Personal Development

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Productivity

5 Steps of My To-Do Lists Revolution

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I've been using to-do lists both at work and at home for the past few years now. And while I couldn't complain about my overall performance, there was always something not right about the way I'd used them, yet I couldn't tell what exactly it was.

Just a few weeks ago I've finally realised what had been troubling me for so long: my to-do lists! What you're about to read may seem obvious and simple enough, but trust me: I really wish someone had explained to me this reason of my daily frustration a long time ago! So here it is: my own to-do lists revolution!

 

My original to-do lists setup

I had hand-written lists for each day in my A4 year planner, I would usually prepare such lists at the end of a previous day. Having finished all the work, I would take 5 minutes of my time before leaving my workplace to summarize the day's achievements and overview the stuff I never got a chance to work on to the following day's to-do list. I would also cross off all the completed tasks to make sure I can see my progress.

I had originally used the page-a-day approach. So no matter how few or many tasks I'd have for the day, they all would be on only 1 page for this day. But I quickly learned that such an approach is one of the worst possible. Simply because it doesn't work unless you manage to finish every single task you had planned for your day.

It all became obvious after I failed to complete the whole list of planned things for a day, and had to somehow keep track of the things so that they get my attention paid to them at some later stage. And this is where I saw just how ineffective it was to try and support this approach in any way possible. No matter what you do, you're going to lose time. I couldn't let this happen for any longer, and so that's how my to-do lists revolution began.

Below are the 5 steps I've gone through to come up with the most effective way of dealing with my daily tasks so far. Having improved my process so much, I'm absolutely certain there is room for even more improvement, so I'll be sure to describe it on my pages later.

 

Reviewing the past few day's to-do lists

The first thing I tried was to make the review of the past few days' lists my daily routine. This worked reasonably well while I had a backlog of few days, but it became a nightmare as soon as the backlog grew to more than two weeks. Having more and more tasks on my new to-do lists and trying to do follow up with the really important tasks, I could spend less and less time looking back and review some old stuff. Yet, now and then I'd realised something which was left out and didn't seem to be important when it was a week old, is quite urgent now that it's been few weeks since I never got a chance to deal with this task. So after struggling for a while, I gave this method up.

 

Keeping track of all the incomplete tasks

Secondly, I've decided to start moving all the incomplete tasks to the following day's plan. I made it a rule – never start adding items to the current day's to-do list unless I'm positive all the previously forgotten or never deal with tasks are at the top of this list. Again, it worked for a while, but as the list of tasks grew, I'd realised my daily to-do list routine is slowly turning into nothing but stupid rewriting of my previous days' to-do lists. I would actually waste my precious time by making yet another list of something I couldn't find time to do.

 

Basic scheduling – marking the stand and end dates for tasks

So the next thing I figured I needed to incorporate into my routine was scheduling. It makes perfect sense – to mark the date when adding something to your to-do list. You need it for historical purposes. Trying to improve the previous paragraph's idea, I started not only rewriting all the incomplete tasks of mine, but also putting the date of each tasks' origination alongside. This helped a lot. This made it obvious that some tasks have been left unattended for way too long. This improved the decision-making because it was clearly seen again how bad a backlog of things I had. It saves my time of thinking back and trying to remember when I was actually going to do a given task, and the date of its supposed start provided the urgency reminder I really found useful. Still, it was not enough, so I've tried to see what else would really help me optimize my process.

 

Throw away your to-do lists

This was the stage where I was much more efficient compared to where I started. So not only I was motivated to continue improving my process, but I also started thinking of changing the most basic parts of it. I've realised that one of the things which was noticeably slowing me down was the fact that I used to-do lists and no other way of keeping track of my tasks.

Even as simple thing as a review of my to-do list for the day would take much longer due to a simple fact that no matter what I did, all the tasks were still left on the same page. So when I would have a task or two completed, I'd tick them off or even color-mark them as being really completed, but this would still leave these tasks on my page. And no matter how hard you try to skip these tasks knowing that they're completed, you still lose some time quickly glancing through them. Time lost on glancing once a day is not so harmful when you think about it. But if you have to get back to your list more than a few times during your day, you'll start noticing how this very glancing through to-do list slows you down.

