Hasta La Ideas

1. Oversleeping. Waking up just 10 minutes late has the ability to throw your entire day off schedule. Use a timer for a week and determine how long it actually takes you to get ready in the morning, commute to your office, and start working on valuable action items. Are you waking up early enough to get everything done?
2. Getting involved in office gossip and/or office politics. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again — these negative behaviors are pure clutter.
3. Tossing junk mail somewhere other than the trash or into a shredder. Don’t let junk mail accumulate on your dining table, desk, or anywhere else it doesn’t belong. Immediately process your mail the first time you touch it.
4. Losing your charge. How many times have you been on a cell phone call when your phone has died? How many times have you needed a flashlight during a blackout, only to find one that is out of batteries? Create a charging station for all of your portable electronic devices that is in a place you will use it. When doing spring and fall cleaning chores, include battery tests for all items you might need in an emergency. (Go ahead and check the charge on your fire extinguisher, too.)
5. Throwing your dirty clothes on the floor. Get ready for bed before you are tired so you have enough energy to put your clothes in the hamper or put them up on a hanger. If you throw your clothes on the floor, you’re just creating more work for yourself in the future and a possible hazard in case you need to get up in the middle of the night.

What stumbling blocks have you found that are guaranteed to clutter up your day? Add to the comments any problems you’ve encountered and the solutions you’ve discovered.

Today’s guest post is by Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, oversees The 99% think tank, and is the author of the new book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality. Thank you, Scott, for joining us today. — Erin

Perhaps you have an idea for a new business, a restaurant you want to open, or a novel you want to write? Or perhaps you have an idea for how to solve a problem at work? Regardless, the sobering reality is that most ideas never happen. While some ideas are killed for good reason, most ideas are abandoned half-baked as a result of obstacles during execution.

I’ve spent the better part of five years studying the struggle to push ideas to fruition. Along the way, I learned that some people and teams are consistently able to defy the odds and make their ideas happen, time and time again. Authors like James Patterson and Chris Anderson; Companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney; and other serial entrepreneurs, restauranteurs, and the list goes on…

While there are a myriad of methods and tips I observed, the force of ORGANIZATION emerged as the most important. I came to believe that organization is, in fact, the greatest competitive advantage in the creative world.

The practicalities of how you organize projects and manage your energy are critical to making ideas happen. Here are a few my observations – and some of the methods I observed:

Reactionary Workflow

We live in a connected world of endless e-mails, texts, tweets, messages on social networks, phone calls, instant messages … the list goes on. Rather than be proactive with our energy, we have become reactive — living at the mercy of the last incoming thing. As a result, we spend all of our energy trying to keep up rather than propelling our ideas forward. Eventually, all of the small inconsequential activity wears us down and we’re liable to jump ship. To avoid reactionary workflow, some people schedule “windows of non-stimulation” in their day. For a 2-3 hour period of time, they minimize their email and all other sources of incoming communication. With this time, they focus on a list of goals – not their regular tasks, but long-term items that require research and deep thought. There are other tricks for how you aggregate messages and reduce “hop time” (the time spent transitioning between sources of communication). But the bottom line is that reactionary workflow is a threat to ingenuity. To combat it, we must focus less on ideas themselves and more on how we manage our energy and ultimately push ideas to completion.

Reduce Bulky Projects To Just Three Primary Elements

Every project in life can ultimately be reduced to just three primary elements: Action Steps, Backburner Items, and References. Action Steps are succinct tasks that start with verbs. They should be kept separate from your notes and sketches. Backburner Items are ideas that come up during a brainstorm or on the run that are not actionable but may someday be. Backburner Items should be collected in a central location and should be revisit periodically through some sort of ritual. One leader I met prints out his list of Backburner Items (kept on a running Word document) on the first Sunday of every month. He grabs the list (and a beer) and then sits down and reviews the entire list. Some items get crossed out as irrelevant, some remain on the list, and some are transformed into Action Steps. The third element of every project is References – the articles, notes, and other stuff that collects around you. It turns out that References are overrated. Rather than spend tons of time organizing your notes, consider keeping a chronological file where all your notes are simply filed chronologically (not by project name or other means). In the age of digital calendars, you can search for any meeting and quickly find the notes taken on that date.

