Reduce your work load

One of the funniest books I have ever read is Parkinson: The Law by C. Northcorte Parkinson. The author details the absurdities of organizational systems all over the world. One of my favorites is the story of the British, who until 1938, had sentries posted on the cliffs of Dover, looking out over the English Channel. They were watching for the invasion of Napoleon.

As individuals, we are sometimes guilty of similar absurdities. Where are the cliffs of Dover in your personal systems? Remember a couple of lessons ago when we talked about taking over another's job and how quickly you can spot the unnecessary in someone else's work? Why not capitalize on a fresh pair of eyes?  Have a co-worker or peer look at your activities in an attempt to help you identify those that you may have overlooked. We are all guilty of being too close to the trees to see the forest.

We are creatures of habit and tend to keep driving hard, even when the utility has diminished to absolute zero. Many things are best eliminated altogether. Those who crossed the barrier into the zone of high performance report that a big part of their success is deciding what not to do.

The six D's of mail handling

Pick a time to work on your mail. For me, the best time is 4:00pm. This allows enough time for all of the day's incomings to arrive, with still enough time to take action before the end of the workday. But, for other people the ideal time could be early in the morning, at noon or any other consistent slot that works best for you. It will soon become habitual, like eating breakfast or brushing your teeth. Close your door, if you have one, engage the voice mail, and during this "appointment with yourself," take one of the following six actions with each piece of paper that you pick up.

• Discard it — If you can do without it, get rid of it. Send it to the recycle bin or to the trashcan. This refers to junk mail or one-way communications that simply say, "thank you," "for your information," or "please note." Destroy it. Ditch it. Don't keep it if you don't have to.
  
  
• Delegate it — If it's something that must be acted upon, and somebody else can do it, delegate it. Designate a due date and direct it to a member of your group.
  
  
• Do it — If it must be done, and you're the only one who can do it, and it will take ten minutes or less, do it now. Don't defer it, dodge it or disown it. Dig in and do it. It could be a quick telephone call to reply to a letter, or an e-mail message, or a brief report. Dispense with it quickly. Don't drag it out.
  
  
• Develop it — If it's important, can only be done by you, and will take longer than ten minutes, determine when you will do it, and time activate it on the appropriate daily planning pages. Develop an action plan now that will ensure that it gets done on time, regardless of its magnitude. Even if the task will take 100 hours, schedule the first few hours to be completed this week. When the two hours are over, schedule another few hours the following week and continue to do this until it's completed. How many blocks of time you schedule each week is determined by the deadline date of the task. Don't put it on a "To Do" list, if you're serious about a systematic plan. Schedule time to do it. Put the paperwork in a follow-up file corresponding with the date you have scheduled for it.
  
  
• Delay it — If it should be done, can only be done by you, but is not a priority, delay it by adding it to your "Things To Do" list. 
  
  
• Deposit it — If the paperwork is informational and must be retained for future reference, drop it in your filing system, or deposit it in a 3-ring binder so you can retrieve it easily. Don't toss it aside with the intention of filing it later; do it now.
  

Reading

Be selective; ask yourself, "Would I have ordered this thing to read?" If not, recycle it, or at least put it into your portable reading section. Set it aside for scanning, at a later time when you are not busy.

Check the item for relevance by first glancing through the table of contents, index, abstract, and the beginning and ending paragraphs. This will reveal whether or not it really warrants a full read.

Skip and skim. Usually an article or a book contains a fair amount of material that you have read before and understand quite well. With business reading, it is usually not necessary to read from cover to cover, like a novel. Decide what is worth reading by skipping and skimming each page or chapter. Pick out the important parts that are worth reading in some detail. You can skip and skim a whole book by looking at sub-titles, keywords and figures. The skipping and skimming technique is particularly useful for someone who is well informed in their field and looking for additional information. Your time is well spent only when you get information that is useful and an addition to what you already have.

Select, scan, and vary the speed. Some material can be read fast and some should be read slowly, particularly if it is new material to you. The skilled reader of a book or article will first scan and select what is to be read and then vary the speed of reading according to the type of material.

Read with a highlighter. Highlighting an area is a signal to the subconscious mind to turn on the recorder and pay attention to those areas. In addition, you will find a highlighted document a delight years from now when you look at the document again to refresh your memory on the topic.

