having fun while doing a great job would be killer, right?

I am normally trying to keep the KC free from consulting mockery, but this one is just too good to pass. This presentation was recently featured on Slideshare. It is a vivid (and hilarious) example of why it is a good idea to leave your consulting / powerpoint skills at work and not take them to your relationship:

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What do we learn from this?

1. When you do fun stuff on your company’s CI, be prepared for it to hit the street eventually. This one is quite old, so no harm done I guess - but your boss might not be amused at all about your version of this that you just thought of. If you have to do it, don’t use a company template.
2. The author did not use the action title correctly at all… but I think we can forgive this
3. When communicating, you have to adapt to the audience. Leave your consulting talk and your ppt slides at work. Your family and your girlfriend will appreciate it (otherwise - see last slide!)

I told you about Jello Dashboard, a nifty tools that plugs into Outlook as an alternative “home screen”, a while ago. Last week, the developer Dr. Uqbar released the new version 4.5 of Jello Dashboard. It is still beta software, and still free.

Pain free GTD implementation in Outlook
While there are ways to model tasks and task views in Outlook so that it gets many GTDish features, it always involves some compromises. For example, I got the context view down, I can see items for review, “+ waiting for” and “+ someday maybe” items get out of my way, and I can sort by context – but still, there is no good way to group contexts by project, which for me is an important feature, and no good way to assign Next Actions, which is a crucial part of GTD.

Jello Dashboard takes the weight off your shoulders. It knows your calendar items. It knows your tasks, and your inbox. After installing it, you can dig right in, create the categories and projects you need, and then work right out of it.

The important thing is: Jello does not tinker with your Outlook. It is basically a (very sophisticated) HTML/JavaScript page that plugs into Outlook. All functionality of Outlook remains the same, your tasks stay where they are, so do your mail and your calendar.

Speaking of my experience, running Jello on Outlook 2007 and Vista, Jello installs easily and can be removed just as quick. Plus, the small community (see the Google Group) is active and the developer is very responsive (he just recently added a feature that allows me to use the “+” in category names after asking for it in the forum), so when you got issues there is support. It is free. It gives you projects, Next Actions and context views just like you wish you had them. Enough reasons to give it a spin, if you ask me. I am doing the same on this side of the internet. I like it so far – maybe struggling with manual implementation in Outlook for a few months made me more accessible for the idea that this could work for me. The killer feature is Outlook integration, for sure, and for this I am ready to forgive minor performance issues (it could be snappier) and wait for a few little kinks to be worked out.

Don’t forget the basics
Remember: Jello Dashboard is a nice tool – but you can only use it to full effect when you are familiar with the basics of GTD methodology.

Have you tried it? Share your experiences in the comments!

There aren’t that many good books about the consulting business out there that focus on the internal perspective – about how consulting feels and works for consultants themselves. There is “FRA-MUC-FRA” (de), already a classic in Germany. There is “Con Tricks”, and all the other books that come to (my) mind are already targeted towards consulting practice and process.

Now, a new book is coming together. It is called “Lores of Wizards”. It is written by Richard and Jon Metzler, both of extensive consulting background – but they do not talk about themselves. Instead, they interviewed with many mavericks of the consulting industry (mostly US focused), and let them speak. The result is very lively, and as I see it, hits close to home.

You can see (and read!) the book grow!
Chapter by chapter, the Metzlers have decided to publish the book online. As of now, you can read the first three chapters, free of charge, right here on the book’s website. I printed them out and read them in one swoop sitting in the garden today. Maybe you want to do the same? You are in for some war stories, some chuckles, and some big truths of our profession. I am sure going to buy the book once it is finished.

Do you have other consulting-related weekend reading tips? Let us know in the comments!

Paul Graham wrote a great essay on good and bad procrastination. I suggest you read it (takes 5 minutes max) and then continue reading, as I am referring to the main idea of it.

