Teaching Your Recruiters To Drink From the Fire Hose

“You can’t have everything.  Where would you put it all?”
– Steven Wright

By: Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher, Aribta, Inc.

Shally Steckerl, Executive Vice President, Arbita

Glenn Gutmacher, Vice President, ACES

Is this your typical day? You begin with checking 150 emails that came in overnight, listen to a dozen new voicemails (on your land line), then check your cell phone for more voicemails, and even some text messages, followed by a quick visit to a dozen websites to make sure nobody moved the ground beneath your feet, then perhaps deal with a bit of “snail mail.” Rinse and repeat – ad nauseam…

With all the fires we have to put out daily, is it really surprising we have no time left to build our skills, network for our career path, or plan adequately and be proactive about creating strategies? If we can barely come up for air once a week, then how are we expected to decide which new tools we test or invest in?

Well, I am here to tell you that there IS indeed such a thing as too much information. After all, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is what is valuable in today’s over-informed insanity. Knowledge is used to determine meaning. By interpreting information and applying our knowledge when deciding how to proceed, we generate wisdom, and it is that wisdom which makes us valuable to our clients and employers.

BLOG SIFTING

Reading 200 blogs won’t make you more intelligent, but it will make you unproductive – so which blogs should you read? First, pick a few reliable and original sources and stick with them:  they will do the job of filtering out all the noise. When you see several of your trusted sources mention a new source, then you can add that new source to your list until it’s time to re-evaluate your sources.

But what is reliable? When you see something really useful on a blog, take a unique keyword phrase (or two) and search on it to see if you can find it mentioned elsewhere. That new tip on your favorite blog may be a “re-post” from someone else who wrote the original, so try to find the source and follow that blog instead.

What is worth keeping? Make a list of sources you read regularly. Take a look at the last ten articles or posts from each source. Among the ten, what percentage did you find actionable, useful or inspiring? If fewer than five out of ten posts were “keepers,” then consider eliminating that source from your list. Some RSS readers like Google Reader will even show you analytics on which blogs you “click on” most, making it easy for you to whittle down your list to only those you find most useful. If you have a hard time deciding if you should keep a source in your reading list, also consider length and frequency of posting.  If the author posts a few times per month but provides much useful data and clearly takes time to research before they write, then that may be a more useful source for you than another author who posts frequent and short updates which mostly originate elsewhere and which you may see repeated by several of your other sources. These “reposters” are the online information equivalent of “fast food” – lots of content but little substance.

Read Early in the Day: Research indicates that reading in the morning doubles your speed. Another way to accelerate your consumption of information is to plan out your reading on a schedule:  Start by setting up an RSS Reader to collect all your information sources into one place. Great choices include the RSS Reader built into Microsoft Outlook 2007 or above, an online reader such as google.com/reader, or applications built right into your favorite browsers such as Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8 or above. Then separate your information sources into two groups:  a “shortlist” of your best/favorites, and another group of everything else.

A. 15 minutes a day: read the sources on your “shortlist”

B. 30 minutes per week to “gist” the rest of the sources:

1. Scan just the headlines, clicking only if you must know the full detail
2. If something is important enough, it will be covered by more than one source
3. Use sites like TechMeme.com to “gist” the news

C. 30 min. a month:  delete unproductive feeds using the “what is worth keeping” method above.

Skim and Speed Read: If you fall behind, take a lunch hour and go to a coffee shop where you’ll be left alone, and catch up with what you can, archive everything else. Here are my top three speed reading tips:

1. Scan the first and last sentences of each paragraph (also a technique of US President John F. Kennedy)
2. Turn headlines into questions and scan the body text for the answers
3. Skim the whole article first, then go back and fill in the blanks

INBOX MANAGEMENT

Keep or Delete? When you scan both your email inbox and your RSS reader, don’t be afraid to hit the delete button. Data can be like clutter in your closet. Don’t be a pack-rat. Having thousands of unread inbox items increases your stress level dramatically. Besides, old emails, blog posts, articles and documents are good for only a few months: most quickly grow stale and lose their usefulness, much like that months-old newspaper you occasionally find in the trunk of your car. Before you save an email, article or blog post, ask yourself if it will mean anything to you in one year, and without the context you have today? If not, just delete it. But if the answer is yes, simply move it to one single archive folder and later you can use your computer’s search feature to retrieve it. Having too many folders is another “stress inducer” that we no longer need thanks to technological advances like desktop search (read more about desktop search here: http://j.mp/desktop-search).

