Have an In-Demand Restaurant Table, Achieve 2 Percent, Write Shorter and More July-August Tips for Print Pros

CUSTOMER APPRECIATION Best Seat in the House

Do you live in a city that has a restaurant where it’s almost impossible to get a reservation? Impress your customers by booking a table (better yet, a prime table at the prime time of the night). You can do it far in advance. You can do it every week. Then give the reservations to a customer who makes a big order from you.

OPERATIONS Clear to Neutral

When you enter a kitchen and find the sink piled high with dishes, you’re less likely to want to dive into cooking the day’s meal. The same applies to the workshop when tools and materials are scattered around, or even your office when you have to clear a pile of stuff off your desk to start working. Enter the idea of “clearing to neutral” — a ritual where “whenever you finish an activity, you [move] everything so [it] is in neutral position.” According to Thanh Pham, at the blog Asian Efficiency, when you return to such an environment, it eliminates all of the friction — both physical and mental — and you can quickly get started with what you need to accomplish.

COMMUNICATIONS Shorten Your Emails

Email is great, at least compared to what came before it. But it still takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it. The solution? Treat all email responses like tweets, but with a set limit of five sentences, web designer Mike Davidson told Entrepreneur magazine. Add the rationale in your signature — that your policy is designed to save everyone time — and you may find everyone in your email circle getting to the point faster.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

HIRING Ask What They Admire

In the sci-fi novel Engines of God, the codebreaker Maggie Tufu says, “Tell me what a person admires, and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.” It’s profound and true, and a great interview question the next time you’re hiring.

PRODUCTIVITY The 2 Percent

Can you achieve 2 percent of your goals for the year in the next week? Yes, it doesn’t seem much time, but that’s how the math breaks down. It’s too often fairly easy to punt a week — but when you think of it as 2 percent of a year — it changes the calculus a bit.

MANAGEMENT Institute a Progress Ritual

One of the biggest problems with being the boss is that few people will give you direct feedback on your performance or offer kind words to inspire you when things get difficult. And yet studies show that the single biggest motivator of performance is the feeling of making progress in a meaningful task. But if your underlings aren’t likely to do that, you have to go out and find the feedback yourself. And the best way to do that, says business author Dan Pink, is to establish a progress ritual. “At the end of every day, take just 60 seconds to record and memorialize what progress you made that day.” You may well be pleasantly surprised by just how much you get done.

OPERATIONS Meetings On Hold

Feeling like your meetings just aren’t that productive? Hold a moratorium for a week or month or however long and look for alternative ways to disseminate the information. Make a note for when things aren’t being communicated well and then reintroduce meetings for those instances.

BE GOOD TO YOURSELF Moving Forward With Positive Action

If you’re like a lot of hard-driving business owners, July can be a time you may feel some unease about what you’ve accomplished so far in 2024. But cut yourself some slack. Studies show that counterintuitively, the more we forgive ourselves our lapses and perceived shortcomings, the more likely we are to move forward with positive action. “Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you,” notes the productivity guru David Allen in Getting Things Done. “Responding inappropriately to your projects, your staff, your unread emails, your thoughts about what you need to do, will lead to less effective results than you’d like.” Instead, he advocates trying to bring a calm equilibrium to your life and focusing on the process required to get tasks done.