Many managers ask me about how to deal with email overload and we’ve covered that a number of times on our courses and in blogs. But I also get enquiries from people who are paper-holics, unable to tell me the colour of their desk because of the piles of paper they have on it.

So I want to give you some ideas of what to do if you suffer from this. All it takes is the will and the awareness to be organised.

If you’re suffering from having too much paper around you so you don’t know how to deal with it all, this is how you cure yourself:

1. Block out some clear, uninterruptable time to get organised. Schedule an appointment in your task manager or Outlook Calendar, just like you would with a normal meeting. Make it as long as it needs to break the back of it and switch off your email, put your phone to voicemail and close your door or place a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on your laptop. (Don’t put it on your desk…no-one will see it among all the other papers!)

2. Get the waste paper bin or recycle bin  and be ruthless. You can absolutely categorically guarantee that over half the paper can be dumped!

3. Look at a pile of papers and work your way through it. Ask yourself these questions:    What is it?  Why do I have it? Do I need it? What am I going to do with it?

If you can’t come up with a really great answer, recycle it. If you really, really need to keep it, place it in a folder. Don’t leave it on your desk without a file…it will just add to the orginal pile that you have been building up. Be honest with yourself. DO YOU REALLY NEED IT?

If you do need to keep it and do something with it, put it on your task list or in your calendar and make sure it’s done.

4. You will have thrown so much away that your waste basket will be filled and you will be full of remorse. But don’t give in. Don’t fall to your knees, tearfully stroking each piece of paper as if you’re saying farewell to a long-time friend. This is the start of you being organised. Submit to the inevitable and allow the paper to shred itself into thousands of pieces or find sanctuary in the recycle bin. You are doing it (and yourself) a favour. Don’t pull it back out ‘just in case’ you might need it again. You won’t. Let it go into the ether.

5. Think about the advantages. Now you will be better organised, less stressed, more able to find the important stuff and less likely to give up looking when the department on floor five want that report they sent you last week.

Easy? No. Worth it? Definitely. And promise yourself it won’t get that bad again!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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I’m surprised by how many of our delegates on management courses say their companies don’t blog, or if they do,they are spasmodic and not measured as to their effectiveness.

Some benefits that can be achieved through corporate blogging include:

• Increasing awareness of your company and your brand
• Establishing your company as an authority in your field
• Acting as an early warning system of any problems and giving you an avenue for  handling the situation in a proactive manner
• Two-way communication makes people feel more confident in your company, and if they feel they are being listened to, they will tend to become more loyal.

The number of blogs out there is still being counted, but experts agree that, including Chinese blog sites, the number is approaching 200 million. Without a blog, you’re missing a tried and tested method in communicating with your customer base and others.

In my new book, ‘eselling’,  I go into detail on how important blogging is for your corporate brand but also for you as an individual. If you manage a team of sales people, you need to identify how valuable it would be for them and you to have personal blogs for customer marketing purposes.

Without a blog presence today, you will be left behind. Take a look at your company blog site (if you have one) and ask yourself if the value of the blogs is as high as it could be. Are they being updated regularly? Do they offer good insights into how your company manages its outside influence? Could it offer more to readers so they come back often?

Do not neglect this important area of marketing for you and your team. There are always opportunities to share stories about your company and staff within it. Be aware of the value of the blog and help your company improve its marketing stance.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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Outsourcing has become very important to many companies due to its strategic implications and cost saving benefits, but many companies have not derived the most effective benefits from it. How can you ensure that if you outsource work, you stand the best chance of success?

Firstly, identify your company’s core and non-core activities. Your core activities are those items central to your successfully serving the needs of existing and potential customers in your markets. These are seen as adding value and giving you a distinct competitive advantage, and the process of identifying these activities should be carried out at a top management level. You should therefore build your capabilities around these core areas that are critical to your business success. All non-core business can then be outsourced.

Take a strategic view of your outsourcing decisions. You shouldn’t act on short-term factors like cost saving and capacity constraints without highlighting whether the outsourcing will affect your competitive advantage and abilities to serve customers.

You should outsource what makes sense for the long-term business.

Benchmark each activity you wish to outsource against the capability factors of all potential external providers.

Keep core activities internally only if you can achieve a competitive advantage by doing so.

Measure all the actual and potential costs of outsourcing the activity, not just the cost of purchase.

You can establish a collaborative relationship with a supplier so you can exploit their capabilities, and this will offer the best of both worlds. You’ll be able to concentrate on what’s important to you and your customers, and you’ll be able to outsource the fringe business that will support you in assisting your customer base.

