all of the awesome tweaks Windows 7 has in store for you.
How to Avoid Bad PowerPoint from Happening to Good People
A good article by Chip and Dan Heath.
The Rest of the Room: How to Set Up Your Office
Post 8 in the series: How to Set Up Your Desk
Having discussed how to set up your desk, now it is time to close this series by looking at the rest of the room.
(FYI: Originally this was the third post in the series because I thought it would be helpful to see the whole context of the room in general before discussing the desk in particular. But that seemed to interrupt the flow of the posts. So this post is now at the end to close out the series.)
The Components of An Office/Workspace
There are six components of your broader work area:
- The desk, of course
- Reference area
- Storage area
- Project shelf
- Meeting area
- Brainstorming area
- Lounge area (maybe)
In other words, you need to have a place to actually do your work (the desk), a place to keep reference materials, a place to keep extra supplies and equipment, a place to meet with visitors and, perhaps, a place to take a break.
What to Put in Your Desk Drawers and How to Use Them
Post 7 in the series: How to Set Up Your Desk
For your desk drawers, I recommend having two of the three-drawer units. These three-drawer units have two normal drawers on top and then a larger file drawer on bottom. Here’s an example:
You can get by with just one if you need to, but I recommend two. One goes on your right and the other goes on your left.
Here’s how to set them up.
Stop Solving Your Problems
Chip and Dan Heath’s latest article in Fast Company is on how sometimes you don’t need to solve your problem, but instead need to look for the folks who already have.
Too Much? No, Too Little…
Now this is really interesting. I haven’t put things together in this way before, but I think it’s right:
“Your feelings of being overwhelmed don’t spring from having too much on your plate, but from having too little [emphasis added], too little of what strengthens you. The specific activities that strengthen you have been drowned out by everything else.
Wow. The problem is not too much to do — there is too much to do, but that’s not the problem. The problem is doing too little that aligns with your strengths — that is, not devoting the majority of your attention to the things that make you feel strong. We let the “too much” crowd out the things where we can really make a contribution, with the result that we do too little of what we are best at.
So, what is the solution?
Prioritize your to-dos based on what makes you feel strong. Which ones do you love? Which ones are you actually looking forward to? Make a plan to do those first, and to find a small way to celebrate them when you’ve done them. Cradling these activities will give you strength and resilience to get through everything else.
This is from Marcus Buckingham’s new book Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.
(As an aside here: Yes, you read that sub-title correctly: it’s for women. I love Buckingham’s stuff, but almost skipped this one for that reason. I ended up buying it for my wife and have now been reading it tonight instead of her, while she reads one of my other Marcus Buckingham books.
(Marcus Buckingham is “the strengths guy” who worked for the Gallup organization and wrote the paradigm-shaping books First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently [on management] and Now, Discover Your Strengths [on developing your strengths]. I find everything that he writes to be incredibly insightful.
(His latest book here was a surprise to me [and I'm not a fan of the pink cover -- but it's not for me, anyway], but it’s an extension of his teaching on strengths to the problems women face. So I decided that it would be a great gift to serve my wife. And, it looks like there are a lot of good things in it that men can learn from, too.)
What to Put on Your Desktop and How to Use It
Post 6 in the series: How to Set Up Your Desk
When it comes to your desktop, there are three things to know: what items to have on your desktop, how to arrange them, and how to use your desktop.
What Goes on Your Desktop
As I’ve mentioned before, the main principle here is to minimize the number of items you keep on your desk. Simplicity rules the day here. This will make your desk feel less cluttered and create a smoother workflow. It also just plain looks better.
The best way to keep things on your desktop to a minimum is to only give something a permanent place on your desktop if you use it more than once a day. Even then, if it is easy to access that item via a drawer, it should probably go in a drawer.
This would mean, for example, that unless you really love your stapler, it should go in a drawer. Likewise, no desk organizer-things. And pen and pencil cups are unnecessary. If you really like them they can work fine, but really it works great to have just one pen and one (mechanical) pencil on your desk, laying flat, and the rest in drawers.
The main things you need to have on your desktop are:
- External monitor (if you connect your laptop to it to provide a second screen)
- Mouse and keyboard
- Laptop stand (so that it will be at the height of your external monitor)
- Pad of paper
- Pen and pencil (lying flat, rather than in a pencil cup)
- Inbox (this kind works well)
You might also find it useful to have:
- Docking unit for your iPhone or iPod (if you have one)
- Desk lamp (if needed)
- Telephone (land line; this would be a must at work, but at home I see it as optional if you primarily use your cell)
- Printer (if you have room for one without cluttering your desk)
- Decorations (just don’t overdo it; if you have an actual office, pictures can also go on shelves instead of the desk)
- Any other items necessary to your specific situation (but keep it to a minimum!). For example, I have my wireless router and modem behind my monitor, as they don’t get in the way back there and this also gives me easy access to them when I have a problem. (However, one of these days I will probably move them to another room to get them out of here and simplify a bit more.)
