I’m a sucker for productivity software, so when I started using Evernote I was cautious about getting too hyped up about it. Now 6 months into my Evernote journey I’m more in love with it than ever. But like Quicksilver, it’s a little hard to describe what it is and why it’s valuable. Maybe by seeing how I use it you might see a way it could be helpful to you.

It’s a notebook.

If all I did with it was take notes it would be the bomb. It’s got a nice simple writing interface that lets me focus on what I’m writing. It has folders (Evernote calls them Notebooks) and tags that I can use to keep all my notes organized. Plus it has a terrific search engine for finding anything I need. So right away I’m miles ahead. If I just start taking meeting notes in Evernote I’m instantly more organized and effective.

But I can’t always whip a computer out and take notes in a meeting. No problem, write notes on paper, then snap a picture of your notes, or scan them in with your ScanSnap and presto. Your notes are in Evernote. The bonus? Evernote uses some kind of OCR magic and reads your handwritten notes so that the text in them is searchable! (You have to write somewhat neatly, your mileage may vary.) See how it’s making your notebook better?

The mobile app takes your notebook to a whole new level. With it you can easily record a voice memo, or snap a picture to get something into Evernote. See a book you want to order, snap it. Have trouble keeping track of receipts, business cards, or other scraps of paper, take a picture of the item and toss it! It’s all in your notebook now.

It’s a list machine.

I tried a bunch of fancy GTDish to-do apps, with little success. But Evernote got me back on the GTD bandwagon, with focus and productivity.

I keep four lists in my To-Do Notebook in Evernote, Today, Tomorrow, Later and Saturday. Each day I construct my Today list from the Tomorrow & Later lists so that I have a focused list of things that are urgent and important. I also measure what I put on the list based on how much time I have work on to-do’s that day. This means it’s likely I can actually accomplish my Today list today! This keeps me tons more focused on my tasks during the day. (Saturdays are different for me, that’s mostly errands, so those chores go right on the Saturday list.) I can easily cut and paste tasks from one list to another to make my lists. Once I complete a task I mark it off and move on.

Because the notes sync effortlessly to and from the mobile app to the desktop I can capture to-do’s anywhere, mark things off as soon as they are done, and easily remember what’s next on the list. It’s hard to screw up!

It’s a brain.

My hatred for (and frustration with) paper is legendary. I can lose, misfile or otherwise misplace any piece of paper no mater how important, or how little time I’ve held onto it.

By creating a list of things that I frequently forget, and dropping them into Evernote, I became a genius! I added:

The web clipper adds websites into my brain easily. Push one browser button to clip a webpage as a PDF and dump it into Evernote. I use it for two things, reference notes and recipes. When I’m doing research for a client or a project I will often clip some of the webpages I find that are helpful. It makes it nice and easy to reference them. It’s also easy to email those pages out of evernote if the client wants to see them. Cleaner and more convenient than emailing a bunch of links (and the email includes the URL if the recipient wants to visit). When I come across a recipe I want to keep, clip it! Then when I’m working on menu planning they are all there.

Pro Tips: I found Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials e-book enormously helpful. He helped me to think through how I wanted to use Evernote so that I would start as I intended to continue. He gave me some great hints including: He also has great tips for when to use notebooks and when to use tags, it’s really worth the small investment (if you are going to make Evernote a key piece of your workflow).

How do you use Evernote?

In Good to Great Jim Collins uses the concept of “The Flywheel” to describe the growth of a great company. At first you push hard against a heavy flywheel and it barely budges. But you keep pushing steadily and pretty soon the flywheel is moving. Each time you push it it gets going a little faster, until before you know it the flywheel is FLYING. The speed and momentum of the flywheel is made up of the accumulation of the thousands of pushes made all along. It’s this steady effort, that produces incremental results that I have seen over and over in successful businesses. It’s not the one breakthrough call, but the 10 calls a week, every week that produce the big sale that puts a company over the top.

However, that’s not the story we see in the movies, or on TV. Media loves to tell “The Lottery Story”; American Idol, The Social Network, the one big event that will change your life forever (can you hear the reverb there?). The lottery story says that I don’t need to make those 10 calls a week, I just need the one right call. I need to meet “that person” who is going to give me a chance. If that wealthy person would just give me $100K (They wouldn’t notice it), if I could land that Fortune 100 client, if, if…

One problem with the lottery story is that it sometimes happens so that occasional happening provides reinforcement of the dream that it might happen to me (You can’t win if you don’t play!). We see an acquaintance who was once on our level, “suddenly” working on bigger deals, with a larger staff and think, “Wow, he must have it it big!” What’s more likely is that you haven’t noticed the hard work that your acquaintance has put in over a long period of time to reach that goal.