And that's how I decided to get rid of to-do lists completely. Instead, I've got myself a 5-section A4 organizer, and started using the smallest post-it notes I could find to manage my tasks for the day. So one section of this organizer would be used for all the tasks for the current day. Another section would be the one for the tasks for the whole current week. There's also one for the month (where I temporarily put EVERYTHING that doesn't belong to this week's plan), and there's the completed tasks section.

The main reason for switching to post-its is that I can accomplish all the things I did with to-do lists (like tracking tasks, marking the start dates and marking tasks as deferred or completed ones), PLUS I can MOMENTARILY get completed tasks out of the plan for today. If it sounds too simple for the best to-do list optimization trick, TRY IT yourself!

I can't emphasize enough the sheer pleasure and feeling of satisfaction you have when you mark a tasks completed, and then immediately detach it from current day's list and physically move it into the completed section. As you progress through your day, or get to visibly notice the amount of things left to be done. As soon as something's done, you get rid of it – and therefore you can simply see the current state of things by glancing at a page quickly. Many post-its – many tasks, few post-its – few tasks. It's that simple!

 

Completion dates for all the tasks

Now that I've made a major progress in my daily planning, I only felt like tweaking the process a bit to make it even better. So one of the things I've finally decided to start doing is putting completion dates for all the tasks. Combined with the start dates I've been adding to my tasks for some time by now, completion dates gave me the last bit of comfort I needed to make sure I'm doing the best I can. If start dates were there to ensure I know exactly when I'd put the task on my list and to help me realise the urgency and growing importance of some tasks, the completion dates helped me analyze whether I was coping with the load okay, or whether some particular kinds of tasks were constantly forgotten about, or whether some task took much longer that I originally expected. All I need now is to have a half-an-hour a week spent solely on such analysis – as any tweaks I made to my planning based based on such analysis results have the potential to bring my performance to an even higher level.

 

What happens now?

That's all I've done so far. My To-Do Lists Revolution isn't fully over, but it starts to look and – more importantly – feel like an evolution to me now. There's no major part to change in the process as I'm very happy with the results. I'm spending less time planning and managing my daily tasks, and with the revolution I've gone through I'm not afraid of any tasks – no matter how big or complex. I'm still working on other possible ways to improve my daily planning approach, so who knows – maybe once day I'll have another revolution to blog about! ;) Till then – good luck!

Why Being Impatient Is Good For Your Success

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Why am I so impatient all the time?It’s just incredible how quickly I expect a result after I start working on something. It doesn’t matter what I’m dealing with – a 5 minute job or a 6-month project. I always want something to happen as quickly as possible, and even when it does in fact happen much sooner than it should have, I would still feel that I really wanted it to happen even sooner ;) It may sound to you like a perfect way to be constantly irritated or disappointed, but trust me I’m very far away from anything like this. In fact, being so impatient makes me happier and more productive!

The most important thing about anything that happens to you is to know as much as possible about the reasons behind it. If I’m impatient, I want to know why. Mostly it’s explained by my character – I’m just an impatient type of a person. I hate waiting for something to happen, especially if it’s anything to do with my personal performance. In other words, if there’s even a remote chance of something happening sooner just by having me put more effort into it, I’ll definitely try my best to finish it off as quickly as I can.

But simply settling for something being the nature of myself isn’t in my nature :) So I’ll always question myself even further into really deep understanding of my being impatient in every particular case. And below I’d like to give you a few examples of how I do this and how this helps me feel much better about the situation, keeps me motivated and even boosts my confidence.

