Is your diary a useful business tool?

Whether you use an electronic or paper diary the most effective way to manage your time is to schedule everything you need to spend time on - not just your appointments.  Electronic diaries have the advantage of being able to colour code different types of tasks, leisure time etc without having to stock up on coloured pens.

The starting point with organising your diary is to list everything you need to achieve in the week. Next is to identify the strategic or revenue-generating priorities. There’s a great deal written about when we work at our best and how long we can focus without a break.  In essence we work most effectively first thing in the day and need a break after 90 mins of focused work, so schedule your strategic priorities for first thing in the day then build everything else around that.

I put everything in my diary. Like any new habit it took time and discipline to get myself to plan and use my diary to manage my time.  If you stick at it you'll get into the habit of using your diary to schedule all your strategic priorities and tasks you’ll find:

• You achieve more strategic priorities - providing you don’t shy away from not putting the ones you don’t want to do in your diary
• You’ll feel good about achieving more priorities .... and the business will benefit
• You’re less likely to forget to do things as if you need to reschedule something you simply move it to another time
• You’ll be better prepared for client meetings, phone calls etc because you’ll have put planning time in the diary
• You’ll be driving more opportunities forwards (see article below)
• You’ll become more realistic about the time it takes to do something and hence better at estimating how long a piece of work takes - which is really important if your time is money
• You’ll find yourself working faster or more efficiently if you know you only have an hour to complete something - providing your interruptions are being kept to a minimum and you remember to take proper breaks
• You’ll achieve things rather than getting to the end of the day and feeling a failure as you haven’t knocked anything off the to do list
• You’ll discover whether you really have more do to than time allows so be in a position to evaluate what to delegate or outsource
• You’ll have a better work-life balance

If you get into the habit of spending an hour on a Friday planning the week ahead, checking your diary each day and doing the scheduled task before you get buried alive in you inbox then you will become more productive and more effective.

In reality interruptions and changes to your diary are unavoidable but if you are managing your time rather than allowing it to be managed 100% by outside influences then you’ll be better placed to cope with these without work taking over your life.

Give it a go!

Driving opportunities forwards

Some years ago I was an account manager at a marketing agency and I was expected to write a contact report from any meeting, or significant telephone conversation, summarising what had been discussed, the actions required, who was responsible and any deadlines.  In fact, if you failed to get a contact report out within 48 hours of the meeting you were likely to get a talking to from your line manager.

As a consultant it’s something I still do after meetings. It’s allowed me to keep ideas and suggestions on the agenda for future discussion, some of which I have succesfully turned into additional business.  If we don't regularly give our clients new ideas and show that we're really thinking about their business someone else will. Also it’s a well known fact that it’s more cost effective to grow your business organically from your existing clients than to spend time and money finding new clients.

I’ve mentioned this to a number of friends and clients in service organisations and was surprised to discover that very few of them actually do any sort of written follow up after a meeting. 

If you’re in the service sector and don’t follow up meetings or significant phone calls here are my top 3 tips for making client meetings work harder for you:

• Take a look at this free tool Minutes.io which allows you to take notes at meetings and share them.
• Schedule time in your diary after each meeting to write up some notes
• Use the notes as an agenda for future meetings

Why is an essential skill missing from the education system?

Touch typing is the third most valuable skill I’ve learned, the first being to use a knife and fork, the second being able to write.   I use these essential skills pretty well every day.  We all need to be able to feed ourselves so children are taught to use a knife and fork from very early on. We then start to learn to draw and write. Most children use computers at school and will go on to use at home and probably at work most days of their lives but the majority do what is known as ‘hunt and peck’ so need to watch what they are doing with their fingers. 

Keyboarding skills are an essential, basic life skill - just like using a knife and fork or being able to write - so I’m puzzled why they aren’t taught at school. Any ideas why?

I heard it on the grapevine

‘I believe that clients make few distinctions on the technical capabilities of the best firms and, as a result, place great emphasis on the ability of the individual partner to enter their world, relate to them in their language, and talk to them about their business. We will never succeed by being technicians alone, no matter how high our level of technical skill. Clients want us to know their business. They want us to be interested in them.'

Source: David Maister via Sutherlands PSBD'

'You don't pay the price for success--you pay the price for failure. You enjoy the benefits of success.'  Zig Ziglar

'Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.'

Dale Carnegie

'If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.'

Lewis Carroll

'Allowing yourself constant distractions destroys your concentration and you're kidding yourself if you think it's just taking a break.'

Source: Sarah Matthews, presentation on improving productivity for Sussex Enterprise 

Software worth trying

Spring cleaning your Mac

OmniDiskSweeper is a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper scans your disks and highlights the biggest files, so you can determine what's using up your disk space. It's a fast, easy way to find things that are hogging your drive and clear them out so you've got room for the stuff you really need.

Ever forgotten a password?

1Password is a program from Agile Bits that creates, remembers and restores passwords for you. Remembering passwords you have created is easy but if you have a business with your own website, e-mail etc you suddenly find the passwords you need to gain access aren’t as easy to remember as your loved one’s birth date.

Any on line activity that asks you to create a user name and password prompts 1Password  to ask you if want to save it.  As many of use use a number of computers and devices it can be set up to sync wirelessly with iPhone,  iPad and Android.

I’ve used 1Password for at least 3 years and it’s proved to be one of the most useful programs and applications I use. As well as storing passwords I use it for keeping other essential information like my NI Number and car insurance policy details.

Look forward to seeing you at....

First Friday Chichester January meeting at 1.00pm on Friday 6th January at The Nags Head, Chichester (new venue!)


Chichester Chamber of Commerce & Industry Monthly Networking Meeting at 6.00pm at Selsey Country Club. Please remember to book on line.

Chichester College Business Breakfast Club at Chichester College at 7.30am on Wednesday 11th January where I will be giving a short presentation on 'Removing the constraints that limit productivity'

Chichester Chamber of Commerce & Industry Networking Breakfast at Vicars Hall at 7.30am on Friday 27th January where I will be giving a short presentation on 'Networking face to face and on line'

Networking is an excellent way to build business if you are in a service sector where business relationships are centred around trust. However if you’re not comfortable with it you won’t come across your may not be putting your best foot forward and don’t forget - ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’.  If coaching or training would held you make networking more enjoyable and more successful get in touch.