Episode 14 of my Better Email Management series is now on YouTube. I discuss a few Gmail settings (that exist in similar form on most other email clients as well) I use to be more efficient. I conclude with an introduction of using email templates to have a set of canned messages you can easily add to your outgoing messages to save you from having to type the same thing in over and over again. Gmail uses templates for this and most clients have a way to use multiple signatures to the same effect, even if they don’t offer templates. Hope you find a tip or two here to help streamline your workflow.
Tag: Classes
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Master Email Search
I’ve posted a new addition (Episode 13) of my YouTube series and Better Email Management. This one talks about using search to quickly find your emails. Mastering search helps make your email sessions more efficient for a couple reasons. One, of course, is you can quickly and easily find an email you need to refer to, and another is a bit less obvious, but if you are facile at search, you don’t have to spend as much time thinking about how to store and organize your emails. Instead of creating a hierarchy of email folders or labels, and then having to remember what you did and how you handled an email that spanned multiple categories, you can just be confident that your searches will find what you need, freeing up your mind to concentrate on the work at hand, not the logistics of email management.
I focus on Gmail, but other clients have similar search abilities, so do a search and find out what’s relevant for your client.
Hope you find this helpful!
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Internal Family Systems and the Enneagram on 20April2022
I’m leading a discussion later this month on the Enneagram and Internal Family Systems for the Spiritual Life Foundation. Here is the general announcement. Please RSVP as described below if you’d like to attend. The session will be online via Google Meets.
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 – 7:30 PM PDT
Have you ever found yourself saying “a part of me feels like …” or “a part of me wants …” or “a part of me believes” …. Well, in the language of Internal Family Systems, that statement is more true than you might think. According to the Internal Family Systems model, in addition to our self, we all have multiple sub-personalities, or parts, that both arise from trauma and stress and provide a number of services to keep things running smoothly. In this session, we’ll explore the basics of the Internal Family System model and make connections between how these parts manifest themselves and our enneagram types. Come and explore new ways to get to know yourself and better understand and appreciate others.This session will explore using the Enneagram in the context of the Internal Family System, IFS, model. Internal Family Systems is a powerfully transformative, evidence-based model of psychotherapy. The mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Our inner parts contain valuable qualities and our core Self knows how to heal, allowing us to become integrated and whole. In IFS, all parts are welcome and have good intentions.
Please RSVP – CLICK HERE
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Another class offering this October
I just signed up with the UH Manoa Outreach College again to offer a one-day class this October. This one is scheduled to be in person, pandemic permitting. The College made a nice little writeup about the class here. It combines my general workplace productivity content including email and task management and priority setting, with a focus on balancing the urge to constantly do more with a purposeful effort to do less and free your mind from constant busyness. Hope I can see some of you there.
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Navigating the maze
By this time next month, my regular paychecks will have stopped, to be replaced by something as yet not completely known, perhaps by nothing at all, but hopefully by something. A month ago, I lost my father; we weren’t particularly close, but he was my father and he was a life with his own dreams, scars, and sense of moving forward that is now extinguished. That’s sad no matter the relationship and getting this new perspective on his (and my own) life has taken time to process – time I had intended to prepare for that lost paycheck. I’m feeling OK, actually, going through things one at a time, with more of life unsettled than I would normally prefer.
I decided some time ago I needed to do something else, something different, a different environment, with my career. I applied and interviewed for a couple jobs – feeling like I was more interviewing than being interviewed; I wanted something different, not just a different color paycheck. I didn’t actually get any offers, and it probably appears like sour grapes to say I probably wouldn’t have accepted had I, so I won’t. But it was a good process and I learned things – about myself and my industry. For instance, I’ve now applied for a major facility Director position three times, to get invited to the panel interview each time, but never progressing beyond, and I now think I understand why. I also understand more about what’s important to me, what I am looking for in meaningful work, and what it would take to actually want and get such a position in the future, if that’s what I decide to do.
So, what’s my current plan? I’ve started Astromanager LLC and will be doing my own thing. I wrote myself a business plan so I could better lay out my thoughts for myself and to explain to others. I hope it will be a good start, but I doubt it will be an accurate roadmap to what actually happens in the end. I’m hoping to spend <~50% of my time doing meaningful, but temporary project-related work for astronomy – helping to get projects started, or through some tough spots, or filling in a temporary gap or need. With my experiences in the science, observations/operations, and technical/project sides of astronomy, I think I can fill a variety of needed roles and offer groups a way to seize opportunities they might not have otherwise. Is there a market for this? If there isn’t, I think there should be, and judging by the inquiries I’ve received already, I’m optimistic there is a real mutual need here I can address. I’m really grateful for the support I’ve received so far and in addition to fearing I won’t have enough work offers, I am beginning to fear I may have too many.
I want to spend the other ~50% of my time on my coaching and training material – a lot of which I’ve discussed here already. I’ve got content on workplace productivity, anti-productivity, project management, leadership, teamwork, systems engineering, and personal and professional growth. I think there’s relevance here to a more general audience beyond astronomy that I’d like to explore. I also think there’s value in continuing to bring these ideas to astronomy and the broader technical/academic world, particularly to students and those in early career stages. A colleague told me today that she thought our training teaches us the technical aspects of our industry, but it doesn’t teach us how to be humans; how to relate to others; how to get our ideas across and accept others’, etc. I’ve learned, and am still learning, most of this the hard way. How great it would have been to figure this stuff out earlier. I’d like to help others learn some of my lessons earlier than I did.
