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Four Ways Social Networking Can Serve Your Organization

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BNET has a good article on Four Ways Social Networking Can Build Your Business. Here’s the intro:

Social networking may sound fluffy, but it can translate into real benefits for you and your company. William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, surveyed 1,600 executives and found that firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that don’t. Online networks can help you hire the right people, market your product — or even find a manufacturer.

The four ways social networking can serve your organization are:

  1. Finding unexpected collaborators.
  2. Building a global business from scratch.
  3. Finding talent in the trenches.
  4. Viral marketing on the cheap.

Read the whole thing.

Do Goals Get in the Way?

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Yes, that’s the point.

They get in the way of less important courses of action.

This does reduce flexibility — the flexibility to do what is not worth your time. But you should not set or implement your goals in a way that blinds you to genuine, spontaneous opportunity.

There’s the rub.

Seth Godin had two good posts recently that relate to both sides:

The Thing About Goals

Having goals is a pain in the neck.

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

Willing to Be Lucky

I just heard Kurt Andersen quote E.B. White with this glorious phrase.

How willing is your organization to be lucky? What about you in your career and your marketing efforts? Or in the people you meet or the places you go or the movies you see or the books you read?

My closest friends each were found as a result of chance encounters and luck. So were my biggest ideas and some of my most successful ventures.

It’s very easy to plot a course for today that minimizes the chance of disappointment or bad outcomes or lousy luck.

I wonder if you could plot a different course, one that created opportunities for good luck?

Thoughts on How to Schedule Your Day

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It may not seem much in line with GTD, but I believe in having a general framework from which you approach your day. In other words, a basic schedule of sorts that gives some behind-the-scenes guidance for how to slot things in your day. This template is not something you literally put on your calendar, but is more of a mindset.

The Four Things You Need to Do Each Day

My thoughts on this are continuing to emerge, but it seems to me that there are four types of things you need to carve out time for in any given day:

  1. Routines
  2. Releases
  3. Projects
  4. People

Definitions

Routines means your daily workflow routines, such as processing email and your physical inbox.

Releases are small actions that are not project related. GTD has you put these on your next actions list. I found that doing so actually ruined my next action list because I would always end up with six trillion mosquito tasks staring at me all day long. I’d want to do things just to get them off my list, and not because it was the most strategic use of time.

So now I group all of these mosquito tasks together into a project of their own, which I keep outside of my next action list. My “next action” on them is then “work through releases.”

Projects are any unique initiatives you are working on which have a beginning and an end.

People means interaction, networking, general management stuff, meetings, stuff on your calendar, and so forth. Obviously much of this is also involved in projects as well.

Dividing Up Your Project Time

Within your projects each week, I’m thinking that it might be best to divide up time in this way:

  1. 70% on core projects: Things that execute and improve those things that are right at the heart of your business / ministry / nonprofit model.
  2. 20% on progress projects: Things that will generate entirely new growth and approaches that did not exist before. This is akin to the concept “20% time” at Google or 15% time that 3M began back in the 50s and such. The principle behind designating time to both core projects and progressive projects is: “preserve the core, stimulate progress” (Jim Collins). Be doing both.
  3. 10% on learning projects: Developing your skills and knowledge. Do this “on the clock,” so to speak. It’s too important to only leave to evenings and free time.

How Much To Spend on Each Area

This section really should have come before the above section on dividing up your project time. But dividing up your project time is of greater importance, so I put that first.

Anyway, let’s talk now about how much time these four overall areas should be given each day. This will vary for everyone. And it’s not rigid (except for, as much as possible at least, the first: getting your routines out of the way immediately). Again, it’s more of a lose agenda I keep in my head that is very adaptable; it’s not some firm structure.

Here are some initial thoughts:

Routines: 1 hour or less. Do these right away. Take that very seriously. Get in to work early and hammer out your email, review your RSS feeds, plan your day, and do any other daily routines. Get these out of the way in one batch early on so that you don’t have to keep trying to find time to finish them up throughout the day. They will only get in your way if you don’t nail them out immediately.

Releases: 1 hour or so. After doing your routines, take maybe 30 minutes to an hour to clear out non-project actions. These are basically the “next actions” in the GTD system. If you clear some out every day, you can keep up. Again, knock these out in a concentrated batch early in the day, before the phone starts to ring and new email starts to come in.

