Personal Life Media

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and I’m here live at AdTech San Francisco. This, I have to say, has been the best show ever for AdTech. I’ve been coming since 1996, 14 years. I’ve missed one AdTech when I had Tay-Tay. And so I just really want to tell you that if you didn’t show up here at AdTech – and you know, I’m not getting paid, they’re not even sponsoring the show or anything, it’s just a really good event. And I, as you know, have siphoned off the best of the best speakers, and I’m doing this series called the Muckity Muck Insights. I’m getting who I think are some of the most clever interesting valuable people that have shown up here at AdTech to speak to people who are spending thousands of dollars to get them to tell them interesting things, and one of my very favorites is on the show today, Pierre Khawand who has been a DishyMix perennial favorite I’ve had hear on a number of episodes because he’s actually a CEO of a company called People On The Go. He’s an efficiency expert for the digital world. All of us involved in social media and email and texting and all of the various ways that we communicate, Pierre has really I would say deconstructed today’s modern communicator, and he has come up with some coping mechanisms for us. He is just an amazing guy at teaching you how to be more efficient and less stressed when you have to deal with so many inbound communications channels. And so lets welcome him onto the show. Welcome Pierre.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you Susan. It’s very exciting to be here today. The show has been so energizing and I’m excited to be back on your show.

Susan Bratton: Awesome! Now did you speak yet or are you speaking later?

Pierre Khawand: I did speak earlier today.

Susan Bratton: All right, tell us what you taught everyone. Give us the, we want your golden nuggets Pierre.

Pierre Khawand: So my topic was email and social media, and this has been my basically passion right now. It was email but now with the advent of social media, I combined the two because I think they’re both excellent technologies that give us great opportunities. But then at the same time they’re interruptive technologies, which means they’re constantly interrupting us and that can be overwhelming. So I talked about approaches to simplify and optimize how we use these technologies and also work on our behaviors, which I think is the bigger part is how we actually manage our time and thinking and decision-making around these.

Susan Bratton: Well I know about your concept called the Results Curve. I know you have a YouTube video on this, you can Google the results curve and find out about it. And I can tell you that ever since I learned that from you – I’m such a fan of yours Pierre. What you tell me to do I do because everything you’ve ever told me works, and the Results Curve, I’d love for you to explain it to people because it’s been, I have a timer on right now ‘cause we’re timing our show here, but I use the timer on my iPhone all the time now since I’ve heard about the Results Curve. So give us that in case people haven’t heard it yet.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, the Results Curve. So the Results Curve is something I published recently which summarizes or visualizes how our results change with time when we are working on a task. And it shows, just like a diagram it shows how our results start to get more and more but then after a while they decline. But the problem is that we never stick long enough to a task for this to really materialize. So every few seconds we keep switching to something else that’s maybe more exciting, maybe more interesting, and then we don’t stick long enough to our task, therefore the Results Curve shows us that our productivity is basically five or ten percent of what it could be. And that’s humungous. So the outcome of this is that we really need to focus for 30 or 40 minutes before we switch to another task, and that’s when we get the most accomplished. What I, the reason or something I like to say usually is great accomplishments don’t come from working a few minutes here and a few minutes there. They come from focused and purposeful work and the Results Curve tells us that we need to stay focused at least 30 to 40 minutes at a time to get those great accomplishments done.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, what I’ve noticed is you said set your time for 40 minutes, and it takes 30 minutes your monkey mind to settle down and for you to really focus in and it’s that last 10 minutes where you’re completely focused on your task, you’ve got all of the, you know, all of the moving parts in your brain, you’re holding them simultaneously and your creative juices start to go. And what I’ve found is that actually when the dinger dings at 40 minutes I’m really in the zone and often I’ll just keep going and my best work gets done. And that has been such a huge help for me, recently especially with things like writing.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you for mentioning the timer Susan. This sounds like a simple tool but it’s one of the most powerful tools that many of our workshop participants end up using and it transforms how they work. Something magical happens when we press that timer button. We become more aware of time, even if we don’t do anything, we just become more aware of time. And that alone is a big improvement, but then the other thing is we become accountable. We feel more accountable because I know now if I decided to work on my budget for the next 30 minutes and I put that timer, in 30 minutes I’m going to know if I did anything on this budget or if I got sidetracked on YouTube or the Twitter or whatever else.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Well let me segue into another question about that, which is a lot of times I think email saps our focus, you know. We’re doing things and constantly checking our email and I know you’re a big proponent for blocking specific time to check email. But now some people like to be communicated to via text. Others like to communicate with you in a social, you know, send you a Facebook email. Others send you regular email. Then you get voicemails on your cell phone, you get voicemails on your work phone. There are probably other, you know, other channels that I’m forgetting about. How do you recommend that we not only manage the inbound prioritization of all of these requests, but also is there anything that we should be doing around our outbound communication to people?

Pierre Khawand: Yes. And you’re hitting right now on one of the fundamental strategies that I continue to preach. So I start, when talking about email I start first talking about process and making the, optimizing the process and simplifying the process. But that’s only a part of it. The next part, which is the bigger part, is the behavior and the strategies, and this is, one of the strategies is to really put less information out there and therefore we’re going to get a lot less. So we all know this thing about what goes around comes around, and that’s so true for email. So I think if we streamline what we put out there, that’s a huge leap into getting control over email, but also it is about pushing things off of email to where they belong. So I think like I mentioned also in the workshop, if we have a hammer, if all we have is a hammer we think everything is a nail. So if we all have email at least we think all we have is email, so every communication becomes an email message and we forget that really we do have a broad range of tools and each is appropriate for a certain communication. So what I’m holding in my hand right now is a table that shows the list of available tools and then what each one is ideal for and what it’s not ideal for. And this is what we try to really talk about, like email is great for factual asynchronous communication, but it’s not good for emotional issues and complicated issues. IM is great for quick exchanges but it’s not great to have a long conversation on IM. Phone is great for discussion but not for visual things and sharing documents so we really need to use the tools for what they’re best at and that can really take the load off of email instead of always using email.

