The holiday season is named the most stressful period of the year, year after year after year. Why is that?

When asked the question, most people talk about family stress, and, at some point, mention lack of time. I think the latter is usually underestimated: between the added end-of-year work at work, the holiday preparations at home and the multiple events and functions of the season, I have seen many a new client’s calendar balloon to twice its size at the end of the year. To make matters worse, most people plan November and December as if they were full months, when they actually last less than 25 days when the holidays are factored in.

With all this, if their time management is less than optimal, no wonder things go haywire…

It’s easy to avoid this time crunch, though, and the best time to do so is October:

-Examine your time management systems today. Where are there frictions, those little things that don’t work right, make you a little late, a software that doesn’t work exactly the way you want, etc.? Address them now, and everything will go much more smoothly come November.

-Plan now for the next three months: if you start planning the time you have left now, with ample time added to take care of all your emergencies, you’ll find that you have plenty of time to get everything done without stress this year.

If this still feels overwhelming, no worries. Just send me a message at my Fab40 address, and I’ll give you some extra tips and solutions.

Yours in Daily Mastery,

Karin
Fabulously40 Time Management Expert
www.DailyMastery.com

PS: mid-month, I’ll address the stress created by people :-)

When I was younger, I was always annoyed at all the beauty articles in the magazines. If I was to do everything they said I should do, I would have to spend almost an hour and a half in the bathroom each day.

I didn’t especially want to do it when I was single and with a simple job. Once I had a family and a business to run, it became simply impossible.

So I ended up looking at beauty advice in the same way that I look at all other activities in my life: What is the return on the time that I spend? how much time is necessary for me to look the way I want, and how much is just nice to add, but doesn’t make that much of a difference? Then I started to collect my time-saving beauty tips, using them first for myself, then confirming their universality with my clients.

Here are my top five, that have allowed me to go from bed to fully ready in just a half hour:

•Take a shower rather than a bath – it’s always faster.

•Get a great haircut. I discovered how priceless the right haircut is when, for the first time in my life, I found a hair stylist who really knew how to cut my hair. Thanks to that person, my hair routine is: wash my hair every other day; put leave-in conditioner; let dry on its own. When I need to look more professional (I have curls, so my hair naturally looks relaxed rather than slick), I just tie it in a loose ponytail for the first 45 minutes, and it comes out smooth and looking perfect. How’s that for saving time?

•Use double-duty products as much as possible. For instance, I have found that a hydrating shower gel keeps my skin well-hydrated, to the point that I need extra body lotion only on the coldest days of winter.

•Use forgiving, fudge-proof make-up: tinted moisturizer; powder foundation; a lip gloss; etc. For instance, using a tinted lip gloss instead of a lipstick allows me to be ready in 10 seconds, since I don’t need lip pencil or brush I would need for lipstick. In a pinch, it can even double as a blush stain for my cheeks.

•Once a week (or whenever you want to) pull out all the stops and indulge in the full-blown, long version of getting yourself ready… After all, we’re girls, and it’s sooooo fabulous to pamper ourselves. Just not when we need to get the kids to the bus and ourselves to work.

The funny thing is, since I started to apply those tips a few years ago, I have received more compliments on my look than I had before! I attribute it to the fact that, thanks to my short routine, I can sleep longer… sleep is one of the most effective beauty-enhancers. Makes your face looks fresher, more radiant, smoother all by itself.

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
Fabulously40 Time Management Expert
www.DailyMastery.com

I LOVE reading.

Yet, with a successful business and a family to take care of, I found myself with whole weeks when I didn’t seem to have the time to read – especially non-work-related reading. I absolutely hated it. Did I mention that I love to read, anything (or almost), and that I am and always have been a voracious reader?

So I learned a well-guarded secret, an incredibly effective way of having my cake and eating it too: I learned to speed-read.

I know, I know, it’s not really a secret, there are plenty of books and classes on the topic… Yet most people don’t seem to know that they can learn it, they think that somehow, you either are a fast reader or a slow reader, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The truth is, it’s a skill, and like all skills, it can be taught.

