Be More Productive Than Ever

**Note** I originally wrote this entry at the end of June and intended to publish it the first week of July.  Then my wife went and had a baby, and the last few weeks have been a blur of diaper changes and midnight feedings.  That said, none of what I wrote is any less relevant in August than it was in July.  Enjoy. -AB

If only it were this easy!

I’ve had one of the most productive years of my life so far in 2012, and the year is only half-over. During the first six months of this year, I have accomplished nearly every goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year. Those include personal and family goals like teaching my son or preparing my family for the birth of our daughter (any day now, seriously). Spiritual goals like daily prayer and volunteering at our church. Financial goals like getting that promotion I’ve been working towards. Giving speeches. Writing blog posts. Reading books. Of the 34 specific, measurable, attainable goals I set in January, I have achieved 27 of them in one form or another and failed at 7 of them. Goal-setting and regular evaluation of goals is an important part of my productivity.

1.) Set achievable goals, and then review them regularly.
Look back at the goals you set in January.  How many of them were specific, measurable, achievable goals? “Lose weight” is not specific. Lose how much weight? By when? “Lose ten pounds by June 1st” is specific, measurable and achievable.

2.) Do more in the same amount of time as everyone else.  
We all have 24 hours in a day. What you do with those 24 hours determines how successful you will be.  I read a great New York Times article about what CEO’s do that everyone else does not.  One of the things that popped out at me was that they get more done in the same amount of time than everyone else does. They find tiny ways to be more productive. For me, that has been eye-opening. I used to waste a lot of time on things that weren’t adding value to my life. TV, messing around on the internet, classic time-wasters. I’ve cut a lot of that out of my life and replaced it with things that I feel are more productive uses of my time.  In the mornings, when I’m getting ready in a quiet house with my wife and son sleeping, I will throw on my headphones and listen to a book.  This has helped me read/listen to more than twenty books so far this year.  They run the gamut, from fiction to business to biographies,  but each one has engrossed me and taught me something.  I write speeches for my Toastmasters group and then turn around and edit those speeches into a blog post. Twice the work in half the time.  But lest you think my productivity is limited to my personal life, I’ve also found ways to increase productivity at work, through consolidating a dozen reports into one simple easy to read report or getting a subject matter expert to explain to me a topic I am not familiar with before I dive headlong into a new project.

Find the places you are wasting time and figure out a way to use that time more effectively.  Sitting in line at the post office? Don’t check your email/Twitter/Facebook, rattle off some words you were trying to learn in German.  Playing blocks with the kid? Just kidding, when it’s play time, my son gets 100% of my attention.

3.) Find someone to keep you accountable. About once a month, a good friend and I talk by phone about our goals. We discuss the things we’ve been working on, detail our failures, and offer advice to each other. These conversations are great because they allow me the chance to see what someone else is doing (and sometimes shamelessly steal his goals as my own) and they keep me accountable because I know that I’m going to have to talk about what I accomplished and I don’t want to say “nothing.”

Sure, there are literally hundreds of other ways to increase your productivity, but these are three things that I started doing this year that have turned 2012 into one of the most productive years of my life. Wouldn’t you like to look back on 2012 in six months and be able to say the same thing?

Principles

With the Presidential campaign season in full swing, I feel obligated to comment on a subject I feel many of our national politicians lack- principle. A principle is a law or rule that has to be followed. A man (or woman) must have firm, unchanging principles which he believes at his very core. This is the problem I see with so many of our elected leaders whose opinions seem to ebb and flow with the public opinion. I’m not talking about any specific politician, though this could easily devolve into a partisan pissing contest, but more the politician in general. They seem to lack principle.

Perhaps my opinion is the effect of the 24 hour news cycle, of being constantly plugged in and bombarded with news from all angles- email, Facebook, twitter, cable. You can’t go far without finding someone’s opinion being blasted in your face, usually at a high volume. But underneath all of the bloviating, I rarely get the sense that someone is politicking for the good of the American People. More often, they are out to win, to make the other side look bad and to lord their superior opinions over their opponents. When did it get this way? When did calm discourse and working to find common ground become a relic of the past?