Projects: 2 hours or more. After your routines and releases are out of the way, turn to concentrated time on your priority projects. By this time it might be 9:00 or 9:30, so interruptions are going to start. That’s fine. Try to avoid getting interrupted, but if you got your routines and some releases out of the way, you’ll be able to handle interruptions better without getting too side-tracked. You can’t isolate yourself, anyway.

The amount of time spent concentrating on projects will vary with your job. For some people it might be a lot more than 2 hours a day. For others it may be much less.

People: I don’t have a time recommendation here. This could be the rest of your day, depending on the nature of your job. As long as you got in time to get rid of your routines and some standard action items, along with some concentrated focus on projects, you’re doing well and should be able to focus the way you ought in regard to meetings and interacting over your work.

Free: The core principle behind my above thoughts is to get in early and get routine stuff out of the way right way, and then make some progress on your next actions (releases). Then you can work in more releases as desired in between meetings and project work and be more discretionary in how you use your time.

In other words, be disciplined so that you can be spontaneous. If you aren’t keeping up with at least some baseline of progress at the very beginning of each day, the spontaneous time will never feel like it comes. You will always be trying to “keep up.”

What if your job is to do routine things? For example, processing insurance claims. That would go in the project time, except you would be doing operations (ongoing things that involve more than one step) rather than projects (initiatives that come to an end and involve more than one step). You’d still have daily workflow routines to clear out right away, such as email and your physical inbox and stuff, releases that may not pertain to your ongoing operational stuff, and some projects.

These are some loose, initial thoughts. The main aim driving my thinking here has been: If you want to be able to spend 70% of your project time on core projects and 30% of your time on advancement and learning projects, you need to be able to group your work into some type of “categories.” If you don’t, it will be harder to single out your project time from other time.

Simply doing projects, and even next actions, “whenever they work during the day” has never worked for me. In order to have the “whenever it works” time, I need to also have some designated time for them as well.

Making it All Work: David Allen's New Book Now Available

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For those who haven’t already heard, David Allen’s latest book is now available: Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life. I haven’t read it yet, but when I do I’m sure I’ll be interacting with it in some posts.

Here’s the summary:

Why this book? Why now? GTD, now in 28 languages, has become a viral phenomenon around the world. An understanding of the reasons for that success and the principles behind the power of GTD opens a much broader application of the underlying formulae for success, across the whole span of life and work. “Making It All Work” illuminates the true basics of self-management – control and perspective – and how to get and keep both in any and every situation with solutions simpler, and more sophisticated, than you think.

David Allen shows us how to excel in dealing with our daily commitments, the unexpected, and the information overload that threatens to drown us. “Making It All Work” provides an instantly usable, success-building toolkit for winning “the game.”

“Making It All Work” addresses: How to figure out where you are in life and what you need; How to be your own consultant and the CEO of your life; Moving from hope to trust in decision-making; When not to set goals; Harnessing intuition,spontaneity, and serendipity; And why life is like business and business is like life.

BNET has several excerpts from the book (HT: Lifehacker):

In Defense of Buzzwords … Sort Of

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It’s not uncommon for people to say “I don’t like that word — it’s overused.” For example, I think the word “synergy” may have gotten burned out back in the 90s or so. Words like “strategy” and others are today’s victims.

It is important to be original. We should continually be coming up with new ways of saying important things. That not only keeps things interesting, but also advances thinking and stimulates new ideas.

Let’s just not forget that the concepts behind the words that we feel are over-used usually remain valid and significant. Don’t let the concepts be devalued in your mind because you don’t like hearing the words again and again.

And if the bulk of things in your life need to be new in order to be meaningful, you are going to get exhausted. Because even the concept of “newness” can become old. Avoiding cliches can become cliche.

And in the meantime, you’ll also be left with a reduced vocabulary for communication. Buzzwords came to exist for a reason: they do communicate something. Every field has its jargon — the medical field, sports, the business world, the world of work. Without buzzwords, there are certain things that are going to be more complicated to explain, wasting time.

Come up with new, un-buzzword-like ways of saying things continually. But you can’t reinvent the whole field of buzzwords at once. You will always have to use them in some way or another.

The problem is when people use buzzwords without really understanding what they mean, as an attempt to appear credible simply because they’ve used a certain word. That’s ugly, and to be avoided. But the intelligent, thoughtful use of a buzzword sometimes is what keeps the ideas clear and facilitates effective conversation. Maybe, when used in that way, they aren’t even buzzwords after all.

This is probably a bit of risky post — it sounds like I’m devaluing the concept of newness and originality. But I’m saying the opposite: namely, let’s make sure we don’t become unoriginal in our opposition to lack of originality.

