Key Areas of Your Business

While in Toronto in early November at the Professional Organizers in Canada annual conference I attended a workshop delivered by Deanne Kelleher from Kaos Group called “Essential and Powerful Business Tools”.  The session made me realize how many systems all of us small business owners should have in place and perhaps don’t, myself included.  If only I could find the time!

Here are the key areas of our business that Deanne suggests we have systems for:

1. Customer Relations Management – simply using the Notes field in your existing customer contact database to record conversations, TY notes sent and referrals is a good place to start.  Also keep track of who subscribes to your newsletter.
2. Marketing and Networking – set goals for your newsletter distribution and track how many subscribers you have, how many you want and how much business comes from your newsletter.  Track how many business cards you give out in a year.  Look at your website analytics regularly.  If you write articles which ones create the most website traffic?
3. Email – create an FAQ section on your website to handle potential customer inquiries and create a standard email in your ‘Drafts’ folder for respond to routine inquiries.  Create a thank you email to send to each new person you meet asking them to subscribe to your newsletter.  Consider including a link to your newsletter in your email signature.
4. Process and Procedure – create an Operations Manual (ugh!) which includes administrative procedures, communication processes, goals, year end procedures, and much more.
5. Social Media – think about what you are saying and to whom.  How often are you saying it and where.  Does it work?  Is your goal to educate or acquire?  Are you connected to your ideal clients?
6. Tracking – what will you track and when?  How will you track it?  Why are you tracking it?

I don’t know about you, but I think I need to hire Deanne to help me figure out how to get all of this done!

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Is Email Overload Turning You Into a Hamster?

Yup, here I am yet again ranting about email productivity, or lack thererof!

I’m reading this great book about email entitled The Hamster Revolution. Though I’ve studied this subject a lot, I like the creative approach to explaining what email overload can do to us – it can turn us all into tiny hamsters running on a hamster wheel 7 days a week trying to keep up.

The book really brings home two keys to managing email before it manages you.

1. Reduce Email Volume
2. Improve Email Quality

The authors explain three key questions to ask yourself as you work on reducing email volume.  The idea being that if  you send less email you will receive less email. 

• Is Your Email Needed? Does my busy recipient truly need this email to do his or her job? “Send we-mail instead of me-mail“, the authors suggest.  Don’t you love it!
• Is Email the Appropriate Communication Tool? Email is company property and is stored forever and can be reviewed or forwarded at anytime anywhere.
• Is Your Message Targeted? Is your message being sent to the right people in the right way? Decrease your use of Reply All, CC and Distribution Lists.

Improving email quality has two components.  Write really good subject lines and sculpt the body of the message.

• Good subject lines are absolutely crucial to clear, easy and quick communication via email.  The book suggests putting 1 of 5 action words in every subject line: Action, Info, Request, Confirmed, and Delivery. And then writing a good descriptive title describing the project or using specific dates, times & places when referring to the topic at hand.
• The authors suggest sculpting the body of your email using a method called A-B-C.  A if for Action Summary, then B for Background and finally C for Close.  The Action Summary is a sentence that describes a specific action, purpose or key point.  The Background is the body of your message.  Try using bullet points, numbering and keep it short and to the point.  The Close is the place to include a nice comment, describe next steps, and include your automatic signature.

These are all concepts that I teach in each and every Take Control of Email workshop I do and in my Email Organizing Basics on-line web session.  However, clarifying them in this way seems to make the concepts easier to remember. Thanks Hamster Guys!

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Save Me From My Smartphone!

Yup, that’s right, I did it, I finally moved into this decade – I’ve got myself a brand new Blackberry Style 9670 Smartphone – eeks!

Now, you would think that perhaps that was an easy decision and that my relationship with my new device is a love in.  So not the case, people.   Mostly because it’s been a very long three week journey to get the right smartphone and to get it all nicely synced with MS Outlook. 

I think I’ll start at the beginning.  I’ve been carefully researching smartphones for several months and added the associated cost to my budget all ready to roll for 2011.  Now, the trouble is ‘they’ keep bringing out new devices faster than you can figure out what the little buggers can do, or not do. 

