How can you clear out your inbox and keep it clear?

This is the first in a series of articles with suggestions on how you can manage the piles of email that come your way. I get about 300 email messages a day and send around 120 per day. Almost every night when I go home, my inbox is dead empty. When I come back from vacation, it only takes about 2 hours for me to get caught up again.

How do I do it? I follow several really easy principles that keep things simple and help me decide what is junk and what is not.

Create Personal Folders

You are filing your email away, right? Did you know that when you start up Outlook, the email that is in your inbox is not stored on your computer? It is actually stored on a remote server that the IT guys manage, and Outlook is pulling down a list of email stored there and showing it to you.

Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of Email Jail. When you have more messages stored on the Email Server than are allowed, you will get a nasty gram in your inbox that will tell you that your inbox is full, and that you must clear out some messages. Until you do, you are not allowed to send any more email. If you let your inbox fill up even more, you will not be allowed to receive any new messages.

Stay out of email jail by creating personal folders and filing away your email. Creating personal folders should be done with minimal choice and organization required. Your email is searchable - don’t muck things up by creating individual folders for every project or concept within your company so you can find things manually. That will only slow down your filing and prevent you from searching using the automated search function in Outlook.

Create folders like this:

Active
Archive 2006
Archive 2007
Archive 2008

That’s it. Now, drag all messages from your sent items and your inbox into the appropriate archive folder for that year. Whatever year the message came during, put it in that folder.

Save Worthy?

The Active folder is where you drag any message from your inbox that seems save-worthy.

Messages are save-worthy if:

• They are the last message in a conversation and contain all of the previous messages. Don’t save the earlier ones. Trash them.
• They contain information in them that you think you might need to reference later on. I delete all personal messages.
• The contents do not expire. I delete messages that give a URL in them that I have saved as a favorite in Internet Explorer or Firefox. I delete all issues that are resolved.
• The message is directly relevant to your work. I delete other people’s random status reports after I read them. I am not trying to archive all comm traffic.
• I have replied to the message and no longer need it.

I put messages into the Active folder and leave them there for 30 days. Every 1st of the month, I backup my documents and such, and I also open up the Active folder and copy everything more than 30 days old to the Archive folder for the appropriate year (right now - 2008).

No Sub Folders

I don’t make subfolders of my archives. I don’t try to group messages into folders. I just archive them by year so that the .pst files (Post Office Files that Outlook uses to store your personal folders in) don’t get too large.

Making subfolders makes searching a real pain the butt.

I also don’t use categories. Adding categories slows me down as well. I have another trick for that.

Edit the Subject

I am careful to edit the subject line of email to help me find it later. Here are some good principles:

• Before I send out a message, I put the project name and ID number in the message with a good subject. Using thoughtless subjects like “Dude” result in chaos later
• I rename subjects on emails I receive before I reply to improve searchability on them.
• When an email is particularly save-worthy, I definitely give it an excellent subject before I file it away in my Active folder.

That’s your first installment of help using Outlook. Create personal folders, keep them very simple, file only the last message in a thread, delete everything that is not save-worthy, edit subjects, and never make folders for groups of messages.

Next time: The Two Minute Rule!

Make your first week on the job a success and avoid these pitfalls.

Announcing Vacation

Want to have that nice job offer rescinded before you even start? Let the hiring manager know, after they extend an offer to you, that you plan to take a vacation during the first couple of months you will be working for them. Better yet, tell them you cannot start on the date they are asking because you will be in Hawaii.

Your goal during the interview process is to show high energy and enthusiasm for securing the job. You do this by sitting forward, looking the hiring manager in the eyes, and making a closing statement where you ask them to give you the job.

The halo effect this creates is completely neutralized if, the first days you are on the job, you announce that you have a long-standing vacation plan that you never made anyone aware of before you were made the offer. In fact, your boss is likely to get pretty ticked off.

When I’m job shopping, I cancel all vacation plans. I don’t interview for jobs when I have vacation plans pending. I recommend you do the same.

Doctor and Dentist Appointments

Shiela was on the job for less than three hours before she announced to her boss, “I have a dentist appointment I can’t reschedule this afternoon. I’ll need to leave early.” Her boss stared at her with a look of disgust, waved her hand, and the magic was over. A week later, she was fired after a couple of other incidents where she had to leave early, come in late, or take a long lunch for various reasons.

You can trash your reputation quickly by coming to your boss and asking for things. Your job, when you are hired, is to provide service to your boss and do work for them. You are supposed to be helping your boss, not asking them to help you. Anytime you talk to your boss and it sounds like, “I need something from you,” you are making a withdrawal from your account with them. Until some time has passed and you have proven yourself, there is not a balance to withdraw from, and your boss will resent your high-maintenance needy way.

