Autry to host training workshop – Enid News & Eagle – Melissa McGann, from the Oklahoma Child Support Office in Enid, who works with employers in the area, said this training will benefit any size or type of …

In this month’s Inc magazine there is a review of the ToneCheck add-on for Outlook. If you install it, it conducts a spell-check like operation looking for words that might be harsh, angry or offensive and flags them, giving you the option to change them before sending the email.

Do professionals not know that sending angry and offensive emails is counter productive? Do we really need a computer program to tell us when we’re too angry to send an email? Hopefully it’s more reliable than spell-check, given the limitations we’ve discovered in that system.

There’s another solution to the problem of sending angry, offensive emails, one that’s been used since way before computers. Write the email or letter if you must. Put it in your drafts folder overnight. Decide if you really want to send it tomorrow. Research shows that ‘getting things off our chests’ actually makes us more angry. Tomorrow, you’re much less likely to want to send it, and much less likely to regret it. You don’t need an Outlook plugin to tell you that.

Child support system has a fair structure – NewsOK.com – Oklahoma uses incomes to determine each parent’s portion of support: If you make less, you pay less and if you make more, you pay more. …

Eight face arrest for child support – Sequoyah County Times – The Oklahoma legislature and the US Congress have enacted law to allow the OCSS to collect child support owed from non-custodial parents who receive …

Multitasking is a bit of a misnomer, since our brains really aren’t capable of doing more than one thing at a time. According to Elizabeth Poposki, assistant professor of psychology in the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, “Neuroscientists tell us that the human brain is incapable of doing two things at once. What we do when we multitask is switch back and forth between tasks.” In other words, we think we’re doing multiple things  at once, but we are really just switching between several activities quickly.

In a recent NPR Science Friday interview, Dr. Christopher Chabris, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Union College, offers a similar position: “It’s a fallacy that we’re able to multitask and do two or three or four or five things just as well as we could do them if we did them one at a time. The problem is that we don’t really get the sense of how badly we’re performing these multiple tasks at once, and we think we’re doing them just fine.” I know plenty of people who claim to be great multitaskers, but I wonder how much of that is perception vs. reality.

I’m a bit of a productivity nut, and I actually take a few minutes at the end of each day to jot down a few things that I accomplished. This helps me make sure that I really am getting work done and being productive, and it gives me a point of reference that I can use later for status reports or questions about my work. From this experience, I know that I get much more work done when I stay focused on the task at hand by working in chunks to complete one thing at a time. When I try to do multiple things at once, I still get everything done eventually, but the tasks aren’t completed as quickly and quality often suffers as a result.

Your Homework Experiment

• Take two periods of time (maybe four-hour or two-hour periods of time) where you plan to do similar work.
• In one time period, multitask as much as you want.
• In the other time period, turn off Twitter, email and other distractions to focus on one task at a time (working in chunks)
• After you finish each period, write down everything that you completed along with a quick quality assessment of the output.

Which time period allowed you to get the largest amount of work done?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Today, we have more tools to communicate than the time we have to actually use them. For those counting, we have phone (fixed and wireless), computer-based telephony (Skype etc.), mobile VoIP, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook and of course, email. It is a surprise that we can find time to really talk to anyone!

The folks from Plantronics have finished a new study called How We Work, which they’re going to release at our Mobilize 2010 conference held next Thursday in San Francisco about the future of the mobile Internet. The study has a couple of stats that jumped out at me, and highlighted our love-hate relationship with email.

Apparently, the use of email by professionals has increased 78 percent over the past five years. Nearly 83 percent surveyed use email as a primary communication tool for business, and nearly 57 percent say they are overwhelmed by the volume. Nearly half blame email for causing workplace relationship problems.

Isn’t it ironic? We love using the email and yet at the same time we hate it just as much!

Fear less, hope more;

Eat less, chew more;

Whine less, breathe more;

Talk less, say more;

Love more, and

all good things will be yours.

Swedish Proverb

When choosing the tools your organization relies on, there are many issues to consider. But one is easy to overlook: communication. After all, your team probably has plenty of communication tools already at its disposal. But when you’ve been working on a project for a while, it can become obvious that a variety of communication tools can actually be a problem. If you need to go back and check on a series of communications that may have occurred via email, IM or something else, you may not know what tool you used. And if you need to get in touch with your team quickly, you may not be able to tell which method is the quickest or best way to manage it.

The Importance of Keeping Things Simple

Keeping your team using just one or two channels of communication makes collaborating significantly easier. A single tool may not be an option — different tools work particularly well for real-time communication, while others are better if you just need to shoot a reference message over — but having your team focus on a limited set of communication tools can reduce the chances of miscommunication. By knowing where they need to check for updates rather than having to search through a dozen different inboxes, your team will get information faster and can act upon it quicker.

The difficulty lies be in choosing which tools to use. After all, there are pros and cons to any communication medium you may consider. And in larger organizations, just trying out a bunch of different tools and seeing what sticks simply isn’t an option.

Looking at Integrated Tools

If you need project management tools for your team, a logical option is to focus on those tools that have integrated communications tools, such as a chat or messaging feature. At the very least, you won’t have to go searching for a secondary tool. There are other benefits, though: When your employees are only checking one tool regularly, they can become more efficient. Skipping around from one application to another means lost minutes, fumbling with passwords, transferring information between tools and other opportunities to lose productivity. Of course, there are ways to minimize such issues if you find a communication tool that is truly ideal for your team that’s not integrated with the rest of your collaboration tools, but, when in doubt, integration offers an easy solution.

It may be worth adding an internal policy about which communication tools to rely on: if your team uses an integrated tool, it may be necessary to ask them to use that tool for all team communications, no matter what they rely on to communicate externally. Such a policy can help ensure that all communications are recorded and easy to reference in the future.

Photo by Flickr user Jeff Keyzer, licensed under CC 2.0

Mark and I have been collaborating on a Career Tools cast to come out shortly called ‘Decorating Your Desk’. One of the action steps is keep your desk tidy. It occurred to me that some people might wonder why we’re telling you tidy your desks like your mother told you to tidy your room, when what you really want to know is how you can get from where you are to CEO.

Marshall Goldsmith says to change everything, change one thing. If you make an effort to listen better, others will think you respect them more, that you communicate better and that you have more patience. By changing one thing, everything changes.

Desks are the same. By choosing one small area where you increase your standard, there is a ripple effect. Having a tidy desk means you’re more organized, you can find things quickly, and people aren’t afraid to come to your desk for fear they might catch something. You’re less likely to be late to meetings because you’re not looking for your notes. You submit your expenses on time and your boss doesn’t see your name on the tardy report. When the VP comes over and asks for the Henderson report and your desk is clear and you can reach for it, knowing where it is, the VP gets the impression that you are together and in control of your work.

And then, he considers promoting you and you’re on your way to CEO.

We received an email this week from one of our members letting us know how his job search went. We’re always glad to know that our members have used our guidance to get the roles they want. Even though the news still says the economy is bad, we get emails like that every week, in fact almost every day.

What was interesting about this email was just how long the process took. He originally submitted an application on 1 May, and after an initial flurry of activity, nothing happened for 15 weeks. During this time, Paul continued to follow up, mostly weekly following our recommendation. Eventually, nearly 4 months later things started moving again.

If after 15 weeks, a hiring manager realizes his recruitment has stalled, often in my experience, he will just start again. If however, you’ve kept in touch, followed up regularly, been friendly and helpful, the recruiter or hiring manager will remember you and pick up where he left off. It means being organized and persistent. But it pays off time and time again.

Congratulations on your new role Paul.