Hi! I’m Chris Schultz. You’ve landed on my little outpost of internetville. I’m a unrepentant entrepreneur-enabler & community-activator. Thanks for swinging by. A penny for your thoughts.
Personal & Workplace Productivity 2007
- January 9th, 2007 /
Every year around this time of year scores of people are thinking and writing about their goal of being more productive then ever this year, and their techniques for accomplishing those goals. I’ve been implementing various processes both personally and here at the Voodoo office this past year to help with our productivity, so I thought I’d share them with our readers here.
Enhancing Office Productivity
- Daily “to-do sessions” with our team here - identify and assign tasks that need to be accomplished and review assignments from previous days. We work very democratically and consider ourselves “jack of all trades” so much of our work can be done by either of us, we split tasks in different ways to keep our workdays balanced.
- Regular conference calls with our team in Russia – We communicate with our Russian team using a combination of instant messenger, Basecamp, and occasionally email. We have used Skype on a limited basis in the past, but we are ramping up its use through scheduled video conference calls this year. We want to bridge the distance between us as much as possible and there’s nothing that does it like seeing and hearing each other. Not too mention it is a lot easier to explain site UI revisions over a call than it is to write it all out in Basecamp.
- Primary daily goals are due by noon – the morning is when we are most energized, but it is also the time that is most easily wasted. We are working to present the deliverables on each of our primary daily goals by noon, then move onto secondary tasks in the afternoon. These days that means accomplishing tasks on siteMighty in the morning and then on to blogging, customer communications, and business tasks in the afternoon.
- Implementing “Getting Things Done” strategy – I’ve been reading a lot about David Allen’s “GTD time and stress management” framework. We’re making an effort to implement it here, and I’ve purchased copies of the book for Blake and myself.
- Have the right tools for the job - this means no slow computers. I upgrade my laptop every year or so. Same with our office computers. If something doesn’t work, get rid of it. People’s time is way to valuable to waste fooling around with bad technology.
Enhancing Personal Productivity
- My Moleskine is in my pocket at all times – I started carrying a Moleskine with me last year and its been great. I write daily to-do lists in it and have it by my side all day long as I work. I mark finished tasks with one highlighter and carry the ones I don’t get done over to tomorrow with another color highlighter. As GTD recommends, getting stuff out of your head and onto paper really helps clear the mind.
- Spend the first 30 min of each day doing strategic planning – It’s too easy to sit down at your desk and start checking email, reading blogs, shopping, etc and next thing you know you have no idea what you want to get done that day. I sit down and plan my day based daily, weekly, monthly and yearly strategic goals. We learned this technique from our EO strategic planning workshop last fall. It’s been incredibly helpful for me.
- My 8525 is synched with my outlook for calendar – I like the sync on the Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile platform. I’ve never been a PDA carrier, but having your calendar on your phone is handy.
- Getting your thinking time in – I relish the time I get to think with a clear head and no distractions. I come up with my best ideas when I am taking my morning jog or riding my motorcycle to and from work.
We’ll be working hard to be more productive than ever this year. Here are some great resources on the GTD program. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions for us I’d love to hear them. Happy 2007!
Random Posts
- categories: All, Entrepreneurship /
Jan 10, 2007 at 11:05 am
I am sure you get tired of post suggestions but I think a good follow-up on this post at some point would be to go through a day of productivity. I am always interested to see how others work to reach their goals. How many hours a day? What are some necessities/quirks/perks that help you complete your schedule? How do you determine benchmarks and how do you measure them?
Sidenote…..if you are an existing Cingular customer…..I wonder what you will be buying in June???
Jan 10, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Blake, thanks for your comment. That is a great idea, a “day in the life” post. We’ll see if we can put that together, I appreciate the idea. As far as the iPhone goes… man, I bought the 8525 six months too early, but maybe Cingular will let me upgrade at that point. It is mighty enticing.
Jan 11, 2007 at 11:15 am
Great post! I especially agree with the points:
1) Daily “to-do sessions” & meetings with team, I would add that it is good to discuss how things were done at the end of the day summarizing it all, which gives people extra motivation to do things during the day.
2) Primary daily goals are due by noon – with all the meetings, urgent tasks, etc. it’s for sure good to list it all out or correct in the large A4 notebook (my personal experience), even though quite a few modern technologies around thinking with pen is always more efficient.
3) Spend the first 30 min of each day doing strategic planning – this too is really important, during the evening, breakfast and A4 notebook for drawing arrows and points is always really nice during that time to keep quite a few things better out of the brain and more on paper!
P.S. Really amazing how managing things and project is similar according to business experience around the world!
Oleg
Jan 16, 2007 at 11:37 am
Thanks for the insight guys. We follow a similar routine each morning! A mentor of mine called it “finishing your day before you start it”, meaning making sure your day was completely mapped out, with income producing/goal acheiving activities prioritized over the stress relieving activities (like filing, organizing the desk, answering emails, etc).
One note on the moleskine – i spent a LOT of time travelling post-Katrina and the more successful entrepreneurs I have met with all seemed to have their “notebook”. That made shopping for Christmas gifts for my business associates very easy (they ALL got a Moleskine!). It is a very inexpensive gift but priceless at the same time.
Since I spend so much time travelling, that is when i catch up on all of the business magazines. I always find that there are mentions of websites, companies, services, books etc that I want to find out more about, and they go in the moleskine. That way, when i get in front of a computer and have free time, I can go through my moleskine and start going down the list of all of the things i wanted to find out more about.