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#2 lunch and learn: How to get effective with your to-do list

Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, February 03, 2012

What it is:

A two -column to-do list to separate jobs which you need to do ‘on the business’ from jobs which you need to do ‘in it’

Why it works:

I’m sure you are completely at home with the difference between to-dos that are ‘on’ the business and ‘in’ the business, but just in case you need a reminder:
  • to-do’s on the business relate to the work you are doing growing the business and making it more profitable (like these lunch and learns for instance)
  • to-do’s in the business relate to the work of the business itself; serving customers, making product etc

Working ‘on’ the business tends to be brain ache stuff and falls into the ‘important not urgent*’ basket. Which means we tend to have it on our to-do list but never quite get round to it.

Working ‘in’ the business stuff always seems to be urgent so there is usually plenty of it on the to-do list and we move through it pretty quickly.

What you do

This recipe is achingly simple, but it works!
  1. Divide your to-do list into two columns. Head one column “On” and the other “In”.
  1. Categorize everything  - from now on- that pops on to your to do list under the appropriate column heading.

When you see the empty ‘on’ column you can’t help but want to fill it. And once it’s filled you will of course want to cross those ‘on’s off the to-do list. Before you know it you’ll be working more effectively (doing the right stuff....) because you will be working ‘on’ the business.


*Stephen Covey came up with this very clever way of looking at tasks in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

He divides tasks into four quadrants:
  • QI - Important and Urgent
  • QII - Important but Not Urgent
  • QIII - Not Important but Urgent
  • QIV - Not Important and Not Urgent
Steven Covey proves that highly effective people make time for the QII activities, and that doing so can reduce the time spent in other quadrants.  The book is well worth a read.
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#1 How to be productive by doing the right things right

Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, January 31, 2012


What it is:

A better way of looking at productivity

Why it works:

When we talk about productivity - which lets face it, is often - we are mostly referring to getting more stuff done in less time.

But that’s missing half the equation and most of the good stuff.

Because while we might be mega-efficient at getting stuff done, sometimes the stuff we are doing doesn’t progress our business, groan.

So what we really need to be referring to is doing the right stuff as well as doing stuff quickly.

Verne Harnish has a lovely shorthand for this “right things right’

Doing the right things is about strategy, it’s about working out and selecting the best stuff to do to get to your goal. It’s about doing stuff that is effective.

Doing stuff right is pretty obvious; it’s doing it correctly and quickly. And it’s about being efficient.

So this recipe is designed to get your thinking about being productive in a bigger way: being effective as well as efficient.

What you do:

1. At the end of every day ask yourself:
  • What have I done today that has been effective?
  • What have I done today that has been efficient?


I find that when I know I’m going to ask myself these questions I pay more attention to doing the right things (being effective)!  


2. Also ask yourself the opposite

  • What have I done today that has been ineffective?
  • What have I done today that has been inefficient?


I love these two because they highlight the really wasted time, ugh, and there is always some.


3. Do this every day for three weeks. At the end of that time you will see some interesting patterns emerge (so you can take remedial action!) but even better, you will be so very much more focused on doing the right (effective) stuff.
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100 lunches

Julia Bickerstaff - Monday, January 30, 2012
Tomorrow, and for the rest of this year, this blog will be devoted to 100 lunches. Here’s why:


I’ve never been a great one for lunch breaks - too much to do and way too little time in which to do it - but after a run of afternoons when I’d arrived for the school pick up feeling distinctly below par, I decided to change my ways and take a proper, albeit small, lunch break.

Being incapable of spending half an hour doing nothing, I decided to use my lunch break to read. First of all I simply used the time to catch up on my favourite blogs and make some headway into my enormous reading pile.

But after a while I found I preferred to read articles which gave me something practical that I could go off and do.  I guess that being in the middle of a busy day, my brain was primed for activity rather than just general interest.

So I changed the focus of my lunchtime reading into a search for good tips that I could experiment with immediately. Of course not all of them worked (for me, anyway) but I found plenty that added a certain little oomph to my business.

I started compiling a list of the stuff I liked and shared it with a few of my coaching clients. They loved it so I thought I’d share it more widely. 

So the sharing starts, one tip at a time, tomorrow. And it's called 100 lunches because I thought you might want to take a ‘lunch and learn’ break too.

