No time to do a to do list

No time to do a to do list

If I hear another person say to me, ‘You have to work smarter not harder’ I may loose the plot. It’s the sort of consultant speak sound bite that wrankles to the core of my bone marrow. This is not just because everyone uses it; it’s become a consultant's karaoke song, like 'Imagineering' or 'lean manufacturing' or 'just in time'. Urgh! Even simple act of just writing the phrase down gives me that squirmy goose bumps feeling. Because, as a piece of advice, it is sooo utterly useless.

If I was smarter I wouldn’t have to work harder now would I?

I’d love the time to get myself smarter. To be ultra efficient, successful, smug. It can’t be that hard. I mean look at my dingbat competitor down the road. He's playing golf everyday and picking up his kids from school and was in the bottom set for maths!

‘What you need’ the life coaches and mentors say,’ is to take control of your 'to do' list’. It’s a start I suppose, and I take their point but I am a little bewildered. Exactly which list are they talking about here? Is it the one I have on my Windows Outlook that I started in the airport departure lounge in a fit of organisational sobriety while I had nothing better to do? Would this be the very same task list that I’ve forgotten to update or delete the items I actually did remember to do, that pops up with those annoying reminders every time I open my e-mail?

Or, perhaps they mean the list on that piece of paper in the hole thingy in the car door where you put stuff so it doesn’t disappear into the foot well while your testing your ABS. Under the sticky stack of car parking tickets?

Or, possibly is it the list stuck under the magnet on the fridge beneath the pizza delivery number and the invitation to a swimming party. Excuse me while I go off at a tangent here, just because I can - Those invites often say ‘Adults are welcome'.….welcome to do what exactly? To turn an interesting shade of pale blue and stand around catching veroucas’ in last year's all too snug swimsuit, trying not to look at cleavage or cesarean scars while you try to suck it in to the point of hyperventilation- Mental note to self. Book tanning session at gym before aforesaid party. Membership should be used for something. Better put it on the to-do list.

There must be some better way of organising our lives. If we can put man on the Moon and crash a beagle into Mars surely we can have bash at some personal organisation?

Frankly, I’ve got no tips to offer personally. I could try to delude myself that I am some sort of guru or practitioner in the art of time management. But numerous editors and colleagues will gleefully attest to by deficiencies in this area. Frankly, and I can say this from behind the sofa of anxiety attacks, the finding this article on my to do list was a bit of a surprise and completing it almost a herculaneum task. Whenever, by some chance of fate, I do actually remember what the knot in my hanky is actually tied to remind me to do, I have to lie down in a dark room with a wet towel on my head to recover from the shock.

But, I know a man, or in this case a women, (why isn’t that so surprising?) who really knows about this stuff. She is one of those adorable American woman who can run a law case in three cities, solve a murder, referee her kid's softball game and figure out how to print out her spreadsheets so that they fit on just one piece of paper and maintain readability without optical aids, all on the same day…and then. to add insult to injury, she even has the time to share with you, on her life coaching blog site, her daily dose of assertiveness training and motivational adrenalin while casually throwing in the fact that she has today, a well as qualifying as an airline pilot, won the high school moms home baked cookies competition. She is Oprah on speed…

So I asked Melissa.

Melissa’s number one tip is to actually use paper, don’t make digital to do lists on your computer or electronic devices. Now before I get the tree conservationists rounding on me, and rightly so, I probably will need to remind the readers that even though they, and they know who I am talking about, will probably input all the relevant information into the ether of their hard disk, more likely than not they will probably only print this list out anyway. This will take up three lines on a piece of A4 paper, in the corner, and then they will stick it in their filofax or under a pile of papers and loose it. The paperless office is just a mirage. (Interesting side note here. Just read a pamphlet on the paperless office. Did the irony get lost somewhere?).

The advantage of using paper is that you may also use both sides, which will probably be really useful as you have run out paper anyway as you didn’t put ‘getting more printer paper’ on your to do list. The technophiliacs amongst us, may well be using a spreadsheet to help you with managing this list. Now this is fine but, if this is the case, my advice to you is that you and your Excel really should really be getting out more often. I used to work at a company (in fact most of them) where Excel prowess was seen as some sort of light sabre for the Jedi management classes, where management peer respect was judged by your manipulative skills of spreadsheet dynamics. It was not uncommon to see a 'droop' (my collective noun) of managers peering intently over a screen of grids with numbers in hushed conversations about what the benefits of a ‘pivot table’ in this application could be. (See, I know the jargon at least)

But that’s another story, for another time. The point is paper to me is so err …substantial. There is something oddly alluring in experiencing the pleasure of scribbling in the margin and that thoroughly satisfying feeling you get when crossing something off the list. It is the same feeling you get when watching the Sunday afternoon films after your mum’s Sunday dinner and the dishwasher is on its cycle. I know it's pathetic, but these are small battles won.

