My (one & only) obligatory "Management Lessons from the Olympics" blog post

I'm feeling a little bit lonely out here. I may be the only person in the blogosphere not to blog about the Olympics. No "Leadership Secrets from the Balance Beam."

No "Three Things You Can Learn from Sprint Cycling."

No "Teamwork Lessons from Dressage."

And no "What Synchronized Divers can Teach You about Innovation."

But now that the Olympics are over and the Olympic-related posts are (mercifully) dying down, I'll give it a shot. I think we can learn a lot from the track & field events. (Of course, I'm a former competitive track and field runner (and coach), so what did you expect?)

The Value of Consistency and Patience: Galen Rupp (silver medal, 10,000m) is the first American medalist in the event since Billy Mills in 1964. Rupp is supremely talented and worked his ass off over the past four years to get to the medal stand. However, there was absolutely no magic to his training program -- he repeats the same workouts every 8-12 weeks during his training cycle. The repetition of the same workouts provide consistency, a clear benchmark for improvement, and the ability to adjust (in the PDCA cycle) his training if needed. Lesson for businesses: don't abandon your tactics or approach to the market if they don't yield results in the first quarter. It's the steady accretion of your activities that leads to long-term success, especially when consistency allows you to engage in PDCA along the way.

Play to your Strengths: Usain Bolt (triple gold medalist in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay) isn't the fastest guy out of the blocks. At 6'5" he's much taller than the average sprinter (who's usually about 5'9"-5'11"), so it takes him longer to uncoil at the start and accelerate to top speed. However, Bolt does have the highest top end -- and that's what he focused on in his training, not his start. Lesson for businesses: emphasize your strengths rather than trying to shore up your weaknesses. If quality is your strong point (Whole Foods, Amazon), then push your quality so far beyond your competitors' that their products and services look second-rate. If service is your bailiwick (Nordstrom, Zappos), then make your standard the gold standard.

Believe in your Strategy. And Stick with It: David Rudisha (gold medal, WR in 800m) is a rarity among middle distance runners: in big races he doesn't run "tactically," lurking in the back or middle of the pack and waiting to kick in the last 200m. He runs *his* race: he takes it out hard from the start and forces everyone to run on his terms. (Rudisha developed this approach after he lost a major race because he was boxed in at the end and couldn't accelerate to the front.) This tactic isn't without risk: if he goes out too hard, or if he's not in peak form, he could easily get outkicked by a fresher competitor who conserved his strength. But Rudisha would rather lose on his terms than on someone else's. And in fact he hasn't lost -- the tremendous pace he sets from the beginning takes the sting out of others' kicks. Lesson for businesses: you've got to stick with the strategy you believe in and execute it. Properly formulated strategy will leverage your strengths and unique capabilities. Don't change it because other companies are taking a different approach. Have faith in it, and don't run other people's races. Otherwise you might get boxed in.

August 2012 Newsletter -- Turning Strategy into Performance: Part 1

The first step in ensuring that you can execute on your lovingly crafted strategic plan is to ensure that it's clear. Crystal clear. Sounds easy, but it's not. Look at Walmart, Reebok, or any other brand that lost its way. Download PDF

What will you be judged on?

Tony Blair recently told the Stanford Graduate School of Business that one of the most important things he learned during his time in office was the need to set a schedule that's aligned with one's real priorities. He related a memorable story about his first meeting with President Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton said that he wanted to talk to him about a critical issue. Blair expected some extraordinary piece of geopolitical insight, but instead, as he relates it,

Clinton said to me, "I'm going to talk to you about something really important: scheduling. You will find that one of the hardest things when you get into government is finding the time to think strategically. . . . The system will take you over, and you'll be in meetings from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, and you'll think you're immentsely busy, but actually the tactics and strategy have all gotten mixed together."

I've opined on this issue before, but it's got more clout when you hear it from Tony Blair. In fact, he goes on to say that he did an analysis for one president on how he used his time, and found that less than 5% of his time was spent on his priorities.

Blair's not naive. He knows that crises erupt, and that it's the leader's job to deal with it. But he points out that those crises are seldom what's really important in securing the long-term success and reputation of the government:

If you're not careful, something happens -- there's some crisis, and you spend time dealing with it. You lose your strategic grip on what's going to determine whether you're a successful government or not. Now these crises are real; you've got to deal with them. But actually, when you then judge a government -- you know, when I think of the things that I lost sleep on, some of the crises that suddenly came -- foot and mouth disease, we had a fuel strike -- nowadays, nobody even remembers these things.

