New Year’s resolutions – and how to stick to them

2013-12-31 02:00:51-05

The beginning of a new year is often a time to take stock and think about how you want things to be different going forward. Many people will do this by making New Year resolutions:

• Eat/drink less
• Exercise more
• Give up smoking
• Bring order to the chaos of personal admin

And most will fall by the wayside within weeks, if not days or even hours.

But if you are going to make changes in your work or business life, you need to make them stick. You need to see them through or risk failing to meet your objectives. How can you set yourself up for success?

Treat your resolutions like any other project objective and create a plan. The key is to write it down. Putting pen to paper will give more substance to your resolution and make it feel more like a commitment. Better still, share it with a colleague or friend effectively making the commitment to them – that’s much harder to break. Then execute the tasks, review progress and outcomes, and then adjust or re-plan. It doesn’t need to be a complicated plan, or one that’s months long. Just the first few steps with that commitment to review and adjust, re-plan or extend the plan, will do.

Here are my top three New Year’s resolutions:

Tackle e-mail overload

Coming back after the Christmas/New Year’s break often means an e-mail inbox bursting at the seams. By following a few simple steps you can tackle what might seem an overwhelming task and set yourself up to better manage your e-mail going forward.

• Step 1 – move all your unread e-mails to a new temporary folder.
• Step 2 – sort but sender.
• Step 3 – Go through each sender and do one of the following:
  • Delete random junk mail, info mails you don’t need, out of date meeting invites etc.
  • If the e-mail is the result of a subscription list that you are no longer interested in, UNSUBSCRIBE NOW!
  • If it is information you need to keep but there is no action to be taken, file it – NOW – in an appropriate sub-folder or archive.
  • If the e-mail requires action – move it to a ‘to do’ folder.
• Step 4 – your temporary folder should now be empty so turn you attention to the ‘to do’ folder. Create three sub-folders to prioritise the e-mails – high, medium and low.
• Step 5 – Go through each e-mail and assign a priority, moving it to the appropriate sub-folder.
• Step 6 – deal with the e-mails in each sub-folder in turn.

I set up automatic rules to move info e-mails I want to keep. I then allocate specific ties each day to go through the remaining e-mails filing those that don’t require actions, prioritising and dealing with those that do. That way my inbox only has e-mails that need to be actioned.

Accentuate the positive

As project managers we are trained to assess risks, look for and manage issues and solve problems. As a result we often miss the good things going on. We don’t notice the support given by a team member to the colleague who was struggling, or the excellent report produced by another. It is all too easy to take these things for granted.

Yet one of the most powerful tools in your leadership toolbox is catching people doing things right – and praising them. How do you plan for that? Well I always recommend that everyone finds a few minutes in each day for reflection – what went well, what could have been improved, what needs to be tackled tomorrow. Add to that list, ‘who did something good today’, and make a note of it. I do my reflecting during my walk to the station in the evening.

Then once a week, take a look at your notes and decide how to give the praise and credit for the good things done. It might be in a 1:1 or a team meeting. It could be through a newsletter or project status update. It may also warrant a reward in your company’s recognition scheme if it runs one.

When you do your weekly review, is it always the same people that feature? If it is, think about why that is. Do you have more interaction with them than other members of the team? Make a mental note to try and find something done well by the other members of the team. If you can’t find anything over a period of time, this might be an indicator of a problem. Are they under-utilised, in the wrong role or under-performing for some reason? Whichever is the case, you will either accentuate the positive or identify and mitigate a negative. Both are good for team morale.

Improve your communication

Do you communicate enough? How effective is your communication? As project managers we can often get immersed in the delivery and forget to sustain the right level of communication with both our team and the stakeholders. The New Year is an ideal time to re-appraise your approach and frequency.

• 1:1’s with team members and key stakeholders – how often? Are all the right people covered
• Team meetings – frequency, agenda
• e-mail newsletters on the project’s progress
• Status reports

Key to the re-appraisal is to get feedback from the recipients and to ask others if they would like to be recipients. For example, you may have a large team and only have frequent 1:1’s with your team leads. How about giving every team member a chance to speak to you individually once a month or once a quarter? As with our other resolutions, create your plan, particularly for gathering and acting on the feedback. Then build it in to your overall plan.

Well that’s three of my favourite resolutions. What project management resolutions will you make this year?