Use Design-Centric Systems To Stay Organized

The color, texture, size, and style of the materials used to capture your tasks (and your notes) are important. People who have successfully developed personal systems for productivity over the years claim that their designs make their projects more appealing (and thus more likely to be managed well). When it comes to productivity, attraction breeds loyalty.

Measure Meetings With Action Steps

Meetings are extremely expensive if you consider the cost of time and interruption. Beware of “Posting Meetings” or meeting just because it’s Monday. Such meetings are often planned for the morning — when you’re most productive — and often end without any Action Steps captured. A meeting that ends without any Action Steps should have been a voice-mail or an e-mail. When you do meet with clients or colleagues, end each meeting with a quick review of captured Action Steps. The exercise takes less than 30 seconds per person. Each person should share what they captured. Doing so will almost always reveal a few Action Steps that were either missed, duplicated, or misunderstood. Stating your Action Steps aloud also breeds a sense of accountability.

Insecurity Work

In the era of Google Analytics and Twitter, we spend too much time obsessing over real-time data. Just a decade ago, we had to wait for weekly and monthly reports for information that is now always available at our finger tips. Whether it is checking your site’s traffic, customer sentiment, or your bank account, these small repetitive actions don’t help you make ideas happen. They just help you feel safe. “Insecurity Work” is stuff that you do that (1) has no intended outcome, (2) does not move the ball forward in any way, and (3) is quick enough that you can do it multiple times a day without realizing — but, nonetheless, puts us at ease. The first step for reducing Insecurity Work is self-awareness. During the research for my new book, I was astonished by the spectrum of self-imposed guidelines and very effective rituals that people use to reduce insecurity work. Insecurity work is yet another workplace phenomenon that can reduce productivity and obstruct great execution.

My book, out this month, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality chronicles the methods of the creative leaders that have pushed their ideas to fruition (and make our lives interesting as a result). My hope is that the book will prompt more discussion on the mechanics for pushing ideas to fruition.

One of my second quarter resolutions for 2010 is to go rock climbing. Since I have never been rock climbing, I signed up for lessons and took my first course on Sunday.

Up until my class began, I was under the impression that I would do a lot of climbing as part of my rock climbing class. I did make it up a small wall during the class, so there was some climbing. However, the majority of the class was dedicated to equipment, safety measures, and knot tying. In all honesty, the class should have been called Knot Tying 101.

I was initially put off by the knot tying instruction. I went to rock climbing class wanting to rock climb. The next day, though, when my arms and fingers were sore just from going up the wall once, I quickly changed my opinion.

It’s hard to learn a new skill as an adult. We have to trust someone else to show us the way. We have to train our minds and our bodies to behave in new ways. We have to practice. We have to not be good at something before we can get better. And, we can’t dive right in and do it exactly the way we have imagined it.

Knot tying is vital in rock climbing. Improperly tied knots can mean the difference between a safe climb and serious, life-threatening injuries. Thankfully, most new skills that we acquire in our daily lives don’t start with life or death skills training. It won’t kill you if you fail to follow the instructions for how to use a new time tracking software program at work, but you may lose out on wages or waste time redoing your time sheets later. Learning the basics helps you to be more productive over the long term, and an initial investment in these fundamental skills can have huge rewards.

If you need to go back and learn some basic skills to pump up your productivity (per the discussion in today’s first post), I recommend that you do it. Take the chance. Trust someone else to show you the way, and cut yourself some slack if you’re not great in the beginning. Once you master the new skill, you’ll save yourself significant amounts of time.

Glen Stansberry, productivity blogger and the brains behind the LifeRemix network (a network Unclutterer proudly belongs to), authored “80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day” Tuesday for American Express’ OPEN Forum website. The article gives tips and insights from 19 small business and productivity writers and consultants on how to get more done without having to clone yourself.

