Productivity in a Mobile World

How to Get Agile Practices Adopted Anywhere

2016-06-22T22:17:00.001-04:00

Adopting Agile is easy.

You just need to gain the trust of organizations and departments by constantly delivering the highest value products with consistent tempo, be willing to take on changing requirements at any time and continually improve processes. And you might want to ensure the team is working at a cadence that is sustainable and they have a work environment they love.

To facilitate the organizational evolution to a higher state of Agile, I’ve provided three different approaches to Agile adoption.

The Borg Approach

Do you remember one of the greatest threat to the universe in Star Trek the Next Generation: The Borg. They are the hive mind cyborg collective that is unstoppable in that they assimilate new technologies and they take over living organism (mainly humans) and attached all kind of cybernetic and robotic equipment and in the process the person’s brain is re-written to be compliant to the “Borg Collective”. When the Borg would come in direct contact with humans, they would say in their icy cold emotionless synthetic voice, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

A leader in an organization who takes the Borg Approach, might come into an organization and say, “I’ve found a better way and it’s agile. We will start doing agile. There is a process called Scrum. We will do that. Everywhere.”

The Cowboy Approach

In the wild west there were limited supply of law enforcement officers and a lot of sturdy rugged individualist who where homesteading. As a result the interpretation of the law and execution of the law would sometimes fall to the individuals otherwise know as the Cowboy. You could say that the Cowboy was his own law.

A leader who takes this approach might say, “To hell with the rest of you, my group is doing agile.”

The Socratic Approach

Socrates is one of my favorite greek philosophers. Socrates taught a method of learning that is still practical and effective in our modern world.

You might think of Socrates as the first Corporate Consultant. If you’ve ever hired or worked with a consultant, they almost exclusively use the Socratic method. Remember next time you hire a corporate consultant, you are paying them to use ancient mystic wisdom on you.

The socratic method in the simplest form is to ask questions of the learner that help him/her gain knowledge of a topic by making observations and employing reasoning to self-discover knowledge.

Consultant, “What is the biggest pain point in your current work flow?”

Company Person, “Well it’s pretty obvious to me that department X doesn’t talk to department Y. If we could simplify the hand-off between X & Y we’d be a lot better off.”

Consultant, “Can you describe the hand-off scenario?”

Company Person, “Yes, but it’s complicated. “ [Spends 30 minutes describing the details]Thank you Socrates.

The Company Person might have just solved the problem as part of explaining it.

By asking successively detailed questions, the socratic methods spirals in to find the core issues. Perhaps Socrates can be credited for a key piece of the modern day “Toyota Production System” and the use of the “5 why’s”. Taiichi Ohno, architect of TPS, may not have known that he borrowed knowledge from the ancients, in essence the WHYs are a formalized socratic method. Ohno’s full process, including the “5 Why’s” grew further into Kaizen, lean manufacturing and Six Sigma.

Double, triple, quadruple and quintuple (5 times) thanks to Socrates.

Why all the Whys?

Asking why questions instead of giving answers enables you to go deeper into the problem space. Natural human tendency is to predict the answer. We have a tendency to assume we know the answers. It’s a nasty habit that is especially common in our inter-personal relationship and even in our evaluation of company processes.

In a morning meeting, a team mate snaps at you when you ask him about the progress on a piece of a project you are collaborating on.

Our human response is to ask ourselves, WHY is he so snappy. The first answer might be, “he’s a jerk". This answer does not result in a positive outcome. Too much ambiguity remains.

Let’s say in this example, you actually go ask him personally about WHY he felt emotionally charged about the question from the meeting. He might tell you that his 8-month-old daughter has a fever and he was up all night trading shifts with his wife.

Resist the Urge to Assume

Within an organization it’s critical to re-train ourselves, our colleagues and our teams to double down and perhaps quintuple down when asking WHY.

When we listen well in our organizations by asking the deeper questions, we begin to see the process problems instead of the personality or cultural problems. Adding on multiple WHYs will challenge us to dig deeper than just our assumptions.

Have you heard people stop at the first WHY and then create an entirely fictional story in their own mind about the incompetence of the organization or individual based on a single event or even a recurring organizational habit?

When we stop at the first WHY and never explore further, it introduces frustration, animosity and finger pointing.

Asking “Why" Leads to Agile

For yourself and your colleagues (even your own family) creating the habit of asking WHY in successive increments can be a catalyst for change. The WHY habit will push assumptions to the sideline and bring solutions to the forefront.

Since agility is centered around change and change requires knowledge and knowledge require asking questions, the natural outcome of asking iterative questions would be agile behaviors.

It’s really about listening, learning and experimenting with discipline.

Ask WHY a lot

Make sure when you ask WHY you are inquisitive and not vindictive or judgmental. That means that your tone of voice and body language need to reflect the desire to learn.

Look to answer the WHY questions for your customers and others throughout your organization. If you are the agile leader, serve, set the example and be a solution provider.

What is the biggest hurdle you currently face with adopting agile in your company? Please leave a comment.

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4 Tips to Solve Communication Issues With Geographically Distributed Agile Teams

2016-06-15T21:45:00.001-04:00

The workforce has gone global.

Geographically distributed teams are the norm.

There is a vendor I work with that provides 24/7/365 support for our systems. The vendor’s workforce is distributed across at least 3 continents. Most of the people work from home and use teleconferencing tools to communicate with clients.

Where I work there are 2 main locations and 2 time zones. People are geographically split about 50/50 between the two locations. In addition, some team members are contractor who work at yet a different sight.

Beyond that, several people have work at home agreements on particular days of the week, which increases the remote workers by a factor of two.

How does a high performance software organization run smoothly with so much distance between members of the same team?

The management team has done several experiments to create an environment that supports good communication for the distributed teams:

Team Chartering - creates work agreements and alignment on roles, goals and team norms
Accessibility - among team members enables fast communication
Common Tools - create a development environment that is efficient for everyone
Team Space - enhances shared vision, shared information, space for brainstorming and information radiators showing status of work and possibly changes in priorities

Team Chartering - The Key to High Performance Interaction

In the book Decisive, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe some interesting decision making tactics for hiring. One experiment was run for a call center where turnover was very high. The experiment consisted of a new interview process that actually walked the candidate through a very difficult support call with a customer. In contrast with a normal interview that talked about “a good work environment, great benefits, and growth opportunities,” this new interview style set the expectations about how difficult the job would be. This interview techniques primed the candidates to expect some hard to handle customer calls and also weeded out those people who were not capable of handling difficult customers. As a result of this interview evolution dramatically reduced the turnover at the call center.

The act of priming people’s expectations is the core to solving conflict and communication issues before they occur. See the article “Solve Conflict Among Team
Members Before it Starts,” for a detailed discussion on how Team Chartering helps set expectations and align work agreements among team members.

Accessibility - The Grease that Keeps Team Running Smooth

When teams are co-located they just talk to each other as a part of the fluid motion of their development work. Teams members that sit near each other have an amazing productivity because they get stuck and then unstuck within seconds.

One person finds a difficult piece of code. He turns around and asked his colleague about the problem. She responds with a piece of advice or provides context for the code. He says, “OK. that makes sense. I think I got it.” Problem solved.

When individual team members have specific knowledge areas they are especially critical information conduits.

Fluid communications among team members is key to make sure everyone is aware of what others are doing.

Many teams use chat room applications to keep the information flowing. Slack and HipChat are two of the most common.

Use a chat app and keep teams sharing information constantly no matter how many locations are involved.

Common Tools - Experiment, Adopt, Mentor

My favorite home improvement tool is my Dewalt Cordless Impact Driver/Drill with Quick Release Chuck. I keep a long philips head screw driver bit and a few drill bits in the case along with the tool. I can quickly replace electrical outlets sockets, hang pictures and install bathroom accessories in a flash. Or I can build a deck or a garden gate. I don’t carry screw drives AND a drill, I carry my combo tool and get through things fast.

Tooling can increase performance for anyone and can create a new speed limit for your team.

All teams need to experiment with different tools. And adopt new tools when experimentation shows substantial performance gains.

The team member who has experience with the tools must then mentor others in the best practices.

No matter whether you are close in proximity or far away, all team members need access to the common tools and the common repository of software libraries, scripts and build machines.

Team Space - Shared Space = Shared Information = Shared Success

The best thing about a team space is the information radiators that provide a constant focal point. An information radiator can be anything from white board drawing to matrix of sticky notes to an LCD screen that shows up-to-date information about the current development status.

For remote teams, a single team room is not possible. You might have a team room for each site. Consider the case where every person is in a different location. In this case, you would need a virtual team which can be constructed using Wikis, video and teleconferencing, and possibly a virtual whiteboard or shared creative space.

For distributed teams, the next best thing to information radiators in excellent video tools that can show the details of a white board drawing.

A fall back option is a shared creative space such as www.realtimeboard.com.

And the minimal situation is a tool to show the content of a product backlog and status of teamwork. A spreadsheet would be the simplest implementation and a web application like Trello, JIRA, Rally or VersionOne would be the most comprehensive solution.

Simple audio communications will not be enough to keep a team in sync, there must be a conduit for sharing the vision, backlog and progress of the teams works.

Remote Teams Have Challenges

There is no doubt that remote teams are challenged by many more obstacles that co-located teams. The ability to push information between team members is much more difficult over the phone or via video or even with agile project management web application.

The ability to see the attitude of a teammate instead of just hearing a voice can create friction because telephone communication can miss more than 55% of the content. To be precise communications breaks down to 7% verbal, 38% vocal, and 55% visual.

On a conference call you get the verbal and vocal, but sometimes the connection isn’t great and that erodes communications even further because it frustrates either one party or the other. If the connection creates a broken voice or static or echo it’s infuriating for everyone.

If you are faced with managing a geographically distributed team give them every advantage that you can by helping them set expectations about how they will work together (Chartering). Also provide the best available messaging/chat and video/audio conferencing (Accessibility). Make sure you give the team the best tools (Common Tools) and create the best shared space (Team Space) that you can so information flow will be easy.

What is your biggest struggle with your remote team? Please leave a comment.

Also, if you find this information useful please share on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin or another spot that enables you to help others.

Solve Conflict Among Team Members Before it Starts

2016-06-08T22:23:00.001-04:00

Remember those weird times in junior high when you were the go-between for two people who were attempting to be girl-friend/boy-friend or perhaps there was a conflict that needed resolved and notes needed to be exchanged.

The two people who had the most to gain or lose would invite a 3rd party into the equation to pass along notes or information because they were not capable of communicating face-to-face.

I can remember one time when I was involved in a relationship-defining event between two good friends. I was their letter courier. One of them would have some emotional trauma about their relationship and they would tell me and with their permissions I would tell the other. Or one of them would write a short letter, explain their underlying emotions to me and I would delivery the note with some hints about how the other person was feeling.

This was heart wrenching for not just 2 people, but 3 people. This practice extended the force field of emotional pain beyond the 2 people and brought in extra’s to help the drama fester. It was horrible and in this case resulted in a heart wrenching breakup. One of my friends was a pretty massive weight lifter and the whole episode melted this rather hulking guy into a puddle of tears.

Office Conflict

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, write, “The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambigous expectations around roles and goals. Whether we are dealing with the questions of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment , and withdrawals of trust.”

Over the course of your time in the office you are likely to experience criticism. One of the sharpest pains I feel is when someone not in the room is being belittled. When this happens I feel a strong need to stand up for the absent person and to provide perspective about the situation. This can help, but it often does not solve the root mis-alignment of roles, goals and expectations between colleagues.

In the event multiple team members seem to be frustrated with another team or person, it’s time for teams to come together and sort out their problems together so they can be on the same page.

Just like in junior high story, there needs to be an intervention, except this time there is restoration and not a break up.

Enter Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing

In 1965 Psychologist Bruce Tuckman introduced the team development concept of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.

Other’s have added onto this concept and re-name the phases over time, but essentially there the stages of team development involve some amount of conflict, posturing and finally resolution and performance.
The emotional energy and conflict in the Storming stage eats away at productivity and in some cases key patterns of behavior can linger if Storming and Norming fail to results in a common purpose, goal and shared working agreements.

Storming

”..participants form opinions about the character and integrity of the other participants and feel compelled to voice these opinions if they find someone shirking responsibility or attempting to dominate. Sometimes participants question the actions or decision of the leader as the expedition grows harder…” - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.

Norming

“Resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of co-operation emerges” - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.

Performing

“With group norms and roles established, group members focus on achieving common goals, often reaching an unexpectedly high level of success" - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.

As a team leader or project manager you want teams to accelerate through Storming and Norming and jump into Performing as quickly as possible.

I’ve heard some people say that failure to pass through Storming will just delay the inevitable Storming to another day and cause the team to repeated regress before they can push through to Norming and Performing.

In order for the team to establish the “norms and roles” the team must do the work of internalizing the goal(s) and coming to some agreement on how they will interact with each other and the world around them.

Agile Chartering to the Rescue

When creating a new team I want to provide some acceleration to get through storming and norming and into performing as quickly as possible.

My typical approach is two part meeting. First, define the problem that needs to be solved using, “Project Chartering” and then define the working agreements for the team using, “Team Chartering.”

Project Chartering provides an answer to WHAT.

What are we building?
What is the customer expectation?
What are the key features?
What are the milestone?

Team Chartering provides the HOW.

How will we the team build this (What process)?
How do we communicate with the business and marketing?
How does the team delivery a solution to the customer?

Admittedly there are a number of WHAT questions to ask in Team Chartering, but these WHAT questions are centered around the tactical working agreements and the teams process.