Reschedule these the moment you are hired. If you lose a month or two, so be it. If you have to pay cash to go to a doc-in-the-box to get by for a couple of months - do so. Unless you are being treated for terminal cancer or need kidney dialysis to survive, your first months on the job should be relatively appointment free. Make yourself entirely available for work.

Day Care

If you are a single mom with kids in day care, say so up front and let your future employer know that you have constraints you have to work around. They deserve to know. The first day on the job, if you are packing up your desk at 4:00pm because you have a two hour commute and need to be at the day care by 6:30 to get your kids, you’re already sinking fast.

There are two important steps to take to prevent job loss due to day care: warn your hiring manager in advance of your situation, and accept responsibility for and fix the situation.

Can someone else pick up your kids? Anyone? A neighbor? A family member? No? Why not? Fix it. Why do you have a two hour commute? Move. Seriously. If you aren’t willing to move closer to work so you can work more hours, you aren’t serious about the job. Don’t be surprised when you are let go for working 7 hour days.

Working Through Lunch

Working through lunch does not entitle you to leave early. A lot of people think it does, so they tell their boss “I’m eating at my desk and working through lunch because I have to leave early.”

Here’s what your boss thinks: “Idiot.”

Working through lunch in most corporate offices is not a way to go home early - it’s expected. I didn’t say it was right, it’s just what a lot of people do. It does not entitle you to leave early. Your boss paid for you to be around when they need you. If you leave at 4pm, and your boss leaves at 5pm, your boss is unshielded and does not have you to help them for an hour in the afternoon. If you think it doesn’t bother your boss to walk up and down the cubes and see them all empty at 4:30pm, you’re wrong. It does.

You see, your boss probably does that same walk against at 7:00pm, long after you thought the work day was over, and that guy that is still sitting there hammering away? He’s your next boss.

You can choose to let that happen if you want, but realize you are making that choice.

Working From Home

Want to be despised during your first week? Ask what the work from home policy is. That’s a great way to have your boss call up the recruiter that found you and have him bless them out for bringing him lazy people to help him. You might think that work from home is the defacto standard for work these days, but it isn’t.

In a lot of offices, work from home (WFH) is indulged in only by bottom performers. Top performers show up, because they know that to be seen and to see others is to be prominent in the organization and build a reputation for success.

Even if telecommuting is offered, don’t make any use of it until you have solidly entrenched yourself and have built a rock-solid relationship with your boss.

Casual Dress

Here’s a great way to destroy your reputation early on: interview in a suit, and then show up in jeans. Let your coworkers and boss set the fashion standard within your team. Fit in. If they all wear jeans, then wear jeans and fit in. If they don’t, and you feel that it isn’t important and you do, your job performance will be meaningless and you will find yourself hovering on the brink of being let go right off the bat.

Recommendations

How do you avoid these pitfalls?

• Cancel all vacation when you start interviewing or take your vacation before you start.
• Postpone all dentist and doctor appointments until 60 days past your start date no matter how hard it was to get those dates.
• Get someone else to pick up your kids from day care.
• Commit to reducing your commute by moving closer to the office and do so quickly.
• Don’t work through lunch - work your full workday.
• Forget about working from home during the first 60 days
• Dress like other members of the team

All of these points revolve around a single, theme: You think you are entitled to certain things on the job. You think there are rules, and you believe your boss has to play by those rules. You believe that a boss that won’t let you do these things is unreasonable. You believe that success on the job depends upon things being done right.

Wrong.

Success on the job depends entirely upon whatever your boss thinks it does. If your boss thinks no one should ever take lunch, unless you are a union worker protected by labor laws and union contracts, when you take lunch, you take your career in your hands. Your boss might not get you for taking a long lunch, but when you fall out of favor, your boss can easily find some other rule to enforce that you might accidentally break in order to drive you off or destroy your ability to ever be promoted.

Should things work this way? Maybe not. But, they do work this way, and smart people learn to work with the system they have or accept the limits of their success when they refuse to play the game.

I’ve been very slowly working my way through the online program Personal MBA. I already have an MBA, so I was curious whether or not I would learn anything that I had not already forgotten. I read the first book, this one, and I’m already impressed. When I started this book, I was reading 200 words per minute. I was reading 700 words per minute by the end of it ten days later. Results talk, bull***t walks. Get it.

Buy 10 Days to Faster Reading at Amazon.com now!

How in the heck are you supposed to fire your bad boss? You cannot manage your bad boss. No matter what you do, your bad boss is not going to respond well to negative feedback from you, nor is your boss going to alter his behavior based on your input. Since you are a paid employee, your bad boss will probably take your praise as kissing up. Your complaints will be taken as whining or political maneuvering. Your bad boss can only be dealt with using one of two effective strategies:

• Grin and bear it, or…
• Resign

Most people apparently believe there is a third effective strategy:

• Complain and stay

While that is an option, is not not an effective one. Choosing complain and stay is choosing to be a poor performing employee who hates his work life and lets everyone know it. If this is the strategy you currently follow at work, don’t be surprised if it fails to produce happy results for you. It will not. You will not be appreciated for doing this, your skills at work will not make up for it, and you will go to work every day wondering when the axe is going to fall… on your neck!

