Need more time for innovation (or whatever)?

How to get three hours back every day

by Matt Heinz

I need more hours in the day, and I assume you do as well. Between our personal and professional lives, there's always too much to do and not enough time to do it.

But despite these challenges, I'm constantly looking for ways to do two things:

1. Eliminate distractions
   
2. Make better use of "down time"

If you're trying to do the same, here are eight things I'd recommend trying. Collectively, I think they effectively give me back about three hours every day.

Don't drive

• We waste a lot of time in the car, driving. Except for returning a few phone calls, this isn't very productive time typically. If you can take the bus, other public transportation, or even carpool with coworkers, you can use part of that time to get caught up on other work. Catch up on email offline, brainstorm something without other distractions, and work through other things on your to-do list. Worst case, catch up on some of your reading. Any of that is better than stop-and-go traffic.

Always have something to read with you

• Everywhere you go, carry something you want to read. It can be printed materials (newspapers, magazines, printed-out articles), or it can be saved content on your SmartPhone. For example, on my iPhone I have access to my RSS feeds via Google Reader, a mobile version of ReadItLater that syncs Web articles I want to read, and also an iPhone version of Kindle software to catch up on a book I'm reading. There are so many times during the day when I'm waiting, or in a line, that can be used for a few minutes to catch up on some of this.

Avoid and cancel meetings

• Do you really need to attend every meeting on your schedule? Have you yourself scheduled meetings that can be more effectively handled with a 5-10 minute conversation in the hallway? I'd be willing to bet that 25% of your meetings this week aren't worth your time. Figure out which ones they are, and get your time back.

Keep your email offline, all the time

• If you use Outlook in particular, right-click on the icon in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and select "Work Offline". This will essentially "freeze" the email in your inbox currently, and queue up anything in your Outbox to sync when you want to. This helps you focus on what's at hand, without getting distracted in real-time by new incoming messages. Click the send/receive button when you want to, but otherwise stay more focused and more productive without the constant distractions.

Forward your phone to voicemail when you need/want to focus

• Most phones and phone systems give you the ability to point inbound calls directly to voicemail. If you need to focus on something, shouldn't you turn off this distraction as well? You don't have to do this all day. But if the project in front of you will take 30 minutes to get done, don't let things like new emails and phone calls distract you. That 30-minute project could take 60-90 minutes easy if you check email, take a call, and have to get re-engaged and focused again.

Get up earlier

• Would it really be that hard to get up 30 minutes earlier? This may not be your most productive, awake time. But an extra 30 minutes (when the rest of the house is still sleeping) could be used for reading, exercise, whatever you want. This alone gives you an extra 3.5 hours a week, and that's a lot of time.

Do your most important 1-2 tasks/projects FIRST every day (before email and voicemail)

• At the beginning of each day, you already know what 1-2 things are most important to accomplish. But most of us, before tackling those projects, check email and voicemail and quickly get distracted by the day's interruptions and fire-drills. Nine times out of ten, those distractions can wait until your most important tasks are finished. Get them done first, and I guarantee you'll feel (and be!) far more productive every day.

Delegate

• You probably aren't delegating to others actively enough. You're probably doing too much yourself, including things might be more efficient to be done by others (and sometimes with better results). You could be using a service like TimeSvr to get small tasks done by someone else. You could use eLance to outsource a variety of administrative projects. You could use ActiveWords to shortcut frequently-used activities on your computer. Long story short, you're working too hard and doing too much. Do less yourself, but get the same and more done.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

True Test of a First Rate Innovator

by Robert B. Tucker

Tom Peters used to remind executives that it mattered little what they proclaimed to be their top priorities. Instead, the "In Search of Excellence" co-author advised looking at your calendar to reveal your main concerns, because that is where you are spending your time.

I thought of Peters' admonition when reading IBM's recently-released study of 2500 chief information officers. The contrast in the calendars of CIOs in high and low growth companies was quite revealing.

Low growth CIOs, according to the analysis, are bogged down in the muck and mire of tactical issues. Their calendars reveal 50 to 60 hour weeks reacting, fixing problems. They sweat and toil away just keeping the network up and running. They fight fires to the point of exhaustion. And still nobody is much happy with their work.

