Get Stuff Done — Balance Your Life — Tips from SAP Mentors

SAP Mentors are amazing. They really help to move the needle in the SAP community, influencing or even co-innovating with SAP, all while having a successful career on their own and, as far as I can tell, balancing their busy work schedule with friends and family, too. On top of that, they often find time to give back by volunteering for a cause of their choice.

How do they do it?

Personally I’m struggling a bit with my schedule. I have too many emails in my inbox. This announcement blog post should have been out weeks ago so that it could have been in the SCN announcement cycle, such as on the SCN home page or in newsletters. For years, I’ve wanted to fully implement David Allen’s GTD methodology, but didn’t find the time or, more accurately, didn’t really make time for it.

To procrastinate further, I put together a public SAP Mentor Monday webinar in order to find out:

• What are SAP Mentors doing to be so productive?
• How is work/life balancing really working out for them?

Recording availabe here: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p30ttu00ntu/

Please join us on Monday 30th of September at 1:00 p.m. PST

Participant Passcode: 170 133 7730

SAP Mentor Monday additional dial-in information

We have three main panelists, each of whom will briefly share how they get so much stuff done. As a little teaser, I asked each of them to share one tip before the webinar.

Thomas Jung Jung was recently the presenter at the super-successful HANA development MOOC. For many years, he was the top contributor to SCN in the ABAP space and seemed to make presentations all over the world on an almost weekly basis. He once admitted to get up at 4:00 in the morning, because that’s when there was the most action on SCN’s ABAP and BSP forums.

His tip: Take screenshots of what you do for later reuse. I take screen shots all day long and use Camtasia SnagIt to automatically catalog them by date. It’s not just useful for blogging, but I often find myself going back for all kinds of reasons. It’s almost like a journal of what I was working on.

Tammy Powlas seem to be everywhere on SCN as well as SAP and ASUG conference presentations. During this week’s SAP Mentor Monday, she ran another session where she shared her BI expertise.

Her tip, which she learned years ago from a book called How To Stop Worrying and Start Living: “Create a list of things to do today,” ideally the night before. She herself does it the first thing in the morning and then crosses off completed items.

Jon Reed shifted his career path on the fly a number of times. At one point he ran an SAP recruiting firm. Now he’s a successful blogger and ERP analyst with video taking on a key role. He credits a creative approach to time management with making these shifts.. Jon has the amazing ability to stay levelheaded when the emotions run high within the SAP Mentors and brings us forward.

He went beyond the call of duty and gave 3 tips, 2 I am sharing here: Using Dropbox (or similar tools) to sync content across devices (you want to have an “I can work from anywhere mentality.

Protect your ability to unplug to get key deliverables done–use filtering tactics to have “degrees of unpluggability,” from “fully available,” to “available to key clients/employer only,” to “family/emergencies only.” Use additional email addresses, alerts, or apps to improve such filtering rather than defaulting all your emails to one device you can’t turn off when you are awake.

Really looking forward to the upcoming SAP Mentor Monday webinar. I am convinced that one of the keys to a happy life is the satisfaction of making a difference, even if it is a small one. These tips help us all to go from thinking about solutions to actually implementing them.

Even before the webinar, it would be awesome if you would use the comments section to share one tip that really helps you to get stuff done.May be I get to inbox zero one day too.