The 7 Ways Successful People Approach Their Work

When it comes to work, everyone has their own methods for getting tasks done.

But it turns out that the most successful people tend to have similar habits.
Or, so says Laura Vanderkam, author of a new mini e-book, "What the Most Successful People Do at Work." (The e-book is the third in a series, which also details the habits of successful people in the mornings and on weekends; the series will be published in paperback in September.)
Vanderkam, who wrote 168 Hours, a guide to getting the most out of your time, has, over the years, asked hundreds of people to track how they spend their days. Her analysis of these time logs has provided the fodder for her books, and in her latest examination -- of how successful people approach work -- she’s come up with seven common habits that people who shine in their fields use to accomplish things.
While one of these matters above all others, it is also the one that takes the longest to achieve -- and you'll see why in a minute. Here are the seven commonalities she found.

1. Mind Your Hours.
If you want to give your working hours a makeover, you've got to know how long your activities take. One of the most prolific children's book illustrators interviewed in the e-book can project exactly how much time a drawing will take (and actually measures each by how many Seinfeld reruns will play in the background before she’s finished). Then, she uses that knowledge to set goals for specific time periods — i.e. three illustrations in a day.
To get the same understanding of your own work or productivity, Vanderkam recommends you keep a time log for a full week so you also capture the weekend — that’s when people tend to be less conscious of what they're doing. There's no one way of tracking your time, so just pick something that works for you. As Vanderkam said by phone from her home outside Philadelphia, "The goal is to be helpful, not to make you hate your life." For instance, Vanderkam updates her time log twice a day. Another person might want to do it more frequently, using a computer or smartphone app. Whatever you choose, make it something convenient that will also allow you to faithfully track what you've been doing.
"Time passes whether or not you make a conscious choose about how to use that time," Vanderkam says. "And not being conscious of how you spend your time is also a choice. I can't tell you how many people tell me by the second day, 'I got so sick of saying, "checked Facebook," for the tenth time that I stopped doing it.’”

2. Plan.
The next step to being more conscious with your work time is to plan out your hours. This might seem really obvious, but many harried workers find themselves in triage mode — only answering urgent matters and never taking a moment to strategize about how best to spend their time. As Vanderkam writes, "People lament that they’d love to have strategic-thinking time, but they’re just too busy!"
She recommends having a planning session at least once a week -- or a big one weekly and then smaller ones as projects get finished. She also suggests planning over different time frames. For instance, at the end of the year, you could plan your goals for the year, and then, in your weekly planning sessions, make sure you are steadily working toward those goals.

3. Make Success Possible.
With a new plan, it's easy to start getting excited about your goals, become over-ambitious ... and then fail. But you are more likely to reach your dreams as long as you set discrete, doable tasks for yourself -- and then make sure you're held accountable. First, break down big projects into small steps, and try to limit yourself to tackling three to six a day.
Then, make sure you get to them. Everyone has a different accountability system, says Vanderkam. She personally uses an accountability partner, with whom she has weekly check-ins on Friday. Others might want a more punitive or public approach, such as making a promise on Stickk, a web site in which people can set goals and then promise to do something dreaded, such as donate to an organization they loathe, if they fail.

4. Know What Is Work.
Many of us end up spending inordinate amounts of time answering email. As Vanderkam writes, “According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend 28 percent of their time wading through their inboxes.”
But checking email is not the same thing as doing “work” — and by that, Vanderkam means the core of what you’re trying to accomplish. “Email expands to fill in the available time. Give email less time, and it will take less time,” she says. If you’re the kind of person who is worried about leaving your inbox unattended, Vanderkam suggests starting to wean yourself off by being on email for 20 minutes, and then using the next 40 minutes to focus on a task without interruption. Eventually, expand those times between email check-ins.
Another thing that can look like work but isn’t always: meetings. “The reason you have a meeting is that you want something to change in the world by the end of it,” she says. “The problem is that people have meetings to check that everyone is still doing their jobs — but hopefully you hired people good enough where you don’t have to check.”
She also notes that many people schedule meetings as a way of imposing a deadline.  She says that if you’re a supervisor giving an assignment, you should explain that you won’t meet about the work, but you still need the project done by a certain time. In general, she says, “meetings have to earn their place in someone’s life.” For this reason, she recommends shying away from recurring meetings. “Everything you do with an hour should be a conscious decision,” she says.

5. Practice.
Vanderkam points out in her book that while professional musicians or athletes spend time practicing their craft or sport, many people with other jobs don’t. “Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too,” she writes. And that means that you can also consciously practice your job skills with the goal of improving, though you’ll need to ask someone to give you feedback.
“That’s the chunk that’s missing for a lot of people in their work,” Vanderkam says. “We don’t have as much feedback as we need. People do yearly performance reviews, but that’s kind of useless vs. ‘What did you do right in this presentation?’” If you don't get regular feedback, then after you, say, complete a task or give a presentation, ask your supervisor what you can do to improve next time. Or, have a friend in the same profession either look over your work before you send it to your boss or watch you practice giving your presentation before the real thing.

