Monthly Archives: February 2015

Would you like to get even more done each day?

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With just a little bit of forethought, you can build a more productive mindset with these 2 tips:

Always Be Ready. When time opens up in your schedule, such as a meeting gets cancelled, you suddenly have time to handle other opportunities. Most people go back to checking email or running for coffee. Instead, build in new routines you didn’t think you had time for. For example, carry notecards, envelopes, and stamps with you. “Found” time can be used to write a “thank you” card sharing appreciation with clients, vendors, and staff. It’s a chance to WOW someone.

Slow Down. Sometimes we get so caught up in what’s happening in the moment we forget to breathe deeply. When unanticipated situations crop up, stress is a natural reaction. However, remembering to breathe deeply can calm the hectic moments and allow you to re-focus on where you want this day to go. This reflective pause helps you experience improved concentration and an increase in energy. Relaxed bodies also have greater self-confidence—just what you need when things seem to be spinning out of control. Pause. Reflect. Refocus.

Being productive means you’re doing what you said you’d do, in the time you promised.

Check your routines and build a mindset to get more done, and you’ll achieve more every day.

Do you practice “seeing things through” like a baseball player?

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Leaders follow through. They go all the way PAST the end of a meeting and/or a project, then they turn around to see what happened. It’s something I learned back in 1990.

“Womack,” my baseball coach yelled, “you run through the base every time. You’ll stop 10 feet later.” I remember that like it was yesterday.

I only played one year of baseball growing up; my senior year of high school I (somehow) made the varsity team. I was playing with kids who’d practiced since t-ball days at 3 and 4 years old; I had a lot to catch up on. Little did I know that a single lesson I learned on a cold spring morning would ring so true two and half decades later.

Spring training is around the corner for some of the teams I follow. (Last year I made it to 8 baseball games at four stadiums!). Sometime this summer, tune in to a baseball game long enough to watch a player hit the ball and run through first base.

Then, think about the connection to being a great leader: You’re done after you finish, not as you finish.

In the world of leadership and influence, seeing something “through to the end” is a valuable leadership skill. Here are two specific examples of “running through first base.”

1. Researching a quote.
2. Following up after meetings.

FIRST: Are you planning to be on stage any time soon? If so, think about the quotes you might use in your presentation. Are you going to include a quote by someone famous?” Years ago, at the end of a workshop I facilitated, a participant approached me at the end of the day to ask: “Who was that person you quoted in that one slide?” My heart sank as I admitted I did not know; it was a quote I pulled from a website. She shook her head and said, “Why didn’t you spend a little extra time researching it?

Now, when I find a new quote to use, I always spend a few extra minutes learning something about the person who wrote or said it. It’s how I run through first base…

SECOND: Think about what happens soon after you finish a meeting or a training session. Usually one of two - or both! - things happen:

1. Everyone starts to forget the finer details of the discussion; and
2. Everyone begins preparing for their next meeting.

As a leader, you probably have one-to-ones with your staff, you probably meet with clients or vendors during the day, and you probably have conversations with your spouse and/or friends outside of work. Consider this: In the few hours after talking with someone, you have a unique opportunity to make a lasting, positive impression. Wait too long, and you may miss the opportunity.

Here’s a task: Today - before you leave the office - build a one or two-touch follow-up plan for a meeting you’re attending or a presentation you’re giving this week. Think about the questions they “might” ask during your meeting, and find an article, a book, a Web site or some other information you could send later on to remind them of what you talked about.

I travel quite a bit…It’s what I do. Along the way, I know I’m going to present Keynote presentations, meet one-on-one with Get Momentum coaching clients, and even randomly meet people along the way. I’ve built specific “follow up” informational pieces to each kind of meeting I can imagine having. It’s how I run through first base…

The mark of a leader is the ability to “see something through.”

Practice this kind of follow through as a learning leader, and watch how people respond.

 

* That picture is of my sister, Felice, and I the day we were invited down to Yankees Field at the end of a game…Great memory!

