by Eileen Roth
You may have heard of biorhythms, the daily cycle of chemical secretions in the body that determines everything from mood to energy levels, alertness, body temperature, and your sleep patterns every single day. People are rhythmic animals but everyone is different. Combine individual biochemistry with personality and past experience, and you get infinite variations on daily peaks and valleys. The highest performers are those who work and live in synch with their own personal ebbs and flows. So get into the rhythm. Get in touch with the groove of your sleep, peak, and pace times.
Sleeping
Start with the basics: The only way to make the most of your waking hours is to get enough sleep. You may not have expected a book on getting organized to address your zzz’s and dreams, but science has assessed the productivity price of sleep deprivation, and it is steep! Sleeping more can help you be better organized, while getting your act together can also leave more time for sleep. Ahh.
The problem is that we’re so used to shortchanging ourselves on sleep that few people have any clue what their natural rhythms are. To discover yours, consider how you usually wake up in the morning — before the alarm, or only when it rings? If an alarm is required to wake you up, go to bed a half hour earlier tonight to see if you need more sleep. Keep pushing your bedtime back by half-hour intervals until you wake up before the buzzer goes off. If instead you usually awaken before the alarm, try setting it for a half hour earlier or going to bed a half hour later. Keep adjusting in 30-minute increments until you sleep through to the bell. In either case, you’re now within a half hour of the amount of sleep you naturally need.
Feeling your best: Peak
Your peaks are the times you feel best during the day — energetic, creative, clear. If you tend to crawl out of bed and drag all morning long but perk up after lunch, you’re an afternoon person. P.M. is your peak time. If, on the other hand, you get out of bed or arrive at the office raring to go, you have the rhythms of a morning or A.M. person. Many people have more than one peak. You may shine in both midmorning and late afternoon.
Identifying your peaks is important, because this is when you can really get stuff done. Your peak is the time to take on the hardest projects. Invent the better mousetrap. Make key sales calls, redesign the kitchen, or write the big report.
One of the best ways to leverage the power of peak time is to schedule a chunk of time each day, often known as the quiet hour, to devote to important projects. Clear your calendar of meetings and close the door. Forward the phones or have your assistant tell callers you’re in a meeting. Alert your staff that you’re unavailable for everything but fire alarms. Now go for the flow and see if you don’t accomplish as much in an hour of peak quiet time as you do the rest of the day.
Analyzing your pace
Are you a tortoise or a hare? Everyone has different work speeds and though neither slow nor fast is better, knowing your natural pace can help you schedule your time for best performance.
The tortoise: Moving ahead at a slow-and-steady pace, the tortoise is a highly focused person. You probably prefer to work on one project at a time and complete it before starting another. Multiple projects and too many close deadlines may stress you out. You have an awesome attention span.
The hare: The hare runs in short bursts, taking breaks and jumping from one thing to another along the way. Enthusiastic, good under pressure, perhaps creative, the hare is a chunk person who needs to schedule plenty of changes of scenery for a productive day, and may need some structure and deadlines to stay on track and see things through to completion.
You know the fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare? In my version, they both reach the finish line at the same time because they work with their own natural rhythms.
Imagine two people, a tortoise-type and a hare-type, both have three projects to complete in their daily quiet hour. It’s Monday, and all three projects are due on Thursday. Table 18-2 shows you how both people could best use their pace to reach their goal.
Table 18-2The Tortoise and the Hare: Three Projects in Three Hours Day Tortoise Hare
Monday Project A, 60 minutes Project A, 20 minutes
Project B, 20 minutes
Project C, 20 minutes
Tuesday Project B, 60 minutes Project B, 20 minutes
Project A, 20 minutes
Project C, 20 minutes
Wednesday Project C, 60 minutes Project C, 20 minutes
Project B, 20 minutes
Project A, 20 minutes
Thursday Submit Projects A, B, and C Submit Projects A, B, and C
Both the hare and the tortoise reached the goal at the same time, but how they got there was totally different. The tortoise completed each project before tackling the next, while the hare broke them up into chunks and juggled the order so each quiet hour session was different. By knowing their rhythms, they used their own pace to get to the same place. Get to know your pace, and you can P-L-A-N accordingly.
The thoroughbred: While you’re in the animal kingdom, let me mention a master of pace: the thoroughbred racehorse. Trained to vary its pace depending upon its place and how much of the race has been run, a thoroughbred combines the best of focus and chunk performance styles. There’s an animal to emulate!
To tap the power of thoroughbred pacing for yourself, strive to adjust your pace to suit the current requirements of the project. Is this a time to work fast and furiously, or is slow and steady the way to go? During the long midstretch, try mixing the two performance styles. As a big deadline draws near, allot smaller chunks of time to other items on your To Do List and reserve peak time for this top priority. Remember that racehorses are highly trained—not just to run fast, but to match their pace to the needs of the race.
