As September approaches and kids head off to school or college, it is a ripe time to adopt healthy work habits. What about adding a focus on planning to that fresh start? If you are game, here are 3 tips to get you started:

1. Commit: a six-letter word that transforms “dreams” into “results.”  There are a whole host of testimonies and advice that tout the benefits of good planning. Some of us are natural planners; others are not. When you read such quotes as “one hour of planning saves 10 hours of doing” or “it pays to plan ahead; it wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark,” or “failing to plan is planning to fail,” do you nod your head in agreement or scrunch your face in disbelief? For some, making a fresh start involves a renewed commitment to planning.

2. Sort: A common term in “clutter” management, sorting our tasks into long-range (strategic), annual (operational) and short-term (tactical) will help us focus our time and energy.

In David Allen’s Six Level Model for Planning (Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress Free Productivity, 2001), he uses a flying analogy to illustrate various levels of planning:
50,000+ feet: Life
40,000 feet: 3 to 5 year vision
30,000 feet: 1 to 2 year goals
20,000 feet: Major areas of job responsibility
10,000 feet: Current projects
Runway: Current actions

Let’s explore some ideas at each of the first three levels of tactical planning.

LEVEL 1:  Runway: Current actions
Develop a running list of “to dos.” Get the things you need to do out of your head and onto paper, a document, an Outlook task list or whatever medium works best for you. The most important thing here is the de-cluttering of your brain so it is not periodically reminding you of tasks to be done.

Identify your top “8″ tasks each day. Spend the first half an hour of the day or the last half an hour of the previous day developing your top 8 hit list. Limit yourself to no more than 8 priorities each day. Revise the list during the day as needed and create a new one each day. Take time at the end of the week to evaluate how well you moved items to completion and make improvements, as needed.  Notice what you’re not getting to and see if the things “not getting done” have a pattern to them.

Stay focused on your hit list. Put it right in front of you and use it to focus your day. When another item or interruption begs for your attention, assess whether it fits into your hit list or bumps something off your existing list. If it doesn’t, add it to your running list for evaluation later that day or tomorrow morning.

LEVEL 2:  10,000 feet: Current projects
Use project management tools, such as the work breakdown plan, to organize what needs to be done by when, by whom.

· Start with a SMART goal to clearly define the goal for the project. SMART goals need to be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results Oriented and Time Bound.
· Identify all the “big buckets” of work that need to be done to accomplish the goal.
· List all the tasks to be done under each “bucket.”
· Assign ownership and deadlines. Make note of what buckets need to be done before others and which buckets can be worked on simultaneously.
· Move tasks off your work breakdown plan to your “hit” list as appropriate.

LEVEL 3:  20,000 feet: Major areas of job responsibility
Flying at 20,000 feet suggests you have made a decision as to what areas give you the biggest bang for your time – the 20% of your job you are going to focus on for 80% of your results. To help you with this decision, answer these key questions: What is the purpose of my job? What are the measures of my success according to my manager? What is considered exceptional performance? How does this affect my priorities? How does that affect my relationships with others? When you’ve done this job analysis, look at your tasks to see if you are giving priority to the ones that will make you successful.

3. Improve: Keep your eyes open to new tools that can build your planning efficiency. Whether it is a webinar on Outlook or time management, organizers in your Blackberry or a new day planner system, take time to talk with others about what works for them and pay attention to new resources.  One word of caution here: if you find your office littered with day planners and systems that never get off the ground, go back to #1. I’m a firm believer that you can make most any system work, if you are committed.

Speaking of sharing resources, what tips and tools have you found helpful for day-to-day planning? Comment.

Time Management CD: Get More of What You’ve Got (listen to sample)

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Developing a Lean and Mean Strategy

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And yet, listening is one of the most powerful tools we have as leaders and managers.  Listening is how we show respect; it’s the means to understanding the root cause of a problem and the very best way to handle resistance to change.  It’s the magical influence and persuasion tool that we repeatedly neglect to use.  Why?  Because we’re so busy talking.

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Recently, Michael Harrington, our Director of New Training and Strategic Initiatives, presented on the idea that we all make assumptions of people based on their behavior.  Rarely, do we actually go to the root cause of the belief of that behavior and try to solve the behavior if problematic (our Belief: Behavior Connection Model).  Whats more, we perpetuate the problematic behavior by letting our own assumptions and their actions continue to fuel the problematic behavior in others we wanted to stop in the first place.

In this clip Michael discusses this concept through the narrative of the Red Converse Sneakers & the Ladder of Inference:

Decisions. We all make decisions; we make decisions about our lives, our families, during our jobs and for our company.  This morning I decided to stop and let a pedestrian cross the street.  Now why do you think I decided to do that?  Was it because I’m a stickler for the rules, or because I have a belief that we should do unto others?  Whatever the reason, the idea is that I made that decision because I have some belief that’s driving it.  If we were to take this from a business perspective, whether we’re a staff member in a department or the department head, when a decision needs to be made, the hope is that there is some uniformity in the way the decision is made, and that is has the best interest of the company or department in mind and that it is based on the same set of business ethics.  The problem is we’re people. We all have different beliefs around what is right, wrong or inconsequential, and so it is critical that we build some foundational beliefs in our employees to make sure their decisions are in alignment with our organization.

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Day 1

8:30am Welcome and Meeting Set-up

9:00am Setting the vision and strategy

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In 2006, the new vice president of a quality department was concerned about internal customer feedback which was indicating that other departments did not think as highly of quality operations as they did themselves.  The VP tried to surface the feedback with her staff members and found them dismissing the information, stating, “Oh, nobody gets along with quality and they never will.”

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The first time I read that quote, I promptly put the book down and it was months, not days or weeks, before I picked it up again. The dilemma was that I knew he was right. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t deny it.  Don’t we grow up waiting and anticipating the time when we can become an adult and the driver of our own destiny? Hmm…..I don’t know about you, but my destiny didn’t include problems. Read the rest…

Working with an organization recently to train their staff on how to best implement a social media program, my brother and I found ourselves needing to take a deeper look into why some organizations succeed at social media and why some, for lack of a better term, just stink at it.

There are many different kinds of social media and for each one, there are probably a hundred different recommendations on how to best use them, but as we were discussing best practices we kept coming back to the same question: “what does a social media initiative need to have in order to be successful?”  See, every company has critical success factors, those “without a doubt” things that it needs in order to function, and so, why can’t an initiative or program also have success factors? Read the rest…