6. Pay in.
Let’s say, God forbid, that you lost your job today. In order to find a new one, you’d have to draw on your career capital, which Vanderkam says is “the sum total of your experiences, your knowledge, your skills, your relationships — and all these things enable you to get a new job if you need one, create new situations for yourself or other people, or even let you take a break without having it ruin your career.” Successful people tend to pay in to their career capital account regularly.
There are three main ways to create career capital. One is to simply improve your skills and adopt new ones important in your line of work. Take professional development classes, or have a mentor help you figure out what you’ll need to learn in order to succeed five, ten or 20 years from now. Another type of career capital deposit is developing a portfolio of your work. “The good thing about writing or illustrating books is that they are then out there in the market, speaking for you and your ideas even when you’re not around,” she writes. And that explains why experts in many fields from medicine to business take up the pen. But writing or publishing isn’t the only way to create this portfolio. Doing work that has any kind of visible, tangible outcome will have the same effect.
The third and final way to build your career capital is to build up a network of people loyal to you. You can do this by introducing colleagues to others you know who could be helpful to them, providing references for people, and also standing by associates when they’re down. “Anyone can have lunch with someone who is successful,” says Vanderkam. “Real career capital comes from having lunch with someone who just lost the job she loves.”

7. Pursue pleasure.
The final commonality Vanderkam found among the successful is that they find joy in their work. While many of our jobs have elements we like less than others, over time, she recommends we try to tweak our time to spend more hours doing the things we love and fewer hours doing the things we don’t.
The other thing she found is that joy, in turn, often comes from feeling a sense of progress in our work. In fact, a feeling of progress brings more joy than encouragement from a boss. For this reason, focusing on the core parts of your work that are measurable and give you the greatest sense of accomplishment will bring you joy, further fueling your desire to work.
So, which of the seven rules does Vanderkam think is most important? Paying into our career capital account, which of course, builds slowly. But, she says, “If you take the long-term view of your career, say, ‘I won’t be with any one organization the whole time, but I will be with me. What can I do to make sure that “me” is a great person to work with?’ If you’re paying into your career capital account every day, it’s hard to see how your career couldn’t soar.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2013/05/01/the-7-ways-successful-people-approach-their-work/

8 Things You Should Not Do Every Day

It's for your own good. Cut these things out of your day and you'll see gains in productivity--not to mention happiness.

If you get decent value from making to-do lists, you'll get huge returns--in productivity, in improved relationships, and in your personal well-being--from adding these items to your not to-do list:

Every day, make the commitment not to:

1. Check my phone while I'm talking to someone.
You've done it. You've played the, "Is that your phone? Oh, it must be mine," game. You've tried the you-think-sly-but-actually-really-obvious downwards glance. You've done the, "Wait, let me answer this text..." thing.
Maybe you didn't even say, "Wait." You just stopped talking, stopped paying attention, and did it.
Want to stand out? Want to be that person everyone loves because they make you feel, when they're talking to you, like you're the most important person in the world?
Stop checking your phone. It doesn't notice when you aren't paying attention.
Other people? They notice.
And they care.

2. Multitask during a meeting.
The easiest way to be the smartest person in the room is to be the person who pays the most attention to the room.
You'll be amazed by what you can learn, both about the topic of the meeting and about the people in the meeting if you stop multitasking and start paying close attention. You'll flush out and understand hidden agendas, you'll spot opportunities to build bridges, and you'll find ways to make yourself indispensable to the people who matter.
It's easy, because you'll be the only one trying.
And you'll be the only one succeeding on multiple levels.

3. Think about people who don't make any difference in my life.
Trust me: The inhabitants of planet Kardashian are okay without you.
But your family, your friends, your employees--all the people that really matter to you--are not. Give them your time and attention.
They're the ones who deserve it.

4. Use multiple notifications.
You don't need to know the instant you get an email. Or a text. Or a tweet. Or anything else that pops up on your phone or computer.
If something is important enough for you to do, it's important enough for you to do without interruptions. Focus totally on what you're doing. Then, on a schedule you set--instead of a schedule you let everyone else set--play prairie dog and pop your head up to see what's happening.
And then get right back to work. Focusing on what you are doing is a lot more important than focusing on other people might be doing.
They can wait. You, and what is truly important to you, cannot.

5. Let the past dictate the future.

Mistakes are valuable. Learn from them.
Then let them go.
Easier said than done? It all depends on your perspective. When something goes wrong, turn it into an opportunity to learn something you didn't know--especially about yourself.
When something goes wrong for someone else, turn it into an opportunity to be gracious, forgiving, and understanding.
The past is just training. The past should definitely inform but in no way define you--unless you let it.

6. Wait until I'm sure I will succeed.
You can never feel sure you will succeed at something new, but you can always feel sure you are committed to giving something your best.
And you can always feel sure you will try again if you fail.
Stop waiting. You have a lot less to lose than you think, and everything to gain.

7. Talk behind someone's back.
If only because being the focus of gossip sucks. (And so do the people who gossip.)
If you've talked to more than one person about something Joe is doing, wouldn't everyone be better off if you stepped up and actually talked to Joe about it? And if it's "not your place" to talk to Joe, it's probably not your place to talk about Joe.
Spend your time on productive conversations. You'll get a lot more done--and you'll gain a lot more respect.

8. Say "yes" when I really mean "no."
Refusing a request from colleagues, customers, or even friends is really hard. But rarely does saying no go as badly as you expect. Most people will understand, and if they don't, should you care too much about what they think?
When you say no, at least you'll only feel bad for a few moments. When you say yes to something you really don't want to do you might feel bad for a long time--or at least as long as it takes you to do what you didn't want to do in the first place.

http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/8-things-you-should-not-do-every-day.html

10 Ways to Make Email Better

Hate managing email? This list of tricks can help.

