The setting was one of the Accomplishment More With Less workshops that I facilitated onsite for an intact team recently.  I had 25 engaged participants who have contributed tremendously to the success of the day long workshop. Actually 24 of the 25 were the ones who were full engaged and who had a blast learning and transforming, but one didn’t. He was disconnected and oblivious to everything that was happening around him. He started the day disconnected and finished the day disconnected. 

"My manager sent me here" he later said. And as a result, Jack (let us call him Jack) stayed isolated for the duration of the session. We went through dozens of concepts, techniques, demonstrations, individual and group exercises, team building exercises, coaching discussions, and we watched videos, played games, discussed important workplace issues, among other things. Each one of these activities presented a whole new opportunity for Jack to put aside the reason why he got to the workshop and to participate and reap the benefits of being here. Each one was a potential fresh start for Jack. But no! Jack was stuck. 

Jack was stuck on one thought and wasn't able to go beyond this thought: "Training should not be mandatory, and  I cannot stand it that I am here at a mandatory training." Whether training should be mandatory or not is not the issue here and we might even agree that Jack has a point. However, the issue is that Jack couldn't put this behind him and move into enjoying the benefits of the program. While people around him were experiencing transformation, he continued to experience resentment and despair. Later and his feedback form, he reiterated the same thing, and added that nothing would work in his organization because management want certain things to be in a certain way.

Dr. David Burns, one of the leading psychologist who teaches cognitive psychology, discussed a similar situation in his writings. The situation boils down to someone asking us to do something that is beneficial for us, but us  feeling pushed into it (because we were told to do it) and therefore resisting it and refusing to do it. It is difficult to win in this situation. If we do what we are asked to, we feel defeated, and if we don't do it, we lose the potential benefits and experience resentment and despair (as Jack did). Dr. Burns advises considering the potential benefits, and if they have merits, to go ahead and engage in the activity but make it clear to ourselves and to the other person that "we" have decided to do it based on its merits.

Back to Jack. If you find yourself like Jack in the midst of a training or an event or a project where you feel pushed into it, and maybe resentful, hopeless, and unwilling to engage and reap whatever benefits are on the table, here are some steps to consider:

1. Write down clearly the thought that are keeping you in the state you are in (in the case of Jack, these were something like "Training should not be mandatory, and  I cannot stand it that I am here at a mandatory training"). If you don't write them down, they are likely to continue to be floating in your head, get exaggerated, and difficult to bypass.
2. Now that you have clearly written down these thoughts, put them on the side for a minute, and write down the advantages and disadvantages of the action or event that you are resisting. If you are unable to figure these out because you are under the influence of your bad mood, look around, and see what others are experiencing. If possible, maybe get some objective input. Formulate this list also in writing, so you can more objectively review it and make use of it.
3. Make your decision on how much you want to engage based on merits. Maybe even write your decision down such as "I evaluated this situation clearly, and I believe that it is to my benefit to engage, and therefore I will engage to the level that I see beneficial to me."
4. Take a small step towards engagement. Our moods don't work like computer bits and don't change states from 0 to 1 on demand. It is not likely that you will now feel fully empowered and ready to engage (even though you might). It is more likely that you are more able and willing to take a small step towards engagement. Take that step and see what happen.
5. Take another small step towards engagement.

And the rest will be history! And you now unleash the possibilities and a whole new world of engagement.

Julie & Jenny, both very active and in leadership roles at their company and both having to deal with loads of e-mail messages constantly pouring into their inboxes, get together regularly not just to have friendly chats, but for something more drastic which they refer to as an e-mail "party"! Basically it is a get-together that is focused on processing their e-mail messages, however after creating the right atmosphere to make this a fun activity. "Fun?" You might ask. Well, keep on reading.

"The party usually starts with venting" said Julie, and sometimes it might involve some wine but it certainly has to involve chocolate, she indicated later.  "E-mail is a suffocating activity " she added, so doing it alone may not exactly be motivating or even possible, however doing this with a friend while enjoying some treats and nice exchanges seems to turn this activity into one that is digestible or even enjoyable!

The e-mail party seems to involve these main ingredients

1. Companionship: Having someone with you. Creating the feeling of togetherness.  You are not alone in this!
2. Conversation: It is not just about being together, but also sharing observations, insights, and even "venting" as Julie put it.
3. Immediate gratification: Well, let us admit it, the wine and chocolate seem to help, or whatever makes you comfortable and willing to undertake the challenge.
4. Focus: It sounds contradictory to be having conversations and rewards and yet be mentioning focus. However, the e-mail party does have one core purpose, and that is going through and processing e-mail. The rest is designed to help us stay focused on this purpose.
5. Clear destination: The goal is to have an empty inbox and feel good about it. Not to mention stay on top of things, give our team the answers they need, and help move important issues forward.