A Productivity Tip from Jerry Seinfeld

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Lifehacker has a good post from a while back giving a very useful productivity tip from Jerry Seinfeld:

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write.

Read the whole thing to get the details on how it works.

The author of the post, Brad Isaac, points out that this technique can be used in many different areas. He’s used it “for exercise, to learn programming, to learn network administration, to build successful websites and build successful businesses.”

I’ve done a variation of this with some things as well, including eating less, trying to read 3 books a day, and getting up super early, and found it to be very effective (though the 3 books a day didn’t last too long!).

You can even implement this technique on your iPhone with the Goalkeep app.

Maslow Revised His Hierarchy of Needs

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Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? I recall learning about it for the first time back in about 7th grade social studies. Still today, I see it referred to all the time in management and productivity books. Even books on project management talk about it.

Starting with the lower-level needs and moving to the higher-level needs, the hierarchy is:

  1. Basic physical needs: food, clothing, shelter.
  2. Security: physical welfare and security of belongings.
  3. Social: sense of belonging, acceptance, friendship.
  4. Self-esteem: accomplishment, respect for self, capability.
  5. Self-actualization: performing at your peak potential.

(That’s the best summary I’ve seen; it’s from The Project Management Professional Study Guide, p. 323).

Whether you agree or disagree with Maslow, here’s what’s really interesting: According to Stephen Covey and Rebecca Merrill in First Things First, Maslow revised his hierarchy later in life.

He realized that the highest need is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence — namely, living for a purpose higher than self.

That’s significant. Even Maslow recognized that, ironically, a real sense of fulfillment does not come from seeking simply your own welfare, but from living and doing things for a purpose beyond yourself.

This could be pondered at so many levels. I’m going to make the application to career and management (I hope that’s not a let-down!). One of the reasons people feel a lack of significance in their jobs is because they don’t see how it relates beyond themselves (and their company).

In fact, people today are more and more looking for this connection to wider significance in their jobs. They want to do things that fit a larger purpose and do good on a wider scale than just meeting the bottom line, or accomplishing the next task at hand.

To keep people in your organization motivated — genuinely motivated — keep before them a line of site to the wider purposes that their work serves.

And that’s probably more important to most people than what they are paid.

C.J. Mahaney on Time Management

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C.J. Mahaney has been doing a good series of posts on time management over at the Sovereign Grace blog.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think GTD does very well with the runway and 10,000 foot levels, but leaves the higher levels less developed than I think they need to be. Mahaney’s posts hit the higher levels well, talking a lot about roles, goals, and scheduling.

Why Most People Don't Keep Their New Year's Resolutions

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There are a lot of reasons people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions, but I’m going to mention two that I haven’t heard many people think about.

Two of the biggest reasons people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions are:

  1. They don’t know where to write them down.
  2. They don’t know how they integrate with their other goals.

It is not sufficient to simply say “write down your resolutions.” If you don’t know where to write them down, that’s not helpful because you’ll write them down and then forget about them.

If you write your goals down in a Word document, for example, how are you going to remember to look at it? Or if you write them down on a piece of paper, where do you put that paper so you can review it regularly?

The other problem is: So you have these 3 new resolutions for the year. But what about the 30 other things you have going on in your life? How do you keep those 3 resolutions in mind so that they aren’t crowded out by everything else you have going on? And what about the 5 other goals you have which aren’t new year’s resolutions, but are just as important (or more so)?

In other words, your new year’s resolutions need to fit clearly within the wider context of your whole life. If you don’t see where they fit in relation to all of your other priorities, it is easy for them to simply turn into vague intentions.

This relates to the problem of where to write them down. The reason people don’t know where to write them down is that they don’t know how they fit into the wider context of their whole life.

Which takes us to the importance of a productivity system.

Your new year’s resolutions are really goals. Don’t let the term “resolution” throw you off. These are goals. Therefore, they need to be kept with any other goals you might have and they are accomplished in the same way: by reviewing them regularly, and breaking them down into “next actions” and/or “projects” to keep the ball rolling.

In other words, you need to put your new year’s resolutions (goals) into a trusted system that you review regularly. By making them a part of a “system,” your goals aren’t just a random document filed some where. Rather, it is kept along with all the other outcomes you are seeking to obtain and actions you need to take. This integrates it with everything else that you have going on, and makes it easy to review them.

I thought about going into detail on how to do this, but that risks too much detail at this point. If you are using Outlook or OmniFocus or something like that to manage your projects and next actions, then it’s simple: Just create another level called “Goals,” and put your goals (which includes new year’s resolutions) in there. Then review your goals regularly along with your projects and next actions.

