The Simple Tools of Control

By Sam Carpenter

In Western culture, the word “control” has an undeserved bad rap.  It conjures up the image of a type A personality gone wild with power, who, headed down the road of personal self-destruction, cuts wide swaths of anxiety among all those encountered.  “Control freak” is a term that often surfaces.  But if hyper-control is a bad thing, do we want the opposite, to be out of control?  Like everything else, moderation is the key.  In truth, most people don’t spend enough time focusing on the methodology of control.  There is a science and an art to it.

In your answering service and in your personal life, if you’re ready to devote some energy and time to seizing control of your day, let’s get technical.  Center your efforts around three primary tools: a digital voice recorder, Microsoft Outlook, and a cellular phone.  Of course, none of these tools are new, and they stand on their own in terms of their usefulness.  However, when one combines them a new and powerful sense of control is found.  These tools are about the following:

• Having a goal-oriented, consistent strategy of communication with others as well as yourself. 

• Having efficient systems to accomplish all necessary tasks and completing them promptly.

• Not suffering ineffectiveness due to actions not taken.  Most of our failures stem from what falls through the cracks, not from overt mistakes.

These tools are about event control.  Think of the mind as an endless filmstrip spewing out a stream of thoughts rushing downhill with no rhyme or reason.  How do you trap the good ideas and slow down the incessant mind-noise?  Very simple: Carry a digital voice recorder.  When an idea worth remembering appears, pull out the recorder and record the thought.  Then forget it and move on, leaving your mind with one less bit of clutter.

For me, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing – I capture the thought, and my mind is free to move on.  There is nothing more to ponder in the moment and nothing to remember later.  Daily, I review the recordings of the past twenty-four hours, transcribing them into the appropriate Microsoft Outlook task, calendar, or contact list.  Once transcribed, the thought has permanence and action will be taken.

Microsoft Outlook, my second efficiency tool, has enormous timesaving advantages over the classic paper-based day planner that I lugged around for years.  Synchronizing Outlook with my PDA once a day, all information is at my fingertips no matter where I am.  As a manager, Outlook’s most vital feature is the task list.  (Hint: designate each manager as a “category,” thus centralizing each manager’s various tasks in order to better engender concise and quick “sit-downs” to review progress on various tasks.)  Outlook’s appointment calendar and contact information features are also vital.  Keep them up to date – and use them.

One habit that remains from my former paper-based planner routine is my early morning “planning and solitude session.”  In the quiet of dawn, it’s time to download the voice recorder information into Outlook and then review the tasks for the day.  This session is the day’s most significant act of personal control.

The third efficiency component is the cell phone.  The key understanding here is that a telephone number doesn’t represent a place; it represents a person.  After all, people aren’t looking for the place where Sam is located; they’re looking for Sam.  However, this fact of life can lead to a day of unending disruption.

Everyone has a cell phone, but because most people use it improperly, it’s often a source of anxiety and a time-waster.  This means that the cell phone’s best feature is its on/off switch.  The primary purpose of my cell phone is to make calls – not to receive them – and so my phone spends a large part of the day turned off as I divert incoming calls to voicemail.  This way I can focus on immediate tasks without interruption.  I’ll call people back later when I am in “callback” mode. 

That’s it, three communication tools to seize control of the day.  If you can muster the necessary self-discipline and patience to work out the details of how the tools interface with each other to suit your own style, you will experience significantly more control and peace in your day.

Epilogue: Last year I combined these three tools into a single combination tool (i.e., the Blackberry).  I immediately hated it and went back to using three separate tools.  The added “benefit” of having email readily available was a distraction because there was a subtle (and sinister) prodding to check messages in every spare moment.

Sam Carpenter is president of Centratel in Bend, Oregon.      [download issue]