What an innovative way to turn a task that can be challenging or mundane into something to look forward to and enjoy!  Maybe it is time you try it. Stop looking at these hundreds of messages in your inbox and dwelling about them and have a party!

Join us at the next group e-mail party: Join the "Accomplishing More With Less" group on Facebook and stay tuned to receive the announcement!

My friend Liz said that she realized after a while that no matter how hard she tries to resist having the variety of chocolate treats that are nicely distributed throughout her home, she kept falling for the temptation and having them! What eventually worked for her is to not have chocolate around--in other words, a chocolate-free home!  Without getting too deep into the psychological aspects of addictions, let us just keep things simple for now, and extrapolate this techniques to see how it might help with resisting daily interruptions and distractions that keep us getting off track and away from our important initiatives and projects.

Interruptions are the primary enemy

How much do you think interruptions reduce your productivity? 10%? 20%? 50%? I am sure you are curious about the answer. The answer (both quantitative and qualitative) lies in the Results Curve (free download) and it is estimated to be a shocking 80% or more. 

So anything we can do to avoid them is a good thing. Here are 5 things to avoid having around so we are not constantly interrupted. While it is not possible to not have these around for too long, see if you can avoid them for 40 minutes at a time as the Results Curve suggests.

5 Things to avoid having around

1. Having your e-mail open while you are trying to focus on something else.
2. Having Social Media open or easily accessible!
3. Having extra documents open that can easily distract you and draw you into a different topic or task.
4. Having extra papers laying around that can sidetrack you.
5. Having food (such as chocolate) that is easily accessible. Instead make it your reward after you finish your focused task (and maybe keep in a remote place that would require some physical movement to get to).

Now if you really want to move into more advanced techniques that can help you stay focused, check out the the countdown timer suggested in the Results Curve! Stay tuned for the next technique on how to stay focused that is coming soon!

As I was getting ready for our lunch & learn webinar this week, I wanted to review a couple of related articles, and my first instinct was to print them so I can take a look at them while on the go (in between meetings or at a café before or after lunch).  However instead of printing, Delicious and the iPad came to the rescue, and helped save ink, paper, and time!

Having installed the Delicious toolbar on my browser (see www.delicious.com), bookmarking these articles in Delicious is one click away. Furthermore, Delicious allows me to tag the articles with relevant keywords and add a custom note.

Delicious also allows me to make a bookmark private or alternatively keep it public and therefore share it with others:

With just a few clicks the article is now available from anywhere, using any computer or device, like a smartphone when in motion or when space is tight, and the iPad while sitting at the Café and sipping my favorite decaf vanilla soy latte.

Additional Resources

• Question & Answer: Can I import my browser bookmarks into Delicious? Can I make a Delicious bookmark private?
• 5 Ways to watch over your brand and quickly address issues! Learn from Delicious.com

Share with us how Social Bookmarking has saved you time!

Last week, I wrote about 5 specific behaviors that e-mail users
tend to display, and that can drive their team's productivity down.

These behaviors were

• Not responding to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
• Abandoning e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
• Responding to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
• Responding to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
• Copying everyone and their brother unnecessarily

I also included a brief self-assessment (the 3-minute e-mail "airhead" test) that can help us reflect on the above behaviors and recognize how much we engage in them.

From Self to Others

While a self-assessment can be useful, the real assessment needs to include "others"; the people who send us e-mail or are on the receiving end of our e-mails, and who may have differing opinions about whether we engage in these e-mail "airhead" behaviors and to what degree.

I am inviting you to involve others in helping you assess your e-mail behaviors by sending them this 360-degree feedback form (see below), so they can give you their input on your e-mail behaviors. Forward to them the form and ask them for their feedback (anonymously if preferable). Ideally you would include people from all angles, like your colleagues, your direct reports,  your manager, and potentially people from other groups.

Download the e-mail 360-degree feedback (PDF, Microsoft Word, Web Form)

Once you gather the feedback, compare it to your own self-assessment, and see what you learn, and what adjustments you might want to make to how you manage e-mail.

Score interpretation

As a recap from last week, here is the interpretation of the score:

• Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
• Semi e-mail airhead:  Total score of 10 to 14
• Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
• Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
• Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3

Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to e-mail management!

