Leaders: A more productive second half

It is part of the role of the leader to help the team maintain a productive pace and to strengthen the team to produce a prosperous and balanced result.

One of my recommendations directed at leaders is to have them plan the year with the help of their team in regards to productivity, balance and the reduction of urgencies. Applying this kind of strategy for the second half of the year is constructive, since it aligns the team with a plan for the following months.
Some points are essential in planning the team’s productivity, and as the leader, you must be ready to develop these strategies:

1 – Review what can be improved – Question the team about what hasn’t worked out this year so far and what needs to be changed in the following semester. This can include a review of processes, the implementation of new tools, an analysis of a possible lack of communication, including the improper use of e-mail, relationship problems with clients or suppliers, etc. Perform a thorough check of these critical areas and create an action plan to minimize them.

2 – Create a Reduction of Urgencies Policy – help your team to clearly understand what is urgent, what usually brings about these urgencies, and create a plan to prevent them. Remember that good part of urgencies can be reduced with planning, preparation and prevention. Often enough, simple properly thought out and applied checklists can minimize the problem. The definition of clear priorities may also help a lot as well.

3 – Define balance strategies – the longer your team has for what is truly important, the greater will team productivity be. Within the possibilities of your business, what could be done to enable everyone to use their time more effectively?
Perhaps rewards in the form of time (such as days off, etc.) could motivate the team quite a bit.
See what can be done and elaborate a bank of benefits with the help of your team.
4 – Stimulate the use of productivity tools – The more people are able to plan individually, the lesser will the quantity of collective urgencies and delays be. Train your team to use their tools, such as e-mail, video conference, etc. wisely. The improper use of productivity tools results in time administration problems, which everyone ends up feeling.

5 – Discuss the reduction of meetings and interruptions – A lot of companies perform recurrent meetings that provide inconsistent results. Analyze the possibility of reducing one of these group meetings or a more intelligent way of conducting it. This also applies for frequent interruptions, which can be eliminated by using rules or tools for sharing knowledge.

Intelligent leaders understand that a team with no time cannot achieve results in a productive and balanced manner. It is the role of the leader to create strategies to be shared with all the involved. Don’t let wasted time jeopardize results!

Will you take advantage of the 4th July to grow?

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Marcus Canesqui, one of the blog readers, with an interesting topic for us to comment on:

“… with the upcoming long weekend, a lot of people schedule a number of activities, quite often of personal nature, such as renewing documents, analyzing bills, etc… In the middle of all this, we sometimes overload our holiday planning and we end up not doing everything we set out to do or having that needed rest and on Monday comes that sensation of frustration…”

For those who will not travel, this comment is extremely pertinent. Napoleon Hill used to say that everyone has the same 24 hours: 8 hours in general to rest, 8 hours to work and the8 hours that remain is what set us apart from those people who realize their dreams from those one who do not.

This weekend is the perfect time, for those not travelling to catch up on their planning, their dreams and their leisure! It is indeed worth planning with a lot a flexibility to take good advantage of this time!

If you still do not know what you will do, what about some ideas to help you come up with your own:

1 – Family – Since there is free time, the family must come first! If you have kids, ask them what they would like to do, where they would like to have lunch at, what movies they would like to watch (RIO is an excellent idea), etc. If you do not have kids, devote your time for your relationship, to friends, to your parents, to your relatives, etc.

2 – You – What about catching up in your personal planning? Organize your drawers, set aside some clothing for donation, renew your documents, go for a walk, dedicate some time for your hobby, catch up on your reading, have dinner in a special place, rest, etc…

3 – Your Dreams – Nothing like a long weekend to help you think about your goals! What do you want to accomplish this year? Is there a well-defined action plan in place? If you want a step-by-step guideline in how to define your goals, follow the series of posts here.

I, for example, will not travel this time (whew!), so I will take the kids to the movies, play some tennis, go each day to a different restaurant chosen by one of us, renew my driver’s license and get my son’s ID card, write one or two chapters of my new book, have lunch with my in-laws and enjoy Saturday to date my wife!

Marcus’ tip is noteworthy, nothing too strict, everything should be flexible and open to changes or steps towards your dreams, while others stay at home, lazily watching TV. Do not blame luck or the lack of it for your results, but those small attitudes done at the right time, such as this one!

What about you? What are your plans for this holiday?

