Small steps to big results: Do one High Value Task a day

We've all been there: Overwhelmed with the day-to-day aspects of life - incoming stuff that's relatively easy to handle - we focus on it, excluding the "big things." After a while it feels like the trivial many have sunk the vital few (from the Pareto principle - see Koch's book The 80/20 Principle for an in-depth discussion).

I've been experiencing this for a while, and it's really unsatisfying. Since making the leap to full-time personal productivity consulting, it's very important for me to maintain steady progress on multiple fronts, e.g., marketing, networking, reading, and writing, but I'd like to do more. I realized I wanted to, as Laura Stack puts it, end each day with a sense of accomplishment, rather than finish being frustrated by my inability to accomplish anything important.


So I've found something that applies Maurer's one small step approach: Do one high value task a day. If you do this, I guarantee you'll feel better about your day.

Breaking it down a bit: First, complete just one per day. Sure, doing more is great, but I've found thinking of nailing one action (even a small one) gets around the mind's resistance, which is the essence of Maurer's book. As he says:

Small steps are a kind of trick - a stealth solution. Do small, easily-attainable goals - they won't set off alarm bells.

Second, it has to be of high value - the vital few. What's high value? Something that moves you one tangible step closer to where you want to be. Call it your goal, purpose, current initiative, or concern, but think vector, not just speed. (Next week we'll talk about how to discover the latter based on your action management system - a challenge when using a bottom-up approach.)


This approach is a cousin to Gina's idea of deciding your Most Important Task the night before, and doing it first thing in the morning (covered in Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, with an earlier version here), and Leo's variation, with some caveats:

Things not to worry about:

• Doing it first thing (a fine idea, but not required),
  
• Planning it the night before (again, if it works for you, great),
  
• Making it big (think impact, not size), or
  
• Doing more than one per day (otherwise you risk procrastinating).

However, there are some Things to worry about:

• Make sure you have a list of some, esp. small ones (e.g., respond to a prospect's email, prepare for a conversation),
  
• Never finish the day without doing one (i.e., NO EXCEPTIONS, which Mark Forster claims is crucial for developing a habit, along with identifying current ones, listing new desired ones, and being specific WRT adopting them), and
  
• Don't include routine "care and feeding" tasks such as emptying your inboxes, networking, exercising, blogging, or reading (some exceptions apply).

(An example: Today I spoke with a potential telecoaching client [1] and wrote an email to a top productivity consultants.)


Give it a try - I've found this helps a lot with being able to let go at the end of the day, feeling satisfied I've done something worthwhile. And please let me know if you're currently doing this, what kinds of tasks you do, any variations, and how it's helped.

I'll finish with an surprising idea from Liz Davenport's book Order from Chaos. She claims she can predict where anybody will be in ten years just by looking at their to-do lists. If it's only taking care of business or survival items, in ten years, you'll be right where you are!


References

• [1] Interesting observation: The people who call me need my help, but paradoxicaly, often have trouble following through. This includes returning emails (such as "Let's talk and see if I can help") and making appointments! So I've learned to a) give them some slack, and b) be persistent, which for me requires continuing development of my boldness skills (see If not now, when? The importance of being bold).
  

So a bloke with a broken thumb walks into a bar...

Or: Ways a broken thumb changes your perspective

OK, my doctor told me Mountain biking is dangerous (told to me while he and I were riding, incidentally) but until this weekend I'd been lucky - cuts and bruises, but nothing very serious. But Friday I had a nasty spill crossing a creek, and (with apologies to Mr. Rogers - who we loved) Can you say Avulsion fracture [1]?

The good news is a) xrays are all stored digitally now, so my Flickr account should be updated soon, b) it doesn't appear that surgery will be necessary, and c) I've learned a few things:

• Mountain biking is dangerous. I'll remember that next time I ride (sometime in November, sadly).
  
• I'm right handed, and it's surprising how many things you use your hand for. Glad I didn't break my foot!
  
