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The Most Productive Way to Spend 5 Minutes Right Now

Humans are social creatures. One of the biggest predictors of happiness is whether you have a thriving social network — people who will look out for you and care about you as a person.

Of course, we’re all busy these days, and finding time to build up a network outside of your immediate colleagues (who you see most days) and your immediate family (ditto) isn’t easy. Between commutes and work and household chores, how can you connect with the rest of the universe?

Long term, it’s worth switching up your schedule to find time for friends and colleagues outside your own company. Not only does this remind you that there is a world outside your job, if things ever go wrong professionally, you’ll need this network to come to your aid. You can have lunch with someone every other week, and even try my personal favorite, the networking playdate (getting together at a playground, for instance, with a professional acquaintance who has kids the same age).

But here’s something you can do right now: take 5 minutes, and send an email to an old friend or colleague and ask how she’s doing. Say you were thinking about her because… surely there’s a reason. You just remembered something funny that happened when you all worked together. You saw another acquaintance you have in common. Update her on your life. Even if you’re Facebook friends and she may have heard (from your postings) about what you had for breakfast this morning, there’s something far more meaningful about a personal, one-on-one contact.

Do this every day for a month. Worst case scenario, some of these emails will be ignored. Most likely scenario, you’ll wind up reconnecting with a few folks — getting a few more social events on your calendar, and hence strengthening your social network. Best case scenario? Use your imagination! People make amazing things happen, from job offers to introducing you to future business partners, to letting you use their beach house for the weekend. You may also be able to help someone out — introducing him to a new client or setting him up for a date — which is also a great way to build a network.

Best of all? Reaching out takes very little time. It’s certainly a better use of 5 minutes before that next boring conference call than playing Angry Birds.

What’s the best thing that’s happened to you because of a “How are you?” email?

Related:

• What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast
• 5 Ways to Put Serendipity in Your Life
• Never Miss a Deadline Again

Help for the chronically disorganized

Takeaway: List-making may seem old-fashioned to some people, but it can actually help keep your life more organized and you less stressed.

I am a big proponent of making lists. Written lists keep my mind from being cluttered even more than it already is. I think people underestimate the mind energy it takes to mentally store a list. If you’re going to the grocery to pick up ten things, why not write what you need down and free your mind a little?  To me, a list is like a thumb drive. It’s a separate container of information that I can access without having to bother the hard drive.

I’ve also found that list-keeping can help me better organize my life in other ways:

It keeps me accountable. I guess for this to work you have to be your own taskmaster. I know that if I look at my to-do list at the end of the day, and see that I haven’t accomplished something I intended to, I feel a little guilty. I know, I know, guilt is not a healthy affective state but being accountable to yourself is not such a bad thing. Of course, this works best for those who are intrinsically motivated. If you’re more externally motivated, let someone you work with know that a task is on your list. Or post your list on the refrigerator for your family to see. If you know that others are expecting you to do something, you might be more motivated to do it.

It helps you know yourself better. By evaluating your to-do lists from time to time, you might see a pattern in the tasks you often leave unaccomplished. You can ask yourself what it is about those tasks that you dislike (making telephone calls, writing email) and work around them if you can.  If the tasks you never complete are directly related to your job, then maybe it’s a sign that you’re not really happy doing what you’re doing.

It can give me a sense of accomplishment. Not only is this true if you finish all or most of the tasks on a list, but even on those days when you just aren’t feeling it, you can pick something from your list that is least objectionable. If you don’t want to do anything mentally taxing, choose something that is more physical.  That way, you have completed something, even if it wasn’t top priority on your list.

If you’re not the paper list sort of person, here are some electronic productivity tools you might want to consider:

• Evernote
• ToodleDo
• GoodtoDo

The 10 worst ways to communicate with end users

Takeaway: To be a successful support tech, you have to be a skilled communicator. See if you recognize any of these common communication missteps.

You think you’re a good communicator: You keep your users informed and you listen to their problems. So why is it that no one appears to read your emails or seems capable of following your instructions? Are you surprised to learn that the users have been living with computer issues rather than ask you for help? These are all signs of a breakdown in communication — which we, as support techs, frequently misinterpret as user indifference or even stupidity. Before long, we find ourselves on a downward spiral toward complete communications failure. Even with the best intentions, it’s possible to sabotage our own attempts to communicate with the users by inadvertently committing one or more of the following deadly sins of miscommunication.

