Welcome back! Hopefully you’ve had a fabulous beginning of July… and a fun time uprooting all the reasons that make you stay late in the office. Just as a reminder, we’re already seen that you spend long hours there because:  

- You’re overworked, the powers that be wanting to get more done with fewer people (something we can’t do much about, except say no to extra tasks when our plate is already overflowing);

- You’re procrastinating

- You’re being a perfectionist and it’s costing you time

- You underestimate how long things take

There also is another cause for this “dis-ease”: Not planning for emergencies.  

The fact is that you can’t

-    predict when an emergency will come, or what this emergency will be;  

-    forecast whether a routine task will suddenly run into an unexpected delay (someone you need an answer from is on vacation, for instance) ;  

-    know ahead of time if you will get all the green lights or all the red lights on your way to work.

However, you can still factor those things happening when planning your day.  

In other words, while you can’t know the timing and the nature of delays and emergencies, _you do know that delays and emergencies will happen in your day, and you can estimate how much time on average they take out of your day_.  

How do you do this?  

-    Keep a log of all emergencies, unexpected delays and how long they took for a week or so. Once this is done, average the number of hours that they take every day.  

-    Plan your day accordingly, by leaving this time open. For instance, if you saw that emergencies take on average two hours a day, plan you tasks and appointments as if your day was 6 instead of 8 hours.

-    The days where emergencies happen, you will be all set. The days when none happens, you have extra time to get ahead for the next day, do your professional reading, or any other task you had put on the back burner.  

One of my mentors in this is my mother, a dentist: Her assistant leaves two appointment slots open every day, because my mother knows that, more often than not, she’ll get a couple of emergencies, such as a broken or painful tooth. When those emergencies don’t materialize, she uses that time to get caught up on her paperwork or read her medical journals. And she always feels calm and in control of her schedule.  

When you start planning for emergencies, it transforms your day.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.DailyMastery.com

The world we live in today tends to make long days in the office a fact of life. Employers are giving ever more work to ever fewer employees, and expecting them to still accomplish it. However, there are other culprits to late nights in the office than being overworked: one is procrastination, which I explained in my last post (incl. reference of post). Another one is having unrealistic expectations of how long a task takes. And, while it’s easy to do it with new tasks or projects, you most likely do this also, or maybe even primarily, with the routine tasks we do all the time.  

We should know how long those routine tasks take, but it seems like sometimes we don’t. It’s due to a quirk of our brain: our brains, contrary to common beliefs, don’t have an internal clock – that’s why we need the clock on the wall. Our brains estimate time from experience and memory. For instance, if you perform a task ten times, you brain will have a pretty good idea of how long it takes, just by remembering how long it took you in the past. This said, while in most people the brain remembers the average of how long it took, *some brains tend to remember only one occurence*, more often than not one of the shortest, and this becomes the reference from then on.  

The good news is that you can consciously change this reference point: start by doubling the time you think something takes in your planning. For instance, if you think that a task will take an hour from start to finish, allocate two hours for it in your schedule. If it takes less than that, wonderful! You can use this extra time to get started on the next task earlier, or actually get home on time, for a change! If its still not enough time, triple it next time, until you can comfortable fit it in your schedule.  

After a while, you will have installed that doing the task takes you two hours instead of one, and you will plan your time much more accurately, and avoid the last minute rush, dash, stress and anxiety that go with not having enough time.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.DailyMastery.com

Do you often put off things until the last minute? Do you have items that you keep moving from day to day on your to-do list, and never get done? Do you wait until you have no underwear left (or even a little after) to do your laundry? In other words, are you a procrastinator?  

Welcome to the human race! Most of us procrastinate on certain things, and sometimes it is actually beneficial: it allows us to stew on some things and start working on them once the mental groundwork is done; or to avoid doing certain things that just bring no value to our work or life, but that others want us to do.  

However, when procrastination becomes chronic, it also makes us rush to meet a deadline – if we meet it at all -, and creates a lot of stress, both emotional (“I still have to do this… Why am I not doing it? What’s wrong with me?”) and physical (lack of sleep, rush to make things happen at the last minute.)

So how can you bring procrastination back under control? In all my research and years of dealing with clients who procrastinate, I found that procrastination come from only one of four sources:  

Bad timing: You have other priorities when the task gets on your radar, or it simply comes in late in the day, when you’re already tired.  

Fear: something in the task is scary. It can be the task itself, such as calling people you don’t know to ask for something, or it can be that it feels overwhelming, too big, too difficult, not enough time.

Distaste:  You simply don’t like this task - or even hate it.  

