Respect For Coworkers is Smart Business, Even if You Don’t Need Them

By Steve Eaton

I used to load food on airplanes at Sea-Tac International Airport. In theory, loading each flight on time was easy; the only factors that could make the job difficult were delayed flights, broken-down trucks or weather problems.

If things went smoothly, we had three hours to load three planes, but often flight delays would place all three on the ground at the same time, at which point we had to figure out quickly how to be in three places at once. If an airplane ever had to wait for loading to be finished, our company would be charged $100 a minute, which, in those days, was a lot of money. This very bad situation was also called a delay, but we were good at adjusting on our feet, so delays on our end were rare.

At one point on this job I had a boss who came straight from college with a master's in business administration, which was supposed to mean he knew how to manage us properly. He had good hair and looked like a game-show host. He was the kind of guy who might clean his garage with a sweater tied around his waist while wearing unscuffed boat-deck shoes. He never helped.

When something went wrong, this boss would call out to a team of loaders preparing for a flight and order them to run a meal or something else out to a waiting airplane. He was clueless. We knew if we did what he said it would start a chain reaction leading to multiple delays. So we often ignored what he told us and orchestrated the rescue with other loaders ourselves so that each flight went out on time. He didn’t care, as long as he looked good at the end of the day.

In contrast, we had another weathered supervisor who had worked his way up in the organization and could step in and do our jobs if needed. Sometimes he did. When he had to recruit emergency help, he would call out to us and simply ask, “What are you doing now?” That question allowed him to figure out who could best be pulled off his current assignment to go fight a fire. He respected us because he knew we were the only ones who understood exactly where all the moving pieces were.

Only a few leaders understand that respect should flow both ways, up and down the ladder. Does your boss panic like you do when you realize you are going to be late for a meeting with her? Does she call you from the airport to explain she’s going to need to reschedule?

Once, when a supervisor from the top floor missed a meeting with me, he sought me out at my office in the basement to apologize and take care of business. He did not summon me up to his office with no explanation for why he’d failed to show up. Another boss stopped what he was doing in the middle of a busy day to drive me to his home so he could loan me a book. He knew I was dealing with a family crisis and wanted to help in whatever way he could.

Novelist Paul Eldridge wrote, “A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”

This is not to disparage rank; there are reasons for it. It's helpful to have someone in charge who can take responsibility for decisions. I would not do well in an organization where everyone held hands and sang "Kumbaya." But I do not believe rank exists so supervisors can easily identify inferiors whom they can quickly replace if they disagree with them.

I once asked Stephen R. Covey if he ever worked with leaders who sought out his help for their companies but were blind to their own shortcomings. He said, “All the time.”

So if you have an office big enough to host an aerobics class, ask yourself this: Do you treat all the people who work for you with respect, even when you don’t have to? If someone treated you the way you treat others, how would it make you feel? How about the rest of us? Do you know the names of the people who come to your office to pick up the recycling? Are you courteous to the people who serve you at a restaurant or at McDonald's? Do you ever give the boss a sincere compliment? I have it on good authority that a lot of the top dogs have feelings, too.

Don't worry. I don't want us all to start singing. I’m just saying we can find simple and even fun ways to treat each other with respect. I once complained I didn’t get to travel as much as my co-workers, because I liked the cool shower caps at the fancy hotels and the notion of watching TV from bed.

I didn’t get to travel more, but now I have a very impressive collection of shower caps. The travelers started saving them for me. Now I know that next time there is a lice outbreak I’ll be the go-to guy. I will hold the power.

Sometimes that’s all you can hope for, respect in the face of a lice outbreak.

It’s a start.


Steve Eaton, is the director of communications, for the Jon M. Huntsman School or Business. He writes a column for the Deseret News that can be seen here. The above content is a column that originally ran in the Deseret News. It was used with permission from the organization. 
     

“Flack” Shares Five Secrets For Dealing With Reporters

I was raised, by a father who was a journalism professor, to be a newsman. It’s in my blood. When I go into a newsroom I can hear it calling to me. That’s real life. Like a window open on a cold day, I can feel it in my bones. For now, however, I am in public relations. I’m lucky that I get to work at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business where the importance of ethical leadership is emphasized and truth is considered central to any PR strategy. Not all in my profession are so blessed.