Improvement and Self-Efficacy

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Spend a few moments considering the things that affect your ability to turn your beliefs into action. The short answer is, anything you let influence you, your focus, and your thinking. It is whatever you let into your sensory area, what you see, hear, and feel. If you want to increase the likelihood that you’ll achieve what you want, and are setting significant and realistic goals, then you need to invite in new information.

There are at least 5 ways I know of to change my own mindset (I write about these on pages 86-89 of Your Best Just Got Better…)

  1. Read Biographies
  2. Read How-To Books
  3. Attend Conferences and Seminars
  4. Write About Your Journey
  5. Meet (Regularly) With Mentors and Life-Friends

Keep in mind, you’ll only get as far as you believe you can. This is not the time to disillusion yourself (or freak yourself out) by taking on a humongous, intimidating goal. Begin by practicing on smaller things so that you can perform successfully on bigger ones later; choose just one or two areas to study over the next couple of weeks.

Consider learning more about any one of the preceding suggestions, and watch how your own efficacious attitude toward what can be done begins to shift, ever so slightly, in a positive direction.

So, now that you think you can, what big things would you take on?

How To Prioritize Your Most Important Things

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Many of the presentations we coordinate we put under the title, “Mastering Workplace Performance”.

Most importantly, we talk about how leaders can most effectively “Manage Their Day.” Too often, people think that they need to manage “time,” or Superiors need to be better directors to their Subordinates. Personally, I believe it’s time to change the conversation; to up level what we really need to be talking about.

We’re Talkin’ Focus Here
I think this is an important way to look at the presenting issue or the inciting incident that we are addressing. Yes, people have TOO MUCH to do, and NOT ENOUGH time to do it in. So, now that we know that…Here are questions I am often asked:

“When you support a large staff and have your own duties, how do you (1) best coordinate being available to the staff and (2) completing your tasks without jeopardizing your deliverables?”

So, let me take each one of these, one at a time, and share with you a philosophy AND a tactic…

Question 1:
how do you best coordinate being available…

My question to you is: “How available is available?” If you’ve created a culture where interruptions are commonplace, it’s going to be difficult to count on the the time you need to get your most important work done.

According to an article published in the Houston Chronicle on 2/27/2006, “People switch activities, such as making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle or working on a document, every 3 minutes on average.” So, imagine this scenario:

You’re looking at a 4-page document. Each page has approximately 200 words on it. EVEN if you read it straight through, you’d probably get through those 800 words in “about 3 minutes.” At which point you get interrupted. Let me ask you, is “being available” worth you having to go back and re-read that document…again?
In 2009, the technology organization Basex completed a survey. After asking hundreds of workers do you know what they found? “The average employee spends 28% of their time dealing with unnecessary interruptions followed by ‘recovery time’ to get back on track.”

So, NOW my question is a deeper one:

How Long Do You Have/Need to Recover?
Researchers Gloria Mark and Victor Gonsalez of the University of California, Irvine, found that once interrupted, it takes workers 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they return at all.

So, let me give you a tactic. Next week (try this on TUESDAY, ok?) ask 3-5 co-workers to help you with an experiment. Ask them to give you 15 minutes at a time, 3 different times that day (try 10am, 1pm and 3pm to start) to focus on one activity without distracting you.

What if (this is a BIG question) you had 3 X 15 minutes to work on something without running the risk of getting distracted? Try it for JUST ONE DAY, and then a second day, and then for three more days.

That’s right, according to chapter 10 of the book Your Best Just Got Better (reviews here), it will take you 5 days of experimenting with a tactic to know whether or not it will be worth it to continue practicing enough to actually make it a habit.

I did write an article on interruptions in the workplace. Want to see? Here you go.

Question 2:

how do you complete your tasks without jeopardizing your deliverables…

I went over to google.com and in the search bar I typed, “how do I prioritize my work?” and - BAM, just like that - I was given about 3,680,000 results in just .38 seconds. That means you’re not the only one asking this question.