I long for someone with principles and the ability to move beyond party lines to accomplish what those principles stand for. I don’t necessarily have to agree with someone’s ideals to be able to find benefit in their point of view. Too often politics is a win at all cost, loser goes home with nothing game. It’s not a game. It’s our livelihoods. Our tax dollars. Our health care. Our economy. It’s not a set of talking points, and for once I’d like to see someone stand up there and take responsibilty without doling out the blame and pointing fingers. I’m just so tired of “politics as usual.”

Which brings me back to principles. Principles are the foundation on which all other things can be built. A politician with shifting principles, shifting loyalties will never be able to build something great when his foundation is constantly shifting based on the prevailing winds. Someone who stands firm in his beliefs, whatever they may be, will gain the hearts and minds of the people who are so desparate for something of substance.

Get To The Point (Again)

One of my most popular posts has been Get To The Point, a primer on how to be clear, concise and quick in a fast-paced business environment.  I talked about organizing your thoughts so you know what you’re talking about, concisely expressing your main points and getting to your conclusion quickly because no one likes to listen to someone prattle on.

I have a few more thoughts on Getting To The Point that I’d like to share with you.  I recently gave a speech in which I used Keynote slides to help illustrate my points.  I had about twenty-five slides and the speech lasted about ten minutes.  For most of you, this description is already bringing to mind some of your own experiences with Powerpoint in a business meeting.  Someone slaps a slide up on the screen full of text and bullet notes and then proceeds to read word for word what is written on the slide.  Within seconds, the audience zones out either by reading the slides instead of listening to the speaker, or by just tuning out completely.

GET TO THE POINT, PEOPLE!

This pretty much describes nearly every single staff meeting I’ve had in my professional career.  It describes about 75% of the courses I took in college.  I don’t know about you, but I can read.  Do I really need someone to put a slide up and then read to me word for word what is on the slide?

NO!

So why do we do it?  Why do you do it?  The biggest complaint I hear from meetings like that are about the presenter reading directly from the slide.  But when given the chance to present, the same exact people do the same exact thing- bulleted powerpoint slide, read from the screen.

THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT.

Your slide should help emphasize what you are trying to say.  It should not give the presentation for you.  You should know what you are trying to say verbally to keep the audience focused on you and your message.  The powerpoint slide is there simply to help make your point or to show off something you want the audience to know.  That’s it.

For example, the speech I gave was about making smart decisions in the workplace.  I came up with a little acronym to help me outline my points.  Here is the slide I used:

Simple, right?  Doesn’t tell the audience what each point means, but it does sort of grab your attention and make you want to know what each letter stands for.  I could have used a slide like this:

But that is so wordythat the audience will focus on reading the text on the screen instead of listening to what I am saying.  I went on to outline each letter in bullet point and summed them up at the end, but I never dwelled on the slide and I certainly never read directly from the slide itself.

Here is another slide I used:

While this slide was up, I talked about Netflix’s recent decision making snafu’s, how they seemed to have no direction and how they only served to anger their customers who left the company in droves (800,000 lost subscribers) and tanked their stock price (from $300+ to $70 in only 15 weeks.

Again, I could have used a slide like this:

But then you aren’t listening to my point, you’re reading the words on the slide.  In fact, you may have read every word on the slide before you moved on, EVEN THOUGH I had just told you what would be on the slide in the previous paragraph.  The goal of ANY speech, whether it is a business presentation, a staff meeting or a toast at a wedding should be to communicate your message clearly and concisely while engaging your audience.  Not to overwhelm your audience with words on a slide.

After my speech, I received the following comments:

“Great visual aid, very well organized.”
“Good use of slides.  Thank you for not looking at the screen the whole time.”
“Your slides were simple and easy to understand and kept me engaged.”

People LIKE to be engaged by their speaker.  They want you to look at them, talk to them and make eye contact with them.  They don’t like having slides read to them.  The next time you have to put together a powerpoint presentation, make your slides simple and focus on the message you are trying to get across.  Your audience will thank you for it.

