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Today’s guest post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

I recently posted a timely meditation for Christmas which gives reason for pause. Beyond the gifts and the buildup to December 25 lies a simple question: am I more productive than I was last year? This question is really universal in scope as it applies to one’s life at work, at home and in terms of personal improvement. In other words, am I making a difference?

This is of course easy to talk about and difficult to do. What does “success” mean? I’d like to think that it implies improvement and this is what I preach in my daily work as a school administrator. Is Joe working at his potential and making progress? Is Susan fine-tuning the ways in which she is working and learning? These questions and more are ultimately what make the difference between the underachiever and the successful student.

Whether one is a Christian or a member of another faith tradition, the legacy of the humble man of Nazareth gives all of us an example of purposeful living. My suggestion for Christmas day? After you’ve opened some gifts and spent time with those you love, take a walk or spend some time alone. Reflecting on the areas of life that need attention might be the best gift of all. A gift to yourself.

This post is Part III in a series of thoughts on LEAN practices and your GTD workflow, where we are working on eliminating waste from our productivity practices.

Evaluating our Current Responsibilities

In Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Successful People“, he discusses the roles that each of us plays in the course of our lives. There are times that we must act in different ways, such as Spouse, Employee, Team Member, etc. Covey suggests that in planning for managing our time and commitments that we identify the various roles that we have, and list the responsibilities that go along with them. This is a good place to apply the basic LEAN principles in order to reduce waste and increase our effectiveness:

These steps are essential, in order to achieve any realistic success with your “big-picture” goals. As a set of examples I will put forth some of my own roles (as I have currently defined them) and show how I apply each step.

These roles and current responsibilities are as follows:

• Husband
• Employee
• Personal Development
• Spiritual Development
• Home Manager
• Salesman
• Blogger

Each of these Roles is important to a full and balanced life. Let us work with the Employee role, as that is a role that most of us are familiar with. First, we need to Define the Value to the Customer: I have three kinds of customers in this step -

1. Internal Customers - the staff that I support by maintaining the CRM and acting as a liaison for various service providers and vendors
   • Value - Provide timely contact information
   • Value - Maintain all current reporting
   • Value - Update systems as required
2. External Customers - the clients that want information on our products and services, or to purchase same
   • Value - Provide timely responses to inquiries
   • Value - Connect potential clients with Sales Consultant
3. Myself - I have goals for my career and my finances that need to be serviced and maintained, just as any of my co-workers who rely on me for achieving their own goals.
   • Value - Achieve financial goals by performing assigned tasks
   • Value - Advance career potential by acquiring new skills
   • Value - Increase value of personal brand via Networking

The second step is to Map the Value Stream: for my Internal customers the flow is pretty basic:

• Client inquiry enters CRM via email or telephone
• Inquiry is filtered and assigned to the appropriate sales consultant
• Vague inquiries are manually processed and assigned
• Monitor CRM reports to ensure timeliness and accuracy
• Update sales team with Response Time reports and Sales Tracking reports
• Close out customer account in CRM following completed transaction

I drew out a flowchart of this system, in order to find the bottlenecks and breakdowns in communication that (sometimes) can make this a frustrating process. (The diagram looks more complicated than it is, I need more practice at this sort of thing!)

The largest obstacle to the third step, Introducing Flow, is entering the records of interactions between the Sales Consultants and the Clients. Even in the flowchart, this is obvious. Each consultant is responsible for entering their own information, so the value and accuracy of the reports they receive are their own responsibility. With each iteration the inaccuracies reduce the value of the information that the reports provide.

Introducing Pull as a Solution

Step four in the process, Pull, is about creating an environment where you get what you need, when you need it. Not through forecasting, but by creating a fast production chain that allows you to order what you need when a specific event triggers that order. 

For my Internal Customers, I need to provide them with accurate activity reports, yet these reports are built on data that the Internal Customers provide. I have created a system in Outlook to handle this for me. First I make an appointment in a shared calendar, with a reminder set to inform me that it is time to generate a report one hour in advance. When I receive this alert, I open the appointment, and “Invite” the Sales Consultants. The text of the Invitation is a request for them to be sure that they have updated their CRM accounts for each client interaction. A copy of this Invitation also goes to the department manager, who like to be kept informed. The Sales Consultants then perform their data entry and “Accept” the invitation when it is complete. When I have received all of the “Accept” emails, I know that the report is ready to generate.

Perfection is a Journey, not a Destination

A horrible cliche, but true, true, true. In the proper context though, it isn’t so disgusting. Anyone who has held a supervisory position over a diverse group of adults can tell you that some days teaching Kindergarteners calculus would be less frustrating. Pursuing step five in the LEAN process, Perfection, is a worthy goal. Perpective, also, is a useful thing. As I am not a “manager”, but more of a facilitator, I can only lead so far. I can provide the tools that my Internal Customers need to accomplish their tasks and meet their goals. I can provide some motivation and personal incentives, and that will have to be enough.

I trust that this example has inspired you to evaluate your own responsibilities and roles. Leave a Comment below, or a trackback, I would enjoy seeing your own examples.

I found this article (”Making Peace with Time“) by Michael Gilbert while doing some research on another topic. It is a concise and valuable approach to time management that has eerie similarities to Getting Things Done, by David Allen. As the material will be familiar to those involved in the GTD community, I thought it would make a good fit. The article is actually reprinted from In Context Magazine (1994!), but the timeless technique is still very relevant today, in the 21st century.