These lessons are as true for you and your executive team as they are for a prime minister and his government. Think about the crises that you've dealt with -- an angry customer (or customers), a problem with product profit margins, negotiations with a logistics company, whatever. Sure, they're all important to your organization. But we're not talking the BP oil spill, the Challenger explosion, or the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear meltdown. We're talking about crises that, if they consume your day, will inevitably lead to sub-optimal performance and long-term decline.

When "the system takes over" and your time is consumed by daily tactical issues, you don't have the space for the essential act of thinking. Blair says that

you've got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time. One of the things I always ask is, 'Where's your thinking time?'"

John Donahoe, CEO of Ebay, adheres to the same precept. He says

I take days away. . . . I find that very hard to do in the office or in a familiar environment. I find that if I don’t schedule a little bit of structured time away, where there’s no interruption, that it’s very hard to get the kind of thinking time and reflection time that I think is so important.

Here's the challenge for you: build some of this thinking time into your week or month. Make it part of your standard work. It's easy to be lulled into the safety of immediate action, particularly when a crisis hits. But thinking time is critical to ensuring that the actions you take are actually of value, and are spent on the activities that posterity will actually judge you for.

Donahoe knows that. Blair knows that. You should know it too.

Open doors and closed minds

I am not making this up. A network admin in a class I taught was complaining that she can't focus on her work because it's so noisy at her desk. Her office is right next to the main conference room, so there's a lot of traffic and noise from the meetings held there. Moreover, the company president has decreed an open door policy -- to the point that no one (at least at her level) is allowed to close their doors. Ever. And people don't like to close the door to the conference room either.

She asked the president if she could close her door. No.

She asked if she could wear headphones. No.

She asked if she could work at another desk. No.

She asked if she could close the conference room door. Yes, but it's politically difficult for her to ask execs to close the door because it's too noisy.

I repeat: I am not making this up.

Consider the organizational culture that would not only allow this situation to happen, but would make it difficult or impossible to improve it. I mean, who really thinks that an open door policy means that a door must be open *all* the time? That's insane.

This situation reminds me of the problems that companies have when they adopt 5S or other lean concepts. Management adopts the tools without understanding the problems they're intended to solve, so they end up with LAME instead of lean. (Or see my piece on Kyocera's pathetic 5S implementation.)

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, an open door policy does not actually require everyone's door to be open all the time. It's a mindset, an attitude, and a culture. It's not the physical position of a piece of wood. Any organization that is willing to sacrifice not only the productivity but the well-being of a worker, has a lot to learn about the oft-forgotten pillar of lean -- respect for people.

I won't bother listing all the possible ways a company can maintain an open-door mind-set without critically undermining people's ability to concentrate and focus on their work. (But if you're interested, feel free to contact me.)

But I would love to know: where do people come up with these moronic ideas?

First, identify the value.

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your organization, start focusing on value, not on deliverables. When you look at job descriptions or examine organizational expectations, you see that they're usually driven by a focus on deliverables, not value. To wit:

• you need to be at the office from 9-5
• we have an open door policy, and expect you to keep your door open at all times
• everyone must attend the monthly all-day, division-wide meeting

Notice that the focus isn't on the value you're providing, it's on the deliverable of your presence during certain periods of time. But if you focus on the value your customer wants, you can remove the manacles of arbitrary expectations.

For example, a woman in a class I recently taught told me that her boss expects her to keep her door open all the time. In this case, the "deliverable" is the open door. Of course, that makes it difficult for her to get her own work done, because she's constantly interrupted by her team. But what's the value she's providing? Her team needs her to answer questions and solve problems as they arise -- and if you've ever managed a team, you know that many of the questions are the same ones, over and over. So why can't she put up a list of FAQs on the server, or post videos answering the most common questions, so that her team can access the answers when they need it, without interrupting her? Of course, she'd be available for more complex issues, but at least this method provides the value while improving her ability to do her own job.

Another example: a company I worked with used to have a quarterly, all-day meeting for its 75 directors and VPs. No one wanted to be there for the full 8 hours -- the "deliverable" -- but it was mandatory because the exec team wanted ideas to cross pollinate throughout the company. Once they focused on the value, however -- the cross-pollination -- they saw that there were other ways to accomplish the same goal. Now they have a much smaller, much shorter meeting, and the company pays for a giant pizza lunch once a quarter where  everyone can exchange ideas about what they're working on and why it's interesting.