SOPA/PIPA and the Wikipedia Blackout

If you’ve been on any social network, read or listened to the news or tried to access Wikipedia today, you’ve probably noticed that there is a massive push to raise awareness and fight support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). I hope this is something you support. It is federal legislation that will could well open individual owners of websites (like aaronbushell.com) to liability should someone post copyrighted content on the site. My website could be shut down without due process. I could be fined or jailed as someone who supports copyright infringement. THIS IS NOT RIGHT.

If you go to any Wikipedia page today, you will see that they are forwarding all pages to their SOPA informational page. You can put your zip code in to get the contact information for your elected representatives. I highly recommend you contact them to voice your opposition to SOPA.

Critical Thinking

The most important skill you can have?  Critical thinking.

A friend recently sent me an article she had read about the importance of critical thinking skills.  The article discussed the failure of many businesses to engage in critical thinking, describing it as “an organized and disciplined way of thinking logically with clarity and precision by using an approach that’s fair and accurate and focusing on information that is relevant.”

It further broke down the components of critical thinking into four subtopics:
• Strategic thinking. This requires leaders to assess the business climate and make the right decisions about where a company is going.
• Creative thinking. Creative thinking is essential for problem-solving and growth. “If you think about it, everything that you touch, every building that you walk in started with creative thinking,” Hagemann said. “So it’s imperative that we have great creative thinkers in our leadership.”
• Problem solving. Problem solving is being able to assess a problem, cut it down to the bare bones and deal with it as quickly as possible, she said.
• Decision making. decision making is a often a test of character and being able to make tough decisions and have the willingness to be held accountable. “That intellectual fortitude and courage is also a very important piece,” she said.

I’m sure it is not entirely a surprise that critical thinking is, well, critical in business.  But how do you go out and hire employees who are critical thinkers and how do you train your current employees to think more critically?  I have an answer for both of these questions.

You must remember that the onus is management to train and develop your team to become more critical thinkers.  When I was managing a Bank of America branch, I had to face this task head on.  At the time, the bank had developed a deep focus on utilizing the teller team as the front line for recognizing sales opportunities and deepening the bank’s relationship with it’s clients.  One of the branches I managed had a great team, but they had never been challenged by management to seek out these sales opportunities.  The team was good, to a person they were intelligent, dedicated employees who wanted to be successful.  They just didn’t know how.

I started out by working behind the teller line with them.  During transactions, I showed them how to take a look at the customer’s accounts while they were processing the customer’s transaction.  I taught them what things to look out for- large dollar amounts in a savings or checking account, mortgage loans with a low balance or high credit card balances.  I taught them how to ask the right questions to customers as a part of their normal conversation to try and uncover opportunities.  It took time and one-on-one interaction with my employees, but they learned and they got better.  The results were amazing.  After two quarters, we had increased product sales by 38% and had reached 100% of the banking center’s sales goals, and we continued to do so for my remaining time at that banking center.  Even better, though, was that the center continued to be successful after I left, proving that it wasn’t just my presence at the bank that had caused the success, but that I had helped develop the critical skills in the employees that allowed them to continue their success even after I moved on to another banking center.

The point here is that I spent time with them and taught them what to look for.  After a customer left, I’d dialogue with them and bounce ideas off of them to help them better understand what we were looking for.  It didn’t take long before they knew exactly what to look for and because they knew their customers better than anyone else, they could easily probe to find even more opportunities.  Customer has an 18 year old getting ready to leave for college?  Student accounts and online banking!  Customer is trying to pay off credit card debt?  Possible consolidation loan opportunity.  It was amazing what they were able to accomplish with just a little direction and instruction and coaching.

So that is how you develop critical thinking in the employees you already have, but how do you hire good critical thinkers when you are looking to hire new employees?  I’ve got three ideas:

1.) Engage your team.  Again, your team knows what works and they know a lot more people than you do by yourself.  Make sure they are on the lookout for good team members to add to your organization.  I am of the opinion that if you find the right person, you should hire them regardless of whether or not you have an open job requirement.  The right people make or break an organization.  Why let that person go somewhere else when you NEED them working for you?

