I was thinking about all of those business jargon words and phrases that come up all the time that we don’t have a clue what they mean, but we feel that we’ll look daft if everyone finds out that we don’t know.

photo by dull hunk

The most extreme example of this is when someone was pontificating about the importance of CPO.  I was racking my brain as to what this could mean, and eventually had to ask because it was bugging me, and I don’t mind looking stupid (well not too much.)  It turned out this guy meant CPD (Continuing Professional Development) not CPO and everyone else had been trying to work out what he was going on about as well.

Although it turns out that there are dozens of meanings for CPO as well, he could have meant Chief Petty Officer or Certified Prosthetist and Orthotist, or any number of the CPO’s on this list for you jargon collectors.

The lesson for me here was to ask, because often everyone else in the room will be wondering exactly the same question, and they’ll be grateful to you for asking.

If you want some good definitions of business jargon, I’ve been collecting some good ones here, and giving my plain English version of them

Business jargon Part 1 – Sensitivity analysis and KPI’s

Business jargon part 2 – Opportunity cost, scaleability and marketing collateral

Business jargon part 3 – Discounted cashflow and ROI

Now I’m not a big fan of the Royal family so some might say that I’m biased here.  Well I am biased, but I think there are also some really good reasons why this wedding is bad for business.  Here’s why.

We’re all closed

Over the last two weeks, it seems like no one has been able to get a decision made, close an order, or get any work done.  I know this is super hypocritical from someone who spent last week eating cheese, drinking wine and floating round in a spa in France, but I doubt that a week off for Julia will really cause the entire economy to close down.  But extending the Easter bank holiday to encourage everyone to take two weeks off all at the same time has caused an enormous traffic jam in business.  Just in my own little world, I’m waiting for designs back from the design company where half the staff are off this week, waiting for a decision on a 100k equity funding deal (no one’s answering the phone there) and sales are down this week for pretty much all of my clients.

After the traffic jam

After a traffic jam, once the lights change back to green on Monday, business will be slower.  This happens every year in January, when it takes a couple of weeks for everyone to get back into work mode.  The momentum will have been lost.  And given that the economy is currently described as “plateauing” and times are not easy for small businesses, we could do with all the momentum we can get.

But it makes people happy…

Yes, I’m sure that lots of people will be very happy tomorrow with their street parties, bunting and ironic Prince Philip masks.  And I’m happy that they’ll be happy, even if this article sounds like I’m a miserable old thing. I’ll be happy tomorrow because I’ll have a lovely quiet day absorbed in some fascinating financial modelling.  Different fun for different people, I guess.

But do we all need to party at the same time?  Couldn’t we all create things, run businesses, drink beer, sing silly songs, but in our own way, and whenever we want to, not just because someone decided that the 29^th April would be a good time to have an extra bank holiday.

Some of you will know already that a couple of weeks ago I got severely panned on an online group in response to an article I wrote about networking. It was in a closed LinkedIn group of about 200 people, so I can’t show you what this person said, but it was pretty vitriolic. So I thought I’d talk about what it felt like and how I handled it.

My initial response

At first I was really upset about it. I knew that I’d written an article with some strong views about how to network but I didn’t think that it was really any more contentious than any of my other blog posts. I really didn’t understand why this person had got so upset, and why he was saying such bad things about me. When I put the article out on Twitter (a couple of days before) it had got a good response, and lots of people liked it.

And, as I first heard about it at 09:30 on a Monday morning (not my best time, I have to admit), with people emailing and phoning me, it felt like a complete disaster. In particular, it felt like a disaster that I’d caused.

How I checked it out

The first thing I did was to check what I’d actually written. Maybe I had written something completely awful, and I’d said something I shouldn’t have.

But no – when I looked at it again, I thought, well, that is quite full on, but that’s what I’m like. I’m someone who feels passionate about business, and that passion comes through in what I write. I haven’t bitched about anyone, and even though I talked about someone (who I didn’t name) whose opinion I disagreed with, I didn’t say anything bad about that person.

Other people’s reactions

Throughout the week, people kept adding comments, and emailing me about what this person had said. So, the whole thing kept going – once it’s online, it has some momentum. What’s interesting is that although lots of people said that they thought I’d been misinterpreted, no one actually stood up and said Oi! Leave Julia alone.

All this had been said in a LinkedIn group for a pretty small community and (I’ve been told) this was the gossip of the week in the Brighton business community. Nice and juicy, unless you’re at the middle of it.

How my feelings changed

I went very quickly from upset, to thinking it must have been my fault, to being angry. All in about the first hour of seeing it.

I then got a little bit scared. By Monday night I was checking that I’d locked the doors of my house. I knew this was silly, but I checked. Twice.

I got out of that one pretty quickly by laughing at myself, and then getting on with what I needed to do on Tuesday. There’s nothing like a complex spreadsheet to take your mind off things.

