For busy professionals, multitasking is a must-have skill that allows you to shoehorn more productivity into an already packed schedule.

It’s an often-maligned skill, too, because of the frequently quoted problem that multitasking results in poorer quality work. But I disagree. Like other skills, I believe that multitasking is something you can develop and improve and use strategically. Here are some tips to help you do that:

• Start small. Don’t multitask your rocket science work AND your brain surgery work right out of the gate. Instead, multitask a few different less-essential things until you get good at multitasking.

• Triage your work. Not everything should be multitasked. Driving, for example, should remain separate from reading, talking on the phone, putting on make-up, etc. But a lot of things – things that aren’t life-and-death situations – are able to be multitasked. Multitasking on billable work is debatable. I’m personally of the opinion that if you charge by the hour, you shouldn’t be multitasking billable hours. But people who bill by the project and can take as long as they want on something might be okay with multitasking. Especially if they…

• Know the bandwidth limit. Even awesome multitaskers have a limit. It’s like bandwidth. You only have so much mental capacity to use at once. Most tasks don’t take up all of your bandwidth. Some tasks (like driving your car) should probably take more bandwidth than you think they should. But talking on the phone to a coworker doesn’t need to take up as much bandwidth as it does.

• Group like projects together. The most effective kind of multitasking is when you group similar projects together. For example, if you manage half a dozen Twitter accounts, and you want to spend a focused amount of time on Twitter, you can multitask this easily.

• Prep for multitasking. Before you multitask, make sure you have everything ready to go. The purpose of multitasking is quickly lost if you have to get up from your desk or if you spend your time searching for a folder or opening programs. (That’s another reason why grouping like projects together is a good multitasking idea).

• Keep a list. A list of “multitaskable” tasks should be handy. This should be stuff that you can do whenever you have some extra bandwidth. Email sorting, quick email responses, filing, Twitter-follower-list-adding, reviewing your schedule for the day. These are low bandwidth activities that you always need to do. Keep that list nearby. When you discover some extra bandwidth, pull out the list.

• Set time limits on your work and focus on improving your multitasking skill. The purpose of multitasking is to get more work done in less time. So if you have two projects that each take an hour, and it takes you two hours to do them both, then it doesn’t matter if you do them at the same time or if you do them consecutively; there’s no time saved. Instead, focus on doing both of them well in 1 to 1.5 hours in total. This will take some time because multitasking is a skill.

• Have a goal. This is a good time management tip for anyone, whether or not you want to multitask. But if you do multitask, it will make your multitasking easier. That’s because consciously knowing the goal can help you unconsciously work toward it. And, you won’t be half-heartedly working around the project without a clear purpose; you’ll be actively working toward the goal.

• Get into the zone. Multitasking isn’t something you do to avoid real effort. It’s something you do when you are focused and operating at your peak. If you find that you’re trying to multitask but you’re only doing one thing at a time, put something aside until you can focus. I don’t juggle but it seems kind of like juggling: You see jugglers starting with 3 items and then once they have a rhythm, they seem to be able to effortlessly add more in later. Compare that to someone who tries to just START juggling 17 items at once. Seems harder to do. (Back me up here, jugglers!)

Multitasking is a muscle that needs to be worked. When you schedule your day, sit down and quickly identify two or three projects you can multitask at the same time. Work at it. Evaluate how you did. Try again another day. Build your multitasking muscle strategically.

Start juggling!

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In a couple of days, my calendar is going to ping me with a reminder. It’s going to say “One month in – how’s it going, Heather?” This reminder is for me to review the new business strategies I intended to integrate into my business this year.

Each year, I list out a bunch of strategies I want to integrate into my business. Some are marketing strategies, some are productivity strategies, some are customer service strategies; that kind of thing. I always have a really bold and vibrant vision of the year ahead and it’s easy for me to actually create so many strategies that I simply can’t implement them all effectively.

What I find is that over time, some strategies simply can’t be done in the day (because I don’t have time, for example) while other strategies become quickly integrated into my daily routine.