It's often difficult to see the distinction between the value and the deliverable, because we're so used to thinking about (and being rewarded for) the latter and not the former. So try focusing on the problem you're trying to solve, rather than the format of the solution. Then consider multiple solutions to the problem. You'll likely find that within that solution set lies a better method for delivering the value to your customer.

July 2012 Newsletter -- Improving the Signal to Noise Ratio

In order to make 5S relevant to the knowledge worker, it’s essential to translate—not transfer—5S to the world of information. Doing so avoids wasted time & effort; reduces decision paralysis; and eliminates the "frazzle factor." Download PDF

Sowing the seeds of our own demise

Leslie Perlow, author of the seminal study on "time famine," is at it again, this time with a new book called Sleeping with your Smartphone. The book is based on experiments that she did with the Boston Consulting Group (and which I described in an earlier blog post) to reduce the need -- or the perceived need -- to be "always on." In a new HBR blog post, Perlow points out that

accepting the pressure to be "on" — usually stemming from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones — in turn makes us accommodate the pressure even more. We begin adjusting to such demands, adapting the technology we use, altering our daily schedules, the way we work, even the way we live our lives and interact with our family and friends, to be better able to meet the increased demands on our time. Once our colleagues experience our increased responsiveness, their requests on our time expand. Already "on," we accept these increased demands, while those who don't risk being evaluated as "less committed" to their work.

She calls this the "cycle of responsiveness (although I'd probably call it the "vicious cycle of responsiveness"), in which our willingness to respond to increased requests simply leads to increased demands. Like ocean waves gradually wearing away a sand castle, these demands end up eroding any vestige of time that we can unambiguously arrogate for ourselves.

From a lean perspective, there are two major problems with this cycle of responsiveness. First, there's the waste of overproduction. I've argued before that if the only thing you're providing your customers is a fast response, you'll soon be replaced by someone cheaper in Shenzen or Mumbai. Your job is to provide real value -- value which most of the time doesn't need to be delivered within 12 minutes of receipt of the email. In other words, being "on" all the time isn't necessarily what your customer needs. Yes, your customer may appreciate it, but that doesn't mean that they need it. And that, from a lean perspective, is overproduction.

Second, the cycle of responsiveness prevents (or at least impairs) the ability to do kaizen and reflection. If you're always "on" and responding to customers, you never have the time to stop, to reflect, to figure out how to improve your processes and systems. You end up racing faster and faster in a desperate attempt to stay in the same place on the treadmill, like George Jetson.

Perlow provides valuable suggestions for how to break the cycle. Check them out here.

Emails & meetings, signifying nothing.

I've been wondering recently why people are so busy at work. Is work really that much more demanding than it was 20, 60, or 100 years ago? Are customer demands that much more onerous? Lean thinkers spend a lot of time trying to reduce the amount of waste in a process -- an admirable goal, to be sure. But sometimes the root cause of waste lies less in the process, and more in the mindset of the people working within the process.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Tim Kreider writes about the self-imposed "busyness" that afflicts so many people. They’re busy, he argues, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. (To his credit, he points out that people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs don't complain about being busy. Those people are tired.)

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

In my own consulting, I see an awful lot of activity that really doesn't need to be done. One client spends his time -- everyday -- creating elaborate 50-100 slide PowerPoint decks for his boss. Wouldn't a single page document, or even a meeting, be a more efficient way of communicating the ideas? I've seen HR professionals crafting policies and procedure manuals that are so verbose, turgid, and unnecessarily complex that it's a wonder they have time for any real, value-added work. I've seen engineers attending meetings from 9am-5pm, but are only relevant to them for the 30 minutes from 1-1:30pm. And I haven't even mentioned the often pointless trolling through the email inbox that consumes so much of modern work life. How much of this activity is really necessary or value-added?

Tim writes,

I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Me, too.

Printing comes back home.

Blog posts about the value of domestic manufacturing are more properly the purview of Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell over at Evolving Excellence, but I'm not sure they read the Sunday New York Times book review. So I'm stepping in with the latest story on why it makes sense to make things at home -- this time, books. Dave Eggers's new book, A Hologram for the King, is being published by Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Michigan. Eggers said,

I have to admit that I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment when it came to the printing of McSweeney’s books [Eggers's publishing house]. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of our production in the U.S., and even more in Canada, and then, about five years ago, we started printing in Asia, too. But then, a few years ago, I got to know this printer outside Detroit called Thomson-Shore. They’d done some pro-bono work for our tutoring center nearby, 826 Michigan, so I visited the plant, and thanked them, and saw some beautiful books they’d made, and met the men and women who worked there. Walking the production floor was very much like meeting members of an extended family; most of the people at Thomson-Shore have been there for decades.... The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate, to reprint, and to correct problems, and the prices are close enough to China’s numbers, when you take shipping and various delays into account.

