Humbert

At the top right of my business blog, WorkIzWar, the first thing that you see is a hamster. His name is Humbert. Humbert has a little wheel to run on, a water bottle to drink from, and you can feed him food pellets. In fact, he will follow your mouse around, watching and waiting for you to do so. Right above his head are these words: 'Waste time with Humbert?'

A digital hamster might seem like a frivolous, even juvenile, thing to include on a business blog, but he serves a very important purpose. During the course of our days, we all come across Humberts. Sometimes they are people who like to chat about non-work issues, or work issues that were decided a long time ago. Sometimes they are tasks that are urgent (just like Humbert, they want to be fed), but not important. Often, they are simply busy work that we do to put off tackling difficult or unpleasant tasks.

All of them prevent forward movement - what I like to call momentum. And all of them are career-killers. Some of them are even business-killers.

Do yourself a favor. Get out a piece of paper. Draw a line down the center, so that you have 2 columns. On the left side, write down everything that you do or become engaged in - every conversation, every phone call, email, task... literally everything that you do today. At the end of the day, in the right-hand column, put an 'X' for everything that's a 'Humbert'. It's easy to define: Did the activity or conversation move you forward? No? Then it's a Humbert.

Do this for the rest of your week. Look how many Humberts there are! If you're like most people, at least a third of what you do is no more helpful to you, your career, and or organization than feeding an imaginary hamster! Who has that kind of time to waste?

Humbert does. And he'll always be right there, waiting patiently for you to come back.

(Update: Humbert died of neglect because so many of you took this article and applied it. Good for you! So we've procured a new hamster named Harry to continue to confound and distract you. Good luck.)

The (Lack of) Persistance of Memory

The human brain is an amazing organ. Despite our current technological expertise, it has yet to be equaled in terms of computing power per ounce, but it does have something in common with the hard drive on your computer:

Every time that you remember something, your brain re-commits it to memory, effectively playing post office with itself and fundamentally changing the memory. This has such a profound effect on your perceptions that it's actually possible to create memories of events that never happened, so vivid that your brain can't tell the difference.

Aside from how disturbing this is when applied to the idea of 'eyewitness testimony' at a trial, this has potentially destructive implications for your business. Even Customer Service and Salespeople that are 'young and sharp' remember things differently than they actually occurred.

How do you combat this? By making it part of your organization's culture to record everything in your CRM or database as soon as it happens (while it's happening, if possible, so that even the wording used is retained). If it was a phone conversation, record those and attach them to Customer accounts (in my call center experience, 95% of Customers remember a phone conversation differently than what actually occurred). If it was an email chain, make certain that those are attached to the Customer account, too.

The essential ingredient here is urgency. If a rep or anyone else who has direct communication with Customers is slow to record those communications, curb this behavior immediately. The longer anyone waits, the more that will become your culture, and the less accurate the information in your database will be. And then why are you spending so much money for it?