So it’s just a little secret I’d like to share. Trust your senses! Just because I know myself fairly well, I always try listening to my senses. So if I’m impatient, I know that this is a sign. And in my case, it’s probably a positive one. The first I do when I grow impatient is I try to interpret the sense depending on the given situation. It’s really cool actually, just relying on this sense. It’s like one of them sure indicators which are always telling you the truth – so if you learn to feel comfortable with such an indicator, you’ll be glad when you seen one – you’ll just know you’re about to learn a valuable piece of information with little or no effort.
So what does being impatient suggest to me?

– a progress. When I’ve been doing something for a considerable amount of time, and I feel my impatience grow, this usually means I’m making some progress and somewhere deep inside I already feel the final goal is rather close. I’m growing impatient because my mind knows how much I’ve spent working on the subject and suggests it’s about time we finish it off. This progress type of impatience is a very positive sign for me.
– a sense of right direction. I usually grow impatient when I’m fairly confident about the step I’ve just taken, but it takes some time for the result of this step to follow. So when I’ve done something and I feel impatient, I know this is because I’m on the right track. Or at least I think I’m on the right track. This is a very positive sign as well, because it reinforces my confidence. It confirms that what we’ve done so far is a correct thing to do and invites me to continue in a similar way till the goal is successfully achieved.

– a sense of a completed stage of the process. When I’m impatient about something, this suggests that I’ve done what I could for the moment, and I’ve just completed a certain stage in the process I’m working on. The actual reason I’m growing impatient is because I’ve done all the work, and it’s now time to wait for the results. So again it’s a good sign.

– a perfect moment for planning of the process.This is where, having realised and considered all the good signs above, you look one step further to evaluate the rest of the plan of actions. Do you really have to wait for the result right now? Is there anything in your plan that you can do right now? Is there anything that can be changed in your plan so that you don’t have to wait for the result right now, but instead you’ll have the option of coming back to these results later? Basically, this would be a good moment for some prioritizing done to the rest of your plan. Maybe you haven’t realised how far in your plan you actually are, and that you’re only few steps away from a major turning point. Then it might be more beneficial for you to stop being impatient and dive into one of the future steps of the project and later come back for your results.

Improve!

People being unique creatures and all, there’s a pretty good chance your signs of being impatient will be different from mine. That’s why it’s important to analyze a number of situations when you’ve felt impatient and try to remember the actual meanings of this sense.

Remember, you’ll perform much better when you’re prepared for the result. So when you feel impatient next time, just take 2 minutes to think about your reasons for the impatience. Try and use the positive approach, but don’t be surprised if your impatience has some negative signs for you – it’s an equally possible opportunity.

But the bottom line is that no matter what kind of sign it is – a positive or a negative one, it’s still going to help you because it will be a valuable piece of information. Take your time to do the basic analysis at first, and soon enough you’ll learn to quickly recognize the patters and signs of your impatience, and all what’s left for you then is to follow the indications.

What would be really interesting is to know if your signs are very different from the ones I have. So if you do decide to master the goodness of being impatient, please take extra few minutes to come back and leave a comment here. After all, if you have learned something useful from this article, then I’m sure there is something I can learn from your impatience too!

Positive Questions

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One of the most important things about your personal development is gaining confidence. Simply put, any success in your life is about a confidence of some kind.
 
 
It's all about confidence
 
In the simplest scenario, when you have a certain task to complete and that's all what's required of you, it comes down to the fact that without some confidence you won't be able to do anything. You have to be sure of your solution before you go and apply it to your task. Yes, it requires a certain level of knowledge, but you really need to have confidence to back it up.
 
Take any kind of exam as an example. Doesn't matter, which one it is, it could be an exam you sat back during your school years, or it could be one of your horrible memories of being a student at some university, or finally it could be an exam you had to sit just the other week to improve your career prospects.
 
The bottom line is that all exams are the same. They're here to make sure you've got the knowledge you claim to have. And if you were actually attenting the necessary courses during your study, you're more than likely to have all the knowledge you need.
 
Still, most of us find it very uneasy to sit an exam, no matter how well prepared we are. And almost always there's a lucky few students in your class which seemed to glide through all the exam challenges with no noticeable worries at all.
 
