We’re right in the middle of the holiday season, when the stress starts to accumulate until it reaches a breaking point. Start taking steps today to make some positive changes that will help you manage our stress over the next two or three weeks.

• Get it done. Yes, I know you have a million things to do and you are trying very hard to get them done, but now is the time to power through that task list. Having a big pile of unfinished tasks looming over me is a big contributor to my increased stress around the holidays. In addition to all of the regular work, holiday tasks like shopping and cooking can make an already overwhelming workload seem even more daunting. I could either procrastinate, which only increases my stress, or suck it up and devote some extra time to completing my task list. I suggesting spending some extra time this weekend to make a big dent in that task list with a focus on those things that you dread doing, but that must be done before the holidays. Getting the most unpleasant tasks out of the way now helps reduce stress in the long run by making the remaining tasks seem easy by comparison.
• Put it off. Now is a good time to focus on the work that really matters and the urgent tasks that must be completed during the holidays. Everything else can wait until after the first of the year. Take a really hard look at that task list and find the “nice to have” tasks that aren’t urgent and likely won’t be completed before 2011 anyway. Make a conscious effort to just move those items out of your active task list and defer them until after the holidays. Having better focus and putting off a few of the less urgent tasks can make the existing task list more manageable and less stressful for the holidays.
• Stay fit. During times of increased stress and less free time, it can be too easy to neglect our health and let our regular fitness activities slide, but this is when you really need those workouts. Hitting the gym or the running trail is a great way to reduce stress and improve your mood, especially during a time when most of us tend to overindulge a bit on all of those delicious holiday treats. If you are really pressed for time, try to combine activities with a little extra walking during that shopping trip, or turn a family gathering into a healthy after dinner stroll around the neighborhood. You can reduce your stress and burn off some of those extra cookies at the same time.
• Have fun. When we are at our busiest, it can be hard to take time out to have some fun and relax. Find a few non-holiday hobbies and make sure that you leave at least a few minutes a day to do something you enjoy that helps reduce your stress. Have lunch or coffee with a good friend or take an evening off to go to the movies. Even just spending 30 minutes with a great book to relax before bed can help you unwind and reduce your stress, which will help you sleep better and make you even more productive and less stressed the following day.
• Escape.If all else fails, have an escape plan. Maybe this is taking the easy way out, but if possible I love to go on relaxing vacations over the holidays. Several years ago, I escaped the  Thanksgiving holiday with a trip to Hawaii where I spent 6 days sitting in a beach chair, having fruity drinks and reading science fiction. I came back relaxed and ready to take on the rest of the holiday season. Don’t feel obligated to always have a traditional or expected holiday. If you want to do something different, interesting and less stressful, go for it!

What are your favorite tips for reducing holiday stress?

My friend Sue came to my house to use my faster internet to plan a holiday in Peru. She was looking at a website for treking tours at Machu Pichu, but couldn’t find a price. “Is there a phone number?” I asked. “Yes”. “Well, it’s noon in Peru, let’s call them” and 5 minutes later she had all the information she needed and a little bit more she didn’t expect.

Then my son, Scott, was tasked with finding the right person to speak to at Apple’s headquarters in California.  After some web-searching, he couldn’t find anything helpful and at first put it to one side. Then he  thought, well, I could just phone the switchboard and ask. Within 2 minutes, he had the right person’s voicemail, and she called him back less than 5 minutes later. Easy!

Sue was worried what would happen if the person who answered spoke Spanish. Scott was little worried that Apple would be unwilling to give him the right person to speak to. Neither were true, and the problems were solved very quickly. It takes no time at all to phone someone and ask. If you don’t get what you want, you can carry on the other routes you want to try. But it’s worth calling and speaking to someone.

At Manager Tools, we review the business weekly in an operational review. It’s really easy to see how the changes we make in suppliers or ways of booking flights or methods of working make a difference. We review our finances weekly and so we immediately see a difference. The people we work with are all on the call, so we hear how our changes affect them.

When I’ve worked in multi-national companies, it’s much more difficult to know how the work you do makes a difference. I can’t tell you that a quarterly earnings report has ever been changed by a saving I made. I might have saved our team a few hours a month with a new method of working, but it was probably a drop in the ocean compared with all the hours worked each week by the whole company.

There was an article in Bloomberg Businessweek which made me think about this. Campbell (the soup company), needs to make $80 million in annual savings every year – not to make MORE money, but to KEEP UP WITH INFLATION. That’s an astounding number, just to keep up. How do they do it? “Every day, before their shifts begin workers … huddle with managers to find ways to save the company money.” Later the article says “A 1 percent gain in plant efficiency in North America adds $3M to operating profits”. They only need 27 1% ideas to make their $80 million.