What should I do if I know I’m going to be late to team meetings?
What should I do if I reach a blocking issues?
What is the definition of done for our work product? (e.g. code reviewed, function tested, regression tested)
Who is responsible for moving an item to ‘Closed’ on the Scrum Board?
What should I do if I have a serious technical concern with an implementation?
Etc.

Some of these question seem pretty trivial. However, these are the kind of things that people stumble over in intra-team relationships. I typically have a list of 50 questions that are both trivial and tough.

The length of chartering event depends on how many people are involved in the project. Typically 6-8 hours is typical duration for combined Project/Team Chartering. If the team travels to a common location for a kick-off, book a day for this adventure and come armed with questions that the team needs to answer. If the team is remote, you need to conduct this exercise with an online collaboration tool. One of my favorites is Realtime Board (www.realtimeboard.com)

The time investment might seems high for a meeting with a lot of people, but this concentrated time results in outstanding team performance.

I’ve seen an unintended A/B test in my own work environment where one team was chartered and other was not. The chartered team demonstrates higher collaboration with internal members and external stakeholders and delivers high output than the non-chartered teams.

You could say it’s just the people. I’ve seen too many examples of good people on non-performing teams that result in bad outcome and average people on good teams that result in outstanding outcomes.

There is a high correlation between success and good team process. For a team to be effective the roles and goals and norms need to be well defined.

You either let the team struggle to define the roles, goals and norms, or you can prime the pump and race through storming and norming and shift the team into performing.

Is there conflict or disagree on your current teams? What is the biggest issue?

Please add a comment or send me an e-mail with the ‘Contact Steve’ tab.

Improve Agile Meeting Productivity 2x-5x

2016-06-01T22:13:00.001-04:00

Let’s say your personal productivity is awesome. Perhaps it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. You have habits that are working well. Perhaps you’re waking up, getting some exercise, reading, and working on your big goals. At work you may even have your e-mail inbox under control.

But your work environment is chaotic and your meetings are wasteful. See if you find anything familiar in this typical scenario.

Example of a Wasteful Meeting

Meeting Idea

Your boss says, “Let’s decide how to create an architecture for the next generation of our software product. I’ll schedule a meeting to discuss the architecture.”

Don’t get alarmed yet, but NEVER have a meeting to DISCUSS something. Only have meetings to DECIDE something.

Meeting Invite

The meeting announcement goes out saying, “Future Architecture Discussion.”

The body of the meeting says, “Let discuss the future architecture of our application that will support the upcoming requirements.”

Now you should be a little alarmed. This meeting is not looking like a good use of your time because there’s no definitive deliverable.

Meeting Time

The meeting time arrives and all the very opinionated, smart, capable, driven, and highly effective people arrive in the room and take seats around the table. For the purposes of this (nearly historically accurate) example, let’s assume there are 6 people attending the meeting.

If everyone arrives roughly on-time, you have already saved many minutes of the start-stop-restart cycle.

When the meeting host settles down in his or her chair WITHOUT a note pad and only a cup of coffee in hand, you should begin to raise the alert level to DEFCON-3.

This style of meeting will result in NO MINUTES and possibly NO DECISIONS.

Meeting Flow

During the meeting there is a flurry of different topics that come up. The meeting starts with architecture, but shifts subtly to some interesting topics:

What if the marketing guys have got it all wrong?
What if the CEO won’t fund the architecture?
What if the current application technical issues cause the team to spend 50% of their effort fixing bugs instead of creating the new architecture?
Etc.

These are interesting but they’re enticing, emotional, and USELESS in regards to the architecture discussion.

Alert raised to DEFCON-2.

Meeting End

Near the end of the meeting, people begin to look at their watches saying they are have another meeting to attend. Nothing has been written down.

Like nuclear war, once the missiles are launched it’s too late to rescue this meeting. Raise the alert status to DEFCON-1 - Maximum alert.

Is There Another Way?

The example above is likely to resemble some of the meeting norms where you work. Inefficient and ineffective meetings might be a cultural norm, but it’s not the way it has to be.

With a little attention at each step in the meeting process you can improve the effectiveness and increase the collaboration in your daily meetings.

Example of a Productive Meeting

Meeting Idea with a Deliverable

The boss suggests that you gather the technical leaders and determine the next steps in the architecture evolution. She says, “Can you get with the team and develop a roadmap for the architecture?”

You’re empowered to create a ROADMAP. This is the deliverable from the meeting.

Meeting Invite With a Purpose

You think for a few minutes and decide on the goal for the meeting. “Create and record a roadmap for application architecture with a 5-year horizon.”
In addition, you come up with a rough agenda.

Agenda:
1. Review the marketing requirements
2. Record highest risk items
3. Create a list of architecture changes necessary to meet the business goals.

A meeting invite with a purpose can result in 2x improvement because it primes the brains of all the participants to think about the problem ahead of time.
With a goal, you can take your 2x productivity to the bank by shrinking your meeting length by half.

With a goal and agenda, you could find a 3x impact. A meeting that normally takes an hour could take 20 minutes. The meeting ends when you’ve reached your defined goal and know how to get to the goal with a written plan.

Meeting Time With a Prompt Start

Depending on the business norms in your company you’ll experience very different meeting norms: for example, habitual tardiness to meetings. One way to shift business norms is to start on time.

In one meeting I hosted the attendees arrived on time, but were quite talkative about numerous subjects. In order to move the meeting forward, I said, “I can make your Friday shorter if we start on the review right now.” And then we got down to business.

Meeting Flow With a Plan

When it comes to meetings, there’s nothing like a good plan. A colleague quoted once, “Never attend a meeting that you don’t control.” Perhaps that’s a little extreme, but I would say you should always have a plan for the meetings you host, including slides and/or a facilitation plan.

At the minimum I create Powerpoint slides to keep the meeting focused on a specific outcome. When you have a representation of the goals, people have a much easier time keeping their focus.

Meeting Flow With a Turbo Charged Plan

Since people are very visual and actually engage with more energy when standing, consider using sticky notes or a whiteboard. Sticky notes are especially effective because they can be moved and re-arranged easily during a discussion.

Copy paper and blue masking tape are also very useful if you have information prepared before hand.

To increase the effectiveness of sprint grooming or planning meetings I often print out sprint backlog titles to tape to wall. Then I have the team create a task breakdown using sticky notes that are placed in order under the backlog item. I use the Post-It Plus application to take a picture of the the wall. The application recognizes eat individual sticky and exports the sticky notes in several formats. Excel is useful when I have a large quantity of notes. I then get the notes transcribed.

Meeting End With Closed Loops

At the end of the meeting you should have the following.

1. Actions recorded
2. Decisions recorded.

No matter what kind of meeting you’re holding, the end game must conclude with decisions and actions recorded.

When You Need a 5x Strategy

Under normal meeting circumstances a goal and agenda are sufficient to succeed. But sometimes a meeting deals with highly emotional or widely debated topics that need a 5x strategy. Without a 5x strategy, you’ll lose hours of time and potentially create even more tension.

Productivity of 5x is possible and realistic when you come prepared with a detailed facilitation plan that includes well planned activities. The plan should include strategies and activities for:

dealing with peoples biases (mental or emotional baggage)
effective brainstorming
taking large quantities of creative input and move it towards a decision
keeping the level of engagement high so that the participants keep their energy and intellect focused on the topic
engagement during the meeting with boundaries
any needed follow-up

The article “You Can Have Better Agile Meetings” provides a overview facilitation flow.

If collaboration attempts fail and the emotions or topics remain unresolved, the most common alternative is to call in the higher authority to resolve the issue.

This is a weaker approach that could result in temporary solution, but with a high probability that the parties will find “insurmountable issues" with the top down decisions as soon as the slightest obstacle is encountered.

Conversely, the gains from a 5x strategy can achieve a lasting consensus and full buy-in from your team members.

Please leave a comment about the most debated topic that needs to be solved in your work place?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 6: Making it Work

2016-05-26T22:01:00.001-04:00

Is your work enjoyable?

If it is, then you might be more amenable to call everything you do at home and at the office work. If not, let’s reframe for a second.

Work = Effort toward a Goal

If the equation holds true, then what you do at home (home maintenance, vacations, personal finance, raising kids, plans of the future, health fitness and hobbies) is also WORK.

What’s interesting about calling all of our life activity ‘work’ is the sense that work is something that you do with purpose. You want a result for your effort.

The business mind is focused on achieving the business goals, the revenue, the growth, and the sustainability of business.

The personal mind is focused on seeing how to prepare kids for life in the future, enjoying a vacation, re-training for another career, reducing the stress in life, spending more time with your spouse, changing ingrained habits or starting on a bucket list item.

The business mind has a natural craving to design and execute goals. The rewards are very tactile. When you do a good job for a customer you might get a thank you, and of course you get paid.

For salaried folks, you might not see the transaction so vividly, but we want to get the project or tasks done and often we are measured during the year for achieving specific goals. Achieving goals results in a better review and potential earnings growth, maybe a promotion with more scope.

The personal mind requires a lot more proactive behavior to create the goal. Personal goals are not laid out by the leadership of the business, they are created through personal leadership.

For specific steps on how to employ personal leadership see the prior articles on “How to Learn a Productivity System.” Part 3, 4, and 5 are focused almost completely on personal leadership. Parts 1 and 2 are focused on tactical ways that you can create time in your day so you can spend more hours doing the strategic tasks needed to increase your personal leadership.

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 1: Capture

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 2: Actions

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Planning

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 5: Evaluate Life Dreams

Which is more important, business mind or personal mind?

That is a tough question.

The business mind provides the How-the monetary sustenance.

The personal mind provides the Why-the Character and the Motivations.

The answer: They are both important. They both impact each other.

A personal example of interleaving the personal and business mind

In 2005 I took a role as a “Team Lead/Scrum Master.” My leadership style was centered around high volume and persuasive intimidation.

In 2008, I was promoted to department manager and I WAS SCARED SPIT-LESS. I had engaged in numerous technical and political battles with my peers over the years, and now I was taking over leadership of a team that knew my reputation as loud, overbearing, manipulative person. I had created animosity with a couple of the most senior and respected individuals by forceful getting my way using pushy tactics.

Answering the wakeup call

Faced with managing a team that saw me as an antagonist rather than a helpful resource, I realized I needed to drastically alter course.

In the months and years that followed my promotion, I studied hard to change my mindset and my behaviors (and I still study hard to this day). I read book after book and listened to people in the organization that showed management skills coincident with what I was learning about effective personal and public leadership. I moved my personal style from directive-authoritative to servant-leader.

This personal study to improve character created a deep well of good behaviors and resulted in better quality of life in both my personal sphere and in the business arena.

People in my organizations gave me feedback that they had grown to respect me over time as I demonstrated consistent other-centered leadership.

Personal leadership has a broad impact

Isn’t it interesting that the personal mind has such a great impact everywhere? It might be the more important mind after all.

The moral of the story is this: No matter if it’s personal or business it’s WORK. And if it’s work, it needs a system to move toward the goal.

One of my favorite authors, David Allen, has a great book on this very topic called, Making it All Work. He provides an entire book dedicated to creating a unified productivity mindset around personal and business goals. David Allen’s previous book, Getting Things Done describes a comprehensive productivity system which is now known globally as GTD.

What is not working in your personal or business system? Write a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 5: Evaluate Life Dreams

2016-05-18T21:52:00.001-04:00

When we think about productivity, we might think about being busy. That is an inaccurate view of productivity.

Productivity is achieving the most important things in life while avoiding the pitfalls of busy work and unproductive meaningless time wasting endeavors.

So if you’re not yet keenly aware of the most important things, then that’s a very good place start. If you’re already aware of the most important things, then it’s good to revisit them to make sure you continue to move in the right direction.

Identifying the most important things

The following two exercises will help you identify some of your core desires in life. These exercises strip away things that are just about prestige and outward appearance.

Yes, I want to own a Porsche 911, but it actually doesn’t appear on the core list of what I want to achieve during my living years. A Porsche cannot help me leave a legacy so it is not on the ‘got-to-have’ list.

Give these two exercises a try for building your core desires. If you already have a most important list, is it time to revisit it? Compare these exercise results to your existing list. Are there any differences?

Why do you think some things made the list and others didn’t?

Time Travel to Your 80th Birthday

Envision your 80th birthday party. In this self-created visualization consider the location, the people, and the conversations you’ll have with those attending the party. You might need to close your eyes.

For me, I placed my 80th birthday party in my backyard and visualized my wife, my daughters, my grand-kids, my extended family, and my friends. I thought about my own character and legacy and the character of my children and grandchildren.

Another addition to the exercise would be to visualize your professional accomplishments. It could be the successful sale of a business, the retirement from a company after attaining a certain leadership position, or perhaps the accomplishment of a significant goal that impacts the world.

In your visualization you can also think about:

Things still on your bucket list
Health goals
Travel

These results are the core of why you want to be productive.

To discover the real dreams in your life requires considerable introspection.

Write down your thoughts on paper or in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Through the years I’ve added, removed or refined different aspects of it. Revisiting it annually moves me into a mindset where I can be more focused on the things that matter.

What Do They Say at Your Funeral?

In the exercise above, you envision a living legacy. You can see, hear, feel, and interact with your surroundings. This activity is a retrospective on your life.

There are several approaches you can take to talk about your non-living legacy.

1. Think about attending a funeral. It’s quiet and respectful. People are seated and someone is ready to speak at the front. But as you look into the coffin you realize this is your funeral. Consider who you would like to speak and what they would say.

