A Call to Action: Once! Now!

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

Bestselling author (and personal superhero) Kevin Kruse laid down some serious wisdom today. I am highlighting Kevin’s message here for two reasons:

  1. By sharing Kevin’s time management notion of “Touch it once” in this post, I’m doing just that – taking a cool idea that can be executed in less than five minutes and acting on it now, rather than adding the idea to an endless pile of “I oughtas.”
  2. By sharing this creative cadence with you, perhaps we can collectively amplify the drum beat of chaos-free productivity.

Here’s Kevin’s “Touch It Once” Cadence Call…

January 24, 2012 0 Comments

10:00am. My hour of power for health is complete, and I’ve finished an hour of focused writing time. Time to open my email accounts…deep breath.

The Google alert on my own name shows that my previously scheduled blog post went live this morning. I hop over to kevinkruse.com to make sure it’s all good and notice a typo (“they” should read “my friend”). Damn, I’ll have to fix that in a few minutes after I scan the rest of my emails.

“No! Touch it once,” my inner voice reminds me. I quickly open WordPress and fix the typo.

Next email is from a freelancer giving me his EIN number so my accountant can prep a 1099. I’ll have to send that along with a note to my accountant later.

“No. Touch it once.” I hit Forward, add a few lines and off it goes.

Next email. New invoice from an advisor. “What?! I wasn’t expecting this,” I think to myself. Double-click the PDF. Yep, it’s right. Damn, I just finished paying bills yesterday. I’ll have to stack this for my next scheduled bill pay session.

“No. Just do it now. Touch it once.” Fortunately he takes credit cards. Open the form, type in my info. Email it back. Good, only 3 minutes.

Next email. I joined the Pennsylvania Society. Somebody needs to know if it’s a non-profit or not. How the heck do I know? Who can I pass this onto? Oh,

“touch it once.” I open a new tab in my browser and go to their page. Quickly scan 2-3 of their pages. No mention of 501(c)3 status. Reply to email: don’t think so.

“Hmmm, I should write a blog post someday about how the voice in my head chants “touch it once” as I clear my inbox each morning. Yeah, that would be a good one. Wait!” Open WordPress, start typing the new blog post. Title, “Touch It Once.”

Touch it once. Touch it once. Touch it once. It’s the cadence call of efficiency and productivity.

Whether I’m going through my paper inbox on my desk, or the email inbox on my computer, if the item at hand can be taken care of in less than 5 minutes I do it right then and there. If I can delegate it, I’ll do that. Otherwise I’ll schedule time to complete it.

Touch it once.

[Now clicking the Publish button] 

Check out Kevin’s blog post for more.

Yammer Time

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

What is Yammer?

Yammer is a simple, scalable solution that lets employees share and connect with coworkers in a private, secure enterprise social network.  It’s like Twitter for your internal organization. Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

Check out this quick, engaging and informative presentation on the What, Why and How of Yammer. Worth the 3 mintues it takes to view.

Yammer Overview

Steve Jobs, on Being You

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011
Commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005

Clarify priorities with MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could and Won’t)

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Prioritization Technique – MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could and Won’t)

The MoSCoW technique is a good focus method that helps you choose when you have too many options.

MoSCoW is an easy-to-memorize acronym that provides a straightforward way of prioritizing items.  Dai Clegg of Oracle UK Consulting first described MoSCoW in CASE Method Fast-Track: A RAD Approach. Clegg then donated the Intellectual Property Rights to the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) Consortium.

How Now, MoSCoW?

By following MoSCoW, we can classify each option in a list of possibilities with rating criteria:

M – MUST have this
S – SHOULD have this if at all possible
C – COULD have this if it does not affect anything else
W – WON’T have this time but WOULD like in the future

The o’s in MoSCoW are added just to make the word pronounceable, and are often written in lower case.

MoSCoW empowers you and your customer to participate actively in the decision process regarding the best order of doing things (and which ones are really important).

So, now…how will you MoSCoW?