The Repeat Test
Create Strategies to I
Use your notes to make changes in your routine so that you can create strategies that allow you to be productive.
Every professional has those moments when they can’t seem to focus. No one means to waste time at their job, but it’s often a struggle to climb that hill when you have no motivation to do so. To get your work done, you need to come up with strategies that prevent you from wasting precious time in your workday. The repeat test is a great tool to see where you waste time in a day. Using a spreadsheet, make a column of numbers representing the hours of the day that you are awake. Your column may start at 6 a.m. and go as late as 11 p.m. After you have created the first column, create a second column that is considerably wider than the first. At the top of every hour, stop for 1 minute and consider how you spent the last hour. Jot down your notes in the second column next to the appropriate hour. You might write, “Department meeting accomplished very little. Twenty people in one room is too many.”
The technique of evaluating productivity and committing to change is not new, but it has yet to gain popularity. In 2013, Harvard Business Review researchers asked 15 business executives to make themselves more productive by thinking consciously about how they spend their time. Each executive was able to dramatically increase their productivity by cutting desk work by an average of six hours a week and meeting time by an average of two hours a week. One executive, Lotta Laitinen, a manager at If, evaluated her time and chose to abandon meetings and administrative tasks in order to spend more time supporting her team. It led to a 5 percent increase in sales by her unit over a three-week period! Try the Repeat Test for a few days to see how it feels for you. At the very least, you will gain immediate insight into the ways that you use your time. If you keep at it, the test will give you a valuable record of how you spent your week, month, or year.
Using this test is a great way to improve your own performance. If you noted that an hour was wasted, you have specific notes as to why.
If at First You Don’t Succeed ... The Creation and Success of The Muse
company profiles. The Huffington Post and TechCrunch covered the
In December 2010, Kathryn Minshew quit her day job to run Pretty Young Professionals (PYP), a women’s networking site she had started with three coworkers that autumn. She bootstrapped the company and guaranteed a small payroll with personal savings, working as an unpaid CEO and editor-in-chief. By spring, Minshew managed to attract only 9,000 users. Then, a redesign increased users to 20,000, and the other members of the founding team began to get more involved. The group eventually splintered in half after an argument about how to best run the company. “We split our equity on a piece of notebook paper. We didn’t have lawyers; I didn’t think we needed them,” said Minshew. “I spent three weeks alternating between the fetal position and the whiteboard, trying to figure out how strongly I wanted to fight for the existing company, compared to how prepared I was to strike out and do it over.” Minshew decided to do it over. In September 2011, she launched The Daily Muse — now called The Muse. PYP’s entire staff, plus another cofounder, joined her. The new website became a career-development platform with original content, interactive job boards, and comprehensive
launch, and the site drew more visitors in its first month than PYP had at its best.
In November, Minshew was accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. She added mobile, local, and social media functionality to her platform. By the end of 2012, the website had nearly 2 million users in more than 160 countries, increasing at a rate of 30 percent every month. In 2013, The Muse secured partnerships with Intel, Sephora, NPR, Pinterest, Twitter, and Foursquare. If one thing can be learned fromMinshew’s story, it’s this: In a business partnership, formalize the process and paperwork and hire a lawyer who can spot problems you never dreamed would arise — in case things get personal. Of course, always choose your partners wisely. “It’s so important to find people who share your values and ethics,” said Minshew. “There are a lot of things you can paper over, and having different sets of opinions is valuable, but not when it comes to code of conduct.”
2 • www.JayConner.com • PO Box 1276, Morehead City, NC 28557
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