Before you go to anyone with a problem (and a solution/a number of options for a solution), you need to understand how this problem looks from his/her point of view.

You can find this out by asking these questions:

1. Why is it a problem?
2. Why is it a problem for me?
3. Why would it be a problem for him/her?
4. Why would it be a problem for us?

That’ll help you a lot not only with communicating your problem but also with solving it.

I often meet small business owners, who are stuck in exactly this position. You are overloaded with work and would be glad to give it to someone, but can not. Because everyone on your team is already very busy.

You don’t have time to find new clients and bring in more money because all your time goes into satisfying the needs of existing customers. And even if you would be able to get more orders, you are worried that you won’t be able to fulfill them.

It might look like a desperate situation with no way out, but it isn’t so.

Let’s look first at why this is happening. Usually, one of the two reasons is true:

• risks, you did not prepare for, became a reality;
• you are spending all your time working in your business and not paying enough attention to working on your business.

In both cases, there is good advice you can follow to get through this crisis.

For fast-acting relief try slowing down.
 — Lily Tomlin

Slowing down might be hard, but it is necessary for you to be able to assess your situation in a calm and practical manner. You are the leader of your army, and as the joke goes:

“Generals don’t run because at the times of war it causes panic, and at the times of peace it causes laughter”.

So, slow down and look at your battle.

You would notice that many things aren’t going as you would like them to.

Maybe your team isn’t a team, but a group of people who come to the office with the goal to earn their salary and nothing else. Or it could be that you are spending a lot of time doing the work that should not be there at all — dealing with problems, re-working, doing stuff that doesn’t contribute to your bottom line or barely profitable.

Maybe (as with a lot of technical founders) your main priority is technical perfection of your offer instead of meeting customer needs? Maybe morale is low, or people (you included) are burned out and don’t have enough time to recover.
All this will be visible if you slow down.

The next steps you take would depend on your observations

They may include:
- Improving your teamwork and harnessing benefits of synergetic effect;
- Making your workload visible and improving your process of handling it;
- Improving your focus and eliminating unprofitable clients and projects;
- Making use of a continuous improvement to boost all aspects of your business without being unnecessarily disruptive;
- Focusing on the business growth by finding clients who would be happy with your product as it is now
- Adjusting your product to meet customers’ needs better.
- Improving quality to reduce rework, problems and other types of money-eating activities.

It all might seem overwhelming, and you might not know where to start. If that’s the case, I would suggest to start with implementing Kanban for your workflow and improving teamwork. It is by no means a “silver bullet”, but often can double your team productivity in a very short period (2–5 months).

With the current state of Internet, where tonnes of junk information are pushed on us through all the available channels, I’d like to have at least one quiet place where I can steer clear of it. And just by blacklisting a few tags I can prevent most of that shitstorm flood from ever appearing in my feed.

And my guess is that I’m not alone in this kind of thinking.

So, Medium, can we have a blacklist for tags, please?

We all want our teams to collaborate and perform well but how can you achieve this?

You might think that you have a team, while in fact, all you have is a group of people. They don’t work well together, blame each other for failures and don’t seem to have any team spirit. When you try to give them a challenging task, they try to come up with all kinds of reasons why it can’t be done.

So what is required to create a good team? Only three things.

The first is an unconditional mutual respect.

Every member of the team should recognise the right of everyone else to have their own opinion, no matter how ridiculous it might sound. Being a junior member does not mean that person should be any less respected.
This is easy to do if you remember that every person you meet is better than you at something.

The second is a common goal.

Only a common goal can turn a group of people into a team. A shared understanding of what has to be achieved would unite people and help to coordinate efforts. The primary challenge to you as a leader is to communicate this goal clearly and concisely and empower people for achieving it.
By the way, “earning a salary” is a personal goal, not a shared one. ;)

The third requirement for a great team is shared values.

Our values define the way we would take to accomplish our goals. They act as a compass for all or most our actions. If everyone has a compass which points in a different direction, unnecessary conflicts are inevitable. You need to discover the values which every member of the team would believe in.
The easiest way to do it is to look at what upsets people — and then reverse it to a positive direction.

If your team has all three points sorted out and has enough freedom to work out their own way of doing things, they’ll eventually become one of your star teams.

P.S. By the way, your family is one of the most important teams in your life. Do you have all three points sorted out? ;)

Most of us want to grow our business — to serve more people, to create more wealth for our family, to get more or better opportunities.