Many journalists, however, would still call me a “flack.” It’s supposed to be derogatory but it doesn’t bother me. In fact, I’d have that as part of my title on my business card if I could.

Since I’ve been working in public relations I’ve been to conferences and been involved in situations where people try to figure out formulas or approaches to motivate journalists to behave properly. For those who have never worked in a newsroom on a daily paper, I guess the inexact science of working with reporters can appear baffling.

So, I thought I would share five simple tips that can help you be more effective if you ever need to deal with the press.

1. Realize that you are not at the center of the world. Each day when most reporters get in they are under pressure to deliver two or three stories, regardless of how well they did the day before. If you have news that’s worth covering, it will have to compete with whatever else is on their plate. While it may be true that Normon Foddlebaum has won an award that is in his world is the equivalent of an Oscar, that doesn’t mean that your news won’t be trumped by someone or something else that day that is more pressing or interesting.


2. Overall, journalists don’t have a huge bias to the left or the right. They do, however, have a bias toward the negative. Is that bad? Not necessarily. If they do a big story on someone being mugged on Main Street, be grateful. It means that such a thing is still considered unusual. In New York it probably wouldn’t make the paper. In general, reporters get more reward for unearthing corruption, dirt, and scandal then they do for writing about awards, happy faces, and balloons. And while you may not be willing to admit it, a story about the local principal being arrested is more likely to draw you in than a story about him being named administrator of the year. That’s just life.


3. Don’t even try to manipulate journalists. Treat them with respect and try to understand their world. Don’t think you can trick them into running an inflated story or massage an issue by hiding key facts. They are smart and they have absolutely no use for manipulative, dishonest people as sources.


4. When they call, they need help now, as in within the hour. If they tell their editor that they have a story for the day and then they suddenly can’t get the interview they need, life gets very uncomfortable for them. The rest of us operate in a world where we think up work today and finish it four days or even two weeks from now. They don’t have that luxury. Everything is due now.


5. When you write a press release, write it in news style. Follow Associated Press rules. Make it something they could cut and paste into a story if they wanted to. If you really want Normon Foddlebaum to have his day in the sun, don’t fill your release with fluffy, unattributed statements about how great he is. I have rewritten hundreds of press releases as a reporter and I was shocked at how few even came close to being usable. You know why that is? It’s because PR people write press releases to please their bosses. That’s where the reward is for them but if your release only succeeds in annoying reporters and editors before it is deleted, then you are wasting everyone’s time. 

So, it’s not that complicated. You just have to be honest and treat reporters like real people who are under unbelievable daily stress to find and report the news. Sure they annoy, pester and torment us but that’s part of their job. As humorist Peter Dunne once said of newspapers, they “confront the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Once you understand that things start to make more sense. Then you’ll begin understand why you can never be completely comfortable when dealing with the press and why that’s okay.

— Steve Eaton

How Do You Make Time For New Ideas When You Are Already Booked to the Max?

 By Steve Eaton

How innovative are you if the Beddelman report is due at 2 p.m. and it’s 1 p.m.? If the boss is expecting something of you right now, can you make time in your schedule to think up new ideas and game-changing strategies?

At the Huntsman School of Business we talk about the entrepreneurial spirit and emphasize the importance of innovative thinking. In today’s fast-paced workplace, however, tapping the creative powers of your employees and yourself can be more than a little challenging.

Years ago I attended a memorable and outstanding workshop on creativity given by the late Gordon MacKenzie, author of “Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.” He had worked for Hallmark and said that even though the company depended on creative ideas for its product, the culture didn’t always encourage things that weren’t part of the status quo.

“Trying to get an idea through Hallmark was like trying to drive a four-wheel drive truck through a mountain of cooked oatmeal,”he said. “You never have a sense of hitting a wall but eventually you come to a stop.”

At one point he was asked to take a new position that would be charged, in part, with encouraging innovation at the company. Gordon came up with the title “creative paradox.”

Once he got that title he decorated his new office with candles, a giant wood telephone wire spool for his desk, and signs that featured Chinese characters, even though he had no idea what they meant. He even hung from the ceiling an unsual chair he purchased from an artist. The chair had wings and a halo on the back of it and he dangled it just above his regular chair, tilted forward. He wanted it to look as if he had just fallen from the ceiling chair into his regular chair.

People would come in to this strange, mystical office and present their ideas to him and he would listen intently and say, “Good idea.”