Dare to be different! Choose one of the other two:

Grin and Bear It

The truth is that most bosses are bad bosses. They… ahem… we cannot help ourselves. We’re just not the same sort of person you are. We aren’t very skilled at considering others and not particularly interested in learning about ourselves, either. We’re at our job to get a paycheck. Maybe we don’t even really want to be the boss and have been secretly coming up with our own plan to change careers and get away from this company. Maybe we complain inside our offices where you cannot hear us, and we just don’t let you see it.

We don’t care about management books or management techniques. We pay you, and we expect that you will do perfect work in return for us without us lifting a finger or ever talking to you. We’re bad bosses: we believe that if we have to tell you anything, then it is “You’re fired.”

One of my good friends has a saying. Here it is:

The grass is always brown on the other side.

Guess what? When you resign and take on that new job that pays more working for the awesome person you loved during the interview, you will find within weeks that the really cool boss is leaving or being promoted, or that you are being moved to another department. Since 90% of bosses are bad bosses, your boss being bad at your next job is a fair probability.

When you get there, you will be just as miserable as you are here.

Thus, you might want to adopt the grin and bear it strategy:

1. Do not complain to anyone, ever, that you do not like your boss or your job
2. Do not show outward signs of discontent
3. Find out what your boss likes, and do that. Ask them directly if necessary. Ask their admin if that doesn’t work
4. Find out what your boss hates and never do that, no matter how tempting or necessary it seems
5. Dress nice for your boss - it makes them think you are trying harder
6. Perform: deliver results, document the results in easy-to-consume graphics and charts backed up by data that is available not not necessary to study.
7. Make your boss look good at every opportunity.
8. Ignore your boss’s weaknesses and grin as he steals your work, steps on you, and makes his career out of your unappreciated efforts.
9. Eventually your boss will leave, be replaced… or you will be moved, recruited from elsewhere, or promoted. Change happens - so meditate and let it happen.

The results of this sort of activity will have a high price, but that’s why jobs pay good money. If it were easy, anyone could do it successfully. You guessed right, by the way. The grin and bear it strategy is fairly successful whether or not your boss is a bad boss. You’d be surprised how many people think their boss is a really bad boss when in reality they are just a medium-class annoying boss.

But let’s say your boss is sure-fire bad - a ten on the scale of badness. Your boss, in front of everyone at a staff meeting, announces to the team something they learned about your from a third party that should never have been revealed publicly. Your boss tells your peers that you are worthless. Your boss tells you that you are worthless, calls you names, yells at you with a raised voice, curses (not in anger - but directed at you), or touches you inappropriately… not innocently… but such as slapping you right on the butt.

And extreme example, but let’s say that your boss is just down and dirty bad and must be fired. How do you do that?

Resign

Firing your boss is quitting:

1. Prepare your resume (print at home or professionally - never at work)
2. Make friends with anyone who works for any sort of recruiting or contract employment company
3. Build a network of friends around you and exploit it for employment opportunities
4. Tell NO ONE that you are preparing to leave
5. Slowly migrate personal things out of your office - don’t use a big box. Just grab something every night and pull it out of there. Replace photos with company certificates that mean little to you. Replace personal gizmos with company propaganda so that your cube does not go empty.
6. Back up all of your data, contacts, email, documents, templates, etc to multiple discs or USB keys - just in case one fails - and take it home. You’ll need much of what you used at work later on your next job, probably.
7. When you have interviews, your children are sick, you are sick, or there is some need to pick someone up from the airport. TELL NO ONE. Don’t tell your work buddy that you know you can trust. Don’t tell your cube mates. Don’t tell your boss. Don’t tell anyone other than your spouse behind closed doors after the children are asleep.
8. Find another job. Do not leave for money - find a job you like with people you like doing something you can believe in. Your next higher-paying yet soul-stealing job will destroy you, and you will end up having to come back home in shattered and humiliated ruin
9. Give notice. Most people give two weeks - I think two weeks is really lame because no one can hire a replacement and train them in two weeks. Often it takes two weeks to get an ad placed or recruiters spun up to full speed. Six weeks is nice.
10. Refuse all counteroffers. When you accept a counteroffer, you doom yourself. Usually, within six months, people who accept counteroffers are gone - fired or finally leaving anyway.
11. Decline any offer of an exit interview. If they corner you into one, say nothing negative. Find whatever positives you can, and emphasize those only.
12. Still tell no one. It is your boss’s right to announce you are leaving - not yours.
13. Arrange with your boss to move your remaining things out late at night so as not to raise a disturbance. You walking out to your car carrying a box mid-day smiling and laughing about what a bunch of jerks they are makes everyone else feel bad and you might need to return here in an emergency.