Note: This post is based on a previously published article. It’s also available as a PDF download.

1: Inappropriate nonverbal communication

Our words may say, “Absolutely, yes, of course I don’t mind helping you change the toner cartridge,” while our facial expressions, tone, and body language simultaneously scream, “You complete and utter gimboid, do you honestly think that I spent four years in school, have an IQ of 167, and earned 53 technical certifications just so I could change your toner cartridge? Would you like me to breathe for you too?”

It’s not necessary to be a behavioral psychologist to know that tutting under your breath, rolling your eyes, and suppressing little smirks combined with your apparently kind words, sends a patronizing, insulting message to the user. Instead, if you are frequently asked to perform such seemingly menial tasks as changing toner cartridges, turn it into an opportunity to educate and empower the user.

2: Showing off

Just because we happen to know all the correct technical terms and concepts does not mean we should use them when communicating with users. Providing instructions that are overly technical and contain far more information than users need is not the most effective means of conveying our message. Instead of impressing a user with our superior knowledge, it alienates and belittles them and makes us seem supercilious and pompous.

For example, telling users to clear their cache and delete their objects to solve a browser issue may be technically correct. But the chances are, if a user knows how to carry out these instructions, he or she has already done it. Try giving the user click-by-click instructions on how to perform these tasks, perhaps accompanied by a single line of explanation in terms the user can relate to. Aim to impress with your attitude instead of your knowledge.

3: Losing patience

If William Langland had not coined the expression “Patience is a virtue” in 1377, I am firmly convinced that it would have been invented by an enlightened support tech sometime during the latter half of the twentieth century, just as humans were being introduced to computers in the workplace. Even though the computer literacy of the general working population has steadily improved over the intervening years, there always seems to be at least one user who simply doesn’t get it, and whose persistence in demanding help for the same problem stretches our patience to its breaking point.

Calling the user a brainless twit and bashing him or her over the head with a gel wrist relief may provide a moment of immense satisfaction. But it’s likely to result in a miffed user and an unemployed support tech and should, therefore, be avoided at all costs. A better alternative is to develop techniques for (a) preventing such situations and (b) handling them appropriately when they do occur.

4: Being dismissive

Imagine going to see your doctor because you have a mysterious green knobbly growth in your arm pit and all he does is pat you reassuringly on the back and tell you not to worry but do come back in a month or two if it hasn’t gone away. How would this make you feel? What if the doctor didn’t even look at the growth? This is precisely how we make the users feel when we fail to engage with their problems, dismissing them with platitudes and vacuous reassurances. Even though we may be 100 percent certain that Bob’s computer isn’t really taking twice as long to boot up and that Marcie must be imagining that high-pitched whine, telling them not to worry about it and to let you know if the problem doesn’t go away achieves absolutely nothing except to make them feel stupid and insignificant.

Whether a computer problem is real or perceived makes little difference to users. All they know is that they have a problem that needs to be resolved. Even merely perceived problems can be fixed with some sensitivity and a little creativity. However insignificant the issue, by engaging in the problem and treating users with respect we increase their confidence in us and open the lines of communication.

5: Failure to inform

This may seem like stereotyping, but in general, geeks are not natural communicators, at least not when it comes to communicating with members of our own species. Unfortunately, the ability to meaningfully communicate with fellow human beings is a prerequisite for being effective in our role as support techs. In many organizations, the support tech is the user’s prime interface with the IT department. Support techs function as Babel fish, translating between geek and human, and are ultimately responsible for ensuring that users are kept informed and up to date.

Constant communication is a critical part of fulfilling any work order, from acknowledging its receipt all the way through the process to a follow-up phone call to make sure the user is satisfied with the work performed. Often, users can accept a delay provided they know about it in advance and can plan accordingly.