2.) Always be on the lookout for talent.  If I were starting a company right now, I can think of about a half-dozen people off the top of my head right now who I would recruit to come and work for me.  Some of them might say no, but the people I’m thinking of are those stars who really love a challenge and would be willing to work their butts off for a new startup.  You should always be in the mode where you are hiring.  People will leave your organization for all sorts of reasons and you never want to be stuck relying on the resumes that come in from Human Resources as your only source of potential candidates.  Did the guy at the mall who helped you with your shoes impress you with his attentiveness and customer service?  Give him your card, sit down and have a cup of coffee with him.  He might well be the next valuable member of your team.

As a post-script to that, building your own team makes the unit incredibly strong.  When you pull someone into your team because you recognize their talent and potential, you are hiring someone who will be more dedicated to you and harder working than the average candidate.

3.) When you get to the interview, ask questions that will require critical thinking of the candidate.  I participated in several interviews when I was hiring people at Bank of America and the one thing I could not stand was the standard interview trope, “Where do you see yourself in five years” and “What are your strengths and weaknesses”?  Even what many hiring managers consider to be “better” questions are still junk.  “Tell me about a time you were challenged at work.”  “How do you work under pressure?”  Seriously, any job-seeker worth his salt will have a canned response to your canned question and if he’s a half-decent employee, he’ll see right through your boring interview to the boring desk job behind it.

Try this on for size. “What do you know about (my company)?”  Has the candidate done her homework?  Do they know anything about the company, position or industry?  If not, you know you’re probably not looking at someone with the passion to do the job the way you want it done.

“What would you do during your first 90 days on the job?”  What does this answer tell you about the candidate?  Is this someone who wants to come in and “fix” everything right away?  Or is this a more thoughtful candidate, who plans to observe before jumping right in?  Will she build relationships?  This question can help you determine whether the candidate is a good fit for your organization along with giving you a good idea of how she approaches projects.

How do you personally define and measure success?
This is a two-part question.  The first part is intended to help you determine the candidate’s view of himself, and how much he has thought about what exactly success means.  The second part is to gain insight into how the candidate would measure success in your organization.  Most people have an idea of what success is but very few have a defined way to measure it.  Even if the candidate hasn’t thought about it before now, a thoughtful and well-reasoned answer will be a sign of a quick thinking, analytical employee.

What tools or habits do you use to keep organized?  Everyone says they are organized, but take a look at the desks of the people you work with to see if they really are organized or not.  Asking for specific examples of how the candidate stays organized will allow you a peek into what to expect from this person on the job.  If they can discuss actual, specific methods (like Getting Things Done), you probably have a good applicant on your hands.

What accomplishment in your career to date are you most proud of?  I had to think about this one for a minute.  I’ve had numerous successes during my career.  All of the ones I am most proud of involved being a part of a team.  My study abroad experience at the Berlin School of Economics popped into my head.  Of all of the projects I have ever completed, this one was probably the most challenging and time consuming.  I also thought about going into underperforming bank branches and teaching them how to be top performers.  But the one I settled on was very recent- completing and analysis of moving the Procurement process to paperless.  I spent a week working on a team that broke down the Procurement process from start to finish and we figured out a way to do the whole thing without paper.  Right now, we generate between 150 and 200 pieces of paper for a new contract and anywhere from 2-100 pieces of paper for each purchase order.  We spend hours putting the files together and even longer trucking these documents all over the facility to get signatures.  The team developed a way to eliminate all of this by making the process paperless, and in doing so estimated we could save the company a pretty big chunk of change.  That is what I love- improving the process to make everyone’s life easier and saving the company money at the same time.

Get the candidate to think “we can’t do that.”  This one is great for testing their critical thinking skills.  You want to pose a problem in which the easy answer is “we can’t do that.”  The average candidate will look at the situation and say that it can’t be done.  The great candidate will imagine some scenario where it can be done or will offer alternatives and trade-offs.  This is the type of person you are looking for if you want critical thinking skills.