Somehow, if it is on paper, you feel you own it, it's personal. Digital is antiseptic. Not quite there. Maybe it one of these left side, right side brain things, a psychologist somewhere will undoubtedly have a word for it. Its like your pump bag at school; it may be embarrassing but it is yours and if anyone nicks it you will cry. If you ‘own’ it, you are more likely to take an interest in it and actually do something about it.

M’s next world shattering point knocked me bandy. To be honest she was on a roll and there were several she mentioned actually but I want to build up the excitement. She asked me to ask myself, or indeed you, this question. Should the item even be on your to do list? Does it actually need to be done? What would happen if you didn’t do it? Would the sky fall on your head? Should somebody else be doing it? If not, why not?

I felt a wave of feng shui flow through my nether regions. Here was a new personal mantra. I was aligned! And then she gave me a new chant. Only ever put three things on your to do list. Wow there, mister! Three? Really? But, she added, keep two lists; I knew there was a catch.

Apparently you have to have two lists, one in the back of your filonotethingybook, and one in the front. You move things to the front only when they have to be done. Now this is radical stuff. But it actually makes sense. I can cope with about three things at a time, anymore and I get sidetracked and end up not finishing anything. I can hear the sound of heads being slapped across the Kingdom. There is nothing common about common sense is there? We just need to be reminded about it once in while. Pity it has to be by an American.

My friend also told me to tell you that say if you do something for 21 days you will develop the action into a habit. For most of us getting past 21 minutes is tough enough. There are so many more interesting things to distract us. Like the satellite remote control or putting the kettle on. Not necessarily to make a drink, just put it on and forget you have.

By now light bulbs were popping on in my head like a deserted fairground and a kid with a catapult and grudge but we haven’t finished yet.

Don’t open your e-mail box before you look at the to-do list. E-mail and to do lists are non-compatible. Like olive oil and gravel. Didn’t Bill and his buddies realise this when they wrote Outlook. It has become some unwritten law, but one I’ve never actually seen it in any operations manual, that the reading and the replyment thereof of the new e-mails of the day shall take preference over all life processes in the Universe, even it is only from your mate discussing the lamentable merits of Leeds United FC’s 4:3:3 system. As soon as you hit your mail in-box your intentions to tackle your tasks, keenly honed on the commute to work, are gone like a leaf on the breeze. Take a deep breath and be brave! The World will not collapse into a black hole if you don’t look at your e-mails for ten minutes. Honest Injun!

Finally, two gems Melissa thought we should share in the spirit of sharing and caring as her 'Blogyourwaytolove' web site puts it.

Firstly, prioritise the list, even the three things you have on it. OK, so that is pretty obvious but some tasks are always much more important, relatively. An air traffic controller’s to do list- example, item 3. Must get the other plane to change altitude and course in the next er.. five seconds, has a smidgen more urgency than say, putting together a budget for indoor plant decorations.

How to prioritise though? That’s easy. Number one priority every time, is the completion of task on the list that is going to make my boss look good? After that, really just take a pin.

Mel's last tip was how to deal with the big items that sometimes appear, hysterically, the week before you go on holiday. For example, the complete, new interactive catalogue for a brand new e-commerce site in fourteen languages that the MD wants to launch at the sales conference in two weeks. Piece of cake!!!

Before we go into M’s solution I just wanted to flag up this Alert! More consultspeak. You may well have been wooed with the idea that you ‘should break these big projects into smaller projects; that you really can ‘eat an elephant, if you do it one piece at a time’ or that ‘epic journeys start with one step’. OK, that’s fine I get that. The fact is though that you will still have to eat some pretty unsavoury bits of an elephant that frankly make the bush-tucker trials look like a picnic. (Which, agreed, to some extent it is). So, and I agree with Melissa here, you should be thinking of ways to make the unsavoury bits more user friendly. Maybe share that task with a friend or colleague. Or better still, delegate.