So, I had my eye on the LG Windows 7 Smartphone – loved that big screen and the slide out keyboard with the nice size keys on it.  So, of course, I went to the phone store and purchased myself this little devil after asking several ‘techie’ types if the Windows 7 would sync properly with my Outlook Contacts, Calendar and Tasks – “of course”, I was told by various people. 

Long story short, after many hours of phone support attempts and two very nasty men at LG who treated me like a complete idiot, I turned to the online community hiding under my Google search bar – just wish I’d thought of that before I bought the phone.  Therein I found a YouTube video which showed me how to download the software and install it in order to have my new LG phone and Outlook talk nicely to each other – cool, I thought to myself. 

However, what I discovered upon successfully getting everything up and running is that they don’t really talk nicely to each other at all.    You need to download a Windows Hotmail Live Connector in order to have your Contacts and Calendar talk to your phone.  Tasks were completely forgotten altogether by our friends at Windows – apparently they think we have nothing to do all day long except go to meetings and email people- geez, get a life!  Anyway, once I figured out that I now had to maintain two sets of everything, I nearly lost it. Yup, that’s right every time you add an appointment to your Outlook calendar, you have to add it to your Hotmail calendar and ditto for Contacts.  All I have to say is, “I don’t think so …bleep, bleep, bleep …!”

After a final call to the nice people at Bell Aliant, off I went with the phone back to the store to be exchanged for the Blackberry.   And, low and behold, it only took me a week to get the Blackberry Desktop Software onto my computer and finally get it synced – gee whiz, just my luck.  One techie friend told me that 99% of the time the software downloads perfectly, you plug in your BB and you’re off to the races.  Why did I have to fall into the 1% who downloaded it 5 or 6 times, called various techie people, got really frustrated, took it out on my husband (sorry, honey!) and then talked to my husband’s amazing friend Andy today who had me up and running in 30 mins. flat.  Andy, you rock! 

Just goes to show you that I should stick to organizing and let other people set up my technology.  Rest assured I will have all kinds of things to say about managing time effectively when you own a Smartphone.

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Those Darn ‘To Do’s’

I’m thinking about ‘To Do’s’ because there are just too darn many of them!  

If I look at my ‘To Do’s’ from this past week there are 51 items that I put on the various days this week and all but 4 of them are complete – this blogpost is the next one I can check off – yippee!  No wonder I’m exhausted – 51 ‘To Do’s’ crammed into an already fully booked week . . . . it’s so time for a nap.

I was chatting with a client yesterday who has finally got a reliable system for tracking her ‘To Do’s’ so they are now in one place.  Before she started using the Task list in Outlook she had ‘To Do’s’ in many places – on specially designed sheets just for that purpose, buried in her email inbox, in meeting notes, in her planning calendar and worst of all in her head!  The drawback to now having them all in one place is that she realizes how many there actually are which can be a bit scary. However, even though she is struggling with getting them done on the day she plans to do them, she does feel far more in control knowing they are all in one place and she can re-assign them throughout the week.

All this to say that making lists doesn’t actually accomplish anything other than gathering everything in one place and getting it out of your head.  Setting the intention to actually accomplish the specific items on the lists only happens when you make a concious decision on each and every item and decide when you will do it. You are usually going to have 3 categories of ‘To Do’s’ – do now, do soon, do someday.  The ‘do now’ and ‘do soon’ items should all be assigned a specific day whereas the ‘do someday’ will eventually either become ‘do soon’ or ‘do now’ or they will be deleted once you get really tired of looking at them on your list – ha!

You can effectively manage your ‘To Do’s’ with either a paper-based or electronic system.  I learned on paper 15 years ago from my friends at Priority Management and have been loosely following their system ever since.  I am in the process of considering switching to using Outlook but am delayed because I can’t decide which Smartphone to buy, darn it!  Without a Smartphone that gives me access to my Calendar and Tasks in Outlook there is no point switching from my paper system since I’m always out of my office and need my planning and organizing system by my side at all times.