Why do you think such people exist at all? Do you really believe it's sheer luck they have? Of course it's not it! It's all about confidence! Without being confident, even most knowledgeable students will easily fail even the simplest exam.
 
Now, why exactly do we feel uncomfortable with exams? This is because they are perfect examples of some authority questioning our expertise in a certain area. And no matter how good we are, there's always a few questions full of doubt we always ask ourselves sitting any exam.
 
 
Doubtful and negative questions 
 
Examples of such doubtful questions would be:
  • Am I really good enough to pass?
  • So many people failed this test. Can I really do it?
  • I obviously haven't done enough preparations. What do I do now?
  • What will my friends say if I fail?
  • What do I do if I don't get a promotion because of this failed test?
And there's also a whole bunch of questions you would ask about a specific problem you're looking at on your test sheet.
 
They would be something of this kind:
  • Why can't I solve this problem?
  • Stupid me! How come I can't find the right solution to this? Any solution, for that matter?
  • Another question I have no answer for. Don't I know anything on this subject? 
Depending on your personality, you could be asking slightly different questions, but most of them would be of the kind I've shown – you're being negative to yourself, and sometimes you can also be very harsh with your self-inflicted criticism.
 
 
Be positive and constructive
 
Without your criticism being anything constructive, you can't help yourself solve any problems and answer any questions. Being negative about your (quite possible) lack of knowledge of the exam subject isn't helping either. So usually you just get more and more nervous about your exam, until you run out of time and go home being absolutely sure you have failed.
 
Had anything like this ever happened to you? Well here's why.
 
It is true that you have to ask questions to yourself when you're building logical chains trying to solve a given problem. But what most of us naturally neglect is the fact that even questions could have negative impact on our performance. It's as if by even asking a question, you're automatically reassuring yourself that you really don't know the answer. So you keep asking questions to make some progress on your solution, but because most or all of the questions are asked negatively, they're subconsciously taking you further and further away from a possible correct solution.
 
This is my message for you today: be positive when you approach any task, and make sure even questions you ask yourself are positive.
 
 
Asking positive questions 
 
Using the examples I've given earlier, here are just a few examples of positive questions. If you analyze each one of them, you'll see that most of the questions leave no room for your lack of knowledge. All the questions assume that you know the right answer, and only point you slowly to this correct answer.
 
So, general questions asked positively:
  • Is this exam really as hard to pass as they say? I'm sure I can easily pass.
  • So many people failed this test. How could they, it can't be so hard to pass?
  • Where do I start? Quickly scanning through all the questions to spot the obviously easy ones sounds like a plan.
  • What will my friends say when I pass? What will I say to support the ones who failed?
  • It's just a quick exam. Honestly, is there an easier way to earn a promotion?
And, similarly, some positive questions about specific task you're looking at:
  • How can I solve this problem the easiest way?
  • No solution comes to mind. Is there something wrong with the question? A typo, maybe?
  • What do I know about this question? Even if there's no solution yet, every little helps.
So, positive questioning is here to help you boost your confidence level, and do it the quick, easy and natural way. Asking positive questions means assuming you're good enough to find the answer, and this way of asking yourself is a sure way to approach the right solution.
 
Of course, positive questions alone can't save you if you don't know anything about the subject, but they will make sure you never lose any of your confidence because of negative questions.
 
Asking yourself positive questions and generally taking a positive approach to any task will take most of possible pressure and nervousness off your shoulders, leaving your mind clear and sharp, ready to solve even the hardest problems.
 
Update: Incredible! Just one day later after I posted this article, I see Steve Pavlina has written a very good article on weak vs strong questions. Please read it here: Asking the Right Questions
[tags]positive thinking, positive questions, confidence, self-growth[/tags]

Best Advice Possible

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How often do you seek someone else’s advice? Do you like all the advices you get, and do you follow them blindly, or do you reject some of them as bad or even ridiculous ones? Do you ever notice that some people give you bad advices, while some others give you generally good ones, and only rare few people will always give you best advices?