High growth CIOs work differently. Their calendars reveal a different use of time. For sure, they keep critical systems up and running and no doubt fight their share of fires.

But as a group they seem to have figured out how to keep their powder dry. They make a point to helicopter up high enough to see the big picture. To think about strategic issues the way the CEO must. These innovation-adept CIOs devote a whopping 87 percent more of their time "enabling the business and corporate vision" than their slow-growth peers.

These CIOs also seem to have realized that their unique position in the organization gives them a perspective few others have. And in recent years, they have focused laser-like on improving their innovation skills.

Titled "The New Voice of the CIO," the survey identifies the personal best practices of highly effective Chief Information Officers. For instance:

• High growth CIOs spend an impressive 55 percent of their time on activities that spur innovation. Low growth CIOs are mired in tactical execution and IT issues.


• Specific innovation activities include generating buy-in for innovative plans, implementing new technologies and managing non-technology issues.


• High growth CIOs spend 94 percent more time integrating business and technology to innovate than low-growth CIOs.


• High growth CIOs actively use collaboration and partnering technology within the IT organization 60 percent more often than low growth CIOs.

Ever alert to new ways to add value to their organizations, today's standout CIOs focus on return on investment from technology. They involve themselves in reinvesting the cost savings from technological innovation into other parts of the business, namely product and strategy innovations.

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that the "true test of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and still function." This is what all of us are required to do to add unique value to our organizations.

Although IBM researched the changing role of leading CIOs, the report challenges all of us to rethink priorities in a time of challenge and change. Even if you're in HR, logistics, purchasing or payroll or some other functional area, what your calendar reveals about how you invest your time can be instructive.

How do these high growth managers find time for strategic thinking and innovation while others are bogged down in the weeds of daily execution? How do they "decommoditize" the value they create for the organization and become indispensible? Read this report and you'll find yourself taking notes... and taking action!


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Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

The Innovator Within

by Matt Heinz

I'm constantly blown away by the brilliant, innovative ideas around us. It's a shame that so very few of those ideas see the light of day.

Brilliant people with innovative ideas are everywhere, but most of their ideas get caught in one of three traps:

Fear/Risk: Innovative ideas are inherently risky. They buck trends, go against the status quo. The risk of failure is quite high. It's why most people keep their day jobs and merely dream about their ideas vs. taking action on them. Oftentimes this is born out of income risk. I can't quit my day job to give this a shot - if it fails, my income and family suffers. Or it could be the risk of ruining your reputation. Try something innovative at work, and if it fails that may damage your success record. Or your promotion. Or raise. This is why so many great ideas, innovations and start-ups are born in a recession. Individuals with great ideas lose their secure jobs, so the risk of starting or trying something totally different goes down significantly.

Rejection: Because innovative ideas aren't what people expect, they get rejected easily. If you raise an innovative idea in a big company, it's likely to get squashed. If you run a new idea by someone who's embedded in the status quo, they won't understand what you're saying. Worse, they'll tell you it will never work. Innovators get rejected - a lot - but for many would-be innovators, that rejection is too much to overcome. Either they can't move forward in their existing organization, or become convinced that the nay-sayers are right. That's a travesty.

Bandwidth: Who has time for new ideas anyway? You woke up this morning with too much to do as it is - current projects, current deadlines, current initiatives. We then go home to family, kids, chores and a thousand things pulling at our time. Innovations usually start in someone's spare time, but finding that time can itself be a significant challenge. If you get laid off, and suddenly have a plethora of time, the bandwidth limiter is eliminated. But for the rest of us, finding time to triage and pursue our new ideas can often be an insurmountable challenge.

For every entrepeneur, no matter how confident or determined, these hurdles exist. For the majority of individuals with great ideas, these hurdles can in fact be crippling.

But there are equal but opposite attributes that successful innovators have that anyone can learn and/or adopt. These include courage, tenacity, passion, organization and thick skin. But perhaps most important is conviction. Conviction that you're onto something, that you're right, conviction that it doesn't matter if others can't see it, if it's risky, or if it takes a few extra hours in the evening and weekends to tinker with it.