“Getting to work on the big things” in consulting needs to be put in perspective, I think. We live by projects, and the big thing seems to be just that: The project you are working on right now. This is, of course, also the expectation of superiors and customers alike – they want your full power and energy on their topic, right now, and they pay you to do so, after all.

As a project leader, you will often already live by the good, C-Type procrastination that Graham proposes: You focus on identifying the clients’ real need, you build and enforce the relationship, you make sure that the project is on track and that the right things are delivered on time. If not – I am not speaking from experience here – you might want to re-evaluate what you are spending your time on, and if this is leading you where you want to be. Your team is there to get the nitty-gritty details. Don’t try to micro-manage. If you spend more time working out hotel deals for your team than thinking about your client, you are procrastinating the wrong way.

As a more junior consultant, the same idea of tackling the big stuff applies. In project reality, compared to the project lead,  the feeling might be quite different. You are remote from the big picture. You are working on a stream in the project, and the world to you often ends at the edge of the Excel sheet you have to build. This, for most junior consultants, is not perceived as a big, exciting, potentially world-changing problem to solve, but more than a task that has to be done. Ok, I am getting sidetracked here – now it is about motivation instead of procrastination? There’s a link: When you are motivated, and have an idea why you do what you do right now apart from “I was told to”, you are much less likely to procrastinate on that issue.

So what can you take from Graham?
The senior – go tackle the big issues. You give your team sense and direction. As I am not in your shoes, I can’t give advise from own experience, sorry.
The junior – Yes, of course. Getting promoted to project lead soon. That’s not what I mean – I’d say, you can get your motivation up by getting yourself a better idea of the overall project, and thus decrease time used for bad procrastination. Use possibilities to see what the other streams are working on. Talk to the project lead over lunch about where he wants to go, and what the end result looks like in his/her opinion. Your ability to let go of what Graham calls “errands” might be limited, but you can, too, defer doing your expenses and replying to non-critical email for a while when cranking on your job. After you have given yourself an idea for why you are doing your task and how it impacts the big picture, chances are you will actually want to take all the time you can for it.

What about distractions?
Now this is a topic big enough for another article Come back soon, it might already be up then.

By the way, I am still crying myself to sleep at night because no-no-no-one has replied to the first KC hive mind yet. I know that there are at LEAST five living people reading this (might be six, have not called them all in a few days to make sure) – so hey, if you are so inclined, make my day and write a comment!

The “hive mind” scheme is something I am borrowing from lifehacker. The idea: Let the readers decide!

Let’s start the KillerConsultant hive mind with a simple, yet important question.
How do you talk about your job as consultant to friends and family? There are a few aspects to that:

How much to reveal?
We are bound to not disclose details of our engagements by contracts, NDA’s and common sense. So what _can_ you tell? Is it ok to say in which city you are? Do you only state the airport you are flying to? When can you reveal a customer’s name – never, or only when the relationship with your consulting firm is published? When it comes to the type of work you are doing, is it ok to say “I am working in a post merger integration / controlling / marketing strategy project”?

How not to bore them to death?
With all those limitations of what you can tell, how to you make it an interesting story, so that your buddies don’t pity you for the lame job you have? (Given that you do not consider consulting a lame job. If you do, I hope the KC gives you some input on how to change that!) Consulting-lingo is another issue here – do you try to eradicate “deliverable”, “slidedeck”, “key-stakeholder” and all this job-specific vocabulary when explaining what you do to people outside consulting?

How to not make yourself look stupid?
I don’t mean that your friends and family assume you are stupid. But watch their face closely when you have been raving about the latest frequent flyer program for ten minutes, or how you hate this and that airport because you never get good rental car upgrades there… you know what I mean? Consultants’ lifestyle seems to disconnect them a bit from the real world, at least it often seems so from the outside. How do you avoid that?

I am looking forward to your approaches to this!
Of course, you do not need to reveal your real name in the comments if you wish to.