Do you want to know why? As surprising as it may sound, in most cases the explanation is hidden within ourselves.

Let me explain. Why do we ask others to share their opinion with us, and why do we seek for advices? This usually happens when we’ve reached a certain stage with our task, and we stop and think it would be better now to know what others think of it, and maybe take some of their ideas and apply them, instead of trying to continue on our own.

 

Seeking advice isn’t anything negative.

It doesn’t mean we’re weak or stupid, incapable of solving a problem or accomplishing a given goal. What it means is a willingness to do what we have to do in the most optimal way. Seeking advice means being open-minded.

It means welcoming other’s opinions and being ready to listen and understand what other people have to say. Seeking advice essentially shows your willingness to broaden horizons of your thinking, and demonstrates your ability to factor in some things you haven’t thought of when you just started working on the problem.

Is it possible to accomplish some goals without asking for any advices at all? Of course it is! But it really is a matter of your self-confidence. If you’re very comfortable with the task and you have a clear vision of accomplishing it, you may not need or want any advice. After all, you could (and should!) be the one person doing something best of all, and then not only will you be able to achieve great results without any advices, but instead you’ll be able to help others out by sharing your wisdom and giving advices to them.

 

Why ask for advice at all?

In lots of situations, when we ask for advice, we really expect a substantial help. We quite often will get irritated when a person starts giving us general pieces of wisdom in return to a very specific question. Most often, we ask for a specific advice, and get easily irritated when we’re getting a different kind of advice. It could be a priceless one, but if it doesn’t help our immediate task, we don’t want it.

Another thing about seeking advices is that even when we get something useful, we keep searching for the best advice possible. The stage when we start asking people for advices suggests that we’ve probably got our problem practically solved, but we wouldn’t mind an opinion on making our solution a perfect one. If there are few final touches to be made and for some reason we haven’t seen them ourselves, we’d like others to point these areas out and explain how to improve the situation.

 

Why some advices are bad

Look back at some of the advices you’ve asked for and you suddenly felt irritated with. Why did you find those advices bad? They probably were genuine, so people must be trying to help. Yet, the help you’ve received wasn’t what you were looking for.

This explains perfectly what a bad advice is. It’s a piece of information you haven’t found particularly useful in the context of your problem and your question.

So why some advices are bad? Is it something wrong with the people you ask? Possible, but not as nearly often the case as you might think. What is it then? It’s simply the wrong context. What you’re asking for isn’t what a given person is talking about. So you get an advice, but it doesn’t help you much.

The responsibility for bad advices quite often lies on yourself and not on the people you seek advices from.

 

Find the right person to ask for an advice

As simple as it may seem, this is the rule which might help you get much better advices from people around you. Before asking your questions, think what kind of help you’re looking for, and try seeing whether a particular person is the best one to ask for a help. This explains most of your frustrations when you ask for advice and get unexpectedly frustrating one in return. This is simply because you’ve incorrectly chosen a person to talk to. Try and find a better one, ideally the best person to ask your question.

I’m not saying all the bad advices you’ve got were bad simply because you’ve chosen wrong people. There could be lots of other factors involved: someone could be misleding you, or someone could be mistaken himself and then give you a wrong advice absolutely unintentionally. There are other factors too, it’s impossible to name all of them.

But since we’re talking about self-improvements, finding a better person to seek advice from is one of the factors you can easily improve on.

 

So what person would be the best one to seek advice from?

It is the person in a better (best) position, similar to yours. So, if you’re trying to solve a particular problem, seek for someone who is known for successfully solving a similar problem in the past. If you’re starting up a business, seek for an advice from a successfull business owner.

The key point here is that you should always seek for an advice from someone in a substantionally better position, if not in the best one. This is important, because if you talk to someone who’s in a position worse than yours, even the sincere advice may turn out to be a very bad one for you.