To date I’ve amassed about one hundred ‘lunch and learns’ and my intention is to post two of them a week; thinking that in seven days that’s quite enough for a busy Kitchen Table Tycoon to read and act on. And acting on is the name of the game here. No fluff: it’s all about to-dos!

Each ‘lunch and learn’ is bite-sized; I hope you find them quick to read and digest. I don’t have time for reading long blogs, and I doubt that you do either.

So here we go. First one will be up on Tuesday. You can get them direct by email if you sign up above; that way you won’t miss any.

I’d love to hear what you think of each ‘lunch and learn’ and the series. And of course if you have one you are happy to share please let me know - I’d love to include yours too. 

A final note. ‘Lunch and learns’ are not meant to be prescriptive  - I am certain that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another- but they are all activities that I have tried, found useful and enjoyed. I hope you do too.
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How to .....set goals for 2012 when you are awash with kids, holidays and family time

Julia Bickerstaff - Sunday, January 01, 2012
Wait.

Today is New Years Day and this morning while out on my early morning walk (thank you bubba!) I shamefully realised I had not really set my goals for 2012.  

My excuse, I guess, is that December was a much busier month than I expected. Lots of work, a plethora of kids concerts followed by a school term that finished way too early, a baby to look after (gosh, I had forgotten just how time consuming that is....), guests to entertain and - well a whole lot of other stuff that simply swallowed up the month.

So there I was, on my walk, feeling a bit cranky because I was embarking on a New Year much less organised than I would want to be.

And then it dawned on me:

January is very much a family month for us. The boys are on school holidays and the whole reason that I structure my work in the way that I do, is so that I can spend time with them. So I won’t be doing a lot of work; although I always do a little -  it keeps me sane!

Therefore I can relax. There is no reason for me to get worried about kicking off 1 January with my goals - as my “business year”  starts on 1 February (or 30 January to be exact).

I have another few weeks to get my planning done. And that extra time will mean I can give some quality thinking to 2012 rather than hurrying my planning to fit some arbitrary starting point.

Of course I am not alone. There are many Kitchen Table Tycoons, like myself, who have to bide their time. We just need to work to our own timetable - and wait to start our year.  
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How to.....pay yourself

Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, December 09, 2011

Found this while browsing the KBB archives. How to make sure you can pay yourself.




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How to.......play good guy, bad guy, when you are the ONLY guy (or girl)

Julia Bickerstaff - Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Hire an (imaginary) chairman

When you work for a  boss and have some difficult news to impart - maybe a pricing issue with a customer or a negotiation with a supplier - you can always blame the boss. But when you are the boss, well it can all be a bit tricky.

On the one hand you want to play the good guy and be the warm friendly person, but you also need to address the issue, make the difficult decisions and say the hard stuff.

How do you do both?

Hire an (imaginary) chairman.

A friend of mine does this very elegantly. In a recent pricing negotiation, she explained to her customer how she had wanted to offer them a lower price but how, when she discussed it with her chairman (the imaginary one, of course), she realised that the business could really not afford to do such a deal. She emphasised that she had been very reluctant to agree with her chairman but had eventually come to realise that he was right and that this was the best deal she could do.

The client  took it very well, saying that they completely understood the situation and thanking  her for at least considering the lower price.

My friend continues to have a very good relationship with her client and  - yeah - they also pay her a good price for her work.

Sometimes, when you are the boss of a little business, you just have to have a few tricks up your sleeve. I’m collating a few more so if you have any that you’d like to share, please do!
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How to........improve your chances of reaching your 2012 goals

Julia Bickerstaff - Monday, November 28, 2011

 

The Weightwatchers way

Way back in 1961 Jean Nidetch accidentally discovered that publicly sharing goals was a very simple way to achieve them.

At the time Jean was rather overweight and had enormous trouble sticking to diets. In a moment of despair she invited a group of friends to her house and told them about her weight loss goals. It was the birth of Weightwatchers.

It turns out that it’s the goal sharing - rather than the diet sheets, special food etc etc etc - that is the single biggest factor in getting the best weight loss results.

It works for business too.

Right now is a great time to be setting goals for 2012 so try thinking of a way you can publicly share them, such as:

  • buddy up with another small biz owner and share each others goals
  • tell your friends and family
  • start a small biz group (like a weightwatchers group) to discuss and share goals
  • blog your goals
  • try a goal sharing website such as http://www.43things.com/ and www.stickk.com



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How to......get your marketing off to a flying start next year

Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, November 25, 2011
Diarise it

Imagine you have a list of 88 potential customers and you want to have two face to face meetings with each of them next year. That’s a manageable 4 meetings a week for 44 weeks of the year -  and gives you a breather of a few weeks off to cover holidays and the unexpected.