Susan Bratton: All right, good. So are you still teaching that email inbox management thing that I took from you probably, what, like, probably 2004 or 5. You know, it has to, I don’t even know what year this is, but it was a long time ago and I’m still using those practices. Are you still teaching that?

Pierre Khawand: We are and they actually evolved over time…

Susan Bratton: Okay, yeah…

Pierre Khawand: But yes, the fundamental principle is still valid. Thousands of people write to us and say “This is really making me feel in control.”

Susan Bratton: So a person can take a class from you on managing the deluge of email in their inbox. What’s your class like now? How long does it go? How do you take it? Is it email only? Which email things do you support? Like give us the rundown on essentially what you teach today.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, yeah, so how can someone really take advantage of the methodology and these techniques. So we have several offerings. One of them, which is one of the most popular, is a 90 minute webinar that’s about managing and organizing the email inbox. And this is contained, this focused on email and it goes through the techniques that Susan just mentioned. And then you get a self paced from that so this way people can review this at their own pace whenever they feel like it. Now the more comprehensive offering is the Accomplishing More With Less workshop, which is a whole workshop around not just email, but around managing the workflow, managing time, managing priorities, and it’s more, I would call it, it’s more the modern up to date way of doing things. So traditional time management techniques worked well in the earlier pre-Web 2.0 era, and I think right now because we’re bombarded with so much more information and we have so many interruptions we need something different and that’s what the Accomplishing More With Less is about. And we have the workbook that’s available at Amazon, which gives everyone who cannot join me at the workshop the full methodology that they try.

Susan Bratton: Well I have an extra copy of Accomplishing More With Less workbook that Pierre has given me, and I of course, as – if you’re a DishyMix listener you know that I have a DishyMix fan page on Facebook. You just have to go to dishymixfan.com or search for DishyMix, all one word, and post your desire for the Accomplishing More With Less workbook, and I’ll send an autographed copy to a lucky recipient. I’ve gone through the whole workbook myself, ‘cause I really like the way Pierre approaches things. They’re like the real world way of how we get bombarded by all of these different technologies. And you have lowered my blood pressured immeasurably Pierre, just by having the inbox management piece of it. You also teach the desktop management piece and how you can align your files and your folder systems and your flag systems, and you essentially teach us a systematized way to manage all of our information, both the stuff that we have to get to, the stuff that we’re dealing with now, and the stuff that we can archive but then find again easily. And I’ll tell you, one of the things that I’ve noticed recently is that I’ve gotten really far on the training that you’ve given me because my file folders in my inbox match the file folders on my desktop and I don’t even really have any physical desktop folders anymore. That’s all kind of gone now for me. But what I’m struggling with now is naming my documents and finding them again. I’m struggling with the search mechanisms and the right names for things and I create so much content – you know, with, now I’m publishing 20 different books, you know, and I’ve got, there’s different iterations of all of them and different components. I mean one product that I sell could have 40 files that are associated with it – workbooks and e-books and audio files and video clips – and I’m feeling really overwhelmed by the naming conventions and the organizing process. Do you have any new information? Has your thinking evolved since you taught this to me years ago?

Pierre Khawand: I think having a naming convention that’s probably… I mean, this case I think it needs to be a little bit more detailed Susan. It sounds like your system, your information has developed so much…

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Pierre Khawand: and maybe a basic naming convention is no longer able to convey all what you want to convey in the system.

Susan Bratton: So what’s a sophisticated way to have naming conventions? Or how would you approach it?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, I might approach it like a tagging system. So I might include in the name potentially a few extra keywords that relate to this project and maybe they keywords may be three keywords, one for topic, one for the format that this file is in and one is the intended purpose or usage. And I’m just making that up not knowing what…

Susan Bratton: Sure; that’s good though.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: How long can the names of files be?

Pierre Khawand: Fortunately they can be much longer and I would not hesitate to use longer names now….

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: Unlike the past when we were limited and we weren’t used to it.

Susan Bratton: Okay, so we can name our Word docs and our keynote presentations really long things now?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Oh really?

Pierre Khawand: Which is, which can really be helpful…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: if it’s done with a naming convention and not ad hoc where it just becomes a long name that’s more saying a sentence. But if it’s really keyword driven it could be a great plus to a naming convention.

Susan Bratton Okay.

Pierre Khawand: And matching this with a good search mechanism – like having desktop search utility that can really go through these names easily is another nice addition.

Susan Bratton: I’ve been relying on Macintosh’s search capabilities, and actually they’re not that good. I’m surprised.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah. Have you tried Google Search?

Susan Bratton: Maybe I should download that. There’s a Google desktop search mechanism, isn’t there? And it’s probably better. Yeah, that’s a good idea. So you like that tool?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah. It’s, some people have, again, I think our listeners, they might divide into two camps. Some people have little bit of a unease feeling with having Google access the data and save some of this information, and some don’t mind it, so…

Susan Bratton: Okay, that’s good to know. So what other golden nuggets have you shared here at AdTech or what other things are you working on that are… You’re developing some new things, aren’t you?

Pierre Khawand: I’m always developing new things Susan.

Susan Bratton: I know, I like that about you.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you. So the latest thing I’m working on is actually a study on how we use email and social media. And I have right now an actual survey on the website on people-onthego.com. It’s about three to five minutes so it’s not too long, but it’s really about how we use these tools in the workplace and how much we interrupt our work, do we have a strategy or not, how much time do we spend on them, how closely related to our actual goals and results they are. And this is part of the longer more comprehensive research that we’re doing about this topic because I believe a lot of opportunities exist for us using all these tools, but also a lot of challenges, and our goal is to really zero in on how we can balance between these two, leverage them the most that’s possible but yet not get overwhelmed, not get sidetracked by them.

