Posts Tagged ‘Productivity’

I have a giant stack of user manuals in my house. Manuals for the stove, the microwave, the gas fireplace, the digital camera, the DVR, the game consoles, yada, yada. Yes, I’m the type of person who actually reads user manuals so I can use my devices better and do my own troubleshooting when there’s a problem. When I don’t have a user manual for a device, I look for it online and bookmark or download the PDF.

Well, I’m going paperless with my user manuals because they’re all going into my iPad.

Just imagine this: all (or most) of my manuals in one portable device, searchable, and including a dictionary and ability to write notes. Here’s how to do it:

• Download the PDF to the computer that you use to synch and back up your iPad.
• Drag the PDF to your Books collection in iTunes
• The next time you synch your iPad, voila!, the user manual is now on your iPad

This means I can get rid of the ugly stacks in my house and I never have to worry that a manufacturer will remove a user manual for an aging device.  Want to learn more? This article from MakeUseOf shows you how to paginate, bookmark and annotate in iBooks. Love it!

• 2 Comments
• Tags: apple, Gadgets, Productivity

Earlier this year, I was in the bathroom at my son’s elementary school when I saw the sticker you see at left on the mirror above the sink. I was intrigued by the promise that one sticker would “save up to 100 lbs. of paper every year.”

So I visited the website (TheseComeFromTrees.com) and ordered a bunch of stickers for Matrix Group. Jessica, who is on the “green team,” put stickers everywhere we use paper: in the bathrooms, the kitchen, all the printers.

Curious to see if the little stickers would make a difference, I started paying attention to the amount of paper waste in the women’s bathroom. Here’s what I found: in the women’s bathroom, the trash bin for paper hand towels used to fill up before lunchtime. Today, the bin does not fill up at all during the day. This is consistent every day. The women of Matrix Group are absolutely using fewer hand towels in the bathroom. Could the little sticker really be making a difference?

We haven’t reduced the number of female staff, so that couldn’t be the cause. And I can’t imagine that we’re using the bathroom any less. So I started talking to my co-workers and they all agreed that because of the sticker, they are using 1 paper hand towel instead of 2. We had effectively halved our paper consumption!

This got me thinking. How had a little sticker changed behavior?

I attended a presentation last week by Don Schmincke of the Schmincke Research Alliance. He effectively articulated why management consulting doesn’t work: You can’t change behavior by changing the process. You need to change people’s beliefs in order to change their behavior. People need to believe and understand why doing something is important and necessary.

So how did the little sticker make me change my beliefs? In this case, I don’t think the sticker changed my beliefs, but it did help me connect the dots between trees and my paper consumption. The little sticker also made it easy for me to do good: just think about where paper towels come from and use fewer!

This reminds me of signs that remind us that stormwater drains go into a nearby river or bay. Even though I already don’t litter, I’m extra careful when I see that a gutter or drain will dump into a body of water.

Or how about the gauge in my Honda Hybrid that tells me how many miles per gallon I’m averaging on a tank of gas? There is a number that I shoot for with every tank. When the gauge tells me I’m below that number, I look for ways to change my driving to up that number: I coast more, I don’t speed, I use distance to slow down, I turn off the AC, yada, yada.

The question is: in our daily lives, what other signs and reminders could help us be more productive, healthier, greener, nicer? What labels and signs have helped you make a difference in your life?

P.S. I hope you’ll consider ordering stickers for your home and office. Heck, I’m thinking of buying a bunch and plastering them in bathrooms of bars and restaurants all over town! Won’t you join me?

• 2 Comments
• Tags: corporate culture, green, Productivity

My husband and I recently bought a new house. Even though the new place is slightly bigger than our old house, I was determined not to move old crap so I took the time to audit all of our stuff and toss out as much stuff as possible. During this process, which took months, I realized that moving to a new house is a lot like redesigning your website. Here’s how:

Inventory and audit everything. During the move, I was amazed at the stuff that I “found” and the junk that I ended up tossing. It makes me think of a content audit we completed for a client recently. After delivering the Excel spreadsheet that listed all of their website’s content, the client said, “wow, there’s so much stuff that we didn’t realize we still had online.”

Don’t just hire movers to move everything. A neighbor recently moved and she hired movers to pack up her entire house and move the boxes and furniture. Me, I prefer to do my own packing because it gives me a chance to edit, sort, and toss. With a redesign, I recommend that clients not ask us to just migrate everything because inevitably, we’ll migrate content that should be archived or we’ll put content into the wrong place and it gets “lost” forever.