I was speaking with a colleague of mine who does something similar. She had developed several strategies she wanted to integrate into her year. For example, she wanted to increase her article marketing and she wanted to do more blog commenting. We usually chat about our strategies from time to time so I asked her how hers were going nearly one month into the year. The blogs were easily integrated in and are now a habit for her. The articles, however, are not. We talked about the reasons that could be and what she and I discussed might be helpful for you, too:

• Integrating new strategies into your daily schedule is important to do from time to time, but not always easy. I’ve found that if you want to be more successful at making them habits, you need to do everything possible to make it super-easy to do. The easier they are, the more likely you’ll do them and the more likely they will become habits.

Take exercise as an example: Lots of people make a New Year’s Resolution to start exercising… and then they fail. One of the reasons is that exercise might be an hour or two commitment a few times a week: Driving to the gym, working out, showering, driving home. It adds up so it’s not compelling to do. The secret to integrating it into your life is to make it really easy at the very beginning. Start with a 5 minute workout at home; have a friend call to remind you. Then, increase your workout to ten minutes. Then to fifteen. Then twenty. Eventually you will find yourself at the gym doing a full workout, but by then it will be a habit. To get there, though, it had to start easy.

It’s the same with my friend and her articles: Instead of writing an article a day – her original goal – she should start with an article a week. Or, split the work between herself and a freelancer. Eventually, she can increase her own effort. And she should decide ahead of time what the article will be about, rather than staring at a blank page.

And it’s the same for your 2010 goals. The goals that easily integrated into your business – celebrate them. And the ones that you’re struggling with one month in – take baby steps and make them easy. You may not start out as boldly as you had originally dreamed but making them easy will help to make them habits.

Have a great time!

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With only hours to go before 2010, your planning is probably finished. Your strategizing is tucked away. Your dreams are sitting on your desk, waiting for you to show up on Monday morning. You’ve done everything you can do this year and now it’s coming to close.

And the champagne is flowing generously.

Before things get too carried away, over the next few hours, take a moment to pause and consider what I’m about to tell you: The week between Christmas and New Year is often an INSANE week, filled with gifts and festive activities and diets-be-damned eating. And the entire year leading up to this moment has been INSANE for many people, filled with bad news compounded by bad news. This past week – and this past year – has possibly been all about you running around and trying not to go crazy.

All that is about to change
Take a brief moment and reset your thinking. Make the following 10 promises to yourself for 2010:

1.    Promise to give the very best of yourself to every customer you meet. (They will reciprocate with repeat business).

2.    Promise to be positive, upbeat, enthusiastic, optimistic, and encouraging. (Smile brightly and the world will smile back).

3.    Promise to see every crisis as an opportunity. (You might just find the springboard to stellar success).

4.    Promise to invest in yourself and your business. (You know it takes money to make money… so spend a bit on your business).

5.    Promise to be more productive and make the most of every moment. (You can do more in the same amount of time).

6.    Promise to find the balance between work and family. (It’s a reward that can’t be counted).

7.    Promise to leap into new challenges. (Action and boldness are key ingredients that will help this year to be spectacular).

8.    Promise to be productive and to fight procrastination at ever turn. (Cut out that time playing Farmville in Facebook in favor of more revenue-generation).

9.    Promise to focus on operating a smart, efficient, profitable business. (That’s what it’s all about).

10.    Promise yourself that 2010 will be a great year for you and for your business. (It all starts with this decision).

These promises aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams. They are achievable every single day and the business that commits to these 10 promises will have a successful 2010.

Here’s what I’d recommend
Write these promises to yourself. Put them on your desk. Read them every day before your day starts and review them every day before you sign off for the evening. If you’re REALLY serious about succeeding and these promises make sense to you, then create a metric for each one and use them as a checklist. (For example, for the “see every crisis as an opportunity” promise, why not create a list of things that stress you out and then choose on each week and find the opportunity in it).