Pick a day of the week for those meetings and block out that time in your diary, for the whole year, right now.

Of course the meetings will probably have to shuffle around in your diary a bit, but that doesn’t matter. Once a regular meeting is in your diary it reminds you to make it happen, becomes a comfortable habit and forces you to make time to do it.
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Why a short-on-time business owner creates a better business

Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, November 15, 2011

I’m a huge champion of people running Lifestyle Businesses* and, as you probably know, am in the throws of creating one myself.

A question I am often asked is “Is it possible to run a profitable business when you are constrained by the number of hours you can spend on it?”

You bet it is.

The human brain is a funny old thing and often behaves in unexpected ways. One of the surprises is that it often works better if it is constrained in some way.

Here’s why:

Every day the brain is subject to a cacophony of activity and if it didn't chose to ignore most of it we'd go bonkers. The brain works so hard ignoring stuff that all the other work it does has to be performed with mega efficiency. As a result, when the brain is asked to think about how to solve a problem it doesn’t bother digging too deep for a clever solution, rather it just grabs the closest answer.

But when you put an obstacle in the way of the brain so that it can't grab the nearest information it steps up a gear, and magic happens.

First of all the brain sorts through it’s impressive store of information and then it plays with it, matching seemingly unrelated bits of information in various permutations and combinations until, amazingly, a clever solution appears.

So how does this relate to running a business against the clock?

Well because you have set the clock as an obstacle, your brain can’t default to solving your business problems using the most obvious resource, time. Instead it has to dig deeper and that’s where it gets clever and imaginative.

Classic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, who think nothing of spending 100 hours a week on their business don’t get to activate that aspect of their brain in the same way. Their brains see a problem and immediately want to solve it by throwing hours at it.

So your business will be more creative, imaginative and innovative because you restrict the number of hours you work, not despite it.



*A Lifestyle Business is one that’s designed to complement the owners life, and often that means it’s run on less hours than most entrepreneurial businesses.

Often Lifestyle Businesses are run by Mums, but not exclusively. A dear friend, for example, runs a Lifestyle Business which allows her to spend 4 months a year trekking in Nepal.

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One a day

Julia Bickerstaff - Wednesday, November 09, 2011
I’ve been amassing, for about 3 years, a cupboard of ‘ebay’ stuff. It’s full of purchasing mistakes (rather a lot I’m ashamed to admit), unwanted gifts (yep, no excuse, it sounds ungrateful) and clothes the children have outgrown.

We moved house recently and I lovingly packed the whole cupboard up in a box -neatly labelled ‘ebay’ - and carefuly unpacked it into a new cupboard in the new house.

And there it was destined to stay.Because despite my grand plans, I had never actually sold a single item on ebay.

It’s not because I didn’t know how to sell stuff and it’s not because I was hopeless at selling, it’s simply that I never quite got round to it.......because it seemed like such a huge job.

Truly, I had the Everest of unwanted items.

The thought of photographing, writing the details and then mailing all that stuff made me feel ill. So it stayed in the cupboard, and I just felt guilty whenever I went near it.

Then a month or so ago my husband, rather alarmingly, discovered both the cupboard and all my purchasing mistakes. I had two options: divorce or sell the damn stuff.

I chose the latter.

I didn’t sell it all at once, mind, that would be too awful. I decided to do one piece a day, every day, until the job was done.

Today I went to my cupboard to do my daily piece and, joy of joys, it was half empty!

In less than a month my cupboard has gone from looking like a prop on Hoarders to feeling pretty much like the rest of our cupboards (we’re a busy family of 6 , we don’t do perfect).

And here’s the learning - ‘one thing a day’ works.

I have a friend who hates making sales calls (although honestly she is so very good at them that I can’t think why). She started doing the ‘one a day’ in October 2010 and last week she told me that she has doubled her income this year. Go girl!

Another small business I know does the same with debtors - they call one a day; and guess what, they now have cash in the bank.

So here’s my tip: If you have a job that you don’t like, and is repetitive don’t put it off until you can find the time to do it all at once. Decide to do it ‘one a day’. Try it for a month. See what happens.
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