No surprise to those who have dealt with long supply chains from China: it's harder to communicate and correct problems before and during production, and the lower prices are significantly offset by the cost of shipping large batches of inventory across the Pacific.

Eggers felt so strongly about the relationship with the factory that he includes everyone at the plant in the book's acknowledgments:

When I was thinking of the acknowledgments, it made sense to thank everyone at the printing plant, given they’re a big part of getting the book out into the world.

The use -- and abuse -- of parking lots

A reader writes in:

I've been in organizations that use parking lots in their meetings. But too often, those ideas never go anywhere - the company just ends up with a bunch of flip chart sheets that contain good ideas that never get fleshed out in subsequent meetings, because they're just not "big enough to hold a meeting on" or because "we don't have enough time/resources to investigate this right now" so they're constantly de-prioritized or put on a back burner.

It's a good question. Lord knows you've probably seen more than your fair share of those flip chart sheets rolled up and lying in an unused closet like Dead Sea Scrolls. So what to do?

Given my (ahem) rather strong opinions on the need to live in your calendar (or to set up a personal kanban), it's not surprising that I advocate carving out a specific time to revisit the ideas that have been relegated to the parking lot. You can choose the first or last 10 minutes of the next meeting, or you can schedule a new meeting specifically to clear out the parking lot. It doesn't matter.

Specificity is the key to making this work. You won't just "get around" to talking about those ideas any more than you just "get around" to tackling tasks that aren't on your calendar or your task list. This doesn't mean you have to do it every week: there's nothing wrong with deciding only to review the list monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually. Just be sure to block out sufficient time for the review on your team's calendar.

It's important to bring evaluation criteria to the parking lot review. You'll undoubtedly have way too many potential projects to take them all on, so you'll need some way of selecting the winners from the losers. Some possible criteria are:

• Ease, benefit, and urgency
• Revenue vs. risk
• Alignment with organizational goals vs. departmental goals

It doesn't really matter what criteria you use, just that you have some consistent way of determining whether or not the item is worthy of your organizational time and attention.

Now, the hardest part: throw out the losers. Get rid of the flip chart sheets and move on.

The parking lot is exactly like your personal to-do list: there's an infinite amount of stuff clambering for your attention, but only a finite amount of stuff that you can actually do. With an organization, there's an infinite number of potential projects, but a finite amount of people and money to take on those projects. So you have to cull the list. You have to divest yourself of the fantasy that you might actually take advantage of the opportunities that have been previously languishing in the parking lot. After all, the company has survived this long without implementing these ideas, so clearly they aren't all that vital to its success.

If you don't cull the list, you're sowing the seeds of the parking lot's demise. The list will be 83 items long, and no one wants to attend a meeting with 83 items on the agenda. Eventually, your colleagues will all find themselves too busy visiting their customers or washing their hair, and you won't have any more parking lot reviews.

But at least you'll have a nice collection of Dead Sea Scrolls in the closet.

Busy, not burned-out

I was gratified to read some of the recommendations in Joann Lublin's article, "Making Sure 'Busy' Doesn't Lead to Burnout" in the Wall Street Journal last week. Turns out that a lot of people are championing the ideas that I've been preaching about for awhile:

For some time-starved managers, keeping a detailed calendar often makes more sense than making daily to-do lists.

This advice echoes my argument that to-do lists don't work because they agglomerate items with disparate urgencies and complexities, and they don't provide any context: how long will the tasks take, and how much time do you really have available.

The article also recommends that people

prepare a weekly plan for tackling tasks tracked by their boss, such as regular revenue reports—and scheduling of daily items that eventually will land them in trouble if not completed.

This advice, of course, is nothing more than my suggestion to use the calendar as kanban, which enables you to automatically "pull" work forward at the right time -- and to do so automatically, without the cognitive burden of having to remember to do something at a certain time.

The article also points out the danger of taking on too many problems that aren't your own:

Consider [urgency addict] Liz Bishop. In January 2011, the senior vice president of Heffernan Insurance Brokers in Petaluma, Calif., was juggling 280 emails a day and often distracted by colleagues' crises. "I love solving problems,'' Ms. Bishop says. "That's emotional cookies for me." Meanwhile, her customer revenue had plunged 50% during the recession, and Ms. Bishop, whose clients were mainly in the construction industry, found herself without time to bring in new clients.

