Too Familiar?

Here is a new system that we created within our company.  I suggest that everyone have the same 3 categories across the team, but that the prioritization is role-specific.

Determine your 3 categories that all of your actions fall under (or should fall under).  In our company, I determined the following as our 3 categories:

1. Revenue producing:  an item on the to-do list that will bring money into the company
2. Service-related:  an item on the to-do list that will make our members or clients lives and businesses better
3. Brand awareness and networking: actions that will help build our brand throughout the industry and beyond

Based on your list, prioritize your categories.  My particular role in our company is bringing in new business and also long-term strategy.  If my role was to service our clients and members more directly, I would prioritize the categories differently.  Therefore, my category prioritization is as follows:

1. Revenue production
2. Brand awareness, strategy, and networking
3. Service

Determine some examples of what each category would entail.  For example, I would use the following examples for our company:

1. Revenue production: sales calls, creating letters of agreement, invoicing, etc.  For your firm, this might also be billable hours or creating proposals.
2. Brand awareness, strategy, and networking:  arranging presentations at design centers, writing blog posts, staying connected with my professional network, etc.
3. Service:  adding functionality to the website that would improve the client experience, monthly member calls, etc.

A few more ideas:

• Establish a “D” category.  There will naturally be things that fall into the “Other” category.  We call those category “D” items.  These will still need to get done but in the prioritization exercise, they will be the items that are least important to your business.
• Every time you add something to your to-do list, make sure that you put a letter next to it or color code it.  This will show you where you need to be prioritizing and what items can be downgraded.

For more great techniques to work smarter, I suggest Gina Trapani’s columns at FastCompany.com. What systems do you use to prioritize your laundry list of to-dos?

It’s 8:30 am Monday morning and you turn on your computer to start the day.

Enforce the one click rule. Once you open an e-mail it is much more time efficient and effective to reply the minute you finish reading it.

Organize e-mails by folders. Set up a folder with-in your inbox for each client to catalog all of your correspondence.  Then broaden your electronic mail message organization method with more general folders. Personally, I recommended assembling a folder for each client project, pricing, acknowledgements, tracking information, and invoices.  You can tailor your folders to your needs, for it will drastically reduce the time spent searching for e-mails.

Weekly cleaning of your inbox, spam, and unwanted deleted items. If you really want to go the extra mile, take a few minutes to unsubscribe from promotional e-mail lists you don’t use.  Cleaning out your e-mails will not only increase your productivity, it will also free-up storage space for the entire office.

Mondays seem to frequently start for me as mentioned above and then quickly spiral out of control; all of a sudden it is 6:30 or 7 pm and while I have been frantically busy all day, I have not checked one item off of my best laid Monday plan.  Unlike Office Space, as a CEO, this is what I call our Case of the Mondays.  While I will take our Mondays over the cubicle nation Mondays depicted in the movie any day, I still feel less than fulfilled after a day like this of heavy firefighting.

I recently read a great article by Peter Bregman for Harvard Business Review with tangible steps to managing your day.  As today is a Monday and we still have four more days left this week, I thought this might be particularly applicable to making the most out of not just tomorrow but the rest of the week.

[Below is an excerpt from Harvard Business Review]

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.

Read more…

In interior design, we are hired by our clients to be innovative and creative.  However, are we carrying that ability to innovate and be creative into how we run our businesses?  Furthermore, are we using our gift of visual thinking to represent that innovation?  In a main stage presentation called Fostering Innovation in Turbulent Times, Tom Wujec, Fellow at Autodesk, gave a convincing argument for not only the importance of innovation in general, but also for the special importance of encouraging innovative process creation through sketching.

Tom Wujec

The backbone of every good product or service is innovative teams that augment their creativity, Wujec argues.  How do they augment this creativity?  They make the creativity visible.  In an industry where many of us are primarily visual learners, this becomes of paramount importance.  When thinking about how to innovate and improve any of your business processes, post visuals on a giant bulletin board or use a huge white board to visual where you are going.  Could your manuals or communications be more visual?  Wujec gave a great example of Mattel turning a 60 page manual that shows the flow of money through the company into a 1 page visual that even a 12 year old could understand.  Let’s be honest, who is going to read 60 pages?  Let’s also be honest, who has time to write 60 pages??

Wujec argues that in order to propagate a new idea, whether it be for a large problem within the firm or for a small task, put it on one page and make it visual.  An example of this from Autodesk is below:

Wujec also argues that a linear innovation process doesn’t work anymore.  If you try to innovate linearly, it’s much easier to get stuck and bogged down in one aspect of the process.  When you get stuck, you are much more likely to throw in the towel.  Wujec used this visual to show the innovation process.  Not a coincidence that he shows the innovation process as a drawing.

Again, as an industry of visual people, we have a leg up.  From this point forward, make all of your conceptual ideas visual.  At Gibson Design Management and Gibson Design Group, we are big fans of the giant post-its.  It’s rare that one is not on the wall with a process that we are tossing back and forth.  “Writing on the walls” serves one main purpose: collaboration.  Through putting up what one, two, or three of us are working on, others can and will chime in with ideas.  We are then able to propagate an idea much more easily than a piece of paper that sits on one of our desks.

The $60 million question is: are you taking the time out of your day to actually come together and flush through a process?  Even if you are a sole proprietor, are you setting aside some time to figure out where innovative improvements need to be made?  As designers, I would imagine that many of you sketch to solve design problems.  Why aren’t you sketching to solve business problems?  Give it a try.  The next time you sit down and think about an area of your business that needs improvement, start drawing.

Post note: There is a book by Dan Roam called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.  I would recommend picking it up if you subscribe to the idea that through drawing we can solve ideas more quickly and clearly.  If you’re not sold yet, you might be swayed by this excerpt from the book:

“When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen.  Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.  Three arrows to show direct flights.  Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.”  – excerpt from The Back of the Napkin

Dan also has a great website that explains many of the theories at BackoftheNapkin.com.

The article certainly got me thinking about my own home office.  We have a couple different rooms in our house that I could use to set up my office.  I can’t quite seem to make up my mind which one is the best.  For the past three months I have been using a small desk and a few bookcases in our den.  However, I am a girl who loves organization and having lots of space; this set-up leaves me with too little desk space and no filing cabinet.  However, I enjoy the view out of my window and the fact that this room is farthest away from the hustle and bustle of my home.  What is a girl to do! 

Kay's home office

I would love to see pictures of your “creativity at work” – what environment helps you create your best work?  Maybe it’ll help me come up with my own permanent solution.