If you’re not recharging when you’re outside the office, you won’t be productive inside the office. Here’s how to reclaim your downtime.

By Alexa von Tobel

Are your weekends your own?

Think about it. What did you do on Saturday and Sunday? Catch up on emails? Put out a few business fires? Or finally slog through those household errands you didn’t have time to get to during the week?

If you returned to work Monday feeling more ragged than refreshed, you don’t really own your downtime–and that’s a problem.

You already know that taking breaks to refresh your mind is good for creativity and productivity. But I’d be willing to bet that most entrepreneurs have trouble putting this into practice. It starts by reclaiming your downtime. Here are four tips to do just that.

Schedule “me time.”

Me time is different for everyone. But regardless of whether it’s cooking, going to the gym, or relaxing at home with a book, make sure that you’re getting it in. For me, Saturday is my quiet time to kick back with a magazine or get a 10-minute chair massage so I feel like I did something nice for myself. It’s often how I find inspiration. For that reason, Saturday is my free day and I give myself permission to do absolutely nothing.

Set clear expectations.

Being the founder and CEO of LearnVest means people ask a lot of me during the week. I hate saying no and letting them down, but I’ve found saying yes to everyone means saying no to myself and the things I care about. Over time, I’ve learned to say no politely and with sincerity. Recently I had dinner with a few girlfriends. Since I’d said I’d be busy from the outset, no one was upset about the fact they hadn’t seen me in a few weeks. However, if I’d tried to appease them and make plans only to cancel at the last minute, that would have been worse. It’s just important to set expectations, and I do it with everyone from family to friends and even my husband.

Keep separate calendars for work and play.

Even on paper, my professional and home lives stay separate. I use several email accounts and separate calendars so I can see at a glance what my weekend looks like. If I check my personal email and see I have four errands to run, then I’ll know to power through so I meet with some friends. Since my husband and I have limited time and work similar hours, we throw things in each other’s calendar all the time. Again, it’s about setting clear expectations.

Outsource what you hate.

If the weekend rolls around and you find yourself running all these awful errands, try outsourcing them. Personally, I love doing laundry. But it takes up to four hours, which isn’t a good use of my time, especially if I haven’t slept, gone to the gym, or seen family. If you find yourself dreading certain chores, pay someone else to do them and find a way to save money elsewhere, say by bringing your lunch to work. The point is to filter out what you dislike and don’t really enjoy and maximize the things that you do love because, let’s face it, the rest of the week you’re maxed out.

ALEXA VON TOBEL is the founder and CEO of LearnVest.com, the financial-management and lifestyle website. She was recently selected as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs and highlighted in Inc.’s 30 Under 30 list of cool young entrepreneurs.

As state elections draw near, disputes over political yard signs can lead to lessons of free-speech in America’s neighborhoods. Homeowners’ desires to the express their political views by planting yard signs may collide with community association boards’ efforts to preserve their communities’ appearance.

It is important for your community to have reasonable rules about political signs and even more important to have the knowledge and skill to effectively guide the residents and/or an association board through the process of creating, communicating and enforcing community rules.

The courts have found that the right to display a political yard sign in community association-governed property is not protected under free speech rights. Instead, the association’s governing documents as well as city, county and state statutes dictate if yard signs are permissible.

Community association managers are like small town mayors, with the responsibility to be reasonable and fair while upholding rules. If your community has yard sign regulations, make sure they conform to state and local laws and enforce them consistently. A CMCA-certified manager should be knowledgeable of best practices, industry standards and laws affecting political signs. Make sure your community is protected with competent management.

For associations whose covenants don’t currently regulate the display of political signs but are considering it, we urge the following:

• Consult state statute. State law may already regulate such signs.
• Consult local town or county regulations. Some counties regulate the duration and placement of signs.
• Develop a rule that will be effective for your community during next year’s election, which will include a very important presidential election.
• Don’t prohibit signs without exception. The right to express political views during campaign season is dearly held. If your association’s rules are content neutral, reasonable and consistently enforced, there’s less chance of expensive litigation.
• Remind residents of sign rules prior to election season.
• Don’t forcibly remove signs. This is only a last resort, because it will cause hard feelings.
• Approach enforcement in a friendly, neutral manner.

What are you community rules about political signage?

CAMICB sent recertification extension notices this morning to individuals who need to recertify and/or pay their annual service fee by October 1, 2013. You now have until November 1, 2013.  Here are a few helpful links:

• Recertification application
• Recertify online
• Continuing education
• Are you due for recertification?
• Pay your annual service fee
• Recertification requirements
• Continuing education worksheet

A few things to note:

1. It is the responsibility of each CMCA to provide documentation of their 16 hours of continuing education at the time of recertification. CAMICB does not track your CEs. If you took a class with CAI, please log into their website (caionline.org) to print out a certificate of completion.
2. Only courses completed between October 1, 2011 and present will count as continuing education.
3. If you have held an active AMS, PCAM, FL CAM, NV CAM or NAHC-RCM for at least a year, this will satisfy your CMCA continuing education requirement.
4. Credit hours may be earned only for education that meets either of the following criteria: It pertains to community association operations or management and/or it contributes to the professional development of the CMCA.
5. The CMCA Annual Service Fee is $105.00. Oftentimes this fee is confused with CAI’s individual manager membership. Recently, CAI increased the rate of the individual manager membership from $130.00 to $134.00. While CAMICB maintains an affiliate relationship with CAI, we are an independent credentialing body: separately incorporated, governed by an independent Board of Trustees, and guided in the administration of our program by the standards of our accrediting body, the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. We are not a membership organization; we do not collect membership dues. We assess our credential holders an annual maintenance fee which is used to support the development and delivery of our core exam and the operation of our program in accordance with best practices in professional credentialing.

Roland Richardson, Certification Assistant, is happy to assist you with the recertification process. Contact Roland at rrichardson@camicb.org with any questions.

More bills on HOAs expected next year

A Scottsdale man challenged a newly minted law he said would give homeowners associations an advantage over residents — and he won. Read more. (Arizona)

Homeowner Association Feuds Grow Amid Rules And Fees

More and more U.S. homeowners live in community associations, also called homeowners associations or HOAs. Amenity maintenance, development plans, rules and amateur governance can all result in bitter feuding within these groups. Buyers should study the rules before purchasing a home in an association. Owners should learn how to contest a decision if a conflict arises. Read more. (National)

Veteran wins battle to fly U.S., USMC flags outside home

A veteran has won his battle to fly two flags outside of his home. For two months, retired Marine Captain Jim Lowe, 73, has waged a campaign to fly the American flag along with his USMC colors at his Griffin home. The homeowners association at the Sun City retirement community said that covenants only allowed one flag to be displayed outside a home. Read more. (Georgia)

Neighbors fed up with HOA parking rules

A neighborhood parking restriction has homeowners pumping their brakes against their homeowner’s association. Read more. (Texas)

HOA ban on sex offenders leads to lawsuit

A Texas homeowners association is facing a lawsuit that claims it improperly tried to oust a registered sex offender living there. Read more. (Texas)

This is an alert from CAI’s Government and Public Affairs Department:

by Walter Frick

Perhaps no one has done more for the cause of data-driven decision-making in the minds of the public than Nate Silver. His book, The Signal and the Noise, explains the power of statistical modeling to improve our predictions about everything from the weather to sports to the stock market. Data science is the hottest field to be in right now, and Silver is its poster child.

But for most people, the gulf between recognizing the importance of data and actually beginning to analyze it is massive. How do those without extensive training in statistics equip themselves with the skills necessary to thrive (or even just survive) in our age of “big data”?

Last month I had the chance to put that question to Silver, and his answers may surprise you. Far from counseling that everyone must major in statistics, in the edited conversation below he advises students and executives alike to roll up their sleeves — no matter their statistical literacy — and get their hands dirty with data.

HBR: If I’m an average professional or an executive, I’ve read your book, I know this stuff matters and I also know it’s complicated and I can only expect so much. Is there such a thing as kind of a level of statistical literacy that I need to get to? What kind of education do I have to go back and make sure that I have?

Silver: I think the best training is almost always going to be hands on training. In some ways the book is fairly abstract, partly because you’re trying to look at a lot of different fields. You’re trying not to make crazy generalizations across too many spheres.

But my experience is all working with baseball data, or learning game theory because you want to be better at poker, right? Or [you] want to build better election models because you’re curious and you think the current products out there aren’t as strong as they could be. So, getting your hands dirty with the data set is, I think, far and away better than spending too much time doing reading and so forth.

HBR: What about if I’ve read your book and I’m just starting college or a little younger and I’m trying to think actually maybe this statistician/data scientist role is something that I’m interested in? What do I study? How much education do I need? What’s that base for plugging into some of these jobs?

Silver: Again, I think the applied experience is a lot more important than the academic experience. It probably can’t hurt to take a stats class in college.

But it really is something that requires a lot of different parts of your brain. I mean the thing that’s toughest to teach is the intuition for what are big questions to ask. That intellectual curiosity. That bullshit detector for lack of a better term, where you see a data set and you have at least a first approach on how much signal there is there. That can help to make you a lot more efficient.

That stuff is kind of hard to teach through book learning. So it’s by experience. I would be an advocate if you’re going to have an education, then have it be a pretty diverse education so you’re flexing lots of different muscles.

You can learn the technical skills later on, and you’ll be more motivated to learn more of the technical skills when you have some problem you’re trying to solve or some financial incentive to do so. So, I think not specializing too early is important.

HBR: Say you’re at the point where you started playing around with some data. You’re interested, you’re motivated, and now it’s time to actually learn some of those skills just like you talked about. Am I just going and picking up a textbook? Am I trying an online course?

Silver: I mean my path has been kind of sui generis in some ways, right? Probably an online course could work, but I think actually when people are self-taught with occasional guidance, with occasional pushes here and there, that could work well.

An ideal situation is when you’re studying on your own and maybe you have some type of mentor who you talk to now and then. You should be alert that you’re going to make some dumb mistakes at first. And some will take a one-time correction. Others will take a lifetime to learn. But yes, people who are motivated on their own, I think, are always going to do better than people who are fed a diet of things.

HBR: Say an organization brings in a bunch of ‘stat heads’ to use your terminology. Do you silo them in their own department that serves the rest of the company? Or is it important to make sure that every team has someone who has the analytic toolkit to pair with expertise?

Silver: I think you want to integrate it as much as possible. That means that they’re going to have some business skills, too, right? And learn that presenting their work is important. But you need it to be integrated into the fabric of the organization.

You’ve seen this shift in baseball teams, for example, where it used to be that you’d hire an analyst to check that box and have them compartmentalize. That doesn’t accomplish much at all.

HBR: You’ve had obviously some very public experience with the fact that even when the data is good and the model is good, people can push back a lot for various reasons, legitimate and otherwise. Any advice for once you’re in that position, you have a seat at the table, but the other people around the table are really just not buying what you’re selling?

Silver: If you can’t present your ideas to at least a modestly larger audience, then it’s not going to do you very much good. Einstein supposedly said that I don’t trust any physics theory that can’t be explained to a 10-year-old. A lot of times the intuitions behind things aren’t really all that complicated. In Moneyball that on-base percentage is better than batting average looks like ‘OK, well, the goal is to score runs. The first step in scoring runs is getting on base, so let’s have a statistic that measures getting on base instead of just one type of getting on base.’ Not that hard a battle to fight.

Now, if you feel like you’re expressing yourself and getting the gist of something and you’re still not being listened to, then maybe it’s time to change careers. It is the case [that] people who have analytic talent are very much in demand right now across a lot of fields so people can afford to be picky to an extent.

Don’t take a job where you feel bored. If it’s challenging, you feel like you’re growing, you have good internal debates, that’s fine. Some friction can be healthy. But if you feel like you’re not being listened to, then you’re going just want to slit your wrists after too much longer. It’s time to move on.

HBR: What about, from the perspective of an organization or a business, knowing those areas where data is really going to be the key to making good predictions and good decisions versus those areas where it isn’t? Speaking to a lot of start-ups and tech companies, you hear ‘Data can’t tell us anything. The future is so different than the past and we really can’t rely on it at all, so it’s really an intuition game.’

Silver: A lot of times when data isn’t very reliable, intuition isn’t very reliable either. The problem is people see it as an either/or, when it sometimes is both or neither, as well. The question should be how good is a model relative to our spitball, gut-feel approach. And also how much do we know about this problem. There are some issues where you just don’t have a good answer and you have to hedge your risks as a business and not pretend that you’re more certain than you really are.

A lot of private businesses are very reluctant to deal with uncertainty in their outlook. The manager doesn’t want to seem like he’s not sure what he’s doing. And the consultant or the analyst wants to provide information to make the manager feel more confident. That’s quite problematic because a lot of problems that are on the frontier of business, on the frontier of science, [are] by definition fairly challenging ones that no one else has solved.

That’s where having a more humble attitude about what you can accomplish and what you can’t is important. Just because a model is not going to be very precise or accurate doesn’t mean that therefore you should trust your gut instinct after a couple of whiskeys and assume it’s going to be very much better.

Walter Frick is an associate editor at the Harvard Business Review. Follow him on Twitter @wfrick.

HOA Battles Wild Pigs

Driving through the Henry Ranch neighborhood, it looks like a massive landscaping project is underway. The grass at many homes seems to have been rototilled, and piles of dirt lie across walkways. But this is no improvement project. It’s the work of a wild pig wrecking crew that is laying waste to yards, and racking up thousands of dollars of damage on nightly raids. Contra Costa Times (California)

Roadwork Dispute

Dozens of Winget Pond neighbors wanting their roads fixed say they don’t know who owns them, and the developer, the state, and the city aren’t claiming ownership and taking responsibility for maintenance. Neighbors say the streets have been cracked years, but potholes started forming about seven months ago, and that’s what prompted their HOA management company to pursue repairs from the developer.  Charlotte WCNC (North Carolina)

Florida HOA laws

By mid November, all homeowners associations are required to register with the Department of Business and Professional Registration. Attorney Michael Posner said these new rules are similar to ones that already exist for condos and he expects more rules will follow to bring homeowners associations under as much regulation as a condo. West Palm Beach WPTV (Florida)

High Voltage Lines

A couple dozen homeowners’ association leaders met Thursday night as part of the newly-formed West Frisco Homeowners Coalition.  Together, they’re plotting their next move to fight new high-voltage transmission lines and a substation through Frisco. Frisco WFAA (Texas)

CO Residents Pick up the Pieces
Residents in Colorado are facing huge bills and months of work ahead of them after floods ravaged thousands of homes. Even those who bought flood insurance are discovering their policies don’t cover their entire house, such as a finished basement, or lodging and food while they rebuild. The Denver Post (Colorado)

Must-haves for preparing HOA budgets
Condo associations and homeowners associations in the midst of preparing budgets for the next fiscal year need to ensure they include the right items, such as common expenses by category and reserves intended for repairs, lawyer David Bendoff writes. Before the board adopts a proposed budget, residents must receive a copy and be given at least 30 days to review it, Bendoff writes. Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Ill.)

by Roger Schwarz

What does your team do when someone takes a meeting off-track? If your team is like most, the leader says something like, “Lee, that’s not what we’re talking about now” or “Let’s get back on track” or the team simply ignores Lee’s comment and tries to bring the conversation back to the original topic.

But if your team responds in any of these ways, Lee may continue to press his off-track point, the meeting may drag on with members getting more frustrated with Lee, and the team won’t accomplish its meeting goals. Or Lee may stop participating for the rest of the meeting and the team, without realizing it, loses Lee’s critical input and support for implementing a team decision.

If you assume that Lee or others who derail a meeting are the problem and the solution is to get them back on track or stop them from talking, you may also be off-track. These team members’ behaviors are often a symptom of larger team problems. Team members often make off-track comments when there isn’t clear agreement on the meeting’s purpose or process, or when the team doesn’t provide time to hear each team member’s thoughts on a topic. Sometimes the problem is that you think others are off-track when they are not. So how do you handle it?

Agree on the track before going down it. Team members can’t be off-track if the team hasn’t agreed about what track it’s on. If your team doesn’t explicitly agree on the purpose and topic for each part of the meeting, then team members will use their own understanding to decide what is on-track. Because members will naturally have different interpretations, one team member’s comments can easily seem off-track to others.