Which just goes to show a) it doesn’t matter how insignificant the efficiency seems, it’s worth doing; and b) Confucius was right when he said the longest journey begins with the smallest step. Whatever you do today, it matters.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_49/b4206015275454.htm

In our newsletter a while back, we had a couple of articles on the ‘Knowing Your Business’ theme. Recently, I read an article which made me think of this series, and how the most obscure bits of data lead to revenue streams. This article describes how Martinair will, for a charge, guarantee an empty seat next to you on an aircraft: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/thingsinthesky/2010/08/23/a-fee-i-actually…

You can’t buy it until 4 hours before departure, which means, I’m guessing, that Martinair know that if a seat isn’t sold four hours before takeoff it pretty much isn’t going to be, and that the empty seat fee they can get from people who are willing to pay for it makes up for any times they would sell the seat for full price.

With a simple website change and a little bit of promotion, every flight that isn’t full is generating more revenue than it otherwise would have, because they have the data. Data isn’t everything, but sure is the start of lots of things.

In many ways, technology has made it easier for those of us with health issues that require ongoing treatment to work. Employer understanding and more flexible employment conditions have also helped.

But the fact is that undergoing continued health treatment while you’re working full-time remains a challenge — especially for the freelancer or contractor. You have fewer hours available to work, but enough tasks to fill a full day; you’re not functioning at full-throttle, but your clients expect you to be; you’re worried about your health, and juggling the stresses that creates in your personal life as well as in the professional world.

The good news is that balancing work and ongoing health treatment isn’t impossible. These are a few of the techniques I’ve used to make it easier.

1. Prioritize your health.

If you require ongoing health treatment, it’s important to prioritize that over your work. While for most of us, work contributes to overall well-being, we need to be healthy if we’re to get the most out of it. Your health is a prerequisite to satisfying work.

Accepting that your health comes first will make it easier to prioritize your work, as well as family and other commitments. It will help you make work-or rest decisions on a daily basis, and help you manage the tasks you have to suit your energy levels as well as your schedule.

2. Schedule treatment and recovery.

If your treatment takes up a certain amount of time each week, block out that time in your calendar — as well as the time you’ll need to recover from the treatment, if that’s an issue. A common beginners’ trap is to block out the appointment time to the minute. Instead, allow yourself a little fat here and there to allow for traveling to and from treatment, any recovery you may need to do, and settling back to work afterward. Also factor in the possibility that you may feel less than fabulous — physically or psychologically — for some time after the treatment.

If your treatment times or intensity change from week to week, block out the time you’ll need as soon as you know what’s going on. Overestimate that time, rather than underestimating it. If you feel good, you’ll be able to get ahead of the game — and that’s great. But if you don’t, you’ll have built in enough downtime to cope with the aftermath of treatment. Better to find you have a clear half-hour of focused work time that you weren’t expecting than to have to attend a meeting or client call when you’re not at your professional best.

3. Speak to clients.

Discussing your personal health problems with clients may seem like a no-no, and there will undoubtedly be times when you’ll cite “other client work” rather than ill health as the reason why you need to set a deadline so far in advance, for example.

But in the case of ongoing clients or intense contracts, it may be best to talk about your health-related commitments up front. Don’t be shy or feel bad about doing this: even us hired human resources are real people, and as we’ve already established, your health is your top priority. A caring client with sensible expectations will be more than willing to accommodate your time requirements, so long as you explain them up-front and ensure that they’re on the same page as you are.

Most clients don’t want you to be available 24/7: they just want to know that you care about the work, are responsive within reasonable time frames, and will maintain open communications with them. Again, the first step in doing that is to explain your needs to them up front. Don’t lie, avoid telling the truth, or try to participate in Skype meetings from the doctor’s waiting room. Be honest, and your working life will be far less stressful.

4. Use technology to your advantage.

OK, so you may not be participating in meetings from the doctor’s waiting room, but you may find that, if you need to travel for treatment, or your appointments leave you less time to deal with contacts in person, technology can be a big help.

Document sharing, wireless connectivity and a smartphone, shared task lists, automatic reminders, and other time- and task-management tools can really help you stay organized and on top of both work and the rest of your life. Providing colleagues with access to your working files can help you avoid client panic — and the associated guilt — and ensures projects keep moving even if you’re out of action for a day or two.

That said, take care that technology doesn’t simply see you working more hours, or working when what you actually need is space to attend to your health. Yes, you may be able to respond to email on your phone while you’re in the doctor’s waiting room — but don’t take the fact that you’re connected to mean that you must attend to work in every spare moment you can get.

5. Be flexible with yourself and your clients

We all have good days and bad days, but when you’re not in peak form, the bad days can be more frequent, or more difficult to work through. After a period of ongoing treatment, you may be more easily able to anticipate its after-effects and allow yourself meeting- or deadline-free days as appropriate. But you may also have bad days that you don’t anticipate.