6: Lack of documentation

Not providing the users with consistent, clear, and easy-to-follow instructions is another way in which we frequently fail to communicate. Various aspects of our jobs require us to write user-consumable documentation, such as instructions for new procedures, explanation of corporate computer-usage polices, and manuals for new employees. Before distributing new documentation, test it out on a few users. Well-written documentation, kept organized and up to-date, should ultimately save you time, as it provides users with an immediate resource for answering their questions.

7: Lying

What should you do if you’re asked to perform a task you find laborious or boring? Or what if you’re asked a question to which you don’t know the answer? What if the answer to an inquiry is something that will make the user unhappy? In such circumstances, bending the truth or misrepresenting the facts can be alluring, especially if the lie seems harmless and the chances of being caught are small. Is lying to the user ever justified? Sometimes, it’s necessary to simplify the facts to give users an explanation they can comprehend — but that’s different from deliberately lying to avoid work or to save face.

Many years ago, I worked with a senior support tech who was in the habit of blaming Microsoft for everything. When users came to him with a problem he could not immediately resolve, he would tell them it was a Microsoft issue and they just had to live with it. After awhile, users stopped going to him with their problems and he took to bragging about what a great job he was doing, as his users had so few issues. This situation continued until the next IT reorg, when he was assigned to a different group of users who were more computer-savvy and accustomed to being treated with more respect. A few weeks later, the tech was out of work due to the high level of complaints and his declining skills.

In short, when presented with a problem we can’t resolve, for whatever reason, it’s far better to be direct with users and help them find a resolution by some other means than to mask our ignorance or unwillingness as an insoluble technical issue.

8: Giving too much information

Honesty may be the best policy, but this does not mean it’s appropriate to overburden users with too much information. A mother of five grown-up boys once told me that in her experience, the average teenager will tune out all but the first three sentences of any lecture. So you want to pick those sentences carefully. It may be unfair to compare users with teenage boys, but the principle still applies: Limit communication to what’s absolutely essential and don’t expect users to absorb too much information at once.

It’s possible to fail to communicate by overcommunicating, in terms of both frequency and detail. If we email everyone in the company every time the slightest imperceptible change is made to the users’ environment, many of them will simply ignore the messages. Before long, work orders to set up inbox rules deleting messages from the IT department will start flowing in to the help desk.

Limit mass email to the users who will actually be perceptibly affected by an upgrade, downtime, or some other change. If the impact is for a limited period of time, such as a lunchtime reboot of the email server, set an expiration date and time on the message. Be careful not to overwhelm users with details or explanations that aren’t relevant to them. For example, if the email server needs an unexpected reboot at midday, tell the users the time, expected length of outage, what it means for them, and what — if anything — they need to do. Users don’t need to be given full explanation of why the reboot is necessary, although a single sentence summarizing the problem may help them appreciate the urgency and is more likely to elicit their cooperation.

9: Not providing training

Training is not restricted to sitting in a classroom for three days learning how to create a PowerPoint presentation. Support tech-provided training can be as simple as a 30-second demonstration to a single user on how to add a contact to his or her address book or as complex as a multi-day onsite class on advanced report writing.

Even if providing training is not part of the support tech’s formal job description, it’s almost impossible to effectively fulfill the job function without training users. Some techs deliberately avoid educating users because they regard knowledgeable users as a threat to the integrity of the network or to their jobs. Although these concerns should not be dismissed as mere paranoia, they aren’t valid reasons for failing to improve the computer literacy of users.

10: Failing to listen

Communication is a two-way process. As support techs, we need to actively listen to our users. By definition, our role is to support our users, to enable them to perform their job functions, something we can hope to do only if we have a thorough understanding of their needs. As time allows, listening can be a proactive process, with the support tech spending time with users to learn their routines and to see where technology can be applied to improve productivity or safety.

Opportunities for user feedback can be created through feedback forms, satisfaction surveys, follow-up phone calls, and even brown-bag lunches. Although it may not be possible or even desirable from a business standpoint to implement all of the users’ requests, without making a concerted effort to align the IT function with the business directive, it’s all too easy for the IT department to become wholly self-serving and to perceive users as little more than an inconvenience.

Four steps to identifying and managing project risks

Takeaway: Some IT consultants overlook risk identification and management, especially on small engagements. Brad Egeland says this oversight could cost you future business.