Employees, emboldened by the approval of the creative paradox would go back to their supervisor and tell him or her their idea, adding that the creative paradox liked it. The middle-managers would try to find the creative paradox on the company organization chart but Gordon's title wasn’t there. Fearing he might be above them in the pecking order, the managers would often allow their employees to proceed with their creative idea just to be safe. Hallmark used a “creative paradox” to free up innovative ideas.

A story in the Jan. 19 Wall Street Journal, “The Trouble With Tinkering With Time,” talks about how different companies have tried to give their employees more time for innovation. Google is famous for its “20% initiative” where employees are encouraged to work on projects that are not related to their job description.

The writer, Alec Foege, says that companies can be terrified to let people “tinker” with new ideas on company time.

“They’ve got enough to do already thank you very much,” he writes. “Innovation at its heart, is a torturous anarchical act. True tinkerers are dilettantes, free-form creative types motivated more by their own curiosity than by the bottom line. In short, they aren’t the kinds of employees most big companies like adding to the payroll in the first place.”

He writes that just one drawback of a firm officially structuring innovation time is that “being ordered to tinker robs the activity of personal passion.” He suggests that one radical approach would be to allow people to directly profit from their successful ideas. He warns that companies who embark on these initiatives have to make room for “genuine creative chaos without clear goals,” and that they need to know that repeated failure is part of the deal with such a strategy.

I was once asked to come up with a presentation that my company’s executives could use to help employees understand the firm’s latest goals. I came up with quite the unorthodox presentation that proved more than a little memorable. If you come to my office in the basement you can see a sign that reads, “Rewarding Top Employees With Spam.” That’s a left-over prop from that presentation.

One of my favorite parts of the song and dance I created for my superiors was a lightly scripted moment that had me bursting into a room while the executive was making the presentation. I would get into an argument with him or her that would eventually lead to me being thrown out of the meeting, much to the delight of my coworkers. I proved quite good at being booted from meetings and they even sent me on the road to be ejected mid-presentation in other places where the company had offices.

That was fun creativity for me but it came because the executives were willing to take the risk and encourage such ideas.

I’m not sure what the secret is to institutionalizing innovation. Gordon MacKenzie said creativity is not the kind of thing you can mandate and measure. The most innovative people I know are the right-brained sorts who are great at generating new ideas but not so good on the follow up. What do you do to keep yourself from falling into a rut? How do you reinvent your work? Send us a blog post or just share a new idea or two. Maybe you’ll end up being someone celebrated for revolutionizing higher education as we know it now or … maybe you’ll just get thrown out of a meeting. That’s all part of the risk you take. Are you up to the challenge, or are you going to finish the Beddleman report first?

Utahns Should Park the Monster Plows and Enjoy a Snow Day

Editor’s note: The column below ran in the Deseret News in November of 2010 but the author, our own Steve Eaton, feels the message is one that people in Utah still need to hear. “Utah people know so little about snowy weather and driving,” he said. “I think they could learn a thing or two from the people of Washington State where I grew up.” This column is used with permission from the Deseret News.

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It's started to snow again, and it's becoming clear to me that people in Utah don't know how to deal with snow. My family moved here from Seattle, where we would get snow just every other year, and we do a better job with snow than you Utahns do.

Here is a basic rule about snow that is apparently rocket science to most of you: If there is visible snow on the ground, start canceling stuff. You should cancel school, work and church meetings. Close everything.

That's what snow is for: an excuse to cancel stuff.

In Washington, we were so good at this that we took it a step further. In the Evergreen State, if snow is just being forecast, you should cancel stuff. You don't even have to wait for the snow to fall. This is called a snow day, and a snow day is a lot like a vacation day. Think about this carefully for a few seconds. Are you getting this? Something has gone terribly off track here. When I went through my first winter here and tried to explain this concept to people I got a three-step reply.

First, we never cancel anything because of snow. This is stated as if it's a bragging point. That's very confusing to me. It's like boasting, I never turn on the lights in our house, even if I walk into stuff.

Second, they say, the snow we are experiencing now is nothing compared to the way it used to be. It used to snow 14 feet in an hour. You couldn't even open your front door, the snow was so high. You would pour a glass of water in the house and it would freeze before you could drink it.

This leads to the third reply: Even then, we didn't cancel anything. We don't cancel anything for snow.

