Do you enjoy working with people? Part 3

Do you enjoy working with people? In these three articles, you will go through the steps always to be in your mind to shorten your working day by simple tips. Lazy people who really wants to be rich without hard work can refer these articles. Actually hard work really does not matter until it is for a specific outcome.

Read these articles also.

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 1

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 2

Defer your mail

 Think hard about this one: do you really need to deal with your inwards mail at the start of the day, when you are at your bustling, incisive best? Is it so important that it must take priority over everything else you do? Does it demand an unrationed slice of your time and the peak of your concentration?

In some businesses, the answer will be "Yes". In others, it may make more sense to defer the mail till later. This may mean that replies will go out tomorrow instead of today, but does that actually matter?

One editorial department that I headed years ago had a silly rule, handed down by the board, that letters from readers must be answered the same day. I cancelled it. Most such letters were of the "smart Alec" variety. Ostensibly correcting errors in our publications, they were from people keen to show that they knew more about a particular subject than we did. Far more important for our editors and sub­editors, was the lead-up to press day rush. Letters any letters could come later.

The same company also had a rule that an extra copy be taken of every letter sent by every executive and added to a thick file which went the rounds of the boardroom. In theory, this made sure that left hands knew what right hands were doing. In practice, it wasted each executive's time on the meaningless (to him) minutiae of other departments. This is how bureaucracies grow and fester.

Don't file it throw it away

Some secretaries are obsessive filers; I've known some that even filed "thank you" letters. It's a nice, gentle way to fill the day, but it wastes time and valuable office space.

If you can cut down on filing, you automatically cut down on manpower and on the time you spend organising and supervising it. One example common to many companies is suppliers' sales letters and catalogues, especially those for peripheral equipment: copiers, office furniture, stationery, mobile phones, conference facilities, etcetera. File them, and the most likeiy outcome is that everyone will forget they are there or remember them but forget where the hell they are filed. And when you do get around to needing to buy something, invariably you go to the same old supplier and nobody thinks to look in the files to see what else is available. Instead, get your secretary to list any really vital contacts under categories in a "little black book". Then you can get an up-to-date catalogue, or a salesman to call, if ever you need one. And throw everyone's sales bumf away.

That is just one example. If you are ruthless or cynical enough, you will find many more.

A similar category of wasteful over-filing is inter-departmental memos. Their main function, in my experience, is in the playing of office politics who takes the blame if that project is late or goes wrong. In a really well run company there is no need to file these, because they do not exist in the first place.

Don't drive use a taxi

Or a train.,. Just because you have a company car, you don't have to always use it. Spend two hours on the motorway and you are working the whole time, your blood pressure proves it. "Let the train take the strain", in the old Saatchi's jingle, and in the same time you could enjoy the scenery and a few refreshments and the real time saver -review your notes and/or strategy for the meeting you are going to, a job for which you would otherwise use time in the office.

Around town, the strategy is the same. Executives in big cities like London or New York automatically take taxis as a matter of course, but even in smaller towns it makes sense. In my advertising days, I could have driven to see most clients, but it made far more sense to use taxis. On the outward journey I could preview what I wanted to present to the client; on the return one, note down all the actions needed as a result of our meeting. This was much more productive than threading one's way through traffic and fretting about cyclists. And my wife enjoyed using the company car.

Don't be diverted

Anxious to please, some suppliers (especially) will want you to tour their plant, gawp at the view from the boardroom window, take you to lunch at the local Hog and Swill, even show you photographs of their grandchildren. This is fine after the business has been done, or not at all if time is pressing" Here is Tony O'Reilly on the warpath a frozen foods company called Ore-Ida, one of Heinz US's subsidiaries, has been losing money:

"On one of his first self-appointed missions, he flew up to the Ore-Ida plant where he sat in the offices of Paul Corddry, the vice-president of Sales and Marketing. Corddry offered him the usual tour of the plant which all new executives got, but O'Reilly was curt. 'I don't want to hear all about that', he said abruptly. 'I want to know why your cashflow has been so poor?'."

Take proper breaks

You cannot relax if you are on call 24-hours a day, and companies which insist on it are short-changing themselves. At constant stress levels, your productivity dwindles. So:

•        Take a proper lunch break. A meal will boost your energy levels so you get more done in less time. If the morning's work has revved you up, a glass of wine will calm you more effectively -and less harmfully in the long run  than any pills. OK TWO glasses, then. But working while you eat is not clever; it is a shortcut to an ulcer.

