When should you confront a co-worker?

The Rule of 3

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to participate in many interesting activities, from parachuting and bungee jumping to traveling and trying new exotic cuisines. A long time ago, I learned a simple trick called the rule of three. The basic breakdown is:

• First time Just do the activity
• Second time Learn how to do it properly
• Third time Do it again to determine if you like or enjoy it

In a professional setting

This has served me well, and over the years I have started to use this for other aspects of my life. One good example is related to a question I get asked very often by colleagues and employees “When should I confront an annoying colleague?”

Obviously before you confront someone, you want to ensure the annoying habit is actually a habit and not just a one off incident. So think of it with the “Rule of three framework”.

• First time This is the first time you notice this action or behavior
• Second time This time you notice exactly what is being done and confirm that this was not a one off anomaly. Think of exactly what the other person is doing and why it bothers you. What is motivating the other person to do this?
• Third time This is the time you confront the offender. You now know that this is a habit, it has happened multiple times and you now understand exactly why it troubles you.

Power in simplicity

In his book “Getting Things done”, David Allen uses imagery to explain the concept of being cool and in control: “Mind like water”. He explains that when you throw a pebble in a lake, water always reacts with the appropriate level of response; it never over or under reacts.

In our hectic lives, we sometime overreact when having a bad day and later regret our actions. Using the rule of three will force to you react calmly and only after having carefully considered the situation. Your cool confidence will be noticed and usually responded to more favorably than simply belching out what comes to mind the first time something happens.

Think of other aspects in your life that can benefit from this rule.

Creating the paperfree work environment with Evernote

The Brilliant Idea

The fine folks at Evernote came up with a brilliant idea. They created a hybrid cloud-based solution to store all your personal digital information, making it available everywhere, on any platform and completely searchable.

I call their solution a hybrid-cloud solution because it is based on an offline-online model. All of your data is downloaded and available offline on their Windows, Mac and Linux clients. At the same time, it is available via their web interface or dozens of other mobile devices like Android, Iphone, Ipad, Nokia, RIM, etc. Your information is always synchronized across these clients and always available.

Evernote also gives each user a unique email address. Anything you send to that email address is uploaded to your default notebook and available within minutes.

What is a note

All information in Evernote is stored in a capsule called a Note. A note can be as simple as a line of ASCII text or as complex as a collection of Office files, videos, pictures or any other type of digital media you can throw at it.

Unlike other systems, Evernote provides a bunch of organization tools but doesn’t specifically force you to use any of them. You decide how to store your information and make it available. Their tools include:

• Notebooks A notebook is a collection of notes.
• Tags A tag is a way to logically group related notes together making them easier to find later. Evernote supports sub-tags, which means you can even associate one tag as a subordinate of another.
• Saved Searches If you find yourself performing a particular search over and over then why not save it as a Saved Search?
• Attributes Evernote automatically saves a lot of attribute information with each note (which can be used to fine tune searching). They save things like creation and modification dates/time, geotag information (when available), type of information the note contains (i.e. word file, picture), etc.

Did someone order some OCR

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and it’s on the Evernote menu. They have a sophisticated OCR engine that detects text in images and makes it searchable. As an example, you can take a snapshot with your smartphone of a wine label and upload it to Evernote. Their elephants will analyze the image, detect the text and make it searchable. I take a picture of every business card I get and upload it to Evernote. It makes the text searchable so it creates a digital Rolodex. If you have decent handwriting, it may even be able to understand it.

note: In this case OCR does not mean it converts text in the image to usable text you can copy and paste. In Evernote land, OCR is only used to make content searchable

As you can imagine, they prioritize detection for their premium users over the free ones. In my testing, a premium account had a new image indexed within 5-30 minutes (often almost immediately). In free mode, I once waited about 24 hours to have an image indexed which is really acceptable.

If you create a PDF from a word type program then it automatically makes the PDF searchable and Evernote includes this in your “in document” search results. If you scan a page and then convert it into a PDF, it usually does not have a searchable index (since it is a picture imbedded in a PDF container). Premium users also enjoy the benefit of their PDFs being searchable.

The Trunk

A discussion about Evernote would not be complete without mentioning The Trunk. The guys at Evernote realized that their users had lots of feature requests and that they would never be able to meet every requirement, so they built an API that partners could use to interface with Evernote.