But one thing always gets in our way — we don’t nearly have enough time to do so. Especially if you are in business for quite a while.
Every day we are focusing on serving existing customers, solving usual problems, managing our teams… If you are running a small business, you would know what I am talking about. You are working very hard just to keep the lights on.

This is what I would call “being in a survival mode”.

And while we are at it, growth comes last. We don’t allow ourselves to work on things which would increase sales, bring new opportunities or develop new partnerships. At this point, we have lost the big picture behind the noise of everyday routine.

Allow me to share with you a very simple way to overturn this predicament in a very short time.

There are just four steps in it:

1. Visualise all your work.
   Take a pack of Post-Its and write every single thing you are thinking of doing on them. Try to make sure that each note holds not more than three days worth of work.
2. Sort your work
   Use a flat painted surface to set up a board with three rows and four columns.
   Columns are (left to right): “Want to do”, “Will do next”, “Doing”, “Done”.
   Rows (top to bottom): “Growth” (new business), “Survival” (existing customers, to keep the lights on) and “Losses” (Anything that does not contribute to bringing in money).
   Sort your stickies between the rows and columns.
3. Boost your focus by setting WIP limit
   This is the most painful part of the exercise because it would force you to make decisions. You would have to restrict the number of things you and your team are working on at the same time.
   Start with the limit of 2 per person in the “Doing” column: write the total number on the column label. For the “Will do next” start with the limit of 3 per person. Write it on the label.
   Now, you would have to move all the unfinished work from “Doing” and “Will do next” into the “Want to do” until you fit your work within limits. That’s the hardest part. Be ruthless.
4. Use this system every day for two weeks
   Make sure that you are sticking to the limits and recording all the new work which comes your way. Do not hide any work that you do from yourself.
   It is going to be hard because you would want to break the limits countless times. For this case, add one more row (on top), called “Emergencies”. Emergency means “drop everything else, work on this until it is done”.
   Obviously, you can’t have more than one “emergency” per person in your “Doing” column at any point in time. Doing this would allow you to handle various important interruptions. Just make sure to ask yourself this question every time you are adding another “emergency”: is it truly worth dropping everything else just to do it?

By the end of two weeks, you would start to notice how the pattern of what you work on is changing. If you would keep at it, in no time you will become able to bring in more “Growth” work and focus less on “Survival” part.

Is your business in survival mode? was originally published in Vunela on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As business owners, we want to make sure that everything is done right…

Most often “right” means “exactly how I want it”. Since only we know what it is we want, we can’t fully trust our employees to do everything for us. We end up trying to control everything, and it creates enormous stress.

Not only we would stress out about our employees making mistakes, but they would also be stressed out by our excessive control and will end up making mistakes.

Most of our day would end up being clogged by making decisions and assigning/explaining work to people who know better how to do it. Why have you hired them otherwise?

There are two ways out of it:

1. Trust your team to make the best decision.
2. Create a procedure of how it should be done.
3. Trust your team to devise and maintain the best procedure of how it should be done.

The first way requires you to become crystal clear with your staff regarding your values. Do you prefer work to be done as fast as possible? Or with the best possible quality, but taking as much time as required? Or make a prototype first and then do a review?
After that, you would have to trust your team to find the best way to match your values.

The second way involves you walking through each step yourself once and recording every step and decision you make. Then you ask your team member to walk through these steps with you and ask all the questions they can think of. And after that, you finalise your procedure and document it.

The third way (yes, I know, I said there would be two) is an application of the first to the second. You ask your team to develop the best procedure, and then you review it, and together you make corrections. This way, your team will own the procedure and will more likely follow it to the letter. They will also feel empowered to improve the routine to create a better outcome.

With this, you would free up a significant amount of your time while creating better results and reducing unnecessary stress for yourself and your team.

One of the most dangerous mistakes you can do to harm your productivity is to assume that you can finish everything.

When you strive to complete all the tasks that fly your way, you are losing your focus. You stop prioritising and work on what’s faster to do. You don’t pay attention to the things that are valuable. Most valuable tasks take a while to complete. So they simply fall through your net.

By putting them off, you start to accumulate work debt. It starts small, with abandoning improvements. You no longer learn new things. You don’t improve your working process. Ignore large but not pressing problems and opportunities for long-term changes.

Then, you start ignoring reviews and maintenance work. “Don’t fix what’s not broken” turns into “Don’t touch what’s not broken”. And this causes slow but sure degradation of your “status quo”. If you are a manager, you don’t feel you have time for 1–1 with your subordinates and other routine tasks. “They are working well enough, so what’s the point?”