There are innovators within all of us. Everyone has these amazing ideas - be they recurring or fleeting - that can create massive change, efficiency and betterment in the world around us - at a micro and macro level, and everywhere in between.

Perhaps part of the solution isn't to convert innovators into entrepreneurs, but to create a better channel of innovative ideas into the hands of those with the time, courage and tenacity to make them happen. Make the idea exchange easy, but with all the right attribution and financial rewards available to the originator.

Your neighbor has an idea that could change the world, but isn't doing anything about it. How do we change that?


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Five Minute Rule helps get intimidating projects done

by Matt Heinz

We all have big, intimidating projects on our plates that, frankly, are a little scary. They either feel like a lot of work, or you're not exactly sure how to tackle them. So, we hem and haw and avoid them.

I've found that a fairly simple trick can help me get more of those projects done. It takes just five minutes.

When I'm facing a big project or task, I tell myself I'm going to spend five minutes getting it started, and that's it. I'm either going to just do five minutes worth of that task, or just spend five minutes planning how to tackle it.

The secret of the Five Minute Rule is that I almost always keep going, blow past the five minutes, and get the task done in far less time than if I would have kept procrastinating.

It's those five minutes that demonstrate how relatively quickly & easily the task can actually get done. If you get five minutes of momentum, sometimes that's all you need to keep going to the finish. If you use the five minutes to brainstorm, it makes the task far less intimidating and easier to get done right away.

Find something on your list right now and give it five minutes. Let me know what happens next.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Keeping it Simple

by Mike Myatt

One of the most effective ways to order your world is to simplify everything you encounter. However the problem is that keeping it simple often becomes very difficult when our basic human nature is to over-complicate everything we touch. In thinking about the people I respect the most, to the one, they possess the uncanny ability to take the most complicated of issues and simplify them. You will find that the best leaders, communicators, teachers, and innovators have a true knack for taking extremely complex, dense or intricate content and making it engaging and easy to understand. In fact, it was Leonardo Da Vinci who said:


"Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication."


In today's post I'll take a look at the often overlooked benefits of keeping it simple.

While simplicity may have become a lost art, understanding the importance of simplicity is nonetheless critical to your success in business. Consider all the presentations/meetings you've attended in the last few weeks. Was it the people who were able to articulate their positions in a simple and straight forward fashion, or the individuals that made things complex and tedious that got traction with their ideas?

It has been my experience that the more complicated, difficult, or convoluted an explanation is, that one or both of the following issues are at play: 1) the person speaking is a horrible communicator, or; 2) the person speaking really doesn't possess a true command of their subject matter. It is one thing to toss around the latest buzz-words or to have the most complex flow chart, but it is quite another thing to actually possess such a deep and thorough understanding of your topic that you can make even the most complex issues easy to understand.

It is almost as if business people have come to believe that complexity is synonymous with sophistication and savvy. It has been my experience that the only things that "complexity" is synonymous with are increased costs and failed implementations. There is an old saying in the software development world that states "usability drives adoptability" which tends to lend support to my observations. Those of you that know me have come to understand that I prefer to cut to the chase and get to the root of an issue as quickly as possible...this requires the ability to simplify, not complicate matters.

The truth is that simplifying something doesn't make it a trite or incomplete endeavor. Rather simplification makes for a more productive and efficient effort that is often more savvy than other more complex alternatives. As an example I'll use the area of design to prove my point. I can think of no better representation of simplicity at work than the iPod. Apple took something complex, sophisticated, and feature rich and crushed the competition by making it simple. The simplicity of the iPod is exactly what makes for a great user experience. Absolutely nothing is lost in the iPod's simplicity, and it is in fact the simplicity itself which makes it so classically elegant.

Another benefit of simplicity is that it serves as a key driver of focus, which enables greater efficiency, productivity, and better overall achievement. Keeping things simple allows you to focus on one thing at a time without the distractions that complexity by its nature breeds. I would suggest that you break down every key area of your business (operations, administration, marketing, branding, sales, finance, IT, etc.) and attempt to simplify your processes, initiatives, and offerings.