Use a move to re-organize the flow of your house or website. When Maki and I moved into our old house, the garage was pristine. Over time, the garage became a dumping ground for everything: old notes, out of season equipment, holiday decorations, overflow storage for kitchen items, yada, yada. Pretty soon, the garage was a mess and it was hard to find anything. With this move, I’m taking the opportunity to re-organize the garage so that everything has its place, the shelves are properly labeled, and like items are grouped together for easy access. Same with a redesign: don’t just dress up the pages, use the redesign as an opportunity to make it easier for your customers to find information and services. And label everything properly!

If you haven’t used it in a year, toss! My mom always tell me to toss clothes that I haven’t used in a year. While this advice is not always practical (think winter coats and specialty items), I think it makes sense to put into storage, donate or toss things that my family no longer needs. Same with your website. Check your usage reports to see what content is just not getting visited. If the content is no longer relevant or out of date, you’re better off archiving the content offline or simply deleting it. In fact, old content can be a bad thing because Google can index it and serve it up to visitors, which can cause confusion and misinformation.

Organizing takes time. This process has taken more time and energy than I had originally budgeted. So the moral of the story is to allocate enough time to do your content review, then double or triple your estimate.

Get professional help. I’ve blogged in the past about how I worked with a professional organizer to get my house into shape. For the new house, I’m involving C. Lee from SimplifyYou early. She is going to help me figure out where to put mail, how to store kids’ games for easy access, how to organize supplies in the garage, etc. She can tell me what other clients have done and she can recommend products and solutions that would take me hours to research. With a website redesign, I recommend that clients work with us to create the content inventory, site map, migration plan, navigation and taxonomy. We’re able to do the work faster and we can draw on our experiences working with hundreds of other organizations.

Don’t just make the new house a replica of the old house. Sometimes, clients ask us to redesign their websites, but they want the navigation, content and applications to look and work exactly the same way. What is the point then of the redesign? A new website, like a new house, will have similar functions (think kitchen, living room, dining room, etc. or About Us, Contact Us, Calendar, etc.) but the new site should have updated and improved design, flow, content and functions. Now is the time to create a really great About Us page, redo the site search, roll out some new publications and rethink the online store.

The new house is a work in progress and it will take time to get it just right and feeling like home. But the time, money and effort will be more than worth it.

How about you? When was the last time you moved and how did it go? Is it time to “move” or redesign your website to clear out the garbage and create a fabulous, new space?

• 2 Comments
• Tags: Information-Architecture, Productivity

Last December, my husband and I set up a managed account with one of the brokerage firms. We expected a few extra pieces of mail as the account ramped up. We certainly did not expect the flood of mail that started appearing in our mailbox as we received confirmations of trades and prospectus information from companies. The photo at left shows the 3 inches of mail that arrived from that one account in just one week.

Once I realized what was happening, we quickly switched to e-mail confirmations and statements.I vowed to do more to reduce the paper tsunami that swallows my mailbox every week but then entropy set in and I just resigned myself to simply standing in front of the garbage can as I reviewed my mail.

Well, turns out I have another opportunity to reduce my carbon footprint and save trees. We’re moving next week, which means I get to contact all my creditors and vendors to give them my new address. In the process, I’m switching to e-statements whenever I can. I like how Schwab retains my statements for 10 years. And I love that ExxonMobil is planting a tree in my name because I switched to e-statements for my DRIP. Wherever I can, I’m receiving bills through my online banking account and paying online.

According to Matador Network, “The average person in the US receives nearly 11 pieces of junk mail each week, or 560 pieces a year. This amounts to 4.5 million tons of junk mail yearly, of which 44% goes straight to the landfill unopened and unread.” Apparently, eliminating US junk mail would be like taking 480,000 cars of the road!

So what can we all do to reduce our paper consumption? Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Opt out of credit card offers by going to http://www.optoutprescreen.com/; btw, this has the added benefit of making you less likely to be victimized by identity theft from people stealing these credit card offers and opening up accounts in your name.
• Contact the Direct Marketing Association and opt out of about 75% of direct marketers’ lists by going to DMAchoice.
• Configure your online banking account to send you e-mail notifications when you have a new bill and stop paper bills.
• Take the time to cancel unwanted subscriptions and catalogs; this is the most time-consuming because it’s easy to just pitch the unwanted stuff in the trash but think of the trees you’re NOT killing by making the effort.
• Print everything double-sided.
• Watch what I’m printing. Before I hit print, I check to make sure I’m not printing unnecessary pages. I once nearly used up a ream of paper when I accidentally printed a search results page that had hundreds of pages of debug code. Ugh, that was not pretty.