Susan Bratton: One of the things that I’m noticing is a lot of apps are now pushing content to my phone. So Four Square, Facebook, you know, you start to integrate the social apps onto your Smart Phone and they start pushing data to you and it’s constantly an interrupting situation. I’ve turned a lot of it off but not all of it ‘cause I’m kind of playing with it, you know, trying to get a feel for it all. You’re doing the piece of research now – and I understand that you’re going to deal with whatever is is – but what do you think some of the solutions might be to all of these new social media interrupted kinds of situations?

Pierre Khawand: I think there are a couple of aspects to this problem and a couple aspects to the solution. So one is again back to process and tools. I like tools that integrate many of these feeds into one place and allow me to appropriately organize them so I can focus my attention on the top, lets say, 20 percent…

Susan Bratton: Oh god yeah…

Pierre Khawand: and then, yeah…

Susan Bratton: What are there like, is there is a meta tool out there that organizes all your inbound communications?

Pierre Khawand: Well there are three tools that I really like…

Susan Bratton: Oh great! What are they?

Pierre Khawand: One of them is just an RSS reader…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: so that helps me organize all the blogs and then share what I would like to share. Another one is…

Susan Bratton: Oh wait, stop right there.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: So what do you use Google RSS Reader?

Pierre Khawand: I use Google, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. It seems like the best. So when you say “I share what I like to share” how are you sharing the information that’s coming in on your reader?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, this is something actually not, it’s not as known about, the readers, which is they form a community and they allow you to connect with people and share information and mark a blog entry, share it and everybody else who you’re connected with who is following you on Google Reader can see what you’re sharing. So this way you can have your top 20, 50 friends and colleagues who are knowledgeable and you can be sharing all the cool blog things that you’re reading. It’s more of a social tool. It’s becoming more of a social tool, not just a way to keep up with the subscriptions.

Susan Bratton: So you’re just contributing to the disastrous push content, Pierre. Busted. Okay, so you’re using a blog reader; what else are you using? What kind of other tools…?

Pierre Khawand: The other one that I like and think is effective is social bookmarking. So this would be like Delicious for instance where I can share all the bookmarks. First I can track them for myself…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: and tag them in a way that I related to those topics. And then I can share them with people that I want to share them with, but I can also keep them private if I want. But what I really like about it, actually about Delicious is going to their homepage and looking at the hot topics, and it’s like having an instantaneous magazine that tells me what’s the world interested in right now in one page, so giving me that as a glance. But the third tool, which I think is the most useful, even for professionals who social media is their core work, is something like Tweet Deck where I can see, not only I can see all the updates from Twitter, from Linkedin, from Facebook, whatever, you name it, but also I can define my own columns that, I might for instance zero in on the top ten people in the ad space that I’d like to follow and hear from – so I can include Susan and some of the colleagues here at AdTech, and then have a column that just shows me those people. And this way I don’t have to delude their messages by the hundreds or thousands of other Tweets from everybody else. So it really helps focus and watch for certain brands, watch for the things I’m interested in instead of being bombarded by all of this information.

Susan Bratton: So you use Tweet Deck to do this, uh huh. And you’ve set it up so that you have a list of people that you follow in one of your vertical columns, uh huh. And then do you have any kind of a customized search as well, ‘cause that’s what I’ve done? I use a customized search in a column so that I can see all of the things that are coming out just about those keywords that I track.

Pierre Khawand: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: I like that.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, yeah.

Susan Bratton: It’s hard for people to set those up though, you know.

Pierre Khawand: It can be. It can be, and this is where we’re actually making more and more offerings relating to social media to help people, because we can all figure it out but it’s just a matter of time, taking the time, and also…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, somebody should just tell us.

Pierre Khawand: optimizing how we use it, so what I describe right now, we demonstrate this and say “Okay, you know, you’re bombarded by all these feeds; why don’t you set up” and we go through a process. The beginning of this process is knowing who to follow. So we try to get everyone to think about, do some strategic thinking and say “Who would be the top 50 people I really want to know what they’re thinking, what books their reading, what insights they’re giving out, what events they’re attending” and that need to be the center of all of our effort as opposed to having hundreds of thousands of people in our network who aren’t necessarily related to our core values.

Susan Bratton: So different subject; what is the most popular webinar or training program that you offer at People On The Go?

Pierre Khawand: The most popular is managing and organizing your email inbox.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that’s my personal favorite. What’s the second most popular?

Pierre Khawand: The second most popular is the Accomplishing More With Less…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: which is available now as webinars.

Susan Bratton: Oh good.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, and it’s available in Second Life.

Susan Bratton: Is it on demand webinar or do you have to sign up at certain times and do you teach it live every time or is some of it…

Pierre Khawand: It’s live.

Susan Bratton: It is, you do it live?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: And do you do it and you have other people working for you now that do it too?

Pierre Khawand: Both.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Pierre Khawand: So I do it and I have, we have trainers who do it and it’s one of the fascinating experiences to have people online from all over the country and we’re all connected and experiencing the ah ha’s of how to manage interruptions.

Susan Bratton: Nice! And what’s your fantasy for the growth of People On The Go? Where do you want to take it next and what would be like the perfect clients for you? What business do you want to generate that would be really good for you?

Pierre Khawand: I would like to make this methodology a standard in the business world so that when companies talk about productivity and interruptions they have a common language and individuals and teams have a way to communicate about these issues and a great head start and some guideline into how do we help each other out in this big information overload mess, because it is not an individual problem, I think it’s a collective problem.

Susan Bratton: It is a collective problem.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: What would be three things that you would add to a corporate culture today to make the biggest impact on the information overload?

Pierre Khawand: Three things…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, if you just had to establish new rules for, new behavioral rules that everyone had to follow between now and, you know, the rest of the year, what would those three things you’d institute?