This situation reminds me of Jamie Flinchbaugh's advice that our direct reports' problems are not our problems:

Your problem is why is the preventive maintenance program not working that allowed all those pieces of equipment to go down in the first place. Or why are your customers not seeing the value proposition. Or do we have a planning problem or an execution problem that allows so many projects to get behind schedule. You have unique problems, and until you understand that fact, and work on the appropriate problems for your role, little progress can be made.

There are no Copernican insights here, which is both good and bad: you don't have to spend money, buy new equipment, or hire new people. On the other hand, you have to  use your calendar assiduously, delegate appropriately, and learn to address system-level issues.

Nothing new -- but not necessarily easy to do.

Self-Congratulatory Blog Post of the Week

I'm thrilled to announce that my book, A Factory of One, has received The Shingo Research and Professional Publications Award for 2013. (Yeah, I know: it's a bit early for 2013. Probably a bit of administrative level loading on the part of the Shingo Prize committee.) This award is given to authors for their writing on operational excellence, and promotes and recognizes new knowledge and understanding. I'm honored that the committee has deemed my thinking about the application of lean principles to individual knowledge work as worthy of the award.

June 2012 Newsletter -- Cognitive vs. Reflexive Systems

Cognitive systems rely on human judgment, and are therefore prone to errors. Reflexive systems rely on rules, making it easier to do the right job the right time. Transforming cognitive systems into reflexive systems improves quality and lightens the burden on your workers. Download PDF

For god's sakes, go home. (Part 2)

As clear a statement as you can get, this time from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook:

I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6:00, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids. I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.

Dr. Deming talked about the need to drive fear out of the workplace. I think that's a key element of respect for people. An environment where people are afraid to go home so they can be with their families (or just go home so they can take care of themselves) is quite the opposite.

Here's Sheryl's video. Well worth the 57 second investment to watch.

For god's sakes, go home.

I'm on vacation in Italy right now*, so this post feels particularly appropriate.

There are times when you have a huge project, you have quarterly earnings, I don't care what it is. And you are focused. You say to your family, "I'm not going to see you much this week or this month." And then when you go home, put the iPad away, the BlackBerry down, and be there. Don't be half anywhere. Be there. Wherever you are, be there.

-  Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo and Autodesk

My friend Paul says that there are no rollover minutes in life. You get 1440 of them each day (if you're lucky), so use them wisely -- particularly if you're a leader. "Being there," as Carol Bartz would say, is a big step in that direction.

*I'm practicing what I preach. I wrote this post three weeks ago.

Three key principles at Novartis

I love this interview with Joseph Jimenez, the CEO of Novartis. He hits on several points near and dear to my heart. 1. Simplify: Jimenez knows that elaborate strategic initiatives have zero chance of success if they're not translated to a small number of concrete actions that people can take on a daily basis:

At Novartis, our business is very complicated. But you have to distill the strategy down to its essence for how we’re going to win, and what we’re really going to go after, so that people can hold it in their heads — so that the guy on the plant floor, who’s actually making the medicine, understands the three priorities that we have as a company.

2. Identify the value: Jimenez understands that the value of one's work is ultimately decided by the customer, and that far too many corporate activities are simply empty exercises by that measure:

We needed to shift the company to become more externally focused, versus internally focused. People were proud of producing 75-page PowerPoint documents, and that was seen as a success.  If the C.E.O. or the head of the division complimented you on your PowerPoint presentation, that was a good thing.  And I said, forget that. We have to put the patient at the center of everything we do.

3. First, look in the mirror: Jimenez describes how at an earlier job, his division kept missing their sales forecasts. A consultant pointed out that the root cause wasn't a lack of skills or a poor planning process; it was fear: people were afraid to tell the truth. And he realized that he bore some responsibility:

We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem. I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news. It’s a chance to say: “Hey, thank you for bringing me that news. Because you know what?  There are nine months left in the year. Now we have time to do something about it.  Let’s roll up our sleeves, and let’s figure out how we’re going to make it.”

Jimenez doesn't talk about lean in this interview. But the lessons and values he discusses certainly fit in with core lean principles.

