Did you know in 2009, we’ll spend over 41% of our time managing emails? Corporate users send and receive an average of a 133 email messages a day.  There are over 701 million corporate mail boxes worldwide.  In the next 4 years, enterprises will spend close to $17 billion on just organizing email software, on cleaning up, on categorizing, on making email interaction useful. Enterprise email by the way cost an average of about $440 per user per year.  For many, email has become a daily “pruning” task.

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The World Economic Forum has announced 34 visionary companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2009 for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest calibre, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society.

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Typically between Thanksgiving and the 1st week in January, most People (buyers, clients) mentally check out, or generally are not interested in any new discussions, initiatives, campaigns, etc.  So, as a professional services provider, unless you’re trying to wrap up existing opportunities, here are some ideas for productivity:

1. Update your marketing – start with your stale website, archive the old press releases, newsletters, blogs, etc.  Enhance your online press kit with new reference letters, updated PDF downloads, engage in article marketing best practices, and for the love of GOD, please get some new professional headshots!

2. Update your writing – finish that book proposal that’s been in your head for the past six months, the white papers you’ve been meaning to write or the articles for your article marketing strategy.  BTW – find someway to keep investing in yourself with a new training course, new coaching or mentoring.  Raise the bar on your intellectual horsepower, command of the English language or your sense of personal and professional etiquette.

3. Update your contacts – not via some half-baked automated and often annoying email system that makes me do the work, but rather personal phone calls to touch base, send highly personalized holiday greetings, and express your appreciation of their friendship and business from the heart!

4. Update your portfolio of relationships – given the festive nature of the holidays, what better time to reconnect, reengage, remember, and reward key members in your most valuable asset – your portfolio of relationships.  This is also a great time to deprioritize those you’ve invested in who candidly don’t get that reciprocity is a built-in law of relationships!  Amazing how many people keep calling me to support their job search efforts, whom I haven’t heard from in 3 years!

5. Update your quality of life – spend quality, uninterrupted time with your loved ones, reconnect with old friends, meet friends often for a “mint mocha half decaf not so hot with a twist,” turn off the Blackberry and the iPhone and listen to Mannheim Steamroller Christmas.  Instead of buying a Christmas tree this year, go out with the kids and cut one, go see The Nutcracker, or throw a cookie party!
 
Bonus – Plan to get “scrappy” in January.  Given the current economic conditions, most people will get heads down and butt up a lot faster (I’m thinking January 2nd vs. say after the MLK holiday in years past).  Use this slow time to really plan your goals, key strategies to obtain them, objectives to executing each strategy and the tactics you’ll take on a daily basis (GSOT).

What are you doing during the holiday slowdown?

We recently enhanced our email newsletter distribution system in an attempt to further focus the value we provide to our broad base of constituents based on their individual and often unique preferences. 

Many Fortune 500 companies can’t get this right, so I was amazed at some of our findings:

1. On the positive side, many of the 40,000+ recipients not only opened our newsletter, but read the content, found it of interest and value, and even forwarded a number of items to others – see article on the value of social networking at work
2. Why do I need to know you’re out of the office and won’t be back until next Tuesday at 12:28 AM?!?  We all get way too many emails, and I’m convinced this is one we can do without.
3. The referral to others while you’re out was interesting, if not amusing – “here are 28 different names and numbers for you to contact if you want any of these 117 items on the menu of what I do each day.  By the way, I’ve stepped away for a bio break for 00:02 minutes.”

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There are three types of relationships:

• Personal – These are your friends (golf buddies, neighbors, parents at kid’s school, etc.); they like your warts and all and you choose them, making them rather safe.
• Functional – These are people you work with to perform your job or realm of responsibilities.  You build relationships with them, often because you have to (colleagues, customers, suppliers, etc.). You don’t necessarily choose all of them, but because of the context of your relationship, likewise they feel fairly safe.

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Increasingly, I find myself working on various speaking, training and consulting engagements in Canada. During a recent dialogue with some colleagues and clients there, I asked about the health of their economy. One of the most interesting responses I heard was, “Unlike in the U.S., our media is not trying to drive us into a recession.”

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