The other problem with the lottery story is that there is no clear next step to winning the lottery. If that’s my plan, what do I do on a daily basis (other than buy lottery tickets) to win? As a result, I see people who are trying to “win the lottery” being unfocused, chasing potential lottery tickets in all sorts of directions. “That direction didn’t work, but THIS one will for sure!”

In conversations with experienced sales people and non-profit fundraisers alike I have heard the same story, success comes from consistent work in one direction over a period of time. In fact I’ll go further, I have seen some lighting strikes of success, but they have always come to individuals who are working hard, doing the little things, making their follow-up calls, sending thank-you notes, then all of a sudden a big deal floats their way. The people that I have seen who are running after the big deal, and not working daily on the little things that lead to success don’t seem to find the “big deal” that they are so desperate for.

Maybe that’s the point. When we are being consistent, and working everyday for the deals that we find, we find deals. And doing what we are good at, actually delivering work, in big deals or small deals, leads to competence. That competence, that comes from working daily on our craft over a period of time puts us in position to act when a bigger deal comes along, which gives us experience for the bigger deal, and so on. We need the training & experience that comes from that consistent practice in order to attract the deal of our dreams.

Are you pushing the Flywheel or playing the Lottery? How have you seen consistent effort, or practice pay off?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

In 1943 Abraham Maslow proposed that humans operated within a hierarchy of needs. Until our basic needs for food, security and shelter are met, we don’t worry about our higher level needs for love, esteem or importance. As businesses grow their owners have a similar progression of needs; at first we have a basic need for customers. Soon, we start to realize higher level needs.

When small businesses start their needs are simple. What start-up businesses need most is a customer (or another customer). The bottom step on the pyramid is “busy”. When businesses are getting started the owners have a lot of time, and their goal is to turn that time into customers.

Persistence with a competent business development process rapidly turns a business owner from not so busy into very busy. At this point the need changes from a process that keeps us busy to one that keeps us profitably busy.

Many people would guess that owners that are lucky enough to develop a business that is busy with profitable work have “made it” and don’t have any more work to do. But that’s not the case. It turns out that just making money doesn’t make most people happy, there’s still a higher rung on the pyramid. Being profitably busy with work we enjoy; work that challenges us, that connects us to people we have fun being with. Work that keeps us sharp, learning new things and finding new challenges.

Finally, there is the bonus round. Being busy with work we like still doesn’t make most people happy. We want to be more than cogs in the business machine (even if it’s our business); we want to have a life, a family, and give back to our community.

Each of those stages require the business owner to learn new skills, and to give up old things that they may have been very good at (and that may even be earning them money!) Each stage is a transition, a role change for the business owner; and like Maslow’s hierarchy, we can get stuck at any of these stages.

Where are you in your journey from “not busy” to “busy with profitable work you love”? What things do you need to do to move to that next level? What do you need to give up?

Photo Courtesy "The Unamed" via Flickr

When I talk to business founders about why they made the leap to working for themselves I often hear them talk about the draw of entrepreneurial freedom. I sometimes reply with a lame joke about how entrepreneurial freedom means you can set you own hours, work any 100 hours of the week you want to… But the truth is that being your own boss does bring freedom; but that freedom means different things to different people.

To some Freedom means….

• Saying no
• Never having to worry about a merger, or buy-out making you “redundant”
• Being able to decide what your time is worth
• Being able to set your own priorities, tea party with the toddler on a sunny day, or time in the office
• Choosing who to work with, and being able to work only (or mostly) with people you like and respect
• Taking the vacation of your dreams while you’re young
• Being home for dinner every night

What does entrepreneurial freedom mean to you?

Sometimes when I have this conversation with a business founder it can be kind of a downer. They made the leap to have freedom, and they may have had it for a time, but they’ve traded some of that freedom for more success and business. Some of the work I do is to try to help businesses continue to grow so that the founders can get more of the freedom back.

