Pre-planning

• • “For every 10 minutes of pre-planning you do, we get four to five hours of productivity improvements.”
  • On a weekly basis, schedule the most important tasks and activities first and build our week around them
  • “The best day begins the night before.”
    • Pre-plan day to focus on important and critical path items
    • Create the next day “To Do” list of up to 7 items
    • Set up time to “meet with ourselves” to do the most important during our “prime time.”

• Pre-plan E-Mails, meetings, phone calls to make shorter and more effective

Communication

• To communicate better communicate less
• Power of Three
  • Focus on the 3- 5 most important issues in any communication
  • As humans our ability to learn, understand, and implement is limited (and always over-estimated)
• Shorter and more focused and clearer communication and E-Mails focused on actions that the other person needs to do – keep to one page or less
• Proactive E-Mails when setting up meetings or activities – suggest the time for the meeting rather than asking for their suggestion
• Bundle communication – call or E-Mail once about five things rather than five times each about one thing

Think: What’s the Next Action?

• Focus on the most important on the critical path
  • Always be prioritizing – WIN – What’s Important Now?
  • Too many tasks, too many priorities means no priority
• Re-think our definition of urgent – not everything is urgent (and if truly urgent, pick up the phone and call).

Manage E-Mails

• Keep the In-box as clean as possible
• Be brutal when going through E-Mails
  • Keep in mind – What’s the Next Action? For this E-Mail
  • Then delete, do (if can be done quickly), defer (and set up a reminder for a later time) or delegate
• 80 / 20 response internally is good enough (80% perfect response immediately is better than a 100% response in five days)
• Reduce thank you E-Mails and Reply Alls
• Do not be the problem – how many E-Mails do we send out each day?
• Create Outlook Rules / Quick Steps to move documents into folders and organize Outlook

Task Management

• Use a Day Planner, notebook with a To Do list, or the Notes app on our smart phone to manage immediate tasks and write our pre-planned notes for the next meeting
• Use Tasks in our Outlook to manage tasks that are not immediate
  • These can link into our phones as a reminder

Work without interruption

• Turn off all pings, warnings, turn the sound off on our computer, etc.
• Minimize distractions
• It is OK to tell someone to come back
• “Quiet hours” – shut the door, turn off the phone, shut down the E-Mail and work for 60 – 90 minutes straight with no interruption

Manage upward

• Ask for advice regularly – but, think through a possible solution before asking
• Ask for help if overwhelmed

Reduce our intake of unessential information from outside

• Read the papers and surf the Internet only at set times during the day and much less
• Skim through and then store non-urgent, nice to know, just in case information
• Unsubscribe from websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to avoid clutter with E-Mails and reduce distractions

Shorten meetings

• Come with an agenda, stick to the agenda, move on
• Avoid chit chat, especially at the beginning of meetings
• Call time out to digressions and “going down the rabbit hole” in discussions

Schedule downtime away from the phone and E-Mail to reduce stress and have work-life harmony

• Evenings and weekends
• Vacations