Season of sloth
‘Tis the season — the last two weeks of the year — when nothing gets done. People are focused on the holidays and their families, and have to drag themselves in even to jobs they like. News stops, which makes it tough on organizations like ZDNet.
I usually look forward to this time of year as a chance to catch up on tasks I can’t otherwise accomplish — those items with a priority of 2 on my to-do list, when I never seem to get to all the 1s. Here then is my advice for making these weeks productive:
Go through all the piles on your desk. Decide what you can file in existing folders, and what new folders you need for other items that don’t need to be always at hand. Better yet, if you forgot you had it, you can live without it. Throw it out.
Once your desk is clean, do the same for your e-mail in-box. Same routine — file things in folders, trash what you don’t need. But save e-mail addresses and other contact information in a database, so you can find people quickly. I use ACT! 2000, but Outlook will do the trick, or if you have a Palm computer, its address list is probably best.
Whittle down that pile of publications. Start at the bottom (which is easier said than done). Check the table of contents — are there any features or columns you must read? Rip them out and put them aside. Then toss the dross in a reject pile, and be sure to recycle the pile when you’re done.
Speaking of recycling, you can gain good karma by recycling those useless AOL and Earthlink CD-ROMs that have been piling up in your mailbox.
Check the links on your Web site. Nobody likes dead links. I’ve found Watchfire’s LinkBot Pro to be an extremely valuable tool, but there are dozens of others.
Make your site more visible to search engines. Follow our advice, and use a tool like TopDog or WebPosition Gold to raise your rankings.
Document. Good managers make themselves easy to promote by grooming players on their team to succeed them, and one of the best ways to do that is to leave detailed information about the processes you’re responsible for.
Treat yourself to a present. If you have a few hundred dollars left in an accessible budget category, why not buy something that will make your life, or that of your administrative staff, easier? Some of my favorites are a business card scanner, for keeping contact information online; a label printer, for easy letter addressing; and a new pair of speakers or audio headset, for listening to MP3 files, streaming audio from radio stations, or online broadcasters like Spinner.com.
Articles | Administrator | 
Monday, December 18, 2000 12:00 pm
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