K Srikrishna

The Entrepreneur Life

Tag: productivity

Team Work
Photo Credit: torbakhopper

3 Tips That Can Make You Accomplish A Great Deal More

January 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The family and I had to make an unplanned trip overseas due to a parent’s minor medical emergency. Shutting down our house, packing for travel and all the other many minutiae of last minute travel was stressful. So to keep our sanity, the wife and I made list of the top 1, 2 and 3 things we’d like to have accomplished during the trip. This is an exercise we’ve found helps us both stay focused and reduce the stress of dealing with change that’s inevitable from having aging parents and young adults.

Many unexpected and not-always-pleasant things happened during our trip—from one of our kids getting a nasty strain of flu to home aides quitting making parental post-operative care difficult. So our way back to the airport, as we listed all that we got accomplished and were surprised at all that we’d been able to accomplish, despite the low bar we’d set for ourselves. As we dug deeper, we realized that as always we had much to be grateful for. Some of these lessons are applicable just as much for our businesses as to our daily lives.

TL;DR

  • Goals – have few, finite and clear goals and de-prioritize all else
  • People – put people first and this will always pay off
  • Self-care – take care of yourself; short breaks go a long way

Goal clarity By keeping three things, as the primary outcomes, whenever we encountered a fork (or plain temptation) we were able to pick the right things (or say no) without dithering or guilt (both hard when family’s involved). Surprisingly, this provided us sufficient wiggle room to get other things accomplished (eight at last count on the airplane back).

People focus By keeping people as our primary focus, we not only had fulfilling and meaningful interactions but once again got more accomplished as the people we met with sought, often of their own volition, to get things off of our plate. In a few instances we were able to actively help them, but in most instances, the joy of meeting one another was both fun and de-stressing that our productivity bloomed.

Self-care While visiting India is always enormously enjoyable, between others and one’s own expectations, real-world constraints not limited to traffic, bureaucracy, and inertia can render the simplest thing challenging. And that’s when the family is not involved. So accepting that there are constraints and it is okay to retreat and seek some time for yourself to recharge is not easy. Even the occasional 10-minute power nap or 2-hour curling with your e-reader recharges and lets you come out roaring.

2 Tools That Will Improve your Effectiveness as a Marketer

October 22, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Every year I try to learn something new – be it a skill, a tool or just some facts. 2018 has been a time of great learning, thanks to my daughter, I wanted to share two tools that I’ve learned about from her and since put to good use for myself and customers.

  • Canva, as my primary online visual design tool – from making Twitter or web post headers, webinar announcements to trifold brochures and even eBook cover design, this has been an amazing tool where every day I’m discovering more. Here are some examples

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • Tableau as my data visualization tool has similarly been a much used for not just number crunching, but being able to create excellent visualizations as well as insights that aren’t always self-evident from staring at the data in Excel.
    Here are two examples

Visualization of Girls Toilets Availability

The kicker is, both of them are available online, easy-to-use and you can get started for free. They also have great online communities that can help you get up the learning curve fast. So give them a spin today and share your own favorite tools in the comments.

Startup Founder Secret #2

October 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments

StopwatchOne of the challenges in getting advice – even when we agree with it – is figuring out how in the heck are we going to find time to follow it. As an entrepreneur or founder, you’ve got enough and more on your plate – so while it’s great to hear you should meditate, how do you squeeze it into your insane calendar (you do have one don’t you?)

This is a secret that I learned from Stephanie Winston, organizing guru from her book The Organized Executive.  In three words it is

Meetings with yourself

Notice, when you have a meeting with a customer or prospect, a candidate you are trying to hire (or in some cases when a critical person is threatening to leave) you drop everything else to take that meeting. Look around you – your day is probably filled with meetings – product reviews, vendor negotiations. In fact if your day is anything like a typical founder’s day – meetings are the only thing that seem non-negotiable and you have to fit in your other tasks in to little time chunks between meetings. So rather than let this get you down, start by marking meetings on your calendar, with just one attendee – YOU!

This is a great way to get that blog post written, contract reviewed or to even meditate. It most importantly prevents you from using this time to take other meetings. So start now, and mark your calendar up for the next two weeks – or if you want to be bolder for two months – with a daily 20 minute meeting with yourself to meditate, or twice weekly to blog or fortnightly for date night with your significant other. Let me know how it works.

