Small Business Marketing, Operations and Strategy | Mark Riffey's Business is Personal

Stop Chasing Rabbits: A Productivity/Focus “Secret”

I don’t spend a lot of time writing about “the hows” of staying focused, but I do remind you now and then about the reasons that make focus so important.

For example, I closed the post A Thousand Dollars an Hour with “The goal? To do more of the right work. The work that advances your business in massive steps.”

I hope everyone can relate to that.

There’s nothing wrong with what I might call “leisure reading”, but I suggest setting aside time for it rather than doing it during time planned for work.

One thing that really helps me is to avoid “chasing rabbits”.

Have you ever seen a dog chase a rabbit? Rabbits are incredibly elusive because of their ability to quickly change direction when running at high speed. What makes them so elusive: A body designed to make radical direction changes without losing much speed.

The dog might end up running half a mile or more within a football field and might never catch the rabbit. An overhead view of the path of a rabbit eluding a predator looks like the crayon scribbles of a two-year old. It goes everywhere, randomly… just like your afternoon spent doing random browsing.

Chasing links

Your productivity suffers the same thing on the web.

It starts like this: Someone sends you a link via email, Twitter or Facebook. You follow it, it leads to another page, which leads to another and the next thing you know, the afternoon is gone and you can’t begin to remember what you did for the last three hours.

If you have the discipline to open the link in a browser tab and then not read it, you might end up with 20-30-40 browser tabs open. Not only does that slow your machine / browser down, but it’s a buffet of ready-to-serve distractions just waiting to suck you in.

Some folks might bookmark the links to get them out of their face (and out of mind so they can get back to work), but I’ve found that people rarely read the stuff they bookmarked.

Bookmarking misses the mark

Bookmarking works because you don’t have to worry about the tragic loss of that critical link that you know you need to read (a dash of sarcasm?).

For me, traditional bookmarking wasn’t effective, even via Delicious. Too much clutter? Too many clicks? Not in my face to remind me I had reading queued up? I don’t know.

What I do know is that Instapaper has, for the last few years, been the #1 “secret” tool that keeps me focused during the day.

Links come at you all day long. Click one, start reading and the next thing you know, the afternoon is gone.

Instapaper to the rescue

I don’t know why the subtle differences between Instapaper and simple bookmarks are enough to make this so much more productive for me, but they are.

Maybe it’s because I know those links will be in Instapaper when I’m in reading mode. Maybe it’s because I can archive with 2 clicks and instantly move to the next article. Maybe it’s because the queue of reading is kept in sync from my laptop to my desktop to my iPad and iPhone. Maybe the ease and speed of the Read Later bookmarklet does it.

I suspect the marriage of those things is what makes it work for me. I noticed a significant difference once I started using the free Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet. For me, it was the real key to quickly eliminating the tempting distractions without losing important reads.

If you have a Kindle, this page shows how to make Instapaper links automatically go to your Kindle.

I hope this helps you do more of the important, valuable work…all without missing out on XKCD.

PS: I’ve added a Read Later link to the bottom of posts, if you can’t use the bookmarklet for some reason.

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Signs your work is incomplete

photo credit: telmo32

From time to time, you get signs that your work here isn’t complete.

I recently I had one of those days.

Six of us, including a three year old and a one year old on the downhill side of a cold, were set to fly what usually is a two segment, three hour flight from Missouri to Montana.

I’ll spare you the boring parts: It took 19 hours to get home that day. Some of that was the airline’s fault, some was weather, some was bad luck and some good.

The signs during that day were varied:

A cancelled flight early in the morning that we were not told about until arriving at the airport.
A desk agent who moved us to another airline after the transfer deadline.
A desk agent who patiently spent 90 minutes cleaning up the mess.
A mechanically challenged plane that we were forced to sit on for an hour.
A 43 year veteran flight attendant who walked the aisle at the end of our flight and personally thanked everyone for their patience.
Another desk agent who told me she couldn’t help me for an hour.