• If I ever have to have my right hand amputated because of a combine accident [2], I'll be one a jump ahead of others who haven't had this kind of experience with the left hand.
  
• I have much more appreciation for the from-scratch learning that children do. I realize I took this somewhat for granted - it's slow to learn this way!
  
• I hope learning to use my left hand for things will help stave off Alzheimer's (my wife is an RN in an Alzheimer's unit). As Dr. Michael Merzenich says in the article Change or Die:

  ...the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong. the key is keeping up the brain's machinery for learning... Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. "People mistake being active for continuous learning," Merzenich says. "The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they're leading an interesting life when they haven't learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe."

  Related to lifelong learning:
  • George Leonard encourages us in his book to "Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning:"To learn is to change. Education, whether it involves books, body, or behavior, is a process that changes the learner. ... and the best learning of all involves learning how to learn - that is, how to change.
    
  • Brian Tracy writes that "committing yourself to lifelong personal and professional development" is one of the keys to the future.
    
  • Peter Drucker says "We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn."
    
  • lifehack.org shares 15 Steps to Cultivate Lifelong Learning.

On top of that, I'm trying to use this as an opportunity to appreciate being well. I'll leave you with some thoughts on gratitude I've been collecting. Stay healthy!

• Tell someone how much you appreciate them. I really connected with the lessons from How Full Is Your Bucket? - I now carry "gratitude artifacts" to share with folks I interact with, including NASA stickers (love the meatball) and "drops" printed on-line. And uber-networker Tatsuya Nakagawa lists ways to express gratitude for someone you connect with in 15 Quick Ways to Give Value and Make a Positive Impression.
  
• Appreciate great customer service. I have bunch of stories, including a nifty one from the folks at the Rokenbok Toy Company. An escalated version of the above is to offer to send a letter of gratitude to the someone's supervisor. I do this regularly, and I find people are genuinely surprised and delighted. It takes about five minutes to write one by hand, and feels great to do!
  
• Ellen Weber has points out some ways gratitude transforms the human brain in Two Words Can Transform a Workplace. She writes: "Interestingly, the art and science of gratitude grows easier the more you practice it."
  
• Finally, don't forget the good old-fashioned thank you note. The Esquire article A Little Gratitude gives some great suggestions.

How about you? Any tips for being grateful (or broken bone stories)?


References

• [1] "A pull-off fracture at a musculotendinous or ligamentous insertion site caused by sudden forceful muscle contraction or ligament traction." Yes, I pulled out a chunk of bone from my thumb.
  

What can you learn from the world's best productivity consultants? Let's ask!

As you know, I'm working on being a top personal productivity consultant. In addition to absorbing every related book I can lay my hands on [1], I've been developing my networking skills [2], building my LinkedIn network, and asking smart, successful people how they got to where they are (and where I want to be).

To accelerate this, I'll be running a blog series interviewing the world's top productivity consultants, and I'd like your help. My goals? Learn from the experts (productivity methods and business tips), form connections, and get inspired.

From you I'd love to know:

• Who would you like to hear about?
  
• What questions would you ask?
  
• How do you suggest I make contact with them?
  
• Have you or a colleague worked with one of them?
  
• How do I convince them to participate?
  
• And anything else you suggest for the project.

Below you'll find details, including my requirements for choosing, a starting set of candidates, some sample questions, and some helpful tips on connecting and interviewing I've pulled together to make this project successful.

Let me know!

(Side note: A Tip of the Hat to Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek fame for pushing me over the edge on this. Though I've been collecting names since January, it was his points on becoming an expert [3] that kicked me into action.)


Requirements

The folks whose stories [4]I want to share and learn from should:

• Be an acknowledged expert in time management and personal productivity,
  
• Have a highly successful consulting practice,
  
• Work with top people in mid-to-large sized organizations, and
  
• Have a business and/or research focus.

In other words, the person you'd hire if you wanted the best, and were willing to pay top dollar for. (Note: I've not included David Allen (whose story is very well know) or Mark Forster (who I had the pleasure of interviewing earlier).