How to Resign

The guys at Manager Tools have provided three excellent podcasts that tell you exactly how to resign your job. You may be surprised at their advice. I highly recommend you heed their words. When you leave with style, whether fired or of your own decision, remaining professional can only help your situation and your reputation.

How to Resign Part 1
How to Resign Part 2
How to Resign Part 3

Some of you will have ethical problems with the above. Fine - do as you must and take your chances, but I believe that being more open and honest will not result in change in the organization. Correction: there will be change. They will change you out for someone else and lock the door on you after you leave. This way you still have a fallback strategy. I have seen a lot of people leave big companies, and after six months or so, some of them come back. They were smart - they kept their complaints to themselves and left their options open.

Here’s my best recommendation… if your boss really stinks, and you need a change, then start making the change. Do not keep a bad boss because you fear change, have become comfortable, do not think you can earn as much elsewhere, or that the grass is brown everywhere. Make the change. I have made the change before several times in my career when I saw things coming to closure of their own.

The day Lorna and I decided to leave Japan we talked about the people who had left. So many of our friends had moved to other cities, taken other jobs, become busy parents, or had moved on to other things. We were surrounded by new and different people, and it just felt like we were hanging around reminding everyone of a time that was no more. Sometimes, it is just time to leave.

Take a chance, rely on your friends and contacts, reach out to professionals for opportunities, and explore your possible options. Yes, you can fire your boss. Looking at poll numbers for how many people are unhappy in their jobs, lots of people need change in their lives, but seem afraid of it.

Frank Herbert wrote,

Without change, something inside us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.

Find your next job without burning the one you have.

What is a PDF file?

A PDF is like a .doc or a .ppt that you can no longer edit. Once you convert your office software file into a PDF, you can send it out so other people can read it, but it can only be opened for reading.

The graphics, text, and other content of your file are converted by whichever program you prefer into the PDF format. You keep the original, and you send out the PDF.

Many e-books are in PDF format. I’ve sold a few myself using this document type.

Advantages

PDF files have two important appealing features:

• Security: PDF files are difficult to edit. The very technical can open them in their editors and mess with them unless they are encrypted. Even that encryption can be broken. But PDF format basically does keep your friends from putting their name on your documents. Professionals who write really great documents sometimes will send them out as PDF to keep others from stealing their work.
• Portability: MACs, PCs, and Unix machines can all use PDF format documents easily, and the content will look the same on each. Thus, to reach the widest audience, PDF is a good format to use.

Not So Good

PDF files have some issues:

• Security: PDFs are not rock-solid secure. Secure it with a password, and someone can get in.
• Cannot be edited: When you send files to coworkers that cannot be used as templates, you tick them off and they demand the original. You will have to send it to them, because all work you do at work belongs to your company, not you. Sorry, but there is no such thing as “stealing your work” when you are at work. Your work you are paid for was purchased from you. Your coworkers have a right to re-use your files and copy you.
• Complex creation: To use the cool security features, you really have to read thoroughly about PDF files. Did you embed your fonts? What the heck does that mean? PDFs have lots of options, and the free programs do not support them.

How to Make Non-Secure PDF Files

On a PC, making PDF files is easy. Just download and install CUTEPDF. Once installed, when you want to convert your document, just print it and choose CUTEPDF as your printer.

Linux users can make PDF files directly in OpenOffice.Org, the free office software that comes with the operating system. They can also view them without installing extra software. OpenOffice.Org is available for Windows users, too. It isn’t as slick as Office 2007, but it can easily keep up and is 99% compatible with Office 2003 and earlier. It is also 100% less expensive, as it is available for free.

So, try your hand at making a PDF file, and you can publish information that others cannot change without great effort in a file format which is compatible with any computer.

Most managers focus on weakness. There may be 300 different tasks or projects going on below us, perhaps thousands if we are high enough up the corporate ladder, and we cannot focus on all of them. In order to be efficient with our time, most managers leave alone the people that they know they can trust and focus on the people they cannot. They invest their time not on what is going right, but on the things that are going wrong and how they can help get them going right.

Here is the result of that kind of thinking:

• The people who are weakest on your team or around you get most of your attention while the strongest on your team receive the least
• You invest in people where the return is very low or negative while not investing in people where the return is very high
• You end up “down in the weeds” (buzzword alert) trying to fix small problems on one person’s desk instead of considering how you can use multiple people to solve problems
• Your reports see you as a source of negativity
• You see yourself as hopelessly flawed and become discouraged
• You fail to leverage your best when faced with difficulty
• You spend time in the parking lot complaining about what others do wrong or poorly
• Demoralized, you “die on the vine” or leave.