10 tips on not losing time on Social Networks

I have already spoken several times about the impact of social networks on our productivity, but this subject is one of the most often requested by the readers of this blog, so I prepared a summary with 10 strategies that can save your time:

1 – Be selective about your networks – Network quantity does not mean quality. Why take part of social networks that are not relevant? The ideal is to focus on the main networks where your friends and interests are at. In my case, I use only 4 networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Orkut -> in this order of importance).

2 – Cancel your notification e-mails – All networks allow you to configure e-mail notifications, and the best is for you to cancel them all, so you are in charge of the network and access it whenever you want to, otherwise it will be difficult to control your urge to know why someone has “tagged” you in your friend’s photo…

3 – Establish a network focus – The one who tries to please Greeks and Trojans at the same will eventually find trouble with one of the sides. Create a strategy for each network you have, for example, if you use Twitter for professional means, do not mix it with personal stuff. A lot of companies use social networks when hiring a professional and it will not look good if there are photos of you drunk, after a night out. Keep coherence in the profile you choose, with photos, texts and comments! A lot of people unknowingly get burnt for not having a strategy!

4 – Determine your schedule – I am not against checking your Facebook account during working hours, but I am against abusing this privilege. Use those minutes before or after your working hours, as well as your lunch time, in case you want to access your social networks from work for personal use. I normally check mine from home, at the end of the day.

5 – Follow only a few, but relevant, people – Why follow people who have no relation to you or who whose content has become irrelevant? Go on a people diet regarding the ones you follow, and observe in the next few days those ones who have not aggregated value and simply stop following them.

6 – Use aggregators – There are sites and software that allow you to centralize your social networks or update them through a single post. I have used Tweetdeck which allows me to update my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously! One site worth looking into is http://www.threadsy.com as it combines your e-mails and social networks in a single place.

7 – Be relevant on your networks – People enjoy following those ones who provide a relevant content, in the right measure and regularly. That annoying guy, who “twits” a lot at once, ends up losing followers. And, that one who “twits” posts saying that he has woken up in a bad mood, also does not aggregate much.

8 – Use your waiting time to your advantage – I like to update my networks when I am at the airport or waiting for start an event. To take advantage of these short minutes is a lot valid as long as your cell phone or tablet is enabled to do so. There are dozens of software for these devices that work very well!

9 – Social Network does not demand “real time replies” – Don’t feel obliged to reply to a message at the very moment the person has sent it. If it were truly urgent, this person would find a different way of reaching you. If you create this bad habit of replying as soon as the message arrives, besides getting these people accustomed to this behavior of your part, you will also lose a lot of time needlessly!

10 – There is life out there – It is not because social life has become digital that you must hide behind a computer in your relationships. You must set aside some time to spend with your friends and family in person!

The role of the teacher in the management of kids’ time

No one is born productive, people become productive along their lives. Now, it is clear that this statement could be different, and without any doubt, parents and teachers have a fundamental role in this matter. It is possible, in a playful way, to help kids to have a more productive future from early in life.

I have two boys, aged 5 and 11, both of who use a planner, but in the worst possible way.
No teacher has ever encouraged them to use it productively. What I have done and recommend to teachers/parents is the following:

1 – Take all the homework your child has to do and make him/her write it down on the planner (and not on the particular notebook for that subject – as this is how you will create the habit of distributing all the things that have to get done).

2 – Encourage your child to arrive home and show his/her parents all that has to be done.

3 – Teach him/her that when a lesson or activity is done, it must be scratched off the planner.

4 – In the following day, the teacher will look at all the kids’ planners and those who have scratched off all of the items, will get a “teacher’s special stamp” (of course, it changes as the child grows). In my case, I do this with my oldest son in a weekly basis (so he gains responsibility), now with my younger one, I do it daily.

5 – This also applies with studying for tests or working in group. You must encourage the child to always do the tasks ahead of time and not at the last minute (may be even rewarding him/her in some way).

It is our role as parents to help our children, but never use this as a tool to demand things from your child or in a boring matter; it has to be playful, light and that will give the child some type of positive return!

The subject is cool and I will write some more about it in future posts…

How to start your own business while employed?

The wave of startups, venture capital funds, and people talking about the subject has finally taken off. Since I started talking about entrepreneurship, back in 2001, by Empretec, I have never seen a better time than now to start your own business.

In this post, I will focus on the professionals who want to follow this route, but still do not possess the conditions to leave their present jobs, or even by option, prefer to preserve the security of formal employment and take those first steps, towards entrepreneurship, very slowly.