By the end of the week, my feelings had changed to feeling sorry for the person who had said these things about me. Saying this risks him getting upset again, but he’d been so over the top in trying to damage my reputation, that he’s probably done himself much more damage than he’s done to me.

Facing everyone

On the Friday morning, I was due to go to the Brighton Chamber breakfast, where I knew a lot of people would know about what had happened. I was a bit nervous, but knew I had to be there. The weird thing was that no one mentioned it, and breakfast was just like any other networking event.

Lessons learned

If you don’t like something online, don’t respond straight away, while you’re still angry. Have a cup of tea and calm down first. My detractor didn’t do this, and I guess this is what caused all the trouble.

If you’re angry with someone, email them or phone them. Don’t have your fights in front of everyone else. This is more honest and more likely to help you to stop being angry, especially if you’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick.

If someone says something bad about you online, do respond, but do that just once. Don’t get drawn into the debate. One of the least pleasant things about this episode was that it carried on all week, but if I had responded to all the comments, this would have made it last even longer.

Don’t be surprised if people enjoy seeing a fight. 8 million people watch EastEnders, because people love a bit of drama.

Don’t expect people to take your side – while people love to watch conflict, they don’t want to be involved in it or take sides because this would make them feel vulnerable. Remember that if this happens to you, it’s going to be a much bigger deal to you than to anyone else, so you have to work on it not being a big deal.

Like most people, email has a tendency to take over my life. It’s how I most often communicate with people and I don’t want to miss out on what’s happening, especially if a client wants to ask my advice.

But email is the number one time killer – it will eat up your day if you’re not careful. Responding to emails as the priority means you’re responding to other people’s agendas, rather than developing your own business or doing the things which are important to you. And half the time, emails just need a quick scan and a fast “that’s fine” response.

So I changed my relationship with email and decided that I would only pick up email while I was between meetings, which, for me, means being on the bus. Travelling between meetings is dead time – I’m only staring out of the window or eavesdropping on strangers when I’m on the number 49 to Hove, so I might as well be doing something useful instead.

And it’s been great. I can catch up with what’s going on and my replies are much more brief than before, so I’m not hoovering up everyone else’s time. If it’s something complicated, checking email on my phone means that I’m much more likely to phone someone and have a real conversation.

Of course it doesn’t always work – I’m not on the bus every day for one thing but, on my other days, I’ve found that I can still free up my time for more useful and enjoyable things by only checking email at 11 am and 3 pm, rather than sporadically through the day.

Why not try taming the email beast yourself, and see if you can get a couple of extra hours per day?

I’ve just finished a business advice session with one of my clients, looking at how she can be more productive by being in control of her to do list. This is an issue which comes up frequently in my mentoring and, while different methods suit different people, I thought I’d share some of the to do list productivity techniques which work for me.

Rule 1
• Anything which you aren’t going to do in the next 5 minutes needs to go on the to do list, even if it’s just a quick phone call. Otherwise it will be lost forever.

Rule 2

• Make sure your list is very specific and defined. For example “online marketing” is so wide and vague that you’re never going to get around to actually doing anything, whereas “spend 45 minutes reading the econsultancy report on SEO” is a clear instruction to do a very specific thing. That one is on my list for this week.

Rule 3

• Putting everything on your to do list will make it enormous, which can then make you feel dispirited and that you’ll never actually do anything. So you need to prioritise. I use Stephen Covey’s matrix to choose the things from my list which I’m going to do on any particular day, so that I don’t waste my time on trivia or get caught up in firefighting.



• Urgent things are the ones you must do in the next couple of days. Paying a cheque into the post or calling a client back would be an example of something which is both important and urgent, but reading a new email about how great the iPad is, might be urgent (because it’s a new email) but it’s likely to be unimportant.
• Important things are the ones which will make me and my clients money, maybe now or in the long run. The aim is to get the urgent and important tasks done first and then concentrate on the non-urgent but important things. If something is not urgent, and it’s not important, I just take it off the list and don’t do it. That probably chops out about a third of the list straight away – just don’t do these things.

Rule 4

• Each day, before you do anything else (including delving into your email) choose which things you’re going to do each day.

Rule 5

• Allow yourself time for people phoning you, getting distracted, eating lunch etc rather than filling your day to the full. Only put on the list for that day the things you can reasonably do, you can always finish off that day’s list, smile, and then get ahead with tomorrow’s stuff.

There are lots of resources to help you with your time management, and we can all do with getting more out of our day. In particular, I recommend some sessions with Clare Evans to support you in developing some excellent habits and talking to Susanne Barthelmes at All Sorted Consulting to make sure that all of your systems are working well for you. And of course, once you’ve done that you’ll be so productive that your business will be ready for the next stage, which is when you’ll want to chat to me about your strategy to develop and grow.

Other prouuctivity posts you’ll find useful

Why I only check my email on the bus

The 10 minute team meeting

Doing a pomodoro – time management using an Italian tomato shaped egg timer