When you countdown and shout “Happy New Year” today, you’re not just celebrating the turn of the calendar, you’re saying goodbye to a year of challenge and saying hello to a year of opportunity. This is an exciting time for business owners!

On that note:

10…
9…
8…
7…
6…
5..
4…
3…
2…
1…

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Oh, he seems like a nice enough guy, and his books (Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, or Death by Meeting are decent enough books), but in a recent article with Forbes he seemed to take a stand against virtual teams. In the article “When you Absolutely Can’t Meet Face to Face“, Lencioni is interviewed by Terry Waghorn about virtual teams, virtual meetings, and virtual work.

Lencioni talks about “the challenges of being dispersed” and he says “no single tool or device can replace face-to-face interaction” and “a virtual team needs to acknowledge that its being distributed is a disadvantage” and “there is simply no substitute for sitting down face to face with your team to solve problems in real time”. That’s not right at all. Virtual teams are not at a disadvantage.

Here’s why I think Lencioni is wrong. If you go into a business relationship assuming that the virtual team is at a disadvantage, all of the disadvantages will be highlighted. But I face-to-face connection also has its disadvantages, too! Rather, I think businesses should simply accept the circumstance they’re in – virtual, face-to-face, or mixed – and embrace it.

Here’s why I think virtual teams are better:

• Virtual teams create highly collaborative and work focused meetings. In my experience, the right leader with the right technology can get far more accomplished in a virtual collaboration than in a face-to-face collaboration. (The “right leader” needs to be in control of the meeting and the “right technology” needs to work consistently and allow everyone equal access.)

• Virtual teams save costs and time. There is no traveling time, there is little or no meeting costs (aside from any meeting technology you’re using). This increases the amount of time that people have to be productive. That is a win in my books.

• Virtual teams can speed up projects. Teams that are dispersed across timezones can give more attention to a project than teams that are stuck in a single project. If I work on a project when I start work (in the Eastern timezone) and pass it off successfully to those in subsequent timezones, the project gets much more attention each day than if several of us try to work concurrently on the project in a single timezone.

I understand what Lencioni is trying to say: He wants teams to connect relationally. However, I believe you can still do that successfully through virtual tools. And, on balance, I believe more gets done at a lower cost with the right leader leading a virtual team.

Good Luck and Happy Blogging!

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However, success tends to breed success. Soon you may find yourself with a steady stream of projects. You may even get to the point of turning down projects that you simply do not have time to complete. The decision then becomes, do you continue to do it yourself, or hire someone? It can be a difficult decision. But you must take into consideration that continuing to work alone can be counterproductive.

There are several reasons for this:

No business owner is good at everything
You probably have a natural aptitude for the work that your business produces. You can quickly and easily turn out finished projects that are of the highest quality. Other types of work, however, may not come so easily to you.

Perhaps you have trouble producing high quality written work. You struggle with putting words together in just the right combination to convey your meaning. Consequently, preparing written reports, ad copy and other documents takes you an inordinate amount of time. Or maybe math is not your strong suit. While words flow quickly out of your fingers, you struggle to understand spreadsheets, complete payroll and perform other tasks that involve long strings of numbers.
No matter what your weaker area is, you will find yourself dedicating extra time to those projects. You will lose valuable productivity simply due to a natural weakness.

No business owner has time for everything
The sheer quantity of tasks that must be performed by a small business can be onerous. Even if you are the rare person who is equally talented in all aspects of business management and production, performing them all by yourself ensures that you have less time to produce your main product. Every task takes time to complete.

So you have to make the decision, should you do it yourself or hire someone?

The solution
You may not be ready to hire an on-site part time or full time staff just yet. That’s okay; after all, those costs can be high when you factor in overhead and equipment purchases. But there is an intermediate step you can take: Outsourcing. Whether you choose a virtual assistant to work consistently with you or a freelancer to take on specific projects, you can scale up or down or hire on an as-needed basis.

