Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
Practice number 3 we talked about the concept of Good Enough as a tool to battle perfectionism and practice 4 addressed using the time management skill of Beat the Clock to support Good Enough. Our next practice is about Waves. The world around us ebbs and flows. You would be very hard pressed to find anything that remains constant and static, and we are no different.
Our brains and bodies work in rhythms. We are physically designed to work best by cycling between periods of energy spending and renewing.
Fact: “Research in the 1970s showed that 90 to 120 minute ultradian rhythms (ulta dies – many times a day) account for the ebb and flow of our energy throughout the day. Physiological measures such as heart rate, hormonal levels, muscle tension and brain-wave activity all increase during the first part of the cycle. After an hour or so, these measures start to decline and the body begins to crave a period of rest and recovery. Signals include a desire to yawn and stretch, hunger pangs, increased tension, an inclination to procrastinate.” – The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Fact: Your brain can only operate at peak capacity for periods of up to 90 minutes.
“Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.” – TheEnergyProject.com, Tony Schwartz
Work intensively for up to 90 minutes at a time with brief ten minute periods of recuperation to walk around the office, stretch, or fill a glass of water. Notice the impact of this practice on the quality and effectiveness of your output.
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Monday, June 6th, 2011
Hopefully you have had an opportunity to work on and implement the Morning Ritual and One Thing at a Time practices and they are already having a positive impact on your day and how you approach it. If you haven’t had an opportunity don’t be discouraged just recommit to working on it and you will get there.
The next things we will look at is knowing and understanding when perfection is not required, or sometimes attainable, and how time management is important to stay on track.
Practice Three: Good Enough
Not every piece of work requires the same painstaking care and attention. Mastering the ability to recognize when the job is good enough is a vital way to gain back portions of your work day.
Sandra was a perfectionist who was doing multiple drafts of simple letters and memos. The time she was investing in these was taking away from the time she had to spend on more complex work. As a result she was not recording chunks of time and was always fighting deadlines. Since she began integrating a Good Enough strategy into her practice she has caught up on her backlog of files. Now she will do a quick first draft of her letters and her veteran legal secretary polishes the draft and sends it to her for her signature. Her clients appreciate the shorter memos that get straight to the point. And she has more time for the complex legal work she excels at.
The principle of Good Enough is especially valuable for you perfectionists out there – save your painstaking eye for detail for the projects that most deserve it.
Practice Four: Beat The Clock
Related to the principle of Good Enough, rationing time is a strategy for maximizing the ability to plough through a to-do-list in less time. For the smaller and simpler tasks such as reporting letters and memos, assess how much time each project is worth then work to complete the task within the allotted time.
I have been using this strategy to manage the amount of time I spend preparing for presentations. I used to endlessly revise my presentation slides and speaking notes. The time that went into each presentation was excessive. Now I manage my time carefully and give myself a time budget for investing in the preparation of each presentation. The result is that my work is focused and I often finish ahead of schedule. The overall quality of my presentations has improved.
Posted in Balance, Organization, Planning | Permalink | No Comments »Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Sandra‘s office was piled high with files, her work-life was spent putting out fires and her dog was feeling so neglected it had taken to chewing the couch.
Jeremy felt like it had been a long time since he had a life. Days and weekends were spent at the office, he’d gained 20 pounds in a year, and his wife had gone on vacation to Mexico with her best friend Gary the hairdresser – again.
Sandra and Jeremy are not alone. These days it seems like the standard answer to “Hi, how are you?“ has become “Busy, and you?” Having a successful professional life and keeping the plants alive and your partner speaking to you requires a whole new set of disciplines.
The higher we climb in our careers the more projects we juggle. Our work becomes increasingly complex. The deadlines are just as short as ever. To survive and thrive under these conditions it is critical to develop new skills and strategies for mastering the demands. In my work as a professional coach I have come across ten simple practices that have made a significant difference for me and for my clients.
They are called practices – because they are simply routines and approaches for you to try out in your work day. Implement them one at a time and observe the effect each one has on your performance. I shared these last week with the attendees at the CBA Women Lawyer’s Forum Annual Conference in Vancouver and was delighted to discover this approach to work is catching on and some of the senior women lawyers were applying practices like these successfully in their work.
Over the next month I will be posting the series. Let me know how they work for you.
