Our 100th Newsletter: Celebrate With A Challenge!

Mind Tools Newsletter 100 - May 13th, 2008 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email

Contents: What's New? Make Time with Action Programs Emotional Intelligence and Risk Management A Final Note

Welcome to the 100th edition of the Mind Tools newsletter. We're very proud to be sharing this milestone with you!

We have an extra special issue today with an extra article, an irresistible offer, and news of our celebration "100 Minute Challenge"!

Would you like to find an extra 100 minutes in your working week? We’re challenging you to do just that, with a little help from some great Mind Tools resources.

The 100 Minute Challenge

So what would you do with an extra 100 minutes?

Would you focus on completing that all important project, drum up some extra business, go to the gym, or spend more time with your family? Improving your time management skills can be incredibly rewarding. So why not join us, and take up the challenge today?

The first step towards your 100 extra minutes is to read our first article in today's newsletter - looking at Action Programs - and then to imagine exactly how you will use your extra time. More instructions later!

Use of Action Programs is just one of the 39 powerful techniques taught in "Make Time for Success!", our popular, in-depth, time management and personal productivity course.

An Unbeatable Time Management Bonus - "Make Time for Success" Fre'e!

For the next 8 days only, as a 100th newsletter celebration, we're offering Make Time for Success (normally selling at US$37) for fre'e when you join the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club. What's more, the first month's membership is just US$1, and club membership comes with our risk fre'e guarantee - if you don't like the club - for whatever reason - you can cancel at any time and get your last month's fees back.

With the practical skills of "Make Time for Success!", combined with the rich support and encouragement of the Career Excellence Club, you have an incredibly powerful career accelerating combination. When you join, you'll be well on the way to surpassing the 100 minute challenge in very good company! To find out how, simply click here.

Time management is just one of the important personal effectiveness skills available to members of the Career Excellence Club. It's a vibrant, dynamic and enjoyable learning environment, with new resources each day of the working week. These range from articles, Bite-Sized Training lessons, audio Expert Interviews and Book Insights, to forum discussions led by our coaches and trainers. Find out for yourself and get "Make Time For Success!" for fre'e too!

What Else Is New: Emotional Intelligence & Risk Management

For this special edition of the Mind Tools newsletter, we have two more new articles for you at the Mind Tools site.

Whilst our Action Program helps you build some truly essential time management skills, or second article Emotional Intelligence helps you work well with other people, and have a healthy attitude towards them. Click here to find out more about what emotional intelligence is, and how to develop it.

Our third new article this week looks at the Risk Impact / Probability Chart. This helps you assess the likelihood and potential severity of risks.

In the Career Excellence Club, we have some great new resources, adding to the wonderful resource pool that members enjoy. Coach Sharon Juden helps members redress the work/play balance, whilst Trainer Dianna Podmoroff looks at how to develop your recruiting skills. Among the other new resources, we report on the FIRO-B tool for interpersonal skills assessment, and we review John G Miller's "The Question Behind the Question". To find out more about the club, just click here .

We hope you enjoy this special edition of the newsletter!

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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100 Minute Challenge Article:

Make Time with Action Programs

Becoming Exceptionally Well Organized

	Bringing focus to the way you work.

You are probably familiar with the idea of "To-Do Lists."

To-Do Lists are great for managing a small number of tasks. The problem is that, for most of us, our To-Do List is not really a planned, focused action list. Rather, it is a sort of a catch-all for a lot of things that are unresolved and not yet translated into outcomes.

Specific entries, such as "Call Tina," exist along with vaguer aspirations, such as "Get started on house painting project." Often, the real actionable details of what the list-maker has "to do" are actually missing. (Take, for instance, the house painting project: more precise entries would be choose color scheme, buy paints, and so on.)

What this means is that you tend to do the specific tasks, and fail to make progress with the big, important projects. And even if you do get beyond the quick actions, having a complete project as a "to do" can lead you to focus all of your attention on it. This makes multi-tasking difficult.

This can be a serious problem in a job where you need to make progress on many different projects at the same time - and this is exactly the situation most senior managers find themselves in.

This is where Action Programs are useful. Action Programs are "industrial strength" versions of To-Do Lists.

Because they incorporate short-, medium- and long-term goals, they allow you to plan your time, without forgotten commitments coming in to blow your schedule apart. Because priorities are properly thought through, you'll be focusing on the things that matter, and not frittering your time away on low value activities. And because they support delegation, they help you get into the habit of delegating jobs where you can. All of this lets you save time - and get away on time - whilst also significantly increasing your effectiveness and productivity.