The principle of snow disrupting things is such a key concept in Washington, that if it does snow and people don't cancel things, well, we just go out and crash. We spin and crash. We go into ditches. We get out of our cars and fall down. And we don't have to wait until we get out on the roads to do it. We crash in our driveways and in parking lots. We're good at it.

When you go outside and it is cold and you fall down, that's nature's way of telling you that you've made a mistake. You're supposed to take the day off.

Here's another part of the equation. Everyone should be talking about the impending storm when a blizzard is coming and what things might be canceled. The newscasts here don't inspire panic. People don't rush out and buy generators if a storm is coming.

In Seattle, the TV people give storms cool names like "The Arctic Blast of 2008," and they come up with great graphics and warn of death, looting and destruction. Here, all we get is this dire warning: snow likely.

We live near a hill, and some of the recent snowstorms made the hill very slick. This meant that some people couldn't make it up the hill. When I saw this start to happen, I ran out in my sneakers to try to help.

It turns out that standing on an ice-covered hill behind a 6-ton car that is spinning its tires and sliding backwards isn't that helpful.

One of the people I went to help asked me what would happen if they just did a U-turn and went back down the hill. Since I'm from Washington, I didn't know. My guess was that they would just start doing out-of-control donuts down the hill because that's what we would do in Washington.

To the credit of local officials, they eventually canceled the hill. They closed it but only for a few minutes until this monster snowplow showed up that completely cleared the snow.

While we're at it, explain this to me: What's with the monster snowplows? We thought it was an earthquake the first time one went by.

I assume snowplows cost a lot of tax dollars and, because they make the driving safer, they make people stop canceling stuff. Trying to explain this just tires me out. It seems so simple. I'd write more but I think I'd better get out and buy a generator and batteries. Snow is likely. I hope the stores aren't already closed.

— Steve Eaton

Grateful for a Computer With a Heartbeat

This week, just as I was on deadline for the Huntsman Post, my computer crashed. To use a football analogy to show you how close I was to meeting that deadline before the crash: I was down by two touchdowns with three minutes to play in the fourth quarter. I had come in early, was planning on staying late, and was believing that with a successful on-side kick or blocked punt I could still get a victory. 

Then, suddenly, just before the snap, each member of my offensive line died at the same time of a heart attack. That's the part where my computer crashed. Suddenly I was in a totally different game.

If you take away my ability to type and do e-mail, my world changes. After I organize and clean my office, all I can do is go outside and plant crops. Thankfully, the guy in the office next door to mine is Tom James. He has actual job skills and he deals in these type of work crisis situations every day at the Huntsman School of Business. Computers crash, and people run to him as their vocational world starts to unravel. He calmly goes about defragmenting hard-disk megabytes and downloading drivers, and soon he is rebuilding things and saving the day. Since his office is nearby, I see this drama play out on a regular basis but, of course, it’s much more serious when I’m facing a technology meltdown.

While he was in the other room hitting my computer with those shock pads, hoping to get a heartbeat, I found an old laptop in my office that had been retired years ago because it too had a tendency to crash. I plugged it in, booted it up and it worked—sort of. Because I do a lot of my work in Drop Box, I was able to get to many of my latest documents. It was still a painful process to meet deadline because many of the things I normally do without even thinking became more difficult. Sort of like throwing a long pass after your offensive line drops dead.

Everything was slow. I could have run a lap around the building every time I clicked on something expecting a response. Normally, I have two computer screens, which proves extremely helpful when I am writing stories and press releases from typewritten notes, e-mail information or audio recordings that live in my computer. I couldn’t use those two screens anymore. I could still progress but it was like writing left-handed—underwater.

Within 24 hours Tom had my computer back to life and working again. It’s sort of sad, however, because she doesn’t remember me anymore and has forgotten all my preferences and what we did together last Christmas. She is sometimes confused when I ask her to do things she used to do all the time like print a document or launch a program. I’ll click on a program and she wants to know if I agree with pages and pages of rules before she’ll let me use it. She used to trust me.

It is sort of like in Star Trek when Spock was finally tapping his human side and then they killed him off at the end of the movie only to try to bring him back to life in the next movie. The new Spock had forgotten some of the Star Trek movies he made just like we had.

