For those of us who work at a corporate office there are times when a break is the most refreshing thing. To help lighten the atmosphere in the office, create a place where people stop and smile – a bulletin board of clippings, funnies, photos, or even graffiti. I suggest you start the thing with just a couple items on it, hang it somewhere many people will see it, and invite others to add to it.

A bulletin board can be purchased for a few dollars at office supply stores, discount retailers like Target, and toy stores.

Consider ways to customize the board – wallpaper the surface with papers printed on your home printer with a watermark of the logo of your company or cover the surface with seasonal wrapping paper.

Ideas for starter material:

• Photos of your kids with a great caption
• Photos of your animals with a humorous bubble.
• A comic strip cut from Sunday’s paper.
• A fake award certificate that teases someone in the office like: Jason, the fastest talker award.
• A place to write.

Places to post a bulletin board where they’ve been a welcome addition:

• Lunch room
• Snack center
• Bathroom
• Locker room
• Water cooler

We had one of these in my dorm in college. The inside jokes and hilarious photos created a buzz and got a lot of participation. And, a bulletin board will get you out of your cube and away from a computer screen. Have fun with it!

P.S. Starting a board for home could be equally amusing!

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R & R (rest and rejuvenation) are the intentions behind the Friday @ Five entries. Often these are inexpensive and low key because you recharging your batteries can be more easily achieved without running around and doing, doing, doing. Many Friday @ Five entries are geared to do with your family or friends.

How do you keep up with the information being published on your field of expertise? How do you know when competitors release a new product? What free public relations are you getting by being mentioned in the media, blogosphere, or television? The bottom line question here is: “Are they talking about you (or your topic of interest)?” For example, I like to know when the Productivity Café is mentioned anywhere – in an article, online, in a blog posting.

Today a significant struggle in this information age is knowing where articles related to you, your company, your competitors, or your area of interest professionally and personally are.

Do you try to read the Wall Street Journal and local sports page every day? Do you scan a multitude of magazine subscriptions? Do you hire a clipping service to get information to you? Do you do a Google search every day on the keywords representing key areas of interest to you? Do you have 30 hours in each day? It seems it would take that to cover all that is produced electronically and in print. Deducting from the piles of untouched magazines and unfolded WSJs in my clients’ offices they’d like to keep up with that information but they have information overload. They have no time to get to the information search they’d like to do.

A shortcut to seeing a bulk of the information about your key interest is Google Alerts. Google Alerts will help you save incredible amounts of time if you’ve been looking for this information yourself and money if you’ve been paying for others to do it. Google Alerts notifies you when an article of interest has been found by its search engine. Since Google is the #1 search engine and is the go-to place for information about people, politics, and topics, as you already know, it’s great to have Google tell when it finds your information. Remarkably just a decade ago if you said, “I’ll just google that,” it would have been a meaningless phrase while today it means you’re going to go get some good information.

Here’s how it works:

1. You create your alert or search parameters by telling the Google Alert tool your keyword(s). In my case, ‘Productivity Café’.
2. You tell Google what sources you’re interested in knowing about – just blogs, just the web, just in groups, just in the news, or everywhere. Comprehensive for Productivity Café.
3. You tell the Alert how often to notify you (once-per-day, as-it-happens or weekly – I prefer once-per-day)
4. You enter the email address where you want to receive your alerts.
5. You click on ‘create alert’.
6. You receive emails at your prescribed frequency, scan them, and are easily up-to-date.

I suggest you create your first alert now and give it a try. You will find Google Alerts yields an abundance of the information you need quickly and for free so you can be up-to-date and leverage this knowledge to your success.

What we like about reality shows is the feedback the judges give. That process of giving feedback causes contestants to improve their performance and raise the bar on their output. Managers and employees, front line and support professionals, and production right through administrative people will improve productivity by applying feedback lessons demonstrated on reality shows.

The feedback process I’m talking about is two-way. A manager might give his team members feedback, a reality check, on how their doing their job so they can do it better. More importantly a boss can give positive feedback to encourage others to do more of what they do well already. An employee can give her supervisor input on areas she’d like to explore for a future project to start collaboration.

Here are the characteristics of feedback that could help you increase your reality’s effectiveness, productivity, and success:

• Feedback should be timely. On the reality shows that feedback is immediate – within seconds of a performer finishing. Commending a salesperson for a successful year in April or May of the following year is too long of a lag – the salesperson is already heavily concentrating on this year’s goals. Catch people doing things right and say something right away.
• Annual review time should be a summary of feedback you give and get throughout the year. Using things ‘you did 8 months ago’ is rarely fruitful.
• Positive feedback is good to give publicly.
• Unlike reality shows, criticism, even constructive criticism, is best delivered in private. Go in an office or room with a door and shut it.
• Deliver criticism using the sandwich technique – surround the all-important criticism with recognition of specific success or listing a positive thing. For example, “Terry, you have been a real contributor to the Big Project. You have met every milestone admirably. (positive)
  I encourage you to take an extra day to proofread more thoroughly and clean up the grammatical and spelling errors. There are a lot of them. Those errors are starting to blemish your reputation and require more work from others. (constructive criticism)
  Beside being on-time you’re a real team player and I appreciate that. The new guy, Pat, has mentioned your efforts in sharing the way we do things around here.” (affirmation)
• Be specific in your feedback.
• Have personality when you deliver feedback. One of the things that make reality show judges entertaining is the personality they have. They seem to be able to deliver all forms of feedback because it is authentic. You can use your personality to gain a reputation for delivering all feedback, good and bad, in a way that is easy for the receiver to hear. That’s exemplified in a boss who can fire someone and stay friends with him or liked by him.
• Give feedback about actions, results, and behaviors, never the person. Do say, “Your enthusiasm is causing you to jump into our conversations so quickly that others in the room are feeling that they don’t get to finish their thought. Please hold up and be sure someone who is speaking is completely done before you start talking.” Do not say, “You are loud and overzealous and that is making you unwelcome in meetings.”
• Deliver feedback in a way that you’ll be heard. In other words, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.” For example, don’t create a lot of fanfare for a shy individual. Celebrate her success in a way she can accept and enjoy – perhaps with a note and gift certificate to the local coffee shop.