Routines
A routine is a standard sequence, a set of unchanging steps. Routines are an efficient way to accomplish repeated tasks, and the more you can standardize things you do over and over, from filing a certain report (create standard headings) to cooking dinner (do all your chopping first), the more time you can save. With the right routines, you can get more done while thinking about it less.
You don’t need to think much when following a routine. So when do you suppose you should tackle routine tasks? That’s right: off-peak time. To make the most of your rhythms, do routine jobs during those minutes or hours when your mind’s on autopilot and your energy level has dropped through the floor. Before you know it, the simple reward of getting something done can wake you up and send you toward another peak.
Routines are relative. Everyone has different experience and skills, so while cooking dinner may be a routine for you, making a meal can be a new challenge for a kitchen neophyte. Table 18-3 lists some common repeated tasks, from daily to once or twice a year. Look over these tasks and assess whether they’re routine for you and if you can improve upon your routine by streamlining the steps. If you make one small change now, the cumulative time-saving effect can be huge by the end of the month or year.
Table 18-3The Routine Breakdown Daily Weekly Seasonal/Annual
Sort and read mail Cleaning Spring/fall clothes
cleaning and rotation
Sort and read e-mail Shopping Wash windows
Make copies Garbage removal Polish silver
Send faxes Laundry Clean china cabinet/buffet
Phone calls Clean upholstery and carpets
Data entry Family portraits
Filling out forms Purge toys
Everyday cooking Car: wax, oil change, tune-up,
rotate tires
Personal
Cleaning up today’s projects and creating tomorrow’s To Do List are two important routines that you should complete at the end of every day. Just these two daily steps can help you maintain your organization for life.
Putting rhythms and routines to work: Priorities
After you have your rhythms and routines down, prioritize. A priority is
a grade of importance plus urgency that determines when you tackle tasks. Here are two ways to assign priorities to your lists:
Numeric rank: The most thorough prioritizing system is a numeric rank. You hardly want to rank every item on your Master List every night as you prepare tomorrow’s To Do List. But if you already have a rough, priority-based idea of the five to ten items you want to accomplish, simply write them in priority order, ranked from number one to the end.
A-B-C: If you prefer not to sweat the small distinctions between priorities, try the simpler A-B-C system for ordering tasks:
•A: High priority
•B: Medium priority
•C: Low priority (but it still needs doing or should get crossed off the list!)
The A-B-C system provides a nice code for your To Do List, so you can see at a glance the grade that you assigned to this task. Is it right for right now?
Priorities don’t dictate the order in which you should tackle tasks, but they do determine when. You can probably guess that you don’t just go one to ten, or A to C from the beginning to the end of the day. Match the priority to the productivity of the time slot, for example:
Peak time: A’s, possibly some B’s, and number one to three priorities
Off-peak time: B’s, C’s, and lower priorities such as eight to ten.
Crises can be often averted by the planning techniques discussed in this chapter. For unavoidable surprises — the delayed flight, the upper-management fight, the computer crash — you need a Plan B with options to cover things that may go wrong.
Calendars: Rhythms and routines meet lists
So you prioritized your To Do List according to your rhythms and routines. Now you have to juggle those tasks with commitments from meetings to mom-and-me groups, from doctor’s appointments to dinner parties, from baseball games to business lunches. This is where your calendar comes in.
The rule of one
Use one planner/organizer to handle all your commitments, business and personal. Otherwise, you’re likely to miss a morning meeting that’s not at the office or arrive late at your daughter’s afternoon tennis game.
Paper, electronic, or both?
Software products have revolutionized the idea of the electronic organizer by making planning programs mobile. Handheld organizers can stand alone or hot-sync with the calendar program on your desktop computer, and then slip into a purse or pocket for anytime access. Cool. In addition to search-and-sort capabilities, you can set these up to sound alarms, issue reminders, dial the phone, receive e-mail, or access the Internet, all from the palm of your hand. Brands such as Palm Pilot, Casio, Hewlett-Packard, Jornada, and Royal daVinci are on the market as this book goes to press. You get the same functionality but lose the portability by using one of the many computer calendar programs all by itself.
Still, old-fashioned paper has plenty of pluses when it comes to your calendar. First of all, if you’re simply not tech-savvy, an electronic organizer can stand between you and your schedule instead of making you more efficient. Visual people often do better with paper, which allows you to see time and lists in a layout rather than as individual items. Paper also makes switching from week to week and month to month easier to plan activities in advance. For this reason, corporate VPs and CEOs who travel and do strategic planning may prefer paper so they can see an entire quarter or year at a time. Speakers, trainers, and meeting planners often need to book events months in advance and need to quickly check two or three dates to decide which one is best. Paper takes the cake here.