Are you living the dream? What enabled you to stay with the dream, or what’s keeping you from living in the freedom you had in mind when you started out? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Photo courtesy of flickr.com/photos/yourdon/

Is this worthy of my full attention? I’ve been asking this question a lot lately.

It started when I saw a number of articles about the high cost of multi-tasking. There’s this study out of London that found “Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ – more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana”. Or this series from the New York Times about the dangers of parenting while plugged in which says that “feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition [from their parent's technology] are widespread”. Lastly there was Peter Bregman’s blog post at HBR.org in which he describes his process of giving up multi-tasking. Working with a single focus enabled him to make significant progress on important projects, reduced stress, and improved patience. This all sounds good!

So if the benefits of paying attention to what we are doing are high, and the costs of multi-tasking are severe, why do I keep trying to do things while I’m distracted? The sad truth is, I multi-task when I get bored. That’s right, if I’m  on a conference call (even with you) and the conversation strays to a topic that I don’t need to be 100% on top of, my eyes will flit to my twitter stream, or I might check my email (it’ only takes a few seconds, I won’t miss anything). When there’s a lull in our dinner table conversation; maybe I’ll check the weather for tomorrow… It’s insidious. It’s so easy to avoid even a moment of boredom that I will do it almost every time. The problem that the “escape” to technology poses is that instead of choosing what to do with that moment, I spend that time scratching my anti-boredom itch.  Do I need to know what tomorrow’s weather is? Are those updates in my twitter feed really that important? What if instead I listened to the conference call to see if there is something I can add? Or if there isn’t excuse myself to get something more important done, or redirect the conference call to matters that are truly valuable and engaging to everyone on the call.

When I flit to technology to easy my boredom everyone loses, I’m not present, I’m not giving my energy and attention to the conversation and if we all do it, then someone rambles on with no one listening, and they get no feedback that they are boring. Yikes!

This is why I’ve started asking the question, “Is this worthy of my full attention?” If it’s not I should move on, if it is I should pay attention. Nothing is worthy of my partial attention, nothing.

I need to be clear and set good boundaries, either this is worth my time or it is not.  But beyond that, there might actually be a value to being bored. Peter Bergman again:

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These “wasted” moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

To lose those moments, to replace them with tasks and efficiency, is a mistake. What’s worse is that we don’t just lose them. We actively throw them away. ” (From “Why I Returned my iPad” on Peter’s Blog)

Is being bored worthy of my full attention? Sometimes it is.

Image courtesy of Goldmund100 via Flickr

Once you’ve been doing something for a while you start to figure out what works and doesn’t work.  You know when the “conventional wisdom” is right and when it’s bunk. Having tried all the “short cuts” you can tell people when they really save time and when they don’t. Experts have found not just good ways to do things but also good ways to explain them to other people.  Experts, if you get them talking about their areas of expertise, are interesting.

Moreover, the best experts have opinions that are different, that stand out. No one asks you to come to a conference to espouse the same ideas you can find in a Marketing 101 textbook. You get invited to speak, and people read what you write, when it’s something contrarian, unexpected, or contains particular insights. It comes back to being an expert. Experts know something that not everyone knows; and they have the courage (almost a need) to share that knowledge with others.

This is why writing and speaking (and increasingly video) are key parts of every professional’s business development toolkit. People want experts, people who know that they know. The best way to demonstrate that is to show up somewhere (either in person or virtually) and demonstrate your expertise. Talk about what you know (in person or on video), write about what you know (articles, books, blogs, etc.) show others that you know what you know.

Doing this over and over not only sharpens your skills; makes you more sure of what you know.  But it also helps you to fine tune your ability to communicate it.  You find better illustrations, you develop new ways to answer questions or overcome challenges. You become a better expert.

So many professionals see speaking and writing as a big chore. “If I’m such an expert why do I have to demonstrate it all the time. If I’m good, work will come to me.” But speaking and writing is more than business development, it’s also personal development. Honing your message and sharpening your presentation doesn’t just attract clients, it makes you better as an advisor.

Photo courtesy of "ydiggnme" via Flickr

Lately I’ve been feeling a little blah about work.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but I’ve been at this for almost 10 years now, a lot of this is stuff I’ve done before.  One sales call starts to look like another sales call; writing another proposal, or meeting new people at an event, well, doesn’t seem so exciting the 900th time.

