Friday afternoon, end of the week: what will you do to “wrap up” successfully? You could squeeze in one more call or meeting, but maybe you’d be better served to reflect on the week. What did you learn? Who did you connect with? What was a waste of time? What returned dividends? If you don’t make time to reflect, you miss out on learning.

Someone once said if you never slow down, nothing good will be able to catch up to you. That is true of insight. For as much value as leaders place on speed, there are times when leaders are better served to slow down.

As  you start into the weekend, do you have clear intentions about how to spend your free time? Will you rest, enjoy liesure and renew on purpose or slog through the weekend only to arrive at Monday unchanged?

Why not use the same skills to get the most out of your workweek to get the most out of your weekend?

Rory Vaden is a friend and colleague in the speaking profession. While Rory is a relative newcomer, he is a rising star because of his good ideas, platform power and integrity. He is the founding partner of Southwestern Consulting, a public seminar company that provides professional sales training.

The following is a nuts and bolts article from Rory’s ezine which I know you’ll find useful.

Advanced Email Strategies

It’s amazing how many of our consulting clients are struggling with email. Managing email is quickly becoming one of the biggest challenges in business today. It’s also becoming a tremendous source of anxiety and stress for a lot of people. Fortunately, I’ve been learning a lot about the subject not only from handling my personal inbox, but from some of the highest performing professionals in the market today. In hopes not to overwhelm you, I’m breaking this up into a few articles. So, here are 5 self-discipline strategies that you can use today to help you get your inbox to 0!

#1 The Batch Attack – Batching means you don’t check email except for set times during the day. You have to discipline yourself to be willing to let them build up, knowing comfortably that you have systems in place to nuke them later. Batching is more efficient because it allows you to put your focus completely on email, then focus on something else, then back on email, and then back to something else, etc. Batching also reduces your anxiety by demonstrating that you have power over your inbox and that you are not slave to the minutiae of email. There comes a point (after you are so ridiculously frustrated with the amount of emails that you get) if you let them build up to where you get so many emails that you will become numb to the stress they cause and they lose their power over you. There are so many and it’s so impossible to keep up that you stop caring that they come in. That is actually a healthy place to get to because it empowers you to, from that point on, let them build-up knowing that you will batch-attack them later.

#2 The No-Notify Technique – Turn off the Outlook notification window. This is a core principal of self-discipline: The Magnification Principle. Focus is power. Sunlight focused enough (through a magnifying glass) creates enough energy to start a piece of paper on fire. Your focus does the same thing; it creates energy. Anything (other than family) that distracts your focus during catch-up time should be viewed at as the enemy and should be eliminated. One of the biggest culprits is the ridiculous Outlook window that flashes up in the bottom right and/or the little yellow envelope. Get rid of it. Now I know some people are stuck on the idea that “I have to be able to respond to email RIGHT AWAY”. I get it. I have important deals, last minute contracts, etc. too and so do our clients. But really, do reasonable people honestly expect you to be available at their beck and call every waking moment of every waking day? And besides, who really has the time for you to call them back right away unscheduled? I prefer to do business with high-performing people and I don’t expect high-performing people to be sitting on email 24 hours a day – most of them don’t; do you? Turn off the window, batch it, and get back to them. Even if you batch, you’re still checking email 3-5x a day. This will feel awkward at first, but you’ll get used to it shortly and you’ll love the freedom you have to focus on other things during the day.

#3 The Save Out Technique – I sometimes have a hard time cleaning out my closet and giving away clothes, even if I haven’t worn them in years. Do you have that problem? Most of us have the exact same problem with email. We keep an email on the off chance that we might need it someday. I believe that psychologically there is a huge emotional cost to carrying “baggage” like that, but even if we can’t get ourselves to just delete stuff, then what I recommend is copy and paste that email to a word document and save it somewhere. If you need it, you can get to it, but it’s out of the daily view of your inbox. Clean it out.

#4 The Extended Out of Office – This is a great strategy one of my coaching clients stumbled upon by accident after a calendar goof up. When you are travelling out of the office, turn your out of office assistant on and have it say that you’ll be gone 1-2 days later (or earlier) than you’ll actually be gone. Since it takes you 1-2 days of focused uninterrupted time to catch up anyway, let the world think you are unavailable; because you are. You’re busy catching up and keeping your sanity.

#5 The Non Multi-Medium Technique – Multi-media might be the way we digest entertainment information, but it shouldn’t be the way we process all of our work information. It’s one thing to have 200 emails to catch up on, but that hopeless feeling tends to be dramatically amplified if we also have 10 voicemails, 6 sticky notes on our desk, a pile of snail mail, a stack of business cards to call back on, 4 texts to reply to and Tweetdeck up and running in the background. Yuck. Instead, funnel and try to consolidate all of those mediums into one central method for managing and distributing tasks; such as email. Even if it means you go from 200 emails to 230, it will still help you focus better. So try to somehow convert those items to email tasks (by emailing yourself, for example) so that everything can be centralized in one place. You’ll go nuts trying to keep up on all the different platforms. Clean off the clutter to conserve your desk space and your emotional energy and get it all into one manageable place. Also, turn your attention away from less critical (non-immediately income producing) tasks such as social media until you get caught up.

Hopefully that will get you off and running towards a 0 inbox!