Practice One: Morning Ritual
Open the day with a planning session. Review priorities and upcoming deadlines. Plan the work schedule for the day. Take a short break followed by focused work on the top priority for the day. Try not to spend any time on your email until later in the morning. If necessary have an assistant review the morning email for any urgent messages requiring attention.
Practice Two: One Thing at a Time
I remember back in the 90’s when I had “skilled multi-tasker” proudly highlighted in my resume. Now I would have to say that I am a multi-tasker in recovery. I guarantee this post was written without stopping to check email.
Multi-tasking is over-rated. Once paraded as a virtue, it is now getting known for what it truly is – a time-waster and productivity killer. The human brain can’t multi-task attention. In Brain Rules neurologist John Medina clearly indicates why multi-tasking doesn’t work: “Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more mistakes.”
Create zones for intense and focused work during the day. Turn off the email. Close the door. Focus on just one project for up to ninety minutes. Observe how this time for uninterrupted concentration impacts the quality of your work.
Posted in Balance, Organization, Planning | Permalink | No Comments »Sunday, February 6th, 2011
This post is for those readers who were not born with organization in your DNA . If your office is filled with piles of paper, if your contact management system is made up of a collection of business cards gathering dust in a drawer, then I want to direct you to an article from the Saturday Guardian this week: How to Create a Home Filing System. (Thanks to Mary Childs of Ethos Law for sending along the link this weekend.)
The author introduces the C.R.A.P method of filing. C.R.A.P stands for chronological, random ascending pile. This method of document storage can be effective for those with a highly accurate memory for linking documents to moments in time. For example, say I have a pile in my office that I started in November last year. (And please know I have no such pile as I completed a thorough reorganisation of my office in early January!) I need to pull out the invitation to a charity event that was mailed to me in early December. Using the C.R.A.P filing system I can move through the strata, and given the pile has risen to about a foot high in 3 months, the December document is likely to be found in the bottom half. In about 5 minutes I will have found the document in question.
Problems with the C.R.A.P. system? Pets. Children. Other people. It is all too easy for innocent furry creatures to knock over a pile; a child to enjoy playing in the piles like leaves in the fall; or a well-meaning partner who puts the chronology into disarray.
Another problem with the system? The aging brain. As people age all of a sudden they find they cannot remember which pile is which, and when did that letter arrive anyway?
The truth is, at some point most of us most migrate to a better system. There are numerous options. My preferred method is the simplest.
Filing A to Z. Get yourself boxes of hanging file folders and plain manila envelopes, a labeller, and a shredder. (The David Allen approach. For more on this read Getting Things Done. His system is complex, but if you choose not to adopt it in its entirety there are many chunks that can be scavenged into your own personal system.)
Assure yourself that Rome was not built in a day and allot yourself a scant 5 minutes at a time for filing. (While I advocate the five-minutes at a time approach to catching up on filing, I never practice it. I am an all at once, spend the afternoon up to my elbows in paper, and wrestle it to the ground kind of person. If that is what works best for you, go for it!)
Slowly but surely work your way through the pile. Either keep it and file or throw it away. And if you can’t decide, put it aside and keep filing. Read Julie Morgenstern‘s post Weed Out Papers and then get started. If you are hunting for an organization road map to follow try her book Organizing from the Inside Out .
Allocate one manila folder to one hanging file folder. Use the labeller to make nice neat labels.
When in a year or more time the file cabinets are full – purge to make room.
For the digitally-advanced get one of the latest scanners and quickly scan rather than file your documents and store on your hard-drive. I am a big fan of this idea but this would require purchasing a more state-of-the-art scanner than my current version. Also, I know that I cannot divest myself entirely of paper files so this would be half-way measure.
To tackle collections of business cards the simple answer is get on Linked-In. Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started. First step is to set up a simple profile. This takes between 5 minutes to an hour depending on how detailed you want to get. Next, using the handy application on Linked In, connect it to your Outlook contact list and select those people you wish to connect with and send them invitations. This takes about 5 minutes. Now it’s time to turn to the pile of business cards. Sort through the pile and pull out those people you actually want to be connected with. Throw out the rest. Then look the people up on Linked In and invite them to connect with you. The beauty of Linked In is that each individual keeps their own profile updated and you receive alerts when they have a new job, address, or other related news.
Bottom-line, getting organized is worth the time spent for the energy it frees up and mental clarity it brings.
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