Pierre Khawand: Okay, I’ll start with two behaviors that I actually seen teams and organizations work on, and they have made breakthroughs. So the first one is to agree among each other how to tell other people that they’re focused. So that, some teams have done it, some organizations and teams done it in a very simple and playful way like having a little sign that says “I’m focused right now” or having a little red flag that they put up and say “I’m focused”. Or some people use IM, which is more efficient for teams that are dispersed. And then having – this is number one – so agreeing that it’s okay for someone to say “I’m focused, and therefore I’m not going to be able to help you or answer your question”, even to their boss, “until I’m done with my focus session.” So that’s number one. Number two is agree on how they escalate issues when issues that are worth escalating come up so that if someone is focused they can still have a way to reach them and interrupt what they’re doing and handle an escalation.

Susan Bratton: What’s a good example?

Pierre Khawand: Like a good example, like a customer urgency. Obviously… Well let me give you two examples. An example where we don’t want to interrupt somebody, an example where we want to interrupt somebody. So a first example is a boss who thinks “Oh, this website looks, this page on the website looks like it’s not following the new guideline” and they pick up the phone, call one of their designers and they immediately want to talk about it. And that’s interruption for the designer, interruption for them, maybe interruption for other people, and it didn’t have to happen because having that wait until the designer is available is not going to change anything. One where interruption is worthwhile is a customer issue that comes up that if not resolved it might threaten the deal or the satisfaction of the customer. And that one is worth interrupting someone for, but in that case if we have agreed on how do we escalate that issue – and it shouldn’t be on email, it should be some other way, like cell phone is great, some other way that doesn’t involve email because otherwise people will have to be checking email all the time. So if we take the escalation off of email we save each other a lot of time and make our work so much more efficient. So these two, they sound simple but they’re actually, they can create a huge quantum leap because they’re at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is we’re all asking each other things all the time, and therefore we’re not letting anyone else on our team to get any meaningful focused work done.

Susan Bratton: All right, those were two and they were both around the results curve – letting people have the time to focus. Is there a third thing that you’d institute? If you’re king and you get to make the entire business world change, what’s the third thing you’d do?

Pierre Khawand: Okay, I’ll give a more strategic one and it’s a little bit, takes a little bit more effort to actually implement. I call this Visual Planning, and this is looking at the goals and the results that every individual is trying to accomplish and then putting a list of the activities that they’re doing or planning on doing and finding the link between the two and how strong or how weak that link is, and therefore getting rid of all the weak links or the non existent links and focusing on the activities that have direct links to the results. So this is a little bit more involved maybe what you asked for Susan, but this is something that, it’s a huge challenge today. We’re all busy doing all kinds of things, which on the surface they appear like they’re related to what we’re trying to accomplish, but when we analyze this more and try to think of how effective are they in really helping one of these results and quantify it, then we can easily get rid of probably half of the tasks and activities that our teams and our people are doing and focus on the ones that have the strong links, and that can be transformational for many teams.

Susan Bratton: It makes a lot of sense. I’ve gone recently through, one of our products is called Speak Up With Power and Influence. I’m going to get you a copy of that. What John James Santangelo teaches you is how to get really clear on your goals and prioritize your goals. And then to figure out who needs to support you in accomplishing those goals, and then he teaches you how to ask those people to support you in accomplishing those goals. And it’s a really good process, and what I’ve found is if you have – and I know you have this in the Accomplishing More With Less workbook too, how you quantify your, you know, your top goals and what all this extraneous stuff is. So I think those two could work really well hand in hand. I want to make sure I get a copy of that for you…

Pierre Khawand: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: ‘Cause a lot of times it is not just about you accomplishing your own goals, but it’s really great to go into the whole 40 minutes on your, you know, your countdown timer and get something done. But often you’re relying on other people. There are so many things now that we do that are collaborative in nature and if you’re working with people who don’t also have their goals clarified and understand what their objectives are it’s problematic.

Pierre Khawand: Yes. It’s a team effort…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: It’s a team effort.

Susan Bratton: So now, have you done… I’m going to switch gears completely; have you done any traveling recently, ‘cause you’re always going to some fun places? What are the last couple places you’ve been?

Pierre Khawand: I was in Germany recently…

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah?

Pierre Khawand: And…

Susan Bratton: Where were you?

Pierre Khawand: I try to work on the same actually time as the U.S. time…

Susan Bratton: Oh.

Pierre Khawand: to keep up with the U.S., and it’s worked out really nicely.

Susan Bratton: Really?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah. I was in the Stuttgart area…

Susan Bratton: Oh.

Pierre Khawand: and it was 20 degrees below the first weekend I got there…

Susan Bratton: Oh man.

Pierre Khawand: That was over the holidays.

Susan Bratton: Now my grandfather on my mother’s side is from Stuttgart, so I know the area. I love Munich, I love the whole Bavarian area of Germany, it’s awesome. And what were you doing there?

Pierre Khawand: I was visiting family actually.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, and it was a great trip and…

Susan Bratton: But you didn’t grow up in Germany…

Pierre Khawand: No I did not…

Susan Bratton: You grew up in Lebanon?

Pierre Khawand: I was actually, I grew up in Lebanon…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: and I did make the trip to Lebanon as well…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: during that same time.

Susan Bratton: How was that? What is Lebanon like? I don’t even know.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, Lebanon is right now, it’s I think in a relatively stable stage…

Susan Bratton: Good.

Pierre Khawand: We hope it continues.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: And in terms of Lebanon itself, it’s a pretty, I would say that the rain is very similar to California. It’s a beautiful country. Unfortunately with all that happened it took away from that, but it’s very Mediterranean…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Pierre Khawand: and then very quickly you get to the mountains and you can be skiing in March or April…

Susan Bratton: Nice.

Pierre Khawand: and then go down into the beach and lay in the beach.

Susan Bratton: Do you still have family there too?

Pierre Khawand: I do…

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Pierre Khawand: I do, so my parents are there and that’s what takes me there almost every year.

Susan Bratton: Oh that’s great. And what about Susan, your wife? Is she…?

Pierre Khawand: She’s from Germany and that’s what takes us to Germany…

Susan Bratton: That’s the German connection.

Pierre Khawand: So our vacations are parents vacations right now.

