Latest Blog Posts

9 Tips for Working from Home There are oodles of tips on the Net for working from home.  Here is a compact version. 1. Create a morning and closing routine Routines are important because they prime us for jumping into our work and help us transition back to our personal life, respectively.  There are lots […]

How to squeeze more out of your employees – and have them thank you for it No one cares about how well employees manage their inbox. Not the leadership. Not employees themselves. But here is why everyone should: Fixing it will take two hours. Keeping it fixed, another two hours over a couple of weeks. […]

Errors that LeanMail novices make in the planning step    Follow-up; Read; Read and revert; Call; are a few of the typical entries that many LeanMail novices write as Next Actions.    At the time you write them, they make perfect sense because at that particular moment you were immersed in the details of what it was you were supposed to do.  The problem occurs three […]

Politically Correct or Upstanding?   There are two reasons why I think it’s high time we traded the term “politically correct” with the something else.      The first reason is because over the years “politically correct” has been stigmatized as being negative and heavy instead of righteous and observant of personal values and ethics.  Less informed people shun being politically correct because […]

How to Run an Effective Daily Stand-up Meeting I was recently requested to suggest how to run an effective daily stand-up meeting. It dawned on me that we had not articulated the process in our own company so all the more reason to explicitly formulate this important morning staple. The Goal The goal of the […]

Desktop hack: Ctrl + N Open documents using Ctrl + N. It may take some time to form the habit, but it is by far the fastest way to open a new document in the majority of software applications.

Desktop clutter – Productivity Tip Here’s an easy hack for reducing clutter on your desktop. The computer desktop has replaced the physical desktop in many ways. It’s important to keep it clean and neat, just like your physical desktop so that you can find the things you’re looking for. Even more important, having a clean […]

Looks can be deceiving, so we stick to tried and true Pareto.  My team (steeped in the 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle) came to me with this; Trello’s (new?) way of adding priorities to cards – and I have to say it looks very cool.  Unfortunately, this time Trello got it wrong. Looks can be deceiving.  Ok Trello fans, before you dismiss me […]

Lacking Discipline? Get Values Cheerleaders  I’ve been flying for over 50 years. How a plane defies gravity with its own massive weight along with the weight of passengers, baggage and freight is, for me, always mind-boggling. Every time I fly.  Core values of flight  An airplane is designed and constructed by teams of thousands of individuals meticulously following an explicitly detailed master plan. Each step enables it […]

A Simple Rule to Run Effective Meetings Ask your team to identify their biggest productivity killer and inevitably two issues will rise to the top of the list: managing their inboxes and their useless meeting schedules. I’ll tackle the former in a future post. For now, I’d like to focus on increasing the value of […]

How to break a habit that makes your life miserable: an exercise I stumbled upon Thomas Oppong’s article, Why Eliminating Behaviors That Make You Miserable Can Make You Happier, which references a book by Randy J. Paterson, Ph.D., How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use.  I thought it could be helpful to create […]

To use a habit tracker app or not to use a habit tracker app Getting into a habit tracker app (apps that help us remember to study our Spanish, do our push-ups in the morning and drink at least 1½ liters of water) are springing up.  Do they really work?  That’s a question I had […]

Why “I hate email”, echoes in many workplaces Let’s not beat about the bush.  “I hate email” is said under many a breath for one main reason (yes there are many others but I’m sure you’ll agree this tops the list): It sucks out huge swaths of time without giving us any idea of what […]

How to improve team productivity and how to measure it This is where most companies succeed or fail. We’ve all seen big companies start from the ground up. Microsoft, Apple, Uber and many others have shown us that we can go from an idea to a successful business with the right bases. These bases are […]

A word from our CEO, Michael Hoffman Most of you know that besides being an executive coach, I run a software company called LeanMail.  But what many of you are perhaps not aware of is that we recently made a revolutionary change in our implementation model. Previously, we sold LeanMail as a single unit that […]

Is This You? Improving with Habit Change I’ve seen Hector (a local homeless person) wheeling his cart around Barcelona a few times. It’s massive. It must be extremely difficult to maneuver. One day I went up to him asked him if he really needed all of those things. He actually articulated an impressive defense. That’s […]