I remember as a kid I watched a cartoon show about the future called “The Jetsons.” In the episode I remember, two of the main characters were in the military and were being punished by being put on a clean-up detail. It meant that they had to sit at a panel and punch buttons and watch as robots did the actual scrubbing and sweeping. They complained to each other of the difficulty of the detail and how that part of the military, where they punish you with hard labor, not changed in hundreds of years. They weren’t doing any actual work. They were just punching buttons.

So what percentage of your day involves mouse clicks and typing? What happens to your world when your laptop crashes or your smart phone gets dumb? Have you ever thought doing something was too hard because it might have involved ten or fifteen clicks?

Now, I know where you think I’m going with this. You think I’m going to complain about us all using smart phones too much and never communicating in person. You think I’m going to advocate for an Amish lifestyle and a car that runs on corncobs. I’m not. The technology I use every day allows me to communicate, keep my job, and makes it so I’ll never ever have to go back to the circus where I grew up.

This Thanksgiving I’m going to be grateful for the very technology that everyone loves to complain about. I need my computer even if she seems distant to me right now like we are strangers that just met. I’ll win her over. And it just so happens that I care about my iPhone that connects me to eBay where there is soooo much stuff that I really need to buy before it is too late.

When I get home there is plenty of real manual labor to do. Don’t worry. I’ll stay connected to the earth. Most of it is in my garage and I’ll need to sweep it out. In one way, we are sort of like the Jetsons, you know.

Only in our case, it is my wife who has figured out how to push my buttons.

—Steve Eaton

Top Ten Productivity Apps For the iPhone Junkie

I am probably the only person in the world who has more productivity apps on my iPhone than games. I could have funded a trip to Maui and back with the money I’ve spent on apps that process, track, list and analyze things. So, I thought I’d share with you my top 10 productivity apps so far.

1.     “Drop Box” – Free - Dave Patel, a Huntsman executive type who knows stuff and has been there and done that, told me about Drop Box and it has become something I use every day. Since many documents I work on become group-editing projects, they end up in Drop Box where everyone can get at them. Once something is in Drop Box I can access it on my phone which means I can continue to work on projects even while in a line at the grocery store or while I’m waiting for a meeting to begin. (Of course, you can also use it to work on stuff while you are on vacation or watching a sunset, which can cause your wife to whack you on the side of the head. Be careful.) It’s free because they want you to use it so much you’ll start storing all your pictures, documents and even old socks in there. Once you are hooked, they charge you to for added storage space.

2.     “Docs To Go” - $9.99 – I know, spending $10 for an app in the iTunes world is like paying $200,000 for something in real-life dollars. It’s expensive. But it is a grown-up app you need if you want to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your phone. (I’ve never used it for PowerPoint but I suppose that I could always give PowerPoint presentations to people who are in line with me at the grocery store.) I bought this so I could open the work stuff I store in “Drop Box.”

3.     “Easy TimeSheet” - $2.99 – There’s a free version but I wanted all the bells and whistles. This app allows you to not only track how long it takes you to complete a project, like writing a blog, but to figure out how much your company paid for that particular project based on your hourly time rate. This would be a better app if I could find another app that reminds me to stop it when I switch projects and start it when I begin a new project. If you have a lot of multi-tasking and moving pieces in your work life, this can be a difficult app to maximize.

4.     iBlueSky - $9.99 – Have you ever tried mind mapping? This is a great app for organizing your thoughts. Also, if you take notes in class with a mind map approach like this you can really remember things for a long time. (If you have a disorganized, rambling teacher, however, it will drive you crazy trying to take notes in a mind-map format.) If you hate lists but also hate forgetting stuff and being undependable, you could make this app work for you too. I think someday, when I am an evolved, peaceful person, I will have my to-do lists in iBlueSky. There are lots of apps that do mind mapping approaches but the others have square bubbles that are too rigid and or goofy bubbles that make you feel like you are in junior high. This one is simple, clean, with no caffeine.

5.     “Touch Goal” – $3.99 – This is a good app for people who like to assign point values to stuff they do so they can have a total score at the end of the day. For example, you could give yourself 20 points for sticking to a diet all day and one point for every time you pick up a piece of trash outside and throw it away, proving you are a good person. I know, I know, the idea of quantifying your day with a score will horrify all you right-brained, mentally-balanced, sunset-watching people. Not me. I just give myself 10 points if I can watch a sunset without getting whacked by my wife.  

