Take Back Control of Your Time EASILY

Time... your top non-renewable resource.  You can always make more money, make new friends and start over in life.  The one thing you can never do is recover lost time.

Has control over your own time (and therefore over your energy) constantly eluded you?  It certainly mystified me for years.  So how do you transition from the "managed chaos" of your life now to:

• Having full control over how you use your time
• Being able to accomplish everything that's really important
• While giving yourself more free time for the things that matter most to you

 

Let's Talk About the BASICS

If you need to get hold of your time better, you need to SEE your time visually.

1. Open a new Excel spreadsheet (or use a spreadsheet from Google Docs, as discussed in the previous post).
   
   
2. Across the top, label the columns Sunday to Sunday.  Having the extra day's overlap at the end of the week is something I find visually useful.    Down the side of the spreadsheet, put the time in half hour increments from the time you get up until the time you turn out the lights.
   

Planning based on a one-week time period is vital for clarity.  Yes, you need to have clarity on your goals for the year, the month, etc.  However, planning concretely on a weekly cycle is the most effective.  

Once you've got your spreadsheet ready, don't start filling it in quite yet.  First you need to jot down the various role you play in your life.  Those could be spouse/parent, technical expert or business owner (or whatever your work is), friend/adviser, volleyball coach, etc.  You should not have more than 7 major roles.

Then decide what your top three objectives will be this week.  Those could be all in one of your roles or spread across two or three.  You should never try to accomplish more than three major objectives per week.  These are the objectives that will give you the greatest satisfaction and contribute the most to your long range plan.  

Here's a screen shot of one of my weekly schedules from June.  I've had to reduce the size to fit it in, so the text is too small to read, but you get the idea.  The color coding refers to my own particular "roles" in life.  

And mine runs Monday to Monday, simply because Kathy, my amazing accountability partner, holds my feet to the fire on Mondays - that's when I have to come clean about my use of time over the previous week! 

The Ironclad Rules of Scheduling and Effectiveness

Yes, the rules.  Following RULES is what separates the super-effective "life-hacker" from the rest of the bumbling masses.  You have a choice - either YOU decide what you will do and when, or other peoples' agendas will take over and smother you.  It's up to you.  And it's a lot easier to preserve your independence and safeguard your time if you follow the rules.

1. Take your top 3 priorities and double the amount of time you "hope" it will take you to get them done.  Then insert them into your schedule, as early on the given day as possible.  

NOTE: Insert them where YOU would like them to go.  If you start saying to yourself, "Oh, I can't put it there because I promised Mable I'd talk to her about the bridge club then," your thinking is plain backwards.  Put your priority into that time slot and reschedule with Mable.  The point is that if you allow other peoples' ideas and expectations to get in the way, you're sunk already.  

2. Next, schedule time for the following, using the order below:

1. Exercise and fitness
2. Quality time with friends and family
3. The 1-3 things you would most like to do this week
4. Admin and household chores

3. Color code your spreadsheet, if you wish, for greater visual clarity

4. Be sure to leave extra time for transit from one location to another, eating and necessary bodily functions.  In other words, avoid the common trap of scheduling things too closely and underestimating the transition time from one task to another.

5. As for all the "urgent" things that typically come up like weeds and choke the time away from those few really important activities that actually matter, this is where you need some care.  Allocate no more than two times per week where you can batch the seemingly "urgent" tasks together and get them done.  It's vital to keep the "urgent" in its place; otherwise you'll always be reacting to the minutiae of life and never have the time to move forward.

6. Work when you say you will.  Use a timer (such as e.ggtimer.com) to keep you on track and instill a sense of urgency.  When you work, stay focused and don't allow distractions until you get to the end of your allotted time.  Working in blocks of not more than 60 minutes works best.  

7. STOP working when you said you would stop and play when you said you would play!  This prevents the phenomenon called "bleed" where you say, "Oh, I'll work just a little longer on this," or "I'll just stay and chat with Betsy for a few more minutes."  This will trash your schedule for the whole day.

8. Eliminate Distractions.  First, check email not more than three times during your workday and NEVER before completing work on your top priority in the morning or just before bed.

Also, refuse to attend meetings that have no clear purpose or where no decisions will be made.  And learn to politely refuse interruptions from colleagues who just want to chat.  Ask them to send you a calendar invite to coffee next week.  

9. Go over your schedule the night before and begin your day by visualizing how it will go, feeling wonderful about accomplishing everything.

The Bottom Line

Why go through all this planning?  Why live your life by these abstract rules?  Simple... it works!  You see, the whole idea here is to:

1. Force you to differentiate what's truly important from what's really not.  This will vastly increase your personal effectiveness.
   