The Pass the Buck technique only works, of course, if there is actually somebody to delegate to. You may well be looking down from your heady heights at a responsibility vacuum. The clue for you here that this strategy won’t work for you is when you realise that you don’t actually have to appraise anybody yourself.

Or, you could try to do it in a different way, in another environment. Like brainstorming at Starbucks and wash it down with a Caramel Machiatto to get rid of the taste.

Speaking of which, that reminds me, I notice that beverage replenishment is fast approaching on my mental to do list. Now if I could only find my filofax, make sure my PowerBook is charged up and my PDA is synced I’ll be in complete control of my appointments, contacts and list and able to work on the run. I’ll be off but before I do I will leave you to ponder this.

In the words of Melissa. ‘The knot in the hanky of life is there to simply to remind you. It won’t do it for you. Getting your thumb from out of your arse will always help’. Thanks Melissa. Hold on a sec, was she talking about me? Must add doing a to do list on to my to do list.

Give them new eyes not new landscapes

Employee engagement Part 1
Extract from ‘Defrag your business’.

I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking charity web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to log on every day or so and see what the boys and girls have achieved. No-one can say that web technology hasn’t taken massive leaps forward over the last few years and changed our horizons and expectations of how we find information and interact massively. Except, that is, if they look at one specific area. Intranets.

Almost without exception they look exactly the same as they did five years ago. While the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true Web-based rich media applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect our intranets, our most powerful internal communications tool, to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually and fundamentally not much has changed.

I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as it presents me and you with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is, more often than not, passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.

Intranet audits were a staple of my experience. I have seen lots of them. Way too many for anyone who wishes too maintain their sanity. With some glorious exceptions, which I can count with my socks off, there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet has acknowledged by management as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of technology and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication, engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we like to put into our mission statements.

Forums, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto some intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us, the social bookmarking Web site. The opportunities and benefits for social computing applications on intranets are huge.

Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge bank. (Arguably more useful is actually a 'failure bank' but that’s another story) These tools are used so not much for communication but address the ‘at least we know where it is when we want to find it’ principle. But the true asset value of a company is its knowledge repository. It is 60% and more or your net worth if you believe Harvard Business School. Can you think of a better reason than giving the management of knowledge flow, its retention and acquisition in your organisation anything less than 150% support and making it your number one priority? I can’t think of any either but amazingly, although internal communications, innovation and differentiation features in pretty well every survey of corporate priorities, (even more annual reports) few pay it more than lip service. Why? Because it is hard to do and few know really where to start. ‘We tried the intranet thing but it doesn’t work ‘is probably the most often used phrase I hear. So you give up do you? Or, do you just get better at it?

Lets just pick one simple example. The commonest .net2 deployment are, or at least should be, blogs used for collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. This is frankly bonkers as they take seconds to set up and can save thousands of pounds

Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine, and I know this is a stretch, the impact and discussion arising from 40 sales people dealing with the inevitable launch issues and how quickly these issues would be flagged, fixed and customer facing people made aware of solutions.

The often quoted example of this in practical action is BT's launch of their Home Hub. Initially it was an unmitigated disaster but, by using a blog site to give direct feedback from sales people, installers and development engineers to the CEO, it was transformed into the biggest selling device of its kind, not just in the UK but across Europe.

Imagine her feeding back to the team, the whole team, by video with a small thank you and identification and appreciation. It really isn’t hard this stuff, but lets not get too giddy here.

The phrase I often hear from frustrated CEO's who are bemoaning the lack of communication is that 'my door is always open'. Yes, it might be but it works both ways too.

As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.

So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss? Mistrusted and a place of last resort for finding information.

Frankly, because it is not that big a signal on the corporate radar simply. On the face of it, there are few metrics that can get put on the spreadsheet for the weekly meeting that get the juices going. It is true to say that the benefits (and costs) are largely hidden. But if you have to pick one try just this one. Staff retention. Then look at the incurred costs for loss of knowledge and recruitment and training. Now that is truly scary. It can wipe of the profit for a business unit in no time. One key loss alone will pay for the tweaks in the intranet that may (I would say probably) alleviate much of the frustration in allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Which, if you are still awake, is cited as the number one reason individuals leave jobs

This position is reinforced by the often prevailing view that it is just good money chasing after bad. The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest more time and effort in it now? Many executive teams, optimistic about the intranet’s potential in its early days, now wonder what all the noise was about. While there certainly are productivity tools online—that’s just a matter of common practice in the workplace anyway—the innovation and the knowledge sharing that was supposed to flow from the intranet just never materialised.