Additional resources

The Managing and Organizing Your E-mail Inbox

The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook

We all do some of this at least some of the time, but when we do most of this and most of the time, this can drive our productivity and our team's productivity down drastically. 

5 things that e-mail airheads do

1. Don't respond to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
2. Abandon e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
3. Respond to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
4. Respond to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
5. Copy everyone and their brother unnecessarily

Take the 3-minute e-mail airhead test now!

Interpreting the score

After you take the test and add your scores, please review the following:

• Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
• Semi e-mail airhead:  Total score of 10 to 14
• Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
• Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
• Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3

Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to how to deal with e-mail "airheads" and how not to be one, more often than not!

In 2007 I waited for 24 hours in front of the Apple Store in Palo Alto to get the first iPhone, review it, and include the review in the Smartphone Experiment book that I was about to publish at the time. In 2010, when the first iPad was released, I wasn't ready to repeat the 2007 camping adventure to get the iPad. I also didn’t think that the iPad was more than a mega-iPod touch and not primarily a productivity tool. I even proceeded to skip the iPad for the time being and get a netbook instead in order to lighten up my load during travel instead of hauling the super duper laptop and its accessories.

When my netbook failed me, mostly being too slow with limited memory and limited processing power, both eaten up by the operating system and not leaving enough juice for my applications and browsers, then I resorted to the iPad. You have heard so much about the iPad, so I won’t attempt to review it or tell you how much I love it (which I do), but I would like to show a picture of the latest set of productivity tools (in which the iPad has claimed its place) that I consider crucial in the mobile and virtual work environment that we live in. 

The new toolset for today’s mobile and virtual work environment

And now with us in the picture, the picture might look like this

Your turn to add your pieces to the above diagram! Your input is welcome in the comments below.

When describing the amount of e-mails that people at her organization have to deal with on a daily basis, one of our workshop participants described it as "the e-mail jail." Another participant described e-mail as "painful."

The other  "jail" that  I hear about consistently (even though it has not been described this way) is the meeting jail (that is when you spend several hours a day if not all day in back to back meetings). It has been described also as painful. No wonder that many meeting "inmates" end up checking out mentally and/or checking e-mail during meetings (steeling from one jail to pay the dues of the other). 

So if most people concur  that e-mail and meetings are not used effectively or even abused, why do we all keep sending an abundance of e-mails and setting up a profusion of meetings? Today I am going to explore the topic of meetings. Please refer to the tip-of-the-months articles for more insights into the e-mail related issues.

Why do we keep having so many meetings?

Maybe because some of us (those who set these meetings up) need to communicate information to others, or get information from others, or maybe get some decisions made, and they resort to meetings to do so. While others (those who get asked to attend these meetings) may or may not have interest in communicating this information or getting these decisions made, or maybe they don't think that meetings is the best way to accomplish this.  We find that the latter is true more often than not. Meetings are sometimes used as substitutions for having good information sharing processes and technologies, for having best practices for communicating, and for having a clear decision making process. Meetings can also be a great escape from having to do the real work. What a great alibi!

Managers, at all levels, are likely to initiate more meetings and require/expect their staff to attend these meetings--more so than non-managers. Hence this appeal is for managers to re-think their meeting strategy. Similar to the appeal I sent a while ago regarding interruptions.

Dear Manager,

I would like to share with you a few strategies that can help you minimize the number of meetings that you have with your staff, and make the meetings you have far more effective, and therefore save yourself and your staff some valuable hours, which you all need to do your critical tasks:

1. Find ways to communicate information and to get information from people without necessarily getting everyone in the same room or on the same conference call. Tools like wikis, blogs, Microsoft SharePoint can help streamline this information sharing process, turn it into a 24x7 on-demand activity, and create a team "memory" for the team effort that can be leveraged again and again.
2. Think through how the decision making process is currently working within your team, or not. Is it ad-hoc or it is structured and clear to everyone? Is it efficient or it is taking too long?  Has it been discussed? If you don't know  the answer or not happy with the answer, then further exploration is imperative. The most common decision making models are: One person making the decision on their own, or one person making the decision but after consulting others,  or the person delegating the decision, or everyone deciding together by consensus (and more variations of these). It is important to identify which issues should follow which model. So instead of having long meetings with endless decision making discussions, let us get clear and save time. 
3. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Both decisions and tasks. More can be delegated than most of us would admit to. Instead of spending time with endless group discussions and decisions, let the person closest to the issues make the decision. Delegate and then coach to build individual and team skills that can also be leveraged again and again.
4. Develop a results driven culture (you might call it the Management by Objectives practice which was popularized by Peter Drucker). Communicating and discussing objectives is more efficient and it leaves room for you team to take initiatives and be creative. Everyone wins.
5. Involve your team in this process of making meetings effective. The collective wisdom of the team is likely to prevail and bring about some compelling results.