I have nearly 21,000 email messages in my inbox. I don't file, archive, or delete anything.
Think this hands-off approach is a bloody mess? Personally, I think my approach is working--I try to touch email messages as few times as possible, spend zero time organizing them and feel confident if I ever need to search for a keyword or for someone who works at a particular company, Gmail's search capabilities can find it in my massive pile.

Yet I'm doing it all wrong, according to email-filtering service Sanebox, which advises the opposite strategy--one in which you let its algorithms sift through all your messages and organize them neatly into manageable folders that do all sorts of neat tricks. I've tried it, and it is, indeed, slick.

In fact, the folks at Sanebox argue that keeping all your mail in your inbox is "terrible for your productivity," the company opined in a really helpful (and entertaining) list of 100 email hacks it recently compiled.

Here's a round-up of the company's best tips.

Turn off notifications.
You're humming along with work swimmingly and you hear it--the ping on your phone that tells you an email just landed in your inbox. Now you're curious, so you hop in there to see who it's from and your productivity just stopped dead still. Unless you're waiting for some time-sensitive critical message, don't give yourself an excuse to keep checking email. Silence notifications wherever you're getting them (including visual popups on the desktop). A better bet is to set aside a few times during the day to deal with email.

Never unsubscribe from suspicious emails.
Hate spam? One way to get even more of it is to hit an unsubscribe link in a message you're not sure why you're getting. If you do, you could end up at a website where you're asked to input your email address to confirm your desire to unsubscribe. Now the spammer has verified your email address (it was only a guess that landed the original message in your inbox) and can sell it to others who will barrage you with messages.

Don't use images in your signature.
Sometimes people are looking for a particular file and filter their messages according to which ones include attachments. By including an image (which becomes an attachment) in your signature you're actually mucking up their search results. Plus, tossing around unnecessary graphics is a waste of bandwidth.

Don't use email to discuss a difficult subject.
If someone at work needs straightening out, don't do it on email, particularly if there's a chance the discussion could become contentious or if someone could be hurt or offended. It's much easier to gauge someone's emotions and respond appropriately on the phone, via video chat, or even better, in person.
Never email your credit card information.
Unencrypted email is not secure so you don't want to use it to communicate any kind of confidential information. For one thing, a message may have to cross any number of networks before a recipient gets it, and once it arrives how will that person store it? What if their system is compromised?

Forget about attachments and use links instead.
Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and the like are great because you can share a file with others and as soon as someone makes an edit to it, the change is viewable by everyone who has access. Attachments, on the other hand, are static--if you find yourself in an email volley including various iterations of the same document things can get confusing. With a URL linking to the cloud, however, version control isn't a worry.

Stop scanning and faxing.
If you've ever been emailed a contract to physically sign and return to someone, you know what a pain this can be. You either have to print it out and find an actual fax machine, or take the time to scan, save, and attach each page into an email.
Instead, use an online fax service such as Hello Fax. The first five pages are free; after that plans start at $10 a month.

Amp your network right inside email.
Rapportive is a free tool for Gmail users that adds a sidebar to each message you receive that shows you what the person looks like, information about what they do, where they're located, as well as what social networks they use. The best part is this: Directly within the window you can send a LinkedIn connection invitation, add someone to a Google+ circle, follow him or her on Twitter, or friend them on Facebook.

Fill in the recipient last.
There's nothing worse than accidentally sending a message before you intend to. Save yourself this embarrassment by leaving the "To" field empty until your missive is perfect. Gmail users can also use Google's "Undo Send" feature which gives you a few seconds after you hit send to change your mind. To turn it on, go to settings (the cog on the right of your Gmail window), then Labs, where you'll find the feature plus a slew of others you might find helpful.

Use an unguessable password that's different for each account.
You've heard this one before, but it bears repeating because lots of people still get in trouble for not heeding this advice. Your email password absolutely has to be one that someone can't guess and one that you don't use with any other account.

To ensure it can't be guessed, use the first letters of a memorable phrase, such as yamsmosymmhwsag, a 15-character password (longer is better) taken from "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray."

Another trick: Think of a two-word phrase at least eight characters long that you can remember, such as "SteakBurrito" and pepper it with symbols that look like letters, like this: St3@kBurr!t0. Then, for each site that you need a unique password, take the first and fourth letter of the site and stick it in the middle of your skeleton key. So, for Facebook, your password would be St3@kfeBurr!t0.

And don't store all your various passwords on paper or in a file somewhere but in a password manager such as LastPass. Not only can the service generate unique passwords, it's free and available as a plugin for all the major browsers.

http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/10-ways-to-make-email-better.html

The Deadly Cost of a B-Player

Here's how mediocre employees can take down a business. Don't let it happen to you.

I recently attended VatorSplash here in San Francisco, and I had the fortune of listening to Renaud Laplanche, CEO of Lending Club speak about a variety of topics. The one that struck me most wasn't about innovation (which is one thing Vator is all about) it was about hiring. My ears perked up.

There's no shortage of information about hiring on Inc.com; Tony Hsieh let us in on the hiring snafus at Zappos. So I'll add this article to the list because it seems so obvious but it's not. It's about how a B-player can ruin your business, or at least take years away from where your business "should be."