Information 5S -- Apple Edition

In his book Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky writes about Apple's extreme secrecy -- both external (not letting the media know what it's working on), and internal -- not letting people inside the company know what other people and other teams are working on. As Lashinsky explains it in an interview,

Apple people below a certain level -- and that level is a very high level -- do not multitask. You have a project, you work on that project, you know what your function is.... Apple operates on a need-to-know basis. So if you're not involved in a project, you're not involved, it's not of your business, and you're encouraged to mind your own business... You work on the discrete task that you've been assigned to work on. They don't get distracted by what other people are working on.

It strikes me that Apple is engaging in a form of information 5S -- except that in this case, the "sorting" of information is externally imposed and enforced by the company. And there are real benefits to it: you're better able to focus on your work because you're not getting buried by a bunch of needless "reply all" emails, or getting roped into meetings that are only tangentially -- at best -- related to your work. By identifying the important and relevant information for each person, and by defining clearly focused responsibilities, Apple eliminates the needless  cognitive load on people.

That's certainly a contributing factor that  enables them to do their best work. I'm certainly not advocating that all companies follow this route. (Neither is Lashinksy, for that matter.) But it's worth considering how much unnecessary cognitive load you impose upon your people in an attempt to "keep them in the loop."

First, think.

I heard it again from a client this week: "I don't have enough time to work on that." Well, let me be perhaps not the first, but certainly not the last, to call bullshit on that complaint.

There's always enough time to do what's really important to you. If your child got hit by a bus and you needed to take her to the hospital, you'd somehow find the time to do it, because it's more important than preparing your 93-slide Powerpoint deck on which color white to put into the product line next year. (And if the hospital isn't more important than your Powerpoint, then please stop reading now and go back to your well-worn copy of Mein Kampf.)

No, the issue is how you choose to allocate your attention. It's a matter of identifying what's most important. And ironically, that identification takes time.

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed four CEOs about time management. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, talked about the value of getting away from daily problem solving and walling off time to think:

Part of the key to time management is carving out time to think, as opposed to constantly reacting. And during that thinking time, you're not only thinking strategically, thinking proactively, thinking longer-term, but you're literally thinking about what is urgent versus important, and trying to strike that right balance.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (not surprisingly) takes a more analytical approach: he actually builds a spreadsheet with a time budget for the year.

I budget how much time I'm going to be out of Seattle and in Seattle. I budget what I'm spending my time on -- customers, partners, etc.... I schedule formal meetings and my free time.... I'm not saying when they're going to happen, but I budget all this stuff. I try to make sure that I feel comfortable that I have enough time to...think, to investigate, to learn more, but I have to budget my time.... I give the budget allocation to my administrative assistants, they lay it all out and then anybody who asks for time, they say, '"Steve, this is in budget, it's not in budget, how do you want us to handle it?"

How do you find enough time to do the important stuff? First, make time to decide what's important. And if you don't have time to do that, you don't belong in your job.

May 2012 Newsletter -- Association/Disassociation/Re-association

Athletes, workers, and organizations must go through three distinct phases to achieve excellence: Association, Disassociation, and Re-association. The final phase is most often ignored, because it's easy to get stuck in the zone of complacency. Download PDF

Four to-do lists? Try 5S.

My client yesterday showed me her to-do list. Make that her to-do lists. The handwritten one on the yellow legal pad. The messages marked as unread on her Blackberry. The meeting action items listed on her iPad. The messages she flagged for followup in her Outlook inbox. Four lists, four places to look for work that needs her attention.

As I've written about before, 5S for the knowledge worker does not mean putting tape outlines around your stapler or setting rules about how many family photos can go on your desk. That's just a mindless transfer of 5S to the office. What you need to do is translate it for the office -- and that means applying it to the information you manage.

If you're living with four to-do lists, you need 5S. You need a way to organize the tasks so that you can easily see them, assess them, and make rapid judgments about what, how, and when to handle that work. If you're embarking on a scavenger hunt every time you want to plan your day, you're in trouble.

From my perspective, the twin purposes of information 5S are (1) to help surface abnormalities (in this case, work that's not getting done), and (2) to make it easier and faster to access materials. The fewer lists you have, the more likely it is that you'll accomplish those goals.

If, for some reason, you need to work with multiple to-do lists (the iPad for meeting notes, a legal pad for things you remember at your desk, the inbox for stuff arriving via email), that's okay -- but then it's incumbent upon you to 5S those lists each day: review them, consolidate items, and schedule the work in your calendar or on a personal kanban.

You wouldn't want to do something as simple as grocery shopping with four different shopping lists. Why would you want to do something as complex as scheduling and planning your work with four lists?