A Presentation on Structure

I spent the weekend completing a presentation for my Toastmasters club later this week and wanted to share it with you. It is also my first use of Slideshare which is an excellent site that falls under the Social Media label. Check out the presentation and let me know your feedback.

A Presentation On Structure

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jeffrey Hurley.

Improve your focus, give your brain a break

Have you ever found yourself in the difficult position of having to complete a task yet found the task to be less than exciting and wondering if there was some way to get through the challenge with your sanity still in tact. Often in work situations we are responsible for tasks and actions that are needed to be completed but these tasks are not fun.

One of the approaches that I have found when working on focus has been to use a 20 minute rule. This is a unique motivator I found while in college when I had to study for exams. The basic idea is to allow yourself to get into the groove and leverage your mind's ability to remain intensely focused for short periods of time. I have heard of studies that have found that our minds will start to wander after as short a time as 20 minutes (I couldn't find any specific one so I can just tell from my personal experience)

What I do is set a timer, I have a countdown watch that is set to 20 minutes. I turnoff the phones, blackberries, and email alerts; to effectively get into your groove you will have to be certain that there is no interruptions so that you can train your mind that it is okay to be focused. I have a small note pad nearby in the event something pops into my mind, that will need to be addressed but is not what I am focusing on, so that I can write it down to address later. Then I set the timer and am focused for the 20 minutes straight.

When the alarm goes off I stop what I am doing right then and there and move away from the project and reward myself for the focus time. The key is to reward yourself. I recommend do a little physical exercise and get your blood moving like take a short walk get outside for a brief moment. I keep the break to no longer than 5 or 10 minutes so that I can get back to focus on the task at hand.

After doing this for awhile I found I can focus and get into a flow quickly and the ability to complete my task lists improved noticeably.

Try it out for yourself and let me know how it works.

Everyone is an outsourcer

I am an advocate of the outsourcing model. That does not mean I believe companies should send all of their jobs to another country. Rather companies should focus on their expertise not on "all the other stuff." If you look at outsourcing they way the typical middle class family does you would see that they have been outsourcing for some time. So much is outsourced that many people no longer what they are doing as outsourcing. Here are some examples of family outsourcing:

• Daycare or after school care
• Tax preparation services
• Dry cleaning
• Gardening
• House painting
• Plumbing
• Growing food
• Dining out or buy ready made meals
• Clothing (do you make your own?)
• Entertainment (movies, TV, sports)

This is not sending jobs overseas, rather it is freeing up time for higher value activities (ones you would rather be doing instead of these)

All of these things are forms of outsourcing and yes some of them are done overseas but a vast majority are local. Why do we outsource so much of our family work? Some would say because both partners are working and don't have time for these activities. I would argue that both partners are choosing to focus on higher value skills and outsourcing the items that can be performed with better expertise or for lower cost by someone else.

This is the most basic of arguments for the outsourcing model. What is your business and how does your business make money. Doing taxes is not about making money unless your are a tax accountant. Writing computer software is not about making money unless you are a computer software developer.

Most organizations need to be focused on product innovation not on how to complete their tax return, find the best office space, or the bookkeeping. When a company is small much of these activities are outsourced; what changes as an organization grows that requires these activities to be done in house? What activities are you as an individual still doing that should be sourced elsewhere to free up your time?

American's are Outsourcing their jobs: A Humorous Look

The Onion network takes humorous look at the trend in personal outsourcing:



More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

The Terra Cotta Army...my first YouTube video

Okay so I have been doing a lot of reading up on social media tools lately in preparation for a presentation I am doing later this week. Funny thing is between the research and experimentation I didn't have enough time to complete my Sunday blog post and then here I am on Wednesday and realized, wait a minute I can post on some of the cool stuff I am working on.

So here it goes, this is my first attempt at video following some of the recommendations I learned online, more about this later. So here it is a short, under two minute, video of the Terra Cotta Soldiers in Xian, China:



I hope you enjoy. Cheers

How I use GTD to manage my email

I am a big fan of the David Allen getting things done system. His tips and tricks for time management are effective because they work whether you are paper based or electronic based in how you apply them. I have been able to achieve remarkable productivity increases use a combination of paper and electronic based tools to implement the GTD system.

If you go to David Allen's web site you will find some great tools and he has a free download that will explain how to set up a series of folders in your email system and mobile device. I use a blackberry connected to my office outlook, though this is a greatly reduced in capability blackberry for various compliance reasons. This is where mine is set up. The first thing I did was set up a series of folders in outlook to support the two minute drill.

In the outlook mailbox I have
1) @Actions folder where I drag any mail items that will take longer than the two minutes to process
2) @Waiting for folder where a copy of any request I have outstanding with someone else is placed. I review this file to determine what is outstanding and who needs to be followed up with.
3) @Touchbase here is where I place any emails that represent an ongoing exchange and though not a priority action or a waiting for I want to make certain to follow up with this person. This is a once a week folder versus everyday.
4) I then have a series of offline folders or in outlook terms "PST" files that I use to manage the large amount of emails and projects. These folders are set up by year and quarter

• 2008 - Q1
• 2008 - Q2
• 2008 - Q3
• 2008 - Q4

Under each of these folders I place sub folders to file all of the inbound emails

Alerts
These are auto generated emails from the various servers that provide activities of the status of their performance and batch jobs. They typically require no action on my part, my team is responsible but they are important for service level performance measurement. So I keep them filed for future reference.

Projects
Every project seems to have some form of email trail and I am still, many years after completion, referring back to legal contracts or other documentation related to project in 2005.

each major project has notes/minutes, documents/presentations, and other

I try not to get carried away with excessive file and directory structures but when you have to find something quickly a year later this system sure helps.

I then have a personal folder with Transactions, Network Activity, Travel, and Other.

With this set up I am able to handle my email traffic very easily and then incorporate this into the rest of David Allen's recommendations in the book Getting Things Done.

Yes College Students Should Study Abroad

I just finished reading a great article titled, The New Global Skill Set by Don Asher. He outlines , how colleges are now requiring overseas study as part of their graduation requirement. I think this is great.

I have had the opportunity to work abroad fro the last four years and have enjoyed every part of the experience.

Don spoke with several global managers and one quote stood out to me and I paraphrase, Bradley A. Feuling , "strong project management skills and and diverse cultural knowledge" are essential traits of managers overseeing functions in multiple parts of the world.

The world is rapidly catching up to the United States, in technical know how, however, they are not giving up their cultural heritage. Thus the ability to have empathy toward our differences becomes a valuable asset in any global work we do.

I have met many individuals in Asia that speak a minimum of three languages, the language of their native country, English, and one other (French, Japanese, or Chinese). We as Americans should learn to speak multiple languages as well.

Having just returned from a trip to Cambodia I was surprised to learn the Cambodian people have a fascination with learning other languages; I met nine year old children that could hold a full conversation in English and a basic conversation in Japanese (with my teenagers). After inquiring further I learned the Cambodians see this as the path to future opportunity.

Don's article goes on to recommend studying abroad for at least a semester. Again I strongly agree. When I have spent a month or more in a country I begin to appreciate the subtly of the cultures and truly appreciate the beauty of the rest of the world.

I sincerely hope this becomes standard curriculum for undergraduate and graduate programs throughout the US.