Renaud laid it out simply: when you hire a B-player, they'll do an okay job and there's not really a reason to fire them. But B-players can do a few damaging things to your business:

1. They'll either hire mediocre people just like them or even worse, C-players, making an increasingly larger portion of your business run by them.
2. Your A-players will leave because they don't want to work on a mediocre team and they get sick of the general feeling of not being able to get things done.

You've got to nip your B-players in the bud. Either get them to "A" status by coaching and mentoring them, or cut them loose. You don't want to look back and think about where your business "could have" been.

How have you dealt with B-players on your team? I'd love to hear your challenges and successes.

http://www.inc.com/janine-popick/the-deadly-cost-of-a-b-player.html

Stealing Time: How Highly Productive People Get More Done

You can get discouraged by all the things that take minutes here and there from your day--or you can steal some of that time back.

Time is a precious and tricky resource. You only get so much, and when it's gone, it's gone for good. You can start the day with the best of intentions to cram in as much as possible. But then you wind up having to deal with all those things--phone calls, an urgent request from customers, computer outage, a delay running necessary errands--that steal some of that time out of your day.

But while there isn't a way to change the nature of reality, you can improve your productivity. Instead of being purely a victim, steal some of that time right back.

Think Differently
Rarely do things you need to accomplish happen in one continuous block like a video game, where if you don't get through the next start, you start over at a previous point. Instead, your day is filled with what are much shorter segments of small tasks that either exist on their own or are part of bigger undertakings.
Instead of being like a video game, your day is more like how a computer multitasks. There are many jobs that have to be done. The computer gives each a turn, performing some work on one, then putting it on hold and moving to the next.

Start Stealing
To steal time back, you need to learn how to make use of the periods in which you're left waiting for something else to happen. For example, you're on hold, waiting for a vendor customer service person to get on the phone and handle a problem you're having. Instead of just listening to terrible music, scan through some emails or skim an article you've been meaning to read.

Perhaps you're paying a call on a prospect and will be waiting for five minutes. Sounds like a good time to pull out a tablet loaded with some work (you did bring it along, didn't you?) and make some progress on a response to an RFP. At a restaurant in that time between placing an order and receiving your food? Do some productive day dreaming, with notebook at hand, about new product or service ideas. Or write that birthday card to your Aunt Zelda.

The bad news is that we all waste enormous amounts of time. The good news is that even without giving up some guilty pleasures such as watching "Downton Abbey"--you do need breaks from work and personal life expectations--there are many opportunities to snatch back a few minutes here and there to take care of small tasks that would otherwise nag or never get done.

 http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/stealing-time-how-highly-productive-people-get-more-done.html

How to Allocate Your Time, and Your Effort

How does he find time to meet with 10 customers a week and make his yearly quota in the first quarter?, a salesman wonders about his top producing coworker. I can barely find time to have five appointments a week and get all my paperwork done correctly and turned in on time. 

How does she manage to champion strategic initiatives, network with executives, and only work 40 hours a week?, a manager ponders about his colleague on the corporate fast track. After a day full of project meetings, the best I can do is reactively respond to e-mail at night instead of proactively developing my department.

Here's the secret: Your colleagues that zoom ahead of you with seemingly less effort have learned to recognize and excel in what really counts — and to aim for less than perfect in everything else.

Most likely the highest producing salesman on your team spends less than half the amount of time that you do on filling out paperwork. Yes, it may be sloppy, but no one really cares because he's skyrocketing the revenue numbers. The manager who has caught the eye of upper management may send e-mails with imperfect grammatical structure and decline invites to tactical meetings. But when a project or meeting really matters, she outshines everyone.

If you're shocked and feel like this seems completely unfair, I'm guessing that you probably performed very well in school where perfectionism is encouraged.

I know. I was a straight-A student from sixth grade through college graduation who did whatever it took to produce work at a level that would please my professors. Admittedly, this strategy paid off as a student. My perfect GPA signified an exceptional level of achievement, and I was fortunate that in my case, it was rewarded with scholarships and job offers.

The rules changed when I started my own business over seven years ago. I realized that doing A-work in everything limited my success. At that point I realized that I needed to focus more on my strengths. As Tom Rath wisely explains in his StrengthsFinder books, you can achieve more success by fully leveraging your strengths instead of constantly trying to shore up your weaknesses. Realizing the importance of purposely deciding where I will invest more time and energy to produce stellar quality work and where less-than-perfect execution has a bigger payoff has had a profound impact on my own approach to success and my ability to empower clients who feel overwhelmed.

As I talk with time coaching clients struggling with overwhelm whether they be professors, executives, or lawyers, a common theme comes up — they can't find time to do everything. And, they're right: no one has time for everything. Given the pace of work and the level of input in modern society, time management is dead. You can no longer fit everything in — no matter how efficient you become. (This conundrum is what inspired me to write a book on time investment).

