by Helena Escalante | Habits, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 55 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
9 Habits to stop NOW
— From: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss’ book opened up the doors to the wonderful opportunity of lifestyle design that has become the dream—or the coveted reality—of many people. Beyond the many fascinating ideas and amusing stories that the book shares, sprinkled throughout is a collection of tips and pointers to become super efficient and productive.
One of these tools is what Tim calls “The Not-to-Do List” where he offers a list of 9 habits that we should all stop doing right now for the sake of maximizing our productivity and keeping our stress levels as low as possible. “Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items,” he says.
Here’s the list:
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers. “It just results in unwanted interruptions or poor negotiating positions.” There are services that can send you a text transcript of the voice mail message immediately after the call to save you time.
2. Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night. (I’m so guilty of this one…) “The former scrambles your priorities and plans for the day, and the latter just gives you insomnia.”
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time. “Request them in advance so that you ‘can best prepare and make good use of the time together’.”
4. Do not let people ramble. “A big part of getting things done is getting to the point.” This may not be as easy as it sounds in some foreign countries, where culture dictates that getting to the point is rude before you go through the appropriate initial niceties that a call or meeting demand. Yet you can always say something to the effect of: I have a hard stop at X time. Since I value our time together, I want to focus on [the issue], so let’s get started on this and we can catch up on personal matters another time, deal?
5. Do not check email constantly—“batch” and check at set times only. Set an auto-responder saying “Due to the high workload, I am currently checking and responding to email twice daily at 12 pm ET and 4 pm ET [or your preferred times and time zones]. If you require urgent assistance (please ensure that it’s urgent) that cannot wait until 12 pm or 4 pm please contact me via phone at [number]. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers. Analyze your customer base: “which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and which 20% are consuming 80%+ of my time? Then put the loudest and least productive on autopilot by citing a change in company policies. Send them an email with the new rules as bullet points: number of permissible phone calls, e-mail response time, minimum orders, etc. Offer to point them to another provider if they aren’t able to adopt the new policies.”
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize. “If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. The answer to overwhelmingness is not spinning more plates—or doing more—it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.”
8. Do not carry a cell phone 24/7. Take a digital detox at least one day per week. “Turn [it] off or, better still, leave [it] in the garage or in the car.”
9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should. “Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting.”
ACTION
TODAY: Focus on not doing right away: select the one or two habits you are going to stop doing NOW. Write them down in a card and keep it near you and visible all day as a reminder.
FUTURE: Pick a couple of habits that you’d like to ditch within a month’s time. Tell family, friends or coworkers about this so that they can help keep you accountable. Further, keep yourself accountable with your favorite system (a journal, an X on a calendar, an accountability/habit app, etc.). After the time has passed, pick another one or two habits—or continue to reinforce the previous ones—and keep yourself aware and accountable of your progress until you have eliminated them. Repeat as necessary. For more on the topic you can read this earlier post.
Know someone who needs to stop doing these things right away too? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Mindset, Planning, Time
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 11 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
Create an intermission to get started on your mission: We need to purposefully take some time off to give deep thought to what we want
— From: This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love by Tama J. Kieves
We’ve all heard the saying: “There are seven days in a week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday… and ‘Someday’ is NOT one of them.” So why do we tend to push our dreams, wants, and longings for someday?
Tama Kieves says, “You have no idea how much your current job [read: business / activities / routines / lifestyle] affects your thinking about your future and keeps you chained to your past. On vacation from my law firm, I got a suntan and what seemed like a brain transfusion… Outside my office, not everybody scowled and snapped and neither did I… I could not assess my job and my life while in the thick of my job that was my life.” She continues, “I’ve just noticed that we only tend to find our mission once we take an intermission from the work life that doesn’t work.”
