All caught up. Caught up on inbox zero, on chores, on busy work. Now I can get down to something big and meaningful, you might tell yourself. It is a great feeling being caught up. All the psychological weight of incoming tasks has gone. You feel free, you feel motivated, you feel like you have time to do something big. But, like everything, it is fleeting. What happens when the next email hits, when the next interruption stings by your desk, when it is time to go to the next meeting?
'I'll just do this one thing now, so I can be caught up again.' 'It's only small and I like the feeling of being caught up, so I'll just do this small thing and THEN get onto the big stuff.' But guess what? This type of thinking is what got you here; this type of thinking is standing in the way of growth; this type of thinking leads to a life of mediocrity. Just like Covey's big rocks and sand analogy, you must make time for the big things first. An entire life can be wasted if you focus on busy work. Will you really care that you got to inbox zero every day in a job that you hated? This is the trap that many people who complain of 'having no time' fall into. Not realising that just starting the day with something big and proactive is all the change that is needed. The busywork can still get done in a reduced amount of time; or it will not get done; or sometimes it just sorts itself out. All are manageable if you have already made progress on the big stuff. Gary Vaynerchuk posted a great reminder the other day: 99% of stuff does not matter. Stop worrying about dumb shit. Focus on the important and put this first. Execute
James Clear just published a great blog post on Tendai Buddist monks and how this can relate you your own projects. It is well reading the whole article for context but my favourite excerpts are below:
If something is important to you, complete it. If not, kill it. We all have things that we say are important to us. You might say that you want to lose weight or be a better parent or create work that matters or build a successful business or write a book - but do you make time for these goals above all else? Do your organize your day around accomplishing them? It doesn't matter how long your goal will take, just get started.
I recently joined the Best Life Ever Facebook group. They were running a daily challenge at 4.44am and joining made me realise that it is easy to wake up even a little earlier to get more done. Also, that it is illogically satisfying to see all the 4s in a row when you wake up. Tim Ferris says he has lots of phone screenshots of 5.55pm as he has a superstition about that number after finishing his first book at that time of day.
4.44am to me seems the best time to wake up. It still feels like you are part of the 4am club but it is really closer to 5am and you can get still get so much done before anyone else is even awake. Get up earlier. Go to bed earlier. Nothing good happens at night in the week anyway. What else would you be doing? Would it move you closer to where you want to be? To sacrifice the morning is to sacrifice the day. To win the morning is to win the day. Try it and see what happens for two weeks.
I need to be mindful today. Mindful of distractions both from myself and others that will divert me from my path. I need coping strategies; replacement habits for each type of distraction.
The best solution is to not get distracted in the first place. Turn off notifications, put your phone in airplane mode or do not disturb. Put iMac in the same mode. Turn off email. Focus on the things that will make the biggest difference, even if those can only be partially done because they are so big. These are the ones to get done. These will move your life forward. Why am I spending time on the minutiae? Proactive in the morning. Reactive in the afternoon. If I do get distracted, or find myself about to get distracted, I need a replacement habit. If I am about to get distracted, I may as well do something else productive instead. I could tidy clothes away, put a wash on, do some meditation or some quick yoga. These are good ideas but I need to be strong of will not to allow these themselves to be the distraction - only to help worse distraction. Think back to revising at school how you used to tidy everything or make revision timetable or other planning in order to not start doing something important. Do not use coping mechanisms as a proactive excuse not to start the hard work. But also know when ten minutes of doing these will save hours from not doing some other distraction. Know when to choose the right path. How To Get To The Top Of The Life List Or: Why You Should Forget Results And Focus On Your Effort13/2/2018
How do we define the best? Rankings, metrics, striving to get ahead? Life is filled with competition. What is the best book? What is the best blog post? What is the best phone to get, the best TV, the best laptop?
Why does not everyone have the same stuff? Know the same things? Behave in the same way? Now we can share information so freely, why is not everyone operating on the best way of doing things - just like pushing out an operating system upgrade. Why do not all humans already do the best thing for themselves? Firstly, the best is subjective. What is best for me might not be best for you. Secondly, there are outside forces not wanting us to be our best - tax law; governments; special interest groups; companies who sell arms, kill animals, stuff humans with sugar. And thirdly because we are wired to fit in. We want to do what everyone else does. Standing out is dangerous. But standing out is what is necessary to be the best you. You will not make it to the top of any list if you do what the majority of people do. Most people use any "free" time to consume - media, chocolate, fear. To whittle away their time on purpose - with chores, with a day job, down the pub - rather than living like mortals and using their short time with purpose. We try to emulate the results of others without putting in the effort - this is how the middle class was created. To buy the car that they see others driving as a status symbol, not realising that the rich are buying the car using money their money has earned whilst they themselves are doing the opposite - paying for both the car and the interest on the credit they took out to buy it. Same with their house and their lavish holidays. If you want the life of your dreams, then you better put in the work rather than dreaming. Life is a balance of effort and expectation - you can get in balance by raising or lowering each end.