Switch off your mobile phone when you get home. Most doctors these days, at least in cities, refuse to take after-hours phone calls or make any house calls at all. If you want treatment after hours you must call an ambulance or visit a specialised after-hours practice. There is a reason for this: doctors know what is bad for their health.

In some service industries advertising is one clients may need educating that their newest bright idea can wait until morning (by which time it may no longer appear so bright). Is that rush job really so urgent? Are all your client's jobs "rush jobs"? Fire him! At least, have a quiet word... You do your damnedest for the client; you do not marry him.

• At least one day at the weekend should be yours and yours alone. Switch off the mobile. Have an unlisted number. If desperate, spend every Sunday with your mother-in-law... with the cycling club... in the Bahamas, or wherever. But be strictly out of touch.

Of course, none of the above may be possible if you work for a company, or indirectly for a client, that wants to own you eight days a week and 25 hours out of every 24. In this case a review of your priorities would seem not just in order, but overdue. You have only one life. Do you really enjoy that working with people?

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Do you enjoy working with people? Part 2

Do you enjoy working with people? In these three articles, you will go through the steps always to be in your mind to enjoy your working day by simple tips. Lazy people who really wants to be rich without hard work can refer these articles. Actually hard work really does not matter until it is for a specific outcome.

Read this article also.

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 1

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 3

Shorten those memos

Winston Churchill, doing one of the toughest management jobs of all time running Britain during the Second World War sent a memo to the Admiralty at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. It said: "Please let me know, on one side of one sheet of paper, what the Navy is doing to combat the submarine menace."

If the Navy could do this on one page, and it did, there is no reason why any memo you or I should ever write need take more than two. There is just no room in business for the. sort of verbiage that characterises bureaucracies: "With reference to your paragraph (iv), my department is of the opinion that on the basis of probabilities there is no compelling reason..." etc.

A good memo writer begins with his conclusion or recommendation in one paragraph, or better still, one sentence. Then he gives the reasons for it, in one paragraph each. Then, if he is proposing some action, he lists possible objections to it, if any. Finally, he says why these objections should be dismissed. And that is all.

This system means that every recipient of the memo gets to grips with it from the outset. He doesn't have to wade through a lot of words to see what the author is proposing or even to discover that the memo has nothing to do with him. Both writer and reader focus on the essential point from the outset; they think about the Polo, not the hole.

The same point applies to inter-business sales letters: the first sentence should tell the reader what you are offering him or asking him to do. The justification for your proposal comes next, then the sales pitch. You haven't time to wade through a load of waffle; neither has he. So why waste time writing it?

Keep phone calls brief

Not much infuriates me in these golden retirement days, but one person who does is the business caller usually a time-share resort salesman who starts his pitch with a "How are you?" routine. He doesn't know me. He doesn't give a damn how I am. His inquiry is as insincere as the "Have a nice day, now", spoken in a monotone, which is unfortunately spreading from America to countries which should know better. He is wasting my time and his own.

There are only three rules for business phone calls. The first is keep it short. The second is be brief. The third is don't spend time on it. Here is Donald Trump again:

"I believe there is an art to handling telephone traffic. The first thing you need to remember is to keep the conversation short. Not only will you make your points more strongly, but if you limit your calls to 30 seconds or less, as I try to do, you'll be able to start and finish one conversation while your secretary Is initiating another."

Cut down on meetings

Some executives like calling meetings because it makes them feel important. So do some chairmen. I've sat in on board meetings which, considering the expensive talent attending and the lack of real decisions, were just a waste of company resources.

Meetings are sometimes essential: for example, to point your team in the right direction on a new project, or to convey to them the implications of a new company policy. Many, though, are time-wasters because fifty per cent of what emerges is irrelevant waffle -gossip about clients or competitors, point-scoring by one department over another, self-promotion by the overly ambitious. Other meetings degenerate into pointless routine, as Andrew Neil discovered when he became editor of The Sunday Times:

"The monthly Wapping management meeting... was supposed to be a gathering of top Murdoch executives where problems would be solved and policies agreed. But the meetings were a waste of time: no decision of any importance was taken unless Rupert was there. So I delegated them to James Adams who, after a year of diligent attendance, realised that not a single decision had been taken and delegated the meetings to his deputy."

from Full Disclosure.