This is how just about every manager and every individual contributor does their jobs and sees themselves. Most companies and managers do nothing about this situation. The fact is, they don’t know what to do about this situation.

There is hope.

Marcus Buckingham has written three books which provide guideposts to taking yourself from negative to positive leadership.

1. First Break All The Rules - the story of a Gallup Organization study of management showing what great managers do differently
2. Now Discover Your Strengths - a listing of the 31 strengths identified in the study and how and why to bring them to life on the job and at home.
3. Go Put Your Strengths to Work - presents a six step discipline for taking action on what you learned in the first two books.

The concept is relatively simple:

• Everyone has inborn, native qualities that do not change
• When these qualities are utilized well, personal success results
• When you try to leverage other qualities you do not have and never will, you get poor results and end up beating your head against a brick wall.

There is an online test you take when you read Now Discover Your Strengths which is called Strengthsfinder. When you take the test, it will output which five of the 31 strengths are your signature themes in life. This is not a personality test. It doesn’t tell you anything about how you act when you are cranky, it doesn’t try to explain why you do things. These are simply strengths you have.

I took the test.

Looking at my list of strengths and studying the list of the 26 other strengths that are not signature themes of mine, I can see countless times that I have attempted to solve a problem or succeed by pushing a strategy that required a strength I did not have. Instead, I would have been better off solving the same problem by using my five strengths.

And when I view people that work around me, do I look at the things they cannot do, or do I look at the things they do and see what it is they bring to the table? Do I know how to leverage their talents - which person to pick to solve each kind of problem my team faces?

Most importantly, am I developing my and my team’s strengths, or are we wasting a lot of time investing in weaknesses which will never really improve beyond barely acceptable levels?

Thoughout my career I have found myself focused on developing skills that do not come naturally to me, and I have completely ignored seeking out training and coaching in the things that I do really well. This makes no sense! It is like Coca-Cola spending all of their money on making a better cardboard box to ship drinks in instead of investing in a new or better soft drink.

How to manage to strengths?

• Find out what your strengths are.
• Use your strengths to solve problems and get things done.
• Ignore, work around, or spend only a little time managing weaknesses to get them just good enough to keep them from sinking you, then forget about them.
• Find out what other people’s strengths are
• Go to them for those qualities and put them to work
• Hire people who are naturally empowered to fulfill a role at work
• Develop your children’s natural talents instead of focusing on what they cannot do or do not do well.
• Figure out what your boss is good at and offer yourself as a plug-in to cover what they do not do so well.
• Ignore your boss’s not-so-strong points.

This is harder to do than just reading an article on an opinionated man’s blog. But, it is easier to do that it first appears. Read the books, take the test, learn the strengths, and other people and yourself will start to look different to you.

You might have a major epiphany and realize what you want to be when you grow up.

You need to read. In keeping with our principle of effectiveness, you need to read the right things that will help you accomplish your objective. To be effective, you must have a goal so that you can reach a result that meets or exceeds that goal. Setting a goal requires that you know what it is that you need to accomplish.

The unpleasant truth is that what we need to accomplish is not merely learning the tricks of a trade. In order to become more successful at life and in our careers, we must improve who we are. That means that a lot of the reading we will be doing will be self-improvement books - not books on how to write an excellent resume.

Own Your Current Situation and Be Proactive

Your current work situation is a projection that you have created through a series of choices you have made combined with the forces of entropy and serendipity.

You have chosen your current job. You applied for it, you were hired, and you stay where you sit. You have made three choices that have resulted in you sitting or standing where you are during your work hours: the choice to apply, the choice to take the job, and the choice to not leave that you make every day. Unless you understand that your situation is the product of your choices, you cannot even begin to improve your situation by reading books about business.

You must accept, before you go any farther, that you are ultimately responsible for your situation. If you cannot accept this, and you are convinced that you are the victim of circumstances beyond your control, that the environment outside of you controls everything that you do, and that you are helpless and hopeless in the face of it, stop reading now, because nothing you read will help you.

In order to change your situation, you cannot change those around you or the company you work for. Nor is it efficient or effective to sit around waiting for something to change in the environment while you passively suffer and years pass. The most powerful forecasting model that exists is the immediate past. Whatever happened last year will most likely happen again this year. As a result, passive behavior is rarely rewarded by entropy, as your situation will deteriorate into chaos if you just sit there, and serendipity, which requires you take action to have a happy circumstance occur.

Being proactive is your only hope, and proactive behavior is rooted in the belief that we are each responsible for our situations.

Books You Are Looking For

There are two basic sorts of book on the shelves of bookstores for you to read and begin changing your life around so that you are happier at work.