So it was just at the right time that I picked up “The Inner Game of Work” by Timothy Gallwey.  Tim has a lot of good ideas in this book, but the one that I’ve been working with the most is that there are three measures of satisfaction in work, Performance, Enjoyment and Learning.  He says that if any of these three get out of balance (e.g. if you focus only on performance) then the other two will suffer. So if you are feeling flat about your work, you might try dialing back on the performance measures, and add a dose of learning.

But how do I add learning to tasks that I’ve done 900+ times?  Glad you asked!

One solution is to be really observant. I may be on my 5th interview of the day, but I can still watch really carefully for the facial expressions that the interviewee is giving me.  Even on the phone, can I recognize the emotion in their voice, are they excited, scared, nervous? By focusing in on these critical details I realize that this interview isn’t really the same as the other 4, their emotions are all different; in fact it’s at totally different person! Being observant has helped me to see what’s unique and different about this interview, and since it’s different there are things to learn.

A second solution is to challenge my own thinking. Writing that proposal, how can I get the idea across with fewer words?  Or what if I tried using an illustration, or a chart?  Would that improve the communication? Forcing myself to look at the challenge afresh, and maybe learn something new in the process keeps me learning.

Now comes the magic part; this not only helps me to keep focused on tasks that I’m not that fired up for, but it also improves my performance.

When I listen for the emotional clues in the interview, I’m listening much more closely to the interview.  When I try to craft the shortest sentence that communicates what I need, I think more deeply about what I need to communicate. You get the idea; it’s a double whammy!  Not only is the task more interesting and enjoyable, but the performance improves too!

So if you are doing more tactical work, or if what you have on your plate is too routine, see if adding some learning or challenge can help revitalize the task and improve your performance.

What do you do to rejuvinate your routine tasks?

For over a decade I worked in a job where I traveled 9 – 12 days each month; 40% – 70% of my days were spent somewhere else.  It seemed normal to me, most of my peers were doing it. If I wanted my career to go anywhere it was clear that travel was a part of that.  My boss and all the executives at his level were “Platinum” frequent flyers, it was part of the job.

I have now gone nearly a decade where I have only had one assignment that I had to fly to perform.  I recently had lunch with one of my colleagues from those days of heavy travel. He’s still traveling a lot and despite the fact that he had a heart attack, he’s overweight, puffy, and his joints are stiff and sore. It got me thinking about the long-term health effects of business travel.

When I traveled for business I ate almost exclusively in restaurants, and often indulged in foods or drink that I wouldn’t have at home.  I exercised less, stayed up late.  That’s just the physical challenges.  There’s also isolation, loneliness, stress of performing at a high level in unfamiliar environments and with people you may not know. The isolation isn’t just on the road, being gone a lot puts a lot of strain on your relationships at home, and with friends in your home town too.  You are not part of the community in the same way that you could be if you were home. Not everyone who travels experiences all of these issues, but I would say that everyone experiences some of them.

Businesses are talking a lot more about their corporate responsibility; they are trying not to externalize the costs of their environmental impact, provide workers compensation to offset the cost of injuries, and try to engage our communities to “give back” to those who help enable our success. In that context maybe business travel isn’t the world’s greatest threat, but the cost of business travel is extremely high, and I’m not sure we are doing enough to avoid it.

I know there are times when you have to be there.  Yesterday I lamented the ability of people who work behind a computer screen all day to build relationships, I know there is nothing like sitting face-to-face.  But if people saw business travel for the health threat that it is, I think that some creative ways could be found to avoid it. I’m not saying we need to eliminate business travel, but I believe it can be reduced or limited.  What if there was a rule that an individual couldn’t travel more than 5 days a month, or 20 days a year?  We’d get really picky about when it was important enough to get on a plane.  Sometimes it would be worth it, but other times…

Study after study tells us that healthy workers are more productive, we know that one of the most influential factors in your health is the community of people you hang out with.  If business owners really care about the health and well being of their workers (and themselves) then making an effort to reduce business travel is essential.

I know there are healthy people who travel a lot.  There are also people who smoke and don’t get cancer, but when we see someone who smokes we want them to stop.  I think if we are honest with ourselves we don’t need a government funded research study to tell us that extensive business travel is unhealthy. It’s time to make a decision to do something different, to find different ways to work, and ways to diminish the impact that working has on our team’s health.

What do you think?  Is it time to get off the plane?

