20 Things You Can Do In 20 Minutes to Be More Successful at Work

You look at your to-do list and everything seems hard and insanely long-term. Create a five-year strategic plan. Map out the skills your IT organization will need over the next 36 months. Sign that seven-year outsourcing deal.

It's okay. You can admit it. Sometimes it can get a little...overwhelming.

Then there's your schedule. Project updates. Executive team meetings. Vendor visits. Tête-à-têtes with direct reports. E-mail. Presentations. There's just no time to breathe. The thought that you could possibly fit in anything else seems downright laughable.

What you need is a 20-minute miracle.

Of course, most big transformations take a while, but not all changes require a military campaign. There are things you can do in just one-third of an hour that can have a meaningful and, yes, even a long-term, positive effect on your life, your job and your enterprise. You could call a customer; you could downsize (and revolutionize) your weekly meetings; you could try out some Google Apps. We've gathered 20 of the best ideas we could find: quick yet effective tactics that can improve the IT organization, boost your career, add to your technology knowledge, sharpen your management skills and enhance your relationship with the business.

Now all you have to do is free up that first 20 minutes to read this article. Let us know how these work out for you. And tell us about your own ideas for how to accomplish change in 20-minute doses.
This could be the start of something...short.

1. Counterintelligence 101
Grab the annual 10-K reports that your top competitors have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and read the section called "Management's Discussion and Analysis." That's where the CEO (through corporate lawyers) describes what happened to the company in the past year, good and bad.

By scanning that material, you can immediately get a better understanding of the competition, says Mary Lacity, professor of information systems at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "CIOs need to enable business strategies and the CIOs' bosses will certainly be developing strategies vis-a-vis their competitors," Lacity notes.

To buttress what should be an ongoing campaign to elevate your IT work in the eyes of your fellow execs, check out how your top competitors position IT. UPS's latest 10-K mentions technology 32 times. Target, Kohl's, Citigroup and Blockbuster are also known for tech talk in these annual reports. Also, says Lacity, note whether rivals' technology leaders are part of the senior executive team. "If most competitors have their CIO reporting to the CEO," she says, "that might be ammunition for a more prominent role for you."
-Kim S. Nash

2. The Mini-Meeting
If singles have figured out a way to condense that painful first date into eight minutes of intense communication, why not try the same thing with your IT meetings?
Sit down right now and reschedule all your internal IT meetings for just 20 minutes. If that's too radical, do it for the get-togethers happening this week. Or, if you're feeling especially powerful, try it for your interdepartmental meetings.

"There's only about 15 minutes to 30 minutes of true productivity in most meetings, even though meetings are typically set up for an hour," says Michael Hites, CIO of New Mexico State University, who once placed a 30-minute limit on all meetings. "The idea is that it forces you and your meeting buddies to prepare and focus." Hites found that shorter meetings were more effective and left more time to actually accomplish things.

If you like that idea, consider this even more sweeping suggestion from Direct Energy CIO Kumud Kalia: Cancel all recurring meetings with your subordinate staff. "Ask them to come to you with major issues, not every little decision," Kalia advises.
-Stephanie Overby

3. Business Intelligence 201
Take your own company's 10-K and pay attention to the bad stuff that happened in the past year. Think about how technology affects such events, then figure out what you can do about them. For example, in its latest 10-K, Owens Corning, the $6.5 billion maker of construction materials, talks about how the decline in U.S. home building hurt sales. Could better business intelligence have predicted how steeply new construction would fall and have helped Owens prepare?

Think also about how IT can mitigate the scary possibilities cited in the "risk factors" section. Blockbuster notes in its latest 10-K that consolidation in the movie rental industry looms and that some video stores will be forced to close. "If we are unable to capitalize on the store closings of our competitors," the $5.5 billion company's report says, "we may be unable to grow our market share and our financial results may be adversely affected." You can bet Blockbuster's new CIO, Keith Morrow, is thinking about how he can help the company profit from competitor losses.

This 20-minute exercise educates you about the central business issues that your company faces and fights, and what matters to Wall Street. Remember that what Wall Street thinks about your company affects your future and your paycheck.
-K.S.N.