What a difference a smile makes. I have just tried the guided meditations that come with Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance and one of them makes you visualise a smile. It is pretty difficult to not start smiling from even just imagining a smile in your mind - even before you are supposed to put a smile on your lips. The joy that it gives to see my four-month-old boy smile is amazing - the first time he smiled was heart melting.
I have also been reading Win Bigly, about persuasion and how reality can be split as everyone interprets it differently. Someone going around with a frown all day is likely to perceive those around them as unkind and unfriendly. Those that go around with a smile on their face all day are likely to perceive the world as a happy, helpful place. Because reality is not fixed. It is in our own minds and our actions rub off on other people. This also reminds me of Gaby Reece who says, "go first". When you go into a lift, don't expect others to speak to you - go first. At a party or a conference, don't expect others to approach you - go first. Want others to be kind to you? Go first. This resonates a lot with me as I have tried to be less introverted over the years. Smiling is also going first. It is amazing how contagious it is, and it also starts to build the realisation that we can make our reality anything that we want it to be. It is in our thoughts that we have complete control. We must realise that the world around us, and even our own bodies (as the Stoics would say as we can be struck down by illness), is out of our control. But there is no reality, only our perception of it. We definitely have control over our own thoughts and choices and so we are more powerful than we imagine. We have the ability to shape our own reality through our perception of it.
Now that everything is completely global, jobs are going to the cheapest countries. IT was outsourced to India and now Ukraine and Romania. As a human population, we have the risk of massive upheaval across the globe.
Yet, when you think about a country in the context of the universe, it is an insignificant speck of dust floating on a pond of water on a rock. Really, we need to the think of the whole planet - all countries together. I wondered if we asked all the world leaders what they would focus on first if they were the leader of the world? And then the follow-up question - what is stopping us doing that right now? You can ask yourself the same question. And bringing it closer to home. If you were playing yourself in a movie about your life, how would you want the main character to be like and what would they do? Again, the follow up - what is stopping you doing that right now? What would that character in the movie do?
This is often quoted by the software industry where being slow and waiting for perfection to launch can be an excuse just to stop yourself putting something out there. A more nimble competitor will likely beat you to market with an "inferior" product. This can be true with any industry, obviously.
But the opposite can also be an excuse. "We are not waiting for perfection" can be used as an excuse for crappy, not well thought out product, terrible processes and poor customer service. An excuse to not strive for continuous improvement. And to argue about whether you are aiming for perfection or not is completely futile as you have to define what perfect is. If you have to define anything, then better to just define what "good enough" is. What features can we live without? What has to be there? When something is good enough, using your previous criteria, then it is good enough. Ship it. âThe thing that a lot of companies trying to copy silicon valley's way of doing things miss is that minimum viable product actually needs to be viable. You cannot launch with a shell that does not actually do anything. You cannot launch an X management system that does not calculate, report or analyse X correctly. You cannot use MVP like a snake oil salesman and expect that not to impact your reputation and your customers. Once you launch, you need to keep getting better. Should you then strive for perfection? Or at least excellence? I would say yes. Through a ladder of "good enough" steps, each getting you closer and closer to an end vision. You cannot ship a new car if the wheels fall off. Arguing that the customer wants a perfect car because he wants the wheels to stay would be quite arrogant. In a world where even the big software companies (looking at you Apple) release updates that break core workflows of their users, this is simply not sustainable. I think at some point Silicon Valley will take some lessons from the history of manufacturing processes and two companies who should be at the forefront of this are Tesla and Apple. Who will bring stability to innovation first?
Written by Brad Egeland
Meetings are a way of life in project management. Weekly project team meetings, daily stand-ups on agile projects, weekly customer status calls and meetings, quarterly reviews on large government programs and projects and kickoff meetings on just about every project I've ever led or been involved with. How meetings are conducted can either make your job as a project manager easier or harder... sticking to some good meeting management techniques is always going to be your best plan for success.
