“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” -Bruce Lee
For well over 20 years I have been obsessed with the idea of how to get more done in a day. If only I could just be faster and more efficient, then I could be more productive and my life would be filled with enviable success. I bought every book and system on time management, getting things done, efficiency and prioritizing. I’ve owned Franklin Covey planners, digital To-Do applications and created a hundred file folders in my email system to organize it all. I was a firm believer in the results-by-volume approach.
I’ve realized in modeling Geniuses that I had it all wrong. I’ve learned from the world’s best and brightest is that it’s not about doing more, it’s actually all about doing less. It’s not about optimizing a large workload, it’s all about eliminating the workload in the first place. What can’t get eliminated can get done more effectively by employing a few tricks.
I have a friend who is a high level Executive VP at a Fortune 100 company. He controls a budget of $700M. He's a busy guy. For every 5 emails I send him, he MIGHT respond to one. And his response will always be one word. Maybe two. Things like: “Yes.” “Interesting.” “Busy.” Or “On it.” He never offers to DO anything in email. In all the years I have known him, he has never initiated an email to me. And he has trained even his closest friends and colleagues to not expect a response to any email they might send. Until I realized the brilliance of his strategy, I would tease him that he has the Steve Jobs approach to email. And then I realized that this was a perfect example of simply doing less. He starts by eliminating. Then if he decides to engage, it's so short and sweet and to the point that there isn't a wasted word. There is a reason he is at the top. He isn't being rude or dismissive. He makes lots of time for people in person. He is just prioritizing his output, making sure that he is producing real results, and not getting caught in the email vortex which claims so many lives. Smart. So I started modeling his strategy. It's taken a month or so, but my email volume is way down. I seriously have more hours in my day. If I offend a few people with short responses, I hope they'll forgive me and know that I am now a lot happier because I am spending less time at my computer and more time getting important things done. My fantasy is that more people adopt this strategy.
I was recently asked to share with a large women’s magazine some strategies on how to go from “Being Busy” to “Getting Things Done.” Below are a few points I shared with the magazine that I have gleaned from spectacularly effective people. Some of these examples apply to mom’s and women. Swap out the examples for things in the workplace and you’ll have a winning formula.
1. Be Effective, Not Busy - There is a universal truth that most of us keep ourselves busy to avoid doing the uncomfortable, yet critically important, things in life. We use being busy as an excuse for why we can't get other things done. For example, many people say "I'm too busy to get to the gym" or "I'm too busy to makes that cold call." We pride ourselves on getting a lot done, but we never stop to ask ourselves if we are getting the IMPORTANT things done. Do you really need to find a new job that makes you happy? Make an uncomfortable sales call? Find some quiet time to write that book you've always wanted to? Nearly all of us use the the excuse of 'being busy' to avoid what really matters. To dramatically change your life, try this exercise: for 3 full weeks, put an alert on your computer or phone that goes off at 10am, 1pm and 4pm that asks a simple question when you read it "Am I being productive or just active?" What you are really asking yourself is: are you being busy or are you being effective? What are the top-three activities that you use to fill time to feel as though you are being productive? If you want to get control of your time, figure out what really matters and cut out the busy work that you use as a way to avoid the important. Stop trying to be more efficient. Focus instead on being more effective. What is important to get done? Do that and forget the rest.