Some of my favorite tips from the article:

Jonathan Fields, JonathanFields.com
“Exercise – It sounds counter-intuitive. You have to spend time exercising. But, research has shown that exercise boosts cognitive function, creativity, problem solving and productivity. In fact a NASA study showed employees who exercised daily worked at 100% efficiency after 7 hours, while those who didn’t saw a 50% drop, meaning it took them twice as long to accomplish the same thing. So, exercise, in effect, creates time.”

Jonathan Salem Baskin, Dim Bulb
“Finally, a technique I learned in a high school mechanical drafting class was to group like-executed tasks together, so don’t just staple once but try to take care of any immediately obvious stapling needs. If you open your online calendar to add an appointment, check to see if there are others to add before you close it out. The time you don’t spend doing these repetitive tasks will be extra time to focus on the work that matters.”

Jeff Cornwall, The Entrepreneurial Mind
“Too often, entrepreneurs do not prepare their employees before delegating to them. This results in the classic case of ‘it is quicker to do it myself’. By investing the time in simple training, communicating a clear explanation of expectations, and documenting the basic process for them to follow, delegation will quickly become a way to free up time.”

Becky McCray, Small Biz Survival
“Use checklists. Make and use checklists of daily tasks. This saves you time in two ways: you will work more efficiently with a checklist in front of you, and you will spend less time trying to remember what still needs to be done. You can read more of my explanation of a social media marketing checklist here.”

I also enjoyed the obvious, but extremely important tip Glen shares at the end of the article:

Improve your typing speed. Think about how much time you spend in email and other forms of online communication. Improving how fast you type could potentially add bunches of minutes to your day.

You may not agree with all of the tips provided, but you’re sure to garner at least one or two gems from “80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day.” Additionally, I liked the article because it introduced me to other articles, blogs, and writers on productivity.

While many productivity experts religiously follow the “only touch it once” system for document management, I’m more of a “touch it as few times as necessary” system follower. There are simply times when touching a paper only once is unrealistic for me — the mail will arrive while I’m on a phone call or I need to really mull something over before responding.

To handle these touch-more-than-once documents, I have a (gasp!) procrastination bin on my desk. Actually, it’s a basket that hangs from a shelf, but “hanging procrastination basket” just doesn’t have the same catchy name factor as the straightforward “procrastination bin.”

I have certain rules for what can and can’t go into the procrastination bin. The bin isn’t a dumping ground for things I don’t want to do or a spot for papers that need to be filed. It’s a designated area for things that can’t or shouldn’t be dealt with right now.

Qualities that make it okay for a document to go in the procrastination bin:

• It can fit. If the procrastination bin is full, nothing more can go inside of it and the document must be processed immediately. There is no squishing, fancy folding, or clever engineering to fit more inside the bin than what it was designed to contain.
• There are no consequences for procrastinating. If putting off the task will cause me stress, cause someone else frustration, or has a nearly immediate deadline, the document cannot go into the bin.
• Time is scheduled on the calendar for when to do it. When a paper goes into the bin, an entry must be made on the calendar for when to properly process the paper. Nothing can go into the bin and be forgotten.
• Procrastinating might be better than taking care of it right now. There are times when not taking immediate action is actually the best thing to do. The procrastination bin is perfect for these types of documents.
• The bin is small. I purposefully purchased the hanging basket that is made of wide mesh and isn’t very large. It can only be used for papers, and I’m not tempted to use it for items other than paperwork. It has a dedicated purpose and limited functionality.

In addition to the rules I have for the procrastination bin, I also have 30 minutes blocked off on my calendar each month to re-evaluate everything that is in the bin. Even with other dates on the calendar to process each paper, I’ve found that this 30 minutes will often take care of some of the items earlier than planned. I always schedule this 30 minute evaluation to occur right after lunch when my concentration levels are low. I realized that it’s better to use this time in a somewhat productive manner than waste it staring off into space, zoning out.