Susan Bratton: And how did you two meet?

Pierre Khawand: We met Tango dancing in San Francisco.

Susan Bratton: Oh no way…

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Tango dancing. Are you still Tango dancing?

Pierre Khawand: We just started again.

Susan Bratton: Again, yeah.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I just started dancing again too. I don’t do formal dancing, I like to go out dancing, you know to clubs or, yeah, more free form. I recently went to Berkeley and I did one of those ecstatic dance evenings. Have you ever done the ecstatic dance stuff?

Pierre Khawand: I have. I don’t know of that specific one, but yes, yes.

Susan Bratton: I really enjoyed it.

Pierre Khawand: Movement is definitely a relief…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: and a growth opportunity.

Susan Bratton: Oh well I was a total 80’s disco queen. I mean, you know, that was my, my 20’s were the 80’s and so we would go out dancing every Thursday, every Friday and every Saturday night without fail for years we went out. And then when I met Tim we just, he wasn’t a very good dancer.

Pierre Khawand: That can change things.

Susan Bratton: He’s so much better now. He’s been really getting good. But we just kind of let that go and went on to other things. And I recently went through this process where I had this little where you were supposed to, you know, you were doing this workshop thing and you were supposed to look at your life after retirement and what were you going to spend your life doing, and the net of it was well start doing that now you idiot. You know, you can, you never know. So dancing was the number one thing on my list that I wanted to do when I had more time, so I thought all right, I’ll go start doing it again. So I’ve taken some dance classes and I’ve gone out to these ecstatic dance things and they’re such good communities of people that get together – they get together every Wednesday night or every Sunday morning. They’ve been doing it for, you know, 20 years without fail and nice communities of people and I’m really enjoying it.

Pierre Khawand: That’s exciting, that’s exciting. Keep it up.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. We spend too much time in front of the computer, don’t we?

Pierre Khawand: Yes. Yeah, movement actually is one of what I talk about in chapter 10 in the Accomplishing More With Less…

Susan Bratton: Okay, tell us.

Pierre Khawand: workbook, which is about managing stress…

Susan Bratton: Yes?

Pierre Khawand: And I believe movement is a huge part of getting back into reality as opposed to getting stuck into our mind, which creates a lot of the stress. And so movement, exercise, aerobic, that feeling of endorphins, that can go a long way.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. All right, well it’s nice to meet a Tango dancer.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I just think that’s a sexy thing, isn’t it? Tango’s so hot, isn’t it?

Pierre Khawand: Tango is awesome.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. I can imagine that a lot of people have met their partners Tango dancing.

Pierre Khawand: You know it’s a good question about meeting partners dancing. I don’t think it happens as often.

Susan Bratton: Really?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, we have many friends who, they meet a lot of people…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: but the ones who have their actual longer term partner they’ve met Tango dancing or dancing (unintelligible).

Susan Bratton: Well who know why.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Well Pierre, I’m glad to see that you’re continuing to innovate and that your company is so successful. You do this neat thing with me as well for DishyMix fans. Tell us about your free seat of the week. We’ll end the show with the freebies, we love the freebies. So tell us about it.

Pierre Khawand: Yes, the free seat of the week will be announced every week on Twitter, so I will include in the hashtag DishyMix free and that will be – so if you put in your search DishyMix Free you’ll always be up to date on when I post it and you will get the opportunity to respond to me and claim it and it will be yours. So I will do that once a week about one of the webinars either that week or the week after.

Susan Bratton: And you always promote different webinars, so one week it might one of the one, and another week… You run through them.

Pierre Khawand: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: You have a lot of…

Pierre Khawand: A whole variety.

Susan Bratton: different webinars now. You’ve really developed a lot of content.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, so it’s, it would be one week it could be managing organizing your email inbox, next week it might be Excel pivot tables, then it might be Wikis and then it might be social media. So you will have a variety of things to look forward to.

Susan Bratton: Everything sounds good to me but the pivot tables. That’s the opposite of the way my mind works. Even a pivot table can’t help me Pierre.

Pierre Khawand: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Awesome! Well thank you so much for coming on the show. How do people find you, follow you, etcetera? Give us all your deets.

Pierre Khawand: So people-onthego.com. That’s where the survey is, that’s where my blog is. And then pierrekhawand, that would be Twitter, so @pierrekhawand. It’s p-i-e-r-r-e-k-h-a-w-a-n-d, and I will look forward to hearing from everybody.

Susan Bratton: Pierre the magic Khawand, all right.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Thank you Pierre. Have a great day.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: I am your host, Susan Bratton. You got to meet Pierre Khawand from People On The Go. I hope you’ll take advantage of the free Accomplishing More With Less book at the DishyMix fan page. Just put your desire there and we’ll choose one of you and send it out. And definitely start to follow Pierre and get one of his free seats of the week. He does an awesome job and you can become more efficient and less stressed and then go Tango dancing. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye. Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and I’m here live at AdTech San Francisco. This, I have to say, has been the best show ever for AdTech. I’ve been coming since 1996, 14 years. I’ve missed one AdTech when I had Tay-Tay. And so I just really want to tell you that if you didn’t show up here at AdTech – and you know, I’m not getting paid, they’re not even sponsoring the show or anything, it’s just a really good event. And I, as you know, have siphoned off the best of the best speakers, and I’m doing this series called the Muckity Muck Insights. I’m getting who I think are some of the most clever interesting valuable people that have shown up here at AdTech to speak to people who are spending thousands of dollars to get them to tell them interesting things, and one of my very favorites is on the show today, Pierre Khawand who has been a DishyMix perennial favorite I’ve had hear on a number of episodes because he’s actually a CEO of a company called People On The Go. He’s an efficiency expert for the digital world. All of us involved in social media and email and texting and all of the various ways that we communicate, Pierre has really I would say deconstructed today’s modern communicator, and he has come up with some coping mechanisms for us. He is just an amazing guy at teaching you how to be more efficient and less stressed when you have to deal with so many inbound communications channels. And so lets welcome him onto the show. Welcome Pierre.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you Susan. It’s very exciting to be here today. The show has been so energizing and I’m excited to be back on your show.

