The view from here

I’ve been running some time management workshops recently and one of the things that we’ve been looking at is the direction in which people are heading, their longer-term goals. Having a direction is an excellent way (and possibly the only real way) of establishing your priorities, without which it’s impossible to organise yourself in any meaningful way. The thinking behind this is that it’s important to know where you want to get to otherwise, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, it doesn’t really matter which way you go.

I left school with weak A-levels and didn’t go to university. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to return to studying and get the degree I didn’t get a quarter of a century ago. As I was thinking about this, it struck me that it would take about six years to do this and that I would be 45 years old by the time I got my degree. That length of time felt daunting until I realised that, unless something dreadful happened, in six years I was going to be 45 anyway – I might as well be 45 with a degree.

My destination was the degree and I had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it when I began studying. An analogy that I often use is that of a pilot filing a flight plan: when the plane takes off, the pilot knows where he’s going to land – unless, of course, something unexpected happens. It’s a helpful analogy but, like any analogy, if you push it too hard it will break down. Since I made my choice, my outlook has changed and evolved. In the words of every contestant on the X-Factor, I’ve been on a journey and the view from where I am now is different to the view I had when I started studying.

Someone once told me that “to decide is to divide” – a yes to one option is automatically a no to another option. But that yes also opens up the possibility of a whole lot of other options. Because of the choice I made five years ago, I was alert to several opportunities that have come my way in the last few weeks, opportunities that have helped to clarify that vision I mentioned above. For us, the destination doesn’t have to be fixed in stone – we’re not locked into a flight plan and it’s possible for us to change our destination at any point. It’s what makes the journey exciting.

The Outlook is rosy

Say what you like about Microsoft but when it came to Outlook, they really came up with a great productivity tool. I recently purchased a MacBook, to use as my main home computer, and I’ve been disappointed to discover that I can’t find an Apple equivalent that’s as good as Outlook – to the extent that I’m seriously considering forking out a couple of hundred quid on Outlook for Mac.

Outlook does so many things and is used by so many people that I’m baffled by how little people know about what it can do. Few people ever seem to have had any training on how to use Outlook, beyond sending an email. As email, it seems, is the thing that most people struggle with, here are some techniques to help you get on top of your in-box.

The first tip to get on top of your in-box is to stay out of it – or, at least, not dive straight into it every day. When you open Outlook for the first time in the morning, it probably takes you to your in-box and the temptation is then to start dealing with those emails. Instead, set your opening folder to your Calendar (Tools>Options>Other>Advanced Options>Browse and choose the Calendar folder).

Next, stop Outlook telling you when it receives an email (Tools>Options>Preferences>E-Mail Options>Advanced E-Mail Options and uncheck the boxes under the heading “When new items arrive”). The key thing here is that you check your email when it’s convenient for you, not every time someone sends you a mail. If you’re doing the latter, you’re effectively treating email like another telephone – and you probably already have a couple of those.

Once you’ve freed yourself from the constant interruption of arriving email, you can concentrate on other things. A really good habit to get into is only checking your in-box every couple of hours or so – if you like, you can book out half an hour in the calendar to do this, so that you get into a routine.

Why do this? Well, if you were trying to lose weight, imagine how you’d feel if someone regularly waved a cream cake under your nose, telling you how delicious it was. You wouldn’t be very happy, would you? It would make losing weight that much harder. If you’re struggling with email, that’s the equivalent of what Outlook is doing to you. Take some control and give yourself the space to concentrate on your job - which is not, believe it or not, to handle/produce emails.

You have mail...

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by “abroad” – by which I mean, from my Anglo-centric viewpoint, any country that wasn’t the UK. I’m of a certain age, which means I predate email, when the only way of contacting people abroad was to send them airmail letter. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing one of those lovely blue envelopes hit the mat, the glamour and mystique of the strange address and the poetry of the phrase “par avion”. Weeks would pass between posting a letter and getting a reply, the excitement would build and the eventual letter would be read and re-read, digested, considered and then finally responded to.

All that’s changed now, of course. Nowadays, I can text friends on the other side of the world and get a reply almost instantly – assuming they’re awake, of course. I can share pictures of events with friends in at least six other countries (and comment on pictures of their events) through Facebook and Twitter. The waiting for the postman has gone, replaced by the much shorter wait for the ping of the email inbox. Lest this sound like an old man’s paean to a bygone age, let me be clear: what we’ve lost in romance we’ve more than gained in sheer convenience. I’m in touch with friends now in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible twenty – or even ten – years ago.

But there is, of course, a price to be paid. Email has revolutionised communication but it’s brought a whole slew of problems along with its tremendous advantages. And while email itself is steadily becoming less popular amongst what I suppose I must now call the “younger generation” it’s still the dominant form used in business. So if you feel overwhelmed by email, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a look at some email best-practise to help alleviate the information overload you might be feeling.

We’ll start next week by looking at a few of the basic skills but if you have any hints and tips on how to make email – and, in particular, the main tool for using email, Microsoft’s Outlook – work better for you, do please drop me a line.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.