2. Write your own obituary, but include more insightful things than just “survived by” and “lived at.” Go deep enough to bring out your legacy. What you want to leave after you pass on can be a serious guiding post to your core dreams.

Wow. That’s Different Than I Expected

There are some interesting things on my bucket list: trip to Italy, vacation in Tahiti, own a 1978 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, do an Olympic Distance Triathlon, watch the Formula One US Grand Prix Live, race a motorcycle, and many others.

In contrast, the two exercises resulted in things like “Happy, healthy, and wise children and grandchildren” or “a solid contribution in the market of productivity services that saved people millions of minutes over their lifetime.”

Evaluating your legacy gives a clue as to what dreams are truly the most valuable to you.
Stephen Covey’s 2nd Habit in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to “Know the End from the Beginning.” It’s a fancy way of saying do some planning.

When it comes to identifying your legacy, you’re doing meta planning. That’s effectively asking yourself what matters most and then providing a good solid answer.

The Core is Ready, Now What?

Once you’ve come up with a high, tactile version of your living and non-living legacies you’re ready to address the parts that make the dream happen.

Dreams can be hard to break down into parts because achieving dreams seems impossible. Dreaming doesn’t take any special effort or discipline, but reaching your dreams requires you to decompose the dream into small bite size chucks. For some concrete steps in breaking down dreams into goals and goals into plans, see the previous article, “How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals.”

What About My Bucket List?

Don’t throw away your bucket list. Just know how it fits into the priority of things that matter most.

For example, I had the dream of running a marathon. It was about 5 years of small steps that finally took me to the end goal in 2014. This happened to align with my desire to lead a healthy, fit life, so it didn’t take me in the opposite direction of my core dreams.

Please write a comment about what you discovered while doing these exercises. Did anything surprise you?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals

2016-05-11T19:37:00.001-04:00

My kids have awesome dreams for the future.

One of my kids wants to be a movie producer. One wants to be a famous actor. One wants to travel the world.

For myself, I still dream of being a race car drive (Yes, it’s true I still this dream even as a middle age person).
These are examples of dreams and dreams can come true. However, inorder to make a dream a reality, it must be decomposed into a goal.

Dreams cost you very little energy and time. You can spend 5 minutes envisioning yourself crossing the finish line of a marathon or making decisions as the head of your own company or seeing yourself on the beach with your family in Hawaii or leading a large community of people to serve others or heading up significant a social change in your country or seeing your children live with integrity and principles.

And now the hard parts begins.

Goals on the other hand, require much more than 5 minutes to write down. And then they require much more energy and time to achieve once you’ve really put them down on paper and committed yourself to achieve the goal.
Some people have the capacity to keep all their most important dreams and goals totally encapsulated in their heads and then connect those to action. Those people are very rare.

Most people need to take deliberate action to translate dreams into well written goals and then decompose goals into specific action steps.

Simple Dreams and Goals

Dream: “I want to have more energy and less stress.”

This is a great ambition.

What gives a person more energy?

Studies show energy is rooted in good habits around sleeping, eating, drinking water, exercise and good mental health.

In fact, there is a study showing that active people have about 20% more energy. If that is true, then we can decompose a dream of having more energy into a goal about being active.

Goal (Weak): “I want to exercise so I can have more energy.”

The weak goal above has a couple elements to help a person move toward more energy, but it lacks some critical elements. The strong goal below includes the extra elements that remove the ambiguity about the frequency of exercise and the duration of exercise which are required ingredients to improve your chances for success.

Goal (Strong): “I want to exercise for 20 minutes, at least 3 times per week and do that consistently throughout 2016.”

This is much better and and more potent goal that has the potential to start a good habit.

Breaking that down further results in a plan of action which I talk about in the article, “How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Plan”

We’ll create a specific plan for this goal of exercising which should put us on the road to
achieving the dream of “having more energy.”

The Plan: “I will do (yoga, a walk, a run) for 20 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday right after I get up at 6:00 am.”

More Complicated Dreams and Goals

Dream: “I want to be a CEO of my own company”

Interestingly, I’ve had this dream myself for many years. And as I looked around at the big company I was working for, I was overwhelmed with immense obstacles that seemed to bar the way: I don’t have an MBA. I didn’t attend Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. I’ve never started my own company before.

WAIT a minute. “I’ve never started my own company before.” What am I thinking? Starting my own company for the first time automatically makes me a CEO. Right?

After some contemplation I became aware that I didn’t really know what my company would do or what it would sell or what type of service it would provide.
So that dream was a little narcissistic in that I didn’t really have any purpose or obvious value to offer. It was more a ‘dream’ fueled by the desire for prestige.

To build a sustainable dream, you must insist on offering value. And you might argue that I’m wandering into the gray area of the philosophy of what makes a good dream vs. a bad dream. And you would be right. I think there are principles which should be followed when deciding about which dreams to chase vs. curtain.

Here a restatement of the original dream, but this rendition has a value statement.

Dream: “I want to lead a company which helps individuals and business maximize their productivity.”

This dream has more tangle value statement and can more easily be generate goals and plans.

Goal (Weak): “Create a business to help people be more productivity”

This goal makes sense in that it provides a more focused idea (creating a business), but the weak goal lacks a time frame in which to execute the business activity, which will enable procrastination rather than accountability.

Goal (Strong): “Have a profitable business that serves productivity minded individuals by 31 Dec 2016.”

The strong goal will provide the qualifiers and deadline that make a idea into a GOAL.The Strong version also provides the necessary ingredients that make up a ’SMART’ goal: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

Let’s examine whether or not this goals passes the SMART test:

Specific - There appears to be pretty specific outcome to this goal which is a ‘profitable business’ that serves a ‘productivity minded’ market group. The term ‘Specific’ is probably one of the gray areas to the ‘SMART’ goal definitions because the definition of ‘Specific’ can be broadly interrupted. However, the strong goal appears to meet this criteria.

Measurable - The word ‘profitable’ is a little loose with respect to measurement. Does this mean profitable over the whole year or profitable for one month or profitable since the dawn on time. This actually needs work. Let’s propose that this be modified to say, ’…profitable for 1 month in 2016’.

Attainable - Depending on the expenses to run the business and the time allocated to running the business, this could be very attainable or it could be unachievable. For the context of this goal, let’s assume the expenses are very low and the time commitment for the business is roughly 10 hours per week. That sounds attainable.

Relevant - I think this hits a home run for relevant category because it flows directly from the Dream.

Timely - There is a deadline on the goal, so this is also spot on.

Takeaway for Dreams and Goals

When it comes to creating goals and plans, there is a cost equations.
Dream-to-Plan Time = Size of Dream * Goals Creation Time * Plan Creation Time

Notice this is what we call an exponential equation. That means if you have a big dream, you’ll need to put in big time. Maybe not all at once, but definitely over the life of your dream.

Let’s consider another complex dream to illustrate the cost principle.

Dream: “I want to have children who live with integrity and principles.”

You will probably need to spend time working on that dream every week. If you are a parent, you are probably already investing time in this area through many different activities and interaction with your kids.

Below is one example goal that is decomposed from the dream.

Goal: “Provide daily personal input into children’s lives regarding life principles.”

Let’s break this down and see if it complies with the SMART goal format.

Specific - Very specific

Measurable - The measurement is to do this everyday.

Attainable - Seems reasonable

Relevant - Very relevant toward the dream

Timely - This is a bit redundant with measurement in this case. It’s a daily thing.

And then there is a plan that comes out of this.

Plan: “Read a quote or article or affirmation at breakfast that captures a life principles and briefly discuss.”

As a parent, you might say, “I do this as a course of everyday living. I teach by example. I teach at every opportunity.” And I think you are correct. Keep up the good work.

Sometimes it gives you a boost if you can do something very intentionally rather than in a reactionary situation. Intentional situations are usually more relaxed and the child’s brain is ready to receive input. In reactionary situations, such as teaching in the heat of the moment or when something went wrong, is often frustrating and much of the energy and training is waisted because the emotional situation constrains the brain and learning doesn’t happen well.

I really love to hear from you about the your biggest challenges setting goals. What do you find the most difficult in goal setting?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Planning

2016-05-04T20:35:00.001-04:00

“Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the greatest crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied Commander

These were the words spoken before the D-Day invasions were executed.

In light of the immense planning that was required to pull off this amazing multi-nation, multi-front, humungous battle for freedom, another famous quote is also realized.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” - Dwight D. Eisenhower.

At home and at work I believe this quote about planning to be spot on. It’s interesting to see how your brain works differently in a meeting or during an activity if you’ve done some planning versus when you wing it.

Consider Two Scenarios

Scenario #1: You receive an e-mail meeting invitation from a colleague titled, “Acme Contract” and the meeting is schedule for tomorrow. The body of the invitation says,”-Thanks.” You’re aware of the Acme Contract and you know you’ll be working on the Acme contract. If fact, you have some very specific feelings about the Acme Contract and how it will impact you and possibly others on your team.

You show up to the meeting and your colleague says, “We’ve got to update the contract and bid based on new input from my boss. I’m showing the spreadsheet on the overhead.

Let’s update the info to reduce the overall cost.”
Scenario #2: You receive an e-mail meeting invitation from a college titled, “Acme Contract Updates.” The body of the e-mail says,

Goal: Review and Update Acme Contract Cost and Assumptions to Reduce Overall Cost.

Agenda:

1. Review current contract and bid.

2. Re-assess assumptions

3. Update bid based on new assumptions

See attachment for current contract and bid assumptions.

You show up to the meeting and you know what the outcome is. Your brain has already been working subconsciously on new assumptions and ways to save costs. Your brain has a slight edge over Scenario #1.

Ask yourself this question, “Assuming a 1 hour meeting, how much time is saved in Scenario #2 over Scenario #1?”

What do you think? 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes?

If there are 3 people in the meeting you would minimally save 15 minutes total for your company and 5 for yourself.

If there are 5 people in the meeting and you save 30 minutes, you just saved 150 minutes for your company and 30 for yourself. WOW. Do you think it’s realistic to save your company 2 1/2 hours of time?

Surprisingly, I think you’ll find it’s very realistic and practical. If you do this, you’ll be a hero among your peers and in the eyes of your superiors because you’re creating more value in less time.

You might be saying, “Sounds pretty idealistic and like it will take a lot of work to create that goal and agenda.”

A Mechanism to Train Yourself to Plan

1. Commit to never sending a meeting invite out unless you have at least one sentence in the body of the meeting notice, The GOAL: “Goal: ……”

It will take 1-5 minutes to write this single line but you will ALWAYS recoup that time by saving a minimum of 5 minutes in every meeting you host.

When you write the Goal statement in your e-mails it will force you to think just a little deeper.

2. Always include a concrete outcome in the goal statement.

You would not use “Goal: Discuss developing a new app” as a goal statement. The word “Discuss” is not a concrete deliverable. The real PURPOSE of a meeting is not to discuss something. The PURPOSE of a meeting is to come to agreement and record decisions and action steps.

A better goal, then, would be, “Goal: Create a Development Plan for the New App.” Now I have a pre-defined output for my meeting. At least for myself I know what I expect to get out of the meeting. At the end of the meeting I should have a draft plan to get from zero to new application.

It works even better if you reiterate the goal at the start of the meeting so the brains of all the participants are tuned into the PURPOSE of the meeting. It’s like a magnet. The GOAL is one side of magnet and the people’s brains the other side of the magnet. Now the magnetic forces align.

Often when I write the goal it requires me to dig deeper so I actually do some thinking and PLANNING. Within 1-5 minutes I clarify my intentions for myself and for others and my return on investment will be much greater than the time it took to do the hard work of thinking.

People don’t like wasting time in meetings, but when you put together a 5-minute meeting plan and you execute that plan and you get the necessary buy-in and collaboration with multiple people, you really create a win-win.

In fact, I consider holding and conducting meetings as a productivity enhancer because I can actually get a high level of collaboration and alignment from group sessions. When you have strong and capable people working on complex projects, you might need more meetings to get alignment. But you don’t want meetings that result in throwing around random off-topic ideas or bringing up the baggage of how, “it didn’t work last time we tried this, so it’s doomed to fail this time."

You need to get the creative energy FOCUSED on solution-oriented thinking. The GOAL will guide you to that end. Facilitation training can also be very useful. Read more about that skill in a full-scale facilitation process, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic).”

Please let me know the outcome of your experience using the “Goal:…” statement in your meetings.

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 2: Actions

2016-05-02T21:11:00.001-04:00

The past 2 weeks were a disaster for my productivity system.

As a software project manager I oversea about 10 projects. A couple of the bigger projects have a release cycle of 2 weeks. Effectively that means there is no down time, there is no week off because one project releases on even weeks and the other project releases on odd weeks. The other 8 projects are smaller research projects, which require more hand holding because they have significant risks and exposure to the company’s senior leaders.

One of my colleagues was off for 3 days so I did a little filling in. Then the following week we on-boarded a new project lead which, in the end, is going to help tons, but requires a bit of time to properly train a new person.

During this 2-week period my inbox went from 0 to 357. And my stress level pegged the ‘overheat’ mark so I knew I was loosing a few things along the way. The really urgent things didn’t get lost because some of my co-workers reminded me through e-mail and phone calls that they needed something (which is kind of embarrassing to be asked twice or three times).

In the end, the urgent and important got done, the important but not urgent things got done, most of the urgent and unimportant things were ignored, and the not important and not urgent items were totally ignored.

For a really detailed description of the time management matrix, see the article “How to Save a Million Years of Time in a Life Time.”

How does one setup a system that manages his or her time, ensuring the important things done in life in spite of a continuous flow of stressful weeks?