6.     “Streaks – Motivation Calendar” - $1.99 – Sports figures have people tracking all the stuff they do so that someone can announce how many passes in a row they’ve caught or how many games in a row they’ve got on base. Why shouldn’t you use this to keep track of things you consistently do, like how often you exercise or how many days in a row you can go without complaining? (My personal record is five days and it would be higher if it weren’t for that no-good, stupid … oops. I guess I’ll have to start over tomorrow.)

7.     “Daily Tracker” – Free – This is an app that includes just about everything you could want for tracking things, including a “to-do-list” and “expenses” function. I use it to track how much sleep I get. We all think we don’t get enough sleep. I know, however, that in 2012 I’ve been averaging 7:06 minutes a night, something I would not have believed, if had not tracked it myself. (Caution: if you are someone who likes to honestly brag about how little sleep you get, this app could spoil all that for you.)

8.     MyFitnessPal – Free – I use MyFitnessPal to track calories. It has bazillion foods listed. And it remembers which foods you eat most often so they are always at top your list. When you type in “chocolate chip cookie,” for example, you don’t have to go searching for it, it knows your cookie habit. You can also fix it so your friends can see how you are doing and give you a bad time if you eat only chocolate chip cookies.

9.     Tactio Health - $1.99 – I use Tactio Health to track my weight because it predicts the future. For example, it says if I continue to lose weight at the rate I am right on my current diet, I will have lost 450 pounds and reached my goal by April 3, 2013. It’s fun as long as you are losing weight but if you gain weight it gets rude and tells you things like, if you don’t get serious, you won’t reach your goal until 2038 or worse yet, you’ll NEVER reach your goal. On this app you can also track lots of things like body mass, resting pulse, activity, cholesterol and chlora-hydrine-fiber levels. This is the kind of stuff healthy, skinny people like to track. I just use it to predict the future.

10.  “Clear” - $1.99 – If you love crossing things off your to-do list, this is the app for you. It’s a very simple app but it is very addictive. It doesn’t allow you to do project management, scheduling or a thousand other things lots of apps offer but it gives you a little shot of joy when you check stuff off your list because it makes this little happy Star Trek noise. If you aren’t a list maker, don’t even try it. You’ll never understand.

The above list changes almost daily. I’m always searching out new apps in hopes of finding the perfect app that fixes everything and brings joy, peace and top-quality pizza into my life on a regular basis.

Now this list, of course, doesn’t cover game aps, entertainment apps, news apps, book aps or all the fitness and running apps I have bought. I don’t even mention “Coop Shoot,” a must-have game app. That game app was developed by former Huntsman student Britney Johnson, and current Huntsman students Lauren and Shai McDonald, and they are way smart and cool, so everyone should have that app.

There are so many apps. There are even apps to help you find apps. What are some of your favorite apps? Let me know and maybe I’ll check them out next time I’m watching a sunset or I’ll share them in a future blog post.

— Steve Eaton

Steve Eaton, is the director of communications, for the Jon M. Huntsman School or Business or, as some people call him, “the PR guy in the basement.” He writes a column for the Deseret News that can be seen here. http://bit.ly/AuYLYF

List-maker Shares End Zone Time Management Approach

Have you ever had a to-do list so long that it’s hard to feel like you are making progress? I’ve had days where I started with a list of 60 things I felt I had to do; I accomplished 40 of those items, but still ended up with 72 things on my list. That’s because assignments came in faster than I could complete them. It was like digging in sand.

Imagine you were quarterbacking a football team and you had to drive to the other end of the field but the length of the field kept changing, in fact, at times you were so far away from the end zone that you couldn’t even see the goal posts.

This is how I’ve felt at times, especially on those days when I accomplish a lot and still end up further away from the end zone than when I started the day. I work hard. I want to run into the end zone and celebrate every now and then. So that’s why I developed a time management system I call “Define the End Zone.”

Here’s how it works. You put your to-do list into a numbered word document. Then you pull from that to make a short list of just the things you want to accomplish before noon. That might be just six or seven items on your list. It might look like this:

1. Take the mayonnaise jar out of my backpack. 
2. Return Mitt Romney's call.
3. Finish "zinger document" for President Obama. 
4. Call back Clooney and tell him I do not want to meet Friday at 9:30 p.m.
5. Work on the Bloomberg report of the Zero Project for 60 minutes. 