I learned it, and boy am I happy I did! I now spend about a third of the time reading work-related literature than I used to, and I still read and learn more than I did before. In a career where there are no classes, standards or certifications like mine, it’s a huge advantage, and it allows me to provide better service to my clients.

Most importantly, it allows me to have time to read for fun. And when I pick up a good fiction book (recently, after resisting it for a long time, I’ve been delighting in the Harry Potter novels) I can still read it at regular speed, savoring the plot, and sometimes even slowing down to savor the individual sentences. Or speed up my reading when I can’t wait to see what happens next and have limited time available. It gives me complete flexibility and control.

As an expert, I’m not afraid to say that speed-reading is one of the best time management tools you can have in today’s information-saturated world. It’s given me back time, and it will do that for you too – or it might simply allow you to finally go through this pile of material that you’ve meant to read for a while.

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
Fabulously40 Time Management Expert
www.DailyMastery.com

Interruptions... It's something we all know, dread, but don't know how to fix. It seems like interruptions eat away at our days, and they do.

Did you know that the average office worker in America now experiences 8 to 11 interruptions every hour . Worse, it takes between 5 and 28 minutes to recover from an interruption, i.e. recover the level of focus you had before the interruption. Taking the most optimistic of those numbers, it means that 40 minutes out of every hour are lost to interruptions. And that doesn’t even count the time spent in the interruption, which may or may not be productive.

At best, if you let things be in their present state, you‘re effectively working 20 minutes out of every hour. Quite scary, isn’t it?

That’s why it’s so important to minimize interruptions as much as possible, if possible by filtering calls, by processing your email in batch instead of as every email comes in, and create a no-interruptions-allowed period of time: Once every day, turn off your phones, your email, your blackberry, close your door if you have one, and/or put in earplugs so that you don’t hear anything short of a shout, hunker down and get a focused 60 minutes of work done.

It’s an easy thing to do, and one that yields huge dividends. If there is only one time management habit you’ll change this year, make it this one!

Have a wonderful end of month.

Karin
Fabulously40 Time Management Expert
www.DailyMastery.com

Greetings from Europe, where I’m spending a family vacation!

Most of us go on vacation at least once a year, but I have a very difference experience from most, in that I leave with complete peace of mind, knowing that everything that needed to be taken care of had been, while many stress out about everything before and while on vacation.

I developed my travel planning techniques when I had to travel alone with my then-toddler, and anything that was missing, or badly prepared, had dire consequences in terms of his mood and my resulting stress and happiness… Today those techniques allow me to plan any trip, even on short notice, and still make sure that everything goes smoothly from beginning to end, and that everything that needs taken care of while I’m away is.

Here is *how I make it happen: *

Immediately after deciding on taking a trip, I:

•Start a list of the things I need to get done before leaving. Every time I think of something, I put it right there, and check my list daily for things I can do that day. This list can have items as varied as “take dried fruit on plane” and “verify that Ann checks my email while I’m away.”

•Look at everything I have planned for my vacation time in my planner and production schedule for that week, decide what I will do while away, if anything, what I need to do before leaving, and what I can push back to after my return. I re-organize my work plan accordingly for the weeks before my trip.

•Plan a day to get all my last-minute things done, such as packing and stocking the house for my hubby (not that he can’t shop for himself, but I thought it would be nice, since he’s staying home alone and having none of the fun my son and I are having.)

About a week before leaving, I

•Start a list of all the things I need to take with me. Yes, you can pack at the last minute, but making a list allows to minimize what you take with you, while making sure that all possibilities are covered and you don’t forget anything. Among other things, it allows to plan my wardrobe so that it’s as versatile as possible, using as few items as possible (I ended up being able to take a single suitcase for both my son and me this time, and we’re set no matter where I end up going).

•Start putting away everything I know I’ll take and don’t need before my trip.

As a result, when I left last Saturday, everything was ready, packed, everything that needed to be done had been done peacefully and without stress, and this was in spite of my beloved cat passing away two days before our departure.

Have fun preparing your own vacations!

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.DailyMastery.com

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