I guess I’d better keep putting ‘Get a smartphone’ on my ‘To Do’ list until I finally get tired of looking at it and just take the plunge and buy one.

Well, kids, could go on and on, but gotta run and check some ‘To Do’s’ off my list!

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Your Brain at Work – Decision Making

Over the last two weeks I attended a fascinating series of webinars delivered by David Rock, CEO of Results Coaching Systems.  The series was entitled ‘Your Brain at Work’ and I learned so much about how your brain works and affects your productivity, among many other things, that I thought I should share with all of you.  As well, David says that talking about what you are studying helps to assimilate the information so I’m doing as instructed.

A survey of 6,000 employees showed that most do their best thinking in the morning but only 10% do their best thinking at work – yikes!  Perhaps this is because most of us use this crucial morning time at the office for checking email and attending meetings – not good. 

David recommends that you only use your brain for ‘processing’ not storing information and I so agree with him.  You can only consciously focus on one active task at a time and can only hold 4 ideas in your working memory.   Creative work takes the most mental energy and we need to do this during our best time of day and before we use up mental energy processing email and attending meetings. 

He says that one of the most complex tasks is prioritizing your day in alignment with achieving your goals.  And all these years I have been prioritizing my day the night before.  Hmmm… my reasoning for that was so that I could hit the ground running the next morning combined with the fact that I am not really a morning person.  Have I been doing it all wrong? 

When we try to make decisions or solve problems it takes a lot of energy.  In addition, when we are anxious we have a lot less insight which makes problem solving much more difficult.  A little bit of pressure inhibits the signal required to solve problems.  Imagine that most of us are either under constant pressure from our organization or we put constant pressure on ourselves to go faster, do more, be more productive.  It seems that perhaps we’ve got it all wrong?

We all need to slow down physically and mentally and stop pressuring ourselves to make decisions and solve problems. That is when we will begin to be truly productive.

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Email Productivity – Making Life Easier for Others

Here’s the last collection of thoughts I have on Email Productivity, I promise.  Well, maybe not.  You never know when I might read or think of something new and exciting to share!

The final part of managing email effectively has to do with thinking about the people on the receiving end of your email messages.  The underlying concept is that the fewer messages we send, the fewer we will receive.  Here are a few others.

1. Use ‘cc’ and ‘reply all’ very sparingly – before you use either, imagine that you have to ph0tocopy your message, put it in an envelope and mail it – would you still include as many people?

2. Use correct business etiquette – treat email as business correspondence, – use ‘Dear’, use capital letters to begin sentences, use proper sentence structure, and finally  ’Regards’ with your signature to complete the message

3. Respond to incoming messages within 24 hours – if you don’t know the answer, let the person know that you’re working on it

4. Limit each message to one topic – this makes it easier for the recipient to file, respond and manage your message

5. Use a descriptive subject line – subject lines are the most important part of your outgoing email, be specific as to message content and the action required by the recipient

6. When creating a message follow these steps to avoid forgetting the attachment – open the new message, insert the attachment, type the body of the message, create the subject line and finally insert the To:

7. Always include an automatic signature – there is nothing more frustrating, especially if the recipient is not as well organized as you are, than having to search for someone’s phone number when you receive an email and need to call them

Email makes communication faster and easier and can make a powerful business impression.  We canb all establish positive professional relationships by managing outgoing email effectively and always keeping the recipient in mind.

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Email Productivity – Filing and Retrieving Messages

Here’s the one part of the training I deliver on E-mail Productivity that even I am still not sure about.

Should we create folders within our E-mail program to file and retrieve messages?  Should we just leave all the messages in one folder which gets archived regularly and is searchable anytime?  Should we file all messages outside of our email program?  How should we handle all of the ‘in process’ messages that are filling up our inbox along with the constant flood of new messages?

I think the answers are always, “It depends.”  It depends on your organizing style and preferences, it depends on the policy of your organization when it comes to information management, it depends on the capacity of your email system, it depends on how the way you organize messages affects the other people you work with.

