TASK: Change the World One Meeting at a Time
Graham Allcott

Graham Allcott

Earth from Space

What You’ll Need:

Pen and paper
Access to your team’s shared calendar

How Long It’ll Take: 10 minutes

Experiment with the next meeting you have to hold:

 

> Instead of a half hour or hour long block, make it 20 minutes or 45 minutes.

> Instead of just providing a general title, provide a one-sentence aim for the meeting that starts “By the end of the meeting, participants will … ”

 

You’ll be amazed at home much more focused people will be just from these two simple changes.

If you want to learn how to make meetings more productive we hold follow the forth coming link to our productivity workshop called “Making Meetings Magic”

 

 

 

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Posted in Productivity, Work ideas

Task: Get a Grip on Guilt
Graham Allcott

Graham Allcott

grace marshall

This weeks task is bought to you by our new productivity Ninja for the West Midlands Grace Marshall 

“Get a Grip on Guilt” is just one of Grace’s “21 Ways to Manage the Stuff That Sucks Up Your Time” available on Amazon now.

 

 

When you have multiple roles, commitments or several projects on the go, it can be easy to find yourself stuck in a guilt trap of procrastination and worry.

That feeling of being torn between commitments – that time spent on one thing means something else is being neglected – can rob you of your time, focus, motivation and energy.

Here’s a 5 minute exercise to help you get a grip on guilt:  

1. Check your guilt What’s behind this feeling? - What thoughts, beliefs, worries, or fears are causing you to feel guilty?

2. Challenge your beliefs -Ask yourself, “How true is that, really?” Some underlying beliefs are based on past truths that may no longer reflect today’s reality, and some are part truths.

3. What are the positives? - Often when we are responding to guilt, we only notice what’s going wrong. Take some time to acknowledge what is working well and going right, and the potential positives that can come from this situation.

4. Identify what’s important - Rather than focusing on the fear or worry itself, what is it that you value that feels threatened here? Get to the core of what’s important.

5. Clarify positive action - What can you do to honor what’s important?

Not Guilty

Image by renaissancechambara

For example:

Feeling: I feel guilty if I don’t respond to clients’ emails straight away.

Belief: Emails should be answered immediately.

Challenge it: Who says? Hmm, me probably. Or maybe that one cranky client years ago.

Positives: I have better insights and come up with better solutions when I have time to think. Some of my best responses have been 48-hour turn-arounds, and those clients were very happy.

What’s important: Reliability and service. I pride myself on delivering on my promises and giving good service, which means I need to respond in a timely manner.

Positive action: Set clear expectations of 48-hour turn-around on emails and communicate this to clients. Emphasize quality and meet those expectations every time.

Like this? Try these

Struggling to stay on top of everything? Try one of our how to get things done workshops

Catching Up?  thinkproductive.co.uk 

Holidaying productively! thinkproductive.co.uk 

How To Reduce Productivity Guilt – Bullish

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Posted in Productivity, Task

TASK: Hack Your Emails to Death
Graham Allcott

Graham Allcott

Graham Alcott Think productive
 

 

 

 

In a previous task we set up the key folders to help process incoming emails.

Now we need to clear that backlog of emails currently in your inbox by HACKING.

Remember, hacking is about looking for the quick wins, and most quick wins involve either reference filing or the delete button.

Death be not proud

Image by qwrrty

Where to start?

> Create a folder called “Email Death Row”
> Chuck all of the stuff that’s so old that there won’t be actions required, into this folder.
> Sort the remaining emails by ‘From’
> Hack based on ‘From’ (sender)
> Then hack based on ‘Subject’

Getting bored? Then move back to ‘Date’, back to ‘Subject’, back to ‘From’

When you start to find yourself struggling to find any opportunities to deal with groups of two or more emails in a single move, your hacking job is done.

Move the remaining emails into one of the folders you created on our last task @action @waiting @read or one of your few reference folders.

 

Need some help? Sign up to one of our email training workshops

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Posted in Email

TASK: Get ready for inbox zero! (part one of two)
Graham Allcott

Graham Allcott

think productive

Your inbox is not your to-do list. I cannot emphasise this enough.

It is nothing more than a holding pen for when new inputs land.

We need to create new holding pens for things that need doing, things that are happening and things that can be ignored.

When an email comes in, either deal with it immediately (if it takes less than 2 minutes) or moves it out of your inbox into one of these folders.

Task

Set up three processing folders in your inbox:

  • @Action – for email you receive where you know a reply or other email action is needed and where the action will take longer than two minutes
  • @Read – for anything that you want to scan your eyeballs over at a later stage rather than read as soon as it lands in your inbox
  • @Waiting – for emails where you’re waiting on someone else to do something and where you are committed to seeing a successful conclusion

Use an ‘@’ symbol before each word to make sure that these are at the very top of your inbox folder structure (e.g. ‘@Action’). (Optional)

 

Miniature Circus Exhibit at Big EDepending on what you already have set up as your reference folder structure, you might want to make some changes:

  • Get rid of any subfolders.
  • Reduce the number of reference folders you have so that they fit onto one screen.
  • Now you’re ready to deal with new emails that come arrive


We’ll deal with clearing the backlog of old emails in the next task, next Thursday!

Need some help? Sign up to one of our email training workshops

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Posted in Email

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