Personal Outsourcing Performance

So, I’ve been trying to close my email client while I’m doing other things and only process it to zero first thing in the morning, after coming back from lunch, and before I leave work. The problem is that I’m scheduled for meetings all day long and I need to get notified of those meetings as when I’m in the middle of coding I don’t like to be consciously aware of the time. The only way to do this previously was to leave my email client open as it reminds me 5 minutes before the meeting. This wasn’t working for me as I was checking my email wayyyy to often and constantly interupting my focus and thus reduce my productivity.

What’s the solution? Everyday when I come in to work the first thing I do is process my email to zero and accept any meetings that there may be, or create meetings / appointments that need to be made. I then click the print preview button in my Lotus Notes webmail client which puts the schedule in PDF format. Next, I open up a browser to gmail and start composing an email to Sandy [http://www.asksandy.com]. I then switch back, click the select text button in the PDF viewer, highlight my schedule and copy and paste it into my gmail body and add an r to the beginning of each meeting. I also remove any details to maintain confidentiality as these details can not be trusted to an outside source. So an example of the body of my email would look like this.

r Meeting 9:30am
r Meeting 11:00am
r Conference Cal 3:00pm

What this will do is tell Sandy to send me an SMS text message at this time to remind me of the meeting[ You have to set this up in your account and you can also set how many minutes ahead of time you wish to be reminded].

How do I know what meeting I’m supposed to attend if I only have the time in the reminder you ask? I print out my schedule and set that aside out of site, but in a consistent place I can grab and look at when I get the meeting reminder from Sandy via SMS. At that point I know what room the meeting is in or if it’s a conference call I have the # and passcode. Voila! You now have a schedule that you can now put out of mind and have essentially outsourced to your virtual, virtual assistant Sandy, while still keeping the details confidential. In addition, this allows you to not keep in line with only reading emails a few times a day.

Is this method foolproof? No, where you can get burned is if someone reschedules a meeting the same day. My hope when they don’t get an acknowledgment that I’ve accepted their reschedule is that they will instant message me [ Unfortunately, I have to leave this on. I prefer this to telephone].

Isn’t this a lot of work? Well it is and isn’t. It’s not automatic, because we do not have an options to export our calendars for confidentiality reasons of course. If I could it would be put into google calendar lickety split and google would remind me as it would be less intervention. The time is saves me is very much worth personal outsourcing this to Sandy, especially when I need extreme focus. So there you go, personal outsourcing can be done in a corporate environment you just have to be a little creative.

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