Susan Bratton: Awesome! Now did you speak yet or are you speaking later?

Pierre Khawand: I did speak earlier today.

Susan Bratton: All right, tell us what you taught everyone. Give us the, we want your golden nuggets Pierre.

Pierre Khawand: So my topic was email and social media, and this has been my basically passion right now. It was email but now with the advent of social media, I combined the two because I think they’re both excellent technologies that give us great opportunities. But then at the same time they’re interruptive technologies, which means they’re constantly interrupting us and that can be overwhelming. So I talked about approaches to simplify and optimize how we use these technologies and also work on our behaviors, which I think is the bigger part is how we actually manage our time and thinking and decision-making around these.

Susan Bratton: Well I know about your concept called the Results Curve. I know you have a YouTube video on this, you can Google the results curve and find out about it. And I can tell you that ever since I learned that from you – I’m such a fan of yours Pierre. What you tell me to do I do because everything you’ve ever told me works, and the Results Curve, I’d love for you to explain it to people because it’s been, I have a timer on right now ‘cause we’re timing our show here, but I use the timer on my iPhone all the time now since I’ve heard about the Results Curve. So give us that in case people haven’t heard it yet.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, the Results Curve. So the Results Curve is something I published recently which summarizes or visualizes how our results change with time when we are working on a task. And it shows, just like a diagram it shows how our results start to get more and more but then after a while they decline. But the problem is that we never stick long enough to a task for this to really materialize. So every few seconds we keep switching to something else that’s maybe more exciting, maybe more interesting, and then we don’t stick long enough to our task, therefore the Results Curve shows us that our productivity is basically five or ten percent of what it could be. And that’s humungous. So the outcome of this is that we really need to focus for 30 or 40 minutes before we switch to another task, and that’s when we get the most accomplished. What I, the reason or something I like to say usually is great accomplishments don’t come from working a few minutes here and a few minutes there. They come from focused and purposeful work and the Results Curve tells us that we need to stay focused at least 30 to 40 minutes at a time to get those great accomplishments done.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, what I’ve noticed is you said set your time for 40 minutes, and it takes 30 minutes your monkey mind to settle down and for you to really focus in and it’s that last 10 minutes where you’re completely focused on your task, you’ve got all of the, you know, all of the moving parts in your brain, you’re holding them simultaneously and your creative juices start to go. And what I’ve found is that actually when the dinger dings at 40 minutes I’m really in the zone and often I’ll just keep going and my best work gets done. And that has been such a huge help for me, recently especially with things like writing.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you for mentioning the timer Susan. This sounds like a simple tool but it’s one of the most powerful tools that many of our workshop participants end up using and it transforms how they work. Something magical happens when we press that timer button. We become more aware of time, even if we don’t do anything, we just become more aware of time. And that alone is a big improvement, but then the other thing is we become accountable. We feel more accountable because I know now if I decided to work on my budget for the next 30 minutes and I put that timer, in 30 minutes I’m going to know if I did anything on this budget or if I got sidetracked on YouTube or the Twitter or whatever else.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Well let me segue into another question about that, which is a lot of times I think email saps our focus, you know. We’re doing things and constantly checking our email and I know you’re a big proponent for blocking specific time to check email. But now some people like to be communicated to via text. Others like to communicate with you in a social, you know, send you a Facebook email. Others send you regular email. Then you get voicemails on your cell phone, you get voicemails on your work phone. There are probably other, you know, other channels that I’m forgetting about. How do you recommend that we not only manage the inbound prioritization of all of these requests, but also is there anything that we should be doing around our outbound communication to people?

Pierre Khawand: Yes. And you’re hitting right now on one of the fundamental strategies that I continue to preach. So I start, when talking about email I start first talking about process and making the, optimizing the process and simplifying the process. But that’s only a part of it. The next part, which is the bigger part, is the behavior and the strategies, and this is, one of the strategies is to really put less information out there and therefore we’re going to get a lot less. So we all know this thing about what goes around comes around, and that’s so true for email. So I think if we streamline what we put out there, that’s a huge leap into getting control over email, but also it is about pushing things off of email to where they belong. So I think like I mentioned also in the workshop, if we have a hammer, if all we have is a hammer we think everything is a nail. So if we all have email at least we think all we have is email, so every communication becomes an email message and we forget that really we do have a broad range of tools and each is appropriate for a certain communication. So what I’m holding in my hand right now is a table that shows the list of available tools and then what each one is ideal for and what it’s not ideal for. And this is what we try to really talk about, like email is great for factual asynchronous communication, but it’s not good for emotional issues and complicated issues. IM is great for quick exchanges but it’s not great to have a long conversation on IM. Phone is great for discussion but not for visual things and sharing documents so we really need to use the tools for what they’re best at and that can really take the load off of email instead of always using email.

Susan Bratton: All right, good. So are you still teaching that email inbox management thing that I took from you probably, what, like, probably 2004 or 5. You know, it has to, I don’t even know what year this is, but it was a long time ago and I’m still using those practices. Are you still teaching that?

Pierre Khawand: We are and they actually evolved over time…

Susan Bratton: Okay, yeah…

Pierre Khawand: But yes, the fundamental principle is still valid. Thousands of people write to us and say “This is really making me feel in control.”