How to Use the Tool:

Follow this four-step procedure to create your Action Program:

Step 1. Collection

First, make a list inventory of all the things in your world that require resolution. Try to collect and write down everything - urgent or not, big or small, personal or professional - that you feel is incomplete and needs action from you to get completed.

To an extent, this collection is taking place automatically. E-mail requests are getting stored in your email account, memos demanding attention are being delivered to your in-tray, mail is reaching your mailbox and messages asking for action are accumulating on your voice mail.

But there is other stuff - stuff that is idling in your head, projects you want to run, things you intend to deal with lying at the bottom of the drawer, ideas written down on stray bits of paper - that need to be gathered and put in place too. Bring all of these actions and projects together and inventory them in one place.

And - this is really important - make sure that your personal goals are brought onto this list.

Tip 1: You can experience tremendous stress if you have too many mental "To Dos" floating around in your head. You never know whether you've forgotten things, and you always have that terrible feeling of not having achieved everything you want to achieve. By writing down everything on your Action Program, you can empty your mind of these stressful reminders and make sure you prioritize these actions coherently and consistently. This has the incidental benefit of helping you improve your concentration, simply because you do not have these distractions buzzing around your mind. Tip 2: The first time you create your Action Program, you're going to spend a while - maybe two hours - putting it together. This is the up front cost of organizing your life. However, once you've done it, you'll be amazed at how much more in control you feel. Also, it will take relatively little effort to keep your Program up-to-date after this. Tip 3: You'll find it easiest if you keep your Action Program on your computer as a word processor document. This will make it easy to put together, update and maintain on a routine basis without a lot of tedious redrafting.

Step 2. Pruning

Now, process the list you made in step 1, by looking carefully at each item.

Decide whether you should, actually, take action on it. A lot of what comes our way has no real relevance to us, or is really not important in the scale of things. If that is the case, then delete these things from your inventory.

Step 3. Organizing and Prioritizing

This comes in three parts.

First of all, review your inventory of items. For any which are separate, individual actions that make up part of a larger project, group these individual actions together into their projects.

For example, at home, you may want to improve your bathroom, and repaint your living room: these can go into a "Home Renovation" project. At work, you may be providing input into the requirements for a new computer system, and may be expected to test and then train your team on this system at a point in the future: all of these go into a "computer system" project.

What you'll find is that once you start, items will almost seem to "organize themselves" into coherent projects.

You also need to make sure that your personal goals are included as individual projects.

Second, review these projects, and allocate a priority to them (for example, by coding them from A to F) depending on their importance. Clearly, your personal goals are exceptionally important projects!

Third, insert your projects into a formatted Action Program.

The Action Program is split up into three parts:

1. A "Next Action List," which shows the small next actions that you will take to move your projects forward.
   
2. A "Delegated Actions List," which shows projects and actions have delegated to other people.
   
3. A "Project Catalog" that shows all of the projects you are engaged in and the small individual tasks that you have identified so far that contribute to them.

The great news is that, by this stage, you've already created the largest part of this: the Project Catalog! This is the list of prioritized projects and activities that you've just completed.

Typically, the Project Catalog is at the back of the Action Program, as it's often only referred to during a weekly review process.

Next, create the Delegated Actions List by working through your Project Catalog, and identifying tasks that you've delegated. Record these under the name of the person who you've delegated the activity to, along with the checkpoints you've agreed.

Tip: If you haven't yet delegated anything, or you haven't yet agreed checkpoints, don't worry! What we're doing here is creating the right framework - you'll have plenty of time to use this framework properly!

Typically, the Delegated Actions List sits in front of the Project Catalog in your Action Program document, as it's referred to quite often.

Finally, create your Next Action List by working through the projects to which you've given the highest priority - the projects that you want and need to move forward on straight away - and extracting the small, logical next actions for these projects.

The Next Action List goes on the front page of your Action Program, as you'll refer to it many times a day.

