What To Do When There's Too Much To Do (11 page)

As part of the process, you will re-connect with your leadership and your teams, reaffirm your important tasks, and verify your strategic direction. There's also a continuous improvement component: When a process seems unusually long and inefficient, do what you can to make it easier for everyone. Just because something's been done a certain way for a long time doesn't mean it's the best way to do it now. If you find a problem, fix it if you can, or offer a solution if you can't.

Don't change for the sake of change. If an existing system works well and you can't think of a better way to do it, then why fix it or upgrade it?

A high level of organization leaves little, if anything, to chance. In addition to increasing efficiency, you'll appear more professional when organized. You'll impress your clients with your ability to easily find files, details, and paperwork. Conversely, clients will be disturbed if you're unable to quickly access the information you need. With a great system in place, you'll look more professional and will quickly serve the needs of your clients, coworkers, and employer.

Here are a few starting points you can implement fairly quickly, as you put more long-term processes into place:

• Get rid of clutter. It's distracting, and makes it harder to find things.

• Organize your entire workspace for maximum efficiency, eliminating any frustrations.

• Purge computer and paper files to make more room and simplify organization.

• Implement simple but logical filing and naming conventions for your computer files.

• Tweak your logistics and prepare resources in advance of your anticipated needs.

• Set up shortcuts for all standard tasks.

• Automate tasks or processes you'll do more than twice.

In the grander scheme of things, you'll want to define long-term organizational and procedural goals, and then pro-actively decide the best ways to move toward them. Be specific,
whatever it means to you in terms of time, money, numbers, or any other metric.

Creating a detailed organizational plan of action is essential not just to bringing everything together, but to implementing it all and maintaining your personal momentum. This isn't really something you can do on the fly; make time to sit down and plan out the details, or your attempts are likely to fail. Plan the various aspects of your system, integrate them, understand the details of how they fit together—and then confidently execute your solutions. Once they're in play, make every effort to keep the loop tightly closed. This will require constant attention to detail, and immediate action to fix or replace the things that are not working well.

Learn the keyboard shortcuts for all your computer programs, and program macros for common tasks. You'll save a surprising amount of time.

People will inevitably cause breakdowns in your workflow loop. We try to do our best, but we make mistakes, we forget, we let deadlines slip, we communicate poorly, we suffer illness and injury—and as a result of all this, we inadvertently damage our own and other people's productivity. Here are some people issues to look out for and suggestions on handling them.

One factor that sets human beings apart from the rest of creation is our ability to communicate in great detail, with a minimum of confusion and unproductive “noise.” Still, it's amazing how easy it is to
fail
to communicate properly. The annals of history are replete with episodes of poor communication (or a
complete lack thereof), leading to widespread misery and pain. On a lesser scale, individuals and businesses have to deal with miscommunication issues every single day; in the workplace, such issues can have a severe impact not just on individual productivity, but on the overall bottom line.

Even minor corporate miscommunications can prove costly. Here's an interesting example. Once I worked with the president of an automotive parts manufacturing organization, who called someone in finance to get a figure to put into a speech he was planning. The president expected him to spend maybe fifteen minutes on a rough estimate. Instead, the finance guy spent
ten
hours coming up with an exact figure. It turned out all the president was looking for was a high-level guess—was it $5 million, or $50 million?

Whose fault was this miscommunication? It was both their faults. The president should have said, “I'm looking for this type of number, and I'm thinking it'll just take you fifteen minutes or so to ballpark it, plus or minus a few million dollars. Does that sound reasonable?” The finance person could have said, “To get you the figure you're requesting, it's going to take me this much time—is that what you want?” The president could have then decided whether or not it was worth the effort.

Clearly, then, your ability to communicate is a critical productivity tool, especially in terms of how you word your communications, and your level of aggressiveness in expressing your needs and requirements. Even when the lines of communication are wide open, beating around the bush, couching your message in obscure terms, or burying it in a mass of unnecessary verbiage may cause mental static in the people with whom you're trying to communicate, resulting in confusion and irritation. At best, this will slow them down; at worst, they may ignore you. Either outcome will damage productivity, both yours and theirs.

Therefore, whether you're communicating with employees
or superiors, make every effort to get your point across with a minimum of noise. Choose your words with great care, saying precisely what you mean, as directly as possible. Let's consider several ways you can do this.

Get straight to the point.
Have you ever tried to talk to someone who rambled, refused to give a straight answer, or danced around the subject? If you have, then you know how annoying and nonproductive it can be. Perhaps the person was afraid you'd get angry if he came right out and said what he wanted to say; maybe he wanted attention; or maybe he just liked to hear himself speak.