One effective strategy: Train thy self

Take special-forces training as an example. In the series “Surviving the Cut” special operations forces training includes:

Ranger School
Air Force Pararescue
US Marine Recon
Special Forces Divers
Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)
Marine Sniper

Another great training example series is “Navy SEALs: BUDS class 234.”

Even if you haven’t seen these series, most of us have an idea about the rigor of this type of training.

What’s interesting in many documentaries that I’ve seen (including books and post mission interviews), is the comments from special operations veterans about how they execute and survive in very stressful combat situations. Many veterans say, “I trusted my training”.

"I trust my training"

Isn’t that interesting.

In the heat of battle these amazing individuals with highly tuned senses and unwavering courage and amazing tenacity relay on TRAINING.

This is a huge lesson for us. So let’s get trained in our daily routine so we can handle office stress. Here’s is the training you need to keep it going.

#1 Setup the Routine and Tools

Routine is key. Almost every day of the year I’m reminded how important it is to have
routines or systems to keep on track. After listening to podcasts with very successful people, you quickly see they incorporate systems into their life in order to achieve their desired results.

One of my favorite podcast of all time is Tim Ferris’ interview with Scott Adams (Creator of Dilbert). In the podcast Scott Adams expresses how critical his daily systems are to his success.

In “The One Thing” by Gary Keller he says, “The more creative a person is, the more they need a system.” You’d think it would be the opposite of that. But Keller argues that without a system you will just become distracted instead of productively creative.

Suggested routine for home

Wake up on time. It’s key to force this behavior. You’ve faced more pain in your life than getting up, so you can do it.

Refuse to read e-mail or watch TV or even read the news. Getting distracted from your routine is easy, so make sure you keep the first part of your day clean from tempting distractions.

Work Out. (I alternate between Yoga and Running). This is important to your longevity, mental health, and ability to feel good and have energy.

Eat breakfast with your family. I’m big on pouring into my family’s life first thing in the day. It helps myself, my wife, and my kids enter the day with a mindset of thankfulness, thoughtfulness, kindness, and a spirit that is eager to learn.

Go to work.

Suggested routine for work

Look at your Calendar first. Your time is a map of your daily activities and you need to know the landscape. Don’t be distracted by e-mail inbox. Look to the calendar first.

Designate the biggest appointments you need to accomplish today as “all day” appointments. These are not meetings, they are deliverables that you need to make. (e.g. “Schedule training for the software team,” “Make sure that contract is signed by Pete,” or “Get the Bid to Joe for Atlas Project.”)

Put these on your calendar for each day of the week. Many of these come in e-mails. I’ve created a special button in Outlook to create meetings from e-mails so I can plop these items into the calendar quickly.
If you get projects and direction through e-mails put as many as possible into the calendar to keep yourself aware of the non-meeting deliverables.

Put non-urgent emails into an “!Action” folder at the top of e-mail box.
If the action comes in some other way besides e-mail, a phone call or post-it note, write yourself an e-mail for those actions and either put it into your “!Action” folder or into an “all-day” calendar event on the proper day.

Too many “all-day” events

Don’t get bogged down with too many daily assignments. Challenge yourself to reduce the number of daily events down to 3. Distribute the rest to different days or delete them altogether. Or perhaps put them in the “!Action” folder to deal with later.

If you are frantic at work, you won’t be able to become less frantic without FOCUS. FOCUS requires elimination. FOCUS is the result of shedding things so you can become immersed in one thing.

Review and update appointments daily.

#2 Refresh Your Mindset at Every Possible Interval

It’s so easy to get distracted during the day. Each time I come back to my computer from a meeting or discussion with my colleagues, I look at the calendar first, then at my e-mail inbox.

All Day Calendar First

Put the three big things at the top of the calendar. These are the “Big Rocks” in the parlance of Stephen Covey’s 3rd Habit: First things First. Stephen does a seminar exercise where he has a glass bowl half full of small pebbles and then another bucket with big rocks. The big rocks have labels on them like, “work out” or “time with family” or “write a book.” Stephen asks for a volunteer from the audience to come up to the stage and attempt to put all the big rocks into the bowl with the pebbles. People usually start stuffing the big rocks into the glass bowl only to find they won’t fit. There’s a lot of struggling to push rocks into the pebbles, digging around pebbles, and finally total frustration. The big rocks won’t all fit, unless…

Stephen Covey suggests the person pour out all the pebbles into the bucket, put in all the big rocks and pour all the pebbles on top.

Guess what. It all fits perfectly. That is why the big rocks must be done first.

Meetings on the Calendar Second

What is the next thing on my calendar and how can i prepare for it?

E-mail Third

Triage the incoming mass of information.
If I spend more than 5 minutes on triage and think I’m getting distracted, I go back to All-day events on my Calendar to make sure I can complete the Big Rocks.

Now you have something that looks like a routine. This is the training you can fall back on. We are lacking a little of the supporting philosophy, but that will come. Understanding the philosophy is often the next level of training.

Please leave a comment or send me e-mail and let me know what Big Rock you’re struggling to get done?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 1: Capture

2016-04-20T22:17:00.001-04:00

In high school I started writing computer programs to do math and physics homework so I could reduce trivial work.

I can still remember the first equation I solved using a computer program on my Apple IIgs. It was the quadratic equation. Yes, the quadratic formula was a piece of mathematical beauty to solve for ‘x’.

But, I could not stand to write down all that math on paper and do the calculations. My bigger problem was that I would rush so fast to get homework done that I would make silly errors. My hurried approach would result in getting the problem incorrect.

How could I be fast and accurate?

Doing math on paper was neither fast nor accurate. Doing math on the calculator was faster, but because there wasn’t fancy solver button on my calculator, it was still susceptible to errors.

Remember Shu-Ha-Ri from the previous article, “How to Pick a Time Saving Strategy or System.” This is the learning model that describes how people move from beginner to master:

Shu (shoo) - leaner - do everything in rote fashion without too much analysis.
Ha (hah) - practitioner - understand the theory and tweak the systems based on reflections, analysis and experience.
Ri (ree) - master - innovate and create, potentially breaking with previous systems.

Shu - the Learner

With programming, I started from scratch without google, without help, just a computer manual and a desire to get simplistic, accurate answers without a lot of manual effort.

Knowing that programming can be fast and accurate, I spent a couple days creating my first simple program to save the quadratic equation. A re-creation of the old Apple basic code is shown below along side of the terminal output.

The first version was simple and solved quadratic equations quickly.

While programming this first iteration I learned how to create non-trivial math equations in Apple basic. I also learned how to navigate and fix bugs and how to print out the values so I could easily extract the results.

Ha - the Practitioner

The next version of the program dealt with the dreaded case where the roots were imaginary. Remember these types of numbers? They are numbers that don’t exist in the real word, but we still have to deal with them in the universe of math.

In this particular case, if you try to take the square root of a negative number, normal calculators and computer libraries will give you a big fat error. “OVERFLOW” or “NaN” which stands for Not a Number.

The code had to be modified to address this concern and even more fancy attributes were added later to allow me to type in the values of A, B and C at the console and avoid re-writing the program for every input.
Even with this program, I hardly taxed the computational and power of my Apple II.

Apple Basic:

Ri - the Master

And after many years of programming, I learning Java and C++ and one could say I became a master by applying the learning of my first program in two totally different programming languages.

Java:

C++:

Shu-Ha-Ri as Applied to Productivity Systems

You want to adopt a productivity system to make life efficient. To remove the trivial and accentuate the important.

And I believe that adopting systems for productivity can be similar in nature to the Shu-Ha-Ri experience of my first program on my Apple IIgs.

We can adopt and system and it can take a while for us to actually understand how to make very adaptable and powerful system work for us.

Patience is required when we adopt a system that has so much to offer and we are an apprentice or a newbie. The initial effort may seem too high. We may expend more energy in the beginning and not reap results until much later.

Patience with self if probably the toughest challenge because when learning is hard it feels inefficient and that friction leads us to believe that we are going backwards instead of forward toward our goal.

Take heart.

Start Simple with Capture

Let’s assume you are adopting GTD as your starting point. David Allen suggests that you do a 1-2 day deep dive and gather all your assets, thoughts, ideas, muses, every itty bitty mental trace into lists. Then organize those lists.

This may be an appropriate way to do a comprehensive all-in adventure. I’ve had real problems trying to embraced GTD in that manner. I’ve had more luck with starting the system by “Capturing” everything starting from today.

The key in capturing is to simplify life for your brain. David Allen suggests that when you have a thought about “I should probably do …”, “Your subconscious brain never forgets, even if you conscious brain is no longer thinking about the ’todo’ item.” Since we have tens of “I should probably do …” moments in the day, your brain is compiling a big list of items. This is my definition of stress.

Stress is when the “I need to do …” list in your brain is too full and the consequences of not doing the items on the list creates emergencies in your real personal and work world.
And perhaps that’s a place that capture is at it’s best. The goal of capture is take the list and put it somewhere that gives your brain a little relief.

Capture does not come easy. It’s a habit that really takes a time to develop. The inputs in your life include internal and externals sources. Internal sources are all things generated from within your own consciousness: your thoughts, your feelings, your desires and your goals. Externals sources include things hear (a verbal request from someone, a comment in a business meeting), things you read (e-mail, post mail), or things you see (broken dishwasher, something in the sporting goods store).

So this week's tips is to get a notepad (any size) or sheets of blank paper and write down your thoughts and actions one per page. If you have a notepad, I suggest keeping a lot of white space. Keep notes for each meeting and/or thought on separate pages. If you have 5 meetings, you should have five (or more) pages.

That way you can FOCUS on these items independently later on. Or if you have thoughts about individual items, you can also FOCUS on this type of item one at a time.
That’s it for this week. I’ll talk more about how to deal with your new stack of items next week.

I would love to hear your feedback. If you had one thing you could do consistently that would make your life better, what behavior change would that be?

How to Pick a Time Saving Strategy or System

2016-04-13T22:21:00.001-04:00

Have you looked at the number of breakfast cereal choices at the grocery store? I get dizzy when I walk down that aisle.

I almost prefer going to Costco to buy breakfast cereal because I they have at 1/10th of the selection.

Doesn’t it drive your brain crazy trying to pick out a strategy for saving time? There are so many choices.

And then when you try one, it feels like you are broken or the method is broken or something about the whole system doesn’t flow.

Have you had the experience where you adopt a system and immerse yourself in the system and get overwhelmed and then quit because it’s too hard to keep up. Ever had the feeling like you are a weakest link because the “system works” but you can’t make it work consistently for you.

Wow. I let's take deep cleansing breath.

Where are you with your productivity system

happy with where you are (which means either you reached a level of productivity that is meeting you goals or you don’t know if the investment in a productivity systems is worth the effort, so your good with where you are)
frustrated with where you are (which could mean you want to pick a better system, or just want to go on vacation for the rest of your life)
optimistic that you can find better ways (which means you probably found a system, but are looking for some tweaks)

First let’s be real about learning stuff. It takes time. We are engrossed in a world that wraps up difficult murder cases in 1 hour or creates massive inter-personal conflict then resolves the issue into forever-love in 1 1/2 hours or even 30 minutes for really good plots. There is an expectation that good things can be embraced and achieved in a short time window.

This is mostly a big fat lie.

So let’s reach back into some ancient philosophy to get a glimpse of how people really work. This is in stark contrast to modern media. Please enjoy this as if it were a breath of fresh air.

Shu-Ha-Ri

Shu-Ha-Ri is a concept from Japanese martial arts describing the stages from ’leaner’ to 'master’. And it is directly applicable to developing personal habits and mastering productivity systems.
The short summary of this is as follows…

Shu (shoo) - leaner - do everything in wrote fashion without too much analysis.
Ha (hah) - practitioner - understand the theory and tweak the systems based on reflections, analysis and experience.
Ri (ree) - master - innovate and create, potentially breaking with previous systems.

The the cycle of failed productivity systems that I described earlier in this article is really part of the Shu experience - a natural part of learning. But how do we move to the next level.

I’m going to let that question hang in the air for now and I’ll talk more about that in a future article. Right now, we need to pick a method to start with so we can begin the journey at Shu.

Here is a productivity system short pick list

In order to “Save a Million Seconds in a Year” or "Save a Million Minutes Minutes in Your Life Time" you’ll need some consistency in your time savings methodologies.

Please leave a comment on your latest experience in working with a productivity system. How did it go?

P.S. for some serious depth read this article “Shu-Ha-Ri"

How to Save a Million Years of Time in a Life Time

2016-04-06T22:49:00.001-04:00

This is the last article in the “Save a Million” series — for now.

All the articles have been building to this point. In fact I have a big spreadsheet with the number of minutes versus time frame versus number of people required to meet each of these “Save a Million” goals.

But building exponential articles is not my goal. Nor is building a nice spreadsheet.

Building a greater vision for myself and others is really the bottom line.

As so I’d like to introduce how to save a million years of time in a life time.
Every year I listen to my favorite books to keep my ruder steady. I just finished listening to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a very densely packed book where every other sentence is a quote I should paste on my wall or share in a blog post.

Covey’s center piece for discussing time allocation is the 4 quadrant system. The time allocation matrix is composed of “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” columns, and “Important” and “Not Important” rows. The intersection of these columns and rows creates 4 quadrants that include “1-Important and Urgent”, “2-Import but Not Urgent”, “3-Urgent but Not Important” and “4-Not Important and Not Urgent” as depicted in the diagram below.