There are ways, though, of reducing the impact of meetings on your time and patience. You could try these.

•         Have your meetings less often. A full agenda for a fortnightly meeting, say, will keep people more alert, and focus their attention better, than a light agenda for a weekly one.

•         Have fewer people. In a policy meeting, three people will reach decisions faster than five or fifteen, because they will be less concerned with attracting others' attention to themselves, and so will introduce fewer irrelevancies.

•         Have a proper agenda, listing items for decision in their order of importance. This means that "minutes" and "matters arising" go at the bottom, not the top, stopping people from chewing up half the meeting's time while they go over the same old ground.

•         If a big meeting is inevitable, circulate the agenda in advance, so that people are prepared for it and spend less time thinking and talking on their feet.

•         Or, simply be a tougher chairman. As any reporter on my community newspaper will tell you, most organisations of whatever kind could cut their meeting times in half if speakers were made to stick strictly to the point.

Use the computer more

Bill Gates, looking at The Road Ahead, says that: "If you're twenty-five today and not comfortable with computers, you risk being ineffective in any kind of work you do." That's close. In fact, anyone of any age who is not comfortable with what computers can do for him is probably working too hard.

If you find yourself regularly doing step-by-step calculations on a production schedule, say, or "what if calculations on a range of financial outcomes, you are certainly doing it the hard way. As one simple example, a program I've been using since I retired a decade ago projects my future income from term investments. As often as I like, I can key in any changes in interest rates, inflation or income tax, and in seconds it will tell me what these investments will be worth at the beginning and end of each year from now on.

But this is just a "baby" program which I wrote myself in BASIC. Today, a program like Microsoft Excel, or a similar good spreadsheet, will allow not just step-by-step calculations of this sort but also almost infinite variations or analyses.

Too busy to configure such a program for your own needs? No matter: a university computer science student even a high school computer whizz can do it for you in no time, provided you brief him on exactly what you want the program to do, in what steps. Can't find a program to suit? Spend a bit more, and a programmer will write you one. There is really no excuse for going without.

Nor does the principle apply just to office work. The newest outdoor example I've encountered is a control program which directs an earthmoving machine to precisely where it should be to contour a landscape most efficiently. In the demonstration, one machine was doing the work that normally would require three. For anyone running a contracting company, the implications are enormous.

Read More

Do you enjoy working with people?

Do you enjoy working with people? In these three articles, you will go through the steps always to be in your mind to shorten your working day by simple tips. Lazy people who really wants to be rich without hard work can refer these articles. Actually hard work really does not matter until it is for a specific outcome. 

Read these articles also,

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 2

How to Shorten your Working Day with simple tips Part 3

The first objective of applied laziness is to shorten your working day not to achieve less, but to achieve more in a shorter time.

Long hours are a bad habit. Many executives work extended hours because, seduced by all that stuff about hard work, they feel it is expected of them. But if you measure your performance carefully you'll find that long hours are counter-productive; the longer you work, the more woolly your thinking becomes and the less you actually achieve. (Some people have a longer peak period than others, but the principle still applies: tiredness dulls the brain.)

The best way to lighten the load is by effective delegation, which we shall come to later. But there is also a range of time-saving shortcuts. Get into the habit of using them now, while you are an executive in someone else's company, and they'll make an enormous difference when you need them most: the day you start your own concern. 

 

 

Start early 

Batty though it seems, the quickest way to shorten your working day is to start an hour early. This lets you get the tricky stuff done that report written, tender document set out, contract examined before the others arrive. Or, because you're fresh, you can use that time for strategic thinking: how can I improve my team's long-term performance?

You'll get more done in that hour, you'll find, than in two hours at day's end when you are tired. You may even get more done than in three hours of normal office bustle: phone calls, appointments, and the assorted crap that keeps landing on your desk, destroying your concentration.

You can recoup that hour, and more, by working less overtime at day's end. And think of the example you're setting!

Cut your appointments

The prime job of management is not to keep appointments or attend meetings. It is to make things happen. If your diary is full of internal appointments, it is a short-odds bet that you have too many people reporting to you. Are you trying to do the supervisors jobs for them? Are you simply too accessible to people "down the line"?