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1 – Are you really prepared?

Becoming an entrepreneur is not simple, does not involve luck, or charisma. It is dedication, sweat, persistence and passion. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, it is only another way. The vast majority (I would say roughly 85%) of entrepreneurs will never earn the same as a CEO in a large company would earn and facing with less risks.

It is an illusion to believe that every entrepreneur will become rich, travel abroad three times a year and have time to do everything he wants. In practice, reality is a lot different.

If you really want to be a “working entrepreneur”, be ready to work at least 12-hour days (8h as a worker and at least 4h as an entrepreneur). Like never before, you will need time management and productivity, or you will be headed towards a heart attack!

2 – Limit your roles for a while

As much as you may want to be a volunteer, take that course about wine, or travel to Europe, depending on the time devoted to your role as an entrepreneur, performing these other activities will be literally impossible, or at least, frustrating and tiring.

I am not saying that you should not have time for yourself and do those things that relax you; much on the contrary, they are essential to keep your energy and disposition. What I am trying to say is that it is impossible to create a 30-hour day! You will have to be selective, limiting these “small pleasures” to a certain extent, at least in the beginning.

The important is to establish a period for this limit (6 months ~ 1 year), or you run the risk of living so involved in your own business that your own life will be left aside. Entrepreneurship is only a way to realize your dreams and to increase the quality of your life; if this is not happening, it is time to reconsider this role.

3 – Automate the Business as much as possible

The type of business you undertake will help or hinder your strategy a lot. The more your business can be on “auto-pilot”, the better. And this has to be done from day one; there is no need to wait the business to grow and to have more employees in order to create good working procedures.

Let us suppose you will sell decorative objects on the Internet, from the purchase from the supplier to the delivery to the client, the more the system can help you, the better. In this specific case, there are different sites with e-commerce systems that do this with extreme ease.

This modality of business is a lot different from, for example, selling fine candies for weddings using your great-grandmother’s secret recipe. In this last case, you will need to face the stove and spend long hours in the production. It is not impossible, but everything is more complex in this case.

Consider businesses than can be automated, that you can manage from a distance with greater ease and that demand a lesser level of involvement in the day-to-day activities.

4 – Strengthen your Personal Planning

The more you plan your life at all levels, the better! This means having a planning that will allow your performance at work to be exceptional – you cannot drop the ball! Having a productive work day helps you leave the office with greater disposition to face your entrepreneurial life.

More than ever, I recommend that you plan your week, as I detail in the Triad methodology, and do a monthly planning, which helps you to have a wider view of it all and allows you to foresee situations of urgency with greater antecedence.

It is also worth considering the advice of centralizing all you need to perform on an on-line tool! Of course Neotriad is an excellent option, but its competitor, BaseCamp, does a very good job as well!

5 – Share the Journey

Involve your family in the process, formulate plans jointly, assign responsibilities, and get your husband or wife to get involved in the business. With the family nearby, it all becomes easier, and this shared time can be very gratifying as well.

Other option is to have a partner, but choose wisely. Being a good friend does not necessarily mean he or she will be a good partner! Where will he or she help? How will the profits be shared? How about investments? How long will each one of you work? If it does not work out, how will this partnership be dissolved? These questions must be answered first, because if they left for later and it all goes wrong, it is the perfect recipe for a good fight!

I get the feeling this subject will yield more posts! So, if you have any suggestions, they will be very welcome!

6 Ideas for the Entrepreneur to remove from the 2011 Agenda

I have already written in different articles and posts about the importance of having a list of those things that should not be done. In the book More Time More Money, we dedicated an entire chapter to this topic.

At the most recent ExpoManagement, Jim Collins, considered as being Peter Drucker’s successor, said that all CEOs should have this list of things to be excluded from their time.

For an entrepreneur/director, having this item clear is vital. Taking advantage that the year is just beginning, I have selected a few items that should be considered as part of this list:

1 – Operational Activities – If you spend the all of your time in operational activities, you work ON the business and not THE business in a broader manner. Perhaps this model is preventing the company from growing, of decentralizing decisions or even of allowing you to have more time for your life.

As a suggestion, if you use Neotriad or MS Outlook, you can classify these tasks as circumstantial or setting a specific category. Analyzing the previous week will always give you a clear view of what has been happening.