In time, outstanding work debt accumulates to the level you are no longer capable of ignoring. So you go into permanent firefighting mode. You are focusing on fixing broken things. Overtimes and overwork become your norm. And there seems to be no end to the chain of breakdowns…

But that’s not everything!

Due to overwork and extra stress, your productivity deteriorates even further. You get sick. After all, you have no time to look after your health. You don’t even have a chance to sleep properly.

Your family starts growing distant because you don’t have time to spend with them. And this only adds to the pressure and disappointment.

At which stage of this journey are you now?

This situation is easily preventable. All you need to do is to recognise that there is no way you can do everything. This decision will force you to put priorities in place.

And if you would prioritise value over the number of tasks completed — the whole story would change. If you would put improvement first — you will get growth. And in time you would have more time and more impact than you could’ve imagined.

Make your choice! 😉

Main mistake of busy people was originally published in Life Balance Machine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

…as long as you do it right.

What kind of person would you imagine if I ask you about a productive person? Let me guess — hardworking, always busy person. Who is burning through thousands of todo items every day. Right?

Let me paint you a different picture. Imagine a lazy person, who works for an hour every month. Most of the time that person does nothing — reads books takes walks, spends time with their family… At the same time, they make a lot of money in that hour they spend working.

Which of these two looks more productive to you?

Let’s remember what productivity is. It is creating most value in the shortest time and with least resources. In other words — doing as less as possible for the largest possible outcome.
In this sense, the second person is way more productive than the first one.

So by definition, a productive person must be lazy enough to avoid doing anything that brings no value. And when you are putting more time and resources — you are running away from productivity.

Instead, you should focus on looking for things you can stop doing to get the better outcome. ;)

I want to share with you a tool which makes easy to keep and control your life-changing commitments. This includes tasks like exercise, reading, and other kinds of self-improvement activities.

The key to this challenge is visual control. When you can see the current state of all your commitments, you can make better decisions. You will discover when you are overcommitting or procrastinating.

To do that you can use a tool called Kamishibai board. (Kamishibai is a Japanese word meaning “paper theatre”). This tool is often used in manufacturing to control maintenance and audits.

What you need to start using it are a few pins, a few paper tags, and a green and red markers.

Let’s imagine that you decided to exercise for 30 minutes every day. Here’s what you should do.

1. Write a task on one side of a tag with the red marker: “Exercise for 30 minutes.”

2. Write a resulting state on the other side of the tag with the green marker. For example: “Recharge Complete.”

3. Stick the tag in a very visible place to a wall or a pinboard with the pin.

Do the same with all the other commitments you have. Done.

All you need to do now is this:

• every morning flip all the tags, so they are showing the red side;
• whenever you complete the task, flip that task tag, so it shows green side;

If you want to keep track of what you’ve done and haven’t done — take a photo right before flipping the tags.

I recommend separating commitments into two categories: daily and weekly. For example, I have a weekly tag for reading one book. And to achieve that, I have a daily tag for reading one chapter.

If you want to publish three blog posts a week — make three tags for each of the blog posts and add them to your weekly board.

You will be surprised how well this works, so try it out. Make your first board now ;)

Cheers!

- Sergey

Make your commitments easy to keep was originally published in Life Balance Machine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The problem I see here is a notion that productivity is doing more work. While in fact, productivity is about creating better/larger outcome with less effort. Meaningful outcome.

The very idea of valuable work being necessarily hard goes against this. If you can achieve the same outcome ten times easier — go for it. If there is an outcome which is five times more meaningful with the same effort — go for it! That is the fundamental idea of productivity.

There is a bunch of other things, like a concept of “bottom line”. Like if a bottom line would have any meaning to me when I’m dead. In my mind, it goes like this. Any time in your life which you’ve to spend outside of meaningful and gratifying activity — is a wasted time. And the only person who can decide whether it is meaningful or not is you.

The author also says that we are chasing the feeling of productivity. And this is true. It is gratifying to look back at your day and see many things accomplished. I don’t see anything bad with this. There are a couple of things you should take care of, though. You need to make sure that only meaningful things end up on your plate. And that these actions are small enough for you to finish them in a single day.
Handling things larger than that is like trying to swallow a steak whole instead of eating it bite by bite.

To summarise: productivity is good and necessary when you measure it by an outcome, not the work you do.