2. Create "Not To-Do Lists". Just because you've thrown a Fourth of July Party every year, doesn't mean you need to do it again this year. Or just because you attend monthly networking or PTA meetings doesn't mean you need to keep doing it. The fastest way to get through your work is simply to eliminate some of it. Spend an hour really looking at how you spend your time in a month, whether it's on social commitments, roles you've taken on at work, tasks you consistently do at home, etc., and decide what you aren't going to do. For example, many people have significantly cut back on their Christmas gift giving list. Or have outsourced their lawn care to a local kid in the neighborhood. Take a really hard look at your list and make some tough decisions. Although you might feel obligated to volunteer at your child's school event, give yourself permission to take a year off. Decide HOW you want to spend your time and then eliminate activities that take up a lot of time but don't serve your or your families goals. It's OK to not respond to every email these days. And it’s ok to ask your boss to help you prioritize your work and eliminate the low value tasks. The best question to ask to figure out what's important and what's not is: If you had a gun to your head and HAD to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities (e.g., email, phone calls, conversations, paperwork, meetings, driving, services, etc.), what would you remove that would keep the negative effect on income to a minimum? Train people not to expect email responses, or that you'll show up to every meeting. Get clear about your Not To-Do list and then share that list with people. They'll respect you for it.
3. Make Tight Deadlines Your Friend - Do you ever wonder how you are able to get about three weeks of work done in the day before you leave for vacation? Where without such a deadline that same work would take you, well, three weeks? This phenomenon has actually been extensively studied and has a name: Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law states that a task will swell is (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for it's completion. It's is the magic of the imminent deadline. The shorter the deadline, the greater the focus. The longer the deadline, the bigger monster in your mind you create. So if you have a large to-do list, take the related tasks, batch them up and then give yourself a tight deadline in which to complete them. Tight deadline require focus so be sure an eliminate distractions like email, text messages, Facebook, etc. when you work on them. Physically remove the distractions from your space. If you need to focus on something, lock your phone in the car outside and disable the internet on your computer. Put yourself in a place to focus and set a timer with a goal for what you want to complete in that amount of time.
4. Use a Magical Motivation Strategy - It's pretty hard to get motivated when you read through your To-Do list and see items like "Clean the Garage," "Weed the Garden," "Research Summer Camps," and "Write the Report for my Boss." The problem with To-Do lists is that when we read them, we put ourselves in the mental act of doing the work that often, in and of itself, is not all that fun. Highly effective people make "Goal Lists" instead of To-Do lists. This focus their attention on result instead of the work involved. Change your list to read, "Sparkly Clean Garage," "Healthy, Beautiful and Weed Free Garden ," "Summer Camp Registration Complete," and "Boss is Raving about my Completed Report." By focusing on the goal and mentally stepping into the good feelings you get from achieving the goal, you are naturally more motivated to complete the work. And it feels more fun.
5. Batch Your Activities - This might sound obvious, but it's amazing how many people don't think about batching up activities to save time. If it takes 10 minutes to drive to the store, the post office, the mall, a meeting or whatever, you can figure it's 20+ minutes roundtrip for one errand. It's actually more because you have to spend time getting ready to leave the house/office and then more time getting back into the groove. So really a trip to the store is more like 30-40 minutes in transit, plus the time it takes you at the store. The same goes for meetings. One of the fastest ways to increase productivity is to batch up activities. Batching up errands and meetings is the simplest. Run a whole bunch of errands at once. You can also batch up things like calling friends and family. Allocate 2 hours once a week to calling everyone. Or batch up 3 coffee dates with friends or colleagues all in one afternoon. Batch up bill paying, home maintenance, laundry, etc. into chunks of time where you can get a lot of it done at once. If you have a ton of laundry to do, it's probably faster to get it all done at once at the laundromat rather than interrupting your work every 30 minutes at home to get it done. Think of how you could batch your meetings or calls at work. Doing things one at a time is a huge waste because of the set-up and transition time between activities. Batching will give you back countless lost, unproductive hours in your week.
One of the best books I ever read on being more effective is The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss . If you're interested in more strategies on being effective, read Chapter 5: “The End of Time Management” pages 67-85. And Chapter 7: “Interrupting Interruption and Art of Refusal”, pages 94-118. (And there is another strategy of genius. Don’t read a whole “How To” book from cover to cover. Find the salient bits and just read those parts. See now, I just saved you 10 hours.)