I personally prefer to create folders within my Personal Folders in my email program for any messages that are still hanging around as something that might possibly come back into my life in the current year.  Anything older than that should be archived or filed outside of my email program.  I like to have several ‘Action’ folders such as ‘Pending’ and ‘To Read’ plus my standard array of ‘Reference’ folders in my ‘Filing Cabinet’.  Folders such as:

• Administration
• Clients
• Marketing
• Personal
• Volunteer

A few other ideas you might want to consider include:

1. When should you file ‘Sent’ messages?
2. How can you use ‘Rules’ to automatically file messages?
3. Empty your ‘Deleted’ folder daily
4. Empty your ‘Sent’ folder monthly – I keep 3 months of ‘Sent’ messages
5. Run ‘Auto Archive’ daily for any messages older than 2 weeks

Any comments you would like to share on this subject, I would really appreciate. More on e-mail productivity again next week, I think.

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Email Productivity – Schedule Time to Process

Email is top of mind for me again this week.  I have just finished a week of email workshops for a client where we talked not only about communicating effectively by email but also about improving email productivity.

Here’s a quote I absolutely think says it all from time management guru Harold Taylor “Too many messages are being sent by too many people too often with too many people copied using too many words with too many mistakes and with too little thought.”

Here are the key points that I teach on improving email productivity:

• Schedule specific times during the day to process email
• Clear your inbox weekly
• Convert email messages to tasks and calendar appointments as needed
• Set up folders to organize email messages
• Turn off any sounds, pop-up windows, etc. that notify you of incoming messages
• Whenever possible close the email inbox window and work from your task list or calendar page

Marsha Egan says that every time you let an email message interrupt your productive work it takes 4 minutes for your brain to get back on track and focused on what you were doing.  Imagine if you check email every time a message comes in and you get 50 messages a day - that’s over 3 hours of lost productivity – yikes!

I suggest that you begin by becoming aware of how many messages you receive daily and how many times you stop to check incoming email.  If you can take control of just this one thing by scheduling specific time during the day for email processing, your productivity will improve immensely.

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Managing My Contacts – Help!

This weekend I was busy creating a new marketing campaign which meant entering over 100 new potential clients into my newsletter contact list.  The newsletter template I use requires me to import contacts in a .csv file.  Well, that’s where life gets complicated.

You see, I can save an Excel spreadsheet as a .csv file and then import it.  No big deal, right?  However, my contacts are all ‘supposed’ to be in my MS Outlook.  More confusion.  If I create a new category in Outlook and enter them all there, then export to an Excel spreadsheet, then save as a .csv, then import into the newsletter template I’m good, right? “Good grief”, is all I have to say.

All of my contacts are not in MS Outlook.  Yes, I just admitted it! This is where my organizing skills collapse in a heap of business cards and spreadsheets and paper address books.  You see, I hate keeping my contacts up-to-date in the computer.  I’d much rather be chatting on the phone with my contacts, having coffee or doing business, not entering their information in the computer.

There must be a simpler way.  Perhaps one of my goals for 2010 should be to find it.

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Managing Electronic Information

Over the past several weeks I have been doing some research on Electronic Document Management.  What I have discovered is that I know absolutely nothing about this subject even though I thought I had a handle on it.

Let me clarify that by saying that I am pretty skilled at working with small business owners and entrepreneurs on paper and electronic information management.  But when it comes to the world of big business and the overwhelming volume of e-mail plus all the documents created by hundreds of  individuals as well as massive shared drives holding thousands of documents, what I have learned is that some pretty sophisticated software to manage it all is your best bet.

I attended a fascinating webinar hosted by Mimosa Systems a couple of weeks ago. They have a pretty seamless system that takes the responsibility for managing ‘corporate records’ away from the individual user and files and manages it all seemlessly in the background.  Check them out at www.mimosasystems.com .

Having spent hours with some of my corporate clients trying to file and delete e-mail messages I can only imagine how productive they would be if they didn’t have to worry about doing this anymore!  Holy cow, people get on board, do it NOW!

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