Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Can you tell the difference between a detail and the big picture?

It depends on perspective.

I’ve gotten a lot of email over the past few days thanking me about writing the GTD stuff that’s helped transform my own performance over the years. But, I’ve also gotten the same amount of skeptical messages challenging me on everything from why I’m even involved in the business at this stage to what the role of the CEO in the organization happens to be.

Some of you may be reading the Harvard Review case studies a little too closely to get what they are really about:

CEO’s aren’t external facing creatures that don’t get involved in the operations at any cost. Successful CEO’s understand their industry and how the unique advantages their companies/services/products help them go from where they are now to where they want to be today.

To put it more bluntly..

The same guys that are stuck in this mindset that because they are the CEO / Owner / President of an IT solution provider are the same guys that are running into a wall on moving managed services.

That war is kind of over folks.

I often have this conversation internally as well. We don’t need to perfect the technology we should have released a year ago – we just need to get stuff up there and let the people catch up to us. Everyone wants to be a perfectionist, but if your entire business model is wrapped around the ability to manage a workstation or a PC.. Well, don’t listen to me.

Listen to CES: Expecting to launch over 80 different tablets.

Quick, how much do you make providing managed services against a tablet?

We used to have a world in which employees had a workstation and a server account. The more important ones had a laptop maybe. But then they got a mobile phone. Then a netbook. Now a tablet.

The answer is, you don’t get paid for providing managed services on a tablet. You provide managed services on a per-user basis which is easier to price than a complex breakdown of all the devices and services the people use.

Bringing it all together

The details of how you manage yourself let you see the big picture of what’s going on around you and give you a clear path to going where you need to be.

Much like athletes train for strength, speed, vision, coordination, balance – successful professionals train for accountability, meeting deadlines, not letting criticism get to them, ability to handle negative feedback, ability to continue working despite setbacks and so on.

The point, if I may be so obvious about it, of writing down your goals, milestones and processes is to keep on motivating yourself.

There are no cheerleaders in business. The sentiment behind those $20 Office Depot employee of the month plaques is so thin that it doesn’t even make people at McDonalds try to get your order done correctly.

If you can’t push yourself, nobody will. But everyone will line up to beat you down.

So the point, ladies and gentlemen, is that dealing with the details helps you understand the big picture and the outline of steps along your journey to the end result you desire is a set of motivational incentives to keep you working.

Bad day? Focus on the negatives and let it ruin your day. Or focus on where you need to be and keep on fighting.

That… is the point.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Start of Year Maintenance cycle most successful businesses people go through. Fact is, unless you’re remarkably organized and suffer absolutely 0 external interference, you’ve got to dedicate some time to straightening things out.

Even if it works. Don’t lie, you know it doesn’t.

Fact is, over time we do find little kinks in our process or in our execution, despite of all the planning.

Success demands focus and attention has to be paid to even the smallest details. When you do that, you uncover tons and tons of efficiencies you could be enjoying.

Something as simple as cleaning goes a huge way towards organizing.

Typically I would never consider spending half the day just cleaning my office. But if you were dumpster diving today, you could have walked away with 4 Microsoft MVP awards.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the awards by any means, but over the years it’s made less and less sense to keep around my 2005 Microsoft Exchange MVP plaque. I’m not sure if the plaque didn’t mean much in 2006, nor if it rapidly depreciated between 2010 and 2011, but today it was just a day to get rid of it. I haven’t touched Microsoft SBS 2003 – but it took till Jan 3, 2011 to throw out half a dozen books about it. I even found books that I never even cracked – all in trash.

These are some of the things I worked very hard to earn. Now imagine all the other stuff that just came as a result of being in business – that somehow fell on my desk, then into my to-do pile, then into my filing cabinet and eventually in the archived items that should have been shredded in the long, long ago.

Important or Irrelevant

How do you decide if something is important or irrelevant? I have no idea, if you do – let me know.

I can tell the difference between actionable and inactionable: Will I do something with this junk or not?

Try it – now that you know if you’re going to do something with the item: Have I held on to it for over a year?

It’s hard to believe that you’ve had the best of intentions on working on something – something so important that it consumed office space – yet got untouched for 365 days.

We tend to hold on to stuff that we like even though we don’t actually do anything with it year in and year out. When you’re forced to look at it – you dig it – so it never gets thrown out. But if you’re not going to do anything with it, you shouldn’t keep it.

I don’t remember where I read this, but one of the sites had a story about how to clear out your wardrobe. Hang all the clothes in your closet with the hander facing towards the outside of your closet at the beginning of the year. As you wear/clean and rack your clothes back, face them towards the back of the rack. At the end of the year, look at all the stuff still facing to the outside (that you didn’t wear once) and throw it out.

We all have best of intentions – but only results matter.

The Point

Don’t rush yourself through this.

The more successful you get, the more “little things” creep up to cause big problems.

When I posted last week about people not dealing with external issues in January, many of you wrote in to say that was not going to be the case. One of my buddies even IM’d me earlier this morning to taunt me “Hitting the phones hard today!!! gonna prove you wrong!” and by 4PM he sent the following: “Not a single phone call today. Not one” – this is not a bad thing! This is a blessing.

Look at everything in your business that you don’t like and you’ll find a ton of them started with you. So look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and ask yourself one question:

How can I make this better?

Then write the list, put checkmarks next to it and get it done!

The more you get in a grove of making lists, reviewing your progress and improving your process – that much better you will be every year.