See for yourself: why ask for an advice on a particular problem from a person who had never dealt with a similar problem? Any polite person would genuinely try helping you, but if they got no relevant experience, this would be very hard, and they would end up giving you either something very generic, or suggesting something you would reckon to be the worst advice possible. There’s no reason to be angry with such people, they did their best and it really isn’t their fault they couldn’t help you more.

 

How exactly do you get the best advice possible?

Contentrate on your particular problem or task, and try your best at finding the best person to talk to. Even a short and simple advice from the right person would be of much more help to you than a very long and complex solution suggested by someone who isn’t really in a position to give any advices to you.

[tags]best advice, self-growth, asking questions[/tags]

Finding Time For Everything

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How often do you have to decline an opportunity to do something fun or exciting simply because you have no time for it? How often do you give up bright ideas which keep occurring again and again? How often do you find yourself feeling guilty for letting the opportunity go simply because you thought you had no time for it?

 

Time management is very important

No matter what you do – it is always a good idea to be time conscious. Even having a pretty good idea of how much time you have at hand and what exactly your progress is, the task of successful time management is not an easy one.

Some people like the idea of having a daily plan accurate to every minute. They would know what time they usually arrive at work, when it is time for them to leave, when and how long a lunch break is going to be. They are making every appointment they’ve arranged, they’re sticking to the plan and never let a single minute escape their productive and effective approach.

Unfortunately, it’s a luxury not many of us can afford. Such is the real life of many – not everything is up to us. In most cases we’re being regulated by someone else’s idea of the best way to spend our time. At work, we’re advised about our lunch break time – we’re basically told when it is the good time for us to stop working and leave the office for an hour. We’re also advised in a similar way when to do many other things related to our work.

And face it, it is not so often that we’re told HOW to do things, or when exactly. We’re generally expected to give some results within a certain deadline, and we are to manage the time allocated for the task on our own.

Project management, they say. Use your time wisely, they advise. And it’s not always that you get a chance to attend a relevant course – on project or time management, so most of these things you’re simply expected to know or to pick up from your colleagues.

The good news is that it’s quite possible to learn and obtain such skills, so you should be fine if you have a colleague or two willing to share the knowledge.

 

Time-saving tip one: be conscious

That’s all time management is about. Be conscious about everything you do. It’s actually very easy.

From GTD, I’ve learned about the 2 minutes approach: when given a task, instead of diving into it right away, sit back and take 2 minutes to break it down into smaller tasks. Think of the ultimate goal you have. Enlist the steps you think are necessary in order to achieve this goal, and propose the time you’re going to need for each step. Don’t spend much time thinking about it, literally spend 2 minutes and not more. Write down your goal and steps to achieve it, and note the time.

You’re set to go – start working on steps, taking them one by one. After working on the problem for the time you expected you needed to complete it, stop and review the situation. Analyze the tasks list and answer few more questions to yourself: Have you reached your original goal? Has your original goal changed after taking one of your steps? Have all the steps proved to be necessary? Did any step take longer or shorter time than expected?

Even this simple approach – extra 5 minutes overall, is bound to dramatically improve your performance. You will not work any faster or any harder that you would usually do. Instead, you would have your approach optimize for each particular task, and by brainstorming the goal before and after the time allocated for it, you would see the potential for improving your timing.

 

Time-saving tip one two: be patient

Don’t expect to improve momentarily. Such things don’t happen overnight, so be prepared to spend at least few weeks working on all your daily tasks and goals with exactly the same approach. Don’t be lazy to write everything down. If it takes you longer than 2 minutes to take notes of your planning, do so – it’s always better to spend another 5-10 minutes planning your tasks that to lose a day working on some step only to realise later it was completely unnecessary and irrelevant to the overall goal.

You’ll soon discover that some global goals need more time for breaking them into smaller steps than others. Don’t be afraid to spend this extra time, in fact when you do start distinguishing goals and realising how much consideration time they require, this will mean you’re on the right track and that you’re improving.