2. And to give you much more FREE TIME and FREE ENERGY.
   
3. Increase your mental clarity
   
4. Put you in a position to accomplish your most important objective each day by noon (and often much earlier)!

Follow these simple procedures and you'll find that your life just got a whole lot easier.  If you're not finding that, there are a few probable causes.

First, you may find yourself thinking, "This weekly schedule thing just doesn't fit MY life very well.  Maybe it won't work for me."  Well, nine times out of ten, that kind of thinking is self-delusion.  It comes from a hesitancy to make the "tough" decision to defy the "priorities" other people have already inflicted on you.  Taking back control of your time means thinking differently, doing things differently and quite possibly annoying others who have unrealistic expectations of you.

Second, it looks great on paper but falls apart on implementation.  The most common cause is that you didn't allow enough time per objective or you're trying to do too much at once.  There's also the issue of your mental habits.  If you schedule something and then, when the time comes to do it, you say "I just don't feel like writing those emails right now," you'll never get anywhere.  You've got to do it.  

Building your personal resilience is never easy, and taking back control of your time is no exception.  Yes, the process is simple and if you do it you'll see great results.  Yet it does require a new way of thinking.

So go build your schedule, put it into action and be sure to share your results with everyone on the blog or email me directly.  We'd love to hear about it!

~Dr. Symeon Rodger

September's Here and It's Time to Get Yourself ORGANIZED

Labor Day (the holiday Monday that kicks off September here in Canada and in the USA) may not feel a lot like New Years, but under the surface much of the human activity is pretty similar...

People are examining their priorities and making commitments to improving their lives on all levels; the only difference is they're not openly calling these commitments "resolutions", as they will five months from now.  Yet the idea is the same.


And no wonder - the beginning of September is our society's REAL New Year on a fundamental level, more so than the "official" calendar New Year down the road.  By the way, that "official" New Year is quite arbitrary anyway.  In the old Roman Empire, September 1 was the official New Year for centuries.  

Getting Organized

Of all the things the people around you are doing right now so they can "hit the ground running" this week, I think you'll find that taking back control of their time is near the top of the list.  After all, if you can't control your time and use it effectively, it's hard to make progress no matter what direction you're heading in.  


Fortunately, getting organized isn't nearly as hard as it used to be, thanks to a lot of great online tools available today.  In the list below, the tools that have (F) after them are free and the others are so inexpensive they might as well be.  Here are some of my favorites:


EVERNOTE (F): Evernote is a a fabulous tool whose logo is, appropriately, an elephant, because with Evernote you'll never forget anything again.  

My life before Evernote was an endless series of doodles and notes spread across several notebooks and loose pieces of paper... and you can imagine how hard it was to keep track of what information was where - I couldn't.  Enter Evernote and life just got a whole lot easier.  You work online and they securely store your notes so there's no danger of losing your valuable info if your hard drive crashes.  No more sticky notes needed ;-)


Watch a fun intro to Evernote here.




RESCUE TIME (F): How much time do you waste every day?  Wouldn't your life be a lot more painless if you simply worked more efficiently?  Welcome to the world of Rescue Time, a free online tool that monitors how you spend time at your computer and, if you wish, how much time you spend away from it.  The application even sends you a report each week to let you know how much time you've saved.  It's like having an automated supervisor to keep you on track.



E.GG TIMER (F): Whenever you sit down to work on something at your computer, you either allow yourself a specific amount of time or leave it open ended.  Setting a time limit is one of the secrets of personal effectiveness and E.GGTIMER helps you do that by providing an online countdown for you.  Get in the habit of setting a time limit and you'll be FAR more efficient.  



TIME TRADE: Formerly known as Time Driver, TT is an online appointment software that's a real lifesaver to anyone whose life is full of meetings, appointments, etc.  Instead of the endless back-and-forth of using email to agree on a time to meet, Time Trade lets you decide when you could be available and then send the other person a link to your Time Trade calendar displaying those available times.  They simply click the one they prefer and voila!  Lots of time and mental energy saved!



CALENDAR QUICK: Calendar Quick bills itself as your source for printable online calendars.  Face it, most of us need VISUAL calendars to wrap our heads around the coming week or month.  For me, Google Calendar just wasn't good enough at that.  Don't get me wrong; Google Calendar has its advantages, but I found its visual display far too limiting for keeping track of everything in my life.  


Calendar Quick allows me to build calendars for any date range I want and then print them as a pdf or as an Excel spreadsheet.  These printed calendars are a huge organizational help to me just because they give me the visuals I need.  Calendar Quick also has an online monthly schedule you can use - it can import directly from your Google Calendar and then incorporate that data into any calendar you create, download and print.  