I’ve run some projects as an internal PM and others as a consultant brought in to either lead a team or perform the work myself. The way you run engagements will differ somewhat based on your incoming status (employee vs. consultant) and the size of the effort (long-term software implementation vs. short-term consulting gig to implement new processes). There can also be differences in how you put together the upfront formal planning documents, and the way you formalize and document requirements.

One variable that remains constant regardless of whether you’re an internal or an external project lead is the task of risk identification and risk management. I’ll address the topic of risk below from a consultant’s perspective.

Step one: Identify risks

You’re coming in cold and don’t know the potential risks of the organizational infrastructure, procedures, and personnel. Be careful not to make assumptions before you have all of the facts; otherwise, you can wind up adding more risk.

Even if it’s a one-on-one engagement with the CIO or project sponsor, it’s critical that you run through a risk identification process during a detailed risk planning session. (The CIO is your best source of initial information.) The onus is on you to ask good questions, because you’re the expert on consulting engagements and can warn the client about the common pitfalls they might encounter. You’re coming in cold and don’t know the potential risks of the organizational infrastructure, procedures, and personnel. Be careful not to make assumptions before you have all of the facts; otherwise, you can wind up adding more risk.

Step two: Talk to SMEs and users

The next step is to meet with subject matter experts and end users (if these are different people) and any other personnel who will interact with the solution to a significant degree. These individuals can be good resources when you’re trying to identify potential risks.

Step three: Devise risk strategies

You need to work with the project sponsor, the SMEs, and users to determine and document the best strategy to mitigate or even avoid these risks if they arise. Even if you can’t formulate a detailed risk response to each item, it will still be helpful to identify a strategy to keep in mind as you continue to track these risks.

Step four: Manage risk and provide regular status updates

I’m a proponent of managing consulting engagements on an ongoing basis like you would on a formal long-term project. I encourage you to conduct weekly status meetings with the client, during which you should provide a revised task schedule and status report. Your risk list should be part of every weekly status report during.

Conclusion

We may not always conduct smaller consulting engagements with the same formality as we would $2 million dollar projects for Fortune 500 companies, but the need to identify and manage risks is still there. It’s worth the time and effort because mitigating even one risk could mean the difference between success and failure and might land you future business with the client.

Related TechRepublic resources

How to Win Over Your Boss

In Getting a New Boss? Interview Again for Your Job, career coach Priscilla Clamanoutlines three steps to get yourself “rehired,” as she calls it. Since BNET blogger Sean Silverthorne called her advice “absolutely brilliant,” I thought I’d check out the three steps:

1. Update your resume.
2. Set up a meeting.
3. Present yourself.

Now, I happen to think that this sort of “me-centric” approach can easily backfire. But, the original post does have some decent points and Claman herself has a disclaimer at the end, “I find that the higher up you are, the less successful the “rehiring” method is.”

In any case, if your boss isn’t behind you 100 percent, it can make your life miserable. Believe it or not, you can win him over just by asking a few questions that show him you “get it” and are management or senior management material. Whether he’s newly promoted, newly hired, the result of a merger or acquisition, or has been your boss forever, here are:

10 Simple Questions That Will Win Over Your Boss

1. Ask what he thinks you can do to be more effective.
2. Ask what her top three priorities or goals are.
3. Ask what you can do to make him more effective.
4. Ask what you can do to make the team more effective.
5. Ask if he’s interested in knowing what will make your job easier.
6. Ask what her take is on the company’s top priorities and goals.
7. Ask what he thinks you should do differently or improve upon to be more effective.
8. Ask if she’d like to meet periodically, one-on-one, and if so, how frequently and what format would she like the meeting to take. Then set it up.
9. Ask what his philosophy is on your shared functional responsibility, whatever that is, i.e. marketing, HR, IT, engineering, finance.
10. And, if the meeting’s open-form and you feel it’s appropriate, ask about her background. Most people like to talk about themselves and how they got there, as long as they don’t feel like they’re being grilled, pumped for information, or played in some way.

