Friday is my busiest day. Most folks power down and go into weekend mode. Not here! Ask yourself, ‘why do I go down a gear on Friday?’, ‘How does this benefit my career?’ Ok, let’s be honest. We do this because others do it. Right? This is a high-risk way to manage your career. You’re letting others determine how you behave. And it damages your career in many, many ways. Here’s an alternative approach.

How to make Friday your busiest day and reap the rewards

7 Mistakes to avoid:

1. Don’t fill your day with low-impact tasks.
2. Don’t get pulled into fluffy things that you don’t really want to.
3. Don’t do project meetings when you know it will kill your whole morning.
4. Don’t go to long lunches.
5. Don’t leave early.
6. Don’t waste time studying analytics, trends, click-thrus etc… you know what they’ll say, don’t you?
7. Not Saying NO enough.

Do this instead.

You’ll get more success if you:

1. Plan with intention - Use Friday to plan the entire week ahead. Spend at least 2 hours on this. Planning is decision making. When you plan, you make decisions.
2. Get Ready for Monday – planning on Friday lets you hit the ground running on Monday. See the difference? You’re already a step ahead of everyone else.
3. Do Strategic Meetings Only – Book meetings with key contacts on Friday. Most will say Yes. They’re in down mode, so they’re easy to arrange.
4. Find Like-minded people – Connect with people that have the same values as you. Look around the office and ask, ‘who’s killing time v who’s using it’. Link up with those doing it right.
5. Do high impact tasks – disconnect from activities that suck the life out of you, your projects and your enjoyment in life.
6. Share useful information – everyone wants ‘relevant’ information. Select the 5 pieces of useful information you’ve read during the week and circulate these.
7. Authority – Establish yourself as someone who provides ‘useful’ and high value information not just cats doing ninja tricks.
8. Stay late – when everyone is gone, you can get focused and do more work. Global clients will still be up. Call them. Chase them up. Your colleagues won’t. They’re gone, so now is your chance.

What’s going on here?

It’s about behavior.

• It’s how others impact the way you behave and respond.
• To succeed, in the way you want to succeed, you need to observe how others make you behave the way you do.
• Admit it.
• Put a plan in place to create your own blueprint for success.
• Find ways to do this every day.
• See where you fall down, where you can improve and what you’re doing right.
• Keep at it.

Success is like developing a muscle. You have to train it, assess it, and increase it. Luckily, there are no short-cuts. If you persist, you’ll succeed. You have to!

What do you think?

Do you plan to make Friday’s the busiest day? What would change if you did?

Photo Credit puliarfanita

One of my best friends, based in Nashville, Tennessee, is worried about his career prospects. He’s turned 40, had a decent job as an IT developer but this has been sent to India. He was furious but now he’s just depressed. Where to start? Many are worried that their jobs will be off-shored to India and China. You can look at tis two ways. As an opportunity or a setback. Here’s some ways you can take advantage of this right now.

5 Careers Opportunities for IT Professionals in China

Before I start, I’m in China so I see things from the other side of the fence, so to speak. I’ve worked in the US, UK and most of Europe. I see where he’s coming from and the future is indeed bleak if you’re in the US IT industry, at least in the QA, technical writing & coding.
It’s not if it will happen, it’s when.

For those who are looking at China, especially Shanghai and Shenzen, the skills most in demand are:

1. Project Management – Asians are terrific workers but lack leadership skills. PM is a (relatively) new discipline here and as companies develop they need people who can put shape on the deliverables.
2. HR – likewise, there is a shortage of skilled HR execs who can develop a strategy and show Management the career paths they need to develop to attract, nurture and retain talent.
3. Legal – as China goes global, it needs people in the legal field to help with contracts, litigation, procurements and other such issues. Mandarin skills are a plus, but not always mandatory.
4. Finance – Shanghai aims to be the Asian hub for Finance. They’ve recently opened a new Nasdaq-type stock exchange. So much money is getting plowed into its Finance Centre. You have to see it! The financial world involves interacting with bankers all over the world – and the default language of all business communications is English, which brings us to…
5. Communications – Chinese CEOs want to improve their English. Can you help?  Chinese Marketers want to refine their campaigns. Can you help? Chinese HR Depts want to hire the right people. Can you help with the interviews? Chinese exporters want to arrange meetings in London, New York & Amsterdam. Can you be there to help?

Remember, there are more BMWs per head in Beijing than any other city on the planet! Lot’s on business to be done here.

Opportunities for Entrepreneur

Saying that, I see many opportunities here. Let’s take a step back for a second. Many Indians, Chinese, and Europeans made the move to the US to better their careers. I’m sure you know some.

• They’re hard-working, right?
• They studied English (a foreign language), right?
• They made the move to a new country and survived, right?

Well, it’s the same for you.

It’s do-able.

Unless you’re held back by domestic commitments, which are understandable, then moving to Asia is worth considering. Maybe now it’s (possibly) the turn for US folks to move to these countries to find work. I know this is hard to swallow for many people, but well… why not?

