Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized
By Sally McGhee and John Wittry

Sally McGhee is a recognized thought leader and innovator in the field of productivity management. Sally has trained thousands of people in the corporate environment. She has more than 25 years’ experience as a consultant and an executive coach, and is the founder and CEO of McGhee Productivity Solutions.

John Wittry is an executive consultant working with senior level executives in Fortune 500 companies. John is also a major contributor to service and product development for McGhee Productivity Solutions. His 15 years of experience as a senior manager sparked his passion for productivity as part of corporate culture.

To learn more about other books on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, visit Microsoft Press.

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• What is productivity

• Work-life balance

• Integrating professional and personal—creating balance

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All of us have been impacted by the information age. With multiple channels of communication, increased volumes of data, and 24/7 connectivity, being able to focus on what’s important, maintain boundaries, and hold true to our values has proved extremely challenging. These factors make it important to have clearly defined professional and personal objectives so you can be focused and productive. In this article, we introduce a new and powerful way to redefine productivity and work/life balance. Without clarifying these terms, it can be difficult to improve them. After you understand these definitions, you’ll be surprised how simple the concepts are and how quickly you can implement solutions to maintain a work-life balance.

What is productivity?

Productivity seems like a generic term, one that is easy enough to define, but it actually means very different things to different people. For example, when we ask clients what productivity means, we get a variety of different responses:

• Getting more done
• Doing what I said I would do
• Being more strategic
• Using my resources wisely
• Experiencing work/life balance
• Meeting my objectives effectively
• Feeling in control and relaxed
• Delegating effectively
• Spending more time being proactive, not reactive
• Going home each day feeling complete
• Completing more things on my list
• Spending more time with my kids
• Procrastinating less
• An empty Inbox

When you review these comments carefully, you’ll discover that there’s an underlying theme that links them all together. That theme is “action” or “getting things done.”

Therefore, you might define productivity in its simplest form as completing actions. However, you can cheerfully complete actions until you are blue in the face (and some of you are) and still not experience what we define as true productivity. We’re sure you’ve had days that were really busy but on reflection, you didn’t feel as effective as you wanted to be.

Productivity is not about getting more things done; it’s actually about getting the right things done. However, most of our clients are still working with an unconscious belief—“I’ve got to get it all done!” This belief is extremely powerful and drives our clients to create habits and routines to support it. Instead of starting work at 9 AM, they’re now starting work at 8 AM—to get more done! Instead of leaving work at 5 PM, they’re now leaving work at 6 PM—to get more done. Instead of waking up at 6 AM, they’re now waking up at 5 AM—to process more e-mail. They’re purchasing smart phones so they can do e-mail during meetings, on planes, and at stop lights—to get more done. These habits ultimately have a negative impact on people’s lives: they cause broken agreements with family members and coworkers, deteriorating relationships, declining health, decreased quality-of- life and well-being.

The truth is, you’ll always have more to do than you can do, and you’ll never ever get it all done. To emphasize this point: you will NEVER, EVER get it all done. Let that sink in for a moment.

Therefore, it’s time to let go of the unconscious belief “I’ve got to get it all done!” because it won’t bring you any success. All it will do is drive you to keep changing your habits to get more done and feel overwhelmed!

Once you let go of this belief, you’ll naturally be more discerning about what you choose to do: Focusing on activities that make the biggest impact, activities that affect your ultimate goals and objectives. You’ll find yourself relaxing, being more focused, saying no, and living in greater balance.

Remember productivity is not about getting it all done. It’s about getting the right things done. This is a critical shift in thinking to make before you can start being more productive.

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Work-life balance

It’s important to have a personal reference point for balance; otherwise, you can’t create or maintain it. The American Heritage Dictionary defines balance as “A weighing device, consisting essentially of a level that is brought into equilibrium by adding known weights to one end while the unknown weights hang from the other.” Our definition of balance is:

Balance: A consistent focus or influence that creates a sense of well-being.

If you’re not feeling good and you’re out of sorts, you need to find a way to increase your sense of well-being and bring yourself back into balance so that the scales are equally weighted. We hear you saying, “Easier said than done!” and you’re correct. The challenge is to determine what you can do to increase your well-being.

When you review your personal and business Meaningful Objectives, focus on them collectively and ask yourself, “Can I maintain a sense of well-being as I complete these? Do these objectives promote my happiness?” It’s important to include both personal and business objectives because you can’t create balance in a vacuum; you need to evaluate the whole picture and not just a piece of it. After you’ve done this a few times, you’ll start to discover the areas on which you need to focus to create balance for yourself.

Balance is subtle and it’s different for each one of us. Sometimes all it takes to acquire it is one great vacation with your family, consistently exercising three times a week, or having unstructured time on weekends. The most unexpected events can create a high degree of well-being, and so bringing your life back into balance doesn’t necessarily require time-consuming activities. It does require quality activities such as being alone for a day, getting a massage, or reading a great book. You may not immediately recognize which activities hold the most quality for you, but by trying different things, you’ll find out.

We’re all so busy “getting things done” that we often don’t think about what we need to do to create balance as a consistent focus and experience. Balance might seem like an inappropriate word to use in conjunction with work, and many of our clients think that if they approach work with balance, they’ll slow down, get less done, lose their edge, and ultimately reduce their productivity.

However, we see our most productive clients using balance to increase productivity, not decrease it. When they exercise early in the morning, they start their day being more centered and having a clearer head. When they make time during the week to watch a sports game or go to the theater, they awake the next morning with the great idea they’ve been searching for. Sometimes we see clients working long hours for days back to back, but then they balance that work with a three-day vacation or take time in the middle of the week to play golf or work in the yard.

It’s important to identify what allows you to successfully create balance. The key is to review your personal and business objectives simultaneously while asking yourself, “What do I need to do to maintain balance?”

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Integrating professional and personal—creating balance

Tracking both personal and business objectives in your Internet mail service (IMS) not only increases your productivity, it assists you to create and maintain work-life balance. Remember, “You go where you focus.” If you have only business goals tracked in your system, you’ll migrate to a purely business focus. Your personal life will be without clear direction and your results will reflect that lack of attention, as we’re sure some of you have experienced.

Most of the companies we work with today have specific systems and tools to manage their business goal setting process. However, employees are not using these systems and tools to manage their personal goal setting. Clients hardly ever track all their personal actions in their systems let alone their personal goals! They’re overwhelmed, spending most of their time at work, neglecting their priorities at home, and feeling like they don’t have a personal life.

When clients do track personal activities, more than likely, it’s happening in their heads and not in their systems. This causes them to feel overwhelmed or to underestimate the time it takes to complete personal activities. We’ve noticed that if clients don’t use their IMS to manage their personal lives, it’s easy to overlook them and default to a business focus, putting their private lives at the bottom of the list. For some of you, your personal lives don’t even make the list! That’s exactly why we suggest you use your IMS as a tool to track and manage your personal objectives just as you would your business ones. With both recorded in one central system you can begin to improve your sense of balance and ensure your true values and priorities are being achieved.

For example, Lola, one of our clients, is a vice president at a retail company. She had a personal objective this year to learn how to jump horses, which involved taking jumping lessons three times a week: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings. She also had an objective to launch a new product line in a four-month time period, which was an aggressive time frame. Riding was a fun activity that enabled her to more easily spend long hours ensuring the launch was successful. These two objectives complemented one another; Lola had a lot of fun and was also highly productive.

Having clear personal and business goals that promote your well-being and self-expression is not only possible, it’s actually more productive.

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