Follow-up with peace of mind
Posted on | Januar 12, 2012 | No Comments
“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.”
Bill Bradley
If you want to succeed, you have to be amazing at follow-up. You can have the best ideas, and even start acting on them, but that most often does not produce the desired action by itself. At least not without some other person involved.
Chances are, you work for a corporation, and you are dependent on other people for information, work, or something else (even though that is really true for any type of work not happening on a deserted island). If you are ambitious, you keep several projects in the air at once, and in the midst of handling it all, you just forget about that email you sent, that call you made, that stuff you requested. And chances or, that other person has enough on her plate, to de-prioritize your stuff… more work for her anyway.
If you are already advanced, that stuff you are waiting for has a place on your todo list. You’re half a step ahead of the game. Problem being that every time you look at your todo list you stumble over something you have no control over. It just takes up mental capacity.
So to get rid of the problem, you need a system that reminds you of stuff needing follow-up in the future when it is appropriate. Not before, not after. Calendars are good for that, but not perfect, because they should be full of actual and hardly negotiable commitments of your time, not all sorts of reminders.
The solution you need is nudgemail. (Maybe there are other systems out there that I don’t know, but the point is, you just need one system that works, and that you are actually using). You can send your future self emails, and use simple commands in your subject line to tell the system when you want that reminder. And you can snooze reminders – how cool is that!? If you’re really advanced, send other people emails and add nudgemail in bcc, saves you one step.
If you know any other services, go ahead and use them, but use anything. Because you need to get rid of things that really shouldn’t take up your mental capacity… yet. And there is no better feeling than receiving a nudgemail long after you have forgotten that you wanted to remind your future self of something. You will love that feeling.
–> Think about how this advice can help you to become more effective today.
My recommendation: Set yourself up with nudgemail. Write “Nudgemail for email follow-up” on a post-it and stick it somewhere you can see it. For every project step that lies somewhen in the future, send yourself a nudgemail reminder and then forget about it. Your future self will thank you.
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