Make sure you choose wisely, because outsourcing can create more problems than they solve, as you haven’t determined the precise reasons for doing it in the first place.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Email has completely changed the way we work. Most managers we talk to consider themselves to be enslaved by the keyboard, unable to accomplish their daily tasks because of the amount of electronic, as well as paper, mail they receive.

What’s the best way of dealing with this? How can you proactively manage your in-box so it serves you, rather than the other way round?

Firstly, does it matter how many emails are in your in-box? Well, yes it does. If you have dozens or hundreds of emails in your in-box, you run the risk of losing sight of the importance of some of the messages, and will find it difficult to find something at short notice. Yes, you can use the search box, but that only proves you have too much information there, because you can’t find it easily.

Also, by not pruning your in-box, and your colleagues contributing as well, you add pressure to your company servers,causing the well-known and ill-timed message from IT that the servers have crashed again. Don’t moan…you added to the problem!

So here are some tips to deal with this dilemma:

Prioritise your in-box. Check the sender’s names…how quickly do you need to deal with their email? Check the subject…is it urgent or just for information? Is it your responsibility or can it be delegated on? Check the priority given by the sender…do they really mean it’s urgent?

This initial scan can help you identify those emails that need immediate attention, and those that can wait until you have more time.

Reply in stages. You may wish to send a brief acknowledgment to the sender first, following up with more detail later. This means you take control of when you deal with it, and the sender isn’t wondering what’s going on. This is useful when you need to get more information before replying or when you’re angry, upset or confused about a message and you need time to compose yourself.

Set specific time for dealing with incoming mail. That way, you control it rather than the other way round. Resist the temptation to check every email the moment the tell-tale sound alerts you to a delivery. Most managers tell us that checking first thing in the morning, again around lunch and again later in the afternoon gives them time to deal with other stuff in their day, too.

Use a filing system to manage your messages. Check what the archiving policy is for storing emails, and if you have to keep them for a certain time period. If it’s a central facility, utilise that rather than filling up your own memory. Create your own filing system arranged by customer name, project name, date of receipt, research project, etc. Then use subtitles in the files to determine what still needs to be done.

For example, you might have a folder for ABC Ltd, then subtitles in the folder for invoices, projects, work in progress or items still to be done. The pending items can be marked ‘unread’ so they still stand out in the subfolder.

Many people find it useful to set up day-folders, just like a diary. Make five folders corresponding to days of the week, then when an email comes in and you want to deal with it on Wednesday, simply transfer it to the Wednesday folder. That way, you have your to-do list for next Wednesday.

You need to practice good housekeeping with your in-box. Set time limits for how long a message will stay in your in-box. (Take a look now and see how old is the oldest message in your in-box…surprised, huh?). Decide what you are going to do with any messages that are there…file it, delete it, delegate it, action it…do something with it! If a response was necessary, make sure you’ve done it. Send unwanted messages to your ‘deleted messages’ file, then cleanse that file regularly.

Offer alternatives to email. Remember, there are practical and effective alternatives to email, like instant messaging, text, voicemail, teleconferencing, and (a communication method that seems to have gone out of favour recently!) actually talking to someone in real-time!

Check who your mail is coming from. If you find that much of your overwhelming email is coming from old subscriptions to sites you no longer have any interest in, purge the lists so you only get stuff from people you are actually going to read. Ask yourself…how many emails do I get that I delete without reading? Maybe they are from senders you can unsubscribe from.

So, remember to avoid these common mistakes:

Don’t react immediately to every email that comes in
Don’t let your in-box become another storage folder
Don’t become overwhelmed with too much clutter

That way, you reduce the risk of being overwhelmed by your inbox, and you can spend time on more important things…like running your department!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

We’re going to continue our look at the different roles of managers by focusing today on a manager’s role when it comes to dealing with information. As we noted earlier this week, a manager is responsible for monitoring information, disseminating information, and acting as a spokesperson. Let’s take a closer look at what each of those tasks entails.

As a monitor it is your job to keep track of what information is coming in and going out of your organisation. In order to do this you must accept and review information that you receive (whether you asked for it or not) as well as ask the questions needed in order to obtain new information.

The disseminator is responsible for handling and distributing the information he or she has received. This means making sure that subordinates and, in some cases, higher ups receive the information you have gathered – especially if they would not otherwise know about it.

As a spokesperson you may be asked to share information that is pertinent to your particular work group with other work groups within your organisation. In some cases you may be asked to give reports to people who work outside of your organisation. Either way, you’re going to be responsible for the proper transmission of information.

The way you handle information is imperative to the success of not only your own career but your organisation as a whole. Take the time to look at every piece of information you receive and determine whether or not it is really critical and, if it is, make sure it gets shared with the right people as soon as possible!

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
Free email course “Improve your Management Skills”