   

Feedback can be a great part of our reality. Think about your feedback habits and if a judge would say to you, “You need to give more feedback, more often, more clearly,” do it!

Especially memorable for kids and families, yet sure to be a hit with anyone, have a reverse meal this weekend. Yes, simple to do and likely to shake things up a reverse meal is a fun way to flip things on their heads.

When you sit down for a meal this weekend serve a small portion of dessert first. Then have a main course. Finally have a salad or other traditional starter course. I suggest you ‘act normal’ as you set the plate of brownies in the middle of the table – as if you always start with the sweet.

The kids will think, “What? I don’t have to finish my vegetables before I get dessert?” and “What’s up here? Aunt Lori is acting crazy!”

Imagine a dinner party with aperitif first, dessert, cheese course, and on back through appetizers. It’s a good time to make your favorite dazzle-em dessert and let the appetizers be more plain.

Be forewarned: they will want dessert again after eating the full reverse meal. To serve or not serve that is up to you!

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Rest and rejuvenation are the intentions behind the Friday @ Five entries. Often these are inexpensive and low key because you recharging your batteries can be more easily achieved without running around and doing, doing, doing. And most Friday @ Five entries are geared to do with your family or friends.

Evaluate your planner to be sure it is a customized tool is part 2 in organizing your planner. This was inferred in part 1 where I suggested adding pages and section. If you have been using your planner the same way for a number of years and if you use the standard package as it is delivered to you, your tool is probably good but not great for you. That’s because your roles have been changing, your life has been evolving, and there are an abundance of choices in planners today. For example, some of you have moved from being sales people to being sales managers, others have gotten married and had kids, and some readers are now running their own company after years of working for corporations. If you’re doing the same job the expectations for your performance are undoubtedly different than they were 2 years ago and vastly different than 5 or 10 years ago. So, there is every reason to tailor your planner to match your life today. (Or, maybe you really should invest in a PDA – but that’s a topic for another day.)

Some things to consider as you evaluate your current planner ~

• Are you using the ideal size? Maybe it’s time to switch to larger or smaller – only you know. But, a clue is if you’re regularly folding 8 ½ by 11 papers in half to fit in your smaller size binder, it may be time to upgrade.
• Will your company purchase your new stuff? Most will and they have discounts with one or more vendors.
• What do you ‘make do’ using today? If you write notes all over the mileage pages, buy some blank or lined pages for your binder so they’re easier to read?
• Do you keep an electronic address book? Perhaps printing that out would be useful, up-to-date & legible rather than using the ‘write on’ pages.
• Add a pocket!? This is a handy place to put reference materials for your day. It might be your grocery list, your meeting agenda, or your upcoming report outline.

Finally, consider taking a course on using your planner. or taking a refresher course or scheduling some time with a product expert. Even if you’ve taken the course before, you’re likely to hear things that relate to your current mode of operations. Invest in some training that will have ROI for years to come.

What do you do in the heat of the summer as you’re near the end of the work day, ready mentally to get home, yet you have a half-hour before you depart? Consider clearing out your paper planner during that energy or attention lull. This task will help you prepare for months of productive use of the tool as things get more active in the upcoming back-to-school / back-to-work days. Here are some areas to give attention in your planner organizing.

Step 1 – Declutter your planner

1. Remove old scraps of paper, receipts, and other debris.
2. Remove calendar pages for months and years past.
3. Review non-calendar sections and evaluate whether you use them or not. Just because the maker of your Day-timer, FranklinCovey planner, Day-runner or other system put a ‘goals’ page in your filler set, you don’t need to keep it there. If you don’t use it, loose it. Eject unused and insert useful pages. This may mean purchasing more lined paper or blank pages to suit your style.
4. Discard pouches, pockets, and dividers that you don’t use. Sure they’re a good idea and you’d like to try to implement their function but you’ve got established habits… tailor this system to how you do work not how you wish you worked.

Step 2 – Add relevant sections

1. Do you write notes on your address pages? Purchase some blank pages.
2. Do you wish you had a page with the sizes your family wears from shoes to shirts? Title a page and insert it. You can mark it with a post-it tab that hangs out like a section divider or use your label maker to repurpose and re-label an unused tab page.
3. If your pockets, wallet, purse or tote is littered with receipts and reminders, add a pouch as the place to tuck those papers throughout the day.
4. Take a look at the website for your planner company – there are lots of useful pages to consider: client contact, expense tracking, mileage tracking, meeting planner, and more. Order the pages that will enhance your productivity and effectiveness today.

Step 3 – Tidy current sections that you’ll keep

1. If you’ve been adding to your contact section and not removing names it’s time to recreate your address pages. Ask your assistant or hire a college kid before he goes back to school and have him input all the useful contacts into a document that is formatted to fit in your planner. In a word processing program you can have the page size match your planner size, avoid the rings where you put the holes, and have a perfect fit. You can identify the useful and active contacts on the old pages by simply highlighting it.
2. If your calendar is not legible, get new pages and start again. That nearby student might have better printing than you – hire that ‘cheap’ labor and have her redo it.
3. In the business card keeper pull every card out, file the inactive ones, alphabetize the remainder, and put them back in order for improved future reference.

This should get you started on phase one of organizing your planner. Read again tomorrow for phase two.