• Books on self-improvement
• Books on management

The two kinds of book differ from one another dramatically, and it is important to approach both sorts of book.

Books on self improvement focus on principles and beliefs from which your behaviors are projected. These books, like this article, offer insight and wisdom into the very nature of what makes a human being successful and happy in life.

Good books about management are often based in the principles found in self-help books if not self-help books themselves. The funny thing about looking for books on management is that the good ones all contain advice to the manager on how to improve their own activities at work. There is actually very little content on the shelves that covers specific, manager-only skills and activities.

Lots of people quit their job and find another one - only to discover, as a good friend of mine is fond of saying, “The grass is also brown on the other side.” If we change our circumstances without changing anything about ourselves, we ultimately find ourselves repeating our bad experiences over and over again. That’s because we make the world around us what it is with our beliefs and perspectives.

Great Sources for Books

Do you walk into book stores and pile up a shopping basket with your hardback selections and then pay full price for them? You fool!

Check the prices on Amazon.com instead. You’ll find plenty of these books available used for less money than the shipping costs. I purchased Caplow’s excellent work for literally $1.00 and $3.00 shipping.

But there is an even better way to find books on the cheap. Try your local Goodwill store. When people finish reading business books, they often hand them in for a tax write-off to a local store. You could do what I did and get a copy of most of Drucker’s works sitting right there on the shelf for $.075 each.

The Temptation of Hard Skills

I have worked with technologists for many years. When given the choice of meeting new people, learning to socialize, or learning a new technology, they will pick the technology almost every time. And yet there is little evidence that learning a new technology will help improve our situations at work. Yes, it’s nice to have a hard skill to fall back on, but learning another programming language or configuration tool will not get you promoted, nor will it help you succeed in your current job when you already have plenty of skills.

Hard skills are tempting because they are easy. Learning a hard skill does not require us to work on ourselves, to learn our strengths and weaknesses, to find out unhappy truths that we might be in the wrong role, or to reach out to others. Learning hard skills does not require any emotional vulnerability.

But hard skills are more expensive. Go ahead and pass on that book about learning how to successfully work with different personality types and pick up another book on Java. You will end up spending more money and time over the long-term with less payout in terms of improving your current situation.

The secret to a better work experience is not in fixing your resume, although the skill of making a good resume is certainly a skill with real benefits. The secret is to fix yourself. The books I recommend you begin with focus on improving not just your skills, but your beliefs and therefore your behaviors.

Status is project management communication, and any channel of communication available to you is a possible delivery method for status. There are two basic kinds of delivery method: presentation and verbal. When you give status in presentation format, you have a reference document that you are reviewing with a group of people. When you give status verbally, you are delivering it without much preparation and without referring to a common document.

Verbally or in presentation format, you can deliver status:

• Face to face
• Over the phone, one on one
• On a conference call
• By instant messenger
• In email

Face to Face

Face to face status reports could happen in a staff meeting, but more likely might occur in a hallway or when you stop by your boss’s office to check in on another topic. “So, how is Project X coming along?”

When you deliver status verbally, stick the recommended format. First, provide overall information such as project health, % complete, % target complete, number of days ahead or behind schedule. Tell what milestone you are in, and what next steps are. If asked, go into a very crisp description of the most important issue that is outstanding on the project. The biggest point to remember about verbal status is to keep it concise. Practice delivering status verbally in your mirror, and try to give the entire project status in less than 30 seconds. More than that, and you risk irritating your manager with unnecessary details, or, more likely, you risk rambling on and on about details that are not the right details.

Whether you are in a conference room or in your boss’s office, the ability to provide crisp, fresh project status verbally can mean the difference between being seen as a project management genius and a village idiot. Wandering, verbose reports on projects which provide seemingly random and extensive irrelevant details are a frequent source of irritation for management.

Over the Phone

The same rules apply over the phone. Consider a conference call to be the same thing as an in person meeting around a table. A one on one call is the equivalent to any face to face meeting. Be brief. Since you are not in person, you can use a script or a one page status report for a reference source without revealing that you are doing so.

Instant Messenger

Most IM programs don’t really allow for graphics, so hopefully you have a text status which is very brief that you can paste into IM on request when your boss sends a quick message over asking after a particular project. Have it ready to go, in writing, and pop in the overall information first. If they press on, provide milestones in another message and your top issue last.

Email

Email is by far the most powerful tool for providing project status. There is one big mistake that separates email from all other communication channels. Email provides the ability to attach documents, so many project managers will attach one or more files, usually a combination of documents such as a presentation with multiple slides and a spreadsheet with multiple tabs.

Folks, the truth is that most managers will never open up your attached documents in email. If the status is not in the actual body of the email message, it might never be seen, which is why you are called or IM’d for project status.

Why?