Susan Bratton: So a person can take a class from you on managing the deluge of email in their inbox. What’s your class like now? How long does it go? How do you take it? Is it email only? Which email things do you support? Like give us the rundown on essentially what you teach today.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, yeah, so how can someone really take advantage of the methodology and these techniques. So we have several offerings. One of them, which is one of the most popular, is a 90 minute webinar that’s about managing and organizing the email inbox. And this is contained, this focused on email and it goes through the techniques that Susan just mentioned. And then you get a self paced from that so this way people can review this at their own pace whenever they feel like it. Now the more comprehensive offering is the Accomplishing More With Less workshop, which is a whole workshop around not just email, but around managing the workflow, managing time, managing priorities, and it’s more, I would call it, it’s more the modern up to date way of doing things. So traditional time management techniques worked well in the earlier pre-Web 2.0 era, and I think right now because we’re bombarded with so much more information and we have so many interruptions we need something different and that’s what the Accomplishing More With Less is about. And we have the workbook that’s available at Amazon, which gives everyone who cannot join me at the workshop the full methodology that they try.

Susan Bratton: Well I have an extra copy of Accomplishing More With Less workbook that Pierre has given me, and I of course, as – if you’re a DishyMix listener you know that I have a DishyMix fan page on Facebook. You just have to go to dishymixfan.com or search for DishyMix, all one word, and post your desire for the Accomplishing More With Less workbook, and I’ll send an autographed copy to a lucky recipient. I’ve gone through the whole workbook myself, ‘cause I really like the way Pierre approaches things. They’re like the real world way of how we get bombarded by all of these different technologies. And you have lowered my blood pressured immeasurably Pierre, just by having the inbox management piece of it. You also teach the desktop management piece and how you can align your files and your folder systems and your flag systems, and you essentially teach us a systematized way to manage all of our information, both the stuff that we have to get to, the stuff that we’re dealing with now, and the stuff that we can archive but then find again easily. And I’ll tell you, one of the things that I’ve noticed recently is that I’ve gotten really far on the training that you’ve given me because my file folders in my inbox match the file folders on my desktop and I don’t even really have any physical desktop folders anymore. That’s all kind of gone now for me. But what I’m struggling with now is naming my documents and finding them again. I’m struggling with the search mechanisms and the right names for things and I create so much content – you know, with, now I’m publishing 20 different books, you know, and I’ve got, there’s different iterations of all of them and different components. I mean one product that I sell could have 40 files that are associated with it – workbooks and e-books and audio files and video clips – and I’m feeling really overwhelmed by the naming conventions and the organizing process. Do you have any new information? Has your thinking evolved since you taught this to me years ago?

Pierre Khawand: I think having a naming convention that’s probably… I mean, this case I think it needs to be a little bit more detailed Susan. It sounds like your system, your information has developed so much…

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Pierre Khawand: and maybe a basic naming convention is no longer able to convey all what you want to convey in the system.

Susan Bratton: So what’s a sophisticated way to have naming conventions? Or how would you approach it?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, I might approach it like a tagging system. So I might include in the name potentially a few extra keywords that relate to this project and maybe they keywords may be three keywords, one for topic, one for the format that this file is in and one is the intended purpose or usage. And I’m just making that up not knowing what…

Susan Bratton: Sure; that’s good though.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: How long can the names of files be?

Pierre Khawand: Fortunately they can be much longer and I would not hesitate to use longer names now….

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: Unlike the past when we were limited and we weren’t used to it.

Susan Bratton: Okay, so we can name our Word docs and our keynote presentations really long things now?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Oh really?

Pierre Khawand: Which is, which can really be helpful…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: if it’s done with a naming convention and not ad hoc where it just becomes a long name that’s more saying a sentence. But if it’s really keyword driven it could be a great plus to a naming convention.

Susan Bratton Okay.

Pierre Khawand: And matching this with a good search mechanism – like having desktop search utility that can really go through these names easily is another nice addition.

Susan Bratton: I’ve been relying on Macintosh’s search capabilities, and actually they’re not that good. I’m surprised.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah. Have you tried Google Search?

Susan Bratton: Maybe I should download that. There’s a Google desktop search mechanism, isn’t there? And it’s probably better. Yeah, that’s a good idea. So you like that tool?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah. It’s, some people have, again, I think our listeners, they might divide into two camps. Some people have little bit of a unease feeling with having Google access the data and save some of this information, and some don’t mind it, so…

Susan Bratton: Okay, that’s good to know. So what other golden nuggets have you shared here at AdTech or what other things are you working on that are… You’re developing some new things, aren’t you?

Pierre Khawand: I’m always developing new things Susan.

Susan Bratton: I know, I like that about you.

Pierre Khawand: Thank you. So the latest thing I’m working on is actually a study on how we use email and social media. And I have right now an actual survey on the website on people-onthego.com. It’s about three to five minutes so it’s not too long, but it’s really about how we use these tools in the workplace and how much we interrupt our work, do we have a strategy or not, how much time do we spend on them, how closely related to our actual goals and results they are. And this is part of the longer more comprehensive research that we’re doing about this topic because I believe a lot of opportunities exist for us using all these tools, but also a lot of challenges, and our goal is to really zero in on how we can balance between these two, leverage them the most that’s possible but yet not get overwhelmed, not get sidetracked by them.

Susan Bratton: One of the things that I’m noticing is a lot of apps are now pushing content to my phone. So Four Square, Facebook, you know, you start to integrate the social apps onto your Smart Phone and they start pushing data to you and it’s constantly an interrupting situation. I’ve turned a lot of it off but not all of it ‘cause I’m kind of playing with it, you know, trying to get a feel for it all. You’re doing the piece of research now – and I understand that you’re going to deal with whatever is is – but what do you think some of the solutions might be to all of these new social media interrupted kinds of situations?

Pierre Khawand: I think there are a couple of aspects to this problem and a couple aspects to the solution. So one is again back to process and tools. I like tools that integrate many of these feeds into one place and allow me to appropriately organize them so I can focus my attention on the top, lets say, 20 percent…

Susan Bratton: Oh god yeah…

Pierre Khawand: and then, yeah…

Susan Bratton: What are there like, is there is a meta tool out there that organizes all your inbound communications?

Pierre Khawand: Well there are three tools that I really like…

Susan Bratton: Oh great! What are they?

Pierre Khawand: One of them is just an RSS reader…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: so that helps me organize all the blogs and then share what I would like to share. Another one is…

Susan Bratton: Oh wait, stop right there.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: So what do you use Google RSS Reader?