Back in the 1970′s two remarkable behavioral scientists asked the question: How is it that some people just learn things faster than others? These two scientists, John Grinder and Richard Bandler, were teaching some classes and noticed that some students picked up the techniques they were teaching much more quickly than others. They decided to interview these highly effective learners to discover what they were doing in their minds that allowed them to apply new material quickly.
After interviewing several fast learners, they discovered that people who learn things quickly follow the same mental process. They found that effective learners had a natural ability to ‘rehearse’ something in their mind before actually doing it. Mental rehearsals allowed them to easily install new habits or behaviors that they wanted to do in the future. They mapped out this process, and then created a simple ‘technique’ anyone could use to learn new things quickly.
Want to learn a new golf swing technique? A new dance move? How to make your hair look the way your hairdresser does when you are at the salon? Or nail that big presentation you have to give at work? Follow this strategy anytime you want to quickly learning something new. For example, I personally use this strategy every time I am at my workout class and the instructor shows us a new move. I get it in a few seconds and notice I do the move near flawlessly right away while the rest of the class fumbles. The first couple of times you use this process it might take you a few minutes. You’ll get fast at it and be able to move through these steps in just a few seconds.
How to learn new things quickly, step-by-step:
1. Identify something you want to learn how to do. Break the steps down into appropriate chunk sizes so you can learn the pieces that make up the whole if it’s too big to learn all at once.
2. If you have someone teaching you this information, watch this person very closely. Make a mental recording of it. For example, if you have someone teaching you a new golf swing, watch this person do it and remember what they did.
3. Once you have a clear model of the desired behavior, imagine there is a virtual movie screen in front of you. Watch a mental movie of yourself on this screen and notice what you are doing NOW. If you are trying to learn a new golf swing, watch a mental movie of how you are currently swinging the club.
4. Next, watch a movie of you doing the new desired behavior. For example, watch yourself swinging the golf club in the way you WANT to be swinging it. Notice yourself swinging the club in the same way your instructor modeled it for you.
5. Once you see yourself doing the new behavior and it feels right, step into the movie and rehearse it being in it and experience it as if you were actually doing it. Move your body, say things to yourself. Really get into the act of doing the behavior as if you were really doing it. For example, physically practice the new golf swing with a club in your hands (real or imaginary). Rehearse it until it physically feels right. Make any necessary adjustments.
6. Imagine doing that new behavior in the future. Watch yourself doing this new behavior 1 week in the future, 1 month in the future, 6 months in the future, etc. Think of doing it with different people in different situations.
This rapid learning technique can be used for almost anything. If you have a big presentation to give, watch a mental movie of yourself giving the presentation perfectly, then step into the movie and physically rehearse it until it feels like you have it just right. Then imagine seeing yourself giving this presentation perfectly in the future. You’ll be amazed at how fast you’ll learn new things when you follow this technique.
Have you ever received a rejection letter in the mail? Been told “no” when you asked for someone’s phone number at a bar? Or been told you aren’t welcome to join an exclusive club?
Have you ever hung up the phone on a telemarketer mid-sentence? Shut the door on a sales rep who came to your house? Or walked by a homeless person asking for money and just ignored him?
Whether you are the one being rejected, or doing the rejecting, I think it’s safe to say that most people find rejection sucks.
There is probably no group of people more accustomed to rejection than salespeople. These folks, in my humble opinion, have one of the hardest jobs on the planet. I am often in awe of salespeople who deal with the rudest side of humanity and endless rejection, yet still manage to knock on another door or make another cold call with a smile on their face.
Awhile back my business partner and behavioral scientist, Tim Hallbom, and I decided to model out the strategies of some truly amazing sales people – those at the top of their game. We wanted to know, among other things, how these top salespeople stay positive in the face of so much rejection. What do they DO when they get rejected? How do they deal with it?
What we discovered was interesting. Here it is: top salespeople don’t believe they are ever rejected.
Here are a few quotes that came out during our interviews with these top salespeople:
“Just because someone chooses not to purchase, it doesn’t mean they won’t buy at some point in the future; one thing you can be sure of is change. There is really no such things as a ‘no’ answer in sales. Just ‘No, right now’.”