There are already dozens of partner created products that work with Evernote and according to numbers presented by the company, many more are on the way.

The freemium model

In addition to the OCR differences between the free and paid users, there are also some other benefits to upgrading (which costs $5 per month):

• 1GB per month Upload Limit (instead of 60MB for free users). This is not a total data size limit, it is how much new data you can upload. They do not limit total data size.
• More filetypes. Free users can upload PDF and image fines. Premium users can upload any type of digital file from Office documents to videos and more.
• More powerful sharing Every Evernote user has the ability to share a notebook with a group of users. Free users can only share notebooks in read mode whereas Premium members can share notebooks in READ/WRITE mode.
• Priority Processing As mentioned above, priority for OCR processing is given to paid users. Paid users are also given support priority.

To be honest, most users will find the free version more than adequate for what they need to do. Even as a free user, you get 720MB of free cloud-based, searchable data storage per year (60MB per month).

My only wish is that they revamp their iPhone client to make it more powerful and intuitive. Overall, I give Evernote two thumbs up and a hearty endorsement. I am moving my digital info to their service and I strongly encourage you to take a look.

LINKS:

-Evernote Link

-GTD Using Evernote Link

-Evernote Essentials Link

An end to multitasking?

Image by John Ragai used under Creative Commons License

Many years ago, I got to the point where I felt overwhelmed by my jobs and all the tasks I had to perform. After a long search, I learned and implemented the concept of Getting Things Done promoted by David Allen. One of his beliefs is that a person cannot multi-task and he built his entire system around this one concept. He preaches undertaking tasks one at a time sequentially.

Working in the computer industry, I could not easily accept this. After all, my Operating System allowed me to run multiple applications simultaneously for a reason. Right? Well not really... Each computer core (think of a core as an individual brain) can only handle one thing at any given time. Manufacturers have implemented time division techniques to make it look like the computer is processing multiple items per core by slicing the time each process has to fractions of a second. This gives the allusion of multitasking.

The Steeve Jobs alarm

In 2010, during a presentation, Steve Jobs presented features the upcoming version of his Operating System called Lion (to be released mid 2011). The one feature that stuck out for me was full screen application support. In this case, full screen does not mean maximized (like in Windows), it means the apps takes up 100% of your screen real-estate. Whether you like or hate Apple, you have to agree that they spend an unholly amount of money conducting usability research. Why would they implement something that seems backwards? That would prevent you from multi-tasking?

The Research The truth is that when we attempt to multi-task, we become much less effective. Modern cognitive research clearly demonstrates that when people multi-task, they perform less work and miss information. Researchers discovered that re-orienting yourself to the task at hand, after a distraction, takes 10-15 minutes. Quantifiably, performance for multi-taskers can drop as much as 40% along with a marked degradation of memory and creativity.

Distractions There are 2 types of distractions :

• Active disruptive: Distractions you cannot control like someone walking into your office.
• Passive disruptive: Distractions you cannot control like n SMS, Email, Instant Message, telephone call, etc

This is the reason why many people are more efficient and effective at home. If re-orientation takes 10-15 minutes and you keep getting distracted by Active disruptive then you experience a severe loss in productivity. Working from home means Active disruptive intrusions completely disappear.

Passive disruptive can be controlled and allow you to decide when to engage with them. You can send calls to voicemail, ignore emails and Instant messages, etc. Ignoring these means you are completely dedicated to the task at hand. Go around and ask people where they go to get their most important and productive work done. I have very rarely seen people says the office.

As technology develops, we are seeing more and more companies add technology that is classified as Passively disruptive and this is a good thing.

Practical How To - Find a Time Management Framework that fits your needs and apply it to your everyday life. All of them will bring stability and control to your chaotic life which will in turn allow you to concentrate on one activity at a time.

• Remember that most people can only concentrate an a specific task for 18-30 minutes before their mind starts to wander. Determine what your personal threshold is and plan accordingly. You may want to create intervals between your productive times by checking emails, picking up voicemails, etc. These are good times to engage with the disruptive activities (pick up voicemails, check emails, etc).

• Use the closed door policy. Let people know that there are times when you should not be bothered. Close your office door or post a Do Not Distrub sign on your cubicle entrance. Send calls to voicemail and shutdown Instant Messaging and Email. There is a time for all of these but not when you want to be productive.

