Innovative Time-Saving Tip

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

I just saw a Tweet (for those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, this is what their micro-blogging posts are called) with a great time saving tip. If you listened to this month’s Forward the Action Call on personal productivity, you heard me discuss the increased demands technology has placed on all of us. People now expect answers to their emails in minutes, not days or even hours. With a crowded email box, the effort of answering emails could take hours daily. This time in not spent forwarding your agenda, so what can you do?

The Tweet I read recommends leveraging another current trend/expectation. If you are responding to an email from your Blackberry or iPhone, people expect much shorter answers. In fact, they are honored that you took the time to respond to them at all since you are clearly away from your office and engaged in some other activity of importance. They know that you sent the message from your phone because the signature line tells them.

So here is the recommendation, change the reply line (you can do this just temporarily) on your desktop to read “Sent from iPhone” or “Sent from Blackberry”. Then you can send much shorter responses – like one sentence or phrase – to all of those emails.

Kind of innovative. What do you think?

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High Achievers Must Set Their Own Standards

Hicham El Guerrouj is an Olympic gold medalist in track and field as a middle distance runner.  His vision of achieving the title of Olympic Champion led to a tough ten year battle and was almost not realized.  El Guerrouj was headed down the path of becoming “The Greatest Never” [to will a Olympic gold medal] and instead became “The Greatest Ever.”

Prior to arriving at his first Olympic games, El Guerrouj was part of the Moroccan relay team that set a world record.  He won the indoor world championship, came in second in the world championship, and was on an unbeaten streak in the 1,500 meters as he entered the games.  During the 1996 Olympics, on the last lap of the race, while battling for first place, he f...
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An End to Death By Meetings

Board meeting room

Image via Wikipedia

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

At the end of a meeting I attended the other day, I almost witnessed a scene that is all to familiar in the business world.  A group of people, often very highly paid, sit around in a room for hours, discuss lots of great ideas, make statements regarding things they would like accomplished and about actions they would like “someone” to take.  When the meeting breaks up, everyone walks out of the room and promptly forgets everything that was discussed until the day of the follow-up meeting.  All too often, during that next meeting, no one has done anything that was last discussed and nothing has been accomplished.

If this is a c...
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Accountability is About Results – Not Punishment

Principal's Office

Image by ecastro via Flickr

For some reason accountability has gotten a bad reputation in this society. When the word is used, many of us tend to have flashbacks to being sent to the principal’s office to be held “accountable” for our actions — which of course only happens when the actions are deemed unacceptable.

Our entire school experience is based upon a punitive use of accountability. We are given assignments and are graded on our performance when they are due. When we are younger, our parents often bug us during the interim to see how we are doing and whether we are making progress. The older we get though, we learn that, in college, it’s our responsibility – no one will be there to prod us along. And our grades, at the end are used to hold us accountable – to reward or punish us for the quality of ou...
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