If you use a paper planner, then just make sure that you have a “Goals” section in there, put your resolutions in there along with any other goals, and make sure to review it regularly (in the GTD system, that’s the weekly review).

If you don’t use any software or a planner to manage your life, then you could start simple by just creating a Word document. List your goals, projects, and next actions (creating a separate heading for each) and then maybe put it on your desktop so you can easily open it every day. (Usually I don’t recommend putting things on your desktop, but when starting out here this would be the main exception.)

There is so much more that could be said: how to organize goals, how to word them, how to break them down appropriately into projects. But takes us beyond the point of the post right now.

In sum, if you want to accomplish your new year’s resolutions, you need to not simply “write them down,” but write them down in a place that you review regularly and which reflects the wider context of your whole life.

Weekly Productivity Routines

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In the last post we talked about why productivity routines are necessary and then discussed the daily routines that I recommend. But daily routines are not the only type of routines you need to have. There are also weekly, monthly, quarter, and yearly routines. In this post we will cover weekly routines.

One quick aside before diving in: Again, I’m only talking about productivity routines here. There are other types of routines you can also use this system to build into your life. There are lots of possibilities that are opened up by creating a system for managing your recurring actions and routines.

Daily Routines Pertain to Your Job, Weekly Routines Pertain to Your Personal Work

To begin, a quick word on the nature of weekly routines versus the nature of daily routines.

My weekly routines pertain almost exclusively to my ordinary life as opposed to work life. Most of my daily routines, on the other hand, pertain to my work life. I have found that balance to be very helpful.

It is not that I don’t do any household stuff or personal work during the week (far, far from it actually), but I have segmented my repeating tasks into a once a week routine that I do every Saturday morning. This allows me to be more free during the rest of the week to do other actions and projects, or just relax and play with my kids.

Also note that when I talk about routines here, I’m not counting here things like “do the dishes,” “set the table,” “snow blow the driveway” because those are the types of things that don’t need to go on a list. They are event-triggered (“we need to have supper, let’s set the table”), so a list isn’t needed. There are lots of things like that every day that I also do (and thank you, Heidi, for the far longer list of things that you do every day to keep things running well!). I’m talking here about non-event-triggered stuff: the stuff which if you don’t remember to do, won’t get done.

Note also, and very significantly, if you are a stay-at-home mom (or stay-at-home dad), you may have many personal and household routines that are indeed daily. It would not be possible to segment all of your routines into a Saturday morning. In that case, those things would be built into your daily routines because managing the household is your job.

The Weekly Routines You Should Have (Or, One Example of Weekly Routines)

Everyone is going to have different routines here. Here is what I do to make sure I “cover all my bases” each week and make sure things aren’t slipping through the cracks:

  1. Process personal inbox (i.e., the one at home — yes, you should have an inbox at home, not just work).
  2. Process personal email. I actually do this every day as part of my daily routines. But if you prefer to think about your personal email less than your work email, you can build a different routine: every other day, or every week.
  3. Process notes I’ve jotted down to myself and put into my inbox at home.
  4. Process voice notes.
  5. Process OmniFocus in.
  6. Enter receipts into Quicken (OK, you may not use Quicken, but however you keep track of your checking account and other balances, I recommend doing it in your weekly routines).
  7. Reconcile bank statements (if any) and process other financial stuff.
  8. Write check for offering.
  9. Give allowance to kids.
  10. Distribute out-box.

Some of this is self-explanatory: For example, have an inbox at home as well as work, and process that home inbox at least once a week. More if you prefer.

I talked about voice notes in the previous post on daily routines, as well as jotting notes to yourself on paper when you have an idea you can’t act on right away. The notes that you jot on paper go into your inbox. Then, when processing your inbox, it’s useful to group those into a pile and create the next actions from them all together. For voice notes I use a program on my iPhone to collect action items I think of when I’m away from my computer or paper.

Entering receipts into Quicken is the way we keep track of our account balances. You can also just have that all downloaded into Quicken, but I’ve never been able to get that working. It’s not hard, anyway, just to type in what we’ve spent and keep our account balances current.

When I receive a bank or credit card statement, I put it in a pending file called “financial to enter.” Then on Saturday mornings when I get to that task, I go to that folder and, if I received a bank or credit card statement that week, I take it out and reconcile it in Quicken. If I receive a check in the mail I also put it into this file. I usually can’t just go to the bank right when I open the mail, but I don’t want to leave it to memory to cash the check, either. So I put it in my “financial to enter” file and take care of it with my routines on Saturday.