My long time friend and colleague in the National Speakers Association, Jeff Davidson, is  author of the new book, Simpler Living: A Back to Basics Guide to Cleaning, Furnishing, Storing, Decluttering, Streamlining, Organizing, and More. Jeff, who holds the registered trademark for “The Work Life Balance Expert,” has been studying the phenomenon of increasing stress and time pressure on individuals since 1988. Back then, he was researching for his book Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society. This brief interview will introduce you to Jeff and his interesting new book.

Q: Is the world getting more complex or is that simply a perception?

A: Complexity is accelerating. Signs are all around us. People constantly checking their mobile devices. People battling to stay on top of the dozens of emails that can come in on a moment’s notice. All around us, information and communication seem to be tugging for our attention at every turn. In the office, the tasks mount up.

Q: Is life at home as difficult as life at work?

A:  Most people today face more clutter and disorganization at home than at work. Through my research and a series of calculations, I was able to determine that in 1988, in a 24-hour period, more information became newly available on Earth than a person could ingest at normal reading and viewing speed in the next 80 years. The next day, the phenomenon would repeat itself. In other words, in 1988, more than a lifetime’s worth of information became newly available every 24 hours.

 Q: So you’d say it’s worse today by a long shot?

A: Yes. Today, with high-speed Internet connections, Global Positioning Satellite systems, and the myriad of ways by which we can all gather information, more information becomes newly available in less than one second than a person could comfortably ingest in the next 80 years. Said another way, every second, a lifetime’s worth of new information becomes available.

This is not hard to fathom when you count up all of the TV broadcasts around the world, radio broadcasts, information added to Web sites, magazines, newspapers, zines, e-blasts, listservs, newsletters, special bulletins, and what have you, that becomes newly available each second. As such, the term “information explosion,” coined many years ago, no longer adequately describes what any of us face on a given day. There are no words that can capture the essence of how much information rains down upon each of us, all the time, without end.

Q: What does Simpler Living offer that others in the field do not?

A: The book is one of a kind. It is presented in landscape format, as opposed to portrait; in other words, it lays out as a coffee table book, and it appears as a coffee table book. It is 452 pages, but easy to get through because of the two to three pictures per page, totaling more than 1,000! Although the text contains more than 130,000 words, you don’t want to sit down and read it like you would any other book. Rather, I advise flipping through to just a few pages at a time to gain some quick ideas for areas of your life where you may be in need of simplicity.  

The first three chapters of the book offer a walk-through of how society became so complex, along with some antidotes as to keeping your own life simpler. Chapters 4 through 24 represent something not offered in any other book: A room-by-room review of numerous ideas as to what one can do to simplify every part of the household. After finishing all the possible rooms that one might have in a home, Simpler Living then focuses on areas such as health, diet, and nutrition; commuting, travel, and leisure; and managing a home office or traditional office.

Q: Any parting observations?

A: The world is not about to slow down and accommodate any of us. If anything, the pace of life seemingly will increase in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. It’s important for us to establish a framework now for taking back control of our personal environments, so that as we proceed into this brave new world of ever-increasing information and communication reception, we will have the capacity to maintain control. The very good news is that virtually every working adult can do this. By applying simple measures here and there, and recognizing the larger picture of what’s going on around the globe, we can avoid falling into the abyss of hopeless complexity in our lives.”

You begin each week with many demands on your time, but do you design your week for maximum advantage? In this audio blog you’ll learn the five questions that you should ask at the beginning of each week. Your answers will provide you an agenda that will help you improve your business and your life. Listen here: Five Questions

I’m an activity and experience junkie. I want to live life fully and generally be as productive as possible. I’ve learned, however, that anything overdone can become a fault. Sometimes I just need to do nothing. This non-activity is called different things (“vegging” comes to mind although I’m not convinced that becoming vegetable-like is the goal) but whatever you call it good things can happen when you relax the need to always be doing.

Sanborn Associates here posting an interesting mention on “Uncle” Mark made by Mike St. Pierre writing at LifeHack.org:

Mike had some fun with the whole family tree paradigm and created a family tree consisting of the top productivity bloggers on the internet (according to his criteria). This is what he says about Mark:

The Rich Uncle: Mark Sanborn, Sanborn & Associates
When Mark’s book The Fred Factor, hit the bookstores in 2005 it propelled Mark beyond other public speakers and married productivity with customer service. Mark is values-based and sets high standards for organizations and their interaction with customers.

Mark doesn’t necessarily consider himself a productivity blogger so it’s interesting to look at his work through Mike’s lens. We guess that when you look at it, the notion of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary (the theme of The Fred Factor) is a productive endeavor. Coincidentally, Mark just released a new eBook on productivity. In it he’s compiled a list of 101 of his most effective productivity tips.

In honor of Mark’s placement on St. Pierre’s productivity family tree, we’ve created a special coupon good for $2 off 101 Tips for Improving Productivity; simply go to the store, login or register, and apply coupon code mstpierre to receive the discount!

We were also pleased to note that productivity pro and our pal, Laura Stack, also made Mike’s tree as the Responsible Mom. We’re wondering if she’ll bake us cookies for pointing this out! By the way, congratulations to Laura on her latest book, The Exhaustion Cure. We understand it’s zooming up the best seller lists. (We just checked – #3 in Healthy Living on Amazon.)