In my time investment philosophy, I encourage individuals to see time as the limited resource it is and to allocate it in alignment with their personal definition of success. That leads to a number of practical ramifications:

• Decide where you will not spend time: Given that you have a limited time budget, you will not have the ability to do everything you would like to do regardless of your efficiency. The moment you embrace that truth, you instantly reduce your stress and feelings of inadequacy. For example, professionally this could look like reducing your involvement in committees, and personally this could look like hiring someone else to do lawn maintenance or finish up a house project.
• Strategically allocate your time: Boundaries on how and when you invest time in work and in your personal life help to ensure that you have the proper investment in each category. As a time coach, I see one of the most compelling reasons for not working extremely long hours is that this investment of time resources leaves you with insufficient funds for activities like exercise, sleep, and relationships.
• Set up automatic time investment: Just like you set up automatic financial investment to mutual funds in your retirement account, your daily and weekly routines should make your time investment close to automatic. For example, at work you could have a recurring appointment with yourself two afternoons a week to move forward on key projects, and outside of work you could sign up for a fitness boot camp where you would feel bad if you didn't show up and sweat three times a week.
• Aim for a consistently balanced time budget: Given the ebbs and flows of life, you can't expect that you will have a constantly balanced time budget but you can aim for having a consistently balanced one. Over the course of a one- to two-week period, your time investment should reflect your priorities.

Once you have allocated your time properly, you also need to approach the work within each category differently. As I explained above, trying to "get As in everything" keeps you from investing the maximum amount of time in what will bring the highest return on your investment. That's why I developed the INO Technique to help overcome perfectionism and misallocation of your 24/7. Here's how it works:

When you approach a to-do item, you want to consider whether it is an investment, neutral, or optimize activity. Investment activities are areas where an increased amount of time and a higher quality of work can lead to an exponential payoff. For instance, strategic planning is an investment activity; so is spending time, device-free, with the people you love. Aim for A-level work in these areas. Neutral activities just need to get done adequately; more time doesn't necessarily mean a significantly larger payoff. An example might be attending project meetings or going to the gym. These things need to get done, but you can aim for B-level work. Optimize activities are those for which additional time spent leads to no added value and keeps you from doing other, more valuable activities. Aim for C-level work in these — the faster you get them done, the better. Most basic administrative paperwork and errands fit into this category.

The overall goal is to minimize the time spent on optimize activities so that you can maximize your time spent on investment activities. I've found that this technique allows you to overcome perfectionist tendencies and invest in more of what actually matters so you can increase your effectiveness personally and professionally.
On a tactical level, here are a few tips on how you can put the INO Technique into action:

• At the start of each week, clearly define the most important investment activities and block out time on your calendar to complete them early in the week and early in your days. This will naturally force you to do everything else in the time that remains.


• When you look over your daily to-do list, put an "I," "N," or "O" beside each item and then allocate your time budget accordingly, such as four hours for the "I" activity, three hours for the "N" activities, and one hour for the "O" activities.


• If you start working on something and realize that it's taking longer than expected, ask yourself, "What's the value and/or opportunity cost in spending more time on this task?" If it's an I activity and the value is high, keep at it and take time away from your N and O activities. If it falls into the N category and there's little added value or the O category and spending more time keeps you from doing more important items, either get it done to the minimum level, delegate it, or stop and finish it later when you have more spare time.


• If you keep a time diary or mark the time you spent on your calendar, you can also look back over each week and determine if you allocated your time correctly to maximize the payoff on your time investment. 

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/how_to_allocate_your_time_and.html

6 Things Really Productive People Do

People often ask me, amazed, how I manage to do so many things. Aside from writing two columns every week, I speak regularly, travel, create videos, manage my business, write books, consult with five companies, network, socialize, cycle, run, read, cook, sleep six to seven hours a night and have dates with my wife. Oh yeah, I watch a lot of television while hanging out with my dog as well.

Okay, I know it sounds ridiculous. But accomplishing my preferred future requires this level of activity. I have the same 24 hours in a day that you do, but I have made specific choices that allow me to make the most of every day, and still feel happy and relaxed. Perhaps these tips will help you make the most of your time as well.

1. Pick Your Priorities
Make choices about the activities in your life. With most endeavors, you can either go deep or go wide. Focus on spending time that for you is fun and productive. If you like big families, have them, but recognize up front that kids require time and you'll have to choose a lifestyle that supports quality time with them, for you to feel satisfied. I chose the life of a consultant because I like to work with companies, but don't want the life of a big company CEO. My choices are based on the lifestyle I want.

2. Go For Efficiency
You don't do everything well. The things you do well usually give you greater joy and require less time. Don't take on something with a steep learning curve if you don't have the available bandwidth. Design your life to meet your wants, and recognize when to say no to opportunities that are outside the scope of your desires. Live your life by design, not default.

3. Integrate Your Activities
Many people go crazy trying to figure out how to spend time with friends, family, work, play, etc.  Stop trying to balance time between them all. Find ways to enjoy them in a combined manner. Build your social life around people in your work environment. Find people in your company who share common interests and develop your career around the people and activities you love. If everything is out of synch to the point where you feel pulled and stressed, a change is likely imminent one way or another.

4. Actively Manage Time-wasters
Social media, family, friends, employees, co-workers and general whiners all under certain circumstances can suck precious time from you if you let them. Budget your time for necessary activities. Make a choice to limit non-supportive interactions that don't energize you. As for social media, it can easily be a black hole for time and productivity. Use it appropriately and sparingly as a tool to support your endeavors and social needs, but lay off the Farmville.

5. Be an Active Learner
You would think learning takes more time from you, but actually there are always new tools and new ways of doing things that can save you time on mundane tasks freeing you up for your priorities. Always be looking for a new way to gain back an hour here or there. Just try it and dump it quick if it starts to drag on.

