Get Financially Fit!

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 Only through dedicated work does a man fulfill himself.
-William Carlson

We have all had the experience where we get excellent service from a waiter, waitress, or flight attendant. My challenge for you this month is to reflect on how to provide better service to your customers and achieve more fulfillment.

We all have a choice in how we approach work. We can see it a necessary hardship or we can choose to make it a fun and rewarding experience.

Here are the essentials to be a productive and fulfilled worker:
1. Choose to make work fun
2. Focus on that which is within your control
3. Get organized and productive
4. Deliver what your customer needs
5. Be reliable

Let’s get started.

Choose to make work fun
“What would it look like to have fun at work?” This is a question that a colleague named Tom taught me to ask. His enthusiasm for interacting and working with people was contagious. You always wanted to work with Tom because he complimented people, saw every challenge as an adventure, and genuinely loved to work. I asked him how he came to love work. He told me that when he was young, a coworker taught him to ask the question, what can I do to make work fun every day? When Tom was 65 our company offered a generous buy-out package. He reluctantly took it and expressed to me how he was going to miss working with his coworkers. What would make your work fun? Imagine complimenting others, seeing the challenges of the day as an adventurous journey, and making work fun with your natural gifts and talents.

Focus on that which is within your control
You have a choice on whether you focus on things that you control or things that you don’t control. When you focus on things you control you increase your effectiveness. When you focus on things you can’t control you risk becoming a complainer. Taken to an extreme a complainer can become the chronic ‘boss hater’.

When you communicate with your coworkers you can significantly affect the tone of the conversation by changing your questions. For example, instead of asking the generic How is it going? Ask, What’s going well? or what’s fun on your project? You’ll be amazed how the majority of your conversations will be positive and end in you feeling great about the conversation.

Get Organized and Focused
In my experience, getting organized and productive is one of the hardest challenges. An eye-opening book that really helped me improve significantly is Getting Things Done by David Allen. I recommend that you borrow a copy from your local library.

The strategies that David recommends are to get clutter out of your brain, maintain a simple system of physical and electronic inboxes that you empty regularly, and dealing with short tasks immediately.

A powerful principle that David advises is to reduce the clutter in your brain by not requiring your brain to track your open tasks and commitments. Keep a single to do list and reliably use your calendar. He recommends that when you create your to do list, add a column where you identify the next action step. I found his recommendation of adding your next action step for each open task to be helpful. I now schedule many things that I need to do directly in to my calendar.

I successfully implemented his strategy for emptying physical and electronic inboxes. I typically get 100 emails a day and would historically have over a 1000 emails in my inbox. For a period of time I was able to keep my work inbox near zero emails. At the moment I am struggling to get back down to zero emails as I balance many competing deadline.

A very useful recommendation is to immediately complete and close short tasks and requests. Instead of letting lots of little tasks pile up, just complete any item that takes less than 1 minute. For my job I have found that it is beneficial to complete any task immediately that takes less then 5 minutes. For a few days it felt like I was spending a lot of my time completing a lot of short tasks, but this really did reduce my sense of stress.

Deliver what your customer’s needs
I had a work experience that has changed the way that I approach my work. I had worked with a team of people for many years. We often would identify and work on improvements that we thought would help our customers. One day we got a new manager who interviewed our different customer segments. Her survey method was to ask each customer to prioritize his or her needs from 1 (most important) to 5 (5th most important). She shared the results with us and then we went to work addressing the customer’s requests in the appropriate priority. Over the course of 5 years we repeated this process every 6 months. We were able to provide some customer needs quickly, while other challenges took persistence and time to complete. In our customer’s opinion we went from being one of the worst to the best suppliers within just a couple of years. By the fifth year we were proactively developing solutions that were not needed for several years.

The key lesson that I learned from that experience was to build a relationship with your customers. Ask them how you can improve and what you are doing well. If you keep asking this question and focus on improvement you will help your customers win.

Be reliable
We all appreciate it when other people complete work and commitments by agreed upon deadline. I recommend that you make being reliable foundational to your work. Being reliable not only means delivers work on time, but also providing clear communication if you become aware that you can’t meet a deadline. You will have the most peace if you honestly let your customers, colleagues, or boss know immediately as you become aware that a delay is occurring.

Life Application
What can you do today to become more productive and fulfilled? What can you do to make your work fun? This month take on the challenge of being more productive and fulfilled in your work.