Candidates

The main question is: Who are the best people you'd like to hear about? While I've not contacted any of them (so I haven't a clue whether they'll consent to an interview), I have a ton of respect for the following experts (by no means complete):

• Nicholas Bate (Being the Best: The A-Z of Personal Success)
  
• Chris Crouch (Getting Organized: Learning How to Focus, Organize and Prioritize)
  
• Liz Davenport (Order from Chaos: A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life)
  
• Ronni Eisenberg (Organize Your Office! Simple Routines for Managing Your Workspace (Revised and Updated))
  
• Kerry Gleeson (The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Get Organized to Do More Work in Less Time)
  
• Lisa Haneberg (Focus Like a Laser Beam: 10 Ways to Do What Matters Most)
  
• Barbara Hemphill (Taming the Paper Tiger at Work)
  
• Mark Hurst (Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload)
  
• Jan Jasper (Take Back Your Time: How to Regain Control of Work, Information, and Technology)
  
• Dan Kennedy (No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs)
  
• K.J. McCorry (Organize Your Work Day In No Time)
  
• Sally McGhee (Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized)
  
• Mary McKinney
  
• Len Merson (The Instant Productivity Toolkit)
  
• Julie Morgenstern (Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work)
  
• Kathy Paauw
  
• Marilyn Paul (It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized)
  
• Hyrum W. Smith (10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management)
  
• Lynne Snead (To Do Doing Done)
  
• Laura Stack (Leave the Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time...and Feel Great About It)
  
• Stephanie Winston (The Organized Executive: A Program for Productivity--New Ways to Manage Time, Paper, People, and the Digital Office)

Hey - That's a nice bibliography!


Questions

While the number of questions I asked will be limited by how much time our experts are willing to share, here are some I'd love to hear answers to. Please let me know yours.

• How did you get your start?
  
• What were the biggest factors in your success?
  
• How did you build your clientele?
  
• How do you to ensure (as much as possible) that clients "get it," i.e., that it sticks [5].
  
• What's your market focus/niche?
  
• How do you summarize your method, and how did you develop it?
  
• How do you stay on top of the field (reading [6], tools [7], assistants, outsourcing [8])?
  
• For authors, how did your book(s) come about? What's your muse?
  
• What were your biggest influences in developing your method?
  
• Who were your mentors [9]? How did you connect with them? What did you give back?
  
• What products and services do you sell?
  
• How do you apply the 80/20 principle to your practice?
  
• How did you decide pricing? Is it fixed, or more like Value-Based Fees?
  
• What role did networking play, and how do you stay on top?
  
• What strategic partnerships [10]did you form, how did they come about, and what's their value to you?
  
• How do you delight and surprise your clients?
  
• Who are your competitors/peers?

Connecting

How do you suggest connecting with these busy folks? Here's one approach from Scott Allen (author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors And Closing Deals Online): Using LinkedIn to Find Celebrity Guests. Scott provides some great wisdom on networking on his Linked Intelligence and The Virtual Handshake blogs.


Interviewing

How do you do a great interview? Here are some tips:

• Some interviewing suggestions, by Dan Gillmor (the original link seems broken.):
  1. Prepare for your interview.
     
  2. Look around.
     
  3. Don't go in with an attitude.
     
  4. Listen to the answers.
     
  5. Get past canned "talking points."
     
  6. Ask these final two questions: "Who else should I speak to about this topic?" and "What have I not asked you that I should have asked you?"
• The Art of Asking Questions
  
• General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews
  
• How to Conduct Podcast Interviews
  
• Conduct A Podcast Interview
  
• Local radio producer Deb Krumholz (board member of the Take Back Your Time movement, shared these tips:
  • Be relaxed.
    
  • Be yourself (are those contradictory?)
    
  • Try to be in the moment, i.e. really listen to what the other person is saying and respond instead of going back to your agenda.
    
  • Have many more questions prepared than you'll probably have time to ask.
    
  • Make it as much a conversation as possible.
    
