I have been cleaning out closets and drawers and tossing, tossing, tossing. It’s that time when I want to use the new year calendar event as a mid-year re-group, re-focus, re-evaluate, re-start. Cleaning up the stacked junk all around helps me.
Chris Brogan in the December 2010 issue of Entrepreneur called “The New Attention Deficit” makes a point that we have allowed technology to crowd our lives so much that we do not focus enough on the hear and now, which naturally leads to a less productivity. He offers tips on other ways to clean up the mess we may find ourselves in. A few of them speak to me. Perhaps they are calling your name, as well.
“Pick two or three 30-minute windows” to deal with email correspondence. There’s no doubt that the drip, drip, drip of email throughout the day is a disturbance to efficiency. We might think we’re great at shifting gears constantly, but the reality is any clutch can be over used, causing the transmission to operate less effectively. And, yes, stop email notifications. Goodness, do we really need to know the second every email enters our inbox? Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised at how much more clear your thinking seems when it has more to do with changing habits than how much mental acuity-activating supplements you took in the morning.
Pick a task and stick to it. Help yourself by closing all those open windows and tabs that you are not actively using. They, too, are mere distractions that can tempt us to sneak away from our work more often than we should.
I am amazed how often I am with people who think it is necessary to answer every single phone call, regardless of what they’re involved in. Are you and your callers so important that immediate contact is essential to each day’s success? It’s that changing gears thing again. Do we really need to do that to our brains all day long? No. Let your voicemail do its job. Just be sure to return the calls in a timely manner and as needed. Chances are, just like unopened mail on your desk, when you get to the voicemail, the urgency no longer exists. And life goes on.
One of the worst things, in my mind, that indulging with technological communication methods has done is to limit human contact. We’ve got to remember that first we are people who really do need other people. We need to hear voices in a real conversation, we need to see people and greet with a handshake or a hug, and we need to know we’re appreciated and to know we are heard. How does it feel when you are with a friend, client or superior and you see their eyes glancing at the monitor in front of them, answering every phone call, or, what I think is even worse, texting? Do you feel like they’re with you? Are they really paying attention to what you offer or to your needs? Here’s a little Golden Rule advice: turn off your monitor, put your phone on vibrate, and look eye to eye at the person you are with. It doesn’t matter what business we are in, human relationships build it in some way and certainly they help grow and maintain any healthy business. Give humans the attention you, they and your business deserve.
I agree with Brogan that the minutes we save by cleaning out our time-junk and setting technology boundaries will be used wisely to our greater success in business and life in general. And the people we’ve built relationships with by doing so will be grateful that we have made a significant place for them along the way. Now that makes for a happy new year.
Cheryl Ann Wills, co-owner The Hard Bean Cafe
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