There are so many opportunities for people in India, Singapore, China, and now Vietnam (the new low cost dev centre). And no, you don’t always need to speak the language but if you do, just learn it.

One of the most successful web marketers in the US is John Chow, a guy who moved from China as young man. Today, he’s minting it.

How to get started

• Read the China Daily http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ to get an insight into China today
• Read China Tech News http://www.chinatechnews.com/
• Connect with me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh where I share links, photos and videos
• Signup to LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/ and connect with me http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh there.

LinkedIn is an excellent gateway with some really super groups where you can ask questions and get real feedback. It’s for business professionals and has been the most productive social network for me.. I really recommend it.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section so we can share with others.

Likewise, if you think you’re friends might like this article, please send it to them.

Last week we looked at how much time you spend working every week. We looked at how Christine managed her time and tried to find ways to improve her productivity. The key here is to step back, see where you’re spending/wasting time and then find practical ways to address this. What works for Christine may not work for you – but making a start will make a difference. 

7 Ways to Save Time At Work

Here are some ways she created more time during the week.

• Attended team meetings but left after giving her presentation – unless it was critical to stay for the next presentation. Usually not.
• Stopped attending meetings where her input was not required, e.g. general FYIs and progress reports. She asked for the Status Reports from the PMs, accepted/rejected her tasks, and got back to work. See Project Management by video here.
• Worked from home every Tuesday (and later every Wed). This let her work – without interruption – for 10 hours.
• Booked conf rooms – just for herself – locked herself in and worked away in peace. When she worked at the desk, people kept interrupting.
• Ignored emails – except high priorities – for 24 hours. Why? Many small things resolved themselves. People found the document they were after. People didn’t need something anymore.
• Ignored low priorities emails for 72 hours. Why? Many emails were just total time-wasters. Spending time on this robbed her of time in other areas.
• Turned off her Blackberry, IM and email when working. She checked these on the dot at 11 am and 3pm.  Between then, she was ‘working’.

What Christine did was prioritize her work.

Providing she met her deliverables – or exceeded them as was now the case – her managers were fine. Co-workers had to change their expectations, i.e. she was not available for idle chatter, “How do I move a pig in Farmville?”, or activities that removed her from her goal.

See How to Get Your Email Answered.

What makes here different is that she has a definite goal. Her aim was to be more productive and get the recognition. Many people do the donkey work but don’t get the credit for it.

By using her time well, she showed senior mgt that she was a cut above the rest. When I left the project, she became the Team Lead.

See 4 Hour Week Cheat Sheet.

How about you?

How much time do you spend actually doing what you want to do? How do you stop others from wasting your time and pulling you away from your goals?

What’s the one thing you enjoyed most in Avatar? For my Project Management friend it was the video logging. Did you notice that the team kept their reports not in Microsoft Word (i.e. on paper) but as video logs.

When trying it out, the protagonist in the movie couldn’t get a handle on it. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it’, was the reply.  Well, it worked for them, could it work for you? Here are some of the reasons you might want to consider using video for project management activities.

What Avatar Can Teach You About Project Management

Advantages of video logging

• Capture Emotions— Capture human elements missing from electronic reports, such as emotions or subtle suggestions made in the video logs that would not otherwise be noticed.
• Speed — Videos are faster to make. You just open your mouth and talk! Consider the effort in using Microsoft Word, applying styles, finding the right template, typing, fixing grammar horrors etc.
• Convenience — you can record videos almost anywhere. The recording device is smaller and easier to transport.
• Faster — For me, using a flip camera is now as easy as a telephone – just start talking! Consider this against the effort in using Microsoft Word, applying styles, finding the right template, typing in, fixing grammar horrors etc.

Disadvantages of video logging

• Structure — you need to train people how to deliver video reports, otherwise they’ll ramble defeating the purpose.
• Search — while you can search Word files on the network by keyword (i.e. metadata), how would you do this with video? Is it possible to tag/keyword videos as we do with Word docs and online reports?
• Edits — while videos are faster to make, if they need to be edited, then you lose the upside.
• Convenience — while you can record videos almost anywhere, this can be abused as employees file in reports pretending to be onsite with the client.
• Compliance – the number of laptops stolen each year (holding confidential data) continues to rise. This raises issues with unauthorized user video apps to submit, retrieve, share confidential data. Of course, this also applies to PC, iPhones etc.
• Storage — maybe this is no longer as problem as the cost of server space continues to fall and compression technologies improve. But would terabytes of data get expensive in the end? Not sure.

Should Project Manager use video for status reports?

It’s early days yet but I can see the attraction of using video to file in reports.  The difficulty may be in getting people to make the change. As it often the case, the problem is not in the processes or technological benefits, but the human issues that underpin these decisions.

What do you think?

Could it work? What do you think is the main barrier to using video more frequently in the work place?