The reason why doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter if the person was amusing or instructive to listen to, as ramblers sometimes are. What matters is that they wasted your time, and their own, by not getting straight to the point. You don't want to do this to other people, so make your communications concise.

Some people avoid brevity because they don't want to seem rude; admittedly, verbal interaction is useful in the workplace as a form of social lubrication. There's no doubt politeness pays, and playing nice will help you stay in your coworkers' good graces. Nonetheless, in most workplace situations, you'll want to be direct. You can smile when you do so, to take the edge off for the easily offended.

If you have a hard time with straightforward communication, practice what you want to say in advance. Take a results-oriented stance, envisioning exactly what you want to achieve. Then edit your message toward that end to make it plain and specific. Tweak your message to avoid sounding brusque, and then deliver it assertively, as simply as possible.

Avoid unnecessary qualifiers and hedging.
Some people just can't seem to deliver any message, especially a request, firmly and directly. They hem in everything they say with so many
qualifiers—“what if's,” “maybe's,” and “could be's”—that ultimately what they're trying to say gets lost, causing the recipients to waste time on interpretation and clarification.

In other cases, the bad communicator hedges the message to make it seem less important than it actually is. Instead of just telling the IT Department that they need a certain backup file right away, for example, they might say something like, “Um, if you have a chance, could you pull this file for me? No hurry.” The recipient may now ignore the request or push it down the priority scale, because the sender hasn't made the urgency clear.

My roots are German on my father's side, and we have a word for this kind of poor communication: “mealy-mouthed,” from the old German slang term for an inability to communicate directly. It's often used in a contemptuous way for someone who's unwilling to state a personal opinion, or come down one way or another on an issue. This might play well in the social and political arenas, but it's painful and unproductive in the workplace.

Some qualification is unavoidable, especially when the information you're imparting is based upon the actions of people you can't control, or you're simply uncertain. But again, you can avoid the worst of the problem by delivering your communications without frills. Don't ramble. Avoid uncertainty or hesitation. Use the active tense rather than the passive. Say things like, “I need this file …” rather than “This file is needed …,” because it sounds more direct and imperative. Give people a deadline by which you need results, not “if you get the chance,” or “when you can.”

Similarly, if someone asks you a question, give them the specific information they've requested, rather than a dump of your entire brain. You can be helpful and add additional information if you think it's relevant, but don't waste your time or theirs with extraneous information.

Make your requests and requirements plain.
Workplace communication should be as unambiguous as humanly possible. Directness is important when asking for information or giving instructions. Take charge, choose authoritative words, and make your requirements absolutely clear.

In an effort to say the minimum possible, however, be careful about being unclear. If you tell someone, “I need information on the Smith account,” you're direct, all right; but you're too vague, because you haven't asked for enough information. Which Smith account do you mean? If two or three Smiths exist with different first names, you're already tripping over the speed bump of uncertainty. Furthermore, what material do you need—everything in the whole file, or just this year's financials? And when do you need it—within the next hour, by the close of business, or sometime in the next week?

So don't hesitate to explain as much as required for others to fully understand you, especially in terms of deadlines and deliverables required. Just don't unload so much information on your listeners that they can't understand what you're saying. This is a judgment call, and planning and pre-editing your message is helpful here. Examine your message closely before sending. If all they really need to know is in the final line of the message, then cut everything else and just send the final line.

It's also important to use the right words to get the point across. If what you're trying to say doesn't seem quite on the mark, then spend some time refining it, because it's likely to pay off in dividends of greater comprehension. As Mark Twain once pointed out, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and lightning-bug.”

In general, make your language easy to understand. Don't address someone as though they're a third-grader, but on the other hand, don't use ten-dollar words just because you can. Also avoid using unnecessary jargon. Before you refer to something by an acronym or an abbreviation, make sure it's
a shared term. For example: It won't help to ask a new intern to get you the RFP for the DFW DCH account ASAP if they don't know that an RFP is a Request for Proposal, and DFW DCH is shorthand for the Dallas/Fort Worth branch of the Dalquist, Culpepper, and Harrison law firm.

Acknowledgment in all directions.
In the military, someone who receives a verbal order is often required to repeat it back immediately to acknowledge they received it. This is especially true in the Navy. It's Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a simple reason: If a message is poorly relayed and the wrong action taken, the results can be disastrous.

Your miscommunications may not have devastating results, but they can certainly damage productivity. Therefore, acknowledgment of those communications is absolutely essential. When you receive a message from someone, whether they're above or below you in the chain of command, acknowledge its receipt as quickly as possible, even if you can't supply the answer immediately.