Lack of information: sometimes, we procrastinate because we know, at a subconscious level, that we’re missing a piece of information, or we don’t know what to do, and without further information we won’t be able to do it.  

Bad timing is an easy one to resolve: just reschedule the task for a better moment, and it’ll happen easily. Lack of information is just as easily cured: in most cases, sitting down and taking the time to write everything you know about the task and how to perform it, as well as the things you know you’ll need but don’t have, or don’t know, at this point, will make your procrastination disappear.  

Things become more difficult when the source of the procrastination is emotional, i.e. fear or dislike. You can choose to face the emotion head on, and for instance work on your fear of cold calling. Or you can develop strategies to completely sidestep the whole issue by using the following strategies:  

Decompose the task you hate or fear in bite-size pieces. For instance, finding books on decoration is a much less overwhelming goal than redecorating the whole house. Write down and schedule only those bite-size pieces, and your project will happen almost by itself.  

Allow yourself to work on it for a limited time: you can most likely force yourself to do something for 15 minutes, right? Then set a timer for 15 minutes, do what you need to do for this time (filing is a frequently hated task, and one that is very suited to this method.) When the timer rings, give yourself permission to stop. Chances are that you will actually want to continue now that you’ve started.  

Give yourself a reward: Decide on something you would love to do, or a treat to yourself that makes you smile just to think about it, then use that treat as a motivator do you your task – but make sure that you give yourself this special moment or thing only after your have finished your task... If it helps you, put a picture of your reward right next to your desk, or wherever you see it while engaging in the activity you dislike or fear, so that you have a reminder in front of you whenever you are tempted to just procrastinate again.  

By using those strategies, independently or together, you’ll see your procrastinating tendencies go down quite drastically, and you’ll discover a wonderful side effect: suddenly, you will have much more time available to do the things you love doing.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin  

PS: One note to add to this article: Sometimes, procrastination really is a disguise for perfectionism. To learn more about this aspect, go to my newsletter or email me and I’ll send it to you.

Do you keep working on a project until it is absolutely perfect, or someone else takes it off your hands? Do you do everything yourself because “no one does it right”? Or will you sometimes not even start a project because the resources aren’t there to do it well, and what’s the point of starting if you can’t do it right? In other words, are you a perfectionist?  

Being a perfectionist has many payoffs. There is a lot of recognition from the people outside of the process, who recognize and value your work. There is also the feeling that you have done a great job, and you know that there has been no cheating, bluffing or cutting corners. But it also exact a cost in the stress you experience, the frustration that no one notices the small details that you spent so much time perfecting, the sheer exhaustion from the many hours worked.

So what can you do if you are a perfectionist and want to keep your love for a job well done, but want to get rid of the downsides?

First, remember that what counts is the result, not the process, unless the process affects the results. I read the story of a man – speaker and seminar leader – who insisted on packing the books to be sent to the seminar location himself, because the labels had to be in this exact corner, perfectly aligned with the sides of the box, and no one would do it right… The problem was that almost anyone could ensure that the boxes reached their destination in time, which is all that really mattered, and he wasted precious time on a task that others could do, at the expense of his speaking business. No need to mention that he never became very successful. Do you indulge in your own equivalent of labeling the boxes yourself? If yes, clearly separate for you the result (the boxes have to arrive at the right place and at the right time) from the process (how to write the labels, where to place them, etc.) and focus on the result. It is it that needs to be perfect, not the process.  

Then, remember the 80/20 rule: 2 of your effort yields 80 of your result. Getting to 9 of your result takes you about 50 of your effort… Do you really want to double the time you’ve already spent on a project, to achieve a small 1 further improvement? My perfectionist clients all put close to their workspace a prominent sign saying “80/20” or “remember 80/20” and stop on a regular basis to assess if they are working toward their 80 of perfect result, or if they are in the other 20%, and if what they are doing is truly worth the extra effort or not.  

If you apply those two ideas consistently, you will find how easy it is to stop the maddening, stress-inducing aspects of your perfectionism, without compromising on the high quality you want in everything you do.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.DailyMastery.com

You have read time management and organizing books, you know what to do, you’ve even tried some of the solutions they offered and liked them, yet nothing seems to really work. What is going on? Why is it sometimes so hard to get and stay organized?  

The clients who come to me for help are usually having trouble for one of two reasons:  

Biology:
Yes, biology, as in the way you brains are wired. While we are born equal, we also are born different, and that is true of our brains as well as our looks. Some people are more detail-oriented, while others are more attuned to the big picture; some people are so detail-oriented that they create wonderful but time-consuming systems, such as one of my clients did – his to-do list took him an hour a day to maintain! -; others are wonderfully creative, but mundane, day-to-day details seem to elude them; some have excellent internal clocks, while others have an internal clock operating on a different rhythm than the watch they wear on their wrist.  