I was almost shocked when I saw something that reminded me of what I learned in a time management class I took in 1996 (when I was still a graduate student at the University of California):

Here are three steps that can make pri­or­i­tiz­ing daily tasks sim­ple for you:

• List your tasks in your daily plan­ner. (I know this sounds sim­ple but most peo­ple don’t do it.)

• Assign let­ters to each task as follows:

• A = High Pri­or­ity and must be done today

• B = Impor­tant (It would be good to get this done today but it’s not critical.)

• C = Less Impor­tant (This is more of a some­day list.)

• Assign num­bers, in order of impor­tance, to each let­ter (ex. A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2). This is the numer­i­cal order you will fol­low. A’s are done first start­ing with A1. If time is left after the A’s are done, start on the B’s, fol­lowed by the C’s.

According to the article, by fol­low­ing this method of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, you will be able to work smarter dur­ing your quest for a more pro­duc­tive day.

Now, you’re probably asking yourself, “Jason, why are you shocked? Isn’t that a good way to prioritize?”

Hmmm, yeah, maybe…

In The Old Days
Before Twitter. Before YouTube. Before Quantitive Easing. Before the TWO recessions we’ve been through since then. Before… you get my point.

Your work today is SO fluid, SO important, SO big, that to be available to potentially useful information, to have a boss that changes your Most Important Thing (see chapter 7 of the book Your Best Just Got Better) and to have a team member that is now the sole caregiver for a parent, a child, a family member, etc… all of that is going to DEMAND your ability to focus, refocus, and ignore. (More on that later.)

How do you complete your tasks? Well, if you got a copy of my book, I’d recommend you start by reviewing pages 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. (Don’t have a copy? No worries, you can review Chapter One for free right here.)

There I talk about how important it is to define your work at the NOUN and the VERB levels.

Want to read an article on this? Here you go.

Oh, and of course I made a video, here’s the link…

Do You Know (Clearly) What You Want?

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At the start of each day, you have a choice. You can work on the noise that shows up, as it shows up. Or, work on the signal, gaining momentum toward what you and the team has decided is the next goal.

There’s no secret to being productive. If there was, your search would have uncovered it by now.

No…In order to get things done, you have to sit down and, well, do them. The most important “resource” of them all - more than funding, more than time, and certainly more than the next release of your product/app/service - is focus.

While I was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory a while back, one of the engineers I met with explained the term “Signal to Noise” to me over lunch. Immediately, I began to apply this “electronics” term to the field of productivity and workplace performance. Here’s how I’d like you to think of this term:

Signal-to-Noise: a measure of how much useful information there is in a system, such as the Internet, as a proportion of the entire contents.

As you look at your own systems - your to-do lists, your email inboxes, your shared project management lists - can you quicky identify the “useful” information? Focus on the most important aspects of your work, and achieve more success each day.

2 Reasons to Visualize

Use visualization to see what you are working toward as you realize each goal. My top two reasons for visualizing are:

1)      So you can recognize what you want when you see it.

2)      So you are ready for the situation or result when it shows up!

Right now, you can practice an effective Focus Technique. Open up your journal or notebook, and on the top of a blank page write: “What will get me closer to my next goal?” As you write down each item, ask yourself, “Is that signal? Or, is it noise?”

Positive Focus

Positive focus is different than positive thinking. Watch what happens when you direct your focus on the positive, the “plus side of things.” An executive of a Fortune 50 company told me that he starts each day with a 5-minute focusing exercise. Before he checks email, before he prints his calendar, before he sits in on a meeting, he mentally prepares for his day. Yes, he will surely have to put out some fires, and handle some crises, but that doesn’t take away from his focus on what he wants.

This kind of visualization process is used by politicians, athletes, public speakers and startup founders. Try it tomorrow morning. Sit, quietly, and set a timer for 5 minutes. In that time, imagine (or, as I say “image-in”) what you’d like to see throughout the day. Then, as things come up throughout the day, reflect back on what you wanted to happen and make real-time decisions that keep you on course.