6. Lighten Up
No need to beat yourself up if you can't do all the things you want because you are handling other stuff that needs attention. It happens. The world won't come to an end in most cases just because you left a few things undone. Celebrate progress and keep refining toward a happy productive existence. This is why making lists and crossing off items is a staple in any productivity handbook. Every completion is a small victory that adds up in a big way.

http://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/6-things-really-productive-people-do.html

Why You Can't Do It All

The simple rule for start-up survival is to focus on the 80/20 rule-the 20% of tasks that generate 80% of the benefit.

My first year at business school, I thought my professors were trying to kill me. Each night, I had more reading and homework than could possibly get done in one evening even if I stayed up all night. I quickly realized that one of the key lessons of survival was prioritization--figuring out what portion of the work was most important and what just was not going to get done.

I remember one night, working on a term paper with a group of students. We had worked hard on the paper and we all thought it was in good shape. We had other work to complete that night and were not anxious to pull an all-nighter so we were ready to move on. One of the team members, however, felt it was not "A" material and wanted to keep working on it. I remember thinking even back then that this guy did not "get it."
My life in start-ups has been the same experience as business school. To survive and flourish, you have to quickly figure out what is "important" and what is "noise." You can't do it all...

Both at my former company TripAdvisor as well as my current company Car Gurus, we have a saying: follow the 80/20 rule, technically known as the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle tells us that 20 percent of the inputs account for 80 percent of the results. You have to cut through the noise, figure out what tasks represent the 20 percent with the greatest leverage and focus on those tasks. Find those projects that make a big impact and ignore EVERYTHING else.

Is it difficult to step away from fire drills and turn away from the mounting volume in your inbox? Absolutely. But if you don't, your days--and your team's days--will slip away without having addressed the projects that will really drive your business.

The sooner you figure out how to apply the 80/20 rule and run with it, the better off you'll be.  There are 100 things you can focus on each day, and it's up to you to parse the data, decide what projects or features have the greatest leverage and get the product to market as fast as you can.

Don't forget, you can't do it all....

http://www.inc.com/langley-steinert/why-you-cant-do-it-all.html

10 Tricks for a Fabulous Workday

Want to have the best workday ever?  Day after day?  It's not as difficult as you think.
These 10 tweaks to your everyday behavior will virtually guarantee you a day that's not just enjoyable but allows you to get more done than you ever thought possible.

1. Start with 15 minutes of positive input.
It's easier to achieve and maintain a positive attitude if you have a "library" of positive thoughts in your head, so you can draw upon them if the day doesn't go exactly as you'd prefer. Start each day by reading (or listening to) an inspirational book to ensure that you have just such a resource at hand.

2. Tie your work to your life's goals.
Always remember that there's a deeper reason why you go to work and why you chose your current role. Maybe it's to support your family, to change the world in some way, to help your customers, to make a difference: Whatever the deeper motivation, remind yourself that this workday--today--is the opportunity to accomplish part of that deeper and more important goal.

3. Use your commute wisely.
Most people waste their commute time listening to the news or (worse, especially if they're driving) making calls, texting, or answering emails. In fact, your commute time is the perfect time to get yourself pumped up for the day, and there's no better way to do this than to listen to music that truly inspires you and gets you in the right mood. Don't depend on a DJ: Make your own mixes!

4. Stick a smile on your face.
It's likely, if you followed the first three steps, that you'll already be smiling. If not, stick a smile on your face anyway.

It doesn't matter if it feels fake: Research has shown that even the most forced of smiles genuinely reduces stress and makes you happier. Does this mean you should be grinning like the Joker in the Batman comics? Well, yes, if that's the best you can do. But something a bit more relaxed might be less alarming to co-workers.

5. Express a positive mood.
When most people are asked social greetings--questions such as "How are you?" or "What's up?"--they typically say something neutral ("I'm OK") or negative, like "Hangin' in there." That kind of talk programs your brain for failure.

Instead, if anyone inquires, say something positive and enthusiastic, like: "Fantastic!" or "I'm having a wonderful day!" It's true that there are some people whom this annoys--but these are people you should be avoiding anyway. (See No. 7, below.)

6. Do what's important first.
Everybody complains about having too much to do, but few people do anything about it. As I explained in "The Surprising Secret of Time Management," 20% of your activities are going to produce 80% of your results.  So do that 20% first, before you get to the 80% of your activities that is mostly wasted time. You'll get more done, and you'll get better results.

7. Avoid negative people.
If you've been following Steps 1 through 6, you'll probably find that the most negative people in your orbit will be avoiding you, while the positive people will want to hang out with you and help you. Though it's true you can't avoid all the Debbie Downers, you can certainly find something else to do when they start grousing about stuff they won't or can't change.

8. Don't work long hours.
Long hours are simply a bad idea. For one thing, as I have pointed out before: Long hours, after a short burst of productivity, actually make you less productive. But frankly, if you've followed Steps 1 through 7, you'll be getting so much done that you won't need to work those long hours.

9. Wind down and relax.
Once you're done with the workday, fill the remainder of your hours with nonwork-related activities that bring you joy and help you relax. The analogy of "recharge your batteries" is valid. Failing to take time to relax and stop thinking about work guarantees that you'll begin the next day with a "hangover" of resentment that will leach the joy out of what can, and should be, a positive work experience. overconcentration.

10. End your day with 15 minutes of gratitude.
As I pointed out in "The True Secret of Success," exercising your "gratitude muscle" is the best way to make certain that you experience more success. Before you go to sleep, get out a tablet (paper or electric), and record everything that happened during the day about which you are (or could be) grateful.
You'll sleep better and be ready for tomorrow--which will probably be even more fabulous than today.