Beyond that, be careful. It’s easy to justify adding things, but the end result can easily be a cluttered desk that saps your energy.
Here are a few more details on some of the items mentioned above.
First, I recommend hooking up your laptop to an external monitor because it allows you to work on a bigger screen. Your laptop screen will also become a second monitor, thus resulting in a good increase in screen real estate. This is important because the best way to increase white collar productivity is to increase screen size. (So get the biggest possible monitor that you can.)
Second, it also makes sense to have a laptop stand so that your laptop will be elevated to the height of your screen. Many of these also provide additional USB ports.
Third, a docking unit for your iPhone makes sense because it saves time by preventing you from having to pull out a pull out the cord each time you want to sync your iPhone.
Fourth, it can save a lot of time to have a basic printer right at your desk so you don’t have to walk to one of the main printers at your work every time that you print something. On the other hand, it takes up space at your desk and you might not print enough to make it worthwhile.
How to Arrange Things on Your Desktop
I find that it works best to place my monitor in front of me (obviously) and then everything else on the left side. This stems from a few factors.
First, the inbox goes on the left side because of the “left to right” workflow pattern. (New stuff goes on the left, you deal with it in front of you, and outgoing stuff goes on the right.)
Second, the phone belongs on the opposite of your preferred side (the left side, if you are right handed) because that leaves your preferred hand available to dial or jott down any notes. You also don’t have the cord going across your desk when you use it. (If you are left-handed, then the left side won’t provide these benefits, but it will still sync with the fact that everything else is on that side.)
Third, having the inbox on the left side implies that the paper pad would also be on the left side, since any notes you create would be new input and thus would go into your inbox if you don’t handle them right away. And since the paper pads are on the left side, it makes sense to put the pen and (mechanical) pencil right beside them.
And as long as those items are on the left side, it makes sense to put everything else on the left side. This also leaves your right side free, which is important because it is the area you would look over when meeting with people.
So, to summarize, everything goes on the left side and the right side remains open. As a corollary to this, then, position your desk to make the visitor area across the right side of your desk (outlined in the previous post).
The sequence of my items goes like this: My monitor is right in front of me. Right beneath it is my iPhone dock, and right in front of it are my keyboard and mouse. Behind the monitor are my router and modem. To the left of my monitor is my laptop stand and laptop. To the left of that is my pad of paper, pen, and pencil (when not in use). At work, to the left of that is my phone. At home I don’t keep a phone at my desk, so to the left of the paper pad is my inbox (at work the inbox then goes just to the left of the phone).
At work, to the left of my inbox at work are some pictures of my family. Then, far to the left of that across that portion of the U is my printer.
At home to the left of my inbox is a desk lamp and to the left of that is my printer. Here’s my home setup (which you’ve seen a lot by now):
And here’s my work setup (which you’ve also seen a lot by now):
How to Use Your Desktop
I mentioned in the second post in this series that everything at your desk falls into two categories: permanent stuff and transient stuff. Permanent stuff includes four things: equipment, supplies, decoration, and reference (which actually goes in drawers and on shelves, rather than on the desktop). Transient stuff includes three things: input to be processed, action reminders, and support material.
The thing to notice is that all work falls into the transient category.
In other words, you don’t store work on your desk. Your desktop is for doing your work, not for storing your work.
What goes on your desktop permanently is the equipment used for doing your work. Any work items flow across your desk, but should not stay long. Things that you need to keep around go into files, not piles on the desktop.
With this in mind, here’s a rundown on the process I recommend for how to use your desk.
The workflow goes from left to right. When new input comes, it goes into your inbox on the left. When it’s time to process those items, handle the items in the middle, right in front of you. Any piles that need to be taken somewhere else go on the right side.
If you have an L-shaped or U-shaped desk, you can use the “L” part of the desktop for these out piles. If you have a rectangular setup, you can still do things this way by just using the floor. If you have a parallel arrangement you can put them on the desktop behind you.
If you need to group things into piles so that you can work on them in batches (things to read, notes to enter onto your action lists, etc.), it tends to work best to create those piles on the left side. As I’ve discussed before, it can be efficient to create piles. You just need to work to the end of those piles right away, rather than keeping them around.
Processing your inbox, of course, is just one type of work and hopefully it doesn’t take up too much time. When you’re doing other work the left and right sides work well for spreading out reference material and other support items.
There isn’t any specific system to give with that — you just put things wherever they are most helpful to you at the moment. The system is that you kept your desk clear so that it is available in this way when you are working on things. And so when you are done or at a point where you won’t be able to get back to the project for a while, but the reference materials away and the support items back into files, so that the desktop remains clear for whatever is next.
Posts in This Series
- How to Set Up Your Desk: An Introduction
- How to Set Up Your Desk: Basic Principles
- Excursus: Against Desk Hotels
- The Four Ways to Configure a Desk
- Where to Put Your Desk
- What to Put on Your Desktop and How to Use It
- What to Put in Your Desk Drawers and How to Use Them
- The Rest of the Room: How to Set Up Your Office
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former 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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