Either way, you can save time by bunching your appointment times together and keeping them brief ten minutes if you must, five minutes if you can. One chief executive gets each departing staff member to summon not the next person on the list, but the next but one. So people arrive in a continuous stream, and none of his time is wasted.

Use the time you save to create deliberate gaps in your schedule. This is your thinking, plotting or planning time, and is absolutely essential. Hear what Donald Trump says on the subject:

"I work from morning until night, but I try to make sure there is plenty of white space on my appointment calendar... Not being booked solid allows me to come up with ideas rather than simply react to other people's problems... Making sure that I run my day instead of allowing my day to run me is a key way I avoid being overwhelmed by work."

from Trump: Surviving at the Top

If your diary is full of external appointments, on the other hand, the question is much simpler: are you trying to do the salesmen's jobs for them? (On this subject, I cannot help recalling Lord Stokes, then chairman of British Leyland, making headlines in the 1960s by dashing off to Cuba to sell buses to Fidel Castro. You could just about date this major company's final decline from this misuse of its chairman's time,)

Try a job sheet

This is a plain white sheet of A4 paper on which you list the tasks ahead of you sort out this, chase up that, resolve the other, adding new jobs as they crop up and crossing out completed ones. Tony O'Reilly uses file cards with a blue border and "A.J.F. O'Reilly" embossed on them, but this sort of swank is not strictly necessary.

The job sheet is essential to the executive whose specific tasks can take anything from two days upwards. Organising a new branch was one example I've encountered; launching a new magazine was another. In such jobs it is more efficient than a diary. You don't have to pause, even for a moment, to think what comes next, because you have it constantly in front of you. And, at day's end, you do not have to waste time transferring a dozen or more partially completed jobs from one diary page to the next.

If you have only a few appointments, you can note these at the foot of the sheet, e.g., "Broker 10 a.m. Tues." or "Sarah's b'day Fri. p.m.". This leaves your secretary free to do something useful, like chasing up outside suppliers and internal laggards, responding to job seekers or filling in one of those damnable questionnaires with which governments plague businesses.

Personally, I used a job sheet in a range of businesses for over forty years, and found it so useful that for most of that time I didn't need a diary at all.

Cut down on correspondence

If the billionaire oilman Jean Paul Getty could run his global empire from any old hotel room anywhere, with just one secretary and an overworked telephone, you can cut down on the paperwork you generate and the time it takes to do it.

Getty had strong views about office efficiency:

"One of the serious wrongs in American business is the penchant for wallowing in welters of paperwork and administrative detail. Some companies have literally hundreds of people keeping records on each other and passing interoffice memoranda back and forth... The cost of this over-administration is staggering, not only in salaries paid to paper shufflers, but in the general slowdown it has on all operations."

quoted in The House of Getty

What to do about it? The first rule, practised by Getty and others, is: never write a letter when a phone call (or fax, or e-mail) will do. Stockbrokers already-work this way, accepting buy and sell orders worth thousands or even millions of pounds on the strength of just a phone call. True, some brokers do have expensive systems which tape record every incoming call, just in case of arguments later. But for many businesses a much simpler tape system or none at all is all you need.

The second rule is: never write a letter if a footnote will do. For example, you get from a regular supplier a letter setting out price, delivery time and terms on a new item. If these are OK (and you may well have had a haggle session with him already) just scrawl "Agreed" in the margin, initial it and fax it back. A normal margin will even allow, "Agreed, except we reserve the right to vary the quantity by ±10% and vary your price pro rata", as I have this minute proved by practical experiment.

That still leaves the letters which demand a fuller reply. A few people are expert at dictating. Most are not; their letters are rambling, repetitive and imprecise.

At least 50 per cent of letters arriving in the average office are on purely routine matters. Most stock replies will be on computer. For the others, work up a system with your secretary: you attach a brief note to the incoming letter, he or she writes the reply. To begin with, you write reasonably full notes; as time goes by these become shorter and shorter: "Try again September", "See ad. agency", "Not poetry, thanks".

Gradually, this turns your secretary into a PA, able to read your mind and stand in for you on a range of subjects. Good: stretching people's talents, not their hours, is the basis of good delegation and indeed of good management generally.  Do you enjoy working with people?

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