I give my kids their allowance because I have kids. If you don’t have kids, or they are grown up, then obviously you can skip that one! What’s noteworthy here, perhaps, is that I actually put this into my routine. This might seem like something to “just remember.” But again, I don’t like just  having to remember stuff because (1) I won’t remember it and (2) I don’t like having to sort through my mind to recall what I have to do that day. I write it down, get through it, and then I’m done and can focus on other things.

Same with writing the check for our offering at church. I don’t want to just leave it to chance to remember to do that Sunday morning. So I build it into this weekly routine along with the other financial stuff. (If you do direct withdrawal, you don’t need to worry about this.)

In regard to distributing your out-box: As you go through your inbox, there is often stuff that needs to go somewhere else in your house. Or you need to give it to your wife or husband or a roommate. It’s not efficient to get up and take it where it needs to go right away. So I start a pile for this stuff. Then, when I’m done with everything, I take that stuff where it needs to go.

I also handle stuff that needs to be filed in that way. I group it together with my other “out” stuff, and then file it all in a batch after distributing the other out-box stuff. I find it inefficient to file each document needing filing as I come across it in my inbox.

Bi-Weekly Routines

There are some tasks that don’t need to be done every week. Some of those are monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks — which I’ll also be posting on. But some of them are in between weekly and monthly. The key with those is to make them hit on Saturdays as well.

This is important, so I’ll say it again: You want these other routines to hit on the same day that you do your weekly routines so that you only have one day on which you have to think “I have to do some routine tasks today.” Make everything hit the same day. (This applies to monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks as well as the bi-weekly routines — make them hit on Saturday also, so that you just do them right along with your weekly routines.)

Here are some bi-weekly and every-three-week routines I have:

  1. Pay bills (anything that is not automatic; this comes up in my action calendar every two weeks).
  2. Pay mortgage (I single this out because the consequences of missing a payment would be so dire).
  3. Check softener salt (for our water softener).
  4. Review digital pictures. Heidi takes them off the camera, and if I don’t have this task months might go by before I remember to look at our latest pictures.
  5. Review notes on this or that. (If I take notes on a book that I want to remember very well, I’ll create a repeating task to review them every few weeks for a while.)

The Broader Principle Here

Everyone will have different tasks here, but the key principle to see is that you don’t have to leave things to chance. When there is something that needs to be done regularly, build it into your routine. And the way to do that is by having a task list that is designated specifically to hold all of your repeating tasks. Anything that needs to be done on a schedule goes in here, and the result is that it is easy to find and it will actually get done.

The usefulness of this is very large. Take my water softener. It needs to be filled with salt about every 3-4 weeks. I’m not going to remember to do that. But I don’t want to wait until the salt is all gone and the water becomes hard to realize it needs to be filled. So I just created “check softener salt” as an every-three-week task in my action calendar. It comes up on Saturday, when I’m doing my other routines, so it doesn’t get in the way but does get easily done.

Speaking of household appliances, this concept of an action calendar is far more effective (to me, at least) than the other way I’ve seen. For example, on the furnace filter that I just bought it came with a sticker that you can put on the furnace telling you when you changed the filter last.

That is not helpful. Am I just going to happen to be walking around in my furnace room, at just the right time, to realize that my furnace filter is due for being changed? That is not going to work.

Even things that aren’t repeating, but are time-based, can go into the action calendar. For example, our mortgage was just sold to some other company. The actual effective date of the change is January 1. But I wanted to send my payment in during December so that I get the interest tax deduction for that payment this year rather than next. Yet I wasn’t going to send it to the old company when they are only holding the mortgage for another few days, risking that a big mix-up is created. But the new company could also be confused by receiving the payment before the change in ownership.

Maybe I just shouldn’t think to that level of detail! But here’s what I did: I sent the payment to the new company to arrive the last week of December, but then created an action to come up the first Saturday in January to follow-up and make sure the company processed it, even though they received it before the actual change. Without my action calendar, it would have been hard (or, at least annoying) to remember to check up on that.

And again, I group these all onto  Saturday morning because I find that when I get home in the evening, the last thing that I want to do is look at my action calendar and see three things that I need to do. By grouping them onto Saturday mornings, they actually get done.

Future Posts

Now we’ve covered daily routines and weekly routines. Coming up we’ll cover monthly routines, quarterly routines, and yearly routines.