The advantage here is that you can start small and slowly build your business in an organic way, rather than hiring an employee and hoping that you’ll get enough extra business to cover their wage. Outsourcing your work is the way to go!

About the author: Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Disclaimer: © 2009 Heather Villa. Permission is granted to repost this article. Article must be published in its entirety, including author bio, and all links must remain intact.

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Based on the research I have done, I am going to test out the Uberman sleep schedule, maybe slightly modified. If you want to read more about Polyphasic Sleep, check out Lifehack.org or Steve Pavlina’s diary of adjusting to and living with the Polyphasic Sleep cycle.

First let me say, that my assistant Joan is screaming No! Her exact words when I asked her were:

It’s hard to say.  IF you can get to that REM cycle in that short amount of time, then it probably will.  However, according to the article, you have to be disciplined to take the naps at the scheduled times every day. This I see as a problem for you because depending on what you are doing and what is going on, you will miss the naps. As it is you can’t stop and go to bed when you say you are going to now.  Anything like this, you HAVE to follow to the T or it won’t work. Personally, I would never do it.  Naps only make me cranky. I normally only get about 5-6 hours of sleep on any given night, but when I sleep, I really sleep.

You seem to do better when you quit early for the day – like around 7-8pm and then get up at 6:30am.  It’s always easier for me to get you up when you work that schedule. I think if you will follow a regular working day and quit at a regular hour and sleep normally that you will do much better.  When you work all night, it seems to take you two to three days to get back on this schedule. But during those two to three days you seem out of sorts. That’s just my observation from working with you.

So this could work, but unless you are committed to stopping – no matter what – and talking all these naps, then I don’t see it working for you personally.

Heh! If that is not a challenge, I don’t know what is. Let me tell you why I am testing this out:

1) My profession deals with productivity, if I am not willing to try something that may make me more productive, then I am not very good at my profession.

2) I am raising a little one, which requires that I be ‘available’ at specific times, that don’t always mesh together to make the most convenient schedule for me.

3) I have always been most productive at night and early morning (between the hours of 1am to 7am).

4) I work from home and am able to build a schedule that suits me best.

That being said, my last ’sleep’ was this morning from 7am to noon (after I sent the little one off to school, I hardly got any sleep last night). Right now would be my normal time to go to sleep. Based on my schedule, the times I need to make sure I am awake and the general rule of this sleep cycle is being up 4 hours, sleeping for 30 minutes (I am going to change these up a bit), I plan on doing the following:

2:30am to 3:30am – asleep

3:30 am to 7:30am – awake

7:30am to 8:15am – asleep

8:15am to 12:15pm – awake

12:15pm to 1pm – asleep

1pm to 5pm – awake

5pm to 5:45pm – asleep

5:45pm to 9:45pm – awake

9:45pm to 10:30pm – asleep

10:30pm to 2:30am – awake

As you see, I am doing 45 minute sleep cycles (except the 2:30 to 3:30am one which is an hour) and 4 hour awake cycles. The uberman schedule states that you are awake 21 to 22 hours a day, I think pushing 20 is just enough for me.

This cycle will let me be up when the little one goes to school, comes home from school, needs dinner and goes to bed. It will also permit me 8 hours awake during normal business hours ( don’t worry clients, I am not turning into a slouch) and it will also permit me time awake when I do dinners, movies and of course my productive nights when I get writing and other things done. Don’t get me wrong, I am not expecting to work 20 hours a day and sleep 4 hours a day, what I am hoping for is that I have a better balance in my life utilizing productive times for me. I will have time to also do the things I love (reading, cooking, etc.).

So, it is 12:43am on Tuesday October 13th. This begins in a few hours. At 2:30am I will go to sleep for the first sleep of this new schedule. I will attempt to keep a log (while probably not as good as Steve Pavlina’s) over the next 30 days to see how it turns out. Whether this will work for me, or be a permanent thing, only time will tell.