That’s fine — everyone has sick days, right? Don’t panic: just do what you can, and talk to clients if you need to push out deadlines or deliverables by an extra day or two. Perhaps you’ll be a bit flexible the next time the client wants a deliverable turned around quickly, or you find that meeting a deadline means working a few hours on Saturday. Flexibility is the way to juggle the ups and downs of ill health, and the passion you have for your work, without guilt or pressure.

6. Make the most of the good days

Depending on your condition, you might find yourself motivated to work at odd times, or keen to catch up on client work over the weekend. I usually take advantage of these times as opportunities to make hay while the sun shines. Ongoing health treatment can really eat into your time and work rhythms, so you may simply find yourself reveling in having a whole day clear of appointments — finally you can sink your teeth into a job and really make some progress!

On those days I try to pay attention to the aspects of my work that I really enjoy, and to acknowledge the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing good work. Since work contributes to my sense of well being, contribution and capability, I try to pay attention to those times as much as possible.

Ongoing health treatment is a burden at the best of times, but this approach has helped me to ensure that it has a minimal impact on my working life.

Have you had to work through periods in which you’ve had to take time out regularly for health reasons? What advice can you add?

Image by stock.xchng user lcs9.

Stever Robbins, the Get-It-Done Guy, has a great new book out entitled 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More. One of the concepts I love from the book is the idea of “action days,” which he says originally came from Thomas Leonard of the life coaching community.

He explains action days like this. “You and a few friends get a conference line. You agree to check in at a certain time each hour. For example, right on the hour. At each check-in, someone (you?) reads the attendance list. Each person briefly reports what they’ve done in the last hour. Then they promise what they’ll do in the next hour. Once everyone has reported, you get off the phone and go for it!”

The “action days” concept could work even without using a conference line; all the participants could simply post their updates via Twitter, Facebook or email, or you could even host a regular action day on your website and have corresponding blog posts where participants add their updates within the comments.

Overall, it’s just a great, all-around way of getting and staying on track, and here are just a few ideas for ways you might use action days in your business.

Action Days to Overcome Procrastination

Action days are especially helpful for overcoming procrastination, so if you’ve been avoiding certain projects, this might be a good solution for making progress on things like updating your website, organizing your office, or hiring a new assistant.

Some jobs we tend to avoid more than others, but that doesn’t mean they are any less important, and using a “shot-in-the-arm” approach like this might be the perfect cure for procrastination.

Action Days for Accountability

I’m a big advocate for accountability partnerships, but one thing I know for sure is that finding a good and consistent accountability partner might not always be the easiest task. Schedules, working styles, differences in priorities, and even time zones can interfere with even the best of intentions when it comes to forming a reliable partnership, making it hard to stay on track and defeating the purpose of having an accountability partner.

Action days could make for a perfect substitute to a longer term accountability partnership or could at least be a great way to shake things up and add occasional insight and interest to your current accountability system.

Send out Twitter or Facebook posts, or even email a group of colleagues or friends to arrange an action day for the group, and again, this would be the perfect way to encourage everyone to get a jump-start on projects they’ve been avoiding. Set up a specific day and hourly check-in time, and you could even have everyone commit to the projects they plan to tackle. Then, when the day comes around, get to work on your individual commitments to see how much progress you could make on your projects.

Action Days for Weekly Progress

Certainly, having even an occasional (say, monthly) action day could be quite helpful, but imagine if you had one per week! I’ve found in past experiments with my own productivity and schedule that even the shortest and most concentrated blocks of time can have a huge impact on what I’m able to get done. I’ve even seen that I can get way more done working one concentrated day per week on a project than five where I jump from project to project, so action days could actually result in the bulk of the work you get done in a given week.

If you’d like to test the waters with weekly action days, find a few others who might be interested and set a specific day and check-in times (for example, Wednesdays are weekly action days with on-the-hour check-ins). Then send out email, Twitter, or Facebook reminders the day before the action day each week.

However you set them up, whether you work in regular or one-off groups, action days can be a great strategy for getting started on large or less appealing projects, and they can be a good addition to your current system for getting things done and warding off procrastination.

As an added note, Stever Robbins organizes occasional action days through his website if you’d like to experiment with the concept, and you can check also out a podcast episode where he explains how he uses action days.

What other strategies do you use to get started on big projects and avoid procrastination?

Photo by Flickr user wwarby, licensed under CC 2.0

In an article in Realbusiness, Peter Knight describes his experience at Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, which describes itself as “the most luxurious hotel in the world”. If you look it up, you’ll recognize the building from every article you’ve read about building in Dubai. They have a fleet of Rolls-Royces and rainshowers and jacuzzis in every room. It sounds wonderful.