The next diagram takes the grid and applies real-world examples. An interesting exercise for you is to contemplate the time matrix and find one additional example from your life for each quadrant.

Notice the red arrow on quadrant 2? That’s where time savings takes place. And of course, it’s impossible to save time, so we are really investing our time in things that will produce the joy and results that we desire in life.

Covey goes on to describe how to approach these different areas so that we can do the things that matter.

It’s very exciting for me to think about the vision of a million people living more effectively, that is a million people living daily in Quadrant 2 activities.

Which brings us back to How to Save a Million Years in a Life Time.

Let’s do a little math to see how a million people cumulatively save a million years of time in a lifetime. According to my spreadsheet are 525,600 minutes in a year

Multiply this by 1,000,000 and you get 525,600,000,000 minutes in a million years.

Let’s call it 526 billion minutes.

Stay with me.

There are 14,600 days in a 40 year lifetime (365 * 40 = 14,600).

Multiply the days by 1,000,000 and you get 14,600,000,000 people-days in a lifetime.

So now we just need to divide the total minutes to be saved by the people-days and we’ll get minutes per day saved.

526 billion minutes / 15 billon people-days = 36 minutes per day per person.

NO PROBLEM.

In the previous article we talked about numerous ways to save time.
To make this type of savings sustainable, we need to create systems that enable good behavior.

Component #1: Written Vision

I discussed vision statements in the article, “How to Save a Million Minutes in Your Life Time”. Writing this down on paper or in a word processing application will force you to think sequentially rather than randomly. And those sequential thoughts about what you want life to look like in the future will challenge you to do some work inside yourself.

The internal examination that you do will sharpen your self-knowledge and also bring tremendous humility when you compare your goals to your current situation. The humility is good because you will see more clearly what needs more focus to move closer to the goals and what must be abandoned because it is wasteful.

One method to extract a simple written vision is picking out high level principles and then identifying the associated behavior:

Example:

I want to be a person of Integrity. [Principle]
At home I want to demonstrate consistency to my children and not be emotionally reactive. [Behavior]
At work when I say I will do something I do it. [Behavior]

Example:

My life exhibits humility [Principle]
When I find out I’ve misunderstood or done something wrong, I will absorb the moment with a sense of learning rather than becoming defensive. [Behavior]
When there is a conflict or argument with my kids, I will listen closely to learn why they think or act in a certain way before I judge. [Behavior]

You can easily write down have a dozen or more of these vision statements and behaviors. This is Quadrant II work, and it will challenge you.

Component #2: Committed Time

This is a must. At first this may be hard but it gradually gets better. The goal is to create time blocks in your calendar for your time savings (investing) activities. Start by getting up earlier. Put “Run” or “Yoga” on the calendar when you want exercise.

Some say it’s hard to go to bed early and that’s a huge barrier to getting up early. Someone else said, “If you get yourself up at 5 am for 5 days in a row, you won’t have any problem going to bed early.”

The time block is the best way to block off the calendar. The second best mechanism is the “all day” event that will ride along the top of your Google, Apple or Outlook calendar. This acts as a checklist for you.

Component #3: Daily Reminder

Keep yourself on track by creating an acrostic or note that expresses your vision. Put this somewhere public or just remind yourself periodically.

Some like notes on their mirror.

Some like sticky notes on their monitor (not the every changing urgent moment sticky notes, but ones that contain your higher goals or reminders about good behaviors or how you want to be).

Some have a mantra they repeat to themselves in the morning right when they get up.

Some like an acronym for their purpose that then use to remind themselves how they want to behave and who they want to be.

Component #4: Reinforcing Environments

Habits contrary to your written vision increase the struggle to move in positive time-savings direction.

Reduce Counter Productive Environments

For example, if you really like TV and you have 1000 digital channels available to you, you will have a hard time saying no to TV. A very positive step for you might be to cancel your cable subscription and/or digital satellite service.

Embrace Reinforcing Environments

Instead, consider a steady diet of really good books that can help change your thinking (which is the how you will steadily and exponentially achieve better results with your time and energy).

There are so many good books it’s hard to say where to start, but you can find a few of them in my previous article, “How to Save a Million Days of Time in a Lifetime”.

Please leave me a comment and tell me the following:

1 - counter productive environment that you want to change.
1 - reinforcing environment that is working well for you.

P.S.

In case you wanted to see a summary of my spreadsheet…

Save a Million Spreadsheet

To Save a Million …	…In a …	Requires this many people	to save this many minutes per day	for a total of this many minutes	in a total of this many days
Milliseconds	Day	1	16.67	16.67	1.00
Seconds	Year	1	45.66	16,667	365
Minutes	Lifetime	1	68.49	1,000,000	14,600
Hours	Century	25	65.8	60,000,000	36,500
Days	Lifetime	2,000	49.32	1,440,000,000	14,600
Years	Lifetime	1,000,000	36.00	525,600,000,000	14,600

How to Save a Million Days of Time in a Lifetime

2016-03-31T22:32:00.001-04:00

Yes, this does raise the bar quite a bit.

There are 1440 minutes in a day.

Saving one million days x 1440 minutes = 1.4 billion minutes.

In order to save that kind of time I’m going to need a small army of people. So how big is the army? It’s about 2,000 people. For military folks I think thats about the size of a regiment.

The maneuvers of this army are unlike a traditional army. This small army is rather autonomous. Each person can act independently to achieve the goal of my previous article, “How To Save a Million Seconds This Year". I’m using 40 years for the lifetime because it represents the median years of the average person’s remaining life expectancy.

1.4 billion minutes / (40 years * 365 days per year) / 2000 people is about 49 minutes per day per person. Let’s round down to 45 minutes per day per person.

Saving (investing) 45 minutes per day is pretty achievable for most of us. Remember from my previous article, “How to Save a Million Milliseconds per Day”, that saving time is impossible, but what we really want to do is invest our time in things that matter.

Why do you care about saving a million days of time in a lifetime? In the previous article, “How to Save a Million Hours of Time in a Century,” you were pretty stunned that I asked you to save a million hours of time in a century and that goal was impossible to achieve without enlisting 25 friends and family.

Saving a million days of time in a lifetime is a goal I have for myself. It requires that I help 2,000 people save an average of 45 minutes a day during their lifetime. This is a personal mission.

If you would like to help me, please share this article with your family and friends.

Perhaps even ask if they would like to sign up to receive future articles. But only do that if you feel you are getting value from these articles.

Here’s a couple practical things that can help you save 45 or more minutes of time in your day.

A Goal

Let’s say you want to work on physical fitness (this category is probably one of the most tangle). A goal might be to run a 5k race. Consider picking a local race…and there are so many to choose from. Sign up. Now you have a goal. If you take this option, be sure to give yourself about 3-4 months if you are starting from scratch.

A weight reduction goal might also be very tangle. There are a zillion ways to approach this, but perhaps a practical way to approach this is targeting a 5 or 10 lbs in 30 days.

Another way to slice this goal would be a goal to workout a certain number of days in the week. Workouts might include yoga, weights at the gym or running. Let’s say you wanted to start with 2 days per week. You might find a class at the YMCA or Local Gym that could help. If you want to spend little or no money, you can easily grab a yoga mat and use YouTube as your instructor.

Another type of goal would be to read a book to improve your personal or professional skills. Breaking this down into a daily reading goal is potentially a good way to decompose into bite size morsels. Here’s a couple of my favorite if you need a starter list

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey (my foundation for a purposeful and productive life)

Getting Things Done by David Allen (this is a system for executing a purposeful and productive life)

The 80/20 Principle by David Koch (a framework for determine the best ways to apply time and energy)

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan (a very specific system for applying the 80/20 Principle)

Along this same line, a family based goal would be to play 1 family game in a week with your entire crew. Or perhaps have breakfast with everyone in attendance twice a week.

Perhaps you are ambitious on this front and want to have dinner together every weekday.

A Calendar

You probably have a calendar app or perhaps you use Google Calendar or Apple Calendar or Outlook Calendar. If you have a goal of doing a time saving activity such as personal growth or health or time with family or professional certification or personal activity, step 1 is to schedule the time in your calendar.

Seriously, if you want to do that morning jog or yoga or breakfast with family, put it in the calendar. Whether at home or at the office, we typically respect our calendar and do what it says. So take the proactive step and put your ambitious plans on your calendar.

A Buddy

I love to do things with my friends and family and you might feel the same way. It’s fun to go to the movies with a group or friend or spouse or son or daughter. When you go out to dinner It’s more fun to share a meal with someone rather than sit alone at a table.

This is also true for many of the aspirations that we have. Enjoying solo success is seldom fulfilling. Think about events like swimming or track where an individual competes alone. When he or she wins the race, the celebration is shared by coaches and family and not just one person.

I had the ambition of running a marathon, and I shared it with a friend and we both began to dream and plan. We both ended up running marathons within 12 months of each other. Our plan to run together didn’t workout, but we achieved our dream and shared in each others the success.

Please leave a comment about the goal that you are trying achieve and your biggest challenge with reaching it.

-Steve.

How to Save a Million Hours of Time in a Century

2016-03-23T20:42:00.001-04:00

In 2009 I told my wife that my new years resolution was to run a 5k.

2009 went by without a lick of running.

In 2010 I told my wife again about my 5k plans. She smiled. Then awhile later she told me she had registered for a 5k. I was shocked into motion. I registered myself and bought a training program called couch to 5k. The program started with interval training. 60 second run, 90 second walk and repeat for a total of 20 minutes. By the end of the 16 week training plan I could run for 3.1 miles steadily at roughly 11 miles/minute pace.

Considering I had made a goal to run a marathon before I turned 45, it was about high time I started some kind physical activity.

Fast forward to 2016…

I’ve run numerous 5k’s (including a zombie 5k), many 10 milers, a few 1/2 marathons, a spartan race, a tough mudder and the marine corp marathon in 2014.

Saving (investing) time in my physical health everyday resulted in the achievement of several goals that motivated good behavior changes include healthier eating, better scheduling for sleeping and rising, more energy and tons of fun with friends and family during these events.

I don’t necessarily recommend a marathon, but the value of investing time for things that matter pays dividends.
What about saving a million hours of time in a century? What value is that?

If you haven’t started raising children yet, you are likely to start that adventure sometime in the future. You will leave a legacy. That legacy (i.e. your grown children and grandchildren) will be deeply affected by your daily life choices (even if you decided to let things just happen…that is a choice).

My suggestion is that you make a choice to invest your time in training the next generation and help encourage your close friends to adopt the time savings (investing) behaviors.

Here’s how:

A million hours is about 60 million minutes and to save that much time you must save 1,644 minutes per day. Wait a minute. 1,644 minutes is 27 hours. You have to save every hour of the day plus 3 more hours that don’t exist.

You are a leader in your own right if you are a father or friend.
Including yourself, influence 25 other people to save (invest) 60 minutes a day. And you will save roughy a million hours in a century. For the math lovers: 1,644 divided by 25 is 66 minutes, and we’ll round down to 60 minutes.

It’s easier than you think

List 5-10 families and/or 10-15 friends.

If you are friends with 6 families with an average of 4.5 people in each family (2 adults and 2.5 kids), you can influence 25 people in the next century.

Biggest items for saving time

Personal Growth

In order to gain the greatest advantage of saving time, a deep understanding of your life’s mission and the goal of your time on earth are required ingredients.

In fact, you might say there is a mathematical relationship between your understanding of your goals, the real depth of knowing your desires, and the effectiveness of applying your saved time. If you know what you want, you’ll use your time efficiently to get there.

And that is why you need to use your saved time to grow personally. To read, to think, to journal and to write down your end game.

The learning and the contemplation will result in clarity of purpose and the clarity of purpose with double your effectiveness. It’s an awesome equation. And it’s recursive such that you get the doubling effect over and over.

To help your friends and family (your sphere of influence) collectively save a million hours in a century, you must teach this concept.

Go to coffee with your friends and talk about what you really want in life. Be candid and don’t use a script like, “I want to be happy” or “I just want to do good.”
Make your brain work on this topic. And make your friends think deeply as well.

Time With Family

This is somewhat of a platitude, “Quality time with family.” So let’s remove some of the constraints such as “quality” and just simply say “time with family." The more the better. Why?

Consider what you would like to do in the future with your family. 5, 10 or 20 years from now would you like to take your kids and grand kids on vacation together and have fun?

Or perhaps in that same time frame would like to continue to pour your life into your kids and grand kids with love, attention and time together.

Or perhaps even later in life when you’ve slowed down to a crawl and need a little assistance, would you like to enjoy the company of your kids and grand kids?

Its easier to do that if you’ve built recurring family fun events into your daily, weekly, monthly schedule so that there is positive feeling about family.

In order to help other families do the same, you can sponsor events to bring families together. Invite your family friends over for board games. For dinners. Avoid movies events, but engage in interactive events such as bowling or roller skating or ice skating or hiking.

Time for Health

Invest in health is one of the hardest things to do.

We can see benefits from personal growth within days or weeks because we apply principles of better communication or leadership or listening.

We can see benefits from time with family as laughter and good feelings occur in real-time. Or a rehearsal of the memories brings back a flood of joy.

With health, it’s often a longer game.
I keep thinking about playing soccer with my grand kids or having the mobility and energy to travel the world as a 60 year old. And these visions help focus me on sustaining my body.

If that doesn’t work, sign up for 5k or tough mudder and then you’ll have an immediate goal for which you must answer the call.

Measuring success toward saving a million hours in a century

I wonder what questions I can I ask myself each week to monitor my ambitions of spending time in the right place. Here are some samples:

Given personal growth is great need, did I spend my time reading a book (or listening to an audio book) about 30 minutes a day?