How about you select one of the above, and make it one of the topics in the next meeting to get this effort started?

Additional resources

• The checklist for conducting an effective meeting: What to do before the meeting, during, and after!
   
• Managers, pay attention! Are you driving your team’s productivity down by constantly interrupting them?
   
• The Effective Meetings Workshops

Fearlessly facing the issues

E-mail messages, especially the not-so-easy ones, seem to sit in our inbox for a while before we finally take actions on them. We may agonize about them for days and looking at them dozens of times before we finally take the necessary action. By that time, it may be too late and we may find ourselves missing important windows of opportunities or critical deadlines and therefore needing to do some damage repair. Or even if it is not late, we still feel exhausted and guilty, having spent valuable mental and emotional energy without making much progress. 

You know these messages that I am referring to. Scan your inbox right now and identify 5 to 10 of these messages and let’s get to work:

1. If you need more information before you can handle the message (like more clarification on certain issues, or access to a report that has some relevant data), then initiate the request to get the necessary information. Put a reminder so that if you don’t get the information within the necessary timeframe, you can follow-up in a timely manner. Then move to the next message.
2. If you need time to think through the content of the message and/or preform the related task, then set time on your calendar to do so, and then move to the next message (most important treat this time like a serious appointment that is not easily subject to change. So when the time comes, just do it!).
3. If you need to consult with others before you can handle the message, then initiate the request to consult with the relevant people. Also, put that reminder so you can follow-up. Then move to the next message.
4. If you have the information you need, and don’t need more time to think it through or perform a related task, and don’t need advice from others, then prompt yourself to take the action now! If you have been postponing such a message, it is likely that what is stopping you is an underlying fear of facing the issues (making a decision, saying no to people, giving information or opinions that may rock the boat, etc.). So the solution is to fearlessly face the issues and learn in the process. Below is the 5 step process that can help you do so.

Fearlessly Facing The Issues: A Five Step Approach

• Step 1: Draft your “fearless” response (but don’t send it yet). In other words, how would you respond if you had no fear and if you were to face the issues to the best of your knowledge.
• Step 2: Write down what you are afraid of (specific thoughts that are causing your fear), and what are the likelihood that these unfortunate events will come true (jot this down, don’t just think it), and how you would manage them if they would come true.
• Step 3: Review your “fearless” response again and potentially refine it to minimize any associated risks. At this point you may already feel ready to face the issues and send your response. If not, go to step 4.
• Step 4: Get feedback about your response from someone else, and preferably someone objective who is not a stakeholder in the issues. Get some objective feedback on your analysis in step 2 above.
• Step 5: Refine your response and send it and stay tuned for more learning.

If you start fearlessly facing the e-mail issues on a daily basis (every time you go to your inbox), you are likely to dismantle these fears quickly and accelerate your e-mail process! 

Additional Resources

• Special Lunch & Learn Webinar: Empty Your E-mail Inbox--hands-on session (August 5)
• Managing and Organizing Your E-mail Inbox Workshop (August 12)

Conducting effective meetings is an art and a science. It is a multi-faceted challenge and it is a team effort. However, there are still some basic things that we can do to help avoid meeting inefficiencies. 

Before the meeting

• Clarify what are you are trying to accomplish?
• Determine if a meeting is the best way to accomplish this objective?
• If so, does it need to be face-to-face or virtual?
• Who should be in the meeting?
• How long does it need to be?
• Prepare and send clear objectives, agenda, and logistics
• Share supporting material ahead of time
• Send a reminder

During the meeting

• Assign clear roles (facilitator, time keeper, note taker, etc.)Co
• mmunicate objectives and agenda (again)
• Ask if more items need to be added to the agenda
• Communicate how participation will be handled (especially for virtual meetings)
• Engage the participants (ask the observers for their input)
• Ask questions, make suggestions, stay flexible, but don’t hesitate to facilitate (it is your role and your responsibility)
• Stay strategic, think 80/20
• Summarize key decisionsConfirm action items
• Schedule potential follow-ups
• Have participants fill out feedback forms

After the meeting

• Send meeting notes and action items
• Review evaluation forms/feedabck
• Identify lessons learned and future improvements

Additional Resources

• The Effective Meetings workshop