 

Finding time: use 2 minutes approach

Our life isn’t about sacrifices, but if there are any we’re making at all, then time is definitely one of them. To do anything, you have to put your time to it. So whenever a new opportunity arises, don’t simply throw it away by saying you have no time. Take the 2 minutes approach again. Look at the opportunity. See it a goal. See what the positive sides are. Try and quickly break it into some steps, and try to predict the time commitment required for each.

Chances are, you’d lose the same 2 minutes by simply regretting you’ve just missed a good opportunity. When you deny yourself even the slightest chance of trying something exciting out, you’re bound to be thinking about it for at least some time later on. So instead of not doing something and then losing time regretting about it, just take the time and consider the possibilities.

Once you agree that 2 minutes is a fair price to pay for a good chance, it gets easier. Once you’ve given something a proper thought, you’ll feel more relaxed and assured – you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you might be missing, and after just 2 minutes you’ll have a list of some kind of the benefits you may gain should you agree to spend the time necessary. Try this, and you’ll be amazed how many good opportunities which seemed to be real time wasters will turn out to be the things you can quite easily afford.

You can spend 2 minutes considering the opportunity, and therefore improving your chances for a right decision, or you can lose the same 2 minutes regretting the missed opportunity later. One more thing: often you regret something just because you have not properly assessed it. Lots of opportunities seem attractive, but turn out to be somewhat different once you take time to analyze them. So you may feel upset and ruin the rest of your day simply because of some opportunity which in reality was no benefit to you anyway. But because you haven’t taken time to look at it closely and see this, you’d regret that you have let something go.

So all it takes to find time is really to take a closer look. And once you make yourself comfortable with the idea of spending 2 minutes in order to save yourself hours, you’ll feel much better and easier about making such decisions. You’ll also be sure to look at every opportunity closer, and to make sure that you never miss a really good chance or never take up something you really shouldn’t have. Of course, 2 minutes aren’t going to make you 100% right about every decision you make, but they sure are going to improve your chances.

[tags]finding time, time management, planning, efficiency, self-improvement[/tags]

Never Leave A Question Unanswered

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Every day we hear dozens of questions asked and answered, so what I’m going to say is probably a kind of situation most of you are familiar with.

 

Why do we ask questions?

You get a question asked, and it’s the casual type one – you’re expected to give an answer within few seconds, and it’s perfectly okay if you don’t know the answer – the person who asked you will just move on to try his luck with someone else.

How often do you get asked questions? I mean, any kind of question – be it something related to the position you have in your company or some personal advice people want from you? Rarely will you have not a single question asked during an average working day. Chances are, you’ll be asked at least few times during your day. And depending on how popular or smart you are, people will turn to ask for your wisdom more and more.

 

Giving valuable answers

When asking questions, surely people tend to note your answers and how correct and accurate they are, but they also look at your ability to face questions you don’t have an immediate answer for. Sometimes they deliberately ask you a question no one can answer, and they simply watch how you play it. In fact, your ability to find an answer to such questions is considered to be one of the best personal and professional skill you can possess.

First things first – no lies. If you don’t know the answer, don’t lie about it – just be strong enough to admit your lack of knowledge on the subject. Don’t say anything just for the sake of giving some kind of answer – your good reputation and trust of your colleagues may be lost with just one stupid answer you gave abruptly and without proper thinking on it, yet it might take you hundreds of brilliant, intelligent and perfectly correct answers to earn this trust and respect again.

Then, know your strong points and your weak areas. Learn to quickly give any question an estimation which suggests whether you’re capable of answering a particular kind of question or not. Always remember: you’ve got your trust and respect to protect. Evaluate each question, see how important it is to others that you give the correct answer.

 

How to answer questions

Answering questions is easy, once you stick to this idea: a question is asked, because someone wants to know a correct answer. What kind of answer is correct? Most people would agree, that to give a correct answer is to provide a meaningful and useful information, which is 100% correct in your opinion. But not many people realise that simply saying “I don’t know, sorry” is a correct answer as well. Don’t let this idea get out of your sight when you’re looking for an answer.