8 Surprising Tips to Boost your Productivity Here at LeanMail, we’ve seen that the key factor for productivity and successful email management it is not only to have the right tools and training but to be open to change. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that Behavioral Change is a trending topic. The more […]

Email management for productivity: easy to mistake a tool for a solution. Even though most of our customers might call our LeanMail email management software for Microsoft Outlook the definitive solution for email management, productivity, and efficiency, it’s not.  It’s easy to mistake a tool for a solution because once you have consciously and subconsciously […]

Email management is not a tool and it’s not bad Many people refer to email management as a tool, but it’s not.  Email is a medium just like books, CD’s, and letters are media.  You may not like managing email but that has less to do with the media itself and more to do with […]

If you are a LeanMail user who finds him or herself on the road a lot — perhaps you don’t even start your computer every day, you can still keep up with LeanMail.  Here’s how: Of course the best way is to download the LeanMail app for iPhone (now in a Beta version) by contacting […]

Email is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Forbes Magazine (2008) Employees spend 1 to 3 or more hours per day managing email at 40-60% of capacity.  That means they typically lose 30-60 minutes PER DAY.   Not some.  All — even the ones who believe they are extremely productive. That means […]

It all started with a client. To begin with, his IT manager had told him that 92% of his incoming email was spam and was filtered out before it ever reached his inbox. So my client never saw more than ninety percent of his incoming volume. What my client found even more astonishing was that […]

One of your prime objectives as a sales director is to get your teams out of their inbox and in front of the customer as much as possible. I’m not knocking the importance of email, I’m just saying that you probably see a huge benefit to having your teams managing their inboxes at twice their […]

I’ve seen Hector (not his real name) wheeling his cart around Barcelona a few times. It’s massive. It must be extremely difficult to maneuver. One day I went up to him asked him if he really needed all of those things. He actually articulated an impressive defense. Does that remind you of anyone you know? […]

I have this weird habit, one might think. Before I click send on a mail that contains a document that I have attached, I open the document and check it one last time. Even if I have already gone through the document, or have just created it, I open it once it is attached to […]

You land a meeting with a prospect that you’ve been researching for quite some time.  Then you make the same mistake that most sales people make:  you book an hour-long meeting at her office. What’s wrong with that?  Plenty.  The chances of converting that meeting into a sale are quite slim at this point.  So […]

Training successfully educates only those who are predisposed to the new material. Others may endeavor to learn during class but may not permanently adopt it. The problem isn’t the value of information or the eagerness of the learner: It’s a problem with both the training model itself and the way learners learn. It’s a systems/change […]

a When there are conflicts in the workplace it is usually because of poor communication or interpersonal communication challenges. Leaders are challenged on a daily basis to interact effectively with others. The most successful leaders are emotionally intelligent agile. They know how to read people and are savvy in their communications. The good news is […]

  OK, I have a small company of only 200 employees, so $3.2 million is nothing. But imagine a company of 2,000 employees that spend 2 hrs. per day on email with an average annual salary of $70,000. That would mean that they spend OVER HALF A MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY managing email. Since we […]

  Not so long ago, Sony Corp. in the US was hacked. I am sure you’ve heard about the case (it was eventually blamed on North Korea, though security experts are questioning that conclusion). My favorite tech-magazine has this interesting article on the subject: The importance of deleting old stuff, another lesson from the Sony attack […]

There’s a horde of startups trying to replace email. Some of these apps, like Slack (which we use at Business Insider), take a chat-room approach. There are enterprise messaging apps that work like Snapchat, like Cotap and TigerText. Some mobile-first productivity apps like Quip imagine that we’ll communicate directly in the documents we’re working on. […]

  I just read an article by a very smart man, Nathan Zeldes, who believes that we need a benchmark for email classifier performance.  In other words, some way of gaging how well auto-prioritization Maybe.  Maybe not. It seems that most email apps these days are looking for this algorithm as if it were the […]

This youtube video is GREAT for introducing Lean to your colleagues.  Most of the basics are included and the production quality of the video is very good. Duration: 9:30 Find out more about our Executive Leadership Coaching Program. Click HERE to watch the video. Happy Friday! Michael Hoffman  