In case it isn’t obvious, you don’t just plop down in your boss’s office with a notepad and start an inquisition. Ask for a one-on-one meeting because you’d like to know what you can do to be more effective and help him be more effective, wherein you ask a few questions, as appropriate, etc.

And, contrary to the aforementioned HBR advice, do not tell her about your role and your team. Instead, ask if she’d like to hear your perspective on your and your team’s role. If she says, “absolutely,” then set it up. But I still say it’s better to ask for her perspective on your and your team’s role. Get the difference?

And whatever you do, don’t present yourself, your resume, or your achievements either. Frankly, your boss, new or old, isn’t primarily interested in any of that stuff. He’s primarily interested in meeting his objectives and helping his boss meet hers.

The closer you come to demonstrating that that’s your priority as well, the sooner you’ll win him over because you “get it.” And the sooner you’ll be viewed as management or senior management material.

10 Things Great Managers Do

There’s all sorts of rhetoric about what good bosses should and shouldn’t do these days. I guess that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, most of it’s pretty basic, generic fluff that sort of blends together after a while.

Even worse, a lot of it’s, well, utopian. It panders to what employees want to hear instead of giving truly practical and insightful advice on what makes a manager effective in the real world where business is everything and everything’s on the line.

This list is different. It’s different because, to derive it, I went back in time to the best characteristics of the best CEOs (primarily) I’ve worked for and with over the past 30 years. It’s based entirely on my own experience with executives who made a real difference at extraordinary companies.

Some were big, some were small, but all were successful in their respective markets, primarily because of the attributes of these CEOs. Each anecdote taught me a critical lesson that advanced my career and helped me to be a better leader. Hope you get as much out of reading it as I did living it.

10 Things Great Managers Do

1. Maintain your cool and sense of humor, especially during a crisis. When our biggest customer - and I mean big - thought I leaked a front-page story to the press, I offered to resign to save the relationship. My boss, a great CEO, gave me this serious look, like he was thinking about it, and said, “You’re not getting off that easy.” Then he broke out into a big smile.
2. Tell subordinates when they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes I can be pretty intimidating and I’ve had CEOs who shied away from giving it to me straight when my emotions got the better of me. Not this one guy. We’d be in a heated meeting and he’d quietly take me aside and read me the riot act. He was so genuine about it that it always opened my eyes and helped me to achieve perspective.
3. Be the boss, but behave like a peer. I’ve worked with loads of CEOs who let their egos get the better of them. They act like they’re better than everyone else, are distant and emotionally detached, or flaunt their knowledge and power. That kind of behavior diminishes leaders, makes them seem small, and keeps them from really connecting with people. They’re not always the most successful, but the most admired CEOs I know are genuinely humble.
4. Let your guard down and really be yourself outside of work.You know, teambuilding is so overrated. All you really need to do outside of work to build a cohesive team is break some bread, have some drinks, relax, let your guard down, and be a regular human being. When you get to be really confident, you can be that way all the time. That’s the mark of a great leader.
5. Stand behind and make big bets on people you believe in.One CEO would constantly challenge you and your thinking to the point of being abusive. But once he trusted and believed in you, he put his full weight behind you 100 percent to help you succeed. He’d stand up for you even when he wasn’t sure what the heck you were up to. And he’d give you new functional responsibilities - something up-and-coming execs need to grow. Okay, he wasn’t perfect, but who is?
6. Complement your subordinate’s weaknesses. I often say it’s every employee’s job to complement her boss’s weaknesses. The only reason that’s even doable is because we’ve all only got one boss. But I actually had a CEO who did that with each and every one of his staff. For example, I’m more of a big picture strategy guy and he would really hold my feat to the fire by tracking my commitments. It felt like micromanaging at first, but I eventually realized it helped me to be a more effective and strengthened the entire management team.
7. Compliment your employee’s strengths. It takes a strong, confident leader to go out on a limb and tell an employee what they’re great at. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s hard for alpha males that primarily inhabit executive offices. Anyway, it’s important because we can’t always see ourselves objectively. Twenty years ago a CEO identified how effectively I cut through a boatload of BS to reach unique solutions to tough problems. Today, that’s what I do for a living.
8. Teach the toughest, most painful lessons you’ve ever learned. As a young manager at Texas Instruments, I once asked my boss’s boss for advice about a promotion I didn’t get. He told me a candid story about the hardest lesson he’d ever learned, the reason he was stuck in his job. He made himself indispensible and didn’t groom his replacement. It was painful for him to share, but it opened my eyes and made a huge difference in my career.
9. Do the right thing. Just about everyone says it, but I’ve only known one CEO who both preached and practiced it to the point where it became a big part of the company culture. You’d walk the halls and hear people say it all the time. He meant two things by it. When he said it to you, it meant he trusted you to do just that. He also meant it regardless of status quo or consequences. He had extraordinary faith in that phrase. Now I do too.
10. Do what has to be done, no matter what. It’s a rare executive who jumps on a plane at a moment’s notice to close a deal or gives an impromptu presentation when a potential investor shows up unexpectedly. It’s even more rare when he does it without asking questions or hemming and hawing about it. He just does what has to be done. That kind of drive and focus on the business is relatively common with entrepreneurs in high-tech startups -  but it shouldn’t be. It’s the mark of a great manager who will find success, that’s for sure.