Remember: you were asked a question because someone believes you to be a reliable source of information. If you say “I don’t know”, your credibility stays the same, because you’ve estimated all the factors, realised you don’t know the right answer, and you’re being honest to say so.

But if you decided to give some kind of answer, and it later proves to be an incorrect one, your credibility will be shaken – people will think and try to understand why you gave this answer instead of simply saying no. And they will probably think something along these lines about you: You simply tried to trick them. You deliberately tried to mislead them. You didn’t know the answer but you were too ashamed to admit it, so you opted for telling the first thing which came to your mind just to look more knowledgeable than you really are.

And as people think of it more and more (remember, we’re talking dozens of questions asked and answered daily), they will make their opinion up about every person they ask around, and it will be very hard to change their attitude to a given person at a later time.

To people looking for some answers, it is important that they get the correct answer. So if you say “I don’t really know”, they will thank you for this anyway – you haven’t given them the answer, but you haven’t given them a false one neither – so they think something like: Oh well, you can’t know everything. I’ll ask someone else.

And they do. And the next question they have from a different field, they’ll probably think again: Hey, why don’t I ask this guy first – so what if he didn’t know answers to lots of questions asked before? He certainly has some strong points, so maybe he knows exactly the answer I need?

 

Patterns we all follow

So when we look at a certain company, or a group of people within, talking to each other and asking questions, it’s obvious that everyone follows some kind of pattern when dealing with questions raised.

Some people, when they face a problem or see something they can’t understand, decide to concentrate for a little bit more and see if they can manage on their own. Others immediately opt for asking someone around – this smart guy at the end of the corridor is a good option, or this lovely girl just across the cubicle – it’s not a big deal if they don’t know the answer, but it’s definitely worth a try.

And in exactly the same way, people follow various patterns when asked a question. Some couldn’t possibly care less and they will say anything simply to get rid of you. Others will take you so seriously that even if you thank them and return to your desk, they will hunt you down after a lunch break to hand you in a pile of paper with their formulas and graphs, representing the ideal answer to your question.

Yet another category of people will fairly quickly think of your question and give you a yes or no, and then forget about it. I think this is the most common category of people. Very efficient approach: they think over your question, they honestly try to find an answer, and they give up or give you an answer fairly quickly.

 

Productivity tip: answer every question

What shocks me though, is that this most common category of people will never come back to your questions once you’re gone. That may be okay for the questions they answered correctly, but it’s a mystery to me why people don’t get curious when they didn’t know the answer.

Again, it’s a case of judging the question – if you see it’s somehow relevant to your work or other activity, you’d probably get a little bit more irritated with yourself for not knowing the answer, but even after this – most of us will simply forget about it few minutes later.

Now, I obviously don’t belong to this most common category of people. ANY question I couldn’t answer will raise some interest in me. But if it’s related to my profession, I simply can’t throw it away – if I have a spare minute, I’ll find the answer myself or google it. If I don’t have an immediate chance to answer the question, I’ll most likely think of it in the background, so once I’m at home, I’ll make some time specifically to find the answer. This way, if I ever get asked the same question again (and you know how some people like coming back to you the following day with the very same question, don’t you?), I’ll definitely have one, and it will be the 100% correct one cause I’ve specifically looked for it.

Some people will say it’s impossible to know everything. And I totally agree. And even if that was possible, you don’t have all the time in the world. And this is true too. But it’s never harmful to expand your knowledge a little, is it?

Once you master questions judgment and estimation, you’ll be able to see how important this question is and whether it’s worth your time and efforts thinking of an answer or looking for it.

Sure it takes time to find an answer for something, but you’ll be surprised how many answers are really easy to find, and once you get into a habit of resolving most of unanswered questions, soon enough you’ll realise that these simple questions and found answers have started building your fundamental knowledge – they help you answer others more quickly, and save a lot of your time in the long run.