MIND42 (F) (think "Mind For Two") is an online application that lets you and a friend work collaboratively to brainstorm and draw a mind map of your ideas.  Or you can use it for just yourself.  For those of us who need mind maps and can't think effectively with just text or bullet points (and that's most people), Mind42 is a great tool.



GOOGLE DOCS (F): Google Docs allows you to create virtually any kind of office document you need - text, spreadsheet, drawing, visual presentation (think "PowerPoint") and then save them online so you can access them from anywhere and share them in real time.  You can also upload your existing documents to give yourself access to them while you're away from your computer, out of the office or just so you have a back-up in case your hard drive crashes or gets fried in the next thunder storm.  


Before this kind of online storage and sharing, my life was an endless effort to make sure to send myself by email all the documents I would need to work with that day (since I'm in several different locations during the week).  Now I don't have to think about that anymore.  Result?  More time and mental energy saved!

You can access videos about Google Docs here.

There's Lots More

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg.  For an excellent list of the best free online tools to help you out with just about everything, go here. 

Of Course, the Tools Only Help If...

...if you already know how to schedule and control your time effectively.  And that's a true art, yet one that's not too difficult to master.  So next time on the blog we'll discuss exactly how to do that.  Watch for it!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

One of the greatest problems we all face is finding time to "get everything done".  And that's a challenge that I had been struggling with over the last few months in the race to get a new segment of business up and running - just when the heck was I supposed to find the time??

Well, turns out that I had been making the single most elementary mistake in life-management.  Yes, it's a mistake I know all about, teach to my clients and I've even shared it with you before. 


Did that stop me from falling right into it?  Hell no!  To see this mistake in what NBC used to call "living color", just have a look at Stephen Covey's demonstration right here:

How to Identify YOUR "Big Rocks" and Avoid My Mistake

Here's a devastatingly effective planning procedure for you.  Try it next week and you're sure to see the difference:

• Ask "What?" - what's your goal? Can you define it exactly?  Are there time parameters?  Can you measure it?  The purpose here is be as exact as you can and as clear as possible.
  
• Ask "Why?" - then do it again.  Get someone else to quiz you on this until THEY are satisfied with your answer.  Their job is to keep asking "why?" until YOU begin to make sense.  This will frustrate the hell out of you, but it's more than worth the pain.  This will help you to connect to your deep inner motivation, your wiring, your "passion".  And if you can't, maybe you should rethink the goal.  If you can't connect with it on a deep level, is it because you feel you "should" do it because  of social pressure or guilt?  Or is the importance and urgency you're attaching to it built on some unexamined assumptions that won't help you in the long run?
  
• Ask "How?" - Get someone else to do this to - they can sense when you're underestimating the time and effort, over-committing, being unrealistic, etc.

Part of the lesson here is to ask yourself if you're really living up to the principles you know.  I was truthfully a little shocked to find I was falling into the trap of scheduling the minutiae of life first and then struggling to find room for the things that really matter in the long run.  But it can happen to any of us.

So when you get ready to plan the upcoming week, take just a little extra time to make sure you put in your "big rocks" first and use these simple questions to get the clarity you need.  You won't be sorry you did!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger :-)

7 Rules for More Free Time, Productivity and a Life Under YOUR Control

There are very few things that undermine your happiness as quickly as a life out-of-control.  If that describes you, then using these 7 inviolable rules can help you create order out of chaos in no time flat.  And even if you don't feel too pressed for time in your life as it is, you'll find these simple practices can make a vast improvement for you.

We're surrounded by a huge variety of information sources vying for our attention.  Heck, I've had two calls from automated telemarketers while writing this post!  Your mental attention is the key here.  Aside from being the key for any form of real spiritual progress, where you focus your attention will determine your results in life on every level.  Using these rules will act as a shield against the modern disease of attention-scattering and let you focus on what actually matters...

 

1. Plan Your Entire Week in Advance

The week is the optimal planning cycle for nearly everyone.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't think farther ahead, of course; it's simply that effective planning at the "tactical" level of life is most easily done using the seven day cycle.

First, open an Excel spreadsheet and put the days of the week across the top and the hours of the day down the left hand side in half-hour increments.  Then you can fill in your week's activities according to the rules below.  Also, it's best to color-code your activities by type, since your mind works best with pictures and this will indeed give you a visual "snapshot" of your week.

I learned this brilliant method from Kathy W., my accountability partner, who is a superb project manager, and it works like a charm, as long as you follow the rules below, that is!