Given my family and my future with them is a priority, did I spend about 30 minutes of day at breakfast or dinner or games or adventures?

Given my performance at work is critical to me, did I spend about 30 minutes a day learning a skill or reading to understand my industry better? Or perhaps I attended a professional event for a couple hours during the week.

Given my health and longevity is an essential part of my ability to meet my goals in life, was I able to spend about 30 minutes a day on healthy activities?

Did I spend time with a friend or family member and encourage them on their path to invest time in things that matter?

If you sum these items above, you get 120 minutes. Let’s try for half of that amount : 60 minutes or 1 hour per day. Let’s dedicate ourselves to investing time and teach the next generation and teach our sphere of influence and we will save a million hours or time in a century.

Please leave a comment and let me know how your 'save a million in time' strategy is working out.

How to Save a Million Minutes in Your Life Time

2016-03-02T20:54:00.001-05:00

A million minutes is…
16,667 hours or
694 days or
22.8 months or
1.9 years.

The median age of the population of the U.S. is about 37 years and life expectancy is 79 years of age. Subtract 37 from 79 and you get an average remaining life expectancy of 42 years. To make the math simpler, we’ll round down to 40 years.

Assuming you are at the average age you would need to save about 68 minutes per day to save a million minutes in your lifetime. Let’s call it 1 hour per day.

If this extra hour is invested properly it will results in a bounty of awesome results for you personally and for people in your sphere of influence.

This series of articles started with ‘Save a Million Milliseconds in a Day’, with a target of saving roughly 15 minutes a day. Followed by a second article ‘Save a Million Seconds in a Year’ with a target of saving roughly 45 minutes daily. And this article focuses on consistent time savings throughout your lifetime with a higher bar of 1 hour of per day.

How do we move from 15 to 45 to 60 minutes of savings (or rather investing our time)

Invested time is the time that you spend on things that matter, things that are truly important and that will leave a legacy.

The first step to saving a million minutes a year is to be consciously aware of that which is important.

In Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he suggests an exercise of envision your 80th birthday party. In this self created visualization consider the location, the people, and the conversations you will have with those attending the party.

For me, I placed my 80th birthday party in my backyard and visualized my wife, my daughters, my grand kids, my extended family and my friends. I thought about my own character and legacy and the character of my children and grandchildren. And I wrote this down and try to refresh the content or add details year after year.

Another addition would be the end game of your professional pursuits. That could be the successful sale of a business or the retirement from a company after attaining a certain leadership position or perhaps the accomplishment of a significant goal that impacts the world.

Perhaps there are few things on your bucket list that you include in the 80th birthday party visualization.

A pace of life that is active but not frantic.
A positive note about your personal health that enables you to be mobile, active and feeling good through all the years of your life
A lifestyle of traveling to places around the globe

Write down your visualization now…take 5 minutes…this article will still be here when you return…

This visualization will now be a beacon to guide you toward investing your time.

Here are some areas that may show up for you…

Investing in time with family

-This will develop a pattern of closeness and allow you to build character into your kids.

Investing in health to increase your longevity

- This increases your capacity to leave a legacy because you have energy and mobility.

Investing in your professional expertise

-This provides you with tools and skills to achieve your work related goals.

Investing in your personal growth

-This will improve your understanding of your own goals and motives, and improve your relationship with others.

Tips to save (invest) 1 hour in your day

Let’s start with family…

In my previous article I mentioned that I have breakfast with my family every morning. The selection of breakfast is just a sample event. The important thing is spending time to insure that the legacy of your family is strong. Other obvious options include dinner together or games. If you have an intention or desire to see happiness together in the future, you’ll need to build that practice into your daily routine. (30 minutes daily … breakfast, dinner, games, etc.)

Longevity…

Part of your capacity to lead a fruitful life is your energy and mobility. If you’re around the median age, you probably don’t have too many mobility issues, but as you move later into life, investments in physical fitness will be required to reduced your stress (longevity) and increase your stamina and muscle tone (mobility). (20 minutes daily)

Professional Expertise…

In order to achieve the results that you envision, you have will invest time in learning skills and collaborating with others. Part of that learning on the job, but you will need to invest additional time outside of your daily job role. In other words, you will be better equipped to achieve your professional goals if you analyze the things you need to know and the skills you need to acquire, and then allocate time to learning those specific skills.

For most professionals, interpersonal skills are the single most important thing you can learn. Second is how to organize people to achieve a goal. A third priority is to engage in a community of other individuals in your field (30 minutes daily or 2 hrs in a single week).

Personal Growth…

What is personal growth and how does the visualization of the 80th birthday party relate? I’m going to suggest that the depth of your friendships, the ability to positively impact your family and community, your conviction about what your life is about, and your ultimate satisfaction or happiness or contentment in life are all wrapped up in this amalgamation called ‘personal growth’.

This area of life is akin to a rudder and therefore the time spent here will direct the ship. Investments here have the highest return. Examples of include, consistently reading books that move you toward your goals (30 minutes daily), time for contemplation that includes analyzing your daily and life goals (15 minutes daily)

30 minutes (family) + 20 minutes (longevity) + 30 minutes (professional) + 45 minutes (personal growth) = 125 minutes

That’s about 2 hrs a day, which sounds like a lot. Let’s assume you consistently spend half that much time for all the activities listed. That is 1 hour a day. You are on course for saving (investing) a million minutes in your life-time.

Write a comment or send an e-mail and let me know where you struggle the most with your time savings?

How to Save a Million Seconds This Year

2016-02-24T22:20:00.001-05:00

I play Call of Duty: Black Ops with my daughters (both the original and Black Ops II).

We typically play team death match and we are all on the same team. We like to keep the family on one team and the “bad” guys on the other team. Cooperative games help keep us “liking” each other.

Depending on who is play, we’ll have 2, 3 or 4 Teske’s on the same team playing against as many AI players as the game will allow.

The next and most important debate we have is what difficultly to play.

If you play Recruit, you will totally smash the opponents.

If you play Regular, you’ll likely win with a decent margin.

If you play Hardened, you have a 50/50 chance of winning and you better bring your 'A’ game.

If you play Veteran, you need your A+++ game, caffeine, luck, and my middle daughter … who is a terror to any opponent she faces.

Saving a Million Milliseconds a Day is equivalent to Recruit or Regular.

Saving one million seconds in a year requires an average daily savings of 45 min/day, 3 times the amount of minutes at the “Million Milliseconds” level. This type of savings is on the order of Hardened and depending on your situation and capabilities, you might consider this the Veteran level.

In my previous article, “How to Save a Million Milliseconds in a Day,” I talked about several ways to invest time toward your the valuable life pursuits.

When it comes to saving random pieces of time on the order of 15 minutes, it’s pretty easy to find your top 5 time wasters and eradicate them from your routine.

Saving a millions seconds per year requires a more systematic approach. My goal each year is to eat breakfast with my family every weekday. I’m calling this 30 minutes of “saved” time. It’s saved time because, if remember from my previous article that you really can only invest time and earn the rewards of well spent time, you can never bottle up time and use it later.

First consider what is important

Your significant other is important.
Your intellectual growth is important
Your health is important.
Your family is important.
Your friendships are important.
Your career is important.
You could probably name a few other important things that are personal to you.

Level Up From Recruit to Hardened Through Consistent Behaviors

Below are example of systems that reflect what is important and will yield a time savings (investment).

Breakfast with your family - 30 minutes/day

This investment results in bonding and discussion about all kinds of interesting things … Discussion at breakfast include stuff seen on YouTube, things read on Tumblr and numerous events from school or friends.

To enhance this breakfast activity even more, I read a impactful quote and we discuss it briefly. I do this because I want to set the tone for the day … to lead my family in the practice of good thinking.

Reading an educational book or listen to an inspirational audiobook book - 30 minutes/day

A natural outgrowth of knowing that your intellectual growth and your career are important is the adoption of learning as a habit.

Well planned meetings at work - 30-60 minutes/day

In order to achieve better results at work, you will want to adopt a systematic way to make the most of your time with other people. This doesn’t necessary mean you are militaristic with your meetings, but you must use a little time in preparation.

Spending 5 minutes of your personal time can return 5 minutes to each person in the meeting. You just clawed back 25 minutes for 5 people or 50 minutes for 10 people. Everyone thanks you. If you have longer meetings, you might try a system that I propose in “Change your Meetings and Change your Life”.

This list is not exhaustive. Take out a piece of paper and write down 3 more items.
If we applied all 3 of the items above, it would result in not 45 minutes, but 90 minutes that can be reinvested in the valuable life pursuits of your choice.

Not everyday is so well structure, so we might achieve 50% of this (as you would expect from a battle at the Hardened level) and on average we would get 45 minutes.

Wow. You just “Leveled Up”. You saved One Million Minutes in a Year. Congrats in advance.

Write a comment and let me know one thing you want to invest your time in during this year.

How to Save a Million Milliseconds per Day

2016-02-17T21:47:00.001-05:00

Saving time is impossible.

But we all use the word ‘Save’ to mean ‘Avoid Waste’ or ‘Do the things I really want’.
For comparison, you can save $100 today by putting money in the bank or in your sock drawer.

In six months you can go back to the bank (or sock drawer) and get your money out and you’ll have it ready to use.

If you save $100 in a bank with an interest rate of 1% annually, you’ll get $101 dollars back.

If you invest your money in the stock market (not in 2016 of course, but over a longer period) you could get 10% annually and you would get back $110.

Saving time is more like earning interest on a $100.

With time, we are really trying to invest, not save. We want today’s time to give us the best results we can possibly get. Unlike a savings account, with time you never get back the principle, you only receive the interest (value in the future)

So now that we share a common vocabulary, how does a person save a million milliseconds in a day (or about 17 minutes)?

1. First thing in the morning … don’t consult smartphone or laptop or morning TV news

Avoid reading any e-mail or looking at Facebook or getting engrossed in the news.

Workout, brush your teeth, read a book, get a shower, eat breakfast, write in your journal, pay a bill or sit quietly and contemplate what you want to accomplish for the day. Better yet, write a list of things you want to get done. If you write the list, you will actually save even more time because you will focus on what you want done by the end of day.

If you avoid digital distractions first thing you can save up to 10 minutes. Reinvest the minutes with purpose...something that adds value to your life.

2. If you watch TV, switch to Netflix and avoid commercials

Yes you will have to sacrifice the latest shows, but you can manage this because your life goal has a professional vector and a family or personal vector. Neither your professional pursuits nor your family goals will benefit from watching sitcoms (I’m sure someone has a exception to this rule, but I think the exceptions would be TV columnist).

For 30-60 minutes of programming you can create up to 15 minutes to reinvest.

3. Cut down on watching

If you watch two - 30 minute episodes, consider just watching 1 episode. Have something ready to replace the TV time. Since your energy is low at the end of the day, you might be able to introduce light reading or perhaps if you find a really entertaining business book, you could indulge in that.

(Netflix Subscribers: If you want to help yourself cut down on watching, turn off auto-play. It's not easy to find, so here's the quick details ... Upper Right Corner --> "Profile Icon" --> "My Account" --> "My Profile" --> "Playback Settings" --> Uncheck "Play next episode automatically".)

4. Substitute an educational or professional podcast or audiobook for music or talk radio during commute or exercise

Remember investing time is by definition saving time. When you take time to invest in your future, you are actually saving time by creating a better more effective you in the future.

This could be an investment of 15-60 minutes or longer depending on your one-way daily commute or the length of your exercise routine.

To extend this time savings, substitute podcast or audio books on both legs of your commute; home-to-work and work-to-home.

5. At work, create a goal for every meeting that you host and publish it in your calendar invite

Determining and writing a goal will either shorten your meeting because you can stop when you meet the goal, or it will focus everyone so you can get to your goal quicker. A goal does mysterious things to your brain that helps you hit the mark. Assume you could save 5 minutes per meeting. If you have 3 meetings, it’s possible to save 15 minutes in one day.

If you attend another persons’ meeting, you can simply ask them at the outset of the meeting, “What's the goal for this meeting?” That question will help everyone in the room dive into the meat of the collaboration.

If you think deeply you can probably find more interesting ways to save a million milliseconds. If you do, you are on the path to something great...maybe saving a million seconds.

Leave a comment and let me know your biggest time waster?

On the Journey of Productivity and Excellence

2016-02-10T20:49:00.001-05:00

It was my junior year in college. I will never forget the lesson.

I did something that solidified one of my life principles: Leverage.

At Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado I took an algorithms class and the major assignment was to create visualizations of sorting routines as they ran. The idea was to start with a list of few hundred names and then create a plot on the screen that showed how they moved from chaos to order during every step of the process.

As a visual person I loved seeing the graphics on the screen move as each piece of the puzzle fell into place. It was like Neo in The Matrix … seeing the patterns and knowing that they made sense.

Every few class periods the professor would assign a new algorithm to the process. Near the end of semester, the professor assigned the grand finale:

Pull all the sort algorithms together and create a single application so that you can upload a single set of data and interactively select any algorithm and watch it run. The application should return to the main menu and allow a person to again select another algorithm and watch it run. Rinse and repeat.

There was lots of groaning throughout the class. Many people anticipated weeks of spaghetti code combined into one big pasta dish that would turn out looking like ten different Italian dishes run through a blender.

Earlier in the semester I figured out I could design a common interface for all the algorithm projects and reuse it for each subsequent assignment. After all, I’d have to test all the projects, so why not use a common interface and automate the test.