Most people are not trained to read at anywhere near their comprehension rate. Most people read about 200 words per minute, which is only slightly better than the speaking rate. Through training, almost anyone can learn to read 600 words per minute, with no loss in comprehension. If your job involves a significant amount of reading and you enjoy reading for pleasure, it may be time to take a speed-reading class.

Letter writing

A lot of the work of correspondence is in composing a very careful reply. You may draft up something and revise it a couple of times. This part of your creative output can be put in the bank for future use.

What you need to do is to take the idea of the form letter and extend it into unique and different letters. This can be done by composing a letter in modular paragraphs. Later, you simply retrieve a copy of the letter that you have set aside in a file entitled "Modular form Letters."

You can extend this principle into proposals, quotations, email, reports and articles. 

Using a phone directory

If you are going to use a directory to make cold calls, survey calls or random calling of any kind, begin in the back of the directory and work forward. Every new insurance or real estate agent eagerly goes to work and begins cold calling from directory. Guess where they all start? Alan Aaker gets dozens of telemarketing calls and is likely to be quite hostile.  Jody Zwiener, on the other hand, never hears from anyone and will likely talk your arm off.

How to handle e-mail

Dispense with messages one at a time. Delete, file, respond or forward each one that you open. If the message relates to long-term tasks, transfer the needed information to your organizer and delete the message. You might want to expand the window to full size when reading your e-mail.

When an incoming e-mail merits a thank you, say nothing else. Don't add unnecessary comments that might encourage another reply in return. There is too much e-mail that simply serves to thank others for thanking them. "You're welcome" is usually unnecessary. Don't feel compelled to get in the last word.

Don't clutter your electronic files with non-essential correspondence. Delete most e-mail and only file those that you have to reference in the future. Print as few as possible and don't keep both printed and electronic versions. Resist the urge to print your e-mail. Answer it, file it, or delete it. Don't keep it unless absolutely necessary.

When sending e-mail, respect other people's time as well. Before you send that message to your entire mailing list, ask yourself a question. Would you send that many copies if it were printed document? Send it only to those who need it or can benefit from it. 

Don't let the circulation list be determined by the ease of transmission. For all of our sakes, quit being the central distribution center for the mindless humor that seems to clutter up my e-mail. I would just as soon find my own humor, thank you. I think it is rude to mindlessly forward all that (what you think is) cute stuff you have found on the Internet, to your entire contact list.

Use a relevant header to make it easy to file. If you're replying to a message and changing the topic, take a few seconds to change the header to correspond with the new topic. Make sure the header grabs the reader's attention and immediately identifies the topic. The only way some people can cope with the overload of e-mails is to delete most unsolicited messages unread. They make this decision based on the header. A vague title such as "Opportunity" or "Thought you might be interested" could easily be deleted accidentally. If you know the receiver, you might want to include your name in the header. And if you're replying to their e-mail, say so.

Although e-mail is sometimes viewed as a casual, conversational form of communication, it is rapidly becoming the accepted form of business communication as well. As such, it warrants similar guidelines to that of hardcopy correspondence. 

Keep your message brief and indicate any action you want the reader to take. Limit each message to one topic. Use the spell checker feature and get liberal usage of the insert paragraph function, you will find the same names and phrases appearing over and over again in your writing. Careless typing and sloppy grammar will reflect on both you and your company. I find sloppy or overused capitalization very offensive and a good indication of what the writers think of themselves.

Assume that all your e-mail will be saved and viewed by others. Formality is even more important when corresponding to people in other countries, who may not be accustomed to the more casual approach to communication.

There are dozens of symbols called emoticons representing the various emotions such as happiness, sadness and other emotions, and even more abbreviations that people seem to be using, but I don't recommend either. Not everyone is familiar with them. Personally, I get annoyed when I encounter such hieroglyphics as LOL, IMHO, or OTOH. It may save the writer a few seconds, but I waste my time trying to figure out what the gobbledygook means. We survived quite nicely without smiles, frowns and laughter symbols plastered in our written letters for hundreds of years. Why the necessity now?

A signature file, which could include your name, company, telephone number, fax number, website address and one-line description of your business can be added automatically with most e-mail programs. It's unobtrusive at the end of the message, helpful to the reader and it compensates for the lack of a letterhead. 

Most e-mail handling software is able to store multiple signatures or paragraphs. This provides you with the capability of developing and storing a standardized auto response to messages that often require similar replies, such as "thank you's" and "I'll be out of town's" etc.

