Unusually Under-Booked

Nearly a year ago, I had calendar sync problems between my Blackberry and my Outlook calendar. So I had to get some meetings back on my calendar. As I asked one of my team members to resend the invitations for a couple meetings, she commented that my calendar looked "unusually under-booked." It was a funny yet scary realization of how busy my calendar is every week. That comment plus the fact that it was still January -- and not too late to get those New Years resolutions in -- got me thinking about re-implementing a quarterly administration day.

What is an administration day? I got the idea while reading one of John Maxwell's books. Maxwell encouraged his readers to take a day every quarter to get away by yourself to reflect and plan. With our busy schedules, it is way too easy to just be taken along by life as weeks and months and even years pass by on the calendar without really implementing lessons learned and needed changes.

I started taking quarterly administration days a few years back. I would take a day or half day of PTO, grab my journal, my calendar -- that might mean your laptop or smartphone so be careful not to get sucked into work or surfing the web -- and my Bible and go to a forest preserve (if the Chicago weather cooperates), a library, a Starbucks or my quiet time spot at home.

The idea is to look back at the previous quarter to reflect on how you dealt with the day-to-day things, how you handled trials and changes, to pull out lessons, to see themes and trends you wouldn't otherwise see. For me, it also means spending extended time talking to and listening to God.

Once you have done that, it's time to move on to the "So what?" Based on what you have seen looking back at the last quarter, how are you encouraged? How are you challenged? What things do you need to continue? What do you need to do more? Do you need to make some major changes, maybe in how you prioritize and spend your time? Do you need to move more of your attention and energy from the day-to-day (operations) and week-to-week (tactical) to longer-term planning (strategic)?

As I write this, another calendar year is coming to an end. It's time for me to take that quarterly administration day. It's a discipline I had and let go in my life. Through some changes and new opportunities this year I have been reminded of the value of this discipline. So after I post this, I am going to block out a good chunk of a day yet this week -- since it's December and this is Chicago, the forest preserve isn't an option -- and set it aside for reflection, prayer and planning. How about you? Do you need to implement a quarterly administration day for 2011?

Customer Service Lessons

You know it's good customer service when you find yourself telling others about it. Here goes with 2 stories from last week that pushed my thinking in terms of extending and expanding customer service:

1. As our team sat down to a welcome lunch at Fulton's on the River for a Manila manager starting an assignment in Chicago, the waitress came to the table with a neatly folded pile of black napkins. She explained that she offered black napkins to her customers who were wearing dark pants as an alternative to the white napkins set out on the table. What a great idea! With her experience in food service, she -- or the restaurant -- offered a simple solution to a problem I don’t typically think of until returning to the office and seeing all those white specks on my dark dress pants. By offering that and being prepared to deliver it right away, she quickly established the restaurant as a high-touch, value add service. And it costs the restaurant very little to offer that to its customers.


2. Half-way through a meeting the next day with a Senior Executive who was my customer a few years back, he asked me point blank, "How can I help you?" The direct simplicity of the question along with the genuine intention behind it really hit me. He saw this meeting as an opportunity for each of us to help or serve the other. That question reminded me to think of everyone as a potential customer/someone I can serve and to directly ask "How can I help you?" instead of just thinking and assuming they must know I would help them.

So I challenge you -- and me -- to look for and be ready to meet opportunities to add value in incremental, quick ways helping your customers in areas they might not have cycles to think about and to expand your definition of who the customer is.

Commuting Activities

A number of years ago as I considered two job offers within a couple years, I had to think through making the switch from driving between Chicago suburbs as my normal daily commute to taking the train into the city every day. I did the math and the number of "lost" hours on the train at first deterred me from seriously considering the job in the Loop. But then a friend of my dad said I should look at it differently. Instead of thinking of this extra commute time as "lost" time, I needed to ask how I could use that time. And I quickly realized that there were definitely things I could accomplish riding the Metra train in and out of the city that I could not do driving my car.

Years later, I am still surprised or at least question when I see someone playing Solitaire on their laptop or mobile device as the way to pass the time of their commute. And I don’t mean casually playing either. They look to be "all in" for Solitaire. That doesn’t compute with me. I have some regular train activities that I prove more valuable to me And to no one's surprise after reading this far, they don’t include Solitaire or other games. Rather I typically have my quiet time reading the Bible, journaling and praying on the morning ride in and working through email, creating deliverables, doing some homework for a class at church or reading a book or article -- whether for career or to push and grow me spiritually -- on the ride home. Those activities make my commute time valuable to me.

How about you? What are your favorite commuting activities? What is your approach to all those hours every year? Why?

Keep It Short

We all get pounded with so much information. We need to devise ways to process it all.

What do I absolutely need to pay attention to? What can I afford to delegate, delay, delete?

Many times we turn to quicker, shorter, more immediate communications (e.g., IM over Office Communicator). And we eliminate much of the extra information in those chats. I propose we start doing the same in Outlook meeting invitations. Many of us now have our calendar synched to our mobile device. Often the meeting subject is so long it cannot be viewed easily from a smart phone or other mobile device. So here is my short list of words -- I could come up with more but I don’t want to give you too much information to wade through ;-) -- to eliminate from Outlook invitations Subject and Location:

• Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. - This is evident from how often it shows up on the calendar.
• The Month or Day -If the Service Review is scheduled in October, chances are it's the October Service Review.
• Meeting - If there are other people invited, assume it is a meeting.
• Conference Call - If there is a dial-in number or an OC link, it's a conference call.
• Discuss - This happens in most meetings. Otherwise I am not sure why several people would be meeting.

Feel free to add to the list. But remember to keep it short.

9/11 9 Years Later

I spoke at the monthly Men's Breakfast at my church earlier this month. This ministry year, we are focusing on being prepared for spiritual warfare. When I picked the month to speak at Men's Breakfast, it occurred to me that the first breakfast of the new ministry year would be September 11th. And immediately I thought there could be a tie between the September 11, 2001 attacks on America and the spiritual warfare theme.

As I finalized my message Friday night it struck me that I would be getting up to speak at about the same time that United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark on September 11th nine years ago. United 93 was the plane where the passengers stormed the cockpit and forced a crash landing in rural Pennsylvania to thwart the terrorist attack on the US Capitol building 124 miles away in Washington, DC. So I used the story of the American heroes on United 93 that had to make a choice very quickly that morning that they could have never imagined -- whether to strike back against terrorists and give up their life to win out over evil -- to open on Saturday morning. As I told the story in a summary timeline of the events on United 93 on September 11, 2001, and showed pictures of the WTC towers on fire, many men listening Saturday morning wiped tears away from their eyes. The emotional clarity that comes with a crisis or crucible like those attacks is hard to match in everyday life. But I challenged the men Saturday morning to be continually preparing spiritually for whatever may come their way from the enemy. We cannot wait for a crisis. There is no time for preparing in the crisis.

The time for preparing is now. The time for major decisions -- some of which if we are honest with ourselves we should have made already -- is now. So when we walk into a crucible event -- even one as small in comparison to September 11, 2001 as an application outage, a major customer issue or a big one like an ethical choice when no one is watching (well, when no other person is watching) -- we have to know already what things are up for negotiation or decision and which are not negotiable because we have already prepared and decided. So the lesson for all of us from 9/11 nine years later is prepare now, make the tough and foundational decisions now.