Unfortunately, too many people believe that there is just one way to be organized, and desperately try to make themselves fit this solution. The same way that there are different types of brains, there are different ways to organize your life and your environment. If you try to use a system that isn’t adapted to you, it will fail, since it goes against your nature.  

Negative associations:
When people have a negative association with being organized or on time, or a positive association with being disorganized or time-challenged, getting and staying ‘on the wagon’ so to speak, is very difficult.  

For instance, one client had memories associated with each and every object she owned, and was afraid that, if she let go of the object, the memory would go with it. It’s not until she learned to dissociate the emotion and the object that she was able to let go of the clutter in her home and office. Another client had rebelled against his parents, who were attached to timeliness to the point of excess, by being systematically late. Twenty years later, he was still living his life as if to spite his parents, completely unconscious of this pattern. Becoming aware of this pattern is all it took for him to stop being late and missing deadlines, and being able to learn and use the concepts we covered together.  

So, what can you do if you have trouble getting and keeping your life organized?
•Ask yourself if it could be because you are trying to adopt strategies that don’t work for you. For instance, are you trying to have a clear desk when you are “out of sight, out of mind”?
•Ask yourself if it is because you have something in the way – you can usually tell because anxiety rises when you think about organizing yourself, and when you start to do it – or, no matter how much you want to make it happen, somehow you never get around to doing it.
Once you have identified the reason why you have trouble in this area, the solution is often obvious, and you can go on your way. Otherwise, hang in there, I’ll offer some solutions in my next post.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,  

Karin

As a time management consultant, I’m often asked what are the top mistakes I see people make. Last time we saw the first five. Here are the last five:  

6)Not taking time to relax: Sufficient sleep is necessary, but not enough to ensure that you function at your best, and make the most of your time. Providing your mind with rest is just as important to effective time management. By not giving your brain breaks from work on a regular basis to do completely different things – engaging in fun activities that have nothing to do with work or obligations – you slowly lower our performance level, always resulting in much lower performance (hence more hours at work to achieve the same results) and sometimes ending in mental burn-out.

7)Ignoring your own time management style: There is no such thing as one-size-fits all in time management, but the different styles and the corresponding techniques are not widely taught. So you most likely learned your time management skills from our parents, a teacher, a mentor. If this person had the same time management style as you, you learned and improved your skills. But if this person had a different style, no matter how much you tried, you never were able to replicate their habits successfully, and probably blamed yourself for it. Don’t… All you did was try to use for yourself a solution that is not adapted to who you are. Learning your personal style will allow you to develop tools and strategies that actually work for you.  

8)Reinventing the wheel: In my professional life, I’ve seen too many people re-inventing the wheel on a regular basis. Too many don’t take the time to sit down, think through a procedure for activities and tasks that they perform on a regular basis. As a result, every time they need to re-create the whole process, again and again. Taking a few extra minutes to think it through and create a written procedure or checklist can save you untold amounts of time: a client of mine, whose profession requires her to prepare events several times a month, reduced her event preparation time from an hour and a half to 20 minutes just by taking the time to create a checklist of everything she needed.  

9)Not delegating enough: This is one of the most common, and most time-consuming time management mistakes I see. You have built your business on your own; or you have built a career based on your ability to get things done. You now have resources to delegate, but you still perform many tasks that would be more profitably and/or effectively done by others. As a result, you waste time on tasks such as filing, or packing, or drafting letters. You’re also wasting money in the process: if your hourly rate is $100/hour, it is the same whether you are in front of a client or filing your papers. By delegating tasks that can easily be done by others, you are freeing time for you to do more of the things that only you can do, and using your resources much more effectively.  

10)No emergency planning: According to the National Fire Protection Association, in 2006 a building caught fire every 60 seconds or every day in America. In other words, most people will be directly affected by a fire in their lifetime. Unfortunately most people don’t have a plan to deal with such an event, and will waste enormous amounts of time, money, stress and effort in trying to recover from it. When life’s smaller emergencies strike, it’s often the same: there is no set plan B, or even plan C, if their child falls sick the evening before an important meeting, or if they themselves fall sick right before a critical deadline at work. Having a backup plan, on the other hand, allows you to immediately spring into action and deal with the emergency effectively and quickly, then be able to move on without stress.  

How many of those time management mistakes do you make?