The final project was completed in a few days and it took me very little effort.
A few hours of good design resulted in an easy semester of programming and an even easier final project.

The professor pulled me aside after he finished grading the final project and he said, “I really liked how you wrote that project. If I were a software company, I would hire you.” I thought that was pretty cool.
Putting my 20 year-old elation aside, the real lesson I learned was how to maximize my Leverage.

Thoroughly understanding the problem creates Leverage.

Good planning creates Leverage.

Leverage allows you to do something once and have it work for you over and over.

It’s perhaps a little cliche, but Archimedes said it right,

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Leverage is a tool available to everyone. Like any craftsman, you must explore and practice to find the one that works for you. Here are my Productivity levers…

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey (my foundation for a purposeful and productive life)

Getting Things Done by David Allen (this is a system for executing a purposeful and productive life)

The 80/20 Principle by David Koch (a framework for determine the best ways to apply my time and energy)

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan (a very specific system for applying the 80/20 Principle)

Every year I re-read or re-listen to these books to refresh myself on the concepts and practical tips for a successful life. Like a ship constantly adjusting its course on a long journey, the principles and practices found in these books help me navigate the ocean of life and reach islands of success throughout my journey.

What is your #1 productivity lever? Please leave a comment about either your biggest productivity challenge or your biggest productivity lever?

http://www.steveteske.com

Don't Torpedo Agile Part 1: How to Deliver Working Software Every Sprint

2016-02-03T22:29:00.001-05:00

As a technologist, I'm easily drawn in by new and shiny things. I love watching the key note speeches for every apple product launch and every Telsa car launch.

And when it comes to new technologies, I love to learn the latest about Amazon’s latest Web Service or new Productivity App for my iPhone.

At work or at home, the latest alert or e-mail appeals to me like water calls a thirsty hiker.

In the modern age of ubiquitous distractions, one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is focus. Focus is the unsung hero of so many successful people and successful endeavors.

Thomas Edison is a preeminent example of someone who was focused and persistent. His single-minded search for a sustainable burning ember contains the recipe of success.

In the age of environmentally induced ADHD, we are especially in need of any and all mechanisms, systems, tips, or tricks to help keep us on task.

Enter the time box

When you travel to the airport to get a flight, you have a limited time in which to check-in, get through security and board the plane.

The time constraint motivates good behaviors such as planning and focus. You might pack the night before and consider the traffic conditions as you plan your departure time. On the morning of your departure, you won't likely be distracted enough to pick up a book and read a few chapters or look over your family budget or commit yourself to buy a brand new travel bag.

Scrum and other Agile systems typically utilize a 2-4 week time box (sprint) to enhance focus in teams. Institutionalizing a fix period to create and deliver working software applications is just like getting to the airport on time, you eliminate distractions and make sure you have a good plan. However, practicing good time box discipline is hard because it can feel arbitrary. It’s less arbitrary when you consider the business side of agile:

Deliver customer value (a working product or feature) at the end of each sprint and revenue can be earned immediately for the company.

A sure fire way to how to torpedo agile -- treat your time box like it’s a ‘hopefully we make it box’. You’ll lose a lot of the power of scrum because getting things working and deployed to customers on a regular schedule core to agile development.

Here are some tips to help keep teams focused on the time box:

1. Don’t cave to the ‘multi-sprint’ development paradigm

Sometimes the magnitude of a new feature or product looks like it’s impossible to break down into component parts or perhaps the component parts are understood, but they seem too large for a 2 week development cycle.

At the start of a project it’s very difficult to create a simple working product in 2 weeks especially if the end product appears to have significant complexity. But it’s not impossible and it’s actually prudent to break it down.

If you are a scrum master or product owner or developer, be diligent and painstakingly help the team decompose problems into smaller nuggets that have value and can be created in 2-4 weeks.

These processes can be tough to comprehend for teams new to agile, but it's worth the pain and effort to create a discipline of delivering value every sprint.

Decomposition does not attempt to throw away the grand vision of a larger and more comprehensive application, but to FOCUS on composing working building blocks every step of the way.

2. Decouple ‘multiple features in one story’

In some cases a single customer request that has multiple features packed inside. At first these features look like a collective package that can't be broken. But if you listen carefully and ask for specific examples about the use case, you can assist in breaking out multiple stories that represent individual items with stand-alone value.

This helps to FOCUS the discussion and prioritization efforts by examining a pond rather than an ocean of ideas.

3. Dig deeper in developing the definition of done and possibly get down to the details in task planning

It’s easy to get off track or even falter in planning and executing a sprint if there is ambiguity about what the team is doing. For most experienced teams they know that each story requires a Definition of Done (DoD).

The DoD for a story can be written literally as, "This story is done when...such and such happens." For an online shopping cart a DoD might read, "This story is done when the user can select an item from the online store and then it shows up in the shopping cart when the shopping cart icon is clicked." Other Dod alternatives include a bulleted list, or a series of well written tests that must pass.

Team sometime include process related criteria as a boiler plate in the DoD such as, "Must be code reviewed. Must pass a sanity test. Must be delivered to specific servers or development environment."

The next step beyond the DoD is to get more detailed when it comes to recording each task associated with the story. A team will have more confidence in achieving sprint goals when they have clarity about how things are decomposed on a task level.

Writing a DoD enables the team to FOCUS on the details of how a story will be created in real life and this results in a better plan for sprint execution.

4. Don’t settle for progress when you can have completion

Progress is good, but not profit-making. Doneness is great and profitable. If the team is not reaching done, then hold a retrospective. Don't be generic about your retrospective. It should be FOCUSED on one thing…getting to Done. Here’s another article where I describe a how-to plan for a retrospective, “Learn from the Past to Make the Future Better.”

What do you think your biggest issue is when it comes to completing all the items in a sprint?

Thanks in advance for any comments.

http://www.steveteske.com

You Can Have Better Agile Meeting

2016-01-27T22:44:00.001-05:00

Are people in your organization talking about how inefficient meetings are?

Are Project Managers and business leaders curious about the effectiveness of so many agile meetings: Daily Standup, Planning, Backlog Grooming, Review, Retrospective?

Agile meetings are usually above and beyond technical design meetings, architecture meetings, monthly department meetings and possibly meetings with external consultant or clients.
It’s clear there are a lot of meetings in the corporate world and which means there are a lot of opportunities for waste and inefficiency.

When business leaders in my organization began to wonder about the numerous meetings my agile teams conduct, I usually point back to the fact that we deliver high quality and reliable features every two weeks and before agile development was introduced, the development cycle was long and the quality was inconsistent.

But even with the introduction of the agile process and the revolutionary results it brings, you still should consider the efficiency of your meetings.

There are a couple rules of thumb for meeting duration. In scrum there are time boxes for everything. And a time box is intended to be A hard stop. The time box reinforces the dead-line focus of everything the team does.

The official Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland only gives guidance for 4-week long sprints. Below are extrapolations I’ve done for 2 weeks sprints, a very popular industry practice.

For a 2-week sprint, if those 77 hours are not well managed, they could easily be wasted.

Avoid meeting waste. Follow a meeting process:

Keep to your time box and, if you constantly goof it up, fix the core issue. Usually the core issues are lack of planning before hand or lack of focus during the meeting.

For things like retrospective, I highly recommend a well defined meeting process. Retrospectives are intended to be creative and can be very long and chaotic if you don’t have a specific goal and a means to get there.

If you really want to knock meetings out of the park with super efficiency, I describe a system in my article, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic)”

Check out all 9 articles in my series of Better Meeting Magic:

Planning - Improve Your Focus and Improve Your Teams Performance in Meetings
Opening - Turn Tough Meetings into Successful Outcomes With an Excellent Plan and Meeting Kickoff That Creates Focus
Bias Check - Change People’s Preconceptions and Prejudice into Powerful Learning Activities in Your Toughest Meetings
Brainstorming - In a Meeting What is Best for Creative Problem Solving? Total Freedom or Well Defined Process?
Narrowing - How to Find Great Ideas from a Massive Sea of Brainstorming Information
Deciding - Always Enter a Meeting with a Goal, Always Leave a Meeting with a Decision
Retrospective - Learn from the Past to Make the Future Better
Closing - End a Meeting with The Confidence That Everyone Knows The Path Forward
Followup - Close the Open Loops: Keep Track of Your Meeting Outcome and Follow-up

Some would say the best way to reduce meeting waste is too eliminate them. That may be true, but you don’t get a team working in one homogenous and efficient direction without some sort of coordination and collaboration. Meetings don’t have to be the ONLY way. I do find that effective meetings move people toward the goal faster than impromptu communication.

Please let me know how you keep from wasting time in agile meetings. Post a comment or send me an e-mail.

http://www.steveteske.com

Close the Open Loops: Keep Track of Your Meeting Outcome then Followup

2016-01-20T21:31:00.001-05:00

As a parent I understand the extensive effort in following up on chores and tasks. Its time consuming to audit the quality of a job after the bathroom has been “cleaned” by a teenager or the room has been “cleaned” by the middle schooler.

As a project manager keeping track of numerous commitments and an extraordinary number of moving parts is also on the order of difficult and time consuming.

Recently I completed a key milestone for one of my projects. The project required the collaboration of multiple departments, multiple distributed teams and external contractors (including managed service partners for those of you who know what that is). The gist of the project was to replace an aging database infrastructure with the latest hardware and latest release of database software.

The process took months of preparatory work and collaboration. It started 3rd quarter 2015 and culminated in a successful cutover on 7 Jan 2016.

In order to make this happen I provide a lot of oversight and I facilitated numerous meetings. I highlight only a few of the key of meeting below:

1 day facilitated session with consultant to create a new architecture
1/2 day facilitated session to create a step-by-step plan for the upgrade
2 hour facilitated session with IT security and networking team to identify all networking and security changes
1 hour planning session for the week of the upgrade
15 minute weekly meetings with external DBA consultant
15 minute daily standup during the week of the upgrade
2 1/2 hour cutover conference call with the multiple teams and external partners participating
(It went super smooth by the way)

This project required a lot of hard work by many technical folks and those technical guys deserve kudos’ for their efforts. I’m highlighting the meetings because I am about to give some tips to on how to take these key meeting events and get the most of them through good follow-up.

In my previous article, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life,” I introduced Better Meeting Magic, a way to change the culture and productivity of a team, department, division or company that embodies the spirit of collaboration, inclusiveness and focus.
This installment is all about FOLLOW-UP:

Here are my tips to following up:

Tip #1: Get the minutes out as fast as possible

To enable faster minutes capture, use visible formats such at sticky notes or a whiteboard. I describe some options for highly visual collaboration in the article, “In a Meeting What is Best for Creative Problem Solving? Total Freedom or Well Defined Process?”.

When the meeting is done, you the following apps to take pictures and send them to yourself and/or the meeting participants.

Microsoft Office Lens - best for whiteboard with drawings
Post-it Note(r) Plus - best for anything with post-it notes of any size and also 8x10 or 11x17 pieces of paper

Tip #2: Get the next step or meeting schedule as soon as possible

At work I use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail and meetings. When I get back from my current meeting and I need to schedule a followup meeting, I will do one of two things:

Write an e-mail to myself to schedule the next meeting and put it into my GTD ‘!Action’ folder (I actually have Outlook rule that automatically puts the e-mails from me and to me into my !Action’ folder)
or simply schedule the next meeting right when I sit down at my desk.

Tip #3: Make sure you have a good capture-processing-resolution system in place

I use Getting Things Done by David Allen as my capture-processing-resolution system. If you read more about GTD, you’ll find it’s actually got 5 phases of processing for everything in your life.

In the previous tip I hinted at my GTD system for schedule a followup meeting. I use that same system for capturing and executing all actions. I use David Allen’s suggested e-mail boxes called ‘!Action’, ‘!WaitingFor’ and ‘!ReadReview’. I also take any date sensitive actions and create an ‘all day’ meeting on my calendar. The ‘all day’ meeting shows on the calendar as a small banner for the day it’s due. To make it easy to create these calendar banners, I created a Outlook quick access rule to copy e-mail contents to calendar appointments, so I can execute this whole step in 1-click.

In the morning and many times throughout the day and in the evening, I review the calendar, the !Action folder and !WaitingFor folder and make sure I follow-up and I ping other people to follow-up as well.

Close your Open Loops and Use good meeting practices coupled with GTD to succeed in your work and at home.

Having problems with follow-up? Share our issue in the comments or send me an e-mail. I’ll be glad to talk about it with you.

http://www.steveteske.com

End a Meeting with The Confidence That Everyone Knows The Path Forward

2016-01-13T21:48:00.001-05:00

Today I was in a meeting that was intended to be 15 minutes long. It started late, about 6 minutes past the hour, and got off to a rocky start due to technical issues with conference software. Many of the participants often get side tracked with deeply technical concerns or quandaries about corner cases. In fact, I think it was probably about 20% focused on executing the project (the stuff I wanted) and 80% of the discussion was what-if scenarios or providing context for different meeting participants.

Interestingly, the meeting lasted about 25 minutes, and in percentages, the overage was about average for this group of very talented and highly responsible staff. They have an incredible sense of ownership for their work and as a result, they want to know all the details of pretty much every decision. Especially when it comes to technical decisions that are near or directly inline with their sphere of influence. Good folks.

Was this meeting wasteful? Perhaps. But it was successful because I got a list of actions assigned to specific people and I scheduled a daily standup meeting to follow up and insure everything got done. There was no ambiguity about what needed to happen or who was going to do it. To me, leaving a meeting with zero or very little ambiguity is a sign of successful outcome.