  • Try to put yourself in the shoes of your listeners and ask what they'd want to hear.
    
  • It's okay to be a little bit "challenging" to your interviewee.

References

• [1] list of reviewed book posts
  
• [2] You might enjoy A geek "gets" networking: The strange magic of connecting with others.
  
• [3] I like how Tim Ferriss I like how he decided to write a book. First, he picked one book out of dozens based on reader reviews and the fact that the authors had actually done what he wanted to do. Second, using the book to generate intelligent and specific questions, he contacted ten of the top authors and agents in the world via email and phone, with a response rate of 80 percent. Smart!
  
• [4] Check out these references on story-telling:
  • Stephen Denning's article "Telling Tales" (Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2004). His summary is here.
    
  • Tip #8: tell a story, from Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.
    
  • The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing by Guy Kawasaki.
    
  • Storytelling: The art of the springboard story
    
  • Storytelling from the Daily PlanIt.
    
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)
• [5] See my posts Reader question: Getting personal productivity changes to stick? and A dozen small ways to get productivity improvements to stick in an organization. In addition, the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has some great ideas. Why some ideas stick and others don't is a nice introduction, and the authors' blog is worth a look.
  
• [6] See A reading workflow based on Leveen's "Little Guide".
  
• [7] Laura Stack recommended strongly the ACT contact management software.
  
• [8] You might enjoy The 4-hour workweek applied: How I spent $100, saved hours, and boosted my reading workflow.
  
• [9] Fellow blogger Dwayne Melancon, author of Genuine Curiosity and networker extraordinaire, recently shared some great mentoring tips with me, including asking what they want to get out of the relationship. Suggestions: testimonials, being a reference, web techniques/ideas, book promotions, etc. Also, he's a terrific model for networking, which I experienced first hand. Thanks Dwayne! You'll also want to read Pam's great article The secret to great relationships with mentors? Reciprocity.
  
• [10] For example, Microsoft contributions, e.g.,
  • 12 tips for better e-mail etiquette, Laura Stack
    
  • Process and organize your e-mail to increase productivity, MPS
    
  • 4 Tips for Improving Tasks at Work, Michael Linenberger

A dozen small ways to get productivity improvements to stick in an organization

As I continue to work with organizations at the individual "key talent" level, I've had some opportunities to expand the impact of the work to the next level up - the team. As I've said earlier [1], I'm very committed to getting the work I teach to stick at - a real challenge - and I'm motivated to learn new ways to do this.

In that spirit, here are a dozen or so ideas I shared recently with an executive and her team to continue adopting, sustaining, and deepening their practice. I hope you find them helpful.


Company policy opportunities/possibilities

At the company level, consider these opportunities:

• Support members' scheduling daily blocks (1-2 hours) for processing & organizing.
  
• Do the same for weekly reviews (pick a time that's works for most people).
  
• Facilitate improved email habits by considering new policies (formal or informal) around urgency, and setting expectations about responsiveness (such as a 24 hour response time [2]).
  
• Start adopting email "etiquette" changes that reduce volume, such reducing unnecessary "thank you" responses, or clarifying when CC and FWD is necessary [3].
  
• Investigate email client/server configurations that reduce interruptions, including disabling visual and aural notifications of new mail, and increasing the time between when new messages are downloaded (or allowing it to be done manually).

Team suggestions to sustain, deepen

Here are a few possibilities and the team level:

• Schedule monthly lunches to review basics, discuss what's working or not working, and share any discoveries, ideas, and "aha"s [4] you've come up with.
  
• Dedicate five minutes at monthly staff meetings for a workflow discussion. Another possibility: During monthly staff meetings, one person talks for five minutes on one of the workflow phases, whichever she feels most accomplished in, or experienced the greatest improvement in. Or reverse it to have one person ask for help/support around one area.
  
• Get playful: Give out small awards [5] for people who empty their inboxes (paper, email, voice) most regularly, or for those with the least amount of "stuff" in their spaces.
  