The things that happened to us are useless information to you, but how the problems were handled is where the lesson is. They might not be the same problems your customers encounter, but I’m confident they’re similar in some form and they’ll spark a thought.

Cancelled flight

The cancelled flight was due to weather. United can’t control that.

Similarly, you have business problems beyond your control. What you CAN control is your reaction and how you plan to deal with the ones you can’t do anything about. Advance planning for disasters. Imagine that.

Because automated phone calls are expensive technology that hasn’t been invented yet (sarcasm), we don’t find out with a phone call while preparing to leave for the airport, or on our way to the airport. We find out when we arrived at the ticket desk 75 minutes before flight time.

Yes, we probably should have checked at 5am when we got up, but the same airline had called us earlier when a flight was cancelled for reasons never revealed to us. Yet info about a flight cancellation with immediate impact was left to chance.

Your takeaway: What situations could you use automated phone calls, emails or text messages to warn your clients about?

Resolved mess

After a brief conversation with the gate agent about the value of automated “dude, your flight’s been cancelled” calls, United transfers us to American Airlines after cutoff for the next flight, knowing full well what they were doing. I say this because United agents discussed this right in front of me as if I wasn’t there.

While (understandably) grumbling about how United’s staff dumped responsibility for rerouting us, American’s staff accepted the challenge and thanks in part to ever-present incompatibilities between reservation systems, took 90 minutes to get it (mostly) cleaned up. My patience with them got us six free bags.

What messes caused by outside influences do you clean up for your customers? Are they aware of it? How do you compensate them when you (or they) think you owe them something?

Checklists and silence are golden

After everyone boarded a plane, the crew found a problem during the pre-flight checklist. That’s a good thing. We had to sit on the flight with zero info for an hour. That’s a bad thing.

Your takeaway: Do your critical processes have checklists? What info flows to your customer during problem resolution?

Thanks for putting up with us

A flight attendant, who told us earlier that she’d been flying for 43 years,walked the length of the plane, stopping every 2-3 seats to thank everyone for their patience and for sticking with them despite their mistakes. During the mechanical delay, there was little info or expression of concern. Still, she clearly knew that leaving a last impression was a good idea and made the effort.

What are you thanking your customers for? Are there situations in the past that should’ve earned a customer an apology? It isn’t too late.

The takeaway?

Every time you get good or bad service from another business, think about how it can be used to make your business better.

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A Letter from Georgia

photo credit: ClaireDelRey

We almost didn’t open it, thinking it was junk mail.

Why would the University of Georgia send us mail way out here in Montana?

We aren’t alumni. Our kids don’t go there, nor do we have prospective students considering the school.

The letter was addressed to “The Riffey Family” (printed, not hand-addressed), which may have subconsciously given it a chance it normally wouldn’t have received.

The postage applied was pre-sorted metering like that from a postage machine. Result: It looked like any other junk mail with the exception of the “family” thing.

The letter made it home from the Post Office only because I thought it might be something related to my wife’s doctoral studies, even though she had never mentioned UGA to me.

Blondie

Months ago, we had to put Blondie (our 11 year old Golden Retriever mix) to sleep.

She was suffering from painful arthritis and surgery to repair tendons hadn’t helped her escape a life that had become much like walking on broken glass. Our oldest son came home for the weekend because he wanted to be with her. They hadn’t even charged us for the euthanasia, probably because we’d spent so much on Blondie’s care with them.

The letter was about Blondie. It came from the development (fundraising) office at the University of Georgia Veterinary School.

A letter that almost didn’t make it home. A letter that almost didn’t get opened.

A letter said that our vet, Dr. Mark Lawson from Glacier Animal Hospital, had made a donation to the vet school in Blondie’s memory.

Think hard about your mail

Imagine if we hadn’t known that our vet had made that donation…all because the envelope carrying that notification letter looked “too junky”.