Why? Well we could point to a range of contributing factors. Actually you can generally just pick one of the following and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases it's just simply down one major decision, often made at the beginning of conception- who will be its owner? Who looks after it, nurtures it and cultivates it? For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What should a knowledge manager manage then?

So who does own it. It is seen by many as a poison chalice - it is easy to pass the buck to IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now, and this may surprise a few people who know me but I’m going to stick up for them, well, for a minute anyway. It’s a s**t job. That is why they bring their own sandwiches - it is their one small pleasure. (It's really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks).

It is a close tie as to whether HR or IT departments get more bad raps. To be fair to IT, they have probably invested time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and, unsurprisingly given their workload of fixing printers and replacing laptop keyboards that are allergic to Starbucks Latte, are in no hurry to move in a different direction. They haven’t had their lunch yet anyway. Intranet software vendors aren’t exactly blameless either. Few are using .NET2, most use ASP. or ASP.net at best, which is five year old technology. Do you get the theme here? And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making all that compatible with their new ERP system or SAP.

Corporate IT staff and corporate comms staff, some of them, anyway—are largely under informed, if we can put it delicately, about what’s happening on the Web and often have a blind-spot that something they use daily actually could actually be hugely relevant and have a massive benefit to them. They hold the belief, justified or not that ‘Our company would never sanction that’ so they don’t suggest or push their ideas forward. Its a self fulfilling prophecy and a depressing spiral. 20th century communication in a 21 st century world. And any way, should the IT department be doing that. Who should be keeping on top of this - Can it really be the IT department’s responsibility, most of which are stretched pretty thin just keeping the meter fed, and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.

Many communicators/managers ( if that is not a contradiction, sorry but I'm just a bit skeptical), figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? This is an interesting view from those who inhabit the dreamworld of delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least for every IC and innovation projects I know and have worked on, is that its about change and change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end date, think that box is ticked and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing life-cycle. Even more so for the company Intranet. It should be the heartbeat of any organisation. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.

Trust, and that is the key element in all effective communications, is developed through consistency, relevancy, timeliness and accuracy. One intranet I recently was asked to look at had not had anything added to it for three years. That is not an intranet, it is an historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.


Inevitably at some point we have to start talking numbers to justify investment in fixing tweaking or ripping up and starting again. As you or somebody else from higher up the food chain will undoubtedly obligingly point out, there already has been an investment that been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for. It’s difficult for organisations to write off significant investments in order to start from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you should persevere with old tools and tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interesting to see the metrics applied to measure its affect, success or return on investment. Generally these amount to a big fat none, which, for any management process is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.

And, if you don't think your intranet may not be mission critical in your organisation, here is one statistic you may like to reflect upon. Even if this is only half true is still truly breathtaking. On average the typical administrator in any office environment spends 45% of their working day looking for information to help them do their job. I am assuming that those who could make the decision to invest time, effort and funds in getting the intranet right have no concept or are remotley interested in the impact that freeing up 25% of their colleagues time could have on, their customer focus, their efficiency and even, their bottom line. If this tone appears slightly sarcastic my apologies, but it arises from the huge frustration that my experience has shown me that faced with all the other daily challenges what is looking them, literally in the face, every time they log on to their network is often the cause of so many of their problems.

The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive to implement.

There are some practical limitations too and by far the trickiest for most organisations, both public and private sector, is struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are an anathema to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content. But is that what they should be their role anyway? Is there an argument for loosening the approval processes in key areas? I’d argue, yes absoblinkinlutely yes. Should senior management really be a feared of any possible negatives and shouldn’t they be aware of them and manage them anyway? We live in a world of 360 degree reviews and employee engagement surveys, you carry out them of course don’t you? You don’t? Well you are in trouble then and the best intranet in the world won't help you.

Or maybe you subscribe to the view I saw recently in a post from an HR VP which was a thinly disguised ‘You should be bloody lucky to work for us, just get with it’. And then to sweeten the message, guess what, we are having a pajama day next week just to show you how cool and cute we are. Erm, yeah. Really? I see that in any comany and I’d be polishing up my CV. You will be needing it when your competition cream you into history or you get ‘outsourced’.

Just ask for this stuff, what can they say? No? Its just a word and won’t kill you. I’m hoping here that you actually have some form of innovation and idea management built into your intranet. No? Then start reading at the top again and pass this onto your boss and her boss's boss

Rainmaker 2009