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power points

Also in this week's compendium: Improving your e-mails, digging deeper on customer complaints, and a call for a five-hour day to improve knowledge worker productivity

Imagine your life as a four-burner stove. The first burner represents your family. The second burner is your friends. The third burner is your health.

The fourth burner is your work.

According to the four-burners theory, success requires cutting off one of your burners. To be really successful you have to cut off two.

It's not quite clear where the theory originated but human behaviour coach James Clear revived it recently on his blog, recalling how his initial instinct was to search for a way to bypass the dictum. Perhaps he could combine two burners, he thought, lumping friends and family into one category or get a standing desk to combine health and work.

"Soon I realized I was inventing these workarounds because I didn't want to face the real issue: Life is filled with tradeoffs. If you want to excel in your work and in your marriage, then your friends and your health may have to suffer. If you want to be healthy and succeed as a parent, then you might be forced to dial back your career ambitions. Of course, you are free to divide your time equally among all four burners, but you have to accept that you will never reach your full potential in any given area," he writes.

You have a choice: An unbalanced life, but high performing in a certain area, or a balanced life, but never realizing your potential in a given burner or two. Going deeper, he suggests you could:

· Outsource burners: You outsource aspects of your life all the time, from buying fast food to avoiding cooking or letting the dry cleaner handle laundry. "Outsourcing small portions of your life allows you to save time and spend it elsewhere. Can you apply the same idea to one quadrant of your life and free up time to focus on the other three burners?" he asks.

· Embrace constraints: Figure out how to make the most of the limitations rather than endlessly worrying about time pressures. He notes that this means accepting that you are operating at less than your full potential. Ask questions like: Assuming I can only work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., how can I make the most money possible? Or: Assuming I can only exercise three hours each week, how can I get in the best shape possible?

· Accept the seasons of life: Break your life into seasons, recognizing the importance of your burners may change throughout life. "Maybe you need to let go of something for this season. You can do it all in a lifetime, but not at the same damn time," he writes. For the last five years, he has been in his entrepreneurship season. He built a successful business, but that involved turning his friends burner down considerably and his family burner halfway.

"Everyone has constraints on their time and energy. Every choice has a cost.

Which burners have you cut off?" he concludes.

Breaking some bad e-mail habits

We don't think much about e-mails, at least beyond the content (and sometimes not enough about that). We receive, respond, and send, on and on and on, throughout the day, at our desk, in coffee shops, waiting in line at the grocery store, and while watching television or our kid's baseball game.

Bad habits inevitably creep in. And they remain because as communications consultant Ben Decker notes, it's hard to change habits with something we do so frequently. Here are some tips he feels will help get people to pay more attention to your missives – and respond:

· Put the bottom line at the top. Don't start with a long preamble. Right at the start, indicate the main point. "Cut to the chase. Then elaborate. Think like a journalist – don't bury the lede," he writes on his blog.

· Share personality in your e-mail. Antiseptic e-mails don't engage the recipient. Add a casual touch so people feel they you are talking to them. He says that will encourage them to keep reading and improve your results from the message.

· Use what he calls SHARPS: Stories, humour, analogies, references/quotes (in the text or signature line) and pictures/visuals. They help to make your message stick.

· Use the subject line to get their attention, rather than offering or repeating a tired phrase. Include due dates in the subject line, or required actions. Change the subject line when the e-mail veers into a sub-topic or new direction entirely – you have heard this before, but how often do you do it?

· And finally, before you send, check for typos. Those typos can confuse – or send a less-than-flattering impression about your commitment to quality.

Explore the hidden agendas in complaints

Ignored complaints fester, says leadership coach Dan Rockwell. There is no "make it go better" fairy. You have to do the healing yourself, uncovering the real dissatisfaction behind complaints about your product or service.

That involves establishing the intent the other party has for the complaint conversation. "Don't have conversations when intentions are undeclared, obscure, or unknown. If they don't know what they want, have them come back when they do," he writes on his blog. He also suggests asking:

- If we could go back, what should have happened to prevent this problem?

- What would you like me to do about this? He stresses that doesn't mean you'll follow the complainer's prescription. But it allows a conversation about solutions to begin.

- What needs to happen for you to feel good, when our conversation is over in 20 minutes?

- If you don't mind me asking, "What makes you care about this?" That allows you to probe assumptions and values since nagging issues intensify with time.

Quick hits

- Henry Ford changed the world when he brought in the eight-hour workday. Entrepreneur Stephen Aarstol says to make knowledge workers more productive, we need a five-hour workday. That's less heretical than it seems, if you accept, as he points out, that workers are only doing two to three hours of real work a day, even if they clock an average of 9.4 hours. Shortening the workday will encourage greater productivity.

- Giving advice is rarely as useful as listening, says leadership coach Suzi McAlpine. It's never as powerful as a great questions.

- Psychiatrist and consultant Mark Goulston says to deal better with the negative people around you identify the negative qualities that drive you bonkers and then think of what the opposite of those traits would be. Now start acting as if those individuals were acting in that positive manner.

- When you apologize, consultant Mindy Mackenzie urges you to actually say, "I am sorry," while making eye contact if possible. Acknowledge the error with these words: "I was wrong … but more importantly you were right." Ask humbly, "How can I fix this?"

- Hire people who not only fit your culture, but also believe in your mission and are not afraid to speak up if they have a great idea, says Jenny Duvalier, executive vice-president of ARM Holdings, which placed number seven on the UK's Best Place To Work list.

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