Finding or making time off to give some serious thought to what you want, or find your true calling, or your life’s purpose is not easy. It’s not a lunch-hour activity or something you can do while running on the treadmill. Bill Gates takes “think weeks” every year, and paid and unpaid sabbaticals are on the rise in corporations. Entrepreneur Mike Karnjanaprakorn wrote about the benefits of his time off in this article. But if you absolutely, positively cannot take time off, then use your weekends to set aside time to think and then time to act.
I’ll leave you with one last beautiful quote from Tama:
“All you have to do is take a time-out and honor the purpose of that time. Then inclinations start to tap you on the shoulder. Then dreams. Then means. Just clear the space. Consciously let go of what tires you, and what inspires you will take its place.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take some time to think (1) how much time you could take, (2) when you could schedule your intermission to think about your mission, and (3) roughly how much money you’ll need to make it happen. Whether you plan to take time off in full days / weeks / months or in chunks over weekends and holidays, put it in your calendar and honor that purpose. Note that this time to think and ponder about your dreams, aspirations, goals and how to make them happen should not be a burden, nor should it deplete your savings or derail your career. NO! Just the opposite: it should give you a respite from everyday-life’s routines and craziness; and it should bring you great joy to know that you are creating the space and the time to figure out how to do what you love. Enjoy the time that you have set aside for doing this!
FUTURE: In this article from Forbes, Helen Coster quotes Dan Clements, author of Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, who talks about three steps to put your plan into action: “[1] Start an automatic savings plan, and sock away anything from $10 to $1,000 a month. [2] Choose a departure date and a length of time, and book it on all of your calendars. [3] Then tell a handful of people about your sabbatical plans, so that they can both help you plan and make sure you follow through with your decision. ‘If you don’t carve that time away, it tends to be taken from you,’ says Clements. ‘A sabbatical is one of the easiest things in the world to not do.’”
Psst! Do you know someone who could use a sabbatical or intermission? Please share this post with them and tell them to join us for daily ideas and inspiration!
by Helena Escalante | Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 24 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Actualize your dreams during the weekends
–From What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, a short guide included in What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: How to Achieve More at Work and at Home by Laura Vanderkam
Remember how Laura Vanderkam helped us reframe the way we view our weekends? Well, how about bringing her back in to help with the actual planning of the weekend?
Laura says that, when figuring out what to do over the weekend, the best way to frame the question is to ask, “What do you want to do more of with your time?” And, invariably, with that answer comes the realization that we’re going to need more fingers and toes than we have to count all the things we want to do. So, she suggests creating a List of 100 Dreams and brainwriting “anything you might want to do or have in life.”
The first entries on that list will likely be large, once-in-a-lifetime happenings, such as “…go see the pyramids in Egypt. By Dream 100, however, you’ll be coming up with more everyday founts of joy, which tend to make excellent weekend events.” Further, she suggests, “keep going until you have a good long list of these doable dreams. You could also think of these as a bucket list focused on activities within a two-hour radius from your house.”
Keep the list handy so that, as you plan your weekends, you can access it and check off the items that you are going to do over the weekend. Also, the list is dynamic: you may want to change, add or delete from it according to the things you cross off, additional interests you want to include, or changes in your life’s circumstances that will prompt you to modify things on your list (such as moving to another state).
And don’t forget to include in the list the wishes of your kids, significant other and anyone else who spends weekends with you. You’ll all be creating memories together, so might as well plan for them together and enjoy the anticipation together.
Vorfreude: (German noun) The joyful, intense anticipation that comes from imagining future pleasures.
ACTION
TODAY: Start (and if you have enough time, finish) your list of 100 Dreams. Divide it into things you can do over a weekend and things that require more time than a weekend (save this last one for future planning).
FUTURE: Take your “weekends” list of activities and plan to do them during future weekends. Enjoy doing this!! Laura gives an example about a woman and her husband who “sit down with beers on Friday to plan out their weekends. It’s more about catching up and brainstorming what they’ll do (and drinking beer) than a chore.” Take it easy and have fun, that’s what this is all about!