1

Now, I may have a huge list but this is all I need to think about between now and noon. I do the same thing between noon and 5 p.m., and 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

So, how do you deal with unexpected interruptions that derail your list and threaten to push the end zone back? Let’s say that you are just about to call Mitt and the fire alarm goes off. Because you hate it when you literally catch on fire at work, this instantly changes your priorities. It’s okay. The end-zone approach is flexible.

You must then calculate in your mind how long you think this interruption will take and, if your office doesn’t burn up while you are away, you make an adjustment when you get back. Let’s say that you figure this should be a 15-minute interruption. When you get back you adjust your list by knocking 15 minutes off the last item. Now the last item on your list reads: “Work on the Bloomberg report of the Zero Project for 45 minutes.” The end zone hasn’t moved.

Now you don’t deduct how much time the interruption actually took because, in the case of a fire alarm, you could make that detour last all morning if you are a creative procrastinator. That wouldn’t be fair to the other team. You also have to decide which things can never be deducted such as processing e-mail. I need to force myself to be less attentive to e-mail, so if I stop to go through my e-mail more than once before noon, I’m just making it harder to reach the goal posts. I don’t knock anything off the bottom of my list to compensate for e-mail time or low priority things  that use up valuable seconds such as gazing at the vending machine.

You hit the end zone if you can cross all the items off your list before noon. That’s worth three points. If you do it with 30 minutes to spare, that’s worth 7 points. If you fail, you just punt, make a new list for the new block of time and go after it again. Don’t forget to give the other team its points – seven points if it takes you more than 30 minutes past your deadline to finish your mini-list.

This approach works best when you have a moderate level of incoming traffic. If things are changing too fast, it becomes a distraction. If it’s a quiet, peaceful day where you know you can work on just one project all day, then you don’t really need it.

Since I was in junior high I have been in search of the perfect time management system. In my job now I get to interview many top executives, consultants, and entrepreneurs and I usually try to squeeze in a question in about how they manage their workload.

Their answers are interesting. One executive told me the secret was just to get a good administrative assistant and let her take care of managing all your appointments, priorities and life. Others have talked about getting up early in the morning and never multi-tasking. Someday I’ll write about what the late Stephen R. Covey, the Huntsman Presidential Chair in Leadership (2010-2012), told me when I interviewed him in his home. His focus was on being very clear about your mission and eliminating those tasks from your life that don’t help you reach your most important goals.

Once I took a top executive of a major company out to lunch to find out his approach. He said I should just delegate everything and if there were still things on my list I have to do, I should then do the ones that interested me most. If I neglected an important task, eventually a subordinate would work up the courage to bring it up to me again. Obviously, we were on different worlds. I live on “Planet Delegation” where ideas thought up in meetings and on airplanes come to live on long to-do lists.

I’ve never found a system that works effectively in all situations. The end-zone approach is just one of several strategies that work for me and I don’t do it every day. I find when I use this approach I get to the end of the work day with nothing left in the tank. I leave it all on the field, which is good from a work point of view, but not so good if you get home and you need to actually interact with other people. If my wife wants me to mow the lawn, take out the garbage and explain why I left the back door to the house open all night that can prove very difficult to do on three brain cells.

I have an approach I use when my brains are totally fried at the end of the day but I know I must keep going. I have a strategy for when I want to sprint and set records. I have a marathon approach for when I know I must endure a long list of intimidating tasks that have to be dealt with even if the sun goes down. I have a scheduling approach that brings an unbelievable euphoria of total control at first and then eventually, by the end of the second day, a complete mental breakdown.

If you have a system that works for you, I’d love to hear about it. Send me an e-mail at steve.eaton@usu.edu.

I recognize that there are very few sane people out there who will relate to this blog post. If this blog causes others to stage an intervention for me, I will keep such posts to myself in the future. But we are expected to dare mighty things here at the Huntsman School of Business, right? Well, maybe I’m trying to dare my mighty things in a defined end zone. Don’t be surprised if you catch me suddenly raising my arms in a victory punch or doing pushups in my office. I probably just scored.

Steve Eaton

Bus Rides and Parachutes Could Improve Presidential Politics

Editor’s note: Steve Eaton, who works for the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, writes a column for the Deseret News. We thought that with the presidential debates going on, this satirical article, which ran before the first debate, might demonstrate how some innovative thinking could change the political process. It is used with permission from the Deseret News.