Think hard about your mail.

It does no good to spend time and money sending mail if it never makes it home from the post office. It isn’t just about paper costs, printing, postage costs and the speed of slapping on pre-printed labels.

Everything ON the envelope requires thought because someone, somewhere HAS to decide to open it…and if they don’t, you just wasted time, money and an opportunity. Perhaps more.

Everything IN the envelope requires thought. You might have one shot to make an impression and/or provoke an action.

If you don’t send mail to people, keep in mind that the same considerations apply to anything else you put in front of customers and prospects. If it looks like junk, it might get treated that way.

P.S.

Would you take your dogs anywhere else? What a nice gesture. Wow.

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A Thousand Dollars an Hour

photo credit: Majo´s Photos

One of my mentors describes a person or activity that wastes your time as a “time vampire”.

This might be someone who repeatedly interrupts you for information they could easily find on their own – in other words, they’re really making a social call.

It might be you checking CNN or Facebook.

Interruptions often happen because the interrupter hasn’t been trained to find what you’re giving them – that’d be your responsibility.

Sometimes these inquiries are valuable because of the resulting discussion, but the interruption is often costly because it pulls you out of the zone – a hyper-productive period of work.

That work thing

Even “Work” can be a time vampire.

How do you decide what to delegate, outsource or (gasp) what not to do at all?

We’ve talked at length about how to evaluate this with your staff, including automation and what to retain as a manual task – because it’s important enough that you’d never want to outsource or automate it (like most customer service tasks).

One thing we haven’t really talked in detail about is deciding what YOU do.

At the top of your list: things that no one else can do. Yes, I mean those things that no one literally has the ability to do except you.

Driving, Chipping and Putting

In a professional golfer’s work world, only the golfer can hit the ball. Almost everything else except for promotional talks and photos can be delegated. On the golf course (or the practice range/green), work gets done by the golfer that cannot be delegated. It might be 1000 dollar an hour work, maybe more, depending on the golfer.

While it’s obvious, that’s what I want you to consider: What work of yours is the equal of the pro golfer’s professional-grade driving, chipping and putting?

A Grand an Hour

If the golf thing doesn’t work for you: What work do you do that easily provides 1000 dollar an hour value to your business?

If the 1000 dollar an hour figure bothers you (I hope it doesn’t), try $500 or even $250. It’s possible that the work you do at this level is work that a client never sees, such as big picture planning (mission/vision/strategic stuff) work. Strategic planning and that sort of thing that drives your company for the next three to five years. Decision making at the highest level should be in this pile.

If you do this kind of work for clients (as I do), you probably know what it’s worth to them. Is this work that you can’t possibly delegate? Write that work down on your list.

You can categorize this work however you like (“Class A work”, “CEO work”, “Meat and potatoes”, etc). The idea is to remind yourself that this very high-value work that you can’t delegate is more important to your business than any other work. If it *can* be delegated, then it don’t put it on this list. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, it just isn’t the MOST important.

One floor down

Once you’ve put everything you can think of on this super-important, cannot-be-delegated list, consider the work that is a level below that.

If this vision helps, consider the work that gets done on the floor one flight of stairs below your CEO suite (which might just be your corner of the basement, bear with me).

This work is still very important, but the gap in value per hour provided to your company (no, not to your clients) vs. that on the level we just discussed might be substantial. That doesn’t make it unimportant, just less important than the earlier list.

Perhaps you do weekly group webinars online or some other form of group sales or lead generation (that’s marketing-speak for “doing the things that attract and find new prospects”). Creating the conceptual design of a new product or service. Creating new strategic partnerships with other vendors might also be on this list. Training your staff to do important tasks that you do now is probably on this list since it gives you more time to do “CEO level” work.

It’s possible to delegate this work, but it’s still valuable enough to the company that you feel it is worth your time to do it.

The goal? To do more of the right work. The work that advances your business in massive steps.

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