Have a lovely weekend and let me know in the comments what you are going to do!
by Helena Escalante | Habits, Mindset, Planning, Time
TODAY’S IDEA:
Practice Proactive Procrastination
— From: Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
For many of us, the best ideas strike randomly, and likely in a place—like the shower or the gym—where we cannot write them down. So we interrupt what we’re doing, scramble to finish, change the watch/ring to the other hand, or repeat the idea incessantly… until we can get to a piece of paper or favorite electronic device to write it down.
While ideas are very welcome at any time (see: 15 Famous Ideas That Were Invented in Dreams), I’ve often wondered if we could purposefully create those a-ha! moments to our benefit. Turns out, we can. Austin Kleon in his great (and beautifully designed) book talks about harnessing this power to come up with ideas by boring ourselves on purpose. He calls it “practicing proactive procrastination.”
“Take time to be bored. […] Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, ‘Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.’ Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.”
I believe we are ALL creative people. We all make use of creativity and imagination to solve our problems, to see things from a different angle, to come up with new and exciting projects, to surprise our loved ones, etc. And thus it comes as no surprise that more and more people are scheduling time to just think. One of the most famous examples is Bill Gates taking “Think Weeks,” but short of that, as Kleon mentions, even the time that it takes to iron a few shirts will produce results.
Maybe that is why Raymond Inmon said, “If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.”
And don’t forget to take a notebook with you!
ACTION
TODAY: Take a few minutes to practice proactive procrastination today by going for a walk or simply taking time to think. Pick an issue that you need to solve and set the intention to find answers or solutions during your “think time.”
FUTURE: Plan to take some “think time” periodically, and schedule it in your calendar. By creating this habit, you’ll be able to harness the power the ideas to your benefit and your business and life will be better for it!
Let me know how it goes!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Habits, Planning, Productivity, Time
TODAY’S IDEA:
Create uninterrupted time FOR YOU daily.
Given that we all have 24 hours in a day, how come some people seem to get a lot more done than others? I believe the secret lies in creating the habit of scheduling uninterrupted time on a daily basis and focusing during that time on your priorities.
At plain sight this seems very simple, but in practice it’s not: we’re all busy, not to mention sleep deprived… And the first thing that goes out the window in the face of a looming deadline or lots of work is the time we make for ourselves.
Most of the authors I read and the people I admire prefer to open up a chunk of time in their schedules early in the morning.They accomplish a lot when their minds are fresh and when they are well rested. This is their time, there are no interruptions, and they focus it on exercising, writing, meditating, journaling, reading, or a combination of these or other things that enables them to get closer to their goals.
Mornings are ideal because then you can go on with your day knowing that you have already accomplished, or taken a step towards your main goals. At the end of that day, you’ll feel like you’ve made progress, as opposed to feeling overwhelmed by the lack of time and distractions that would otherwise prevent you from working on your goals. The U.S. Army says: “We do more before 9AM than most people do all day.” This leads me to the amount of time to carve out: whatever is best for you. Experiment at first until you find your sweet spot.
Most of the people I’ve read who have a set morning routine spend anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. Yet Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM), says that, in a pinch, he can do his six morning activities in one minute each and then get going. Could you start with 6 minutes a day if you knew this would take you closer to your goals? Seen this way it doesn’t seem all that crazy, right?
Andy Traub, author of The Early to Rise Experience: Learn to Rise Early in 30 Days, tells us to “publicly declare an end to wasting your mornings,” and reminds us, once a day, to:
“Make one decision that will change a person forever:
That day is today.
That decision is to get out of bed early.
That person is you.”
I am an early bird (and even more after reading these two books!) but my husband is a night owl and he gets a lot done in the evenings and late into the night. Since I’m a witness to these two personalities living together in harmony, I’m not an advocate for one or the other, except for the one that works for you. Or if you simply don’t have time in the morning or the evening, how about during your lunch time? And how about just 5 days a week? That’s the idea behind BoxLunch Lifestyle. Cheryl Johnson, the Founder, says: “Your lunch matters in a way you’ve never thought of before. It can reveal what you value and what might be holding you back. Real changes in how you eat and spend your time start here. Take back your life.”
Whether you do it in the morning, lunch time or evening, please make sure that you are indeed carving out some uninterrupted time on your day to work on your goals. Give yourself the gift of focusing on making your dreams come true. It’s never too early and it’s never too late. Your life will be all the better for it.
ACTION:
TODAY: Schedule some uninterrupted time on your calendar today and honor it like an appointment. What gets scheduled gets done!
FUTURE: Start creating this habit this week. Schedule chunks of uninterrupted time in your calendar and determine what you are going to do with that time. Also, unless you are a cold-turkey kind of person, I suggest starting slowly and building up to it. For example, instead of setting aside 1 hr daily as of tomorrow, start with 20 min during one week, then move up to 40 the following and by the 3rd week you’ll be scheduling one full hour of uninterrupted time for you, that way you’ll be able to assess how much time you need for your goals. Be gentle with yourself if you slip while you are building this habit, there will always be a million things screaming to take your attention away from this time. Just keep coming back to set aside time FOR YOU, daily, to work on your goals.
Let me know how it goes!
by Helena Escalante | Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 50 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: TGIF*: Reframing the weekend
–From What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, a short guide included in What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: How to Achieve More at Work and at Home by Laura Vanderkam
One of the many wonderful insights about this book is the idea of reframing the way we look at a weekend: from 6 pm on Friday when we leave work and the weekend “officially” starts to Monday at 6 am when the alarm clock goes off, we have 60 (sixty!) hours. Even if we sleep 24 hours, that leaves us with 36 hours to play, do chores, tackle our to-do list or all or this plus anything else we want to do. Thirty-six hours is almost the same amount of time as a week in a full-time job!
Laura’s point in reframing the weekend this way is the importance of planning: what gets scheduled gets done. Planning and scheduling ahead will result in your devoting the time to the activities that will help you achieve your goals, big or small. This is the best way to ensure that those goals will be met and you will be able to check them off your to-do or you bucket list. From cleaning your sock drawer to training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, you can do it if you only plan for it.
For those of you that may be groaning now about the idea of planning your leisure time, Laura says: “people have a visceral reaction to the word ‘plan’ that makes them think of things they don’t want to do. I’m suggesting planning things that [they] want to do. […] I don’t want to fill every hour […] but there is a wide gap between planning every minute and planning nothing.”
The key is to do it ahead of time. I’m so guilty of waiting until Saturday morning to start planning, and by then, it’s already Saturday afternoon when the weekend “starts.” With a bit of planning ahead (hint, hint, today is Thursday, the weekend starts tomorrow at 6!) we can make the most out of our time and have a super productive, super fun, or super _______ (fill in the blank) weekend. And yes, you can use the word relaxing in there – it’s part of it if you decide to make it so. The important thing is to plan ahead to use our time wisely, according to our needs and wants.
So let’s not wait any longer to get going! What are you going to do with your 60 hours this weekend? Let me know. Happy planning and happy weekend! 🙂
ACTION:
TODAY: Take 10-15 minutes to plan your weekend from 6 pm on Friday to 6 am on Monday (or whatever schedule works for you around this new way of seeing the weekend). Schedule it in your calendar: you can be as rigid or as flexible with your time, as long as you plan your main activities.
FUTURE: Schedule a recurring time on your calendar for Wednesdays or Thursdays every week to plan for the weekend ahead. Try this out and tweak it to fit your schedule and lifestyle until you find what suits you best. Then set up a calendar reminder in 3 months to email me and let me know how this is going for you!
*For our international gurupies who may not be familiar with the acronym TGIF, it means Thank God It’s Friday!