In doing research for this blog post, I found cute suggestions for ways to reuse junk mail as scrap paper, but I don’t believe that solves the problem: the trees had to be cut down in the first place. Besides, junk mail is some of the most expensive paper because it’s coated and printed in four color.

My goal is to trim the crap that appears in our physical mailbox by 50% by the end of the year. I’ll let you know early next year if I met my goal. How about you? Are you overrun by paper? What are you doing in the war against paper?

• 6 Comments
• Tags: green, Productivity

I got a voice mail from a vendor the other day. He left me three numbers and the best times to reach him at each number.

One of my Project Managers said she was having a tough time reaching a client. I suggested she try the client’s cell phone since that client is almost never at her desk but she’s almost always available via cell phone.

I have a friend who almost never answers his phone, but if I send a direct Tweet, I get an instant response.

Egads. With all of these communication channels, what’s the best way to reach someone these days?

On any given day, I check multiple devices for voice mail, e-mail or text messages: work e-mail, personal e-mail, home phone, work phone, cell phone, Twitter and Facebook. Some of these channels overlap.  For example, direct messages on Twitter, Facebook messages and work voice mail all end up in my e-mail.

But with so many devices to check for messages, I invariably favor certain methods (work e-mail, work voice mail and cell phone), to the detriment of others. Case in point: I completely missed a friend’s voice mail on my home phone because she called while I was upstairs with the baby one Sunday. Since I was home all day, it never occurred to me that I might have missed a call, so I didn’t check voice mail for several days. Eeek.

Many of my friends and staff have consolidated communications on their cell phones. They have no land line at home and do everything on their smartphone. But my husband Maki and I won’t give up our land line because in an emergency, my trusty land line phone (an AT&T Trimline 210 from 1989) that does not need a power source will still work (unless the central office is out).

I thought Google Voice would save me. Google Voice gives you a phone number that’s tied to YOU, not the device. Currently, I have a Google Voice number that rings on my cell phone and home phone; by the end of the week, it will also ring my direct extension at work. I can program Google Voice to ring on specific phones during certain hours of the day. And I can make free calls anywhere in the US and around the world to other Google Voice subscribers. Pretty cool. Currently, only Maki, my mom and the nanny have this number because they’re the people who MUST reach me when they NEED to reach me. But here’s the rub: Google Voice gives me another mailbox to check! Ick. I hope I managed to disable that feature.

All of this thinking about how to reach me and how to reach other has got me thinking. Are we making ourselves crazy by always being reachable and having the expectation that everyone should be reachable at all times? If you’re an NCIS fan, you know that Gibbs’ Rule #3 is “Never be unreachable” so I guess I need to continue diligently checking e-mail, voice mail, text messages and social media messages. <sigh>

How about you? What’s the best way to reach YOU? And how do you let friends know the best to reach you?

• 3 Comments
• Tags: Google, Productivity

I had an early meeting in Hyattsville this morning.  I was armed with my Garmin GPS and printed directions from Google Maps — I still got lost. I had to call my husband for extra navigational assistance.  He was incredulous on the phone: “Don’t you have Jane (the GPS) with you?  Did you follow the directions from Google?”  Yes and yes, but I was still lost.

How is this even possible?  For the last nearly 20 years (how did I get so old?), I have been in sales in the DC area.  I feel like I have driven to most corners of the region.  I know this region and I do not get lost!!!  How on earth did I get lost this morning?  And how did I get lost when I had so many tools at my disposal?

I have a hunch that all of these digital assistants are making me stupid. How and why?

Well, long before cell phones, GPS systems and Google/Mapquest maps, I would get directions the old fashioned way.  I would call the prospect or client and get detailed directions. Mr. client would ask me where I was coming from and he would give me directions that included navigational clues like:” go 4 lights then turn right; if you see the Giant, you’ve gone to far; or go about 3 miles and then get on 95 on your right.”  I would also get really helpful suggestions, like “don’t go through the City at that time of day, take the Beltway.”  I would heed these directions and almost never get lost.  And if I did get lost, I would find a gas station and ask the always-friendly attendant for help. Oh yeah, I also used to carry around maps with me, but I tossed those when I got my GPS; silly me!
Read the rest of this entry

• 9 Comments
• Tags: Gadgets, Productivity

Last Thursday, when the National Weather Service was calling for a blizzard in the DC area, I had a choice to make:  open on Friday but probably close early, close the office OR keep the office open but let everyone work from home.  On Sunday night, with roads still largely impassable, federal and local governments announcing closures and public transportation down for the count, I faced a similar choice: declare the office closed on Monday and give everyone a snow day OR keep the office open and let everyone work from home.