Their success, according to the article, is down to people and systems. Within a few days, the author of the article says that they had taken pages and pages of notes on his likes and idiocyncrasies. This meant that for breakfast they could deliver a cup of tea, and ten minutes later a pot of coffee, exactly as he likes it.

None of the systems would work without the people though. Even with 1200 employees for 200 rooms, the people have to be the right people in order to deliver the right kind of service. With 24 hour butler service, the kind of person you sometimes see on night shift, sleeping at their post, would not work. The systems have to be there, but without the people, the systems would fall down.

By the way, if you’d like to stay there, the room I looked at was $5000/night. I might be saving for some time.

http://realbusiness.co.uk/peter_knight/peter_knight_business_lessons_fro…

I’m not a big fan of email. Actually, let me take that one step further: I hate spending time on email. But for those of us who do most of our work online, we can’t escape it. As a result, we have to make the best of it by being really good at it.

I’ve written a few posts recently about effectively processing email, so now let’s talk more about the other side. When was the last time you took a hard look at the emails you send to other people? Workers must communicate very well over email if we want to get our work done efficiently, but are your emails helping or hindering your progress? Here are a few simple tips for sending better email messages.

Do I Need to Send this Email?

Most of us get too much email, and the people you communicate with are no exception. Before you send an email to some other busy person, ask yourself a few questions:

• Would some other method be better? Maybe you should contact them via IM, social media, a phone call or some other channel instead.
• Can you get your information online? If you are asking someone a question, make sure that you do your research  to see if you can find all or part of your answer elsewhere.
• Do they really want the information you are sending? If you are sending information, does everyone you are sending it to really need it? Think about trimming your recipient list to the people who really want to see your email.
• Can you post all or part of it online to reduce the size? If you are sending information, think about whether you can post that large attachment or lengthy explanation online. Sending a link instead of a multiple megabyte attachment or pages and pages of text might be appreciated.

Write Great Subject Lines!

Yes, this is in every list of tips for sending great email, but that’s because the subject line is critical. It’s the first thing that someone sees, and it can make the difference between an email that gets opened right away and one that stays unread or gets dumped right into the trash. Here are some subject line tips:

• Be precise and clear. Your subject line should accurately reflect the content of your message and be easy for people to understand. Example: Community metrics for October
• Use keywords. I sometimes preface the subject line with a keyword so that people can see at a glance why it is important. Examples: Lightning talks: next steps or Project X: scheduling a post mortem
• Include critical due dates. If you really need something done by Tuesday, include it in the subject line so that people understand when they need to respond. This should be used sparingly. Example: Need approval for project X by Tuesday at Noon
• Use people’s names in subject lines for urgent requests. Again, this should be used sparingly, but it does help get people’s attention. Example: Joe – can you present in the 2pm staff meeting?
• Keep it short. Most mail programs only show the first part of the subject line anyway, so anything at the end is unlikely to seen anyway.

Here are a few “wall of shame” subject lines taken right from my inbox as examples of what not to do:

• There you go
• Wiki
• Next steps
  OR
• “no subject line at all”

Make Your Point Concisely

Now that you have a great subject line, you need to actually write the rest of the email. Long email messages are often mostly unread email messages, so you should try to make your point as quickly and concisely as possible. Any excessive rambling is likely to result in half-read or skimmed email messages, and people might miss your point entirely if they decide not to wade all the way to the bottom of your too-long email. You might even want to keep your email short and offer to send more information if they are interested.

Don’t Bury Critical Information

I always assume that people will only read my first paragraph or first few lines of my email messages, so I make sure that any important information can be found right at the top. Here are some important items that should be in the first few lines and never be buried:

• Due dates. If you need something by a certain time, tell people what you need and when you need it very early in the email.
• Any requests. This can sound counter-intuitive, but you need to tell people what you need from them before you explain it. Let them know that you need them to do x, y, z in the first part of the email, and include the details of what and why later. Trust me on this one, you don’t want to bury your request below a lengthy explanation. Even when they might not fully understand the request at the beginning, by making it early, you encourage them to continue reading to get to the explanation.
• Your point. You want to make your point early even if people might not fully understand it until they read a little more. A simple one sentence summary of the point you are trying to make can help people understand the context and the importance of your email early in the process even if they don’t read all of your supporting detail. At least this way, they won’t miss your point entirely.

Ending Your Email

Here are a few things to think about as you close your email:

• Summary. Include a short, concise summary at the end of your email to remind people about any due dates, requests or to point them to additional information.
• Signatures. People have done whole blog posts on how to / how not to use email signatures (and even what our email sign-offs say about us). My advice is to omit them entirely if you don’t have a real need for one or to keep them very short (one or two lines) with only a few pieces of critical information. Keep in mind that one of those lines can be a link to a web page with full contact details.