Delivering the promise of a #NW2W Or Zen and the Art of the Collaboration
I manage a global marketing team at Unify. One of my core principles in work and communication is to be highly responsive. Feedback is important, but timely feedback is even more important. So I strive for fast response times, ensuring my team is supported and working on their top priorities. It’s a pretty simple philosophy – Don’t be a bottle neck to other people’s work-streams!
What I find is typically the biggest bottleneck for responsiveness is e-mail. At the end of the day I don’t want my inbox to be larger than what my screen can show. So to achieve that goal I experimented, developed and adopted several strategies, in the hope of achieving this seemingly simple goal. Each strategy temporarily cured the problem, but in the end the root cause was not addressed. I had become a slave to my email inbox and it didn’t feel great. Receiving 500 or more emails a day with endless chains and sub streams, compounded by trying to pick the right priority, plus managing them all along with their attachments – there was simply too much non-productive work dedicated to low-value nonsense. It made the day longer and less fun.
I was fortunate to be involved early in the development of Circuit. It gave me the opportunity to stand back and think differently about this ever-present challenge with my email. Believe me – 45,000 emails per year can be quite a challenge. So my thinking developed along with that of Circuit – actively change your communication behaviour, let go of old habits and embrace new ways to communicate and collaborate.
I was able to find my “personal switch” to a better way to work – a better and much more relaxed way to get things done. After first embracing the idea of a new way to work, and having Circuit as the key communication and collaboration tool, I can honestly say the results have been phenomenal (see the next chart!). With this tool now a core companion to our team at Unify I’m thrilled to see others start to realise the same benefits.
Circuit allows me to focus on the really important things; I can either ignore the background noise of lower priority items or dive into them when I have free time at airports or between meetings. I follow threads and sub threads as I need to. I do not have to pay attention to where I have stored the attachments; everything, including documents, is right there in a “Circuit Conversation”! And I have the same experience on my Windows PC, on my Mac Book Air, on my iPad, iPhone or my new Android Tablet, so where ever I am and whatever I use, I’m engaged.
And because video is integrated as part of Circuit I find that I am using video 20 times more than before, and that makes talking to team members across the globe fun. The experience of rich visual communications makes a conversation, and how collaboration evolves that much easier. It allows everyone on my team to be prepared for meetings better than ever before. We truly collaborate as a team.
I am, as an individual, heavily dependent on what my team is doing. If we are out of sync because someone missed an e-mail, or lost thread of a conversation bad things can happen or valuable time can be lost retracing steps. So the team environment must allow for a productive collective engagement. Circuit’s joyful conversation style does just that, in a way that linear, traditional communications tools simply can’t. We all become better in the process.
And best of all? I am no longer a slave to my email inbox.
I bet you’re having similar email pain. Let me know how it affects your productivity and together we can discover how Unify and Circuit can help you fully embrace a new way to work.
To find out more about Circuit visit us here.
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