Email inboxes become clogged very easily. The higher up the chain of command you climb, the more email you receive. The more you receive, the less time you have to process each message. The more content in the message, the less likely you are to bother attempting to process the message. That and the fact that email attachments tend to indicate the opposite of crisp status. Instead, the status on your project is probably a huge pile of data that the manager does not want to sort through to figure out the current state.

Boil it all down to the body of the email. Make it brief. Make it readable on a blackberry or other smart phone. Do not flood management with information, and yet do not leave them asking questions.

The subject line of your email should be very relevant to the project. Put the project’s official name in the subject line along with the project ID number from your tracking system, if there is one. This helps management sort your status reports easily in their inbox after they have filed them away. Try to use the same subject from one email report to the next.

How Often Should You Send Status

Send status reports in email as often as the project events require. If the project is green and not on your boss’s top ten list, then you might never send project status upstairs as your project cruises to easy completion without management assistance. If you have a high visibility project with a gigantic budget, a massive cross-functional project team, and multiple executive participants, then your status should appear in email to all participants and your boss regularly.

Note that I said to include your boss. Never send project status to your boss’s peers or superiors in other departments without copying your boss. If your boss hears about your project from other teams by surprise due to your failure to include her on status reports, you’ll find yourself on your boss’s list of people to educate about status reporting. No manager likes to be blindsided with news about a project that is being managed in their own department.

If the project is important enough and in enough trouble to invite such scrutiny, status reports may be needed daily. They may even escalate to hourly in some extreme cases.

Don’t fall out of your chair in shock just yet! Status reports may be asked for every 30 minutes in certain fast-paced environments.

Sending out effectively organized status which is well composed allows management to quickly consume what they receive passively rather than working long hours to call around, send messages, and slowly gather up information. This allows for the avoidance of much frustration on management’s part and makes you a project manager worth your weight in gold.

The Management Perspective

If your project is important, your boss will be pressed hard to keep his superiors informed of its progress. Smart managers consume status on important projects voraciously. Excellent status reporting means that managers are fully informed of your projects health and overall direction without having to get involved themselves. There is particular information your boss needs in order to show her boss that she is on top of things and able to run the show effectively. Provide this information in a way your boss can consume it on a regular basis, and you will fall upstairs so fast your head will spin.

Even on relatively less important projects, effective status reporting allows your boss to spend only a few seconds skimming your report to determine what sort of progress you have made.

Excellent status creates clarity from confusion. Your job as the manager of a project is to take a swirling, chaotic cloud of information and distil it down into its most basic elements and then present them so that hundreds and thousands of hours of work can be understood in 30 seconds.

To write excellent status, you must understand:

The three components of status
How to write brief details
What key data are needed by management

Three Components of Status

There are three major components to reporting project status:

• Overall – We need to see the overall project health. As managers, we want to be able to detect a project in trouble. We also want to help make that determination sometimes. You might not know everything we know despite our best efforts to communicate. Your project might not be as healthy as you think it is.
• Milestones – Your project has major accomplishments which must be completed by specific dates. We managers want to see which milestones are complete, which ones are in progress, and which ones are coming up next. This allows us to analyze the schedule and decide to either feel comfortable with it or challenge it.
• Issues – Your project also probably has one or more obstacles to completion which have been discovered. We’d like to see brief details about each issue so that we can make a decision about whether or not to step in and help if necessary.

Organizing Your Status

Just as you would clean a kitchen by starting up high and working your way down ultimately to the floor, project status is best when it starts off with the highest levels of detail and works it way down to lower and lower levels.

Thus:

Overall project health comes first. If I like what I see here, I can stop reading the rest.
Major milestones follow overall project health. If I don’t like the project health, or if I am in need of further details, I can read a little further and check out the scheduled dates we are driving toward and your progress on them. Issues may be holding up those dates, so when I see a problem in your project schedule, I can read further and see what it is. Really slick project managers report the issues in priority order showing the issue causing the most jeopardy to progress first.

Brief Details

Your job is to report on the details of your project in concise, crisp status that we can consume rapidly without having to spend much effort on it. It might take you thirty minutes to write your status, but always remember that your manager does not have thirty minutes to spend reading it. Your manager realistically only has about 30 seconds to consume your status as they may have 30, 40, 100, or even exponentially more projects for which they are responsible.

“Brief Details” may seem oxymoronic to a project manager, but to a supervisor with a team of project managers, it is not. There is enormous value in a project manager who can report status without narrative. My recommendation is that you write as though you were creating an old-fashioned telegram. More information about how to do that is coming.

Brief Details?