• Create an information radiator [6] (e.g., a big wall chart) that shows things like: size of each person's email or paper backlog, # of days since last emptied inboxes, # of weeks since last weekly review, # of times checking email/day, etc. NB: Must be done positively, and without shame or guilt.
  
• Host mini "field trips" to each others' offices. Talk about what stuff is still around, look at backlogs, talk about where to (re)start, supplies, filing, etc. Note that this must be done in a supportive and constructive manner. Remember that major self-management changes like this can be quite personal, and usually take a while to master.
  
• Notice ways to help others adopt the new habits, perhaps when someone doesn't write down action and waiting for, is not emptying her inboxes every 24 hours, or not collecting paper in one place. Again, do this in a supportive manner.

Other resources

Finally, here are a few additional posts and discussions on I found helpful.

• From the 43 Folders Getting Things Done forum: GTD for Teams - How do you get started?

  Emory's response reminded me of an article done by Joel Spolsky: Getting Things Done When You're Only A Grunt. It's a great article, and basically says that instead of trying to convert the team to use GTD, or your bugs database, just tell them where their input goes. If you are a hardcore inbox person like myself, instruct others to put anything that they need taken care of in your inbox. Get them to conform to the part of the system that they need to accomplish to keep your system running smoother. Eventually someone else will start to use an inbox as well. The key is to get people to adopt slowly by leading with example.

• From Making GTD stick with teams:
  
  
  • weekly or monthly 'user group' meetings
    
  • group weekly reviews in a conference room with laptops and in-boxes
    
  • share tips and tricks or challenges and wins - in person or via a newsletter (company or dedicated)
    
  • a group purge day of reference filing; e.g., one hour on a quiet day
    
  • (re)read David Allen's book
  
  
• From the davidco Getting Things Done forum:
  
  
  1. lead by example - set aside time to do the weekly review and be very vocal/clear that's what you're up to and you expect others to be doing the same during that time
     
  2. weekly mtg. over coffee - a support group type meeting where you discuss certain points of GTD that would really help the team.. even 15-30 minutes a week could inspire shared practices.
     
  3. get the newcomers on board ASAP - make it part of their initial training. give them the book as soon as they're hired
     
  4. create a private email list or google group for this type of discussion that only team members have access to

References

• [1] Reader question: Getting personal productivity changes to stick?
  
• [2] See Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time
  
• [3] You'll find many terrific tips at Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips
  
• [4] See The thrill of witnessing an "Aha!"
  
• [5] There's a fascinating little story in One Small Step Can Change Your Life on the impact of many small rewards vs. a few large ones. The context was the effectiveness of suggestion boxes. In Japan they work very well - 90% of employee ideas are adopted. But in the US only 38% are adopted. Why? Because Americans use large rewards ($400), whereas the Japanese use smaller ones ($3), which encourages coming up with small solutions. Neat!
  
• [6] Here are two descriptions from Agile Advice and the original wiki.
  

The 4-hour workweek applied: How I spent $100, saved hours, and boosted my reading workflow

While reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (site, blog) I found myself playing with the idea of using personal outsourcing to fix a problem I have with my reading workflow. Short answer: It helped a lot.

As you know, I've made reading a central part of my M.S. in Personal Productivity, and anything that slows it down is a problem. My overall strategy is to pour ideas into head, write about them, and try them out with clients, and wait for something great to pop out. I know you care about reading as well - two of my most popular posts are How to read a lot of books in a short time and A reading workflow based on Leveen's "Little Guide" (hey - I love having smart readers).

However, I noticed over the past few months that my reading pipeline - the number of books read, reviewed, and captured in my Big-Arse Text File - had jammed up; I had a backlog of books read, but not processed. And the bottleneck was transcription - I just hate doing it, it takes a lot of time, and it's become a source of procrastination.

I talked When inputs exceed your workflow system's capacity, and this was an example of that. I needed to fix it. So I decided to apply Tim Ferris's ideas by outsourcing transcriptions of my audio book notes.