But What About ...
Now, I know some of this can sound like a stretch. It may take a leap of faith to give this approach a try. But before you push back too much, let me answer some of the questions I sometimes hear. 

• What if something really horrible happens during the day? You'll be much better prepared to deal with challenges than if you were already halfway to miserable--which is how most people go through their workday. 
• What if I simply have to deal with a negative person? Tune out the negativity. Learn to shrug it off. If the negativity becomes too much of a burden, start using the extra energy you're producing to reorganize your team or (if the person is outside your company) find a different partner. 
• What if I'm too depressed to do any of this? If that's the case, you may need professional help. None of these tricks require more time and effort than making yourself miserable, however. 
• Do these tricks really work? Yes.

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/have-a-fabulous-workday-10-tricks.html

Best Way to Make Employees Better at Their Jobs

Forget trying to come up with motivational tools and "tricks." There's a better--and simpler--way to get more out of your staff.

You've been there. You've stared at a blank document as you struggled to come up with incredible words of wisdom that will inspire and motivate your employees.
So has Scott Moorehead, CEO of The Cellular Connection, which has over 800 stores and is the largest Verizon premium wireless retailer in the U.S.

"I was sitting in front of my computer, trying to come up with something I could tell all these smart people in my company that would help them do their job better," Moorehead says, "and I realized that what I really should be doing is asking them what I should do."

Make them CEO
The ground rules were simple: Yesterday you were a regional manager. Today you're the CEO. What would you do to make the company better?

Moorehead says many of the answers related to the person's job, but some related to broader issues. And regardless of the answer, employees were able to indirectly express their emotions out without offending anyone.

"Overall I loved the feedback," Moorehead says, "but it was also depressing because a number of people said, 'I would do whatever I could to bring back the family atmosphere we used to have in the company.' Those responses made me feel like such a fraud. Every day I was talking about how our business is a family and about really knowing our employees.... and that's not how employees in the field felt.

"We have 800 locations and people across the country," he continued. "It was hard for all of our employees to feel like they are part of the family. I hadn't recognized that. I still saw us as a mom and pop, but they saw us as a giant bureaucratic company. So I immediately changed my mindset from growing the company to fixing who we are."

Keep in mind Moorehead is used to listening to employees. His parents started the company, and they put him through a rigorous training process that required him to work in more than 30 positions throughout the company--from customer service to sales to delivery truck driver to accounting.

"Everyone asks me if that was hard," he says. "I thought it was easy. I didn't have anything to hide and treated the task at hand as the task at hand instead of dwelling on what I would do next. I just stepped into every job and worked hard. I learned a lot, but I also earned the respect of our employees... something I didn't realize I was doing until it was done."

In 2008, at age 30, Moorehead took over the company reins from his father. Since then revenue has grown 239%, from $137 to $466 mil.

Get Rid of What Makes Them Unhappy
"By getting to know our employees and their jobs," Moorehead says, "I could eliminate things that made them unhappy and kept them from doing a better job. Sometimes it's not spreadsheets--it's company morale."

Feedback also convinced him to open satellite offices in other cities so the company could recruit better talent. "Most of our new hires were commuting from up to an hour a day," he says. "To have someone outside my normal circle tell me we needed to go where the talent is was huge."

Of course there is no reason to give employees a voice if you aren't willing to listen, so if you decide to try something like "CEO For a Day" (and why wouldn't you?), respond. Tell each employee what you think about their ideas and input. Be as open and honest as possible. Provide a thoughtful response: yes or no, and most importantly why.

"My secret to success is to be the same person at work that you are when you're having a great day with your best friend," Moorehead says. "You listen to your friends, right? So listen to your employees.
"Then just be that person, each and every day. If you are brave, honest, forthcoming, and transparent you don't have to try to be a leader. You can be yourself."

Where's the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting

What do chief executives do all day?

It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.

That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms.

Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.

In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren't recorded by CEOs' assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.

The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.

But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs' time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.

Even if a CEO has a lot of direct reports, "the effect of the CFO or COO is stronger," and may help reduce a CEO's time spent in internal meetings, says Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun, a co-author of the project. The other researchers were Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat, of the London School of Economics and Julie Wulf of Harvard Business School. Their preliminary findings were just published in a Harvard Business School paper.

The researchers said they weren't surprised by the amount of time spent in meetings, since one of the roles of a CEO is to manage employees and meet with customers and consultants.

A busy meeting schedule—often conducted virtually in global companies—can indicate that executives are engaged with their companies and close to their managers and clients. Still, CEOs say they pine for more solo time to think and strategize.

Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., technology-services firm with about 4,500 employees, says he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. "I don't know when I'm not in a meeting," he says.

Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time "doing frequent iterative touches," either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with "four or five windows open concurrently."

As a result, his meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes, he says.

Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors Inc., a human resources software firm, says he spends about a third of his work time, at most, in formal meetings.

"While you are sitting in a meeting, your competition is getting stuff done," he says. (Software firm SAP AG recently announced that it was acquiring SuccessFactors.)

NV "Tiger" Tyagarajan, president and CEO of Genpact Ltd., a technology-management firm, recently analyzed his time use to make sure he was spending enough time meeting with clients. He determined he was. But he does wish for more time to "sit back and think," he says, or simply to bounce around ideas "without a fixed meeting or a fixed agenda."