Pierre Khawand: I use Google, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. It seems like the best. So when you say “I share what I like to share” how are you sharing the information that’s coming in on your reader?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, this is something actually not, it’s not as known about, the readers, which is they form a community and they allow you to connect with people and share information and mark a blog entry, share it and everybody else who you’re connected with who is following you on Google Reader can see what you’re sharing. So this way you can have your top 20, 50 friends and colleagues who are knowledgeable and you can be sharing all the cool blog things that you’re reading. It’s more of a social tool. It’s becoming more of a social tool, not just a way to keep up with the subscriptions.

Susan Bratton: So you’re just contributing to the disastrous push content, Pierre. Busted. Okay, so you’re using a blog reader; what else are you using? What kind of other tools…?

Pierre Khawand: The other one that I like and think is effective is social bookmarking. So this would be like Delicious for instance where I can share all the bookmarks. First I can track them for myself…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Pierre Khawand: and tag them in a way that I related to those topics. And then I can share them with people that I want to share them with, but I can also keep them private if I want. But what I really like about it, actually about Delicious is going to their homepage and looking at the hot topics, and it’s like having an instantaneous magazine that tells me what’s the world interested in right now in one page, so giving me that as a glance. But the third tool, which I think is the most useful, even for professionals who social media is their core work, is something like Tweet Deck where I can see, not only I can see all the updates from Twitter, from Linkedin, from Facebook, whatever, you name it, but also I can define my own columns that, I might for instance zero in on the top ten people in the ad space that I’d like to follow and hear from – so I can include Susan and some of the colleagues here at AdTech, and then have a column that just shows me those people. And this way I don’t have to delude their messages by the hundreds or thousands of other Tweets from everybody else. So it really helps focus and watch for certain brands, watch for the things I’m interested in instead of being bombarded by all of this information.

Susan Bratton: So you use Tweet Deck to do this, uh huh. And you’ve set it up so that you have a list of people that you follow in one of your vertical columns, uh huh. And then do you have any kind of a customized search as well, ‘cause that’s what I’ve done? I use a customized search in a column so that I can see all of the things that are coming out just about those keywords that I track.

Pierre Khawand: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: I like that.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, yeah.

Susan Bratton: It’s hard for people to set those up though, you know.

Pierre Khawand: It can be. It can be, and this is where we’re actually making more and more offerings relating to social media to help people, because we can all figure it out but it’s just a matter of time, taking the time, and also…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, somebody should just tell us.

Pierre Khawand: optimizing how we use it, so what I describe right now, we demonstrate this and say “Okay, you know, you’re bombarded by all these feeds; why don’t you set up” and we go through a process. The beginning of this process is knowing who to follow. So we try to get everyone to think about, do some strategic thinking and say “Who would be the top 50 people I really want to know what they’re thinking, what books their reading, what insights they’re giving out, what events they’re attending” and that need to be the center of all of our effort as opposed to having hundreds of thousands of people in our network who aren’t necessarily related to our core values.

Susan Bratton: So different subject; what is the most popular webinar or training program that you offer at People On The Go?

Pierre Khawand: The most popular is managing and organizing your email inbox.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that’s my personal favorite. What’s the second most popular?

Pierre Khawand: The second most popular is the Accomplishing More With Less…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Pierre Khawand: which is available now as webinars.

Susan Bratton: Oh good.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah, and it’s available in Second Life.

Susan Bratton: Is it on demand webinar or do you have to sign up at certain times and do you teach it live every time or is some of it…

Pierre Khawand: It’s live.

Susan Bratton: It is, you do it live?

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: And do you do it and you have other people working for you now that do it too?

Pierre Khawand: Both.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Pierre Khawand: So I do it and I have, we have trainers who do it and it’s one of the fascinating experiences to have people online from all over the country and we’re all connected and experiencing the ah ha’s of how to manage interruptions.

Susan Bratton: Nice! And what’s your fantasy for the growth of People On The Go? Where do you want to take it next and what would be like the perfect clients for you? What business do you want to generate that would be really good for you?

Pierre Khawand: I would like to make this methodology a standard in the business world so that when companies talk about productivity and interruptions they have a common language and individuals and teams have a way to communicate about these issues and a great head start and some guideline into how do we help each other out in this big information overload mess, because it is not an individual problem, I think it’s a collective problem.

Susan Bratton: It is a collective problem.

Pierre Khawand: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: What would be three things that you would add to a corporate culture today to make the biggest impact on the information overload?

Pierre Khawand: Three things…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, if you just had to establish new rules for, new behavioral rules that everyone had to follow between now and, you know, the rest of the year, what would those three things you’d institute?

Pierre Khawand: Okay, I’ll start with two behaviors that I actually seen teams and organizations work on, and they have made breakthroughs. So the first one is to agree among each other how to tell other people that they’re focused. So that, some teams have done it, some organizations and teams done it in a very simple and playful way like having a little sign that says “I’m focused right now” or having a little red flag that they put up and say “I’m focused”. Or some people use IM, which is more efficient for teams that are dispersed. And then having – this is number one – so agreeing that it’s okay for someone to say “I’m focused, and therefore I’m not going to be able to help you or answer your question”, even to their boss, “until I’m done with my focus session.” So that’s number one. Number two is agree on how they escalate issues when issues that are worth escalating come up so that if someone is focused they can still have a way to reach them and interrupt what they’re doing and handle an escalation.

Susan Bratton: What’s a good example?

Pierre Khawand: Like a good example, like a customer urgency. Obviously… Well let me give you two examples. An example where we don’t want to interrupt somebody, an example where we want to interrupt somebody. So a first example is a boss who thinks “Oh, this website looks, this page on the website looks like it’s not following the new guideline” and they pick up the phone, call one of their designers and they immediately want to talk about it. And that’s interruption for the designer, interruption for them, maybe interruption for other people, and it didn’t have to happen be