When you terminate a meeting you need to put an end to ambiguity. In Better Meeting Magic vocabulary this step is called CLOSING. Read more about the whole Better Meeting Magic planning paradigm in the article, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic).”

Effective CLOSING removes three primary sources of ambiguity:

1) “What did we decide?” or “WHAT” ambiguity,

2) “Who will do it? or “WHO” ambiguity

3) “Will we discuss this again?” or “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity

Tip #1: Kill “WHAT” Ambiguity by Reiterating the Decision and Asking for Confirmation

Destroy ambiguity in every meeting by reiterating orally what you’ve decided to do and ask the participants to confirm the decision. Example: At the end of the meeting you could say, “The goal of our meeting was to: ‘Decide on a database vendor’. And I believe we’ve decided to move ahead with vendor XYZ to support our database infrastructure. Did I capture that correctly?”

By reiterating the meeting goal and the decision, you will likely get the last minute ‘NO WAY’ or you’ll get everyone nodding their head. If you have dissenting opinions, that’s good because you need to know where you stand before you leave the meeting with a false sense of doneness. If you have consensus, this decision is made and will likely stick.

Tip #2: Annihilate “WHO” Ambiguity by Assign Actions to Specific People in the Meeting

Destroy “WHO” ambiguity by making sure you have a assignee on each action. It's good to assign action in the meeting so the assignees can review the action and possibly ask clarifying questions before the team disperses.

This creates a more sticky sense of ownership. A responsible assignee will try to understand the expectation through dialog. An unwilling assignee will have the accountability of the group.

Add due dates to further eradicate ambiguity.

Tip #3: Short Circuit “OPEN LOOP” Ambiguity by Picking the Next Meeting Time Before You Leave the Current Meeting

Obliterate “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity by asking the participants whether the topic is closed or there are still more to address. As you develop skills in planning your meetings, you will likely see less carry-over meetings because your planning and time management will enable you to reach decision in a single meeting.

For details on good planning tactics, see the article, “Improve Your Focus and Improve Your Teams Performance in Meetings.”

One of the most frustrating things in any business environment is to see good ideas die on the vine. When everyone is busy and there are tough topics left unresolved, people feel weighed down and a natural response to “embrace the status quo”.

In simple language, “embracing the status quo” is just failing to put enough energy into following up on the tough topics. In reality it doesn’t require supreme amounts of energy to conduct a follow-up meeting, but the emotional resistance is high.

When I’m heading for bed and I know I’ll be getting up early the next day to take a run in freezing cold weather I can prime myself for success by putting out my running clothes and running shoes on the floor of my bathroom. Somehow this routine removes some of the friction of getting up early and taking a run.

Use this priming strategy to overcome the “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity by making the next meeting plan during the current meeting.

BTW, if you want to learn lots about how to deal with open loops in your personal and work life, read Getting Things Done by David Allen. His productivity strategy will help eradicate ambiguity in all corners of your world.

I’d like to know if you have applied any of these techniques. Or perhaps you have some of your own.

Please write a comment about your best tools for overcoming meeting ambiguity.

Or get in touch with me on my Contact page to talk about your latest meeting success.

http://www.steveteske.com

Learn from the Past to Make the Future Better

2015-12-26T14:01:00.001-05:00

“Retrospectives” or "Lessons Learned” or "Post Mortems” are a key part of improving your personal and organizational behavior. This article will walk you through some tips for making your future better as a result of learning from the past.

It’s the day after Christmas and we are sitting around the breakfast table discussing all the fun that we’ve had. The questions that we asked was, “What is the best Christmas you remember?”.

The Best Christmas that I remember was the year that I went to bed in my room on Christmas Eve and woke up in the living room on Christmas day.

The door handle on my room was taped shut with masking tape and a bow was placed on the knob. My dad suggested there might be wild animals in the room or some other rather scary scenario.

Eventually I got to open my door and inside was 8’x4’ table with entire slot car track and HO scale train set winding through curves and hills on the imaginary countryside. I had that train/car table for almost a decade (8 years to 18 years) and enjoyed hundreds of hours of fun both racing the slot cars, running the railroad and also completely remaking the entire circuit numerous times.

The next questions was, “What are some of your favorite things about Christmas traditions?”

We had answer like, “Going to a christmas tree farm and getting a tree.” Or “Eating French Dip sandwiches after officially finishing tree decorating. Or “The traditional family Christmas Eve party that we always have.”

Guess what we just did? We reminisced about our favorite things. In technical terms, this was a retrospective, but was obviously a lot more fun than perhaps the same type of adventure you might have at work. And when you apply this to a work scenario, planning is quite important. Mainly because the quality of the retrospective is directly proportional to the planning effort.

The definition of a successful retrospective is: “At least one action items is identified and scheduled to be executed before the participants leave the meeting. "

This is the 7th article in the series of Better Meeting Magic. The introduction to this series, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic) describes how to revolutionize collaboration with teams.

Tip #1: Plan the Retrospective

When it comes to creating a retrospective, it’s always good to know what you want to get out of the retrospective before you conduct this part of the meeting. A random question like, “How did this meeting go?” will likely result ambigous and voluminous feedback. The discussion will likely be more like a shotgun blast than focused actionable feedback.

If you want to conduct a retrospective as a normal part of your meeting, have your retrospective questions planned before hand.

Here are some example questions that you might want to ask at the end of the meeting.

Note: Some questions will help you determine if you are being an effective facilitator. Other questions will help you determine if you got the result you wanted out of the meeting.

“How well did we meet the meeting goal?
“Did we create a satisfactory plan of action?”
"How happy are we with the plan?”
“Did we correctly identify the root cause of the issue?”

Notice how these questions are a little right brained. In other words, people are reaching into their sense of values rather than just the facts. These right brained questions can really get outstanding feedback. If you couple these questions with Tip #2, you can keep the retrospective in a small time box. If you allow people to speak freely on these questions, you might overrun your time allocation.

Tip #2: Use Simple Tools

If you conduct an hour long meeting, you won’t have a lot of time for a RETROSPECTIVE. One of the fastest feedback mechanism that I know about is called fist of five. Here’s how it goes.

Identify two extreme’s to quantify the meeting success or failure. For example: Failure is no actionable content was derived from this meeting. Success is clear and concise and actionable steps were derived from this meeting.
Ask the question of the participants, “I want everyone to vote with your fingers by holding up 1,2, 3, 4 or 5 fingers"
Explain more, “A vote with 1 finger means we have created no actionable steps from this meeting. A vote with 5 fingers means, we’ve created clear, concise and actionable steps that we can immediately implement.”
Now call the participants to action, “On the count of 3 hold up the number of fingers that represent your view on how the meeting went.”
Count and record all the votes on a whiteboard.
For votes that are 1, 2 or 3, ask the participants why they thought it was average or less than average. For vote of 4 and 5, you can skip getting feedback if you are pressed for time.

The outliers will provide excellent feedback. Usually you will learn how people’s expectation may have been different from what you advertised in the meeting goal. Or you may find some interesting and subtle things about how the meeting missed the mark. I love getting outlier feedback…it’s the input that helps me the most change my behavior and perform better.

Tip #3: FOCUS

Focus on getting only 1 or 2 top priority issues from your retrospective. When conditioning a retrospective, you will need to find a mechanism to focus the feedback in a very specific and narrow category in order for it to be useful. This is especially true if you conduct retrospectives at the end of a meeting (which include only analyzing the flow and content of a single meeting) or at the end of 2 week agile software development cycle (which includes only 2 weeks of team behavior).

For an excellent resource on retrospectives, read, "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great".

I recommend looking at multi-voting for a quick decision making framework. You can read more about that technique in the article, "Always Enter a Meeting with a Goal, Always Leave a Meeting with a Decision."

Leave a comment on how your most recent retrospective went? Did you have success at getting action items? Let me know?

Best Way to Plan Your Vacation Itinerary - A Thanksgiving Story

2015-12-26T13:54:00.001-05:00

Inside of the Governor’s Mansion in Colonial Williamsburg

My family went to Colonial Williamsburg for Thanksgiving. It was a great time to gather with my Mom and her Husband and my Aunt and Uncle. We had 9 people from ages 11 to 72.

We spent a total of 7 days and 6 nights at a timeshare and we had way to much to do…below is a sample of the activities for 1 week Colonial Williamsburg…what an eye chart. Events start at 8 am and end around 10:30 pm. In addition to events, there is map with four quadrants of the town that includes about 40-50 houses, shops and restaurants.

These are different from the events and entering each shop is an adventure into the past with authentic tools for carving silver or walk through the 18th century legislative building with a knowledge host guiding you through the history of the chambers and talking about the famous people or important events that were part of the building’s past.

How does one go about making decisions about this type of family adventure: Use a process that is collaborative and inclusive. In other articles I’ve introduced the concept I call Better Meeting Magic.

In the family vacation situation, you definitely need to be more relaxed about structure and rules and more lenient with time constraints, because you don’t want to spoil the vacation feeling.

I’ve done a similar exercise in past Thanksgiving vacations and you can read about that in my article, “How to Plan Your Family Vacation Using Post-It Notes (aka Sticky Notes).” For this particular activity plan, I found a prominent wall to being our planning and put daily heading across the wall. I always recommend using 8”x 6” post-it notes(tm).

Initial Wall

I began to post numerous stickies on the wall with places and events.
This wall was edited in the morning and evening as we dynamically changed our minds about what we wanted to see during our stay in Colonial Williamsburg.

As Stephen Covey recommends in the 3rd Habit of his excellent book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we put all of our Big Rock (important things) on the wall first. You can see “T-Day Dinner” is clearly identified early in the process. You got to have awesome food on Thanksgiving.

Wall After Day 2:

As you can see, there a a number of items that have been checked off.

You can also see there are also a few new items on the board.

SUN is now on the board.

The order of things is also shaping up as we became more familiar with the map of Colonial Williamsburg.

We probably spent about 5 minutes each morning and evening updating things.

The Final Wall

And the final board before on the day we left.

This had most everything checked off and some new things we added.

A great success in terms of getting everything done that we wanted.

Or at least most everything.

I encourage you to read through some of the articles on Better Meeting Magic for a deeper immersion on how to utilize good processes to make every collaborative and creative engagement better.

Tell me about your planning for vacation. How did it go? What were the challenges?
Visit http://www.steveteske.com for more tips and tricks.

Always Enter a Meeting with a Goal, Always Leave a Meeting with a Decision

2015-12-26T13:53:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest time wasters in the corporate world and even in your personal life the delayed decision making. Interestingly, the cost is not just dollars, but also in dreams and goals.

One of my most frustrating experiences is having a meeting twice when it could have been done once. I either facilitate or participate in 1 to 2 meetings per day. On a monthly basis I facilitate a couple business unit status and brainstorming meetings. In some cases, there is a clear path that is desired and other times there is a very vague notion of the future.

When there is a clear path, it is time to seize the moment and move forward. It’s at this point that many people begin to pause and mentally stutter about moving forward.

There is art and science in the timing of decision and I find making decision quickly seems to result in getting to your goals sooner.

When I enter into a meeting, I usually have the word, “Decide” in the meeting goal so that people are pre-programmed to know that we intended to put some down in writing and agree. Here are some examples:

Review Architecture Options and DECIDE on Architecture for Initial Release
Review Subcontract options from vendors and DECIDE on which vendor to go with
Review and Update Development Process proposal (DECIDE is implied with the word “Update”)

The Better Meeting Magic Deciding … always leave with a decision.

Tip #1: Leave time at the end of your meeting (10 minutes) to review your meeting and make sure you’ve achieve your meeting GOAL

If you’ve followed my series of posts from the beginning, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life”, you are aware that having an effective meeting is not by accident. You must create an environment for effective collaboration and decision making.

As part of your meeting plan, give yourself time to review the goals at the end of your meeting. Review the “GOAL” statement in your own mind and then ask others if they agree that you’ve met the goal.

Tip #2: Use multi-voting to DECIDE on the 1 or 2 things.

Multi-voting is one of my favorite decision making tools. I use this all the time to help decide among a set of well understood options. To make DECIDING easier, you needed to complete BRAINSTORMING (see my article, "In a Meeting What is Best for Creative Problem Solving? Total Freedom or Well Defined Process?”) and NARROWING (see “How to Find Great Ideas from a Massive Sea of Brainstorming Information”).
Here’s the process of multi-voting:

Pick the number of results that you to get out of the process…you want to start working on 1 idea, then give each person 1 vote. Or you want to get the top 3 ideas, then give people 3 votes. This process works best when you want start working on 2 to 5 ideas
If you have sticky dots, had out the number of sticky dots equal to the votes to each person. You can pass out markers if you don’t have sticky dots and then use the honor system to insure people count their votes correctly.
Have each person vote by placing a dot or mark on the sticky note or idea on the white board.
Each person vote distribute their votes any way they like (e.g. all dots on a single item or 1 dot for each of their priorities).
When finished, you will usually have a majority of the votes on the item that people think is the highest priority.

Caveats: If you play this game with really smart people, you should make them vote privately, because I’ve had people game the system in the past by waiting for everyone else to post votes and then the tricky smart person stuff one particular item 5 votes and thus threw of the entire process.

Tip #3: Send the meeting minutes and a summary of decisions as quick as possible

Take pictures of the whiteboard and/or wall with sticky notes, dots, markers etc.
Include all this information in a word document or on SharePoint site or OneNote page or Wiki or Confluence page.
It needs to be accessible for everyone.
Make sure you summarize the major decisions.

I’d like to hear how you facility the decision process? What works for you?

Read more at http://www.steve.teske.com