If you’ve got any work ethic, it shouldn’t matter what day/date it is, you should be ready to kick ass any day of the week. But even if the calendar doesn’t matter to you, it does to the government, state and most people that operate on the calendar based system. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Move all your 2010 mail into it’s own folder.

Your inbox should only have 2011 / current stuff. But wait! Once your mail is moved to the 2010 folder, sort it by attachment size and nuke anything that you don’t think you’ll ever need to refer to again that has already been archived, backed up twice and otherwise put away.

Personally, I don’t allow any of my employees to create Vlad mail or move my mail to a “Vlad” folder. Maybe it’s indulgent, but as long as I’m signing your paycheck I expect you to give my email a priority. I don’t forward fart jokes or 419 scams, if I’m sending you an email I have a reason for it.. For one, because I don’t ever want to hear “Oh, I didn’t see that email…” and because we use Outlook and it’s easier to setup Search Folders than Outlook rules. Get in a habit of routing your receipts, automated mail, lists and other non-actionable mail to a folder automatically. Inbox is for the correspondence, and with 2010 over, it’s time to start fresh.

2. Review 2010.

Once 2010 is in a folder by itself, move on to your analog stuff: notes, drawings, whiteboards, notebooks, postits, filing cabinet, pile of papers in the to-do bins, so on and so forth.

What you do with it is very subjective. Some people are really good at catching up. I’m not. I recently threw out boxes of “Cool Marketing” that I thought we should be doing at OWN. Some of it had included launch collateral for Office 2003. Yeah..

Personally, if I think it’s important I’ll give it to someone else. If it’s really important, I’ll find a way to get it done in the bigger picture.

3. Set your 2011 agenda.

Get your important dates on the board.

Annual health checkups. Doctor. Dentist. You know you have to do it so put it on the board. Vacations – ditto. Conferences – same.

Once you have a better idea of when you’ll be in the office and when you’ll be out of the office, you can arrange the rest of your schedule.

4. Get the obligatory crap done first.

You know you have 15 days to pay unemployment taxes, 1 month to send out all 1099’s and W2s and less than 3 months to send your personal taxes. I am not an accountant so don’t take these dates to heart: instead focusing on what is most fun or easiest, focus on what’s required.

It’s fun to procrastinate. Until the time that something is due. Then you’ll have to do the task, the dozen tasks that your boss gave you and another dozen fires that you’re putting out. If you know you’ve got obligations, take care of them now! They will not get easier the closer you get to the deadline.

This is possibly the most important point because missing it means huge fines. Taking care of things now also gives you extra time to have things reviewed, audited, obtain additional information that you thought you had but don’t, getting information from incompetent people, digging for information in archives, etc.

5. Focus on the process.

I always get asked why working the last week of the year is so important. Isn’t that when everyone slows down? No, that’s when the losers quit. Let me put it to you this way – I have a girl that takes the last two weeks of the year off every year to go away and hang out with her family. Guess how much work she drops while she is out? Zip. Zero. Nada. Deals are being done all the way up to New Years Eve and they are always accounted for.

So if you work to exhaustion through the holidays – what do you do now? Well, there is a common misconception that you use the holidays to clean up, slow things down, rearrange, etc. Personal life, yes. In business, it works a little bit differently. Sales people will not be calling you this week – they have a new quota and they are likely in training and meetings. Good luck getting managements attention for anything – they are dealing with the books, audits, direction, reviews and the last quarter/year.

This is common knowledge. Nobody is calling you because nobody expects important people to have the time to pick up the phone. The only folks calling right now are the ones that made some lame New Years resolution and are looking for a job.

Get to work.

Mute your phone.

Do 1-4.

Stop reading this blog.

No, seriously.

Once 1-4 are done, get to designing your process. This is not a 5 minute drill or throwing a dart at the wall. This takes days/weeks to put together. For example: Which emails will you reply to and which ones will you forward. How do you set expectations of when you’re available and when you’re not. How can your clients contact you (407-536-VLAD)? Remember that 2010 review you did – did you write the same emails over and over – if so make them into canned responses or blog posts or KB articles. When will you be meeting with your staff? With your boss? With your clients? When are you available for phone calls? When will you be taking lunch breaks?

From basics to advanced, this is planning time. Don’t jump into things head first or try to make business goals without establishing expectations, review intervals, goals and objectives (if you don’t, how do you know if you’re on the right track or not?). If the goal is to make $100,000 off Service B then at what point in the year should you have made $20,000? When do you quit?

Process is the biggest part of the game because your ability to wing it diminishes in effectiveness the bigger or busier you get.

6. Save this blog post.

I’ll leave it to my buddy Karl Palachuk to write and sell you a huge checklist you can tape to your wall. I don’t have the time or the insight to give you the 300 steps that you need to take right now. Actually, if he writes it I’d buy it. But I will offer you this for free: Save this blog post and come back to it every month. Why? Even with the best of intentions, you’ll likely only act on one of the ideas you get here. We’re impulsive beasts – if you found this valuable print it out. It’s OK, pick a really small font and go hug a tree. Write down the notes or ideas that you got about what you should be doing this year. Then come back to it in a month and see what remains unchecked. Again and again, over and over.

Whether you’ve got a job or own a business, your success is ultimately dependent on how you manage yourself and your time.

Whether you’ve got someone kicking your ass or you need to kick your own ass, it’s up to you to become a success. Work ethic, planning, evaluating, execution, review and process are the way you move forward regardless of external issues.

It’s January. You’ve got the benefit of a bit of a breather before things pick up – use it to step your game up. I certainly hope this helps! Happy New Year!