Tom Krieglstein

Hindsight - 09/16/10 - Buffering Time

Today I was working on an excel doc that I should have just given to Megan, but I didn't. Afterwards I felt like I do when I eat a greasy pizza or candy bar. I know I shouldn't do it, but I did it anyways and I get a 'blah' feeling in my stomach. I used to not get this feeling with such tasks, but rather would get a sense of accomplishment, so I see it as actually a good thing.

I'm learning that working at the executive level is about buffering your time as much as possible to focus on only the work that is in either the entrepreneurial level of "High Urgency, High Importance" or  "Low Urgency, High Importance" boxes. The kind of tasks that have you working on your business verses in your business. Working on the excel doc is an example of working in the business, building out a marketing strategy is an example of working on the business.

The game then is to protect your boundaries for as long as you can throughout the day because various tasks, often found in the "High Urgency, Low Importance" box, will try and squeeze time out of you that isn't in either of the boxes listed above. Even though a task may only take a moment or so to do, it still forces your mind to shift away from the really important work just long enough for you to loose focus, and that costs you.

Home Office vs Office Office

For six years I worked from home and thought it was perfect to be able to stroll from the kitchen to "work" with my oatmeal in hand. For the past ten months I've been working, for the first time in my life, out of an office and now I know I'll never go back to working from home.

It's not that working from home doesn't have its positives, it's just that I didn't realize how much the negatives actually out weigh the positives until I wasn't working from home.

The biggest advantage I've discovered in "office life" is the separation of work and life. While working at home, I was never good at setting boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn't. The computer was always just an arms length away.

Now I've physically forced myself to have boundaries, and mentally I get excited for both. While eating my oatmeal in the morning, I mentally get excited for work. Like a basketball player prepping for a game. Then as my day winds down, usually around six, I mentally get excited to head home and not be working. In both situations, I'm more present than I've ever been before.

Another advantage of "office life" is in valuing my work. When I worked from home, work time was always a bit flexible. If something came up (family call, store run, mail, tv show, etc) I would easily be able to pause my work and go do it. Even more so than Annie, who also worked from home, because she had a boss she contracted for. I am my boss. Now my work hours are more defined and everyone around me treats them as such. It allows me to be more focused and present while at work.

On travel days, I tend to stay home before heading off to the airport, but I find it really hard to get into the work zone while there because I've trained myself so well over the past ten months to disassociate my home from my work.

I know some people work from home with great success, I realized I'm not one of them. All I want to do at home is spend quality time with family and friends.

Improved Effectiveness Through Simplified Task Prioritization

I used to divide tasks into high, medium, and low urgency. High meaning I'd take care of it within the week, low meaning sometime in the future, and medium meaning sometime in-between. I've since simplified my prioritization to only high and low urgency, and ditched medium.

Why? Every time I have to decide how to label a task it costs money both in time and opportunity costs (other work I could be doing). With the addition of a medium label, my time to prioritize took too long because I didn't have a clearly defined set of rules as to what constituted a medium level task. Where as high and low were clearly defined.

With only high and low prioritization levels, my organization time has significantly dropped and I'm much more effective at responding to the most important tasks first.

Try it out yourself by ditching medium level prioritization and clearly defining what it means to prioritize something as high or low.

5 Steps to Achieving and Maintaining Inbox Zero

Eight months ago, a Twitter friend, @cindykane, challenged her followers to have an empty inbox. Up until that point, my inbox was consistantly 100+ deep, so the idea was intriguing. For the past eight months, I'm happy to report my inbox has continued to stay at zero. However, learning a good system took a bit. Here are my five steps for anyone to achieve and maintain inbox zero.

 

1) Create an 'archive' folder and move your entire inbox to the folder. See how easy it was to reach inbox zero :-) Joking aside, this simple action frees you from the weight of seeing 100+ emails every time. You can always revisit the 'archive' folder if needed, so don't panic.

 

2) Remove yourself from every and all newsletters/listserves expect the most important. This will quickly reduce your inbox volume, and be honest, how many of them do you actually read? I concluded I really only read two of my twenty subscriptions. (Check out unsubscribe.com)

 

3) Create rules to filter messages away from your inbox to folders. I appreciate getting Facebook and Twitter email updates, but I don't want them in my inbox, so I have a folder, with a rule attached, that moves all emails from Facebook or Twitter to it.  This way I can batch review them at once verses individually in my inbox.

 

4) Disable all new email notifications. Don't let your inbox control you with a Pavlovian dog like sound. Instead, react to your inbox on your own terms. Check your inbox in batches throughout the day instead of on an ongoing basis.

 

5) Your inbox is not your To-Do list. This is probably the biggest single imporant piece of advice I can give you. Rewire your relationship with your inbox from a To-Do list to an air traffic control tower. Every piece of mail that comes in has four actions...

 

a)  Unsubscribe / Mark As Spam

 

b) Act right away by replying or reading, than archiving. And I mean RIGHT AWAY.

 

c) Move it to a 'Task - High' folder which marks the email as high importance that you'll act on within the week.

 

d) Move it to a 'Task - Low' folder which marks the email as low importance that you'll act on in your free time...whenever that is. (read more on high vs low prioritization here)

 

Five easy steps. Start now and try this system for one day, then two, then a week, a month, and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can actually maintain inbox zero.