Most people think they’re a 3 or 4 out of 5 when asked how good they think they are at managing their inbox. If your system doesn’t allow you to prioritize by importance (value) and by urgency (time), then you will not be able to handle a flow of even 50 mails per day at […]

In this YouTube video you’ll relive those agonizing on-line meeting moments that make you want to pull out your hair!  You’ll be jumping up and down shouting: “So true!”.  Share this with colleagues – especially those who need some help in this area. Although it’s fun to poke fun at this, virtual conference calls are […]

  Responsiveness: when should you reply to a message How quickly we respond to a message (email, phone, sms, chat, etc.) is an often misunderstood function of our work and is further complicated by leaders who institute temporal rules like “within one business day” or in less than two hours. Here is a partial list […]

Many thanks to our client, Mitch Sowards, from www.entrust.us.com (Managed IT Services in Texas), for providing this Friday’s fabulously entertaining video. We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. Duration: 12:21 Find out more about our […]

Do FIRST the things you MUST do You can relieve stress, ensure that you make deadlines, and give yourself a greater sense of control simply by following one general rule: Do the things you absolutely HAVE to do as soon as you can do them.  — Or, put another way: Do first the things you […]

Atrendia Friday Video 18 – When It Comes To Productivity, Technology Can Hurt And Help Ok, this week the Atrendia Friday Video is not a video, but a podcast. I’m sure that many of you wonder if we are really getting a lot of productivity out of all these social “productivity” tools. This NPR podcast […]

In this McKinsey interview, Don Tapscott describes how we get beyond e-mail to the new social platforms.  He focuses on the central and compelling point that you don’t leverage knowledge through containerization, but through collaboration. Tapscott has authored or co-authored fourteen books on the application of technology in business and society. His 2006 book, Wikinomics: […]

Writing a correct subject line can be deceivingly difficult. An initial subject line, where you are the first author of a thread, is fairly straightforward; if it is a call to action, write the call to action in directly: Call Mark Re: Babbit case or Send final sales draft. In your mind you should be […]

Atrendia LeanMail V.3.1 We are pleased to announce the release of version 3.1 of the Atrendia LeanMail add-ins for Outlook 2007 and 2010.   This new version has several significant improvements including: A “Read” button has been added in order to archive mails with the category *Read for mails that you want to read at […]

10 Golden Rules of E-tiquette (there are many more, but these are our top ten)   1. Don’t use “??” or “!” or worse “!!!!”  – Unless followed by a :-).  It sounds like you are shouting. 2. People LOVE to see the line: “For your action:” followed by exactly what they are supposed to […]

More than anything else, perfectionist and self-critical attitudes about ourselves are what kills our productivity.  These attitudes are most often revealed in the form of procrastination, but procrastination is not the demon; it is the messenger. Neil Fiore, in his book, The Now Habit, defines procrastination as: A mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated […]

Measure Results Not Hours to Improve Work Efficiency Here is a great article from the New York Times on this very important topic.

I call this entry “Stress I”  because it will be the first in a series.  Stress is such an important topic in just about everybody’s lives that it makes sense to revisit it often. I read and listened to many people’s opinions about the need for stress as motivation. But can someone tell me of an […]

All this talk about prohibiting internal e-mail in companies is getting to me.  I don’t think it’s a crazy idea – but almost.  Actually, it wouldn’t be such a crazy idea if that was the only way out of this mess, but it isn’t, and therefore such draconian measures are immature; immature in the true […]

Software is not the solution for Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration, but it is an important element. Software is not the solution for Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration, but it is an important element. The solution is to make sure that the ends justify the means. Our demands for accessible, collaborative and engaging experiences are […]

E-mail Management is not the problem. Management is. It is time for the top leadership in organizations of all sizes to recognize that an ad-hoc approach to managing e-mail is highly inefficient and an enormous drag on human resources.  E-mail management: the prioritization, planning and archiving of e-ma The perennial challenge of how to structure […]

I met her at the airport. The connection was riveting. I had never felt anything like it. Sleek, sophisticated, elegant.  She totally blew me away.  I had heard about others who had fallen into this same trap but I had always scoffed it off as having a lack of discipline.  “You’ll be back before you […]