by Eileen Roth
Color-coding your calendar
Color can help you navigate your filing system (see Chapter 16), and make sense of your schedule in a single glance. Choosing a color for each type of event in your calendar can guide your eye to what you’re looking for and help you see how well you’re balancing the way you choose to spend time. In Table 18-4 is a suggested color scheme.
Table 18-4A Color Code for Your Calendar Color Pen Type of Event How To/Why
Blue or black Business (household Think “B” for blue or black
business if a homemaker) and business.
Red Important events Quarterly report due date
or projects for management, end of
contest for a salesperson.
Pink, green, Personal Your favorite color! Match it
purple, brown, to your Personal file color.
and so on Use a different color for each
child.
You don’t need to carry ten different pens everywhere you go to use color in your calendar. Most personal and children’s items can be entered at home, so keep those pens there. If you need to add something while you’re out, use your standard blue or black, and then circle it in the right color when you get home. You can also keep a rainbow at your fingertips by carrying a four- or ten-color pen.
Statistics say some days are better than others
Do you ever find yourself saying, “It’s just not my day”? If it’s a Monday or Friday, statistics are on your side. A staffing firm did a study of productivity by the workday and found that Tuesday took the prize for getting things done, followed by Wednesday, Thursday, and then Monday. Friday, of course, was the least productive, as most people’s minds are already out the door by week’s end. Monday suffers from an overload of weekend mail and calls from clients or customers, as well as reentry shock. So think sandwich when planning your week, and put the meaty stuff in the middle.
Using your To Do List as your planner
If you work primarily on projects, at home or at the office, and don’t need to plan a dozen meetings or appointments, this simple To Do List may be all you need besides a monthly appointment calendar. Here are the six categories to make up your list:
To write: All correspondence, reports, proposals, and so on.
To call: All your outgoing calls for the day, including phone numbers, so you can simply dial one after the other.
To do: Everything else that doesn’t fall under one of the other five categories.
To attend: Meetings, appointments, performances, games, including the time.
To go: Errands such as the grocery store or dry cleaner, the library, a sick friend’s house, the copy center, and so forth.
To purchase: Enter the item and the name of the store so you know just where to go and what to look for when you get there.
Keep the categories in this order on a steno pad or something about 6 inches x 8 inches. Here’s what goes under each heading. As always, rewrite your To Do List daily, accounting for new priorities and progress down your path. Table 18-5 provides a picture of using your To Do List as a planner.
Table 18-5To Do List as Planner Communication Activities
To Write To Attend
To Call To Go (errands)
To Do To Purchase
Noticing and Rewarding Your Accomplishments
Look at this: You followed a plan (to read this chapter) and achieved your goal (to find out how to plan your day and your life). What now? Do you just go on to the next chapter or get to work on your report or jump to your household chores? No! You need to notice and reward your accomplishment. Smile — it’s payback time!
Rewarding your accomplishments can get you to your goals faster, now and in the future. Each time the pleasure center in your brain registers a tangible treat for a job well done, you become more conditioned to tackle your tasks with gusto the next time around.
Reading the comics or doing the crossword may be your reward for a small task. A day at the beach, special dinner out, or new outfit can be called for at the close of a project. Did you just land a major promotion or contract, finish off a huge or hard project, or do something really amazing for somebody else? Think vacation or the art class you’ve been eyeing in the college extension catalog.
Conditioned as we are to rush from one achievement to the next, never feeling good enough, never feeling done, it can be surprisingly hard to notice and reward your accomplishments. Make it easy by coming up with your own dream list of rewards. Keep it on file. Add to it whenever you discover something new. Use your reward list to spur a lifetime of achievement and well-deserved pleasure.
Chapter 19
Scheduling Skills for Maximum Productivity
In This Chapter
Getting to know how to flow
Delegating tasks, preventing interruptions, and saying no
Tasking techniques, from single-focus to multitask projects
Making the most of the phone and other tricks
“Do not squander time, that is the stuff life is made of,” Benjamin Franklin said. So imagine you’re in traffic, trying to get from here to there. What one thing squanders the most time of your trip? The red light.
Red lights are all around you in life, making you stop and wait as the minutes tick by, adding time to every task that could have been saved if only you were driving in synch with optimal traffic flow.
Time management is the way to green-light your day, eliminating obstacles and time wasters to give you the go signal every step of the way. You already discovered how to make and execute a plan. (If you haven’t, skip back to the previous chapter. I promise that the how-to of plan execution will pay off.) But because even the best laid plans can go awry, you need green-light techniques to put your plans into action without the sudden stops that can come between you and your goals. Think green . . . and become a time-maximizing machine.