The experiment

Here's what I did: I submitted audio comments - zipped WMA files from my Olympus WS-300M Digital Recorder (more at Notes on using a digital voice recorder for taking reading notes) - from three different books to three firms. They were:

• Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management by Mark Forster [1] submitted to Tech-Synergy Voice transcription services ($0.60/minute),
  
• Order from Chaos: A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life by Liz Davenport submitted to Enablr | Transcribr ($1.00/minute), and
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss submitted to GMR Transcription Services ($1.50/minute). (Hey - as a former geek how can I resist Recursion [2]?)

I selected these by doing an informal Google search, filtering out those without advertised rates, picking the five least expensive to write to, and choosing the three most responsive.

The results? Surprising!


Cost and results

I expected markedly different results regarding turn around time (TAT) and transcription quality, but they were all very comparable:

• Tech-Synergy cost me $21 (including a one-time discount) to transcribe 50 minutes of audio, 3 day TAT, resulting in 16 pages of notes.
  
• Enablr was $33.60, 33 minutes of audio, 7 days, and 8 pages.
  
• GMR was $49 (including a one-time sign-up fee), 26 minutes of audio, 1 day, and 10 pages.

(Side note: A peer who's reading Ferris's book suggested I sell these notes. However, they're long, rough, and specific to my interpretation. Plus, the space is already taken by companies like BusinessSummaries.com and Powell's Book Review-a-Day. I'll pass.)

The format of returned notes was either Microsoft Word or HTML files - both acceptable. However, while the submission processes for Tech-Synergy and Enablr were straightforward (vanilla HTML and FTP uploads, respectively), I had major problems with GMR. To make a long story short, my contact there was very helpful, and ultimately took care of submitting and returning the files, but their process needs fixing and simplification, at least for Firefox users. (As usual, I broke things like no one else.)

Ultimately, they all got the work done, and transcription quality was excellent. This is especially impressive considering that much of the time I was dictating while exercising!


Savings

So what was the ultimate savings in productivity? First, let's compare hours spent before and after:

Total time spent doing it myself: It takes me roughly 3 times the audio length to transcribe, convert, and enter notes for a book. E.g., for a 30 minute file I'd spend about 1-1/2 hours.

Total time spent outsourcing: To outsource the work, it took ~10 minutes to submit, pay, and download the results. But processing the resulting notes (reading, typing notes, and adding links) took ~2 minutes/page. E.g., for a 30 minute file (say 9 pages): 10 + (2 * 9), or ~ 1/2 hour.

Thus, for 30 minutes of book notes, I saved about an hour, i.e., three times faster.

But the big story is the psychological barrier removed by outsourcing. As I said, I was avoiding transcribing because I found it very tedious, and this clogged up my reading flow, mainly because I don't like starting too many new books before finishing existing ones. It feels incomplete, and I don't like getting too far behind (basic Getting Things Done-inspired psychology).

So overall it was a real win, and I'll definitely be outsourcing all my transcription in the future.


Future steps

That said, I feel like the results were still too expensive. For the next step I'll try submitting three more as projects to sites like Elance, Guru.com, and smarterwork. Suggestions and stories very welcome.

At a higher level, I also want to implement one of Leveen's important principles, that of periodic review. This will help me recall the book's important ideas, my interpretation, and possibly kick off action. After all, what good is reading if I don't improve myself in some way? (Plus, having books in mind when you're meeting folks is a great networking idea and helps facilitate conversations.)

I might return to the electronic reminder system I tried earlier (see Report on a little experiment: Daily random entries from my personal log), but only send entries tagged as BookNotes. Or maybe I'll start with a simple paper-based checklist.

Overall, a fun experiment. And thanks to Ferris for his stimulating book (definitely passed the Scribble Test).


References

• [1] You might enjoy A conversation with Mark Forster (check out his site and blog).
  
• [2] Check out the Droste image the Wikipedia authors used for the article. Why do I care? It reminds me of my very early off-topic post - How to Make The Ultimate Cup of Hot Chocolate. Still drinking it every morning!