As a C-level executive you must focus on simplifying your day in order to maximize your efficiency. By simplifying everything from the information and reports you view, to your communications protocol, to your agenda, to your decisioning structure, you will be better able to operate in today's unnecessarily complex world.

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Top 10 Corporate Time-Wasters

Do you need time to innovate?

by Mike Myatt

Time is the only thing we all have in common, yet it's how we choose to spend it that defines and differentiates us as individuals. Even though time is a key success metric, I am always amazed at how many executives don't manage it as such. Time is indeed a precious and finite commodity, and those professionals that manage it wisely are those that achieve the greatest results. Show me an executive that doesn't leverage time to its highest and best use and I'll show you an executive likely to be replaced by one that can. In today's blog post I'll examine the value of time.

The proper understanding of how to use time directly impacts income. You see, time doesn't slow, nor can it be accelerated or recovered; it can only be wasted, invested, or leveraged. I often hear people espouse the axiom "don't work hard, work smart."

I have a bit of a different take on the subject as I work very hard at working intelligently. It was coming to an understanding of these fundamental principles at an early age that have made a tremendous difference in my life as contrasted with many others I've encountered along the way.

Whether you are a sales person, professional advisor, entrepreneur, or executive, you only have 24 hours in a day, which consists of 1440 minutes, and when reduced to the ridiculous amounts to 86,400 seconds. If you want to do more, earn more, serve more, influence more, or significantly change the level of your impact in any area, you simply must make more out of the time you have at your disposal. So, my question is this - How well do you leverage your 86,400 seconds?

Have you ever heard someone say they wish there was more time in a day?

While I've already pointed out that you cannot increase the amount of time in a day, I've also said that time can in fact be leveraged if you know how. Some people use only a portion of a full day, while others leverage the entire day, and those who are most productive leverage multiples of a day.

Multiples of a day you ask?

In my world there are far more than 24 hours in a day. Through making good use of personal time, leveraging staff and technology, outsourcing across different time zones, associating with quality people and organizations, managing risk, and having a laser like focus on highest and best use principles, I estimate that I'm able to average nearly a full week's work into a single 24 hour period while rarely working more than an average work week on a personal basis. Leveraging time is all about making good choices.

Are you making good choices?

The first step in making the most out of your time begins with the understanding that time itself is a key success metric. You can either leverage your time, or waste your time. Once you learn how to invest your time wisely, you can then get to a point where you can start to leverage your time into multiples. The first step in making this transition is to maximize personal time by avoiding the most common workplace time-wasters. According to most of the research I've read, the following items represent the Top 10 Corporate Time-Wasters:

1. A lack of focus and shifting priorities


2. Technology (phone, email, IM, social media, etc.) interruptions


3. Lack of planning


4. Biting-off more than you can chew (initiative overload)


5. Drop-in visitors


6. Ineffective delegation


7. Lack of organizational skills


8. Procrastination


9. Inability to say "No"


10. Unproductive meetings

Time can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Executives that understand how to use time to their advantage accomplish great things, and those who allow time to slip through their fingers don't. The lesson to learn is to accomplish more through leverage while decreasing personal time commitments. Remember that time is a finite commodity, and once a moment in time has passed it is gone forever.

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Stop Procrastinating - 2 Minutes or Less

by Matt Heinz

When I think about procrastination, I think first of bigger projects. I have a column to write, a proposal to finish, a report to publish.

The real time-suckers are the much smaller projects. If you read an email and don't take action right away, you're procrastinating. If you see an interesting article or blog post and don't do something with it right away, you're delaying action - and you're procrastinating.

I fight this type of mini-procrastination all the time. It doesn't mean I have to actually do everything right then and there. It just means I need to decide what to do, and move on.

But if the task takes two minutes or less (respond to an email, set up a meeting, quickly scan an article), I try to do it right away. With such a short time period required for action, delaying that activity (and reviewing the request or task again later) is pure wasted time. Add that time up across a day of emails, blog posts, phone calls, etc. and it's a ton of wasted time.

Simply acting on those two-minutes-or-less tasks right away will work wonders to clear your inbox, get things done, and keep you moving more productively throughout the day.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.