Going with the Flow: The Time Log
Flow is in, and for good reason. Whether you’re driving a car or playing basketball, churning out a report or researching torts, the ability to get in the groove so that you’re working with time instead of against it is key to peak productivity. Psychologists call this transcendent marriage between time and the mind flow, and when you get flow, you’re good to go.
To find flow, you have to take control of your time and eliminate the interruptions and time wasters so common to the average day.
The first step is to find out how you actually spend your time by keeping a Time Log. A record of all the time you spend on every little thing, from the moment you rise in the morning until you put your head down on the pillow at night, the Time Log is a powerful tool for discovering how you allocate the minutes and hours of your life. Be prepared for good news and bad. I’ll give you the bad news first: Unless you’re practicing good time management or are a very exceptional person, you probably waste a fair amount of time. The good news is that once you find that time, you can reclaim it. The extra minutes and hours are a free gift from me to you, no strings attached.
To start your Time Log, take a sheet of ruled paper. In the left-hand margin, note the time you change activities, and on the line to the right list exactly what you’re doing: getting ready for work or bed, commuting, doing projects or paperwork, making calls, talking to visitors, attending meetings, reading mail, making or eating meals, walking the dog, watching TV, and so on. Also note who else was involved so you can later determine how relevant each activity was to your goals and who tends to take up your time the most.
If you’d like to try a different method, you can create a spreadsheet on the computer, making each row on the sheet represent a 15-minute time block. Many people find this easier because the blocks remind them to log what they were doing. Accounting for time accurately on the computer spreadsheet can be harder, however, because not all activities neatly fall into 15-minute blocks.
Whether you go manual or electronic, keep your Time Log for
at least several days in a row, and optimally for a whole week including a weekend to provide a complete picture of how different days go. I know logging your activities and the time taken is somewhat of a hassle, but hey — just pretend you’re a high-paid lawyer. Attorneys always log their time.
Fixing Your Flow: The Busters
When your log is complete, take a good look to see where the time went. Total up your time by activity type, both for each day and for the whole week. Are you spending time on things according to your priorities? Does anything stand out? Too much time on the phone? Too little time for yourself or with your family or friends or on your current key project?
How much time did you spend procrastinating? How many interruptions did you have? What kind? Who were they with? Are there things you shouldn’t have been doing, because the activities could have been delegated or you simply should have said, “No”?
Can you bundle certain activities together? Are you going out to run errands twice in one day when they can be consolidated into one trip? Could you get all your paperwork out of the way at once? Can you set aside a morning to take care of client calls?
Take a red pen and circle anything that was, in light of your values and goals, a waste of time, even a meeting with your boss or a phone call to a friend. How can you get these time wasters out of your day?
Procrastination busters: Read this now
You can’t get flow without getting started, and starting is often the hardest part. For most people, procrastination isn’t a result of laziness or lack of resolve. Procrastination can be a deep psychological situation involving fear of failure or success, or a natural result of overload. Sometimes you simply don’t know where to start.
Procrastination is such a widespread problem that I make a point of providing excellent ways to beat it in my workshops and training. First, consider whether you tend to do better when working with other people or relying on yourself. Then choose your technique.
Involving other people
There are four ways (A, B, C, and D) that you can call on other people to help you do what you ought to be doing. Choose one or as many as it takes.
Be accountable: Tell someone what you’re going to do and by when. Accountability is built into many tasks at work, in which you have to report to a boss or a team, but try telling your best friend too. At home, see how you hop to cleaning the garage after you tell your buddy Jerry the garage will be spic and span by Sunday night. Better yet, invite Jerry to stop by around 5 p.m. on Sunday to inspect your handiwork. Fill your office mate in on your plan to finish project XYZ, and by all means, tell your mother about your vow to start saving $200 a month.
Barter: If you procrastinate because you don’t like or know your task very well, simply swap jobs with someone. Maybe you can type like the wind, but don’t really get or care how spreadsheet formulas work. Tell your colleague Joyce, the local spreadsheet whiz, that you’ll type up a report for her if she’ll handle your spreadsheet formulas. It’s a win-win!
Collaborate: Working with someone else can help get the job started and done faster because you now have a shared commitment and two minds or pairs of hands. You may assemble a team to divvy up different parts of a project, or ask a friend to come over for your annual closet cleanout to help you decide what looks good and what can go to charity or the resale shop.
Delegate: Why do the task yourself when someone else can? Supervisors should delegate tasks to staff so that employees can grow in their jobs. Parents can teach children household jobs and self-management skills that help them discover the meaning of responsibility and feel like contributing members of the family. (Read “Delegating: The Four Ds” later in this chapter for more.)
