1 Easy Way to Get THAT Task Done

We all have them. The proposal that ought to have been completed yesterday; the article that should have been submitted last Tuesday.

I've been using a simple solution for several years now.

Here's the trick.

Clear Your Desktop!

I've got you there, haven't I? Because you don't know whether I mean your real desktop (made of wood) or the screen that faces you as you read this.

I refer to the screen that faces you as you read this.

No wait! There's more

Most users I see have a screen desktop that is a vast un-navigable array of icons. There are shortcuts and there are documents, and I get paid $100 per hour to sit while they mutter "It's here somewhere".

Silly really.

"A place for everything and everything in its place" was a motto my mother never taught me; if she had have done so, my early life would have been a great deal more pleasant.

I had to learn the hard way.

Make an effort, today, to start filing things on your hard drive in a logical pattern - client data in a subfolder of "Clients\", personal data in a subfolder of "Personal\".

And stop storing data on your boot partition (drive C) in that "Documents And Folders" thing. Drag everyone of them to your data partition (probably drive D) and stop using your desktop as a landfill site.

Use the QuickLaunch toolbar for those tasks (programs or documents!) you use throughout the day.

Then your desktop will be as tidy as mine:-

Here's the 1-Step

At the start of the day, make a shortcut icon to ONE, and only one task that should be completed before the end of the day.

Just one. Not two.

That icon will remind you that there is a priority task.

And it will get done.

Talk to Me !

P.S.

Tomorrow is another shortcut!

Dating My Clients

So there I am, minding my own business, wading through 15 contacts per day playing catch-up, and I notice that a record has dropped through the cracks!

I maintain three date fields in a person’s record:

(1) The date the record was added

(2) The date the record was last modified

(3) The date the person is due for a follow-up call

In several cases one or more of these fields are null.

A null date field means that the record may not show up when I ask to see “Which records are due for follow-up today?” or “Which records have not been modified (with new information) for the longest time?”.

So I took 15 minutes off work and drafted a bit of code which ran thus:

If the date-last-modified field is null, then set it to be TODAY less 6 months ago. That ism make it instantly-very-stale, forcing me to look at it closely on the next contacts run (tomorrow morning)

If the date-added is null, then set it to the date-last-modified. By the first piece of code, date-last-modified is never null, so date-added will be set, at worst, the most recent date of modification. Not perfect, but at least it is a value.

If the date-to-follow-up is null, then set it to be the date-added. That should force me to look at records which are added BUT might never have been contacted!

In many cases I’ll find that everything is on schedule, but in some cases I’ll find a person who has never been contacted, and I’ll rectify that immediately.

It worked so smoothly that I repeated the procedure for my “Company” and “Branch” tables!

Talk to Me!