“That house just didn’t need the service offered.”
“That guy is one of 9 out of 10 who isn’t interested in the product.”
“I’ve been said ‘No’ to about a million times. It means nothing to me. I just move on to the next person.”
“Ok that’s not the right guy. Next.”
Read through these quotes again and see if you can detect any patterns in them. Notice anything in these words?
Tim and I looked at what these top salespeople said and realized there was one thing they all did in common: they de-personalized rejection. They reframed rejection in a way that didn’t affect them as people. In a word, they never felt they, personally, were rejected.
We discovered a pattern. They all used some version of this three-part mental strategy during their sales process when a potential customer said ‘no’:
1. After you get ‘rejected’, change the situation from a person who said ‘no’ to an inanimate object that ‘isn’t interested’. In other words, make it so that you are never rejected by a person, but rather a ‘thing’ isn’t in need of the good/service at this time. Some de-personalization strategies we discovered the top salespeople used are:
- Make it a numbers game. “That person is just a ratio. He’s 9 out 10 people who won’t be interested.”
- Recall something the person is wearing instead of their name or face. “That red shirt isn’t interested.”
- Recall the location instead of the person: “That house (or that office, that store, etc) isn’t interested.”
- Make it about the timing being off instead of the person not wanting it. “The timing is just not right for that person.”
These are all strategies for making it so that you aren’t being rejected by a person. Feelings don’t get involved when a ‘red shirt’ or a ‘house’ doesn’t want you. Feelings do get involved when ‘that really pretty girl Sarah just told me ‘no’ to my face!”
2. Replace the image in your mind of the person with an image of something impersonal. When someone said ‘No’, the salespeople employed a mental strategy where they replaced the image of a person’s face with an image of some thing. For example, when one door-to-door cable TV salesperson got the door slammed in his face by a mean person, he would walk away from the house and replace the image in his mind of the cranky guy at the door with an image of the house and then say to himself, “That house didn’t need the service.” He literally made a mental picture of the guy’s face, and then put that “behind” him so he couldn’t see it and replaced the image in his mind of the house. It’ sort of like those old Fisher-Price picture viewers where you click to move one image aside and then see the next one. He moved the picture of the face and clicked over to a picture of a house. With this strategy he remembered that the house didn’t need the service and he didn’t carry the image of the mean guy in his mind.
3. Say “Next” to yourself. Nearly all of the salespeople, once they heard a ‘No’ didn’t dwell on it for more than a second or two. They depersonalized it and then said to themselves “Next” and got ready for the next person they approached and completely forgot about the last person. As one salesperson said, “I have a memory like a goldfish.”
By using this strategy, the top salespeople never felt personally rejected. Since they never felt rejected they were able to maintain a really positive mental state throughout the day. It became clear that this positive mental state was probably the single most important factor that catapulted these salespeople to the top, where they made $1M+ a year. Brilliant.
Feel free to share your thoughts and comments! Where might you use this strategy?
Sundays have never been the same since Gary Larson retired. He said that after 15 years he ran out of ideas for The Far Side and felt he was getting repetitive. I can’t speak for the other millions of readers out there, but he made me laugh until the end. As a kid when my dad sat on the porch with his coffee, he would open the paper and immediately hand over the Comics section to us impatiently waiting kids and we’d tear through it looking for The Far Side funny first. Everything else in the section was just filler. If ever there was a cartoon genius, it was Gary Larson.
It’s a dream of mine to interview Gary and deconstruct how his “one-in-a-billion” mind works. A genius mind like that needs to be cataloged! Until I get the chance to share his Cartooning Strategy on this blog (which I fully plan to do!), I’d like to open this blog by paying homage to one of the great modern day geniuses and share a few of my favorite “Genius” cartoons with you. They still make me laugh every time I look at them. Enjoy!