You can have the best of both worlds by using a computer program that offers all the advantages of technology but can also print out a paper copy to put in your organizer for portability or easy reference. The drawback is that you have to reprint every time you make a change on the computer, and any additions or changes you make on the paper copy have to be input into the program to keep it up-to-date. If paper is your primary reference point, an electronic-to-paper organizer can become double work fast.
Reading through the rest of this section, which further explores the possibilities of paper formats, may help you decide about the digital divide.
Matching the type to the traffic
Choose from a monthly, weekly, or daily planner depending upon how many commitments you juggle and how you like to view them.
Monthly calendar may be just right if your dates are mostly occasional — doctor’s appointments, lunch or dinner invites, birthday parties, holidays. Retirees and nonworking moms of young kids are examples of monthly calendar candidates.
Weekly is what you want as things become regular — Scout meetings or staff meetings, client outreach, Friday night get-togethers with friends. Many sole proprietors or consultants like to use a weekly calendar because that’s how they bid out and block their time.
Daily is the bread-and-butter format for busy people. If you delegate or receive assignments, track the activities of several children with diverse interests, handle a daily roster of client calls, or drive your self-owned business forward on a daily basis, schedule one day at a time to facilitate 24-hour flow.
No matter what format you choose, you want to be able to see a month at a time to anticipate traffic jams and competing commitments. Add monthly pages to your calendar so you can take this bird’s-eye view.
Exploring your options
These days, buying an organizer is nearly as complicated as buying a car. Decide on the features that can bring you up to speed. This overview of organizer options can help.
Size: Just as a compact car maneuvers easily and can park in the tiniest of spaces, a small, pocket-size organizer provides a portability advantage that allows you to tote it anywhere without hassle. But if you have a big family, you know it takes a van or SUV to hold everything you need, and so it goes with planners. If you have many appointments or use the extra sections and features, 81/2-x-11 may be the size for you. There are several sizes in between too.
Fillers and sections: Add-ons are available such as address/telephone, year-at-a-glance, telephone log, expense record, project planner, notes, goals, maps, reference information, and various clear pockets sized and divided to hold business cards, stamps, and so on. Choose what you can really use, but remember that the more you put in your planner, the bigger and bulkier the results.
Spiral or rings: I recommend rings over spiral binding for your organizer so that you can add or remove things as you need them or they become outdated. Do you really need to be toting around last January’s calendar in June? Many ring models also contain a moveable ruler that extends past the top of the page to mark the current day. You simply snap the ruler into today’s spot so you can immediately open to the right page with a single flip. And who knows when you may want to measure something!
If you need to see previous appointments, keep your old monthly calendars in your planner and remove the daily pages.
To zip or not to zip: Zippered organizers do hold more and so all too often encourage you to stuff them full of miscellaneous papers that don’t belong there. This is an organizer, not a filing system. If you like the zipper and don’t mind taking the extra time to unzip every time you open your planner, the rule is that you can keep a pen, pencil, and calculator inside, and no other extras.
How much is your organizer worth to you? How much time would you spend re-creating it? How much money or reputation would you lose by missing the meetings or losing the contact information inside? Put a note in red at the front that says “REWARD: $50 for the return of this organizer” or whatever it’s worth to you. Make the amount worth the finder’s while, and I bet you’ll get it back with a smile.
Using your planner well
All of your decision-making over what planner to use may amount to little unless you find out how to use it to your benefit. Here are the techniques you need.
Four types of time
Many people only think to mark specific things they must do or attend in their
calendar but remember, this is a planning tool for your whole life. Use your planner to plot out all your time, not just your appointments, meetings, and parties.
There are four types of time to enter on your calendar. Write the items in order by type as you plan your day, week, or month:
Specific appointments, meetings, events, deadlines, trips, visitors, and so on
Quiet time
Family time
Personal time
Include other people’s commitments if they affect yours — the kids (got to pick them up), your boss, colleagues, or staff (if you need to cover for them), your spouse (when you have to take over carpooling duty, find another escort for an event), or roommates.
Schedules change all the time so keep yours looking neat by using a correction pen to white out cancelled or changed entries. It looks much better than scratch marks and frees up the space to write something in its place. I recommend saving your pencil for other purposes, as lead can smudge and become unreadable on the calendar page.
Marking your time in space
Take advantage of your calendar’s visual layout to position events in time. If an appointment or meeting falls in the morning, put it toward the top of the day’s box. If you plan to go to the gym after work, write it after all of your workday obligations. The idea is to see the flow of your day, week, or month visually.
Depending upon the format of your planner, you may have hours printed on the page. Use these as a guide, even if you approximate (it may not matter exactly what time you get to the gym, unless you’re taking a class). Write or circle precise times.