How can you provide details without being long-winded? It is a formidable task that most never master, but it is not impossible. Here are some suggestions:

• Write in bullets, not in prose. There shall be no paragraph anywhere in your status.
• Avoid unnecessary use of titles and colons. We can see that 7/4/2008 is a date. Writing “date: 7/4/2008” does not tell us anything that “7/4/2008” does not.
• Reduce, reduce, and reduce some more. Do your best to shorten all expressions and sentences
• Avoid adverbs (really, very, much) and avoid adjectives (good, bad, ugly)

Key Data

Management will need certain data from you in order to see overall health, performance against milestones, and the threat that project issues present. For overall project health, these data points might include:

• The project’s name
• The project identification number if your company uses a tool to store projects
• The overall project health (red yellow green – more on this in a future article)
• The % complete you expected to be at today (planned completion)
• The % complete you are actually at
• The number of days behind or ahead against the plan
• The number of blocking issues you face (more about this later in this article)
• The number of “normal issues” you face

These data elements should provide a sound overview of project health for the average executive who is not details minded and is not interested in getting more involved in your project.

If I am your supervisor, I need to see more than just the overall health of the project. I also want to see where we are against certain milestones so that I can make a decision about whether or not to get more involved. One of the hardest things a manager has to do all day is decide whether to give you more room or get into your work with you. We don’t want to carry your work for you, but we also don’t want you to fall flat on your face.

Providing project milestones is helpful in this regard. It lets us see your schedule at a high level, determine if the schedule is acceptable as it stands, and predict pitfalls you might face down the road.

Milestones have six components:

• The milestone name
• The percent complete of the milestone
• The planned start
• The planned finish
• The actual start
• The actual finish

Some people like to provide red, yellow, green (RYG) status for each milestone in their project. I don’t believe that adds any value. Of course the completed tasks are green. They are complete! All following milestones have the same status as the current milestone, so there is no point in differentiating them. The RYG status of the whole project is all that is necessary.

It’s best to start with the earlier tasks first and the final delivery date at the bottom. If you list them haphazardly, you will create more confusion than clarity.

Issue Management

The final portion of your status report is to list the major issues your project faces. Important data that we need on your issues:

• Ticket number – if there is a ticketing system, give us a link to the ticket or the number of the ticket
• Issue name – this should be very descriptive and brief.
• Date and time reported – we need this to see aging. The older an issue is, the more likely someone is going to get in trouble for not solving it faster.
• Priority or severity of the issue – your issue is mega-important if it is a “blocking issue.” If the problem is stopping the project from moving forward and is single-handedly responsible for endangering the delivery date, it is a blocking issue and is very important. If the problem is just another bug in some software that will be resolved in short order, it is not as important.
• Who has it – the name of the person who currently owns driving this issue forward
• ETA – Managers are like children and always want to know when they are going to get something. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Provide a time and date for when the issue will be resolved. If you cannot, then provide a time and date for when you will get to the next step in the issue resolution process. If you cannot do that, then provide an ETA for your next updated status on the issue.
• Current Activity – What is currently being done to resolve this issue? Are you firing up a conference call? Are you calling out for reinforcements from a particular group? What is being done to mitigate? Are there alternatives?

Expected Results

If you produce really great status on a project and provide it often enough and to the right people, which are great topics for future articles, you should expect one of two results. Either management will become very quiet and not engage with you very much, which usually means they feel you are on top of the project and are capable of operating without their intervention, or they will increase their communications with you in order to ferret out further details and determine if they need to intervene.

Either result is better than the alternative: Management asking you for status. Your job as a project manager is to create clarity from confusion for the project team and for management. Essentially, the job is one of analysis and communication. If management is asking you for the status, either you are not sending it to the right people, you are not sending it often enough, or you are not sending a good status report.

Management should be able to passively absorb your status without having to reach out to you to find out where things are at. The pace at which you send it, the audience you select, and the content of your communications should be available to them easily and quickly.

A project manager that can status a project skillfully and briefly is a rare find. It should not be necessary to create colorful slide shows or multi-page documents in order to provide really great status reports. Many go that route and drown management in errata. Narratives and prose are always unwelcome in status reports, and yet so many write as though they were authoring a novel and create a report that management must spend inordinate amounts of time with in order to get what they need. Others fail to provide enough information at all, or worse, they provide status irregularly or rarely.

In all of the project management training and certification systems available today, almost none teach how to report the current state and next steps of a project. Learn to status your projects effectively and you have a competitive edge that goes beyond the standard project management toolkit.

The most important item is the bar chart, made manually with two simple boxes, a black triangle, and some labels. It tells quite a bit with a very intuitive graphic: overall status, percent complete, original planned percent complete for this date, and how much is left to go. You might be surprised if you use this that it contains more information than your boss is used to getting.

Big projects with millions on the line usually have a more complex format with multiple slides. This attachment is good enough for a small, low-visibility effort that only needs minimal reporting.

Attached is a simple status report on a single slide in powerpoint.

Project Status Template (PPT)

Here’s a preview of the file: