A valuable lesson a business rockstar once taught me
I once had a client tell me at the beginning of our working relationship to “overcommunicate” with her.
I remember thinking, “What? Why?! Do I undercommunicate? Is it even possible to undercommunicate something? Do I talk funny? Do I talk too quiet? Am I speaking Italian right now? WHAT CAN THIS MEAN!?”
Then, in the voice of a more together, intelligent version of myself, I asked her what she meant.
She, being brilliant and incredibly patient with me, explained that she asks everyone who works with her to overcommunicate. The reason being that if we spent more time overcommunicating our thoughts, tasks, and instructions to others, we would also work more efficiently and create better end-products. Of course, asking more questions, too, leads to more learning (which is never a bad thing… just the other day, for example, I learned that vinegar is a great way to clean lipstick off a mirror.)
Working with this client was a DREAM – it came naturally once I got the hang of overcommunicating. And now it’s something I do with my other clients, as well as my whole team.
Here are 3 tools I use to bolster overcommunication in my business:
- Slack. Free! This was actually recommended to me by someone I recently hired. Brilliant! Slack is a great way to remove email clutter and communicate faster with the people on your team. I love Slack and can’t live without it at this point. It also is WAY faster to zero out my inbox.
- Harvest. Cheap! I use Harvest to boost efficiency, but it also gives a lot of transparency between myself and my team when it comes to project budgets, how long it takes to do certain tasks, etc. In the online space, anything you can do to improve communications is a good investment and Harvest comes pretty cheap.
- Highrise. Free! I use this more for just myself, but it’s basically a digital Rolodex of contacts. And for each contact, you can list customized information which is stored on an HTTPS server. Awesome, huh?