Three-Folder-System: One highly regarded method for “inbox management” is the three-folder-system.  This is the “do it, delegate it or delete” system. In this email management technique, you have just three folders:

1)      Action Required: items with assigned or ongoing tasks that you must complete by specific deadlines, and where you are the primary person responsible for the task.

2)      Follow Up: items requiring you to invest more than two minutes to craft a response, research, or where you must obtain information from some other party in order to complete the task. This folder also includes all your “to do” items, requests that take considerable effort to complete, and anything that can be filed under personal, fun, friends and family, etc.

3)      Archive: everything else including emails or updates from all your social networks (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc); newsletters, email lists and other “FYI” information where you are merely cc’d for political reasons.

If an item is more than two weeks old, then either answer, archive, or delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive later.

The 80/20 Rule: Pareto, an Italian economist, noticed that 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population, and this observation became the 80/20 rule. Incredibly, this rule carries over to time management as well!  Your best output comes from 20% of your activity, while the other 80% of your time is spent on less productive tasks.  How do you fix that?

Make a list of all task categories you do at work each day such as: returning calls, checking email, making cold calls, meeting with hiring managers, sourcing new prospects, writing/editing documents, social networking, etc. In a simple table, create a column that lists each task type and another column for how many hours you spend on each per week. Now add a third column where you rate how that task contributes to your total productivity, using a scale from .1 to .9. While this is very subjective, if you are honest with yourself, it provides a rough estimate. To calculate productivity, just multiply the number of hours times the rating scale you assigned. For example, 20 hours a week of sourcing at a rate of .9 gives it a score of 18. Tasks with the lowest scores should be eliminated and those in the midrange should be delegated or simplified.

Time Saving Productivity Tools

Besides RSS Readers, there are a few other specific tools which can boost your productivity.

• Xobni: An email helper that works along with Microsoft Outlook. It helps you find people, emails and attachments instantly. It suggests your schedule availabilities to someone requesting your time. With it, you can search the contents of your calendar items and the attachments in your emails, not just the contents of your messages. It integrates fully with Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to create your own private social network from contacts in your inbox. Analytics help you figure out who you contact most and why, so you can increase productivity.
• Opera Browser: Faster, safer and more powerful than any other Web browser. Create instant search shortcuts from any web page that has a search box. Use the built-in RSS Reader and email client, and synchronize your browsing history, speed dial, and bookmarks across all your computers and mobile devices. Save time with mouse gestures, voice commands and keyboard shortcuts.
• RescueTime: Tracks all your time on the computer, including the websites you visit, so without any effort on your part, you can better plan your work week, track your activity in detail, receive productivity estimates, and eliminate unproductive activities.
• Perfect Keyboard: Create unlimited shortcuts for any length text block or macro you use frequently to place the desired info into any document, email, web form, etc. For example, type .TY and it spells out “Thank you for your time” and use custom shortcuts for longer text blocks. Great for boilerplate templates and signature files. Use it to save time on typing, and reduce spelling errors.  Other macro functionality beyond text replacement is possible.  (In that regard, also see MacroExpress.)
• Contact Capture: (free with Arbita referral: http://j.mp/arbita-cc) Automates your data entry so you don’t have to type by extracting contact information (names, titles, addresses, emails, phones, websites) from lists, documents, and emails found anywhere on the web or on your computer and exports the data as field-formatted contact records into your favorite ATS/CRM application or directly into Outlook.
• Evernote: Allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Evernote is able to read text inside images like photos or scanned documents, too!
• Tungle, TimeDriver or AppointmentQuest: a way to share your calendar and automate the process of making appointments. Integrates with Outlook.

You are GOING to miss something! Here’s the bad news:  you can’t read, remember, process and file everything.  There’s always going to be more of everything, so the bottom line is you will miss some useful things. But the good news is if it’s important enough, you will see it more than once and so it will hit your radar eventually.

So here’s your plan: handle the “life threatening” or “mission critical” stuff right immediately, deal with the “other important stuff” as much as you can, then archive anything that may be useful in a year. Don’t worry, just delete the rest.  While everyone else struggles to stay afloat, your stress will drop while others’ rise in an age of increasing information overload.

Posted by Glenn Gutmacher on April 21, 2010. Filed under Shally Steckerl, Thought Leadership, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry