Hasta La Ideas

Finishing a project on time is a difficult achievement in the workplace and at home. In last week’s post “Uncluttered project planning,” I discussed ways to avoid missing deadlines when you’re in charge of the project. However, we’re not always the ones calling the shots.

In fact, even when we think we’re in charge of a project, we often are not. When we have to rely on others to supply information, supplies, or support, timelines (and budgets) can quickly be extended. After years of working across multiple professions and with clients, I have identified where projects typically go awry. From page 200 of Unclutter Your Life in One Week:

These are the universal truths for why projects are not completed on time:

• Clients are never as prepared as they say they will be.
• Clients always change their mind.
• People always underestimate the amount of time it will take to do something.

(The word clients in this list can easily be substituted with bosses, co-workers and also you.)

Clients are never as prepared as they say they will be. For most people, working on a project is more fun than planning it. As a result, clients don’t think through the entire process and its results before contacting a vendor. Putting in the research, collecting data, identifying the goal of the project, and envisioning it through to its completion before contacting a vendor will help enormously to preserve a timeline.

Clients always change their mind. I think it’s important for a project to have flexibility, but changing the scope of a project will extend timelines and/or costs. You need to be prepared for these changes and ready for when they happen. You can reduce the impact and costs of these changes simply by having a single decision-making liaison between the client and vendor. If a client or vendor is being contacted by more than one person, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. One person should act as the filter on both ends of a relationship to make sure that only approved changes that relate to the final outcome of the project are communicated.

People always underestimate the amount of time it will take to do something. Even though I have timed myself enough to know how long it actually takes me to do something, I still think I work faster than I do. We all think this way. In our minds, we have speed of pumas. Avoid this project pitfall by using the following:

A good rule of thumb is to double everything up to a day. If you think something will take you two hours, plan for it to take four. If you think something will take you eight hours, plan for it to take sixteen. After eight hours, the double rule stops being as accurate. For projects that I estimate will take between one and five days, I just tag on an additional day. If someone says it will take him two weeks to complete a portion of the project, I add three additional days into the schedule.

Your project’s timeline can be preserved or closely achieved with proper planning, organizing, improved communication, and realistic expectations for work completion. Remember the three universal truths for why projects are not completed on time, and do your best to avoid them.

My alma mater is currently ranked number one in all of the college men’s basketball rankings. They’ve been in the top spot for 11 of the 14 weeks of the polls, and were number one in the preseason. There are five games left in the regular season, and all of the teams Kansas has left to play would love to see the Jayhawks lose.

Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and Missouri fans aren’t the only ones who want to see Kansas mess up their record in the last five games. Fans of the other ranked teams would be happy to see Kansas take a tumble, and, after watching some of the games this year, I’m pretty certain there are a few referees that would be glad to see Kansas lose, too.

In competitive sports like basketball, a game has to end with a winner and a loser. If you’re on top, it’s because you beat other teams to get there. You make enemies quickly when success after success stacks up beneath you. Other people don’t like to see you succeed when it was at their expense. In fact, other teams and fans watch you in hopes of experiencing schadenfreude.

In our work lives, however, very few things are like competitive sports. If someone does well, it’s usually not at the expense of someone else. Many people can do well at a time. Everyone on a project can be successful. Just because someone receives a promotion today doesn’t mean you won’t ever be promoted. Even though this is the fact, it is easy to lose sight of it. We quickly clutter up our minds with jealousy, envy, and hope for some schadenfreude in our immediate lives.

If you want to be productive and manage your time well at work, you need to let go of the belief that your workplace is a zero-sum game. If a colleague is praised for his or her work — even if you feel it is unwarranted — be genuinely happy for that person and then immediately return to your tasks. Getting caught up in office politics, sabotaging your colleagues, and focusing on anything other than your work is a waste of your time. Engaging in such negative behaviors causes people to believe you can’t be trusted, you’re a bad team member, and you’re only out for yourself. Even if you aren’t outwardly expressing your frustrations, obsessive negative thoughts can decrease your productivity. Believing that someone else’s win is your loss is clutter, it keeps you from being productive, and only damages you professionally in the long-run.

If you showed up late to a meeting or missed a deadline, it would be obvious to you that disorganization and clutter were affecting your job performance. There are less obvious ways, however, that being disorganized can impact the quality and efficiency of your work. Take this quick quiz to see if it might be worth your time to become more organized:

1. Do you spend less than 60 percent of your day focused on the most valuable work for your job?
2. Do client/supervisor requests often linger unanswered for more than 24 hours?
3. Do you ever feel like you don’t know where to start working on a project?
4. Do you have action items on your to-do list that have been there for more than a week? a month?
5. Have you led a meeting without providing an agenda to its attendees?
6. When you come into work in the morning, does it take you more than 15 minutes to start doing work-related tasks?
7. If something happened to you, and a qualified replacement would need to step in to work for you for awhile, would she be constantly frustrated or have to pick up the phone to have you help her find things she needed?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, disorganization and clutter may be negatively affecting your job performance.

Start by opening your calendar and scheduling an hour every day this week to focus on organizing. These hours will not be wasted, as your improved efficiency will quickly make up for the time expenditure. Here are some tips that correlate to the questions above.

The first question: To ensure that you are spending 60 percent or more of your day on your most valuable work, you need to plan each day before you start work. You may not follow your plan exactly, but the act of creating your plan will help you to stay more focused on the important work.

The second question: Even if you’re just sending an e-mail or making a quick phone call saying that it will take another day to get back to someone, contact within 24 hours is essential for good client/supervisor relations. Schedule 15 minutes after lunch and at the end of your work day to process these requests.

The third question: If you work in an office that has a preferred project management software, take a class or online seminar and learn how to effectively use this system. If your office doesn’t have such software already in place, research online project management tools and find the one that works best for you. Then, learn how to use it and take advantage of its features.

The fourth question: When planning your day, schedule 30 minutes to focus on these lingering tasks. Keep scheduling time for these activities until you are able to cross all of them off of your to-do list. Then, make a commitment to never let an action item linger on your to-do list for more than a week (or two, based on your type of work). These lingering items create a great deal of anxiety, and that anxiety can slow you down.

The fifth question: A meeting without an agenda can be a waste of time for everyone involved. Learn how to organize a business meeting so that it’s valuable to you and its attendees.

The sixth question: Before you leave work for the day, make sure your desk and supplies are prepared for tomorrow. You need to be ready to “hit the ground running” immediately when you arrive to work.

The seventh question: If you’re out of the office for any reason (emergency, illness, vacation, sudden promotion), someone should be able to come in and take over your work without much difficulty. Unless you are self-employed (and even then, you may have legal responsibilities to your clients), you do not own your work or the materials used to complete that work. Keeping this simple fact in mind can often help to keep you more diligently organized.

Good luck, and I hope that in a matter of days your organizing efforts begin to show you great rewards.

In the comments section of an old post, reader Diana recently left a tip about a creative way to use Google Calendar in conjunction with Gmail. Since the post might be off your radar screens, I wanted to highlight it on the main page because I found it to be a terrific tip.

Simply stated, she suggests that if there is a future action you wish to accomplish (call your mom each Sunday, pick up the dry cleaning, follow up about a job lead) that you add it as a single or recurring event in Google Calendar with an e-mail reminder. In Google Calendar, select “Create Event” in the left-hand column be sure to set the reminder to “E-mail.” It might look like this:

I really appreciate reminders that are pushed into my e-mail account because I have a tendency to forget to check my calendar, especially when I’m traveling. Google Calendar also has a nice feature where you can have your daily calendar e-mailed to you each morning.

Late Friday morning, our Internet connection bit the dust. A tree in the forest behind our house decided it no longer had the will to live and fell over, uprooting and destroying our FiOS line with it.

Conveniently, the tree fell minutes after I had finished my “must complete these tasks or lose my job” items on my to-do list. I had a lot of work left to do in the day, but all of it could wait until the connection was re-established or until I made it to the local coffee shop that has free WiFi.

While I was driving to the coffee shop, I thought about how getting the most important work out of the way first saved me a great deal of frustration. Had I put off the most important work, I would have been angry and stressed and worked into a frenzy about nature simply being nature. Instead, I was more entertained than anything else. A dead tree took out my connection — possibly the best reason ever for losing service.

I structure my day by doing the most important tasks first. This means I sit down at my computer and start writing before checking e-mail, Twitter, voice mail, or even comments on Unclutterer. If I’m at my desk at 6:00 a.m., I won’t get to the other tasks until usually 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. These other activities are a reward for getting through the high priority assignments.

When I leave work at the end of the day, I’ll often open up the most important task for the following day and place it at the center of my screen. (I learned this tip from Glen Stansberry, I would like to note.) Then, when I sit down to work in the morning, I can immediately start on what I need to do.

How do you structure your work day? Do you get your most important tasks completed first thing in the morning? Or, do you procrastinate and put off the hard work hoping that maybe it will just go away? Tell us how you structure your work and what works best for you in the comments.