2. Minimize Your Decision-Making

 

A tremendous amount of your attention and mental energy goes to making decisions all day long.  You fret about them, worry about them, debate with yourself endlessly and finally you decide... or you decide not to decide.  The irony is that all this could have been avoided... 

How so?  By making the vast majority of decisions ahead of time.  First, by planning when you'll do certain types of activities, you take a ton of guess work out of your day.  You no longer have to think about what you'll do next.  And when you batch your activities and make your week "modular" as described below, you're simplifying your life and negating the need for constant low level decision-making.  

You may have heard the absurd idea that you'll save time by "handling it once".  That would mean, for example, that if you come home from work and find four utility bills in your mailbox, you should pay them all right away and get it over with, thus "saving time".  

If you find yourself tempted to do this, give yourself a quick slap on the wrist and snap out of it!  You'll pay the bills during one of the periods of time you will have set aside in advance to deal with administrivia - not before and not after.  "Handling it once" is a moronic idea - it makes you react to your world and puts your time and attention at the mercy of things you don't control. 

3. Schedule the Important Stuff First

"Important" has a simple definition in the world of resilience - whatever moves you forward in life, toward the goals you've set for yourself (and we simply assume here you've set your goals with the right mixture of wisdom and intelligence ;-) is truly important.  Everything else is secondary. 

You'll find there are an awful lot of "urgent" things clamoring for your attention all the time - you'd think they had been taking lessons from my cat!  However, very few of them are important according to the definition above.  The biggest trap in time management is putting what's important at the mercy of the unending stream of what claims to be "urgent".  

So first, decide what activities you'll undertake this week that fit the definition above.  What will take you where you want to go?  Is it exploring a new career, getting some training in a key skill, spending time visualizing where you would like to be six months from now in terms of your health, fitness, career, etc?  

Maybe it's writing a book, talking to a prospective client or updating a website.  Whatever it is, schedule it first!

This, by the way, includes such key regular activities and your routines for maintaining a healthy body and mind.  So be sure to make time for you fitness routine, your meditation, your spiritual activities and whatever other tools you are using to optimize your SELF.  

One last key principle when scheduling your important activities - feel free to put in all the things you think you "should" be able to get done in a day... then divide by two.  Almost everyone underestimates the time they'll need to get a task done.  

The secret here is that it's far better to construct a light schedule and exceed your own expectations than to set yourself a heavy schedule and feel permanently "behind". 

4. Schedule Play Time Next

 

Next, decide on some leisure activities you'd like to undertake this week.  These can be for yourself alone, with your spouse, with family or friends or whatever.  You might want to dive into a particular book this week, go for a swim, get a massage or see a movie.  Make sure you schedule these activities next, since they have a key motivational function in your week. 

 

5. Schedule Administrivia Last

It's been estimated that it takes about five to seven hours a week to run the average household, if you include paying bills, answering snail mail, planning and doing grocery shopping and whatever other weekly shopping you need to do.  And then there's the laundry, meal preparation and clean-up on top of that! 

Remember, you only need to account for the activities that you yourself will be doing.  But under no circumstances should you schedule these activities until you have the really important items above all accounted for.

6. Batch Your Activities and Make Your Week "Modular"

The principle of batching is to group activities of the same type together and do as few different types of activity on a given day as you can.  This leaves you free to really focus and the resulting increases in productivity are enormous.  Moreover, when you do this you're avoiding the mental exhaustion that normally results from having your mental attention pulled in ten different directions each day.  

So when you color code your spreadsheet according to types of activity, you shouldn't see a different color every half hour!  Instead you should see larger blocks and half days or whole days built around a very small number of activities.  

Not only will this boost your overall productivity, as I've said, it will also simplify your life and liberate your precious mental attention. 

7. Allocate Your Time by Metabolism

 

Do you work best at night?  Is that when you're at your most creative?  Then schedule your activities accordingly.  On the other hand, if your best working time for creative tasks is in the morning, then make sure you use the morning for those activities.  

In other words, don't fight your metabolism!  Work with it instead.  Personally, I'm pretty much brain dead by 6pm, and do my best work in the mornings.  So I build my schedule accordingly.  Be sure to get in touch with your own metabolism to find out at what times of day you do which particular tasks the best, fastest and most easily.

The weekend is coming up, so open an Excel spreadsheet for yourself and play with it using the principles above.  And treat it as a lifestyle experiment - you won't get it perfect the first time, and you don't need to.  One thing I can promise you though - if you use these principles you'll rapidly feel your life getting back under control!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger :-)