My College Computer

I’m of the first generation of college students who brought computers to college and when I started my first job I was the only one in my department who had a computer on my desk.  In fact I was hired because I knew what to do with one!  We had a fancy network too, it was called the sneaker net.  Yep, if I wanted to move a file from one computer to another I copied it onto a floppy and walked it over there.

Now I carry a computer in my pocket that’s so advanced it can’t even compare with the power of that college computer; and I can reach the Internet from anywhere. I can drive down the freeway and listen music streamed over the Internet on a  radio station created just for me (really, check out Pandora, it’s the bomb).

I’m a huge fan of technology and all that it enables us to do, I love being able to work from a park bench, or coffee shop if I want to, I love being able to have a great bookkeeper who lives in Austin, Tx, a writer in Springfield, IL, and clients across the country.

Still there are changes that technology has brought that are less charming.  When I started in business we knew that in order to make a sale, in order to build a relationship, we had to go meet someone.  Social Networking is great, email is very convenient, but I still believe that we do business with people we know and like.  There’s nothing like the 3D, real-life, meatspace to push that relationship forward.

When I started in business we used overhead projectors and slides to make a presentation.  They were a pain to make, and took a lot of time, so we only had a few.  Now presentation software is so easy we end up with presentations with 40 slides and 100 words per slide.  One of my favorite bosses would make us put our last slide up first, if he agreed with our conclusion he would tell us to sit down, he didn’t need to hear the rest of the presentation.  If not, then he’d listen and see if he was convinced.  With slides you had to think on your feet, rearrange things and respond to your audience. Presentation software seems to make everyone expect to sit and be entertained/informed, instead of participating in the presentation.  This is a big reason that I only speak with a flip-chart today, no projector, no slides.

The business leaders I learned from were a cautious lot, they wanted facts and not opinions.  They wanted to really understand something before approving it. Today that seems to be coming back into fashion.  We went through a decade where almost anything sold, and half-baked ideas were the norm.  But it seems that time has past, and the caution that I learned from my mentors is back in fashion again.

Yep, things have changed a lot in the last 20 years.  I wonder what the next 20 have in store?

Did you know that fear makes you stupid? Fear is perhaps the most powerful stupid drug that the human body has ever felt.  When we are afraid our reasoning and thinking is disabled by our body and instead we are thinking with our brainstem, basically reacting to reflexes instead of acting.

You know who lives with a lot of fear everyday? Business owners. I know, I’ve seen it in their eyes and heard it in their voices.  They are afraid of all that is out of their control.  Customers and clients, employees and partners, the government regulators and tax collectors, lenders, investors; there are so many forces that bear down on a business owner it’s easily overwhelming.

If these fears aren’t enough, there is one fear that almost every business owner I’ve ever talked to has that is bigger than all the rest.  We all feel like frauds, like we were lucky to get this far.  Yes, we worked hard, yes we are smart, but really… Someone’s going to find out that I don’t have a license for this, that I’m not trained for this, that I can’t do this and they are going to take it all away.

It’s true.  Almost every business owner I’ve ever talked too is secretly afraid that they are doing it all wrong, that they are screwing everything up.  That they are making big mistakes, that they will never recover from.

What makes it worse is that the people around the business owner most likely look up to them for their risk taking ability, for their courage and strength at taking on new challenges.  No one sees the fear that’s inside. So it stays there, inside.

But it is there and it’s making you stupid. What does that worry do for you? Does it motivate you, or hold you back?  Does it make you too cautious, or too reckless?

You have worked hard, you are smart enough, and experienced enough.  How do I know? No one is that lucky.  If you have gotten this far, you have what it takes.  I know that you could have made some better decisions along the way, and you could have done more at times.  But think about your employees, do you think that they make mistakes sometimes?  How much does that bother them?  Are they losing sleep over those mistakes? So they are making mistakes and sleeping well and you are making mistakes and not sleeping?

What’s the difference between their mistakes and yours?  When they don’t know something, or make a mistake, they can get help.  Their boss (or you) might bail them out, or show them a different way to do it.  But if you own your business, who do you ask?

Find someone who can help you out.  Don’t go it alone. We are pack animals, find a tribe who can point you in the right direction. Who is excited when you succeed, and disappointed when you fail?  Who knows all the risks you have taken?

Because there is one thing that fear will never get you, in fact that fear will keep you from ever achieving.

Peace.