Gettler: Insights from a List-man

Graham Harman, CEO at software provider PrintFleet believes in lists and folders for personal productivity. He swears by them.

“As boring as it may sound, I’m a list man,’’ Harman says. “ Everything is about tasks and me crossing off tasks. If you ring me now and say I need to do something, it goes straight into a task. Whether that’s electronic or paper based, I’ve used them both but I have tasks for personal items, I have tasks for business items. Even on the weekend, I have tasks. The reason for that is my head is not clogged up with all the things I am never to do.

“The other thing is I don’t handle a piece of paper twice. If a piece of paper comes over my desk, I make a decision. I either action it if it’s going to take a couple of seconds, I throw it away if it means nothing to me, or I file it.

“I have two types of filing. Let’s say it’s a really good article, I don’t want to throw it away and I don’t want to touch it again. So I’ll stick it into a folder. But I also have in my folders the numbers 1 to 31 which represent the days of the month and I also have another folder with one to 12, from January through to December. When I get a piece of paper on my desk and I know I don’t want to do anything with it now, and I know I have to do something with it, I’ll look at the date, and I’ll put it in for the 30 June. Each day I’ll open up my daily folder.

“So when you get to my desk, you’ll rarely see a piece of paper.”

Outlook provides a good system for filing, he says, so important for personal productivity.

“Bearing in mind email is such a critical tool these days, there is a lot of filing when it comes to email,’’ he says.

“I have a whole bunch of electronic filing with email with documents coming through. But anything that may come as mail, or somebody might put something on my desk, all of that goes into a paper based filing system.”

Harman describes himself as an “email tragic”. Indeed, he prefers email as a means of communicating with people. It wastes less time and gets straight to the point.

“I live on email, I manage by email, I communicate by email,’’ he says. “In fact, I probably get more email than phone calls because people know I have email and respond very fast so because of that, they tend to happily email me rather than call me and I find that efficient because we’re not chatting about the niceties of the day. And you have an electronic copy of it and you go through and follow the conversation. I do manage by email.”

He says everyone, including customers, know and accept that he prefers email to phone conversations.
 

“They prefer that and I prefer that and I certainly get less phone calls today than I ever did in the past.. People send me an email and I’ll send them an email. The nice thing about it is I can reply after hours when there are fewer interruptions and they have a copy of it.

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk to them, I respect that they’re busy, they respect that I’m busy and I think we can be so much more productive by email and I can type as quickly as I can talk

“And if I go to an appointment and they leave me out in the foyer waiting for a period of time, I will nail emails.”

He says setting priorities is critical for personal productivity.

“With the tasks it’s the ones of the highest priority and in business, the ones with the highest priority mean most to our business when it comes to revenue source,’’ he says.

“What we do is sales and marketing, all the other stuff is fluff so when I look at anything, I look at sales and marketing.”

Still, he concedes the big challenge is managing the interruptions.

The biggest difficulty with prioritizing things is interruptions.  Some people tell me they allocate certain times during the day for checking their email. That probably sounds like a really good idea. “

Harman says personal productivity is a matter of working as efficiently as possible. That means saving his phone calls for when he is out driving to and from work and from job to job.

“I have a list of calls I need to make, often I’ll make those calls while I am driving because I figure I have to be in the car anyway, I’ll do all those now rather than when I’m in the office,’’ he says. “I’ll be driving for the next forty-five minutes so I’ll knock all those phone calls over.”

He says the best time for him to work is the first thing in the morning , around about dawn, when his mind is clear and there are no interruptions.

“People are called owls or fowls - they’re either early morning risers or they like to work late at night,’’ he says.

“I’m a fowl. So anything that gets my full on fresh brained, be they power point presentations or proposals, anything that takes brain matter, I do it first thing in the morning. If it’s something big I’ll start at 6am.

“So by the time someone walks into the office at 8,30am I’m pretty well on top of it.”

Even with that regime, he says he is always looking at improving his personal productivity.

“If I had to tweak it, I would pick certain times of day to check my email but I really don’t think it’s practical for my business,’’ he says. “I’m sure I could tweak it even more but I don’t let too many people down, I get everything done. I am never late for an appointment, I’m very structured.”