Doing it yourself
If you need or prefer to lean on yourself to beat the procrastination trap, there are plenty of solo ways to jump-start your motor. Look for a match with your personality style in the techniques that follow:
Jump in!: Have you ever noticed how kids get in the pool? Youngsters generally run to the deep end and just jump in without checking the temperature because there’s nothing kids can do to change it and they want to go swimming. The faster you get in, the faster you get used to the water, so just jump.
Take it step by step: Of course, under no circumstances will you ever see me jump into the pool. You can find me down at the other end, slowly walking down the steps and taking my time getting used to the water temperature as each part of my body, from my feet to my stomach to my chest, gets wet. Any project can be achieved the same way, one step at a time so take a small step today.
Choose your starting point: You don’t always have to start at the so-called beginning or proceed in linear order. If you want to start a project on page three, start on page three. If you plan a holiday dinner and you’d rather design the menu before you decide on the guest list, that’s fine. Just go back and figure quantities after you know how many you’re having.
Race the clock: When we were kids, my brother and I used to race to see who could drink their milk the fastest. Chances are you raced the clock in college by pulling an all-nighter to write a paper or study for finals. Deadlines drive achievement, so give yourself one, write down the date and time you want to finish, and race the clock.
Tie yourself down: As a last resort, you need to simply tie yourself down. Tell yourself you can’t go to the movies, you can’t watch TV, you can’t even get a cup of coffee until you write that report or paint that room. Pretend there’s a real rope holding you there, and you literally can’t leave until you do what you have to do. You can even use a tie or scarf to strap yourself to the chair. You may think twice before taking that coffee break.
Interruption busters: Phone calls and visitors
So you finally get going on your project and what happens? Interruptions. Flow’s greatest enemy and a pervasive part of modern living, interruptions eat time twice over, both the minutes or hours interruptions take and the time required to regain your focus when they’re over. Even if you can stop an interruption in progress, you still need to refocus, so prevent uninvited disturbances before they begin.
Telephone: The simplest way to stop telephone interruptions is not to pick up the receiver when the phone rings or when you think you’ll just clear up a point with a quick call and end up talking for half an hour.
See Chapter 17 for all the ways to filter and funnel telephone calls. When trying to prevent interruptions, the rule is simple: Don’t pick it up.
Visitors: Visitors may not be as common an interruption as the telephone, but a real live person can be more compelling. You can discover ways to control visitor traffic in the next section.
Strategies for work
Diplomacy is key when carving out quiet time at work. Just remember that at the end of the day, your staff, colleagues, and superiors will respect you more for getting your job done than for being always available.
Screen. Have an assistant or receptionist greet your visitors and tell the unexpected or noncritical ones that you’re in a meeting.
Close. Sometimes cutting yourself off is hard, but a closed door is a clear signal to all those who pass that you’re busy on the other side. For those who still knock, open the door partway only and ask them to come back at a specific time. Don’t let the visitor start the conversation.
Stand. If you don’t have a door or closing the door is not appropriate, greet incoming visitors by standing up. Most people won’t sit down if you stand.
Walk. So you’re on your feet but your guest is reclining in your favorite chair. Now’s the time to suggest that you chat while walking back to your visitor’s desk, or say that you have somewhere to go. Then do go, preferably to the restroom, where only the most intrepid will tag along.
Hide. Who says you have to work where people can find you? Go to a conference room, an empty office, a corporate or offsite library, or your home office for high-intensity times. Only the true bloodhounds will track you d
own.
Sign. Put up a sign on your door or cubicle wall that says, “Do Not Disturb — Important Project.” Depending upon your relationship with others in the office, people may respectfully leave you alone or take every opportunity to taunt you.
Postpone. For hard cases, schedule an appointment to talk about an issue later, or a lunch to catch up on the social front.
Schedule appointments you’d rather not take before meetings so you have a good excuse to leave. If your time log reveals a particular person who repeatedly interrupts you throughout the day, schedule a daily 15- to 30-minute meeting to answer all the questions at once.
Strategies for home-based businesses
When you work at home, visitor interruptions all too often come from people you love. That doesn’t mean you have to let flow go down the drain.
Business hours. Inform family members of your work schedule (9 to 5 for most) and ask that they only disturb you for very important matters or emergencies.
Signs that speak volumes. Put a sign on the door during important or peak times that says “Quiet, Do Not Disturb.” If the sign is printed on colored paper, even children who can’t read will know what the words mean. Red, hot pink, neon green — just be sure to share your color code with your cohabitants.
Outsource meetings. Hosting a meeting at home can be less than professional and cause you to spend hours cleaning up. Instead, arrange to meet clients or customers at their office. If this isn’t possible, rent a conference room or choose a mutually convenient coffeehouse.