As part of our time management practice, Gilbert asks us to do a few things to gain some perspective as to how we use our time. That is, how we would like to spend our time vs. how we actually spend our time, and how we can create a program for reconciling those two ideas. First he talks about the pressures of managing time and activities:

…few of us have a peaceful relationship with time.

But where do we begin to transform this relationship? Most of us start by trying to “get things under control.” We use the very same emotional time pressure that we resent to force ourselves to get things done. We make lists and lists of lists. We put Post-It notes everywhere. We make appointments and create deadlines. We surround ourselves with messages screaming “DO ME, DO ME,” all in an effort to control our desires and behavior.

But control does not work. Control is what a guard does to a prisoner. Control only turns joyful commitments into tedious obligations. This is the major fallacy of traditional time management systems.

Time management should be a tool for reflection and making choices…[Emphasis mine, Ed.]

This is the beauty of the Getting Things Done practice, it’s very essence is comprised of “reflection” (Organize & Review) and “making choices” (Process & Do). Putting our Next Actions in the proper context so that we know exactly what to do right at this moment. Gilbert describes a workshop in which he would teach a three-part decision-making process:

1. How do we really spend our time?
2. What is truly important to us?
3. How can we make our committments more effective?

Following these steps, Gilbert says, will give us a clear picture of the real time-management situation that we are in. In order to discover how we truly spend our time, Gilbert recommends creating a time log, a blank piece of paper divided into three columns: Time, Activity, and Interruption. Carry this paper with you for an entire day, recording your actions and activities, according to these instructions:

Part I: Time Well Spent?

1. Every time you take on a new activity, make an entry on the Time Log. You may feel foolish. It will interrupt your work. Do it anyway and do it for the entire day. Pick a happy medium in defining what constitutes a new activity. (Don’t stop to note every pen stroke, but don’t have only large blocks of time entered as a single activity.)

2. Under “time,” enter the time you start the new activity, to the minute. Under “activity,” enter a brief description of what you’re doing. Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

Tracking your day like this will allow you to see exactly what it is that you have been doing, so be honest and disciplined about it. You may be surprised at how different it is from what you think that you have been doing. It also allows you to track the types of interruptions that you experience, and when. I would recommend that if you do this excercise, put the completed time tracker in your Tickler File for four weeks later and do it again then. This will enable you to track your progress on staying productive, and managing those interruptions (if possible).

Look over your actions and activities for the day with a hi-lighter in your hand. Hi-light the entries that you consider to be “important”, and make a list of them on a second sheet of paper. Then make a list of the “unimportant” or “interruption” entries. Staple these together and file them in your Tickler for comparison four weeks from now. You may want to write the “interruptions” on a 3″x5″ card and keep it in your organizer so that you can be reminded of what activities you are working on eliminating.

My favorite quote from this article is in the second portion, “To say that everything is important is just as useless as saying that nothing is important”. There must be an order of things, a priority list. Obviously we prioritize things every day, but to paraphrase Stephen Covey, “Are we doing the right things?” To this end, Gilbert adds two more excercises for finding out what our priorities are, and just how valuable our everyday activities are to us:

Part II: Importance Revealed

Exercise I - Good News: Starting tomorrow, you have four extra hours a day! Take five minutes to answer this question: What would you want to add?

Don’t get down on yourself with pessimistic predictions based on how you actually spend your time right now.

Don’t get technical. There are no restrictions on the four hours. They are an invitation to creativity. But don’t accumulate the hours and give yourself extra days off; the point is to focus on daily life.

Take a blank calendar page and fill in a week’s worth of activities and actions, based on what you normally do in the course of a week, but with 28 hours in a day. How much more could you get done? How would you spend that extra time?

Exercise II - Bad News: Starting tomorrow you have four fewer hours a day! Take ten minutes to answer this question: What would you want to cut?

Use the same guidelines as the first exercise. Give in to your ideals and don’t get too technical. This second exercise is difficult. It involves saying no to things, something few of us are good at. But it is an essential complement to the first exercise. Time management is about making choices and there are only 24 hours in a day.

Repeat the excercise with the blank calendar page, only now you must get everything done in 20 hours per day. What has to go?

This can be a tremendously useful method for drilling down into your psyche and finding out what really is important to you. What would you do if you had just four more hours? What would you stop doing if you had to give up four hours? Indeed, important questions that generate more important answers for ourselves and the future of our commitments.

Gilbert prepares us for this type of analysis with this warning about perserverance and responsibility to ourselves. It seems especially relevant in the context of Getting Things Done:

Part III: Committments Made:

But first, before we get intrigued by tickler files and to-do lists, we need to make a fundamental commitment: To improve our relationship with time, we must devote time to time management! But the commitment doesn’t have to be huge: fifteen minutes each day, forty-five minutes once a week, and an occasional longer period of introspection would be an excellent foundation for change.

This is the description of setting your Most Important Tasks*, your Weekly Review, and sets the stage for the Monthly and Quarterly reviews as well. In conclusion, Gilbert sums up with a statement that is right after my own heart, “Make a Habit of Learning“. I will let Gilbert have the last word:

There are several things to remember as you work on changing your relationship with time: First, that it’s a never-ending cycle of learning, and that cycle includes all three of the parts described above. Second, that these are tools for reflection, not control. Third, nothing changes until you get started. When you finish this article, make an appointment with yourself [emphasis mine, one of the most important time management tips! Ed.] to do the Time Log, or any other exercise or tool that caught your interest.

Finally, be willing to pay the price of change. Realize that you cannot do everything and that real life is about choices. Be willing to experience the short-term stress of learning and you will avoid the long-term stress of living a life that is untrue.

*(Thanks, Leo!)