2 – Meetings with a defined Objective – How many meetings have we taken part of as pure convenience or simply because we did not want to say no? I only have scheduled meetings that have a clear result for me, as the other ones I choose to decline or change how they will be conducted (Skype instead of face-to-face).

3 – Skip from Idea to Idea – Have you noticed that all entrepreneurs seem to have too much adrenalin? A lot of them are so frenetic in their daily routine, that at the first thought of a new idea, they drop everything and rush out putting this idea into practice. At the end, a lot of time lost and very little practical result gained. Be more selective; know how to tell the difference between opportunities and time lost.

4 – Control Your Team Hours – If you have the habit of controlling if your assistant arrived at eight o’clock or ten after eight, become a member of Dimep, which is a time-clock manufacturer! Control results and projects and not time in a meticulous manner. Ever increasingly, time is becoming something outdated; with the traffic, flooding, Internet, we have to be flexible. If someone works better arriving at ten in the morning and leaving at eight at night, why not be more flexible?

5 – Postpone vacations – Relaxing is an item that needs to be prioritized and not left aside! Working frenetically, without pauses, kills your productivity, your creativity and makes your grumpy. Take short vacations (3 to 5 days) and several times along the year, the results are better.

6 – Serve some clients – If the client does not generate profit (I did not say sales/invoicing), he does not generate results, does not help the team and takes away your peace, maybe this client is not the client for you. Scratch him out, cancel the contract, and don’t even think a lot about it.

And you? What must you stop doing for your company and/or your life to begin evolving?

What to do with clients who don’t plan?

After a wonderful vacation, I am back with a lot of new ideas to put into practice, The CEO Agenda to debut in my website, cover of this week’s Época Magazine (Brazilian most read magazine)  based in a new research I developed and a new book in the works. 2011 has really started off too good!

To reopen this new season of posts, I have selected one question made by Mari Peixoto:

“I work in a company that receives outsourcing contracts for Human Resources and Payroll, so in order for me to fulfill my chronogram, I depend on my client to do his part. How can I manage my tasks if my client occasionally does not provide me with the required information within the estimated deadline?”

 

 

This is certainly one problem that if you haven’t yet gone through, you will surely face sooner or later in your life, be it with internal or external clients. This is one of those productivity problems that may give the impression that our hands are tied, but with some simple strategies, this difficulty can be minimized. I will summarize six very simple ideas about this question:

1 – Talk about the problem – If the client has this habit of delays and urgencies, nothing better than to expose the problem in an open manner and to ask him for suggestions about minimizing the problem.
Let him expose his points of view and then complement them with your own suggestions.

2 – Expose the Chronogram – If the client is aware of the chronogram, he will be able to see that by NOT DELIVERING one item, he is directly impacting the project’s final result. Make this crystal clear in the service contract, monitor this item and notify any eventual delays.

3 – Be organized – If you are not organized and planned, you can be sure that the client will take advantage of this weak point. The greater your organization, documentation and management, the better the example you will provide and the lesser are the chances for problems.

4 – FUP – Follow up is a divine blessing. If you plan just a little ahead, you can create a system for warning the client about eventual delays (something like 1 or 2 days before the deadline works pretty good). It is not an e-mail requesting action; it is a follow-up message so he will not “forget”.

5 – Discover patterns – If there is no way around it, learn to deal with patterns from clients (they always exist, believe it!). Does he always send it all around 6 p.m.? Are Fridays the days when he swamps you with requests? Does he always forget that item X from the project? Discover the urgency pattern and work in a preventive manner. You can, for example, reserve some hours for these moments, or even assign professionals for these activities.

6 – Psychiatrics or Rescission? If there is no solution and the client drives you crazy, you have two choices: undergo a psychiatric treatment for your mental state or cancel the contract. These options are always viable. Sometimes you close a door, and when you turn around, you are facing this enormous gate, and don’t you ever forget this!

HAPPY 2011!

What is Neotriad Desktop?

Neotriad had its beginnings back in 2004 when it was called Triad Software, which was a version to be only installed on desktop computers with an Internet backup. This version was based on the best-seller book “The Triad of Time – Brazilian edition”, in order to allow readers to apply the methodology. Some years later, with the evolution Internet technologies, the need to develop an Internet based software arose, and the Neotriad concept was then born.

Triad Software was a huge success, with millions of downloads, but today it is completely outdated. The new version is called NEOTRIAD DESKTOP, which is an available upgrade to users of the old version. All they have to do is to contact our support team for upgrade procedures.