From my experience, there are five things to consider when preparing for just about any meeting needed for your project. As I present these, please consider your own meeting prep processes and comment with any additional tips you might have... Plan well. The initial key to great meetings is up front planning. Never just call a meeting based on a need or want or decision. Always do at least some up-front planning no matter how small the issue may be. You never want to be labeled as that meeting facilitator who just "wings it." You'll find out rather quickly that people don't want to give up valuable work time to attend one of your meetings that doesn't have a well-defined purpose or goal. If it's a meeting to gather information providers together for a critical decision that needs to be made on a project, then make sure you document well what information you are seeking, what decision needs to be made, and what the next steps will be. If it's a regular project meeting, make sure you have a detailed agenda that includes current project status and what's happening next as well as any other agreed upon regular information. Usually a project status report is a good piece of input for this process. In other words - no matter what the meeting purpose is, have materials for the potential and planned attendees that will help you get the most relevant information out of them during the meeting session. Send out information in advance. Always send information - including a detailed agenda - out to your planned meeting participants in advance. Twenty-four hours in advance is a good rule of thumb if that's possible. The more time you give attendees, the more likely they can come prepared to participate and provide you with the information you need. The goal is to get this done in one session - those who always need multiple meetings to accomplish one thing are quickly labeled disorganized time wasters and their meeting attendance will dwindle. Adhere to a plan and timeframe. Stick to the planned timeframe for the meeting. Start on time and finish on time. Your stakeholders' and various attendees' time is valuable and your ongoing meeting attendance and participation will be high if you have a reputation as the facilitator who gets going and runs efficient and effective meetings. Don't be the one who stops the meeting to bring the late comers up to speed (unless it's your CEO and even then...) because that will frustrate those who do show up on time ready to participate. Better to teach the 10% late comers that it's not tolerated rather than to accommodate them and frustrate the other 90% who always show up on time. And end on time... these individuals have work to do and if they know you always run long, they'll be doing their other work on their laptops while your meeting is going on. You don't want that - in fact you may want to ban laptops during your meetings. I do that if it's a critical meeting and I need 110% of their attention. If laptops are present, I guarantee that you don't have all of their attention. One more thing... never cancel your regularly scheduled meetings. Even if a project seems to be coasting between phases for a couple of weeks and nothing is really happening, continue to conduct weekly meetings. Even if you all you do is spend 10 minutes going around the room or phones to all the attendees for a quick update or status of what they are working on or any questions they may have - it will still be helpful and it will keep them coming. You never know when a key piece of information is going to come up during a call or meeting like this that would otherwise fall through the cracks. If you start to cancel meetings, it will only make it more difficult to get them back in those seats when the project starts up full force again. Plus, the goal is for everyone to stay on the same page at all times and these quick meetings will only serve to help ensure it stays that way. Document well. Make sure you take good notes on all of the information provided and for any decisions and task assignments being made. You'll need this for yourself, the project schedule updates, the status reporting and for the next step as you'll see shortly. Communication is Job One for the project manager and information gathering and dissemination is part of that. What you understand from a meeting like this may not be the same as what everyone else - or at least some percentage of the attendees - understood, so take good notes for you and for everyone. Follow-up afterwards. Following every project meeting, be prepared to send out notes from the session. Again, the key is to keep everyone on the same page at all times during the project engagement. When you send out notes from the meeting to all attendees and key stakeholders request that they send back any feedback, questions or alternate understandings of what was discussed and decided upon during the session. Not everyone catches everything or hears things the same. You don't want to wait a week or two to find out that an attendee missed an assignment that you gave them... a critical project deadline may be missed as a result. Ask for responses by noon the next day, revise your notes if needed, and resend the meeting information out to everyone one more time. Summary / call for input The bottom line is always to keep everyone moving forward on the project, get decisions made, get information from key participants and keep everyone on the same page. The project manager who can do that through effective and efficient meeting leadership will win more projects than they lose... and that's always good. Readers - what are your thoughts? What do you do to ensure your project meetings are as effective as possible? Do you agree with this list? What would you add or change? Brad EgelandBrad Egeland is a Business Solution Designer and IT/PM consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management, and project management experience leading initiatives in Manufacturing, Government Contracting, Creative Design, Gaming and Hospitality, Retail Operations, Aviation and Airline, Pharmaceutical, Start-ups, Healthcare, Higher Education, Non-profit, High-Tech, Engineering and general IT. Brad is married, a father of 11, and living in sunny Las Vegas, NV. Visit Brad's site at http://www.bradegeland.com/.
Do the biggest. Do the hardest. Do the one that will make the most progress.
Even if you can only get part of it done. Just start. Do it first thing in the morning, with no distractions for 90 minutes and see how much you can get done. Do the top priority then move onto the second for 45 minutes. The move onto the third for 45 mins. Do all these things before checking email. Turn off your phone and Skype. Obviously turn off your email, but it already will be turned off, won't it? Shortcut to productivity: Proactive in the morning. Reactive in the afternoon. I have not read makers schedule managers schedule but the principal sounds similar. You cannot get much actual work done in tiny chunks. Do not let other peoples meetings whittle your time down into bite-sized bits. And don't let them go over your most productive time - usually the morning. In the morning you can usually go for 90 minutes without a break. In the afternoon only 45. Schedule accordingly. Once you have done work on your top 3 priorities (or it may just be the top 1 depending on the day) then forget the rest. You are done for the day. Most people never get this much done in a whole day. Congratulate yourself that you have just done in 3 hours more than anyone else because you took the time to carve out some uninterrupted block of time big enough to actually do something meaningful. Most people scatter this time throughout the day - checking email. Making tea. Chatting. Getting overwhelmed with other peoples agendas. Remember, just because it is important and urgent to them, does not mean it is automatically the same for you. What if you were on holiday? What if you were off sick? What if it was the middle of the night because they are in a different time zone? They will cope for 90 minutes. Look after yourself first. |
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