Tip 1: If the Next Action is going to take less than a couple of minutes, then why not do it right away? Make sure, though, that you come back and complete your Action Program! Tip 2: It's this selection of appropriate next actions that takes a certain amount of judgment. If one of your projects is of over-riding importance, then have several Next Actions from this project on your list, and keep other Next Actions to a bare minimum. However, if you need to keep a lot of projects "simmering away", have Next Actions from each on your list. Tip 3: Keep your Next Actions small and achievable, ideally taking no more that a couple of hours to complete. This helps you keep momentum up on projects and strongly enhances your sense of having had a productive, successful day. If Next Actions are larger than this, break them down. For example, if your Next Action is to write an article, break this down into research, planning, writing, fact-checking and editing phases. Then make the research phase your Next Action, and put the rest of the stages in your project catalog. Tip 4: Where you have several Next Actions, prioritize them from A to F, depending on their importance, value, urgency and relevance to your goals. Then monitor your success in dealing with these actions. If you find that actions are "stagnating" on your list, consider whether you should either cancel these projects, or whether you should raise their priority so that you deal with them. Whatever you do, make sure you don't have too many actions on your Next Action List. Tip 5: As you work through this process, ask yourself if there are any tasks that you can delegate or, if appropriate, get help with. As you identify these, put these on your Next Action List, with the action being to delegate the task. When you've delegated the task, move it onto your Delegated Actions List, along with the checkpoint times and dates you've agreed.

Now review the Next Action List. If it is too cluttered, move some of the less urgent/important jobs back into the project catalog. If it is thin and under-challenging, pull up some more Next Actions from the Project Catalog.

Also, it makes sense to prioritize the items (for example, from A-C) in the Next Action List so you know what to focus on (it's unlikely you'll have any Actions with a priority lower than C on your Next Action List).

Step 4. "Working" Your Action Program

An Action Program is typically fairly long. But you don't have to run through the entire Program every day!

Usually, you'll only be dealing with the top page or pages. Some activities may be day-specific or time-specific. Depending of the way you work, these can be either maintained as the top page of your Action Program or marked on your calendar.

In effect, these pages are just a new form of your old To-Do List. It is just that only specific short actions are outlined here, while the major projects to which the actions belong are stored in your Project Catalog.

What you must do, however, is review your Action Program periodically, for example, every week (put time for this in your schedule). Delete or archive items you've completed, move items from the Project Catalog to the front pages as you make progress on your project, and add any new actions that have come your way.

Summary:

The Action Program is an "industrial strength" version of the To-Do List. It helps you to process the projects you want to run into actionable activities, and then manage them within a three-tier structure.

The "Next Action List" heading lists the precise, immediate actions that you need to perform to move your projects forwards.

The "Delegated Actions List" records details of the projects and actions you have delegated.

The "Project Catalog" heading lists the projects that you want to work on, along with other actions non-urgent you have gathered that will contribute to the completion of these projects.

This approach helps you maintain focus on daily jobs and long-term goals at the same time, and it means that you always have a plan for "next action" at any moment. This puts you in control, and also gives you a real sense of achievement.

More than this, this approach helps you to multi-task effectively, helping you to manage and progress many projects simultaneously. This is particularly important as you progress your career, and as the jobs you take on become increasingly complex and challenging.

Use of Action Plans is just one of 39 powerful tools taught in Mind Tools' premier time management and personal productivity course, "Make Time for Success!"

Just a reminder: As a celebration of this 100th newsletter, you can download Make Time for Success for fre'e when you join the Career Excellence Club before midnight PST, Wednesday, May 21, 2008. Click here or visit http://www.mindtools.com/rs/CXCLink to find out more!

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And Now For the 100 Minute Challenge! We're challenging you to find an extra 100 minutes next week, 19 - 23 May, as part of celebrating the 100th Mind Tools public newsletter. But don't wait until next week to figure out how you'll find your 100 minutes - start honing your time management skills right now!   As essential reading for the challenge, we strongly recommend the articles on: Activity Logs - Seeing how you really spend your time. Scheduling - Planning your best use of time. The Action Program (above) - How to be exceptionally well organized. Read these articles, and get the hang of these techniques this week. Then apply them in full next week, and see how much time you save! 100 Minute Challenge - What will you do with your extra 100 minutes? A great way to motivate your challenge is to decide how you will make the very most of those extra minutes. Set yourself a timeframe, and promise yourself a reward too! By [insert date] . . . . . . . ., I will have 100 extra minutes in my working week. I'll use mine to . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And, to celebrate and reward myself, I'll . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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A Final Note from James

I do encourage you to read the three 100 Minute Challenge articles, and apply the techniques next week - you're sure to see a huge improvement in productivity and effectiveness. And do reward yourself for creating new time for yourself. This really will help you turn good time management intentions into good personal productivity habits!

In the next issue, we'll ask you "How good is your anger management?", and we'll look at the fascinating topic of cross-cultural business etiquette.

Until then, have a fantastically productive two weeks, and do try the club out - with the bonus as well, there's so much it can do for you!

James

James Manktelow
Click here to email
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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