With the remarkable retrieval capacity of digital note-taking apps, you can always find (and remember) your records of important conversations and meetings. Better still, thoughtfully organizing your notes will help you focus on your top priorities and drive your energies toward your most important work. In Evernote (OneNote, Springpad and SimpleNote are other popular apps), create notebooks that are as broad as possible while still reflecting specific projects and responsibilities; rather than "XYZ account," for example, use "Key Industries" or "West Coast Prospects." Evernote automatically organizes notebooks alphabetically, but any notebooks that have names beginning with punctuation or symbols ("!ManagementTips") show up at the top of the list, followed by names beginning with numbers. Use this to your advantage: name notebooks to keep key priorities, projects, and responsibilities on top so that you’ll see and think about them every day.
Adapted from "Work Smarter With Evernote" by Alexandra Samuel.
Adapted from "Work Smarter With Evernote" by Alexandra Samuel.
More and more people are working in remote teams, but few find virtual communication as productive as face-to-face interaction. Fortunately, there are new technologies and behavioral strategies that can help dispersed teams communicate better.
Adapted from "How Virtual Teams Can Create Human Connections Despite Distance" by Keith Ferrazzi.
- Do a personal and professional check-in. While it’s common for employees who are co-located to share a recent work success or personal story before a meeting, such conversation is rare within virtual teams. Personal sharing helps to forge connections, which is especially important when staff work remotely.
- Ban multitasking during conference calls. For productive collaboration, it’s crucial that everyone be mentally present and engaged during meetings, not working on other projects or checking email. Make this clear and call on people often to share their thoughts. Chances are good they will.
Adapted from "How Virtual Teams Can Create Human Connections Despite Distance" by Keith Ferrazzi.
Email is one of the biggest productivity challenges that executives face. Sorting through the daily barrage consumes a ridiculous amount of valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. But this is a solvable problem if you learn how to efficiently manage your everyday communications.
Adapted from "Executives' Biggest Productivity Challenges, Solved" by Gretchen Gavett.
- Don’t check your email incessantly; only look at it every hour or two.
- Discipline yourself to read only the subject matter so that you can discard irrelevant or unimportant messages right away. You can purge more than half of incoming messages this way.
- Practice “OHIO” — Only Handle It Once. Immediately decide what to do with each email, and answer important ones quickly instead of filing them away. Because once you’re finally ready to tackle them, you’ll spend half an hour just searching through folders.
Adapted from "Executives' Biggest Productivity Challenges, Solved" by Gretchen Gavett.
Too often, project managers leap to solutions before taking time to completely understand the problem that needs solving. Defining the problem is a critical first step; if you fail to do this, you risk designing a solution that doesn’t address what users need or want — or one that does far more than required. Either way, you’re wasting time and money. To focus your efforts on truly understanding the issue, answer:
Adapted from "Managing Projects" (20-Minute Manager Series).
- What problem do people think this project will address? Why do they see this as something that needs solving?
- Who has a stake in the outcome? Do all stakeholders have the same goal, or do their goals differ?
- What criteria will people use to judge this project’s success?
Adapted from "Managing Projects" (20-Minute Manager Series).