5 Ways to Practice Focus 

It’s all too easy to get distracted by emergencies or things that look important. (Since the time you’ve been reading this article

1)      Think of an event you will be attending or participating in soon.

2)      Close your eyes. Picture some of the people you might see there. If possible, imagine their faces. Are they smiling? Serious? Talking? Listening?

3)      Now think about what you will do while there. Will you sit, stand, or walk around? What might you be wearing?

4)      Imagine what you will talk about while there. Consider the other people who will be there with you. What might you discuss? What will you ask them?

5)      Complete the first four steps (which might take only one or two minutes). Stop and write down one thing you would like to do now that you have visualized, before you attend the event.

When you choose to visualize, you move closer to achieving your goal; and when you get there, you’ll experience a feeling of: “This looks kind of familiar; seems like I have seen something like this before.”

When you redirect your focus, your perspective changes. Clearly state what you want, and increase the “signal” of information to achieve the goal.

Your “Momentum Selfie” (one-minute video)

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Ahhhh… technology meets the “Sharing Economy.”

So, when it’s time to share YOUR story of Getting Momentum, we’d love to hear and see what you have to say. Please start your video camera, activate your front-facing, hold your phone in “landscape mode,” and share 59-seconds of your own “Momentum Selfie” video.

Here’s a sample, if you’d like to see:

And YOU get to DECIDE and choose a different outcome

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Former head of DARPA, Regina Dugan leads the special projects at Google. I got to meet her in October last year, hours after she delivered a presentation at a FAVORITE annual conference of mine called: PopTech.org …

Diagnosed at 9 years old with ovarian cancer, Regina told us a very touching, personal and vulnerable story of how she decided there would be a different outcome to her diagnosis. She did it all by herself, and she did it with her team. She did it by fighting, and she did by allowing. She did it, most of all from my point of view:

Because It Matters

I know, I know…In a world of :30-second “cat videos” that grab your attention, a 15+ minute video is a lot to commit to. Here’s a tip: Her presentation is 9 minutes long, her concluding video montage is 6 minutes long. It’s ALL worth your time…

In her presentation, Regina says there are THREE things she knows…Here’s my interpretation of them:

1. It really doesn’t matter what “They say…” (She was given a very LOW percent-chance of living through her cancer. According to Regina, “if it’s possible and it matters, you take the shot. And you never give up.” Look around you right now, there’s someTHING or someONE who matters to you. It’s going to be challenging to get to the next level of “there” (whatever that means to you). If you make it THAT important, you’ll find a way. Because…

2. There’s no 100%, absolute guarantee for ANY of this stuff. “If the odds don’t matter, every moment does.” I can’t promise you anything. I can say that right now I’m going to do my all, to do my best, to do what I can to make something happen. But, life shows up. Challenges. Accidents. Opportunities. Chances-of-a-lifetime appear out of thin air. Sure, you’re busy, and things are hard. As long as there is not “better later” that is a 100%, it means (to me) that we’ve got to take absolute advantage of what we’ve got right now.

3. “If you want to make a difference in someone’s life, showing up is key.” Who are you showing up for? And, are you 100% when you’re there? In the book, Your Best Just Got Better, I dedicated a whole chapter to creating your “Team.” That group of 5-10 people who know will show up for you. However, perhaps even more importantly, I wrote the ENTIRE BOOK with you in mind. Who are you shopping up for? HOW are you showing up for them? WHAT do you do for them, when you’re there? These are questions that make me stop, and think, every time I see them…

How Regina recognizes that we ALL have a story, that we “marshall more will than we thought we were capable of.” Look, we are all in a position to not just accept the odds; we are in a place, at a time, and have the “give-a-shit-ness” to make a difference.

Is it easy? No.

And, that’s why we do it.

“Work is how we make love possible.”