• Learn more efficient note taking techniques like Mind Mapping. This means you will spend less time trying to write down notes and more time concentrating on the discussion at hand. Remember we can only do one thing at a time. When writing, you are not listening.

Now go get productive!

Tickle your way to better organization

We live in an era of information and often times it may feel like we are being overwhelmed by information. Many years ago, I reached an inflection point in my career. I had reached a point where I was constantly overwhelmed with my tasks and information. I did not know what to do, how to handle it and often felt like my work life was out of control. I decided that I needed to find better ways of doing things and so I embarked on a multi year journey to study and learn as many time management, work management and information frameworks as I can. I bought dozens of books, CDs and software.

I found my information management solution and will be writing articles about them in 2011. The first topic I am covering is something called a Tickler File. It is a super simple concept that can be immediately implemented without “practice”. Once you learn about it, you can use it immediately.

What is a Tickler File
A Tickler File is a series of folders labelled by days and months. It allows you to file documents, bills, letters according to a future date at which they will have to be handled.

The daily folders are numbered from 1 until 31.
The monthly folders are from January to December.

How do I sort a Tickler File
Let’s say the date is January 1, 2011. January has 31 days so I would place all of my folders labelled with days in the front and then the folders labelled with the months right after. Since we are already in January, you would sort the folders from : February to December and place the one labelled January right after.

How do I use a Tickler File
Since it is January 1, the first thing you would do in the morning is open the folder labelled “1”. You take out all of the items from that folder, place it in your inbox for action today and move the [now empty] folder after the one labelled February.

Anything you take out of the folder should be handled that day. Pushing an action back should be an exception.

Now on January 2, you would do the same except with the folder labelled “2”. If you are going on vacation or won’t be in the office for a couple of days, look ahead in the folders (for the days you will be missing) and make sure you either take off the items or “reschedule” them to a later date.

Let’s say it is now January 31, you should have used all of the day folders (which are now behind the month folder labelled February). On February 1, you first take a look at the Folder labelled February and must decide on what to do with the items in it. Once you have taken care of those, you move the folder labelled February to the back (exposing the daily folders you moved here in January.) Since you are February 1, you open the first folder labelled “1” and moved the folder behind March.

What goes into the monthly folders?
The contents of the daily folders are easy to understand but you may be asking yourself what goes into the monthly folders.

You use the monthly folders for tasks that must be handled in a future month but do not necessarily have a drop dead date. Let’s say you have a software license that expires in March but you know it will take you a couple of weeks to renegotiate it and you tell yourself you should look at it “sometime in February”. Then you would place the contract with a note in the February folder. When you get to February 1, you open the February monthly folder first, find the contract and decide which day it should be handled within that month. You sort it in the day folder and you’re done.

What about digital?
What we have just talked about can be done physically for paper type work (invoices, contracts, etc) and/or can be implemented digitally. It is so simple, you can easily implement this on any platform using the Operating Systems folder structure. Just create the appropriate folder structure and voila.

After years of searching, I use a tool called PersonalBrain (http://www.thebrain.com) for all my digital filling and time management. I have actually implemented a tickler file in there in addition to a customized version of the ‘Getting Things Done’ methodology. I will write about PB and GTD in a future article. Right now the important thing is for you to understand that you can implement this without any expensive or fancy software.

The challenges
The system itself is super easy to implement and use. After reading the above, you are a pro at it already. The real challenge comes from starting it and committing to use it. Old habits die hard. At first you have to remember to put info into the system and remember to check it every morning (first thing).

Having taught this to hundreds of people, I noticed that the more people used it, the more useful it became and the more committed they became to maintaining it. So the important step is to use it. Use whatever mechanism you want to remind you [at the beginning] that you need to check and maintain the system. Some people have put Post-it reminders on their coffee mugs, others have set-up reminders in their calendaring system, etc.

The tickler system should be easily accessible yet not in the way. I have both a physical tickler and a digital one. I maintain both because not everything I work with can be digitized and kept digitally yet (legal reasons). My physical one is in a filling cabinet that I can access by swivelling my work chair and my digital one is in a top level structure in my main Digital Brain (i.e. PersonalBrain software).