Using INSERT with the VALUE Clause and a SELECT Subquery

Using INSERT with the VALUE Clause & a SELECT Subquery

The data values supplied must match the column list. The number of data values must be the same as the number of columns, and the data type, precision, and scale of each data value must match those of the corresponding column. You can specify the data values in the following ways:

• By using a VALUES clause to specify the data values for one row. For example:
  
  
  

  INSERT INTO MyTable (PriKey, Description)
         VALUES (123, 'A description of part 123.');
  

  For more information, see Inserting Rows by Using INSERT and Values.
• By using a SELECT subquery to specify the data values for one or more rows, such as:
  
  
  

  INSERT INTO MyTable  (PriKey, Description)
         SELECT ForeignKey, Description
         FROM SomeView;
  

  For more information, see Inserting Rows by Using INSERT and SELECT Subqueries

Using SELECT with INTO

---

To create a new table from values in another table, you can use SELECT INTO. For example:

SELECT LastName, FirstName, Phone
INTO dbo.PhoneList492
FROM dbo.Customers
WHERE Phone LIKE '492%'

How to Leave the Office at 5PM (Really)

Every morning you set a goal to leave the office in time to spend the evening hanging out with your loved ones. And every evening around 5 or 6PM, you look at the mound of not-done work and realize it’s not happening.

But before you settle for another late night of Chinese food and furious family members, think about this: some people manage to have both fulfilling careers and fulfilling home lives. What do they know? After studying hundreds of time logs, I’ve realized that these successful people adopt a few key tactics for shutting down and shipping out:

1. Realize you can leave before everything’s done. In our rapid-fire age, email, requests for assistance, calls and meetings can fill all available space. If you aim to go home with inbox zero, you may never go home. Work will always be there and will take whatever time you give it. So give it less time. We all have a point of diminishing returns.

2. Split your shifts. Leaving the office at 5PM doesn’t mean you need to be done for the night. Try going home, spending time with your family or pursuing other personal projects, and then fire your laptop back up around 8:30PM for another hour or two. You’ll probably be refreshed enough to solve problems that would have taken you until 8:30 if you’d stayed put.

3. Do a 4PM triage. If your to-do list for the day has been too ambitious, you’ll probably realize, by mid-afternoon, that it can’t all happen by 5PM. So at 4PM, go through and rank the most important tasks. If you knew that the electricity was going to go off in your office at 5PM, rendering more work impossible, what would you do before then? Do those things. Then stop. Pick up the to-do list again at 8:30PM, or the next morning. Who knows, maybe some of the problems will have solved themselves in the night!


Simple rule, remember there is another day in your life, do not try to complete everything the same day. In today's connected world with emails, worst case now with black berry's they haunt you every where and expects your immediate attention all the time, So manage your time well with cut off time and at least put your phone on silent mode if you donot want to switch it off and focus on your work, otherwise what you next hear is what was your output, so donot sweat and try to move the mountain but work smart. Use outlook to book your time and conclude your work to meet your time lines.

What time do you leave work in the evening — and what time would you like to leave?