Neotriad Desktop is the Neotriad version that can be installed on any Windows based computer and it has similar resources to those present in Neotriad. It allows the synchronization of your data to the online version. It serves as a backup option to Neotriad, or it can be used when you are not connected to the Internet.

Some Neotriad resources are not available on Neotriad Desktop: files, finance manager and teams. On the other hand, all main personal planning and time management resources are available.

Do you want to try Neotriad Desktop for free?

Go to www.neotriad.com/desktop and download the trial version.

How delegate and manage tasks in Neotriad?

One of the main advantages of Neotriad is the ability to delegate and manage these tasks. Neotriad allows you to delegate tasks to two kinds of profiles:

• Neotriad users – In this case, the recommended option to delegate is the creation of a team and to delegate through this team. You have several tools to allow you to manage the tasks with this option. Throughout the system, you have the + icon where you can quickly add a task and delegate it to a team member by clicking on the “TEAM” button.

 

• People not using Neotriad (external contact)– This options is perfect to be used with customers, suppliers or anyone else who doesn´t use or doesn´t know what Neotriad is. In this case, the system will send an e-mail to this person with a link to the task, where it can be edited and have the status updated. To create a task for an external contact, click on the ADD menu and select the DELEGATE option:



When you need to follow up on these tasks (teams and external contacts), the easiest way is to go to the Personal area, click the TASK menu, and use the buttons Team´s Delegated Tasks or External Contact’s Delegated Tasks:



 

If the tasks are not visible, use the filter in left side and select the ALL TASKS option to define the start and finish dates.

If you are using the team’s resource, the initial screen “My Team Day” allows you to view the tasks for that selected day, grouped by member or projects.

Understanding the Team Allocation Report

As requested by some users, we are going to detail and explain the Team Allocation Report, and the main information you need to pay attention to manage your team. It´s important to remember that the report sets as default the period as the current week, but you change as you want.

The main goal of this report is analyze the team from the point of view of time allocation or to understand the productivity of the team based on this allocation.

Triad

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This table shows the team’s usage of time based on the Triad of Time classification.

What to look in this indicator:

Your team should have more than 60% of its time allocated to important stuff, between 15% to 25% in urgent and the rest as circumstantial. If your team values are different from this benchmark, analyze to find out what is creating so many urgencies.

If the option Not Selected is the majority, this means that your team is not classifying the activities correctly , in this case talk to the member and monitor the results.

Tasks

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This indicator shows the total number of tasks each member has and the current status (completed, delayed, etc).

What to look in this indicator:

In this indicator, it is very interesting to look at the numbers and the graphs that show how your team’s complete level is. The important is to observe the number of delayed or not started tasks and to check if it is acceptable.

You can also change the frequency of the report to see behavior patterns. Notice that many times a professional with constant delays may have repeated this pattern in the previous months and repeat it in the future ones. If this is really true, talk to them to understand the reasons for this profile and define steps to change it.

Activity Allocation

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This indicator shows the allocation of each team member among tasks, appointments, projects and goals.

What to look in this indicator:

Use this indicator to know IF the team members are really allocated in tasks, projects and goals that are bringing results. You can merge this information with the Tasks section of the report, for example, you can verify if the member with delayed activities, has many appointments, what could be the reason for so many delayed activities (he spent all of his day in meetings and has no time for the important stuff). You also can check if the members are working on important goals or just in unimportant things.

Activity Statistics

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This indicator is very similar to the Tasks section of this report, but the main difference is the percentage level of completion per member.

What to look in this indicator:

This is the way you can see IF the member is completing his activities within the deadline or with delay. Analyze the delay percentage of each member and check if the percentage of delay or completed with delay is acceptable.  If the numbers aren´t good, click to see which tasks are in this situation and have a talk with the member to help him to solve this delay problems. Probably He is planning more than He can execute or He is not accessing Neotriad to complete the tasks on time.

Hour Allocation

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This indicator shows the allocated time per member, in the team and the total time with personal activities (just the total amount, you can´t see personal team tasks).

What to look in this indicator:

Use this indicator to analyze IF the team planning time is according to its execution capacity. If any member has over 8 hours per day, it is likely he cannot perform all the tasks and will surely delay some items. This indicator show both, team allocated time in activities and personal hours. If the number 0 (zero) is displayed, the team members aren´t setting the tasks duration.