While I’m sure most of my staff would have loved a snow day or two, as a small business owner, I know that when my staff isn’t working, we’re not generating billable time, which means a bad month in revenues, or worse.  So, since Friday, I’ve kept the Matrix Group office officially open but let everyone work from home. Here’s why:

• Most staff appreciated not having to battle the bad roads to keep working and avoid taking vacation days.
• Although most of our clients are in the DC area, we have clients all over the country; the latter expect us to be open.
• It’s precisely when our clients are not able to serve their customers and members physically that they rely on their Web sites to be open for business virtually.
• Letting staff work from home let us put our pandemic/DR plans to the test.

The results have been mostly good. With the exception of staff who lost power at home, everyone scheduled to work has been able to work.  Here’s what helped: Read the rest of this entry

• 5 Comments
• Tags: Matrix Group, Productivity, project management

This afternoon, the MatrixMaxx team at Matrix Group held a Town Hall meeting with clients to get feedback on about a half dozen features slated to go into the 10.1 version (scheduled for release in early February).  We could have surveyed clients via e-mail or a Web survey; we could have conducted a focus group; we could have called a select group of clients and consultants; or we could have gone with our gut and made decisions about credit card processing, meeting wait lists, individual relationships, etc.

Instead, we decided to crowdsource the specifications.  Crowdsource?  What does this mean?  Wikipedia defines “crowdsourcing” as the “act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) and asking for contributions.”  Wikipedia also uses this definition: “the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.”

In the past, Tanya (the Director of MatrixMaxx) and I would sit down, discuss requirements, maybe make a few calls, and then decide on the specifications for each release.  This time around, we decided to get immediate feedback from as big a group of clients as possible to validate our ideas and generate new ones.

The Mechanics of the Town Hall Meeting

• We sent an e-mail invitation to all MatrixMaxx clients, inviting them to an hour-long, online Town Hall meeting.  The e-mail provided details on the half dozen topics under consideration, with a general discussion of the options available.
• Clients were invited to provide feedback in real-time during the meeting, before the meeting via phone and email, and after the meeting via phone and e-mail.
• About 60% of the clients registered at least one person to the Town Hall meeting, which was conducted via conference call and Webex.
• Tanya ran the meeting, leading the discussion and taking notes, which were shared out via Webex to all participants.

Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: association management, Productivity, project management, software development

I was at Union Station a few weeks ago and on my way out, I validated my parking ticket, which would have given me a dollar or two off the total charge.  As instructed by all the signage, I paid for my ticket at the automated station, then hopped into my car and exited the garage.  Later that evening, I realized that the discount had NOT been taken off the charge.  Annoyed, I called Union Station and was told that in order to get the discount, I had to pay at the ticket booth to a live person.

Okay, so this does not make any sense:  discounted parking costs Union Station more money because a real person is needed to process the transaction. (Besides that, it’s just not right to advertise a discount and then not tell consumers how to actually get the discount.)

So it turns out that a lot of companies spend a lot more time processing charges from people who pay less.  Here are more examples:

• The meeting registration system that can’t process discounts properly so you have to call the organization to get the discount.
• The discount code that you can’t use on the Web, only by phone.
• The publication that gives you a quantity discount, but you have to call. Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Productivity

Multitasking is everywhere. People are texting while driving, e-mailing during meetings, talking on the phone while walking their kids, tweeting while watching TV and IMing while working. Many people even brag about their multitasking prowess.

But can we really do two, even three, things at once?  Research shows that we can’t really multitask.  Not well at least.

Way back in 2001, researchers at the American Psychological Association set out to find out if multitaskers are more efficient.  Their findings: multitasking isn’t more efficient; shifting mental gears wastes time. More recently, a group of researchers at Stanford University found that “(p)eople who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.”

While I’m tempted to multitask on a regular basis, I’m trying really, really hard to break myself of the habit. For example, I don’t check e-mail on my phone anymore.  It turns out that when I’m away from the office, I’m usually in my car or in a meeting.  I know I shouldnt’ check e-mail from the car, so I don’t.  And clients typically pay me to pay attention during their meetings, so I don’t check e-mail then, either.  I will take detailed notes on my laptop during a meeting but the note taking helps me process and organize the discussions and information. Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Productivity