By Steve Eaton

We are getting to that point in the presidential elections where some of the foolishness is set aside and we can get down to the serious business of picking our next leader.

This is when we try to figure out who can best bring people together to work for the good of the country by pitting the two candidates, who are capable of raising and spending money the fastest, against each other. We ask them to get up on a stage to demonstrate their leadership abilities by having them argue with and criticize each other before a live audience of millions. The presidential debates are upon us.

Up until now, the election has focused on seeing which candidate could go the longest without saying something that could be lifted out of context and called a "gaffe." Now, instead, we'll be watching to see which candidate can go the longest in a debate without saying something that can be lifted out of context and called a "gaffe."

It's not that there hasn't been some serious campaigning. One of the candidates, and I won't say which one, has sent large, colorful, empty campaign buses around the country to help us decide who would be the best guardian of our money. I'm not naming names because I don't want the other guy to feel bad because he doesn't have as many empty buses available to him. But he shouldn't feel at a disadvantage. He has this cool plane with a bump on it that he borrowed from Harrison Ford and a fleet of bullet-proof cars.

The bottom line is that both of these candidates want to connect with the average voters who struggle to make ends meet and let them know that they will care about them deeply until the election. And while holding campaign rallies where we are allowed to scream our praise at them and applaud enthusiastically is one way to do that, I have a few new ideas I'd like to throw their way.

Why not let some of us ride around in the buses? We had one stop in Logan recently and there wasn't even a surrogate on it, that I know about. If a crowd of hard-working Americans is willing to gather just to look upon a campaign bus and imagine a caring candidate inside, wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of real people on the bus?

You could have 10 or 20 people at a time taking turns getting off the bus and getting praised enthusiastically while connecting with the other average voters. The more articulate and creative bus riders could get off the bus and shout promises at the crowd to make them feel loved. If the crowds got too big, you could send a couple of campaign Cadillacs around the country, too, and have contests to see who could drive two of them at the same time.

Or the other guy could take people on his airplane with him. We could convince him to do this by booting off the press and letting real people sit in the back. It would be a big party and if anyone tried to get too serious or started to ask questions, like the press always does, everyone could go downstairs and watch the candidate throw the offending people off his plane like Harrison Ford did in "Air Force One." We'd give those who had literally fallen out of favor with the candidate colorful parachutes with campaign slogans on them and the promise that someone would eventually find them and feel their pain.

But such talk is probably foolish at this point because the debates are what it is all about. And yet, while it may be disrespectful for me to suggest this, I think there are a few ways we could make them more interesting.

The use of a fire hose would change things quite a bit. What if all the impartial fact checkers the TV people employ were set up back stage and had the power to blast a candidate with a fire hose whenever he stretched the truth or misstated a fact? I'm not talking about a sustained blast that would force us to stop everything to go try and find the candidate, but just a short burst that would knock them off their feet.

Too extreme? How about arming each candidate with a bike horn? That way instead of having to patiently wait, sighing heavily, while the other candidate went on and on about you, you could presidentially honk your horn to drown him out. Then, sometime during the opening statements the networks could make the debate screen into a little box of honkers and we could watch regular network programming while we enjoyed the debates, too.

And now that the replacement refs are out of work, what if we brought them in and let them call penalties on the candidates and gave them the power to keep score or suddenly end the contest? A little humor wouldn't hurt things any. We could even test out the candidates by rolling a football across the stage and letting them each dive to see who was best at recovering fumbles. The refs could then rule against the winner and we could see how the candidates deal with an injustice. That might create some very entertaining "gaffes" and we'd get to see Mitt Romney's hair messed up.

Of course, I believe a combination of all three ideas would work best. I know, I know, I didn't build this campaign or our democracy. There are going to be some bumps in the road in an imperfect system. If they put me in charge, I'd probably just get fired by someone who likes to fire people and then I'd end up being dependent upon the government.

Instead, I'll just sit back and watch them argue. Oh, I'll have my own bike horn to keep me company, even though that's not my first choice. My wife has already warned me that — "especially during the debates!" — garden hoses are not allowed in the house.

Steve Eaton’s columns can be read here:

http://www.deseretnews.com/search/?q=steve+Eaton&type=Deseret+News#steveEaton