Do you ever overthink or overanalyze to the point where you stop making decisions and taking action? Where you’re afraid that the choice you’re about to make isn’t the BEST choice, so you wait it out a little more, and maybe research a little more, and maybe gather together more data … just so you can be SURE? That’s called analysis paralysis.
Debunking the myths of being data driven and being successful can set you free.
We all know that there are only so many minutes in a day, and that goals like being more productive and effective hinge on things like better time management, that is, working smarter not harder. This is particularly true if you think you’ve got a pretty standard process in place. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a visualization tool called a box and whisker plot. This tool will help you determine how long you can typically expect your standard process to take, and how to spot when there’s enough variability to say that it’s time to reexamine what you’re doing, so you can:
If you can find the middle thing in a list, you can do this time analysis.
The upfront cost of new software tends to be perceived as rather obvious. There’s the money you spend on the actual software purchase (if any) and the money you spend on any required hardware (if any). Folks frequently overlook at least five (5) additional cost considerations that can impact both your future budget and your productivity.
If you sit down and really think about the type of data associated with you as a person, most of that data will probably be communications-based, that is, all of that “stuff” that you generate or consume in the course of communicating with others via email, social media, etc. In this post, I’m going to focus just on email-based communications.
It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of spending a lot of time filtering through your email, or getting to the point where you have 1,000+ unread messages, because you just don’t have time or energy to even delete all the ones you don’t really care about or to “do something” with the ones you want to come back to later. Most tips on dealing with this overwhelm glut will focus on things like filters, folders, and labels as your solution, and those things can be really handy. Even so, your real problem could be that you don’t have enough email addresses.
In today’s world, we’ve digitized almost everything, including our invoicing and payment systems. Even so, when we don’t support our data flows with an underlying structure, it can be easy to introduce costly human errors. I recently worked with a training client who was using an electronic payment voucher form, but the form still required manual (i.e., typed) data entry for all line item calculations and total calculations. I happened to be around to witness an incident in which the person filling out the form added an extra zero to the final total of the form. That’s the difference between $9,000 and $90,000. Yikes!! Below, I list three (3) simple ways this client and others can create forms so folks can better screen for and prevent this type of error.
This post builds on my previous post on templates: Templates, Audit Trails, and Client Confidentiality.
I’ll assume that you’ve created a series of template files to support your business flow, standardize your documents in a professional-looking way, and maintain client confidentiality.
In this post, I’ll discuss a couple of ways you can make sure they’re collected together in a way that makes them easy to find and easy to use.
A few months ago, I was the client of another business person. At the close of our business, this person sent me a standard business letter (i.e., date, name/address, subject, salutation, body) with the intent of summing up the transaction. A quick review of this letter made obvious that the business person had opened a previous client’s letter with the intention of using it as a template, but had forgotten to change anything other than my name and address at the top; the information contained in the remainder of the letter was enough to piece together who that other client had been and the exact nature of their business transaction. This oversight/blunder poses a problem in three key areas: the audit trail of the project, client confidentiality, and professionalism. A minor process change could address and alleviate all three.
Brainstorming as a practice can seem completely nebulous, and so can quickly devolve into a practice that is completely unstructured. Like any productive practice, it takes a lot of mindful preparation and a lot of structure in terms of dealing with group dynamics and being capable of changing directions when the session isn’t fruitful. Some common questions your participants might be wondering are: What should I say out loud? Who gets to talk? When is it my turn? What if I don’t have any ideas??
I’ve already covered tips for preparation in earlier blog posts. Now it’s time to address those common questions.
In Part 1 of this topic, Preparing for a Brainstorming Session, I discussed the resources you should have in place to optimize the potential of your brainstorming session. In Part 2, I discussed who to invite. In this post, I discuss how to prep the mindset of your attendees.
In Part 1 of this topic, Preparing for a Brainstorming Session, I discussed the resources you should have in place to optimize the potential of your brainstorming session. In Part 2, I discuss who to invite.