Mr. Dalgaard says he tries to dedicate as much as 25% of his week to thinking by making time on flights or blocking out time on his schedule—occasionally retreating to a quiet room or driving on the highway to let ideas crystallize.

Likewise, Mr. Cowan says that he tries to "build a big fence" around his first work hour in the morning at 7 a.m. to clear his thoughts, catch up on reading and manage email.

In contrast, Jon Oringer, CEO of New York based stock-photo provider Shutterstock Images LLC, doesn't seem to lack "alone time." He is rarely on the phone and averages about three meetings a day mostly lasting about 30 minutes, with some going up to 90 minutes.

The rest of the time he is usually scoping out his competition on blogs like TechCrunch, monitoring Web traffic and Twitter feeds and working on his own pet projects.

He is in the office from about 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., but says he works a lot from home, even during weekends.

"It doesn't feel like I work when I'm working," Mr. Oringer said. "It's my thing."

Executives' assessment of how they spent their time differed from the actual records, as noted by their calendars and personal assistants, researchers found.

When top executives compare their top priorities to their time use, "they are usually surprised about the mismatch," says Robert Steven Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

He recommends executives substitute the word 'money' for 'time' when deciding how to schedule their week. "With money... you'd be more careful and judicious about it. If someone asked you for some, you'd be more likely to say no," says Mr. Kaplan.

The researchers' global study involved both private and public companies from many countries; they didn't determine whether executive time use correlated with a firm's performance.

In another sample of 94 Italian CEOs, the researchers found that the way an executive budgets his or her time strongly correlated with a firm's profitability and productivity, measured as revenue per employee.

In the Italian sample, the key to a company's performance was with whom CEOs met. Meeting with external figures didn't help a firm's productivity, they found. Better performance came from more internal meetings, they found.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/where-s-the-boss--trapped-in-a-meeting.html

How to Excel at Anything

Hit a performance wall? Here are four ways to break through it.
 
You’re good.

You could be better.

Consider a skill you've developed: Business, sports, personal, anything. At first you were terrible.

Terrible is a great place to start because improving on terrible is easy. With a little practice you turned terrible into mediocre.

And you had fun, because improvement is fun.

Then with a lot more practice—practice that started to be a little less fun—you got even better.

Now you’re good. Maybe you’re even really good.

But you’re not great. And somewhere along the way you stopped improving, stopped having fun, and started to think you weren’t capable of being great.

Why did you stop improving and stop having fun? Hitting the wall wasn't due to a lack of effort, or willpower, or even talent. You stopped improving because of the way you applied your effort and willpower.

Say you’ve developed reasonable proficiency at a physical skill. Take golf. At first every swing of the club felt awkward, but you gradually found a groove. You started to think less. You quit thinking about your hips. You quit thinking about the height of your back swing. You quit thinking about what your wrists do in your follow-through.

You started thinking less because your skills became more automatic. In some ways that's a great sign: Automatic means you internalized a skill.

But automatic is also a bad sign. Anything you do automatically, without thinking, is really hard to adjust. To get better you must find ways to force yourself to adapt and modify what you already do well.

Here are four ways to force yourself to adapt—and in the process rediscover the joy of improving:

Go fast. Force yourself to perform a task more quickly. You’ll make mistakes; probably lots of them. Don't get frustrated. The more mistakes you make the better, because the best way to learn is from making mistakes. If a product demo usually takes 10 minutes, fly through it in five. (As a practice run, of course.) You’ll break free from some old habits, adapt to the faster speed, and find ways to make a good presentation even better.

Go slow. Take your time. Take too much time. Swinging a golf club in slow motion allows you to feel muscles working that you normally don’t notice. Taking more time to run through your sales pitch will uncover opportunities to highlight additional customer benefits. Going slower is a great way to notice habits that have become automatic—and to examine each one of them critically.

Go piece by piece. Every complex task is made up of a series of steps. Pick a step and focus solely on that step. Break a sales call into component pieces; first focus on perfecting your opening. No customer is the same, so develop modifications you can instantly apply to different scenarios. Deconstruct each step, master that step, and move on to the next one. When you put all the pieces back together your skills will be markedly improved.

March to a different drum. We all settle on ways to measure our performance; typically we choose a method that lets us feel good about our performance. So pick a different measurement. If you normally measure accuracy, measure speed instead. If you normally measure leads generated, measure conversions instead. Use video. Ask a colleague to critique your performance. Your customers, your vendors, and your employees all measure your performance differently than you do. View yourself from their perspective and you’ll easily find areas for improvement.

Think this process won’t help you excel? Consider this passage from Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open:

Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball…

Every third ball… hits a ball already on the ground, causing a crazy sideways hop. I adjust at the last second, catch the ball early, and hit it smartly across the net. I know this is no ordinary reflex. I know there are few children in the world who could have seen that ball, let alone hit it…

My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.

When you try to do your best every time, every mistake you make is obvious, even if only to you. Learn from every mistake. Adapt and modify your techniques so you constantly improve.

Because when you keep improving you keep having fun—and all the focused effort you put in will once again feel worth it.

http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-excel-at-anything.html

7 Things Highly Productive People Do

You have more important things to focus on than, um, focusing. Get back on track with these tips.

You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?

Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.

Easier said than done, I know.

Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

Here are his tips for staying productive:

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
   
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
   
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
   
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
   
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
   
   
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day.
   
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours. 

 http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/7-things-highly-productive-people-do.html