E-mail is one of the greatest timesaving marvels of the century. But like most things, if misused it can be as much a hindrance as a help. Use it, but don't abuse it.

Using the Internet

Discipline says it all. Get in, get what you need and get out. When you hear the self-talk coaxing you to follow links that are not relevant to your current search, slap your fingers. 

The Internet contains vast storehouses of extraordinarily useful information, and we've just seen the tip of the iceberg—buckle your seat belt. The information available on the Internet is doubling every 13 months. 

The bad news is that the Internet can become a snake pit of time consumption. If you are not disciplined in your Internet usage, surfing can seriously affect you performance. 

The key is not to surf, but to seek. Learn to define, as precisely as possible, what specifically you intend to accomplish while online. Before you log on, set some written goals, write down several key search words or phrases; lay out your game plan. Then when you do go online, use the most sophisticated tools available to accomplish your objectives in the fewest possible clicks. 

Going paperless

Some things that I have tried that didn't work the way they were promoted were:

• Handwriting recognition software — The Cross Pen Company came out with what looked like a nifty device called the Crosspad. It was the electronic version of a legal pad. Supposedly, it would electronically capture your handwriting, upload to your PC and then trainable software would convert your handwriting in to editable text. 
  
  A neat idea that needs lots more work before its ready for prime time. I found training the Crosspad to recognize my handwriting to be a huge pain. After many hours, I was still getting gibberish. I finally gave up and sold it on E-bay.
  
  
• Palm tops — Great idea, but they never held enough, were never fast enough, always out of sync with my PC or out of batteries.  Someday soon I think we will see great improvements here, but in the meantime, save your money.
  
  
• Voice recognition software — Almost the identical experience that I had with handwriting recognition software. I finally got tired of reading gibberish on the screen.
  
  
• Backup systems — I've tried them all, zip drives, internal, external, streaming tape and finally a CD writer. I'm currently using a CD writer as my back up media and still don't feel like I have the problem solved. CD writers are somewhat cumbersome to format, and not all CD-Rom drives can read and write to the disk. 
  
  I've been watching the evolution of the Web-based strategies with interest. It won't be long before we'll see it making sense, but right now, Web-based back up solutions are a little pricey for me.
  
  
• Part time ISPs — Sorry, folks but AOL, MSN, AT&T, Prodigy, CompuServe and the others all give overpriced, poor service. The bigger the name, the poorer the service. It's like being on the Internet with training wheels. When you get serious about your Internet usage, you will move over to the world of always available, high speed, human contact, with a local ISP.

The good news is that I have found some systems that have made significant progress and have vastly improved my personal output. Here is the essential hardware and software that I have found works the best for my particular style and needs.

• Laptop — An essential ingredient of going paperless is portability. This gives you the ability to anytime, anyplace, pull up on a screen any document that would normally be kept in a file cabinet. The key to a good system is to be state-of-the-art. Your system needs to be fast and powerful with huge storage capability.
  
  
• Document scanner — You will cling to your paper if you don't have a quick and handy method of getting a piece of paper into your electronic file cabinet. I currently use a Visioneer Strobe XP100 and love it. I recently bought a similar model for my wife on e-bay for $31, one of life's little bargains.
  
  
• Document handling software — Once you have an image of the document in your PC, you will need some software that can do an optical character reading, file, copy, print, fax and most importantly retrieve the documents. 
  
  I'm currently using  Papermaster 2003, and am very pleased. The Papermaster cabinets currently have well in excess of 4,000 scanned documents and it's holding up well. 
  
  
• Contact management software — A good contact manager can serve as your electronic version of your personal organizer. It should not only take care of contacts, notes and follow-ups, but it should manage your calendars and to-do lists. I currently am using ACT 6.0, but dislike its incoming e-mail handling capabilities. This is a major shortcoming.
  
  
• Electronic banking — I can't recommend it highly enough. Electronic banking has reduced my financial management to a simple few minutes a month and with wonderful control and flexibility. With all the invoices and statements retained electronically in PaperMaster, this has ended years of frustration with the quagmire of paper, overdrafts, late payments, licking stamps, etc. I'm currently with Wells Fargo and using MS Quicken 2003 Premier Home and Business and have no complaints.
  
  
• High - speed connection — When my local cable TV company began offering high-speed cable modem connections. I was one of their very first customers. I wouldn't live without it; I would give up my cable TV first. It is well worth the money to get a high speed, uninterrupted Internet connection at the touch of a button.