Start your meeting by saying something like, “My understanding of the purpose of this meeting is X; does anyone have a different understanding, or think we need to add anything?” Even if you called the meeting and set the agenda, this ensures that if people think other issues need to be addressed, they can say so, and have them considered for the agenda, rather than raising them as off-track items. If it’s not your meeting and there is no agenda, simply ask, “Can we take a minute to get clear on the purpose and topics for the meeting to make sure we accomplish what you need?”

Check that others are ready to move down the track. When moving to a new topic, rather than say, “O.K, let’s move on” or simply move on to a new topic, say something like, “I think we’re ready to move to topic Y; anyone have anything else we haven’t fully addressed on X?” If some people aren’t ready to move on, find out what needs to happen before they can move forward. This reduces the chance that people will re-raise issues that you thought had been fully discussed. If your team is staying on track but regularly runs out of time before completing its agenda, then you’re underestimating the amount of time necessary to make high-quality decisions that generate commitment. When you and the team agree on the track and make sure everyone is ready to move on, you are jointly designing next steps, which builds commitment to decisions.

Test your assumption that the meeting is getting derailed. If the team has agreed on the topic to discuss and you still think that someone is off-track, say something like, “Lee, I’m not seeing how your point about outsourcing is related to the topic of our planning process. Help me understand, how are they related?” When Lee responds, you and other team members might learn about a connection between the two topics that you hadn’t considered. For example, Lee might say that outsourcing will free up internal resources so that the team can complete the planning process in less time. If there is a connection, the team can decide whether it makes more sense to explore Lee’s idea now or later. If it turns out that Lee’s comment isn’t related but is still relevant for the team, you can suggest placing it on a future agenda. One caveat: there are times when it is critical to address team members’ issues immediately, even if they are off-track. If team members raise highly emotional issues about how the team is working together, it is important to acknowledge the issue’s importance and then decide whether it is more important to address than the current agenda topic. Sometimes focusing on how the team works together is more critical than focusing on the team’s substantive topics.

This isn’t simply a polite way of dealing with people who are off-track. It’s a way to suspend your assumption that you understand the situation and others don’t, to be curious about others’ views, and to ask people to be accountable for their own contributions so that the team can make an informed choice about how best to move forward. For this approach to work you can’t just say the words; you have to believe that Lee might be on-track and that you don’t see the connection.

By getting explicit agreement about the meeting purpose and topics and by being genuinely curious when people seem off-track, you and your team can move faster and accomplish more in your meetings.

Roger Schwarz is an organizational psychologist, leadership team consultant, and president and CEO of Roger Schwarz & Associates. He is the author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results. For more, visit www.schwarzassociates.com or find him on Twitter @LeadSmarter.

CAMICB and CAI would like to determine how you perceive the CMCA credential and CAI professional designations (the AMS, PCAM and LSM).  Specifically, we’d like to know to what extent you have promoted these credentials in your own career and how we may be able help you do that. We know, of course, that any kind of promotion elevates awareness of and respect for these professional credentials.

With that in mind, we’re asking you to take just five minutes to share your views about the CAMICB and CAI professional credentials you have earned. Just click on the link below to begin.

The information we collect is strictly confidential and will be shared only in aggregate. The survey will close Friday, Oct. 4, so please complete the survey by that time.

>>CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY<< 

Thank you in advance for your candid responses!

By Mark Suster

Here’s how to break through the noise and get busy people to take action when you email them.

We all get a lot of email. And we send off scores of them, too. For important emails, we hope for replies or action.

If you do the math on the number of inbound emails you get multiplied by the time it would take to read them all and respond to those that expect a reply, you would be astounded. It is simply unmanageable.

Yet some simple techniques can help massively improve your ability to get people to take action on your important emails. And they will appreciate it, too.

1. Keep it short and to the point.

Many people ramble in emails. On my most important ones, I spend as much time figuring out what to cut out as I do putting into the writing of it. On email, less is always more. When in doubt, leave it out.

2. State your most important ask up front.

Many people write email without a “call to action” or reason they’re writing the email. Make sure to state yours and if there is no action required, say so upfront, as in “this is for information only — no action required.”

Often emails are complex and require you to list lots of background. If so, it’s still okay to list what your expected action is near the top of the email. For super important emails or key dates people need, I often put these in red and bold. Example: When I send a “save the date” email I often put the event date, location and “reply by” date near the top in red.

3. If there are multiple parts to the email, try to break it up into sections.

When emails get a bit longer due to background info, I often break them up into sections (as I am doing in this post). It’s easier to follow when you have sections as guidelines. It’s also easier for the reader to scan for what they want. If they get your email and see one big wall of long text, often people shrug and move on to the next email (see point 2 again — if you give an action up front and make it bold, they will get hooked in and at least know what you expect).

4. Write to one person at a time.

This is critical and was the reason I sat down to write this post. I often see people write to many people at once asking for help, as in a CEO writing to a board to say, “Can anybody help me with an intro to Google?” or “Can you please review this list of potential next-round investors and give me your feedback?”

Even if people are well-intentioned, they are less likely to respond to a group email. Any sociologist can tell you that.

As Martin Peacock wrote in the comments section, it’s actually “a thing”:

• Bystander      Effect
• Diffusion of Responsibility

Think about it: If you get an email that says, “Hey, Sarah, I wanted to ask for a small bit of help …” or even “Sarah, I’m hosting an event on Feb 17th and I’d like to ask if you could make it,” you feel it’s a personal appeal to you. If you don’t reply, you’re letting down the sender who is seemingly asking you personally, individually and solely.

The minute you send out an email to a group and say, “I was wondering if anybody could help with …,” each person thinks that somebody else is going to help. It’s true that some people will come forward but much less so than if you sent to each member individually.

Trust me — I’ve tried both for years.

The best way to do this is to set up the bulk of your email message as a general message, and create multiple versions of it. You can then add the person’s name to the top and I often add a little personal message to each email at the top and/or change any pertinent emails.

Sure, this takes longer than a group email. So for less important emails I still send to the group. But when it’s really important I craft them individually.

I am soon going to start piloting a software application to help me do this. It’s called ToutApp. I met the founder and saw the demo and loved the functionality/approach.

5. Make your subject line matter.

Subject lines matter as much as the text of tweets or headlines. We are a generation of email scanners. We scan our email headlines to figure out which ones to open. After a couple of days, if we missed your email, it’s likely in email purgatory until you remind us we didn’t respond.

So make your headlines matter and get opened more!

I write things like:

• “super short, time sensitive request”
• “important intro: company a / company b”
• “future of TV roundtable on Feb 17th — almost full. RSVP this      week.”
• “quick question — can you help?”

Or similar. Again, often I don’t care if I have a perfect subject — I just hit send. But when it’s an important email, the subject line is your life line.

6. Time of day matters.

Don’t send an important email on a Friday afternoon unless it requires immediate action. Often I’ll write emails on the weekend and send them first thing Monday morning. I want to be on top of the stack, not at the bottom of the pile. Most people process email first thing in the morning (although productivity experts say not to!).

I’m told ToutApp will let me send the email early but schedule delivery time.

By the way, when I write blog posts on Sundays, I always Tweet again Monday morning for exactly this reason.

7. Rinse and repeat.

When I was younger I cared when people didn’t respond to my emails. I didn’t get as many and I responded to all.

Over the years, I’ve learned that some people are just high-volume and can’t process 100% of email. The more senior people are the more demands, the busier, etc. The older they are, the more out-of-work responsibilities and therefore they’re not likely up until 2 in the morning responding to emails.

So simply send your email again. I like to hit “reply all” and include them so they see that I had sent it before. My goal is not to make them feel guilty. That’s silly. If they’re important that’s the last thing I’d want to do.

I simply say something like, “I know how busy you are. I hope you don’t mind but wanted to resend & put at the top of your inbox” and then I repeat my call to action.

On the third send (after, of course, leaving enough time to not seem like a stalker/pest) I might say, “I hate to keep sending and I really hate to be a nag. Was hoping for just 2 minutes of your time by next Wed to … .”

MARK SUSTER is a two-time entrepreneur who has gone to “the dark side” of venture capital. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a general partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. You can find him on Twitter @msuster.