Note: I am going to use the #ppse hashtag on twitter to make any ’small’ comments about the experiment, so I don’t have to write a blog post every time I wake up

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In comparing mileage notes, it was interesting to think of the parallels with business: The SUV took a massive investment to start and run, and it would only run for a short time before it needed more fuel. Many businesses – especially small businesses and solopreneurs – are like that: They market their business, then do the work, then need to market again for more business.

Conversely the “Prius” of businesses can do a bit of marketing and go for miles on that small amount of marketing “fuel” investment.

So that begs the question: How can businesses go from gas guzzlers to efficient?

The secret is in branding, positioning, and effective marketing that runs without a lot of effort. I’m going to mention a few items here that I think can help businesses make that transition:

• Twitter, when combined with a professional Twitter client like HootSuite (2.0), allows professionals to schedule tweets and tweet more consistently and effectively.

• An assistant, or a virtual assistant like IAC Professionals (hello, of course I’d suggest this!) takes the pressure off of business owners by taking care of some of the marketing to increase their billable time. One client just reported that he had a record-breaking quarter because he gave his virtual assistant nearly all of his marketing tasks to do for him.

• Checklists, CRM systems, and autoresponders are all ways to improve the efficiency of your marketing to reduce the amount of time you need to “stop for gas”.

• As I’m writing this, one of my clients just told me about a coaching class she’s offering. It’s relevant here so I thought I’d mention it: Trish Lambert of Success in Sweatpants is a certified “Book Yourself Solid” trainer (based on Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid system and book). She’s offering a “coaching in sweatpants” class that covers how to build a foundation for success, how to build trust and credibility, and how to promote yourself. The classes cover critical topics like “how to have a brand”, “how to be an expert”, “how to have effective sales conversations”, and more. Read more about it here: Coaching in Sweatpants and sign up for her class!

Business growth does come from marketing, but not just any marketing. It comes from strategic marketing built on a solid foundation and one that aims at reducing how much you actually market while increasing the effectiveness of the time you do spend marketing.

Speak Soon!

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I said that the first part of the conundrum of committedness is: The more commitments you have now, the less time you have to generate new commitments. But the less time you spend on generating new commitments, the fewer you will soon have.

But there’s a second part to that conundrum and that is: your new commitments aren’t fixed. In other words, your prospects aren’t perfect. You can (and should) market to fill your pipeline but not all of those prospects will react in the same way at the same time. Some will come to market faster than others. Some might suddenly buy more at one time than anyone else. You might have one quarter where all of your prospects fall out of your pipeline and sales diminish.

Let’s talk about the consultant example again. The consultant has several clients (“commitments”) and he or she stays busy with them, carving out just a little bit of time to market because it’s important to generate new business. When all progresses well, it’s a perfect system. But then “part 2″ of the conundrum kicks in and the prospects suddenly (and unexpectedly) buy more. What should the consultant do?

It’s a tough balance. Turning some away might be the wrong answer in today’s economy. Putting in extra hours is probably a good idea. But there’s a risk to this sudden influx of new commitments: the consultant notices that he or she doesn’t deliver as quickly anymore. And some might say that he or she is working too long each day. And there’s the risk that this “overwork” will diminish the amount of time to market.

Guess what. There’s no easy answer. Every business needs to find that special state of Zen in which they have a healthy number of commitments to continue earning an income but marketing in such a way that there is and continuously full pipeline. And they need to acknowledge that new potential commitments could suddenly increase and they should be prepared for it… but not to the detriment of their business today.

So, the consultant should leave a bit of ‘wiggle room’ (but not too much) to market and perhaps a bit more (but not too much) just in case there is a sudden influx of clients. And the manufacturer should leave just a bit of excess inventory (but not too much) to manage any surprise and they should have a plan in place to produce more inventory (but not too much) if demand rises unexpectedly.

In the next blog (tommorrow), I’ll give some more ideas about what businesses can do to work with this conundrum.

Speak Soon,

Heather

Related posts:

1. The conundrum of committedness – part 1
2. The conundrum of committedness – part 3
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