If you liked this article, sign up below to receive a short update once a week on tools and techniques for staying healthy, being more productive and building habits for success.

 

Related articles

The Secret to Preventing Email Wars at Your Startup

August 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

ConflictWhether a startup or a large corporation, email has become just a fact of our work lives, it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t so. Email useful as it is, however seems to create as many problems as it addresses. Beyond the chain letters and phishing emails or spam, flame wars conducted over email is probably the biggest cause of productivity loss, in both large and small companies.

Most back-and-forth email stinkers or flame wars are preventable and many times seem downright silly or petty. Yet they seem to pop up all over the place with near-despairing regularity. Flame wars, particularly between colleagues, is a huge emotional sink, sapping productivity and motivation. This is even truer when the parties involved are in the same office. It is to overcome these that we’ve formulated a simple rule – yep 1 single rule to prevent email flame wars.

The No 3rd email rule Simply put this rule states, if one person has sent an email (#1) and a second person has responded (#2) and it’s clear that they are not agreeing, or not happy – there should be no 3rd email sent. Instead the two parties should talk in person (sometimes this only requires swivelling in one’s chair) or pick up the phone, if not in the same office.

Think about it – most email flaming starts due to one of two reasons:

  • public questioning, accusation or challenge (real or perceived) by usually the sender
  • outright misunderstanding by one party (usually the reader)

In the former case, the recipient responds either defensively, or attacks the sender, as they perceive themselves or their work being undermined or attacked. This may or may not have been the intent of the sender. In the latter, regardless of the sender’s intent, the recipient misunderstands either what is being said or why it is being said (or at times to whom it is being said or copied to) and leads to misunderstanding and grief.

Regardless of who started it, their intent and what was being actually said, the No 3rd email rule works excellently by stopping the electronic conversation, which would at this stage usually deteriorate into accusations, counter accusations and fingerpointing. The beauty of this rule is it is independent of who wields the organizational power between the sender and the recipient and nips the blooming potential conflict in the proverbial bud.

Like all good rules, it’s simple to state and understand, a little bit harder to practice. We are still working on it. What are you waiting for?

notebook
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

“This week” – the secret to managing your time well

November 3, 2013 / / 3 Comments

 

“Honey, can you make the insurance payment? ” my wife would ask me.

“Sure dear, I’ll take care of it,” I’d respond.

Early in our marriage there were often fireworks due to such seemingly innocuous conversations between my wife and I. It took me a while to figure that my wife meant, “Can you get the insurance paid NOW!” And it galled her no end, that my response meant, that I’d get it done one of these days.

Fortunately for us, we arrived at a compromise that all such conversations, especially ones where I needed to get something done, meant I’ll get it done that WEEK! Twenty years on, we are still on talking terms largely due to this one agreement.

Each year, as I work on new projects and often with new team members, I learn a thing or two about managing my time better – even if it’s only what not to do. From my early Franklin planning days of the early ‘80s through the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People all the way through Getting Things Done and Wunderlist, I’ve tried my share of tools and methods to be more productive and get more of the right stuff done in less time. Truth is that it’s still a work in progress and I continue to struggle with procrastination.

As the parent of two teen girls, child of an aging, recently widowed parent, as a slightly overweight middle-aged man trying to get in shape, the operational head of a non-profit and spouse of a professional musician, my to-do list is overflowing. Even when it’s incomplete.Enhanced by Zemanta

If you are like me, your to-do lists are ambitious – maybe more hopeful than practical. The very act of opening them is daunting. But we still put too much for a day on ‘em. It finally dawned on me to apply the lesson I’ve learned in making commitments to my wife. Seek balance over a week – and not try the impossible of trying to achieve it each day.

Plan your to-do list for a week. Yep – not just for the day. The reality is some days you’re going to get only one thing done, if that. On other days you’re going to be on fire. By keeping your to-do horizon to be a week, rather than the day—things will be a whole lot less stressful. Sure the first week you’ll over commit, but very soon you’ll get the knack of it.

Now say after me, “I’ll get it done sometime this week!” 

© 2024 K Srikrishna

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