Contributing to both efforts, I’ve got too many ideas for new content I want to generate, blogs I want to write, books I want to publish, videos I want to make, and communities I want to engage with. It’s both exciting and scary and with an office full of boxes from my father’s estate, and soon to be from my old office, it’s all a bit jumbled right now. I’ve got a business plan, a great network of friends and colleagues, and a path through the boxes. I think I’m going to make it and I hope you’ll be here for, and help me along, the journey.
Mahalo, and aloha.
Scot
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Online classes and a new YouTube channel
I’m working with the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to offer a unique combination of my class content in a remote, zoom-like, environment. You can read more about it and sign up at their page here. I’ll be including most of my Email Management, Task Management, and Prioritization (Getting the Right Things Done) courses along with some of my newer Doing Less content. I’m looking forward to it and hopefully the first focus on productivity doesn’t dilute the ending message to slow down and take a step back from time to time too much. 🙂
I’m also experimenting with ways to get some of these courses out to a broader audience, so I’ve started a YouTube channel. I’m starting it with my Email Management course content and some random other thoughts. Stop on by and let me know if you’ve found it useful. I need 100 initial subscribers to get a better URL and make my content easier to find, so if you feel like subscribing, it would be a big help if you could. I’m not going to beg for likes and subscribes in the videos themselves, but I would like them to be accessible to people looking for such content.
Well, that’s it for now. Mahalo.
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Class Offerings
Over the years, I’ve developed a number of short courses on a variety of topics concerning workplace efficiency, effective management, and leadership. Lately, I have expanded the content and realized there may be a larger audience for all of this than what I am currently reaching. So, I’m also thinking of new ways I can present the material and am considering whether I can make them into a set of self-serve videos that people could pick and choose from. The classes usually include a lot of interactive discussion and some exercises, so I’m trying to develop some way to translate all that into the different format. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
I also need a place to record a summary of the offerings, so for now at least, this is that place.
The Productivity Series
Your email inbox includes hundreds of emails that demand your attention or some action to close out. You are continually barraged with new work requests that make it difficult to both keep track of everything on your plate and stay focused on the task at hand. You find yourself constantly working to do the urgent tasks on your list and seldom find the time to work on those long-term important projects that don’t have specific deadlines. You would love to delegate some of your work, but the process is usually painful enough that it seems easier to just do things yourself. You sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it. If any or all these situations sound familiar, and they are too much so for many of us, these four classes can help you regain control or refine your existing processes for more thoughtful productivity:
1. Email. Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend processing your email and make your own emails more effective.
2. Task Management. Learn how to organize your tasks so you don’t lose track of what you have to do or where you are on a given task. Reduce the amount of time you spend switching tasks and prepare yourself to better respond to new task requests.
3. Prioritization. Learn to make time for the important as well as the urgent. Understand basic human tendencies that sometimes inhibit us from making the best decisions on what task to spend our time on. Learn when and how to slow down and say no.
4. Delegation. Learn effective ways to offload tasks to others and still get results.
Individual Components
Email Management
Finally, a meeting where you’re not only allowed, but instructed to read your emails. Leave this class in control of your email. We’ll discuss the zero inbox method of email management, including ways to send more effective emails, receive fewer emails, and derive better processes to organize the emails you receive.Task Management
Once you’ve learned to manage your email, attend this session and learn to manage your tasks. How do you keep track of what needs doing? How do you make sure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks? How do you stop your mind from reminding you at all the wrong times about all the things you need to do? We’ll focus primarily on a simplified Getting things Done (GTD) type task management approach and discuss several practical ways to implement it.Getting the Right Things Done
Go beyond task management and learn how to identify what the right things to be doing are and explore why we don’t always seem to do the right things, even when we know what they are. Mastering this content should help attendees remove low return tasks from their plates, focus on getting the most important tasks done, and partner better with their colleagues.Doing Less or There’s more to Life than Efficiency
Focusing on productivity and efficiency are good things, but as with most things, too much of a good thing can still be too much. In Doing Less we talk about the value of slowing down, allowing time for context and creativity, and choosing a path simply because it is unknown. Together with Getting the Right Things Done, we address the other half of task management beyond organizing and controlling your tasks to prioritizing, doing, and sometimes purposefully not doing.Successful Delegation
An important part of controlling your own task list is delegation. A critical and necessary part of delegation is tracking and ensuring your delegated tasks get done. Here, we discuss techniques to make proper requests of others, set deadlines, and follow up without coming across as a nag or an untrusting colleague.Effective Meetings
You’ve mastered your inbox, taken control of your task list and become a master of delegation. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to attend, or perhaps even hold, a meeting to discuss your projects. This course offers a framework for meetings that helps ensure you walk away from each meeting with the results you need and with appropriate participation from the attendees. Would you rather watch a good move, or go to a meeting? If you chose a movie, come learn why and how you should attend a meeting instead.Leadership and Teamwork
Can anyone be a leader? Do I need a title to be a leader? How do I learn my leadership style? Leadership is about character and skills and both can be learned. In this course we differentiate management from leadership, discuss the different ways one can lead, find a common thread running through most leadership models and the best leaders, and learn to lead by first understanding yourself, then others. We build a set of skills and a problem solving framework to help leaders and teams focus on the right problem solving steps while avoiding common pitfalls.
Still occasionally suffering from an email inbox that doesn’t get emptied, tasks that don’t get done, meetings that aren’t efficient, and other signs that he has still not fully mastered this material, Scot enjoys presenting these courses and learns something new every time. As a result, his processes continually evolve and improve and hopefully others also gain control and purpose in their work life. It is all a work in progress and a journey he hopes to share with others for mutual benefit.
In preparation for a new delivery system, Scot has started a new Astromanager youtube channel with as of yet, no content. If you want to check it out you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2lJ7RdBBowLLON762LQ6Qg. You can subscribe now for that first video notification and a valuable early subscriber number.